Ensouling Agential Praxis in A Secular World: A Sufi Spiritual Turn in Leila Aboulela’s the Kindness of Enemies

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores Leila Aboulela’s novel, The Kindness of Enemies (2015), in light of its protagonist’s attempt to resolve her predicament of belonging through constructing an agential praxis oriented by Sufism. Aboulela crafts her story in two narratives: the first one is set in present day Britain and thematizes Natasha Wilson Hussein’s quest for identity in a largely Islamophobic environment, whereas the second narrative tells the history of Shamil, the 19th century Sufi leader, who lived in a period when the word ”jihad” had a less a stigmatized meaning. Aboulela offers a revisionist reading of history by juxtaposing Islam and political resistance in non-fundamentalist terms but as a dialectic, which through its manifestation of the principles of Sufism synthesizes in challenging and resisting imperial oppression. Relying on a postsecular perspective, this paper highlights how Aboulela presents Sufism as a galvanizing force of agency through which her female migrants resist and overcome marginality and alienation. I argue that Aboulela’s novel maps out a turn toward spiritual traditions of Islam as transformative and liberating forces which endows her characters with a spiritual spatial horizon to ensoul the concept of agency, and by extension cultivate critical grounds from which hegemonic secular formations can be open to analysis from spiritually oriented praxes.