Islam in the Eastern African Novel offers an idiosyncratic perspective on the sub-Saharan African novel by engaging three novelists from eastern Africa-Nuruddin Farah, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and M. G. Vassanji. Mirmotahari argues that Islam is not an incidental factor in the fiction produced by these writers, but a central presence that renews conversations about nationhood, race, diaspora, coloniality, and the novel itself as a form in a sub-Saharan African and postcolonial context.

This study of the sub-Saharan African novel interprets representations of Islam as a central organising presence that generates new conceptual questions and demands new critical frameworks with which to approach categories like nationhood, race, diaspora, immigration, and Africa's multiple colonial pasts.