“The man Allah has chosen for me to marry”: Enchanted and disenchanted love in Ayisha Malik’s Sofia Khan trilogy

Modern lovers, writes Eva Illouz, inhabit an “ironic structure of romantic feeling” (2012: 195), with chick lit the exemplary genre of “disenchanted” modern love (2010: 22). Ayisha Malik’s Sofia Khan trilogy, this article argues, both illustrates and complicates the sociologist’s model. In each instalment of Sofia’s story, Malik highlights one or more of the modes of disenchantment Illouz details: psychological, semiotic, and socio-political. In each, the novelist also leaves exceptions to the disenchanted rule. In the first book, Sofia’s progress towards coupledom with Irish photographer Conall can be read both in fully secular, disenchanted terms and as the work of a God who answers Sofia’s prayers and is the “greatest of planners” (Malik, 2015: 199; see Surahs 3:54 and 8:30), such that Islam and romantic love are mutually supportive. The second book, which starts with Sofia and Conall about to marry and ends with them poised to divorce, unsettles this accord. Sofia’s claim that Conall is “the man Allah has chosen for me to marry” proves multiply ironic, as Malik shifts the locus of enchantment from romantic love to other sources of happiness, value, and meaning, thereby disaggregating Islam from the secular religion of romantic love that Robert Polhemus (1990) calls “erotic faith”. In the coda novella Sofia Khan and the Baby Blues (2022), Malik locates Sofia’s rejection of erotic faith within a shapely providential pattern, leaving the trilogy deftly poised between the scepticism of chick lit and the reassurance of romance.