[
Music]
abu huzayfah: And the guy cried was crying and screaming. He did not die after the first time. The second time or so, he probably just slouched over. That was
rukmini callimachi: How hard is it to put a knife into somebody?
abu huzayfah: It’s hard. I had to stab him multiple times.
In Chapter Five of
New
York Times, a young Canadian named Shehroze Chaudhry explains how he came to stab a man in the heart on behalf of the Islamic State. Back in 2014, Chaudhry, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Huzayfah, allegedly emptied his bank account and traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State, which assigned him to a police unit tasked with enforcing its strict interpretation of sharia law. Over the next six months, he told the
Read this essay in Arabic here. This piece is part of a limited series on shifting narratives in Syrian literature, guest edited by novelist Rosa Yassin Hassan.
In 2015, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, whose work mixes narration, journalistic techniques and direct observation, recording testimonies and documentation.
Alexievich was among the main voices representing an international narrative experience which cemented that literary genre: the documentary novel. This genre influenced many narrative experiences across the world, including the Syrian novel, which, like other forms of art, acquired new artistic features in the wake of the huge political and social events of 2011.