The Three Apples

I finished reading Kingdom of Strangers by Zoe Ferraris several weeks ago, but I was uncertain about how exactly to follow up on my previous post (July 7). When I had only just started reading the book, I was immediately drawn to the author's use of a well-known, yet little understood, verse from the Qur'an (74:30), in which the number nineteen plays a key role.

At the risk of providing too many spoilers, let me just say that the serial killer, who is the central villain in the novel, arranges the many murders he commits in the form of a trilogy designated by three apples.

The 'Story of the Three Apples' can be found in the anthology we generally refer to as the Arabian Nights, but is more correctly called the Thousand and One Nights (alf laylah wa-laylah). The framing narrative for this collection concerns the fate of Scheherazade, who tells a series of nightly stories to her new husband, the Persian king Sharyar, as a means of avoiding being put to death. Sharyar, it seems, is paranoid about the potential for any of his wives to commit adultery. Consequently, he kills them off once their marriage has been consummated. This leaves him in perpetual need of a new virgin to marry, and, from our perspective, probably qualifies him for the title of fiction's first serial killer.

The content of the Arabian Nights, like the content of the Qur'an, is well known by the majority of Muslim Arabs. However, while reading the latter text can be considered an obligation in Islam, reading the former text is largely forbidden.

Kingdom of Strangers is a laudable piece of contemporary crime fiction, albeit one that relies more heavily than most on its context. Ferraris does a commendable job of portraying the sociocultural complexity of Saudi Arabia, and is particularly adept at using the stark, arid geography of the region to accentuate her story. I do have a couple of small criticisms, and a caution for readers.

First, from a readability perspective, the book does get bogged down about two-thirds of the way through, as what are perhaps a few too many sub-plots wrestle their way towards resolution. Second, as a service to her readers, Ferraris provides a brief glossary of the Arabic terms she uses throughout her novel, but there is an interesting omission. On page 317, she has Katya say to herself, "Ya majnoun," just as she has her big aha moment about the three apples. This expression, which means something like, "Oh, you retard," does not appear in the glossary.

For those readers whose knowledge and experience of Islam and the Middle East are somewhat limited, one should be cautious about equating the culture of Saudi Arabia with the culture of all Islamic societies. And, perhaps even more importantly, one should be cautious about equating the official Saudi interpretation of Islam with the broader and highly variable interpretations of Islam that exist across cultural and ethnic divides, in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world.

Q 74:30 - Nineteen Guardians of Hell

I just started reading Kingdom of Strangers, by Zoe Ferraris, which opens with the discovery of the bodies of nineteen females, who had been murdered, mutilated, and buried in a sand dune. Reflecting on the number of victims, one of the police officers refers to a verse in the Qur'an (74:30) which states that there are nineteen guardians of Hell. This verse, because of its use of this particular number, has always been one of my favorites. I do not think for a moment that the appearance of the number nineteen in this verse is in any way random or trivial. Rather, I am confident that it is a highly deliberate, extremely sophisticated, complex trope, designed to humble even the most erudite Qur'an scholars of any era.

The number nineteen displays a variety of interesting mathematical properties, including the fact that it is a prime number (a number divisible only by itself and one). It is also the number of constituent hexagons in the only non-trivial normal magic hexagon, but for those of us who don't engage in number theory or visual recreational mathematics, it might be difficult to see how any of this would be significant to our understanding of Hell, or the Qur'an for that matter.

The number nineteen also possesses a long history of associations and interpretations in the mystical systems of several ancient civilizations. For example, from a cosmological perspective, nineteen defines the Metonic cycle, which was used by the Babylonians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Chinese to predict the occurrence of solar eclipses. However, within numerology, and more specifically within gematria (the assignment of numerical values to letters of the alphabet and their subsequent interpretation), nineteen has remarkable significance.

Within Islam, nineteen is the number of letters in the basmalah, the invocation that appears at the beginning of all but one of the chapters (surahs) of the Qur'an. When the letters of the basmalah are converted into their numerical equivalents, the total is 786, which some Muslims use as a numerical shorthand for the invocation.

The number nineteen is also highly significant in Baha'i, a religious tradition that emerged in Persia in the 1840s, with deep roots in Islam, where it symbolizes, among other things, the dynamic tension between the one and the many, unity and plurality. This association is based on the observation that the numerical equivalent of the word for one (wahid) is nineteen. The centrality of the number to the Baha'i faith can be seen in the fact that its calendar consists of nineteen months of nineteen days.

The most extensive, and by far the most controversial, effort to establish a mystical relationship between the number nineteen and the text of the Qur'an, was proposed by the Egyptian-born, American biochemist Rashad Khalifa, who carried out a complete numerical analysis of the Qur'an, and set out to establish his own school of thought with Islam. He was assassinated in Tucson, Arizona, in 1990, after a fatwa was issued against him by the Islamic Legal Council of Saudi Arabia, for his heretical ideas.

I have not progressed far enough yet to know just exactly how Ferraris develops her use of this number or the related verse in her novel, but I'm sure I'll have something to say about it when the time comes.