Westbooks - Title Details

Azazeel

Ziedan, Youssef more...

Format: Paperback
Library Classification: Adult Fiction
BIC Subjects: Historical fiction
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Imprint: Atlantic Books
Publication Date: 1/06/2012
Place of Publication: United Kingdom

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RRP: $29.99
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Synopsis

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Winner of the Arab Booker prize 2009. Azazeel purports to be the memoirs of a fifth-century doctor-monk and passionate lover named Hypa, whose scrolls are unearthed by a 20th-century translator. Born in AD 391, when Christianity was imposed as Roman Egypt's official religion, Hypa wanders east to the Holy Land after witnessing a mob of Alexandrian Christians lynching a woman, Hypatia, the neo-platonic philosopher and mathematician who defended science against religion. Ziedan sees the lynching as a symptom of religious intolerance, and the start of a scientific dark age. The fictional monk stumbles on another historical conflict, between the Coptic Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, and Nestorius, the Syrian-born patriarch of Constantinople whom Cyril deposed as a heretic in a schism of AD 431.