When I read accounts of war, I do think about its devastating effect on people; lives lost and grieving families forever changed. But what I loved about The Good Muslim: A Novel
The book opens with Maya preparing to return to the home she had fled 9 years previously. She has been working as a doctor in a small traditional village, delivering babies and trying to educate the community. They turn against her after a woman delivers a Downs Syndrome child, and her husband assumes his wife has had an affair with a Chinese man. The wife is beaten to the point of requiring 3 months of hospitalization, and Maya, after receiving some very definite threats, decides to return home. Her arrival coincides with the funeral of her sister-in-law.
Maya and her brother fought in Bangladesh’s brutal war of independence from Pakistan, both strong believers in their revolutionary cause and both returning with their idealism shattered. Maya became a doctor; her brother Sohail is unable to make peace with certain war events. He fall sin love with a young woman he rescues from sexual servitude in an army barracks. When she, unable to bear her own burdens, flees, Sohail flounders. His teenage crush from across the street, a rigidly devout Muslim, decides to marry him. Sohail moves further and further into a very extreme form of Islam, one that forbids books and even toothbrushes.
Maya’s return home is painful in many ways as she struggles with her memories and the lack of interest from her once-close brother. She is drawn to Zaid, her 5-year-old nephew, now cast adrift by the loss of his mother, but Sohail doesn’t allow her to truly mother him as she would like and he runs wild, a thieving and lying little charmer. When Zaid is sent to a madressa, where he is abused, Maya has to act to save him, but her actions will have ramifications far beyond what she imagines.
The Good Muslim is beautifully written, with layers and nuances that develop the characters. Although a typical American reader will spend most of the book very angry at Sohail and his cold, detached and even cruel religion, by the end the reader comes to understand at least in part what has motivated him. The story moves back and forth between the time immediately after the war and the “current” time of the early 80s.
It deals with a part of history that I know very little about. I knew the basics, of course; Bangladesh started as a part of Pakistan although 1000 miles of India separated the two halves, and in the 70s they fought to become their own country. But I knew nothing about the following Dictator and martial law, and almost nothing about the culture.
Although The Good Muslim
The Good Muslim
Elizabeth enjoys learning more about unfamiliar (to her) places around the world, but what she really loves are well-written novels. Learn more of her likes and dislikes at her blog Planet Nomad.
The apostle Paul in his first letter to the Thessalonians commands Christians to “pray without ceasing” (I Thess. 5:17).What does this mean and how is it even possible? After all, the medieval monks had 7 fixed times of daily prayer, and that was eventually proven to be physically insupportable even for men who had devoted their lives to prayer and didn’t have to be at an office or dealing with the demands of a family who produce an insane amount of laundry. (info taken from p 241; laundry example is from my own life) I have a lot of Muslim friends and sometimes they’ll ask me how many times a day I pray, usually after pointing with pride to their 5 times of prescribed prayer. “We’re supposed to pray without ever stopping,” I tell them, and they’re amazed because they think of prayer as being very ritualistic, with certain motions done and words recited.
looks at various kinds of prayer, most notably whether or not we should strive for contemplative prayer which muses on the majesty of God or active supplication which appeals to his power and love for help in various situations of life, and finds that one is not better than the other but that both are necessary in the life of an active, growing Christian. The subtitle of the work, “experiencing awe and intimacy with God,” points to this. We can know and experience God through prayer, and this will change us.
What do 16th-century Spanish nuns have in common with a young American college student in the 2000s? Menina Walker is about to find out. Her own story is interesting–found orphaned in an unnamed South American country after a hurricane, miraculously alive in a boat with a medallion shaped like a swallow around her neck, she is taken in by a convent and then adopted by an American couple. Her life is all planned out–she is finishing up her dissertation on art history, planning a trip to Spain to research a little-known artist who’s only known works are at the Prada, and planning her wedding.
is told in two parts. One part is the modern story of Menina, the other is a tale of the 16th-century Spain during the Inquisition, and a plucky, hardy group of nuns who rescues 5 girls from its clutches and spirits them to safety in the New World. The stories are fascinating and the girls come from a variety of backgrounds–one a Jew, one escaping the clutches of a powerful man, one from a Muslim background, one a mistreated dwarf with a talent for needlework that saves her life. Just as interesting is their fate in the New World, where they must again use their wits to survive and thrive.
Nurse Abby Monroe finds herself at a loose end. Her long-term boyfriend just dumped her, and on top of that she lost her job at a Boston hospital. Almost on a whim, she signs up for an immunization program with the UN at a clinic in Peshawar, Pakistan, near the Afghan border. On her way there, she spends some time getting briefed in Geneva. Out for a run one morning, she sees a man and a woman struggling on a balcony. The woman falls to her death. Abby is riveted by the sight, and by the brightly-flashing bracelet on the woman’s wrist. But a few minutes later, she’s fleeing herself, from the man who is looking for her. She sees the man remove the bracelet and his eyeglasses from the dead woman’s grasp. Abby runs back to her hotel, but when she returns with the police, there is no body to be found.
follows Abby’s journey from naive American (aside: sometimes her naivety is a bit unbelievable. Surely the UN would have briefed her?) to a woman who bravely take risks to protect others. Her time in the refugee camp opens her eyes to the horrors of human trafficking, and the novel does a good job of presenting the issue. Abby begins to learn whom she can and cannot trust. The most compelling parts of the novel are her times at a rescue house with women who are willing to share their stories–the stories are horrible, gut-wrenching, compelling, disturbing, and ring sadly true, especially if you’re at all familiar with real-life counterparts.
is different than the sort of book we usually review here, I think many people would benefit from learning a bit more about the topic. Given that we live in a time of unprecedented global movements of people, chances are high that you know at least one family in your neighbourhood, that your child has at least one friend at school, who was born in a different country and grew up in a different place, who goes home to eat things like briyani or fufu or baklava instead of spaghetti, pizza or chocolate chip cookies. Or perhaps you yourself are in this situation, perhaps dealing well with some issues and not so well with others.
follows 4 characters in detail. First of all are Hindu twins Shankar and Keshav, the 6 year old sons of the (dead) narrator. We watch as they are separated from their mother at the train station, and follow them in their wanderings through the city, in search of their mother and someone to watch over them. We also follow Simran Kaur, a Sikh girl who escapes out the window from her father, who is planning to dull her with morphine and then shoot her. He does this to protect her, knowing the mobs of Muslim men outside their house will soon arrive to first rape and then either brutally murder or enslave her, her sisters and her mother. Simran is the only one to escape, and we follow her journey with bated breath, as she must battle overwhelming odds to survive. Last of all is Ibrahim Masud, a Muslim doctor in Punjab. Angry Hindu mobs destroy his clinic and he limps towards Pakistan, himself at risk, stopping to care for every wounded person he meets. When he does at last reach the refugee camp on the Pakistan side of the border, he doesn’t stay to join the British doctors and nurses who are caring for a never-ending stream of arrivals. These are the ones who have survived, he realizes, and goes back out to the dangerous fields to care for those who won’t otherwise make it. In a beautiful and satisfying stream of events, he meets and cares for both the twins and Simran.
