Habibi tells the epic tale of two child slaves, brought together by fate, who take us through some of life’s most important lessons.

BY THE flickering flame of a candle, a scribe toils at his writing desk, painstakingly lettering and inking as he copies sacred texts, books and important documents.

When he puts brush to paper, he imparts a certain kind of power to the written word. Within the ink lie magical and mysterious powers that are at once beautiful and frightening.

Sadly, the art of the written word has been all but forgotten today. There is no romance in using a laser printer, no nuances to be explored in a dot-matrix document.

Craig Thompson’s latest graphic novel Habibi pays homage to this art that we have forgotten. His hardcover tome, weighing in at 672 pages, stirs up long-lost memories of scripture and how words and illuminations were once more valuable than gold, because it meant that knowledge was in the hands of the literate few.

But Thompson’s ode to calligraphy is just one of the many underlying themes of Habibi. Over the course of this richly illustrated book, Thompson weaves together stories from the Quran and the Old Testament, scenes reminiscent of A Thousand And One Tales, and even modern-day arguments like capitalism and sustainable resources.

As the title of the book implies, however, (habibi means “my beloved” in Arabic), this is essentially a love story.

“From the Divine Pen fell the first drop of ink. And from a drop, a river.”

And so the B&W drawn book begins, in the Middle East of our fantasies. As caravans thread through the sand dunes, the book’s main female protagonist, Dodola, finds herself sold into child marriage, where her scribe-husband teaches her to read and write.

But this phase of her life is short-lived, and she spends the subsequent chapters of the book as a teenage girl living with an orphaned boy Zam on an abandoned boat in the desert, and then as a concubine in the Sultan of Wanatolia’s harem.

Virtually alone in the world, Dodola and Zam spend years on the boat, as Dodola raises Zam as she would her own son. She teaches him the suras (chapters from the Quran) and tells him stories from the Bible and Jewish scriptures, beautifully illustrated in the panels as sprawling tapestries.

As Zam reaches adolescence, Dodola becomes a sexual figure to him, although his desire for her battles with his conscience and shame.

When Zam is 12 and Dodola is 21, they are torn apart. Dodola is taken by the sultan’s guard to join his harem and she passes her days dissolutely against the opulent backdrop of the palace. The palace, harem and bath scenes are Thompson’s tribute to Jean-Léon Gérôme, a French painter whose Orientalist-style paintings like The Great Bath and The Slave Market appear to have inspired these panels.

Meanwhile, Zam finds himself alone in the nearby village and makes a desperate decision to atone for what he considers his sinful feelings for Dodola. Thompson is no stranger to tackling topics like adolescent love, as his autobiographical character in his previous work Blankets (published in 2003) went through a similar exploration of budding sexuality, spirituality and self-flagellation (though nothing quite as drastic as achieved by Zam).

Calligraphy and scripture feature strongly throughout Habibi. Thompson does not just rely on them as illustrations and background material, but as storylines and supporting characters in themselves.

Water is another central theme in this book, as Thompson portrays how it is such a precious commodity that people plunder and rape for it, and cities fall apart for the lack of it. In the beginning, Zam found pure water and sold it in the village for food.

In the palace, Dodola tries to escape her captor by manipulating the water supply.

In the village, people consume and discard so wantonly that the river becomes polluted with a mountain of waste.

It is a parable about rejecting consumerism, but unfortunately, it is just one more storyline on top of several in Habibi, making it a tangled mess that readers have to navigate through. It does not help that Thompson uses different timelines for most of the book, switching between flashbacks and present-day narratives.

At the heart of it, however, Habibi should be appreciated as a labour of Thompson’s unrivalled craft. What truly captures the readers’ imagination is the detail in his artwork and the vivid way he weaves scripture and fables together. The main narrative – the love between Dodola and Zam – almost becomes secondary to his art.

With Habibi, Thompson has proven himself to be a worthy scribe – one who treasures the stories and words of others, and shares them with the world with utmost respect for their beauty.

Craig Thompson’s Habibi is available at Kinokuniya KLCC. The book is suggested for mature readers.

• Faltering young hearts
• Fabric buttons
• Think out of the box
• Button up
• Get arty at home
• Facing the bullies
• She dared to dream
• Facing death twice