Friends, feminism and Islam

Elif Shafak’s latest novel explores Muslim modernity

Women have long known about men at schools or workplaces who violate our personal boundaries, scream insults or create hostile, walking-oneggshells environments. As evidenced in the #MeToo movement, many of us have experienced our own John Hockenberrys, Harvey Weinsteins and Matt Lauers. Our stories are now being taken seriously and believed.

Reading Elif Shafak’s 10th novel, “Three Daughters of Eve,” at this particular moment is thus an electrifying, if sometimes exasperating, experience. At the center of the novel is Oxford Professor Azur, who abuses, and sometimes has affairs with, students. The novel’s protagonist, Nazperi Nalbantoglu, or Peri, is obsessed with pleasing Azur.

I couldn’t put the book down, but I have to admit: I threw the book across the room a few times in anger at Azur and Peri.

“Three Daughters” is a compelling allegory of what the book jokingly refers to as “Muslimus Modernus,” the modern Muslim, but there is no decoupling sexual politics from questions of the divine.

Peri grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, “stuck in between” her mother’s piousness and her father’s staunch secularism. She attends Oxford University, where she makes friends with two very different women of Muslim heritage: Shirin, “the Sinner,” and Mona, “the Believer.” Shirin is a wealthy, self-assured British-Iranian student who embraces Western ideas of modernity and dismisses Islam as being oppressive to women. The Egyptian-American Mona, by contrast, proudly wears a headscarf and finds strength in her faith.

The book presents two possibilities of what a modern Muslim woman can be: a secular, modern rebel or a headscarf-wearing traditionalist. Both identify as feminist but in very different ways. The novel asks: Can there be another way?

Peri is “the Undecided,” caught in between “the Believer” and “the Sinner.” These are the three metaphoric “faces of Eve” referenced in the novel’s title. Peri represents the novel’s third way, who questions religion, stereotypical gender roles and her place in Turkish society. But, oh, she is a lost soul. Peri looks to Professor Azur for direction. Azur’s teaching methods are unorthodox to say the least. His classroom is an experimental social space where students confront, and even insult, each other in order to challenge each other’s views about God. “We’ll bring irreconcilable ideas and unlikely people together … [because we] can find our true selves only in the faces of the Other,” Azur proclaims.

The novel pivots between a day in Peri’s life in the spring of 2016, her childhood in Istanbul, and her time studyingat Oxford University. Ms. Shafak masterfully deploys dramatic tension as she juxtaposes Peri as a 35-yearold mother who carries a Birkin bag, drives a Range Rover, attends swanky parties and is a member of the “Decent Turkish Ladies Club” with Peri as a little girl who “was prone to darkness,” and Peri as an idealistic college student who “always knew that she was different” and “put so much effort into being normalthat often she had no energy left tobe anything else.”

At moments, there is almost too much drama packed into a single day. A street mugging, an apartment bomb and masked gunmen form the backdrop by which Peri comes to an intense reckoning with her past.

Ms. Shafak had no control over the fact that the U.S. release of her book would coincide with an explosive social reckoning concerning male sexual misconduct. Some readers may consequently feel extraordinary resentment toward Professor Azur and irritation toward Peri, but the abusive power dynamic between professor and student ultimately amplifies this novel’s significance.

The novel’s highest achievement is not its sweeping cultural pronouncements about Islam and feminism or even gendered power dynamics, but rather the quiet moment of clarity into one’s own shortcomings and a realization that we were harshest toward those who loved us the most, and that maybe things could have been different.