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Inshallah
With twin boys only months old, Amanda arrives in Saudi Arabia to live with her husband Mohammed. Her new life is strange and confusing and sometimes frightening. Amanda can barely understand Arabic and the treatment of the women of the family seems wrong to a girl raised in Wales. To add to her problems, Mohammed proves to be verbally and physically abusive - especially once they have their own flat away from the protection of the wider family. Somehow Amanda must escape, but not without her children.
- GenresFiction
317 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 17, 2014
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35 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 10, 2014
I tried so hard to like this book, I really did. I think it's important to support new authors, especially local ones, however this book not only left me cold; it left me angry.
The author makes no attempt to work through the psychology of her characters or make any attempt to understand the differing cultures and the tensions that they cause in any real depth. She relies instead on a steady stream of clichés and stereotypes and paints Saudi culture in a generally negative light.
None of the characters were sympathetic, they weren't strong and there was no personal growth. Instead of feeling empathy for the plight of the protagonist I instead ended up feeling antagonistic toward her. I simply couldn't identify with any of the characters or their decisions and as such didn't find I cared much about the difficulties in their lives.
The language was excessively flowery and failed to convey its point. It was clunky and lacked flow and all in all it just wasn't a very a good book.
The author makes no attempt to work through the psychology of her characters or make any attempt to understand the differing cultures and the tensions that they cause in any real depth. She relies instead on a steady stream of clichés and stereotypes and paints Saudi culture in a generally negative light.
None of the characters were sympathetic, they weren't strong and there was no personal growth. Instead of feeling empathy for the plight of the protagonist I instead ended up feeling antagonistic toward her. I simply couldn't identify with any of the characters or their decisions and as such didn't find I cared much about the difficulties in their lives.
The language was excessively flowery and failed to convey its point. It was clunky and lacked flow and all in all it just wasn't a very a good book.
March 6, 2016
I'll start by saying that I really wanted to like this book. It sounded fascinating, I'm interested in the Mideast, and I was intrigued by why a woman would voluntarily marry her rapist.
What I got, though, was disappointment on all possible levels. I don't know if this is based on some kind of personal experience (if it is, then I truly pity Alys Einion, as the husband character in this book is monstrous to the point where one feels he should be in solitary confinement somewhere because he represents such a clear danger to other human beings), but it's so extreme it's sickening at times. I promised myself I'd leave a review for this book once my rage about it had settled down - it's taken me over a year.
This review is long, I know. Giving a one star review on a book which has so many four and five star reviews, I feel I need to explain exactly why.
The basic premise is that a Welsh girl marries a Saudi guy, after he rapes her and leaves her pregnant with twins. Much as I sideeye Saudi's restrictions on women, I have to give credit that she demonises the man, not really the religion or the culture; the latter would be an easy way to go, particularly in recent years.
I don't think she portrays the husband's family in the best light, given their lack of action when they know how the wife is being treated, but it could have been worse. Besides things like the fact that she couldn't leave Saudi without his consent, and other things which are factual and intrinsic to the culture, the writer doesn't try to demonise Islam or Saudi Arabia - there are other Western women in the book who have very happy/successful marriages, for example, and some of her new family are good to her. Most of them (besides her husband) seem to have some modicum of respect for her, and they recognise he is going off at the deep end. It's clearly him who has a problem, though the nature of the culture makes it much more difficult for her to escape, especially if she wants to take her kids. I think the non-demonisation of the religion and culture (recognising it is problematic, but also that it is her husband who is the root of the problem) is the one point where I can see genuine merit in this book.
The book is structured as an interwoven story of the present day, a seemingly relatively happy marriage (for a very short while) rapidly turning into a hellish nightmare, which is intertwined with how she ended up marrying her rapist; you don't actually hear about him raping her for the first time till very close to the end, though he rapes her on a regular basis from pretty early on. Some of the rapes are downright savage. One time she nearly dies; another time he "lends" her to a friend, then rapes her because she slept with the friend (while the husband watched...) on his say so. I would definitely not recommend this book to any survivor of rape, or indeed of any kind of spousal abuse, because the husband's abusive behaviour was by no means restricted to sexual abuse.
I think my biggest problem with the whole book is struggling to get past one major source of complete disbelief: "How can she be so stupid to marry a man who raped her already, when marrying him will mean moving to a country with a family she doesn't know and a language she basically doesn't speak?" One feels there should have been some kind of rationale or explanation for this, but none was ever given. I was left feeling sorry for the 'heroine', but my empathy was seriously undermined by my frustration with her for marrying her rapist without any explanation - even a poorly thought out explanation, or a rationale one could see was wrong, would have made it easier to understand her, but there was none.
This is not someone she was going out with or had had sex with before, there's no previous romantic or sexual relationship. In that situation it would still be rape, no question, but I can understand why some women are guilted or victimised into believing it wasn't a 'real' rape.
That isn't the case here. She is raped by a stranger, then while she is still recovering, the guy who lives in the same house and occasionally stops by to talk to her comes in one night and rapes her. Turns out she's pregnant, so she marries this man whose first overture to her was to force himself on her when she had been raped and then miscarried the pregnancy from the first rape, and still was in recovery. Quite a catch, eh?
The logic in the book is that she's after family and stability for her kids, but to voluntarily step into this situation when you know, through brutal personal experience, that this man is definitely a rapist hardly seems like a recipe for stability... It's baffling, and it's never really tackled, never mind explained. It was a big frustration with the book, because I was constantly left wondering "But... but why?"
I kept expecting there to be more to it than "I am about to marry my rapist", that I would eventually discover there was something more there than was immediately obvious, but no. She wasn't blinded by love or romance, she wasn't bound by cultural expectations, she wasn't forced into it. He raped her, and when she was pregnant with twins this rapist said hey, let's get married, and by the way this will mean converting to Islam, and moving to a country where you don't speak the language and women are considered the property of men so you will have no rights unless I (the RAPIST) give them to you. And when presented with this argument, she didn't knee him in the crotch and get the hell out of dodge, she said yes.
It wasn't comfortable reading, and I don't think the book as a whole was nearly good enough, interesting enough, or well enough written to justify wading through the endless scenes of the various ways her husband raped her, beat her up, emotionally and verbally abused her, and so on and so forth. It felt more like a misery memoir than a novel.
I also found myself thinking Einion was trying way too hard to be 'clever' and 'writerly' but really not succeeding. I thought the writing overall was too poor to lift the subject matter out of shock value. I seem to remember reading Einion has a PhD in creative writing, which frankly staggers me. I did not find the writing remotely outstanding, and in several places I didn't even find it tolerably good.
There's a very strange, quasi romantic relationship with one of the other Western wives, I'm not sure if it was supposed to be romantic or not and it's never really developed to the point where I knew what was going on. I expected something to happen before she fled the country, but nothing did. I couldn't decide if that was just a route she never quite went down, if the ambiguity was intentional, or if it was just another example of poor writing. I wasn't sure why the thread existed, and it didn't seem to add anything to the storyline or the book as a whole.
I don't remember any passages that stood out to me as remarkable writing, and at least a few that struck me as poor or even as downright inappropriate to the tone of the book.
One in particular (I'm not sure I can quote it accurately in a review because there are restrictions on words and I am not sure if it applies to technical words for sexual organs) was a description of her husband's johnson that seemed like it was lifted wholesale from a M&B romance: "the fullness of his _____ waned".
Not a piece of writing I'd consider especially good in any context, but this was right after he'd raped her. Why a writer would bring out the flowery prose for such a moment I simply cannot imagine. That was the point at which I found myself quite literally rolling my eyes and giving up on finding any kind of literary merit to redeem the book.
As I kept reading, wanting to find answers to my many 'whys', I started skimming larger and larger chunks, and I found the detailed descriptions of so many rapes frankly disturbing. There's a point at which it stops feeling like a necessary part of the book and starts feeling like some kind of bizarre torture porn.
It was also - and it's an awful thing to say, but it's true - so boring. There was so much rape, and so much of that rape was described in great detail, that it simply became repetitive. I don't know if the intention was to shock, and some of the rapes were definitely shocking, but after a time it became mind-numbing, and I skimmed because I simply couldn't force myself to plough through yet another brutal rape scene which was playing out like so many I'd already made myself read. I simply do not think it was necessary nor was it good writing for rape after rape after rape to be described in such detail.
I don't think I'd accuse Einion of sensationalising or glorifying rape exactly, but I am also not convinced it was effective or necessary to treat it this way. It was almost as if the continuous rape was being used not to show what her life was like but to entertain; I don't know how else to describe it except that it felt uncomfortably like something a rapist or would-be rapist might read to vicariously experience or relive the pain of a victim. I have no reason to think this was the intention, mind you, but it was how it came across to me, and it was sickening. A handful of occasions described in detail would have been more than sufficient to portray the horror of her treatment if Einion honestly thought that brutal bloody rape was something she needed to write.
If Einion is writing from personal experience (I don't know either way) then maybe this was cathartic, but in terms of being part of this book, it would have been stronger and would feel less uncomfortably voyeuristic if a lot of the rape scenes had been cut down or cut out. Either Einion or her editor should, at some point, have realised there's a point where it's simply gratuitous to describe yet another rape in excruciating detail.
Overall, the premise and subject matter were intriguing, even promising, but the execution was a huge let down. I think probably the book's one saving grace was that it wasn't written in a linear manner, and the reader spends much of the time wondering 'but why?' This central question piques enough curiosity to make the reader feel the need to understand why this woman would do such a foolish thing in the first place, this thing that has landed her in this waking nightmare. Why would any woman voluntarily put her life so completely into the hands of the man who violated her?
If this had been paid off in the end, then it might have worked better (although I still think the subject matter deserved far better writing), but the payoff was practically non-existent, so the reader is left unsatisfied - unless, of course, endless descriptions of a woman being degraded by her husband in almost every way one could imagine is something the reader finds satisfying.
I feel like if that why question's total non-answer was at the start of the book, far fewer readers would've put up with the meat of the story and all the gratuitous rape, lacklustre writing and go-nowhere story threads to get to the end; if I had known I was never really going to get any remotely satisfactory answers, I certainly would not have finished it, and would probably have stopped reading the first time a rape scene made me want to go and rinse my mind out with bleach. This book was one I was looking forward to reading and wanted to love, because of the setting, and most of all because of the premise and all the why questions it begs, but in the end it was a waste of a few hours of my life I'll never get back, and disappointing on every level.
What I got, though, was disappointment on all possible levels. I don't know if this is based on some kind of personal experience (if it is, then I truly pity Alys Einion, as the husband character in this book is monstrous to the point where one feels he should be in solitary confinement somewhere because he represents such a clear danger to other human beings), but it's so extreme it's sickening at times. I promised myself I'd leave a review for this book once my rage about it had settled down - it's taken me over a year.
This review is long, I know. Giving a one star review on a book which has so many four and five star reviews, I feel I need to explain exactly why.
The basic premise is that a Welsh girl marries a Saudi guy, after he rapes her and leaves her pregnant with twins. Much as I sideeye Saudi's restrictions on women, I have to give credit that she demonises the man, not really the religion or the culture; the latter would be an easy way to go, particularly in recent years.
I don't think she portrays the husband's family in the best light, given their lack of action when they know how the wife is being treated, but it could have been worse. Besides things like the fact that she couldn't leave Saudi without his consent, and other things which are factual and intrinsic to the culture, the writer doesn't try to demonise Islam or Saudi Arabia - there are other Western women in the book who have very happy/successful marriages, for example, and some of her new family are good to her. Most of them (besides her husband) seem to have some modicum of respect for her, and they recognise he is going off at the deep end. It's clearly him who has a problem, though the nature of the culture makes it much more difficult for her to escape, especially if she wants to take her kids. I think the non-demonisation of the religion and culture (recognising it is problematic, but also that it is her husband who is the root of the problem) is the one point where I can see genuine merit in this book.
The book is structured as an interwoven story of the present day, a seemingly relatively happy marriage (for a very short while) rapidly turning into a hellish nightmare, which is intertwined with how she ended up marrying her rapist; you don't actually hear about him raping her for the first time till very close to the end, though he rapes her on a regular basis from pretty early on. Some of the rapes are downright savage. One time she nearly dies; another time he "lends" her to a friend, then rapes her because she slept with the friend (while the husband watched...) on his say so. I would definitely not recommend this book to any survivor of rape, or indeed of any kind of spousal abuse, because the husband's abusive behaviour was by no means restricted to sexual abuse.
I think my biggest problem with the whole book is struggling to get past one major source of complete disbelief: "How can she be so stupid to marry a man who raped her already, when marrying him will mean moving to a country with a family she doesn't know and a language she basically doesn't speak?" One feels there should have been some kind of rationale or explanation for this, but none was ever given. I was left feeling sorry for the 'heroine', but my empathy was seriously undermined by my frustration with her for marrying her rapist without any explanation - even a poorly thought out explanation, or a rationale one could see was wrong, would have made it easier to understand her, but there was none.
This is not someone she was going out with or had had sex with before, there's no previous romantic or sexual relationship. In that situation it would still be rape, no question, but I can understand why some women are guilted or victimised into believing it wasn't a 'real' rape.
That isn't the case here. She is raped by a stranger, then while she is still recovering, the guy who lives in the same house and occasionally stops by to talk to her comes in one night and rapes her. Turns out she's pregnant, so she marries this man whose first overture to her was to force himself on her when she had been raped and then miscarried the pregnancy from the first rape, and still was in recovery. Quite a catch, eh?
The logic in the book is that she's after family and stability for her kids, but to voluntarily step into this situation when you know, through brutal personal experience, that this man is definitely a rapist hardly seems like a recipe for stability... It's baffling, and it's never really tackled, never mind explained. It was a big frustration with the book, because I was constantly left wondering "But... but why?"
I kept expecting there to be more to it than "I am about to marry my rapist", that I would eventually discover there was something more there than was immediately obvious, but no. She wasn't blinded by love or romance, she wasn't bound by cultural expectations, she wasn't forced into it. He raped her, and when she was pregnant with twins this rapist said hey, let's get married, and by the way this will mean converting to Islam, and moving to a country where you don't speak the language and women are considered the property of men so you will have no rights unless I (the RAPIST) give them to you. And when presented with this argument, she didn't knee him in the crotch and get the hell out of dodge, she said yes.
It wasn't comfortable reading, and I don't think the book as a whole was nearly good enough, interesting enough, or well enough written to justify wading through the endless scenes of the various ways her husband raped her, beat her up, emotionally and verbally abused her, and so on and so forth. It felt more like a misery memoir than a novel.
I also found myself thinking Einion was trying way too hard to be 'clever' and 'writerly' but really not succeeding. I thought the writing overall was too poor to lift the subject matter out of shock value. I seem to remember reading Einion has a PhD in creative writing, which frankly staggers me. I did not find the writing remotely outstanding, and in several places I didn't even find it tolerably good.
There's a very strange, quasi romantic relationship with one of the other Western wives, I'm not sure if it was supposed to be romantic or not and it's never really developed to the point where I knew what was going on. I expected something to happen before she fled the country, but nothing did. I couldn't decide if that was just a route she never quite went down, if the ambiguity was intentional, or if it was just another example of poor writing. I wasn't sure why the thread existed, and it didn't seem to add anything to the storyline or the book as a whole.
I don't remember any passages that stood out to me as remarkable writing, and at least a few that struck me as poor or even as downright inappropriate to the tone of the book.
One in particular (I'm not sure I can quote it accurately in a review because there are restrictions on words and I am not sure if it applies to technical words for sexual organs) was a description of her husband's johnson that seemed like it was lifted wholesale from a M&B romance: "the fullness of his _____ waned".
Not a piece of writing I'd consider especially good in any context, but this was right after he'd raped her. Why a writer would bring out the flowery prose for such a moment I simply cannot imagine. That was the point at which I found myself quite literally rolling my eyes and giving up on finding any kind of literary merit to redeem the book.
As I kept reading, wanting to find answers to my many 'whys', I started skimming larger and larger chunks, and I found the detailed descriptions of so many rapes frankly disturbing. There's a point at which it stops feeling like a necessary part of the book and starts feeling like some kind of bizarre torture porn.
It was also - and it's an awful thing to say, but it's true - so boring. There was so much rape, and so much of that rape was described in great detail, that it simply became repetitive. I don't know if the intention was to shock, and some of the rapes were definitely shocking, but after a time it became mind-numbing, and I skimmed because I simply couldn't force myself to plough through yet another brutal rape scene which was playing out like so many I'd already made myself read. I simply do not think it was necessary nor was it good writing for rape after rape after rape to be described in such detail.
I don't think I'd accuse Einion of sensationalising or glorifying rape exactly, but I am also not convinced it was effective or necessary to treat it this way. It was almost as if the continuous rape was being used not to show what her life was like but to entertain; I don't know how else to describe it except that it felt uncomfortably like something a rapist or would-be rapist might read to vicariously experience or relive the pain of a victim. I have no reason to think this was the intention, mind you, but it was how it came across to me, and it was sickening. A handful of occasions described in detail would have been more than sufficient to portray the horror of her treatment if Einion honestly thought that brutal bloody rape was something she needed to write.
If Einion is writing from personal experience (I don't know either way) then maybe this was cathartic, but in terms of being part of this book, it would have been stronger and would feel less uncomfortably voyeuristic if a lot of the rape scenes had been cut down or cut out. Either Einion or her editor should, at some point, have realised there's a point where it's simply gratuitous to describe yet another rape in excruciating detail.
Overall, the premise and subject matter were intriguing, even promising, but the execution was a huge let down. I think probably the book's one saving grace was that it wasn't written in a linear manner, and the reader spends much of the time wondering 'but why?' This central question piques enough curiosity to make the reader feel the need to understand why this woman would do such a foolish thing in the first place, this thing that has landed her in this waking nightmare. Why would any woman voluntarily put her life so completely into the hands of the man who violated her?
If this had been paid off in the end, then it might have worked better (although I still think the subject matter deserved far better writing), but the payoff was practically non-existent, so the reader is left unsatisfied - unless, of course, endless descriptions of a woman being degraded by her husband in almost every way one could imagine is something the reader finds satisfying.
I feel like if that why question's total non-answer was at the start of the book, far fewer readers would've put up with the meat of the story and all the gratuitous rape, lacklustre writing and go-nowhere story threads to get to the end; if I had known I was never really going to get any remotely satisfactory answers, I certainly would not have finished it, and would probably have stopped reading the first time a rape scene made me want to go and rinse my mind out with bleach. This book was one I was looking forward to reading and wanted to love, because of the setting, and most of all because of the premise and all the why questions it begs, but in the end it was a waste of a few hours of my life I'll never get back, and disappointing on every level.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 2, 2016
Rape is seldom the best foundation on which to build a marriage and readers may well find themselves wondering how ANY woman - no matter how unloved or unsupported she might have felt, finding herself pregnant by her rapist house mate - could willingly get herself into the mess that Amanda accepts in Alys Einion's novel Inshallah.
I can only say thank goodness it IS fiction because, much as I sympathised with the central character and her plight, I couldn't help but think "How bloody stupid are you, woman? How many more utterly ridiculous steps towards total self-annihilation can you possibly take?" If this had been an auto-biography, I'd have lost all respect for Amanda very quickly.
Sadly, I suspect that - domestic violence aside - the book's setting in a Saudi extended family was probably far from exaggerated and in some respects - again, domestic violence aside - a lot of the plot goes far too smoothly to be entirely believable.
I can only say thank goodness it IS fiction because, much as I sympathised with the central character and her plight, I couldn't help but think "How bloody stupid are you, woman? How many more utterly ridiculous steps towards total self-annihilation can you possibly take?" If this had been an auto-biography, I'd have lost all respect for Amanda very quickly.
Sadly, I suspect that - domestic violence aside - the book's setting in a Saudi extended family was probably far from exaggerated and in some respects - again, domestic violence aside - a lot of the plot goes far too smoothly to be entirely believable.
November 3, 2014
Although the writing is too flowery at times, I became genuinely emotionally invested in the storyline. I feel as if Alys Einion did a great job of showing a whole new way of life, so different from ours in the West, to a British audience. There were times I had to take a breather because what happened in the book made me so angry that I couldn't jump into the book and help Amanda and her family, I am glad I read it. Insh'Allah is an addictive and eye-opening read, and It makes me really really glad that I'm allowed to leave my house without a male chaperone.
February 2, 2016
Poor character development and a lot of the elements of the book were just not believable I.e how did Amanda survive so long in such a relationship?, how was she 'allowed' to have western friends? How did she even manage to hold down a job when all this was going on inher life? Storyline was not realistic
January 17, 2015
Omg what a book! The central character grew up sharply throughout the book and it's been a while since I stayed up till 1 in the morning to finish it. What a brave woman having to cope with a totally different culture and an abusive husband. Brilliant!!
November 2, 2020
Quite disturbing to read, but a good story.
March 1, 2016
This book took me through a traumatic sympathetic experience and instilled within me with a feeling of claustrophobia and desperation. I found myself utterly possessed by the story and the writing, able to taste, hear, smell and feel Saudi Arabia around me, and as if part of myself was journeying alongside the protagonist. Though this was a journey of claustrophobia for me, I was unable to put the book down, longing to tear the protagonist from the pages myself and ensure that I saw the story to its completion. Perfectly written, gripping and stirring for the feminist in me.
February 14, 2018
I thought the book quite compelling, but I think the author missed the opportunity to examine what would make a woman submit to an abusive relationship especially whilst she was still in the UK. I would also have liked more information or delving into what makes the Saudi female mentality tick. A bit disappointing, but worth the read.
January 20, 2015
This is one of the most distressing books I've ever read, such that it was genuinely difficult to read at times. A brutal and harrowing account of domestic violence that takes place inside the scarily restrictive world of Saudi Arabia. This one will stay with me for a while.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 27, 2015
I enjoyed the story, but I never like the feeling that I am being carried along by fiction into some political point of view, and I did think that was happening here.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews