Minaret, Week 3: The Ablution Stool and the Bus Seat

Week 3: The Ablution Stool and the Bus Seat

Read this week: Chapters 9–13.

Once she is inside the house, the book widens outward, and that widening is this step. Follow the labour first. The woman who employs her was herself freed by a maid, so one woman's London life rests on another woman's wages; a maid is loved cheaply, since her passport and her future lie somewhere else, and a household can pass its standing down a ladder of nations. Then follow her out of doors, to the mosque, where the room her parents once occupied is rebuilt out of strangers, and where a row of ablution stools holds a whole history of fathers and states and the futures nobody planned for the daughters. Watch what steadies her there: not argument, but the shared work of making the same sounds together. Then watch what waits outside — a bus, a thrown bottle, eyes that slide away, a prayer repeated because nothing else stands between her and the street. Then follow her back among people who came from where she came from, and see how thoroughly a person can be taught to look down on her own places. The step asks a hard question. When the state and the street and the neighbours have all settled what her body means, what is left that is hers? Answer with the stools, the bus seat, and the words she says in company.

Questions for the week

• Does the novel critique the class hierarchy that places an Ethiopian maid below Najwa, or does it reproduce that hierarchy through Najwa's own voice? Analyses show a ladder of nations, love bought cheaply from an Ethiopian maid, and an Ethiopian refugee's affection turned into a pet story. They do not settle whether the novel's irony exposes or shares in the ranking.
• Does the mosque function as a genuine transnational community or as a temporary shelter that leaves social rank untouched? Analyses describe prayer assembling strangers into one body, shared hunger disciplining equality only for the duration of prayer, and the mosque as the parents' room. They do not agree on whether it changes life outside its walls.

Passages quoted from Leila Aboulela, Minaret (Grove Press, 2005), for criticism and commentary.