American Dervish is Akhtar's debut novel, which has been "published in more than 20 languages worldwide and a 2012 Best Book of the Year at Kirkus Reviews, Toronto's Globe and Mail, Shelf-Awareness, and O (Oprah) Magazine" (AyadAkhtar, Bio). His play Disgraced awarded him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013. 1970) is a Pakistani-American dramatist, novelist, screenwriter, and actor. Keywords: Loss of Identity, Assimilation, Dervish, ISLAM, Jewish, Community, TenetsĪyad Akhtar (b. With regard to this point, Ayad Akhtar's message to the readers perhaps lies in the way the immigrants to the west in general and to America in particular encounter the so many teething troubles in their lives until they find a path to assimilate themselves into their new community. They both follow the same path in that Hayat finds his identity in befriending the Jewish girl Rachel as well as in discarding the Islamic tenets, taught by his mentor Mina in the meantime, his father finds his identity in accompanying his lifelong workmate-Nathan Wolfsohn, a Jewish professor. Hayat represents the younger generation while his father represents the older one. This theme is overtly applied to both Hayat's character as well as his father's. The novel explicates the inability of the Muslim protagonist, Hayat Shah, to assimilate himself into community as far as he still holds on his remnant tenets he has inherited from his homeland Pakistan. Abstract: This paper focuses on the concept of the loss of identity in Ayad Akhtar's debut novel American Dervish.
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