
Longing and Belonging: A Review of Sadi Muktadir’s Land of No Regrets
“ وَلَا تَنسَ نَصِيبَكَ مِنَ ٱلدُّنْيا …”
…and do not forget your share of this world
Sadi Muktadir’s sometimes sombre, sometimes mischievous, but always profound debut novel Land of No Regrets begins with a snippet of Arabic text on its dedication page. I opened the Quran for this one, and sure enough, there it was. This passage in Arabic comes from Surah Qasas (“The Story”). The full verse or ayah reads:
Seek the abode of the Hereafter by means of what Allah
has given you, while not forgetting your share of this world.
[emphasis added]
Be good [to others] just as Allah has been good to you, and
do not try to cause corruption in the land. Indeed Allah
does not like the agents of corruption. (Surah 28: Verse 77)
The premise for Land of No Regrets is decidedly creative and ambitious. Set in the contemporary present, we follow young Nabil as he is torn from his life at a public middle school in Scarborough, Toronto, and sent to a strict, isolated Islamic boarding school (or madrasa) in rural Ontario.
The story swiftly presents an ensemble of compelling characters. There are headmasters so strict and violent in their imposition of control and conformity that they are dubbed Heart Attack One, Two, and Three (“The Three Heart Attacks were aptly named because of their propensity to instill exactly that upon sight. Seeing one meant an instant heart attack, out of fear for what you were about to endure”). The boys at the boarding school are a motley crew who Nabil divides into three groups: the religious kids (“pious ... respectful … quiet … content with the first answer they were given”), the troublemakers (“always wildin’ … they wanted to see something break … to prove that they were alive and could make a difference”), and the ones caught in the middle (“these kids asked too many questions”). Parents of the students are occasionally present in shadowy flashbacks but are mostly conspicuous in their absence. There is also a silent but omnipresent resident janitor, Sharmil Bhai. A female perspective is cleverly incorporated by the boys’ discovery of a diary belonging to Cynthia, a girl who lived in the same building when it was a Catholic boarding school in the 1970s.
Set against this backdrop of varied characters, the book spotlights Nabil, a curious, questioning kid caught in the middle. Nabil befriends Maaz, Nawaaz, and Farid, and each is given voice with a chapter from their point of view. The prologue, a hauntingly beautiful snapshot of the four friends on a joyride, instills a sense of impending doom that runs throughout the novel—shit is about to go down.
Because Muslims have been so stereotyped and maligned and oppressed and abused, leading to literal life and death scenarios, to wars and the destruction of countries and communities, most Muslims understandably seek literature that cheers us in some way, that acts as a sort of antidote, rather than an examination or interrogation of our communities. What I mean is that most Muslims want Muslim artists to serve as cultural cheerleaders, not cultural investigators. If nowhere else, then at least on the page, we want to be made shiny and whole.
It would have been easy to provide us with a facile portrait of young Muslim boys in a boarding school madrasa—a superficial account that would not have us reckon with difficult truths. Instead, in a bold and daring piece of writing from a gifted writer, Muktadir decides to give us a gut punch.
Few writers would dare to tackle the perils and pitfalls of Islamic schools imparting religious orthodoxy via violence upon adolescents, but Muktadir dives head-first into the challenge. Muktadir’s short stories have appeared in The Humber Literary Review, Blank Spaces, The New Quarterly, Ricepaper, and more. He is a two-time finalist for the Thomas Morton Prize from The Ex-Puritan (now known as the Austin Clarke Prize) and twice shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for best short fiction. He is also an editor at Joyland. Like his protagonist, Muktadir grew up in Scarborough, and spent some time in an after-school madrasa during his adolescence. In lyrical, literary prose juxtaposed with the use of Toronto slang in the boys’ dialogue, Muktadir reveals himself as more than well-placed to wrestle with the themes of toxic masculinity, religious orthodoxy, and the push and pull of identity, race, and belonging. This is his first novel.
Few writers would dare to tackle the perils and pitfalls of Islamic schools imparting religious orthodoxy via violence upon adolescents, but Muktadir dives head-first into the challenge.
How to review a book that is part suspenseful narrative of the fate of four young boys trapped in a madrasa in rural Ontario, and part theological grappling with orthodoxy and the institution(s) of religion? A large part of the novel revolves around the question of how the boys will escape the environment in which they do not feel they belong. Alongside this, Muktadir includes pages upon pages of Nabil’s pontification on what is haraam and why, as he grapples with the way things have always been done.
The book continually shifts tenses, moving between past and present. We know from the prologue that Nabil is looking back on his time at Al Haque and recounting for the reader the shit that went down. Where the past Nabil ends and where the future Nabil begins is always up in the air.
Muktadir situates Nabil’s sense of dislocation within his parents’ experience of racism (and inferred Islamophobia) in Canada. Early on, Nabil recounts his mother’s first encounter with Canadian police:
So on her second night in the country, together with my father in a decrepit basement apartment, she experienced a violent armed robbery by two masked men who broke in while they were sleeping, cursing and shouting and taking absolutely nothing. Disappointed to find absolutely nothing. Afterwards, the police humiliated them, thundering all over their 200 square feet in muddy shoes, turning things over with batons and rolling their eyes while my father tried to make himself understood. Where was the better life?
Sadly, nothing about this encounter is atypical in how Canadian police routinely treat brown and Black bodies, and religious minorities. For members of racialized communities, encounters with the official apparatus of the state are uncomfortable at best, and fatal at worst. Though Nabil is an adolescent obsessed with Pokémon, Chrono Trigger, and other video games, he is mature and sensitive enough to comprehend his parents’ humiliation and alienation in their new country, and that their subsequent decision to send him to a religious school is a topic he cannot broach:
Even at that age, I knew I couldn’t speak to [my father]. There were too many years and lands between us—he leaned on faith, while I leaned on Marle’s love for Crono, which crossed the years and lands between them. It would be years before I’d remember how full of fear my father was, justified though it might have been. After all, how could I have known? When was the last time an immigrant parent told their child what they’d really been through?
Muktadir masterfully portrays not just Nabil’s disconnect, but also the disconnect that his friends at the madrasa contend with, not only from their own parents but also from the wider (white) world around them. Nawaaz gives voice to the sense of outsiderness that young, brown, Muslim boys growing up in Canada feel:
But I know it’s never going to be a phone call to the cops, or telling the teachers or our parents, that would ever solve all the wrong shit around us and see our hope turn into something real. If we’re ever going to end that nasty, bully sick-violent shit around us and see our hope actually grow into something, I’m going to need to protect it with nasty, bully sick-violent shit too.
Muktadir masterfully portrays not just Nabil’s disconnect, but also the disconnect that his friends at the madrasa contend with, not only from their own parents but also from the wider (white) world around them.
In this passage and elsewhere, Land of No Regrets focuses on the idea that in order to survive the abuse, the young boys must become villains themselves. They beat up the other boys, escape the school to go on late-night jaunts to the mall, and much more:
What the Three Heart Attacks did behind closed doors was nothing compared to what we could do. And I was just as guilty—I participated. But only part of me feels remorse. Violence motivated, and we would much rather be villains than victims. Villains survived longer.
The idea of how villains are made and the meaning of good and bad are questions that Muktadir explores through the boys’ doubt, rebellion, and violence. However, this book isn’t an assault on religion per se, rather it’s an indictment of how religious dogma is disseminated. The book is also a searing critique of how the wider (white) western world does not care for its brown, Muslim boys. These middle-school boys have nowhere to turn: not to the insular Muslim community that judges and literally flogs its questioners, nor the broader, outside “West” where “[e]very flaw and fault [becomes] a characteristic of our people.”
For example, Nabil and the boys have “mixed feelings” when they discover that the province recommends an exercise program at Al Haque academy. On the one hand, the province’s oversight over their school could help abolish the violence, but on the other hand, this is the same province that “surveils” its racialized and Muslim communities and
fuck[s] up Indigenous lands … police[s] refugees … support[s] a bill to surveil Canadians. That [same] bill … tell[s] an angry Quebec motherfucker, “Oh shit, we have to kill the Muslims. They’re taking over if our government says they’re taking over, so we have to surveil them. They must be up to evil shit if they warrant surveillance.” He’d go on to kill six inside a mosque. And then another animal would put that Quebecker’s name on a gun and kill fifty-one others in New Zealand. They could find you in the middle of the woods and force you to exercise, monitor your every movement, log your every action online, but they wouldn’t do the same for someone with a Dutch last name who’d go on to drive over a family in a quiet Ontario city. Can’t win. (Emphasis added)
Muktadir shows readers the contemporary reality of growing up Muslim in post-9/11 Canada. That these boys belong nowhere and can count on no one is a recurring reality at the heart of the tragedy in this book. Who can these boys turn to? Not their racist, Islamophobic states. Not their traumatized, defeated parents. Not their religious communities that reward curiosity with cruelty. The despair and loneliness they feel from being trapped inside an Islamic boarding school is palpable. Closer to the end of the novel, Maaz poignantly asks, “Where would we even go? There’s nowhere for us to go. We have nowhere.” Nabil and his friends are not immigrants themselves. They are the children of immigrants; second gen-ers who, in theory, should be more or less happily settled in their new country and cultures; they are the vaunted “Canadian-born” for whom all the sacrifices have been made—but where is their promised land?
A glimmer of hope presents itself in how the boys connect with a long-lost diary of a former pupil that they find while snooping through a storage room. Cynthia’s diary is a leftover remnant from when the facility was a Catholic boarding school for girls. In Cynthia, the boys find a kindred spirit—someone who equally questions the logic of what she is being fed. “Women are too weak to resist Satan, but they’re strong enough to convince Adam … Who’s really weak and who’s really strong?” she asks.
Cynthia’s questions mirror the ones the boys have in an achingly funny scene where Maulana Yusuf regales the boys with the “riches” awaiting them in the afterlife, specifically the houris (beautiful creatures promised as a reward to pious men). Then and there, Nabil decides: “[i]f we were finally getting answers, I would venture a question. That’s all answers ever did for me. Led me to more questions.” And so, with sincerity and curiosity, Nabil asks his question, “What about the women?” This scene and Nabil’s question echo a passage in Cynthia’s diary, wherein she gets into trouble for asking why Mary Magdalene wasn’t allowed to be an Apostle. More than a little afraid about the similarities in their personalities and predicaments, Farid asks the boys, “So, [Cynthia’s] learning, but she wishes she could ask questions about some of the stuff that seems more sus?”
That the boys feel a connection with Cynthia, past the race, gender, and generational divide, is simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking. As the diary progresses, the boys (and the reader) discover that Cynthia has fallen in love with a girl. Her diary, a series of letters addressed to her baby brother, Mark, is her attempt to explain her doubts about Catholicism to a future, older Mark:
Isn’t there a better way? I’m still learning I guess, and I want you to know that it’s okay if you’re confused too. And if you’re still learning and asking questions and stuff. If you find yourself out of place in a place, question, fight and at least look for a person who makes you feel like you’re not out of place.
Much like the exhortation in the Quran that begins this book, the words in Cynthia’s journal provide a reminder to the boys “that there [is] more to life than the afterlife.” Land of No Regrets posits that the afterlife is not the only life worth living and dying for, that there’s the here and now of joy, friendship, laughter, and connection; the novel poignantly exhorts and reminds us (Muslims) not to neglect them.
But it’s not quite that easy for the boys to carve out a space for themselves. In a touching moment, Maaz announces that they belong with each other:
“We fit in exactly here,” Maaz said, using his finger to gesture at the few feet separating us. “Right here. Me, you, Nawaaz and Farid. We fit in with each other.”
Heartrending as it is, the boys are both saved and doomed by their friendship. Nabil hopes that “One day, we can stretch our faith and our country and our communities just a tiny bit, to be able to fit me, Farid, Nawaaz and Maaz into all your grand plans and accept us for who we are.” Land of No Regrets is a haunting illustration of how masculinity centred on violence does not embolden the boys, but rather breaks them piecemeal.
Land of No Regrets is a haunting illustration of how masculinity centred on violence does not embolden the boys, but rather breaks them piecemeal.
Muktadir’s novel is part of a tiny but growing vanguard of literature by writers from Muslim backgrounds that incorporate and grapple with Islamic theology as part of the narrative itself. While there are likely many more, in recently published writing I am familiar with two memoirs and one other work of fiction: Sumaiya Matin’s The Shaytan Bride (a memoir of a young Muslim woman who resists a forced marriage); Lamya H.’s Hijab Butch Blues (a memoir of a non-binary, queer Muslim who argues for their place within Islam); and Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us (a portrait of a devout Shia Muslim family and their “wayward” son). All four of these bold, beautiful books challenge the way Islamic religious doctrine has been presented and/or disseminated. They each argue (plead, even) for inclusive and loving interpretation(s) and practice(s): they posit that things need not be done the way they always have. In their own unique and stellar ways, these works of art, with Muktadir’s as the most recent addition, ignite and inspire us all towards better futures and better selves.