The premise of the new book Mother of the Believers by Kamran Pasha is a familiar one: the book is about one of the most beloved wives of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), Aisha. There was a book last year that was released under much controversy, Jewel of Medina, which focused on Aisha’s relationship with the Prophet (peace be upon him).
The book is told from Aisha’s perspective under the guise of writing a journal for her nephew Abdullah as a way to recount the events of her life. We are there from her birth, her childhood as part of the persecuted group of Muslims, the migration to Medina, her marriage to Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), and so on and so forth. Pasha touches on many of the significant events that are representative of the time of the Prophet (pbuh) while including a cast of characters who are familiar to many Muslims. However, while Kamran Pasha has obviously spent a great amount of time researching the life of Aisha, Mother of the Believers is not exactly a book I would recommend for those who wish to learn about Islam due to the manner in which this book is presented and the lack of true understanding of the religion that may come from reading Pasha’s novelized account.
Pasha telling the story from Aisha’s eyes and as a form of communication to her nephew doesn’t work too well here. First of all, there are too many scenes without Aisha in them where the first person point of view can’t even come into play, never mind the fact that there would be no way she would be able to relate these scenes to her nephew in her journal. Second, if Aisha is writing with the her nephew as the audience in mind, there would be no need to explain the Islamic concepts that she does for the benefit of the reader. I mean, why should she have to define such terms as hadith for someone like Abdullah? I realize that many may look at these as minor grievances, but these alone made this book hard for me to digest.
In addition to the aforementioned contentions, the actual topic of this book did not sit too well with me. In the Author’s Note in the beginning of the book, Pasha writes “My intention in writing this novel has been to give Westerners a glimpse of the richness that exists within the Muslim historical tradition and invite all my readers to learn more about Islam and draw their own conclusions.” That is definitely noble. Yet, despite these intentions, I’m still not quite sure how I feel about the novelization of the most revered Prophet for Muslims and other people that are held in high regard, like Aisha herself.
The reader may come away from this book without being able to distinguish what was real or not. One may believe that some of the more fantastical elements that Muslims believe happened are the work of Pasha’s imagination while thinking other events and pieces of dialogue are true when it’s something that Pasha added to give more color. It is not up to the author to add his own elements to true accounts (for Muslims anyway) that may end up misrepresenting the actions of historical figures or even Islam itself.
In the end, I don’t believe that fictionalizing these religious icons is in the best interest of one who wants to learn about Islam. I understand that not everyone may agree with me and that’s fine, but hopefully if someone really wants to learn about the religion, he or she will go to a different source.
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Kamran Pasha recently wrote an article about the controversy that he expects to face with his new book.
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