British Islam and the novel of transformation: Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus

Abstract

This article analyses Robin Yassin-Kassab’s debut novel, The Road from Damascus (2008). It is one of the few British novels to interrogate the opposition that has been recently constructed between “secular literature” on the one hand and “Islamic dogma” on the other. This false opposition has been a product of polarized rhetoric produced during the Satanic Verses affair. Through its reappropriated Bildungsroman form, in which the protagonist partially converts to Islam, this novel models a transformation of the self and society beyond such oppositions and beyond Islamic identity politics. Yassin-Kassab integrates Sufi narrative structures with the novel’s trajectory of self-development, alluding to Ibn al-‘Arabi’s discourse of mystical bewilderment. In so doing The Road from Damascus epistemologically challenges the binary between Muslim and non-Muslim, secular and sacred, the imagination and religious stricture.

Keywords:

• Islam
• Sufism
• “Satanic Verses affair”
• Bildungsroman
• secularism
• Ibn al-‘Arabi

Notes

1. William Chittick’s The Sufi Path of Knowledge is the most comprehensive English translation of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Futahat that I have found so far, and my quotations are drawn from this unless stated otherwise.