Gurnah's Fiction at the “End of Religion”

EMAD MIRMOTAHARI is associate professor of English at Duquesne University, where he teaches courses in world and postcolonial literatures. Early in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), the novel that brought its author widespread international attention and plaudits, it is revealed that the main character, an adolescent boy named Yusuf who grows up on the Swahili coast in the early twentieth century, cannot read the Qur’an. While most people on the coast speak Kiswahili, Nyamwezi, andmany other local and regional languages, Arabic is the language of commerce, of communal authority, and of faith. The label “savage” is summarily affixed to anyonewho cannot read and speak it. As the narrative goes on, the adults in Yusuf’s world become increasingly suspicious of his inability to read Arabic and of his disinclination toward reading scripture. This suspicion is eventually confirmed, as the novel’s narrator shares that Yusuf’s “attention wandered during the longer prayers, and he was forced to hum meaninglessly over the noise of other readers when he was required to address the unfamiliar sections of the Book” (97). At one point, Yusuf is probingly asked to locate the all-important Ya-Sin surah in the Qur’an but is unable to do so. Yusuf does not know the Qur’an and does not make much effort to conceal that fact; for this reason, he finds himself on the outskirts of the Islamic society to which he nominally belongs. Salim, the narrator of Gurnah’s 2017 novel, Gravel Heart, relates the following about his own schooling in Zanzibar, a plot point that takes place more than half a century after the events in Paradise: