Isolated Incident by Mariam Pirbhai
“Absorbing, earnest and beautifully written, Isolated Incident is a loving portrayal of Canadians besieged by hate-crimes. Through fluid and insightful storytelling Mariam Pirbhai shows how each must rise above grief, rage, and despair to face the price and dangers of belonging.”
–Shauna Singh Baldwin, author of The Tiger Claw, What the Body Remembers and English Lessons
A Haitian woman survives the ravages of an When a rock, a threatening letter, and a burning Quran are thrown into a mosque on the outskirts of Toronto, religious leaders and the police shrug it off as an isolated incident. But many see it as a hate crime. Among them is Kashif Siddiqui, the son of Pakistani immigrants. Kashif joins a group of volunteers at an Islamic Cultural Centre on a security watch during the festive Eid night, a potential target of another attack. When an attack materializes, Eid night becomes a test of friendship, family, and faith for the community; it also ends in near-tragedy and a declaration of love and reconciliation.
Recommended by CBC Books, Quill & Quire, Hamilton Review of Books, the Toronto International Festival of Authors, and FOLD (Festival of Literary Diversity), Isolated Incident is Mariam Pirbhai’s debut novel.
Isolated Incident depicts the disturbing rise in hate-crimes directed at Canadian Muslims living in Ontario and Quebec, while also calling into question issues of land and belonging for both immigrant and settler. Will the children of South Asian immigrants, like Kashif Siddiqui and Arubah Anwar, be able to cultivate a new relationship to what is at once an Indigenous and colonized land–even as they are, themselves, under attack for their difference and their beliefs? Pirbhai enters provocative new territory in Canadian literature, seeing in the Pakistani-Canadian and Muslim diasporas a reservoir of experience and story, where questions of faith and community, migration and citizenship, misogyny and Islamophobia, are central to the political and social tenor of our times.
As Quill & Quire reviewer Zeahaa Rehman notes, “reading Isolated Incident is not unlike receiving a series of pinpricks that ultimately form a bruise in the reader’s heart, reminding them of their relationship to the deeply rooted Islamophobia in Canada.”
MARIAM PIRBHAI is an academic and creative writer. She is the author of a newly released book of creative nonfiction titled Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023), a debut novel titled Isolated Incident (Mawenzi 2022) and a short story collection titled Outside People and Other Stories (Inanna 2017), winner of the 2018 International Independent Publishers’ and American BookFest awards. She is Full Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she specializes in postcolonial literatures, diaspora studies and creative writing. She is the author and editor of book-length studies on the global South Asian diaspora and its literatures, including Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific (University of Toronto Press, 2009). She has served as the President of the Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies (formerly known as CACLALS, the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies), and is deeply committed to decolonizing the way we think about and teach literature and creative writing. She was born in Pakistan and lives in Waterloo, ON.
