A dervish in Milwaukee

And Allah said: I am with the ones
whose hearts are torn.
--Hadith Qudsi

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ayad Akhtar's novel, American Dervish, begins with a prologue: Hayat, a Pakistani-American college student, is eating his first pork at a basketball game and exulting over his new freedom from the claims of religious faith. The novel then flashes back to Hayat's boyhood, his memories as a 12-year-old, living with his immigrant, but well-off, family in suburban Milwaukee.

I began reading with the expectation that Akhtar was about to give us a Muslim counterpart to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And, indeed, like Joyce's autobiographical novel, American Dervish is a story of an adolescent boy who, after a period of being deeply devout, becomes disillusioned with his faith. Also, like Joyce, Akhtar reveals the beauty and wisdom of that faith, as perceived by the youth, as well as how religious belief can be used to narrow rather than open the mind of a sensitive and intelligent child.

But where Portrait of the Artist is almost solipsistic in the narrator's focus upon himself, American Dervish's primary focus returns repeatedly to an older woman: Mina, the best friend of Hayat's mother, whom the boy calls his aunt.

Hayat's family does not fit easily into the local Pakistani community. His father is a physician, an unbeliever, and an irritable but loving father. His mother has little interest in religion as such, but clings to the traditions of Islam out of homesickness for the Pakistani Punjab. Hayat himself is a quiet boy, but initially seems totally American -- Midwestern and suburban in his life and interests.

But then, when he is 12, Aunt Mina, a strikingly beautiful woman escaping an abusive arranged marriage, arrives from Pakistan to live with Hayat's family. Mina reveals to Hayat the beauties of Islam, teaches him to pray, teaches him to memorize the Quran. Without understanding his own feelings, Hayat falls in love. Romantic love for an "aunt" clearly being impossible, he instead throws himself into her love of Islam. He abandons former pasttimes, spending all his free time memorizing verses.

"Almighty God," Muhammad said, "let me see you."
And all at once, he saw nothing but the Lord. He looked to the right and saw nothing but the Lord. He looked to the left and saw nothing but the Lord, and to the front, and the back, and above...and everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but the Lord. What the Lord looked like Muhammad would never say, other than that His beauty was so great he would have preferred to stand there gazing at Him forever.

But Mina is unlike other members of the local Pakistani community, Muslims whom Hayat's father contemptuously describes as "sheep." She is intelligent, cosmopolitan, and delights in the freedom of American society. She contantly reminds Hayat that forms of worship aren't important to God, what's important are the intentions of his heart. Memorization of the Quran -- which he's told would guarantee his parents' admission to Heaven -- is worthless if he doesn't understand what he is memorizing. Mina is greatly influenced by the Sufi dervishes, mystics whose orthodoxy conservative Muslims have always considered suspect, holy men who seek to surrender everything that might separate them from God's love.

What the dervish found was true humility. He realized that he was no better, no worse than the ground itself, the ground that takes the discarded orange peels of the world. In fact, he realized he was the same as that ground, the same as those peels, as those men, as everything else. He was the same as everything created by Allah's hand. ... He and Allah, and everything Allah created, it was all One.

Much of the novel's plot describes how Hayat, in his frantic possessive love for Mina, sabotages her engagement with Nathan, a Jewish doctor and his father's partner, forcing her unexpectedly into a marriage with a more "suitable" local Pakistani -- a man so insecure that he spends his life locking her away from all other people and physically abusing her.

Mina dies of cancer, after years of abuse, a woman crushed in both mind and body by events she could not control -- and events for which Hayat feels intense guilt. Shortly before Mina's death, Hayat visits her in the hospital -- where he finds her delighting in the Scott Fitzgerald quotation she'd found in his published letters -- and confesses how he ruined her life. She told him it was God's will:

Faith has never been about an afterlife for me, Hayat. It's about finding God now. In the everyday. Here. With you. Whether I'm living in a prison or in a castle. Sick or healthy. It's all the same. That's what the Sufis teach. ... Every single life, no matter how big or small, how happy or how sad, it can be a path to Him.

Hayat can't agree, can't understand the hold Sufi thought has always had on her. She replies that her pain is how God speaks through her.

"[E]verything, everything, is an expression of Allah's will. It is all His glory. Even the pain ..." She paused. "That is the real truth about life."

In an Epilogue, Hayat, years later and now a college graduate working in Boston as an intern for the Atlantic, runs into Nathan in Harvard Square. The doctor had stayed in touch by mail with Mina, clandestinely, and knew her story. He brushes off Hayat's attempts at apology, kindly, and essentially gives him the forgiveness that he needs.

Hayat walks away from that encounter, strolling along the Charles river, feeling alive and filled with an odd gratitude. He remembers, for the first time in ten years, verses from the Quran he had memorized back when he was a devout boy of 12:

Truly with hardship comes ease.
With hardship comes ease!
And so when you are finished, do not rest,
But return to your Lord with love...