By Ron Charles,
a Book World senior editor
Wednesday, May 18, 2005; C04

MAPS FOR LOST LOVERS

By Nadeem Aslam

Knopf. 379 pp. $25

Nadeem Aslam is either very brave or very naive. If he hadn't spent more than a decade writing this devastating anti-Islamic novel, it would look like a reckless act. Presumably he knows what he's doing -- and doesn't mind generating a wave of ill-will from Muslims. "Maps for Lost Lovers" is every faith-culture's worst nightmare. After all, the frontal attack by a prejudiced outsider is relatively easy to repel; even blows from a bitter apostate often inspire only a sense of sanctified victimization. But Aslam, a Pakistani-born writer who lives in England, speaks in the quiet, sympathetic voice of an insider as he portrays the physical and psychological violence committed in the name of God.

"Maps for Lost Lovers" takes place in a town outside London where Pakistani immigrants (some legal, some not) live in a state of moral panic amid a culture they abhor but in an economy they need. Parents believe that government authorities stand ready to expel them simply for protecting their children from depraved ideas about sexual expression, women's liberation and personal freedom. They practice the kind of anxious orthodoxy that Western societies try to temper, but in a community that's obsessed with traditional honor, any moves toward assimilation only drive these devout Muslims into deeper, more destructive radicalism. "What mattered was not what you yourself knew to have actually happened," Aslam writes, "but what other people thought had happened."

At the center of this community stands Shamas, a 64-year-old poet who works for the Community Relations Council. As a liaison between the local government and the Pakistani community, he moves gingerly between two worlds that can't touch each other without a shudder. Both sides scream their cases, which the author portrays as a battle between the liberal West and a fearful, misogynist religion. What peace can develop, the novel asks, between a theology obsessed with spiritual and bodily purity and an ideology just as devoted to consumer and bodily freedom?

Shamas investigates acts of racial violence and intimidation, he shepherds immigrants through the labyrinth of legal paperwork, and, when possible, he helps Muslims understand that they may not always pursue the practices of their homeland in this foreign place. Though a closet atheist, Shamas knows the intricacies of Islam well, and he fully appreciates the inexorable power that religion can exercise.

That knowledge has left him in a shadow of grief for the five months since the disappearance of his younger brother, Jugnu, a well-traveled lepidopterist. He and his twice-divorced girlfriend, Chanda, had lived happily next door, their open cohabitation scandalizing the neighborhood. Nevertheless, friends and family found it impossible to resist Jugnu's delight in the natural world. It was Jugnu who awakened Shamas to the bursting fecundity of nature, recalled throughout the novel in passages of gorgeous sensuality.

"Maps for Lost Lovers" is ostensibly a murder mystery, but that suggests more action and intrigue than ever develops. There's really no mystery about the crime. After all, Chanda was living in sin, degrading herself and humiliating her family; what else could her pious brothers do but kill her and her lover? The British police investigate this "honor killing," but all that activity seems incidental, off on the edges of the story, which is primarily a series of searching descriptions about the way various characters negotiate the competing demands of faith, honor and sexuality.

But Aslam also punctuates these deliberations with an encyclopedia of horrors that he suggests stem directly from the religious culture of this community: unruly girls beaten to death by respected imams, young boys raped by honored clerics, defiant women ruined by vicious gossip, frustrated men demoralized by their lapses, helpless wives divorced on a whim by drunken husbands, and all of them reduced to a state of moral idiocy in which every abuse must be ignored or excused to protect Islam from outside criticism. Even Shamas, who rejects traditional Islamic mores as restrictive, finds himself caught in a web of sexual guilt that threatens to destroy him and those he cares about.

The most affecting character is Shamas's devout wife, Kaukab, who gradually becomes the focus of the novel. She seems at first like the mother from a Muslim version of "The Glass Menagerie," both comic and monstrous as she drives her beloved children away with grating attention to their marital and spiritual prospects. What makes this character work -- keeping it from falling into the kind of brutal satire that Jonathan Franzen exposed his mother to in "The Corrections" -- is Aslam's deep sympathy for Kaukab's devotion. "Her children were all she had," he writes, "but she herself was only a part of their lives, a very small part, it has become increasingly clear to her over the past few years." She loves Islam sincerely; her prayers are an anchor in a dispiriting world. Her faith gives her life meaning and dimension, but it also makes her complicit in ghastly abuses such as the murders of her brother-in-law and his girlfriend. Her frustrated children try to make her see this in one of the novel's most wrenching scenes, which lapses, unfortunately, into a kind of shrill lecture on the evils of Islam.

Is this a fair and balanced portrayal? Of course not, but it does powerfully dramatize the perversions that can arise from an obsession with female purity. Whether that obsession is as universal or destructive in Muslim communities as Aslam implies is debatable. This isn't a work of sociology or cultural studies, but inevitably Aslam's beautifully written novel will inflame the impressions of an interested but largely uninformed Western audience. That's a shame because "Maps for Lost Lovers" makes more broadly applicable claims about the injuries inflicted by the devout on themselves and those they love. The real calamity in this story doesn't arise from the Koran but from a sense of religious certainty -- and that theme respects no ecclesiastical boundaries.