Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film

Transcultural Identity and Migration in Britain

Peter Cherry

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755601738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur des Nahen Ostens

A climate of Islamophobia allows anxieties about Muslim men living in and migrating to Britain to endure. British Muslims men are often profiled in highly negative terms or regarded with suspicion owing to their perceived religious and cultural heritage. But novels and films by British migrant and diaspora writers and filmmakers powerfully contest these stereotypes, and explore the rich diversity of Muslim masculinities in Britain. This book is the first critical study to engage with British Muslim masculinities in this literary and cinematic output from the perspective of masculinity studies. Through close analysis of work by Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Guy Gunaratne, Sally El Hosaini, Hanif Kureishi, Suhayl Saadi, Kamila Shamsie, Zadie Smith, Zia Haider Rahman and Salman Rushdie, Peter Cherry examines how migrant and diaspora protagonists negotiate their masculinity in a climate of Islamophobic and anti-migrant rhetoric. Cherry proposes a transcultural reading of these novels and films that exposes how conceptions of 'Britishness', 'Muslimness' and those of masculinity are unstable and contingent constructs shaped by migration, interaction with other cultures, and global and local politics.

Part One

Writing British Muslim Masculinities before and after The Satanic Verses Affair

1

Muslim Masculinities on the Move: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988)

Writing on the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Or, Virtue Regained (1740),¹ Terry Eagleton describes how the novel’s perceived pornographic qualities sparked transnational protests, translations and literary imitations, such as Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741).² Richardson’s Pamela, Eagleton argues, was less so a novel than ‘a cultural event […] a multimedia affair stretching all the way from domestic commodities to public spectacles, instantly recodable from one cultural mode to the next’.³ In the first two chapters of this book, I mobilize Eagleton’s reading of Pamela to claim that Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) can be read as a more recent iteration of a novel and an event which led to cultural production, public debate and demonstrations that continue to influence how writers, filmmakers, artists and the general public read, represent and react to Muslim migrants – and particularly male Muslim migrants. In this chapter, I begin by exploring how Rushdie’s controversial novel explores migration as a process that inevitably, and irrevocably, transforms gender practices. As this chapter will explain, Rushdie’s novel follows the lives of two male protagonists whose gender practices are the site where anxieties about migration most intensely manifest. Questions of gender, and specifically masculinity, are therefore inextricable from Rushdie’s exploration of migration and identity in The Satanic Verses.

Born in Mumbai (then Bombay) on 19 June 1947, just less than two months before India would receive independence from Britain in August 1947, Salman Rushdie migrated to Britain, aged fourteen, to attend the renowned Rugby School and eventually studied History at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Briefly moving to Karachi in 1968, where his Kashmiri Muslim family had since relocated, Rushdie returned to Britain in the 1970s where he embarked on a lucrative career working in the London office of the advertising firm Ogilvy and Mather. While working in advertising, Rushdie was credited with coining a number of memorable slogans through which he demonstrated his sharp abilities in wordplay, such as conceiving the portmanteau ‘irresistibubble’ to promote the bubbly textured chocolate bar Aero and ‘Naughty. But nice’ to advertise the UK Milk Board’s Fresh Cream Cake range.⁴

However, it is with the commercial and critical success of his second novel Midnight’s Children (1981) that Rushdie was able to commit to writing full-time.⁵ Midnight’s Children received that year’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Man Booker Prize – subsequently also being twice voted the ‘best of all winners’ in ceremonies celebrating the Man Booker’s twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversaries. Midnight’s Children, along with his third novel Shame (1983),⁶ kick-started what the critic Aijaz Ahmad dismissively refers to as the ‘exorbitant celebration of Salman Rushdie’.⁷ Ahmad’s cynicism refers to how Rushdie’s early fiction was often marketed to satisfy predominately white British middle-class tastes for exoticized narratives of hybrid worlds and identities. Both Ahmad and M. Keith Booker go further by arguing that much of Rushdie’s success is built on his privileged background, a careful staging of diasporic hybridity and an experimental writing style that, as Andrew Teverson summarizes, ‘conforms to the kinds of discourses authorised by the Anglo-American academy’.⁸ As Susheila Nasta points out, critical acclaim of Rushdie’s originality has often been at the cost of recognition for other British postcolonial writers from earlier periods, such as Sam Selvon, who were writing complex, formally experimental fiction that made use of diverse transcultural influences long before Rushdie put pen to paper.⁹

Nevertheless, few can argue that Rushdie’s early work made an immutable impact on the British literary and cultural landscape. Throughout the 1980s, Rushdie produced a number of intellectually rich and commercially successful novels that combined a preoccupation with history, a critical awareness of the postcolonial conditions of South Asia alongside a transcultural writing style that drew on influences from Latin American magical realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges), Eighteenth-century European satirical writing (Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift), Indian traditions of storytelling and myth (the Mahabharata), modernist and postmodernist experimentation (James Joyce, Italo Calvino), cinema, popular music and more. In the public eye, however, it is probably with his fourth, and most controversial, novel The Satanic Verses, that Rushdie’s reputation rests.

In Rushdie’s own words, ‘The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs … It is a love song to our mongrel selves.’¹⁰ However, as John J. Su remarks, the novel refrains from reproducing a simplistic binary between ‘hybridity and purity’.¹¹ Simon Gikandi, in a famous critique of the novel, observes how The Satanic Verses challenges not only the arguments of nationalists, who favour notions of authenticity and purity, but also those of liberal intellectuals who cherish notions of hybridity. Rather, Gikandi posits that the novel ‘insists on being read as a set of irresolvable oxymorons’.¹² In this manner, Rushdie seeks to capture the potentially disorienting nature of migration. Indeed, the novel opens chaotically with the explosion of an airplane over the English Channel. Blown out of their London-bound flight by a Sikh separatist group, the two main protagonists Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta grab onto each other to survive and fall to a safe but bewildering landing on British soil. Their explosive entry to Britain is also conceived as a rebirth as the pair fall from an airliner that ‘cracks in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery’ (Rushdie, p. 4). Landing amidst all the debris of the plane, the two men must now find their way around in what is a new landscape for Gibreel and, for Saladin, a previously familiar country that is now irrevocably transformed by his unorthodox landing. The two men will never be the same again and will undergo a range of metamorphoses while they make sense of their relationship with their new surroundings.

Despite the vast amount written on Rushdie’s novel, few critics have read the text through the lens of gender, although an important intervention on women characters in The Satanic Verses by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak will be explored shortly, and fewer still have explored the ways that practices of masculinity are challenged, complicated and reconstructed in the novel. This is a striking lacuna as much of The Satanic Verses focuses on the intimate yet fractious relationship between the two central male migrant protagonists, Gibreel and Saladin. Even before the pair have landed in Britain, the omniscient narrator observes the inherent gendering of migration by remarking at how among the detritus of the explosion, are the physical remains of ‘a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia’ and ‘a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever reasonable doubts’ (Rushdie, p 4). This passage highlights how immigration control subjects women to questions of a sexual nature and renders them as both ‘legal appendages’ and sexual objects to male migrants. Furthermore, through the depiction of male genitals and of children, the text also points towards omnipresent xenophobic paranoia about the sexuality of male migrants and, in the then–British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s own words, Britain being ‘swamped’ by migrants as couples are reunited.

My reading of The Satanic Verses responds to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s insightful critique of Rushdie’s representation of women characters in The Satanic Verses. For Spivak, female protagonists are denied the psychological complexity afforded to the male characters that populate the text and thus the novel is

written on the register of male bonding and unbonding, the most important being, of course, the double subject of migrancy, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. The two are tortured by obsession with women, go through them, even destroy them, within a gender code that is never opened up, never questioned, in this book where so much is called into question, so much is reinscribed.¹³

In this passage, Spivak not only draws the reader’s attention to the problematic representation of women characters that are superficially imagined with little or no inner lives, but also observes how male characters are ‘obsessed’ with women as a critical marker of their own sense of self. I agree with Spivak’s criticism, but also position this chapter as unpacking this latter point of order as the characters of Saladin and Gibreel perform their masculinity within codes of compulsory heterosexuality, homosocial desire and homosexual panic that reduce women to objects through which these two male-bodied subjects seek to attain and demonstrate their masculinity. I will explore how patriarchal and misogynistic constructions of masculinity emerge as a locus through which the protagonists struggle to translate themselves into their British cultural setting. Consequently, I will be engaging with how the novel shows the refashioning of masculinity through transcultural exchange and encounter yet still at the cost of oppression of women protagonists. I argue that Rushdie’s text reads the existential difficulties and hardships of migration through Gibreel and Saladin’s homosocial desire for one another thereby showing how male rivalry and anxious, repressed sexual desire becomes a way of holding their unsteady sense of self together. In doing so, The Satanic Verses offers a variety of rich and incisive readings for the ways in which patriarchal masculinity is shaped by migration, and, by exposing these readings in tandem with Eagleton’s notion of ‘the novel as an event’, I demonstrate how the fictional archetype of the Muslim male migrant became discursively constructed as an obtrusive figure in conversations about migration and national identity in contemporary Britain.

‘Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that’

In its dominant narrative thread, The Satanic Verses explores how ‘[migrants] impose their needs on their new earth, bringing their own coherence to the new-found land, imagining it afresh’ (Rushdie, p. 458). Rushdie’s novel addresses the tension between the transcultural possibilities and existential pain that migration brings with it in a complex ‘multitudinous and polyvocal narrative’ that is ‘part fantasy, part “socio-political” and, through the multiple shifting viewpoints and transformations of Gibreel and Saladin, frequently resists interpretation’.¹⁴ Both in its literary form and in its characterization, then, The Satanic Verses conveys multiple features of what I term ‘transcultural narrative’, as elaborated in the introduction of the book. For most of the novel, this shape-shifting narrative is told through the perspective of two male migrants from India – Salahuddin Chamchawala and Gibreel Farishta – who perceive their host nation in antithetical ways. Saladin, for instance, is a staunch Anglophile who is ‘seeking to be transformed into the foreignness he admires’ while Gibreel, prefers ‘contemptuously, to transform’ (Rushdie, p. 426), thereby suggesting a transcultural identity that is able to draw from a range of different cultures he encounters. However, as the narrative unfolds, their futures are increasingly bound together and both are forced to transform through their experience of migration.

Salahuddin Chamchawala is an actor who was born in Bombay but, after a private-school education in England, turns his back both on his Indian homeland and his devout Muslim father to become a ‘goodandproper Englishman’ (Rushdie, p. 43). Saladin’s devotion to England, and even his desire to leave, is presented as a rejection of paternal influence as he is ‘convinced that his father would smother all his hope unless he got away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and himself’ (Rushdie, p. 36). Indeed, his father is an overbearing presence in his enormous size that literally towers over him, both through his hegemonic position in the local community as an affluent businessman and through his strict adherence to Islam. Saladin’s Anglophilia, and his reasons for migrating, are therefore grounded in his repudiation of a localized form of hegemonic masculinity and a desire for more freedom away from paternal constraint.

Ironically, his attempts to cut himself off from his Indian Muslim heritage and reconstruct himself as what the British politician Thomas Babington Macaulay infamously referred to as ‘brown-skinned Englishmen’, who would be ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’, are undercut by the Anglicization of his name to ‘Saladin Chamcha’.¹⁵ Saladin, for example, calls to mind the warrior sultan of Egypt and Syria Saladin, who led the Muslim military campaign against the Christian crusaders from Europe. Yet, in the novel’s protagonist Saladin, this name is ironically reversed, as the character Jumpy Joshi notes, ‘He was a real Saladin […] A man with a holy land to conquer, his England, the one he believed in’ (Rushdie, p. 174), implying Saladin’s religious-like devotion to England.

Saladin’s surname is also cognate with the fictional protagonist Gregor Samsa of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis transforms from a human into a beetle, presaging Saladin’s eventual metamorphosis into a devil-goat which functions as an allegory for the ways he is viewed by anti-immigrant discourses in 1980s Britain and of the transformative power of migration upon formerly entrenched identities.¹⁶ However, Saladin’s shortened surname also translates into Hindi and Urdu as ‘spoon’ thereby both bringing to mind a sense of superiority, as in the British idiom ‘born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth’, and sycophancy, as in the Hindi and Urdu idiomatic use of spoons to signify someone who uses excessive flattery to people in positions of power.

Andrew Teverson points out:

Chamcha, in this incarnation, is representative of a class of migrants well-theorised in discursive accounts of post-colonial diasporic identities. He is a near relative of the psychologically traumatised ‘native intellectual’ in Frantz Fanon’s writings, who has internalised the racism of a dominant white culture to such a degree that he attempts a ‘hallucinatory whitening’.¹⁷

Indeed, Saladin faces institutionalized and systematic racism throughout his life but, until his transformative encounter with Gibreel, he is blind to the multiple ways that British society is prejudiced against him. As an actor, for instance, he is refused a place on screen as ‘his face is the wrong colour for their colour TVs’ (Rushdie, p. 61) and instead he works only as a ‘voice-over’ for advertisements due to his unique ability to mimic different accents. His mimicry has been developed through years of parroting English customs in order to assimilate, for which he has been rewarded with a house in the moneyed London area of Notting Hill and marriage to a wealthy English woman named Pamela Lovelace whose voice stank of ‘Yorkshire puddings and hearts of oak’ (Rushdie, p. 180). Significantly, the character’s name also echoes two novels by Samuel Richardson – namely Pamela; or, a Virtue Regained (1740) and the villainous Robert Lovelace in Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady (1748).¹⁸ While the protagonist’s first name hints at the titular character of Richardson’s text which, like The Satanic Verses caused a furore when it was published, Rushdie’s recycling of the surname ironically subverts the power relationship in Richardson’s novel whereby Robert Lovelace lusts after Clarissa and manipulates her to receive sexual gratification. Here, in Rushdie’s text, it is Saladin who is actually using and manipulating Pamela Lovelace’s body to gain access to upper-class Britain.

Yet his work in advertising also exposes the racist undercurrents of Britain, as explained by the media executive Hal Valence:

Within the last three months, we re-shot a peanut-butter poster because it researched better without the black kid in the background. We re-recorded a building society jingle because T’Chairman thought the singer sounded black, even though he was as white as a sodding sheet, and even though, the year before, we’d used a black boy who, luckily for him, didn’t suffer from an excess of the soul. We were told by a major airline that we couldn’t use any blacks in their ads, even though they were actually employees of the airline.

(Rushdie, p. 267)

Despite these experiences of racism, Saladin’s uncritical appreciation for Britain remains undeterred up to the point when his fall from the airplane, with Gibreel, symbolically signals the onset of his gradual realization of the extent of racist prejudice in the UK.

Saladin and Gibreel first meet on a flight to London from Mumbai and strike up a conversation about both being actors. Gibreel enjoys extraordinary success on screen as a Bollywood superstar who was so in demand that he once worked on ‘eleven movies’ simultaneously (Rushdie, p....