FICTON: SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY
The Good Muslim by Tahmima anam
Family ties are complex, a mixture of love and memory, dependence and disagreement. Set these against a Bangladesh society that is in often violent transition, and the result is the at one familiar and foreign “The Good Muslim.”
The novel picks up where the first in a planned trilogy, “A Golden Age,” left off. That book focused on Rehana Haque, her son Sohail and daughter Maya, as the rising political unrest in east Pakistan exploded. The Pakistani army, seeking to quell the burgeoning independence movement, invaded Dhaka in March 1971. The War of Bangladesh is over in December of that year, but its scars don’t readily fade.
“The Good Muslim” opens eight days after the war’s end. Sohail is on his way back to Dhaka. He’ll spend at least the next 15 years trying come to terms with nine months’ worth of events.
The narrative skips forward to February 1984, focusing on Maya. Trained as a surgeon, she instead finds her calling working as a country doctor. She is practicing in Rajshahi, two train rides and a ferry away from Dhaka, when she receives word that Sohail’s wife, Silvi, has died. Maya hasn’t been home for seven years, but the death combined with signs that she is no longer welcome in the village tell her that now is the time for a journey.
The narrative moves forward in parallel arcs, each a path of discovery. Sohail’s story begins in 1971 and follows as he tries to find his place in a world newly foreign. He turns to religion, first preaching on God’s many faces, but eventually finding truth in a conservative Islamic sect; he and his followers advocate a return to Muslim fundamentals, those found in the Koran and the Sunnah.
Upon returning home, Maya must confront her feelings of disconnectedness. She no longer knows her brother, once a close confidante. A strong- willed woman, she is caught between her brother’s religious world, representative of one part of society, and her distinctively secular desire for independence. Their divide that reflects the larger society.
Though close to her mother, home and hearth are not part of Maya’s search for meaning. She’s worked with women who bear the indelible scars of war, victims of rape and abuse. She found her stride working in a village far removed from modern medicine, but her insistence on fair treatment of women put her on the wrong side of tradition. Returning from a party at the home of an old friend, Saima, “she thought about how excited Saima had been to see her — and how eager those villagers in Rajshahi had been to get rid of her. She was hovering in limbo. She felt too old and too young.”
Reconciliation is needed. Sohail is unable to forgive his past, Maya is unable to find her present. Each strand of the story is woven together with a skill that seems effortless, with a result that provokes reflection.
Anam was born in Bangladesh and grew up to stories of the resistance. Her father worked for the United Nations and, as a result, the family lived all over the world. Working on a doctorate in social anthropology at Harvard, she returned to Bangladesh for an oral history project, which was the basis for her dissertation. Initially, her fiction grew from her research. She has a sharp eye for culture, and for cultural dissonance. The writer’s gift is to make the unfamiliar understood. “The Good Muslim” succeeds in doing exactly that, and doing it well.
