The scenario could be any national news story. Whatever the perpetrator's motive or mental state, his crime is a 'Muslim' one– an uncivil act; everything associated with him becomes tainted. The religion itself is blighted and criminalized. The violence is seen as further evidence that Islam bears responsibility.
We know the scenario too well. Yet those eloquent efforts seem naïve, ineffective and superficial. At the same time we find precious few attempts by our Muslim creative community to explore the human repercussions of these events at a deeper level:–through novels, film and drama.
We now have a novel that tackles this contemporary theme in a fresh and effective approach. Rajia Hassib's "In the Language of Miracles" explores how one American Muslim family is impacted by violence. I don't know if Hassib intended her fictional piece to be a domestic prism through which to view the American Muslims' experience of "terror" in our midst. Because there's nothing explicit here about what's commonly labeled "Islamic terror". For me however, her story is essentially a metaphor of our recurring nightmare– alleged "Islamic violence" directed at Western targets.
What should they do? Samir insists they attend the memorial where he intends to make a statement. Nagla rejects this; she's unfocused and indolent, a condition likely precipitated by the death of Hosaam. Her surviving son Khaled is withdrawn while Fatima tries to ride above the fray. (She's recently befriended another Muslim girl and is perhaps becoming more devout.) Khaled, rejected by all but one school friend, retreats into social media and seeks out a young woman in New York City. With this stranger he's able to share his distress and revisit events leading to Hosaam's action. He returns to his troubled home in New Jersey in time for the memorial but too late to rescue his father from his blundering performance there.
Tellingly, the least acculturated family member, grandmother Ehsan, offers her folk remedies, common sense, and some invocations of Islamic texts that she barely understands to address the pain of her traumatized family. She alone seems to possess the cultural integrity to properly recognize the death anniversary of their child Hosaam. In familiar simple Islamic tradition she prepares special pastries and spends the day at the cemetery to commute with his spirit (and to scrub offensive graffiti off his gravestone) where she also consoles a grieving stranger at a nearby grave.
Published in 2015, "In the Language of Miracles" offers plenty of material on the domestic side of Islam, on migrant trauma, and on the sociology of Muslim Americans. In this debut novel, Rajia Hassib establishes herself as an Arab American writer of great talent.