Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature

E. Santesso

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137281715
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137281722
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Focusing on British novels about the Muslim immigrant experience published after 9/11; this book examines the promise as well as the limits of 'British Muslim' identity as a viable form of self-representation, and the challenges - particularly for women - of reconciling non-Western religious identity with the secular policies of Western states.

1

Islam and British Literature

In 1869 the great Muslim reformer and educator Sir Syed Ahmed Khan left India for Britain, taking up quarters in 21 Mecklenburgh Square, on the fringes of Bloomsbury. After spending the next few months visiting colleges, and meeting with political and cultural leaders, he returned home to found the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh in 1875. There, he furthered his life-long support of the literary arts (one critic argued that “modern Urdu literature owes more to him than to any one man of his generation”). Increasingly, this “maker of literary men” became convinced that the future lay in English-language literary production, and, in a speech to the Mohammedan Literary Society in Calcutta, made his convictions known: “I think it is very clear that English is the language to which we ought to devote our attention.”¹ Earlier in his career, when his writings about the British mistreatment of Muslims in India had caused a stir, Sir Syed had been an object of deep suspicion in Britain; in 1888, already a member of the Order of the Star of India, he became the first Muslim to be knighted.

In August, 1939, a young Indian writer and graduate of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College (by this time renamed Aligarh Muslim University) arrived in London, hoping to find a publisher for his novel. His efforts were fruitless—until a small press (fortuitously enough, located at 37 Mecklenburgh Square) showed interest. Actually publishing the novel, though, proved to be a challenge, as some of the material was considered sensitive at the time, and eventually, an admirer of the novel had to ask the owner of the press to intervene. The novel, Twilight in Delhi, by Ahmed Ali, was eventually published in 1940; it was, by most accounts, the first novel written in English by a Muslim author. Nor did it emerge in obscurity: the owner of the press in question—Hogarth Press—was Virginia Woolf; the admirer urging publication was E.M. Forster, who, in A Passage to India, praised Twilight in Delhi for the way it “movingly evoked” the society “which produced Aziz”—that is, his own character, Dr Aziz perhaps the best-known Muslim character in modern English literature (“Author’s Notes” page 30).

From outsider caricature to insider anthropology . . . and back again

Muslim authors coming to London, and finding their work alternately opposed and embraced by the British establishment—this is the story that this book will follow, and it has a history. In some ways, the publication of Ali’s novel was the beginning of a new tradition; in others, the culmination of a much older one. For all that some have pointed to “multi-culti” novelists and “halal” writers as a recent trend or a fad cooked up to exploit a new market niche, the fact is that British literature has been engaged with the question of Islam in the West for centuries. It is a history that requires some review, as it is here that the tropes of modern British Muslim writing are forged; indeed, Muslim authors writing in English are still in many ways responding to the claims made familiar by this tradition.

The figure of the Muslim first appears in English texts during the Middle Ages—even if the word itself was rarely used (most writings would have used some variant such as Mohammedan or Mohametist).² These early texts almost universally vilified the Muslim as deviant and vicious, often referring to him as “a bloodthirsty barbarian, a heretic, a ‘misbeliever,’ an atheist, a harbinger of the apocalypse, a sodomite” (Cartwright 8).³ As many have argued, this is partly the legacy of the crusades, and partly the consequence of extremely limited interactions between Western Europe and the Orient. By the Renaissance, the growing reach of British soldiers and merchants, and in particular the nation’s more direct relationship with the Ottoman Empire, began to change this image: the Muslim was still a popular villain, but was becoming a more complex figure, and “the difference of Christianity from Islam [was] re-imagined in terms of a series of other differences, of politics, race, [and] culture” (Robinson 146).⁴ By the seventeenth century, Nabil Matar contends that Islam “was no longer viewed as a religion with which Christians were engaged in distant lands but as an intellectual and social matter at home” (73). It is during this period that the Qur’an was first translated into English by Alexander Ross.⁵

As literary realism became a dominant concern in the English tradition, this more complex idea of the Muslim became a fixture. The Enlightenment saw the rise in popularity of formal and informal “travel narratives” which reflected the desire to scrutinise the East as an object of serious and accurate study; in this genre of writing, the authors (admittedly often acting as “agents of a superior civilisation”) used “geographical and ethnographical enquiry” to collect information as a way to educate the public back home (Kabbani 3). Travelogues, along with diaries and letter collections, helped create a seemingly “authentic” vision of Islam. In reality, of course, this authenticity was expressed via highly stylised visual and verbal images that aimed to exoticise and eroticise the East, fuelled by what Catherine Hall calls the “imperial imagination” (35).⁶ Perhaps the most popular work in this tradition was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters from the Levant, published as a collected volume in 1763, a year after the author’s death. In the letters, Montagu openly talks about her task as a writer, which is to correct the “imperfect accounts of the manners and religion of these people; this part of the world being seldom visited but by merchants, who mind little but their own affairs; or travellers, who make too short a stay to be able to report anything exactly of their own knowledge” (232). In terms of accuracy and even-handedness, the letters are indeed an enormous step forward from medieval and Renaissance depictions; however, her writing is hardly immune from the type of sensationalist rhetoric that had earlier been the norm. The letters engage with the ancient Christian– Muslim binary despite the avowed attempt to avoid bias, systematically invoking the familiar Orientalist images of the age. In particular, sexuality, sensuality and idleness are thematic to her descriptions of “the Turkish ladies.” Visiting the Turkish hammam, for example, Montagu gives a striking account of the women around her, focusing on bodies with “skins shiningly white, only adorned by their beautiful hair divided into many tresses, hanging on their shoulders, perfectly representing the figures of the Graces” (107). Immediately, she contemplates the scene:

To tell you the truth, I had wickedness enough to wish secretly, that Mr. Gervais could have been there invisible. I fancy it would have very much improved his art, to see so many fine women naked, in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their cushions. (107)

Montagu’s allusion to Gervais (the Irish painter) illustrates the fact that she is very aware of the pictorial conventions that had helped give rise to the Orientalist depictions of the East. This sort of “wickedness” allows her to invoke particular images that were popular at the time as a way to establish her credibility while also disengaging with these conventions to claim an even more truthful portrayal of the women, available only to her eyes.

The insider/outsider tone invoked in Montagu’s letters remained in place almost a century later; Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan (1836), for example, revisits similar Muslim sites, pays particular attention to the opulent lifestyle of Muslim Turks and makes observations about gender ideology in Islam. Pardoe energetically engages with and challenges Constantinople’s reputation as a city. On one occasion, she chronicles her own experiences in the notorious Turkish baths. The author is aware of previous accounts detailing the exotic beauty and the debauched manners of Muslim women in that setting and she distances herself from such depictions, noting that “I should be unjust did I not declare that I witnessed none of that unnecessary and wanton exposure described by Lady M.W. Montague. Either the fair Ambassadress was present at a peculiar ceremony, or the Turkish ladies have become more delicate and fastidious in their ideas of propriety” (137).⁷ This statement, ironically, carries in it exactly the same kind of claim laid out by Montagu: an allusion to familiar stereotypes while promising unadulterated, untainted reflections on the peculiarities of the life in the East. Like Montagu, Pardoe is determined to make observations with the precision of an anthropologist; on many occasions, she meticulously records cultural differences, highlighting the way in which Islam is intricately intertwined with intellectual life in Ottoman society. Yet these observations often carry a hint of distaste or even condemnation. She notes, for example, that boys admitted to the governor’s school are required to pray three times a day at the mosque; “a tolerably convincing proof that they entertain no anti-Mohammedan partialities” (198). Such wellintentioned comments still serve to maintain a certain image of the East, marking it as Europe’s vaguely fanatical cultural Other. As well, Pardoe’s depictions—employing conventional markers of difference while simultaneously claiming to revise long-established clichés—make it difficult to differentiate between what is authentic and fictional. This is especially true when the writer claims to possess an insider/outsider vantage point: she is a woman, permitted into forbidden spaces, but also a Westerner who is able to recognise the injustices of a highly patriarchal society.

It is also at this point that major English literary authors begin to take a more active interest in Islam. Shelley’s “The Revolt of Islam” (1818) depicts a valiant rebellion against a tyrant modelled after the Ottoman Sultan. Although Shelley’s work is read more as a general allegory about oppression, and is not primarily about Islam itself, Islam provides a handy and familiar metaphor for despotism. Here, the characterisation of the Muslim tyrant seems to conform to the patterns established centuries earlier:

The land in which I lived, by a fell bane

Was withered up. Tyrants dwelt side by side,

And stabled in our homes—until the chain

Stifled the captive’s cry, and to abide

That blasting curse men had no shame—all vied

In evil, slave and despot; fear with lust

Strange fellowship through mutual hate had tied,

Like two dark serpents tangled in the dust,

Which on the paths of men their mingling poison thrust. (694–702)

Yet Shelley himself recognises that such characterisations are somewhat out of fashion and not meant to be taken seriously, anthropologically speaking. He admits that he does not make “much attempt at minute delineation of Mahometan matters” but rather means to create “a tale illustrative of such a revolution as might be supposed to take place in a European nation.” His disinterest in realistic “delineation” of Muslim characters was shared by his wife Mary, who also employed similar clichés in Frankenstein. Early in the story, the monster recounts his observation of a family of “cottagers”; the affection of the young man of the family (Felix) for an exotic woman (Safie, a “sweet Arabian”) inspires the monster’s own desire for a female companion. In that side story, we find out that Safie, whose mother was a Christian Arab slave, has escaped from the tyranny of her contemptible and cruel father, a Turkish merchant, to unite with the young man. Safie is praised for her congeniality and loyalty—attributed to her Christian mother, who had “instructed her daughter in the tenets of her religion, and taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit, forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet” (118). Her Muslim father, on the other hand, is the embodiment of all that was traditionally associated with the Islamic Other: a morally corrupt cheat and a deceitful opportunist, he is labelled, simply “the treacherous Turk”—an epithet any reader would have recognised at the time.

Among all the Romantics, Byron, a self-professed admirer of the orient, may stand as the most high-profile example of an author interested in depicting the Muslim individual—though he nevertheless maintained an ambivalent relationship with Islam itself. On the one hand, he was appreciative of Muslim civilisation, as evident in Canto XIII of “Don Juan” (1819–1824), where the narrator laments the eradication of a Muslim girl’s community:

The Moslem orphan went with her protector,

For she was homeless, houseless, helpless; all

Her friends, like the sad family of Hector,

Had perished in the field or by the wall:

Her very place of birth was but a spectre

Of what it had been; there the Muezzin’s call

To prayer was heard no more!—and Juan wept

And made a vow to shield her, which he kept. (12)

On the other hand, his other works reveal a deep suspicion of Islamic tenets and the general worldview of the “haughty Mussulman” (e.g. “Eliza, what fools are the Mussulman sect, / Who to women deny the soul’s future existence!”). Still, that Byron could express his doubts about Islamic theology—indeed, that he was even familiar with it—while still retaining empathy for Muslim culture and communities, that he could appreciate Muslims as individuals and not condemn them along with their faith, shows the continuing move away from the indiscriminate and caricatured approach to the Muslim typical of earlier periods.

But this history is not one of a simple march towards more empathetic and accurate depiction of the Muslim. From the time of the addition of the South Asian subcontinent to the British Crown in the middle of the eighteenth century, to the occupation of Egypt and Sudan in 1882, the Muslim population within the Empire increased dramatically, to approximately 30 million. The establishment of the British Raj opened a new phase in colonial literature, as authors began to examine more closely the indigenous populace of the subcontinent. It is not too surprising that at the height of British imperialism, a huge number of writings retreated to the more antagonistic rhetoric of earlier ages, restoring archaic images of the “savage” Muslim as a way to fix the identity of the East as uncivilised and disorderly. This rhetorical strategy was useful in legitimising colonialism as a noble, civilising mission—and was precisely the material that Sir Syed made it his mission to counter. Several conclusions can be inferred from the types of writings emerging from the colonies: first, regardless of political sentiment, colonial writing represented the indigenous space as a “contact zone,” and more specifically as an ideological battleground of faiths. In that regard, writings such as Mahometanism Unveiled (1829) by Charles Forster, with the subtitle “an inquiry in which that arch-heresy, its diffusion and continuance, are examined on a new principle, tending to confirm the evidences, and aid the propagation, of the Christian faith” were typical. Second, these texts eventually created a specific body of knowledge (V.Y. Mudimbe describes this as the formation of a “colonial library” [175]), resulting in a propagation of certain ideas about Otherness—ideas which later authors had to account for or engage with directly. Third, this genre participated in a politically motivated discourse which, as Edward Said explains, contributed to the calcification of Eastern identity. According to Said, imperialism was guilty of creating a canon of work invested in inflicting epistemological violence on the object of study: “The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient” (Orientalism 21). Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927), for example, does just that: representing the Orient in accordance with accepted colonial biases, it testifies to the inadequacies of the East in terms of self-governance, administration, education and technology. Speaking of university graduates, she writes that “Rather than take employment which they consider below their newly acquired dignity, they will sponge forever, idle and unashamed, on the family to which they belong” (196). In a climate in which Indians themselves are viewed as lacking agency and action, people like Mayo continue to support imperialism as a blessing for any country judged to be “underdeveloped.” Lastly, the texts about Otherness also became a means to interrogate the future of the Empire and, more importantly, the definition of British identity. As Alex Padamsee suggests, “For Anglo-Indians, the figure of the Indian Muslim carried forward a sublated dimension of their own communal identity, one to which, in the succeeding decades, they were drawn as a means of deferring the insoluble problematic of the projection of a neutral and secular colonialist persona” (197). James Silk Buckingham, known for his exposés of the corruption and exploitation of the East India Company, proves this point as he alludes to universal values of justice, law and order in his comparison of British rule in India with that of the Muslims in preceding centuries. In “The Statement of the Reasons for the Removal of All restrictions on the Trade with India, on the residence of British Subjects in that Country, and for Throwing Open the Trade with China,” he writes:

It is alleged that the possession of land in India by Englishmen (under permission to purchase) would be extensive, and would prove so galling to the Natives, that it would provoke them to expel us. [Yet] [t]he Mahometan conquerors of India, who were a small minority, held possessions by a right which violated justice, yet there were few insurrections against their authority, and not one case of successful rebellion in the course of seven centuries; and will a right, which is obtained by the transfer of its equivalent with the free consent of the seller, be more likely to excite hostility? Are the manners of Englishmen less to be endured than those of a fierce, uncivilised race? (34)

All in all, these texts—written in various genres and reflecting a range of political interests—served to tint the supposedly neutral and encyclopaedic information about the East (the kind of information desired by Montagu’s and Pardoe’s audiences) by highlighting the cultural, racial and religious differences of the “Mahometans,” all in the service of consolidating a firmer Western identity. Caricature had returned.

There is a nice irony, then, to the fact that for all the familiarity of the “moor” or “Ottoman” figure, it was the Muslims of South Asia that would ultimately push English literary representation of Muslims to a new and more sophisticated level, a level which would eventually inspire a rethinking of British identity itself. Despite the fact that the majority of the Indian subcontinent was Hindu, the Muslim population attracted the most political attention: Muslims were often flagged by bureaucrats for their supposedly aggressive and unruly nature and identified as “the most likely source of threat to British rule” (Bennett 15). Indeed, the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 only confirmed, for many, these basic suspicions; as Amin Malak explains, “because the Muslims were the dominant force behind the Revolt of 1857, the British, who called it a ‘Muhammadan rebellion’ and ‘a handiwork of the Muslims,’ singled them out as their most mortal enemy from among the population in India” (22). Whatever the responses of Sir Syed and others to these suspicions, this nervous fascination long remained a visible presence in colonial fiction: in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), the protagonist is commended for his ability to pass as a native “Mohammedan” and act as an agent of the state by providing intelligence against this ever-present threat.⁸ On cue, Kim could quickly alter his appearance: “At a shop on the outskirts of the city the change was made, and Kim stood up, externally at least, a Mohammedan” (207). Yet the ease with which he emulates the Other destabilises Kim’s core identity and seems to jeopardise his true allegiances. After he returns to the lama as a wise “sahib,” he pays his respects in the Muslim manner:

“I was made wise by thee, Holy One,” said Kim, forgetting the little play just ended; forgetting St. Xavier’s; forgetting his white blood; forgetting even the Great game as he stooped, Mohammedan fashion, to touch his master’s feet in the dust of the Jain temple. (302–303)

If in Kipling, Kim’s ability to adopt the indigenous fashion is ultimately a kind of gimmick, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) takes a more serious tone in examining the plight of the Muslim stranded in a hostile empire. At the centre of the plot is the aforementioned Dr Aziz, an Indian-Muslim, who feels completely “rooted in society and Islam,” and takes pride in his heritage (121). Aziz often references his attachment to Islam as a philosophy and a set of moral principles which give him a sense of belonging and an ability to cope with colonial policies which treat Indian Muslims as second-class citizens. As a Muslim, Aziz “like[s] to hear his religion praised” since it “soothe[s] the surface of his mind, and allow[s] beautiful images to form beneath” (105); he is ready to defend it, as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Islam and British Literature
• 2. Rethinking Hybridity in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
• 3. Subaltern Desire in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret
• 4. Mimicry in Fadia Faqir’s The Cry of the Dove
• 5. Transnationalism in Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly
• 6. Resisting Disorientation
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index