Leila Aboulela

After the untimely death of her husband, Sammar sent her infant boy back to her family in Sudan and stayed in Aberdeen, Scotland, trying to knit her life back together while grieving and working as a translator. One of the professors she often works with is Rae, an Islamic scholar who understand her religion and the way she thinks. It is almost inevitable that the two of them will try to find a way towards each other. Except that for Sammar, Islam is her life - she is born to be a wife and show more she is Muslim first and anything else after that. Rae on the other hand studies and understands it - but does not believe and does not want to convert (and have a lot of valid reasons besides the fact that he simply does not believe).

That could have been the setup for a wonderful slow burn of a novel. Using the two different settings for the two parts of the novel (the cold Aberdeen and the sunny Sudan) add even more to the feeling of separation. Sammar and Rae do not seem to have anything in common and yet, their connection is there - even when they both deny it. Except that Sammar is unwilling to change and consider anything but what she thinks is right - even if that means never seeing Rae again.

And herein lies the problem. Had the roles been reversed, with the man insisting on his faith and his way and the woman being expected to submit to it and change, the novel would have probably never been published. Writing the novel this way, with Sammar essentially filling that cliched male role of past romance novels, diminishes the power of the novel considerably. It could have been an exploration of faith and religion (not even remotely the same except in Sammar's thinking) and of finding a way to bridge the differences between cultures. Instead it ended up a reversed romance cliche more than anything.

The writing is good and there are a lot of well-written and well-thought sequences in the book. It probably draws on the author's life in places and these insights into her thinking do make up for the strained main story. I just wish she had not tried to mold it so close to the standard stories (with the genders reversed). show less

Three Muslim women set out on a journey to the Highlands, to visit the grave of a 1930s pilgrim. They are members of an Arabic Speaking Muslim Women's Group in the Scottish city where they live, and Salma is disappointed that only Moni and Iman from their much larger group have come along.

Evelyn Cobbold was a real life Scottish aristocrat who spent much of her childhood in North Africa and travelled through Libya with a female friend in 2011, before officially converting to Islam in 2015 show more and taking the name Zainab. She was the first Muslim woman born in Britain to participate in the Haaj pilgrimage to Mecca.

This novel, however, is the story of a smaller scale and very personal journey for the three women involved, as they leave behind family ties for a few days (including a week at a hotel). All three have time to reflect on relationships and choices, as the story unfolds through their conversations, private thoughts and flashbacks. They revisit their past decisions and consider what the future might be.

Controversially, the story takes a rather fairytale direction with a kind of Muslim magical realism, including a talking hoopoe.

This is Leila Aboulela's fifth novel and the third I have read, and it feels very different from Lyrics Alley (set mostly in Sudan) and The Kindness of Enemies (with the story moving between different time periods and places). I am not sure I expected this novel when I started reading but I found it really interesting and beautifully written. show less

I found Aboulela's description of life as a Sudanese woman struggling to make a living in London to be interesting, but Minaret was largely a morality tale. There was a hint of ambiguity in the ending which signalled that perhaps Najwa's conversion was not the only thing needed to bring her contentment, but overall this was a book in which the devout were the good guys and the atheists, or even the Muslim women who didn't want to veil, were shallow and venal. It was far too two-dimensional show more in its approach, far too sweeping in its generalisations (I don't think that all Muslim fundamentalist men are secretly "tender and protective with their wives", nor do I think that becoming a hijabi protects you instantly from sexual harassment), and that coupled with somewhat opaque character development made Minaret an unsatisfying read. show less

It looks like quite a few GR reviewers have thought that the historical portions of this book are stronger than the contemporary. For me, the first few pages had a bit of an info-dump feel, but after that I was equally wrapped up in both periods and didn't find it jarring at all to bounce between them.

I really like the way the author doesn't make the connections between the two periods obvious - it's only after I finished the book that I could start drawing parallels and contrasts. The show more Goodreads group 'Literary Fiction by People of Color' has started a discussion of this book, so I'm looking forward to a deep dive into it with a bunch of people, but in the meantime, ideas about 'culture' (in general as well as in the 19th century and 21st century) keep swirling in my head - the human need for culture/community and what happens to a person or a community when cultural identity is lost, challenged, stigmatized or even evolves over time. show less