Shadows of Dhaka

Hamish Hamilton

Pages: 297

Rs 499

A title like The Good Muslim plays with several possible interpretations. One is your standard dramatic irony,whereby a characters engagement with an identity (of the good wife,lets say) is revealed,challenged,perhaps invalidated. Another unveils a nastier undercurrent: the contradiction in terms. After all,no matter how often the literary good wife turns out to be a nervous wreck and/ or psychopathic axe-murderer,she does so in the assumption,harrowing though it may be,that the idea of a good wife exists. It is increasingly commonplace,however,to find the very conjunction of good and Muslim volubly (and never too brightly) refuted. And yet,the argument for good Muslims only risks making matters worse if it uses,to put it crudely,the my-Muslim-friend-isnt-fanatic line of reasoning.

Tahmima Anams The Good Muslim,explores,with subtle intelligence,the nuances of its title through the Haque family. Rehana Haque was the protagonist of Anams debut,A Golden Age,set during the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971. The Good Muslim,though it contains flashbacks to 1971,is set primarily in 1984,when Bangladesh is peaceful though not particularly happy,and places Rehanas children,Maya and Sohail,centrestage.

Neither has taken well to peace. Sohail has embraced religion,while Maya has spent years of self-imposed exile working as a village doctor. She returns home,to Dhaka,in the novels opening chapter,from which moment on she is dismayed by the growing religiosity,avarice and forgetfulness of her family,her friends and her country. In one emblematic scene,Maya is driving past Paltan Maidan,where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman inaugurated the country,wiping tears from his eyes,and she discovers that the ground is now a childrens park. Her distress is lucid and angry: It was where,for a moment,they had won. Now their history would be papered over by peanuts and the smell of candy floss.

Meanwhile,Sohail having established a ramshackle home-cum-congregational space on his mothers roof,buried his wife and,for all practical purposes,abandoned his six-year-old son Zaid spends his time organising jamaat after jamaat across the country.

Which one of them is a good Muslim? Anam does an excellent job of setting the siblings up as counterweights while probing the ambiguities of their situation. So: Maya writes anti-establishment columns,Sohail burns books; Maya takes care of the ailing Rehana,Sohail rarely visits; Maya teaches Zaid to read,Sohail packs him off to a madarasa. And yet: it is when Sohail stands in prayer by her bed that Rehana is cured; and,eventually,it is Maya who finds herself seeking Sohails forgiveness.

And what,if anything,is the idea of a good Muslim? Here,the ground is more slippery. Anams novel is set more than a decade before The Clash of Civilisations was published,when 9/11 evoked,for most of us,the ninth of November. And yet,perhaps despite itself,the narrative is shadowed by the gloomy beginnings of the 21st century.

Without these shadows,in fact,Sohails new-found enthusiasm for Islam could well be a form of therapy. Having witnessed what is often described as a genocide,Sohail finds solace in the Quran. Over time,he stops wearing western clothes,grows a beard and begins to preach. Yes,he burns his library but,on the whole,Maya is the angry,intolerant one; Sohails fanaticism,if indeed thats what it is or will become,is decidedly soft-core.

Not once,for example,does Sohail force his mother and sister to abide by his rules: he takes his faith to the burning roof,where he preaches words from the Torah,the Gita,the Bible. He praised the prophets of old,Ram and Odysseus,Jesus and Arjun,the Buddha and Guru Nanak. Over time,his positions harden,though it is never quite clear how or why,except that some fault may accrue to his burkha-clad,rigidly conservative wife.

Still,for all the richness of its themes and protagonists,for all the contours of its argument,The Good Muslim never sparks into a blaze. Partly this is thanks to Anams distractingly vivid prose. To describe the act of shifting into fourth gear as smooth as forest honey is venturing dangerously into Madeline Bassett territory. More unfortunately,some of this artificiality devolves to the characters young Zaid,for example,suffers as much by parental neglect as,it seems,by authorial intervention. As a result,its never quite clear whether Anam is asking her readers to think,or telling them what to think. But then,in these troubled times,perhaps we cannot ask for more.