London has always been a city of incomers. In medieval and early modern times, “foreigners” were people who came from a different county, and Londoners mainly were foreigners. With its birth rate less than its death rate, the city needed, and still needs, new blood coming in all of the time to keep it going, let alone growing.

I’m one such incomer, but count my blessings in that I came into the city with professional skills, a bit of capital, and a few friends to start a support network. Many others start with far less.

This week’s Time Out continues the story of a 23-year-old Pole who arrived in London from a small, poor village, not speaking English. Wiola Andrzejewska started working in a factory without proper employment conditions, was sacked without notice, but gradually developed a network of cleaning and babysitting jobs. Going back to her home town – flying for the first time (having arrived by bus!), wearing London fashions and comparing her achievements to those of her peers who stayed at home, she realises that she has come a long way.

For others, however, London is not a place of upward mobility. That’s the case with Najwa, the central character in Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret. She arrives as an asylum-seeker, but one who, at first glance, has all of the resources necessary to make a success of her life in the city. Her family has money – rather a lot of money – which is what got them into trouble in their native Sudan in the first place, with her father held and then executed for corruption after a coup. She has at least part of a university education, excellent English from a private school education in Khartoum, and a network of helpful relatives – everything, it seems to succeed.

But her twin brother Omar is a drug addict, who will eventually end up in jail doing a long stretch for stabbing a policeman. And her mother is an emotionally scarred woman of limited resources, who deals with widowhood and the onset of leukaemia by leaning heavily on her daughter, ensuring she has no life of her own.

We meet Najwa working as a maid, acutely aware of the way that she has come down in the world, yet resigned to it. For there’s nothing in Najwa’s character or upbringing that prepares her to make her own way in the world, to be an independent person with her own identity. She feels rootless, unanchored, and simply drifts into jobs and relationships without real intentions or plans.

“What’s wrong with us Africans?” I asked Anwar and he knew. He knew facts and history but nothing he said gave me comfort or hope. The more he talked, the more confused I felt, groping for something simple, but he said nothing was simple, everything was complicated, everything was connected to history and economics. In Queensway, in High Street Kensington, we would watch the English, the Gulf Arabs, the Spanish, Japanese, Malaysians, Americans and wonder how it would feel to have, like them, a stable country. A place where we could make future plans and it wouldn’t matter who the government was … A country that was a familiar, reassuring background, a static landscape on which to paint dreams.”

The only place where Najwa can find the family and community that she has lost turns out to be the mosque, and it is ironically the turn to Islam that ends the only other relationships she has. In a worse novel she would end up as a militant fundamentalist, but this is a very good novel indeed, and nothing in her life is clear-cut or clearly right or wrong.

This is a largely sympathetic portrayal of Islam, by an author who is a Muslim, yet it does not have all the answers for Najwa. She in the end will follow tradition and custom, but is it a good choice for her as an individual?

And it is a sympathetic portrayal of London. Najwa is aware of the risk of racism, of anti-Islamic reaction to her hijab, yet encounters no serious problems. Indeed the hostility towards who she is comes more from her own upbringing in a Westernised group that looked down on the local and the “native”:

“I walked down Gloucester Road and thought that whatever happened to me, whatever happens in the world, London remained the same, constant; continuous underground trains, the newsagents selling Cadbury’s chocolates, the hurried footsteps of people leaving work. … For the first time in my life, I disliked London and envied the English, so unperturbed and grounded, never displaced, never confused. For the first time, I was conscious of my shitty-coloured skin next to their placid paleness. .. I had a warm bath when I got home. I heated up a tin of soup. My dislike of London went away and left me feeling ill.”

I live in a block of mostly still council flats, and share the lift with a wide variety of other London incomers – some Africans, some eastern Europeans, some Asians. Many are on their way to making it in London, but some never will. Minaret encourages sympathy and understanding for those ill-equipped for finding a place in a whole new world.

Links: The Guardian review; the Independent’s and an interview with the author.