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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.

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Journal of Postcolonial Writing


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

British Islam and the novel of transformation: Robin Yassin-Kassabs


The Road from Damascus
C.E. Rashid*

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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 been
recently constructed between secular literature on the one hand and Islamic dogma
on the other. This false opposition has been a product of polarized rhetoric produced
during the Satanic Verses affair. Through its reappropriated Bildungsroman form, in
which the protagonist partially converts to Islam, this novel models a transformation
of the self and society beyond such oppositions and beyond Islamic identity politics.
Yassin-Kassab integrates Su narrative structures with the novels trajectory of selfdevelopment, alluding to Ibn al-Arabis discourse of mystical bewilderment. In so
doing The Road from Damascus epistemologically challenges the binary between
Muslim and non-Muslim, secular and sacred, the imagination and religious stricture.
Keywords: Islam; Susm; Satanic Verses affair; Bildungsroman; secularism; Ibn alArabi

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 largely 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 newspapers 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 of ction 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: cf274@cam.ac.uk
ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online
2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.574864
http://www.tandfonline.com

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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 contemporary British Islam. Yet the novel is also unusual: explicitly acknowledging the legacy of the Rushdie affair, its harshest criticism is aimed at the epistemological
distinctions between secular British ction and Islamic dogma that have been haphazardly 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 from
Damascus, the central protagonist encounters a writer named Rashid Iqbal, one of this
countrys leading cosmopolitan intellectuals (297). Iqbal is an obvious caricature of Salman 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. Its
rules, 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, a
Babel. 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 polluted, as trangressively tainted, as a curry, a spiced Bombay curry, into which all the inuences 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 Midnights Children and Islam. Iqbal represents Islam as no more than a supercial structure 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 imagination is sold to his audience as a symbol of that triumphal grand narrative of secular progress 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 substitute 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 landscape 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 novelists, including Rushdie, have taken towards Islamic fundamentalism after the Satanic
Verses 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

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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). Kureishi
presents 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 representation 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).
If The Road from Damascus is undoubtedly situated within the same British literary
marketplace occupied by The Black Album, A Week in December and Brick Lane amongst
others, it does not represent Islam as a dogmatic entity which could be undone by the
limitless 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 for
Lost 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? YassinKassab, I will argue, constitutes his novel as a negotiation between bounded responsibility 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 Islamically-tinged agnosticism, from denying and ignoring an unwelcome piece of information
towards accepting and digesting it, and from being a bad human being towards being a better one. (Writer Talk par. 13)

The novels focus on an individuals moral development within a shifting diasporic community positions it not only as a novel of formation but also as a novel of transformation. 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 agnosticism free from fundamentalism yet restrained by its particularity. The novel of transformation 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 predecessors Lukcs and Hegel, as a problematic form, which reects the dissonant social
relations of modernity. He uses the term transformation to describe a dominant principle in the plotting of the European Bildungsroman; the plot of transformation, with its
focus on generating narrative rather than plotting towards a denitive conclusion, perpetuates a narrative logic according to which a storys meaning resides precisely in the

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impossibility of xing it (7). Yet Moretti argues for the equal presence of formal constraints 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 Bildungsroman will of necessity be intrinsically contradictory (6). It was that Hegelian dialectical
movement 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 Bildungsroman, according to Mark Stein. For Stein, novels of transformation do not predominantly 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 transformation, the reformation, the repeated coming of age of British cultures under the inuence 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 cultures (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 the
British-Arab community. If Stein, like Moretti, sees these novels as balancing the journey with the formal limit, his stress on performative representation adds a new dimension 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 premature 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, corrosively, 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

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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 concretizing his identity and his place in the world, he has returned disillusioned with his
Syrian 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 over lial 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 himself 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 characters who are seemingly trapped in Arab identity politics. When Sami returns to North
Londons Arab community, Islamophobia and Orientalism are characterized alongside
various forms of Sunni Islam (Samis father-in-law), Sunni Islamism (Samis brother-inlaw), and Baathist Arabism (Samis father). Islamic identity, when voiced by these characters, 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 choose
between nationalist and religious discourse: At rst shed innocently mixed Islamic language 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 immovable 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 to
two 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 represented in Samis father. If Syrian Baathism has nowadays fragmented into multiple political 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 complexities of society, and comically portrays the naive generation of new fundamentalisms
to compensate for this failure. It is only the moment of transformation, when our protagonist 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. Sami
is 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

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(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 Islamic
framework, and overtly alludes to the Su imagery of kashf, 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 conscience, to question his ironic atheism and contemplate belief in God:
He searched for his belief, looking mutely into his own silence, and found none. Nothing
solid 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 of
blindness 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 could
even say that it is they who are in denial.
For Sami this was a great leap, across, out, into the abyss. Towards what? Would something
be 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 nationalism through the framework of agnostic doubt. If this doubt continues to employ esoteric
Islamic 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 profound 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 pathway 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 secularism 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 universalism, as Islam.
The Road from Damascus describes a hazardous journey through the politics of British 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 complexity 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 Islam
is tempered with a proviso that any representation must be self-consciously limited:
Sami suspended judgement (310). This suspension functions to perform a new version

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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 transformation 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 heaven 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 not
as 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 that
verse that made me read the Quran again. It warns us not to take ourselves too seriously
when 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 her
brother 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 of
the 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 to
read novels properly if they cant read religious text? [ ] I suppose religions somewhere
between ction and non-ction. (320)

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The intermediary realm, amidst fundamentalist binaries, is occupied by Muntahas religious 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:

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When she prays, her heart is a shining mirror reecting the light of God. She can almost say
that only God is present. She is aware of Him only. Her consciousness continues, but Muntaha, the daughter of Marwan and Mouna, is nearly absent. Aiming at absence. She is the
ame of love blown out by the Beloved [ ]. He the cause and the consequence and she
obliterated 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, in
the centre of it, conscious of herself at the midpoint of extension into inner and outer
space [ ]. 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. God
is greater. (232)

The passage quoted above contains allusions to the writings of Su poets 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 Revelations 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 discussions of the ontological and epistemological nature of Allah, the Prophet, and the friends of
Allah (the Su mystics).
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 called
the 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 existence constitutes the weaker light of the corporeal world which discloses the Divine.
And through His selfdisclosure 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 to
position 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,

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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 love
blown 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 afrmation 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 beyond
and 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 Chittick, Imaginal Worlds 42). The object of knowledge splinters into contingent relationships, whilst the mode of knowing depends on the limit of unknowability.
The trope of the boundary is a potent connection between Islamic esotericism and literary 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 has
a 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 opposites [ ] 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 attributes 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 general 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 treasure 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 emphasizes 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). Occasionalism 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

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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 the
bafement 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 YassinKassabs description of awe, in his blog:

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It strikes me that the most intelligent response to this strange experience of being here, and to
the mysteries of time, matter and life, is awe and humility, which translates to a profound
agnosticism, 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 experienced 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 particular school of thought, and Ian Almond has succinctly described the Shaykhs dismissal
of ve centuries of Islamic thought (23). He has been appropriated as al-Shaykh al-Akhbar 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 Corbins 1998 edition of Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Susm of Ibn AlArabi, and Ian Almond has written articles and a book comparing Ibn al-Arabi and Jacques Derrida. Ibn al-Arabis Su writings are, moreover, palatable to recent western academic 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 also
stresses the importance of appropriate interpretation: the revelation on the plane of the
Imagination requires an additional knowledge by which to apprehend what God intends

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102

C.E. Rashid

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 Abedi
ask: 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, Yassin-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 novel
or a myth, or a religion, or a spiritual path is basic and universal to human experience.
Notes
1. William Chitticks The Su Path of Knowledge is the most comprehensive English translation
of Ibn al-Arabis Futahat that I have found so far, and my quotations are drawn from this
unless stated otherwise.

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