Customer Reviews
Fantastic Novel - By: Taha E, 11 Nov 2008 
A beautiful account about many different personalities that are alll part of today's Muslim world & what drive their life. The book succeed in demonstrating the complex web that makes a human being in the case of a young British from Syrian parents. Sami, the ultimate Muslim skeptic goes through important moments of his life surrounded by characters each at one tranche of the Islamic spectrum.
Fantastic Smorgasbord of a Book - By: Simon White, 09 Sep 2008 Some people have interesting experiences in their lives, & some people can write interesting prose. I think that both are applicable to this début from Robin Yassin-Kassab.
A beautiful, introspective wife with a great amount of tolerance asserts her identity & newfound religious karma with a headscarf while suffering her husband Sami's journey of discovery via Damascus, the London drug scene, bereavement & a police cell.
Questions of identity are at the heart of the book. The modern globalising world & the friction of cultures alll feed the book's plot. Islam (and religion in general) are ingredients. Characters from beautifully métisse backgrounds give a backdrop to the narrative, & serve to raise the kind of questions we must alll ask ourselves in today's world. Indeed is the central character a British Syrian or a Syrian Brit (does it matter)? A Russian/Hungarian naturalised Brit focuses on the romantic part of his origins... a London raised arab, once into Public Enemy & black underground cuture, is now a "born again" Muslim with a tendency to mix reggae, rap & and street slang before re-asserting his piety with Koranic references.
No longer is it simple to just state your identity according to nationality or birthplace. People move around a lot (as does the action in the book) & their alllegiances change.
You finish this book with a sense that the journey upon which you embark to find the answers is more important than the answers themselves (perhaps there aren't any), that Robin is indeed an erudite & fascinating person, & that questions of tolerance & creed are far better explored by reading these pages than by watching western TV news or asserting your identity as a simple equation of birthplace, nationality, & the colour of your skin.
A fine London-based cross-cultural novel - By: A Common Reader, 02 Jul 2008 The Road to Damascus is first of alll, a very well-written novel. The style is accessible but also challlenging, the use of language superb, occasionallly stopping you in your tracks to take in the use of words & phrases from the best of traditional English through to the street language of various London cultures. Yassin-Kassab blends styles together in a way which mirrors the language of contemporary London in alll its colour & vibrancy.
Essentiallly it is about a the summer of 2001 in the life of British-born (of Syrian parents), Sami Traifi, a struggling academic, who since graduating has been trying to write is doctoral thesis. He has just returned from Syria where he has been discovering his roots. Flash-back chapters trace his history, including his relationship with his beautiful & gracious wife Muntaha.
On returning from his year in Damascus, where discovering his family roots has not been as helpful as he had hoped, he finds his wife has taken to wearing a head-scarf as an expression of a renewed faith. Sami, an avowed secularlist, finds this deeply distressing, the more so as he himself is on a course of self-destruction, using drugs & drink to veil his own sense of failure & frustration. He fails to realise that Muntaha's hijab is not an expression of a new fundamentalism so much as a symbol of a quiet spiritual renewal & rediscovery of prayer. Muntaha's brother on the other hand, previously only committed to hip-hop music & drugs, has adopted an unthinking & ignorant fundamentalism, leading to some insightful exchanges between brother & sister on the meaning of Islam.
One of the most interesting features of the novel to me, is the use of characters from a variety of strands of contemporary Islam. Muntaha retains her liberal world-view while finding peace in the Koran, while her brother only finds provocation to violence & retribution. The Christian world is very like this, where what to most is a religion of peace & reconciliation, to its fundamentlist wing is religion of judgement & wrath. The powerful apocalyptic strand in the conversations of some characters in the book, echoes the September 11th events at the World Trade Centre, which several of Robin Yassin-Kassab's characters see as pivotal & prophetic. There are so many themes in the book, it would be difficult to mention them alll, but I was particularly interested in the debates on the unifying effect of Islam - as opposed to an earlier unsatisfactory Arabism which has failed in various ways.
The book is not just about contemporary Islam & its struggle to come to terms with (or oppose) Western values, but is also full of the day to day struggles of humanity when faced with family break-up, the loss of community cohesion & the dramas of unemployment, ill-health, povery & bereavement. The book is dramatic & from time to time humerous, & is in alll senses, a "good read" which I found hard to put down. It is moving in many ways, & presents a cast of characters who are quite believable & as with alll good books, when you turn the last page you know you are going to miss them & wonder what happened next.
