Word: khadija
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hero and heroine are Omar ben Allel and his wife Dawia, who live with six of their children in three rooms in a ramshackle section of the city. The key child is their daughter, Khadija, her parents' "most negotiable piece of property." As a 13-year-old virgin, she should fetch a handsome bride price -but then she is abducted...
...parents recover Khadija, no longer in negotiable condition, and immediately plunge into hilarious legal struggles to reassert her virginity. To their astonishment, they discover that the girl still has suitors. In fact, by the book's end, Omar is counting up the dowry. The wedding ritual is complete with the virgin's epithalamium-the book's title...
...months. She had come to Meknes with her anthropologist husband, Vincent Crapanzano, who was doing field work. In the book the Crapanzanos are thinly disguised as M. and Mme. Hugh, young American writers living near by. As Western pragmatists, they make ideal foils for the other characters. When Khadija vanishes, M. Hugh wants to charge down to the police station to start the wheels of orderly investigation. Having saved face by blaming the calamity on various "invisibles," or devils jealous of Khadija, the family prefers methods far more circuitous and transcendental...