Leila Aboulela

In this country everything was labelled, everything had a name. She had got used to the explicitness, all the signs and polite rules

a Middle-East historian and a lecturer in Third World Politics. He had recently written a book called The Illusion of an Islamic Threat.

In this country, when she spoke to people, they seemed wary, on their guard as if any minute she would say something out of place, embarrassing.

. She filled black bag after black bag, an evacuation. Tearing letters, dropping magazines in the bin, a furious dismantling of the life they had lived, the home they made. Only Allah is eternal, only Allah is eternal. Photographs, books, towels, sheets. Strip and dump into a black bag. Temporary, this life is temporary, fleeting. Why is this lesson so hard to learn?

‘I love your mother more than you,’ she had teased him, hugging her aunt, kissing her cheeks, putting her head on her shoulder. ‘Go away, Tarig, we want to talk,’ she would say laughing. ‘We are going to gossip about you,’ Mahasen would say to him, ‘in little pieces.’ The word for ‘gossip’ meant cutting, too.

This was the Mahasen who now frowned when mentioning Sammar’s name. ‘That idiot girl.’

An educated girl like you, you know English… you can support yourself and your son, you don’t need marriage. What do you need it for?

Yasmin often used. ‘I loathe this shitty British weather.’

whirlpool of grief sucking time. Hours flitting away like minutes. Days in which the only thing she could rouse herself to do was pray the five prayers. They were the only challenge, the last touch with normality, without them she would have fallen, lost awareness of the shift of day into night

quarrel with Mahasen. And when she did come back she had neither the heart nor the means to buy things. Pay the rent for the room and that was all. One plate, one spoon, a tin opener, two saucepans, a kettle, a mug. She didn’t care, didn’t mind. Four years ill in a hospital she had made for herself. Ill, diseased with passivity, time in which she sat doing nothing. The

Yes, we prize virginity,’ Yasmin said, ‘and chastity. It’s hard to believe that a British judge and jury could understand