SOURCE: Zameenzad, Adam. “An Escape to Captivity and Back.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (19 November 1989): 11.

In the following review, Zameenzad praises Ben Jelloun's poetic language in The Sacred Night but questions if Western readers can appreciate the novel's Eastern mysticism.

“The truth is closer to the shadow than to the tree that casts the shadow,” says the blind Consul to the heroine of The Sacred Night, Zahra, who has spent the first 20 years of her life as a man “married” to the wretched Fatima, daughter of her vicious and avaricious uncle.

Her father, a tyrannical patriarch, has reared her as a son to boost his ego and foster his pride, as well as to have a “male” heir and thus prevent his property from falling into the hands of his brother and his wife, both of whom he loathes as much as he does his wife and seven...