[In the following review, Buss lauds the lyrical examination of Muslim gender relations in The Sacred Night.]

La Nuit sacrée, which was reviewed in the TLS of January 27, 1989, shares its narrator Zohra (also known as Ahmed) with Tahar Ben Jelloun's previous novel, The Sand Child. The eighth daughter of a father who decides to bring her up as the son whom fate has denied him, the Sand Child is both imprisoned and liberated by the rejection of reality. It enables her to move with equal status between the otherwise closed worlds of women and men. Though this suggests a number of allegorical interpretations, the surface of the narrative proceeds with enough sheer pleasure and lack of pretension to deeper meanings to ensure that these are rarely overt. “There is no greatness or tragedy in my story”, Zohra writes. “It is simply strange.”

Simply strange is what The Sacred Night is likely to seem to most non-Muslim, non-Maghrebi readers. The best approach is to accept Zohra's world as it is. Ben Jelloun has been well served by Alan Sheridan, whose fluent translation succeeds in conveying a good deal of the original. “Poetic” and “dream-like” are the adjectives most usually found to describe his prose; it is precise about details, and less so in arriving at the totals to which they add up.

In any case, the sum total is the one that matters, and it is impressive. Gender, sexuality, the cultures they impose, and the restrictions imposed on them by cultures, are a form of imprisonment; yet so, too, is the attempt to evade them: “My body had stopped developing. … It was neither a woman's body full and eager, nor a man's serene and strong. I was now somewhere between the two; in other words, in hell.” The legacy of the father is both intolerable and inescapable. In the end, it is only through the touch of a blind man, who can know and recognize and love without seeing, that she achieves happiness and salvation. It is a moving resolution to a story that is ultimately neither that simple, nor that strange.