I understand Aboulela’s desire to answer contemporary fear-mongering with a portrayal of a Muslim jihadist who is not an extremist or a fanatic, but the threat embodied by the fantasy of Shamil cuts in multiple fascinating ways that are often short-circuited by the novel’s insistence on his unequivocal virtue. The Kindness of Strangers reads as a well-crafted but quiet plea for the kind of humanism that once allowed enemies to respect one another.
...a rich, multilayered story, a whole syllabus of compelling topics. As a novelist, Aboulela moves confidently between dramatizing urgent, contemporary issues and providing her audience with sufficient background to follow these discussions about the changing meaning of jihad, the history of Sufism and the racial politics of the war on terror.
This is an absorbing novel, especially in the sections set in the 19th century...The 21st-century tale carries less conviction; its political message can often seem forced.
Capturing two continents across two centuries in less than 350 pages is no easy task and occasionally the effort shows...A great strength of the book is its ability to tell an absorbing story about what so many people have experienced: uncertainty about one's identity, one's place in the world, and one's true home.
If Aboulela were less deft, The Kindness of Enemies would come across as a heavy-handed polemic. Instead, the empathy with which she draws characters trying to straddle shifting fault lines emerges as a vital ingredient to understanding our own less-than-simple times.
