Literary Voices for Islam in the West

▪ 2006

      The Muslim population in Europe and North America is growing quickly, but even more significant is the degree of attention being paid to this very articulate minority. More than ever before, Westerners and Easterners are struggling to understand one another and explain themselves through their writings. An especially fertile topic for Muslim writers has been the pressures on Muslim women living in Western society.

      When Sudanese author Leila Aboulela published The Translator (1999), it was hailed in the Muslim News as “the first halal novel written in English.” (Ḥalāl [“permissible”] is the opposite of ḥarām [“forbidden”].) The Islamic message in the novel and in Aboulela's collection of short stories, Coloured Lights (2001), was subtle, however, compared with her latest novel, Minaret (2005). For this work Aboulela adopts an openly didactic approach, and the book abounds in information about Islamic religious practices. Her message is clearly that salvation is to be found in Islam. Herself a veiled woman, Aboulela studied in London and lived for a decade in Scotland; she probably experienced many of the misconceptions described in her novel. Najwa, the protagonist, is slowly transformed from a modern Sudanese university student into a devout Muslim who interacts with her “sisters” at the mosque and speaks their devotional language. Readers learn in detail the various ways to wear the veil and the importance of reading the Qurʾan and seeking God's help and protection. One wonders if the novel was not written in reaction to the banning in recent years of the public display of religious symbols in France and elsewhere in Europe. Aboulela appears to be aligning herself with French revisionist and Muslim convert Roger Garaudy's call for an “Islamization of modernity” rather than a “modernization of Islam.”

      The virtue of the veiled woman that Aboulela portrays, however, is questioned by Diana Abu-Jaber, an Arab American writer, in Crescent (2003). Rana, a veiled Muslim student in the U.S., relates her numerous love affairs and affirms her ability to seduce any man she wants. She explains her veiling by saying simply, “This reminds me that I belong to myself. And to God.” If Islam represents an identity for Aboulela's protagonist Najwa, Francophone Algerian author Assia Djebar approaches her faith from a cultural angle. Her motivation to speak out during the tragic events in her homeland in the 1990s emanated from a desire “to defend Algerian culture, which appeared threatened.”

      Arab writers have been generally eager to inform the West about their true selves. The ethnographic novels of the mid-20th century were followed by more sophisticated works revealing various aspects of Arab-Islamic societies. Despite her staunch rejection of her country's customs and religion, for example, Algerian Malika Mokaddem clearly values many of the desert traditions she describes in Mes hommes (2005).

      A “dialogue of civilizations”—to use the phrase of Jamal M. Ibrahim, Sudanese ambassador in London—is under way. A lively discussion of the religious and cultural content of Islam has now been brought to Europe and the Americas and is being conducted by writers in Western languages as well as in Arabic.

Aida A. Bamia

* * *