SOURCE: Williams, Elaine. “Angel and Demon.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4447 (24-30 June 1988): 698.

In the following excerpt, Williams compliments Djebar's portrayal of female suffering and rebellion in A Sister to Scheherazade.

Both Assia Djebar and Nawal El Saadawi, in seeking to evoke the suffering of women under Islamic rule, have taken a little-known tale from The Thousand and One Nights, one which offers a haunting image of sisterhood, and placed it at the heart of their stories. The tale runs as follows: knowing that the Sultan has vowed to kill a virgin every night in his bed as revenge for his wife's infidelity, Scheherazade, the Sultan's new bride, begs her sister, Dinardzade, to accompany her into the nuptial chamber, hiding beneath the bed to wake her before dawn. The idea of sisterhood resonates through both these novels.

In Djebar's A Sister to Scheherazade, the second in a quartet of...