American Dervish

October 17, 2011
Poor Hayat Shah: his father drinks and sleeps around; his mother constantly tells him how awful Muslim men are (especially his father, with his “white prostitutes”); he doesn’t seem to have any friends; and he’s in love with his mother’s best friend, the beautiful Mina who’s his mother’s age and something of an aunt to him. Unlike his parents, Mina, who came to Milwaukee from a bad marriage in Pakistan, is devout, which makes sexual stirrings and the Qur’an go hand in hand for the young Hayat (aside from a framing device, the story mostly takes place when he’s between 10 and 12). His rival for Mina’s love isn’t just a grown man, he’s Jewish, so along with the roil of conflicting ideas about gender, sexuality, and Islamic constraint vs. Western looseness, first-time novelist Akhtar also takes on anti-Semitism. Though set well before 9/11, the book is clearly affected by it, with Akhtar determined to traffic in big themes and illustrate the range of Muslim thought and practice. This would be fine if the book didn’t so often feel contrived, stocked with caricatures rather than people. Ultimately, Akhtar’s debut reads like a melodramatic YA novel, not because of the age of its narrator but because of the abundance of lessons to be learned.

Starred review from November 15, 2011
Actor/playwright/filmmaker Akhtar makes a compelling debut with a family drama centered on questions of religious and ethnic identity. In 1980s Milwaukee, 10-year-old Hayat Shah lives in a troubled Pakistani-American household. Father, a determinedly secular neurologist, has no use for the ostentatiously devout local Muslim community; his best friend is a Jewish colleague, Nathan, and he cheats on his wife with white women, a fact Hayat's angry mother is all too willing to share with her son. The arrival of Mina, Mother's best friend from home who has been divorced by her husband for having "a fast mouth," brings added tension. Mina, a committed but non-dogmatic Muslim, introduces Hayat to the beauties of the Quran and encourages him to become a hafiz, someone who knows the holy book by heart. But Hayat's feelings for his "auntie" have sexual undercurrents that disturb them both, and his jealousy when Mina and Nathan fall in love leads him to a terrible act of betrayal that continues to haunt him as a college student in 1990. Akhtar, himself a first-generation Pakistani-American from Milwaukee, perfectly balances a moving exploration of the understanding and serenity Islam imparts to an unhappy preteen with an unsparing portrait of fundamentalist bigotry and cruelty, especially toward intelligent women like Mina. His well-written, strongly plotted narrative is essentially a conventional tale of family conflict and adolescent angst, strikingly individualized by its Muslim fabric. Hayat's father is in many ways the most complex and intriguing character, but Mina and Nathan achieve a tragic nobility that goes beyond their plot function as instruments of the boy's moral awakening. Though the story occasionally dips into overdetermined melodrama, its warm tone and traditional but heartfelt coming-of-age lesson will appeal to a broad readership. Engaging and accessible, thoughtful without being daunting: This may be the novel that brings Muslim-American fiction into the commercial mainstream.

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August 1, 2011

In this first novel, set in pre-9/11 America, Pakistan American youngster Hayat Shah is thrilled when his mother's unassailably smart, beautiful, and devout friend Mina comes to America to live with his family. She introduces him to the joys of the Quran, but when her attentions move beyond the family, Hayat becomes jealous and falls prey to his community's anti-Semitism. Film writer/director Akhtar has a partly cinematic style; it's acute but not cut-to-the-chase. Ripe for discussion, so it's good there's an interfaith reading group guide. With rights sold to 19 countries and a seven-city tour.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2011
Haunted by guilt, Hayat Shah remembers growing up in Milwaukee in the early 1980s, dazzled by Mina, gifted and gorgeous, his mother's beloved friend from Pakistan, who fled abuse back home for being too smart. When she moves into Hayat's home with her small son, Hayat is smitten by Mina's beauty and by all that she teaches him (and the reader) about the richness of the Qur'an: for Mina, faith is about personal interpretation, not about the outer forms; she does not wear a headscarf. But when she falls in love with physician Nathan Wolfson, Hayat's dad's Jewish partner, and plans to marry him, Hayat is wildly jealous. Many readers will recognize the extremist rants by and about Christians, Muslims, and Jews, from all sides. But the people at home move beyond the stereotypes, including Hayat's atheist womanizer dad, who hates the racist extremists. The young teen's personal story about growing up in Muslim America is both particular and universal, with intense connections of faith, sorrow, tenderness, anger, betrayal, questioning, and love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)