Khaled

Khaled is a genie — a spirit of the air, living without a soul, and so destined to vanish at death with no part in paradise. Hovering near the court of the King of Riad in the heart of Arabia, he watches an Indian prince come to claim the king's beautiful daughter, the princess Zehowah, and, seeing the prince's treachery, destroys him. For this he is brought before the throne of Allah and made a man — and granted one extraordinary chance. If he can win Zehowah's true love, he will be given a human soul and the hope of heaven. If he fails, he will perish at death and be lost forever.

But Zehowah, though she takes him for her husband and is loyal and kind, does not love him — and is not even certain she knows what love is. So begins the strange, patient, and finally desperate task at the heart of the book: a man who must teach a cold heart to feel, not for his own pleasure but for his very existence, and who learns in the teaching what love costs the one who gives it first. Through wars and embassies and long evening conversations on love and the soul, Crawford moves his tale toward a crisis that answers its own deepest question — what, in the end, the soul really is.

First published in 1891, Khaled: A Tale of Arabia was a favourite of its author's own, and stands among the finest of the literary “Arabian Nights” romances. F. Marion Crawford, who read Arabic and knew the East at first hand, tells it in the grave, lyrical, ceremonial manner of the old tales themselves — a sustained and beautiful pastiche that takes its marvels seriously and carries the reader, as the Nights do, into a world of deserts, walled cities, and the will of Allah.

This edition presents the complete novel in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword on the book and its author and the tradition of the Oriental romance, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.