Negotiations of Scottish Muslim Identities in the Fiction of Suhayl Saadi and Leila Aboulela

Abstract

This essay focuses on the literary voices of two Scottish-based Muslim writers: Suhayl Saadi and Leila Aboulela, who both negotiate the role of religion in a postcolonial and post-national Scotland. Hybridity is a re-occurring motif in Saadi's novels and short stories. His novels Psychoraag (2004) and Joseph's Box (2009) draw inspiration from various cultural sources such as South Asian or Persian mythology, but are also rooted in a distinctively Scottish landscape and culture. Aberdeen-based Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela set both her first novel The Translator (1999) and her fourth novel The Kindness of Enemies (2015) in Scotland. Both writers negotiate the status which Islam holds in a Western context, combine this with their experiences of prejudice and racism, and present a Scotland in which people seek to transcend nationality through other markers of identity. Despite this similarity, these writers have very divergent views on religion and offer different options for a post-national framework. For Saadi, Islam is important as a cultural entity. Aboulela's works, on the other hand, represent faith as the most important marker of identity and as the only palpable alternative point of identification which questions nationality. Aboulela and Saadi can be read as part of a wider stream of Scottish fiction that tries to move beyond a nationalist literature concerned solely with Scottishness towards a more globalised and cosmopolitan perspective.

In his 2008 history of the relationship between Scotland and Islam, Bashir Maan states that '[b]y the close of the [twentieth] century, there were over 46,000 Muslims and 40 mosques in Scotland. The Muslim community had become a recognised part of Scottish society and Islam the second religion after Christianity'.¹ This article explores the literary voices of two writers who are part of this community: Suhayl Saadi and Leila Aboulela both negotiate the status of religion in a Western context and combine this with their experiences of prejudice in Scotland. In their fiction, they scrutinise different ways to integrate a Scottish with a Muslim identity. At the same time, both writers aim to transcend an exclusively national positioning by presenting other markers of identity. This liberty of no longer relying on national identifications exclusively is what Saskia Sassen defines as post-national.² But both writers have divergent views as to how religion features in a post-national world. For Saadi, Islam is important as a cultural influence; the works of Aboulela, on the other hand, represent religion as the most important marker of identity and as the only palpable alternative to identify with in a post-national world.

As Amin Malak points out, for many Muslims religion is 'a key component of their identity that could rival, if not supersede, their class, race, gender, or ethnic affiliation'.³ This is apparent in Aboulela's writing, which demonstrates that religion can also supplant national identity. Furthermore, Malak argues that Islam is also an important influence on non-Muslims living in Muslim communities.⁴ Even writers such as Suhayl Saadi who do not identify themselves as religious but who grew up as part of a religious community are influenced by the culture and practices of Islam. In twenty-first-century policy debates, Muslim religious identity became a category to describe immigrants to Europe (and their descendants) who had previously been mainly classified on the basis of 'race' or ethnicity.⁵ Thus, academic criticism also increasingly focuses on the analysis of Muslim identities in literature.⁶ In his study of Muslim narratives, Nash summarises Malak's analysis by outlining the different poles prevalent in Muslim writing in English: 'Islam features in both its purely religious as well as its cultural dimensions in the writing of a range of secular authors originating from Muslim nations or cultures, including non-believers like Abdulrazak Gurnah and Salman Rushdie'.⁷ My reading of Saadi's and Aboulela's works here illustrates that each of these two writers leans towards one end of this continuum: while Aboulela's writing advocates a transnational religious community, for Saadi Islam is of importance as a cultural influence.

There are several factors in addition to religion that influence Muslim identities in Scotland. Firstly, the writers discussed here are both shaped by a migrant experience – either their own, as in Aboulela's case, or that of their parents, as in Saadi's case. Secondly, religion as a category seems to be fundamentally at odds with the conception of a secularised postmodern world.⁸ Thirdly, as writers living in devolutionary Scotland, both Saadi and Aboulela are also exposed to a wider public discourse which, on the one hand, continues to put a strong emphasis on national/ist identifications,⁹ but on the other hand also continuously tries to open up to post-national and international orientations. This tension of negotiating the importance of a national positioning in a globalised and increasingly post-national world is also evident in Scottish literature and literary studies. For example, the constriction of Scottish fiction focusing exclusively on national identity was problematised by Eleanor Bell in 2004.¹⁰ Further initiatives in this direction were taken by Gerard Carruthers et al. in the same year¹¹ and by Berthold Schoene-Harwood, who included Scottish fiction in his study of the cosmopolitan novel, in 2009.¹² More recently, in 2015, Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon argued that, after the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, new 'spaces of fiction' opened up where fiction is no longer constricted to a 'national space'.¹³ All these approaches have in common that they advocate that Scottish literature (as well as Scottish literary studies) move beyond functioning as an expression of nationalism and rather engage with more contemporary critical concepts such as cosmopolitanism and transnationalism. This opening up allows for the integration of formerly marginalised voices and identities that have been 'classed as "foreign" to the national story',¹⁴ such as LGBTQ+ writers, women and 'racial' minorities. Fiction such as Jackie Kay's Trumpet or Louise Welsh's dystopian Plague Times trilogy are examples of Scottish fiction that deals with issues of identity beyond an exclusively nationalist perspective that thus enters an international conversation of negotiating human identity.¹⁵ Another manifestation of a transnational outlook in Scottish fiction is the critique of globalised Western (e.g. US-American) consumerism, for example in the work of Ewan Morrison.¹⁶ In Scottish literary studies, both sides of the national/post-national nexus are, for instance, addressed by Graeme Macdonald (2010), who argues that devolution has sparked not only the engagement with Scotland as a nation outside of British identity, but also new negotiations of race and ethnicity within Scotland that, at the same time, are situated within international structures of global capitalism.¹⁷ Bashabi Fraser's discussion of migrant and diasporic literature in Scotland (2016) also discusses the dual locatedness of these works within Scotland and within transnational frameworks.¹⁸

This also leads us to a fourth factor, namely the double marginalisation of intra-Scottish religious and racial minorities. Scottish Muslim writers can be perceived as doubly marginalised because they constitute a religious minority in a Scotland constructed as marginalised within the United Kingdom. Another aspect is racial minority status, since the majority of Scottish Muslims is non-white¹⁹ and thus also vulnerable to racism.²⁰ For this reason, the debate about Scottish (or, for that matter, British) Muslim identity also intersects with debates about 'Black Scottish' or 'Black British' identity. The latest census data from 2011 suggest that non-whites remain a minority in Scotland,²¹ facilitating the majority's homogenisation of all non-white people as fundamentally 'other' and 'non-Scottish', but Michael Niblett emphasises that they actually do have a considerable impact on Scottish culture: 'Although the number of blacks in Scotland remains relatively low compared with England, the black presence continues to exert an influence upon culture. Indeed, the question of a black Scots identity has become an issue within discussions over the construction of a "post-colonial" Scottish identity'.²² The debate as to whether Scotland can be described as postcolonial, i.e. in terms of having been colonised by England, has been led controversially.²³ Scotland's own complicity in the British colonial endeavour has been a recurring argument against this position, put forward, for instance, in the initial argument of The Empire Writes Back (1989).²⁴ Scotland occupies an ambiguous position as both coloniser and colonised, being marginalised by an England which is perceived as a hegemonic centre. Gardiner argues that Scottish and Postcolonial Literature have the same function, as they 'trouble the idealistic tendencies of English Literature',²⁵ i.e. the tendency to use the term 'English literature' to mean not 'anglophone literature worldwide' but 'British Literature', which has awarded literature from Britain (and, within Britain, from England rather than, say, Scotland or Wales) a supposedly superior position, making it the ideal against which others then are marked as inferior. Rejecting this seemingly 'inferior' position, Bhabha argues that the 'nationalist tradition which provided a safeguard against colonial cultural imposition'²⁶ can thus be discarded to allow the negotiation of identities 'in a discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference.'²⁷ This rings true also in the case of Scottish fiction where the preoccupation with a narrow, traditional nationalism that some might have thought indispensable in the face of English hegemony is now gradually changing towards a wider perspective.

My analysis of Saadi and Aboulela will demonstrate their visions of a progressive response to Scottish nationalism that, instead of regressively drawing on an essentialist nationalism, attempts to contribute to a post-national Scotland. While nationalism is not completely superseded, the development of a 'new', less essentialist, more pluralist and multi-ethnic Scottish nationalism means that national identity can lose importance (or can at least be complicated/complemented by) other narratives, such as gender, race, class or in this case faith. Fraser underlines this by arguing that writers such as Saadi and Aboulela are substantially influenced by the duality of their national identities: '[The "New Scots"'] memory of the "elsewhere" enters their writing, which asserts a cultural identity that is constantly being shaped and formed by the Scotland they live in and the links they may or may not maintain with their "homeland"'.²⁸ This emerging cultural identity can be located in a 'Third Space', which, according to Bhabha, is not simply the convergence of two cultures but the creation of something substantially new.²⁹

Scottish Asians, the biggest non-white group in Scotland, are represented in Suhayl Saadi's novel Psychoraag, which has been described as the first Asian-Scottish novel.³⁰ Saadi was born in Britain and comes from a Pakistani background. Hybridity is a recurring motif in his novels and short stories. Psychoraag³¹ and its successor Joseph's Box³² draw inspiration from various sources such as South Asian or Persian mythology, but at the same time are firmly rooted in a distinctively Scottish landscape and culture. In Psychoraag, main protagonist Zaf presents the last edition of his radio programme The Junnune Show. His stream-of-consciousness reflections on his split identity are increasingly drug-fuelled as the night progresses. These passages are interspersed with the narration of Zaf's father Jamil, who immigrated to Scotland from Pakistan after falling in love with a married woman and deciding on exile as a form of repentance. Scotland as a supposedly 'remote' location is perceived as a fitting place for this kind of exile (P, p. 155). Jamil's image of Scotland also reflects other common preconceptions:

People in Scotland had warned Jamil that Scotland had not been properly civilised, that he would get there and find himself surrounded by savages clad only in sporrans and brightly patterned woollen skirts. Either that or he would instantly be attacked by lupine, unintelligible gangsters sporting darkened eyes and long silver blades. Beads, crosses and tea would do no good, they insisted, since the natives were irretrievably hard Calvinists who believed only in damnation.

(P, p. 206)

Especially the description of the Scots as 'natives' draws attention to the implied parallels of Pakistan and Scotland as colonised, though ironically this parallel seems to be unnoticed by a post/colonised Pakistani character who echoes colonising images of Scotland.

Whatever Jamil's perception of Scotland as a remote and savage Other, his Scottish-born son has evidently 'gone native' to some extent: Zaf's ex-girlfriend Zilla is a Scottish-born Pakistani like him, but his current girlfriend Babs is white Scottish. Although Zaf resents the attention they attract as a mixed-race couple in Glasgow – 'In some respects, Glasgow wis livin in some kind of Dark Age' (P, p. 249) – he subscribes to a problematic value system when he stresses the benefits that Babs's whiteness has for him: 'That's why I needed a white woman – to make me strong' (P, p. 248). While generally attuned to his hybrid identity, he feels uncomfortable about the fact that, as a non-white person, he stands out. He thus fantasises about being white, which to his mind would award him a certain degree of invisibility: 'Zaf wanted to be like a lizard and to be able to slip from one skin to another, whenever it suited him – to go from pub to club to mosque to whore and not even sweat in between. To be like a white man' (P, p. 45). At the same time, he is sceptical of a commodified multiculturalism, for instance when he mocks the creation of a 'Commonwealth Tartan' (P, p. 109). Both arguments underline Zaf's scepticism towards a multi- culturalism which integrates his hybrid heritage but equally raises his visibility in a process of exoticising. Michael Gardiner argues that the British state propagated a 'neo-racial conception of multiculturalism […] in the devolutionary era' to supposedly integrate ethnic identities with the aim of emphasising the unity of a shared British identity³³ but at the same time draws attention to questions of race. According to Zaf, it is only the identity of a 'white man' that would award him invisibility, i.e. no longer being identified by his race.

Zaf's hybridity is reflected in his use of language. His voice is not only rendered in a distinctively Glaswegian vernacular, but is interspersed with words and phrases from Farsi, Urdu, and other languages. In order to underline how this eclectic language use is emblematic of Zaf's identity, the author Saadi did not want to italicise other languages, granting each of them equal status, but the publisher insisted on italicising words which are not in English or Scots.³⁴ Mikhail M. Bakhtin argues that the use of heteroglossia which is characteristic of the novel as a genre reflects a polyphony of voices separated into various regional and social dialects.³⁵ Saadi's intention of representing all languages as equal would have underlined this polyphony rather than presenting English as a 'standard' language. The novel is complemented by an extensive glossary which not only contains translations of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu etc., but also of French, Gaelic, and Spanish words and phrases (P, pp. 421–30). The mixing of different languages increases when Zaf addresses the listeners of his radio show, indicating that he represents a wider community of Scottish Asians that actively appropriate the local dialect: '[T]he second-generation Scottish-Asians Zaf associates with have appropriated urban Scots to make their presence felt in both the culture and the language. […] [M]ost of the narrative is conducted in [a] polyglot code governed by the laws and more of at least three different cultural backgrounds, deconstructing and re-engendering both communal and individual identities wherever these differences meet.'³⁶

The appropriation of the Glaswegian vernacular by enriching it to reflect his particular cultural roots emphasises Zaf's wish for a stable hybrid identity, rather than an identity split between Scottishness and being Pakistani.³⁷ The creation of a new form of expression again echoes Bhabha's idea that hybridity is not simply the sum of two cultures but creates a third space where 'the difference of cultures can no longer be identified or evaluated as objects of epistemological or moral contemplation'.³⁸ In Saadi's novel, the equal representation of all languages, as originally intended, would have reinforced this sense of a third space even further. But Psychoraag also employs various other strategies to locate Zaf's identity in a third space which is not at all definable by nationality or religion. He is wary of essentialist notions of nationalism: 'It wasn't that he wanted to become a true Scot or a real Englishman – whatever the hell those things were' (P, p. 135). Instead, it is music that has the power to consolidate Zaf's identity. Music grants him transcendence of all definitions, a transcendence that he originally wanted to achieve by becoming white, or that others may seek in nationality or religion: 'It wis because music defined him. His identity lay not in a flag or in a particular concretisation of a transcendent Supreme Being but in a chord, a bar, a vocal reaching beyond itself. A harmony wheelin out there, beyond the beyond' (P, pp. 210–11). The playlist of the radio show is added at the end of the novel, displaying a wide selection ranging from Madonna to Indian singer Talat Mahmood. The musical technique of 'sampling', of including bits of a song in another song, functions as the ultimate metaphor to describe Zaf's hybrid identity: 'He liked samples, felt comfortable with them. He was a sample of Pakistan, thrown at random into Scotland, into its myths. And, in Lahore, he had felt like a sample of Glasgow in the ancient City of the Conquerors' (P, p. 227). Thus, Saadi presents Zaf's character in terms of a constructed identity that can accommodate hybridity while simultaneously transcending national, ethnic, and racial boundaries.³⁹

Saadi's second novel, Joseph's Box, also draws on a variety of cultural references depicting the spiritual journey of the main characters Zuleikha and Alex. Both characters recently had to deal with bereavement and start out from a position of depression and loss. After a chance encounter, they pull a box from the Clyde containing six additional boxes which they can unlock by solving the clues provided. The novel not only spans 670 pages but is also structurally complex and bursting with cultural and intertextual references. Indeed, Saadi suggested that exegesis, the practice of reading religious texts, might be an appropriate way to approach the novel.⁴⁰ Thus, he underscores the importance of the readers, who will produce subjective interpretations influenced by their individual cultural background. Saadi has elaborated that Joseph's Box employs 'techniques common in Arabic, Persian and Urdu poetics (and music)'.⁴¹ The novel is loosely based on the Qur'anic story of Yusuf and Zulaikha that illustrates the 'progress through the seven Sufi stations of sacrifice, truth, power, obedience, life, memory and beauty',⁴² and thus, according to Saadi, can be read as 'a Sufi metaphor for the attainment of enlightenment; there's no shortcut, it's not a consumer item'.⁴³

Saadi emphasises the search for spirituality per se rather than advocating a specific faith. He uses cultural references from theological as well as secular sources to point out the communalities of cultures: 'Part of my project is to allow the reader to awaken to the perpetual and core nature of the influences of cultures which usually are considered Other in so-called Western thought, and the manner in which such profound concepts underpin our society and literature'.⁴⁴ This is underlined by the fact that the story of Yusuf and Zulaikha is also rendered in the Bible as 'Joseph and Potiphar's Wife' in the Book of Genesis, and is reminiscent of the Greek myth of Pandora's box. The spiritual journey that the characters undergo in the novel ends on a positive note when Zuleikha and Alexander return the box to the river (JB, pp. 669–70). Their feeling of loss is soothed not through an institutionalised faith, but rather through community and non-denominational spirituality.

In contrast to Saadi's fiction, Leila Aboulela positions faith and Islam right at the centre of her writing. Born in Sudan, Aboulela is currently based in Aberdeen and set both her first novel The Translator⁴⁵ and her fourth novel The Kindness of Enemies⁴⁶ in Scotland. Often referred to as an Arab writer,⁴⁷ she has nevertheless agreed in an interview that she is content with being described as a 'Scottish Arab writer', at least in relation to her first novel 'because it is set in Scotland, and one of the main characters is Scottish'.⁴⁸ The same criteria are met by The Kindness of Enemies, which will also be analysed here in order to explore Aboulela's notion of a Scottish Muslim identity. In addition to her affiliation to Scotland regarding parts of her work, Aboulela states in the British Council's writers' directory that her writing reflects the superior status religion has in her life: 'I want to show the psychology, the state of mind and the emotions of a person who has faith. I am interested in going deep, not just looking at "Muslim" as a cultural or political identity but something close to the centre, something that transcends but doesn't deny gender, nationality, class and race. I write fiction that reflects Islamic logic[.]'⁴⁹

Nash sees Aboulela's fiction as constituting a new direction of the Arab novel in English: 'neo-Muslim writing […] re-writes traditional, ethnic views of Islam and Muslims in terms of a twenty-first-century global Islam that attracts believers from many different backgrounds including converts of hybrid non-European and European ethnicity'.⁵⁰ Aboulela diverges from anglophone Muslim writing that uses a 'native informant' perspective catering to Western stereotypes. Thus, Nash classifies her as 'a school of one […] because [she] demonstrates that […] a sympathetic "insider's" voice is operable within the genre of "Muslim" fiction'.⁵¹ Aboulela's position as an 'insider' is evident in her negotiations of a Muslim identity within a Western world which is often identified either with a predominantly Christian tradition or with a secularised form of modernity. Peter Morey uses the concept of postsecularism when discussing Aboulela's writing, defining it 'as a critical discourse that reinstates religious conviction in the modern world against secularist charges of its redundancy'.⁵² Both The Translator and The Kindness of Enemies are strongly underpinned by the importance of religious faith and can thus be defined as postsecular. This unique perspective of exploring Muslim identity in the West seems to strike a chord among her audience – Aboulela has remarked that 'young, second-generation Muslims who grew up in the West'⁵³ are the most appreciative of her readers.

In The Translator, religion is the most important aspect in the life of the protagonist, Sammar, the eponymous translator from Sudan who moved back to Aberdeen, leaving her son behind with her mother-in-law after her husband's death. She cannot conceive of a life that does not centre on religion (T, p. 91). Sammar is acutely aware of the secularised environment she now lives in in Scotland and sees spirituality replaced by consumerism: 'Shops must open, people must get to work. That was sacred. If Sammar had searched for anything sacred to this city and not found it, here it was' (T, p. 116). At the same time, Sammar feels restricted as she cannot practise her faith freely because Muslims are seen as a threat. While the attacks of 9/11 that occurred after the publication of the novel have intensified such Islamophobic suspicions, they were clearly palpable even before 9/11 and are also registered by Aboulela's protagonist (T, p. 128). The seemingly universal Western suspicion against all Muslims makes it even harder for Sammar to negotiate her faith.

A sense of tension between 'Islam' and 'the West' is also illustrated in the love story between Sammar and the Scottish university lecturer she works for, Rae. Sammar cannot conceive of a relationship with Rae as long as he does not convert to Islam. It is only when desperation overwhelms her that she suggests that Rae simply repeat the words of the shahaddah, the Muslim profession of faith, without meaning them in order for them to get married (T, p. 124). Rae refuses this lip service, but they are ultimately married when Rae converts to Islam by conviction.

Although the locations in the novel parallel places of Aboulela's biography, Willy Maley points out a more general connection between Scotland and Sudan, as in Sudan the British Empire was predominantly represented by Scots.⁵⁴ This connection is mentioned in the novel when Sammar and Rae talk about Charles George Gordon, also known as Gordon of Khartoum, who is commemorated with a statue in Aberdeen (T, pp. 49–50). Paul Gilroy has argued that conflicts concerning multicultural society, especially pertaining to race, need always be read against the background of imperial and/or colonial history, which, according to him, 'remains marginal and largely unacknowledged, surfacing only in the service of nostalgia and melancholia'.⁵⁵ By taking up this imperial connection between Sudan and Scotland, The Translator underscores the importance of historic faultlines that influence the conception of race and identity in the present. The novel not only points towards historical connections between Sudan and Scotland but aligns them in an anti-colonial struggle. In his youth, Rae was an ardent supporter of a Scottish nationalism that constructs Scotland as a victim of English imperial expansion (T, p. 52). However, such alignments between Scotland and non-European colonised countries are complicated by Scotland's ambiguous position as both colonised and coloniser, as the statue of Gordon reminds us. The novel presents Islam as the only viable option that can help to overcome these national and imperial frictions and fissures: 'Rae's Scottish nationalism, early socialism, and anti-Orientalist anticolonialism can be swallowed by a placeless Muslim universalism, an effect of globalization'.⁵⁶ Abbas points out that this conception tunes in with the recent religious turn which strengthens the identity especially of Muslim migrants: 'For the architects of the religious turn, […] [r]eligion is the anti-imperialist elixir of lifeworld harmony; it alone heals the ruptures in the West's dissociated sensibility and preserves the radical alterity of Europe's Muslim migrants'.⁵⁷ Thus, Islam can function as a common denominator that transcends national categories and (anti-)imperial struggles.

The importance of religion in general and Islam in particular is further emphasised by portraying it as universal. Rae is shown as being wary of Orientalist preconceptions and as possessing a vast knowledge of Islam and Africa. He has a special comprehension of the Qur'an: 'I view the Qur'an as a sacred text, as the word of God' (T, p. 86). This troubles not only Sammar, but also Rae's Muslim colleague Fareed Khalifa: they do not understand why Rae does not wish to convert even if he has a deep understanding of their religion and thus, in their view, must acknowledge its truth (T, p. 85–86). The novel negotiates not only the importance of faith to Rae, but also to Sammar who tries to ascertain the status that faith has in her life. Aboulela emphasises the obstacles that Sammar faces, in order to manifest a strong Muslim identity from a feminist perspective. During her time in Sudan, Sammar experiences Islam as the governing principle of structuring the day as well as the year. Sammar describes her time in Aberdeen as exile (T, p. 146), but it is exactly the more liberal conditions of the West that allow Aboulela's female characters to come to terms with their Muslim identity: 'The forces diffused from the globalizing West act so as to draw populations from the East and in the process re-birth them. Women characters especially are enabled by the metropolitan space to rediscover faith, better understand their faith commitment, and even engage in da'wa (mission work) among westerners'.⁵⁸ Thus, the novel suggests that the negotiation of faith in a secular environment challenges but ultimately strengthens Sammar's Muslim identity.

The exceptional position that Aboulela awards religion in the construction of identity is again underlined in the novel's conclusion. As Elizabeth Russell has pointed out, the solution of the central conflict cannot be achieved easily: 'the in-between cross-cultural space cannot accommodate their love, and so, one eventually has to give way to the other'.⁵⁹ Rae converts to Islam and proposes to marry Sammar. Letting the wish for faith emerge from an existential situation caused by illness (T, p. 192) makes Islam necessary for Rae's very survival. With his conversion, all other obstacles of their relationship also seem to vanish. The happy ending to the novel's love story plot makes a strong statement on the importance of faith. It is only after Rae's conversion that other markers of identity, such as nationality, become irrelevant. Rae advises Sammar that their religion is not 'tied to a particular place' (T, p. 191). Rather than identifying with the imagined community of the nation,⁶⁰ The Translator aims to transcend the nation by positing an alternative imagined 'community of faith' that unites all Muslims, underlining the transnational character of a global umma that is not bound to a specific territory.

In Aboulela's fourth novel The Kindness of Enemies, the focus of the story is already encapsulated in the first sentence: 'Allah was inscribed on the blade in gold' (KE, p. 3, original emphasis). University lecturer Natasha researches Imam Shamil and his fight for independence in the nineteenth-century Caucasus. Oz, one of her students, turns out to be a descendant of Shamil and invites Natasha to meet his mother and examine a sword they allegedly inherited from Shamil. This narrative alternates with the story of Shamil's fight in the Caucasus.

The overall frame that connects both narratives is the negotiation of the fraught term jihad. Natasha lectures on 'jihad as resistance' regarding the attempts of Muslim tribes in the Caucasus to keep the Russian Empire at bay. Oz points out that, to this end, in the nineteenth century even Queen Victoria championed this jihad (KE, p. 8). Thus, the novel raises awareness that the historically charged term has changed in connotation. At the end of the novel, Natasha makes the changing definition of jihad her next research project, which suggests that the novel does not aim to provide an answer (KE, p. 310). Both Natasha and Oz are aware of the changed perceptions and have responded to this accordingly. Natasha adopts her stepfather's last name, Wilson, to be rid of her original family name Hussein. Oz's real name is consciously avoided: '[His mother] called him Ossie. His friends and teachers called him Oz. We were all eager to avoid his true name, Osama' (KE, p. 4). This underscores that both Natasha and Oz meet a lack of understanding of Muslim traditions, and consequently develop strong inhibitions to use their real names (so central for personal identity) – a problem that has also been shared by various other members of cultural minorities (immigrant or otherwise) in western societies. The situation is aggravated at the end of the first chapter when Oz is arrested, being suspected of sympathising with terrorists (KE, p. 16).

In both narrative strands, Islam is important for the life of some of the characters, though not in its institutional sense but rather as expression of a lived spirituality. In contemporary Scotland, this is demonstrated when Natasha accompanies Oz's mother Malak to a zikr, a religious ceremony, 'for anthropological reasons. The confrontation with religious belief and practice faced every modern historical researcher' (KE, p. 216). In the course of the novel, Natasha faces numerous obstacles: she is questioned by the police in the wake of the arrest, faces professional conflicts, and flies to Sudan to tend to her dying father. Only in the last sentences of the novel does she realise that spirituality and faith are what she was looking for (KE, p. 314). In the other narrative strand, it is Princess Anna (kidnapped by Shamil to avenge the kidnapping of his son) who is increasingly impressed by Shamil's mysticism and spirituality. She even develops a degree of admiration for her abductor and his principles. The turn towards, or the increasing empathy for, spirituality and a life dedicated to faith underscores the essential status of religion in Aboulela's work. The novel shows that the obstacles of living a religious life are universal, by comparing the struggle against imperial Russia in the nineteenth century with a contemporary Scotland characterised by distrust and preconceptions against Muslims as terrorists.

Saadi's and Aboulela's fiction exemplifies the broad spectrum of voices in contemporary Scottish literature that negotiate a Scottish Muslim identity. Both writers are influenced by migrant experiences and write from a position of perceived marginality which is added to the already marginalised position of being Scottish in the United Kingdom. Saadi and Aboulela both address the challenges of living a spiritual life in a largely secularised West, but describe rather different strategies to overcome these challenges. Apart from negotiating a Muslim identity, Saadi and Aboulela also engage with Scottish identity. Saadi does this by employing the Scots vernacular; Aboulela focuses on the parallels between Sudan and Scotland as marginalised and suffering from imperial domination. Saadi's and Aboulela's fiction is concerned with spirituality as a way to lead an ethical life, and their efforts to construct identity in a post-national age. Saadi advocates a stable hybrid identity to which Islam is important as a cultural influence whereas Aboulela shows religious identity to question national identity and presents this as a 'solution' to living in an increasingly post-national, secular world. Both writers' approaches chime in with a trend in post-devolution Scottish literature to turn away from a concern with negotiating a stable national identity and instead emphasise cosmopolitan and post-national frameworks. The discussion of Muslim identity in Scotland only represents one facet of this new writing and contributes to fulfilling Berthold Schoene's hope that Scottish literature after devolution can transcend a narrow nationalist outlook and should ultimately 'be allowed to go cosmopolitan rather than native'.⁶¹