The Taqwacores

Novels are ideal vehicles for learning and teaching about the situation ofmodern Islam. The narrative form facilitates the reader’s understanding thatthe pressing questions of contemporary religion are ones faced by humanactors in their individual day-to-day lives and cannot (and should not) be generalizedto all believers in a given faith everywhere. My own favorite in manyyears of teaching Islam in the context of an introductory course on “western”religions has been Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure (originallypublished in French [1962; English translation 1963]), which broachesall of the fundamental tensions of modernity in the African and French contexts.But that book is now distant in time and cultural space, especially foryoung North American audiences, and stands only, I fear, as a historical portraitof the debate. Kane’s work remains helpful in understanding how mattersgot to where they are today, but perhaps less so for engaging its readersin cultural debates immediately relevant to their lives ...