10 Best Middle Eastern Dramas & Plays Books

The Prophet is a book of 26 prose poetry essays written in English by the Lebanese artist, philosopher and writer Kahlil Gibran. The prophet, Almustafa, has lived in the foreign city of Orphalese for 12 years and is about to board a ship which will carry him home. He is stopped by a group of people, with whom he discusses topics such as life and the human condition.

This is volume three in the Human Trafficking Series, and the companion book to Prince Ibrahim’s Favorite (volume two). Fabulously wealthy and extremely good-looking Prince Ibrahim is obsessed with the female derriere and has invested a fortune and great passion to assemble the finest collection of them anywhere: 111 beautiful rears in his fabled harem Il Giardino Posteriore (the Rear Garden). Voices from the Harem is not really a novel, but rather a rare and fascinating glimpse behind harem walls. It is a collection of poignant stories told by the women themselves about how they were enslaved, how they ended up in there, what they think of it, and where they were before. A few are in love with him; an equal number are plotting to assassinate him. Most have dejectedly resigned themselves to being completely cut off from the world and confined in the suffocating environment of a harem. Some recount chilling stories, such as the one who used to belong to a sheikh who flunked out of medical school but decided to operate on people anyway. He set up a “clinic” in his basement, bought slave “patients,” and regularly performed surgery. Of course, he butchered most of them, but he was able to indulge his desire. Or the one who had been in the laboratory of a scientist who experimented with gags, dildos, and body glues. The experiments kept going wrong and dozens of subjects had to be put down, but were immediately replaced by fresh ones. Or the fussy prince who owned a crocodile, and if his slaves didn’t perform the way he wished, he would have them fed to the crocodile on the spot. Many tell similar stories of being lured with promises of glamorous jobs as models, musicians, or movie roles, then trapped and sold into slavery. Two actually entered servitude voluntarily. More than a few have gone quietly insane (violent insanity means a transfer elsewhere). Some responded to propositions online. Others were simply victims of opportunistic kidnappings. Fathers, brothers, step-fathers, law enforcement officers, clergy, school counselors, as well as professional traffickers, have all been involved in this unspeakable crime.

This is the sequel to Harem Slave, but may be enjoyed independently. Tammy Simmons, an all-American girl from Maryland, spent more than five years in slavery on the Persian Gulf, two in private harems, and three in a high- class “gentlemen’s club.” When she murders a man who has taken great pleasure in tormenting her, she is sentenced to be boiled in oil at a snuff club where rebellious slaves and other criminals are tortured to death as entertainment. She is miraculously rescued by the Ambassador of Cameroon, a member of the club who had fallen in love with her. He takes her as his fourth wife and they return to Cameroon where he is the newly appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Tammy is a strong person and has survived her harrowing years in slavery with most of her sanity and her sense of humor intact, but she is facing major adjustments: her recently restored freedom to a confusing and intimidating world, living in a polygamous household, the very public life as wife of a highly prominent personality, and living in Africa, where she has never been before. It’s a struggle. She thought she could press a button and be herself again, but it’s a lot harder than she figured. Managing money is especially challenging. She keeps going over budget, incurring the wrath of her co-wives. “Try going five years without a penny to your name, surrounded by people who own 747s and yachts and huge estates,” she says. “You lose perspective, and what’s worse, you don’t even realize that you’ve lost perspective.” Readers will cheer her on as she gradually reclaims her rightful place among free people. There are setbacks: she suffers two devastating miscarriages, and the press has a heyday with the fact that the Minister of Foreign Affairs met his most recent wife in a brothel. Further, wife number three, another American, refuses to recognize any difference between being a whore and a slave in a brothel, is horrified to be Tammy’s co-wife. Then it develops that Prince Ibrahim, her owner for three years, decides that he wants her back, and tension builds…

She did not need to pray to take back her rights– she just needed to become stronger than those who had stolen them… This is mostly a nonfictional story. It is one of too many stories of women who suffer in this life because the world tells them “You are less than human beings” every single day. It’s Sunday, February 2nd of 2020, and Nora has turned fifty years old on this day. It’s a beautiful, warm day for early February. “Fifty long years,” she thinks. Her mind starts to wander through her life of half a century… One particular day is clearly marked in her memory, one that happened twenty- two years ago. It was a late January day in the late nineties. She had just arrived in America for the first time. She was twenty-eight years old, and up until then, she had lived her life in the Middle East. Those who do not know her well thought she had become Americanized. She knows there is no label that fits how she has become. Despite all the years that have passed and the gray in her hair, her face remains young and beautiful.

She did not need to pray to take back her rights–she just needed to become stronger than those who had stolen them…This is mostly a nonfictional story. It is one of too many stories of women who suffer in this life because the world tells them “You are less than human beings” every single day.

If you are expecting pornography, do not buy this book. Harem Slave is not your predictable formulaic sex-slave novel; it is above all, a gripping and often suspense-filled documentary of the harrowing life of a victim of human trafficking. It is, in many respects, a survival guide for girls who find themselves in such unthinkable circumstances. Intended for mature readers, Harem Slave is not gratuitously pornographic, but due to the subject matter, does contain considerable erotic material. Tammy Simmons is every parent’s dream daughter: 18, blonde, a majorette, and unimpressed with how beautiful she is. An honor roll student preparing to enter Georgetown University, she seems destined to take her comfortable place in upper-middle-class America. She has taken to heart the high moral principles instilled in her by her tight-knit family, and dreams of being a diplomat. While visiting friends in Europe, however, she is abducted, and to her stunned disbelief, shipped to the Middle East and sold as a harem slave to an 81-year-old sheikh. He is scandalized when he discovers she’s not the buxom Swede he ordered, and sells her to the brooding and cantankerous Sheikh Saud. A year later, she becomes the property of Sheikh Fahd, who dyes the girls in his Rainbow Harem different colors; she is Miss Green. When Miss Purple furtively poisons him, she is bought by the handsome but mentally imbalanced Prince Ibrahim, who has been known to put slaves to death so he and his guests can enjoy their fresh corpses at his lavish parties. Fortunately or unfortunately, instead of taking her into his own harem, he leases her to an elite gentlemen’s club, part of a dark underworld on the Persian Gulf where brothels cater to every taste, every perversion, every excess. She quickly learns that brutality, even in the “nice” clubs, is the norm: in the worst, life expectancy is calculated in weeks. Disciplinary problems are threatened with being sent to a “snuff club,” where they are tortured to death as entertainment. To this point, Tammy has managed to adjust to slavery without completely negating her persona, but now, she almost comes unglued. She has no other choice, if she wants to survive, but to swallow her self-respect and obey orders. It’s a constant struggle. She is proud of herself for not falling apart during one particularly horrible assignment – and then is immediately trundled off to another that’s even worse. How Tammy remains sane in this horrific environment is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, to the power of love toward those who deserve it the least, and to the defiant determination to find glimmers of joy – even lasting love – in a life awash with daily humiliation and degradation. Her caring heart, courage, and ability to understand her masters as fallible humans grappling with their own sets of demons are ultimately the keys to her salvation.

# A story behind the suffering of a Sri Lankan Migrant worker in Saudi Arabia. Kamala a mother of four children facing poverty to manage her family with a drunken worthless husband that sleeps all day getting drunk on moonshine and coconut arrack, he spends all her hard earn money, Kamala works in a local factory paid a low salary and not enough to solve her financial problems. She thinks migrating to a foreign land would be the only hope. The only qualification she has to migrate to a foreign country is to be a housemaid. That salary would be way better than in Sri Lanka, flying to Saudi Arabia as a housemaid would be a dream come true. Yet day after day, Kamala comprehends her mistake and regrets her stupid actions of leaving her beloveds. She is trapped by the secured walls of the Arabian house and by the rules, regulations and her negligence on working. She gets punished by horrific physical and mental abuse by the hands of her employer. Finally trapped her in a room as a punishment with nonpayment of her salary. When she tries to escape she is being physically tortured by the employer with nailing her body feet beating her with chains and sticks. Finally, when she escapes and returns to her mother land, everything what she worked have gone on a waste by her husband and leaving it all for nothing. ## Why I wrote this book. Labor migration to the Middle East has become a main feature of Sri Lankan economy strategies making it the second biggest foreign exchange earnings. Migration is likely to continue in the future. Foreign embassies continued to receive many reports that employers abused foreign women working as domestic servants. Some embassies of countries with large domestic servant populations maintained safe houses to which their citizens may flee to escape work situations that included forced confinement, withholding of food, nonpayment of salaries, beating and other physical abuse, and rape. ### These are few stories… “One particular day I dropped a saucer which broke into pieces. My employer was angry and he heated up five nails and drove them into my hand. When I shouted out in pain my employer’s wife held a knife to my neck,” she said. ## Why you should read this book? When you Google Sri Lanka all you see is a beautiful island with beautiful sceneries and nature surrounded by lovely sandy beaches, diverse landscapes ranging from plains to highlands, rainforests, wildlife and exotic food. But not many know how the Sri Lankan lower middle class suffer. How everyday is a challenge for them to make their ends meet. How much they suffer to keep their families alive, insufficient money to feed their children and to spend for their education. I was inspired by so many stories about how these migrant workers suffer. I have been fortunate enough to help these people and listen to their stories. This shows us how cruel the world is. Another side of life which many has not seen, or even think about, simply a nightmare. Why cannot the governments take any action about this? Non-government organizations? Is there anyone at all? When they send their hard earn money with high hopes, most of the time husbands waste money on alcohol and gambling, children go astray and get abused. These women and families fall of from the frying pan into fire. Time, money, pain all gets wasted. Everything end up in tears. This story will give you the inner aspect in depth about the middle class migrant workers and their lives, how hard they work, how much they sacrifice, how hard they hide their feelings and pain, suffer and struggle to survive every day. This book is a story about a family that went through this horrific abuse and torture. Hope you enjoy this book. Scroll up and grab your copy now.

Naomi Ragen’s first play, which premiered in July 2002 at Habima National Theater in Tel Aviv. It is based on a true story: a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) woman, wife of a rabbi, mother of 12, leaves her home and stays with a friend. The community’s “modesty squad” tries in vain to force her to go back. Her friend is physically attacked, her arm and leg broken. The rabbi’s wife is punished: she is cut off from her children, against her will.