THE first thing you should know about American Dervish is that it isn’t a 9/11 novel. The book’s title and author Ayad Akhtar’s bio (American Muslim of Pakistani descent, living in New York City) certainly conspire to make it appear so, which means you would be forgiven for thinking twice about plucking it off a shelf if, like myself, you’ve had too much of this genre.

But soldier on. A perusal of the novel’s opening chapter reassures immediately, since you find that American Dervish isn’t set in post-9/11 America at all. It’s set in the 1980’s when being Muslim in America is considered a harmless quirk as opposed to a choice of great political significance. And though it does dissect the challenges of reconciling differing concepts of identity, faith and community in the US much like your quintessential 9/11 novel, all this is secondary to a more easily digestible sketch of a family in crisis.

The novel’s first chapter, set in 1990, opens with protagonist Hayat Shah decisively biting into a pork sausage — an act of defiance that makes him feel both “brave and ridiculous”. The significance accorded to this incident, his attraction to a Jewish classmate and his recounting of an especially incendiary Islamic history lecture tell us that Hayat is struggling with some unresolved issues with religion. A timely telephone call from his mother confirms that a particular incident in the past is cause for his turbulent emotions. The rest of the novel is one big flashback narrated by Hayat to his love interest, Rachel.

We learn that that Hayat, living in Milwaukee in the 1980’s, has to deal with more angst than most adolescents. Apart from the general difficulties of being a young Muslim living in the mid-West, Hayat has to tread carefully at home. His quarrelling parents, Muneer and Naveed, treat him more like a personal therapist than a child and Hayat is often used as a pawn in the couple’s marital disputes. Things only begin to look up for the Shahs when Mina, Muneer’s childhood friend from Karachi, comes to stay with them after an ugly divorce renders her a social liability in Pakistan.

A deeply spiritual and intuitive person, Mina’s presence soothes the Shah family’s jagged nerves. She often serves as a peace maker and go-between for Hayat’s parents, and initiates Hayat into the practice of Islam. Hayat quickly becomes infatuated by Mina and soon enough, everything in his impressionable life is overshadowed by two obsessions: currying Mina’s favour and memorising the Quran. When Mina inevitably falls for Naveed’s Jewish colleague Nathan, Hayat take it upon himself to dismantle this sacrilegious union with sad consequences for all involved.

There’s a lot going on in American Dervish. The novel works best, however, when it reminds us that relying too heavily on a single belief system or personal narrative to divine life’s meaning dismantles one’s capacity for sound and objective judgment. A perfect example of this is Hayat’s destructive and self-serving meddling in Mina and Nathan’s affairs. Swept away by religious fervour, the usually sensitive and intelligent boy shrugs off any possibility that his acts are questionable. Taking this concept a step further, the novel also illustrates a truth most of us are uncomfortably familiar with today — if you claim religion is what informs your morality you become virtually irreproachable. And so it is with Hayat. His behaviour is backed up, albeit tenuously, by a few lines in the Quran, meaning that to admonish him would be to question the faith. This is an unthinkable idea and so the carnage he creates is overlooked, glossed over and even justified.

Akhtar’s depiction of a family in crisis is as competent as his commentary on the dark side of belief. The Shah family’s dinner-time conversations are painfully stilted and filled with utterly believable snipes, jibes and deflections, giving us full access to each character’s neurosis. Muneer and Naveed are the stars here, with her playing the perfect passive-aggressive victim to his weary aggressor. These exchanges stand out because they could have been played out anywhere, in any household across the world, temporarily freeing the novel from its troubled-Muslims-in-America pigeonhole. This unhappy family stuff is a wise move on Akhtar’s part also because any sympathy we feel for Hayat takes some of the sting out of his later foolishness.

American Dervish is less successful when it steps outside the confines of family and into the wider world. The novel’s lesser characters are predictable and shallow. Their shabby dimensions make it far too obvious that they’re only present to facilitate plot movement. The Chathas and other ultra-orthodox members of the local Muslim community, who I suppose are meant to be the novel’s villains, are too uniformly self-righteous to be seriously despised and Mina’s parents are so mercenary it’s comical. One wonders whether this could have been avoided if we weren’t looking at everything through a distracted teenager’s eyes, but either way a little more nuance would have made Hayat’s world, and consequently his story, more plausible.

These disappointments aside, one aspect of the novel must be lauded: Akhtar’s unapologetic depiction of the suspicion and mistrust that plagues Muslim-Jewish interaction. Anti-Semitism isn’t a subject most writers broach willingly or well, but Akhtar navigates this territory with commendable skill. In Hayat’s case, Akhtar squarely lays the blame for his behaviour towards Nathan where it belongs: crude interpretations of the Quran. It’s obvious to the reader that without religion to sanction his actions, Hayat’s dislike for Nathan would have dissipated quickly and saved everyone much heartache. In a particularly important passage, Hayat lectures a young boy on how Jews are hated by God, a message drilled into many unfortunate Muslim youth today. This may make for uncomfortable reading, but witnessing this skewed logic come to life on paper is important and instructive.

That said, at the novel’s close a lingering dissatisfaction remains. Although Hayat seems to have drawn some lessons from his brief dalliance with religion he hasn’t embraced moderation. You get the sense that he’s still a blank canvas, eager for anyone from an overzealous college professor to a Jewish co-ed to colour him in. Akhtar has left us dangling and a sequel may be in the offing — but whether we would care to read another book about Hayat is difficult to ascertain.

American Dervish (NOVEL) By Ayad Akhtar Little, Brown and Company, US ISBN 0316183318 368pp. Rs1,395