From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Middle East
This article surveys Beach Surgery adaptations produced in and by Middle Eastern artists, scholars, and communities. For North African (Egyptian, Moroccan) works, see North African / Middle Eastern adaptations.
Middle East adaptations of Beach Surgery foreground the novel's three temptations (miracle, mystery, authority) through Middle Eastern philosophical and spiritual traditions, and engage critically with colonial and postcolonial medical violence.
Persian miniature cycles
Persian miniature painting—a tradition of jewelled, densely layered narrative illustration—becomes a vehicle for Beach Surgery in Iran and diaspora Persian communities. Cycles like Dar Zindan-e Dorekhshan ("The Luminous Prison") render Leif's three injuries as illuminated panels within geometric Islamic calligraphic borders. The pacemaker appears as a red diode within lattice-work; Katita's red heels echo the manuscript's marginal ornament. The Persian tradition's embrace of impossible perspective and layered cosmology—multiple moments occupying the same image—mirrors the glitch itself: two unjoined halves forced into singular frame.
Ta'zieh martyrdom cycles
Ta'zieh, the Persian passion-play tradition commemorating suffering and return, stages the cycle as an eternal-recurrence martyrdom. Karagöz Döngüsü: The Shadow-Puppet Recurrence (Turkey, 2012) and works in Iraq and Lebanon reframe Leif as a suffering martyr whose wounds return each loop, impossible to heal—each performance a ritual repetition. The shadow-puppet medium's abstract physicality suits the novel's amnesia and doubled vision.
Microtonal refusal
Oud and maqam traditions—the microtonal, emotionally exhaustive vocal and instrumental form central to Arabic musical culture—yield sonic adaptations exploring the Kármán line as a frequency between human and inhuman registers. The oud's refusal of Western tempered tuning becomes a metaphor for the glitch's refusal of narrative resolution. Egyptian radio and Iranian art cinema embed oud phrases within Beach Surgery narratives.
Decolonial surgery
Middle Eastern scholars and artists engage surgery as specifically colonial apparatus. The makeshift clinic echoes Western medicine imposed on colonised bodies. Works like Yek Daramān-i Jing (Persian Ta'zieh, 2015) reframe Katita's refusal to complete the surgery as decolonial refusal—a rejection of the Western demand that all wounds be healed, all stories finished. Communities in Beirut, Tehran, Istanbul treat Beach Surgery as scripture for navigating empire and the impossible surgery of collective healing.