April 15, 2010
Using impressive research, Egyptian author Serageldin (The Cairo House, 2003) posits a happier story for the actual Zeinab, daughter of Naqib Shaykh Bakri, who was briefly Napoleons mistress during the French occupation of Egypt from 1798 to 1801, disavowed by her father despite his instigating her consorting with the French, and killed for her horizontal collaboration. Here 12-year-old Zeinab is given by her father to Napoleon in a Muslim marriage that is never consummated and later finds brief happiness in a marriage with chief engineer Nicolas Conte of the French Scientific Commission. Disavowed by her father, she is saved from being executed for treason by her pregnancy, then sheltered by the aristocratic philanthropist Sitt Nafisa the White. Serageldin recounts the devastation wrought on her home country by its successively more abusive occupiersthe French, followed by the Turks and Albanians, who executed the leaders of the long-prominent Mamluke military castein the context of the politics of the times. Through this plausible account of what Zeinabs life might have been, Serageldin opens a window on a tumultuous period in Egyptian history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)