So… What inspired me to write Manzakar, you ask? Oh, so many things.

History. 

I'm a huge history nerd. I'm also a former archaeology student who spent a lot of time in my university years alone in the Antiquities section of museums at 6 in the morning fixing displays, wondering if THIS was how I died, because the creepy statues were certain to come alive at any moment...

I'm also Arab-American. The Medieval Middle East has always fascinated me; so much was happening between the 5th and 15th centuries in that region, from the Crusades to the Golden Age of Islam, to the Mongol conquests. The Mamluk Empire, in particular, has always captivated me, in no small part because I am descended of one of the last Mamluk sultans of Egypt. (That's not a joke. My grandmother held the title of "princess." Not that it did me any good, other than giving me great ideas for stories). I loosely based the Manzakars on the Mamluks, who were slave-soldiers from the Central Asian steppe.

Video games.

I watched, rapt, as my daughter played all the Dragon Age games on her PS5, completely in love with the characters and story. While Manzakar, on its face, may not bear any resemblance to those games, they certainly inspired me—certain characters in particular. If you’ve played the games and read the book… do you recognize them? 

My father’s death. 

My dad passed away in 2022, from Parkinson’s Disease. He was a brilliant physician, an amateur historian, and a hobbyist writer. He also grew up under a brutal dictatorship, where expressing a controversial political opinion meant imprisonment and sometimes even death. He wrote fiction as a way to escape, and he apparently showed most of it to no one. A few days after he died, I found a spiral notebook full of his handwritten stories, all unfinished. Not even my mother had ever seen the notebook or heard of the stories. Every single story echoed of revolution, of characters' frustrations that had been tamped down diligently with threats of violence.

Current events. 

My father believed America was, in fact, the greatest country in the world. I wonder what he would say about the sense of hopelessness that has befallen the country. When rights are taken away, when people are afraid to speak out, when people are afraid to be… And this, in a place that is supposed to preserve all those things the most. 

I will say that when I started to write Manzakar, I didn’t know certain things would transpire, even though I felt the fear, the anxiety. As a first generation American, this feeling is not new to me. But to see it in white Americans is new to me, and while it's disturbing, it's also necessary. Nothing will change if the majority doesn't feel jarred by current events. 

While Manzakar had been floating around in my head for years, I was suddenly compelled to sit down and write it. And write it, I did—I wrote the first complete draft in three months, all while single parenting and working a full-time job. I was consumed by this story, losing sleep and neglecting my responsibilities to write it. I needed to write it. I needed to write a story about identity, about oppression, about resistance. 

But most urgently, I needed to write about hope. I needed to write about characters who were flesh and blood, thriving despite the world they lived in, flawed but bursting with agency and refusing to be crushed, despite all odds.

If Manzakar resonates with readers, I believe it will be because of that hope, above all.

Manzakar is the first book in the Slave-Soldier series, written by R. Laham. You can use this link to get it.