under the full and crescent moon
I'm back again with another review copy from NetGalley and another from Dundurn Press, a lovely Canadian publisher I discovered when I requested the review copy of Jinwoo Park's Oxford Soju Club a few months ago. It was also then that I was introduced to Caitlin Galway's A Song for Wildcats. This time though, I read something a little bit different from them again, with a novel about shifting times for Islam.
The story follows Khadija, the daughter of a jurist of Sharia law in the fictional city that she lives in. Having only been with her father from a very young age, she's uneducated in the ways that women are expected to behave, but has an extensive knowledge of Sharia law that she's gained from her father while growing up. Though he was merely trying to protect her from home, she ends up isolated as a result, and a friend of her father hatches a plan for her to become a scribe for her father to get her out of the house and join society. This is effective, but just as she's adjusting to her new, social life with friends her own age, tragedy strikes and the matriarchal system under which the city runs, is threatened by outside forces.
Honestly, I found the concepts and the time period explored in this novel to be incredibly interesting. I think in the Anglosphere we're subjected to a lot of propaganda when it comes to Muslim life and Islam, so it was really interesting to see a historical fiction perspective that can put aside the many things that end up being weaponized today. I often worry about people who are only exposed to the nastiness shown in war video games and on the news and how it colours their worldview and makes them hateful, so it's always lovely to pick up a book that wants to show something else.
Exploring the possibility of a matriarchal society in Islam and the gradual increase in popularity of the hijab was also really interesting. The author notes this in his afterward, but there are actually societies today that are both Muslim and matriarchal, something the author also admits he didn't really know about before. I was actually compelled to request this review copy because I had just finished reading The Bird King, which takes place in a kind of magical space that starts in a Muslim kingdom that is now modern-day Spain. That novel also has a young woman protagonist who is given the space to speak and think for herself, as well as a stronger matriarchal figure. And I just love that women like these are given a space to have a voice because even people with the best of intentions often shut out the voices of the people who they're trying to protect.
That being said, while I really enjoyed the story of this novel, I found the prose to be a little lacking for me. There are perspective shifts within chapters, which is something that I typically really enjoy, but I had a hard time being really sucked in to the narrative in this case. The reading experience felt almost clinical somehow and I didn't really find myself feeling even that interested in what was going on until after I was already halfway done, which isn't ideal for me, even if the book is shorter like this one is. I just couldn't feel the emotion in the prose.
Nonetheless, I think that the author did doing really interesting things with this novel and I would really like to see more work from Aamir Hussain. Styles of prose are ultimately down to taste and I know there are a lot of people who will love this book--even I have a lot of respect and hold a lot of joy for the story despite my reservations about the prose itself. After all, this book offered an example of exactly the type of society I would love to live in where people care about their neighbors regardless of if they're different or not and fight for what they believe in.
Updated 4Â months, 3Â weeks ago