American Dervish

“Even the confession I had made to Mina while she lay on what turned out to be her deathbed, even that hadn’t been enough to assuage the guilt I’d been carrying since I was twelve. If I was reluctant to share how aggrieved I was with my mother, it was because my grief was not only for Mina, but for myself as well.” 

At the beginning of the novel, Hayat mourns his mother’s late best friend Mina. While he initially withholds the source of his guilt, it is clear that Mina played a significant role in his development from childhood until early adulthood. He feels sorrow for the sins of his youth, as well as the loss of this integral person in his family. 

“‘You’re going to break some hearts, aren’t you, behta?’ She was looking right at me. Again, I felt that surprise. There was something intense and alive about her gaze that the picture had only hinted at. She was dazzling.” 

Hayat meets Mina for the first time at the airport and is surprised at her exceptional beauty. He has seen her photograph on his refrigerator and felt attracted to her mysterious gaze, but this meeting reveals a more powerful magnetism in person. Hayat will go on to develop sexual feelings for Mina that propel several key events in the novel. 

“I found the first surah, a half page of verse called ‘The Opening.’ ‘That’s it,’ Mina said. ‘Read it to me.’ I cleared my voice and began to read: ‘In the name of God, the Benevolent, the Merciful. Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds, The Benevolent, the Merciful.’”

This is the first of Mina’s many religious lessons with Hayat. The child of secular Muslims, Hayat has never studied the Quran and feels slight discomfort reading its words aloud. Mina will go on to ask him the meaning of the verse and show him how the Quran teaches readers about God’s loving, forgiving character. 

“I’m not convinced we were prepared to be happy. [...] This was our cultural text, the message imprinted in even the movie videos my parents rented from the local Indo-Pak grocer—the only place you could find Indian films in town—lavish tales of unconsummated love, or love consummated at the price of death. These films were so unlike anything a paying American audience could ever have taken seriously as the truth about life.” 

The Shahs, as well as Mina and Imran, live with a blend of Eastern and Western customs. The adults’ taste in films reflects their Pakistani upbringing and resistance to the American optimism of Hollywood movies. The tragic stories in Indian films mirror the tragedies like Mina’s future unconsummated love with Nathan. 

“It was now that I began to strive, in earnest, to become a hafiz. It seemed the only surefire way to earn her love and attention once again. And I wasn’t wrong. My diligence in memorizing verses wore away at her resistance to me, and by that spring—some seven surahs and one hundred verses later—our regular study hour was restored.” 

After Hayat discovers Mina naked in the bathroom, he mourns her distance from him. Over the following months, he devotes himself to memorizing the Quran partly out of spiritual devotion, but mostly out of thirst for closeness with Mina. 

“‘What is special for you, behta? Is there something you would never want to lose?’ ‘You, Auntie.’ She smiled. ‘That’s so sweet, Hayat.’ She ran her fingers along my forehead. ‘You love being with me… in this moment…’ ‘So much, Auntie. So much.’ ‘You don’t want it to end, right?’ ‘Never.’ ‘It’s the same with our dervish. He feels this kind of love with Allah.’” 

During one of their nightly story times, Mina tells Hayat about a dervish who experienced homelessness, hunger, and humiliation. She explains that through these difficulties, he maintains love for God and is willing to relinquish everything for this love. Hayat struggles to understand this idea, but Mina’s life will eventually show him the difficult truth of this parable.  

“I went upstairs to my room and watched out the window as they made their way down the driveway. Standing by his car in the moonlight, Nathan leaned toward her. She put her arm around him, her hand finding the back of his head. They held each other for a long moment. It hurt me to watch.” 

Observant and curious, Hayat watches Mina and Nathan’s romance with increasing jealousy. He witnesses this private moment between them with pain, not understanding the intimacy between them and wanting Mina’s attention only for himself. Hayat’s jealousy will fester in secret and manifest in important ways later in the story. 

“‘They bring difficulty for others everywhere they go—it’s their curse. But for that there’s only one solution. And we’ll have to wait another hundred years before anyone has the guts to try that again.’ ‘Try what again?’ Sonny asked suspiciously. ‘Killing them all,’ Chatha replied, adding—after a pause—with the same matter-of-fact tone: ‘Like Hitler.’ ‘Hitler?’ Sonny asked. He looked over at Father, appalled. Father seemed less appalled than exasperated.” 

During this flashback, set at Ghaleb Chatha’s house, Chatha reveals his violent anti-Semitism to his guests. He approves of the genocide against Jews during the Holocaust. Sonny Buledi, a secular Muslim, challenges Chatha’s bigotry and his rigid reading of the Quran, but Chatha holds firm. Hayat, sitting silent nearby, notices that his father appears impatient, as if he has heard this intolerance many times before.  

“All I had to do was finish becoming a hafiz. When I was done, both my parents would be saved. That’s what Mina had said. Every hafiz earned not only his own place in Paradise, but his parents’ as well. No matter how many drinks, no matter how many mistresses, Father would be saved.” 

Hayat has developed a fear of hell’s horrors as described in the Quran—a fear that changes the tenor of his faith as God’s wrath looms in the boy’s mind. Hayat worries for his father’s salvation as he considers Naveed’s heavy drinking and frequent infidelity. However, he delights to remember that his intense memorization of the Quran should grant his father a place in heaven alongside himself and his mother.  

“I felt my heart drop into a dark hole inside me. ‘But he’s not Muslim,’ I said. ‘He’s going to convert, Hayat. He’s going to become one of us.’ She was beaming. ‘Why?’ I asked coldly. [...] ‘Why do you think?’ she asked. ‘Because he sees it’s a wonderful way of life. What other reason?’”

Mina excitedly explains that Nathan will convert to Islam in anticipation of their marriage. She clearly has not expected Hayat’s passive-aggressive response, tinged with hostility and jealousy. Although Hayat questions the purity of Nathan’s motives, the boy fails to consider that his own skepticism is not purely motivated either. 

“You’re going to be a good Muslim. But you’ll treat women right, won’t you, behta? You’ll be the exception… a good Muslim man who has respect for a woman, no?” 

Throughout Hayat’s childhood, Muneer complains to him about her husband’s disrespect for women and his betrayals against her. She often connects Naveed’s failings with her hopes for her son, who she fears will mimic his father unless she intervenes. Muneer rejects the patriarchal dynamics often found in Muslim cultures.  

“Father shot another nervous look at the back wall where Nathan was sitting. He turned to me, but before he could say anything, Souhef, now riding the mounting crest of the congregation’s unruly discontent, shouted out: ‘We all know that Bani Israel believes it deserves the best of everything!! They are never satisfied!! They take and take!! That was then and always will be their undoing!!’” 

During the tense service at the Islamic Center, Nathan, Naveed, and Hayat listen as Imam Souhef reads a controversial passage from the Quran and rails against Jewish people. Souhef escalates his insults and anti-Semitic rhetoric, well aware that a Jewish man interested in converting to Islam is present. 

“I wondered what he had to be crying about. If anything, he had only reason to be happy. He was going to be a Muslim. All Souhef had done was to give him reasons—better ones than the one he really had—for becoming one of us. After all, he would no longer be one of Allah’s despised Jews. Which meant he wouldn’t have to suffer under Allah’s curse anymore. It was extraordinary news.” 

As Hayat again observes a private moment between Mina and Nathan, he reveals that Imam Souhef’s khutbah did not affect him as it affected Nathan and his father. Hayat’s fear of hell and immersion in the Quran have transformed his faith from the mystical devotion that Mina taught him. Agrees with the imam’s inflammatory and extremist hatred for Jewish people, Hayat withholds his sympathy from Nathan, who mourns the barriers separating him from his beloved. 

“‘He’ll never be one of us,’ she said quietly. ‘And I’m the only one who doesn’t care. But that doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter that I don’t care. I’m not the one that matters.’ ‘Who matters?’ Father asked, glancing at me again. ‘Everybody else,’ Mina replied.” 

Mina breaks up with Nathan after repeated clashes between their cultural backgrounds. She has realized that her parents and the Pakistani-American community in Milwaukee will reject him. Although striving to live as a modern American woman, Mina cannot deny the more dominant cultural realities that oppose her desire to be with the man she loves. 

“‘Nathan never did anything to you. He was only good to you, to me, to Imran. To this family. As far as you knew, he had a good heart. He had good intentions. He did not deserve to be treated the way he was treated. He did not deserve for you to say those things about him.’ I didn’t know how to respond. I was feeling at once ashamed and defiant. I knew looking away from her would make her think she was right.”

Hayat thrills to be close to Mina again during another bedtime conversation, but he is surprised at her anger about him trying to indoctrinate Imran with his newfound anti-Semitism. For the first time, Hayat rejects Mina’s point of view as she describes Nathan’s positive attributes and how the boy has misconstrued the Quran. Mina again uses the word intention, which she repeats often when describing the purpose of religious practice. 

“I wrote out the message carefully, taking the time to make sure all the letters were legible: 

MINA MARRYING A KAFR STOP HIS NAME IS NATHAN

When I was finished with that, I pulled out the piece of paper with the Karachi address on it and filled out the space for the addressee: 

Hamed Suhail

Dawes Lines Rd 14

Karachi, Pakistan.” 

Hayat goes to the Western Union alone to send a telegram to Mina’s ex-husband Hamed. Hayat betrays Mina and Nathan, motivated partly by his growing intolerance for Jewish people and partly by his jealousy for Mina’s attention. No one will know about this destructive act until many years later, when Hayat confesses to Mina that he sent the telegram that ended her love affair. 

“I looked down at the Quran in my hands, remembering my first Quranic lesson—here in this room—the night my body had come alive in her presence and in the presence of the holy words she taught me to understand. That was the night Mina first told me about the hafiz, the night I’d gone to sleep brimming with hope and well-being, a night I now recalled with sadness. How long ago it seemed. Everything had changed. Mina didn’t love me the way she did back then. And I knew it was all my own doing.” 

As young Hayat comes of age, so comes regret for his mistakes and grief over the passage of time. Although he might have expected to have more time with Mina after her breakup, he learns that he cannot return to the bliss of their initial nightly lessons. Both characters have changed and grown apart after the events of the previous year. 

“Perhaps I was just stunned at the erosion taking place before my eyes—the change in her appearance was so startling that even her parents wouldn’t recognize her at the airport when she picked them up—or maybe there was truly something newly bewitching about her, something at once desperate and alive, a woman who sensed defeat approaching, but whose glow only brightened at the prospect, an incandescence quickened to its brief, brilliant zenith, a prelude to the decline she must have sensed was ahead.” 

As her marriage to Sunil approaches, Mina loses weight and appears unwell, worrying the Shahs. This physical manifestation of her grief marks not only the end of her love story with Nathan but the beginning of a tragic marriage to an abusive man. Her diminishing appearance might also reveal her spiritual strength in greater measure. 

“‘Boy, am I fucking relieved that’s over. What a fucking nightmare.’ ‘What?’ He looked at me, confused. ‘Memorizing that stuff. Like drinking castor oil every day for three years. Jeez-fucking-Louise.’ For a second, what he was saying just didn’t compute. And once I realized he was talking about the Quran, I didn’t know what to say.” 

Hayat is alarmed to meet the surly, teenage Farhaz at Mina and Sunil’s wedding, since he expected the hafiz to be imbued with divine serenity. Farhaz asks about Hayat’s memorization and reveals that he abhorred his own training. Hayat, who has only heard Mina speak reverently about being a hafiz and has undertaken most of his memorization independently, is dumbstruck that Farhaz speaks so derisively about what Hayat had assumed to be a holy undertaking. 

“‘I know you don’t understand why I burned your Quran, but there was a reason. It’s because you’re different. You can’t live life by rules others give you. In that way, you and I are the same. You have to find your own rules. All my life I’ve been running away from their rules, Hayat. All my life. You will be the same. Don’t ask me how I know it, but I do.’” 

Naveed drunkenly reveals the reasons behind his rejection of religion. He despises the oppressive group mentality that marginalizes Jewish people like Nathan and diminishes powerful women like Mina. Naveed also urges Hayat to abandon his dogmatic approach to religion like his father has. 

“Mina shook her head. ‘Remember what I always told you. Intention. That’s all Allah cares about. Not what language you speak.’ ‘But the imam said if it’s not in Arabic then I’m not a hafiz.’ She smiled. ‘Being a hafiz is not what matters. It’s the quality of your faith. Not the name you put on it.’ I didn’t know what to make of what she was saying. She was the one who’d said becoming a hafiz was the greatest thing a person could do. I looked away, dismayed.” 

Hayat is humiliated and ashamed upon learning that he has memorized the Quran in the wrong language, but Mina does not see it that way. She reminds him of the central philosophy that guided her instruction: Closeness with God is the goal of religious practice. Hayat, in his youthful naiveté, sought the title of hafiz without keeping intention central to his memorization.

“Sunil started bringing the gun downstairs to dinner. He laid it by his plate, alongside the silverware. Having it there calmed him, he said. It kept her ‘fast mouth’ in check. If he didn’t like something she said, all he had to do was raise the gun and point it at himself, or—increasingly—at her.” 

Mina meets a series of traumas after her marriage to Sunil. Amidst his escalating violence, abuse, and control, he buys a gun and threatens Mina with it in front of Imran. The reference to her “‘fast mouth’” recalls Muneer’s words early in the novel about Muslim women receiving abuse when they are bold and intelligent like Mina.   

“‘When Chishti was dying,’ she began, ‘he was in pain all over his body. His followers didn’t understand how a man who Allah loved so much could be put through so much pain… Do you know what he told them when they asked him why Allah was making him suffer so?’ ‘What?’ ‘“This is how the divine is choosing to express Himself through me.”’ Her eyes glistened with eagerness to make the point that was—I would later come to see—something like the boiled-down essence of her life.”

Among the many dervishes referenced throughout the novel, Mina most embodies the title American Dervish. As she explains to Hayat on her deathbed, the dervish Chishti has informed her view of suffering, which she does not blame on others or wish away. Mina perceives her life’s tragic circumstances as evidence of God working in her life.