Book Review

Alif, the Unseen

**SPOILER ALERT**

G. Willow Wilson’s debut novel is genuinely intriguing as the first chapter, actually labeled chapter zero, is set in a very mystical location and does nothing but capture the reader’s attention. Wilson captivates her audience with the obscurity and uniqueness of a story of the sort of One Thousand and One Nights.

The novel follows a hero-and-sidekick-battling-an-evil-villain recipe. However, with a sprinkle of Ms. Wilson’s unique mystical twist: jinn, or the unseen creatures of our world, she brings a new flavour to the overdone plot line; successfully creating her very own genre of literature.

Another aspect of the book that I appreciated is the realness and rawness of the characters. Although the book is surreal, both in terms of the setting and the plot, the characters bring this book down to earth and make it believable.

For example, the protagonist Alif has his virtues and vices; both equally featured in the book. I appreciated her characterization of a simple guy, a Muslim guy, who is very real in terms of his mistakes, his awkwardness, his doubts about religion, and his falling for a girl that is not his type. He is literally, and figuratively, the boy next door.

Deena, the heroine first, and love interest second, is Alif’s childhood friend. She is a girl who was raised in a traditional household, and as she grew, embarked on her own Islamic journey that resulted in her wearing the niqab. Her character really humanizes women wearing niqab, showing the audience is that they are not much different from other women -- particularly when readers notice she indulges in guilty pleasures like meeting Alif at night on their roof, and allows her romantic feelings for him peer through. 

Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical and Modern Stereotypes by Katherine Bullock

In the July 2012 issue of Muslim Link, I reviewed the Quiet Revolution by Egyptian writer Leila Ahmed. Although Ahmed’s book was well researched, I found it incomplete.

Ahmed kept bringing the Egyptian example of the Muslim Brotherhood movement’s role in “influencing” women to veil as her main focus. Based on this simplistic and biased point of view, she allowed herself to draw her own conclusions about why women veil. She did little to inform the readers about Muslim women and the veil in other Muslim countries like Morocco, Nigeria, Jordan, Iran, Bangladesh or Malaysia.

Moreover, I found Ahmed patronizing in her definition of progressive and conservative.  Her reasoning was at times subtly insulting to the intelligence of those women who decided to willingly wear the veil. While Ahmed admitted in her book that most of the current advocacy work on women’s issues in Muslim communities is being done in North America by women wearing the veil, she kept insinuating that these women needed to be more progressive and more liberal.  As if progressiveness and liberalism has only one face. In other words, wearing a veil never makes you progressive enough even when your actions prove it. Ahmed’s book left a bitter taste in my mouth.

That bitterness disappeared after I started reading Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil by Canadian Muslim academic Katherine Bullock. Bullock, originally from Australia, embraced Islam while she was working on her doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto. Her book, first published in 2001, is based on her Ph.D. thesis entitled The Politics of the Veil.

Our Way to Fight by Michael Riordon

I am grateful to author Michael Riordon for introducing me to a quote that beautifully sums up the importance of his latest book, and others like it. 

“Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity. This is why tyrants fear storytelling: all stories somehow refer to the story of their fall.” - John Berger

One can only hope that the stories of countless Palestinian and Israeli activists shared in this book will go towards the emergence of an overall narrative of victory against forces of oppression that have come to symbolize the intractable conflict in Israel/ Palestine.