COMMUNAL BONDS IN BIRD SUMMONS

The novel Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela explores the various intricacies of female friendship, migration, faith, and self-discovery. It is a story about three Muslim women, Salma, Moni, and Iman, who take a road trip to the Scottish Highlands, yearning to visit the grave of a historical woman, Lady Evelyn Cobbold, known as the first British woman to perform Hajj. Additionally, their journey is not just a journey of pilgrimage but rather a transformative experience wherein they face different challenges. These challenges helped them to grow independently and become a new community with their own set of rules and principles. Leila Aboulela explores the themes of communal displacement, religious faith, and female solidarity throughout the book. All these are interwoven to illustrate how communal bonds enable the protagonists to meet the challenges regarding their issues of identity, belonging, and personal development. Although each of the women is on her own journey, the story suggests that their shared experiences steer their quests for self-discovery in similar directions. This paper looks into how their sisterhood develops in the book and how female solidarity serves as a source of strength, healing as well as self-realization. This paper examines how Bird Summons illustrates the significance of communal bonds through feminist, postcolonial, and Islamic literary frameworks, emphasizing their role in fostering intersubjective connections that contribute to the development of individual identity and the challenge of social and personal dilemmas.