The art of building bridges across the cultural chasm

The Translator by Leila Aboulela (Polygon, #8.99) Reviewed by Ziauddin Sardar Western literature has frequently portrayed the Muslims as nasty, brutish folks with hardly any redeeming features. This representation has a long lineage going back to such hardy perennials of Western literature as Flaubert, Voltaire and Camus.

For contemporary writers like Rushdie and Naipaul, Muslims - by definition - are inhuman creatures; their only function is to be painted with all the colours of darkness. Indeed, the novel would not have evolved and developed the way it has, if Muslims did not exist in Western consciousness as prototypes of everything that is unsavoury and evil about the world.

So, it is refreshing to read a novel that tries to give the Muslims their due. The Muslim characters of The Translator are characters who exist both as individuals and as integral parts of extended families and larger communities. And, what is rather important, they are believing Muslims who do their utmost to live by their faith and tradition.

For Aboulela, faith is not an ossified, overbearing cross that crushes its followers and transforms them into proverbial, all-too- familiar fanatics and fundamentalists. It is a liberating force. Her characters live and breath Islam to become fully human, to free themselves from the oppression of their own egos and the crushing burden of uncontrollable desires.

The Translator is a first novel by Leila Aboulela who teaches statistics at Dundee University. The novel may have been written as a diversion from the boredom of numbers; but this not a novel that has been written by numbers. In fact, Aboulela emerges as an accomplished and lyrical writer.

We see both Islam and the larger world from the eyes of Sammar, a young Sudanese widow, living in Aberdeen. She pines for her lost husband and her estranged son who has joined his grandparents in Khartoum. The cold, the snow, the unfriendly locals all conspire to remind her of home and the poor but happy extended family she left behind. Even the gurgling central heating pipes resonate like the azan, the call to prayer.

Sammar is schooled in survival tactics by the cocky Yasmin, a young Pakistani woman who works as a secretary in the Middle Eastern Studies department of a local university Sammar joins the department as a translator and meets Rae Isles, a lecturer in Middle Eastern politics.

In essence, The Translator is a love story. Sammar and Rai fall in love, but there is a catch. Sammar would like the affair to proceed within the boundaries of Islam and wants Rae to convert to Islam and marry her. Rae, twice divorced and a self-declared atheist, abhors the whole idea. When Sammar suggests that they cannot go further unless Rai converts, he throws her out of his office. Dejected, Sammar returns to Khartoum.

The love story is worked out within a narrative of manners that presents Muslim norms and values, mores and etiquette, as a living, breathing reality. The novel catches fire when the scene shifts to Khartoum. Sammar's extended family, with countless uncles and aunts, and screaming children everywhere, is an enduring creation with recognisable characters that exist in almost every extended family.

Oppressive heat and poverty are made bearable because Sammar's family ask so little of life. Happiness is equated not with material goods but with a web of relationships, even though not all of these are happy.

It would be easy to become romantic about this, but Aboulela stops just on the sensible edge of romanticism. Sammar, in many ways is a feminist, although most Western feminists will have difficulty in recognising her as one. She is independent, demands high standards, and wants to shape her own destiny on her own terms. Whereas present- day Muslim culture, and her own family, discourage widows from remarrying, Sammar insists that in Islam it should be, and is, only natural for a widow to remarry. While totally traditional, Sammar wants to transform tradition from within to move forward.

Rae too is a strong character. Aboulela tries to present Rae not as an orientalist but as an expert in Middle East politics. In any case, he knows little Arabic, has poor knowledge of the sources of Islam, and knows even less how it is lived. Yet he is an expert who represents Islam and Muslims in the media, negotiates with terrorists and advises governments.

There is an interesting deeper layer to Rae. He is the good side of the West, but even at its best, and most learned, Aboulela seems to suggest, the West has little knowledge of other cultures. Sammar's request, for Rae to convert to Islam, is an invitation to true knowledge. Fascination and bookish knowledge is not enough, she seems to suggest, without real experience.

Needless to say, Sammar's principles finally have an effect on Rae. He realises the surface nature of his expertise; and comes to term with the fact that he is not above those who he seeks to represent. Being alienated with Christianity is not the same thing as being estranged from all religions. Prayers can be accepted, and miracles can happen, even if people around you dont see them as such. He discovers his own route to Islam before returning to the object of his love.

The Translator is an exceptionally well-crafted and beautifully written novel. Aboulela shows the rich possibilities of living in the West with different, non-Western, ways of knowing and thinking. In Sammar, the heroine of this reviewer's dreams, she has created a personification of Islam that is as genuine as it is complex.

Ziauddin Sardar is Visiting Professor of Post Colonial Studies, Department of Art Policy and Management, at City University in London. His new book Orientalism is published by Open University Press, #11.99

Copyright 1999
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