Analysis
American Dervish was Ayad Akhtar’s first novel and was published in 2012, the same year that his first play, Disgraced, was staged. The two works examine similar themes, most of which revolve around the central idea of Islam in America. The characters react to this idea in a variety of ways. Hayat’s father, Naveed, the product of a family where religion was used as a pretext for abuse, has all but abandoned the Islamic faith. He drinks alcohol, commits adultery, and avoids his more religious neighbors. His wife, Muneer, combines a vague spiritual attachment to Islam with an exaggerated admiration for anything Jewish. The two of them have raised Hayat in a secular fashion, and he knows very little of Islam when, at the age of ten, he first encounters Mina.
Mina is a devout Muslim and introduces Hayat to the faith, telling him stories of the Prophet Muhammad and giving him a Quran for his eleventh birthday. Given that Mina is a beautiful, intelligent woman with great charisma, and that she sympathizes with Hayat and understands him better than his parents, it is not surprising that he falls in love with her, with all the desperate intensity of first love. Even for his age, Hayat is unusually innocent and has no idea what sex entails. His first ejaculations are a mystery to him, the cause of shame and embarrassment. It is therefore equally unsurprising that he confuses his feelings about the Islamic faith with his personal attraction to Mina. When he first starts to read the Quran, he sees God everywhere, and his experience of life becomes ecstatic and filled with awe. It is clear to the reader, though not to Hayat himself, that his rapture is at least as much romantic as it is religious.
When Hayat sees Mina naked, the ensuing rift between them creates a trauma that Hayat’s mother, who has studied psychology and is fond of quoting Freud, would easily recognize if her son ever talked to her about such matters. Hayat has mixed up sexual attraction, romantic love, and religious devotion in his mind. This is far from uncommon in a Bildungsroman and might not have done any great harm to Hayat’s psyche. However, this sudden separation from Mina leads Hayat to reject physical love completely. His aversion to nakedness becomes so strong that he will not even look at his own naked body. His strategy for winning Mina back rests entirely on religion, on his piety, and on his ability to memorize the Quran. Mina’s own version of Islam is in the liberal Sufi tradition, but she is no longer teaching him. Studying on his own, he takes the text he is reading more literally, becoming harsh, intolerant, and narrow-minded, straying further from the faith that she has taught him even as his outward observance of this faith brings them closer together.
Hayat’s understanding of Islam is simplistic and might be called childish were it not for the fact that several of the adults in American Dervish approach their faith in much the same way. Sunil beats Mina out of frustration at his own inadequacy, but his cousin, Galeb Chatha, appears to beat his wife out of a sense of duty, because he thinks this is how a good Muslim keeps his wife in check. It is also from Chatha and from the local imam that Hayat learns his hatred of Jews, a fault of which both his parents are quite innocent, despite their other flaws. Here again, his personal feelings, this time of jealousy against Nathan, find validation in scripture. Hayat...
(This entire section contains 1003 words.)
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can scarcely be blamed for the bigotry he has been taught by adults in positions of authority. While he acquires his knowledge of Islam piecemeal in an undirected, haphazard manner, his secular upbringing has left him ignorant of matters that any Muslim child would know as a matter of course: not only the contents of the Quran, but the importance of studying it in Arabic.
There are scenes, such as the debate in Galeb Chatha’s house in chapter 7, when American Dervish is in danger of becoming more like an exposition of contemporary attitudes to Islam than a novel. The book is saved from being overly didactic by the complexity of its character studies, particularly of Hayat, Mina, and Naveed. Hayat is presented as a child who has never quite been allowed a childhood. He often refers to the children’s television he watches in the family room, but this is generally a refuge from the continual conflict between his parents. Both Naveed and Muneer confide in their son as though he were an adult, apparently wanting his reassurance and sympathy. Even Mina makes few allowances for his age. Muneer seems periodically aware that she has not been doing much to raise Hayat, merely hectoring him occasionally about the type of man she wants him to be, which is the opposite of his father. The result is an all too believable mixture of precocity, anxiety, and ignorance.
At the same time, Hayat’s reliability as a narrator is sometimes called into question by the way in which a third-person omniscient perspective is intercut with his first-person narration. This is particularly noticeable at the nikah in chapter 16, where Hayat is not present and does not explain how he knows what was happening. Sometimes the reader has the sense that the adult Hayat is filling in detail that he now knows, and sometimes that he is guessing. Both these narrative techniques are at odds with the complete ignorance about sex that he professes. Ayad Akhtar has stated in an interview (included along with the reading group guide in the Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2012 edition of the novel) that it is no accident that Hayat’s name is similar to his, though the events described did not happen to him. Nonetheless, it is often difficult to disentangle the author from the narrator in the depiction of a child’s spiritual and emotional development.
