Tahmima Anam's "The Good Muslim"

Thirteen. Her broken wishbone of a country was thirteen years old. Didn’t sound like very long, but in that time the nation had rolled and unrolled tanks from its streets. In its infancy, it had started cannibalising itself, killing the tribals in the south, drowning villages for dams, razing the ancient trees… A fast-acting country: quick to anger, quick to self-destruct.”That is Maya’s Bangladesh for you—Maya, the spirited, feminist, idealistic heroine of Tahmima Anam’s second book, The Good Muslim.Contrary to its title, the central aspect of the book is not religion. Rather, it is the lives of people intertwined with the life and birth of their nation, their courses moulded by the vicissitudes of a country taking shape.That country is seen chiefly through the rebellious, angry eyes of Maya—Maya, the dotctor, the freedom fighter, the column writer, the dismisser of religion, the woman who leaves her home in Dhaka and moves to the countryside up north, to return seven years later. And that is where the story begins.‘The Good Muslim’, the second book in Tahmima Anam’s projected trilogy, probes war-wounds with the precision and light handedness of a medical practitioner. It talks about scars that are embedded deeper than is possible to heal, scars that envelop every other family in Bangladesh. Even as all the while, voices unflinchingly, soothingly sermonise in the background to ‘forgive andforget’.Maya, having lost her father at an early age, and along with her brother, been brought up be her ‘Amoo’ Rehana, cannot understand her brother’s distant, withdrawn behaviour when he comes home from the war of 1971, a hero lauded and embraced by none other than Sheikh Mujib himself—‘the father of the Bangla nation’. She cannot understand why, despite all her attempts, he would not tell him about his experiences at war, why he would not spill out his heart before her. And later, she cannot understand what it is that slowly transforms her guitar-playing, university debating champion brother into ‘mowlana’, who becomes the ‘Huzoor’ holding sermons on the first floor of their house.It is easy, before reading the book through, to think of it as yet another tale of liberal-Muslim-turned-radical. But the difference here lies in the way that Anam explores this world—around the seams and inside out. The difference lies in Maya’s realisation of what it is that her brother sought and found: not revenge but forgiveness—forgiveness from an Almighty, all forgiving God,for his guilt, for the secret crime committed by him, that would haunt him to his grave.The book has some brilliant lines that tug at you somewhere inside. Such as the infinite questions in the mind of the little Zaid, Maya’s nephew who, left alone by his distant father after his mother’s death, learns all sorts of languages from the visiting Jamaats—French, German, Spanish.“I always ask them to teach me three things. Hello and goodbye, peace on earth, and why. They don’t like to teach why. I get it out of them. Why why why…” The charred book that graces the cover seems to stand for both the nation and the people, badly charred at the edges, but with a centre, a soul still remaining, each trying in their own way, to be good. To be a ‘good’ Muslim.