This Sunday, as part of our Bookshelf series on notable women writers, we step into the richly textured world of Leila Aboulela, the Sudanese-born novelist who has carved a space for Islamic spirituality in contemporary literature.
In a publishing world that often seeks to dissect Islam through the lens of conflict or repression, Aboulela writes from the inside, with the quiet authority of someone who lives it.
Aboulela was born in Cairo in 1964 to a Sudanese father and an Egyptian mother but was taken to Khartoum at six weeks old. Sudan was home, but the Cairo of her mother’s family, bustling streets and legendary cinemas was a second rhythm in her childhood.
Her father, a well-connected Sudanese businessman, counted among his relatives the poet Hassan Awad Aboulela. Her mother was Sudan’s first female demographer, a statistician by profession, and a breaker of ceilings by nature.
A daughter of intellect and lineage, Aboulela grew up between numbers and poetry, privilege and restraint. She attended the Khartoum American School—where she was one of the few Sudanese pupils in a sea of expatriates—and later, a Catholic private school run by nuns. Islam was ever-present, but so was English, foreignness, and an education that seemed to exist in contrast to the world outside.
Aboulela’s love for books came early, but it was not Arab literature that first called her. Her father gave her a box set of Enid Blyton–so she read about fair-haired girls in English boarding schools, places so distant they might as well have been fairy tales. Her mother read Naguib Mahfouz at home, but Aboulela wouldn’t return to Arabic fiction until adulthood. Instead, she read Austen and the Brontës, eventually finding herself in the pages of Jean Rhys and Anita Desai—women who, like her, wrote about exile, about a world that felt neither fully home nor entirely foreign.
By 1985, Aboulela had earned a degree in Economics from the University of Khartoum. Later, she moved to Britain to complete a Master’s in Statistics at the London School of Economics. When she married, it was to a Sudanese-British man, an oil engineer whose work took them to Aberdeen, Scotland. And it was in Aberdeen—cold, distant, insular Aberdeen—that she began to write.
It was not a choice. It was survival. “I was lonely,” Aboulela would later say, “and homesick in a way that I didn’t expect.” She had left behind Khartoum’s noisy, close-knit world for a city where, in winter, the sky darkened in the afternoon and where she was an anomaly—a Muslim woman, a mother, a foreigner in a place that barely registered her. She needed to make sense of it. Writing was the only way.
Aboulela began with short stories. Then came The Translator (1999), a novel shaped by her own experience—a Sudanese woman adrift in a cold northern city, her faith the only anchor. It was quiet, introspective, full of the tension of migration and longing, and it caught the right people’s attention. The New York Times called it a Notable Book of the Year, and publishers took notice.
Her second novel, Minaret (2005), was sharper and more daring. It followed Najwa, a woman of privilege whose world collapsed after political upheaval in Sudan. Forced into exile in London, she finds solace in Islam, not through force or oppression, but by choice—a choice that Western readers, accustomed to narratives of Muslim women as victims, often find disorienting.
“I wanted to write a story where the hijab was not a symbol of oppression,” Aboulela explained. “Where faith was something that gave, rather than took away.”
Excerpt from Minaret (2005):
“I’ve come down in the world. I’ve slid to a place where the ceiling is low, and there isn’t much room for me to move. Most of the time, I’m good. I accepted my sentence and did not brood or look back. But sometimes, a shift makes me remember. Routine is ruffled, and a new start makes me suddenly conscious of what I’ve become.”
Faith has always been her subject, though not in the way most expect. It is not the political Islam of headlines but the Islam of the heart—the Islam of prayer beads slipping between fingers, the quiet peace that fasting brings, and the deep spiritual yearning that echoes through her work. She is a Sufi at heart, though she is not one for labels. “We all have an ache,” she has said, “but we do not always know where it leads us.” Sufism, with its poetry, longing, and insistence that God is love, became her answer.
Aboulela has never been a polemicist. Hers is not the writing of rebellion but of belief. This, she knows, is subversive in itself. “In the West,” she once observed, “they expect Muslims to be writing about oppression, to be lamenting their position, to be fighting against faith. But what if faith is where we find peace?”
Her later novels, Lyrics Alley (2010), The Kindness of Enemies (2015), and Bird Summons (2019), expanded her range, but always, at the core, was this search for a home—not just a physical home, but a spiritual one. In Bird Summons, three Muslim women travel through the Scottish Highlands, confronting their desires, faiths, and pasts. “There is something about movement,” she once mused, “that forces you to decide what you carry with you and what you leave behind.”
Leila Aboulela’s novels weave faith, identity, and spirituality themes, offering readers insights into the Muslim experience.
In River Spirit (2023), she returns to 19th-century Sudan, the Mahdist Revolution, and the turbulence of a country struggling against imperial rule. It is her most ambitious work yet, a historical epic that refuses to romanticize the past. It is also a reckoning with her ancestry and place in history.
Excerpt from River Spirit (2023):
“Instead, the silky water. She had missed it. Carrying heavy pots of water from the river was no longer one of her chores; Salha deemed it too strenuous and unfitting. Oh, how she missed it and could never feel settled in a town where people could not feast their eyes on the moving blue, set sail, or eat fish. Her merchant, her river—she yearned for them both.”
These passages exemplify Aboulela’s ability to portray her characters’ inner spiritual journeys, reflecting their struggles and yearnings within their faith and cultural contexts.
She has won the Caine Prize for African Writing, been longlisted for the Orange Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, and had her books translated into 15 languages. Yet, at heart, she remains a woman who writes in exile and carries Sudan within her, even when it is far away.
Aboulela does not write to explain Islam to outsiders or apologise for its presence in her work. It is simply there, as natural as breath. She writes about migrations, silences, and women who seek something beyond the material world. She writes about Islam not as a doctrine but as a way of being.
In an interview, she was asked what she missed most about Sudan. She paused. “The sky,” she said finally. “The way it stretches forever.”
This is what her novels feel like: an expanse, a longing, a voice calling across continents, across time, searching for a place to belong.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media journalist and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days.
Author inquiries: irasroom@gmail.com
