The seventeenth and penultimate part of the biography of King Al-Zahir Baibars was published in Beirut according to the Levantine version. It was investigated and commented on by George Bohas and Iyas Mohsen Hassan.
“The seventeenth part is the final chapter, in which the episodes of the biography are completed”
This section includes 449 pages and contains seventeen divans, through it the narrator “the storyteller” returns to playing on the subject of substitution and likeness, so he sends us, with the King Al-Zahir and some of his men, to a distant city, named Shamsin and Qamrin, which contains in its land and its skies an exact copy From everything in Egypt.
Baibars discovers his twin, Baibars II, and the twins of his retinue who live in a copy of his palace and his land, the king returns from his wonderful journey carrying the shimmering planet that will decorate the tomb of the Prophet in Medina, and during his pilgrimage he repels the foray of Marzuq al-Hindi and his elephants army in a story which the prophetic biography is mixed with the Al-Zahir biography, so the two characters’ attributes overlap and the popular imagination raises its hero to the position of prophecy.
It is no wonder that the devils on the earth, humans and jenies, were envious of the Zahir king, and marched on his country, east and west, north and south. From India to Mecca, from Antioch to Corsica, from Ibiza to Basra to Abyssinia, the biography of Baibars continues, so that history ends the Mongol invasion prematurely, because the end of the biography is already approaching and its hero must eradicate evil from the happy East before the storyteller ends his story.
The seventeenth part is the final chapter, in which the episodes of the biography are completed, as the last searcher for “Maarouf” returns, so the journey of the Ismaili cavalry that began in the second part ends. As for the charming hybrid Arnous, he does not recognize his last two sons, born from his erotic adventures behind the borders in this part, until his offspring are complete and he is ready to join his father Maarouf and his grandfather Jammar whom he saw in a dream and miss them after he became a grandfather. So he leaves the biography as a martyr at the gates of Tyre, surrounded by twelve heroic sons, as Kaiser Darderik Bashqran and Qan Hilwun left it, in addition to a group of Frankish kings whose evil characters accompanied us throughout the last parts.
In addition to the themes of magic, envy, wandering, the last travel and the encounter, this part had an unbearable void and aging that suddenly attacked the details of the story, making you shocked.