The Spiritual Quest in Contemporary Muslim Speculative Writing: A Reading of Bird Summons (2023) by Leila Aboulela

Abstract

This paper presents an examination of Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons (2019) as a site where speculative writing and Islamic spirituality intersect. By employing Islamicisation of Knowledge as a framework, this paper analyses how Aboulela utilises motifs of pilgrimage, metamorphosis and the unseen to foreground the spiritual struggles of diasporic Muslim women living in the United Kingdom. The novel’s magical realist elements are reoriented within an Islamic paradigm which places emphasis on jihad an-nafs (struggle of the self), sabr (patience), tawakkul (trust in God, and Tazkiyah al-nafs (purification of the soul). Through the journey of the three principal characters, Bird Summons dramatizes the confrontation with inner deficiencies and the pursuit of spiritual rejuvenation by situating these processes within broader conversations about identity, migration and modernity. In doing so, this study contends that Aboulela’s work provides a counter-narrative to Western literary frameworks that often marginalise or misrepresent Islam, thereby contributing to an emerging corpus of Speculative writing, particularly by women writers, that both challenge and redefine boundaries of the genre.