"Choked by a kind of brightness": Travelling Transculturally into Leila Aboulela's Narrative of Faith

Sudanese Leila Aboulela, based in Scotland, one of the most prominent Arab writers in English, places faith and Islam right at the centre of her writing. Shuttling from Khartoum and Cairo to Aberdeen, London, and beyond, her transcultural fiction is a double challenge of Otherness: for proposing religious faith as such as the main theme for fiction to a largely secularized Western audience and, what’s more, for asking them to try to experience the “Islamic logic”. The latter is not hypostatically and a-historically given but is seen to act in her Muslim characters’ everyday life, especially in her female protagonists’, and especially in contexts marked by Islamophobia. In its effort to translate for us the “state of mind and emotions” (in her own words) of Muslim believers and their transnational home-in-faith, without trying to domesticate their foreignness, Aboulela’s narrative acts as a powerful, if uncomfortable at times, transcultural aesthetic experience. As a matter of fact, she has successfully won a third challenge, having made art out of the logic of faith. Discussion is substantiated by a reading of Aboulela’s short story "Something Old, Something New" selectively focussed on those elements in it deemed especially relevant to its transculturality.