SOURCE: Accad, Evelyne. Review of Loin de Médine: Filles d'Ishmaël, by Assia Djebar. World Literature Today 66, no. 1 (winter 1992): 184-85.

In the following review of Loin de Médine, Accad commends Djebar's ambition but finds shortcomings in the work's problematic position between paean and revision.

Assia Djebar, the most well known Francophone woman writer of North Africa, tells us in a foreword that she has used the designation novel for Loin de Médine, a collection of tales, narratives, visions, scenes, and recollections inspired by her readings of some of the Muslim historians who lived during the first centuries of Islam. Fiction allows freedom in reestablishing and unveiling a hidden space. Through it Djebar gives voice and presence to the many women forgotten by the recorders and transmitters of Islamic tradition.

The undertaking is quite an ambitious one, and Djebar manages it well in her usual careful...