When I set out to write an Anglophone novel set in Saudi Arabia, there was never a time when I didn’t think it would deal with religion, and more specifically, Islam. The premise of the book does not necessarily have anything to do with faith. Bride of the Sea is about a mother who abducts her daughter, and about the father left behind.
But both parents in the story are Saudi. And my childhood in Saudi Arabia, during the 1980s and early 1990s, was steeped in religion. We prayed at school, between classes. The school day was shortened in Ramadan. Shops had to close during prayer time. When we heard the adhan, I prayed with my father and brothers. My father’s father had died, and his legacy—for example, rent collected on the family house in Mecca—was split among my grandmother and her 12 children according to Sharia law. Less for the women than for the men.
In my day-to-day interactions with friends, family, and strangers, God seemed to be in every other utterance:
- Bismillah.
- Al hamdullilah.
- Assalamu ’alaykum wa rahmat Allah.
- Mashallah, tabaraka Allah.
- Inshallah.
- Allah yihfathik.
- Allah ma’aki.
- Allahu akbar.
- Subhan Allah.
- A’uthu billah.
- La samah Allah.
- La hawla wala quwwata illa billah.
- Inna lillahi, wa inna ilayhi raji’un.
- La illaha illa Allah.
- Walahul adhim!
Islam was integral to Saudi life. But it wasn’t everything. My parents worked, my dad as a professor of operations research and my mom as a nurse—occupations that had nothing to do with faith. I did homework. I brushed my teeth. I visited my grandmother every week. I went swimming with friends. We went bowling every weekend. I ate chickpeas in vinegar by the beach. I mooned after boys. I went shopping. I attended huge Saudi weddings. I read novels and the local English-language papers, Arab News and Saudi Gazette, and issues of USA Today that were several weeks old. I watched Simon and Simon and Egyptian movies and the news on TV. I dreamed of going to college and becoming a writer.
Years later, as an adult in the United States, why couldn’t I imagine a novel about Saudi Arabia without Islam? What creative doorways were opened by that limitation of my imagination? What doorways were closed?
The place I started in imagining religion in the book was not daily practice or Islamic belief or culture or social conventions, although all of those would eventually be part of the book.
The place I started was story.
I was raised on stories from the Qur’an—my father had a book of them that he read to me out loud, translating into English as he went. (I didn’t learn Arabic till I was 10 or 11.) And as part of my Saudi education, I was trained to read, understand and recite the Qur’an. So, it made sense that as I set out to write a novel about a child ripped from her father, extended family, nationality, language, and culture when her mother abducts her, I was inspired by the story of Y’aqoub, or Jacob, and his son Yusuf, or Joseph.
Surat Yusuf, the chapter of the Qur’an about Yusuf, begins like this:
الر ۚ تِلْكَ آيَاتُ الْكِتَابِ الْمُبِينِ
إِنَّا أَنْزَلْنَاهُ قُرْآنًا عَرَبِيًّا لَعَلَّكُمْ تَعْقِلُونَ
نَحْنُ نَقُصُّ عَلَيْكَ أَحْسَنَ الْقَصَصِ بِمَا أَوْحَيْنَا إِلَيْكَ هَٰذَا الْقُرْآنَ وَإِنْ كُنْتَ مِنْ قَبْلِهِ لَمِنَ الْغَافِلِينَ
إِذْ قَالَ يُوسُفُ لِأَبِيهِ يَا أَبَتِ إِنِّي رَأَيْتُ أَحَدَ عَشَرَ كَوْكَبًا وَالشَّمْسَ وَالْقَمَرَ رَأَيْتُهُمْ لِي سَاجِدِينَ
قَالَ يَا بُنَيَّ لَا تَقْصُصْ رُؤْيَاكَ عَلَىٰ إِخْوَتِكَ فَيَكِيدُوا لَكَ كَيْدًا
Alif-Lãm-Ra. These are the verses of the clear Book.
Indeed, we have sent it down as an Arabic Quran so that you may understand
We do tell you the best of stories through Our revelation of this Quran, though before this you were unaware.
Joseph said to his father, “O father! I dreamt of eleven stars, and the sun, and the moon—I saw them prostrating to me!”
[His father] said, “O son! Do not tell the story of your dream to your brothers, or they will plot against you.”
Until I used a portion of these verses as the epigraph for my novel, I didn’t notice that they contain a subtext about the stories that can be told and those that are kept secret.
We do tell you the best of stories …
Do not tell the story of your dream to your brothers …
Yusuf’s dream means this: God chose him as a prophet, a nabi. The stars are his brothers. The sun and moon his parents.
Yusuf hides his dream, but his brothers already know their father favors Yusuf. And as Ya’qub predicts, they’re jealous. They kidnap Yusuf, throw him in a well, and fake his death to prevent their father from looking for him. Ya’qub goes blind with grief. Many years later, Yusuf reunites with his family, and his virtuousness is made clear when he forgives them for all they have done to him and his father regains sight.
My book doesn’t “retell” Yusuf’s story, but it is inspired by it and by the storytelling methods of the Qur’an. Multiple protagonists. Shifts and jumps in time. Dreams as stories within stories. I worried that no one would want to publish my book because it starts with a dream sequence. Dreams are cliché. But dreams are in the Qur’an. And there, they are a true reflection of life. They are the divine speaking to us.
From that point of view, dreams are not cliché. They are motif.
The opening dream sequence of my novel is contained in a chapter called Basmalah, after the act of saying, “Bismillah”—In the name of God. So, my book begins by acknowledging the power of God’s name, and the power and limitations of faith. Faith makes things possible. Faith—or lack of adherence to it—makes other things impossible.
Hannah, the main character, has lived most of her life in America, and was not brought up with her mother’s original faith, Islam. She dreams her mother is dead and relatives in Saudi Arabia are washing the corpse, an Islamic ritual that would happen in real life. In America, Hannah and her mother have been separated from family; they spent many years isolated and alone with each other. Hannah’s reintroduction into the family and her reintroduction to Islam happen at the same time and are deeply intertwined.
In the dream, Hannah is seeing this collective washing and wrapping ritual, watching it from the outside almost. It’s like she can’t access the religion without the collective, without the family. And her mother is also outside the ritual—because in the dream she’s dead.
Then male family members dig a grave on the beach. Eventually, the men realize they can’t dig the grave because they didn’t invoke God’s name by saying bismillahi ir-rahman ir-rahim before they started. Maybe this is a fear of Hannah’s: That because she was raised without Islam, and away from the family, she can’t get the rituals right. She never knows what invocation of God to make or when to make it.
The dream reflects her state of mind. In Surat Yusuf, dreams are always predictable: once deciphered they accurately predict what God has written for the future. Hannah’s dreams, by contrast, may or may not reliably reflect her destiny.
How does one tell a story about/in a culture in which religion is a dominant thread?
In “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” Jorge Luis Borges argued that literature doesn’t need “local color,” those everyday details of place and setting, and he uses the Qur’an as his Ur text. Borges writes, “[I]n the Arab book par excellence, the Koran, there are no camels,” because Mohammed “knew he could be an Arab without camels. … What is truly native can and often does dispense with local color.”
What Borges calls “native,” today we would call a question of “authenticity.” So, Borges is saying that an authentic Arab writer does not need to mention the camels that are simply there in the desert, walking around, chewing cud. She does not need to exoticize the everyday. Following Borges’ logic, a writer from a place where people pray five times every day doesn’t need to mention prayer, just like she doesn’t need to note that characters, say, go to the bathroom or drink water. Perhaps, she does not need to make any sort of deal of their religion or faith, because it’s just part of the atmosphere.
As others before me have pointed out, Borges was wrong in at least one way because there are quite a few camels in the Qur’an. There are about a dozen different words for camel in the Qur’an. And there’s a whole story about a miraculous female camel, or naaqah. The camel’s fate hinges on an entire people’s acceptance of and submission to God’s will. From Surat al-A’raf:
وَإِلَىٰ ثَمُودَ أَخَاهُمْ صَٰلِحًا ۗ قَالَ يَٰقَوْمِ ٱعْبُدُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ مَا لَكُم مِّنْ إِلَٰهٍ غَيْرُهُۥ ۖ قَدْ جَآءَتْكُم بَيِّنَةٌ مِّن رَّبِّكُمْ ۖ هَٰذِهِۦ نَاقَةُ ٱللَّهِ لَكُمْ ءَايَةً ۖ فَذَرُوهَا تَأْكُلْ فِىٓ أَرْضِ ٱللَّهِ ۖ وَلَا تَمَسُّوهَا بِسُوٓءٍ فَيَأْخُذَكُمْ عَذَابٌ أَلِيمٌ
And to the people of Thamûd [we sent] their brother Ṣâliḥ. He said, “O my people! Worship God—you have no other god. A clear proof has come to you from your Lord: this is God’s she-camel as a sign to you. So leave her to graze on God’s land and do not harm her, or else you will be overcome by a painful punishment.
Does Thamud listen? No, of course not. They doubt the camel is really from God, and they kill it. The story ends on this note:
فَأَخَذَتْهُمُ ٱلرَّجْفَةُ فَأَصْبَحُوا۟ فِى دَارِهِمْ جَٰثِمِينَ
Then an earthquake struck them, and they fell lifeless in their homes.
The use of camels in the Qur’an is judicious. And so, I believe, should be the use of religious details, such as prayer, in fiction about an Islamic society. In many Western films set in the Middle East, the call-to-prayer wafts over a cityscape in a shorthand of place-setting. Here we are, in a place with minarets—a place other and different from what We are used to, as Western viewers, assumedly. But the call to prayer and the practice of prayer don’t advance character, theme or plot in these movies. Prayer is just window dressing.
I wanted prayer to be integral to the narrative in Bride of the Sea. When Muneer, Hannah’s father, has finally found his daughter in the United States after many years of searching for her, his interactions with her do not go as expected. And so,
Muneer chooses prayer as his coping mechanism. He unrolls one of the prayer rugs Jameel never uses and spreads it in a corner of the basement.
…
After he prays, he sits for a while, hands before his face but no request for God on his lips.
Later, when Hannah is visiting Saudi Arabia for the first time and Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait begins—it’s 1991—she prays with her father and stepmother, even though no one ever taught her how:
Hannah doesn’t know how to wash for prayer, and she doesn’t know how to pray. She puts on one of Lamees’s long prayer scarves, a sharshaf, as big as a bedsheet. Lamees lays out prayer rugs, one vertical in front and a second horizontally, behind the first. Hannah stands beside her stepmother as her father leads them in prayer.
“Allahu akbar,” he starts, and she raises her hands and lowers them to her chest, like Lamees.
Hannah doesn’t understand the words her father recites out loud, and she struggles to mimic Lamees’s and her father’s movements. But she can pray with them. She needs to pray.
A war is starting. It’s a frightening moment for Hannah, who is so far away from the life she knows in the United States. Every bit of the ritual stands out to her. Where her father and stepmother stand, how they move, the details of objects that are everyday to them: the length of the scarf, the orientation of the prayer rug.
When I moved to Jidda, I was eight, and my dad sent me to school without a head scarf. At prayer time, when the custodial staff laid out large, plastic woven prayer mats in the courtyard so the whole school could pray together, I wanted to fit in. So, I prayed, sticking out like a sore thumb, the only person with bare head and arms. After we had said our salaams to end our prayer, the headmistress gently explained that I needed to bring a scarf to school the next day.
I prayed thousands of times while I was growing up. But that particular prayer experience is thematically useful in explaining what it was like for me to move from the United States to Saudi Arabia. In the U.S., I had prayed a handful of times with my dad, and Islam was not part of my daily life because we did not live in a tight-knit American Muslim community like the one, say, depicted in Fatima Farheen Mirza’s novel A Place for Us.
In Saudi, prayer was part of my school routine, and Islam was everywhere, woven into the fabric of life.
In Wadjda وجدة, the 2012 film by Saudi filmmaker Haifa al-Mansour, the protagonist is a 10-year-old girl who enters a Qur’an recitation contest in hopes of winning a cash prize so she can buy a bike.
I too competed in a Qur’an recitation contest as a student in Saudi Arabia. I don’t think there were prizes. Maybe a paper certificate? The point is, this detail of al-Mansour’s film rings true to me. It has veracity. And it allows al-Mansour to intertwine the way Saudi life is steeped in religion with Wadjda’s very recognizable childhood desire for a bicycle. Which represents, of course, her desire for freedom from the strictures of her life as a girl in Riyadh.
I also competed in a contest run by the education ministry in which I had to research another country and write about it in English. I wrote about Japan, using books from my school’s very limited library. So, Al-Mansour could have chosen to have Wadjda enter any kind of contest. She could have entered a contest to tour and win … a chocolate factory. Of course, such a plot point would not have been specific to Saudi Arabia. But did it need to be? Was al-Mansour trying too hard? Pandering to a western audience? Using unnecessary local color? Limiting her imagination?
Or was she making use of local color in a way that made perfect sense for her themes?
Wadjda wasn’t shown in Saudi Arabian cinemas, because it was released before the government lifted its ban on movie theaters. Would a Saudi audience have needed the contest to be a Qur’an contest? Would the Qur’an contest have had special meaning for some of them, like it did for me, because it spoke to experiences organic to their location and reflected the role of religion in their lives?
Saudi Arabia is a modern society in a globalized world. It makes sense that another Saudi work, Aziz Mohammed’s 2017 novel The Critical Case of a Man Called K, grapples with an issue that goes beyond Saudi borders: namely, the soul-sucking nature of global capitalism. The Critical Case starts out as a workplace novel, a first-person account of an alienated corporate drone. Many of the details of the narrator’s 9-6 job in a glass office tower felt very familiar to me from my U.S. jobs. Needing to look busy. Not really knowing the person in the cubicle next to you. How some people embrace and others refuse what it takes to be “successful” in an office.
At first, there is very little “local color” in The Critical Case. In that bland glass office building, only one of the narrator’s coworkers wears traditional Saudi clothing rather than pants and Skechers. The narrator avoids work by reading Western literature and writing a story inspired by Kafka. And he tells us early on that he does not come from a “religious family.” In fact, his short, rebellious bout with religiosity as a teenager befuddles his mother.
Yet as the story progresses, and the young narrator is diagnosed with cancer, we start to see more details of his society’s religiosity. When the narrator is recovering from chemotherapy in the hospital, his mother even prays by his bedside, alienating him further by asking God not to save his life, but to shorten it to spare him, and his extended family, pain.
In this book, prayer and religion become social goods or annoyances, depending on one’s perspective. The narrator resists the idea that because he’s ill he has to make “hurried plans for Paradise,” just as he resisted coworkers’ earnest talk of how to gain career success. After encountering a proselytizer in the oncology ward waiting room, the narrator explains his attitude toward faith:
I wasn’t, generally speaking, lacking in faith in God, but I wasn’t strongly protective of my faith in Him either. I’d adopted a position that required a stubborn, persistent neutrality, here, in this land which continually forces one to take a clear position on religion, either for or against. Perhaps all it amounted to was that I was delaying taking a stance, just as I delayed clarifying my stance on everything that matters. I did not, however feel that it was in any way my battle: both sides, in my opinion, lacked spirituality, as does almost every contemporary discourse about religion. I’ve long thought that people live as though they were God’s employees, not his worshippers, as though it was in their power to speak badly of Him behind His back and then pretend to go on with their work.
“As though it was in their power to speak badly of Him behind His back and then pretend to go on with their work.” The sentence haunts me. The idea that people are living their lives like God pays their salary, that religion, for many people, is a transactional duty, just like going to work. It’s a way of biding time, making a name for yourself, looking “successful.” Rather than a true, spiritual connection to God.
And the flip side: that work has become a religion. A sort of false god.
This is a deep, incisive, uniquely Saudi critique. But there’s also something universal here—or maybe the better word is global—about the misdirection of our days on earth. Religion and work, according to this novel, have both been corrupted. Praying has become too much like working for a paycheck. And capitalist bosses have become too much like gods, reigning over our lives, requiring us to unquestioningly submit to them.
In The Critical Case, three forces—performative faith, performative family, and capitalist careerism—have emptied people of spirituality. Have infected them.
Here’s a moment when the narrator is going to see his grandfather, with whom he has a fraught relationship, because his mother insists he can’t just call his grandfather on the phone to tell him about his cancer:
I’d often felt he’d been a grandfather since the day he was born and perhaps, like the prophets, he’d discovered, through some form of inspiration and without any special joy or pride, that he was destined to become this grandfather and had accepted the role as his unavoidable fate.
I was thinking of all this as I entered the old neighborhood in the middle of which stands his house—a kind of Kaaba, around which the other houses have grown up. It’s so ancient in appearance that it’s impossible to imagine any other building existed there before it, as though he’d come to this vacant land and said, “Here I shall build a house.”
The story of the Kaaba being built by Abraham is a sort of origin story of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Here the family becomes another religion, and the patriarch’s house is the temple toward which the family must pray.
I couldn’t imagine writing a novel about Saudi Arabia without Islam, but I think it could have been possible. In Barakah Meets Barakah, a 2016 Saudi romantic comedy by filmmaker Mahmoud Sabbagh, a civil servant named Barakah meets an Instagrammer, also named Barakah, and they fall in love. To go on dates, they have to overcome all sorts of obstacles because men and women are not supposed to mingle in public—or at all. But of course, young people do, or try to.
While an American watching this film might say that strict Islam is the culprit that blocks the couple’s romance, Barakah Meets Barakah, like other Saudi media, frames conservative culture, not Islam per se, as the problem. It asks the questions, “Why is our society the way it is? Why can’t it be different? Why does it keep people apart?”
Faith is not the only lens through which to look at the human condition, whether in Saudi or anywhere else. But it is a powerful one. Faith and the stories that go along with faith are an invitation to explore the human and the divine, to reveal hidden truths. What connects us to each other and to the world and to the things we can’t explain? What isolates us?
The novel is a place where those questions can live. Where discussion of religion and its role in our lives, for good or ill, can thrive.
“We do tell you the best of stories.”
All the novelist can do is try.
Contributor Notes
Eman Quotah is the author of the novel Bride of the Sea. She grew up in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, The Toast, The Establishment, Book Riot, Literary Hub, Electric Literature and other publications. She lives with her family near Washington, D.C.
This essay was adapted from the author’s David and Sherry Berz Endowed Lecture, given at George Washington University in December 2021. Translations of Quranic verses are from Dr. Mustafa Khattab’s Clear Qur’an translations, with a few adjustments.
Photo credit: Andrew Chen
