3 Quotes by Salma Khadra Jayyusi

Because the comic hero deviates, by the nature of his role, from social norms, he leads an alienated existence: he is slapped, reviled, insulted, treated as an outcast, disinherited. Yet he bears everything with the rigid patience of the wise Fool, whose foolery is in his passport to safety.(In her introduction to Habiby's Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist)

Because the comic hero deviates, by the nature of his role, from social norms, he leads an alienated existence: he is slapped, reviled, insulted, treated as an outcast, disinherited. Yet he bears everything with the rigid patience of the wise Fool, whose foolery is in his passport to safety.(In his introduction to Habiby's Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist)

Habiby has been able to see man in unheroic positions. If the core of the tragic world is a moral order corrupted by evil, then the world depicted in this novel is a closed one where two evils have met and where heroism has been born out of the havoc that resulted from their meeting(In her introduction to Habiby's Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist)