Like Austen before her, Jalaluddin acknowledges the real perils present in the world of her novel—Islamophobia, coercion of women, and hostility toward immigrants and refugees—while advocating that her characters, and her readers, “choose to live in a comedy, not a tragedy.”Jalaluddin’s appealing, relatable central characters, Ayesha Shamsi and Khalid Mirza, reflect on, and in Khalid’s case rethink, their commitments to religious observance and cultural customs.By alternating chapters from Ayesha’s and Khalid’s points of view, Jalaluddin shows how each of them responds to their first-ever experiences of physical attraction and romantic love at the ages of twenty-seven and twenty-six, respectively. Jalaluddin’s sympathetic, sensitive treatment of how both women and men live their singleness and sexuality in the context of committed faith is unique in Austen-inspired writing—and rare, too, in popular fiction aimed at a mainstream audience. (244)
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By anchoring her love story inPride and Prejudice, Jalaluddin extends a warm invitation to a broad audience to reconsider any prejudices and unexamined assumptions they might have about observant Muslims in the West. In this respect, Jalaluddin’s project is wholly distinct from those of fan fiction writers who, as Marilyn Francus argues, share “a desire for the modern world to be Austen’s world” and who make an “effort to avoid or circumvent modernity and overwrite it with Austen.” At the same time, Jalaluddin offers an affirming mirror to fellow members of her own faith community by depicting characters who are fully as witty, sexy, and romantic as Austen’s. And Jalaluddin makes a strikingly unusual contribution to Austen adaptation, by highlighting the power—and the empowerment—of deliberate restraint. In this sense, Jalaluddin’s take on Austen is much truer to the spirit of the original novels than Rachel Brownstein asserts is typical of present-day adaptation, with its “kinky sub-plots,” “sexy shots” and other “adult” content. (250)
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