[1] Within the realm of Arabic literature, the book is considered a classic and was republished as part of the influential Heinemann African Writers Series.
The first section is an account of Zein's childhood and young adulthood, focusing on his strange ability to draw attention to village girls by falling in love with them.
Seif ad-Din attacks Zein while he is standing talking to Mahjoub's gang, a group of local men who run the village.
The story climaxes with one of these miracles, the wedding of the fool Zein to the most beautiful, intelligent, religious girl in the village, Ni'ma.
Haneen's blessing effects numerous miracles in the village, including turning the criminal Seif ad-Din into a model citizen, helping with harvest and prosperity, and causing Zein's marriage to Ni'ma.
They are not particularly religious, but they do understand the importance of religion to the community, so they collect the Imam's salary from the other villagers every month and see to repairs in the mosque.
Ahmad Nasr claims that Seif ad-Din represents all the negative values associated with modern city life.
The literary critic Ami Elad-Boulaski writes that the shared setting, in addition to the repeated themes and recurring characters, allows Salih's works to be viewed as part of one coherent world.
Elad-Boulaski believes that this world is more fully realized because a reader can track the development of characters throughout multiple novels and short stories.
"[7] Despite the fictional nature of the work, the account of Sudanese village life depicted therein is considered accurate enough to be an anthropological record.
For example, Ali Abdalla Abbas argues that institutionalized religion, as represented by the Imam, contains no holiness or blessedness whatsoever, because it is overly concerned with dogma.
[3] Wail Hassan makes a similar point explicitly when he writes, "Haneen and the imam are not antagonists, the one nourishing the spiritual life of the villagers, the one impoverishing it, respectively, which is how the two religious figures have often been represented by commentators on the novella."
He chose to write the world in this manner as a deliberate argument against socialist realism,[7] which Sondra Hale identifies as the dominant artistic style in mid-century Sudan.
The role of women in a traditional Sudanese society Eiman El Nour writes that all of Salih's works feature "forceful female characters who in their own way rebel against the age-old traditions of a taboo-laden, rural, male-dominated society" of which Ni'ma is just one typical example because of her early participation in the school system and her insistence of choosing her own husband.
[11] Ami Elad-Bouskila concurs with this assessment of Ni'ma as one iteration of the headstrong village girl that appears elsewhere in Salih's works.
Wail Hassan argues that she "breaches only the outward aspect of tradition," because her rebellion is still based in Islam, the accepted religion of all the villagers.
Hassan argues that Ni'ma ultimately "affirms social convention over vanity," because she marries her cousin despite the fact that he is the village idiot.
Ahmad Nasr writes that the novella ultimately argues that "modernization could be achieved under the auspices of popular Islam," because Haneen's blessing of the village encompasses the addition of new technology.