Faith-centered fiction is structured by the frustration of its believers, not serene certainty.

Evidence

Aboulela’s novels are, in fact, always worrying away at the fact that the faithful are constantly being frustrated—in personal ways or in terms of their proselytizing mission—by the resistance of the unfaithful in refusing to yield to their viewpoint. As such, lack and imperfection are at the heart of her books: the lack engendered in living in a world that is less than perfect and that has not been brought into conformity with God’s law. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 498