Safiyyah's War by Hiba Noor Khan

Eleven-year-old Safiyyah wants to travel and explore the world. She loved spending afternoons in the library where Madame Odette would bring out the right maps for Safiyyah to explore the places she was interested in. Places like Jerusalem, Manila, Harare or Manaus in Brazil. Often this led Safiyyah to lose track of the time and arrive home later than she should have. This would lead her mother, Yemma to worry, ever since autumn last year when the war began.

When she arrives at the mosque, Safiyyah sits down beside her grandma, Setti in the mosque courtyard. Setti advises her to use each breath she is given wisely and the knowledge she gains too from her reading of maps. Safiyyah's grandmother had moved to Spain from Algeria when she was a teenager. Safiyyah's great-grandparents had farmed large fruit orchards in Algeria. When they moved to Andalusia in Spain, they brought with them orange, lemon and cherry trees. Setti loved oranges and they brought back found memories. From the taste of an orange she could tell where it was grown.

Soon Safiyyah's mother arrives and takes her back to their apartment in the mosque complex to help prepare dinner. They are expecting her father's friend Ammo Kader for dinner. At dinner Baba tells them that the Germans have crossed the French border at the Ardennes. While they don't know what this will mean for them as Muslims, they do know it will not be good for their Jewish friends.

Baba works at the mosque, while Ammo Kader is the rector, liaising with politicians. Ammo Imam is also involved, helping to run the mosque smoothly. Safiyyah often attends their Saturday morning meetings. Baba hopes one day Safiyyah will attend college and he sees her involvement in the mosque affairs as preparation for this. At the meeting the discussion turns to the war and what might happen. Baba had fought for France in the First World War and had lost his hearing in his left ear. But the brutality had also affected him too. 

On Saturday afternoon, Safiyyah travels to the sixteenth arrondissement with Baba to see her best friend Isabelle. Because Isabelle's father works in the French government, her parents know important ministers and ambassadors. Normally Isabelle's mother was dressed with makeup and her hair in a chignon, but on this day she is still in her dressing gown, talking on the telephone in a panicky voice. Isabelle's nanny, Nounou took the girls to the park. There Isabelle reveals that her family is leaving Paris, going south to their chateau in Provence. Isabelle has no idea how long they will stay at the chateau and she also tells Safiyyah that they may flee to England if things worsen. Although Isabelle and her family are not Jewish they are frightened. Safiyyah is devastated by this news.

After Isabelle leaves Paris, Yemma and Baba take Safiyyah and her younger sister, Fatima to Baba's sister's house to visit their cousins. Sixteen-year-old Tarek, who has just finished high school and who wants to be an engineer, announces that he is enlisting. This shocks everyone. When they return to Paris Safiyyah goes to the library to ask for Madame Odette's help locating a book for Monsieur Cassin. He is an elderly friend of Baba and Ammo Kader who Safiyyah delivers medication to once a month. Monsieur Cassin is a botanist, researching plants in India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia and has just finished writing a book. But he needs a specific book to finish his appendix on insect species. Madame Odette promises to help locate this book. Safiyyah also learns that the librarians are packing books to send to soldiers in the war. However, other books such as special volumes and rare collections are being packed to be sent into the countryside, hidden from the Nazis.

By June 1940, the situation rapidly changes. Safiyyah is no longer welcome in Baba's office for his weekly meetings. While Safiyyah is on her way to bring a book to Monsieur Cassin, Paris is bombed by the Germans. Safiyyah is caught in the bombing but survives and is help by the elderly scientist. Safiyyah, her parents and the mosque work to help the people of Paris and the refugees flooding the city, giving out food and water.

Eventually Safiyyah learns that her friend Isabelle is safe with her parents in England, at her grandfather's cousin's home in Dover. While she misses her best friend she makes a new friend in a young refugee, Timothee who is in Paris with his father. Her family help Timothee and he soon becomes an important helper in what soon happens.

With the arrival of the Germans and the implementation of a curfew, life changes even more. Safiyyah leaves school for several weeks. Then Monsieur Cassin is attacked, his completed book manuscript stolen and his apartment wrecked by the Nazis. Incredibly Safiyyah is able to rescue most of his manuscript from the Nazi soldiers and she and Baba return to help him. However, Baba is far from pleased with Safiyyah who he considers to have placed herself in terrible danger stealing Cassin's manuscript from the Nazi soldiers. However, she confronts him about what she has noticed: that he is exhausted and troubled, out late at night and that the librarians, Madame Odette and Claude have been at the mosque.  Eventually Safiyyah learns the reason behind all of the strange things she's seen and soon finds herself drawn into helping those most in danger, the Jews of Paris.

Discussion

Safiyyah's War is a historical fiction novel that is centered around the help provided to French Jews by the Grand Mosque of Paris during the Nazi occupation of France. 

The Grand Mosque of Paris was built between 1922 and 1926 to honour the sacrifice by mainly Algerian Muslim sharpshooters during World War 1. Like the character, Setti whose grandparents left Algeria for France, many Algerians immigrated to France after World War I. These Muslims were Kabyles and they eventually would join the French Resistance in 1940.

During the Second World War, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris provided refuge and Muslim identity cards to Jews. At this time, France had a large population of Sephardic Jews. They looked similar to the French Algerian Muslims,  spoke Arabic and had similar traditions, including not eating port and male circumcision. While the mosque was a place of prayer it was also a place where people could find a calming quiet, take food and rest. 

It wasn't long after occupying Paris and the northern part of France that the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators began rounding up Jews. There is some confusion as to who was involved, if it was Benghabrit or individual Muslims and the extent of the help offered by the Grand Mosque. According to Benghabrit, he offered sanctuary to French and Algerian Jews in the mosque's apartments occupied by Muslim families, and he also created false identity papers. The sewers of Paris were used as escape routes to the Halles au Vins on the Seine River where they were hidden aboard empty wine barrels on ferries and barges. They were then taken out of Paris to Spain or the Maghreb (northwest Africa). The exact number of Jews aided cannot be confirmed with estimates of dozens to just over one thousand. There is also some evidence via personal testimony of Ashkenazi Jews being saved as well.

It is this history that forms the back story of Safiyyah's War. In the novel, Benghabrit is referred to as Ammo Kadr. According to Noor Khan, the name of the imam who was "the soul of the mosque's Resistance activities" is lost to history and is simply referred to in the story as Ammo Imam. Noor Khan has incorporated many details of the mosque's resistance activities into the story including the underground tunnels, the use of the wine barrels and the bell system to warn Jews of a Nazi raid.  Also many historical figures are represented such as master forger, Adolfo Kaminsky who is "the kind man", Noor Inayat Khan an Indian aristocrat who became a British spy who is represented by the character Madeleine and Madame Odette and Claude who represented the librarians who provided books for the Jews in hiding as well as the saving of rare books and those books the Nazis deemed worth burning. As well many details of life in Paris especially during the bombing of the city and the influx of refugees from northern France.

The novel places Safiyyah's family at the heart of the mosque's resistance with her father learning how to forge identity cards, hiding Jews within the mosque and taking them through the treacherous tunnels to the Seine. It doesn't take the main protagonist, Safiyyah long to uncover her father's clandestine activities and end up in the thick of things. She is a well crafted character, intelligent, compassionate, and full of courage. As Noor Khan writes in her Historical Note, "All those living in the mosque would have been involved in the Resistance activities in some way, no matter how small their efforts may have seemed. Safiyyah represents all the unlikely heroes whose names aren't memorialized and whose stories aren't sung and praised, but whose courage and actions change our world forever."

In a scene earlier in the novel, Safiyyah's grandmother, Setti advises her to choose the "path of light". Safiyyah loves to explore the world through maps. Knowing this, Setti tells her that often maps have led people to do terrible things, wars, oppression and colonization. She advises using the map of the heart to choose the path of light.

Safiyyah's War is a much needed novel about a forgotten piece of history.  The author states in her Historical Note that she wrote it "...to be a humanizing, unifying force in an all-too-often bitterly divided world." Besides being a well-written and engaging story, it is for this reason that Safiyyah's War is highly recommended, especially for classroom selections.

Book Details:

Safiyyah's War by Hiba Noor Khan
New York:  Allida     2023
329 pp.