"Minaret" (by Leila Aboulela)

Emerging first in Khartoum in the realm of 1984-5, Najwa, a student of the city's main university, is one of a clique exploring Western influences. Music, attire, attitudes, and habits of the group play with European and American exports. Quickly shifting to the present day - the new millenium - after a political coup ousted Najwa's family from Sudan, she is shown older, wiser, and lonlier. She rekindles a faith lost, or never quite held, while passing through job as a house cleaner with relative disconnect, and turns to yet another private employer, questioning what she's accomplished, and having little confidence to see it through. 

Brief encounters with the younger brother of her employer lead to conflicts in which Najwa's moral strength is tested and her authority in household matters is questioned. Tamer grows more and more fond of Najwa as weeks wear on, and they privately associate renewed faith with their growing bond. 

A battle between beliefs, morals, instinct and passion is waged, and Najwa's employer learns of the connection her sibling has made, and orders it to stop. Several secret meetings between Tamer and Najwa are made, and Najwa is offered a payment to flee the relationship.
...

During the past half dozen years, a new genre of contemporary English fiction seems to have emerged in the form of a series of novels by Muslim writers that explore the fault lines between various Islamic cultures and the way of life flourishing in the US and western Europe.

The authors do not set out to "explain" or satirise Islam from a western perspective, and they avoid the cute and ingratiating tone that has come to characterise popular narratives about identity and the clash of cultures in Britain. Instead, they write from inside the experience of growing up and living with a network of customs and beliefs, which have themselves been subject to dramatic and far-reaching changes in the 20th century.

Leila Aboulela's second novel, Minaret, marks her out as one of the most distinguished of this new wave. The narrative is tranquil and lyrical, developing the thoughts and emotions of her heroine so calmly that it was almost a shock to realise that I had begun, on the first page, to see my familiar world through her eyes. "London is at its most beautiful in the autumn. In summer it is seedy and swollen, in winter it is overwhelmed by Christmas lights and in spring, the season of birth, there is always disappointment. Now it is at its best, now it is poised like a mature woman whose beauty is no longer fresh but still surprisingly potent." We meet her heroine, Najwa, as she enters the flat where she is to start work as a maid: "I've come down in the world. I've slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn't much room to move. Most of the time I'm used to it ... I accept my sentence and do not brood or look back."

Najwa's story begins in 1984 in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. She is the daughter of a government official close to the president, and her home is a grand house run by six servants. The family travel abroad and maintain a flat in London, but they know practically nothing about their own country outside Khartoum. Najwa studies at the university but the focus of her life is western clothes, pop music and parties. She is a Muslim, and has been brought up to follow the customary round of charitable practices, including visits to hospitals and children's homes and careful donations to the poor; but in Najwa's household only the servants actually pray.

At university she falls in love with Anwar, a fellow student. Anwar is a man of the future, a radical socialist who has nothing but disdain for the faith of the devout hijab-wearing students. He embarrasses Najwa by attacking her father in speeches and in print. When the inevitable coup occurs, Najwa's father is arrested and later executed, while the rest of the family flee to the country.

In London Najwa's brother Omar becomes an addict, stabs a policeman in the course of an arrest and receives a long prison sentence. Her mother, the only link with her former existence, suffers a long illness and dies.

When Najwar is at her lowest ebb, another coup exiles Anwar to London. She begins an affair with him, initiating her first and only sexual experience, but realises eventually that Anwar has no intention of marrying her. She finds the strength to give him up through her relationship with a group of women at the Regent's Park mosque, and as her disillusionment with Anwar increases, so does her reliance on her new-found faith. In the interim she has also been converted into a maid, a humble appendage to a series of Arab families.

The story of Najwa's fall unfolds with the deliberate inevitability of a morality tale, but in the process Aboulela describes the uncertainty and terror of the country's westernised elite in the 80s, and assembles a persuasive description of why a fundamentalist politics emerged.

Najwa journeys from pride and confusion to humility and peace. When she adopts the hijab she begins to see the world from a new perspective. "These men Anwar condemned as narrow-minded and bigoted ... were tender and protective towards their wives. Anwar was clever but he would never be tender and protective." Najwa's conversion is not an easy surrender to tradition. Instead it is a hard-won dedication to service, a kind of restitution for her former life, and the ending of the book is a disturbing hint that the peace she has achieved is contingent and subject to perpetual challenge.

In a narrative of complex reversals, Aboulela takes a huge risk in describing her heroine's religious conversion and spiritual dedication. She succeeds brilliantly. This is a beautiful, daring, challenging novel.