Faiqa Mansab’s The Sufi Storyteller is a murder mystery set on a small university campus where its protagonist, Layla, is a professor of Sufi literature. Mansab uses the multidimensional nature of Sufi theology to develop a plotline that explores themes of mortality, morality, and metaphysicality as embodied in indigenous storytelling. Ultimately, the novel is a unique rendition of motherhood in its perpetual form: martyrdom.

When a string of heinous murders affiliated with Layla leads her to find and confront her long-estranged mother, Mira, they must undergo a lengthy process of reconciliation that is characterised and, indeed, spurred on by stories and the very art of telling them. Both women are deeply involved in the world of academia, and every sequence of events in the novel is characterised by and situated within Sufi mysticism. For, as Layla says, it is different worlds and potentialities that we all see:

“It is not my story…even though it is the same story. How can I see it as you do? How can you expect me to?”

Written from the dual perspectives of the two women, the narrative shifts between autodiegetic and third person, and between present and past, as though to situate this story within the maelstrom of stories it references – fairytales, old wives’ tales, Sufi parables. This enforces Layla’s view of narratives as identity, as language, as currency.

The circumstances that initially drove Mira to abandon Layla are revealed through a series of tales that oscillate between tenses and perspectives. They are an apt, if not very fresh, means to re-emphasise the age-old need to dismantle the patriarchy. While the narrative is based in America and Afghanistan, Mansab takes from South Asian cultural and religious philosophies and idiosyncrasies to individualise the experience of an immigrant, a member of the diaspora – and the regrets and responsibilities that accompany it. “There is androgyny and a natural flux in the art of storytelling,” says Layla – and here, Mansab places her in a prime position to objectively view life in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, caught as she is in the metaphysical border between them.

Layla’s tale is that of the reclamation of the narratives of women from the suppressive attempts of the patriarchy to invalidate them by infantilizing or hypersexualising them. Meanwhile, Mira’s experiences reflect those of one such infantilized, hypersexualised mother and the choices she makes in a series of attempts to free herself and her children from the patriarchal powerplay that seeks to integrate them sociologically and geographically into the tribal area where she is stranded.

But The Sufi Storyteller is also a tale of hypocrisy, emphasising on the theatrical virtue of both women’s preoccupation with stories from their indigenous lands as they teach and speak in the heart of an imperial land that seeks to crush those, and other, narratives into nothingness, figuratively and militarily. There is even a brash reference to the incoming “American drones”, harbingers of safety for American citizens and allies as they shoot holes into the “savages” that do not subscribe to a Western way of life.

Sufi stories have always functioned as subtle yet forceful critiques of authority – both political and literary – using allegory and paradox to question those who claim power. In The Sufi Storyteller, Mansab continues this tradition, challenging the structures of control and authorship in much the same spirit. The patriarchy, ideas of nationalism and patriotism, and Roman mythology are all extensions of her commentary on the matter. But it is easy for the reader to overlook and understate the significance of Mansab’s primary tool: Layla.

Layla – by virtue of her personality, academic interests, and particularly the male relationships she engages herself in – is someone who desires to be around colourful people, almost as a purveyor and connoisseur of thoughts nestled within their hearts. She is drawn to those with the same sort of grief she grapples with. And, while she  tries to assuage this grief, she also capitalises upon it as a means to further comprehend Sufi mysticism and her own place as a storyteller in a world of academics. Layla may seem straightforward, but like the Sufi stories that she so enjoys analysing, she too must be pulled apart, layer by layer, to understand the extent of the sincerity of her intentions and actions. In what is almost a listless lament of lost purpose, Layla postulates, “Life ended when desire was gratified. There was nothing else until the next desire.” Ultimately, she understands that “having power does not translate into usage.” She accepts that this may well be the primary difference between tyrants and saviours. That to exercise restraint on the exercise of power – over language, over military, over ideology – is to truly fulfil one’s responsibility to power and break the cyclical violence of history.

And perhaps, like the newborns in dumpsters in Lahore, like the women coerced into marriages in Afghanistan, like the guardians of indigenous stories who threaten Western imperialism, Layla survives a pivotal moment, narrowly escaping death only to “die another day”. But, as Mansab asserts throughout the novel, every stretch of life is a story that contributes to a collective identity.