Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective

Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie

Madeline Clements

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137554376
• eBook ISBN: 9781137554383
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores whether the post-9/11 novels of Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam and Shamsie can be read as part of an attempt to revise modern 'knowledge' of the Islamic world, using globally-distributed English-language literature to reframe Muslims' potential to connect with others. Focussing on novels including Shalimar the Clown, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Wasted Vigil, and Burnt Shadows, the author combines aesthetic, historical, political and spiritual considerations with analyses of the popular discourses and critical discussions surrounding the novels; and scrutinises how the writers have been appropriated as authentic spokespeople by dominant political and cultural forces. Finally, she explores how, as writers of Indian and Pakistani origin, Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam and Shamsie negotiate their identities, and the tensions of being seen to act as Muslim representatives, in relation to the complex international and geopolitical context in which they write.

1

Writing Islam from a Contemporary South Asian Muslim Perspective

1.1 Sajid Khan

In the introduction to the revised edition of Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, Edward Said (1997: xii) expressed increased concern that ‘malicious generalisations about Islam have become the last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West’. He went on to describe his disturbance on being asked, presumably because of Middle Eastern – and mistaken Muslim – identity, to provide the media with an insider’s insight into the bomb attack in Oklahoma City in April 1995:

I must have received twenty-five phonecalls … The entirely facetious connection between Arabs, Muslims, and terrorism was never more forcefully made evident to me; the sense of guilty involvement which, despite myself, I was made to feel struck me. (xiv)¹

These observations point to a reductive trend in Anglo-American discussions of Islam, and highlight its potentially unsettling impact on those actual and assumed Muslim writers who might be called upon to comment in the Western public sphere.² They provide a means of entry into this study, which asks how four South Asian Muslim authors have responded to the challenge of writing about Islamic faith ties in the aftermath of the attacks on New York of 11 September 2001, which replaced the Oklahoma City bombings as the most destructive on US soil to date.

Writing Islam explores the hypothesis that the international novels of Salman Rushdie, Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie can be read as part of a post-9/11 attempt to revise modern “knowledge” of the Islamic world, using globally disseminated literature to reframe Muslims’ potential to connect with others. It considers how the “world literature” they create and shape maps spheres of Islamic affiliation and affinity, questioning where their subjects turn in seeking a sense of connection or identification, and why. It provides a detailed examination of the inter-cultural and intra-cultural affiliations and affinities the characters pursue in these texts, asking what aesthetic, historical, political and spiritual identifications or commitments could influence such connective attempts. It also analyses popular discourses and critical discussions surrounding these texts, offering a critical examination of the explanations offered by the authors in their non-fiction writing and commentary for privileging, problematising or prohibiting one (Islamic) affiliation or affinity instead of another, and scrutinising how the writers are appropriated as authentic and hence authoritative spokespeople by dominant political and cultural forces. Finally, it explores how, as authors of Indian and Pakistani origin, Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam and Shamsie negotiate their identities and the tensions of being seen to act as Muslim spokespeople in (conscious) relation to the complex international and geopolitical contexts in which they write.

For the purposes of this study, I use ‘affiliation’ to describe the more active and selective of the modes of Islamic connection which may be traced in the novels. According to the OED Online (2013a, ‘affiliate, v.’), the would-be ‘affiliate’, an adoptive son, seeks to attach himself to an institution, organisation, political group or society, expressing in his choice a desire to belong. In Edward Said’s (1983: 18–19) conception, this may constitute what he describes as a ‘turn’ from a lost or outmoded natural familial ‘filiation’ to a critically created and ‘compensatory’ cultural and societal system of ‘affiliation’. Further, it may demonstrate an individual’s desire to become an ‘agent’ or ‘bearer’ of a particular notion of ‘civilisation’ or ‘culture’ (Gilroy 2004: 65).

The term ‘affinity’, in contrast, variously defined in the OED Online (2013b, ‘affinity, n.’) ‘by position’ as a ‘relationship of kinship generally between individuals or races’, and ‘by inclination’ as a ‘voluntary social … companionship [or] alliance’ and ‘psychical or spiritual attraction’, may point to a more natural, unplanned or even involuntary sense of being drawn to a particular community grouping, geographical area or imaginative realm. Nederveen Pieterse (2007: 186–8) uses the term to describe the ‘multiple circuits of [cultural] identification and integration’ within which migrant communities participate in a global multicultural context. However, the term need not be confined solely to this usage. ‘Affinitive’ may also refer, for example, to the kind of feelings ignited between Muslims of radically different social, educational and doctrinal backgrounds when engaging in Islamic rituals or contemplating a common heritage or culture in their South and Central Asian homelands.

In drawing attention to different ways in which contemporary Muslim connections are established and experienced, the literature by authors of South Asian origin which I examine begins to take leave of the colourful, hybrid and darkly comic multicultural visions offered in the popular postcolonial writing of the 1980s and 1990s. This period, bookended in the UK by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and punctuated by Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995), perhaps did more to juxtapose the religious and secular than to explore their interrelationship. Yet the twenty-first-century fictions I consider remain in dialogue with these novels, with works of world literature like Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) and with contemporary fiction by other Pakistani writers in English, such as Aamer Hussein’s story collection Turquoise (2002) and novella Another Gulmohar Tree (2009). They are also indebted to the precedents set by earlier postcolonial South Asian Muslim authors in English, for example Attia Hosain in Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), and to writers from the Urdu literary tradition including the poets Habib Jalib and Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and the prose writers Intizar Husain and Saadat Hasan Manto, whose often controversial works have contributed to a wider history of writing and contesting Islam in subcontinental contexts. The novels by Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam and Shamsie I consider are also composed in conscious relation to such (anti-)colonial antecedents as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940), Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) and Albert Camus’ The Fall (1957), which resurface in places as intertexts. However, without negating the importance of such earlier literary trends and traditions as shaping influences, in particular subcontinental Muslim ones, it is my purpose in Writing Muslims to present a contextualised study of novels produced in the post-9/11 decade by four “Muslim” writers whose names are now prominent in Western academia and publishing, and to explore their contents and creation in relation to the demands of this particular period.

After 9/11: Muslims in the frame

The “terror” attacks of 9/11 and, later, 7/7, brought a militant “jihadist” Islam sharply into world view. Racing to decode the ‘message’ of 11 September 2001, commentators and critics in the British press such as Martin Amis (2008: 3) interpreted the launching in Afghanistan of this ‘Intercontinental Ballistic Missile’ as an alien culture’s wake-up call to the unassuming West.³ As Amis put it, ‘America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated’ (3). Social anthropologist Pnina Werbner (2002: 1) would later observe that it seemed to parties on both sides of the proposed ideological divide ‘that the clash of civilizations predicted by Huntington … between Islam and the West had finally materialised’.

The language used to narrate the violent historical events of 9/11 and defend the invasion of Muslim nation states in the weeks and months following the collapse of New York’s twin towers both reflects and sustains this assumption. The ‘rhetoric of “evil”’ deployed by George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address in January 2002 (Kellner 2002: 344) and the ‘moral’ pronouncements of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in anticipation of the renewed war with Afghanistan (Gilroy 2004: 67–8) are typical. For, as Werbner (2002: 2) went on to note, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it seemed the civilisational ‘ “clash” – or its denial – had become the jargon of politicians and the media’: an evolving ‘newspeak’ (Hobsbawm 2007: 163) of ‘ideological shortcuts’ (Nederveen Pieterse 2007: 179) that could potentially be manipulated in the interests of revised geopolitical agendas, and ultimately therefore in support of the ensuing “war on terror”. Since that time, this discourse has continued to penetrate discussions of globalisation and culture in the US and in Europe (179), tending to separate individuals of different faiths into opposing categories of “us” and “them”; to position Muslims and Arabs as premodern or, as Salaita (2008) puts it, ‘uncultured’ in relation to the West; and perhaps even, as Bayoumi (2008: 4–5) proposes, to ‘degrade the language’ to such an extent that it ‘structure[s] the thinking [of American citizens] about the Muslims living among [them]’.

The articles, interviews, commentaries and notices published by writers such as Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie in the international English-language press since 2001 have attempted in various ways to furnish Western readers with a deeper understanding of Islam and Islamism and to justify the compromising of (Muslims’) civil liberties in a language that perpetuates the notion of a clash of values.⁴ In making their arguments, such intellectuals have typically pitched the reason, modernity and secularity for which they claim to stand against the evils of an irrational, encroaching religious extremism, and promoted freedom of expression over what they consider to be a suspect cultural relativism. This was the case, for example, with the ‘manifesto’ against a ‘new global [Islamic] totalitarianism threat’ signed by 12 public figures including Rushdie, which appeared in the French political weekly Charlie Hebdo in March 2006 (H. Ali et al., cited in BBC News 2006). Prompted by Muslim dissent over the handling of sensitive issues such as the Danish cartoons controversy, its authors tried to use a liberal, secular and democratic rhetoric to distance themselves from accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ while fostering a fearless and ‘critical’ discourse on ‘Islam’ (BBC News 2006). But the resulting anti-fundamentalist press statement sounded more like anti-Islamic ‘moral posturing’ (Nederveen Pieterse 2007: 190–1) than a precursor to reasoned discussion on equal terms.

The slew of fictional narratives produced by either Western or Westernised writers, both in North America (DeLillo 2007; Safran Foer 2005; Updike 2006) and in the UK (Amis 2008; Faulks 2009; McEwan 2005; Rushdie 2005c) in the wake of 9/11 have juxtaposed such similar values and principles when describing imaginary terrorist threats or suspect Muslim subjects. Their attempts to grapple with what the critic Robert Eaglestone (2010: 361) has termed ‘the melange of anxiety and anger that make up the West’s fuzzy understanding of the current multiple and interlinked crises’ have therefore tended to reinforce binary oppositions between Islam and the West, rather than seeking to understand why they occur. In Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), for example, the novel’s rational, secular neurosurgeon protagonist, Henry Perowne, perturbed by a burning plane bound for Heathrow, seen as symbolic of a looming ‘attack’ not just on London but on ‘our whole way of life’ (35), muses about what might happen to his ‘innocuous’ musician son under a radical regime characterised by ‘hatred’ and ‘the purity of nihilism’ (33). His grim conclusion, that ‘in the ideal Islamic state, under strict Shari’a law, there’ll be room for surgeons. [But] Blues guitarists will be found other employment’ (33), re-articulates the underlying notion of a clash of values, pitching in fiction the innocent and expressive individual against an intolerant, absolute, unknown Other.

Critical commentators across disciplines and cultures have begun to expose how such a totalising rhetoric can demonise and demean the Muslim subjects it attempts – and fails – to represent. Analysing in The Uncultured Wars instances of anti-Arab racism amongst American intellectuals, Steven Salaita shows how, in these very public and political representations of an unerringly ‘strange and violent Islam’ (2008: 152), Islamic peoples have come to ‘exist … as characters, never narrators’: always spoken for, but rarely permitted the space or the power to speak for themselves (165–6). So, through the essays of Rushdie (2002: 395), we may learn that the Islam of ‘a vast number of “believing” Muslim men’ stands for ‘a loathing of modern society … riddled as it is with music, godlessness and sex’. Meanwhile, in fictionalised accounts, we may enter the stream-of-consciousness of the radicalised Muslim youth as he surveys with distaste the alluring bodies of bare-bellied teenage girls, ‘weak Christians and non-observant Jews’ (Updike 2006: 3); or “understand” the misanthropic motivations and beliefs of the 9/11 attackers, absent from the scene, through the collective litanies of their numbed New York victims:

‘It’s sheer panic. They attack out of panic.’

‘This much, yes, it may be true. Because they think the world is a disease. This world, this society, ours. A disease that’s spreading’, he said.

‘There are no goals they can hope to achieve … Kill the innocent, only that.’

(DeLillo 2007: 46)

This tendency of (mostly) white, Western “men of letters” to act as pundits, passing judgements on Muslims and Islam even as they attempt to speak for them, has become a cause for concern in a period of increasingly authoritarian anti-terror legislation, heightened security and rising Islamophobia in the West. It has also been a catalyst for calls to respond. The comments of Amis and others, if not exactly tolerated, were at least perhaps ignored, trivialised and un(der)-addressed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Since then such authors’ pronouncements have drawn direct responses from their literary peers, including Terry Eagleton (2007a), Ronan Bennett (2007) and Kamila Shamsie (2007b).⁵ Each of these critics has attempted to reveal racisms and hypocrisies, or to point to the defective logic of ‘leading luminar[ies]’ (Eagleton 2007a: x) like Amis. But they have also emphasised that the critic’s greater task is to challenge the authority of such ‘self-styled expert[s]’ (Bennett 2007: n.p.) to propose their often limited and uninformed opinions on complex and emotive subjects without censure.

Ronan Bennett explained in 2007 that to do so – i.e. to challenge Amis et al. – is not to launch an attack on freedom of speech, far from it. ‘As a novelist’, he suggested in his comment piece for The Guardian, ‘Amis is free to do whatever he wants with his characters’, even if his ‘flamboyant [anti-Islamic] clichés’ prove ‘poor substitutes for understanding, reason and real knowledge’ of contemporary Muslim experiences (Bennett 2007: n.p.). However, what is not acceptable, he suggests, is for the ‘odious’ public endorsements of anti-Muslim prejudice and expressions of racist sentiment published by leading literary and cultural figures to be allowed to continue to pass without comment. Years after 9/11, Bennett urges, critics and authors English and Indian alike must ‘start writing’ to express their inability to remain silent in the face of such an ‘outrage’. The novelist Kamila Shamsie (2007b: n.p.), replying to his comment, summarised the factors that convinced her, Pakistani and a Muslim, to take up the challenge to break her strategic silence and ‘write a heated response’:

The failure to express outrage cannot easily be distinguished from a lack of outrage … Those who didn’t stand up to condemn Martin Amis bear responsibility … because … he is still recognised as one of Britain’s most significant writers, and has the moral authority which comes with that recognition … I don’t advocate any form of censorship … But in worlds without censorship, the way to respond to odious views which are given space in the press is to, well, respond! (2007b)

The post-9/11 period has certainly seen a growth of Muslim interventions in contemporary debates about Islamic peoples, not only via the media channels of news articles and comment, but also via the more enduring literary modes of memoir and fiction (also part, perhaps, of a new wave of Pakistani English writing within South Asian fiction); and a concomitant rise in the analysis of strategies for representing Muslims by academics and practitioners.

In her annual survey of Pakistani English Literature produced in 2005, Muneeza Shamsie (2006: 161) noted, perhaps unsurprisingly, that ‘in the wake of 9/11, 7/7, and the Afghan and Iraq wars a number of Pakistani writers chose to explore the relationship between Muslims and the West, whether they examined the experience of the Pakistani diaspora’ – as Aslam’s (2004a) novel Maps for Lost Lovers had done – ‘or excavated episodes from Muslim and European history’, as her daughter, Kamila Shamsie, would go on to do.⁶ Muneeza Shamsie’s (2008: 21) anthology And the World Changed proceeded to draw attention to works by anglophone Pakistani writers which, in ‘touch[ing] on ideas of religion, identity and otherness’, offered timely responses to geopolitical events. These themes of course surface in her earlier short story collections (1997, 2001) and in regional, diasporic and vernacular works, not just global English ones. Yet Shamsie’s introduction to the 2008 selection firmly situates the short fictions she anthologises in the context of:

The last decade, [in which] Pakistan has been strongly affected by political events in neighbouring Muslim lands, including the rise of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the politicisation of religion, exacerbated by Western rhetoric of Crusades, and the clash of civilizations. (21)

Significantly, she claims these diverse stories, anthologised under a ‘Pakistani’ national umbrella, are ‘part of a new world literature in English that gives voice to experiences beyond the traditional canons of Anglo-American literature’ (24–5).⁷

Global orientations in Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam and Shamsie

I argue that Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam and Shamsie orient themselves towards the “global” in their internationally disseminated novels, both in terms of their geopolitical subject matter and selection of settings which are of symbolic and strategic significance to world powers; and in terms of the intra- and inter-cultural Muslim affinities and affiliations that they map within these zones of conflict and contact. They do this at a time when ordinary experiences of multicultural contact have been rendered suspect, and there is a desire (at least in Western spheres) for writers and academics to attempt to expose where in the world Muslim loyalties lie. This is also a moment when alternative, perhaps more positive, ways of understanding both international faith connections (such as Islamic cosmopolitanism) and responsibility to others as planet-sharing humans could usefully be revived and revised.

In After Empire, Paul Gilroy (2004: viii, 65) highlights how, in the ‘states of permanent emergency’ created out of the “war on terror”, ‘ordinary experiences of contact, co-operation, and conflict’ between people of different races and ethnicities have come to be viewed with scepticism. For Gilroy, these experienc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Writing Islam from a Contemporary South Asian Muslim Perspective
• 2. Enchanted Realms, Sceptical Perspectives – Salman Rushdie after 9/11
• 3. ‘A Devilishly Difficult Ball’ – Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• 4. Re-culturing Islam – Nadeem Aslam’s Mausoleum Fiction
• 5. Stranger Intimacies – The Novels of Kamila Shamsie
• 6. Writing Contemporary Islam – An Ambiguous Project
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index