American Dervish Themes
The main themes in American Dervish are the true Islam, sacred and profane love, and Muslims and Jews.
- The true Islam: The contradictory interpretations of the Quran that Hayat encounters emphasize the individual nature of faith and call into question the idea of a single true Islam.
- Sacred and profane love: Hayat’s dedication to Islam is inspired by and entangled with his romantic feelings for Mina, but without her guidance, Hayat strays into religious bigotry.
- Muslims and Jews: As a boy, Hayat absorbs anti-Semitic beliefs from various members of the Muslim community, while Nathan considers converting to Islam from Judaism.
The True Islam
When she learns that Hayat has told Imran that “the Jews will be the first to go into the fire” of hell, since Allah hates them more than pigs, Mina, who taught him most of what he knows about Islam, flies at him in a rage, breaking his arm. Her fury comes from what she sees as the perversion of a beautiful, profound faith into a message of hate. Later, Hayat shows her the verses on which his denunciation of the Jews was based, but Mina says that he has misunderstood. Sonny Buledi gives a similar response to Ghaleb Chatha on the same point, adding that the next passage contradicts the one on which Chatha relies.
Sonny Buledi is an atheist. His response to the point that there are contradictory passages within the Quran is simply to say that this means one cannot rely on the Quran, which is man-made and fallible. Mina, however, is just as convinced as Chatha and Imam Souhef that her version of Islam is true and others are false. The imam is a religious leader, but his authority is not definitive. Muslims are supposed to interpret the Quran themselves, guided by conscience.
Eventually, Hayat finds even Mina’s interpretation unappealing, since the idea of being ground into dust by the will of God seems masochistic to him. The interpretation of Islam that allows Sunil to beat Mina may be barbaric, but so is the interpretation that leads Mina to bear these beatings patiently. No one can claim to have discovered the one true faith of Islam, and for a long time, Hayat agrees with his father that the true Islam is not worth pursuing. It is only at the very end of the book, in the epilogue, when he recalls some lines from the Quran, that there is an indication that Hayat may derive wisdom from the holy text without following it dogmatically or accepting it as the only source of enlightenment.
Sacred and Profane Love
As soon as he sees Mina, Hayat is struck by her beauty and charisma. When she shows sympathy for him and changes the way he feels about being excluded from the ice cream social, he falls in love with her. Immediately after this, Mina introduces him to Islam, which is quite new to him, despite his family background. It is hardly surprising that a young boy whose first teacher is a beautiful and sympathetic woman should confuse his feelings for her with his love of the subject. It is even less surprising when the subject in question is one in which love, spirituality, transcendence, beauty, and ecstasy continually arise in the course of instruction.
When Hayat accuses Nathan of hypocrisy, he is oblivious to his own. He sees clearly that Nathan’s desire to convert to Islam is the result of his romantic feelings for Mina. He cannot see that his own religious ecstasies have the same source. When he sees Mina naked, he is struck by her beauty but has no time to appreciate this beauty, because she sees him looking at her and is angry. Ironically, the religion on which he relies to win Mina back becomes warped without her influence. His determination to study the Quran has a romantic purpose, but because he is deprived of Mina’s love and guidance, his interpretation of the holy book becomes harsh and intolerant, setting him on a course toward the bigotry that causes another rift with Mina, when she attacks him for poisoning Imran’s mind against the Jews. While Mina may not always be able to explain or textually justify her interpretation of Islam,...
(This entire section contains 307 words.)
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her Sufi approach is as attractive to the reader as it is to Hayat, at least initially, because the warmth of her personality infuses it with the passion of romantic love.
Muslims and Jews
Hayat is unusual and fortunate in the Pakistani community in that his secular parents are entirely free from bigotry against Jews. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true: his father’s best friend is a Jew, and his mother has a peculiar affinity for anything Jewish. She tells him that Jewish men, unlike Muslim men, respect women and says, “I’m bringing you up like a little Jew.” Hayat himself becomes friends with a Jewish boy called Jason Blum and learns about the Holocaust from him. Hayat’s initial instincts are shown to be sound. He helps Jason when the other children are bullying him and is horrified by the idea of his friend burning in hell, as Galeb Chatha says he will.
However, when he is eleven years old, Hayat himself is confidently preaching hatred of the Jews. It is true that he is motivated by his jealousy of Nathan, but he would not have thought of singling out Judaism as his line of attack if the raw material in the Quran and the furiously bigoted khutbah of Imam Souhef had not enabled him to do so. Later, it becomes clear that the mention of “an unbeliever” in the telegram will galvanize Mina’s parents. Hayat even avoids writing “Jew” because he now thinks that this word will suggest that the telegram came from him.
Set against this hatred is Nathan’s view of the solidarity between Jews and Muslims as descendants of Abraham/Ibrahim and “people of the book.” It is this idea that leads Nathan to accept a warm reception at the mosque and leaves him quite unprepared for “the more pervasive, darker strain of Muslim anti-Semitism” to which Hayat says he was exposed many times during his childhood. If Hayat saw frequent bigotry against Jews from the viewpoint of his liberal family, the reader can only imagine what children from less enlightened backgrounds saw.
