Who Is a Muslim?

Orientalism and Literary Populisms

Maryam Wasif Khan

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780823290147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary
• Index: Literature

Who Is a Muslim? argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant iterations in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question "Who is a Muslim?, " a constant concern within eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief among them, takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to the newly formed Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the idea of an Urdu canon, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate around the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship.

1 / Mahometan/Muslim: The Chronotope of the Oriental Tale

More than a century ago now, Martha Pike Conant, a doctoral student at Columbia University, undertook a study of the oriental tale in which she demarcated the literary form as constituted by “all the oriental and pseudo-oriental fiction—chiefly prose that appeared in English, whether written originally in English or translated from the French.”¹ Oriental, the framing adjective, Conant elaborated, pertained to “those countries, collectively, that begin with Islam on the eastern Mediterranean and stretch through Asia.”² Borrowing verbatim from Antoine Galland, the self-professed discoverer and translator of the Arabian Nights into French, Conant further suggests that “ ‘Oriental,’ then, includes here what it included according to Galland […]: ‘Sous le nom d’Orientaux, je ne comprends pas seulement les Arabes et les Persans, mais encore les Turcs et les Tartares et presque tous les peoples de l’Asie jusqu’à la Chine, mahometans ou païens et idolâtres.’ ”³ We can ask what it means to “begin with Islam,” but for now it should suffice to say that Galland and Conant delineated the orient as a set of Muslim territories that extend east from the Mediterranean, and home to, as Antoine Galland writes, Arabs, Persians, Turks, Tartars, and all the people of Asia until China, “Mohammadans,” pagans, and idolaters included.⁴

What is the oriental tale, then, if the orient is constituted in these apparently ethno-religious and geographic terms? By logical derivation, the oriental tale is the name for fictions in English that claim origin in—or by way of their plot, characters, or location are somehow of the orient—a non-Christian, in fact, Muslim geography that lies to the east of Europe. Conant’s generous definition serves the purpose, in fact, gathers for contemporary readers a large part of the structures that have informed that eighteenth-century literary phenomenon we now know as the oriental tale. Taking on a range of fictions that include the Grub Street translation of Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits (~1707), the instructive stories that appeared in weekly journals such as The Spectator and Rambler for much of the 1710s, as well as later, more complex, Gothic renditions such as William Beckford’s Vathek (1787), Conant describes a multifarious narrative that seemed to defy conventional notions of genre and origin. The critical attribute of the oriental tale, then, is its deliberate affiliation with spaces or people designated as the same. Assuming the orient to be an established space from the very outset, Conant directs her readers away from an interrogation of its members and territories, pointing instead toward the European Republic of Letters, the true home of the form in question.

In recent years, Conant’s small, but comprehensive book on the oriental tale appears as a frequent citation in contemporary works on eighteenth-century fiction forms. While the unrelenting efforts of postcolonial intellectuals have forced us to rethink grouping large swathes of people and traditions under the term “oriental,” what remains unchanged from Conant’s conception of the oriental tale are the limits of its influence. Contemporary scholarship still sees the oriental tale functioning largely within a world defined by its Englishness. It is translated into, or originally composed in English; its inspirations are other English or European narratives about the East; and its circles of influence are largely constrained to further literary developments within England.

Alternatively described by James Beattie, the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and moralist, as the “Oriental fable,” the oriental tale also became affiliated—albeit as a lesser form—with the Aesopian tradition that itself commanded significant influence in Restoration England.⁵ Like the English fable, “an amazingly diverse assortment of literary exercises undertaken in Aesop’s name,” the oriental tale also served a variety of purposes—cultural, domestic, political—mostly through the evocation of an Arab or Persian writer named briefly in the English or French translator’s introduction.⁶ Arriving in a reading metropolis where fairytales, or oral lore such as the stories of Tom Thumb and Robin Hood, had been pushed to the social peripheries, while more informative, moral, or knowledge-oriented genres had gained ascendancy, the oriental tale achieved the vogue that it did, in part at least, because it stood as a bridge between these two otherwise removed categories. That is to say, its English authors and translators believed it to be “less insipid” than animal fables, while containing all the “Beauties without the extravagance of our own tales of the Fairies.”⁷ Despite the fact that some of the most heavily circulated oriental tales in eighteenth-century England were translated from French originals, their popularity and their afterlives attest to their significance in the formation of an English nationhood. If the novel achieved this through dedicated realism, the oriental tale took on this task by proclaiming itself as moral and informative, an allegory for the domestic performed by the exotic and the fantastic.

Much like its nineteenth-century scion, the novel, the oriental tale fast became a frequent member of popular magazines and weekly periodicals and papers such as the Flying Post, The Spectator, and The Gentlemen’s Magazine, a staple script for cheap, nightly theatrical performances in London, and eventually a recurrent event in women’s magazines. This last aspect of the oriental tale, mostly a footnote or passing mention in studies of the form, is a significant one. A work such as Arabian Nights Entertainments, for example, made for convenient fodder for eighteenth-century chapbooks, thus achieving a much wider circulation in English society than either the oral folklore that was commonly associated with a newly literate working class or the higher literary forms—essays, poems—that were preferred by a more aristocratic or socially aspiring order. Early reprints of the Arabian Nights, Paolo Lemos Horta tells us, most often appeared as “cheap bootleg editions, some just one story long, produced with a popular audience in mind and with little concern about the accuracy of the translation.”⁸ In other words, various versions of the same volume could be read across social class and gender in edited, pirated, or abridged forms, unlike many texts from elite or high culture, which normally appeared as “poetry and drama, moral essays and prose satire.”⁹

Recent studies of the oriental tale, including the nuanced and comprehensive projects of eighteenth-century scholars, the late Srinivas Aravamudan and Ros Ballaster, revisit this literary form with the intent of explicating the at times renegade, dissident role it played with relation to mainstream narratives of its time. Aravamudan, in a number of articles and two fine books, illustrates the contradictory posture that the eighteenth-century oriental tale took with respect to the emergent novel.¹⁰ Ballaster’s position, articulated through a full-length study of the oriental tale, asks us to consider this form in terms of the political and social complexities that marked the long eighteenth century. Fiction, for much of this period, is the dominant means for France and England to understand and negotiate national politics and social morality as well as the vast swathes—trading and political allies or rivals—that were collectively referred to as the Orient.¹¹ At the heart of these diverse critical arguments by Conant, Ballaster, and Aravamudan, however, is a single concern: what role did the eighteenth-century oriental tale play in the longer history of an emerging English literariness? That is to say, if Conant’s reading of the oriental tale marks its instrumental role in the rise of English Romanticism, then Aravamudan and Ballaster read this form as carving an uneasy, but ultimately complicit, relationship with the idea of nationhood as well as with England’s imperial aspirations.

Aravamudan’s contributions on the import of the oriental tale in England are an invaluable point of departure for this study. In a redemptive reading of the oriental tale, Aravamudan asks us to consider the oriental tale as a form that, like the novel, also “constitutes nationalism, but differently.”¹² Unlike the novel, it “generate[s] a two-way cultural process of dissemination as well as the consolidation of aesthetic values.”¹³ Aravamudan’s celebration of the oriental tale as a form that brings forward a “different set of questions concerning nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and transculturation,” however, rests on a problematic position that post-colonialists have adopted with respect to Edward Said’s eviscerating critique of the totalizing discipline we know as “Orientalism.”¹⁴ Oriental fictions and tracts from the eighteenth century, Aravamudan argues, instigated a critique of the self, as well as of the hegemonies of nation and state that more insular genres such as the novel, in fact, bolstered. Aravamudan’s project—one in which he certainly was not alone—was based on the premise that Enlightenment Europe’s interest in the orient had utopian aspirations, motivated by self-reflection, thus prompting a “fluid circulation of endocultural and exocultural processes.”¹⁵ To put it simply, texts, fictions, and travel narratives that took the orient as their center but demonstrated a committed critique of the self, or took a stand against slavery, constituted a positive orientalism as well as a positive nationalism.

Aravamudan’s persuasive stance on the oriental tale stands as long as the literary history of English is considered a cocooned event with a singular trajectory. If we consider English “not merely as a language of literary expression, but as a cultural system with global reach,” then the pivot of the oriental tale also shifts.¹⁶ Once decentered from the orbit of a single literature or language, the oriental tale is forced to confront the English version of its origins as well as the journeys it takes from the European Republic of Letters toward colonized “orients.” Thus, Aravamudan’s claim, that “oriental tales, pseudoethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political utopias” that “speculated about a largely imaginary East” were “experimental, prospective, and anti-foundationalist,” also asks us to recall that these productive attributes were available only through exercises in allegorical reading.¹⁷ More important, the political and social concerns addressed in these progressive forms are proper to French and English audiences. For most readers, these stories were literally just tales about a distant orient. The oriental tale is thus a literary form whose cosmopolitanism—to use Aravamudan’s word—masks a nation-centeredness that is usually contained in the allegories and moral precepts of the form. Consumed across literate social classes and integrated with the rise of journalistic impulses that had become an indispensable part of public life, the oriental tale was distinct precisely because, for its metropolitan audiences, it was as fantastic as it was authentic, truthful, and moral. The story that this chapter tells continues not in England, where the oriental tale is slowly superseded by the novel, but in colonial North India (and eventually contemporary Pakistan), where this literary form is introduced and systemically canonized over the course of the nineteenth century.

Our present moment—coincidentally defined by the rise of populist movements across Euro-America and postcolonial states in South Asia—demands a more nuanced and critical reading of the oriental tale as a popular national genre distinguished by its worldly aspirations. To go back to Conant, what does it mean to say the “Orient begins with Islam?” Was the vogue for the oriental tale, a much-used phrase, merely a vogue? Is it enough to try and rehabilitate eighteenth-century English attitudes toward the Muslim East by attempting to cast one literary genre as liberal, even dissident? Is this ostensibly worldly, progressive moment ultimately insular or nation-centric? In the case of the affirmative, we must also interrogate the relationship the oriental tale in English forges with the so-called oriental spaces it claims as its origin. And finally, if the oriental tale exceeds the bounds of the metropolis, what are the terms of this excess? That is to say, is the circulation of the oriental tale an unregulated accident, or does it take place within the systems and institutions of a once-colonized world? To read the oriental tale as a sign of translatio, or intercultural exchange, as Aravamudan does, is to elide its historical presence and enduring influence in both the metropolis and the colony. It is a form that inevitably contributes to the twin projects of British national reification and imperial expansion, which are mediated largely through the performative specter of the then-Islamic East. Despite its worldly, but other times naïve, demeanor, the moment of the oriental tale is a decisive event in the intertwined histories of orientalism and its constitutive literary and cultural forms.

When I say the moment of the oriental tale, I am referring to roughly the first half of the eighteenth century in England, when volumes such as Francois Petis La Croix’s Persian Tales and Turkish Tales (1710), Thomas Guellette’s Mogul Tales (1736), and Frances Sheridan’s History of Nourjahad, all inspired by the raging success of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, flooded the English literary market, the scope of their readership ranging from the working to the aristocratic classes. Though not normally considered significant in studies of orientalism—the discipline or the discourse—the oriental tale is instrumental in the imaginative invention of a particular kind of orient. The critical impulses of the oriental tale are not restricted to England, and therefore, I read the oriental tale against the idea that it is archive only to English and Anglophone literatures. I read it as a moment that must be read into the mainstream archives of modern vernaculars such as Arabic or Urdu, both wrought by colonial pasts.

The oriental tale invents and is organized around what I call the chronotope of the Mahometan/Muslim, the relational unit of time and space that is essential to the form and meaning of this literary genre. The oriental tale is inevitably located in the imaginary space I call the Mahometan Orient and its protagonist is a Mahometan, who in later forms gives way to the category of Muslim. The Mahometan and, by extension, the Muslim are constituted as itinerants, devoid of civilizational, racial, or even linguistic origins, a figure who is unlike other “Orientals,” Hindus, for example, and above all, in contradiction to Enlightenment ideals of nationhood. It is this set of time-space relations that replicates in vernacular oriental tales and the later fiction forms that arise from the dominance of this form in the Indian colony. Though the chronotope of the Mahometan/Muslim does not necessarily dictate the plot or the allegorical lesson that oriental tales often have for English audiences, it informs the arrangement of the oriental tale, the orientation of its characters, and the possibilities of representation in the narrative. It is the particular configuration of this chronotope that distinguishes the oriental tale from earlier English and continental representations of the Muslim East.¹⁸

I use the term “Mahometan,” and not Muslim, Islamic, or Arab, to emphasize the imaginative construction of a historic, lived geography and peoples by the greater orientalist project.¹⁹ As a concept, Mahometanism is a European invention, a title that Said explicates in Orientalism as a...