Freedom, family and faith

[1]

By Tahmima Anam [2]

Rs 499

Tahmima Anam’s aptly titled new novel, The Good Muslim, was launched on the eve of Ramadan at Olive Bar & Kitchen in New Delhi, against the stunning backdrop of the Qutub Minar. In conversation with literary columnist Nilanjana Rao, Anam, a Bangladeshi writer, spoke of war, family and fanaticism.
The Good Muslim follows the success of Aman’s first novel, The Golden Age, and is the second part of a trilogy. I read The Golden Age over four years ago and remember getting entwined in the lives of the Haque family.

Like a long-lost friend, I couldn’t help wondering what became of them — mother Rehana, and her children, Maya and Sohail. Rehana, incidentally, is a character inspired by Anam’s grandmother who helped freedom fighters during the 1971 war.
We are reunited with the Haque family in The Good Muslim.
We last met the Haques in 1971, when the war tore their family apart, but brought independence. Eight years have passed since then and the Haque family, still in Dhaka, is now grappling with the changes in a new Bangladesh.
The Good Muslim focuses on the different paths the two siblings embark upon in the wake of this war — Maya has become a spirited, liberal-minded doctor and her brother Sohail is now a strict religious leader.
The main tragedies of the novel emanate from this central disagreement between Maya and Sohail. Maya struggles with her brother’s conversion. She thinks “about the woman and man she had imagined she and her brother would become; but after it was all over, the killing and the truce and the redrawing of the border, he had gone one way and she another. And she had foreseen none of it.” Her mother, Rehana, ominously tells her, “Don’t be so frightened of it. It’s only religion.”
It is this very religion that Anam intelligently questions in her novel, without judging. Her tone is insightful and probing. Through her protagonists she portrays how religion has separately altered everyone’s reality, how its all-consuming frenzy can be feared and how its simple powers can assuage fear. Maya, Sohail and their relatives have all been radicalised in their own ways and transformed by something that is much larger than them. Like a carefully trained surgeon, Anam, precisely but delicately, dissects this new post-war Bangladesh.
The Good Muslim grabs the reader’s attention from the prologue itself, when Sohail encounters “a sight that will continue to suck the breath out of him for a lifetime to come”. The reader moves through well thought out, succinct and vivid scenes with baited breath, waiting to see what Sohail saw. Anam’s narrative is poetic with strong emotional undercurrents. In each chapter she deftly toggles between the personal and the political. She does this when Maya questions the “Dictator who said Allah between every other word” and when Maya bickers with the vegetable seller for substituting the traditional “Khuda Hafiz” for “Allah Hafiz”. She does it hauntingly in her portrayal of the ghost-like Piya, a prisoner of war and victim of abuse whose hair was shorn so she would not hang herself. Many women, like Piya, were raped and subsequently shunned and forgotten by their families. Anam does not let us forget these PoWs — she etches their life-like portraits into our memories, and they stay with us long after the novel is over.
The main themes that run throughout the novel are radicalism versus idealism, forgetting versus remembering and political versus personal turmoil. Though the novel tends to appear dark at times, Anam carries her readers forward through the alacrity and tenderness of Maya’s narration.
Anam is at her best in her treatment of Maya. She paints her as an outspoken and independent female character but also makes her relatable. Anam is careful of not alienating her readers by turning Maya into a “heroine”; instead she makes Maya human with a worldliness and intelligence that highlight the injustices around her. Maya can be compared with the Shaheed Minar that Anam poignantly describes as “the first thing the Pakistani Army destroyed in the war. It was also the first thing to be rebuilt, taller and wider, but Maya wished they had left it broken, because now, shiny and freshly painted, it bore no signs of this struggle”. Like the Minar, the strong Doctor Maya will always bear signs of that struggle, no matter how she may try and reinvent herself. And she realises, so will her brother whose religious fundamentalism is a result of the guilt of war.
The Good Muslim ultimately highlights a simple truth: Often, the bonds of love and family bear the burden of history. Anam’s prose delicately handles the clash of opposing values to produce an interesting exploration of what it means to be radicalised and what it means to be Muslim. “It’s not just the Western world that is asking this question. People within the Muslim world are also asking the same question,” explained Anam at her book launch. In the wake of the Arab Spring and rising extremism, this question is more relevant today than ever.

Mehreen Malik, a barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, London, enjoys freelance writing in her spare time. She is from Lahore but currently lives in New Delhi.