C. E. Rashid British Islam in Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus

7/25/2019 C. E. Rashid British Islam in Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus

1/13

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjpw20

Download by:[39.32.35.188] Date:26 November 2015, At: 08:19

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

ISSN: 1744-9855 (Print) 1744-9863 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpw20

British Islam and the novel of transformation:Robin Yassin-Kassabs The Road from Damascus

C.E. Rashid

To cite this article:C.E. Rashid (2012) British Islam and the novel of transformation: Robin

Yassin-Kassabs The Road from Damascus , Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48:1, 92-103, DOI:10.1080/17449855.2011.574864

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.574864

Published online: 12 Jul 2011.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 661

View related articles
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/17449855.2011.574864http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/17449855.2011.574864http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rjpw20&page=instructionshttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rjpw20&page=instructionshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.574864http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/17449855.2011.574864http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpw20http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjpw20


2/13

British Islam and the novel of transformation: Robin Yassin-KassabsThe Road from Damascus

C.E. Rashid*

University of Cambridge, UK

This article analyses Robin Yassin-Kassabs debut novel, The Road from Damascus(2008). It is one of the few British novels to interrogate the opposition that has beenrecently constructed between secular literature on the one hand and Islamic dogmaon the other. This false opposition has been a product of polarized rhetoric produced

during the Satanic Verses affair. Through its reappropriated Bildungsroman form, inwhich the protagonist partially converts to Islam, this novel models a transformationof the self and society beyond such oppositions and beyond Islamic identity politics.Yassin-Kassab integrates Su narrative structures with the novels trajectory of self-development, alluding to Ibn al-Arabis discourse of mystical bewilderment. In sodoing The Road from Damascus epistemologically challenges the binary betweenMuslim and non-Muslim, secular and sacred, the imagination and religious stricture.

Keywords:Islam; Susm;Satanic Versesaffair;Bildungsroman; secularism; Ibn al-

Arabi

How far has the fall-out from the fatwa chilled the literary muse in Britain? asked

Boyd Tonkin on the 20th anniversary of the Satanic Verses affair. If this question is lar-gely unanswerable, it raises interesting issues about the literary legacy of novels which

become political events. In 1988 Salman Rushdies fourth novel, The Satanic Verses,

sparked a global controversy for its ctional portrayal and satire of Islamic history.

Despite the fact that the novel was not censored in Britain (its sales instead increased

exponentially following the fatwa), the angry protests and violence manifested by Muslim

communities across the world induced two main effects on novelists and publishers in

Britain and the US. On the one hand, a crude rhetoric was articulated which defended

the free speech of literature in opposition to religious sensitivities. On the other hand,

many became nervous with regard to representing and critiquing Islam: the world-wide

controversy over the Danish cartoons in 2005 and again in 2008, in which British news-

papers refused to publish the offending images, and the rejection of Sherry Joness The

Jewel of Medina in 2007 by Random House, which had already bought rights to the

book, are cases in point.

It is in the context of the British literary response to the Satanic Verses affair that I

will analyse Robin Yassin-Kassabs debut novel The Road from Damascus, a work ofc-

tion about British Islam published almost 20 years after Rushdies novel. Yassin-Kassabs

text was well reviewed in the broadsheet newspapers, did not spark any controversy in

the British Muslim community, and was re-issued by Penguin a year after its initial

*Email: [email protected]

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

Vol. 48, No. 1, February 2012, 92103

ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online

2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.574864

http://www.tandfonline.com


3/13

publication. The Road from Damascus, like The Black Album (1995) and White Teeth

(2000), aims a fairly standard satirical critique at the often crude identity politics of con-

temporary British Islam. Yet the novel is also unusual: explicitly acknowledging the leg-

acy of the Rushdie affair, its harshest criticism is aimed at the epistemologicaldistinctions between secular British ction and Islamic dogma that have been haphaz-

ardly constructed in the last two decades. Engaging with Su mystical writings as a

potent challenge to the secular monopoly on the imagination, the novel is adamant that

we should not focus on Islam solely through the framework of modernist identity politics.

By constructing a narrative trajectory of conversion to Islam, and by paralleling the

engagement with mysticism alongside a journey towards agnosticism, the novel argues

for a reconguration of static binaries as dynamic negotiations.

I

The Road from Damascus, published in 2008, revisits the scene of the Satanic Verses

affair in order to comment on its own novelistic project. Near the end of The Road fromDamascus, the central protagonist encounters a writer named Rashid Iqbal, one of this

countrys leading cosmopolitan intellectuals (297). Iqbal is an obvious caricature of Sal-

man Rushdie, and positions himself as a novelist in opposition to Islamic dogma. We

hear Iqbal speak to a crowd of angry Muslim students:

The storyteller liberated from Islam. Islam, you see, is not a civilization of narrative. Itsrules, thats all. Rules and hygiene []. So I present literature in opposition to religion [].Instead of the dominant narrative, I offer a competition of narratives, a hubbub of voices, aBabel. Instead of the one Word, I offer innite words. Histories, novels, characters, fantasies.I do not say we do not have spiritual needs. I say we can full those needs more protably

with literature. The imagination []. Literature is as impure, as blended and mixed and pol-luted, as trangressively tainted, as a curry, a spiced Bombay curry, into which all the inu-ences of a continent have been poured. (299300)

Iqbals polemic rests on the opposition between the spiced blend of literary narrative

obviously echoing the melting-pot slogan of chutnication coined by Rushdie in Mid-

nights Children and Islam. Iqbal represents Islam as no more than a supercial struc-

ture of archaic, disparate rules: in Aziz al-Azmehs words, there is no matter of

concatenation that binds these elements, but that the sole title by means of which they

are joined together is their appurtenance to a name, Islam (25). Iqbals literary imagina-

tion is sold to his audience as a symbol of that triumphal grand narrative of secular pro-

gress for which the destructive past must be abandoned (298). Yet if Iqbals Islam is a

cold set of rules, it is also a rigid dominant narrative which must be refuted through

the hubbub of literature. He refutes religious belief by positioning literature as a substi-

tute for religion, thus proposing the bourgeois doctrine that Literature is the truth of life

(Asad 251).

The caricature of Rashid Iqbal claims that literature is limitless literature decentres

narrative, connoting democracy and multicultural hybridity as he evokes a British land-

scape transgressively tainted with inuences from outside. This constitution of the

novel as a symbol of freedom or free speech, and Islam as a fundamentalist identity

bound by strict dogma, is an apt characterization of the stance that many British novel-

ists, including Rushdie, have taken towards Islamic fundamentalism after the SatanicVerses affair. If Rushdie rarely endorsed the certainties of Yassin-Kassabs caricature,

when writing for PEN he described his fantasy of joining the ght for the modernization

Journal of Postcolonial Writing 93


4/13

of Muslim thought, for freedom from the shackles of the Thought Police, as Actually

Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on Earth (21). The social

impact of the Satanic Verses affair on ordinary British Muslims has been ctionalized

several times, but most notably in Hanif Kureishis The Black Album (1995). Kureishipresents British Islam as one-dimensional, and in an interview he argues that ction

attempts to undo this stasis of religious dogma, to create a more uid and complicated

self through storytelling (The Black Album into a Stage Play, par. 10). This representa-

tion of Islam as merely fatwas and strictures is later endorsed by Nadeem Aslams Maps

for Lost Lovers (2005), in which the British Pakistani community is trapped within the

cage of permitted thinking (110). For Sebastian Faulks, being interviewed on his recent

novel A Week in December (2009), Islam is dangerously monological: the Quran has

no ethical dimension and its message is barren; it is from a literary point of view,

very disappointing (Galvin 2).

IfThe Road from Damascus is undoubtedly situated within the same British literary

marketplace occupied by The Black Album, A Week in Decemberand Brick Lane amongst

others, it does not represent Islam as a dogmatic entity which could be undone by thelimitless novel. As Yassin-Kassab writes in his online blog, it is especially necessary to

acknowledge the delicate issue of a writers responsibility in an Islamophobic climate,

and his complaint against Rushdies The Satanic Verses was that the novel did not act

responsibly, misleading readers by distorting and fabricating Islamic hadiths (Maps forLost Lovers par. 4). Indeed, the caricature of Rashid Iqbal functions to resist an easy

opposition between literature and Islam, and it instead proposes questions which run

throughout the novel as a whole: what is the relationship of Islamic practice with rules,

and with the innite? Likewise, is the novel ever really a synonym for free speech?

Does the novel also have a distinct relationship to the limit and the innite? Yassin-

Kassab, I will argue, constitutes his novel as a negotiation between bounded responsibil-ity and inexhaustible narrative, and argues, furthermore, that Islamic knowledge practices

attempt a very similar balancing act.

Yassin-Kassab challenges the critique of Islamic dogma by constructing a plot which

follows an individuals partial conversion to Islam, through a Bildungsroman structure:

The protagonists journey is from belief in atheist and nationalist myths towards an Islami-cally-tinged agnosticism, from denying and ignoring an unwelcome piece of informationtowards accepting and digesting it, and from being a bad human being towards being a bet-ter one. (Writer Talk par. 13)

The novels focus on an individuals moral development within a shifting diasporic com-munity positions it not only as a novel of formation but also as a novel of transforma-

tion. Transformation a word which indicates, through its prex, a movement across,

beyond, over (OED, trans) and, through its stem, a structure, a shape (OED, form, n.)

is the project of The Road from Damascus, which traces the journey towards an agnosti-cism free from fundamentalism yet restrained by its particularity. The novel of transfor-

mation is a phrase used by both Franco Moretti and Mark Stein to dene a modern

version of the 19th-century Bildungsroman. Moretti treats the modern novel, like his pre-

decessors Lukcs and Hegel, as a problematic form, which reects the dissonant social

relations of modernity. He uses the term transformation to describe a dominant princi-

ple in the plotting of the European Bildungsroman; the plot of transformation, with itsfocus on generating narrative rather than plotting towards a denitive conclusion, perpet-

uates a narrative logic according to which a storys meaning resides precisely in the

94 C.E. Rashid


5/13

impossibility of xing it (7). Yet Moretti argues for the equal presence of formal con-

straints within the modern Bildungsroman: dynamism and limits, restlessness and the

sense of an ending; built as it is on such sharp contrasts, the structure of the Bildungs-

roman will of necessity be intrinsically contradictory (6). It was that Hegelian dialecticalmovement between individual ux and abstract totality which the early writings of

Lukcs also identied in the form of the novel: the uctuation between a conceptual

system which can never completely capture life and a life complex which can never

attain completeness because completeness is immanently utopian (77).

Transformation is a principle of plotting for Moretti, but I will use the word to

describe the structure of the novel as a whole. Transformation is the interplay between

restlessness and limits. The word in this latter sense describes the black British Bildungs-

roman, according to Mark Stein. For Stein, novels of transformation do not predomi-

nantly feature the privatist formation of an individual; instead, the text constitutes a

symbolic act of carving out space, of creating a public sphere (30). Transformation

describes the performative aspect of literature which impacts upon social relations and

identity politics. For Stein the novel of transformation portrays and purveys the transfor-mation, the reformation, the repeated coming of age of British cultures under the inu-

ence of outsiders within (xii). Sheila Ghose posits a similar description of the

postcolonial Bildungsroman, which is no arbitrary choice for writers who, like Kureishi,

attempt to make visible or write a new or different kind of subjectivity into being(128). Nedal M. al-Mousa, in her discussion of the modern Arabic Bildungsroman, also

stresses cultural transformation as a key structuring device: the theme of the art of living

is replaced by the central issue of teaching the hero how to reconcile two opposed cul-

tures (238). Nonetheless, it is Steins description of the novel of transformation as a

British diasporic form, representing individual journeys within an amorphous multi-ethnic

landscape, that I nd extremely relevant for Yassin-Kassabs own representation of theBritish-Arab community. If Stein, like Moretti, sees these novels as balancing the jour-

ney with the formal limit, his stress on performative representation adds a new dimen-

sion to the idea of transformation as a relationship between the novel and wider society.

Yassin-Kassab is certainly aware of the socially transformative effects of a novel within

an Islamophobic climate.

The Road from Damascus opens with a description of its British-Syrian protagonist

Sami Trai, as a solitary gure, disillusioned with his half-nished PhD on Arab poetry.

Sami resolves to get it all back on course, his place in the world, his marriage, his

mother, and so journeys to the symbolic Syrian mountainside, a foreign landscape

through which he hopes to leave childish things behind (2). However, as Sami visits

the house of distant relatives who live in the Damascene mountainside, he discovers a

previously unknown Uncle Faris who has been released from prison after 22 years, and

has been left loonish, a skeleton (5). This uncle, a former member of the Syrian

Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, took part in the unsuccessful uprising against the Syrian

Baathist Party in 1982, and was reported to the government authorities by Samis father.

It is information of the wrong sort for Sami, as closeted family histories slowly emerge

(9). If this encounter eventually becomes a catalyst to bring the protagonist back into the

fold of society, its potential for reintegration is realized by Sami only briey, in a prema-

ture moment of clarity: he lucidly conceded that things were complex, that nothing was

simple [ ]. It would take a summertime for the realization to sink into his core, corro-

sively, like salt into snow (1011).Contemporary British-Arab novels, such as Ahdaf Soueifs In the Eye of the Sun,

Leila Aboulelas Minaret and Fadia Faqirs My Name is Salma often focus on



6/13

protagonists who struggle to transport an Arab-Islamic heritage onto a British landscape

which is increasingly hostile to immigrant communities. So too with The Road from

Damascus. If our protagonist seems to have visited Damascus with the purpose of con-

cretizing his identity and his place in the world, he has returned disillusioned with hisSyrian heritage, family and wife. Hurtling from Syria towards more Syria, from cell to

inescapable cell; Samis new-found information of family betrayal simply stokes his

rebellious yearning for British freedom overlial loyalty (25). He cultivates a theatrical

and ironic stance towards his Syrian heritage, [s]triking poses, claiming allegiances,

academically conscious of a transplanted nationalism which allows him to construct a

sexy version of the Arab world for his female friends (13). In an attempt to free him-

self of the constraints of an Islamic heritage, he frets his way through academic theories

of postmodern and postcolonial identity (the Posts), which, for Sami, problematize the

very idea of a collective narrative (33).

Sami, symbolic of that restlessness and endless plotting, is contrasted with other char-

acters who are seemingly trapped in Arab identity politics. When Sami returns to North

Londons Arab community, Islamophobia and Orientalism are characterized alongsidevarious forms of Sunni Islam (Samis father-in-law), Sunni Islamism (Samis brother-in-

law), and Baathist Arabism (Samis father). Islamic identity, when voiced by these char-

acters, is accompanied by a history which ranges from the crude to the amnesiac. When

Samis mother Nur becomes a practising Muslim, she believes that she has to choosebetween nationalist and religious discourse: At rst shed innocently mixed Islamic lan-

guage with that of nationalism and modernity, not understanding how they could exclude

each other. When she did belatedly understand, she chose Islam. In silence. With immov-

able determination (55).

The immovable Nur cultivates the rigidity and exclusivity of Syrian identity from

which Sami has tried to liberate himself. It is an identity politics reduced in the novel totwo opposing poles: the secular Syrian Baath Party, and Syrias Muslim Brotherhood.

The Baath Party, ideologically oriented towards a pan-Arabist socialism and thus

opposed to any fusion of Islamic sharia and the secular state is microcosmically repre-

sented in Samis father. If Syrian Baathism has nowadays fragmented into multiple polit-

ical parties, and if its radical socialism has moderated since the 1980s, in the eyes of his

father, Baathism acquires a rosy hue of stability. Clashes between Syrian Islamism and

Baathism are narrated by Yassin-Kassab on the microcosmic scale as a discursive gulf

and physical separation between Samis mother and father. And this conict, trickling

down to the diasporic Arab community, solidly fudges into a universal opposition

between Islam and Secularism. If Arab-Muslim characters in particular have lost their

roots through diaspora, as is made explicit in Samis opening disillusionment with an

inauthentic Syria, then they seem to police their new identity in a strict way, excluding

other discourses, and universalizing the oppositions in turn.

The novel describes the continual failure of identity politics to encapsulate the com-

plexities of society, and comically portrays the naive generation of new fundamentalisms

to compensate for this failure. It is only the moment oftransformation, when our protag-

onist partially converts to Islamic agnosticism, which is able to recongure the dialectic

of Samis freedom and the constraints of his Arab-Muslim heritage. Samis postmodern

PhD is nally rejected, and he reacts by binging on drugs in the backstreets of Kilburn,

only to end up in a police cell in a later chapter ironically entitled A Great Leap (175).

It is during the sober stay in a police cell that he experiences a spiritual epiphany. Samiis now free of those sensations that he usually employed as a hijab to drape around

things-as-they-are; he felt he was on the verge of something. The lifting of a veil

96 C.E. Rashid


7/13

(181). As Samis marriage breaks apart, and he nally comes to terms with the death of

his own father, he feels unwrapped and naked (204, 207).

This transformation challenges previous epistemological distinctions. If the moment

gestures towards a true freedom, it simultaneously employs discourse from an Islamicframework, and overtly alludes to the Su imagery ofkashf , unveiling. For the Su poet

Jalal al-Din Rumi, the dunya or corporeal world is the veil, preventing us from reading

the magnicent volume of our soul which would lead to a true understanding of God

(84). Rumis veils are earthly desires, and the uncovering of these will allow for a correct

reading of the inner book of the believer. Consider how aware he will become and

what knowledge of himself he will discover when the veils are nally lifted (85). Such

hermeneutic unveiling is embarked upon by Sami, as he begins to examine his inner con-

science, to question his ironic atheism and contemplate belief in God:

He searched for his belief, looking mutely into his own silence, and found none. Nothingsolid there. He believed nothing either way [ ]. Would it be wrong to at least aspire to

such a belief, to hope? Was hoping wrong? [ ] You could even say that the weight ofblindness falls on those who dont stir to hope, so blind they are to the absurdity of death.The careless atheists, like him. The materialists who sneer at religious emotion. You couldeven say that it is they who are in denial.

For Sami this was a great leap, across, out, into the abyss. Towards what? Would somethingbe there to meet him? To stop him falling through the void? (18384)

Self-recognition is undermined by a mystical bewilderment: as Samis atheism dissipates,

it reveals a disconcerting silence, an abyss, a void.

The novels moment of transformation is a re-ordering of Islam and Baathist nation-

alism through the framework of agnostic doubt. If this doubt continues to employ esotericIslamic imagery, the potential trajectory of a full conversion to Islam, which occupies

Sami throughout the second half of the novel, is appropriately never realized. For the

protagonist of the modern novel, in the words of Lukcs, the conict between what is

and what should be has not been abolished only a maximum conciliation the pro-

found and intensive irradiation of a man by his lifes meaning is attainable (80).

Samis agnosticism is cramped by self-doubt, and yet he still cultivates a partial path-

way to belief (221, 246). Sami articulates Islam to his Islamist brother-in-law in a new

light: Im not an expert. Im not a conventional believer [ ] but I expect Islam is

something you nd inside yourself rather than in any specic country (221). The secu-

larism which had carried the promise of limitless freedom for Sami is now, he realizes,

caught within the same negotiation between choice and doubt, particularism and univer-

salism, as Islam.

The Road from Damascus describes a hazardous journey through the politics of Brit-

ish Muslim identity which is meant to challenge the rhetoric of the Satanic Verses affair

and present a more contradictory account of Islam: I was responding to Islamophobia

and Orientalist myths, directly or indirectly. I wanted rst to give a sense of the complex-

ity of Muslims, Islam, and the Muslim world, Yassin-Kassab argues in his blog (Islam

in the Writing Process, par. 13). So Sami claims a doctrine of radical unknowing, and

the beginnings of acceptance (347). Confronted with the polemic of Rashid Iqbal in the

ending chapters of the novel, Sami remains indecisive; he cannot position himself within

the binary of literature and Islam. The responsibility of the protagonist to represent Islamis tempered with a proviso that any representation must be self-consciously limited:

Sami suspended judgement (310). This suspension functions to perform a new version



8/13

of Islamic identity which is interstitial, doubtfully caught between the competing claims

of Baathism and Islamism, between the claims of freedom and dogma.

II

Despite the novels function to reinstate a complex version of Islam, reviews of the novel

have hesitated from identifying it as a Muslim work. Instead, it has been described as

revelling in the kinetic multiculturalism of the city; for another critic it is ultimately a

cautionary tale about the perils of unchanneled anger and the consequences of bigotry,

whether Muslim, Christian, or secular (Teeman par. 7; Athanasiadis par. 13). Yet The

Road from Damascus engages with Islamic theology on a much deeper level than merely

moving towards agnosticism. We have already seen that the moment of Samis transfor-

mation consciously slips into Su vocabulary, and the narrative complements this through

descriptions of Samis wife Muntaha, a practising Muslim. It is through Muntaha, I will

argue, that this novel of transformation performs a new British-Islamic discourse in order

to unpick the recently constructed opposition of Islam and literature.Descriptions of Muntahas charismatic faith often appear as a signicant counterpoint

to Samis narrative trajectory. Muntaha means the end or the farthest limit in Arabic.

In Islamic symbolism, sidrat al-muntaha is the name of the lote-tree that marked the end

point of Muhammads mystical night journey to the heavenly spheres. In this journey,narrated in both the Quran and hadiths, Muhammad cannot pass beyond the seventh hea-

ven in order to access Allah directly. So too, Yassin-Kassabs Muntaha is a symbolic

character within the trajectory of transformation: she is the end point towards which Sami

should travel, but she is also a boundary, an interstitial space between the Divine and the

human.

Muntaha importantly voices the opinion that Islamic and literary hermeneutics are notas opposed as Rashid Iqbal pretends them to be:

And doctrine is open to interpretation [ ]. The rst word Muhammad heard was read.The Muslims should read better. They should be less literal about everything. It was thatverse that made me read the Quran again. It warns us not to take ourselves too seriouslywhen we interpret. We only have images for whats incomprehensible. (14546)

Muntaha privileges the allegorical and sublime verses of the Quran (mustashaabih) over

the literal verses (muhkam), aligning her with the Shia and Ismaili practice of tawil it

is no surprise that Muntahas mother is Shia. Tawil is presented as an interpretative act

in the novel, one which questions the certitudes of the Sunni tafsir (exegesis) of herbrother and father. Shia tawil is the esoteric understanding of the world; Henry Corbin

perceptively describes it as the transmutation of everything visible into symbols, the

intuition of an essence or person in an Image which partakes neither of universal logic

nor of sense perception (13). Nur, too, seems to evoke this Shia tawil: her reading ofthe world is based on an ethical interpretative work, to read the universe like a book

(59), which recognizes its own provisionality: All you can do is hope. And try to be

yourself, what you hope you may be (343). Muntaha uses tawil to respond to Iqbals

polemic:

But why make a distinction [between religion and literature]? Whatever raises the spirit [

]. Depends on how you read, doesnt it? Same with novels. How does he expect people toread novels properly if they cant read religious text? [ ] I suppose religions somewhere

between ction and non-ction. (320)

98 C.E. Rashid


9/13

The intermediary realm, amidst fundamentalist binaries, is occupied by Muntahas reli-

gious experience of scripture. Rhetorical questions, evident in the above quotation

describing Samis spiritual epiphany in prison, straddle the individual and the social, as

Muntaha puts forth a reading of Islamic scripture which is proper yet personal.Whilst Rashid Iqbal rails against the limitations of Islamic ritual, prayer seems to be

an act of the highest creativity for Muntaha. Occurring several times in the novel, the

longest description of Muntahas prayers occurs after her father has died and Sami has

returned from prison:

When she prays, her heart is a shining mirror reecting the light of God. She can almost saythat only God is present. She is aware of Him only. Her consciousness continues, but Mun-taha, the daughter of Marwan and Mouna, is nearly absent. Aiming at absence. She is theame of love blown out by the Beloved [ ]. He the cause and the consequence and sheobliterated in between.

God is closer to her than her jugular vein. I am inside God, she thinks. God is inside me.

When she prays, she enacts a drama of scale. She is worshipping the absolute Light, inthe centre of it, conscious of herself at the midpoint of extension into inner and outerspace [ ]. It is real but unreal in the face of God. It emanates from God but God is

beyond it. She says allahu akbar as she bends, kneels, and prostrates. Allahu akbar. Godis greater. (232)

The passage quoted above contains allusions to the writings of Supoets and philosophers

such as Suhrawardi, Rabia of Basra and Rumi. I will focus on sections of a Su treatise

which bears a stark similarity to the description above: the Futuhat al-makkiyya(The Reve-lations of Mecca) by Muhyi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ali ibn al-Arabi. Ibn al-Arabi, who

was born in Andalusia in 1165 and after extensive travel eventually died in Damascus in

1240, is a revered Su in Islam whose fame is relatively unknown in western scholarship.

Ibn al-Arabis vast Futuhat is an investigation of the Islamic sciences, including discus-

sions of the ontological and epistemological nature of Allah, the Prophet, and the friends of

Allah (the Sumystics).

Yassin-Kassabs novel of transformation employs frequent allusions to Ibn al-Arabis

writings in order to instate a complex vision of Islamic faith. Such allusions are most

notable through the novels emphasis on the unveiling (kashf) of Divine truth. Muntahas

heart, a shining mirror reecting the light of God, echoes Ibn al-Arabis claim that

when man applies himself to the mirror of his heart and polishes it with invocation and

recitation of the Koran, he thereby gains some light. For, God possesses a light calledthe light of existence which is deployed over all existent things (qtd in Chittick, Su

Path 223).1 If God, for Muntaha, comprises the absolute Light, Gods light of exis-

tence constitutes the weaker light of the corporeal world which discloses the Divine.

And through His self-disclosure in radiant light He makes manifest the incapacity of the eyes [ ] everything

is qualied by incapacity, and God alone possesses the perfection of the Essence (Su

Path 218). The unveiling is always incomplete, and we are ultimately incapable of seeing

the Essence; yet the heart of the believer is capable of gaining some light. Thus God is

almost, nearly present in Muntahas prayer.

Prayer in the novel functions as a symbol of transformation, as it allows Muntaha toposition herself on the boundary between individualism and sublimation in a higher

power. Muntaha, entering into the spiritual state of the Su mystic, loses herself in God,



10/13

aiming at absence through the unveiling of the Divine. Such absence is cultivated as

fan: a Su who had ripped away obscuring egotism to discover the divine presence at

the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realisation and self-control

(Armstrong 268). Muntaha is described later in the above quotation as the ame of loveblown out by the Beloved, both conscious and obliterated, resembling Ibn al-Arabis

description of the Su mystic as the lover of God (the Beloved) who experiences

obliteration in afrmation: Everything that appears from the lover is Gods creation,

and the lover is the object of the act, not the agent. Hence he is the locus within which

affairs take place, so he is obliterated in afrmation (Su Path 114). Such obliteration

echoes the end of Yassin-Kassabs description, where Muntahas acts are both an afrma-

tion of her Self, but also attributed to God. For, as Ibn al-Arabi argues, all acts belong

to God, and no act can have a cause other than God.

Muntahas prayer thus microcosmically echoes Samis unveiling in the solitude of

prison, as unveiling and unknowing occur simultaneously. For Muntaha, the realization

of the individuals relationship to God is the only way we can access Him; nevertheless,

it remains provisional, contingent (God is greater). For In Himself, God is far beyondand far greater than that His servant should know Him. That is impossible. There remains

no object of knowledge for us to pursue except relationships in particular (qtd in Chit-

tick, Imaginal Worlds 42). The object of knowledge splinters into contingent relation-

ships, whilst the mode of knowing depends on the limit of unknowability.The trope of the boundary is a potent connection between Islamic esotericism and lit-

erary writing. Words designating intermediary gures and realms are paramount in Ibn

al-Arabis vocabulary. For Ibn al-Arabi, God can be both known and unknown through

the interstitial realm of the Imagination, which he designates as a barzakh (isthmus)

where opposites combine. The imagination is both subjective and self-subsisting; internal

and exterior to the mind of the mystic (Corbin 219; Chittick, Imaginal Worlds 11). It hasa state of contiguity, which it possesses through man and certain animals, and a state of

discontiguity (Su Path 117). The revelations of Muhammad, argues Ibn al-Arabi, were

accessed in the realm of the Imagination (Ibn al-Arabi 121). To know Gods hidden

treasure, therefore, requires the work of the barzakh: the creation of the World of the

Imagination in order to make manifest within it the fact that it brings together all oppo-

sites [ ] which is the closest thing to a denotation of the Real (Su Path 115). For

whilst the essence of God cannot be present in the world of the imagination, the attri-

butes of God accessible to man can, and these are consequently in a state of perpetual

transmutation (Su Path 118).

The character of Rashid Iqbal places Islam against literature but also, in a more gen-

eral sense, against a secular imagination [f]reed from mind tyranny, free to design the

heavens for ourselves [ ]. Freed to explore the imaginary realms. No grief will touch

us (30304). Yet as Muntaha argues to Gabor, God uses any image or symbol He likes

to get His point across; furthermore we only have images for whats incomprehensible

(14546). It is only on the interstitial plane of the imagination that Gods hidden trea-

sure can be known. Whilst for Rashid Iqbal, religion is blind and destructive (298),

for Ibn al-Arabi, Each prayer, each instant in each prayer, then becomes a recurrence of

Creation (Corbin 257). And as the description of Muntahas prayer closes, it too empha-

sizes perpetual formation and transformation: Each moment God creates anew (233).

This phrase is central to Ibn al-Arabis Futahat. For God never discloses Himself in a

single form to two individuals, nor in a single form twice (Su Path 353). Occasional-ism allows for Muntahas faith to be open to change at any point, so that it depends on

continual self-assessment and a creativity which is emotive and individual: She knows

100 C.E. Rashid


11/13

her sense may be wrong, but it feels right to her. Why should she struggle against herself

to deny what she feels? (92)

The perpetual creation of the Sus faith in God induces bewilderment which stands

in distinct contradiction to Rashid Iqbals condent offerings. The Su experiences thebafement of the Divine paradox: God is huwa la huwa, in Ibn al-Arabis words, He/

not He (Chittick, Su Path 4, 114). Mystical bewilderment is evoked by Robin Yassin-

Kassabs description of awe, in his blog:

It strikes me that the most intelligent response to this strange experience of being here, and tothe mysteries of time, matter and life, is awe and humility, which translates to a profoundagnosticism, a confession that we dont and cant understand. (Dawkins or McIntosh par. 9)

Such awe is articulated by both Sami and Muntaha as they come to terms with Divine

knowability/unknowability. The nal chapter is entitled Awe, as Sami submits to his

bewilderment:

For what is he, now? Not much any more. Not Mustafas son, nor Marwans son-in-law []. Even his name was given to him by other people. In the dead past. So what else?

Hes a bit more of a man now. Meaning, a moment of consciousness. Awe and dread.

For now, thats all he can manage. Perhaps its enough. (34849)

It is here that Sami, like Ibn al-Arabi, celebrates kashf and is held by belief (347). At

the end of the novel it is this Romantic awe which remains, as Sami no longer experi-

enced body-claustrophobia, but instead a sense of openness and space. Now he claimed

a doctrine of radical unknowing, and the beginnings of acceptance (347).In The Road from Damascus, the adoption of Ibn al-Arabis mysticism partners with

Samis agnosticism and with the texts of Sunni orthodox Islam (the tafsir of the Quran,

citing sound hadiths, glossing the qh). It thus exemplies Yassin-Kassabs performative

transformation of the seemingly opposed poles of Islamic stricture and creative freedom.

Ibn al-Arabi was both a strict practising Muslim, yet refused to tie himself to any partic-ular school of thought, and Ian Almond has succinctly described the Shaykhs dismissal

ofve centuries of Islamic thought (23). He has been appropriated as al-Shaykh al-Akh-

bar within an Islamic framework, the grand master of Islamic mystical thought, as well

as radical within recent scholarship inuenced by the literary-deconstructive turn within

the academy. Indeed, on this latter note, Harold Bloom writes the preface to Henry Cor-bins 1998 edition ofAlone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Susm of Ibn Al-

Arabi, and Ian Almond has written articles and a book comparing Ibn al-Arabi and Jac-

ques Derrida. Ibn al-Arabis Su writings are, moreover, palatable to recent western aca-

demic and literary epistemologies through their emphases on individualism and pluralism:

William Chittick has even produced a book on Ibn al-Arabi and religious diversity, in

which he discusses the positioning of Ibn al-Arabi as a thinker who legitimizes other

religions alongside Islam.

If, therefore, the integration of Ibn al-Arabis philosophy relieves us of exclusive

Muslim identity politics, it equally reinforces the novels primary purpose to represent

responsibly. If for Muntaha, the Muslims need to learn to

read better

, Ibn al-

Arabi alsostresses the importance of appropriate interpretation: the revelation on the plane of theImagination requires an additional knowledge by which to apprehend what God intends



12/13

by a particular form []. Interpretation means to pass from the form of what one sees to

something beyond it (Ibn al-Arabi 99). Nonetheless, as Yassin-Kassab makes clear, we

can never be certain of our own capacity to read and represent.

In their inuential study of contemporary Islam, Michael Fischer and Mehdi Abediask: Given the unknowability of the Quran [] and given the labyrinths of hadith and

other interpretive con-texts, is it possible for such an enigmatic text as the Quran to

function as a poetic touchstone for a universalistic ethics? (148). Yassin-Kassabs novel

would answer a resounding yes to this question. If Samis initial identity was based on

the exclusion of Islam as a viable narrative to describe the modern, cosmopolitan self,

then the novel re-legitimizes Islamic structures as modes of narrating a transformation of

crude identities and oppositions. Syrias presence in the novel is therefore not only a

source of contesting Baathisms and Islamisms but also the site of an older Su heritage:

one involving migration and spiritual self-development. By adopting Su discourses, Yas-

sin-Kassab authorizes Islam as a potential trajectory and end point for the journey of the

novels protagonist. For not only are we surrounded by grand narratives and myths and

religious structures of feeling, Yassin-Kassab recently told me, but the plot of a novelor a myth, or a religion, or a spiritual path is basic and universal to human experi-

ence.

Notes

1. William Chitticks The Su Path of Knowledge is the most comprehensive English translationof Ibn al-Arabis Futahat that I have found so far, and my quotations are drawn from thisunless stated otherwise.

Notes on contributor

C.E. Rashid is a PhD student in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge.

Works citedAl-Azmeh, Aziz. Islams and Modernities. London: Verso, 1993.Almond, Ian. The Shackles of Reason: Su/Deconstructive Opposition to Rational Thought. Phi-

losophy East and West53.1 (2003): 2238.Al-Mousa, Nedal M. The Arabic Bildungsroman: A Generic Appraisal. International Journal of

Middle East Studies 25.2 (1993): 22340.Armstrong, Karen.A History of God; from Abraham to the Present. London: Vintage, 1999.Asad, Talal. Ethnography, Literature, and Politics: Some Readings and Uses of Salman Rushdie s

The Satanic Verses. Cultural Anthropology 5.3 (1990): 23969.

Aslam, Nadeem. Maps for Lost Lovers. London: Faber, 2005.Athanasiadis, Iason. The Road from Damascus. The Washington Times 26 Feb. 2010. Web. 24

May 2010.Chittick, William C. Imaginal Worlds: Ibn Al-Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity.

Albany: State U of New York P, 1994.. The Su Path of Knowledge: Ibn Al-Arabis Metaphysics of Imagination. Albany: State U

of New York P, 1989.Corbin, Henry. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Susm of Ibn al-Arabi. Prince-

ton: Princeton UP, 1998.Fischer, Michael M.J., and Mehdi Abedi. Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity

and Tradition. Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.Galvin, Cathy. Sebastian Faulks on the State of the Nation. The Sunday Times 23 Aug. 2009.

Web. 16 May 2010.Ghose, Sheila. Brit Bomber: The Fundamentalist Trope in Hanif Kureishis The Black Album andMy Son the Fanatic. Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective. Ed. GrahamMacPhee and Prem Poddar. Oxford: Berghahn, 2007. 12138.

102 C.E. Rashid


13/13

Ibn al-Arabi. The Bezels of Wisdom. Trans. R.W.J. Austin. London, Paulist. 1980.Kureishi, Hanif. Turning The Black Album into a Stage Play. The Guardian 29 June 2009. Web.

24 May 2010.Lukcs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great

Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: Merlin, 1978.Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Trans. Albert

Sbragia. London: Verso, 2000.Rumi, Jalal al-Din. Mirror of the Unseen: The Complete Works of Jalal Al-Din Rumi. Trans. Louis

Rogers. Lincoln: Writers Club, 2002.Rushdie, Salman. Midnights Children. 1981. London: Vintage Classics, 2008.. One Thousand Days in a Balloon. The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to

Write. Ed. Steve MacDonogh. Co. Kerry: Brandon, 1993. 1524.Stein, Mark. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.Teeman, Tim. The Road from Damascus. The Times 12 June 2008. Web. 24 May 2010.Tonkin, Boyd. Fiction beyond Belief: Do Writers in Britain Still Feel the Chill of the Rushdie

Fatwa? The Independent6 Feb. 2009. Web. 23 Nov. 2010.Yassin-Kassab, Robin. Complex Origins. Qunfuz5 Aug. 2008. Web. 24 May 2010.. Dawkins or McIntosh. Qunfuz21 Aug. 2008. Web. 24 May 2010.

. Islam in the Writing Process. Qunfuz1 Nov. 2009. Web. 10 May 2010.. Maps for Lost Lovers and Writerly Responsibility. Qunfuz 6 Feb. 2008. Web. 24 May

2010.. Personal interview. 10 Mar. 2010.. The Road from Damascus. 2008. London: Penguin, 2009.. Writer Talk. Qunfuz21 Apr. 2009. Web. 24 May 2010.


C. E. Rashid British Islam in Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus

Documents

Transcript of C. E. Rashid British Islam in Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus