| Summary/Abstract |
: Youssef Ziedan’s controversial novel Azazeel follows an anonymous narrator’s
journey from Upper Egypt to Aleppo during the first half of the fifth-century AD. This article
argues that descriptions of landscape enable the narrator to articulate personal and
historical crises otherwise censored or repressed. By incorporating geographical features
into his identity, the narrator creates a poetic version of himself free from the hegemony
of the dominant religious discourse. The search for a free, private space shapes the novel’s
aesthetic as well as political concerns. Overall, Azazeel is an important novel because of its
literary value, its denouncement of geopolitical definitions of God, and its ability to place
the history of religious violence in Egypt within the global context
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