Hamid Ismailov - Of Strangers and Bees

The novel you hold in your hands is not the first to boast the name Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Our present tale spans centuries and half the globe, but it is mostly the quite modern story of a writer in exile in the tumultuous waning days of the twentieth century. The very first Hayy ibn Yaqzan, on the other hand, was the eponymous protagonist of an eleventh-century allegory by the Persian philosopher Avicenna. Or shall we call him the Uzbek philosopher Abu Ali ibn Sino? However we think of him, this great thinker tended to write sweeping tracts covering all available knowledge on a topic: The Canon of Medicine; The Book of Impartial Judgment; essays on the nature of scientific inquiry, physics, psychology and Islamic theology; poetry, even. But one of his more neglected legacies is a short story called Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a name which translates to something like Alive, son of Awake. Ibn Sinos Hayy features a wise old sage telling a curious travelling narrator about the nature of life and the world around him. Major sections of Of Strangers and Bees this current Hayy ibn Yaqzan open with quotations from the original, as translated from Persian to French, then to English, and later revised by me with an eye to the Arabic-to-Russian translation by Artur Vladimirovich Sagadeyev.

The next writer to seize on the name and the title was the Moorish philosopher Ibn Tufail, in the twelfth century. This newer, longer, Arabic-language Hayy ibn Yaqzan posed a thought experiment: what would happen to a man raised by a deer on an island uninhabited by people? Ibn Tufails subject teaches himself science and logic. Later, when he encounters a castaway from the civilised world, he has the opportunity to compare his own pure way of life with the experience of most human beings as they interact with society and material things. The European Renaissance discovered Ibn Tufails tale and produced a Latin translation called Philosophus Autodidactus, published in 1671. This seems to have influenced a whole swath of Enlightenment thinkers who conjured up political philosophies based on their ruminations of mankind in a state of nature.

A Moorish physician named Ibn Tufail makes a passing appearance in Of Strangers and Bees, too (though there is a decent chance that this particular Ibn Tufail may simply be a double). More prominently featured is Avicenna, Ibn Sino himself, who, you are going to have to believe, did not in fact die in the eleventh century, but has instead been condemned to roam the world. The hero of this story whose friends call him The Sheikh is also consigned to wander as a writer in political exile from his native Uzbekistan. His search for Avicenna, combined with his attempts to earn a living and a little respect in the wider world, sends him on a quest through Western Europe and the United States. Everywhere he goes, he finds traces of Avicenna, and with them, traces of his own ambiguous cultural and religious heritage.

Hamid Ismailovs imaginative iteration of Hayy ibn Yaqzan tackles big, important ideas of man and society, art and philosophy, but it is a deeply personal novel, too. Its impossible to forget that this story of an Uzbek writer in exile was in fact written by an Uzbek writer in exile, one who has had to reconcile a Sufi upbringing with a post-Soviet political reality in a multicultural and materialistic Western world. The episodes in this novel that examine late twentieth-century life in exile are plainly written, full of small triumphs and humiliations, and remarkable for their strange mixture of absurdity and banality. Then there are the episodes in between, where the thinking, the magic, the passion in this novel are sunk into its fables and parables and brand new tales from the Arabian Nights. Here you will find talking animals, beautiful princesses, conniving kings, and, of course, a mysterious wandering Stranger.

And then there are the bees. Ismailov has an apparent affinity for the hive insects, and in this book, they take centre stage. Do the bees represent the swarming Soviet (or post-Soviet) masses? Are they humanity, working according to patterns and towards goals of which they have only a dim awareness? If were all bees in a hive, then who is in charge? On the other hand, the bees in this novel are part of a larger cultural and religious tradition. Avicenna (and Aristotle) wrote extensively on bees, with the Uzbek philosopher especially interested in the nature of bee venom and the healing properties of honey. The Quran has a whole chapter called The Bee. They must have something to teach us. But you will have to discover what that might be for yourselves.

Like Persian literature, alongside which it is often nonchalantly classified, Uzbek literature was once essentially Sufi in nature. Sufism was mostly born in the Persian and Turkic world, and expressed and transmitted from there in literary form. Ismailov tells me that Sufism was in fact a way of adapting Arabic-born Islam for the Persian and Turkic world. Great Sufi teachers such as Jalaluddin Rumi (Persian) and Ahmad Yasawi (Turkic) retold the Holy Quran and Islamic religious thought in a literary, poetic form in their own languages. Theres a famous saying about the