Scheherazade in Palestine: Nation and Narration in Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun (Bab al-shams)

Gate of the Sun (Bab al-shams) is Elias Khoury's most famous and ambitious novel. It was published in Arabic in 1998, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel. The novel spans the years from 1948 not only to the Lebanese civil war that broke out in 1975 but also to the 1982 massacre in Sabra and Shatila and beyond in an attempt to establish a grand narrative of the catastrophic history of the Palestinian nation since 1948. Here, Razinsky and Goldberg examine the storytelling and narrative in Khoury's Gate of the Sun.