Khadra Shamy, the protagonist, is the daughter of Wajdy & Ebtehaj, Syrian immigrants who eventually move to a town south of Indianapolis, Indiana to work at the Dawah Center. There, they and their co-workers work to realize the ideal Muslim community and raise their children to carry on that legacy after them. Khadra suffers some abuse from prejudiced classmates at the public school and neighbors in the apartment complex, but, for the most part, she grows into the young woman which the leaders of the Dawa Center envisioned: She prays, reads Quran, supports causes of Muslims suffering around the world and scrupulously upholds the interpersonal morals and gender roles of the community.
Yet all is not perfect among the people of the Dawah Center. Political and sectarian arguments leave their mark. Some children go astray. Most alarmingly, a rising star of the community is murdered as she commutes to Indiana University in Bloomington, and the murder remains unsolved.
When Khadra decides to attend university in Bloomington, some of the patterns of behavior and thought she had absorbed didn't resonate well. She found herself considering other ways of being Muslim, both from the courses she took and the people she met. When she followed the path the Dawah Center laid out for her by marrying a Kuwaiti graduate student, she found herself resisting his demands to conform to his cultural expectations, both while in Bloomington and with his family in Kuwait. In short, she found the way of the Dawah Center too restrictive of a skin, and she was shedding that skin on her way to becoming another version of herself.
As a divorced young Muslim woman, she travels to visit her relatives in Damascus, begins a career in photography and lives on her own in Philadelphia. Along the way, she experiences people and places which transform her in different ways and allow her to better articulate her own personhood.
The novel culminates in a work assignment to take photos of a Dawah Center convention, where she reunites with some family members and people she knew before here awakening. The latest version of Khadra has honest conversations with them, recognizing the harms she had done in earlier, less developed versions of herself. She comes to judgments about people and then revises them when she considers other perspectives on their lives. She can say "yes" and "no" to their requests without fetishizing or ostracizing them as people.
If you have at any point been active in organizations like Muslim Youth of North America and Islamic Society of North America or Muslim Student Association or even your local masjid, you will almost certainly feel like you have lived some of Khadra's life. And while the book has significant criticism of "Islamistan," the physical, cultural and psychic space these kinds of Muslim organizations attempted to create, the author correctly mitigates that blame by pointing out the many valid reasons Muslims of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States had for attempting to create yet another utopian society.
Khadra works in university as a lab assistant on insects. Later, she is a professional photographer. These professions are metaphors for her transformations and her varied perspectives. Each transformation solves some problems and creates others. Each leap forward garners rewards she treasures and generates nostalgia for emotional blankets she had to discard.
Those for whom the inner religious life is not a subject on contemplation will have to be content with the novel as an anthropological look at a minority community, itself composed of minorities, interacting with its larger society. I am nearly the same age as Mohja Kahf, and, when I think about my childhood and adult life, my turning points are nearly always associated with USA political and military interventions in majority Muslim countries. Do my non-Muslim, non-immigrant contemporaries in the USA mark their lives by the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979, the Zionist entity's brutal invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Frank Miller's unhinged Islamphobia in the iconic Dark Knight comics and Bush the Elder's horrific war against Iraq in 1991?
Do other immigrants feel that the naturalization process essentially pledges them to fight continuous wars against the peoples who believe, look and talk like them? In Canada, naturalized citizens pledge allegiance to the House of Windsor, the pinnacle of the colonialism which created the conditions which necessitated their migration to begin with!
Will it surprise this category of readers that many Muslims have ridiculous stereotypes about them just like they may have ridiculous stereotypes about Muslims?
At any rate, I'm not sure if this novel is for a general readership. It definitely has something for those seeking a path to know themselves better.
