ABSTRACT This article argues that Leila Aboulela’s Minaret offers a Sufi feminist theological reformulation of the role that hospitality rituals play in the life of the novel’s diasporic protagonist. Najwa’s childhood recollections memorialize secular hospitality practices of caregiving and almsgiving in which she and her mother engaged in their native Sudan and which foreground the catalytic role of maids in such practices. After her mother’s death in London, Najwa joins a community of women in the Regent’s Park Mosque, who reacquaint her with her Muslim faith through Sufi teachings that resituate these hospitality rites as ones performed by God towards believers. Through these rituals, Najwa embraces the life of a hijabi maid. Performing housework as a ritualistic form of hospitality, Najwa transposes her nostalgic memories of home into a diasporic, theological form of belonging that challenges traditional notions of fixed origins and advances the interplay between physical displacement and spiritual belonging.
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