Ayad Akhtar: Dervish

Hayat Shah Dept: In American Dervish , author Ayad Akhtar, who is also an actor, playwright and screenwriter, has captured a coming-of-age tale from a perspective to which Western readers have too little exposure that of a Muslim boy coming to grips with his place and his faith in American society, according to The Star. Akhtar's skill as both a screenwriter and playwright contributes to the lush visual presentation and the graceful writing in this book. Akhtar co-wrote and starred in The War Within , a 2005 drama about a Pakistani engineering student suspected of terrorism that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Akhtar has also written the stage plays Disgraced and The Invisible Hand . In American Dervish , Akhtar slips easily inside the mind and body of a pre-adolescent and then adolescent boy. Hayat's love and admiration for Mina is bound inextricably to his sexuality, as it awakens without guidance or healthy discussion. But the central themes of the novel revolve around the role of women in Muslim society and the bigotry and racism some of the more fundamental characters in the book display toward Jews and she was the most beautiful, confident and magnetic woman Hayat Shah had ever seen: and when Mina Ali, his honorary aunt, came to live with the Shah family in their Milwaukee home, it was t of a lifelong love affair. Akhtar has set his first novel in his own hometown, in the early 1980s. The core of the narrative takes place two decades before 9/11, but Akhtar deftly explores the tensions that already exist between the desires of immigrant Muslims for the secular lifestyle they both fear and admire, and the tenants of a religion that is, as Hayat is repeatedly told by his mother, policed largely by Muslim men. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.