East Gwillimbury author sheds light on Middle East terror in new book
“It’s not the pain that scared me, or the fear from the coming pain. It was the clear knowledge that I had changed as a human,” Author Allen Sawan said after remembering his first visit to the Syrian jail.
Few novelists writing about the conflicts in the Middle East know firsthand what it’s like to live in such chaos. But East Gwillimbury resident Sawan, who grew up in Lebanon, lived it. He spent his childhood on the run, doing everything he could to avoid the wreckage of the country’s civil war. “Even now years later. I can still hear the echoes of voices of my fallen friends,” Sawan said.
Eventually he turned to counter-terrorism as a means of fighting back against the Syrian Army and the Palestinian Liberation Army—both had caused immeasurable damage to his family, friends, and country. But by the time the war ended, Sawan was tired of violence. “I never wanted to write about this. I never wanted to talk about this,” Sawan said, who came to Canada at 21. Sawan is a real estate agent by trade, but his wife, Rania, urged him to write about his experiences.
While the conflict in the Middle East is portrayed as a fight between religions, Sawan said that’s more of the convenient media narrative. According to Sawan, who has many Muslim friends, very few mosques promote the kind of extremism responsible for breeding the culture of terrorism.
“A few extremists can silence the masses,” he said. “There’s a misconception. I’m not against Islam. I have hundreds of friends who are Muslim.”
His first novel, Al Shabah: An Assassin’s Story, is based on composites of real people, and the events in the novel are historically accurate. “I should know,” Sawan said, “because I lived them.” The fast-paced thriller tells the story of a trained assassin on the trail of a charismatic jihadist leader.
The book will be released from WildBlue Press on October 18, 2017.
Sawan was born into a Christian family on the outskirts of Zahle in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. By the age of 12, he and his family had been forced to move five different times because of the country’s shattering civil war. Detained and tortured by both the Syrian Army and the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLO), he eventually became a counter-terrorist operative specializing in diffusing bombs. Having survived the war, he severed his connections to violence and left Lebanon for Canada.
Source: https://www.yorkregion.com/community-story/7634695-east-gwillimbury-author-sheds-light-on-middle-east-terror-in-new-book/
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