To Hijabs and Beards

By Maya Jaggi, "Beyond belief" - The Guardian - London, UK
Saturday, June 14, 2008

"Unbelief itself is a religion", says an epigraph to this ambitious and topical debut novel.

The words of the 12th-century Sufi sage Ahmad Yasavi, coupled with a Pascal pensée on the limitations of atheism, open a book that satirises a kind of secular fundamentalism that can, it suggests, be as blinding as dogma.

In early 21st-century Damascus, Sami Traifi, a 31-year-old "failed academic and international layabout" born in Britain to Syrian parents, truffles among ancestral roots for a credible thesis for his stalled doctorate.

Instead he stumbles on a family secret, an uncle broken by 22 years in a Syrian torture jail. Back in London, Sami's marriage to a teacher, Muntaha, crumbles as the astute, educated daughter of a refugee from Saddam's Iraq resolves to wear a hijab.

Trained to despise religion by his late father Mustafa, an Arab nationalist supporter of the crackdown on Syria's Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s, Sami is already estranged from his mother Nur, whose earlier decision to cover her hair he sees as a betrayal of his dying father's beliefs.

Secular humanism, he fears, was an antiquated daydream shared by many modernising Arabs. "The fort had already fallen. In its rubble a marketplace of religion had set up."

Yet for all his quoting of great poets, the simplistic nature of Sami's understanding is signalled from the outset. Always, for him, "issues returned to hijabs and beards".

(...)

At the novel's heart are a devastating act of betrayal in the name of secularist progress, and the family reconciliation that comes with Sami's dawning realisation that faith is not synonymous with backwardness, nor secularism with humanism.

Muntaha, with her hijab and prayers, proves more humane, not least in her treatment of Sami's bereft mother - and is by far the most compelling character.

Her loving correction of her Islamist kid brother's know-nothing political posturing is among the most touching scenes.

(...)

Robin Yassin-Kassab
The Road From Damascus
350pp, Hamish Hamilton
£16.99