An Unlasting Home: Mai Al-Nakib's novel explores blasphemy, identity and Kuwait's shifting society

"You're under arrest for blasphemy. Please go inside and get what you need for a few nights in jail. We'll wait."

With these words, the world of philosophy professor Sara Tarek Al-Ahmed begins to implode as she heads into the custody of the Kuwaiti state. Mai Al-Nakib's debut novel, An Unlasting Home, follows the fortunes of Sara as her trial forces her to reconsider her place in the world, what is happening to Kuwait and the generations of women in her family that made her.

The charge comes as a shock to Sara, as she is unaware of the new law against blasphemy, is unsure what she could have said to fall foul of it, and has little idea of how much of a political storm her case has caused in parliament.

She comes to learn that her lectures were being secretly recorded by one of her students, who filed the complaint that would see her face an uncertain punishment that ranges from a fine to death, if convicted.

She is also the first person to be tried under the new law, making her a test case and adding to the uncertainty of the outcome. Sara discovers it was her lecture on the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his famous statement that "God is dead" that has landed her in hot water.

While she awaits her trial, Sara reflects on her life and the lives of the women in her family, trying to make sense of how Kuwait has changed.

The Gulf state swings on a pendulum between liberalism and conservatism, between tradition and modernity; the lives of her forebears reflect these changes.

We learn about the intellectual and cultural shifts that take place from Sara's great-grandparents to her grandparents as Kuwait enters the pearl and later the age of oil.

But Al-Nakib's novel goes beyond Sara’s immediate family to include the story of her Indian Christian nanny/domestic servant, Maria.

Sara is the sum of all of these parts and their interconnecting stories. The question of home haunts the character throughout the novel, growing up between Kuwait and America, Sara and her brother Karim have a complex relationship with their heritage, "Karim and I understood as teenagers, maybe even earlier, that Kuwait wasn't for us… My brother cut ties with severity I couldn't muster."

But America presented challenges too: "No one would have guessed me to be anything other than American, precisely what I had always wanted, and yet, there I was, in the place I had longed to be, inexplicably, decidedly, out of place."

Her sense of being out of place is sharpened during the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, with most of her family, including her mother and father, being in Kuwait. Sara loses contact with them until Kuwait is freed from Iraq at the end of the Gulf War.

The sense of isolation is made worse when debates on the Gulf crisis occur in her college classes, and most of her fellow students seem unaffected by her concerns for her family's safety. Noura, Sara’s mother, is a key driving force behind her life as she is in many ways more fierce than Sara herself.

A bookstore owner in Kuwait, Noura, is much more open to challenging Kuwait's increasingly conservative environment following the post-Gulf War and adoption of parliamentary democracy. She insists on her right to the important Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, for instance, and is very politically involved.

It is her passing that draws Sara back to Kuwait and leads her to decide to teach philosophy there. Comparatively, she is more politically timid and avoids these topics, which makes her case all the more puzzling to her.

She must decide whether to accept that she committed blasphemy and recant the statement in order to have her case dismissed or whether to fight on.

An Unlasting Home captures the moral and cultural shifts that have taken place in Kuwait over the last century and how, even in the present, there is a great uncertainty about where things are heading. 

There is a feeling that concepts like home are temporal, and there is no ultimate home; there is a love-hate relationship with Kuwait for Sara, something pulls her there, and yet something pulls her away.

The novel poses interesting questions about intergenerational changes in women's lives and their role in history.

An Unlasting Home offers an interesting way to probe these changes and makes for a riveting read.

Usman Butt is a multimedia television researcher, filmmaker and writer based in London who read International Relations and Arabic Language at the University of Westminster and completed a Master of Arts in Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter