When shots ring out on the Grand Trunk Road in the fictional Pakistani city of Zamara, Nargis’s life begins to crumble around her. Soon her husband—and fellow architect—is dead and, under threat from a powerful military intelligence officer, she fears that a long-hidden truth about her past will be exposed. For weeks someone has been broadcasting people’s secrets from the minaret of the local … mosque, and, in a country where even the accusation of blasphemy is a currency to be bartered, the mysterious broadcasts have struck fear in Christians and Muslims alike. A revelatory portrait of the human spirit, in The Golden Legend, Nadeem Aslam gives us a novel of Pakistan’s past and present—a story of corruption and resilience, of love and terror, and of the disguises that are sometimes necessary for survival.
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I can’t help but compare this novel–favorably–to Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a much awaited book that I found, in the end, disappointing. Both touch on the hot button issue of Kashmir, and both revolve around the cruel effects of religious fanaticism, especially when combined with the government in power. But in this beautifully written novel, Aslam succeeds in giving us characters that are both more believable and more conflicted.
Nargis and Massud are middle-aged architects living in the fictional Pakistani city of Zamara. They have taken Helen, the bright daughter of a Christian servant, Lilly, under their wing. Helen’s mother, Grace, was murdered by a man who is about to be released from prison. While they are engaged in moving books from a library, they witness an assassination attempt on an American diplomat (or is he a CIA agent?), and, tragically, Massud is struck and killed by a stray bullet. He dies in Nargis’s arms, clutching a book written by his uncle–a book that will figure symbolically as the novel progresses. The government is pressuring Nargis and the other victims’ survivors to forgive the American who killed them in exchange of a large cash payment. Under Sharia law, if they make statements of forgiveness, the shooter will be released from prison–and the government can exact rewards and favors from the US in return. Nargis refuses, kicking off a chain of increasingly brutal events.
In a country that we tend to think of as so absolutely Muslim, more complicated relationships exist. Although Nargis married and has lived as a Muslim, we learn that she was born a Christian and that her name was Margaret. She never converted, just accepted a mistake in her name made at school because it made life easier; not even Massud knew the truth. As the story progresses, we learn more about the uncle and sister that she left behind. And Nargis is not the only one with secrets: Lilly, a Christian, is engaged in an affair with the widowed daughter of the local imam. Her husband’s brother and his cohorts, radical Islamists who have taken control of the mosque, insist that Aysha, considered a martyr’s wife, must never remarry, and they have begun broadcasting citizens’ secrets from the minaret, stirring up hatred and violence in the community that lead to further tragedies.
Enter a young man named Imran, a Kashmiri who has fled from an ISIS training camp. By chance, he befriends Nargis and Helen, and after the crowd turns on the women, the three of them help each other to survive. Their story, and other small acts of kindness, bring occasional rays of hope into the novel–hope that fear, hatred, and fanaticism can be overcome, that people can see what they share beyond their superficial differences and learn to respect, like, and even love one another. In the midst of so much anger and horror–both in the book and in our current world–we would do well to remember this. But this is no happily-ever-after fantasy: Aslam brings the ugly truth to his pages. As in real life, some prosper, some do not, and some simply are never heard from again.
The Golden Legend is an important novel that hopefully more Americans will want to read. It is beautiful. It is horrifying. It is hopeful. It reminds us that, despite everything, we must persist.