Positive communication is a virtue by itself, aiming as it does to overcome barriers between people and thereby to increase understanding. Such communication has been the life work (so far!) of Scottish-Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela, whose first novel was called The Translator. It’s an apt title not only for that book but, with a bit of metaphorical leeway, for Aboulela’s entire oeuvre, and no doubt for Aboulela herself too. The two recurring themes linking her series of successful novels and story collections are translation – in the widest sense of the word – and conversion, which is another kind of transition between conditions. And the conversion – character development tending towards the divine – is made possible by the translation, a most virtuous form of communication.
Sammar, the first novel’s heroine, is quite literally a translator from Arabic to English. A Sudanese woman living alone in Aberdeen after the death of her husband Tarig, she translates texts for Aberdeen University, and specifically for Rae Isles, lecturer in postcolonial politics. Sammar is a widow and a disoriented single parent – she’s left her young son in Khartoum to be cared for by her aunt and mother-in-law Mahasen. She suffers depression, migraine, and the harshness of the Scottish weather – ‘a world dim with inevitable rain’. Only her faith keeps her just about even.
Gradually, though, she falls in love with Rae. For a stretch, the text is reminiscent of a classic epistolary novel, though the letters are replaced by nightly phone calls. There is an exchange of perspectives and a meeting of minds. But the course of love does not run smooth. ‘Mixed couples just don’t look right, they irritate everyone,’ opines Sammar’s Pakistani-origin friend Yasmin. Sammar’s problem with the relationship is less prejudiced, more humane, but deeper. She can only marry a Muslim, and Rae, though knowledgeable about and respectful of Islam, isn’t one. For Sammar, this obstruction isn’t a matter of social coercion. She lives in Scotland, not Sudan, and could ignore Sudanese social rules if she chose to. But Islam is important to her, and it’s important that she marries a Muslim. Therefore she wants Rae to convert.
Rae, meanwhile, has helped her to find a translation job in Egypt. This will allow her to visit her son and aunt in Sudan. Before she leaves, she brings the tensions over the conversion issue to a head, but unsuccessfully.
The novel’s next section unfolds in Khartoum. Sammar reconnects with home and her son, but Mahasen turns on her, blaming her for Tarig’s death. In this strained atmosphere Sammar does some soul-searching, then prays that Rae will convert for his own sake, not for hers. Before too long, she receives the news that Ray has indeed said the shahada. Soon he arrives in Khartoum, and the couple arrange their marriage.
The novel is a comedy in the classical sense that the conflict in the story ends in positive resolution, and specifically in a happy marriage. Indeed, this is high-quality rom-com territory, and if Muslim women were more of a target audience for Hollywood, The Translator would have been adapted for the big screen long ago.
But the novel is very different to a run-of-the-mill rom-com. The answered prayer as a plot device is something not seen in the contemporary novel, except here, nor – as far as I know – in Hollywood movies.
In interviews, Aboulela has cited Jane Eyre as an important influence. Charlotte Bronte’s novel is another comedy in the classical sense (though obviously not in terms of jokes) because the key conflict – Jane can’t marry Mr. Rochester because he’s already married – is resolved, and the marriage between the heroine and her beloved becomes possible. Yet the process of resolution is much gentler in The Translator. Bronte’s Mr. Rochester is blinded in the fire which conveniently kills his wife (he is symbolically castrated, as psychoanalytic critics love to point out). He must be disabled, reduced, and in some way tamed, before he becomes a suitable husband. Rae’s conversion, on the other hand, results from a process of growth. He gains in virtue, and Sammar is rewarded for virtuously holding to her religious values. They proceed, we imagine as we reach the final page, into a virtuous marriage.
Let’s look again at how translation works here. What are the gaps – of language, culture and feeling – that need to be bridged?
First there is the cultural distance felt by migrants. Sammar is alienated not only by the weather in Scotland, but by the people too, people shaped in a very different context to her own. They are ‘private people … made private by cold’.
Beyond that, there is the strangeness felt between a first-generation immigrant like Sammar and second and third-generation immigrants. Sammar is more of an expatriate than an immigrant – she is rooted in the particularities of her Sudanese home. But Yasmin – that friend of Pakistani origin – defines herself, and all other brown and black people, in opposition to the majority white society around her. ‘She had a habit of making general statements starting with “we”, where “we” meant the whole of the Third World and its people. So she would say, “We are not like them”, or “We have close family ties, not like them”.’
The widest gap is that between the Islamic world and the secular west. Sammar not only translates Arabic to English but also Islam and Muslim culture (at least African-Arab Muslim culture) to Rae, and thereby to the western reader. But beyond Sammar’s work, the novel itself, in its most complex move, translates Scottish/western culture as perceived by a non-western Muslim back to the western reader.
An example is Sammar’s reading of a get-well card sent to Rae by his daughter: ‘“Get well soon, Dad,” the card said and it had a picture of a bandaged bear. Sammar found the wording strange without “I wish” or “I pray”, it was an order, and she wondered if the child was taught to believe that her father’s health was in his hands, under his command.’
This last form of translation may constitute a productive estrangement for the western reader because cultural habits seen from a new perspective come into focus more clearly, no longer taken for granted but freshly interrogated. In this respect, the reading experience may be analogous to travelling – you see home with new eyes and learn as much about it as you do about the foreign land you’re traveling through.
The second novel in this jeweled chain is Minaret. Moving back and forward in time as well as space, it’s more formally ambitious than the first. And it presents a conversion narrative of a different sort. Here the new Muslim isn’t an ex-secular Christian but a secular, ‘cultural’ Muslim who begins to take religion more seriously in exile.
Her conversion is preceded by transitions across class and culture. Najwa is born ‘an aristocrat on my mother’s side with a long history of acres of land and support for the British and hotels in the capital and bank accounts abroad.’ Her father is of more modest background, but his position as an advisor to the Sudanese president elevates him above his peers. The family have servants, including an Ethiopian refugee.
Najwa is torn from her comfortable milieu – the university with its spoilt upper class and Communist middle class students, and the American Club disco playing the Bee Gees and Bob Marley – when a coup upsets the Sudanese power structure. Her father is arrested, charged with corruption, and later executed.
The family flees to England, specifically to Arab west London, where its unraveling continues. Najwa’s mother sickens and dies. Her twin brother Omar descends into drug addiction, and then to prison. So Najwa lives alone in a small flat in Maida Vale. Steadily downwardly mobile, she eventually finds work as a housemaid to a Sudanese-Egyptian family. All her previous privilege has drained away. Her employer knows nothing of Najwa’s gilded life in Khartoum, and certainly doesn’t consider her an equal: ‘She will always see my hijab, my dependence on the salary she gives me, my skin colour, which is a shade darker than hers.’
Najwa pursues an unsatisfying extra-marital relationship with Anwar, one of the Communist students from Khartoum University now studying in London. Despite or perhaps because of his proclaimed progressive values, Anwar fails to protect her from the unwanted attentions of his flat mates, and mocks both her elite background and her attachment to Sudan’s Muslim culture.
One day she realises that Ramadan has started without her noticing. The loss she feels then is a catalyst generating a deeper engagement with Islam. She attends the Regent’s Park Mosque and the women’s group which coalesces around the religious teacher Um Waleed.
Here Aboulela offers the reader unusual access to Muslim women’s spaces. ‘Around us the mood is silky, tousled, non-linear; there is tinkling laughter, colours, that mixture of sensitivity and waywardness which the absence of men highlights.’ She describes the women’s pleasure in seeing each other out of hijab, the extra levels of intimacy and knowledge this unlocks: ‘It is as if the hijab is a uniform, the official, outdoor version of us. Without it, our nature is exposed.’
This commitment to outdoor conformity would usually be presented negatively by a western novelist – and by most non-western novelists too, working as they do within a secular tradition in which the struggle of the individual against the demands of society is a key thematic frame. Here, however, the public limitation imposed by the hijab is something to be celebrated. It is seen from the perspective of women who choose to wear the hijab, not as dehumanising but as life affirming.
Najwa’s growing traditionalism – though her life is in no way traditional – is also presented sympathetically. She wishes her brother had been punished the first time he took drugs with one hundred lashes, according to sharia. ‘I do wish it in a bitter, useless way because it would have put him off, protected him from himself.’
When she falls in love with Tamer, her employer’s son, she makes the following jarring statement: ‘I would like to be his family’s concubine, like something out of the Arabian Nights, with lifelong security and a sense of belonging. But I must settle for freedom in this modern time.’
A lot is contained in this declaration, both a provocative, unashamed traditionalism and a self-aware, ironic recognition that the fantasy cannot be realised. The irony is underlined by use of the English, Orientalist title the Arabian Nights rather than the Arabic A Thousand Nights and a Night.
She disputes with her boyfriend Anwar, who not only sees Islamic faith as a mental weakness, but also argues that it is ‘not benign’: ‘Look at what happened in Sudan, look at human rights, look at freedom of speech and look at terrorism. But that was exactly where I 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…’
This, of course, is straightforward realism – for most Muslims, Islam isn’t a political problem but something inextricable from life itself. Yet this treatment of the topic is also remarkably unusual. In the works of novelists from Muslim-majority countries as much as from the non-Muslim west, Islam is generally either ignored or employed as an antagonist. The hero must overcome the obstacles strewn in his path by Islam in order to achieve resolution.
Aboulela’s writing rescues Islam from this straitjacket. And while it is certainly Islam-positive, it (fortunately) isn’t proselytising. She writes novels, not pamphlets posing as novels. All the action and the ideas expressed on the page are driven first by character.
In Minaret, Najwa turns away from Anwar towards Tamer, who is religious like her. The reader thinks he can glimpse the happy resolution to come. But unlike the first novel, the conclusion here is not at all comedic. It’s more of a question than an answer. Tamer is too young for Najwa, and too far above her socially. Rather than kick against these realities and strike out for individual fulfillment – as the heroines of most novels would – Najwa accepts her lot.
It’s an intriguing and in one sense deeply unsatisfying ending, but one which engages the reader still more deeply with the troubled heroine, who continues to struggle with her desires, and with her past. By her own lights she has done the right thing. Personally, I’m not sure I agree, but I respect her perspective as I would respect that of an actual flesh and blood person. I feel that Najwa is out there still, somewhere in west London, struggling towards happiness and probably not quite finding it, but holding to the guiding rope of prayer and Muslim community as she travels.
Minaret might be my personal favourite of these books. The only thing I don’t like about it is the cover (of my paperback copy, at least) which depicts a veiled woman revealing beautiful eyes. More or less the same cover can be found on dozens of novels written by Muslims or set in Muslim contexts. But Minaret is very distinctly different from most of those.
The next book, Lyrics Alley, is the first of Aboulela’s historical novels. The focus moves back to 1950s Sudan, the radio age. Cotton tycoon Mahmoud Abuzeid spends his life crossing between his two wives. One is Sudanese. She lives in a traditional hoash and supposedly represents ‘decay and ignorance … the stagnant past’. The other is Egyptian. She lives in an Italian-decorated salon, and is younger, educated, ‘modern’, outward looking – supposedly.
This novel isn’t in any way about the immigrant experience, but it follows the emerging Aboulela thematic pattern: worlds which are foreign to each other are brought into close cohabitation, and are in need then of translation, of a translator, so that they may better understand each other: ‘They belonged to different sides of the saraya, to different sides of him. He was the only one to negotiate between these two worlds, to glide between them, to come back and forth at will.’
The story follows Abuzeid family politics against a backdrop of the geo-politics of northeast Africa between World War Two and the Free Officers’ revolution in Egypt. British imperial power is waning, Egypt and Sudan are moving in separate directions, and Sudan is on the brink of independence. Change is in the air in general, and is dramatised specifically in the life of Mahmoud’s son Nur. Paralysed in a swimming accident, all Nur’s plans are suddenly stymied and his hopes dashed. He crashes deep into depression, but then, guided by Badr, an Egyptian teacher and a man of religion, he is able to understand his disability as a trial rather than a curse.
Nur’s conversion is one of attitude or perspective as much as religion. He realises that he has been ‘blessed with literacy’, and embarks on a new life as a poet whose lines become lyrics in popular songs. For Nur, ‘The words on the page are a mirror. They reflect his secrets and his beauty.’
Next comes The Kindness of Enemies, a dual narrative juxtaposing Scotland in 2010 and the Caucasus in the mid-nineteenth century, and making good use of the parallels and contrasts between the two timeframes. The book’s hero is Imam Shamil, and its heroine is Princess Anna Elinichna of Georgia – both actual historical figures.
Shamil, who leads the Caucasian Muslim resistance against encroaching Russians, abducts Anna. He hopes to exchange her for hostages held by the Czar, but also wishes to restore Georgia to independence and to place Anna on its throne. As Anna, despite her captivity, comes to respect Shamil and his way of life, there are hints at potential Muslim-Christian cooperation against imperialism.
Like the Algerian Emir AbdulQader al-Jazairi – considered a founding figure of human rights discourse – Imam Shamil practiced jihad before the word was debased by its current proclaimers. These nineteenth century men understood jihad in the classical sense, as an ethical, rules-based warfare prosecuted in self-defence. They observed the Islamic moral imperatives: prisoners were treated as guests, non-combatants and surrendered troops were not to be harmed, and the physical jihad would only bear spiritual fruit if it were coupled to an inner self struggle. They were genuinely virtuous leaders. As such, their stories should be heard more often, by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
This novel’s main twenty-first century protagonist, in any case, is Natasha Hussein, an academic at Aberdeen University. Natasha’s research project is ‘how did this historical change in the very definition of jihad come about?’ Hers is perhaps the most western of voices among Aboulela’s major characters. Daughter of a mainly absent Sudanese father and a recently dead Georgian-Russian mother, she calls herself ‘a failed hybrid’, and writes reports for the police on her potentially radicalised Muslim students. Her situation echoes in some way that of Shamil’s son Jamaleldin, taken hostage and turned into the Czar’s godson, so a Russified Chechen, a Christianised Muslim. In another way, it hints at the plight of contemporary Muslim communities fallen into the gaps between cultures – because after 9/11 and 7/7, ‘Many Muslims in Britain wished that no one knew they were Muslim’ – and then points more generally to the predicament of second generation immigrants who ‘grew up reptiles plotting to silence their parents’ voices, to muffle their poor accents, their miseries, their shuffling feet, their lives of toil and bafflement, their dated ideas of the British Empire, their gratitude because they remembered all too clearly the dead-ends they had left behind.’
Natasha’s development through the novel, as she studies Shamil and interacts with some of his descendants, and when she returns to Sudan after her father’s death, may be understood as a very subtle and gradual process of conversion, which only begins to turn towards the religious in the final pages.
The next book, Bird Summons, is the most stylistically ambitious of Aboulela’s novels. It returns to the human source material of the first two: that is, immigrant Muslim women in the west. The story is framed around an excursion of the Aberdeen-based ‘Arabic-speaking Muslim Women’s Group’ to visit the tomb of the convert Lady Evelyn Cobbold, or Zainab, a real person who lived from 1867 to 1963. Arguments over the nature of the trip mean that in the end only three women actually set out. These are Salma, an Egyptian massage therapist married to a Scottish convert; Moni, Sudanese, mother to a disabled son; and Iman, a young and beautiful refugee from Syria, whose third marriage has just collapsed.
Using free indirect style, the narrative shifts smoothly and continuously between these three perspectives. Each woman has a dilemma to work out, and the journey from their familiar urban lives into the wild countryside jolts them into spiritual motion. Salma is tempted by her suddenly reappeared first love, and by an imagined alternative life in Egypt. Moni is torn between her husband, who wants her to join him in the Gulf, and her son, who needs the care he receives in Scotland. Iman struggles with self-esteem and independence, as well as her difficult relationship with the hijab.
The novel contains a great deal of magic too. A lot of the action happens in a forest. Like Shakespeare’s forest of Arden, this is an arboreal realm of fluidity and change. The normal rules do not apply here, and the story is flooded by a lively symbolism, by dream scenes and Ovidian transformations. The hoopoe bird (of Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds) is a very present character, a cross-cultural spiritual guide as comfortable with Scottish fables as with Sufi lore.
Is Bird Summons the most ‘female’ of the books? It’s certainly the one in which men are least present, or in which they are significant only as presences in the minds of the women. It’s also a novel of middle age – though one of the focalising women is still young. It deals with the disappointments and constrictions of lives seemingly set in place, and with regret concerning doors closed and paths not taken. Like all of Aboulela’s stories, it’s a tale of spiritual regeneration. The plot structure it adopts is ‘death and rebirth’, following not only the renewal of its three major characters but hinting also at a spiritual renaissance shared even by the Scottish landscape: ‘They had come to a country where people had stopped praying and not realised that they were the ones brought here to pray. They did not realise that they were a continuation, needed to fill a vacuum, awaited by the ancient forests and masses of rocks.’
This new perspective elides the distance between Scotland and Sudan, between the West and Islam. For the trees and the rocks, translation isn’t necessary.
Now we arrive at Aboulela’s most recent book: River Spirit. This is the most straightforward of her historical novels, and perhaps the most skillfully crafted too. It certainly makes compulsive reading. There are no time shifts between present and past, though there are regular shifts of perspective between a large cast of focalising characters whose stories are told sometimes in first, sometimes in third person. And there is also General Gordon – the actual historical figure – whose chapters are written in the second person, thus: ‘You can be a catalyst. Your very presence on this soil will stop the Mahdi in his tracks.’
In the late nineteenth century, Sudan was ruled by Egypt, but the rulers of Egypt were actually Albanians, and they in turn were ruled by an uneasy alliance of the Ottoman and British empires. In this complex colonial context, a man claiming to be the Mahdi sparks a kind of revolution, then a civil war. On one side stand people like Azhar-educated Yassin, a lover of modernity who embodies the political pragmatism of those who benefit from the status quo. On the other side are people alienated from the status quo for reasons more economic than ideological: ‘There were taxes we couldn’t pay, land we farmed only to yield enough to keep us alive and the rest went to them, boys stolen to prop up their armies, girls taken for their harems.’
The last two phrases may seem to suggest that the Mahdi’s uprising sought to end slavery, but the reality was much more complex. The Baggarra tribe in Kordofan are described as ‘free-spirited cattle nomads whose livelihood was threatened by Gordon’s insistence to end the slave trade’. In other words, some Sudanese resented British interference because it upset a long-standing and lucrative slaving economy. (This is a fault line that the reader knows will sour Sudan’s future. The descendants of these Baggarra nomads would in many cases fill the ranks of the Janjaweed during the Darfur genocide in the 1990s. These flames are being rekindled once again by the warring militias in Sudan today.)
The established Aboulela themes are less clearly apparent in River Spirit, but still there is a (problematic) translator of a sort, the Scottish artist Charles, who paints General Gordon in two very different ways, and who purchases a black woman in the market to use as a model. The woman in question – Akuany, who becomes Zamzam – fiercely resists this representation.
Akuany’s story points to the difficult cultural ‘conversions’ forced by slavery and empire. When, during her childhood, her village is raided, Akuany loses her home and family as well as her native tongue (Chollo). She is renamed to suit the culture of her exile. At a later stage, she finds herself in a Turkish official’s harem, where the concubines aim to become pregnant, to be ‘um al-walad’, mother of the master’s child, and thus to win their freedom. This was a common means of social mobility: ‘… in every Sudanese family there is a branch that trailed back to a manumitted woman who went through agony to deliver a free child.’
Like Najwa, the unwillingly deracinated immigrant of Minaret, Akuany envies the traditional female role which is denied her. ‘This was how a free woman looked and spoke,’ she thinks, ‘after growing up safe in a father’s house and moving to that of a trustworthy husband. All through life protected and held firm. A virgin on her wedding night, chaste afterward, luxuriant in her modesty, never been whipped, never been violated.’
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Aboulela is recommending the traditional role in any simple way. In the novel’s prologue she describes Rabiha of the Kinana tribe (another historical figure) running all night, despite a snake-bitten foot, to warn the Mahdi of an enemy attack. ‘With each last breath,’ Aboulela writes, ‘she is a rebel, striving to become more than an obedient wife.’ So traditional and non-traditional perspectives compete in these novels as they do in life, and that’s because Leila Aboulela is no more a dogmatist than she is a pamphleteer. The thoughts and feelings which concern her are not primarily her own, but those of her characters. Her writing is always rooted in character, and through character in the sensuous detail of life, particularly in Muslim sensory experiences – what it feels like to fast and to break a fast, to pray with others, to wear hijab – as well as in the sensory experiences of women. Here there’s nothing prim or prudish in her approach.
Aboulela has been praised for writing ‘halal’ fiction – and certainly these are novels which Muslims will enjoy reading – but her greater achievement has been to represent Muslim women in some of their great diversity, people like my own sisters and cousins, a huge demographic which is almost never portrayed in fiction, except in stereotypical terms. Aboulela describes these women to others, gives them voice, and offers them fictions which are a mirror to themselves.
To test this out I gave a copy of The Translator to my sister Rula. English for Rula is a second language, so at first she read slowly. At a certain point in the reading, however, she increased her pace. ‘I’ve never read a book like this before,’ she said. ‘The main character is just like me!’
She’s a virtuous character, my sister. She is patient, modest, compassionate, loving, pious, open-minded, and tolerant. I think she brings out the best in me. And where, on our human level, do we find virtue, except in character, and in the relationships between characters?
Several of the essays in this Virtues issue of Critical Muslim, like Aboulela’s novels, are driven by character. First among them is our editor Ziauddin Sardar’s tribute to his wife Saliha, his description of their long and fruitful marriage, and his lament for Saliha’s recent death.
The name ‘Saliha’ comes from the Arabic, meaning ‘she who performs good and virtuous deeds’, and this Saliha was indeed generously endowed with ‘akhlaq, the “character traits” that define a virtuous person. These virtues are spelled out in the Qur’an: humility, sincerity, patience, modesty, prudence, forgiveness, courage, love, and justice. She did not acquire these virtues. They were infused within her by the Grace of God; and enhanced by her upbringing, by the traditional setting of her family background, and by her own conscientious personality.’
Theirs was simultaneously an ‘arranged’ and a ‘love’ marriage. The relationship was intimate and idiosyncratic, intensely personal, and at the same time it involved an entire family: ‘marriage in our tradition is a social act because it is not personal and individual, it never involves just two people, each alone with their own angst and dreams. Marriage is much too important to be left to the precarious dreams and delusions of a would-be bride and groom.’
Within this framework, there were strong elements of romance: ‘I was always married to Saliha. Even before I was married. Even before I was born.’
It’s a very powerful and moving piece of writing, both an elegy and a celebration, which traces their connection from the times when Zia, as a child, would carry Saliha on his shoulders, to the wedding night, when Saliha handed Zia a copy of ‘Intermediate Biology’ (there’s a great deal of humour here too). The narrative continues through their shared life, first in Jeddah, then London, as children are born, friends are made, projects are begun, and books are written.
Saliha, Zia writes, was ‘the invisible but ever present co-author of all my works’. The ‘behind every great man is a great woman’ line is often delivered as a cliché, whether it’s true or not. In this case, it was certainly true, and noticeable, as I can attest. I didn’t really know Saliha, but I attended a few Critical Muslim editorial meetings in her home. As Zia jumped about, laughing, complaining, and provoking those present, Saliha oiled the social wheels with encouraging smiles as much as cups of tea, and with the occasional cutting comment too. The two characters balanced and complemented each other. And Zia reports very accurately when he writes: ‘those who were privileged enough to meet Saliha instantly noticed the calm, the grace, and the inner and outer beauty that emanated from her.’
In its mature years their relationship settled into ‘joyful sets of choreographed routines’, but was in the end violently interrupted by Saliha’s sudden illness and death. The narration of this episode is full of the kind of raw human emotion recognisable to anyone who has experienced profound loss. Finally, the essay describes Saliha’s absence, and also her perpetual presence. Because Zia experienced Saliha’s presence after her death.
The late Sinéad O’Connor experienced absent presences too. As a child undergoing terrible abuse at her mother’s hands, she once saw Jesus, and another time the Holy Spirit manifested as a ‘small, white, very misty cloud’. Scornful materialists will put such experiences down to the tricks played by traumatised brains, but as Naomi Foyle’s essay points out, ‘consciousness studies remain resistant to materialist reductionism.’
Foyle describes Sinéad O’Connor/ Shuhada’ Sadaqat as ‘a wounded healer who succumbed to her wounds,’ as well as ‘a riveting artist, a powerful voice of protest, a modest and private benefactor to many, a proud single mother, and a courageous role model who spoke openly about her many physical and mental health difficulties.’
What’s unusual in this essay is its attention to the singer as ‘a punk liberation theologist’. This is an entirely logical treatment of Sinéad’s tortured, generous life, but not one I’ve seen written anywhere before. Sinéad bore witness to the abuses of the Catholic Church, and paid a great price for it. But still she took Christianity very seriously, and engaged deeply with Rastafarianism, and in the end converted to Islam, taking on the name Shuhada’, meaning ‘martyrs’ or ‘witnesses’. Throughout her life, she kicked against corrupt religiosity while working to ‘rescue God from religion’.
Aamer Hussein’s essay, on the other hand, describes a woman – Muhammadi Begum, ‘the first woman of letters in Urdu literature’ – who worked to rescue other women from lives confined to the women’s quarters. For her, ‘virtue, in the sense of an honourable, upright existence’ encompassed ‘the values of a traditional household while moving beyond its boundaries’.
And Ebrahim Moosa’s essay focuses on the virtuous character most often referred to by Muslims – the Prophet Muhammad, whose ‘open secret was his embodiment of virtue.’ Moosa finds a certain lack of virtue in contemporary Muslims, even as their praise of the Prophet passes the borders of logic. ‘Often expectations soar,’ he writes, ‘when believers lack in work, labour, and aspiration. His twenty-first century devotees expect him and his teachings to answer every question from the solution to poverty to quantum mechanics and physics. Few pay attention to the history and humanity of the Prophet Muhammad. His true virtue lies in him being a mortal with high standards.’
Are these high standards culturally determined, or are they universal amongst all humans, even amongst the higher mammals? Colin Tudge, in his essay “The Bedrock Virtues”, asks ‘what qualities in fact are widely recognised as “virtues”. From there we might reverse engineer and seek to discover what those virtues have in common, and get some further insight into what virtue actually is.’ Following this reverse engineering, Tudge finds that ‘among the plethora of candidates, just three are outstanding. They are: compassion, humility andthe sense of Oneness. All three are at the core of all the great religions and of many traditional, “indigenous” religions too.’
Jeremy Henzell-Thomas continues the search for common ground. His essay here, “Virtuous Words” launches an etymological investigation of ‘virtue’ alongside a survey of Greek, Roman, Christian and Islamic approaches to the concept. He finds that moderation – etymologically as well as conceptually connected to modesty – is a key Islamic virtue.
This returns us to the notion of balance, of crucial importance in the Islamic tradition – the Muslims, after all, are ‘a middle people’ – and also a crucial factor in successful human relationships. Zia describes his relationship with Saliha thus: ‘She provided a counterbalance to my obvious shortcomings. I tend to be a little – some will say quite a lot – arrogant. But Saliha was totally selfless; humility positively shone in her. My patience is rather limited. In contrast, she seemed to have patience in abundance.’
May we all increase in virtue. May we all find other humans to balance our vices and to create in partnership a virtuous whole. And may our cultures, in dialogue with other cultures, arrive at a virtuous common ground.