The Night of the Mi‘raj
Zoë Ferraris Little, Brown, 357pp, £14.99
The Mi‘raj (as explained in a slightly patronising addendum to Zoë Ferraris’s first novel) is the doctrinal story of a pilgrimage undertaken by the Prophet Muhammad, “both a physical journey and a spiritual climax”, in which he ascends to heaven and meets Allah.
What Ferraris does not mention, perhaps because the ambiguity doesn’t serve her purpose, is that most scholars now read the Mi‘raj simply as a description of the Prophet’s dream. It is hard to feel this allusion complements the distinctly carnal story of Nayir, an Iranian desert guide hired to find a 16-year-old heiress who has gone missing weeks before her wedding. His investigation forces him to work closely with an attractive female pathologist, and as it progresses he finds himself torn between his deeply held religious convictions and a new sense of their restrictiveness.
The detective story grates against the novel’s subtler, more interesting explorations of sexual and religious repression. Ferraris lurches too easily into melodrama or hyperbole, but she has a lucid eye for cultural pressures, and the sympathy she extends to her (often fearsomely devout) characters makes this both a likeable novel and a timely one, despite its aesthetic failings.
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