At Freedom’s Limit

Literature or Religion?

In current discussions, it sometimes seems as if conversations about religion can take place only as fights about literature. One need look no further for the reason than the Rushdie affair, which was central in the consolidation of the Muslim political presence in Europe and served as a vehicle for the expression of many of the disappointments of the (mostly South Asian) immigrant experience in Britain. The kind of protest that started with the burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford, has become a template for expressions of militant Muslim anger elsewhere in Europe, in such controversies as the case of the Danish cartoons. The polemics, controversies, and apologetics that have followed these events have helped consolidate a notion of a transnational Muslim polity constituted by offense and injury.¹ Rushdie’s positions subsequent to the fatwa have not helped matters at all.

If the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988 was a catalyst in the political consolidation of Muslim militancy in Europe, it was also crucial to the renascence of academic discourse on religion. In his hugely influential Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (published in 1993), Talal Asad devoted not one but two chapters, in the section “Polemics,” to the Rushdie affair.² Of the critiques of Rushdie, and of secularism, generated at the time, it is Asad’s that has proven most conceptually influential, possibly because of the theoretical register of his work.³ He has emerged as one of the most important critics of secularism.

According to the religious turn initiated by Asad, literature has taken over the functions once performed by religion and, at the same time, has targeted religion for criticism, indeed, for insult and parody. Even as literature continues to perform this category-confusing, attack-and-mirror maneuver, it is misunderstood as stably secular. For Asad, The Satanic Verses provides a particularly stark example, for this slippery move is precisely what the novel executes: it claims an unassailable status, as a work of art, that is itself a version of sanctity and at the same time attacks the very notion of the sacred (GR, 285–91). As if that were not enough, the novel’s British reception demonstrates the way this doubleness fuels an intense social and political hypocrisy; in the leap to defend Rushdie from Muslim outrage, critics, writers, and even politicians demanded a respectful secularism from politically weak immigrants even as they asserted the sanctity of literature (GR, 269–306). Immigrants were, and are, required to assent to this sacred status in what is nothing so much as a tacit pledge of allegiance, a social contract imposed by national aesthetic fiat (GR, 239–306).

Asad’s recognition of the hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness in the British reception of The Satanic Verses is useful enough, but it is subordinate to his greater conceptual commitments: to the identity of something called modernity with liberalism, to the idea that the sanctity of literature is one of the joints of the modern and the liberal, and to the project of recuperating political religion. In Asad’s argument, modernity, the West, anything secular, liberalism, literary culture, and even antinomianism, are made synonymous through a series of displacements. He presents those who are outraged by the book’s blasphemy as non-Western and repeatedly designates the Muslims (secular and otherwise) who object to the protests and the threats of murder as Westernized (GR, 278–88). And for that designation one might, without too much trouble, substitute “collaborator.” Britain’s more conservative Muslims stand in as symbols of a host of non-Western lifeworlds, and literature emerges as the lifeworld-flattening juggernaut of a catastrophic colonial modernity. As I suggested in the first chapter, Saba Mahmood does not distinguish between literature and criticism, tracing them both to “the poetic resources of the Judaeo-Christian tradition,” which are in turn just a disguise for a colonial secularism.⁴ In her argument, anyone committed to any kind of secularism, or to reform, is in bed with the Bush administration’s imperialism; the rhetoric has become so inflated that it leaves no way of distinguishing between Edward Said and Bush and Cheney.⁵

For the architects of the religious turn, the leeching of religion from life disenchants the world and in the colonized world is, to boot, quite inextricably a result of imperialism. Committed to a reenchanted world, they see secularism as damaging even its own adherents. Religion is the anti-imperialist elixir of lifeworld harmony; it alone heals the ruptures in the West’s dissociated sensibility and preserves the radical alterity of Europe’s Muslim migrants. Aamir R. Mufti powerfully makes the case that there is a “mood”in current scholarship and theory in which religion as “belief, ritual, institution, worldview, or identity” is seen as a means of healing the “shattered totality of life in [colonial] modernity.”⁶ It is a mood shared by thinkers as diverse as Ashis Nandy and Talal Asad. Of course, religion has equally often been an instrument of empire, and there is a complex forgetting of the role of religion in the colonial project in the set of positions Mufti critiques.

It seems easy enough to identify the author of the position regarding literature attacked by Asad. In Culture and Anarchy, when Matthew Arnold suggests that the way forward in the march toward human “perfection” lies in the cultivation of culture—loosely synonymous with literature—the thing to be surpassed is religion, which was once a source of moral improvement but provides, in the end, only lopsided development.⁷ For Arnold, the new obsession with freedom means that anarchy lurks around each corner and haunts every corridor, deforming the spirit of humanity and holding it back from the true perfection of “sweetness and light,” which is comprised of an Aristotelian combination of virtue ethics, a cultivated happiness, and an aestheticized vision of a common, balanced culture (CA, 33–57). The agents of this deformation are modernity’s gallery of freaks and mutants—the inexorable army of machinery; middle-class, liberal, commercial, fanatical Protestants; other, antinomian, kinds of dissenters and nonconformists; and Jacobins (CA, 62). Arnold argues, “the English reliance on our religious organizations and on our ideas of human perfection just as they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth,—mere belief in machinery, and unfruitful.” Moreover, “culture is the eternal opponent of the two things which are the very signal marks of Jacobinism,” “its fierceness and its addiction to an abstract system” (CA, 424). Yet Arnold seems to exempt Anglicanism from religion that ought to be rejected. The Anglican Church is a moderate, encompassing thing: it split the difference between Catholicism and Calvinism; but it has not worked. For Arnold, Anglicanism preserves the historic, millennium-long rapprochement between Aristotle and Christianity, but culture is better, for it is like the Anglican via media that might have taken hold had Elizabeth I managed to rein in the dissenters from the start: it is the better, the true middle way (CA, 20). And it will inherit the task of one version of religion (triumphing over other kinds), which is to provide a national culture from which no one will want to withdraw.

It will anchor and produce ethical life but without the inevitable conflict that accompanies religion. Arnold’s focus on dissenting Protestantism, which stands in for all that can go wrong with religion, allows for a partial rescue of religion, of which nondissenting kinds are then to be preferred; but, exception notwithstanding, or perhaps precisely because such balance as Anglicanism ostensibly provides is ever only an exception, eventually religion ruptures social and cultural unity (CA, 37).

Arnold is not a liberal, even if large segments of the discursive culture that he helped spawn are. His Aristotelian commitments lead to the idea that humanity requires cultivation, that being human is something one has to get good at. Culture gives one a head start in a life worth living. This notion is very unlike the idea that all human life, even prior to work and cultivation, is worth living. There are forms of bare, unbuffed humanity that just are not worth it. In a move that is anything but liberal, Arnold sets up the state as the agent and guardian of culture: “The Sovereign, as his position raises him above many prejudices and littlenesses, and as he can always have at his disposal the best advice, has evident advantages over private founders in well planning and directing a school” (CA, 98). The State will farm a properly Aristotelian humanity.

Arnold’s antiliberalism gives him unexpected friends. He thinks of dissenters, Jacobins, liberals, and the rank and file of a commercial culture as more or less the same thing—that is, like Asad after him, Arnold lumps commercial culture, liberals, and secular radicals into one damaging cluster. Asad and his allies might appear superficially to be at odds with Arnold, but the recent turn to religion turns out to share a great deal with Arnold, not least of which is a preoccupation with Aristotle.

The current proponents of religion are opposed to mechanization, the triumphalism of progress narratives, liberalism, and, in their most antiteleological guise, to Marxism (collapsed into liberalism through Marxism’s commitment to history—often taken to line up neatly with a redemptive account of the devastations of historical progress).⁸ As a reaction to Western imperialism’s brutal manipulation of the rhetoric of freedom, they are usually suspicious of the appeal to freedom; Asad, for instance, casts the controversy over The Satanic Verses as a fight against a modern, secular, liberal culture that privileges individual freedom but does not understand and cannot value “cultural unity” (even the phrasing is immaculately Arnoldian), the symbol and symptom of hale lifeworlds.⁹

What is finally at stake for both Asad and Arnold is a cluster of historical developments: liberalism, anarchy-producing commitments to freedom, techno-progressivism. But where Arnold offers literature as an alternative vehicle of perfection, in the current discussion, literature is the usurper of religion and itself an engine of the modern. The fight between Asad and Arnold is really about what can restore lifeworld harmony to those non—or perhaps just reluctant—moderns caught in the web of modernity: religion or literature? Asad takes himself to be opposing Arnoldian Britain, but the more important point for the rest of us is that this is very much a family fight. Arnold wants to combat liberalism through literature. Asad, it cannot be emphasized enough, does not want to cancel Arnold’s argument; he merely wants to undo its final step. Perhaps it is the overlap between these projects that accounts for the intensity of Asad’s opposition to literature.

Religion is, in this constellation, the truest form of anti-imperialism, sometimes because it is constitutively non-Western and antimodern and sometimes because it just happens, in its most non-Protestant guises, to be the entity that allows for the production of nonliberal subjectivities: this desire for varieties of anti-Protestant religion is, after all, one of the reasons why Asad is so fascinated by medieval Catholicism. But if religion is literature’s Other in this fight, what are we to make of literature? The contest between the two, the question of whether religion can be reconciled with literature, raises a host of other questions: How can literature work once you have come out against it? What function does one assign to literature once one has rejected the basic assumptions of Arnold’s account? Can one win literature a reprieve by subordinating it once again to religion?

If we are to put pressure on the relationship between religion and literature within the terms of the kind of critique of modernity that presents religion as the alternative to the wounds of colonialism, and that takes literature as the usurper of religion, it seems right to sharpen the focus. Let us focus, then, on the literary genre most committed to psychological, sociological, and nonmythical forms of explanation, the form most associated with cities, commercial life, the middle class—in effect, the most modern genre, the novel—and ask: Can there be a novel that is properly subordinate to religion? Can there be a religious novel?¹⁰

How to Write a Religious Novel

The answer to the admittedly heuristic question, Can there be a religious novel?, seems easy enough. All one need do is write a novel with religious protagonists, which observes their pieties with sympathy. Such contemporary novels are rare, outside Christian genre fiction, and it is striking that the Sudanese British, avowedly didactic, Muslim writer Leila Aboulela has written not one but two such novels. Formally cautious and convention-bound to their core, they are still genuinely intriguing. The first one, The Translator, was published in 1999, at a moment when the Gulf War, the subsequent sanctions against Iraq, anti-Muslim feeling attendant upon the Rushdie affair, the increasing visibility of Europe’s Muslim migrants, and an American rhetoric of a coming clash of civilizations were already conspiring to turn Islam, tout court, into an anti-imperial token. The novel is clearly meant to be a response to these events. Set in Aberdeen, it charts the fraught and difficult romance between a recently widowed, devout, and veiled Sudanese woman, Sammar, and a Scottish professor of Middle East studies, Rae Isles. The chief obstacle to their union is that he is an infidel—vaguely a Calvinist—and so cannot marry a Muslim woman. Sammar is the novel’s eponymous translator. She translates Arabic texts for Rae, and the novel implies that she translates Islam into a properly felt system of beliefs for him. Prior to this, he has been a leftist and has told her that as a matter of professional and political principle he believes everything practicing Muslims believe about the religion, but—exposing the paradoxical noblesse oblige of cultural sensitivity—he is not a “believer.”¹¹ The novel’s more striking suggestion is that he translates Islam back to her, that she learns more about Islam from him than she did in Sudan. The obstacle to the romance is resolved through Rae’s conversion.

If religious characters are what are required to make a novel religious, The Translator already seems to fit the bill. But it is doing more than that; it is calling up religious narrative forms that might be precursors to the novel—stories of conversion, confessions, the providential tale—such as the early modern captivity narrative that interprets the brutality of abduction and the travails of escape as part of God’s design. The happy rescue or a fortuitous flight show that God rewards the faithful and punishes the wicked. Of course, conversions and confessions—themselves closely aligned—are usually testaments to Providence. While these forms might seem remote from the novel as a genre, the novel is perfectly capable of preserving these earlier forms—telling stories of conversion, staging confessions, clarifying the divine design at work in worldly affairs. In fact, that is precisely what The Translator does. In the novel, Sammar’s progress follows the arc of confession, Rae’s is the trajectory of conversion. When Sammar finally asks Rae to convert so they can marry, he says he is uncertain. She lashes out at him, returns to Sudan, and gradually comes to the realization that she was wrong. She should have wanted Rae to convert for his own salvation, not just so that they can marry. Miraculously, he does, and then comes to Sudan to fetch her. She thinks of the conversion as an honor and a reward, God’s provision for the patient and faithful; Rae interprets the fact that, for the first time, he has had no trouble on a trip to Africa as a divine gift bestowed because his “intention is good” (T, 195). The romance is absorbed into a providential union (at least as the characters understand the matter), evident reward for their renunciatory patience and devotional labor. Their union is like the divine sleight of (an invisible) hand that replaces Ismail with a lamb because Abraham and Ismail had already consented to the imminent slaughter and accepted it as a duty. Romance, confession, conversion, and providence—neatly wrapped up.

Aboulela has said that she writes fiction that reflects “Islamic Logic” (“Author Statement”).¹² She does not refer to any specific Muslim thinker on theodicy, but the novels suggest that Muslim logic is something like a providential understanding of the world with a Muslim accent, as opposed to, say, a Christian one, or with Allah instead of Yahweh as architect.¹³ This intention seems to be the propulsive force of the narrative logic of her novels. The way to write a good religious novel may well be to make every aspect of it evidence of the workings of Allah, to make it body forth religion with each turn of the plot, every twist of character. What might such a novel do?

Again The Translator is intriguing. The novel’s construction around a simple marriage plot obeys all sorts of narrative conventions: a man and a woman experience difficulty, some misunderstanding; the misunderstanding is overcome, the obstacle surmounted; and the culmination of the narrative is their union. The marriage plot offers opportunities for multiple reconciliations through a process that involves social negotiation (between classes and different groups), individual learning, some change, and a rearranged but still contained social order. One has only to think of Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, or Pamela, or just about any Bollywood romance; the narratives are vehicles of social conflict, but they also offer up finely calibrated imaginings of socially ordered reconciliation.

Pamela, as Nancy Armstrong has argued brilliantly, offers the vision of female virtue conquering aristocratic excess, leading the way for the development of middle-class feminine goodness as a distinctive form of social power.¹⁴ Even as the novel makes a Miltonic claim for the inviolability of the female body (one might think of the Lady in Comus), of its ability to transcend the assault of the aristocratic male, it contains that initially insurgent form of resistance in a round of domestic chores and conduct-book virtue. If the woman is not just her body and her lack of fortune she is no more than her carefully husbanded pantry and her morally managed, immaculately attended husband. Protestantism’s growing commitment to “companionate” marriage—as distinctive a feature of the Reformation as sola fide or nails hammering theses to church doors—shapes the domestic novel’s dependence on the marriage plot.

Even as The Translator shares a Richardsonian commitment to the transfiguring power of female virtue and the domestic novel’s tendency to produce a middle-class ethos of ethically religious female behavior, it transposes these imperatives and possibilities upon a different kind of social and ideological difference and vaster geographical terrain. Marriage offers the possibility of a reconciliation between the hyperbolic clichéd oppositions of cable news punditry—“Islam and the West,” “Western modernity” and “Eastern simplicity,” “Western development” and “Eastern stasis”—which Aboulela nonetheless confirms in her fantasy of union. Aboulela’s commitment to a version of companionate marriage serves to remind us that the tradition of Muslim reform out of which Aboulela’s Islamism emerges is known for its reliance on Protestant thought. Paradoxically, this vision can then be grafted onto a companionate and consensual vision of polygamy. The geopolitics upon which Aboulela draws serves ironically to occlude the relation between Protestantism and Islamism.¹⁵

One of the distinctive pleasures of detective fiction lies in the moment when the reader learns how the detective solved the mystery. Quickly switched pronouns, day-old cigar tobacco, snippets of conversation suddenly become clues, bristlingly alive with significance. The detective’s explanation satisfyingly slots the least important seeming details into a tidy grid of cause and effect. Romance novels have as their generic correlative the moment when love is recognized as requited and the lovers retrace their steps to their now-achievable union. Fear turns out to be misunderstanding; the absence in which the lovers feel forgotten reveals itself as filled with emotional event and a steady pull toward the beloved. All—each indifferent glare, every look stolen at a suspected rival—is explained. What one gets in both genres is a recapitulation of the narrative in brief, with the pegs on which it has been woven clearly exposed. Perhaps one of the most revealing exchanges in The Translator occurs at the end of precisely such a moment, when Sammar and Rae, after rehashing their romantic travails and the path to their union, are discussing their future. What seems only loosely, metaphorically providential in most instances of the romance novel—and here I am thinking particularly of Mills and Boon variants—is suddenly limned with a divine glow. The happy ending is evidence of the truth of Islam, a confirmation of its essential mystery and its generosity:

She had been given the chance and she had not been able to substitute her country for him, anything for him.

“Ours isn’t a religion of suffering,” he said, “nor is it tied to a particular place.” His words made her feel close to him, pulled in, closer than any time before because it was “ours” now, not hers alone. And because he understood. Not a religion of pathos, not a religion of redemption through sacrifice. (T, 198)

Rae’s claim that Islam is not tied to a particular place finds its resonances throughout the novel. Not only does Sammar learn more about Islam from him than she did in Sudan; Islam is produced as both properly global and anticolonial. Although Frantz Fanon, the novel tells us, did not understand the religious feelings of the Africans, the link between Islam and anticolonialism is great (T, 108–9). This anticolonialism is not nationalist and can be equated with Islamic practice. Rae’s Scottish nationalism, early socialism, and anti-Orientalist anticolonialism can be swallowed by a placeless Muslim universalism, an effect of globalization but eventually—and this too is providential—perhaps its gift. Marriage allows for the conversion that allows for the union of East and West. Earlier on, the novel has already showcased the thought that “marriage was half [a Muslim’s] faith” (T, 108). The marriage plot is thus made to align neatly with the conversion, with faith properly observed, and with transnationalism—with what Olivier Roy has identified as a newly “deterritorialized” Islam.¹⁶ Marriage is faith, destination, and reward: the marriage plot is divine (global) design. The history of the genre and its subsequent development make it particularly apt for Aboulela’s purposes. The point cannot, I think, be overstated. The resources the novel as a genre offers (and these include the possibilities of the marriage plot) make Aboulela’s resolution possible: its genealogical burden is also its gift. The novel provides a space where Protestantism, Salafism, and the fantasy of happily consensual (“companionate”) marriage can merge. The Anglophone novel is itself a deterritorialized space that allows for these transformations and can call upon generic histories that exceed the ambit of various localized and customary Islams. And it is here that gender does some of the most intriguing cultural work. Since Islam is almost synonymous with misogyny in the West, Aboulela makes her heroine’s desires consonant with the most conservative interpretation of Muslim injunction, no matter how inequitable. Any clash between the devout man and the devout woman, between female desire and divine command might confirm unsympathetic Western perceptions, which are often unsurprisingly ready to leap to self-flattering prejudice. Hence Sammar’s desire for a man who will guide and instruct her and her desperate desire to be remarried, which leads even to her contemplation of polygamy.

Aboulela’s novels’ characterological interests have to lie in other frictions—hence the hostile mother-in-law, hence also Sammar’s indifference to her son and her abandonment of him. The mother-in-law, who wants her to work and support her son instead of remarrying, becomes the symbol of a modernity hostile to the faith, her archetypal mother-in-law villainy submerged into the villainy of history—as if Aboulela’s answer to the question, What do women want?, is “marriage,” because that’s what God wants, because God knows women want it. But the obstacle to the achievement of this desire, which is also a command, is modern men and women. Modernity itself is overcome in this imagining of marriage.¹⁷

The Translator taps deftly into the contemporary taste for the unlikable, complicit protagonist, an instant mark of narrative sophistication. (Think of the protagonists of Ian McEwan’s Atonement and The Innocent, John Banville’s The Sea, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.) The resentful, complaining, and fearful protagonist becomes a symbol of an inevitably flawed humanity, which is transformed by the march to converted salvation: the unlikable protagonist is a providential vehicle, an instrument of divine forgiveness. Islam is not a religion of suffering—by marked contrast to the “dour[ness]” of the Calvinism in which Rae was raised—and unlikability can be redeemed, always forgiven, as long as it is accompanied by a moment of renunciation (T, 102). In an essay Aboulela has rather strikingly written: “I wanted to point out that the secularism which the West championed and exported had, when it cancelled sin, cancelled with it forgiveness. And a life without forgiveness is a harsh and (paradoxically in a freedom loving society) a stunted, congealed life.”¹⁸ This is Augustine for readers of domestic fiction in literary London: the inevitably complicit, politically formed protagonist of leftist taste or the antiheroine of liberal preference, of an error-prone humanity muddling along, becomes the redeemable sinner of religious social psychology. The conceit and frame of conversion thus enable a cultural eschatology in which all literary forms, social formations, and historical developments can be providentially absorbed.

So it seems that one may comfortably argue that the way to make a novel formally, structurally religious is simply to resuscitate the theologico-formal imperatives of these earlier genres. In fact, we might best read Aboulela’s writing as a series of variations on the idea of conversion. Her novels are not just about religious people, not just in touch with older, religious forms of narrative; they also convert specifically novelistic narrative modes to religious ends. Her most unusual talent is her knack for converting literary strategies of secular provenance to religious purposes. The marriage plot, the unlikable and complicit protagonist of late-twentieth-century taste, and the idea of globalization in a heavily migratory modernity—which is to say, a time in which both people and the idea of the modern itself migrate—are all subjected to conversion; and the formal correlative of conversion in novels, the explanation of cause and effect, might well be the logic of providence.

Let us add another way to write a religious novel to our list: produce an apologetics. Again, Aboulela obliges. She offers up visions of women who seek their own subjection and writes a romance that attempts to dramatize the conditions for what it casts as an ideal Muslim marriage, as if she had decided to model the Qur’anic declaration: “Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded.”¹⁹ Sammar learns from Rae in a way that marks her subordination; she looks up to him; and she is potentially happy to accept the role of a second wife in a polygamous marriage. Add to Aboulela’s ode to subordination allegories of the (happy) defeat of the Left, and we have a perfectly steeped apologetic brew. Rae’s conversion is one such allegory; he used to be a leftist—hence his sympathy for Islam, a sympathy that starts as an honorable, anti-imperialist attempt to undo Orientalist violence—and the novel stages his conversion as the proper culmination of his gently leftist beliefs. He is, in fact, a proxy for the novel’s intended audience, the readers whom the novel goes out of its way to address: leftists who should really be Muslim. Rae’s conversion shows that the Left should have recognized all along that Islam provided superior forms of anticolonial redress.

For the metropolitan leftist—the one who would have read The Wretched of the Earth and Culture and Imperialism, two of the books on Rae’s shelf, and who might have thought that capitalism is a global historical phenomenon, a phenomenon that is no respecter of religious boundaries—the novel stages a paragraph-long lecture. In his mode as instructor to Sammar, Rae says that one of the reasons he has always admired Islam is that capitalism did not “ultimately” develop in it (T,109). The “ultimately” carries a world of hedging. Rae presents a theory claiming that the way Muslim inheritance laws fragment wealth prevented the accumulation of capital. Through him, Aboulela manages to mount an argument against leftist historians who argue that a rhetoric claiming the authority of Islam was used by the emergent Sudanese middle class against older elites, that Muslim traders were crucial in incorporating Sudan into the global economy, and that one of the ways they did so was by plundering the south for slaves. The Turko-Egyptian colonization of southern Sudan in the nineteenth century, which was part of this process of incorporation, used a created distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim groups to authorize the enslavement of the latter.²⁰ Rae’s lecture is clearly meant to counter this narrative and to stand in for Aboulela, who has said that she would like the book taught in postcolonial courses.²¹

The apologetic mix is even more strikingly evident in Aboulela’s second novel, Minaret, published in 2005.²² September 11, 2001, has come and gone, Anglo-American imperialism has blossomed, like a malign mushroom cloud, into a full-scale occupation of Iraq, and Muslim apologetics seem to be of snowballing urgency.

In this novel, the Westernized daughter of a corrupt political official in Sudan accepts her desire for spiritual peace over a period of time that includes her father’s execution after a coup, her mother’s fatal encounter with cancer, her brother’s imprisonment in England in a drug-related attempted murder, and her rejection of her exiled, Marxist-atheist lover for being hostile to Islam and too critical of her father. She falls in love with a much younger Islamist man, for whose family she is now a maid, but gives him up, under pressure from his family, so that he is not estranged from his mother. Then, choosing conservative custom over Islamic precedent (as Muhammad’s first wife was significantly older than he was), she accepts money from his family to leave him alone and decides to go on the Hajj with it.

Both Minaret and The Translator are allegories of the Left’s defeat: they offer Marxists who are vanquished by Islam, Rae because he converts, Najwa’s first lover because he is presented as obviously inferior to the younger Islamist and is replaced by him. Both novels are variations on romance plots. In both, a community of women at the mosque provides comfort and solace that are otherwise absent in the lonely West. Both make use of favored tropes of postcolonial literary arrival and are liberally littered with immigrant trauma, culture shock, and references to the inadequacy of English in rendering bicultural experience. In both, Islam provides comfort, community, and access to identity. Aboulela’s is a vision that refracts Monica Ali through Syed Qutb, a vision that takes traditions of domestic multicultural romance and filters them through contemporary right-wing Islamism.

Both novels take the usual generic markers of domestic immigrant fiction—the problem of the accommodation of female desire in the face of the double challenge of Western hostility and the demands made by cultural codes of belonging; the management of allegiance and of accusations of cultural treason that are the staple of migrant fiction and of second-generation young immigrant life—and translate them into a context where the only operative category of belonging is Islam. They imagine solutions to the problem that the Muslim woman presents for left-liberal, anti-imperial discourse. What Aboulela offers up are reasonably deft visions of Muslim women who desire their own subordination, thus making resistance to imperial dreams of female rescue simpler, more clean. So if Laura Bush, mercifully oblivious to her own predicament, could offer the vision of female suffering under (say) the Taliban as a justification for war, the anti-imperialists can, if they choose, cite Islamist women who loathe the burdens of modernity and wish for different times, whose consent to subordination is really the muscle flex of “agency.”²³ Of course, this false choice is one of the oldest predicaments of Empire, the ugly face of imperial blackmail.²⁴

It is a choice that has frequently been refused by the indigenous Left and by many a Muslim feminist—and they too need to be neutralized. The fight that these novels stage with the Left, a fight that has been going on between leftists and right-wing Islamic militants in many a Muslim-majority society, and on many a Muslim-majority campus, bleeds into their apologetic function. To make the representation of gender do its work by showing consensually self-subordinating womanhood, Aboulela needs to produce narrowly focalized fictions, stories that are closely identified with the protagonist, where the social canvas is not too broad. Broader canvases, a wider range of sympathetic identifications, might necessitate representing men and women who resist religion—even as they resist colonialism—as more than just venal, petty, and inadequate. In Minaret, it is the exiled, indigenous Marxist who is too committed to progress and to change, even as he is aggressively hostile to the West; he is the one who has burned the American flag and is an opponent of the IMF (M, 156). The heroine—for whom Western culture and consumer goods are rarely an issue—can then stand in for an Islam that is able to make its peace with the West, in a way that the leftist will not. It is as if the problem in the current conflict were really Thomas Friedman’s imagination. Friedman thinks that the confrontation between Islam and the West can be coded as a choice between the olive tree and a Lexus; Aboulela can resolve the entire problem by showing devout Muslims happily watching Dallas, being fascinated by John Travolta, and listening to Western music, weaving the Lexus through the olive grove. The problem can then be subtly displaced upon the indigenous Left. Rae, the Scottish leftist of the earlier novel, knows better and is able to see the resolution to the failures of Western modernity in Islam; conversion to Islam is the proper telos for the leftist. “Modernity” is one of the things that Sammar lists as what is different about Britain, but over the course of the novel, it emerges, quite opportunistically, as a category that covers social and cultural radicalism (which needs to be eradicated) but from which imperial economic domination, consumerism, and capitalism can be rescued: modernity is reinterpreted (T, 44). This, of course, is a typical right-wing Islamist move. The fantasy reconciliation between Islam and the West is achieved at the expense of the secular Sudanese, in this case working-class, radical.

By writing these narrowly focalized fictions, Aboulela is able to engage in a strange political two-step. She can present authoritarian Sudanese positions as dissenting ones. One of the more startling moments in Minaret, a novel rife with astonishing moments, is when Najwa visits her brother in prison and wishes that the very first time he took drugs he could have been “punished according to the Shariah—one hundred lashes. I do wish it in a bitter, useless way because it would have put him off, protected him from himself” (M,193). Politically, this is key. One of the major points of contention in the second Sudanese civil war was the imposition of Sharia law upon the country.²⁵ By presenting the argument in defense of Sharia as the protagonist’s purely personal response to her brother’s failure to fulfill his filial and sibling responsibilities, and as a rankly behaviorist solution to his violent drug addiction, which at the same time is polemical in the British context because of Islam’s status as the religion of a despised minority, Aboulela is able to mount the Sudanese government’s political argument as a dissenting position.²⁶ It is important to be clear here: Aboulela attempts an empathetic gloss on the state’s brutalizing policies, even as the representation seems completely removed from the sphere of the state. The virtuous authority of domesticity, which is simply the genre’s inheritance, allows for the burial of the state’s political brutality and immigrant Islam’s besieged European context becomes an opportunity for a cunningly displaced political fight. A right-wing Islamist position is turned into a dissenting liberal one because it is held by protagonists oppressed by their otherness and produced by an author who is a member of a minority in the West. Waïl S. Hassan is right to identify Islamophobia as part of the context in which these novels have been produced.²⁷ In the manner of their response to this bigotry, the novels are able to reveal (almost despite themselves) the more brutal challenges of globalization in a world that is still battling imperialism—the metropolitan, sometimes diasporic, erasure of indigenous political radicalism.

Now, one could argue that the novel’s title makes clear something that postcolonial fiction has always done—translate; and perhaps conversion and translation have been the same thing all along.²⁸ At least one aim of postcolonial literature has been to transform the metropole, to change its culture, to make it more equitable. The claim implicit in a great deal of postcolonial literature has always been that colonial history has given the formerly colonized a claim to global history and the imperial canon. In Shame, in a passage that is almost a manifesto for the branch of postcolonial studies most concerned with diaspora, migration, and hybridity, Salman Rushdie equates migration with translation itself: “I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion . . . that something can also be gained.”²⁹ The transformations and physical dislocations of migration find their correlative in a literary carrying across of linguistic habit and cultural trope. In this case, translation points to alternatives to revivalist versions of cultural nationalisms, takes the emphasis off historical purity or authenticity, keeps company with concepts such as transculturation, adaptation, indigenization. Aboulela is very much signaling—with her title and with the central character—that she inhabits the mainstream of the postcolonial literary project.

The cunning of the fiction lies in that Aboulela takes what was already committedly transformative about this literature and subjects it to a systematic series of further conversions. Though less structurally overt, the practice is akin to that of the Christian medieval and Renaissance poets who would take erotic—or what were known as “profane”—lyrics and, at the practice’s baldest, change only the occasional word to redirect the lyrics to divine devotion, since, so the logic went, the proper object of all worldly activity and devotion is God. As many of these lyrics were already known, the tunes used for the profane poems could now be used for their sacred palimpsests. Parody was not burlesque but instead transformation.³⁰ Sacred parody, then, is the formal principle that governs Aboulela’s fictional practice—the translations translated. The aim is not just the burbling mélange of hybridity, but a deep absorption into a different universalizing teleology, smuggled in under the cover of one of postcolonial theory’s most popular concepts.

But even if they are not converting anyone, these novels seem to be working quite well as apologetics. The Translator elicited from the Muslim News the judgment that it is the “first halal [permitted by the religion] novel written in English” and from Coetzee that it is “a story of love and faith all the more moving for the restraint with which it is written.”³¹ The Sudanese ambassador in London described it as a “dialogue of civilizations” and contrasted it with Tayyib Salih’s classic and edgily anticolonial Arabic rewriting of Heart of Darkness, Season of Migration to the North, which he said depicted “the clash of civilizations.”³² Minaret prompted a Guardian reviewer to describe it as “beautiful, daring, challenging,” and to write that it explains why a fundamentalist politics emerged in the first place —presumably, although the reviewer doesn’t spell it out, because Muslim women needed protective men.³³ Implying that the possibilities of emancipation can be articulated only in a “Western” idiom, an Observer commentator wrote that the novels show a very different picture of Muslim women than does Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, that Aboulela’s heroines do not desire “Western culture.”³⁴

The dichotomy between East and West—as separate systems of ideas regarding women—is precisely what Aboulela wants to calcify. In Minaret, when Najwa is wracked by guilt for having premarital sex, she has the following thought:

Who would care if I became pregnant, who would be scandalized? Aunty Eva, Anwar’s flatmates. Omar would never know unless I wrote to him. Uncle Saleh was across the world. A few years back, getting pregnant would have shocked Khartoum society, given my father a heart attack, dealt a blow to my mother’s marriage, and mild, modern Omar, instead of beating me, would have called me a slut. And now nothing, no one. This empty space was called freedom. (M, 174–75)

As Aboulela casts it, the “West” offers loneliness and sexual freedom, the “East” discipline and claustrophobia mysteriously transmuted into happy collectivity—in fact, happy only because a collectivity. But since the protagonist is not happy outside the West and does not seem to like Sudanese sociality, marriage provides a whittled-down alternative to customary collectivities.

In the Edinburgh Sunday Herald, Ziauddin Sardar, a fairly prominent British Muslim cultural commentator of Indo-Pakistani extraction, who writes for the New Statesman as well, celebrated The Translator for its truly non-Western values, of which the heroine is an exemplar. The review makes clear that he loves the novel even more because it shows the proper way to honor Islam. We do not have to endorse Sardar’s normative religious claims to see that he reads Aboulela fascinatingly well: that is, perhaps because of their ideological affinity, he reads Aboulela without any attempt to bypass the novel’s claims to didactic anthropology:

Rae . . . is the good side of the West, but even at its best, and most learned, Aboulela seems to suggest, the West has little knowledge of other cultures. Sammar’s request, for Rae to convert to Islam, is an invitation to true knowledge. Fascination and bookish knowledge is not enough, she seems to suggest, without real experience. . . . Sammar’s principles finally have an effect on Rae. He realises the surface nature of his expertise; and comes to terms with the fact that he is not above those who he seeks to represent. Being alienated with Christianity is not the same thing as being estranged from all religions. Prayers can be accepted, and miracles can happen, even if people around you don’t see them as such. He discovers his own route to Islam before returning to the object of his love. . . . Aboulela shows the rich possibilities of living in the West with different, non-Western, ways of knowing and thinking. In Sammar, the heroine of this reviewer’s dreams, she has created a personification of Islam that is as genuine as it is complex.³⁵

Conversion is, in these terms, the only form of genuine respect for Islam’s constitutively non-Western values. But if Sammar’s version of female virtue is what counts as “non-Western,” and Muslim, we should finally recognize Pamela and Clarissa as part of the secret canon of non–Western Europe, the literary Knights Templar of Europe’s veiled Muslim truth. Islam, in other words, cannot be parochialized in this way; and a larger affinity, a more global religious connection, becomes visible through the history of the marriage plot.

Together these responses point to the historical intrigue of Aboulela’s novels, which lies in the way they simultaneously inhabit at least three moments in the history of Islam. It is hard to imagine the current role of an increasingly global and political Islam without Salafism, and Salafism, in turn, is hard to understand without the waves of reform—comprised of an emphasis on Qur’anic interpretation (ijtihad) and, paradoxically, on the revival of the purity of the earliest Muslim societies—which have periodically swept a range of Muslim contexts since the eighteenth century.³⁶ The increasingly restrictive project of Islamization in which the Sudanese government has been engaged since the 1980s is part of the longer durée of this brand of the religion. In the latest historical twist, this brand of Muslim identity is consolidated in the metropole by a Right committed to a clash of civilizations and a left-liberal anxiety about doing right by “other” cultures. A host of customary social forms are abstracted into the self-authorizing and stabilized notion of “tradition,” a range of regional and national cultures turned into fodder for “Muslim identity” and non-Western tradition. The transnational context of migrants from Europe’s former colonies helps obscure a long and complex global history.

Halal Fiction

I would like to return now to my question about whether it is possible to write a religious novel. Aboulela’s fiction, a fiction that is didactically religious, seems to suggest that such an enterprise is shot through with tensions and contradictions, and that it is not so easy to do so after all. So what happens to religion in her novels?

In The Translator, Aboulela has one of her more stridently anticolonial and Muslim female characters quote Marx with some hostility. The West’s antipathy to Islam is an emanation from the aphorism that religion is the opiate of the people. This hostility—also named in Rae’s diagnosis as part of what is wrong with Western modernity—is upheld by a fantasy that “mankind is self-sufficient” (T, 42). In both novels, the heroines’ desire for masculine romantic tenderness becomes a partial allegory for what is also explicitly stated—a psychological need for social peace.

Nowhere is the mesh of displacements more evident than in the exchanges and passages in Minaret that explain what leads to Najwa’s breakup with her Marxist lover. She wants comfort, and he offers hard, social analysis: “He knew facts and history but nothing he said gave me comfort or hope. The more he talked, the more confused I felt, groping for something simple, but he said nothing was simple, everything was complicated, everything was connected to history and economics” (M, 165). He is too critical, too hostile to the fundamentalists. He thinks it is regressive to have faith in anything supernatural. He argues that religion is not benign because it has political and social effects, but this is where Najwa says she “got lost”:

I did not want to look at these big things because they overwhelmed me. I wanted me, my feelings and dreams, my fear of illness, old age and ugliness, my guilt when I was with him. It wasn’t fundamentalists who killed my father, it wasn’t fundamentalists who gave my brother drugs. But I could never stand up to Anwar. I did not have the words, the education or the courage. I had given in to him but he had been wrong, the guilt never ever went away. Now I wanted a wash, a purge, a restoration of innocence. I yearned to go back to being safe with God. I yearned to see my parents again, be with them again like in my dreams. These men Anwar condemned as narrow-minded and bigoted, men like Ali, were tender and protective with their wives. Anwar was clever but he would never be tender and protective. (M, 242)

What makes Najwa finally leave is that in order to confront her about her growing religiosity, Anwar asks a theological question:

And he knew how to hurt me. “If everything you hear in the mosque is correct, your beloved Aunty Eva will go to Hell because she’s not a Muslim. How can you justify this, after all the good she’s done for you?” I started to stammer, I burst into tears, whimpering into the receiver. He tried but he couldn’t stop himself from laughing. (M, 244)

Aboulela’s novels, when most committed to religion and to Islam, reveal themselves as most in line with the idea that religion is a brand of sociopsychic tranquilizer. On Aboulela’s terms, the problem with the Marxist-atheist is not that he misrecognizes religion as an opiate but that he fails to administer it. The question of divine justice, of salvational inequity reduces the properly devout heroine to whimpering tears—tears that the Marxist atheist doesn’t know how to mop. It turns out that atheists are bad lovers because they ask pressing theological questions. It is, of course, important to remember here that for every Marxist committed to women’s emancipation there have been several who have been all too happy to avail themselves of the photocopying and tea-brewing skills of their female counterparts. The domestic and sexual labor of many a Marxist’s wife has been forgotten. But, unlike Aboulela, the feminists who criticize such inequity do so in the service of more emancipation, not less.

Aboulela’s fictions avail themselves of the resources of the realist novel but subordinate social realism to psychic representation and realism. Meanwhile, they thrust theology aside—as if the novel were a vehicle for a degraded lyric subjectivity. The female heroine’s desire for peace and the restoration of innocence is presented as properly, devoutly womanly, and the ostensible ability of religion—through the vehicle of tender and protective men—to deliver this peace is cast explicitly as an antidote to a world in social flux.

To clarify the point, we might think briefly about a novel that is likewise realist but which has a much larger range of identifications and presents a Muslim social network in a very different way. Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, which I discuss at greater length in the concluding chapter, is a story of an honor killing within an enclosed, lower-middle- and working-class British Asian community.³⁷In the breadth of the novel’s social canvas—its charting of the effects of varieties of conservative Islam upon a range of people, and of the workings of asphyxiating codes of gender upon men and women both; its refusal to censor the internal violence of the community while representing the intense brutality of British racism, colonialism, and globalization—the novel concedes nothing to power. At the moment of greatest personal and metaphysical distress—having lost her husband, her children, and, perhaps most important, the moral certitude that has both prompted those losses and made them livable—Kaukab, the novel’s fiercely realized, utterly devout protagonist questions how what has happened to her, her family, and just about everyone on the street can possibly be a fair reward for her quite genuine fidelity and for the decency of those killed in the name of communal honor. She ends up wondering how what “[God] does to humans can be called justice.”³⁸ This questioning turns into a longer meditation on salvational justice, yet Kaukab stays faithful and ends by saying, “help.”

In Maps for Lost Lovers, social realism opens into a theological challenge. Paradoxically, Aslam’s progressive, but also sympathetic and immanent, critique of religion presents religion as the very antithesis of an opiate: instead, it emerges as a genuine cause for psychic and conceptual struggle. Faith requires hard, uncomfortable work, work that Aboulela chooses not to represent.

Aboulela’s novels recode religion as social practice, as psychic comfort and focus, as providential design (which substitutes for a represented God). Providence can only be presented as an interpretation by the characters of worldly cause and effect, because heavy-handedly vocal, omniscient narrators—so outmoded they would annul didacticism by turning it into costume drama—are not part of contemporary fashion. The novels also relentlessly sideline justice, the one simultaneously worldly and theological concept that can pose a challenge to religion on its own terms. But in Aboulela’s novels, exploring the more traumatic impact of religion on the world, even in its effects as a powerful discourse, is prohibited, because to broach these issues is a sin and, at the same time, a compromise with Empire. The attributes that allow the novels to be designated as Muslim and halal (permitted by Islamic law) are thoroughly secular, by which I mean that they have little to say about divinity and bracket theological questions and the more troubling effects of religion on the world. In their chaste and narrow romantic focus, they make religion private. Secularism, it turns out, is constitutive of their halal goodness.

There is a formal puzzle here. Aboulela’s entirely obedient observation of the taboo against divine representation and of the more social taboo against any form of religious questioning means that she cannot really represent religion as anything but (in this case anodyne) social practice and psychic salve. Cosmological speculation, imaginings of creation or revelation, divine representation, and theological argument must be absent in order to earn them the imprimatur of the halal. Their theological safety, their closing off of aspects of religion—that is, their secularism—makes them good Muslim novels.

Narrowly focused and truncated in their realism, the novels reduce Islam to just another discourse, a set of beliefs held by some people, showcased by a sympathetic novelistic portrayal. Such a reduction may well be an inevitable feature of novels themselves; the leveling reduction of all systematic belief to one discourse among many—that might, in fact, be the Bakhtinian reading. Without some prior belief, how can one be sure that providential design is anything but simply another authorial illusion, unless one believes that God is the author of the novel?

According to Asad (or, more broadly, the prevailing position on religion), the very fact that I am talking about “belief” means that I am performing a rigidifying operation, that I am forgetting that religion is always social and ascribing to it some “essentialized” mode of being.³⁹ Asad’s view seems to mean that the ascription of any belief at all is a form of essentialism. This is a more austere vision than an argument for variations of belief within and across groups or sects. T. S. Eliot’s fantasy of a Pre- Reformation Catholic Church in which thought is as inseparable from feeling as sugar from well-brewed tea has mutated into the idea that Pre-Reformation, and thus premodern, religion offered a perfect blend of the social and the religious. As Asad would have it, religion as an entity necessitating belief is itself a modern invention. And since the modern is the West, so the argument goes, in the “non-West,” religion is a fluid, collective, social, communal set of practices that it is mistaken to call religion in the same sense as we might in the West.

How, then, do we account for God? God is difficult to incorporate into the generic frame of the realist novel, so the form allows Aboulela to sidestep a larger reckoning with the presence, or absence, of God in the world. But by choosing the realist form, Aboulela commits herself to engagement with the world and religion’s presence in it. So the narrowness of her novels’ focus allows her to evade the examination of religion’s social effects that a more expansive realism might yield. Nevertheless, the novels cannot close off the uncomfortable questions that they seek to contain. What is to prevent one from making the judgment that the subordination Aboulela models is silly, one deluded belief in a world teeming with deluded beliefs?

Narrative and Divine Justice

What if we reformulate my initial question as, Is it possible to write a referentially serious religious novel, by which I mean one that does not void God? I am suggesting that we think of religion as a category that is more than simply filiative, more than just signaling an allegiance to a particular community. Such a novel might have to conceptualize accounts of God as describing something that exists and the metaphysical realm as if it were known, as even the monotheisms claim that at least some of it is, even as they make a case for an absent God, who is also inscrutable. It might have to represent God, which would involve making God into a character. It might have to imagine God as the monotheisms do, find a way to stage the inscrutability and the fictional correlative of an inconceivability that is also good, omnipotent, omniscient, merciful, and just. It might have to read Judeo-Christian-Muslim stories as history, not as myth—and represent them as novels represent history. Would this lead to a religious novel or just a theological one? Are they the same? This is where the problem of whether literature and religion can be reconciled fires up.

A novel that is referentially serious about religion, in the sense that it makes claims about God present in the monotheisms, would make God into a character and put the world and heaven in some kind of dialogue; it would have to world God and deal with the pull to anthropomorphism in language and representation. In such a case, representation would have to reconcile divine omnipotence and omniscience with the wretched state of the earth. In this process, it would have to push away the theological question of justice and yet observe the defiant blasphemy of all theology in its demand for intelligibility, which reveals that to ask for intelligibility from an omnipotent God is to demand accountability. But this very act would then cancel its other (nonblasphemous) religious status to make it anything but halal, anything but nonblasphemous. “Religious,” when applied to novels, turns out to be a social and secular category, the name for a representational propriety—an iconoclasm—that removes heaven from scrutiny. To ask for heavenly scrutability is paradoxically to ask for a genuine worldliness that, at the same time, meets religion on its own conceptual turf. Such worldliness entails an ethical encounter with the divine. The demand for heavenly scrutability requires, in turn, that religion be more than a tranquilizing cultural practice, and identity more than merely a form of comfort. An ethical encounter conceived in such a way means that “religious pain” or “offense” cannot be designated as limits to questioning.

It is difficult to imagine a religious novel that is referentially serious about divinity, but a theological novel—one that interprets God by representing God—is more conceivable, if less reliably religious (one might think, say, of Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of Gebelawi). Religious and secular as concepts become muddled within the very form of the novel. Like anthropology concerned with religion, religious novels make religion ontologically secular. The current defenders of religion need a notion of it that is as fuzzily adjectival as the dreadful, all-purpose “spiritual”—not religion, but religious, a free-floating category that lumps together all manner of antiliberal practices regardless of what any of its practitioners believe. This defense is sustained by a recourse to an ostensibly Marxist commitment to the collective and the social but without a concomitant sensitivity to the fact that not everything is social in the same way and that not all collectivities are politically redemptive. Those postsecularist anthropologists, critics, and now novelists, in the case of Aboulela, concerned with religion are working within a constellation that Matthew Arnold was one of the first to assemble, but they break with him because of his own break from religion in favor of culture. Yet we might call this group Arnoldian: they want to undo Arnold’s surpassing of religion in favor of culture, but the only reason they continue to talk about religion is that they have already turned religion into culture.

Even if their construal is imprecise, conflating, as I suggest in the first chapter, all manner of literature and aesthetic practice, Asad and Mahmood are right to be suspicious of at least one kind: even when allegorical-theological and not conventionally realist novels are inimitably worldly. Novelistic cause and effect demands intelligibility, and representing God within them transforms scrutability into a formal imperative. Novels resist transcendence by making anything with claims to transcendence subject to representation. Representation is, of course, no less a challenge for narrative verse, as is famously the case with John Milton’s Paradise Lost. But as Paradise Lost shows all too well, once such a representation is in play, the collision between justice, power, and world becomes hard to avert without a ruthless suppression of all questions of justice and a simultaneous banishment of the problem of power.