Islamic identity and weather conditions in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and The Kindness of Enemies

Abstract

This study explores how Arab British novelist Leila Aboulela employs weather conditions in The Translator (1999) and The Kindness of Enemies (2015) to depict the Islamic identity construction of the characters of Sammar and Natasha in the two novels, respectively. It argues that in the fictional world Aboulela creates, weather conditions narrate the stories of her characters’ identity construction in diaspora. The study exemplifies how both Sammar and Natasha move from a stage of being unable to see weather conditions as signs of their identity formation to a new stage where they become fully aware of the significance, connotation, and relation of weather conditions to their own Islamic identities. It maintains that through paying close attention to weather conditions in Aboulela’s fiction, readers can understand the dynamics of the Islamic identity of Aboulela’s characters.

Keywords:

• Aboulela
• diaspora
• identity formation
• Islamic identity
• weather conditions

1. Introduction

Here feel we but the penalty of Adam, The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say “This is no flattery: these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am.” William Shakespeare, As You Like It. Act 2, Scene 1 (44)

In William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Duke Senior is banished and his throne is usurped by his brother, Duke Junior. The speaker in the excerpt above is Duke Senior, who likens himself to Adam as they were both banished and left to face the changing seasons and feel the tormenting wind and cold. Yet, this harsh outdoor experience raises Duke Senior’s awareness and leads to his rejection of his old life at the court as he compares it to his new life in the forest. In other words, there turns out to be a connection between weather conditions and the Duke’s awareness of his identity as an exile. According to Duke Senior, the adverse weather conditions he experiences in the Forest of Arden teach him who he is, remind him of his true self, and make him accept, albeit with a sense of bitterness, his new position as a dethroned duke.

Moreover, Duke Senior’s allusion to “the penalty of Adam” certainly draws our attention to the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s fall from paradise. Hence, one may logically think of how weather conditions are portrayed in the holy Books as signs that people need to decipher. In this regard, many studies have been conducted on the connection between weather conditions and the notion of punishment or reward in the Holy Qur’an. In a study titled “The Metaphor of Nature in the Holy Quran: A Critical Metaphor Analysis,” Mustapha Mohamed (2014) investigates the metaphors of natural phenomena in the Holy Quran. According to Mohamed, these metaphors “have two opposing functions” as they are used as a “persuasive tool for both believers and disbelievers” (Mohamed 85). He explains this by pointing out that:

On the one hand, metaphors act as heralds of goodness for those who believe in God and have strong faith in Him, His messages and His messengers. On the other hand, they act as a form of punishment for those who disbelieve in Him and deny His messages and His messengers (Mohamed 85)

Mohamed gives several examples from the Holy Quran whereby rain is used as “a source of punishment and pain for disbelievers” (Mohamed 90), such as in the following verse from Surat Al-A’raf: “But those among them who did wrong changed the word that [had] been told to them So We sent on them a torment from the heaven in return for their wrong-doings” (7: [162]). This verse hints at the punishment of the people of Bani Isra’il, who were ordered by God to enter from a door and say a particular word, and yet they changed the word intendedly. As a result, they were punished for their disobedience, and their punishment took the shape of tormenting rain.

Nevertheless, in “An Analysis of Figurative Language and Its Translation Method in Yusuf Ali’s English Translation of Surah Al Mulk and Al Insan,” Selfina Himmatul Asfiya (2020) gives an example of another verse from the Holy Quran in which weather is linked to the idea of reward. The verse, which is verse 13 in Surat Al-Insan, presents a description of the promised Heaven: “And because they were patient and constant, He will reward them with a Garden and (garments of silk). Relining in the (Garden on raised thrones, they will see neither the sun’s (excessive heat) nor (the moon’s) excessive cold” (76:13). According to Asfiya, “the atmosphere in heaven is very comfortable. The temperature is neither too hot nor too cold. The dwellers of heaven could relax peacefully there” (Asfiya 80). Hence, as the selected verses manifest, the punishment of disbelievers and the reward of believers are enacted. Accordingly, and going back to Mohamed’s idea, one may argue that weather conditions are used indicatively and significantly in the Holy Quran and are employed connotatively. Based on this, this study argues that Arab British novelist Leila Aboulela uses weather conditions in The Translator (1999) and The Kindness of Enemies (2015) to narrate how her characters construct their Islamic identity in diaspora. In other words, we argue that in Aboulela’s fiction, weather conditions have symbolic significations and are intricately linked to how a character perceives his/her identity.

As an Arab British author who lives in the interstices of cultures, in her fiction, Leila Aboulela focuses on voicing the experiences of Arab Muslim people in diaspora and narrating their positive and negative experiences. In The Arab Diaspora: Voices of an Anguished Scream, Zahia Ismail Salhi and Netton (2006) shed light on the cultural role of Arab writers in diaspora who use the English language as a medium in their literary works. According to Zahia and Salhi, the literature of diaspora does not only function as a space where the writers can voice their ephemeral joys and their ever resurrecting pains, but also “acts as a bridge between the Diaspora writers’ host society on the one hand and their country of origin on the other” (Salhi and Netton 4). The cultural role which Arab authors in diaspora play is highlighted in “Hybrid and Hyphenated Arab Women’s English Narratives as a New Coming of Age Literature” by Dallel Sarnou (2014), who lists a number of Arab writers in diaspora, including Leila Aboulela, and draws on Deluze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature to highlight the fact that these writers function as cultural translators, interpreters, or observers of the two different cultural entities they find themselves in between (Sarnou 53). She adds that these writers use English “not as a universal language but as a linguistic means to surpass the boundaries between the Arab writer and the Western reader” (Sarnou 54). In that sense, they are capable of making use of their position in between the two cultures to serve their own purpose.

As illustrated in the previous paragraph, Aboulela is one of these Arab authors who attempt to draw on their cultural heritage to describe the contemporary situations. Her works include six novels and two collections of short stories. The novels are The Translator (1999), Minaret (2005), Lyrics Alley (2010), The Kindness of Enemies (2015), Bird Summons (2019), and River Spirit (2023), and the collections of short stories are Coloured Lights (2001) and Elsewhere Home (2018).

Critics usually describe Aboulela’s fiction as Islamic. For instance, Amin Malak (2004), considers Aboulela to be an Islamic writer, not a Muslim one, for, according to him, a Muslim person is one who “espouses the religion of Islam or is shaped by its cultural impact, irrespective of being secular, agnostic, or practicing believer” (Malak 5). On the other hand, an Islamic writer is one whose identity “denotes thoughts, rituals, activities and institutions specifically proclaimed and sanctioned by Islam or directly associated with its theological traditions” (Malak 5–6). In “Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” Wail Hassan (2011) stipulates that through her works, Aboulela attempts to achieve an “epistemological break” with colonial discourse through articulating an “alternative Islamic discourse” which is shaped by “immigrant perspectives” (Hassan 299). The idea of the alternative discourse is also stressed in “Strategic Nostalgia, Islam and Cultural Translation in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and Coloured Lights” by Tina Steiner (2008), who explains that Aboulela’s fiction “engages directly with an environment that is unsympathetic to religion” (Steiner 9). Steiner adds that in her fiction, Aboulela translates Islamist discourse into the narratives of women, which creates a space for negotiations of identity (Steiner 9).

In “The Practice of Faith and Personal Growth in Three Novels by Muslim Women Writers in the Western Diaspora,” Abdul Majid Amrah (2016) mentions that Aboulela “has positioned her characters within a practicing-Muslim background and used Islam as a rock of stability for the characters to cling to amidst the chaos of their lives” (Amrah 23). Furthermore, according to Anita Sethi (2005), what Aboulela does is that she reflects her perception of religious identity—one she described as “providing more stability than national identity … [as she could carry it] everywhere she goes” (Sethi para 9). It is, thus, an inseparable part of her that strengthens her more than her national identity does. Sethi explains that this kind of gained strength which is related to religion can also be found in Aboulela’s fictional world, particularly in her women characters who live in diaspora. She adds that “rather than yearning to embrace Western culture, Aboulela’s women seek solace in their growing religious identity” (Sethi para 4). That is to say that Aboulela’s women characters are not ones that are submissive or voiceless because they are Muslims, but are ones who choose to be devout Muslims so as to find solace and stability at the hard times they go through in their diasporic experiences. This demonstrates Aboulela’s own way of dismantling the stereotypical image of Muslim women as oppressed, for the women figures in her fiction embrace Islam and its rituals based on their personal choice.

Moreover, in “Re-siting Religion and Creating Feminised Space in the Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif and Leila Aboulela,” Geoffrey Nash (2002) argues that in her fiction, Aboulela “advances a feminized Islamic discourse” that enables the protagonist to counter the frustrations of a dysfunctional Muslim African marginalization in the West (Nash 29). Hence, it can be deciphered that Aboulela’s works, which focus on the experience as well as on the empowerment of immigrant Arab characters, are considered a writing back to the colonial anti-Islamic discourse. The fact that Aboulela depicts the experiences of her Muslim characters in diaspora makes her among the Arab women writers who write in languages other than their mother language and who are described by Ferial Jabouri Ghazoul (2006) as “cultural ambassadors who are able to voice a previously silenced point of view” (Ghazoul 122).

The topic of how Arab writers in diaspora have represented weather conditions in their works has not been extensively investigated by critics. However, there is only one article that is written on this topic, and it is titled “The Weather as a Storyteller in Lalami’s The Other Americans” by Al-Khayyat and Awad (2021). In their study, Al-Khayyat and Awad (2021) trace the role that weather conditions in Arab American Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans play. Connecting the relationships of the protagonist, Nora, with the other characters to the prevalent weather conditions in Lalami’s novel, Al-Khayyat and Awad argue that “reading the weather conditions in the novel can inform us about Nora’s relationship with her family, ethnic identity, love and work” (Al-Khayyat & Awad 53). They conclude by stating that “the weather turns out to be telling Nora’s story of self-actualization throughout the novel” (Al-Khayyat & Awad 54).

Yet, this study does not adopt an ecocritical approach in its investigation of the connotations of weather conditions in two of Aboulela’s novels. It attempts to make a link between these connotations and the Islamic identity formation of the characters in these novels. It also highlights how Aboulela’s employment of weather conditions is used as a clue to understand the characters’ self-perception and the way they interact with other characters within the liminal space of diaspora. It does so as it investigates two works by Aboulela and focuses on the characters of Sammar in The Translator and Natasha in The Kindness of Enemies. The study argues that the two characters move from a stage of being unable to see weather conditions as signs of their identity formation to a new stage where they become fully aware of the significance, connotation, and relation of weather conditions to their own Islamic identities.

2. Scotland’s winter and Sammar’s blues in Aboulela’s The Translator

In The Translator (1999), Sammar is a Sudanese Muslim widow who lives in Scotland away from her son, Amir, whom she has left in Sudan with her aunt and mother-in-law, Mahasen. In Scotland, where she works as a translator, Sammar falls in love with Rae. Her relationship with him goes through ups and downs as he is an agnostic Western figure who has some questions about Islam. This makes Sammar’s diasporic experience a harsh one as there turns out to be a huge gap between her and the person she is in love with; while she represents Islam, he represents the West, and this west proves to be too cold for her to bear. In “Leila Aboulela’s The Translator: Reading Islam in the West,” Chrisitina Phillips (2012) points out that Aboulela’s The Translator:

belongs to a body of work, variously referred to as “Muslim fiction”, “Muslim Narrative”, “Muslim Immigrant fiction” and similar epithets, which explores Muslim experience in a globalized world for the benefit of an English-speaking audience and is particularly concerned with deconstructing some of the stereotypes that prevail in western television, film, and media (Philips 66)

Philips’ argument reinforces Aboulela’s role as an Arab author who feels responsible towards her people and her religion and chooses her fictional works as a space to project and convey her ideas. Philips adds that Aboulela stands out among the Arab writers who wish to “bridge the gap in understanding between the West and Islam;” she manifests that not only does Aboulela explore Muslim experience in her fiction, but she also elevates it above secular “Western” modes of existence (Philips 66). This elevation of the Muslim experience can be witnessed in the relationship between Sammar and Rae. It is our contention that the Sammar- Rae relationship can be metonymically read and understood through the changing weather conditions that Aboulela depicts. In other words, weather conditions in The Translator are, to a large extent, witnesses of the pair’s romance as the study will demonstrate.

The way Sammar deals with weather conditions in the beginning of the novel differs from the way she ends up dealing with them. As the novel opens, she is unable to look at weather conditions as signs. The novel starts with Sammar’s fear of Scotland’s weather conditions. She wants to meet Rae, but “she dreamt that it rained and she could not go out to meet him as planned” (Aboulela 3). Sammar is afraid of the changes in weather conditions; she is “afraid of rain, afraid of the fog and the snow which came to this country, afraid of the wind even” (Aboulela 3). Yet, she does not realize that these changes in weather conditions significantly contribute to forming her Islamic identity.

In her relationship with Rae, Sammar figures out that there is a huge gap between her and Rae; she considers the differences between her world and Rae’s world, which can be witnessed in “the weather, the culture, modernity, the language, the silence of the muezzin” (Aboulela 44, emphasis added). Hence, the weather is not less significant than the other markers of difference between Sammar and Rae, including their religious (or, in Rae’s case, lack of religious) beliefs. While she is a strong believer in God with strong faith, Rae is agnostic, and the absence of faith which she finds in him is what she refers to as the silence of the muezzin. Thinking of the muezzin, a religious reference and signpost, makes Sammar consider differences in weather conditions as she narrates: “We have winter in Sudan, a cold that stays on the skin, does not punch inside to the bones, is content to crack people’s skin, turn it into the colour of ash” (Aboulela 44). As the quotation illustrates, Sammar prefers Sudan’s winter over that of Scotland, for it is not as harsh and penetrating as it is in Scotland. By praising winter in Sudan, she is indirectly criticizing winter in Scotland through depicting what it does.

Geoffrey Nash stresses the importance of faith for Sammar as he explains that “the religious consciousness of Sammar is at the heart of the novel” (Nash 30). For him, this obviously shows in the fact that Aboulela rewrites the veil through Sammar’s thoughts to assert Sammar’s Islamic identity in the West: “She covered her hair with Italian silk, her arms with tropical colours. She wanted to look as elegant as Benazir Bhutto, as mesmerizing as the Afghan princess she had once seen on TV wearing hijab, the daughter of an exiled leader of the mujahideen” (Aboulela 9, emphasis in original). Moreover, the role of faith for Sammar is highlighted by her rejection to marry Rae unless he converts to Islam, which is particularly what makes Nash consider Aboulela to be “adopting an updated Jane Eyre scenario,” reversing the fatalism of the emigrant novel by having Sammar fall in love with her boss and asking him to convert (Nash 30). This emphasizes that faith is essential for Sammar and signifies that its presence or absence counts a lot to her, which explains why she finds Rae’s agnosticism unacceptable.

Among the things that Sammar finds strange when she first goes to live in Scotland is “the privacy that surrounded praying” (Aboulela 75). She is aware that if she wishes to pray, it will be better to do so in a locked room, unlike in Sudan, where she used to pray wherever she wanted even if surrounded by people, “in the middle of parties, in places where others chatted, slept or read” (Aboulela 75). Interestingly enough, Sammar comments on the privacy of people in Scotland by relating this to weather as she thinks that private people are “made private by the cold” (Aboulela 31). It is the coldness which she experiences in the absence of an Islamic atmosphere, and which she tries to overcome by praying even if she has to use her shawl as a praying mat (Aboulela 75).

In the beginning of her relationship with Rae, Sammar assumes that she and Rae would be able to overcome the gap between them facing no difficulties as she considers the possibility of his conversion to Islam. This shows when she addresses Yasmin, her friend and Rae’s secretary, and asks her “Do you think he could one day convert?” (Aboulela 21). Having considered the possibility of Rae’s conversion in her mind, she feels as if:

Home had come here. Its dimly lit streets, its sky and the feel of home had come here and balanced just for her. She saw the sky cloudless with too many stars, imagined the night warm, warmer than indoors. She smelled dust and heard the barking of stray dogs among the street’s rubble and pot-holes. A bicycle bell tinkled, frogs croaked, the muezzin coughed into the microphone and began the azan for the Isha prayer. But this was Scotland and the reality left her dulled, unsure of herself (Aboulela 20)

Sammar’s description of the weather as Sudan-like comes as a result of her inability to understand weather conditions as signs. As the excerpt shows, weather conditions play a crucial role in making her feel at home. According to Salhi and Netton (2006):

regardless of what the reasons that make exiles live far from their homelands and regardless of whether they escaped prosecution or chose to live far from home, they all keep an idealized image of home as a paradise they were forced to flee, and never manage to adopt their new dwellings (Salhi and Netton 3)

In the case of diasporic Sammar, the paradise-image of Sudan which she has in her mind is evidently based on its weather. The first things that come to her mind when she mistakenly feels at home are the warm air, the cloudless sky, and the dust, the three of which are characteristics of weather in Sudan, which prove that she never manages to adopt the weather conditions in Scotland. We would argue here that this description comes as a result of her hope that Rae would convert to Islam, and this would turn the cold and the skies filled with clouds into a home-like place, or a paradise, with the opposite weather conditions. Yet, in her mind, Sammar also considers the possibility of Rae’s rejection to convert to Islam, and this explains the last sentence in the excerpt on her thinking of home, for in this case, she wakes up to the reality that Scotland can only be Scotland.

Sammar’s description of the weather as Sudan-like comes before she voices her thoughts and directs a question to Yasmin about the possibility of Rae’s conversion to Islam, and this proves that the Sammar-Rae romance is entangled with weather conditions. As Yasmin tells her that Rae’s conversion would be considered “professional suicide” (Aboulela 21), Sammar’s aspiration turns out to be a false hope and “hallucination” (Aboulela 20). She, literally, wakes up from her pleasant thoughts and her daydreams of being at home to the harsh reality, and she comes to realize that she was not in Sudan. Besides, the fact that Sammar turns out to be imagining the weather to be warm and simultaneously supposing that it was the call for prayer in Sudan does not only imply the depressing amount of alienation which she feels in Scotland, but also establishes a link between the depiction of weather and her Islamic identity.

Being a strong believer in God, Sammar feels frustrated when Rae refuses to say the shahada for the sake of marrying her. In her response to this, she immediately connects her disappointment in this situation to weather conditions; she starts to feel the extreme coldness not only in the room in which Rae is present and which, as she states, had “no warmth” (Aboulela 127) but also in Scotland in general. Feeling that Rae has let her down, she considers the difference in weather this time as a barrier in their relationship as she decides that she will not live there for the rest of her life “with this stupid weather and stupid snow” (Aboulela 129). In that sense, Rae’s refusal to declare the first pillar of Islam functions as the turning point in Sammar’s relationship with him that contributes to her own self-discovery and makes her acquire greater knowledge of her identity. She simply refuses to adapt to his agnosticism and to his lack of faith and empty space of belief, and this makes her figure out that she does not fit into him nor into his place as she realizes the importance of her faith to her, and she expresses her refusal to be part of this by making references to weather conditions.

In “Beyond the Veil: Exploring Muslim Women’s Multidimensional Identities in Laila Aboulela’s The Translator and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf,” Nawel Meriem Ouhiba (2021) clarifies that the fiction of Arab American novelists aims to depict the real image of Arab women and to resist the representation of Islam and Muslim women that pervade Western texts (Ouhiba 26). Ouhiba adds that these writers resist attempts to fix their identities by writing back the hegemonic discourse (Ouhiba 28–29). They do this by empowering their devout Muslim women characters through giving them leading roles to play and making their devotion to Islam central (Ouhiba 32). The leading role which Sammar is given in The Translator can be read in the light of this understanding and can also be linked to her awareness of weather conditions.

As Sammar goes out of the building after the misunderstanding with Rae, she starts to see everything clearly and begins to understand weather conditions as signals sent to her: “Down the steps, out of the building, to the sunshine and the snow. Everything clear and cold. Her breath smoke, the snow speckles of diamonds to step on” (Aboulela 129). The fact that Sammar steps on the speckles of snow indicates that despite the harsh conditions, she will be able to move on driven by the power of her faith. Although she notices that “snow filled the sky and poured down like it would never stop” (Aboulela 117), Sammar manages to go over it. As she does so, everything becomes clear to her; she decides to move on in her life away from Rae. She stamps her feet “to shake off the snow that was on her shoes” (Aboulela 121) that would hinder her from moving on. In a way, she keeps rising above the snow, and when the plane she takes rises up over the city, she notices that the world she is leaving is “splashed with snow” (Aboulela 132), but she has already left it behind.

Sammar’s return to Sudan following this incident is important as it also marks her spiritual growth. In “The Quest for Self-Discovery: A Study of the Journey Motif in Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and Aboulela’s The Translator, Ulayyan and Awad (2016) make it clear that “the journey motif plays a pivotal role in shaping the identity of the two protagonists” in the two novels (Ulayyan and Awad 39). The authors also draw on Alison Blunt’s understanding of the motif of the journey to highlight that “the outward journey is usually connected with an inner one that plays an important role in shaping the personality of the traveler” (Ulayyan and Awad 39). Due to the fact that Sammar has been away from her homeland for some time and has become used to cold weather in Scotland, she does not find it easy to cope with the hot weather in Sudan in the beginning of her homecoming; as a person who has become used to cold weather, Sammar remarks that “the sun was a spot of blue heat, still too piercing for eyes that had seen fog and snow” (Aboulela 135). Nevertheless, after she spends some time in Sudan, she decides that “life was here” (Aboulela 158), and her preference of her life in Sudan becomes clearer, for it can be deciphered from her unity with the weather and the way she connects herself to it as she narrates that “life was the dust storms that approached rosy brown from the sky, the rush to slam shut windows and doors, the wind whistling through bushes and trees. Brief mad storms and then the sand, thick sand covering everything, whirls of soft sand on the tiles to scoop up and throw away” (Aboulela 158). In one way or another, Sammar has found out that her life away from Sudan and its weather is intolerable. Driven by her anger from Rae, who refused to say the shahada, she goes back to her homeland and finds the true meaning of life. Sammar continues by saying that “life was the rain that came at dawn with lightening, fat drops on the dust, the sun defeated for a day” (Aboulelah 158). This demonstrates that she finally decides to embrace her country with its good and bad conditions and admits that she prefers hot weather in Sudan over cold weather in Scotland despite the dust and heat it brings.

In Sudan, as Sammar one hot day opens the fridge to get a glass of water for her aunt, she is reminded of Rae and Scotland by “the sudden chill” that comes out of it (Aboulela 182). She comes across “the blue cold, frost and it was Aberdeen where he was” (Aboulela 182). Hence, she immediately connects the cold to Scotland as well as to Rae’s memory. Furthermore, Sammar refers to weather in Sudan afterwards as she pays attention to the “cool wind blowing, carrying dust” (Aboulela 183), which can be read as an anticipation that a change will take place; it can indicate that Sammar’s relationship with Rae will blow like the wind and the situation will be turned upside down in the form of a reconciliation that will replace the current misunderstanding, and this is what really happens; in the end, Sammar receives a letter from Fareed Khalifa, Rae’s Muslim friend, who writes to her on behalf of Rae. He tells her in the letter that Rae, who has converted to Islam, proposes to her.

In her first meeting with Rae in Sudan after his conversion, Sammar points out that when she looked at him, “the sun hurt her eyes” (Aboulela 193), which opposes the extreme coldness which she earlier felt in the room when he refused to say the shahada. Unlike Sammar, who could not cope with the cold weather in Scotland, Rae seems not to be disturbed by the hot and dusty weather in Sudan. He and Sammar agree to get married and to go back to Scotland and live there with Amir. Yet, when Sammar expresses her fear that the dust is bad for Rae’s chest as he suffers from asthma, he replies by saying: “It’s not bothering me, my asthma is intrinsic. The dry weather is good for me. It’s very dry here I noticed, good for the bones” (Aboulela 201). In that sense, Rae’s declaration of accepting the totally different weather in Sudan goes in parallel with his acceptance of the change which is made by his conversion to Islam.

Based on this, Aboulela employs the changing weather conditions in The Translator to reflect the identity transformation which Sammar undergoes and to narrate the Sammar-Rae romance. As her relationship with Rae stops for some time and then proceeds based on his religious views, it can be argued that weather conditions in the novel are related in one way or another to the construction of Sammar’s Islamic identity

3. Reading weather conditions as signifiers of Islamic identity in The Kindness of Enemies

This section of the study investigates how the weather conditions in the novel can be read in reference to the formation of the Islamic identity of Natasha Wilson. The Kindness of Enemies has two plots; the first one is the plot of Natasha Wilson, who is a 21^st-century half Sudanese who lives in Scotland hiding her true family name, Hussein. She works as a history professor at the university, and befriends her student Oz and his mother, Malak. Natasha is a specialist on Imam Shamil, a 19^th-century sufi leader in Dagestan who comes at the center of the second plot. After Oz sends her an email on weapons used for Jihad with the username Sword of Shamil, he gets arrested by the security services, and his mother arranges for a campaign calling for his release. Natasha goes to her homeland to visit her dying father and comes back as a different person as she no longer wishes to hide her Arabic Name from her colleagues. The second plot tells the story of the treachery that Imam Shamil receives from the Russian party in the war between the Caucasus and Russia; when the Russians insist on having Shamil’s son Jamaleldin as a hostage, they end up betraying Shamil by kidnapping his son. Aiming to get his son back, Shamil kidnaps worthy Anna, the Princess of Georgia, along with her son and little daughter and the French governess. The Russians demand years later that Imam Shamil should surrender to save his people.

Despite being distant from each other in time and place, the two plots prove to be related to each other. This is stated by Yousef Awad (2018), who explains that “there are strong links between the two plots and one may reasonably argue that one plot reflects the other” (Awad 73). Awad maintains that whereas Natasha is the one to put the pieces together, it is Malak and Oz’s lineage to Imam Shamil that connects the two narratives” (Awad 73). Additionally, in “Narrative Structure and Representation of History in Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies: A new Historicist Approach.” Faten Ahmed Ramadan (2019) comments on the interconnectedness between the plots of Natasha and Imam Shamil as she explains:

The private/personal history of Natasha is juxtaposed with the public history of Imam Shamil and Princess Anna as historical characters. The history of Imam Shamil is reshaped in Natasha’s interest in Islamic jihad. Therefore, the personal history of Natasha and the public history of Imam Shamil are interlinked, deepening the narrative and creating a multilayered polyphonic story (Ramadan 46–47)

The two plots are, thus, significantly connected to each other; it is Natasha’s interest in the character of Imam Shamil that makes her story a quest for her Islamic half which she previously intended to conceal in an attempt to hide her Muslim origin.

In Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature, Wail Hassan (2011) illustrates that the west of Aboulela “is marked by the anti-Islamic and hostility against Muslims in every region and location, irrespective of color, language, tradition, nationality or geography” (Hassan 182). In other words, according to Hassan, Muslims coming from different backgrounds and nationalities are on the same scale which is categorized as the other for Aboulela, and are all united by the dominant sense of hostility directed towards them by the anti-Islamic west. The reason why the west stands against Muslims is explained by Yousef Awad (2018), who points out in “Fiction in Contest with History? Faith, Resilience and the War on Terror in Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies” that The Kindness of Enemies presents “the dilemma of Muslims in a world that labels them as terrorists who are intent on destroying Western civilization” (Awad 76). Awad also sheds light on the consequences of the west’s hatred and hostility towards Muslims as he maintains that Aboulela’s novel “captures the sense of alienation that has resulted from prejudice against Muslims under the pretext of fighting terrorism” (Awad 76). In other words, Muslims are considered inferior to the west and are fought for being stereotypically considered terrorists. Additionally, in “Islamophobia, Othering and the Sense of Loss: Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies,” Khaled Abkar Alkodimi (2021) stresses that Leila Aboulela’s fiction “functions history to tackle specific issues like Muslim identity and religious faith, bringing a new perspective about Muslims and Islam stereotyping in western societies” (Alkodimi 147). According to Alkodimi, Aboulela makes use of history in this novel to draw on the issue of Islamic identity; by reflecting the experiences of Muslims in the West, she helps give a voice to the muted part of the story, the Muslim one.

In “Political Islam/ophobia in The Kindness of Enemies,” Mustafa Buyukgebiz (2021) defines islamophobia as “hatred against the religion of Islam” and explains that the term targets Muslim individuals rather than the religion of Islam. Buyukgebiz argues that this hatred “results from an effort to categorize.” And although it is not a new term, it has come to the fore since the beginning of the 21^st century due to the negative attitudes towards Islam and Muslims as a result of the orientalist perspective and the emergence of colonialism in the East. Furthermore, Buyukgebiz points out that this hatred towards Islam is a serious problem for Muslim immigrants “who try to adapt to the local society and culture with their Muslim identity” (Buyukgebiz 227). According to Buyukgebiz, many Muslim immigrants in the West suffer from the politicization of the religion of Islam because Islamophobia harms the members of religion more than it harms religion itself, and as a result, these individuals end up seeing Islam “as the biggest obstacle in front of them” (Buyukgebiz 227). They also become more suspicious of religion and end up having negative attitudes towards the whole politicized religion as a reaction (Buyukgebiz 229). Relating this to The Kindness of Enemies, Buyukgebiz argues that Aboulela represents this discontent several times in the novel by demonstrating how Islamophobia affects Muslim immigrants and how these immigrants are included in Islamophobia (Buyukgebiz 229).

In this novel, Natasha, like Sammar, remains ignorant of the significance of weather conditions to the formation of her Islamic identity at the beginning of the novel. She pays Oz a visit and gets to meet his mother, Malak, and to see Imam Shamil’s sword at their place. As she plans to leave their house, she gets stuck in the snow. Yet, she remains unmindful of how significant these weather conditions are and of how relevant they are to her Islamic identity formation. She narrates, “their drive was thick with snow and I was unable to get my car to the main road” (Aboulela 10). In that sense, her stay at their house is the result of adverse weather conditions. She would stay until the snow would start to melt because “melting snow meant clearer roads” (Aboulela 69). What Natasha does not know is that her stay with Oz and his mother turns out to be a catalyst for unveiling layers of her identity of which she was unaware, including her Muslim identity.

This goes in parallel with Natasha’s desire to know more and more about Imam Shamil. Her meeting with Malak and Oz proves to be a turning point in her life as they are the ones to reveal things to her about Shamil as well as about herself; their entrance into her life results in a lot of chaos and leads to her identity conflict. This can be deciphered from the way Natasha depicts her own house after she comes back from the university following Oz’s arrest and enters her flat to find out that somebody has been there and has turned it upside down. She assumes that it was a robbery, but she gets to know later that it was the police. On this, she narrates: “I reached my landing at the very top floor and froze. It was as if my door was not my door. It was half-open and inside was chaos. A hole in the roof so that I was staring straight up into the dark attic” (Aboulela 101). This signifies the chaos both Oz and his mother make in Natasha’s life.

According to Faten Ahmed Ramadan (2019), the role which Malak and Oz play in Natasha’s life is of great importance as she points out that “the story of Natasha’s interest in Shamil is deepened by Natasha’s encounter with her student, Oz, and his mother, the actress, Malak” (Ramadan 37). Ramadan maintains that “Oz’s nickname is Osama, by connotation the leader of Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden” (Ramadan 37–38). For this reason, Oz considers his surname unfortunate, and later on in the novel, he is thought to be a “descendent of Shamil” (Ramadan 38). According to Ramadan:

During Natasha’s visit to Oz’s mother, she is forced to spend the night with them due to the heavy blizzard. This incident is a well-written anecdote. To Natasha’s astonishment, in the morning of her stay, Oz is arrested by the anti-terrorist police and is charged of radicalization. Natasha’s career is threatened as she is suspected of collaborating with Oz (Ramadan 38)

As Ramadan puts it, the blizzard is a very important incident in the novel. What makes it so is its significance and how it can be related to Natasha’s identity issue. Surprisingly enough, Oz himself makes a connection between the blizzard and Natasha’s identity when he asks her: “If, just to say, the snow lasted for days and days. If you couldn’t leave, would you come closer to faith, just by being with the two of us?” (Aboulela 42). Yet, Natasha remains deaf at this point to the sound of nature. Her career becomes in danger. On the personal level, having been stuck by the blizzard, the chaos reaches Natasha’s inside as well; the more intimate her relationship with Malak becomes and the more she knows about Imam Shamil from her and her son, the more acquainted she becomes with his Jihadist personality, and the more confused she becomes on the issue of her origin and belongingness to her Islamic roots. Natasha expresses her conflict of origin as she refers to her two halves by saying:

The two sides of me that were slammed together against their will, that refused to mix. I was a failed hybrid, made up of unalloyed selves. My Russian mother who regretted marrying my Sudanese father. My African father who came to hate his white wife. My atheist mother who blotted out my Muslim heritage (Aboulela 40)

Apparently, it is a conflict in her religious identity. Simply put, Natasha finds herself forced to choose between her two halves which have “refused to mix” (Aboulela 40). As a result, she chooses to hide her real family name, which is Hussein, and to replace it with Wilson. Nevertheless, she is fully aware that it will not be possible for her to keep hiding it forever as she states: “Natasha Hussein would always be with me. I could glimpse her in the black-white contrast of a winter branch that was covered on one side of the snow” (Aboulela 40). The snow, thus, proposes that Natasha’s Muslim identity, which she has intendedly hidden, will come to the surface one day; although it has been covered with snow, it is still there and is considered part of her own being. Curiously enough, by tracing Shamil’s story, Natasha has been looking forward to knowing more about herself and to learning about her other half which she has chosen to conceal. In other words, the knowledge which Natasha ends up gaining about Shamil has its echo on the construction of her own Islamic identity.

Natasha’s Islamic identity reaches its fulfillment. Yet, this happens as a result of two main factors: her return to her homeland and her relationship with Malak. In relation to the first factor, despite all her attempts to deny her Islamic half, Natasha’s return to Sudan seems to awaken the part of her which she has forced to sleep. Taking into account that Natasha’s father was a Muslim from Sudan and that her mother was a non-Muslim from Georgia, what Natasha seeks to find is a home and a sense of belongingness, for she does not find herself belonging neither to the Scottish society nor to the Sudanese one. Like Sammar in The Translator, Natasha goes on a journey to Sudan following the news she receives from Tony, her stepfather, regarding the bad health condition of her father. In Sudan, “after the bitterest Scottish winter, the heat and the light felt defiantly foreign, excessive” (Aboulela 248) to her; in a way, this tells how Natasha’s identity is torn between the two different cultures represented by the two excessive weather conditions, the cold and hot weather. She confesses later to Malak that her trip to Sudan has changed her a lot (Aboulela 314). Although her homesickness is not fully cured, her trip, obviously, has taken her “in the right direction” (Aboulela 314); having become “confident that there was a home, there, ahead of [her] (Aboulela 314), it might be argued that Natasha’s visit to Sudan plays a role in her acceptance of her other Arab and Muslim half which she has always concealed within herself. Relevant to this, Nagendra Bahadur Bhandari (2021) discusses the issue of diaspora’s cultural identity by explaining that immigrants go through “processes of negotiation of the cultural practices of their home and host land” (Bhandari 107). Despite such negotiations, these immigrants prove to be controlled by their origins as Bhandari argues that they “are not free from their cultural origin from where they along with their ancestors have come” (Bhandari 107). That is to say that one’s bond with his or her homeland and culture, including language, religion, manners, dress, values, and others, cannot be simply cut or ignored; it remains there despite all attempts to weaken it.

Interestingly enough, the bond which Natasha keeps with her culture is also emphasized in a recent study titled “Reclaiming Identity through Communal Voice: Narrating Self-Recognition in Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies,” in which Amjad and Farahani (2022) consider Aboulela’s novel to be a call for embracing roots as they suggest that through the character of Natasha, Aboulela “makes it clear that for Muslims to find themselves a stance in Western societies, there is no way but going back to their roots” (Amjad and Farahani 25). Yet, in the case of Natasha, the authors emphasize that it is the power of Islam that helps Natasha forge her individual identity in the end by “finally choosing religion as her defining identity” (Amjad and Farahani 26). They conclude by illustrating that what Natasha does in this novel comes as a result of Aboulela’s awareness of “the limits of much advocated hybridity” (Amjad and Farahani 26) and that the theorized return to Islamic roots which is suggested by Aboulela while living in the host culture functions “as an alternative for assimilation” (Amjad and Farahani 26).

As for the second factor, which is Natasha’s relationship with Malak, the relationship between Malak and Natasha is very integral as Malak is the one who gives Natasha “a sense of communion with Shamil” (Aboulela 311) and helps her become more knowledgeable about Shamil. In the same study by Amjad and Farahani (2022), the authors highlight the bond which Natasha has with Malak by commenting on the way Natasha refers to herself with Malak and her son. Amjad and Farahani illustrate that “the only group Natasha manifests a genuine sense of belonging to, from the outset till the end of the narrative, and uses ‘we’ pronoun to refer to it is Malak and her family” (Amjad and Farahani 24). This exemplifies that Natasha considers herself to be one of them and that she has something in common with them. Both of them represent the Islamic group which she associates herself with and chooses to define herself by towards the end of the novel. When Malak invites Natasha to practice zikr on the beach with her, Natasha finds out that it was time to acknowledge that what she was after is “spiritual” (Aboulela 314). In that sense, it could be argued that it is Malak’s influence on Natasha that makes her accept her Muslim half and reveal her Muslim identity.

The relationship between Natasha and Malak can also be read in reference to weather. When Malak calls Natasha and suggests meeting her at Dunnottar Castle, Natasha accepts Malak’s invitation and comments: “And I was driving again, this time with a few drops of rain on my front window. Clouds that started to clear as I neared my destination” (Aboulela 311). As the quotation suggests, Natasha becomes able to identify with the weather. The drops of rain indicate that Natasha is about to complete the construction of her Islamic self, her “destination.” Hence, being close enough to Malak and her son, Oz, and going back to Sudan after twenty years of being away have equipped Natasha with the knowledge she needs, and this is the reason the clouds have started to clear. By the end of the novel, Natasha, who previously considered herself to be a failed hybrid, ends up reconciling with her Muslim half. Although when she listens to Malak reciting the Qur’an, nothing sounds comprehensible to her, she follows Malak’s steps and becomes her student, “acting the part of the teacher” (Aboulela 314). As for the story of Imam Shamil, it ends with Shamil demanding not only the exchange of Anna with his son but also the payment of a huge amount of money to his country for the aim of repairing the damage in it upon Anna’s return. Yet, the war between the Caucasus and Russia does not come to an end. The Russians demand years later that Imam Shamil should surrender to save his people, and so he does, and the novel ends with this extraordinary figure’s death.

4. Conclusion

The study has, thus, exemplified how Leila Aboulela employs weather conditions to narrate the stories of her characters’ Islamic identity formation. It has traced weather conditions in the two novels and has argued that they are relevant in different ways to the construction of the Islamic identity of the characters in the selected works. In The Translator, the weather proves to be a marker of difference in the relationship between Sammar and Rae, which is based on their different religious views, and the instability of their relationship is reflected in the instability of weather conditions. Besides, the change in Sammar’s identity is reflected in her transformation from someone who is unable to read weather conditions as signs to someone who is able to do so. In The Kindness of Enemies, Natasha proves to be ignorant of the relation of weather conditions to her Islamic identity in the beginning. Yet, she becomes aware of their significance as she ends up accepting her Islamic half and identifying with weather conditions towards the end of her spiritual journey. In that sense, the study maintains that if readers pay close attention to weather conditions in the two selected works by Leila Aboulela, they can draw a character sketch in relation to the Islamic identity formation of the characters of Sammar and Natasha in the two works.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amal Al-Khayyat

Amal Al-Khayyat: She is an instructor at the Language Center – The University of Jordan. She has published a number of articles on the works of Arab writers in diaspora.

Yousef Abu Amrieh

Yousef Abu Amrieh: He is the author of a number of articles on the works of Arab writers in diaspora with specific interest in adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare by Arab writers in diaspora.