Finding Home Beyond Borders: Sufism and Homelessness in Leila Aboulela’s Writing

Abstract

The romantic urge for home, to which one belongs but where one can no longer be, recalling the longing for the lost Garden of Eden, may have different origins for different writers. Yet the impulse to write about one’s homeland is inevitable for immigrant writers, and Sudanese-British writer Leila Aboulela is no exception. While themes of exile, faith, identity, and belonging are central throughout Aboulela’s body of work, this analysis will focus specifically on her novels Minaret (2005), The Kindness of Enemies (2015), and Bird Summons (2019). By engaging in comparative analysis and tracing thematic threads and stylistic shifts across a broader spectrum of Aboulela’s writing, this paper explores how Sufism serves as both a thematic and structural foundation, offering a lens through which homelessness, belonging, and spirituality are reimagined. It examines how Aboulela creates spaces of fresh promise where both her protagonists and Aboulela herself feel at home again, highlighting the progression of Sufi influences across her three novels. The analysis demonstrates how her engagement with Sufi principles deepens over time, culminating in a unique hybrid narrative mode—situated at the intersection of novel and masnavi traditions—that employs magical realism to destabilize Western logic and bridge Eastern and Western literary traditions.