Minaret, Week 7: Shared Hunger and the Minaret in the Window

Week 7: Shared Hunger and the Minaret in the Window

Read this week: Chapters 24–26, 28.

This step goes back into the mosque, but now it is not only shelter; it is a place where something is built. An older woman's Ramadan talk lands on Najwa like sudden light, and around her women sweat and fast and stand shoulder to shoulder, equal for the length of a prayer and ranked again the moment they step out. Ritual time hands her something memory cannot: a repeating appointment instead of a hoarded childhood. In the same weeks a young man of the house withdraws for the last ten days and comes back with a gaze that looks through surfaces, which his family reads as strangeness, because a household that measures people by usefulness has no scale for what he has been doing. A prison visit is the other side of the step: a state's arithmetic of guilt, and a sister's love hardening into punishment, since love and violence can share a grammar. Notice that the novel says two things at once — shared practice can make strangers into kin, and it can also shut a door on the sister left outside it. The step ends with a tower visible over a foreign street and a friend who listens as though there is time. That is what we carry forward: a person who has lost a country can still be held in place by somewhere to kneel and someone to wait.

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