Review: The Road from Damascus: Robin Yassin-Kassab
Reading provides us with insights into mind-sets and communities to which we would not otherwise have had access. Without books, we base our opinions on media reports, popular prejudices recounted by acquaintances and colleagues, and (we must admit), our own pre-conceived ideas dervied from our own cultures and background. Then a book like Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus, comes along and suddenly we have our eyes opened, and we realise that not only do we now know more about other cultures, but we understand them. I felt the same on reading Monica Ali's Brick Lane - how could one possible get inside the head of a Bangladeshi immigrant other than by reading a book like that? OK, so its fiction, but it seems to breathe out from the communities most of us only drive through on the way to somewhere else.
The Road to Damascus is first of all, a very well-written novel. The style is accessible but also challenging, the use of language superb, occasionally stopping you in your tracks to take in the use of words and phrases from the best of traditional English through to the street language of various London cultures. Yassin-Kassab blends styles together in a way which mirrors the language of contemporary London in all its colour and vibrancy.
Essentially it is about a the summer of 2001 in the life of British-born (of Syrian parents), Sami Traifi, a struggling academic, who since graduating has been trying to write is doctoral thesis. He has just returned from Syria where he has been discovering his roots. Flash-back chapters trace his history, including his relationship with his beautiful and gracious wife Muntaha.
On returning from his year in Damascus, where discovering his family roots has not been as helpful as he had hoped, he finds his wife has taken to wearing a head-scarf as an expression of a renewed faith. Sami, an avowed secularlist, finds this deeply distressing, the more so as he himself is on a course of self-destruction, using drugs and drink to veil his own sense of failure and frustration. He fails to realise that Muntaha's hijab is not an expression of a new fundamentalism so much as a symbol of a quiet spiritual renewal and rediscovery of prayer. Muntaha's brother on the other hand, previously only committed to hip-hop music and drugs, has adopted an unthinking and ignorant fundamentalism, leading to some insightful exchanges between brother and sister on the meaning of Islam.
One of the most interesting features of the novel to me, is the use of characters from a variety of strands of contemporary Islam. Muntaha retains her liberal world-view while finding peace in the Koran, while her brother only finds provocation to violence and retribution. The Christian world is very like this, where what to most is a religion of peace and reconciliation, to its fundamentlist wing is religion of judgement and wrath. The powerful apocalyptic strand in the conversations of some characters in the book, echoes the September 11th events at the World Trade Centre, which several of Robin Yassin-Kassab's characters see as pivotal and prophetic. There are so many themes in the book, it would be difficult to mention them all, but I was particularly interested in the debates on the unifying effect of Islam - as opposed to an earlier unsatisfactory Arabism which has failed in various ways.
The book is not just about contemporary Islam and its struggle to come to terms with (or oppose) Western values, but is also full of the day to day struggles of humanity when faced with family break-up, the loss of community cohesion and the dramas of unemployment, ill-health, povery and bereavement. The book is dramatic and from time to time humerous, and is in all senses, a "good read" which I found hard to put down. It is moving in many ways, and presents a cast of characters who are quite believable and as with all good books, when you turn the last page you know you are going to miss them and wonder what happened next. Highly recommended and should make a splash when it eventually comes out in paperback.
