My brief visit to London over the past weekend was a memorable one. Besides attending the award ceremony where my friend Dahr Jamail received the Martha Gellhorn Prize, dinner with John Pilger, meeting M. Shahid Alam, befriending Ghada Karmi, spending time with my friend and ever-generous host Paul de Rooij, I also had the pleasure of meeting Fanonite editor Robn Yassin-Kassab in person for the first time. Robin’s debut novel has just been published by Penguin, and has been garnering rave reviews. Here are a select few:

The Road From Damascus
by Robin Yassin-Kassab
350pp, Hamish Hamilton, £16.99

Beyond Belief

Robin Yassin-Kassab’s ambitious debut of faith and faithlessness, The Road From Damascus, impresses Maya Jaggi.

The Guardian

“Unbelief itself is a religion”, says an epigraph to this ambitious and topical debut novel. The words of the 12th-century Sufi sage Ahmad Yasavi, coupled with a Pascal pensée on the limitations of atheism, open a book that satirises a kind of secular fundamentalism that can, it suggests, be as blinding as dogma.

In early 21st-century Damascus, Sami Traifi, a 31-year-old “failed academic and international layabout” born in Britain to Syrian parents, truffles among ancestral roots for a credible thesis for his stalled doctorate. Instead he stumbles on a family secret, an uncle broken by 22 years in a Syrian torture jail. Back in London, Sami’s marriage to a teacher, Muntaha, crumbles as the astute, educated daughter of a refugee from Saddam’s Iraq resolves to wear a hijab.

Trained to despise religion by his late father Mustafa, an Arab nationalist supporter of the crackdown on Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s, Sami is already estranged from his mother Nur, whose earlier decision to cover her hair he sees as a betrayal of his dying father’s beliefs. Secular humanism, he fears, was an antiquated daydream shared by many modernising Arabs. “The fort had already fallen. In its rubble a marketplace of religion had set up.” Yet for all his quoting of great poets, the simplistic nature of Sami’s understanding is signalled from the outset. Always, for him, “issues returned to hijabs and beards”.In a crisis of confusion and self-loathing, Sami disappears on a bender, missing his father-in-law’s funeral, before a spell in the cells for possessing a spliff prompts a bout of self-cleansing and a “trembling, contingent faith”. But his own Damascene conversion in 2001 coincides with September 11 – as we know, with heavy dramatic irony, that it will. Once apprehended for having a rolled-up fiver in his nose, Sami is now caught emerging from a Brick Lane mosque in a beard. With absurd comic logic, the police conclude he has a false identity, since the pious beardie and the coked-up dissolute cannot be one and the same. The agents of the free world are as unable to distinguish between “Wahhabi nihilists” and the harmlessly spiritual as between diverse forms of political Islam.

At the novel’s heart are a devastating act of betrayal in the name of secularist progress, and the family reconciliation that comes with Sami’s dawning realisation that faith is not synonymous with backwardness, nor secularism with humanism. Muntaha, with her hijab and prayers, proves more humane, not least in her treatment of Sami’s bereft mother – and is by far the most compelling character. Her loving correction of her Islamist kid brother’s know-nothing political posturing is among the most touching scenes.

Yet the attempt to portray a sprawling multicultural London in the vein of White Teeth, from Nur’s halal butcher on the Harrow Road to Edgware Road’s Arab cafes, is less successful. The first-novel impulse to chuck everything in threatens to swamp the plot. While hip-hop Islamism and a university riot over a subcontinental anti-religious provocateur are richly germane, excursions into “reclaim the streets” anti-globalisation demonstrations or pyramid schemes are less so. The British-Hungarian artist Gabor Vronk, a would-be Vronsky romancing Sami’s wife, is a straw man set up to embody a predatory orientalism (“Arabs are either sensuous or violent, or both”). The novel is most alive in its more intimate exchanges, and in glimmers of a gentle and vital wisdom that outshines the satirical fireworks.

Sects and the city

Reviewed by Aamer Hussein, The Independent

Sami Traifi is an Arab in London – a Syrian, to be exact – and a Muslim. But he isn’t, at least to begin with, too enamoured of his Muslim background. In his ideological leanings he follows his father, a secular and intellectual pan-Arabist, whose ideals have been shredded by political persecution and exile. His mother, on the contrary, is a conservative, religious woman in a headscarf.

Sami becomes an expert in Arab literature. But his mind is weighed down by doubts, questions and a near-obsession with varieties of belief. His sophisticated Iraqi wife, Muntaha, drifts towards the religion of her birth, though hers is the kind of faith that doesn’t depend on outward signs. She, too, chooses to wear the headscarf, much to her husband’s chagrin. His brother, on the other hand, has a hybrid faith: he uses the rhetoric of hip-hop and race politics to express his Islam. Sami’s family is skilfully contrasted to Muntaha’s, whose father, from a very similar political background, turns in exile to a vague, tentative accommodation with Islam.

In a novel so packed with ideas that it threatens, at times, to explode, Robin Yassin-Kassab uses Sami’s interaction with his relatives to voice debates on national and religious identity, on the domination of the Arab-Islamic world by the West, and on the existential choices migrants and exiles make. But his characters are rarely mere mouthpieces for their ideological positions. One of the author’s gifts – and he has many – is to give us characters who, even at their most wilfully one-dimensional, are believable and at times funny.

Ammar, Muntaha’s brother, is a wonderful portrait of a would-be radical. Muntaha’s Eastern European admirer flirts with Islamic terminology in order to draw closer to her. In a witty set piece, a post-Islamic intellectual delivers an insider’s rant against his own cradle Islam so accurate that it seems transcribed from life.

These portraits also link us to the polyglot London that is the vividly depicted backdrop. Though we have seen Arab London before – notably in Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Only in London – this is mostly through the eyes of expats and outsiders.

The Road to Damascus is the first novel that takes us into the British-Arab community and the anxieties and aspirations of its second generation. It will inevitably be compared to White Teeth and Brick Lane; at times, Sami resembles a Kureishi hero in his search for hedonistic escapes in the city.

In spite of its passing resemblances to other novels, this is a very original book that deconstructs, rather than celebrates, multi-culturalism and assimilation. Written with an insider’s anger and pain, it’s also a double-edged narrative that sails with bold energy between its Arab, Islamic and British references, navigating Qur’anic discourse, the exhausted rhetoric of Arab nationalism, the pseudo-academic jargon of the diasporic intelllectual.

At the heart of the novel is the love story of Sami and his wife, or more exactly the story of the fraying of their love. Muntaha is, though not idealised, a positive character, secure in her religious and existential choices. Sami’s own choices are not, however, always consistent. What makes him abandon his studies and marriage: exile or displacement? His burden of identity? His wife’s religious beliefs? His tormented family history? All these don’t quite add up to a reason for his almost pathological disenchantment. What they do give is a hook on which to suspend Sami’s self-tormenting and at times scatological ruminations, often in a dense prose that causes us to endure our hero’s claustrophobic existence from inside his head.

As the title suggests, a journey of self-exploration has its goal. Like the women in his life – his mother, whose name means light, and his wife, whose name implies the infinite space beyond limits – Sami, too, must come to fragile terms with his limits and see, beyond them, the limitless possibilities that faith promises and life fulfils.

Aamer Hussein’s ‘Insomnia’ is published by Telegram

Robin Yassin-Kassab goes beyond the veil

Tin Jackson, The Metro

Early in his debut novel, The Road From Damascus, Robin Yassin-Kassab lightly mocks his central character, Sami Traifi, for romanticising his Arab heritage. He describes Sami swanning around in a black and white checked keffiyeh of the kind worn by the dead PLO leader Yasser Arafat and fashionable with those wishing to be identified with a certain kind of radicalism.

The book’s author photo, however, shows 38-year-old Yassin-Kassab with his head swathed in a similar keffiyeh. ‘Yeah,’ he laughs. ‘It was out of my hands that I was portrayed that way. I’ve only got about six pictures of me and the ones I sent my publishers included a perfectly sensible picture. That one was taken by my five-year-old daughter. I do wear a keffiyeh sometimes, and I like wearing them, but you can’t really see the Scottish mountain in the background, or my rain cape.’

It might seem a big deal to make out of a bit of cloth in a photograph but one of The Road From Damascus’s big subjects is the politics of identity. Sami is a young, highly intelligent but directionless young Syrian trying to make sense not just of his academic life and his marriage but of recent, strife-ridden Arab history and the tensions between different kinds of faith and belief, both religious and secular. It’s a serious, weighty and sometimes blackly comic novel that takes in hip hop Islam, the build-up to 9/11, the politics of the hijab and the pre-millennium London party scene. It’s certainly more complex and worthwhile than might be suggested by its cover, with its cartoony design of London’s Harrow Road and its many different ethnic eateries. ‘I think they were going for the Brick Lane idea,’ he smiles. ‘I think multi-cultural London is the thing.’

‘The real reasons for 9/11 are political events in the Middle East but the book deals with how the attack resonates personally with Sami

The book took a long time to germinate. ‘For many years, I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t write,’ says Yassin-Kassab, who grew up in the north of England and Scotland and who is about to return to the latter to write full-time. ‘To me, a writer was a cultural hero but I didn’t have a story.’ Instead, after graduating from Oxford, he taught English in many Arabic-speaking countries and also worked as a journalist in Pakistan. Once he started writing, his ideas began to gel, all centred on Sami. Like him, Sami is of Syrian birth (though Yassin-Kassab has an English mother) and struggling with the idea that he should do a PhD. ‘It’s not autobiographical,’ he stresses. ‘But his preoccupations are things I’ve been preoccupied with in my life.’ As a result, his characters were initially vehicles to embody his ideas. For instance, Marwan, Sami’s Iraqi refugee father-in law, once a dissident poet, ‘represents what happened to that generation of Arabs: they were secularist and internationalist, and now they’re conservative and vaguely Islamist.’

The beliefs of some of a younger generation are explored through Sami’s brother-in-law, Ammar, who went through a Public Enemy phase before subscribing to a version of radical Islam with hip hop overtones. ‘That’s very current,’ nods Yassin-Kassab. ‘I’ve been there myself, wanting to identify with the black thing even though I’m not black and I’ve got a lot of British Muslim friends who went through that same thing: it’s looking for identity.’

Although one of Yassin-Kassab’s reasons for setting the book prior to 9/11 was that he was familiar with London at that time, he also wanted to provide a backdrop to events. ‘It goes towards an explanation of where these things came from,’ he says. ‘The real reasons for 9/11 are political events in the Middle East but the book deals with how the attack resonates personally with Sami: as he’s trying to sort out how he relates to everything, the world comes to him. A lot of people were demanding you take sides and declare who you were.’

The hijab also has implications about the wearer’s identity: in this book, it’s the cause of contention between Sami, who disapproves of it, and his wife Muntaha, who wants to wear it. This has been an issue in Yassin-Kassab’s own life. ‘Personally, I think you can be a good Muslim without wearing it. But my wife and sisters wear it, and I, like Sami, was a little bit shocked when my wife decided to start. I think, in the present climate, it’s often a brave decision.’

For a person who has written a book about issues that are often angry and conflicted, Yassin-Kassab is friendly and easy-going, gently asking his nine-year-old son and his friend (the writer Giles Coren), who are waiting for him, to hang on while we finish our interview. ‘I am angry,’ he insists. ‘I have been an angry person and if you talk to me about Palestine and Iraq, I still am. But it’s better channelled into writing than shouting.’

The Times review by Tim Teeman

AS LONDON SEETHES around him, Sami tries to make sense of his Syrian heritage, faith (or lack thereof), philosophy and the car crash of his marriage. If that sounds too much, it is: Sami is breaking down in one of the most roiling cities on Earth: pungent with noise, clamour and chaos.

Yassin-Kassab sets his impressive debut novel in the summer of 2001. The events of September 11 explode only in the closing few pages, crystallising much of the debate and anguish that has preceded it.

Sami is a difficult man: an eternal student who can never finish his doctorate, a lacking husband who is not there for his wife Muntaha. She is a teacher, organised and efficient and seeking to embrace more of her Muslim identity. This embarrasses the liberal, chaotic Sami, who – arriving back from a trip to his ancestral home city of Damascus – imagines what people on the Tube must think of them: “A proper Muslim couple…Muslims out on dark business, their trauma children and a string of austere relatives left behind in an unfurnished overcrowded room.”

This is a rambunctious and daring novel, with scattered comedy amid the drama. If “a road to Damascus” alludes to arriving at a moment of moral clarity, this novel follows a character moving away from the same. Sami wrestles, unsuccessfully, with the conflicting tides of rising fundamentalism (as voiced by Muntaha’s brother), liberal thought (as represented by his academic friends), and of the glorious mess of the city – he goes out, gets drunk, takes drugs, loses his mind, is arrested, and is approached to be a police plant within the Arab community.

It’s entertaining, but you wonder why he bounces from one disaster to another. His marriage breaks down, he flails to find meaning in the life of his father and in belief itself, which he searches for “looking mutely into his own silence”. But he finds “nothing solid there”.

Occasionally the endless theoretical chewing gets a little didactic, but Yassin-Kassab maintains a personal focus, sketching the trajectory of Sami and Muntaha’s relationship, from first date to the possibility of an affair between Muntaha and her Jewish colleague Gabor. While Sami takes drugs and his body grossly rebels, the city becomes a narcotic haze.

For a novel that revels in the kinetic multiculturalism of the city, it seems odd that The Road from Damascus should end in the bucolic countryside. But the endless spin and drama of the city is the dominant echo. Readers might wonder if a sequel could follow the fractious Sami post-9/11.

The search for identity

David Mattin, The National

The author Robin Yassin-Kassab says there are parallels between him and the protagonist of his debut novel The Road From Damascus. Randy Quan for The National

Ask the half-Syrian debut novelist Robin Yassin-Kassab to sum up western misconceptions of the Middle East, and he tells a story. In 1996 Yassin-Kassab moved from England, where he grew up with his English mother, to Damascus. The move was an attempt to get in touch with a part of himself that had long been missing: his Arabic heritage.

“In Damascus I lived at the end of a short alley,” says Yassin-Kassab. “Each morning I’d walk down this alley, and as I passed every door someone would say, ‘Hey, Robin! Come in for tea!’ It took me half an hour just to get to the end. And half-an-hour back again in the evening.

“That warmth: it’s a side of the region that many western people simply don’t see.”

If 38-year-old Yassin-Kassab’s personal odyssey around the Middle East – he’s also lived in Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Oman – was a quest for identity, then it’s no surprise that his first novel, The Road From Damascus, is also full of British Muslims searching for themselves and wondering how to live. The novel is the latest from prestigious British publishers Hamish Hamilton, the literary star-makers who brought us Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru. But it’s also the newest gust in a gale force wind that has carried Muslim fiction ever higher up the publishing agenda since September 11.

In both the UK and the US, young and fashionable authors (think Monica Ali and Brick Lane, Gautam Malkani and Londonstani, Mohsin Hamid and The Reluctant Fundamentalist) are finding huge readerships with their tales of Muslim lives in the West.

So where does Yassin-Kassab’s book fit? And how does he feel about joining the ranks of other British-Muslim novelists?

The Road From Damascus is not directly autobiographical, says Yassin-Kassab. But he readily accepts the idea that he and his protagonist, Sami, have been on journeys that share parallels. The novel sees Sami travel to Syria to discover a long-buried family secret, then return to his home in pre-September 11 London, where those he loves are struggling to define themselves: his Arabic wife, Muntaha, has embraced the hijab, while his impressionable brother-in-law Ammar has turned to radical Islam.

As for Yassin-Kassab, after his parents’ divorce, he was raised in south-west Scotland by his mother, and only came back to his Arab roots when he arrived at Oxford University.

“I didn’t have an Arabic upbringing,” he explains. “But it was obvious there was something different about me; my face wasn’t the same as the other children’s, for a start.

“I was always aware that a part of my background was missing. I went to the Middle East in search of that.”

Today, Yassin-Kassab identifies himself as a Muslim: “There are times when I pray five times a day, and times when I don’t pray at all.” So how does he feel now about the fraught question of British-Muslim identity?

“Part of the problem is that there is no distinctive identity for British Muslims,” he says. “It leaves Muslim teenagers desperately searching for a way to define themselves. That’s why you see some young Arabs in London embracing black youth culture. It surrounds them, and it’s cool, and it gives voice to their alienation.”

Of course, September 11 and its aftermath have only caused more British Muslims to wonder where, exactly, they stand. Hasn’t it got harder to be a Muslim in the UK?

“Western Muslims are under huge pressure at the moment,” he says. “That tends to push the Muslim kids one of two ways. You see some who want simply to party and get drunk, and escape Islam entirely. Others get into hard-core Wahhabi stuff, and try to form little cells at their mosque. That’s my character Ammar.

“But I feel great affection for Ammar. He’s misguided and ineffectual, but essentially a good person. There are a lot of young British Muslims like him.”

It’s this central theme – the Muslim search for a British identity – that ensures that Yassin-Kassab invites comparison to a host of other young British novelists. Indeed, stories of identity, belonging, and Islam-meets-West have come to define a new generation of British writers, ever since Zadie Smith’s White Teeth exploded into literary London in 2000. By counterpointing the fortunes of the Muslim Iqbal family against that of the English-Jamaican Jones’s, that book ushered whole new vistas inside the boundary of the traditional English novel. What has followed amounts, says the leading Muslim-British writer Ziauddin Sardar, to a significant shift.

“The Muslim British novel is really coming of age now,” he says. “Go back to the 1970s, and there was a lack of Muslim voices. Muslim stereotypes were common in fiction back then; the men were always misogynistic, the women were always oppressed.

“A new Muslim-British fiction had its birth pangs with Salman Rushdie, and Hanif Kureishi. But with those two, I think, you still see writing about Muslims that stems from an essentially British sensibility. It’s still Islam as seen from outside. Now Muslims are starting to tell their own stories, as seen through their own eyes. That’s a huge shift in power, and very welcome.”

Of course, September 11, and London’s July 7 tube attacks, served to bring interest in western Muslims to an all-time high. But what’s behind this flowering in western-Muslim fiction?

“We’re seeing a generation of Muslims who have grown up in the West, are interested in the novel, and understand the huge power of fiction,” says Sardar. “So you have writers such as Monica Ali writing about a Bangladeshi Muslim in Brick Lane, and Ahdaf Soueif, who explores the western Muslim experience in her brilliant The Map of Love.”

Most recently, the Financial Times journalist Gautam Malkani gave voice to the Muslim and Sikh “rudeboy” teenagers of Hounslow in his Londonstani, albeit to mixed critical response. Sardar points also to Pakistan-born Kamila Shamsie, and Mohsin Hamid, whose Booker-shortlisted The Reluctant Fundamentalist sees a high-flying Pakistani-American tell of his disillusionment with the West.

The result, says Sardar, can only mean a wider understanding between peoples:

“What, after all, is fiction for but to illuminate unknown areas of life?” he says. “Yes, these young novelists are fashionable. They have a kind of exotic value. But we need to look past that and see the social and cultural layers that they are uncovering. They’re showing us how Britain is shaping Muslim life, and how Muslims are helping to shape modern Britain.”

Ultimately, though, Yassin-Kassab, like many of his counterparts, is uneasy about the “Muslim-British writer” tag. The question of identity, he says, is more complex than has been allowed by much recent multicultural fiction.

“This idea of ‘multicultural fiction’ is a way to sell books, and that’s fine,” he says. “But I don’t want to be a Muslim novelist, or a multicultural novelist; I want to be a novelist. Multicultural London is the setting for my book, but it’s really more about parents and children, and marriage, and the relationship of the past to the present.

“Really, this version of identity that we’ve heard so much about since White Teeth is an illusion. It’s a product of our strange, alienated world that everyone is asking themselves identity questions.

“Almost all of us in the West – immigrant or not – have lost touch with the customs and lifestyles of our great grandfathers, so all of us are starting to ask, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What badge can I wear to tell people who I am?’”

Still, western misinterpretation of one such badge forms another major theme in Yassin-Kassab’s book. Back in London, Sami is distressed by Muntaha’s insistence on wearing the hijab. Onlookers, he fears, will believe that she is wearing it at his insistence; Muntaha insists, “I want to belong to my nation”.

“In the West, hijab is just as often about an assertion of identity as it is about religion,” says Yassin-Kassab. “You get these girls in the East End who were a niqab when even their mothers don’t.

“Then the Islamophobes seize on this and say, ‘These girls must be oppressed by their fathers, and uneducated’. Really, it’s often much more complex than that. It’s a conscious decision by these girls to belong to a certain tribe.”

Elsewhere, broader western misconceptions of the Middle East and Arab culture hang heavy over The Road From Damascus. Yassin-Kassab’s journey to the Middle East clearly had a profound influence on his novel. So what did he – a westerner himself by upbringing, after all – discover?

“What struck me most was that, despite all the troubles, there is still a great warmth and sense of connection between people,” he says. “There’s more eye contact, more physical contact, more of a hospitality culture.

“Life in these countries is often not as it is described in western media. Yes, Syria is a dictatorship, but it still contains a spectrum of different ethnic groups living together more or less peacefully. It would be optimistic to call Iran a happy democracy, but people there openly criticised the government when I spoke to them. They sat on street corners reading books. Yet Iran is painted as this monolithic culture with no future.

“People across the region were often keen to question the policies of western governments. But they don’t equate ordinary western people with those policies. I never encountered any hostility.”

So who is stoking this misrepresentation? Yassin-Kassab looks to political convenience.

“It’s good for those in charge that people in the West aren’t asking, ‘Why are we violently involved in the Middle East?’ Instead they’re asking, ‘What’s wrong with these Muslims?’”

But Yassin-Kassab’s extended Middle Eastern journey – funded by teaching English – brought forth more than these observations. It was in Oman that he started to write. “I’d always known that I wanted to, but felt I had no story. One day I just sat down and started. Sami evolved from there.

“I’ve been lucky, Alhumdlillah. There are good writers who spend years trying to get spotted.”

Now, though, Yassin-Kassab is heading to Scotland to work on his second novel. He wants, he says, to avoid the London literary scene, to escape the “multicultural writer” tag it will inevitably try to pin on him. But what, then, of his Arabic roots? Does he feel, at last – after more than a decade in the Middle East – that he has found the part of himself that was missing?

“Yes, I do feel a more complete person,” he says. “I lived in the Arab world for a long time; my wife is Arabic.” Then he stops, and considers for a moment.

“The truth is that when I was younger, it was important for me to ask, ‘Am I British? Am I an Arab?’ Now, I don’t think of myself in those terms. I’m just me.”