The author of The Naqib’s Daughter, Samia Serageldin, took many liberties while writing her book. Although the ending of her book is plausible, it does not follow the actual history her characters encountered. The author has admitted to changing the story of Zeinab to fit her own vision of how the story should end. In reality, Zeinab was murdered for consorting with the French. Serageldin wrote her novel to fit more closely to the ideal American romance novel than to fit the actual events that took place within her characters’ lives.
The first major deviation Serageldin made to her novel was when she had Zeinab marry Nicolas out of mutual love. This move on her part created more drama and added romance to a novel that would have lacked it otherwise. She had admitted that she made this change because she could not bear to give her character such a short life and a tragic ending although that was what actually happened to Zeinab. Creating the marriage for the novel allowed Serageldin to devise a believable excuse for Zeinab’s eventual survival. Serageldin used her knowledge of the local culture to fabricate the Naqib’s daughter’s pregnancy, knowing that it would be the only excuse one could use in that time period to delay a woman’s execution. According to the culture of the time period a woman could not be executed while with child because “the child itself is innocent of all sin in the eyes of God…The sentence may not be carried out on the mother until she is delivered of the child, or else the execution itself would be a crime against an innocent…” (Ch. 14) In this way, Serageldin cleverly added romance and prolonged the life of her main character.
The Naqib’s Daughter was written in a way that attracted the attention of and drew sympathy from the book’s Western readers. The author of the book wrote it to produce the kind of romance Westerners love to hear. A woman in a colonized society falls for her protector and conqueror, marries him, has his baby, and in the end she is split apart from him. It all seems so romantic and fits quite well into mainstream romance. The fact that the characters in the book have to adhere to certain local customs adds a fresh, new taste to the romance that makes it slightly different from other romances. The romance she created between Zeinab and Nicolas was not typical of the time and fabricated. Western readers do tend to adore romances in which the situation seems hopeless and yet it tends to work out in the end. Nicolas fell in love with Zeinab, regardless of her age and his own wife in France, showing the use of the specific romance in the book. At one point in the novel Serageldin has Nicolas thinking that “…he could no longer delude himself that this was displaced paternal affection” (Ch. 10), which fits into the “hopelessly in love” romance ideals of the western culture that do not really exist in the culture at that time. Another scholar named Leila Ahmed stated in her book that Islam “encouraged men to marry more wives to settle the matter of support for the widows and consolidating the young society…” (52) which makes plain that marriage was more practical than emotional during that period.
Seragelding had Zeinab travel to England to have an unlikely meeting with Nicolas. She probably did this so that the romance she created would have closure. As Zeinab reflects on the meeting in the book she realizes that “She had been overjoyed to see him…the passion had burned out…she was free of Nicolas” (Ch. 24). The author had to send Zeinab to England in order for Nicolas to see her and for both of them to realize the romance was at it’s end. She knew that Western audiences would not be satisfied with a romance that does not have an ending. Allowing Zeinab to never see Nicolas again would leave too many questions unanswered for the readers. Serageldin not only changed Zeinab’s life to allow her to live, she also created an unlikely scenario to please her readers. These are just a few of the liberties that Serageldin took while writing her novel to make it more appealing to a larger, westernized audience.