The Scope of Permissibility by Zeynab Gamieldien
The first novel I remember reading about a hijab-wearing Muslim woman was Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This in 2005. A family friend bought the book for my tween sister as a birthday present. I swiped it from my sister as soon as she was done, finishing it in a day. I still remember the feeling of incredulity seeing “Bismillah”, “Ramadan” and a family similar to my own represented in my favourite literary format.
It is almost two decades since Abdel-Fattah’s best-selling novel and there has been a growing body of Australian Muslim literature, spanning children’s books, autobiographies, short stories and many spoken word poems. Some of the Muslim writers making indelible contributions to Australian literature include Maryam Azam, Michael Mohammed, Sara M. Saleh and Amani Haydar. However, novels written by Australian Muslims have been few and far between. Zeynab Gamielden’s debut The Scope of Permissibility (Ultimo Press, 2023) is therefore a welcome and long overdue addition to the canon of Australian Muslim novels.
The Scope of Permissibility follows Muslim university students Abida, Sara and Naeem as they navigate the societal and academic pressures of university life as practising Muslims. Abida is campaigning to become the first female president of the university Muslim Students’ Association, and Sara is coming to terms with a growing infatuation with fellow Muslim university student, Naeem, a medical student whose family holds considerable social status in the Muslim community. Despite their shared beliefs and active involvement in the Muslim Students’ Association, the differences across ethnicity, socio-economic status and gender reveal themselves in the characters’ central conflicts and distinct narrative arcs.
Gamieldien is a master at capturing the idiosyncratic Muslim university student experience while reminding the reader that the Muslim experience is itself very diverse. Her vignettes of the campus musallah, or prayer room, vividly take me back to the cosiness and sense of belonging in my own university’s musallah.
“There were mismatched donated cushions strewn about the room and a girl with fluffy pink socks was dozing on one in the corner, while two Saudi Arabian international students pored over an open architecture textbook…. Abida loved this space, loved that in here they were not marked by their difference but by their similarity.”
Amidst The Scope of Permissibility’s exploration of competing external pressures, the physical space of the musallah serves as an anchor and a space where the Muslim students can simply ‘be’.
The novel’s nuanced handling of its subject matter extends to the depictions of racism experienced by the central characters. The passages in which Abida is decompressing after a paralegal interview are the most heartbreaking in the entire book. In the absence of overt racist slurs, Abida struggles to articulate what she has experienced. She is uncomfortable but not sure she can describe the behaviour of the interviewers as ‘racist’. This resonates with my own experiences of insidious racism in corporate interviews and networking events in the final years of my degree (I wrote about this in Sweatshop Women: Volume One (Sweatshop, 2019). The Scope of Permissibility shines in these moments of emotional maturity which make the characters and their experiences fully realised:
“She had not been called any names or been sworn at… She had not been spat on… She could not fashion the incident into something for her friends to rally around and share online….”
Ultimately, it is Gamieldien’s unabashed dedication to the complexity of the lives of the Muslim university students she depicts that makes The Scope of Permissibility a well-written and enjoyable read. I hope this novel heralds a new era of novel-writing by Australian Muslims who feel emboldened to write engaging stories featuring the Muslim Australian experience in all of its complexity and nuance.
This article has been commissioned in partnership with Diversity Arts Australia’s StoryCaster project, supported by Multicultural NSW, Creative Australia and Create NSW.
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Ferdous Bahar is a Bengali-Australian woman from Western Sydney. She obtained a Bachelors of Laws and a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney. Ferdous’ creative and critical works have been published in SBS Voices and kindling & sage magazine. She is also a policy advisor and lawyer.