Islamophobia and the Novel 9780231541336

Citation preview

I SLAMOPH OBIA AND THE N OV E L

LITERATURE NOW

LITERATURE NOW Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures. Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination Jeremy Rosen, Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace Jesse Matz, Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture Ashley T. Shelden, Unmaking Love: The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present Zara Dinnen, The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture Gloria Fisk, Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature

ISLAMOPHOBIA AND THE

NOVEL

PETER MOREY Columbia University Press / New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morey, Peter author. Title: Islamophobia and the novel / Peter Morey. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Series: Literature now | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017055403 | ISBN 9780231177740 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541336 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Islamophobia in literature. | Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | Fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | Muslims in literature. Classification: LCC PN3352.I83 M57 2018 | DDC 809.3/938297—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055403

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design and art: Lisa Hamm

For Bart Moore-Gilbert, scholar, mentor, friend

CONTENTS

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

Introduction—Islamophobia: The Word and the World

ix

1

Chapter One Islam, Culture, and Anarchy: Faith, Doubt, and Liberalism in Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and John Updike

31

Chapter Two From Multiculturalism to Islamophobia: Identity Politics and Individualism in Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali

65

Chapter Three Muslim Misery Memoirs: The Truth Claims of Exotic Suffering in Azar Nafisi and Khaled Hosseini

95

Chapter Four Migrant Cartographies: Islamophobia and the Politics of the City Space in Amy Waldman and H. M. Naqvi

126

viii CONTENTS

Chapter Five States of Statelessness: Islamophobia and Border Spaces in the Post-9/11 Thrillers of John Le Carré, Dan Fesperman, and Richard Flanagan

153

Chapter Six Islamophobia and the Global Novel: “Worlding” History in Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie

183

Chapter Seven Marketing the Muslim: Globalization and the Postsecular in Mohsin Hamid and Leila Aboulela

211

Conclusion—Toward a Critical Muslim Literary Studies

247

NOTES

253

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

29 1

INDEX

307

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have lived with this book for so long that it is both a relief and a wrench to see it make its way out into the world. The work contained here is the culmination of a particular phase of research into the cultural representation of Muslims that has lasted more than a decade. First in the Framing Muslims project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and subsequently in the Muslims, Trust, and Cultural Dialogue project made possible with support from the Research Councils UK, I have tried to understand the way in which the discursive framing of Muslims as a “problem” takes its shape. I would like to acknowledge the support of both funders here. I also owe a debt to all the scholars, practitioners, and activists who participated in those two networks and collectively pushed forward knowledge in this field. There are too many of them to mention, but the intellectual stimulation they provided helped to sharpen some of the rather rough-edged insights I began with. In particular, the Muslims, Trust, and Cultural Dialogue project yielded publications and activities that sought to make an intervention in the world beyond the literary coterie, based on a belief that literature and culture do more than simply reflect the world and that they can play a small but significant part in (re)creating it. From the various collaborators and contributors with whom I was fortunate to work, I thank especially Akbar S. Ahmed, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, John L. Esposito, and Lord Bhikhu Parekh. All

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

were generous with their time and ideas, and it was a particular pleasure to team up with Professor Ahmed on his Journey into Europe work. Never has the need to understand what connects us across cultures been more necessary. I am proud to have been part of Professor Ahmed’s ongoing work in this area and hope the present volume will make another small contribution to understanding often hidden or neglected links. I am also grateful for the support I received from my colleagues in the Departments of English and History at the University of East London, where I worked for many years. In particular, Kate Hodgkin and Reina Lewis (now of the University of the Arts London) provided support and encouragement in a variety of ways. I worked most closely with Roberta Garrett for all those years. She helpfully listened to my half-formed ideas, fed back useful suggestions as the book developed, and was a constant source of fellowship and support. Now at the University of Birmingham, I am lucky enough to benefit from a stimulating environment in which these topics are at the center of a number of projects and initiatives. Needless to say, the “Muslim question,” so to speak, burns hottest in the multicultural metropolises of Birmingham and London. I look forward to being able to take forward the next phase of this work, drawing on the collective knowledge and experience these cities contain. Among my peers, I thank the members of the Multicultural Textualities collective of researchers, each of whom has provided insights and stimulation in his or her own work and has been willing to share and discuss it with me. I especially thank Rehana Ahmed, Claire Chambers, Anshuman Mondal, and Stephen Morton, who, besides being generous colleagues and friends, are producing some of the most important work in this field today. Beyond this circle, I was lucky enough to benefit from the irreplaceable kindness of the late Bart Moore-Gilbert, whose research trajectory provided a template for my own interests and who was perpetually supportive. His loss is felt deeply, and so I dedicate this volume to him. A debt is also owed to the organizers of the various conferences and symposia at which I have been able to road-test some of my ideas. To them and to the audiences they brought together, I offer my thanks. Some of the ideas about Mohsin Hamid in chapter 7 began life in an article called “The Rules of the Game Have Changed,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47, no. 2 (2011), although they have since been overtaken by the more critically interrogative reading you have here. Similarly, an earlier version of the

xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ideas about Leila Aboulela in that same chapter first appeared in the article “Halal Fiction and the Limits of Postsecularism: Criticism, Critique, and the Muslim in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 53, no. 2 (2018). For their practical and intellectual support in turning these ideas into book form, I thank David James, the series editor of Literature Now, along with his coeditors, Rebecca  L. Walkowitz and Matthew Hart. At Columbia University Press, I thank Philip Leventhal in particular for assisting and advising me, for always being on hand to answer queries, and for arranging for the manuscript draft to find sympathetic but rigorous readers. Heartfelt thanks also go to Annie Barva for a wonderful, sensitive copyediting job. Finally, I thank Amina Yaqin, who reads me best and is the first and best reader of my work, too. I also thank my special daughters, Maleeha and Laila, for putting up with an often grumpy, preoccupied dad for the past few years.

I SLAMOPH OBIA AND THE N OV E L

Introduction

ISLAMOPHOBIA The Word and the World

“The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”1 This is not a policy statement from one of those right-wing populist politicians who seem to have multiplied in recent years. These words come from the distinguished British novelist Martin Amis, interviewed in 2006 about community relations in Britain and the “threat” from Muslims. The unliterary lack of measured reflection in this comment is symptomatic of the heated debate about Islam and Muslims as it occurs today. Where once one might have expected a discussion informed by some degree of sophistication and historical awareness, now the Internet and social media provide an immediate platform for intemperate views to be aired and every ill-informed opinion to be rehearsed. Worse still, violent anti-Muslim rhetoric has become commonplace. When politicians start to articulate prejudice in much the same terms, you know society is in trouble. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, Islamophobia has emerged as the dominant mode of prejudice in contemporary Western societies. In North America and across the nations of Europe, concerns about “the Muslim problem” are central to political debates and policies.

2 INTRODUCTION

As part of the response to international conflicts, acts of terrorism, and state violence in the West itself, the figure of “the Muslim” has come under increased scrutiny. Muslims and Islam have emerged as the focal point of anxieties about citizenship, loyalty, and liberal values. They have been the object of heightened levels of criticism, intolerance, and abuse—their cultures homogenized and vilified and their religion depicted as backward and warlike.2 The same vitriol has passed into mainstream currency, finding outlets in journalism, film, and television dramas, in political statements, and in the outlaw spaces of the Internet. By 2011, UK government minister Baroness Sayeeda Warsi went as far as to declare that Islamophobia seemed to have “passed the dinner-table test” of social respectability, being the only form of prejudice now indulged and approved in the so-called liberal societies of the West.3 In the London mayoral election of 2016, the ultimately successful Labour Party candidate Sadiq Khan was targeted by his Conservative opponents with a slew of guiltby-association murmurs based on his Muslim background.4 And, finally, U.S. president Donald Trump, after an election campaign in which he repeatedly targeted Muslims for criticism, issued on January 27, 2017, an executive order blocking entry to the United States by citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries.5 This book is not about Islamophobia in the novel. Rather, it critically surveys some fictional dramatizations of cultural difference and conflict that take their cue from current anxieties. It traces a variety of responses, some of which tend to reproduce existing ideological biases and others that question or refute them. Through contextualized close readings of a number of English-language texts from around the world, the book reveals how literary responses to the supposed “clash of civilizations” have been nuanced and often highly critical. The novels demonstrate a range of positions: from the avowedly secular to the religious and from texts that appear to underwrite Western assumptions of cultural superiority to those that recognize and critique neoimperial impulses. Although some authors in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September  11, 2001 (9/11) can be said to have actively aligned themselves with the presumed values of the West, formal ambiguities within their texts make for a complex and often ambiguous interpretative experience that challenges the truth claims of culturally exclusivist agendas. From texts that appear to underpin the liberal humanist and individualist qualities taken to mark the

3 INTRODUCTION

emergence both of the modern West and the novel form itself to those that interrogate, reject, or even parody those certainties, the range of literary responses suggests a deep critical intelligence that might usefully inform broader and often more simplistic debates. As might be expected, literary responses to Islamophobia have been many and varied. However, if we trace the relationship of narrative to power as manifest in the content and form of texts, certain informative features appear. Add to that the enabling context in which what we might call “Muslim writing” is published, circulated, and reviewed, and we have the terrain that this book attempts to map. In some regards, what the novel can say about Islamophobia is inherently limited by its vaunted qualities as a liberal medium tied to the individualist perspective. In that respect, it becomes necessary for us to examine the cultural work that formal and generic features are doing in promoting or rejecting particular types of worldview. Thus, I propose to analyze key elements of the representative novels chosen, attending to qualities such as ambiguity; stereotyping; the effects of polyphony; response to the burden of representation that falls on “minority” writers; the fetishization of authenticity; and the presence of a certain kind of exotic idiom that blends the attractive and desirable with (in the Muslim case) the austere and repressive. These features offer ways to understand the novel in its response to Islamophobia because they are central to the novel’s meaning making as an art form. Close attention to them will help us to avoid falling back on judgments based simply on whether a book is sympathetic to Muslims or Islam or not. When it comes to literature and politics, the relationship between narrative and power is never straightforward. Liberal claims can be made not only for the novel’s polyphony but also on behalf of (inter alia) the destabilizing effects of free indirect speech or the potential for minority voices to contest hegemonic narratives of racial, gendered, or sexual majoritarianism. All these features are again in play as we seek to understand literature’s responses to a climate of Islamophobia. However, regarding the debate about culture and difference that ignited again after 9/11, it is important to bear in mind that questions of form can be charged with entirely different political meaning. For example, instead of becoming a bridgehead for contestatory narratives, polyphony in Reading Lolita in Tehran by the Iranian émigré author Azar Nafisi is advocated as a liberal humanist clincher to shut down dissenting viewpoints and readings at the same time as it is

4 INTRODUCTION

promoted as a guarantee of the tolerance, “democracy,” and thereby superiority of the Western literary canon. Thus, the first major lesson that can be drawn from studying narrative and power is that there is no single model of the relationship between form and politics. Indeed, the complexity of this relationship has been understood ever since Louis Althusser’s observations on the relative autonomy of the social superstructure in relation to the economic base and its consideration by Pierre Macherey in relation to literary texts.6 Theodor Adorno also takes up these concerns in Aesthetic Theory. Adorno claims that art is a social act, yet one produced by the tension between the formal autonomy of the work, on the one hand, and its rootedness within society, on the other. The tensions within works of art are expressive of conflicts within the larger sociohistorical processes from which they emerge. He says, “The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form.”7 For Adorno, art operates through its own internal tensions to expose hidden contradictions within society as a whole. Art thus creates its own truth through a dialectic between content and form. Following Adorno, Edward Said argues that narrative is always a social act and that it is the interplay between power and resistance that makes texts possible.8 He points out that “novels participate in, are part of, contribute to an extremely slow, infinitesimal politics that clarifies, reinforces, perhaps even occasionally advances perceptions.”9 For the reader, the task is to recognize that “all interpretations are what we might call situational . . . related to what other interpreters have said, either by confirming them, or by disputing them. . . . Today Islam is defined negatively as that with which the West is radically at odds, and this tension establishes a framework radically limiting knowledge of Islam.”10 The nature of this frame is something Amina Yaqin and I explore in our book Framing Muslims. There we are concerned with tracing this encircling discursive boundary as it appears in political rhetoric, journalism, and popular-media texts.11 Yet a type of framing can be seen at work in literature, too. Literary framing takes place on three levels. First, any act of writing in and of itself is an act of framing; it is an act of bringing together and accentuating themes, issues, and characters as well as of dramatizing the consequences of the collision of different ideas. This is particularly true of what might be called multicultural fictions that focus on relationships between

5 INTRODUCTION

groups with different traditions and value systems. These works always already occupy a terrain contested by warring and hierarchically unequal discourses. However, that framing act then takes place within a much larger frame: the agenda-led frame governing political, media, and journalistic discourses about the key issues defining intercultural relations. In the case of Muslims, these issues have to do with a lack of integration, gender inequality, a propensity for “radicalization,” and so on. Finally, we can see those two acts of framing—the textual and the contextual—as being integral to the way such texts are then placed in the frame governing their production, reception, and recognition as “literary.” This third-level frame validates certain types of utterance in which those key “Muslim” issues become central to the way texts are understood, grouped together, marketed, and reviewed. The most infamous instance of the clash of text, context, and paratext occurred in the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in the late 1980s.12 The dispute is now frozen and canonized as being about freedom of speech versus nascent Islamic fundamentalism. However, the tensions within the book, too, tell us something about the cultural possibilities and interpretation of the imagination. Rushdie’s description of the scene in which the angel Gibreel presents the prophet Mohammed with his revelation mimics Romantic-era ideas of inspiration and the role of imagination in creation.13 These ideas were most famously codified in the English tradition by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817), but already decades earlier, in the mid–eighteenth century, the writer and theologian William Law was observing that our desires and imaginations “are the greatest reality we have.” According to Law, “our own Will and desirous Imagination . . . resemble in some Degree the Creating Power of God, which makes things out of itself or its own working Desire.”14 Law’s intervention marks a stage in the eighteenth-century shift in aesthetics from neoclassical reason and order to Romantic imagination and feeling. Now, at the other end of this process, Rushdie’s perspective—vigorously restated in his memoir Joseph Anton—is that creative inspiration is a freedom guaranteed only by the secularization of art and society.15 As we will see, other contemporary writers such as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis also hold to this view. The Satanic Verses was the spark that ignited a sense of injustice among Muslims that led to, among other things, the assertion of a collective

6 INTRODUCTION

British Muslim identity in the years that followed. And, of course, Rushdie continues to be the bête-noir for many Muslims, who believe his supposed insults to their religion and their prophet to be unforgivable. However, we should be wary of seeing all literary and cultural perspectives that are critical of Islam as “Islamophobic.” Blanket denunciations are unhelpful because they tend to close down debate and are insufficiently attentive to  the status of many of these texts as creative products of art and imagination—something that makes them prone to the same forces of hesitation and inconsistency that always animate those activities. In particular, the novel—with the modes of address it employs and with its unique purchase on the imagination of a reader who is required to create in his or her mind a world and thereafter to populate it—cannot be reduced to pure “message,” whether positive or negative. This understanding of the novel, in turn, raises questions about reception and criticism. One of the key features of the contemporary critical and receptive context is the demand that writing by Muslim cultural background authors be “representative”—something that has implications for form. The controversy in 2006 about the depiction of the East End Bengali community in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, which spilled over into public demonstrations, is one obvious example. Reactions reflected the assumption that Ali’s much-feted novel was offering a transparent window onto a hitherto overlooked minority group—something that united both protestors against it and the literati who sprang to its defense.16 As discussed in chapter 2, both sympathetic and hostile responses were predicated on the successful, or otherwise, performance of authentic representativeness. This tendency to view non-Western literatures as essentially anthropological in nature— affording the assumed Western reader an insight into exotically different lives—is a long-standing one. It amounts to what Gayatri C. Spivak has called an “information retrieval” approach in dealing with the literature of the culturally different subject.17 In this book, I argue that this approach creates what we might call a market for the Muslim. This means that texts from around the world that engage with the existing political articulation of “the Muslim problem,” contain the right elements, and offer some kind of “authentic” pseudoanthropological insight will be published, circulated, reviewed, and critiqued more or less to the extent that they reproduce existing cultural viewpoints. (They can be hostile to or in tension with these viewpoints, but as long as

7 INTRODUCTION

they rehearse them, they will be recognized and accepted.) This is how framing works. So the market for the Muslim has both aesthetic and economic dimensions. Such texts are seen as offering windows onto rare and “exotic” areas of minority experience in the West that are also sites of political anxiety in the case of Muslims. This view enforces a set of criteria that then tends to privilege texts with a realist bent.18 Indeed, one of the remarkable features about many of the Muslim novels that have garnered praise and attention over the past few years is the degree to which they are deemed to offer direct, seemingly unmediated insights into hitherto hidden aspects of Muslim life and experience. To write this kind of novel in an era of Islamophobia is, at least indirectly, to accept a frame in which Muslim cultural values are contrasted with Western, more enlightened, more liberal ones, even if one’s project is to explode this myth. I would not wish to be too dogmatic about this point, but it seems indisputable that the critical success of a text such as Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2006), for example, is tied to its central aim of illustrating the “Muslim problem” of honor killing. Aslam himself made this connection in an interview when he described the imperative he felt to address honor crime in terms that echo the rationale of the war on terror. As Madeline Clements notes, Aslam was suggesting that literature should “condemn both Bin Laden’s acts of international terror and the ‘small scale September 11s’ which occur in Muslim communities each day.”19 One can make the symbolic leap between an international terrorist atrocity and the local cultural practice of honor crime only by reproducing the existing frame that operates through an a priori equation between Islam and violence. Writers need the leeway to address any and all matters of concern, in particular those in which they feel a personal investment. However, Aslam’s response indicates the extent to which the default expectations engendered by topicality are never neutral, least of all when the subject matter is what is commonly deemed Muslim religious or cultural behavior. In the hands of more ideological writers, the moral imperative to address injustice becomes almost inseparable from wholesale endorsement of the neoimperial civilizing mission of the United States. In these writers’ novels, the confluence of Muslim religious doctrine with political power is inevitably disastrous, compromising individual liberty at every turn. Western intervention is then a consummation devoutly to be wished.

8 INTRODUCTION

So in adopting the existing frame and satisfying the market for the Muslim, writers run the risk of replicating the agendas of a presumed Western consumer, who expects and receives confirmation about the superiority of his or her own ways. Real readings, like actual readers, are of course more subtle and flexible than this—able to negotiate the twists and turns of literary textuality, the presence of irony, and so on with varying degrees of sophistication and often in ways resistant to manipulation. Likewise, the more perspicacious of the writers analyzed in this book are keen to show the current predicament as the result of historical factors, chief among which are the legacies of colonialism and its contemporary offshoots. Even so, we can broadly say that as the market for the Muslim in contemporary literary culture operates as a process of production, dissemination, and sanctioned reception in critical circles, it at most allows Muslim-authored texts to offer a critique of Western neoimperialism from within the confines of secular liberalism, while at the same time appreciating “explanatory” narratives about the Other that allow the Other to be better known and controlled. As Joseph Slaughter has written with particular reference to the novel of personal development, another popular form for Muslim writing, “This economy of Western-consumer demand and non-Western supply has an analogue in the metropolitan literary industry’s appetite for Third World Bildungsromane that turns multicultural, postcolonial reading into a kind of humanitarian intervention—a market-forced imposition of certain literary norms that are almost compulsory.”20 Two points follow from this claim: the first is that we need to jettison any idea of a more “authentic” voice coming from Muslim writers working outside this frame; the second is that the challenge to avoid anthropological pitfalls is one of form as much as of content. When we think about writing that works through the existing frame and is successful in the market for the Muslim, we are dealing with a set of sanctioned conventions. For this reason, I choose in this book not to draw a rigid distinction between writers of Muslim cultural background and non-Muslim writers addressing the same topics. Writers of Muslim cultural background may well be able to give more-detailed and less-jaundiced accounts of the operation of certain customs or traditions. Likewise, it is a hugely important point of principle that those from a community that is habitually treated as the object of discourse rather than as the speaking subject have their voices heard. Yet inasmuch as they choose to address the sanctioned topics, what

9 INTRODUCTION

they write will always be shaped and contained by the requirements of the frame, and to that extent we will see a resulting deformation on the level of reception if not in the text itself. In the market for the Muslim, the so-called authenticity of a text is decided by publishers and editors, who shape the text in the publication process, as well as by reviewers and critics, who deem a text “authentic” or otherwise according to how well it satisfies these predetermined criteria. As Sarah Brouillette aptly writes, “For something to be experienced as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated . . . and hence lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by mediating cultural codes.”21 The second, formal point has to do with realism’s utility for the anthropological reading. At the present time, it seems as if almost all attempts to render Muslim experience in a realist mode are fated to be co-opted to explain (or refute) the framing fascination with why Muslims are recalcitrant/unmodern/not “like us.” The particular pressure on Muslim writers would seem to contradict that frequent observation—made by Timothy Brennan, among others—that literary sophistication is a type of bad faith, marking the “Third World” writer’s alienation from his or her own people through the valorization of established Western aesthetic criteria.22 The point here is not that experimental or modernist writing is somehow preferable to or better than realism, but rather that the anthropological frame is such that it may be necessary to devise an aesthetic that refuses and challenges that frame. Thus, engaging with literature in the age of Islamophobia makes demands on both writer and reader. Working against the grain of existing ways of reading these texts also necessitates drawing the parameters of criticism and critique into the discussion. Recent ways of doing this include the so-called postsecular turn, wherein the prioritization of individual moral experience and secular personal development deemed central to the novel is historicized as a culturally specific, post-Enlightenment trend. This awareness might then usefully be brought into engagement with cultural traditions operating through collectivist and religious orientation instead. However, this particular form of the postsecular too often merely reinforces the secular/religious binary, just positioning us differently in relation to it by relativizing our value judgments. In this context, it might be more useful to consider the degree to which narrative’s relationship to secularism and religiosity actually might not bear out the

10 INTRODUCTION

“divergent paths” idea commonly used to account for cultural difference. Quite apart from the constant mutual influence of European and Muslim narrative traditions via the trade routes of southern Europe, North Africa, and Sicily, attentive reading of the English novel alone reveals that religiously derived moral preoccupations are continuous but come to be internalized in formal and metaphorical conventions and choices.23 In reiterating the implication that the West exclusively is characterized by modernity, pluralism, and enlightenment, literary readings also legitimize the conditions underpinning the false construction of Islam as inevitably at odds with Western ways of seeing. The postsecular turn in criticism might be welcome when it recognizes the historical connectedness of the secular and the sacred over time and across cultures, but in its more antisecular guise it tends merely to recapitulate the notion of a materialistindividualist West and a spiritual-collectivist East in ways that ignore historical cross-fertilization. So, in the end, this book argues that it is in part literary criticism’s sense of itself and its own history that prevents the development of crosscultural engagements with Muslim writing that could break through the frame. Inasmuch as literary culture and its critical apparatus reproduces anti-Muslim prejudice in some of its value judgments, it does so because it unconsciously partakes of a view of itself as part of a Western culture that is sealed off, unique, and—it is inferred—“superior.” Certain claims are made for literature that are sometimes implicitly linked to the more capacious sympathies assumed to be a product of postEnlightenment cultures where the heat has gone out of religious controversies, leaving us with the ability unproblematically to imagine our way across difference. In his essay “Is Nothing Sacred?,” written in the early years of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him, Salman Rushdie promotes once more the familiar idea that the novel is almost by definition a bastion of freedom against the narrow exclusivism of religion: “Whereas religion seeks to privilege one language above all others, one text above all others, one set of values above all others, the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel.”24 This is a popular line of argument among writers, generally used to bolster claims about the novel form as a conduit for empathy. Ahdaf Soueif, for instance, sees the writer’s duty as being to create characters who stimulate empathy

11 INTRODUCTION

in readers—“such powerful empathy that they want to reach through the print to help or comfort them. . . . A work of fiction lives by empathy—the extending of myself into another’s, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes.”25 These thoughts are a handy reminder of the basic tasks of fiction, but we need also to distinguish active transcultural empathy from a lazily universalizing notion of shared human experience that can encourage us to respond only to that which is already familiar. As soon as one moves beyond bare corporeal facts to the human in society, the challenge becomes to try to find forms that will do justice to the complexity of individuals in the world in such a way as not to flatten or simplify experiences rooted in particular cultural contexts—in short, not to universalize those experiences.26 I want to make clear that I am not saying that all novelists and book reviewers are Islamophobes or that criticism is inherently Islamophobic. What I am arguing is that we need to be more historically aware of the provenance of the terms and values we employ to approach texts by and about Muslims (as well as by culturally different writers and about people more generally). If we see literature and criticism as systems in their longer context, we will also there find all the elements by which Muslims have been and continue to be framed within Western culture as a whole. There are enough ideologues at both extremes happy to perpetuate and exploit such binary thinking. We owe it to ourselves and to those who try accurately to depict experience using prose fiction to be aware that our conventional tools should always be employed judiciously and self-consciously, with the awareness that times and societies change. Secular criticism as an adjunct of cultural nationalism is not the only lens through which to view Muslim writing. This book ends with a plea for further work to understand the mutually shaping history of Western and non-Western narrative traditions, the better to combat Islamophobic assertions of exclusionary difference. This work, in turn, could inform conventions of criticism and reviewing that at present too often value Muslim writing only for what it can tell us about supposedly alien mindsets. What we need is a critical Muslim studies to match developments such as critical race studies, and we need to keep always in view the standpoints of interlocutors who have different degrees of symbolic, cultural, and economic capital. On the terrain of literature, this seems the best way to counteract Islamophobia and to lay the groundwork for a form of literary and cultural

12 INTRODUCTION

criticism that does not fetishize difference but rather understands the text as always already a space of intercultural negotiation.

There are many ways to decode Islamophobia and understand its appeal: a psychological self-defense reflex against an antithetical Other; the most recent instance of popular moral panic; the logic of neoimperial foreign policies; a manifestation of the unequal results of globalization; or a golden opportunity for nationalist and racist ideologues. This book acknowledges each of these possibilities as it occurs in novels and other prose fictions in English produced since the mid-1990s, the era when an emergent multiculturalism in the West—the product of postimperial population movements and emancipatory ethnic politics—was challenged by the rise to prominence of politically antagonistic “radical” Islamic identities and the countermeasures employed against them. When we consider the contested meanings of the term Islamophobia, we need to note what AbdoolKarim Vakil has called the “conceptual stretching” of the term as it travels.27 Islamophobia has meant different things in different contexts and at different times. The rapid take-off of the term over the past twenty or so years has meant that those seeking a fixed definition have struggled to keep up.28 So perhaps a good place to begin is with the usefully circumspect definition offered by the famous Runnymede Trust Report of 1997, which defined Islamophobia as “the dread, hatred and hostility towards Islam and Muslims perpetrated by a series of closed views that imply and attribute negative and derogatory stereotypes and beliefs” to Muslims.29 The results of such prejudice, including marginalization, securitization, and sometimes violent physical attack, warrant comparison of Islamophobia with other forms of racism, such as anti-Semitism. Of course, there are critics who have felt that the term Islamophobia is a misnomer for a phenomenon targeted at Muslims themselves rather than at their religion. Concerns have also been raised that the loose bandying of the word could serve simply as a blanket with which to stifle legitimate criticism of aspects of Muslim society and culture.30 However, given that most people evincing anti-Islamic prejudice identify the belief system of Islam as causing certain types of behavior in its adherents, Islamophobia seems as good a term as any. Moreover, the urgency of addressing violence and discrimination almost always justified through hostility to beliefs and

13 INTRODUCTION

culture means that such semantic quibbling appears now something of a luxury, particularly while Islamophobic attacks rise in tandem with antiSemitism as the extreme Right is emboldened. There is more than enough evidence—not least in the outpourings of the highly organized and networked groups in the United States that Nathan Lean refers to as constituting an “Islamophobia industry”31—to indicate that it is often Islam itself, in a simplified and crude version, that is held up as an ideological adversary for secular Western society. In Deepa Kumar’s view, Islamophobic myths of a perpetual struggle between Islam and the West, sometimes held in abeyance but always eventually resurfacing, seriously misrepresent history. Kumar reminds us that, in fact, attitudes to Islam and Muslims in the West have changed across history: from an early, baffled curiosity to the comparative harmony of La Convivencia in Moorish Spain, the hostility of the Crusades, the Romanticera fascination with the “Gorgeous East,” and the most recent phase in which U.S. policies toward Muslim countries have been pragmatic and varied.32 Along the way, anti-Muslim prejudice has been constructed and promoted by elites at certain times for political reasons, a process we can still trace today in the fulminations of populist politicians and journalists in search of an enemy to blame or a distraction from other problems. During the war on terror, it was necessary to create a “spectacle of fear” around Muslims and Islam to bolster support for an illegal imperialist foreign policy.33 Continuing this mission into the Obama and Trump years, a highly organized network of Islamophobic opinion formers, many with direct links to the corridors of political power, have ensured that an avalanche of suspicion and invective continues to flow. In similar vein, Stephen Sheehi has argued that Islamophobia is the term used to describe what is actually an “ideological campaign against Muslims.” Sheehi dates modern Islamophobia very particularly to that moment in the 1990s when America became the sole world superpower, with the will and means to impose its political and economic model on the rest of the world. For him, “Islamophobia is the latest ideological construct deployed to facilitate American power.”34 Sheehi traces a line of Islamophobia from the Clinton White House through George  W. Bush to Barack Obama with his ambivalent rhetoric on Muslim countries, continued unconditional support for Israel, and unease with the politically explosive Muslim part of his heritage. In its reading of Islamophobia against the

14 INTRODUCTION

backdrop of recent geopolitics, Sheehi’s critique carries some echoes of Salman Sayyid’s understanding of Islamophobia in Britain as tied to the moment of Muslim political self-assertion and an anxiety about the tenuous nature of Western hegemony.35 Indeed, Islamophobia—like all prejudices—actually reveals more about those holding the prejudice than it does about its objects. A demonic Islamic enemy is all the better for diverting attention from intractable economic and social problems caused by late capitalism and the socially eviscerating tendencies of neoliberalism. Islamophobia makes its claim to the ground of common sense by providing simplistic explanations and scapegoats for society’s ills. It directs the attention of those who have suffered most at the hands of an inequitable system away from national political failures toward an alien wedge portrayed as intent on mayhem and carnage.36 The upsurge of Islamist terrorism, historically linked to Western economic and strategic policies, provides an easy way of unifying diverse groups in a defensive chorus of cultural suspicion, and the two phenomena—Islamism and Islamophobia—march off in lockstep toward a worrying future. To be sure, there are international variations in the antecedents, development, and manifestation of Islamophobia. In Europe, the public visibility of Islam in the building of mosques and the wearing of certain modes of dress piques concerns that in turn lead to targeted legislation. In the United States, we find career Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes, whose crude polemics depend on depicting Islam as a threatening monolith and an ideological foe. In Britain, with its much longer history of contact with Muslim peoples—including the experience derived from colonialism—a willed historical amnesia fed by politicians and the media prevents a more nuanced understanding of Islam, its different strains and multiple histories. We see instead something much closer to what Sherene Razack, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, terms “race thinking,” where prejudice becomes naturalized in the interests of existing social relations via phrases such as “British values,” indicating kinship and common origins, to which the Muslim “outsider” is required to adhere but from whose “insider” benefits he or she is always excluded.37 So Islamophobia is manifest in words and actions. However, there is also what I would describe as a strain of latent Islamophobia, dependent on a powerful, often tacit assumption that Islam and Muslim cultures are

15 INTRODUCTION

inferior to an evolved, secular Western model. This distinction is stoked by the slew of decontextualized soundbites that daily present us with instances of the injustice and barbarity perpetrated in Muslim lands without obliging us to consider histories of imperialism. It is augmented by the underlying thrust of domestic and foreign policies designed to pursue Western strategic and economic interests, which define Muslims and Muslim lands as in need of correction. Therefore, in addition to looking at Islamophobia as a mode of prejudice that might be practiced by individuals or groups against other individuals or groups, we need also to remember the enabling context for such prejudice. This involves considering contemporary global geopolitical arrangements, their complex prehistories, and the manner in which inequalities of power can be cloaked by shrill, pseudo-objective discourses that essentialize difference and seek to justify repressive policies against Muslims. As many critics have noted, the hands of Samuel P. Huntington can be detected giving a shape and a somewhat spurious cover of intellectual coherence to this idea of a collision of irreconcilable opposites in his “clash of civilizations” thesis. Dividing the world up into competing “civilizations,” Huntington argued that future conflicts would play themselves out through issues of culture and religion: “The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions of humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. . . . The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”38 Although Huntington’s schema has drawn widespread criticism for its reductive simplifications, which, among other things, do not sufficiently acknowledge the mutual interpenetration central to the development of all cultures, the clash of civilizations thesis has gained popularity in many quarters as a means to understand extremism and to justify the aggressive advancement of Western interests, especially against Muslim peoples. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, Islamophobia as a tacit assumption has lurked just below the surface of foreign and domestic policies in Western countries. More recently in the election campaign and then presidency of Donald Trump, Islamophobia has been mainstreamed in what at times almost seems like a direct effort to bring about a clash of civilizations in reality.

16 INTRODUCTION

Yet, more than this, Islamophobia owes a debt to particular interpretations of modernity and the Enlightenment—what they are and how we understand their effects—and to the universalization of Western values such that they assume the mantle of a norm and confine the values of other cultures to aberrant status. For instance, claims that Muslims and their holy book are “backward” or “barbaric” are always predicated on the assumption that “we” in the West have a monopoly on “modernity” and “normality.” This myth is maintained even while Western state terrorism continues to vie with other kinds in intensity and human cost. This process has an ongoing history, of which the current moment is merely the latest iteration. Samir Amin describes it as follows: “Modernity arose in Europe, beginning in the Renaissance, as a break with the ‘traditional’ culture. . . . [It] is constructed on the principle that human beings, individually and collectively . . . make their own histories. Up until that time, in Europe and elsewhere, responsibility for history was attributed to God or supernatural forces. From that point on, reason is combined with emancipation under modernity, thus opening the way to democracy (which is modern by definition).”39 Some of the defining features of modernity are its secularism, materialism, rationalism, and central distinction between the public and private realms—operational through “the nation state, the world capitalist economy, the world military order and the division of labour.”40 According to Immanuel Wallerstein, modernity is “a catchall term for a pastiche of customs, norms, and practices that flourished in the capitalist world economy. And since it was said to be by definition the incarnation of the true universal values . . . modernity was not merely a moral goal but a historical necessity.”41 Modernity’s corollary has been the ability to place those whose societies have evolved in other ways beyond the limits of the fully human, resulting in discriminatory treatment that became most clearly formulated in the paralegal status of “enemy combatants” and the establishment of offshore camps for detainees—such as that in Guantánamo Bay—where subjects defined as less than human, shorn of their rights, can be caged. In other words, modernity becomes the benchmark through which to measure and therefore to define the human. Some of these assumptions also find their way into humanism as it has developed, taking the form of blindness to the values and productions of other cultures or of the tendency to judge them by Western (but putatively universal) standards. Thus, V. S. Naipaul breaks

17 INTRODUCTION

into his narrative of travel across a number of Muslim-majority countries, entitled Among the Believers, to inform us of something “essential” in the Muslim mindset he encounters: The West, or the universal civilization it leads, is emotionally rejected. It undermines; it threatens. But at the same time it is needed, for its machines, goods, medicines, warplanes, the remittances from the emigrants, the hospitals that might have a cure for calcium deficiency, the universities that will provide master’s degrees in mass media. All the rejection of the West is contained within the assumption that there will always exist out there a living, creative civilization, oddly neutral, open to all to appeal to. Rejection, therefore, is not absolute rejection. It is also, for the community as a whole, a way of ceasing to strive intellectually. It is to be parasitic; parasitism is one of the unacknowledged fruits of fundamentalism.42

The eye of the Orientalist, evident here, is able to see civilizations in toto and to rank them in relation to each other. At the same time as primping the narcissism of the Western reader, such a perspective is also busily projecting onto the Other culture all sorts of revealing anxieties of its own. Naipaul is a Nobel Prize–winning novelist and travel writer representative of a mindset that has internalized Western standards and mythologies and that automatically reproduces them as a shorthand way to understand other cultures. His writing thus seems to belong to an older way of seeing. Yet the tendency to universalize one viewpoint at the same time as claiming to be able to read and reproduce a range of perspectives persists, and its effects are central to this study. The value of literature lies partly in the way it structures our feelings about the world and others in it, providing imaginative access to alternative experiences. In literature, the assumption that the novel form itself and the values it is said to carry are in some way an embodiment of the pure flowering of post-Enlightenment Western culture ignores other models for the development of prose fiction and overlooks the ways that cultures inform each other through their historical proximity and interaction and how their creative genres take shape in part due to that contact.

In her book Death of a Discipline (2003), Gayatri Spivak notes the appetite for a new global political awareness in the study of literature. The urgency

18 INTRODUCTION

of such a planetary project after 9/11 was palpable. Remarking on the heterogeneity of cultures and disciplines in the multicultural era before the attacks, she writes: “Today the backlash is on the rise. There is a demand for humanism, with a nod towards Asia; for universalism, however ambiguous; for quality control; to fight terrorism.”43 The qualifiers in the second sentence might alert us to a certain ruefulness that the agenda of some antagonists of multiculturalism from the right and the agenda of those on the left made uneasy by identity politics’ demand for the prioritization of difference seem to have moved into alignment. Yet Spivak’s insights into the value of literature in creating a space that can complicate and contest hegemonic discourses remains vital. She lauds literature’s complexity and indirectness—something that makes it more than an addendum to social science or policy-oriented perspectives. Citing the Aristotelian view that the creative imagination allows for more openness and catholicity than the “single-mindedness of history,” Spivak identifies the value of literature as being its “unverifiability: it cannot be tied to a single ‘fact.’ ” “Literature cannot predict, but it can prefigure. . . . Literature is what escapes the system; you cannot speed read it. The figure is irreducible.”44 This is an insight that will hold for us in this book. Owing to its very elusive quality of figuring forth a world like our own but subtly different and open to the play of desire and imagination, literature allows for the projection of different ways of being in the world, offers a portrayal of cultural traditions beyond those of the West (yet affected by them), and potentially yields new dreams for the future. The framing act of literature may be formed by multiple and sometimes conflicting frames, but its power to take us beyond existing relationships to imagine new ones is surely something worth considering amid all the sound and fury of debates about civilizational difference and the so-called death of multiculturalism. For the same reason, I would argue, literary fiction and its study within the humanities—when in an informed engagement with other disciplines and approaches—form a vital strand in understanding and therefore combating Islamophobia as a cultural phenomenon. The two key routes for studying culturally different texts after 9/11 are offered by the postcolonial and world-literature paradigms. Postcolonialism developed out of those emancipation movements in Europe and America that rode the wave of post-1968 political self-assertion, whereas world

19 INTRODUCTION

literature came out of comparative literature and philology. When it comes to postcolonialism, critics have suggested that its roots in secular criticism have led to a blind spot where religion, especially Islam, is concerned.45 There is some truth in this claim, inasmuch as nationalism and antinationalism have tended to provide the umbrella beneath which issues of race, class, gender, and hybridity then shelter. However, some of these criticisms, such as that offered by Anouar Majid, begin from the false premise that postcolonialism is merely the theoretical wing of identity politics and that “the postcolonial” is the inevitably compromised brainchild of those “comprador intellectuals” first picked out by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Arif Dirlik.46 In fact, “the postcolonial” is a description of our contemporary world condition, not a set of theories or an identity. It sums up life for many who wrestle with the legacy of historical colonialism and find their place in the world still acted on by controlling impulses of the powerful nations of the West. It also encompasses the willed amnesia with which these privileged First World nations continue to blame contemporary problems on recidivism or “fundamentalism,” read as inherent in subject peoples and nations, just as it was in the days of empire. Indeed, postcolonial perspectives have become even more salient in a post-9/11 world, where the justification and tactics of Western domination have reemerged with renewed force. Such tactics are focused primarily on Muslim citizens and nations and are composed of the classic colonial staples of surveillance: bodily disciplining; restrictions on movements; the giving, withholding, and withdrawing of citizenship and opportunity; and potential relegation to disposable infrahuman status in a global economy of rights that is skewed and partial. World literature has reemerged since the events of 9/11 as another preferred paradigm for understanding global cultural interaction. It is taken to counter the Western parochialism that privileges European and American experiences, languages, and literary forms and that is also shared by postcolonialism. Works by critics such as Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, and others have sought to define world literature for the modern era, trace its historical antecedents, and develop appropriate methodologies.47 They build upon foundations laid in the nineteenth century by Goethe— responding to a changing world after the Napoleonic War—as well as by Marx and Engels, who in The Communist Manifesto comment on the

20 INTRODUCTION

emergence of an international market for ideas in tandem with a market for material goods, resulting in the rise of a “world literature.”48 This idea of exchange or circulation is central to many of these approaches to world literature and is to be welcomed for reasons I elaborate in chapter 7. However, precisely because of its comparative and synoptic tendencies, world literature as it has evolved in recent years seems best suited to describe trends in the production, consumption, and circulation of literature and its development across space and over time rather than to deal with those formal aesthetic and narrative choices that give each text its distinctive character and meaning but that always emerge from the contentious moments in which they are shaped. For example, Franco Moretti’s sociology of generic adaptation—a hybrid of structuralism and worldsystems theory that sees literary development as a struggle for symbolic hegemony across the world—does away with the need for close reading altogether, advocating instead what he calls “distant reading”: “The trouble with close reading . . . is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. . . . [Y]ou invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter. . . . Distant reading . . . is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text.”49 This view is strictly back to front. It implies that in focusing closely on a given text, the critic is only and forever interested in texts in isolation. This book takes issue with this idea precisely in its attempt to derive symptomatic examples from a range of texts spread across the world. We cannot bypass the stage of engagement with literary texts as texts. If the relative autonomy of a work of art means anything at all, it surely requires of us attention to those facets of any piece of writing that are conflicted. It draws our eye to the rough brushstroke, the flaw in the material, the clash that suddenly sheds new and unintended light. In other words, we can understand the way in which literature makes its meaning as literature only by attending to voice and rhythm, the stated and the elliptical, the whole melding of past, present, and future through which the work of prose fiction takes shape, presented by the author as choices of form. From these essential features, we can then work outward toward a better grasp of the way that works of fiction and their generic frames at given points in space and time help to construct, reinforce, but also sometimes contest everyday commonplaces. This can happen only with a close engagement

21 INTRODUCTION

with texts themselves. For that reason, my own methodology here might be described in those terms articulated by Said as submitting oneself knowledgeably to texts and treating them provisionally at first as discrete objects . . . ; moving then, by dint of expanding and elucidating the often obscure or invisible frameworks in which they exist, to their historical situations and the way in which certain structures of attitude, feeling and rhetoric get entangled with some currents, some historical and social formations of their context. . . . Thus, a close reading of a literary text . . . will gradually locate the text in its time as part of a whole network of relationships whose outlines and influence play an informing role in the text.50

Despite the dangers of distance, world literature’s attention to the circulation of texts as commodities subject to exchange in a global market does connect usefully with our interest in a market for the Muslim and how certain textual and critical preoccupations travel and recur in different contexts. As Waïl Hassan puts it, the “notion of world literature . . . is linked in an important way to the internationalization of culture that resulted from the emergence of capitalism as the dominant mode of production in Europe. Similarly, our contemporary notion of the globalization of literary studies is affiliated with the globalization of capital, or late capitalism in the post–Cold War era.”51 Literature is subject to the forces of globalization in the same way as all other cultural activities. We can see this process beginning even before the age of empire, when literature and its dissemination became a tool in the colonial project. More recently, as Brouillette observes, we have seen a proliferation of postcolonial writing as part of an expansion but also a niche fragmentation of the global book market. However, this expansion has still operated to keep power in the metropolitan centers, with the result that the publishing industry remains unrepresentative of non-Western and minority ethnic communities.52 As for Islamophobia more broadly, two contrasting trends should be noted: the tendency to vilify Islam as an enemy to Western values and, at the same time, a comfortable accommodation with some very illiberal Islamic nations that cooperate with liberal capitalism. These two contradictory positions come together in U.S. foreign policy. As Alan Freeman notes, U.S. policy since the Second World War has been designed to ensure that no Third World or pan-national alliances hostile to market capitalism

22 INTRODUCTION

can emerge.53 This position led to repeated attempts during the Cold War to quash secular nationalist movements in decolonized countries, from Iran to Egypt, lest they be sympathetic to communism. Now, oil and strategic interests mean that the West has no qualms about supporting Islamic regimes that are socially extremely conservative as long as they are open for business. This attitude gives the lie to the always rather fanciful notion that political Islam represents the sole remaining mode of opposition to neoliberal capitalism. In Samir Amin’s more sanguine view, “the project of contemporary political Islam . . . is a conservative project, completely acceptable to the capitalist world order,” and Western governments “know that the power of political Islam has the virtue, for them, of rendering the people powerless and, consequently, ensuring their comprador status. . . . The savagery attributed to the people who are the primary victims of political Islam facilitates the growth of Islamophobia. That, in turn, makes it easier to accept the prospect of an increasingly polarized capitalist expansion.”54 This interpretation goes some way to explaining why Islamophobia has remained a stable and potent rallying call for right-wing nationalists and is liable to be deployed with cynicism by elites when the need arises. Its utility survives shifts of emphasis within capitalism from nationalist to globalizing phases and back again. We might usefully bear this in mind when we hear the claim that Muslims are out to take over and change our cherished “way of life.” As Amin says, “It is not the fundamentalist ideology with religious pretensions that is in the driver’s seat and imposes its logic on the real holders of power, i.e., capital and its servants in the state. It is capital alone that makes all the decisions that suit it, and then mobilizes this ideology to its service.”55 It is up to us whether literature stands in thrall to this ideology or uses its interrogative power to challenge the ideology.

My own position as a scholar living and working in the West clearly affects my engagement with the issues covered in this book. The critic is always immanent and implicated in the conditions he or she seeks to explore, never transcendent. It is impossible to stand outside that nexus of framing perspectives that, I have suggested, often result in latent Islamophobia. As a critic trained in hermeneutical practices that are historically and

23 INTRODUCTION

culturally specific, I would be disingenuous to claim any better knowledge or more objective perspective. Nonetheless, it is possible to advocate— and try to practice—a certain critical self-consciousness in our engagement with non-Western literatures. In the case of Muslim cultures, claims of exclusivity come from a variety of sources. Therefore, a certain critical distance can be useful. We may, perhaps, see Islamophobia more clearly as a structuring frame if we can stand back and understand it as a kind of calland-response: certain demands are made of the writers who deal with “Muslim issues,” and they either accede to or problematize those demands. In other words, framing is always dialogic, and it takes a certain amount of cunning and guile for the writer to be able to circumvent imposed limitations on what they can say and how it will be interpreted. Critics need to be similarly supple. If this book has a numerical bias in favor of texts about or emanating from the South Asian context, it should be remembered that it is not claiming to offer a comprehensive overview of novels by or about Muslims. As Amin Malak reminds us, no single work can be representative of the vast and varied Muslim diaspora across the world; indeed, to try to homogenize it is one of the tactics of Islamophobia.56 In the same way, no national or regional experience can be taken to stand for anything greater than itself. In this case, my particular academic specialism informs the emphasis on South Asian texts here—without implying any lesser status to texts not covered that may come from other regions. Moreover, because those existing comparative critical texts that attempt some overview of “Muslim writing”—those by Geoffrey Nash and John Hawley in particular—tend to have especial strengths in Arabic background fiction, this book may be seen as an attempt to paint in another part of the vast canvas of Muslim literary expression.57 That it does so in such constrained and tense times should indicate that the need for critical explorations of the commonplaces of intercultural debate is urgent and ongoing. Equally, the English-language bias of my selection might seem to highlight the limitations of the paradigm. However, the circulation and hence reach of literary texts about Muslims and Islam are determined by a global market that is properly one of the main subjects of our story. This market has a strong bias toward majority Western languages, indicating the broader power structures that are in play. If the current book cannot in its own terms stand outside those structures, it may at least point to the skewed results they produce.

24 INTRODUCTION

The chapters that follow describe the arc of literary representations in relation to Islamophobia as it is visible today. In moving between Britain and America and then out into the broader world, I wish to indicate a certain international continuity in the features of Islamophobia, along with the literary responses it calls forth. So it is in the first chapter, where three authors—two British and one American—exemplify a certain liberal outlook that has attempted to take the measure of mindsets at odds with rationality and liberalism but that has tended always to fall short. Martin Amis and Ian McEwan buy into the notion that literary creativity in general and the novel form in particular stand against an Islamic insistence on intellectual and personal submission. For this generation of novelists, spurred on by the Rushdie affair, commitment to literature means commitment to a set of liberal values they take to be enshrined in fiction itself. Amis and McEwan make claims about the empathetic and imaginative capacities of art: that it carries the values of Western liberalism and secularity and that, in effect, it can inoculate against extremism. Moreover, they identify with a much older program of moralizing humanistic literary criticism that they believe may somehow come to our aid again in the present. In essays and fiction, such weapons are deployed against a perceived threat from an Islam that is intolerant, closed off, irrational. In The Second Plane, Amis rails against the “dependent” religious mind, and McEwan’s character Henry Perowne in the novel Saturday revels in the material results of modernity’s achievements but is neglectful of the victims of “progress,” one of whom resurfaces to terrorize him. In both cases, Western culture is brought to bear against a range of foes, the most dangerous of which is the Muslim bogeyman. John Updike shares with Amis and McEwan a particularly masculine perspective not always sympathetic to gendered, racial, and cultural Others. He, too, offers critical reading as a path to “convert” the recidivist Muslim. In Terrorist, he is more successful in presenting an appraisal of the contemporary American materialist malaise than in entering the mind of an Islamist terrorist. Even so, his novel is shot through with a greater degree of doubt than the others—doubt not simply in the divine presence devoutly avowed by the young Islamist Ahmad but also in the society that so stridently awards itself all the positive values it denies to Muslim culture. The backlash against multiculturalism articulated by politicians in various parts of the world over the past few years has in its sights the supposed

25 INTRODUCTION

recalcitrance of Muslims. In Britain, there has been a shift from, for example, a quite virulently racist mainstream discourse in the 1970s and 1980s, based on biological racism, about Afro-Caribbean youth as agents of crime and moral corruption to a cultural discrimination against Muslims based on their perceived “alien” practices. The recent multicultural consensus— inasmuch as it ever existed—has come under attack from both left and right. The Right argue for an effectively assimilationist implementation of so-called British values—the distinctively British nature of which always proves somewhat tricky to identify—and the Left emphasizes the divisive effect of identity politics, particularly in its religious form. For those on the left, the breakdown of previous antiracist solidarities has been brought about by claims to exceptionalism, resulting in special treatment conceded to minorities by governments. In the works of Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali, we can chart the course of this disenchantment with the idea of political multiculturalism—a course that, I argue, maps onto the rise of a post-Thatcherite neoliberal outlook in which collective action is denigrated in favor of self-help and entrepreneurship. Kureishi’s novels, such as The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, chart multicultural lived experience. Yet they are also quite trenchant about the potential for identity politics to lead to fragmentation, special pleading, and reactionary community politics. It may be the case that political recognition of minorities caused some groups to organize in such a way as to accentuate conservative values, with results that tended to be repressive to minorities and women. However, when commentators lament the persistence of such practices as veiling, forced marriages, honor crimes, self-segregation, female genital mutilation, and so on, these practices are often understood as in essence “Muslim” practices. This understanding leads to an indiscriminate attack that fails to recognize the roots of practices in particular regional cultures and their social structures. (It is also, of course, the case that none of them is exclusive to Muslims.) The novels I am concerned with in chapter 2—The Black Album and Brick Lane—are about the lived experience of individuals negotiating their way through the modern minefield of community relations. Both are by writers deemed to be in some way “representative” of multicultural Britain—despite their protestations to the contrary—and this expectation has had particular effects on these novels’ reception. That both novels also have bildungsroman elements, depicting the growth and education of their

26 INTRODUCTION

main characters, results in the collision of collectivist forces and individualist impulses. In The Black Album, the central protagonist is torn between secular self-realization and the suffocating demands of an Islamic revivalist group at the college where he studies. Characteristically, Kureishi rejects the closed system of Muslim extremism he depicts, preferring to extend the protagonist’s journey of self-discovery. In other words, he valorizes individual over collective identifications. Brick Lane, written not long after 9/11, extends this trajectory with a Bangladeshi female protagonist who rejects the shackles of domesticity and the pressure to conform. Nazneen’s transformation from dutiful wife to adulterous lover to independent economic entity—forming a business with like-minded female friends—marks the completion of a process whereby the British multicultural novel comes to embrace the neoliberal ethos of individual economic self-assertion. This is the preferred route to emancipation for Nazneen, who at the end becomes the model multicultural liberal subject, using her design skills to produce “traditional” (and therefore exotic) garments for the wider market. Thus, taken together, these two novels register a shift of emphasis from collectivist political assertion to commodification and consumption. By the end, the industrious but still devout Nazneen embodies an Islam “we” need not be phobic about. The question of culture as a battleground in the war on terror also occurs in those texts addressed in the third chapter. I argue that Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner are part of a subgenre that saw an exponential growth in popularity after 9/11: the Muslim misery memoir. Such books make particular truth claims, using the supposed authenticity bestowed by cultural background and personal experience, to tell the West what it should know about the oppressive Muslim countries it stands against. These books intervened in the ongoing American culture wars, appeared at the time of the Bush interventionist foreign policy, and underpinned the moral claims of this project in stories where injustice and oppression are foregrounded and linked to religious ideology. Nafisi’s and Hosseini’s novels construct rigid binary distinctions between American freedom and the suffering of those in Muslim countries. However, it is in their mutual interest in the slippery processes of reading and writing—Nafisi’s characters read from the canon of great Western literature, Hosseini’s protagonist is a writer—that both texts expose the expedient and questionable nature of their judgments. The

27 INTRODUCTION

truth claims of these two exhibits in the court of world opinion are thus exposed as ideologically sealed but at the same time never watertight. If Islamophobia can be related to questions of form, it receives its most direct treatment in novelistic themes. Chapters 4 and 5 explore how movements across space are impeded by Islamophobia, both within the metropolis and across international borders. In Amy Waldman’s The Submission and H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy, both set in New York City, Muslim characters’ ability to shape the city space is curtailed by defensive forces that seek to police it against them. Both novels reveal the negotiations and restrictions that result, including the kind of surveillance, detention, and expulsion experienced by real Muslims after 9/11. The books chronicle the closing down of alternative and hybrid identities amid the chorus of patriotism demanded after the attacks, although in the end they vary in their commitment to articulating Otherness. In the liberal thrillers examined in chapter 5, John Le Carré, Dan Fesperman, and Richard Flanagan are concerned to contest those states of exception that engulfed Muslim subjects as their citizenship was called into question and their ability to move across borders was curtailed. These writers rehearse the precarious position of the outsider, or homo sacer, who already exists on the periphery and is vulnerable to the full force of securitization and exclusion. However, they also tend to displace experiences of marginalization from Muslims to white, non-Muslim protagonists, suggesting a discomfort with conveying culturally different experience in their novels. Islamophobia is not simply experienced in the cities and the countries of the West. It is fostered by historical policies that have often seen Muslim lands and their populations treated as expedients, collateral damage in the pursuit of other struggles. Chapter 6 discusses how both Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows are concerned to reconnect modern readers with that longer history. They tell of the globalization of conflict in the Cold War as the United States encouraged international Islamist extremism in the fight against communism in Afghanistan and elsewhere and consider globalization’s impact on the conduct of post9/11 campaigns. In the process, these global novels by two Pakistani writers puncture Western complacency and superiority, crossing space and time to thread together characters separated by cultures and continents. Yet in this important project they are sometimes hampered by the same commonplaces of liberal universalism that shadow those less sympathetic

28 INTRODUCTION

accounts we have seen. “Worlding” the contemporary novel about Muslims is one way to try to establish more equitable narrative space, but it is still fraught with dangers. Novels that speak to the current geopolitical problematic in which Muslims stand center stage are addressing a particular audience: that market mentioned previously and reinforced by reviewers and critics. Chapter 7 returns to the question of reception and those frames through which Muslim writing is contained. I explore two ways in which the current market for the Muslim operates. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist dramatizes the experiences of a character who moves from being a foot soldier of the neoliberal economic model to one of its fiercest critics; it also destabilizes liberal readers’ expectations and confronts their prejudices. However, despite its inscription of the pitfalls of reading and writing “the Muslim,” the novel itself—as a marketable commodity—is inevitably implicated in the processes it critiques. In Minaret, Leila Aboulela attempts a realist depiction of the experience of devout female religiosity in a novel that indirectly questions the normative secularity of the novel form in a way that might be called “postsecular.” Yet within the existing market for the Muslim Aboulela’s efforts are liable to be co-opted by that anthropological tendency we have witnessed in response to other novels, in which generic expectations and the burden of representation combine to reinsert the text into prevailing discourses about “the Muslim problem.” Artistic and cultural forms can reinforce Islamophobia. But they can also expose it, dramatize its inconsistencies, or outright oppose it. Claims for Western superiority often carry within them, even when unnoticed, the bacilli of an unstated support for the notion of individualism, co-opted as part of the discourse of freedom that nowadays also often implies an endorsement of an inequitable globalized economic system. For every Martin Amis scurrying to rearticulate the truisms of Euro-American cultural superiority, there is an Abdul Rahman Munif addressing the human cost of the pursuance of Western greed and exceptionalism,58 but they do not enjoy equal exposure. Most of all, art—at its most ambitious—can expose Islamophobia for the thing of shreds and patches that it is. Islamophobia is often seen as a unified, monolithic discourse that is actively imposed on passive objects. However, it is actually a discourse riven with anxieties and contradictions. This book seeks out those instances where the discourses of

29 INTRODUCTION

Islamophobia, as dramatized and played out in contemporary novels, find themselves exposed as the conflicted and uncertain formations they actually are. Islamophobia is a widespread and growing phenomenon that affects the daily lives of hundreds of thousands—even millions—of people worldwide through surveillance, suspicion, travel bans, unfair detention and arrest, harassment, and violence. Its ubiquity obliges us to identify it, expose it, and map its spread as it appears in the realms of politics and society. This book argues that we might usefully extend our understanding of Islamophobia—and therefore our range of resources to combat it—into the realm of culture, too. In the end, an understanding of the conflicted nature of Islamophobia, as revealed in contemporary literature, might contribute toward eventually dismantling it.

Chapter One

ISLAM, CULTURE, AND ANARCHY Faith, Doubt, and Liberalism in Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and John Updike

In a world where Muslims can be routinely vilified en masse, Geoffrey Nash’s idea that they are subject to a Kulturkampf, a cultural struggle, fairly encapsulates the situation.1 Our task as students of the relationship between Islamophobia and the novel then becomes to identify the constituent elements of this struggle: the values through which it is waged and what literature’s part in it might be. If literature is not merely reflective but active in the process of constructing realities through which our contemporary world can be imagined and understood, we need to consider the tacit assumptions by which it makes its claims on our assent. This, in turn, requires us to attend to those values considered foundational or definitive that are drawn from the deepest recesses of the Western sense of self and that then become the raw material for fictional writing as much as for political or public discourse. It means, for one thing, tracing and contesting the binary distinction by which the West comes to be equated with liberalism, secularity, and modernity and Islam is rendered authoritarian (sometimes totalitarian), superstitious, and backward. The tone of reductive, moralistic separatism characteristic of modern discourse about Muslims and the West and its attendant fetishization of “our culture” becomes the main way to instrumentalize this sense of difference and exceptionality. In thinking of culture, we can take Edward Said’s cue when he suggests that a culture is “not something to which one

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belongs but something that one possesses and, along with that proprietary process, culture also designates a boundary by which the concept of what is extrinsic or intrinsic to the culture come into forceful play.”2 Historically, this sense of culture has often been tied to the state in projects of national renewal or at times when hegemonic authority has felt under threat. Said remarks on the proximity of culture and the nation-state, an assimilation that is accompanied by “assurance, confidence, the majority sense, the entire matrix of meanings we associate with ‘home,’ belonging and community.” Yet this also means “that culture is a system of discriminations and evaluations[,] . . . a system of exclusions legislated from above but enacted through its polity, by which such things as anarchy, disorder, irrationality, inferiority, bad taste and immorality are identified, then deposited outside the culture and kept there by the power of the State and its institutions.”3 When it comes to drawing a distinction between Muslims and the West, claims are made on a supposedly deeply felt sense of identity and tradition—quite in the face of the negotiated, fitful, and often violent history by which identification with state projects has been enforced. The recent fissiparous tendencies highlighted by the British vote to leave the European Union, along with the rise of reactionary populist parties across Europe, are illustrative both of the atavistic nature of these identifications and of the fact that nationalism tends to trump the rather more airy claims of civilization, and a great deal of work has to be done to render the two synonymous. Mahmood Mamdani has usefully explained how the post-9/11 phenomenon of an assumed unbridgeable cultural gulf has emerged in the table talk of policy makers and opinion formers. Locating “culture talk,” as he calls it, as part of the latest phase in a much longer story of U.S. post-Vietnam global political engagements, Mamdani suggests that the era since the Cold War has seen the “ascendancy and rapid politicizing of a single term: culture.” Culture talk assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and then explains politics as a consequence of that essence. Culture talk after 9/11 . . . explained the practice of “terrorism” as “Islamic.” “Islamic terrorism” is thus offered as both description and explanation of the events of 9/11. It is no longer the market (capitalism), nor the state (democracy), but culture (modernity) that is said to be the dividing line between those in favour of a peaceful civic existence and those inclined to terror. It is said that our world is divided between those who are

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modern and those who are premodern. The moderns make culture and are its masters, the premoderns are said to be but conduits.4

Culture and cultural difference are then constructed as the cause and legitimation of violence, whether the fury of the terrorist or the calculated precision attacks of “smart” warfare such as unmanned drones. In the erection and codification of “our” values—that which separates “us” from “them”—the categories are not neutral. Indeed, these categories are produced by and in turn are productive of Western normativity. They tend to view culture as essential and formative as opposed to constructed and negotiable. Culture talk tends to reify cultures as objects that have attributes driving individual behavior. This has led to attacks on Islam for its supposedly inevitable and predictable impact on its adherents, usually traced back to the myth that the Quran supposedly forces a literal interpretation and thus determines behavior, whereas the Bible and in turn Christianity have a tradition of critical interpretation. In assuming that culture causes people to do certain things, this view also exoticizes the Other—although, as we will see later in the book, this exoticization is less about cozy commodification and more about the frisson of vicariously experienced threat. More-liberal positions tend toward a minimization of difference on the basis of notions of a “shared humanity.” Such familiar modes of categorization fail to recognize their own cultural privilege and support for a universal system. Tolerance is mistaken for good citizenship in a move that eventually tends to yield to demands for assimilation when its notions of acceptable difference are challenged. Thus far I have been referring to culture as the logic of practices by which a notion of unity is created. These practices depend on a performative sense of ourselves and of Others that has to be created and constantly reiterated. For example, the othering of Muslims as terrorists and irrational people requires certain mechanisms to allow it to spread and be internalized. Talal Asad writes of modernity as a project aimed at institutionalizing certain principles—“constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, . . . consumerism, freedom of the market—and secularism. It employs proliferating technologies (of production, warfare, travel entertainment, medicine) that generate new experiences of space and time, of cruelty and health, of consumption and knowledge.”5 Against each of these principles, “the Muslim” is positioned as aberration or threat. Such an

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undertaking involves the aesthetic realm, too—that other, narrower kind of “culture” usually taken to mean the arts, media, and sometimes science and often having class connotations. Literature, for all the claims made for its independence, is one of these technologies. In this chapter, I examine two novels that participate in the process of sanctifying Western modernity through literary art in particular ways: Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006). I come at them by way of Martin Amis’s essay collection The Second Plane (2008), which crystallizes many of the key issues.6 In particular, I want to focus on aspects of Amis’s essay “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,” which can be seen to articulate several key tenets of the liberal novel as it sought an initial response to 9/11 and the changes it wrought. Taken together, Amis and McEwan can be seen as advancing what Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate have called “the new atheist novel” as a “front in the ideological war against religion. . . . Quite simply, the novel apparently stands for everything—free speech, individuality, rationality and even a secular experience of the transcendental—that religion seeks to overthrow.”7 Central among the tenets of this breed of liberal novelist is the value of the kind of artistic and literary endeavors that Islam, since the Rushdie affair, is said to be suspicious of. In particular, what gets rearticulated is a notion of a tradition of core cultural values that literature should be in the business of preserving, primary among them being pluralism and reason. I want to contrast this very British approach with the more hesitant prognosis of the American writer John Updike. Whereas Amis and McEwan elevate literature to an article of humanist faith to set against the censorious repression of political religion, Updike, as we will see, has a more ambivalent relationship with this redemptive project. Whereas McEwan in particular invests in the power of literary art as a going concern and as a means to confront the immediate threats to his protagonist’s world in the early years of the war on terror, in Updike art as a mode of self-expression is treated ambiguously, almost as a mode of passing the time, on a par with shopping or sex. In McEwan, art and canonical poetry in particular can reach and subjugate the savage and the culturally “heathen.” This view is part of a post-9/11 fetishization of the great Western literary text as the herald of free expression and its elevation to stand for a culture that, in fact, is exhausted and in crisis. However, to achieve this elevation, McEwan, like Amis, must reach back to the cultural and literary authorities of yesteryear:

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for McEwan, Matthew Arnold, and for Amis (albeit ambivalently), F. R. Leavis. Updike, however, is drawn more to the exhaustion and crisis end of the spectrum. Terrorist is much more interrogative in its approach to the value of art. On the one hand, it is itself a novel. On the other, the book’s representative artist figure and her work are treated with a degree of distanced skepticism in a broader study of societal and familial breakdown. Both McEwan and Updike do oppose the “irrational” with the “rational,” perceived as essential markers of difference. But, again, whereas in Saturday reason emerges battered but triumphant, in Terrorist the representative rationalist protagonist is pinned down in a culture that is frayed and irrational, built now on consumption and the gratification of desires. In the end, the eponymous terrorist’s mission is defeated not by the redemptive power of art as such, but by a more hesitant, almost pantheistic embodied humanism working through fellow feeling with other living creatures. The fact that, as critics have frequently remarked, both novels have to resort to quite contrived and implausible denouements is indicative of a certain strain in the task of standing up for liberal humanist values. In fact, both McEwan and Updike—like Amis—manifest a marked postimperial melancholia of the kind identified by Paul Gilroy.8 In Britain the loss of empire and in the United States the loss of a particular white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant consensus have led to compensatory fantasies about the reassertion of white male power in the face of competing claims by others. In keeping with the two novels’ domestication of cultural struggles, the decline of white male power is figured as a failure of parental (and especially paternal) protection.9 This failure then calls for a reassertion of masculinities of a particularly assertive kind, corresponding to ideals of a national “best self” that has been lost and must be retrieved.10 Even then, both novels manage to concoct endings characterized by a sort of default-setting liberal wish fulfillment in which the forces of death and disorder are vanquished and the threat from the irrational negated. In both texts, acts of reading (and misreading)—of critical interpretation— are central to the resolution of the plot. For the satisfactory triumph of their endorsed value systems, both depend on the “conversion” of the threatening Other,11 and yet, at the same time, the faith displayed by characters is always haunted by its flipside, doubt. *

*

*

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In Britain, the attempt to erect the literary as a main bastion of Western freedom is only the latest instance of a tendency that has appeared sporadically but especially at times of crisis over the past two hundred or so years. This tendency frequently occurs as a response to forms of social change felt to be threatening to bourgeois hegemony. As a predominantly middle-class form, the novel has been uniquely placed to chart such anxieties as well as to give them expression. Yet it has also been co-opted in a discussion of secularism that universalizes a particular idea of “human nature” corresponding to Western experience and social development. Talal Asad’s assertion that “religious toleration was a political means to a strong state power” after the seventeenth-century European wars of religion might confuse cause and effect;12 state power was the price to be paid for ensuring toleration and the advance of secularism rather than something already lurking in the shadows waiting for an appropriate vehicle. Yet Asad is correct to suggest that after Kant the insistence that religion should submit to criticism and reason became an Enlightenment commonplace. Rational criticism becomes an alternative to religious authority—something that resurfaces again, two hundred years later, in the Satanic Verses affair, where freedom to criticize Islam is exalted and where “the sacred role performed by literature in modern culture” accounts for the outrage caused when protestors in Bradford burned a copy of the book.13 Of course, it has been many years since literature has occupied an exalted space in the West; it has long since been desacralized and reduced to a commodity among other commodities. However, the peculiar reanimation of this much older way of thinking about literature after the Rushdie affair and again after 9/11 indicates that literature continues to hold what we might term talismanic potential, ready to be wheeled out whenever a decisive rebuke needs to be issued to those from other cultures who simply don’t understand how important it is. The talismanic potential of literature is dependent on its openness to being interpreted. As it has been deployed in current debates, it is taken to stand in contrast to the “closed” sacred text of Islam. Asad revisits his comparative history of these ideas in his book Formations of the Secular to suggest that although interpretation of the Quran has always been open and shifting, there has been no equivalent of that nineteenth-century European tradition of “higher” criticism that drew so strongly on Enlightenment and German idealism to treat the

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Bible as a literary text open to being read in mythological and symbolic as well as literalist ways.14 The legacy of German idealism feeds directly into English Romanticism, particularly in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who drew on Kant and Schelling to suggest that objects of perception are really composed only of ideas in the perceiving mind. In literature, idealism came to mean the representation of things in an ideal form or as they might be: the imaginative treatment of a subject through poetry or fiction. If true reality is located in our consciousness, then this bestows a central importance on the imagination. Coleridge’s poetic practice famously begins from an appreciation of the importance of imagination, a vital force with the power to transform objects and transfigure the mundane. Even in its simpler form, the imagination is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”15 The result of this quasi-divine elevation of ego and imagination is that the Romantic artist becomes a prophetic genius, a seer for his  community. Artists become—as Percy Bysshe Shelley later put it— “heirophants of an unapprehended inspiration”16 working in the service of art as a substitute for religion. Coleridge himself elaborated on this line of thought in his treatise On the Constitution of Church and State (1830), with its explicit call for a “clerisy” of the learned, composing a “third estate” to propagate the liberal arts and sciences and to keep alive the knowledge of the past.17 This idea influenced successive generations of English thinkers, foremost among them Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s criticism responded to the cultural crises and perceived spiritual poverty of his mid-Victorian age and helped to shape the emerging field of literary criticism. In particular, he can in some ways be seen as initiating what Chris Baldick calls “the social mission of English criticism.”18 In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold’s version of culture—“the best that has been thought and said in the world”—emerges as a panacea for social ills in the absence of an effective national religion. Coleridge’s “clerisy” gives way to Arnold’s educated “remnants” and finally, in the twentieth century, to the critic as priest consecrated by F. R. Leavis, interceding between literature and the people and guiding taste in the era of “mass civilisation and minority culture.”19 What is of interest here is that each of these critics was writing at a time of perceived social upheaval: Coleridge wrote Church and State between Catholic emancipation in 1829 and the First Reform Act of 1932; Arnold

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penned Culture and Anarchy just after the Second Reform Act (1867) and in the wake of the Hyde Park Riots and resulting fear of working-class anarchy; Leavis’s entire career coincided with the multiple and sequential upheavals of mass popular culture, war, decolonization, and, latterly, immigration. When McEwan and Amis return to these authority figures after 9/11—even in a spirit of critical engagement—they display not just a particular kind of mysophobic social conservatism but also a fantasy return to the womb, with its comforting feeling of an organic, continuous, and racially homogeneous national culture. Here, once more, we may contrast Updike’s American and yet noticeably more multicultural perspective, where the humanism on show in Terrorist is of a jaded existential variety, revisiting the perennial theme of faith versus resignation that Updike owes to Kierkegaard’s work on ethics and duty, Fear and Trembling (1843), as well as to his own Lutheran background. In each case, however, humanism is seen to have developed out of Protestantism and has therefore shaped Western secularism in particular ways. Saba Mahmood has gone so far as to claim that the tendency to read all texts, including sacred ones, as symbolic systems rather than divine truth is the key difference between Christianity and Islam, creating a “normative secularity” against which Muslims—with their inability to put sufficient critical distance between themselves and their sacred text—are weighed in the balance and found wanting. For her, secular antipathy is fortified by “a certain commitment to the poetic resources of  the Judeo-Christian tradition—evident in a literary and aesthetic sensibility.”20 Although we may concur with the suggestion that the normative truth claims of secularism expressed through literature need to be critically investigated—one of the fundamental assumptions of this book, in fact—we should be wary of totalizing phrases such as “the Judeo-Christian tradition,” tossed around without qualification. They take too much at face value the categories erected to discriminate between cultural formations that are humanly linked and repeat chimerical civilizational binaries in ahistorical ways.21 I return to this point as it pertains to literature when I explore the postsecular turn in chapter 7. For now, it is worth observing that readings of fearless Western art battling Islamic charges of blasphemy—seen in the Rushdie affair and subsequently—are interesting less for what they tell us about a supposed Islamic antipathy to literary art than for what they reveal about how the

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free expression/cultural offense dyad has been fully realized as the defining frame through which to understand cross-cultural tensions between Muslims and the West. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize the mutual power of art and criticism as they have developed in the West and as they have been institutionalized in the education system in ways that accord them a pseudosacred status. The Romantic view of art as autonomous, existing in and for itself, meant that it was ideally positioned to replace God as the transcendent repository of value.22 The secularization of the university in the nineteenth century ironically furthered the religious aura accumulating around art and literature, while the humanities took shape as a discipline emerging from philology and moral science. In Asad’s view, art and literature became central in “imparting a moral essence of European civilization to students in higher education through the study of great literature and great art. Thus the idea of European civilization became fused with great aesthetic achievements[,] . . . and criticism accordingly became the disciplinary means to celebrate these achievements.”23 We should note, however, that aesthetic concepts are not simply theological but have political implications, too. Jo Carruthers reinforces this point in her book England’s Secular Scripture, which traces the development of a Protestant-derived quintessential English aesthetic valuing simplicity and directness as set against more demonstrative or ritualistic traditions. Beginning with the iconoclasm of the Reformation and its rejection of Catholic pomp and ritual, theological doctrine became transposed into a moral and aesthetic register and wedded to the emergent English nation. The canon of English literature forms what Carruthers calls a “secular scripture” in its hallowed preference for the transparent “style-less” style of realism and its emphasis on directness and moral seriousness. Moreover, as in the case of Leavis’s criticism, “valued aesthetics are rendered natural, so that aesthetic judgements are considered equivalent to moral ones.”24 In our present age, this script has become combative, aligning itself with expressions of prejudice against Islam as a publicly performed religion. Thus, we see instances of what is argued to be “rational Islamophobia” from public figures, such as the journalist Polly Toynbee and the authors Fay Weldon and Jeanette Winterson, wherein claims are made for the reasonableness of anti-Islamic feeling on account of Islam’s own visible irrational qualities.25

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The notion of reasonable Islamophobia has gained traction through repetition. One of its earliest post-9/11 formulations comes in Martin Amis’s volume of essays The Second Plane, where he describes followers of militant Islam as “misologists” (haters of reason) and religious minds as irretrievably “dependent.” If, as Asad concludes, Islamophobia is rooted in paranoia, denoting “a range of affective states, including horror, loathing and nausea,”26 and if paranoia is a condition particularly associated with modernist aesthetics, we can perhaps see the anti-Muslim paranoia that sometimes appears to surface, directly or indirectly, in Amis and McEwan as rooted in aesthetics as much as in politics.

The main recurring themes of Amis’s collection of essays on terror spanning the first six years after the attacks are the fruitlessness of trying to engage rationally with the irrational terrorist mind, the proximity of boredom and terror in their essential banality, and—characteristically for Amis—the crisis of masculinity he sees behind the cloak of Islamist anger. These interests shape The Second Plane from its eponymous first essay onward. In the “Author’s Note,” Amis insists he is not an Islamophobe but rather an “Islamismophobe, or better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to kill you.”27 Nonetheless, in his dismissal of any attempt to understand terrorists as fatuous “moral equivalence” (ix), it might be that he asks us to give up at the door, so to speak, the only chance we have both of  understanding the causes of terror and of effectively distinguishing between Islamists and other Muslims. So it proves in a volume that seldom observes categorical niceties. In The Second Plane, an uncompromising tone with a threatening edge intrudes more than once across the essays, assuming a necessitarian, one-size-fits-all view of history wherein Islam must be forced to tread the same path as the modern enlightened West. Islam must be required to leave its “convulsed,” “medieval” stage and evolve as the West did after the wars of religion. But Amis fears that this won’t happen voluntarily: “We would have to sit through a Renaissance and a Reformation and then await an Enlightenment. And we are not going to do that,” he states firmly in the first essay (9).28 This and other essays seem in the business of consciously attempting to create a cultural, national, and even civilizational unity in the gathering

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storm. Yet all the while there is an overstretching, a hectoring tone that suggests an underlying lack of confidence that such a consensus will be forthcoming. Annabelle Sreberny has observed how in this essay Amis employs the personal pronoun we in different ways, sometimes to signal a personal opinion—“we would hope the [U.S.] response will be, above all, non-escalatory” (9)—and at other times to indicate or try to engender Western cultural solidarity: “What are we to do?” (9). In each case, however, the effect is to delineate between perpetrators and victims, Islam and the West. Sreberny remarks wryly: “That individual pieces of writing should echo the dominant political frames of the day is perhaps not a surprise; but ‘we’ (academics) don’t often get a chance to see this happening so clearly.”29 The second essay in Amis’s collection, “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,” is even more germane. It is about the challenge to the individualist and dialogical form of the novel from the collectivist and monological forces of religious zealotry. Amis argues that the 9/11 attacks prodded novelists out of their solipsistic reveries and forced them into more public writing, such as journalism and commentary pieces. He then juxtaposes what he takes to be the key principles of novel writing with what he depicts as the irrational and totalitarian impulses of politicized religion. He says that novelists create worlds aspiring to “shape and pattern and moral point” and claims that “a novel is a rational undertaking; it is reason at play, perhaps, but it is still reason,” whereas “September  11 was a day of de-Enlightenment” (13). Of course, as he concedes, writers have always been keenly engaged in public affairs; he alludes to Shelley’s famous phrase about writers being the “unacknowledged legislators” of the world (16). Yet such interventions, such legislations, are oblique, open, imaginative, and uniquely individual; “but of course there is an excellent reason why the unacknowledged legislators of mankind are going to remain just that: unacknowledged and unfollowed. Literature forms a single body of thought, yet its voices are intransigently and unenlargeably individual. And the voice of religion . . . is ‘the voice of the lonely crowd.’ It is a monologue that seeks the validation of a chorus” (16). Against the contemptible weak thinking of religion, Amis ranges the playfully rational individual voices of writers, supposedly all espousing “the ideology of no ideology” (19), whatever that may be. This faux naïf pretence that literature stands clear of political taint is a very old liberal

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humanist canard. To see it appear again in this context—at a time when it was de rigeur to take sides in the war on terror—strikes an oddly anachronistic note. It is a claim hardly borne out by Amis’s own approach in those works of short fiction that are also included in the collection. The most notable of these works is his attempt to imagine “the last days of Muhammad Atta,” in which the terrorist ringleader is depicted as a constipated, sexually repressed nihilist with no special interest in either Islam or politics but is instead excited by “all the killing—all the putting to death” (122). The idea of an uptight renunciate driven to atrocity because he is not getting enough sex is somewhat limited both as social critique and as psychological profile; elsewhere in The Second Plane Amis cites “serious commentators” to the effect that “suicide mass-murderers are searching for the simplest means of getting a girlfriend” (67). However, if we take at face value his opening assertion that it is not worth trying to understand the terrorist mindset because it cannot be apprehended through reason, then Amis’s own spectacular failure to create a plausible terrorist could perhaps be read as a badge of honor—a sign of his own unflinching reason. Amis’s brand of rationalism, such as it is, owes less to the classic Cartesian model than to that same earnest English offshoot we have already seen. “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd” at one point interrupts its excoriation of the religious mindset to meander off into the byways of personal reminiscence and the annals of literary criticism. In the same central segment where Amis invokes Shelley, he describes two previous attempts to corral literature into yielding an ideological message. The first was F. R. Leavis’s call for an academic elite to promote the true judgment of literary texts—a judgment that was, as we have seen, taken to have a moral dimension. Famously, central to this process was the creation of the “Great Tradition,” the canon of revered literary works, never extensive but reflecting Leavis’s preference for a direct style and residually Puritan moral seriousness.30 The paucity and provincialism that came to be associated with this approved list draw Amis’s satire: “When I was at university you could always identify a Leavisite by the sorry dilapidation of their bookshelves. Conrad, James, George Eliot, some Austen, one Dickens (Hard Times), Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Hopkins, and a couple of vanished mediocrities like L.  H. Myers and Ronald Bottrall” (17). The Leavisite project was dependent on “the scrawny charisma of its prophet” (18) and quickly fell apart

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after his death, to be replaced in our own time by what seems to be for Amis the even more deadening orthodoxy of political correctness. On the face of it, there seems little to connect these two very different outlooks. To understand how and why they are linked in Amis’s essay, it is important to recognize that his repudiation of Leavis is only ever partial. Although he disagrees with the content of Leavis’s Great Tradition, he does so merely to counter it with his own aesthetic preferences instead— advancing writers such as Bellow, Nabokov, and Joyce for inclusion in the pantheon. He is not contesting the central claims made for great writing as the transhistorical product of unique genius carrying implied moral benefits. As Bradley and Tate observe, “While Amis’ somewhat Oedipal animus towards F. R. Leavis is ever-present in his criticism, his Olympian tone remains recognisably Leavisite: the literary critic’s job is still to judge, literary judgements are still moral judgements and the Great Tradition still exists, even if its centre of gravity has shifted westwards from England to the east coast of the USA.”31 Yet this is not all that connects their two worldviews. Amis’s second target is political correctness, which he sees as having become dominant in the British secondary-school approach to literature: a symptom of antiintellectualism resulting in a “hypocritical piety” (18). “The language and literature papers in our national exams,” he notes, “are becoming invitations to ideological conformity; and everyone knows that there are few marks to be had for bucking the earnest line on, say, Maya Angelou” (18). Here a potentially salient point about the limitations of the examination system is overshadowed by the supposedly casual choice of Maya Angelou as herald of what the essay calls a “literature of ingratiation” (18). The effect is to cast aspersions on the literary worth of culturally (and racially) different experience. The matter of whether students are being invited to acquiesce in the platitudinous recycling of received opinion or not is tied to an implicit questioning of the worth of a writer from beyond the white AngloSaxon male experience whose work resonates with the historical disempowerment of blacks by whites. To say this connection between Amis and Leavis is merely unfortunate would be to exonerate a writer whose body of work shows a concern for the piercing effect of the carefully chosen phrase. Close your eyes here, and you could be listening to the F. R. Leavis of Nor Shall My Sword (1973), his late volume on, among other things, the dangers of pluralism.32 Leavis attacks

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“pluralism,” along with “compassion”—two buzzwords of politics in the 1960s, when post-imperial immigration was changing British society: the former is synonymous with incoherence and opportunism, and the latter means self-indulgence. Leavis berates the so-called enlightened of his day who tell the rest of society what it really wants, using “their assumed representative status and authority to fix on the country the progressivist convention that it happily endorses the idea of becoming, or being made to become, ‘a multi-racial society,’ with a ‘multi-racial culture.’ ”33 This cannot be a positive development for Leavis because his entire oeuvre has been predicated on cultural continuity and the organic growth of a collaborative common culture of which great writing is the finest flower. Mass immigration has deleterious effects on this continuity, in effect destroying it. When Leavis wrote in 1972 that “the obvious truth stands there too starkly to be ignored: we might multiply our intake of immigrants by fifty and make no difference to the problem of over-population in the undeveloped countries—though we should ensure catastrophic transformations in our own,”34 he anticipated contemporary right-wing populism with its simplistic diagnoses of contemporary ills caused by immigration and cultural dilution. It might be going too far to ascribe the same views to Amis. However, when he remarks in “Terror and Boredom” that “the West is enfeebled . . . by thirty years of multicultural relativism” (72) and that “our ideology, which is sometimes called Westernism[,] . . . weakens our moral unity and will” (74), and when these claims are put together with Amis’s comments in the Ginny Dougary interview quoted at the start of the introduction to this book, in which “we” must make Muslims suffer until they put their house in order, we are left facing something more exclusive and aggressively purist than rational.

In describing Ian McEwan as what they term “the New Atheist novelist par excellence,” Bradley and Tate mention his contribution to the development of a subgenre that takes its inspiration from the works of the so-called celebrity atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens whose indictments of religion became best sellers in the years after 9/11.35 McEwan’s novels have long shown an interest in both the discoveries of science—in particular neuroscience—and the complexities of narrative. The combination of these interests in an era when the call of

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metaphysical explanatory systems can once more be heard in the public sphere results in the elevation of literature, in particular of the novel form, “as the basis for a humanist piety.”36 In place of religion, we are encouraged to put our faith in the imaginative and scientific narratives modernity has given us. The novel in which this line is played out most resolutely is McEwan’s response to the climate of paranoia created after 9/11, Saturday. Saturday is set on February 15, 2003, the day of huge antiwar marches in London and other cities across the world prior to the start of the attack on Iraq by U.S. and British forces. It contrasts the comfortable lifestyle of its central protagonist, distinguished neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, with the global upheaval caused by the war on terror and its prosecution, which has brought people onto the streets in unprecedented numbers. It also attempts to make connections between domestic familial relations and an invasive, brutal outside world that threatens them. The novel marries a modernist structure reminiscent of Woolf and Joyce, where all events take place in one day and include moments of epiphany for the central character, with a more conventional deployment of omniscience and free indirect discourse. In fact, the proximity of omniscience and the protagonist’s modes of thought is one cause of the strong sense of a closed, self-justifying perspective running through the novel. Although Perowne is clearly in some ways a flawed character, we are never given an alternative to the complacent view he offers. Perowne is an archrationalist, taking comfort in his professional capabilities and the ordered certainties offered by science. In particular, he is committed to a Darwinian perspective that offers a more acceptable mythology than creationism’s supernatural explanations. Darwin’s summation—“There is grandeur in this view of life”—in the final paragraphs of Origin of Species becomes Perowne’s credo as he considers the validity of the evolutionary viewpoint: “If he ever got the call, he’d make use of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities—and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.”37 His positivist convictions and the pleasure he takes in the terminology and techniques of brain surgery at times give him

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feelings of godlike power. His life is ruled by decision and precision, having no space for the irrational or the random, and he dismisses the religious mindset as a “problem of reference”: “In Henry’s view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis” (17). Control is all, and Perowne is happiest in those spaces where he can exert the most command and filter out random threats to his equanimity: his luxurious Bloomsbury townhouse with its imposing library and wine cellar, his expensive car, and the operating theater. However, as the delusions of divinity suggest, Perowne’s convictions themselves have something of the quality of religious faith, and his hubris means that, from the outset, in the historical moment of threat he inhabits there is always the sense that he is riding for a fall. He is proud but somewhat bemused by the achievements of his talented children, both of whom have chosen to pursue careers in the arts—Daisy is an award-winning poet and Theo an acclaimed blues musician—even though he cannot fully appreciate the openness to intuition, imagination, and uncertainty that the creative life requires. In the course of the novel, however, Perowne is brought to confront the forces of the impulsive and the irrational when he is accosted by the thuggish gangster Baxter, with whom he has an altercation after a traffic accident and who later invades the Perowne household while the family is holding a reunion dinner. Baxter appears to represent the atavistic fury of the excluded, to whom Perowne’s assurance and wealth are an affront. Perowne’s scientific interest is piqued by the fact that Baxter is showing early signs of Huntington’s disease, a degenerative and incurable illness affecting mood as well as motor skills. At the end, after Baxter is overpowered and tumbles down a flight of stairs, Perowne’s surgical prowess is called upon as he operates to relieve the pressure on Baxter’s brain, in the knowledge that although he can prolong the gangster’s life, in doing so he is at the same time consigning him to a slow, lingering demise. Perowne’s vocation helps foreground the mind/body dyad that structures the text; there is much reflection on the relationship between the physical brain and consciousness as the seat of subjectivity. For all the supposed explanatory power of neuroscience—which offers a medical explanation even for antisocial behavior—Perowne is still unable to arrest the decay of his mother, stricken by Alzheimer’s disease, which condemns her to a perpetual present. Similarly, Baxter’s future will hold the loss of “a

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continuous self” as his Huntington’s progresses: already he is displaying the mood swings of “a degenerating mind” (223).38 In contrast, the chemical release found in vigorous physical activity—be it sex, a game of squash, or the adrenaline rush of the confrontation with Baxter—emphasizes the body as the site on which experience is largely played out. Body and mind can fall out of synch, leaving one to grope speculatively in the dark—as Perowne seems to do when at the opening of the book he momentarily sees a burning plane over the city and finds himself unable to account for it: “Henry knows it’s a trick of vision that makes him think he can see an outline now, a deeper black shape against the dark” (16). In his uncertainty, he mistakenly reaches for the most immediately available frame of reference in these days: a terror attack. Indeed, this matter of skewed or uncertain perception is an insistent theme, making the novel less determinate than it may at first appear. Molly Clark Hillard suggests that one theme in Saturday is the difficulty of “interpretive reading in a post-9/11 world.”39 As the story progresses, Perowne finds himself misreading not only the appearance of the burning plane but also the motives of the antiwar protesters who block off the streets; the social and class implications of his encounter with Baxter (preferring to see it in neuroscientific terms); and the authorship of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach,” which his daughter reads to Baxter while the family is held hostage. The obvious complacencies of Perowne’s privileged stance indirectly gesture toward the partiality and subjective nature of his viewpoint. Indeed, the novel displays a certain ambivalence about its central character’s confident pronouncements, but it fails to show any other point of view more than fleetingly. It is for this reason that it ultimately does nothing to counter the political limitations of its resolutely white, middle-class outlook. Perowne is constitutionally unable to read any cause–consequence relationship between his luxurious lifestyle and the impoverished existence of those down-and-outs and junkies who occupy the park benches at night. The thought he does bestow on them is merely the usual watery liberal regret that there are people worse off than he is. He is even less aware of his own internalized prejudices. His instinct is to be suspicious of anyone who is not white—from the Chinese, who he fears might take over through weight of numbers, to the black men and “Middle Easterners” who sell tickets for local gigs from a bench in the square but who he initially thinks are drug dealers. Of course, Perowne’s

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greatest ire is reserved for Muslims. In his mind, Islam is always synonymous with extremism and terrorism. Islam threatens to be the new totalitarianism of the twenty-first century, another in a long line of political utopian movements “licensing every form of excess” (34). Perowne looks at his son and thinks, “In the ideal Islamic state . . . there’ll be room for surgeons. Blues guitarists will be found other employment” (33). Three women in burkas emerging from a taxi are compared to “three black columns, stark against the canyon of creamy stucco and brick” and “have a farcical appearance, like kids larking about at Halloween” (124). His admitted “visceral” distaste leads on to a rant about cultural relativists and their supposed flaccid tolerance for Islam’s gender inequalities. To be  sure, Perowne’s opinions in the book are frequently undercut by events. However, his views on Islam are never called into question. Islam remains for him the cause of “repression, corruption and misery” around the world (192). However, that is not to say that Perowne’s worldview is impregnable. In fact, he feels ambivalence about many things, despite being buoyed by science and cosseted by material comforts. Chief among these ambivalent feelings is his attitude to the impending war—on the one hand recognizing that it is a risk with potentially serious long-term consequences, on the other believing that Saddam Hussein is a brutal tyrant whose overthrow would benefit the Iraqi people and the world. His attitudes shift according to his interlocutor, and such vacillations may serve to make his character more complex. They chime with the interest in the ultimate impossibility of possessing total knowledge or of guarding against the random. Yet even they feel somewhat self-serving and misplaced. All Perowne’s decisions in the book are governed by self-interest—even his apparently magnanimous decision to operate on the violent intruder in his home—and his feelings about a war that is, even at the time, demonstrably illegal and detrimental to global security seem platitudinous and detached. This slightly “undercooked” quality is characteristic of the book as a  whole. For example, although Saturday invites reading as a kind of allegory—with Baxter standing in for those excluded from the benefits of material society, the wretched of the earth, whose anger at injustice may break out in violence, and Perowne embodying the rich, complacent, and entitled “West”—the correspondences are not consistent enough to make the allegory work, nor do the connections reveal any new insights.

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McEwan is careful to avoid making Baxter an Islamist. However, he has recognized that the novel is open to allegorical reading.40 Baxter’s status as a generalized damaged misfit seems an attempt to evade the real issue and the “real enemy.” Stephen Morton makes the connection for us when he points out how Perowne’s surgical intervention on Baxter “mirrors the liberal British state’s regime of biopolitical control”: “This narrative can be read as an allegory for the British state’s attempt to define and produce a ‘good British Muslim subject’ in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7.”41 The most unintegrated element in the novel is probably the antiwar march itself. As a plot driver, it operates to cause the traffic holdup that leads to Perowne’s first confrontation with Baxter. Beyond that, the largest political rally in British history exists only to allow him a few supercilious shots at the protesters and their slogans. Banners proclaiming “Not in My Name” have a “cloying self regard” that suggests “a bright new world of protest, with the fussy consumers of shampoo and soft drinks demanding to feel good or nice” (72). Although, we are told, “Perowne cannot feel, as the marchers probably do, that they have an exclusive hold on moral discernment” (73), he sometimes manages an air of sanctimony that is every bit as self-congratulatory. What the book does offer is a meditation on male power and violence, with the sanctioned state violence of war being contrasted with the illegitimate invasion of Perowne’s house by Baxter. At the start of the novel, we are introduced to the notion of savagery and threat, symbolized by the park railings, standing “like a row of spears” (4), and by the multiple locks on the front door. However, these locks afford no protection from the “dark,” “simian” Baxter, who appears like some revenant from the disavowed past come back to haunt the pampered middle-class Englishman.42 The action culminates as Baxter takes the family hostage, holding a knife to Perowne’s wife’s throat and threatening Daisy with rape. At this point, Perowne experiences that total powerlessness to protect his family that is a noted theme of early post-9/11 novels.43 The threat to Perowne’s sense of autonomy is also characteristic. The necessary physical intervention—bundling Baxter down a flight of stairs—is the work not of Perowne but of his son, suggesting a generational as well as a personal dimension to Perowne’s temporary eclipse. However, rather than waking up after his taste of the brutal realities of an invasion, Perowne returns to the comforts of home and bed with his

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unharmed wife. He prefers the security of those domestic affections celebrated in the Matthew Arnold poem “Dover Beach,” recited by Daisy to placate Baxter while they are being threatened, to a serious engagement with more intractable global problems. Moreover, despite Perowne’s selfproclaimed aversion to literature, the family escapes courtesy of a large dose of literary culture. Throughout the novel, in fact, emphasis is placed on the necessity of both science (represented by Perowne) and art (embodied by his children and their maternal grandfather, a celebrated poet) in the grand scheme of enlightened modernity. Daisy tries to undertake her father’s literary education by recommending books for him to read. She has benefitted from her grandfather’s tutelage, imbibing from an early age Shakespeare, Milton, the King James Bible, Brontë, and Kafka, before being eased (somewhat nepotistically) into an Oxford college (133). The choice of Arnold’s poem at the book’s moment of crisis is not simply a statement about the therapeutic power of great writing. It seems also to call up that larger Victorian program by which the masses were to be educated into their role as social arbiters in an era of advancing democracy. Saturday appears to promote the same project as Culture and Anarchy in proposing exposure to “the best that has been thought and said” as a way of correctly channeling dangerous energies. Dominic Head suggests an intended symbolic correspondence between the Hyde Park riot of 1866 that so worried Arnold and the antiwar march of 2003.44 Culture here stands against the “anarchy” seemingly threatened by more or less everyone else: drug addicts, peace protesters, the mentally ill, and Muslims. Perowne’s paranoia is almost parodic at times, but the prescribed cure seems offered in all seriousness.45 So when the time comes, “Dover Beach” has a talismanic quality in the novel, its importance reiterated by its being printed in full at the end of the novel as a kind of appendix. Baxter stands awestruck by the poem, and Perowne speculates that he is experiencing a profound, moving nostalgia that reminds him “how much he wanted to live” (278). Although Baxter’s mind is being eaten away by Huntington’s, his mood swing here takes on a broader implication, connecting him to a cultural or civilizational consciousness in which he is immersed for all his disenfranchisement. The miraculously pacifying qualities of the poem’s slow incantation by Daisy, soothing the savage breast of a man intent on violence, gives it a privileged power in the book. In this context—at a time when the war on terror was

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purportedly being conducted to safeguard what the novel semi-ironically calls “our way of life” (35)—the invocation of this famous work by the guru of Victorian liberalism seems highly significant. The argument is not simply that personal affection and tenderness may act as a protection against the chaos of a world threatened by “ignorant armies” on the march but also that the values of culture and education as a bulwark against the ignorant, rebellious masses advanced by Arnold in his broader work appear somehow revived and retooled for application in the modern world. Alongside Amis’s invocation of the legacy of the unfashionable F. R. Leavis in The Second Plane, McEwan’s use of Arnold—revisited in his next novel, Chesil Beach (2007)—implies the continued salience of a paternalistic investment in the transformative power of literature. Although this credo may on one level be seemingly innocent, employed in this way and at this moment it stands alongside those other clarion calls of Islamophobia that urge us to safeguard the defining principles of “our civilization,” represented by scientific achievement and great art, to which Islam poses a threat. By implication, Baxter and the other outsiders and untouchables of this world are excluded from these benefits but can be “brought in” through education and exposure to their power.46 Like a boy with his nose pressed against a sweet-store window at Christmas, Baxter can only look on in spellbound wonder at the goodies being tantalizingly dangled before him. The therapeutic qualities of Arnold’s work suggest that the excluded may be transformed by exposure to art and literature, although—as with Arnold and his fellow nineteenth-century liberals—there is always some doubt as to whether the aim is to empower or to pacify them. Seen in this way, Perowne’s own ambivalence, like that of the text itself, ends up being a testament to the liberal good faith of the West. His magisterial autonomy is played out literally over the prone body of Baxter as he operates on him. The rational agent has survived a nasty scare but is finally given the ability to “invade” the very body of his disarmed adversary, shining the light of scientific knowledge into the dark mind of one whose own fate is, as we have already been told, the subject of unrelenting biological determinism that is leading him to an early grave. Perowne’s professional diagnosis is rolled out again at the end as the neurosurgeon muses on the day’s events from the comfort of his bedroom. Here it is used as a blanket to throw over all those who do not enjoy the material benefits of progress and civilization. As Perowne, “the professional reductionist,” thinks of his

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family, he reflects: “So much divides them from the various broken figures that haunt the benches. . . . It can’t just be class or opportunities. . . . [I]t’s down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code at the level of molecules. . . . No amount of social justice will cure or disperse this enfeebled army haunting the public spaces of every town. . . . You have to recognise bad luck when you see it, you have to look out for these people” (272). The social drivers of class and race, then, purportedly have a negligible role to play in producing Perowne’s own advantages and the disadvantages of others. Superior breeding, in all senses, wins out.47 As Perowne muses, he conjures up an affable Edwardian doctor, standing at the same window one hundred years earlier, looking optimistically at the new century, unaware of the cataclysms to come: the Somme, Hitler, Stalin, Mao. “If you described the hell that lay ahead, if you warned him, the good doctor . . . would not believe you. Beware the utopianists, zealous men certain of the path to the ideal social order. Here they are again, totalitarians in different form, still scattered and weak, but growing and angry, and thirsty for another mass killing” (276). In this account, the privileged Englishman is a bemused spectator to the atrocities of history, which happen elsewhere and may draw him in, but his pragmatism inures him to the dreamers of dreams. But now the utopianists arise once again, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, in the robes and combat fatigues of the Islamist. Strangely, colonialism and decolonization do not figure in this list of defining upheavals of the twentieth century. As Paul Gilroy has remarked, the besetting inability of the British to face the profound change in status that followed the end of empire has resulted in a “postimperial melancholia” that has only gathered pace with widespread immigration. The denial of the cruelty and injustice accompanying empire—from which Perowne’s privileged lifestyle ultimately derives—has a considerable psychological and moral cost.48 In explaining away injustice as the product of genetics and in symbolically eliding the anger of the dispossessed with the terrorism of the Islamist, McEwan flattens multiple historical factors and normalizes the exculpatory viewpoint of the rich, white, male subject. In a novel full of optical images, the most disabling blind spot is that experienced by Henry Perowne as he gazes from his bedroom window. Thus, the text itself, with its peculiar Janus-faced attitude to so many of the contemporary issues it mulls over—from war to inequality to moral responsibility—performs its own limitations: a surfeit of apparent empathy

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that would putatively allow for a range of perspectives and at the same time a very firm endorsement of one viewpoint in particular. Here, for all his complacent arrogance, our protagonist Henry Perowne is a guarantee of the good intentions and superior capacity of the middle-class white male, backed up by the assembled achievements of Western civilization set against the barbarians at the gates.

If sympathetic British liberals always maintained a somewhat apologetic air when it came to supporting the prosecution of the war on terror, in the United States a sizeable strand of liberal opinion was galvanized by 9/11, only slowly to become disillusioned as the years went by. The “hard” liberal viewpoint received its intellectual rationale in 2003 with the publication of Paul Berman’s book Terror and Liberalism.49 Berman suggests the existence of a strong tradition of antiliberal thought—encompassing communism, fascism, and now Islamism—that has been implacably opposed to the values of the liberal West (mainly America). He offers an appealingly simple— one might say simplistic—take on two hundred years of history but in the process homogenizes different strands of Islam, elides international grievances and their causes, swallows Huntington’s clash- of-civilizations thesis almost whole, and is throughout too uncritical of U.S. motives and policies down the years, always assuming they stand on the liberal side of his liberal/totalitarian divide. Berman claims that nineteenth-century liberal ideas of progress were predicated on the rejection of a single divine authority and on the rise of pluralism and a consciously chosen freedom. Of interest for us here is that Berman’s narrative draws on literary way markers in his description of how this emergent liberalism soon met its opposite in the form of an antiliberal impulse. The spirit of rebellion that followed the French Revolution led in the nineteenth century to an interest in crime and decadence—in works such as Dostoevsky’s The Devils (1871–1872) and Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1857)—or what Berman calls “the rebellion that begins with freedom and ends with crime.”50 In time, the antiliberal impulse was developed in thinkers such as Nietzsche and taken up in the totalitarian political theories of the age, characterized by notions of purity, sanctification through death, and submission to a strong leader standing in for the now absent God.51

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As this summary might indicate, Berman’s argument—with its rapid extrapolations from different discourses and intellectual traditions—is weak on the causal connection. Moreover, it offers less a carefully researched historical account than a sort of journalistic white-water-rafting approach, where we are supposed to be swept along with the force of the argument.52 In its civilizational bluster, “Old Europe”–type criticisms of dissent abroad, and persistent disregard for the negative consequences of U.S. meddling, Terror and Liberalism is a pitch-perfect document of the liberal case for the war on terror. Although the book stakes a claim as an explanatory metanarrative for modern history, it was less than prescient about how the Bush doctrine—with its disregard for fundamental rights and freedoms—paved the way for renewed U.S. exceptionalism, paranoia, race thinking, and Islamophobia in the years after it was published. I return to other aspects of Berman’s argument later. However, the diagnosis he offers of that perceived mid-twentieth-century Western angst that opened the way for Islamist critiques is worth considering here. He notes the widespread mood among thinkers of both the left and the right that “in becoming alienated from his own nature, modern man has sunk into a wretched state—a misery that swallows up human life even in conditions of material plenty.”53 For the intellectual father of Islamism, Sayyid Qutb— who is also the central villain of Terror and Liberalism—the cure for this malaise is God and sharia law. For others, it is communism or a more conscious awareness of existential choices. In any case, the same sense of entropy and decline appears to be shared by the two main protagonists of John Updike’s novel Terrorist, although they differ markedly in their reactions to it. Terrorist tells the story of Ahmad Ashmawy-Molloy, a mixed-race teenager from the declining industrial town of New Prospect, New York, who has converted to his absent father’s religion, Islam, fallen under the sway of a radical preacher, and is brought to a point where he agrees to undertake a suicide-bombing mission to drive a truck into the Lincoln Tunnel in order to blow it up. His school counselor, Jack Levy, tries to befriend the boy, begins an affair with his mother, and, at the novel’s end, manages to dissuade Ahmad from going through with his plan. As this synopsis suggests, the novel has thriller elements—money laundering, a sting operation, a double-cross, murder, and a “Will he or won’t he?” ending—although its central business is attempting to account for cultural alienation of various

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kinds. Terrorist received an almost universally negative response from reviewers and critics. Richard Gray, noting Updike’s failure to create a believable outsider in the young would-be bomber, concludes that its “brave attempt to imagine the other never really fits together as a meaningful story,” and Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, bemoans the lack of veracity in “the cartoonish stick figure named Ahmad,” who has none of the known attributes of an actual suicide bomber.54 It is certainly the case that Updike’s attempt to render the inner workings of the Islamist mind seems to falter from the start, being informed by research and secondhand information rather than by any personal experience. However, this is also true of those other liberal non-Muslim writers who tried to come to terms with the changed world after 2001, such as Don DeLillo. As Anna Hartnell has said, Updike should at least be credited for moving away from the prevalent tendency to “privilege the category of ‘trauma’ in treatments of 9/11.”55 In the febrile atmosphere of the time, Updike was taking a risk in producing a narrative in part from the perspective of an Islamist terrorist, and his efforts have a serious intent, particularly when compared with Amis’s sneeringly distanced take on Muhammad Atta. Updike’s book at least has the virtue of trying to imagine what alterity is like, how the world might look when seen through different eyes. Yet the target in Terrorist seems much more to be, rather than the Islamist mindset, a general cultural malaise and two possible responses to it: one of which is extreme and nihilistic and the other—in the guise of Jack Levy— jaded yet tentatively hopeful. That said, the novel’s apparent position on a number of issues—foremost among them gender and race—is deeply conservative, and, as with McEwan, we see a desire to replay a version of the 9/11 attacks, this time with a positive outcome. Thus, I propose that we read the novel with an awareness that its engagement with terror and the irrational is shot through with desire: a desire to believe that disaster can be averted through a critical reading of texts and situations that can bring about the “conversion” of the miscreant. The active agent in this change is doubt. Where Amis and McEwan are in the business of reactively pedaling certainties— often in superannuated forms—Updike’s characters are made to embrace the fact that nothing can be finally known for certain, a position that pulls the rug from under civilizational claims to exceptionality from wherever they emanate.

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The central organizing binary of Terrorist, appearing in the very first sentence, concerns God and the devil: “Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God.”56 The very last sentence of the novel repeats this thought almost verbatim, changing only the tense—“These devils . . . have taken away my God.” The novel charts the journey between these two propositions. The closeness Ahmad feels to his God is emphasized—some might say rammed home—by the refrain from Sura Qaf 50:16: “We are closer to him [the human] than his jugular vein.” This phrase is repeated with variations no less than eight times, managing to convey the desire for both nearness to God and other kinds of more human proximity as Ahmad’s resolve falters. Among the devils tempting him are the falsities of other faiths, the skepticism of the lapsed Jew Jack Levy, his own burgeoning sexuality, and the godless materialism of Western culture. Ahmad seeks to avoid the fate of the “dead-eyed” boys at school who think “this world is all there is” (3). He identifies the United States with “sex and luxury goods” (38), the former often being used to sell the latter. A capitalist consumer society has no time for God, valuing enterprise and self-realization over submission and believing that safety lies in mere accumulation. Ironically, these views—minus their religious bent—are largely shared by Jack, for whom modern America is pocked by cultural and environmental decay. The urban deprivation of New Prospect—a city once thronged with “knitting mills, silk-dyeing plants, leather-works [and] factories” (12)—means it is now a soulless shell, and white flight has left the city center to black and immigrant restaurateurs and drug dealers. However, for Jack, this is simply part of a longer-term deterioration. He reflects on how compression of available space means that “houses” have given way to “housing” and how even the dreamscapes of Hollywood and popular culture are now debased and infantilized. In his role as guidance counselor at Ahmad’s high school, he sees the human cost of this decay, reflecting that a directionless society can give its young no direction as they “slide into the fatal morass of the world—its dwindling resources, its disappearing freedoms, its merciless advertisements geared to preposterous popular culture of eternal music and beer and impossibly thin and fit young females” (23). What Nash calls the “spiritual anomie of postmodern capitalist America” 57 is in Updike’s novel blended with a kind of pioneer artisan nostalgia for a “bygone time when people made things by hand, hunched over in

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their own cottages” (82). Jack’s wife, Beth, picks up this theme, reflecting on the relative comforts of their life together compared to previous generations, “slaving in the mills when cities still made things; people are so afraid of the Arabs, but it’s the Japanese and Chinese and Mexicans and Guatemalans and those others in these low-wage platforms who are doing us in, putting our workforce out of work” (138). Beth is certainly not a perspicacious character. However, her diagnosis blends past and present and, taken with Jack’s longing for an earlier era of small-scale industry and a make-and-mend ethos, implies that the racial diversification that has accompanied immigration has had its own culturally impoverishing effect. Although Jack does not express himself in quite such stark terms, the novel as a whole treats nonwhite cultures as debased and problematic. In particular, black culture—here represented by Ahmad’s classmates Joryleen, choir girl turned hooker, and her pimping, thuggish boyfriend—is presented in grotesquely stereotypical terms. In the same way, Jack admits to an instinctive dislike for Islam and has a mental block when it comes to Ahmad’s Muslim surname. We should, of course, take care to distinguish the characters from their creator; Jack himself is the object of anti-Semitism from others, and Ahmad is abused for being mixed race. Yet the longing for a supposedly unified culture of the past—which is always in essence monocultural and racially stratified—gives Terrorist something of that “collective melancholia for an idealized national past that never really existed,” identified in the Bush years by Richard Crownshaw.58 This longing is the American version of the imperial melancholia we see in Amis and McEwan and derives from the same source: white insecurity. Decay is also experienced in personal and physical terms in Terrorist. Jack is acutely aware of his own bodily decline, particularly when he is with Ahmad’s mother, Teresa “Terry” Molloy, during their affair. However, the trope of slackening and deterioration is most mercilessly attached to Beth. Beth is a huge female grotesque, a “whale of a woman giving off too much heat through her blubber” (20), whose largely sedentary lifestyle consists of devouring fattening foods and watching soap operas. Bloated Beth literally embodies the cosseted decline of America and is also damned as an inadequate provider of wifely comforts for Jack. In time-honored Updike style, the male gaze ensures that female value is conferred largely through bodily and sexual attributes. Jack’s keen appraisal of the much younger Terry’s physical attributes sees provocation everywhere, and Joryleen

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comes to be associated with the body and sexual temptation for Ahmad, who finds himself stirred by her proximity and fascinated by what he calls her “ornaments” (67). Although there are brief passages of female focalization, courtesy of Beth and her protective sister, Hermione, by and large women are linked to the themes of the flesh, its potential for corruption, and instinctual sensory experience, which is valorized in the end as that which unites human beings across difference. However, the fact that all of the female characters are defined in relation to males—as either sex objects or frustrated lovers or spouse material—means they fail to rise beyond a secondary role of providing a counterpoint to Ahmad’s fixation with purity. It means, too, that they bear an unfair burden of blame for the “fall” that Ahmad’s proposed mission seeks apocalyptically to correct. Terrorist’s broader point is that the human impulses to sex, religion, and art stem from the same instinct for survival and celebration. Sexual and religious ecstasy are connected in the novel, not least when Joryleen persuades Ahmad to visit her evangelical church for a Sunday service. Once there Ahmad feels that Joryleen has lured him into “a sticky trap” as the “rhythmical rapture” of worship gives him a sense of witnessing “sex among people” (51, 15, 62). Joryleen herself sings “songs of Jesus and sexual longing,” and the bluesy extemporizing of a female soloist, with its rhythms and repetitions suggestive of intercourse, reaches an orgasmic crescendo (8, 66–68). (Joryleen’s later graduation from gospel singer to prostitute is an awkward attempt to cement the religion–sex connection.) Ahmad is— somewhat predictably—preoccupied with the virgins promised to martyrs in heaven. He is offended by the stained-glass windows of the church because they represent man’s blasphemous attempts to compete with God in the act of creation, yet he cannot avoid being aroused by the revealing clothes of the girls at school and the occasional glimpse of a tattoo (19). Art, depending on sustained acts of creation, is therefore one of the main challenges to Ahmad’s Sunni-inspired aniconism. He cannot appreciate the pursuit of beauty for its own sake that inspires his mother in her paintings. Art for Terry is about overcoming the injunctions by which religion has attempted to cordon off ecstasy. Replying to her son’s explanation that Muslims do not worship Mohammed, she draws on her own experiences: “Roman Catholicism is full of these fussy distinctions too, about all these things nobody can see. People make them up out of hysteria and then they get passed on as gospel. The nuns put such ridiculous stock in all of

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it . . . but all I saw was a beautiful world around me, for however briefly, and I wanted to make images of its beauty” (240). Terry’s view repudiates Islamic injunctions about representation and seems to be a bold restatement of that post-Romantic association of art with imagination and inspiration traced earlier in this chapter. She states, “Religion to me is all a matter of attitude. It’s saying yes to life. You have to trust that there’s a purpose, or you’ll sink. When I paint I just have to believe that beauty will emerge. Painting abstract, you don’t have a pretty landscape or a bowl of oranges to lean on; it has to come purely out of you. You have to shut your eyes, so to speak, and take a leap. You have to say yes” (91, emphasis in original). As the novel’s representative free spirit, Terry Molloy articulates the value of art and might be expected to emerge as the main valorized voice countering the bleak austerity of her son’s worldview. However, things turn out not to be that straightforward. The text implies that Terry’s embrace of artistic freedom comes at the cost of nurturing Ahmad appropriately. She is drawn as an overstretched single parent who does her best to support her son. However, we are told that she “sees her son often for less than one hour in twenty four” (9), spending most time in her job as a nursing aide at the local hospital. Terry claims little talent for motherhood, and Ahmad disapproves of her lifestyle and regular string of lovers. He sees her as “a victim of the American religion of freedom . . . though freedom to do what and to what purpose is left up in the air” (167). Terry embodies a different kind of malaise in which the cost of personal freedom is borne by others. As such, she forms part of a broader theme of failed parenting. Ahmad’s father has absconded, and he seeks alternative father figures throughout: from Charlie Chehab, the son of his boss at the furniture store, to Shaikh Rashid, the imam who leads him toward violent jihad. Jack Levy’s expressions of paternal interest are rebuffed, and he offers an admittedly lame explanation for Ahmad’s zealotry for God: “I guess a boy needs a father, and if he doesn’t have one he’ll invent one. How’s that for cut-rate Freud?” (117). Terrorist’s heavy-handed employment of Freudian understandings is typical of a novel where various explanatory systems appear to have been tried and failed. Those characters without religious faith are rudderless— another instance of decline and loss. Jack exhibits a weak-kneed liberalism motivated by the pleasure principle, and Terry’s faith in art is a religion of

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one. In this world of unbelief, Ahmad strives for certainty yet still experiences moments of self-criticism and doubt: “Was his own faith, he had asked himself at times, an adolescent vanity, a way of distinguishing himself from all those doomed others . . . the already dead, at Central High?” (272). Indeed, in the novel doubt becomes heroic. It is the necessary grit in the oyster of dreams of transcendence, as the novel’s epigraph from Gabriel García Márquez insists: “Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses” (italics in Terrorist). Here we may return to Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism, particularly to his critical interaction with Tariq Ramadan’s argument about faith and doubt in his book Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity.59 Berman cites Ramadan’s interest in the story—common to both Bible and Quran—of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.60 Berman cites Ramadan’s view that the space for doubt within Western systems of thought is symbolically initiated in the dilemma prompted by God’s order to Abraham, whereas the Quranic version instead emphasizes unquestioning compliance with God’s will: “In western religious tradition,” states Berman, “there is a space for scepticism and doubt. These two attitudes, scepticism and doubt, are elements of faith—the elements that prove the authenticity of belief in God. . . . The God of the Old Testament instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and Abraham doubts the instruction and struggles to resist it, for a little while—and Abraham’s doubt and struggle testify to the sincerity of his belief.”61 Except that Abraham doesn’t doubt or struggle! No dilemma between submission and rebellion is articulated at all in the biblical version. Abraham simply follows instructions, taking Isaac to the appointed place, preparing a fire to burn the offering, and making ready the knife. As Karen Armstrong has noted, “We are told nothing about Abraham’s state of mind during the three-day journey to the land of Moriah. Nor are we given any clue to Isaac’s reaction when it became clear that he was to be the victim of the holocaust.”62 However, this lack of detail has not stopped artists and thinkers being fascinated by the latent potential for psychological interpretation in the bare bones of the story. Erich Auerbach, for instance, makes it the starting point of his account of the development of the unique features of the Western mimetic tradition, opposing the transparency and detail of the Homeric epic, where everything is laid out for the reader, with

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the story of Abraham and Isaac, where “time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed,” leading to “unrelieved suspense,” and events “remain mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’ ”63 Both Berman and Ramadan are attempting to distinguish between different types of religiosity: a Judeo-Christian tradition where doubt has been historically validated and is central to philosophical thought and an Islamic system where questioning (ijtihad) is allowed but where it always operates from a deep well of faith.64 The issue is not that the distinctions posed are totally invalid but rather that they rely heavily on generalizations about two traditions that actually evolved in tandem from many of the same source materials. In the end, then, the argument is less about the two scriptural sources of the story than about critical reading and desire. Each writer extrapolates from the Abraham story using the resources of exegesis and “literary” reading to substantiate a view of his culture as fundamentally different from its interlocuter. What we have in Berman and Ramadan is less proof that Islam forecloses doubt and struggle than the desire that it should for the sake of their arguments. In spinning this type of interpretation, they add their own desiring readings to the many others that have been made down the centuries—such as the one famously proposed by the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, an avowed influence on Updike. Ramadan summarizes Kierkegaard’s seminal reading of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling, where he “shows that the story of Abraham carries, in itself, Christianity’s fundamental Message concerning the existence of man who is subjected to the sense of sin, suffering, anguish and fear. Faith is, at best, the assumed test of anguish and inward conflict.”65 This is the message Ahmad needs to hear in Terrorist. In the novel, kinds of reading are also shaped by desire—the most urgent being Jack’s/Updike’s desire to save Ahmad and therefore replay (or reread) 9/11, with a positive outcome this time. Jack’s job is to introduce doubt into Ahmad’s sealed faith. After climbing into the cab of the lorry containing the explosives, which Ahmad is driving to its destination, Jack launches into a fierce lesson in religious history, focusing on some of the “repulsive and ridiculous stuff” in the Torah but with equal applicability to the other Abrahamic faiths: “Plagues, massacres, straight from Yahweh to you. Tribes that weren’t lucky enough to be chosen—put them under the ban, show them no mercy. They hadn’t quite worked out Hell yet, that came

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with the Christians. Wise up—the priests try to control people through fear. Conjure up Hell—the oldest scare tactic in the world. Next to torture. Hell is torture, basically. You really can buy into all this? God as supreme torturer? God as the King of genocide?” (295, emphasis in original). Jack’s potentially self-sacrificing heroism validates his message, which has to do with taking responsibility for one’s actions instead of palming it off on a deity. It offers the classic Protestant dilemma between faith and free will and puts it at the heart of any beliefs worth having.66 In turn, Ahmad has his own conflicted reading of the world, the Quran, and the hadiths, which strives for certainty but which secretly craves the “get out clause” that will allow him to abort his mission and save himself from a martyrdom in which he only half believes. Instrumental in his ability to question are the lessons he receives from his imam, Shaikh Rashid. Rashid is usually read as a negative character, and in his final appearance, as Ahmad’s qualms grow, he is described as looking “disagreeable” and “ugly” (266, 271). However, he is the one who inserts strategic questioning into the lessons he gives Ahmad, challenging literalist interpretations of the scriptures. He alerts his young charge to possible imperfections in the Quran, caused by human error and misunderstanding. The version of the Quran handed down to us is “in sore need of interpretation,” he states, “and interpretations, in the course of fourteen centuries, differ” (105). Ahmad responds with concern: he feels a chasm opening under him. As Rashid takes him through the points of potential dispute, he is, in fact, offering Ahmad an important lesson in critical reading, a skill that effectively brings Ahmad to the point where he can, in the final pages, reject the path of martyrdom prepared for him by others. Of course, Updike is here projecting that desiring reading again, offering his characters critical tools most often associated with the Protestant tradition with which to critique the source of their own faith. For some readers, this projection might seem indicative of Updike’s “failure” to understand “the Islamic mind.” Yet, equally certainly, such a pure, representative “Islamic mind”—constrained and made spotless and doubtless—is hardly likely to be possessed by any human agent in this world. Its creation is another example of the desire to fix and “read” the Other in particular ways, based on essential difference. Ahmad’s striving for an always impossible certainty is the real subject matter of the novel.

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Thus, Rashid becomes in the end a positive influence, whether deliberate or otherwise. Charlie Chehab from the furniture store is revealed to have been in the pay of the CIA, setting Ahmad up in a sting to capture the wider jihadist group manipulating him. The CIA’s plan was to have Charlie pull Ahmad out before the fatal hour, and the murder of Charlie is evidence of the jihadists’ ruthless evil.67 Although there is no evidence that Shaikh Rashid is also an agent provocateur, his intervention allows Ahmad to finally step back from suicide and mass murder. On the night before his planned operation in the Lincoln Tunnel, Ahmad reads the fifty-sixth sura—one of the passages Rashid earlier had him recite—which emphasizes God as a creative rather than a destructive force. As David Simpson says, “What saves the Lincoln Tunnel is a moment of literary-critical scepticism of the sort that Ahmad has indeed shown before and which his teacher Shaikh Rashid has himself modelled for Ahmad despite his apparent intention to train him as a suicide bomber. . . . Ahmad in his final moment is unable to construe the truth of the holy book as unambiguously endorsing blowing up Jack Levy, even as he had previously resolved to blow up several hundred others who were not looking to die.”68 Ahmad’s critical reading leads to his “conversion.” Doubt is shown to be a wellspring of positive action, whereas blind faith is depicted as leading only to death. Critical reading operates alongside a revivifying reconciliation with the animal nature Ahmad has been seeking to deny. He has throughout proven an observant and sensitive figure whose strivings for asceticism seem to go against his own instincts. His sympathetic observation of those insects that swarm over the city in the summer months is shot through with a suppressed awareness of shared mortality and the brevity of life. There is a certain bliss in simply being alive that finally allows Ahmad to reconnect with the beauty and complexity of creation and the struggle for life, not against it, symbolized by the dying bug he takes pity on shortly before he sets off on his mission. Like all other creatures, he is, as the novel says, “impaled live upon the pin of consciousness” (310). This is not only the root of his dilemma but also the source of his “salvation.” The last sentence of the book tells us that the devils have succeeded in taking away his God. The novel ends on a note of resignation rather than bliss. However, as Kierkegaard reminds us, resignation is the last stage before faith. As Ahmad and Jack sail through the Lincoln Tunnel and out again into the sunlight, the

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death of Ahmad’s religious faith yields the birth of something more ambiguous and imperfect.

It can, of course, be objected that Updike’s valorization of doubt belongs to the same tradition of thought as Amis and McEwan’s positivist certainties: one might say it provides the soil from which secular beliefs can grow. Perhaps the investment in a kind of Protestant-informed pantheistic humanism limits the novel as a critique of the worldview that might drive a young Muslim to become a suicide bomber. Crucially, there seems no broader geopolitical awareness driving Ahmad’s radicalization. Pankaj Mishra remarks of the 9/11 novel: “Struggling to define cultural otherness, . . . Updike and Amis fail to recognise that belief and ideology remain the unseen and overwhelming forces behind gaudy fantasies about virgins.”69 Nevertheless, I would argue that the very shortcomings of these books tell us something about the West’s categories and prejudices when it comes to the Muslim Other. In erecting secularism, modernity, and liberalism as totemic, these novelists have to perform acts  of historical selection. They have to arrest the process of cultural evolution—which is driven by change and includes phenomena such as colonialism and immigration—at a particular moment. For Amis and McEwan, the Victorian and modernist nature of their prescriptions—the zombified return of Arnold and Leavis as cultural talismans—shows this particularly clearly. These figures are conscripted for a program of nostalgic cultural purism that is directly Islamophobic. In Updike, I have argued, the same urges to purification are explored, this time through the young Muslim protagonist, but they are rejected in favor of a kind of world-weary resilience, embodied by Jack Levy, which speaks of perseverance in the face of cultural exhaustion. As such, Updike’s novel ends in a more uncertain, indeterminate way. We may not have learned much about Islamist extremism, but we have understood something about the other fairytales by which the West seeks to comfort itself.

Chapter Two

FROM MULTICULTURALISM TO ISLAMOPHOBIA Identity Politics and Individualism in Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali

In a review of Nick Cohen’s polemic You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (2012), Hanif Kureishi returns to what is for him familiar territory. Recalling how the Satanic Verses controversy twenty years earlier divided liberal opinion, becoming “the Dreyfus Affair of our age,” Kureishi claims that the clear-sighted truth speaking of figures such as Salman Rushdie continues to be crucial in keeping free the imagination in an era when an extreme form of a great religion has become an “absolutist, sacrificial death cult.”1 Since the Satanic Verses affair in 1989, relations between Muslims and the rest have become the frontline in a battle over freedom of speech and the right to offend. Kureishi’s account of the fault lines exposed by the Rushdie affair has become, for now at least, the canonical view of recent history as the anxious gaze of politicians and the media has fallen on the West’s Muslim populations, on the lookout for signs of radicalization. This gaze became obsessive after the terrorist attacks in New York on September  11, 2001, and the West’s chosen response to them. As British Muslims came under increased scrutiny, so Kureishi’s texts from the previous decade—such as his short story “My Son the Fanatic” (later made into a film) and novel The Black Album, both of which explored the phenomenon of Muslim extremism among the community in Britain—came to seem particularly prescient.

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In this chapter I chart the development of a shift of perspective in British political discourse from an endorsement of multiculturalism to a view of Muslims that is at best suspicious and at worst Islamophobic. I focus on two novels, one from the mid-1990s and the other from the early years of the twenty-first century, both of which contain characters who find themselves forced into a relationship with kinds of Islamic radicalization but which also seem emblematic of a rejection of collective identification in favor of types of individualism. In shaking off the staple requirement that minority writers be representative of their putative communities, these texts reject one of the central tenets of literary multiculturalism that continues to have a highly problematic investment in the notion of texts “speaking for” communities. The novels I examine are Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003).2 I argue that in each a rejection of the emphasis on supposed authenticity and what is known as the “burden of representation” in fact mirrors the broader social trend away from multiculturalism as a political ideal based on group identities and the need for recognition of those identities and toward individual autonomy guaranteed by and played out through an economic individualism that aligns with neoliberalism. In Britain, questions around “Muslim writing” inevitably map themselves onto the history of and debates about multiculturalism and identity politics as they have evolved over the past thirty or so years. Here I  briefly trace the rise of multiculturalism as a policy response to an increasingly diverse postimperial community, some of the criticisms of it that have emerged, and its relationship to the contemporaneous development of a post-Thatcher neoliberal project. The backlash against multiculturalism is nowadays often said to be about values; the centrifugal needs of a coherent nation must win out over the centripetal drives of the politics of difference. Yet if we see multiculturalism as, in Talal Asad’s words, part of “the attempt to deal with the practical problems encountered in education and the social services—two major institutions of Britain’s welfare state,”3 we get a very different view. With this emphasis in mind, the rejection of multiculturalism can be seen less as an expression of concern about integration or “British values” and more as part of the neoliberal attack on the idea of social welfare provision itself. In other words, it is as much an economic objection as a culturalist one. I propose, then, to read The Black Album and Brick Lane as marking this movement away from community-oriented,

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socially liberal multiculturalism and toward a culture of economic individualism advocated by politicians and the media since the 1980s. Hanif Kureishi’s texts—from his seminal debut film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) to the novels The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album as well as the film My Son the Fanatic (1997)—in fact always inscribe the presence of an entrepreneurial narrative of self-interest rubbing up against the heterotopian energies these stories celebrate, embodied in some of the brash capitalist characters that populate these texts. However, I argue that in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane this hegemonic post-Thatcher narrative increasingly comes to take over—namely, in the materialism of the central character and of those valorized women with whom she identifies most. It is embedded in such a way as to appear natural and almost unconscious: just one of the means by which the protagonist escapes the stifling confines of Bangladeshi traditions. Yet in the end economic independence and the entrepreneurial spirit come to be celebrated as the royal road to female immigrant autonomy. The tension between what is often seen as the secular individualist form of literary fiction and the modes of living described in The Black Album and Brick Lane, which are in one way or another based on collective cultural and religious coordinates, comes through in aspects of both content and form. These two books present distinct answers to the question of whether it is possible, within the confines of the novel, to articulate Islamic religious identity. The avowedly materialist Black Album, like its predecessor The Buddha of Suburbia, recognizes all identity as experimental and performative; therefore, claims to a core, true religious identity are treated as opportunistic or dishonest. Brick Lane foregoes collective identification for individual self-assertion and a religious faith that, although depicted ambivalently, remains private and unthreatening. Similarly, while Kureishi uses the social comedy and bildungsroman forms to construct a bawdy, rambunctious disavowal of religious purism, Ali offers us supposedly unvarnished realism as a way to draw us in and ensure our sympathy for her downtrodden protagonist.

Although it is true that, as Rehana Ahmed has written, “the British Muslim has become a cipher for the excesses of multiculturalism,”4 it is important to understand that it was not always so. The end of the European

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empires saw the beginnings of a movement of increasing numbers of people from former colonies to the metropolitan centers of Europe in search of employment opportunities. In the post–Second World War era, South Asians, many of them Muslim, found jobs in Britain’s factories and textile mills, often in industrial cities such as Bradford, Birmingham, and Leicester. As Sukhdev Sandhu says, they “lived scattered and largely respectable lives . . . [and] were demonised far less than Caribbean immigrants, who were routinely depicted as drains on the taxpayer’s coffers and red-blooded menaces to society.”5 Even so, racism still blighted these South Asian migrants’ lives and opportunities, and they were routinely discriminated against, particularly in their places of work. Ambalavaner Sivanandan has described how although a “racial division of labour” kept the new communities apart for a while, a commonality of discriminatory experiences ultimately created “a mosaic of unities and organisations [that] would resolve itself into a more holistic, albeit shifting, pattern of black unity and black struggle.”6 At the same time, the permanent murmur of racial hostility from majority white society came to be reflected in the rise of Far Right groups such as the National Front and subsequently the British National Party and in successive pieces of government legislation from the 1950s through to the 1980s designed to stem the flow in immigration from the nonwhite former colonies into Britain. Those who have written about the antiracist struggles of these years tend to identify cross-cultural consolidation as essential to the fight against white racism. Kenan Malik, for example, has written of how the Indian Workers Association of the 1960s and 1970s included not just Indians but Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, too. The Asian Youth Movement of the 1970s was a nationwide organization working on behalf of Asians, irrespective of culture or creed.7 Similarly, Asian and Caribbean workers, looking to the United States, where color-conscious antiracism sought to create solidarities against the dominant white culture, sank their differences in a common project in which the term black came to signify a coalition of those nonwhites affected by discrimination. (There was even a British “Black Panther” movement, including such later cultural luminaries as Farrukh Dhondy, Darcus Howe, and Linton Kwesi Johnson.8) However, as James Procter notes, “while the inclusive nature of ‘black’ in the 1970s offered a way of overcoming cultural ‘differences,’ it also led to the suppression of difference in presenting a unified front against racism. ‘Black’ was forced

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to conceal and perpetuate a range of inequalities and tensions internal to the imagined community it drew together.”9 Sociologist Tariq Modood has remarked on the damaging effects of this homogenization, which tended often to privilege African American models of identification and struggle over the Asian experience. He describes how “when this American anti-racist movement was pursued in Britain, it highlighted a problem, for in Britain there was also a second cleavage: a West Indian–Asian dualism. Despite the different political and cultural histories that this cleavage represented, British anti-racism, having accepted the opposition between black and white, continued to deny any political or anti-racist strategic significance to this internal division.”10 Modood argues that this denial had a negative effect on some Asians’ ability to mobilize as part of the antiracist struggle. As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, these fissures began to widen at the same time that the class solidarity that had been a defining feature of the old antiracism came to be challenged by forms of identity politics organized around gender, sexuality, race, and culture. These identity politics were an important feature of the new landscape that emerged in the 1980s in response to the resurgent racialized nationalism of the Thatcher government. The demand for “recognition” of hitherto oppressed minority groups began to supplant the more traditional claims for a redistribution of wealth in society.11 Charles Taylor delineated the political effect of this model in his influential essay “The Politics of Recognition,” where he claimed that “our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.”12 The demand for recognition of minority identities is a central defining feature of political multiculturalism. We should be clear that multiculturalism was never an official policy in Britain: there was no British equivalent of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988, officially enshrining toleration of difference. However, inasmuch as recognition of the needs of minority groups came to affect civil society in Great Britain, it did so primarily in those areas where social provision—education, housing, and cultural activities—was in the gift of sympathetic local authorities. The Greater London Council established the Ethnic Minorities Unit to cater to the needs of minority communities in

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the capital, and the municipal authorities in Birmingham and Bradford followed suit by developing race-relations units and directing funding toward minority community organizations.13 One of the best-known documents, seen in hindsight to have enshrined multiculturalism as a principle, was The Swann Report: Education for All (1985), which recommended a shift in policy to address the needs of minority ethnic children in schools, including a multicultural curriculum, mother-tongue teaching, and multifaith religious education.14 The late 1990s, with a new Labour government in power, was probably the highpoint of British multiculturalism. The public revulsion that had followed the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence by white racists in Eltham, South London, in 1993 culminated in the publication of a report by Sir William Macpherson that identified systematic failings in the police investigation amounting to what was famously described as “institutional racism.” The Blair government then made it mandatory for public institutions proactively to encourage equality rather than just passively to prevent direct discrimination. Macpherson’s work was followed in 2000 by a report from a Runnymede Trust commission under the chairmanship of Lord Bhikhu Parekh that recommended a wholesale revision of the way in which minority interests were reflected in the organization of British society.15 Finally, in 2001, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook encapsulated the prevailing mood on the libertarian left, which had seen black culture, literature, and art become mainstream, by remarking, “Chicken Tikka Massala is now a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences.”16 However, very soon 9/11 and the preceding summer’s urban riots in Oldham, Bradford, and Burnley—blamed on a lack of integration among the young Asians who took part—marked the beginning of the shift away from multiculturalism toward “integration” and “community cohesion” as an increasingly nervous nation looked suspiciously at the now alien Muslim population in its midst and wondered about that population’s propensity for millennial violence.17 In fact, multiculturalism was always more of a zeitgeist than a coherent approach, a vibe arising directly from the lived experience of communities jointly inhabiting the major cities of Britain. Tensions had appeared in this model of cohabitation long before the events in the summer and autumn of 2001. A series of upheavals in the 1970s and 1980s catapulted

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Muslim identity to the forefront of global affairs in ways that suggested a limit to multiculturalism’s cozy accommodations. These upheavals included the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Satanic Verses affair ten years later, in which Salman Rushdie’s allegedly blasphemous novel created outrage across the Muslim world, with protests and violence ensuing. The Satanic Verses controversy taught Muslims the need to become organized in defense of their perceived values. It heralded the emergence of a Muslim political identity category because it illustrated how, in Modood’s words, “existing forms of recognition and representation were inadequate and marginalised some people who were poorly or not at all represented by the left versus right discourses of the third quarter of the twentieth century.”18 Along with this emerging Muslim political identity, the argument goes, there has been a recalibration of racism around matters of culture rather than ethnicity. What is known as “cultural racism” emphasizes languages, beliefs, and traditions over biology and makes them the focus of fear and hostility. Anti-Muslim cultural racism takes on board some of the psychological coordinates of phenotype racism but redirects them to aspects of life and behavior instead of to the body. Michel Wieviorka describes this shift as depending on the construction of Muslims “as a natural category, and [where] their behaviour, real or imagined, is informed in some way or another by an essence, by innate attributions or an almost genetic cultural heritage.”19 One concern has been that the public assertion of religious identity runs contrary to the secular foundation of Western civil societies and thus represents a threat to it. There are those to whom this shift from equality to recognition and from opposing racism to emphasizing culture is anathema. In particular, the commentator Kenan Malik has claimed that relativism and a toleration of sometimes repressive practices sanctioned by multiculturalism has, in the case of Muslims, led Britain on a path “from fatwa to jihad.” Noting the eagerness with which local councils in the 1980s took up the politics of difference, Malik insists that multiculturalism, rather than being driven by community pressure from below, was in fact imposed from above in order to defuse antiracist energies. Worse, the rhetorical support and financial largesse that followed multiculturalism meant that it “helped create new divisions and more intractable conflicts which made for a less openly racist but a more insidiously tribal Britain. . . . Once political power and financial resources became allocated by ethnicity, then people began to

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identify themselves in terms of their ethnicity, and only their ethnicity.”20 According to Malik, this process set one minority group against another, broke down the antiracist consensus, and led to intercommunity violence, alienation, and a susceptibility to extremism dressed up as authentic Muslim cultural values. Malik’s book offers one of the sharpest analyses of the rise of a kind of separatism spawned by the fetishization of cultural and religious identity by governments as a way to address social diversity. His account of special pleading and the rise of an “offense culture,” where cultural sensitivities are supposedly sacrosanct and to be protected from criticism or satire, is largely persuasive.21 However, for all its stridency and commitment, his book From Fatwa to Jihad has three main problems. First, the antiracism that Malik lauds and laments was predicated strongly on a form of identity politics (as the wholesale translation of American strategies, reflected in the very existence of a British “Black Panther” group in the 1970s, demonstrates). Other accounts with less-selective recall make this clear, as when Sivanandan acknowledges of early immigrant industrial disputes that “quite a few of these strikes also involved ‘cultural’ questions, such as the right to take time off for religious festivals, the right to break off for daily prayer (among Moslems [sic]), the right of Sikh busmen to wear turbans instead of official headgear.”22 Malik’s objection seems more to do with the religious turn in identity politics than with defining identity markers per se. Second, for all the assertion, there is no proven link between multiculturalism and radical violence of either the intercommunity or terrorist varieties. The idea that something as vague as multiculturalism led people to espouse separation and violence seems a false cause: no evidence is given for why this should be the outcome. And third, Malik fails to recognize the power dynamics of his own argument in terms of the different levels of access to cultural capital and public platforms enjoyed by liberal intellectuals and the communities they write about—and often criticize.23 However, there are some useful insights in Malik’s trenchant book. Notably, in making his case for the importance of not closing down freedom of expression at the supposed behest of minorities, Malik conscripts as interviewees Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali. The novelists recount their experiences of the pressures of would-be censorship over their subject matter and the connected phenomenon whereby as authors they were considered in some sense representative of the communities they were writing

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about. Kureishi laments the climate of fear that has followed the Satanic Verses affair and made writers wary of tackling tough cultural topics.24 Ali gives her account of the controversy engendered by her novel Brick Lane, which had to do with the charge that she was misrepresenting the real Brick Lane Bangladeshi community in the book. The protests organized first against the book and later against the film adaptation by the Greater Sylhet Welfare and Development Council, reignited those questions of community sensitivities versus freedom of speech first raised at the time of the Satanic Verses affair and given new life in the outrage caused by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s decision to publish insulting cartoons about the prophet Mohammad in September  2005. The protestors claimed that Brick Lane gave an inaccurate and insulting view of their community.25 At the same time, liberal critics took sides, with most defending Ali’s freedom of expression. Some, however, such as Germaine Greer, questioned the right of a mixed-race, Oxford-educated non-Syhleti to represent the area’s working-class residents, and the Guardian lead writer encapsulated generic confusion, the anthropological viewpoint, and liberal vacillation in one inglorious swoop: “The artists are responding to a public hunger for some insights into British Bangladeshi life. They are providing reportage from an under-reported community. There is a price for that, and it comes in treating one’s subjects with greater care than if they were made up.”26 I want to return to the precise ways in which these pressures are played out in The Black Album and Brick Lane. For now, it is important to note some of the implications of an expectation that multicultural writing must needs be “representative.” What has been called “the burden of representation” has long been a feature of multicultural approaches to the arts. It offers both an acknowledgment of the comparatively disenfranchised status that the minority group might have in the public realm with regard to available opportunities for self-expression and a mode of reading the resulting cultural texts with criteria for “placing” them in an unequal cultural marketplace. In early critical studies of British multicultural literature, a sense of the novelty of emerging writing by a so-called second generation is accompanied by a tendency to line up writers according to the communities from which they hail in a sort of “tour round the diasporas” approach, where the assertion of multiculture is in tension with the tendency to treat communities separately. Even so, there is always the

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implication that such writers are representing a collectivity greater than themselves.27 Kobena Mercer’s classic analysis of the burden of representation on black British cinema in the 1980s identifies a critical requirement that the individual minority film “speak for” the community it represents and from which its creators come. Yet Mercer is also acutely aware of the limitations such expectations impose as well as the broader context in which they take place. At heart, this question is about power: “who has power over the apparatus of image-making.” Mercer quotes Judith Williamson’s observation that “the more power any group has to create and wield representation, the less it is required to be representative.”28 At that time, the expectation that a film “speak for” its community implicitly lay behind multicultural patterns of funding. Minority filmmaking then became a guarantee of multiculturalism; the more such films were produced, the more multiculturalism was demonstrated. At the same time, states Mercer, “the very notion that a single film or cultural artefact can ‘speak for’ an entire socioethnic community reinforces the perceived marginality and ‘secondariness’ of that community.”29 Something of the same bind is at work in minority fiction and in Muslim writing particularly in an era of Islamophobia, when communities are under scrutiny. Muslim cultural background fiction demonstrates the multiculturalism of a liberal “republic of letters” that would allow all voices to be heard, but at the same time its status as a distinct minority category perpetuates its marginalization. As Mercer reminds us, “The struggle to find a voice does not take place on neutral or ‘innocent’ cultural terrain,” and the very designation of a group as a minority reasserts the power of hegemonic culture.30 In the contemporary era, this power is connected to knowledge in particular ways. Ahmed writes of how there has been an “anthropological interest” in British Muslims “reflecting a mainstream British readership’s spurious desire to ‘know’ the Muslim Other in the context of events such as 9/11 and 7/7.”31 This interest is catered for through the predominant use of forms of realism, reinforcing the illusion that direct experience is being rendered. There are good historical reasons for this use of realism—the desire to counteract stereotyped views with more accurate images in an era of racism, for example. The same impulses are understandably in play in our modern Islamophobic age, too, when

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Muslim-background writers feel a need to use their greater degree of proximity to minority groups to offer a more accurate view of them. However, it is equally possible to argue that employing direct realism in a bid to correct misconceptions is to accept a discussion whose terms have been set in advance by those creating the stereotypes. In Muslim fiction, the idea of a “corrective” realist text embodies the sanctioned flipside of the outsider’s anthropological gaze. Yet the Brick Lane controversy illustrates the pitfalls of this approach, where both sides—Ali’s supporters and the protestors— expected the author to be “representative”: they simply disagreed about how well she discharged this duty.32 We may want to ponder the degree to which the interpretative expectations thrown up by realism in The Black Album and Brick Lane have operated to keep the texts and the critical responses to them fixated on matters of accuracy and authenticity at the expense of understanding the broader societal shift they mark. One other line of criticism aimed at multiculturalism is also worth briefly considering because it offers a way of understanding the shift that I am suggesting has taken place in multicultural literary representation across the past twenty-five years or so. This line was encapsulated as far back as 1994 in David Theo Goldberg’s celebrated collection Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, in which the editor conceded the politics of recognition: “The capacity to name oneself in the order of thought . . . does not guarantee on its own the material conditions and resources, the material power necessary for social flourishing and living freely.” He went on: “Political economy has disappeared almost altogether from contemporary cultural studies and, by implication, from much of the identity-driven analysis concerning multiculturalism. . . . [This disappearance serves] to cover (up) the political and economic roots of . . . marginalisation.”33 It is one thing to take an interest in the exotic commodities and styles that emerge as a result of multiculturalism—what Stanley Fish famously called “boutique multiculturalism”34—but quite another to tolerate cultural practices that are less amenable both to perceived liberal values and neoliberal commodification. Indeed, one of the features of the center–left parties across Europe that came to power in the 1990s and that backed the development of multicultural models of citizenship is that they also sought an accommodation with what is now hegemonic neoliberal capitalism.

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Traditions and values that fell outside the framework of liberal tolerance provided by this nexus of interests—quickly elevated to culture-defining status in political discourse—came to be dismissed as in some way “fundamentalist.” Slavoj Çiäek was alert to this feature of Britain’s New Labour government even in the early days of its first term in 1997. He went as far as to suggest that multiculturalism is the ideal form of the ideology of global capitalism: it is “the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected.’ ” Going further, he accused multiculturalism of being “a disavowed, inverted, selfreferential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’—it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position.”35 For Çiäek, as for a number of other critics from the left, multiculturalism’s focus on cultural differences leaves the capitalist system intact. Although there is some merit in this line of argument, Çiäek’s version seems too totalizing, reducing complex and contradictory social formations to black-and-white questions. Nonetheless, the general point that multiculturalism has proven amenable to co-optation by the forces of the neoliberal market seems irrefutable. Go to any market stall or convenience store, visit any fashion boutique or home-furnishing outlet, surf the Internet, and evidence abounds. I examine in the next chapter some other implications of this relationship when it comes to Muslim culture. Here it is worth noting that the infusion of market values into the multicultural novel may be most evident in the closing pages of Brick Lane, but it has already shaped the protagonist’s relationship with her surroundings and her community long before this point. If, as Christian Joppke remarks, multiculturalism’s “focus on culture takes attention away from other, perhaps more important sources of minority discrimination, most notably socio-economic inequalities,”36 then the assertion of its compatibility with neoliberalism has been accompanied in recent years by a more forthright advocacy of a secular social liberalism that marks the boundary between acceptable “integrated” practices and values, on the one hand, and selfsegregating fundamentalist ones, on the other. The recent repudiation of multiculturalism marks at one and the same time the limits of multicultural tolerance when its object ceases to be “market friendly” and an

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attempt to ring-fence European values by defining them against their opposite—the radicalized Muslim.

Popular culture itself provides some of the most well-documented examples of the creative energies of youth being siphoned off for corporate profit. Hanif Kureishi’s writing exists at the intersection where the forces of youthful rebellion meet their rearticulation (and possibly neutering) in the shiny packaging of the mainstream entertainment industry. Writing of the key difference between the black and Asian British experiences of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Sukhdev Sandhu notes how young Asians “lacked an indigenous youth culture. They forged no musical alliances such as those between rude boy ska and skinhead stomp at the end of the 1960s, or 1976’s reggae–punk axis.”37 He credits Hanif Kureishi with imaginatively connecting British Asian experience with the main currents of popular culture going on at the time. Kureishi was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1954 to a Pakistani father and an English mother. Many of the characters in his fiction and films orient themselves around the new sounds and styles of urban pop culture. For those who share his mixed or second-generation background, the challenge of Asian diasporic experience in Britain no longer has to do with settling down in a new home country or battling for economic security, as it had been for the first generation. Quite the opposite: “Kureishi’s characters grew up plumped by domestic comforts and securities. They took them for granted and are now hungry to lap up the disorderly and heterotopian possibilities of metropolitan life.”38 Such is certainly the case with the young protagonist of The Black Album. Kureishi’s second novel tells the story of Shahid, an inexperienced youth from Sevenoaks, and his education in London—an education that turns out to be literal in the college where he enrolls to study English literature; sexual in his relationship with his impulsive and hedonistic tutor, Deedee; and political as he is drawn into involvement with a radical Islamic group. The novel takes place in 1989, at the time of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie. Shahid’s radical student friends undertake their own book burning on campus, much to the horror of the liberal Deedee, who has taken Shahid as a lover, introducing him to a world of parties, drugs, and sexual indulgence. Events take place in a chaotic urban

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landscape of raves, down-at-heel boozers, and drug dens, which at times has an almost Hogarthian quality. We see the underbelly of the materialistic, greed-driven ethos of the Thatcherite 1980s, a time of moral and financial meltdown that even ensnares Shahid’s arrogant, acquisitive brother, Chili, in a downward spiral of squalor and dependency. By 1989, the yuppie financial bubble had burst, and characters in the novel are set adrift in a world where old political certainties are crumbling along with the Soviet bloc and the Berlin Wall. This is the era Kureishi’s early work so ably chronicles. His novel The Buddha of Suburbia charts the adventures of its mixed-race protagonist across the 1970s, from the dwindling of the hippy era through the rise of punk to the eve of Thatcherism in 1979. The films My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Stephen Frears, 1987), whose screenplays were written by Kureishi, offer hybrid, cross-racial, antiheteronormative responses to Thatcher’s austere social conservatism. Yet what these works and The Black Album also have in common is an awareness of the allure of the kind of unfettered capitalism offered by Thatcherite reforms. In The Black Album, Chili and his estranged wife, Zulma, initially buy into the resulting material excesses—something that makes them derisively dismissive of Riaz’s religious revivalist group—but both suffer from the strain of being unable to sustain their lifestyles when the economic tide turns. The presence of these capitalist characters in the face of the text’s clear preference for progressive social relationships and cultural free expression illustrates the broader social struggle marking these years. As Rehana Ahmed has put it, Kureishi’s oeuvre “spans the transition from a Thatcherite monoculturalism to a liberal multiculturalism and the backlash against multiculturalism of the post-9/11 years.”39 We should be aware, however, that Kureishi’s critique of unrestrained capitalism and his critique of religious zeal share a distaste for fixed, authoritarian positions. His is a liberal discourse that attacks both Thatcherism and religious fundamentalism for their inflexibility and intolerance of other viewpoints.40 However, it should be noted that Kureishi describes these shifts from monoculture to multiculture and the kinds of social formation multiculturalism throws up. He is not an advocate for these shifts. As Sara Upstone points out, “To read Kureishi as an upholder of multiculturalism . . . does not offer the most accurate rendering of his position. For Kureishi does not subscribe to the concept of multiculturalism as a toleration of individual

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communities and ethnic differences.”41 Thus, although he celebrates the results of multiculturalism as lived experience, he is deeply suspicious of political moves to harness the politics of recognition. In The Black Album, this suspicion emerges in the satirical eye for hypocrisy applied to some characters, such as Deedee’s estranged husband, Brownlow, whose Marxist egalitarianism is only skin deep, and the local Labour council leader, George Rugman Rudder, who is keen to ingratiate himself with the ethnic minority vote and loudly proclaims his “faith in different faiths.”42 The potential for special pleading thrown up by religious identity politics reaches its peak in the satirical treatment of the affair of the “divine aubergine,” discovered when “a devout local couple had cut open an aubergine and discovered that God had inscribed holy words into the mossy flesh” (171). Riaz’s group claims the revelation as an instance of divine approval of their radical stance and uses it as a lever to force political favors from Rudder. However, whereas The Buddha of Suburbia, like the early Kureishi films, thrives on polymorphous mingling and the dismantling of conventions, The Black Album seems much more an exercise in rehearsing opposing positions in a freedom-versus-restraint binary. This is evident primarily in the decision to center the action on protests against a novel that, despite being unnamed, is clearly meant to be The Satanic Verses. Freedom is also mapped onto hedonism and sensual pleasure—visual (in video and film), auditory (in pop music), and sexual—whereas restraint emerges in notions of purity, religious zeal, and abstinence. Doubt, which frees one to dream and imagine, is preferable to the dry certainty claimed by the zealots: Deedee views them as dangerously “devoid of doubt” (110). Indeed, the main message of the novel is encapsulated by the need to “embrace uncertainty” (227). Despite a few somewhat tepid attempts to imagine the attractions of a religious outlook, the novel in the end makes secularism the key guarantor of individual liberty against the Riaz group’s censorious self-righteousness.43 Kureishi’s main objection to the identity politics that he sees taking over from class orientation is that it freezes identity in false shapes for political convenience. Against this, The Black Album, like its predecessor, records a young man in the process of wrestling with the challenges to identity that youth and new experience raise. True identity is seen as fluid, and the search for an authentic self is more fruitful than the possibility of finding

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it. The narrator tells us of Shahid: “He believed everything; he believed nothing. His own self increasingly confounded him. One day he could passionately feel one thing, the next the opposite. . . . Which was his real, natural self? Was there such a thing? How would he know it when he saw it? Would it have a guarantee attached to it?” (147). Such feelings are not far removed from those experienced by the confused Pakistani-adoptee“convert” Chad—the most bewildered and sympathetic of the Riaz group—who expresses a sense of empowerment in the new religious identity politics: “No more Paki. Me a Muslim” (128). However, what Shahid and his creator seem to object to is the attempt by identity politics to freeze identity in one shape that fiercely resists any further personal evolution. At one point, Shahid reflects: “These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew—brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human” (92). In Kureishi’s view, such identification opens the door to self-defined victimhood and backward practices. With its interest in the attraction of those obsessive emotional investments characteristic of youthful passion, Kureishi’s fiction is perhaps well placed to explore religious identity politics—at least as a recent “fashion trend.” One of his recurring themes is the extent to which identity is a costume, a disguise that can be donned and doffed according to context and personal preference. In the same way, his work shows an acute awareness of the blind spots of earlier models of antiracism. This awareness applies not just to those liberal figures with barely suppressed racist and exoticist predilections—such as the suburban bohemian Eva and the patronizing theater director Shadwell in The Buddha of Suburbia—but also to the earnest but problematic demands for the tactical suppression of difference under the political identity label black, espoused by the activist-cum-actress Tracey in the same novel.44 The Black Album offers an even more cutting depiction of the self-serving dimension of earlier types of “radical” politics in the blatant hypocrisies of Brownlow and Rudder: the former an egotistical misogynist, the latter a political trimmer with no actual principles to sell out. That said, it would seem, from both The Black Album and Kureishi’s subsequent statements, that the author identifies a danger to freedom and art in the politics of Muslim cultural identity that did not exist in older models, which had a more encouraging view of self-expression. Thus,

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cultural identities tend less to be truly organic expressions of belonging or affiliation than marriages of convenience encouraged by the political ideologies of the time. Those liberal characters who are not denounced as hypocritical tend to be well meaning but misguided in their attitudes to cultural difference. Deedee packs her students’ curriculum with representative texts from black music and culture. Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye provide a soundtrack to her teaching of the U.S. civil rights struggle, and she encourages her students to treat canonical and popular texts as interchangeable. Interestingly, though, whereas popular culture provides a valorized means of youth identification in The Buddha of Suburbia, it is treated with more suspicion in The Black Album. On the one hand, Shahid and Chad bond over their pop-music tastes. On the other, Kureishi’s determination to define art and culture as an antidote to religious fundamentalism requires that he reassert the liberal humanist reading of the European canon as personally liberating and culturally vitalizing. Shahid grumbles: “He didn’t always appreciate being played Madonna or George Clinton in class, or offered a lecture on the history of funk as if it were somehow more ‘him’ than Fathers and Sons. Any art could become ‘his’ if its value was demonstrated. He wouldn’t be denied the best” (135). Literary culture works to safeguard the power of the imagination against the claims of monolithic “Truth.” In a passage reminiscent of Salman Rushdie’s conflation of religious revelation with the creativity of the poet in The Satanic Verses, Shahid reflects that stories are “exercises in that most magnificent but unreliable capacity, the imagination, which William Blake called ‘the divine body in every man’ ” (133). Between the alternatives offered by Riaz’s dry certainty and Deedee’s “soft” liberal relativism, the novel’s discussions about the role and relevance of literature and culture take on an added urgency. Midway through the book, Shahid makes a tentative stand for creativity and the right to individual artistic expression but is immediately slapped down by the Muslim group’s leader, Riaz, who charges literature with being full of corruption, deceit, and self-regarding elitism. In an exchange characterized by rhetorical thrust and parry, Riaz and Shahid clash over the responsibilities of authorship. Responding to Riaz’s demand that he write a newspaper article on blasphemy “for your people,” Shahid tries to open a discussion of “storytelling. . . . Why we need it. What can be said . . . and what can’t be said . . . What is taboo and

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forbidden and why. . . . How censorship benefits us here in exile” (182, ellipses in the original). Yet Riaz insists that all fiction is, by its very nature, a form of lying—a perversion of truth. Isn’t the phrase “telling stories” used when children make us chuckle. They pass the time when we have nothing to do. But there are many fictions that expose a corrupt nature. They are created by authors who cannot, we might say, hold their ink. These yarn-spinners have usually grovelled for acceptance to the white elite so they can be considered “great authors.” They like to pretend they are revealing the truth to the masses—these uncultured, half-illiterate fools. But they know nothing of the masses. The only poor people they meet are their servants. (182)

The target here is clearly Rushdie, but the main point is to underline the supposed responsibilities of an author to his or her community when writing about minorities. Once more the burden of representation falls heavily. All we learn from such self-indulgent authors, according to Riaz, is the “filthy” contents of their imagination. To Shahid’s riposte that “a free imagination, looking into itself, illuminates others,” Riaz retorts, “We are discussing here the free and unbridled imagination of men who live apart from the people. . . . Must we prefer this indulgence to the profound and satisfying comforts of religion?” (183–84). Riaz’s view that freedom in any society must be limited here morphs into the kind of call for censorship in the interests of community sensitivities that has provoked the ire of the liberal intelligentsia in the years since the Rushdie affair when confronted by Muslims’ sense of offense. However, perhaps the most telling part of their exchange comes when Riaz, having described the communitarian aims of his own work, asks Shahid what “standpoint” he writes from, only to receive the reply, “There is no . . . standpoint”(174). This exchange encapsulates all that has gone before and puts Shahid (and Kureishi) in the company of those writers who in the days after 9/11 were to reassert the liberal universalism of the Western literary tradition as a main line of defense against Islamic terrorism. Here, I would draw attention to the way in which Shahid’s reply underwrites the novel’s broader disavowal of positions that are seen as a threat to foundational cultural values. Although Zulma’s white lover, Jump, is ridiculed for his paranoid Islamophobia, in which he imagines a Europe overrun by Muslim hordes (190), the underlying endorsement is of those perceived

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Western values supposedly now under threat from Islamic identity politics. The rearticulation of the notion of an unfettered, free-floating artist, responsible to no one but himself, is juxtaposed against a kind of fanaticism in the Other that is central to contemporary Islamophobia: the herd mentality, the absence of critical thought, the propensity for violence.45 Moreover, we might claim that Kureishi’s lack of sympathy for Islamic collective-identity positions as symbolized by Riaz’s group actually undermines his argument for the novel as a space of jostling views, many voices, and dialogue. Ruvani Ranasinha has observed how “The Black Album’s monolithic portrait of the Islamic believers does not articulate a range of heterogeneous voices on its central issues,” meaning there is no genuine polyphony.46 The group’s members appear to have no discernible theological bearings at all—just a desire to take orders from a strong demagogue. Moreover, they appear motivated for the most part by a confused tangle of personal hang-ups and obsessions. Precisely because of this, they do not seem like seriously threatening antagonists. At one point, Kureishi offers a wry observation on the burden of community representation when Shahid consoles Riaz with the suggestion that there may be a media career awaiting him: “there’s nothing more fashionable than outsiders” (175). And, indeed, Riaz ends the novel pondering an offer of a television appearance: “For those TV people Riaz is a fascinating freak,” (243). Yet for all the characteristic lightness of touch, in taking this line— equating Western lifestyles with free thinking, questioning, and imagination, as against Islamic robotic quiescence—Kureishi throws in his lot with a sort of no-nonsense, muscular secularism of the kind nowadays associated with Amis, McEwan, Rushdie, and the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris: a critique of religion as superstition that primarily has Islam in its sights.47 This position is consistent in Kureishi’s work, but it also has implications for the form of The Black Album. For instance, Bart Moore-Gilbert has noted how “the predominantly comic register of The Black Album expresses its author’s perception that the threat of ‘fundamentalism’ is minimal and that its exponents are primarily ridiculous and self-deluded rather than evil or, indeed, rational actors. . . . The inescapable inference to be drawn from The Black Album is that the more complexly drawn (‘liberal’) characters are more fully human, as well as being more worthy citizens, than their ‘fundamentalist’ antagonists.”48

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Put simply, one might say that the satirical social comedy form, of which The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album are preeminent examples, inscribes a conservatism that is not only uninterested in rendering the motivations and solidarities of the Riaz group but also actively hostile to them precisely because they are inherently collective.49 Shahid rather shamefacedly participates in the book burning while still hankering after the uninhibited lifestyle Deedee personifies, but the violence of the act precipitates his break with Riaz’s group. In the end, the novel—like its protagonist—comes down decisively on the side of freedom and selfexpression, and on the final page Shahid and Deedee take off together on new adventures—“Until it stops being fun,” as she puts it (276). Shahid has learned to shake off the influence of religious fundamentalism to embrace life, love, and provisionality rather than abstinence and the promise of eternity. The Black Album’s conventionally modern resolution fails to disturb those negative opinions that many readers in the mid-1990s—and most certainly since then—might have about the growth of Muslim identity claims. To that extent, the ending has a curiously slack, comforting quality, with hero and heroine driving off into the sunset, having vanquished the foes of both repression and domesticity. This avowedly individualist ending is most certainly not an endorsement of multiculturalism; indeed, all the damage to which Shahid and Deedee have been witness can be read as a product of the misguided indulgence that has made such outrageous claims possible. Here we confront the paradox by which one of the writers who has been seen as most representative of socially liberal British multiculturalism produces a text chronicling those forces that in the early years of the twentyfirst century would lead to its disavowal. Multiculturalism apparently carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. The question then becomes what takes its place. If The Black Album (like The Buddha of Suburbia) is aware that the rough and tumble of the multicultural metropolis is always shadowed by the rapaciousness of a looming Thatcherite materialism that will be interested in cultural coexistence only to the extent that it can be packaged and sold, Brick Lane goes a stage farther by performing the process whereby a version of multiculturalism can be brought to reject  communal solidarity altogether in favor of individual economic self-assertion that produces the good neoliberal subject. *

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The durability of multiculturalism, despite heightened suspicion of Muslims and an increasingly integrationist official discourse, draws our attention to its protean qualities. We might almost say that another kind of multiculturalism has come into being, bypassing the socially liberal political and experiential varieties—a multiculturalism that can be reconciled to the market orientation of the modern liberal nation. Zygmunt Bauman has suggested that in the contemporary era of global capitalism, longstanding social bonds are now sacrificed to the preeminence of the market and mandatory individuality in a process he refers to as “liquid modernity.”50 One might expect this process to sound the death knell of multiculturalism, which is by definition predicated on collectivism. However, as we saw earlier, another school of thought calls out multiculturalism for an obsessive focus on cultural identity and practices that overlook possibly more important sources of discrimination, such as socioeconomic inequality.51 This is a kind of multiculturalism, it is said, that has no problem accommodating neoliberal demands and in which race—along with other identitarian categories such as gender and sexual orientation—has taken the place of redistribution in a kind of marketplace of recognition. In addition, with the continued exotic predilection for marketable ethnic products, cultural difference itself takes on an increased value, and the best kind of multicultural subject is then one who can enter this market as a free and full participant. Will Kymlicka suggests a mutually transformative relationship between neoliberalism and the multicultural contexts in which it operates, what he calls “a dense field of social relationships” that condition neoliberalism’s impact.52 He records how multiculturalism began with the increasing incorporation of minority rights by liberal states in the West, enshrining recognition of difference within a system where state regulation and intervention were recognized tools used to curb the effects of markets’ cyclical flux. With the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, multiculturalism was initially seen as “unjustified interference in the market in response to ‘special interests,’ ” a sort of extension of the welfare system neoliberals opposed and a misuse of government funds.53 Yet the survival of multiculturalism in the teeth of this attack has to do less with its own politically compromised nature than with a new attitude among neoliberals, who gradually came to see the market potential of multiculturalism. If interventionist social liberalism could use multiculturalism as a way to better integrate

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minorities into nations, surely it was possible to use the same identitarian impulses to integrate them into global markets. Thus, according to Kymlicka, the aim became to draw on the unique, saleable characteristics of minorities to create commodities for markets and to extend the reach of such markets using the cultural knowledge minorities could bring to the table. In short, the idea was to create “not a tolerant national citizen who is concerned for the disadvantaged in her own society, but a cosmopolitan market actor who can compete effectively across state boundaries.”54 Leonie Sandercock explains his kind of business-friendly multiculturalism, sometimes known as “commercial multiculturalism,” as assuming “that if the diversity of individuals from different communities is recognized in the marketplace, then the problems of cultural difference will be dissolved through private consumption, without any need for a redistribution of power and resources.”55 This alignment of cultural identity with the discourses of neoliberalism is gendered in particular ways and offers a challenge to orthodox feminist politics as well. Second-wave feminism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s at what turned out to be the end of the era of state-organized capitalism, regulated markets, and funded welfare systems. Nancy Fraser describes how feminism took an intersectionist approach, allying with other emancipatory movements around class, race, and sexuality to challenge structural subordination of women.56 However, in the Reaganite–Thatcherite 1980s, feminism was confronted with a very different political animus that prioritized privatization, deregulation, and the elimination of capital controls and that emphasized competition rather than welfare. In this context, Fraser sees feminist ideals being resignified, surrendering their broader claims for social justice in favor of the rhetoric of recognition. Feminism became absorbed into identity politics, and issues of culture were elevated above those of political economy.57 Out of this shift emerged “a new romance of female advancement and gender justice” under neoliberalism that overlooked the grotesque inequalities, job insecurity, low wages, and negligible welfare provision resulting from reforms designed to promote individualism and discourage broader solidarities.58

Although Brick Lane’s feminist message appears obvious, the question of the book’s relationship to the phenomenon of political multiculturalism

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tends to split opinion. One the one hand, there is the argument, advanced by critics such as Sara Upstone, that “the novel’s conclusion speaks obviously to the possibility of multicultural Britain,” with its “powerful utopianism representing the claims of British Muslims to British citizenship.” On the other stands the more sanguine view voiced by Rehana Ahmed that “a submission to patriarchal culture on the part of the Muslim woman is counterposed to an individual dissent and withdrawal from culture and community.”59 It is the latter view, borne out by the novel’s denouement, that emboldens me to suggest that Brick Lane is in fact a document of the end of socially egalitarian multiculturalism and the beginning of a multiculturalism that can be co-opted to produce successful market actors functioning always as autonomous individuals. In this kind of multiculturalism, community links are a hindrance to success, and the protagonist’s choices are valorized to the extent that they repudiate community values in favor of economic self-assertion. The story opens in 1985 with Nazneen, an eighteen-year-old woman from rural Bangladesh, finding herself married to a much older man and brought halfway around the world to live on a dilapidated council estate in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. She has been taught always to accept the will of fate—a lesson confirmed by the difficult circumstances of her birth, which strikes the keynote of a tale about the cost and the limits of following traditional strictures regarding female passivity and endurance. At first, Nazneen accepts this dogma wholeheartedly, in contrast to her beautiful and daring sister, Hasina, who defies her parents to marry for love and whose subsequent misfortunes back in Bangladesh—relayed in letter form—offer a counterpoint to Nazneen’s own experiences and an extended lesson in the gender double standards of the traditional society to which she belongs.60 The narrative is punctuated by flashbacks to Nazneen’s childhood in Bangladesh and by the intermittent series of letters from Hasina. Memories of the lush landscapes of the past not only provide access to Nazneen’s back story but also serve in the first part of the book as a symbolic correlative to the grimy metropolitan cityscape in which she finds herself, offering the balm of familiarity in the hostile spaces of London: “Twice she stepped into the road and drew back again. To get to the other side of the street without being hit by a car was like walking out in the monsoon and hoping to dodge the raindrops.”61 But Hasina’s letters have a Richardsonian

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admonitory quality to them. Although in many ways an innocent, Hasina is nevertheless aware of the ever-looming shadow of that shame that her actions are bringing on her. Despite her internalized piety, she cannot resist following her heart. When love leaves her marriage, she finds herself taken under the wing of a wealthy landlord, Mr. Chowdhury, the first of a number of men who turn out to have dishonorable designs on her, and thereafter falls into prostitution before being rescued by a glamorous but superficial westernized couple. Through everything, Hasina’s spirit remains unbroken, while her sister in Britain finds her own ingrained submissiveness challenged by the glossy material provocations of the world around her and by the temptations presented by her unfulfilled desires. Nazneen at first opts for the life of a conventional Bangladeshi housewife, catering to the daily emotional and physical needs of her husband, Chanu, a frustrated dreamer puffed up with the bitterness of the perpetually disappointed. Yet she does so only through an effort of will, suppressing her own urge for self-expression, symbolized in her fascination with the sparkling, whirling ice skaters she sees on television. In these unpromising circumstances, Nazneen feels haunted by loneliness and thoughts of home—feelings compounded by the death of her baby son. It is only some years later, with the arrival of Karim, the intermediary who brings materials and orders to her for the dressmaking piecework she takes up, that those passions and longings she has hitherto kept private are turned loose. In the second half of the novel, with the action transposed to 2001, Nazneen and Karim’s intensely passionate affair is juxtaposed with a deteriorating situation for the Muslims of Brick Lane. Met with suspicion and racism after 9/11, the community organizes politically under the guidance of a group calling itself the Bengal Tigers, led by Karim and formed to combat increasing extreme right-wing activism in the area. Yet as their campaigns deteriorate into infighting and recrimination, Nazneen comes to see that the yearning for freedom she is experiencing is to be satisfied neither by eloping with Karim nor by retreating with Chanu back “home” to Bangladesh. Community relations may be strained to breaking point and radicalization apparently gaining a foothold, yet behind these more headline-grabbing confrontations the novel quietly insists that a greater injustice is the constrained position of women. As Nazneen strives to keep her infidelity secret, she watches the price extracted from those women

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who challenge their husbands, become “too Westernised,” or merely seek employment of their own. Such women are taken to have brought shame on themselves and their families, just as much as the “fallen” Hasina has. Brick Lane offers a sort of cost–benefit analysis of women’s selfdetermination, reckoning the social ostracism that comes from ignoring convention against the sense of empowerment and purpose that results. In the end, it seems to say, the gains outweigh the losses: Nazneen breaks off with Karim, understanding that each of them has been cherishing an unreal fantasy of the other; refuses to accompany Chanu back to Bangladesh; and enters into a business partnership with her friend Razia, designing and making bespoke women’s clothing. Just as Nazneen comes to realize that Hasina has opted for the road less traveled by Bangladeshi women because “she isn’t going to give up” (490), so she now recognizes her own earlier timidity as a product of a time “before I knew what I could do” (486). However, the narrative’s trajectory strongly suggests that the price of this personal emancipation is a conscious disengagement and distancing from central aspects of community. Investment in cultural identity by other characters tends to be treated as misguided or driven by personal complexes; Chanu’s lament for what he calls the immigrant “tragedy”—the struggle to assimilate with Western values—seems as much a product of being snubbed at work as of mature reflection (113).62 Like several other positions on offer, his view seems composed of prejudice and cliché. For example, the debates about multiculturalism play out semiparodically in the battle of the leaflets between the right-wing activists and the Bengal Tigers. The leaflets’ titles—“multicultural murder” (attacking a revised school curriculum); “hands off our breasts” and the reply “keep your breasts to yourself” (about the censoring of a workplace calendar featuring topless women); the menacing “march against the mullahs” (reminiscent of later real-world tactics employed by the English Defence League in Muslim areas)—all suggest a strong element of stereotyping and self-stereotyping in the erection of supposed cultural values to be defended (250–59). This defense is most strongly manifest in the formation of the Bengal Tigers. Again, as with Kureishi’s student radicals, Ali’s novel adopts a wry, satirical tone in its description of their meetings. In the first meeting, Karim and an antagonist known only as “the Questioner” squabble over

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the movement’s constitution and aims, and an Afro-Caribbean member— depicted as a kind of rootless spiritual tourist—finds himself nominated as the group’s “Multicultural Liaison Officer.” In subsequent meetings, identity markers harden: some girls who attended the first meeting in hijab have now “upgraded to burkhas” (279); discussions center on whether certain types of behavior are “Islamic” or not; and personal rivalry leads to deep disagreements over policy and approach. The Bengal Tigers’ agenda threatens to become more sectarian and international, marked by concern for suffering Muslims around the world and sympathy for violent direct action but also characterized by a kind of Muslim exceptionalism that the novel is clearly critical of. Even the heady sense of power Nazneen experiences by attending their meetings and feeling she can at last act to influence world affairs is offset by the omniscient narrator’s insistence that this sense of power is in fact simply a compensation for unfulfilled personal longings. Of Nazneen’s sense of sympathy for the Muslim victims of violence in Chechnya and Palestine, we are told that “she mistook the sad weight of longing in her stomach for sorrow” (244). Skirmishes between the Tigers and racists culminate in a riot that swirls round the streets of East London, taking in the landmarks of earlier battles: Cable Street, where antifascists confronted Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 1930s, and Altab Ali Park, renamed to commemorate a Bengali textile worker murdered by racists in 1978. Yet even this historical resonance is undercut because the riot is depicted as intracommunal, “brown-on-brown,” a product of gang culture and revenge. Karim remarks despairingly, “It’s not even about anything any more” (475). Against such collectivist cultural identity claims, Brick Lane insistently promotes individualism. This emphasis might be unsurprising, given that the novel is about shaking off patriarchy and tradition to find one’s own way in life. However, Nazneen’s growing sense of herself is mapped onto physical and material needs that can really be satisfied only by the indulgence of certain appetites. Her intensely physical relationship with Karim, while it lasts, provides her with a sense of herself as sexual and corporeal that she has previously been denied. Likewise, she experiences a fascination with the sparkling dresses that fit so tightly on the skaters she watches twirling on television. Moments of freedom are experienced through dress for her, too, as when she fantasizes: “If she wore a skirt and a jacket

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and a pair of high heels then what else would she do but walk around the glass palaces on Bishopsgate, and talk into a slim phone and eat lunch out of a paper bag? If she wore trousers and underwear . . . then she would roam the streets fearless and proud. And if she had a tiny tiny skirt with knickers to match and a tight bright top, then she would—how could she not?—skate through life with a sparkling smile and a handsome man who took her hand and made her spin, spin, spin” (277–78).63 The mention of Bishopsgate, with its “glass palaces,” is significant because it refers back to an incident early in the novel when Nazneen becomes lost in London’s financial and business quarter. Overawed by her surroundings, she contrasts her own aimless wandering with the impressively purposeful movements of the smart businessmen and women she sees. They come to symbolize possibility for her and, in what Ahmed calls “the curiously frictionless space of the financial city,”64 she marvels that “every person who brushed past her on the pavement, every back she saw, was on a private, urgent mission to execute a precise and demanding plan: to get a promotion today, to be exactly on time for an appointment, to buy a newspaper with the right coins so that exchange was swift and seamless, to walk without wasting a second and to reach the roadside just as the lights turned red” (56). Caught up in this swirl of activity, Nazneen feels a “leafshake of fear—or was it excitement?” (56). This part of the action takes place in the 1980s, during the financial boom of the middle years of the decade, when the Thatcherite neoliberal dream was beginning to be realized. Although Nazneen is on the outside looking in—and although she can never seriously expect to share in the power of the financial beneficiaries of the liberalization of markets—there are other ways in which the supposed benefits of this era of reform could have been hers. Much later in the novel, Chanu is mulling over the racism, ignorance, and poverty that prevent Bangladeshi immigrants from rising in British society and lamenting its effects on him and Mr. Iqbal, the local newsagent, when he is interrupted by his westernized daughter, Shahana, who informs him that “Mr Iqbal just sold his flat. . . . For one hundred and sixty thousand pounds. . . . He did Right to Buy. . . . Fifteen years ago. Paid five thousand pounds in cash” (321). The Right to Buy scheme was introduced by the Conservative government in 1980 as part of its tranche of policies designed to reduce the role of the state

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in people’s lives, in this case by giving council tenants the right to buy their homes at discounted rates. Although the move proved popular, the results have also been criticized for helping to fuel a subsequent house-price bubble, driving poorer people out of certain areas, and giving wealthy landlords the opportunity buy up properties and then rent them out again at inflated rates. My point here is that Shahana’s aside, the fetishization of financial workers in Bishopsgate, the idea of reinvention through dress and consumption, and the rejection of available community identification all work together to prepare us for the denouement, where individualism and economic agency reach their apotheosis. In fact, the character that most comes to embody entrepreneurial spirit as the valorized national trait for immigrants is not Nazneen but her friend Razia. Initially oppressed by a husband who is more interested in public acts of piety than in looking after his own family, Razia is the first woman to pick up the tailoring piecework with which Nazneen is also soon involved. Such “shameful” behavior is noted by Chanu, who views Razia as a bad influence on his wife. Yet this is only the first of Razia’s transgressions: she rejects the restrictions of the traditional sari, preferring to don a tracksuit and later a (heavily symbolic) Union Jack sweatshirt; takes English-language classes; and gets a drastic haircut. The process of “westernization” for Razia is not depicted as straightforward or easy—at one point she has to rescue her son from drug addiction—but she persists, at the end becoming the leading figure in a dressmaking collective the women set up. Razia leads the women in business acumen, becoming supplier to the significantly named Fashion Fusion boutique. She notes with amazement “how much these English are paying for their kameez” (480), spotting an opening in the market for exotic “ethnic” commodities. When the business is set up, she shows a sharp eye for profit, noting, for example, that extra beading on a garment will cost “five pounds extra per piece. They can take it or leave it” (480). Such business sense and entrepreneurship now sanction cross-city movements and exploration of the kind that Nazneen has previously only indulged in guiltily; as the business grows, Razia scopes new orders by traveling on the bus “to distant lands: Tooting, Ealing, Southall, Wembley” (481). With Nazneen as her designer, Razia, who has always been most closely linked with Britishness through dress and outlook, is also significantly the best businesswoman. It is

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telling that she gets the last word in the novel, reassuring Nazneen as she tentatively steps out onto the ice of an open-air skating rink, “This is England. . . . You can do whatever you like” (492). By the end of the book, it is hard not to see this ringing assertion as a rejection of “separatecultures” multiculturalism and an affirmation that progress and autonomy for women are to be found in integration, entrepreneurship, and economic independence.65 Michael Perfect notes how by the end of Brick Lane Nazneen “has begun to forge an economic and social role for herself as well as the familial one. In so reconciling individualization and socialization, Brick Lane might usefully be termed a ‘multicultural Bildungsroman.’ ”66 Although I would endorse the bildungsroman reading, this chapter has suggested that what is being offered is in fact a move away from multiculturalism as an inclusive, socially sustaining solidarity. Nazneen ends up as what is sometimes now known as a “mumpreneur”: a woman who can combine the traditional female role of childcare with entry into the previously masculine world of business and enterprise.67 If this is multiculturalism at all, it must logically be an example of that neoliberal multiculturalism identified by Kymlicka in which the aim is to create successful “ethnic” market actors.68 Moreover, the denouement brings Nazneen and her friends closer to that mode of independent individualism noted by Christina Scharff in her study of young Western women who reject feminism as a label, preferring to identify with choice and personal autonomy as opposed to collectivist action among women. Interestingly, Scharff finds that these young women’s sense of agency—and thus their assertion that feminism is no longer relevant to them—is juxtaposed against and therefore established through the argument that Muslim women in particular do not have such agency, being victims of patriarchal cultures and therefore more in need of the feminism these women have outgrown.69 Seen in this light, Brick Lane describes a journey by which its protagonist moves from multiculturalism through feminism to a final economically individualist position wherein the oppressed Muslim woman shakes off the shackles of patriarchy, tradition, and communal solidarity to arrive at the Promised Land of market independence. Not only are men redundant in this scenario—both Nazneen and Razia are free of their husbands by the end—but the kind of recognitionbased collectivism that has previously shaped Bangladeshi claims is cast aside in favor of integration with an ideology where the nation as a whole

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reemerges from the long sleep of economic protectionism to the postThatcherite dawn of enterprise and choice.

Taken together, The Black Album and Brick Lane offer a strong rejection of what they depict as the misguided channels of minority-group community assertion. In both cases, political multiculturalism is shown to lead to the dead ends of censorship and personal oppression—especially of women. It can certainly be objected that Kureishi’s celebration of the dissolute energies of the liberal lifestyle—embodied in the caricatural figure of Deedee—is insufficiently attentive to the fact that sexual emancipation has historically tended often to favor men and has resulted in women being forced into objectified pliancy by the male gaze. (There’s certainly an element of this objectification in Kureishi’s depiction of this character.) However, this lifestyle is still seen as preferable to a life of devout austerity in which all individuality must be surrendered. For Nazneen in Ali’s novel, the celebration of autonomy and feminist agency comes at the expense of the rejection of community politics and an endorsement of the entrepreneurial spirit: a path that has come to be increasingly valorized as social modes of support have been deliberately attenuated by successive governments. This movement from identity to individualism also seems characteristic of a broader social shift in ways of looking at empowerment. Nowadays, concern for egalitarianism and group rights is seen as less “sexy” than personal economic fulfillment as an active consumer. It remains to be seen how the inevitably widening inequalities produced by neoliberal economics react with what will by necessity become louder calls for redistributive justice. In one way or another, multiculturalism has proven remarkably durable, and claims of its demise are certainly exaggerated. However, in an era when Islamophobic policies are increasingly being adopted by governments in the United States and Europe, there must come a point where the targeted disciplining of those who are not deemed acceptable (and accepting) freemarket subjects produces direct conflict. It is not the job of novelists to produce programmatic blueprints for the coming struggle. Nevertheless, in novels such as The Black Album and Brick Lane we may see a roadmap that at least marks out part of the route by which we arrived here.

Chapter Three

MUSLIM MISERY MEMOIRS The Truth Claims of Exotic Suffering in Azar Nafisi and Khaled Hosseini

In the years immediately after 9/11, as the war on terror geared up, one could be forgiven for feeling a strange disconnect between appearance and reality. It was not just that the attacks seemed to visit an unprecedented anxiety on a still powerful United States but also that a governmental response calculated to capitalize on the trauma and desire for retribution led normal empirical rules to be suspended. Fact and political expediency appeared to have gone their separate ways, and the Bush and Blair governments’ insistence in early 2003 that Saddam Hussein had so-called weapons of mass destruction squirreled away somewhere in Iraq, despite the failure of United Nations weapons inspectors to find any, was only the most egregious example.1 There was also something slippery about the discourse of fear established in the wake of the New York and Pentagon terror attacks. Barry Glassner has described how war-on-terror rhetoric was carefully calibrated to stimulate fear, allowing for more visceral responses and the sidelining of reason.2 Such responses tended to encourage blind faith in the sagacity of politicians in time of war. Despite swift initial military successes in Afghanistan and Iraq, as the wholly inadequate plans for reconstruction in both countries were exposed and infighting and counterinsurgency created bloody intractability, U.S. government attempts to “sell” a constructed image of reality based on American commitment to liberty became more frantic.

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Propaganda began to sound more discordantly against the persistent litany of human rights abuses at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. The desire to promote the achievements of security forces, reconstruction work, and embryonic democracy became aligned with an urge to control, where possible, the burgeoning information fields of the media, Internet, and global communications. In 2006, the Pentagon’s Information Operations Roadmap laid out plans for information warfare, including “the creation of ‘Truth Squads’ to provide public ‘information’ to counter negative publicity.”3 In other words, at the same time that the Bush administration was launching its ill-fated war on terror, another even more fundamental battle was taking place: a battle over the nature of reality itself. All sorts of established truths were going to the wall, nowhere more clearly than in the realm of international relations, where the Bush “doctrine of integration” aimed to draw other nations into arrangements that would sustain U.S. interests, while established principles of national sovereignty and due process were overturned by the policies of preemption and regime change.4 What allowed the United States to claim the right to reshape the global order was its status as the sole surviving superpower: the only nation with the economic and military wherewithal to impose its will on a chaotic external reality. As we will see, this status sometimes meant resurrecting the discourse of empire, bolstering certain ways of seeing the (specifically Muslim) Other. However, one should also register the messianic quality present in the same discourse—something akin to those old colonial missionary narratives used to justify conquest. Critics have remarked on the quasi-religious fervor with which neoconservatives such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and their compatriots in the Project for the New American Century sought to reshape the world in American interests through the use of U.S. military supremacy.5 Ron Suskind described the Republican White House of this time as a “faith-based Presidency,” both in the sense that the Bush team’s decisions were often supposedly the result of prayer and contemplation and in the perhaps more significant sense that the president himself came increasingly to brook no dissent and expect a kind of blind faith from others.6 But what role did literature play in all this? To what extent can some of the writing produced in the post-9/11 period be said to have partaken of this reshaping of reality in the interests of ideology? And to what extent did

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literature challenge that reshaping? To answer these questions, I examine two examples of a subgenre that experienced an exponential boom in popularity and sales after September 11, 2001: those texts I would call “Muslim misery memoirs.” My examples are Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2004) and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2004).7 Muslim misery memoirs partake in large measure of the culturalist discourse that sees Muslims and Muslim lands as inherently different and threatening. They depict Islam as a source of oppression, drawing on an Orientalist historical template that for good measure also evokes recognizable types of totalitarian enemy—Nazism, communism—and the kinds of oppression of minorities and women the West has supposedly eradicated. Hence, they inscribe the regions they depict somewhat schizophrenically: as a potential threat to those freedoms cherished in the West if left unconfronted and as so backward that they are rendered supine in the face of a neoimperial project of rescue and modernization. The books specialize in moral certainties and primary colors when it comes to character and background. Their overarching message appears to be that rescue by the West, which is to say the U.S. military, cannot come soon enough for the benighted figures who haunt their pages and who suffer all manner of deprivation and abuse in the name of Islam.8 Moreover, as I show, such texts operate through a kind of exotic metonymy in which details of life under Islamic oppression come to stand in for a whole culture, reduced to certain extreme essences that operate to evacuate history and keep the reader firmly focused on personalized narratives that always claim greater political resonance. Yet, for all their seemingly confident moral prognoses, both texts I address in this chapter at the same time display an unexpected level of anxiety about the project of “unveiling” the East to the West and in particular about the legitimacy of writing as a mode of conveying an other culture with which they have a problematic relationship. The Kite Runner is beset by a gnawing anxiety about the adequacy of its narrative to account for the situation it describes. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, there are two Azar Nafisis present: one confident in her prognoses and assured in her tastes as she guides us and her students up and down the exalted slopes of Western literature; the other terrified that her point may be missed, that despite her best efforts there may be other ways to read and understand literature. Women often play a particular role in Muslim misery memoirs as carriers of cultural baggage and the focus of Western sympathy. The Muslim

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woman becomes the object of discourses by both modern secularists (including some feminists) and Islamic conservatives and fundamentalists: her body, the confines of her life, and her mode of dress being read for what they supposedly yield about the essential qualities of the cultures in which the she lives. In that sense, she becomes a stereotype, a fixed and unchanging signifier of timeless modes of life. However, as critics such as Mohja Kahf have noted, in the Western gaze the signifying power of the image of the Muslim woman has shifted through the ages, from its roots in pagan and Old Testament paradigms of the threatening female to the powerful queen or noblewoman of the Middle Ages and then, with the rise of European Romanticism and the project of colonialism, to the familiar figure of the oppressed female, incarcerated by tyrannical Muslim men in the harem or behind the veil.9 It is this latter figure, whose contemporary manifestation is the Iranian woman smothered by her chador or the shrinking, burka-clad Afghani woman, who still provides the clarion call for neocolonial interventionist adventures today. Leila Ahmed has identified the colonial basis of this trope, pointing out that the tendency to read the plight of the Muslim woman as indicative of the corruption of the entirety of Muslim culture has its roots in the discourse of colonial feminism employed by imperialists such as Lord Cromer, the consul general of Egypt and no friend of feminist campaigners at home in Britain, to castigate Arab Muslim society for its backwardness on the basis of its treatment of its womenfolk. Ahmed comments on how the same set of assumptions pervades even academic feminist scholarship: “To this day, the struggle against the veil and towards westernization and the abandoning of backward and oppressive Arab Muslim ways . . . is [sic] still commonly the framestory [sic] within which Westernbased studies of Arab women, including feminist studies, are presented.”10 Lila Abu-Lughod takes up and extends this point, indicating how such “culturalist” explanations for women’s oppression—which lay the blame squarely at the door of Islam—conveniently ignore the longer, entangled histories of the evolution of certain social systems, a story that, given the legacies of colonialism, the Cold War, and globalization, ought really to include Western support for the repressive regimes that have allowed such ideologies to thrive.11 In works such as those I analyze here, which totally omit any consideration of previous U.S. interference in each nation’s affairs, selective decontextualization allows the author to attribute all the

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abuses we see to a brute named “Islam” that works everywhere to curtail human rights. The rights of women in particular have been frequently invoked to justify the war on terror. One of the most celebrated high-level interventions came when U.S. First Lady Laura Bush, deputizing for her husband in his weekly radio broadcast to the nation in November 2001, took oppression of women in Taliban-held Afghanistan as her topic. “Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror,” she opined, “not just because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us.”12 Here, smuggled in with sympathy for the powerless, we find the additional frisson provided by the final clause: the Taliban and their ilk have their own imperial designs on us, so acting to depose them satisfies both our human altruism and our long-term self-interest. Hyperbole masquerading as common sense is a hallmark of the discourse and brings forth rhetorical connections that would otherwise surely be debatable; Laura Bush ended her broadcast by observing that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,”13 effectively challenging the more usual solidarities between feminism and antiwar struggles. Indeed, the fate of women tends to dominate the Muslim misery memoir. The form presumes its addressee to be a Western subject, possibly but not conclusively female, who will experience outrage and empathy in almost equal measure. They employ voice and perspective in particular ways so as to encourage certain types of interpretation, not just of the events narrated but also of the supposedly accurate political backdrop, and to foreclose others. Dohra Ahmad sums up the set of assumptions that motivates the technique used to describe the lot of women and the oppressed in Muslim misery memoirs: “These narratives allow women to speak, at least purportedly—but only in ways that are legible and familiar within the language and experience of American feminism. . . . [These women] are made over to look like us precisely so that we can take for granted what we are rescuing them to. Underneath an inconvenient and irritating layer of culture . . . lies a free liberal subject waiting to emerge into unproblematic selfhood.”14 In their inclusions and omissions and in the way they shape character and plot, Muslim misery memoirs ostensibly participate transparently in

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promoting those values of freedom and individual choice claimed to be at the heart of “our” side in the war on terror. As such, they can be seen to reinforce a hegemonic message in which potentially all societies run on Islamic lines are seen as inherently flawed and in need of intervention. Roksana Bahramitash goes so far as to say that “negative stereotypes of Muslims as part of the dominant ideology of North America are reinforced through institutions independent of the state such as the mainstream mass media.” For her, books such as Reading Lolita in Tehran “reinforce the message that the political elite seeks to convey.”15 Although I think this may be one effect of these books, it could be argued that their very qualities of rawness and at times crude propagandism actually distract from their endeavor to create fully convincing fictive simulations from which relevant lessons can be drawn for our “real world.” This distraction has to do with the matter of mimesis, the way the books make their truth claims, how they manage their reality effects. Exploring this issue also requires that we consider questions of genre because it, too, conditions how we receive and interpret literary texts.

If we understand the term realism to refer to an effect created by both a book’s subject matter and its form, we may wish to consider how that effect is received and processed. How should we understand what Michael Taussig has termed “the power of the copy to influence what it is a copy  of?”16 Many critics assume what one might—borrowing a phrase from media studies— call a “hypodermic” model of influence: readers encounter Muslim misery memoirs, take on board their shocking stories of brutality and oppression, and understand them as an accurate depiction of those parts of the world that feature as the settings, thus increasing the chances that they will support intervention.17 It is not my intention to contest what seems to me the incontrovertible fact that these texts form part of a broader current animus against Muslims and their culture. My point is, rather, that each text stakes its truth claims in part on the supposed objectivity guaranteed by the techniques of literary mimesis—that is to say, they create believable, three-dimensional worlds for the characters to inhabit and in which readers can immerse themselves— and in part on the expectations engendered by the rules of the genre to which the text belongs. These features are then underwritten, as in the cases

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of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Kite Runner, by the supposed authenticity of the author as a spokesperson hailing from that region of the globe under scrutiny. Significantly, only The Kite Runner claims to be a novel. Reading Lolita in Tehran is subtitled A Memoir in Books. Nonetheless, they share an arresting immediacy in their mode of address, a crystalline clarity that lends authority to sometimes slightly implausible events and encounters. Fatemeh Keshavarz sums up the qualities that make such “New Orientalist” texts successful: “They often have an informal tone and a hybrid nature that make for an accessible read. Most of them blend travel writing, personal memoir, journalistic reporting, and social commentary. They show an awareness of the power of the personal voice, nostalgia in exilic literature, the assurance that comes with insider knowledge, and the certainty of eyewitness accounts.”18 Now domiciled in the United States, Azar Nafisi and Khaled Hosseini can be read as the kind of “native informer” Hamid Dabashi identifies as crucial to the self-justification of neoimperialism. Dabashi says of such writers: “Faced with the Islamophobic conditions of their new homes, they have learnt the art of simultaneously acknowledging and denying their Muslim origins. They speak English with an accent that confirms their authenticity to their white interlocutors.”19 Dabashi’s polemic captures the way in which books such as Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Kite Runner peddle images that find a ready audience in the contemporary West. However, I wish to go further and consider how the texts’ formal ambiguities undercut their otherwise selective and simplistic worldviews. It is a truism of poststructuralist criticism that genre, like any other category, is defined by that which it is not. In his essay on genre, Jacques Derrida famously describes how the “law” of genre—to observe limits—is opposed by the “counterlaw”: that those limits will always nonetheless be transgressed. Thus, although genre supposedly organizes meaning in such a way as to avoid “impurity, anomaly or monstrosity,” in practice other forms, voices, and registers are always invading and troubling any notion of purity in genre.20 Contemporary theorists of genre agree. Gillian Whitlock comments on the fluidity and dynamism of genres. She also quotes John Frowe’s view that genres also have a regulatory function in relation to reality. They “are ‘fixes’ on the world that have formative power as representational frames. . . .‘[G]enres create effects of reality and truth that are central to the ways the world is understood.’ ”21 For Frowe, “genres are

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constellations of thematic, formal and historical dimensions, that organise knowledge about attitudes towards the discursive world they constitute and refer to.”22 Thus, we can understand the memoir form, utilized by Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran, as performing a task that is concerned to shape a recognizable reality using those linguistic forms, techniques, and tropes that the reader will identify both as appropriate to a genre that claims authenticity for itself and as guaranteeing truth vis-à-vis their reference to the real world beyond them. Yet the “purity” of the memoir form and thus its relationship to truth is inevitably compromised in Reading Lolita in Tehran because genre boundaries are never firm and because Nafisi’s own register—as we will see—wobbles markedly between the modalities of autobiography and fiction. Women’s life writing often transgresses generic boundaries, resulting in the kind of “inter-generic ‘contaminations’ ’’ that Bart Moore-Gilbert sees as common to all genres. As a form of narrative, autobiography, Moore- Gilbert says, relies on “such ‘fictive’ devices as the ‘emplotment’ of the protagonist’s trajectory in relation to particular moments of crisis . . . figurative language and self-conscious manipulation of ‘narrative voice.’ ”23 All of these features are evident in Nafisi’s memoir. The tension between novelistic techniques and memoir results in a kind of “shape-shifting” between fact and fiction. Keshavarz argues that, “as a memoir, the book borrows first and foremost the authority of the author’s personal voice. . . . Yet the book also ventriloquises other (often extreme) positions through characters.”24 I would argue yet another level of complication is introduced into Nafisi’s text by the canonical English and American novels it interpolates and comments upon. While lending a further aura of authority, these borrowings point up shortcomings in the rather narrow, judgmental perspective the narrator-teacher displays. In the end, it is not so much a case of generic ambiguity or transgression as of generic incompatibility, where contending elements in the narrative undermine and pull away from the central ideological message.

Reading Lolita in Tehran tells the story of Azar Nafisi’s spell holding illicit weekly English literature classes for seven young women at her home in Tehran in the mid-1990s. The action takes place in the years just before Nafisi’s departure for the United States in 1997 but ranges back in time to

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encompass her youthful idealism in the days before the revolution in 1979 and her vulnerable and ultimately untenable position as a university tutor in the Islamic Republic, where free thought and Western ideas are severely curtailed through censorship and periodic purges. As Nafisi reminds us, her story is told with hindsight, over a span of time that includes “offstage” political events such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and, more immediately, 9/11 and the war on terror. So a book that insistently contrasts the freedoms of the United States—the land of aspiration and fulfillment to which characters look for escape and a model of a better life—with the (particularly gendered) oppression of the Islamic Republic of Iran could expect a warm reception from many readers in the West.25 In a spirited demolition of Nafisi and her book, Hamid Dabashi has noted Nafisi’s connections with noted neoconservatives—some of whom, including Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, and Paul Wolfowitz, were advisers to or even members of the Bush administration. Dabashi sees Nafisi as a “native informer of the worst kind, a voice putatively from the troubled country of Iran but in fact an intellectual carpetbagger who provides the “public illusions that empires need to feed themselves.” Nafisi, he asserts, engages in the systematic denigration of Iranian culture in favor of advancing the literary glories and cultural superiority of her Western sponsors. Despite hailing from only a small body of privileged émigrés, Nafisi is taken to be the authentic voice of oppressed Iranian womanhood. Comparing the coarse picture she paints to the picture offered in Betty Mahmoody’s notorious text Not Without My Daughter (1984), Dabashi labels Reading Lolita in Tehran’s “ideological foregrounding of the American empire . . . [as] reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects.” Yet, says Dabashi, perhaps the text’s greatest sin is its evacuation of history: “What is impossible to miss is the almost total absence of any sort of Iranian context. . . . There is not a single word as to why millions of people poured into streets and risked (and often lost) their lives to topple one of the most savage military dictatorships in modern history. It is as if the sole purpose of the 1979 revolution had been to inconvenience Nafisi.”26 Nikki Keddie sees the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as the culmination of a fifty-year national transformation carried out by Mohammad Reza Shah and his father, Shah Reza Pahlavi, before him. Secular modernization— based on Atatürk’s model—was accompanied by rapid industrialization and infrastructural investment, legal and land reform, urbanization, and

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an expansion of the armed forces and governmental power.27 This period culminated in the oil crisis of 1973, in which the shah overplayed his hand in leading OPEC’s demands for a higher price for Iran’s oil, resulting in more money entering the Iranian economy, which led to inflation and shortages. Economic difficulties and the shah’s increasingly autocratic and authoritarian style, together with the rising power of a Shia clerisy aligned with merchants and students, allowed the conditions to emerge for the revolution.28 Keddie acknowledges the invidiousness of trying to trace revolutionary momentum to a single source but suggests that one crucial moment leading to the Iranian Revolution was the conspiracy between the CIA and MI6 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953.29 Yet this moment in itself can be seen merely as a way station in a journey that has its origins in the strategic position of Persia (as the country then was called) in the age of the European empires and, in particular, its economic penetration in the early twentieth century. In 1901, Britain was granted a concession to prospect in southern Iran, a move that led to oil’s discovery near Ahwaz in Khuzestan, southwestern Iran, in 1908, just as the British navy was moving from coal to oil as fuel for its ships. The strategic importance of Iran as a center for the West’s energy needs begins at this point and gathers pace with the establishment in 1914 of the AngloPersian Oil Company, later to become British Petroleum, or BP. But it was only after the Second World War, with the emergence of a popular nationalist movement in Iran, headed by Mossadeq and calling for the nationalization of Iranian oil—thereby providing the inspiration for Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser to do the same with the Suez Canal in 1956—that Western forces were prompted to intervene and stage a coup. Thereafter, the shah became increasingly dependent on Western and especially American support, much to the chagrin of many in the country, not least the Shia ulema.30 The reader will find none of this crucial historical context mentioned in Reading Lolita in Tehran. Not only would it distract from the text’s portrayal of the grim-faced psychopaths governing contemporary Iran as archetypal monstrosities that have somehow sprung fully formed from the darkest reaches of the human unconscious, but it might also give those forces a degree of historical rationale and taint the utopian view of  the United States. One might say that Nafisi’s use of the memoir form  has a strategic advantage here, allowing for a ground-level personal

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perspective that need not be concerned with much beyond the phenomenological experience of living under a clear and ever-present tyranny— certainly not with the untidy twists and turns of history. Nafisi instead deals in much more straightforward polarities. The most insistent of them is the juxtaposition of freedom and oppression. The former is enshrined in the United States, a country representing the future and a talismanic space whose allure is spread by the emergence of satellite television and the stories told by visiting relatives who now live there. The latter is the provenance of the Islamic Republic of Iran, life denying, backward, and unfree, where existence is a daily round of harassment, propaganda, and anti-American sloganeering. The role of the canonical Western novels that Nafisi shares with her students is to create small pockets of freedom: she contrasts “the open spaces the novels provided and the closed ones we were confined to.”31 The lack of freedom in Iran is experienced on a systemic level and prompts small gestures of rebellion—modifications in dress and forbidden activities in the private space of Nafisi’s apartment—that testify to the attraction of that which is being denied. Nafisi talks about the sometimes absurd effect of censorship on the cultural items they can access. This censorship is part of a broader set of postrevolutionary purges characterized by an anti-intellectualism that bursts out in the temporary closures of the universities and the harassment and even murder of artists and intellectuals. Amid the chaos, Nafisi outlines the elaborate preparations she and her students make ahead of their weekly meetings. Indeed, to the same degree that sensory pleasure is taboo in Iran, Nafisi and her students experience strongly the lure of the illicit, both in their relationships and in their tastes: Nafisi carefully chooses her clothes and makeup for each class; the respectable front maintained by one of her colleagues is described as hiding “insatiable desires” and “wayward longings” (163); Nafisi’s apartment symbolically contains a “love seat”; and after they have studied the novels, the students eat ham sandwiches and indulge in “beckoning” and sensual Persian dancing (265). Perhaps unsurprisingly in a society where all physicality is discouraged, simple experiences take on an erotic charge. Here, even a tea glass can be a source of arousal: its “honey-coloured liquid trembles seductively” (20). Interdictions against looking or being seen are, of course, directed primarily at women. If the male gaze always carries a threat, in Reading Lolita in

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Tehran looks between women—and the gaze of one woman on another— carry a host of resonances, many of them sexual. For instance, the text opens with a description of two photographs of the seven young women who make up Nafisi’s secret cohort. In the first, they all are clad in the obligatory burka; in the second, they have unveiled: “each has become distinct” (4), expressing an individuality the regime has tried to douse. The memoir’s take on veiling is very much that of standard Western and feminist objections to the practice—that it has to do with aggressive state control over women’s bodies. Yet the chance to unveil allows for the indulgence of a barely suppressed homoerotic urge that exists when Nafisi writes of her young female students: one reveals a “flirtatious pout”; another has “skin so transparent you could count the veins”; and a third transfixes Nafisi as  she shakes her “magnificent” hair from side to side (15, 16). Afsaneh Najmabadi has described how the conventional Western view of the veil as a gender marker of cultural difference overlooks its frequent function “as a marker of homosocial, homoerotic affectionate bonds among . . . women.”32 This description captures something of the quality in Nafisi’s gaze on these young women as they disrobe and also of the book’s broader affective schema in which the erotic is located in women’s hair, women’s bodies, and women’s dance, whereas (heterosexual) romance is to be found only in the pages of novels, never in the imperfect relations the women establish with their men.33 Describing life in Iran, Nafisi speculates: “We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure or virtuous. . . . What was alien to us was Eros, true sensuality” (304). Deferred sexual gratification is released only via the dubious route of martyrdom and those orgiastic rituals of public mourning that accompany the deaths of leading figures such as Ayatollah Khomeini. Compulsory veiling is only one of a series of oppressive impositions on women the book charts. Traditional, submissive roles are imposed, and rights curtailed. Nafisi describes how under the Islamic Republic “the laws had regressed to what they had been before my grandmother’s time. . . . The age of marriage was lowered to nine[;] . . . adultery and prostitution were to be punished by stoning to death; and women under law were considered to have half the worth of men” (261). Conventions are maintained by a phalanx of dictatorial male relatives who haunt the text—fathers, husbands, and brothers—while on the national level the Revolutionary Guards and morality police patrol relentlessly.

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Reading Lolita in Tehran may be viewed as a feminist text, then, inasmuch as it records what is claimed as a form of consciousness raising—the exposure of these browbeaten girls to the fresh air of the Western literary classics to show them that another way of life is possible. Friendship and solidarity between women are invoked against various types of abuse by men, and the literary heroines singled out for praise are those whose quiet rebellions paved the way for better women’s rights within the overall context of advancing human rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries— something that Iran is rowing away from but that the West can rescue. Throughout the text, there is a repeated inference that the source of this oppression, the reason Iran has gone so badly off the rails, is Islam. From the outset, Islam is seen as “an absolutist refuge” (103) for the cowardly, tyrannical, or just intellectually lazy. It is depicted as a rigid, totalitarian, ideological enemy of freedom akin to communism. Although the book seems at first glance to be a targeted indictment of the instrumentalization of religion by the Islamic Republic, in fact it attacks Islam as a whole for legitimizing oppression. There is no clear view of whether politically ambitious clerics have hijacked the religion or whether the religion itself is a tool historically shaped for use by aggressors—although the latter is implied by Nafisi’s wholesale dismissal of Islam in all its manifestations.34 Nowhere does Islam feature as a spiritually fulfilling site of comfort, only occasionally as a desperate security blanket resorted to by those seeking protection against social suspicion on the one hand and the unnerving challenges of real autonomy on the other. Indeed, inasmuch as Islam is directly discussed at all in the book, it is shown to be incompatible with Western values and freedoms—as in Nafisi’s blithe dismissal of what she calls the “myth of Islamic feminism—a contradictory notion, attempting to reconcile the concept of women’s rights with the tenets of ‘Islam’ ” (262). Several critics have homed in on this aspect of the novel’s message. Keshavarz describes this dismissal as “totalizing and silencing”—an insult to the many Muslim feminists in Iran.35 The idea that feminism is, in Dohra Ahmad’s ironic phrase, “exogenous to Iran” is contradicted by the many accounts of feminist activity there and, indeed, all across the Muslim world.36 Keddie describes the specific and local forms of feminism in modern Iran—some of them even tending to accommodation with Islamist movements; and miriam cooke records the activities of high-profile feminist groups working either within Islam or in Islamic contexts, such as the Revolutionary

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Association of Women of Afghanistan, the Afghan Women’s Network, and Women Living Under Muslim Laws.37 Nafisi’s particular trick is not only to snuff out any possibility of feminist practice or resistance from within Islam but also to disregard all kinds of feminist activity that does not originate in the West and coincide with secular values. The cavalier treatment of Islam and feminism is of a piece with the overall disdain for political commitment of any kind in the book. Nafisi recalls with some embarrassment her own youthful dalliance with radicalism in the shape of a thesis on the American Marxist writer Mike Gold and her flirtation with revolutionary protest in the run-up to 1979, which she now sees as a “mood,” akin to a teenage tantrum. Revolutionaries the world over, she dismissively states, are stuffed full of cant, spouting “sounds” from a received “script” and even tending to dress alike to emphasize their credentials (86, 165). The uniformity they display and require of others makes them no different from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. In Iran in particular, the secular Hard Left is condemned for its choice to compromise with the nascent Islamic Republic as part of a vainglorious fight against imperialism (112). By contrast, literature is a showcase for all those qualities, such as tolerance, ambiguity, and individual judgment, that politicos are expected to disavow. It transcends political bickering and is infused with “the honesty of imagination” (141). Instead of materialist ideology or the dangerous fantasies of religious maniacs, the greatest English and American novels offer rest and refreshment as well as an imaginative filter through which to come to a better understanding of ourselves and our world. Segments of the book are given over to working through these insights as Nafisi introduces her students to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and works by Henry James and Jane Austen. If all this and the memoir’s overriding investment in the aesthetic and formal appreciation of literature smack of the complacencies of the liberal humanist school of criticism from the early twentieth century, that is because the book is that school’s inheritor, and part of the aim is once more to revalidate its universalist claims for the contemporary world. Indeed, I would argue that the real political statement of the book—and hence its Islamophobia—in the end lies less in the strident denunciation of the Islamic Republic of Iran than in the universalist understanding of the meaning and value of literature that is proposed. The issue is not that

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Nafisi’s readings of each of the great novels she teaches are somehow Islamophobic or wrong. It is rather that these readings nestle against a uncompromisingly painted backdrop in which the “high” cultural artifacts of the West are deemed always superior to those of Iran—save perhaps for a few treasures of Persian literature from centuries ago—and in which the values these artifacts enshrine are used very markedly to emphasize Western culture and, by inference, the West’s social developmental trajectory as the norm, in comparison with which the Islamic East is always aberrant and inferior.38 The values enshrined in the great novels of the Western canon are claimed to operate irrespective of social, geographical, or any other context, and their meanings are claimed to be singular and unequivocal. Nafisi articulates a deeply conservative view of literature and criticism in keeping with those other near-contemporary volleys in the so-called curriculum wars of the 1980s and 1990s. As a response to the new, vigorous assertion of black rights as well as broader patterns of postimperial population movement, questions were raised from the 1970s on about the representativeness of the established canon of great literary works as an educational tool in the multicultural societies of the West. In the United States in particular, in tandem with minority self-assertion and a rise in migration from Latin America and Asia, moves were made to adjust university course content, to amend textbooks and anthologies to reflect the new demographics, and to challenge established white male hegemony. In this moment of multiculturalism, cultural pluralism was placed against melting-pot assimilationism.39 In response, a conservative backlash accused multiculturalists of introducing the taint of politics into the sacred and supposedly neutral space of Great Art. In reality, as David Theo Goldberg has pointed out, the struggle is one over visions of what America is and who should control it: “If the political charge against multiculturalism has meaning, then it implies that monocultural commitments are political also; indeed, that the struggle between them in the final analysis can be played out only on political terrain.”40 We are returned once more to that battle over the nature and legacy of humanism discussed earlier. On the one side is a vision of a progressive, selfcritical humanism, broad and open enough to allow for the modification of its list of sacred texts as part of an ongoing evolution of society. As its key proponent, Edward Said, puts it, “Whereas the humanities used to be

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the study of classic texts informed by ancient Greek, Roman and Hebrew cultures, a now much more variegated audience of truly multicultural provenance is demanding, and getting attention paid to a whole slew of formerly neglected or unheard of peoples and cultures that have encroached on the uncontested space formerly occupied by European cultures.”41 Ranged against this vision are conservative critics for whom a dilution of the given humanist heritage, carried out by politicized academics, constitutes an attack on the very fiber of society. Classic formulations of this position include books by figures such as Alan Bloom, Jacques Barzan, Mark Lilla, and Roger Kimball.42 After 9/11, the conservative side in this struggle was reemboldened with educationists such as William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife, who wrote of the attacks that they offered a “teachable moment,” implying that the values of white, Western, Judeo-Christian culture could be reasserted at the heart of curricula and society. Bennett, Cheney, and fellow neoconservative sympathizers produced an essay collection for schools indicating how teachers could use the terrorist outrage as a way of emphasizing conservative and patriotic cultural values. Containing contributions with titles such as “Seizing This Teachable Moment,” “Protecting Our Precious Liberty,” and “Preserving America, Man’s Greatest Hope,” the collection was part of a concerted attempt to restate “our” core values of civics and history in the face of their dilution by cultural relativists and direct attack by the terrorists.43 In this fraught atmosphere, Nafisi’s restatement of the Great Tradition is anything but neutral.44 Working defiantly against the historicizing schools of criticism that have emerged in literary studies in the past halfcentury or more, the text declares that the great novels transcend their own time and place and that their characters—and by implication we, the readers—achieve “development and maturity” by successfully negotiating life’s challenges (223). The royal “We” of liberal humanist criticism is resuscitated to inform us that the “beauty and perfection” of the Western canon as well as appropriate form enable such works to rise above the ugliness and shabbiness that sometimes constitute their subject matter, satisfying “the instinctive desire for beauty” (38, 47, 49). Great literature heightens our sensitivity, and, as is always the case in such pontificating, we are flawed beings if we dissent from the critic’s magisterial judgments. Thus, the declared universality of Western literature acts as a smokescreen for certain types of privilege, not least Nafisi’s own. There is no real sense of class

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in the novel, but rather an insistence on pedigree. Nafisi casually drops in her father’s one-time position as Tehran’s youngest ever mayor, mentions in passing her own schooling in Switzerland, and notes that her mother was one of the first six Iranian women elected to Parliament in 1963. It is presumably the legacy of the “fourteen generations” of Nafisis known for their “contributions to literature and science” (84) that has made her unusually sensitive to the beauties of fiction, and she is surprised and dismissive when one of her students rebukes her for her class complacency.45 Yet it is a characteristic feature of Nafisi’s text that it lacks the courage of its stated conviction in a humanist notion of literary transcendence. Notwithstanding its insistence that “a novel is not an allegory” (111), Reading Lolita in Tehran proceeds to invest each of the classic novels it invokes with a direct political message for its besieged Iranian readers and for us. In a series of mini-essays inserted into the chapters’ ongoing story of Nafisi and her girls, we are treated to the teacher’s expositions of the overarching meaning of each novel studied, interpretations that emphasize the novels’ pertinence to the moment. For example, Lolita is used to inform us that “at some point the truth of Iran’s past became as immaterial to those who appropriated it as the truth of Lolita’s is to Humbert. It became immaterial in the same way that Lolita’s truth, her desires and life, must lose colour before Humbert’s one obsession” (37, emphasis added). Novel and Iranian reality, like Humbert and Lolita, are bound together by “the pervasive intimacy of victim and jailer” (37). Thus, at the core of Lolita there lies a lesson in democracy and self-determination, something denied by the predator who steals his captive’s life. Similarly, The Great Gatsby “is not a comment on America as a materialistic country, but as an idealistic one, one that has turned money into a means of retrieving a dream” (142); and Austen and James respectively teach us about the importance of choice—that talismanic neoliberal nostrum—and the value of ambiguity, set directly against the absolutism espoused by the Iranian revolutionaries and their student acolytes. Crucially, these qualities are also enshrined in the novel form itself. Nafisi sees the novel as having “a basically democratic structure” (187), as in the case of Pride and Prejudice, where “all tensions are created and resolved through dialogue” (268). On several occasions, Nafisi remarks on the form’s polyphonic and hence “democratic” propensities as well as its capacity for ambiguity and eschewal of absolutes (132, 187, 268).46 At the center of this

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claim is the capacity to inspire empathy: “It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes” (118), and “this respect for others, empathy, lies at the heart of the novel” (224). Truisms about empathy’s centrality to the novel form—ensured through its polyphony and by inference aligned with liberal politics—are repeated like a mantra. So, too, is the invocation of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” a right also at the heart of the novel protagonist’s quest throughout history and supposedly coming closest to realization in the United States of America. Seldom can a text have sought so egregiously to flatter the vanities of its assumed readership while at the same time flagellating an entire other culture. Even so, a certain awkwardness in Nafisi’s own artistic execution, contrasted with the humane expansiveness of those writers she would celebrate, points up a narrative voice that is shrill and intolerant. In practice, Nafisi cannot reproduce such generous capaciousness in her own work, being dogmatic and domineering in her interpretations of the “true” meaning of each of the novels she teaches, cutting off those students who disagree or who venture other readings and continuously speaking for those favored few with whom she sympathizes. This tendency is exposed most starkly in the “trial of Gatsby” section, where Nafisi organizes her university class in a mock trial of Fitzgerald’s novel for its alleged immorality. The trial of Gatsby is also that of literature and art. It works as a microcosm of the ideological conflicts at play in postrevolutionary Iran. The appointed “prosecutor,” a fundamentalist male student named Nyazi, states that the role of art and culture is to support revolutionary values as laid down by Khomeini. His opponent, “defence counsel” Zarrin—one of Nafisi’s pet students—counters by quoting Diderot on how style and form act as guarantors of the purity of a work’s morals (129). The rather ineffectual Farzan stands in as judge, while Nafisi represents the defendant, Gatsby. However, it is soon evident that this “trial” is not an innovative pedagogical device but actually a platform for Nafisi to impose her values and readings on both court and readers. As the scene goes on, she interrupts more and more, eventually becoming defendant, defense counsel, judge, and jury rolled into one. Zarran is allowed some space to speak, but only to the extent that she parrots her teacher’s assertions and even misreadings. They insist on taking Gatsby’s narrator, Nick Carraway—with his curious ellipses and, at other times, pretensions to omniscience, surely one of the most unreliable narrators in modern literature—too much at

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his own estimation as a plain-dealing reporter of what he witnesses. They see him as a mirror by which a true vision of the novel’s events can be perceived, and they fail to spot his crucial tendencies toward hyperbole. This issue is not so much a small matter of interpretative disagreement as an example writ large of Nafisi’s tendency to steamroll all other viewpoints. The somewhat overbearing narrative voice of Reading Lolita in Tehran, with its confident expositions of the true meaning of each work, brooks no dissent either from the more politically engaged of her students or from her readers. We are simply expected to accept what we are told. In place of that celebrated novelistic polyphony, Nafisi’s memoir employs what we might call a carefully controlled directive monologue— editorializing, interpreting, and attempting to suppress any critical engagement. All voices are homogenized and subsumed.47 To be sure, there are some coy disclaimers thrown in early on, appealing to the readerly imagination to bring work and characters to life. Yet these disclaimers are less moments of postmodern hesitation than they are pseudo-Shakespearean requests to the reader to allow her characters to work on our imaginary forces. The play of imagination and fiction here serves to preserve a space that the statist Thought Police cannot reach. Equally, the mysterious figure of Nafisi’s so-called Magician—a sort of confessor who takes his name from a Nabokov short story and who, as a dissident subject, is said almost to have ceased to exist—also bends to authorial will, despite his metafictional trappings. Although he is depicted as a supposedly semimythical figure who has “created an elaborate fiction out of his relationship with the world” (173), he remains a mirror for Nafisi herself, a cut-price Wizard of Oz, confirming her in the rightness of her own decisions and urging her to have the courage of her convictions. Then there are the text’s peculiar digressions—the most memorable being the non sequitur chapter containing an account of Henry James’s support for the First World War. Following almost immediately after a section commenting on the futility of the Iran–Iraq War and the bogus rhetoric of martyrdom surrounding Iranian soldiers, we are regaled with James’s anguished but steadfast support for Britain in its war against Germany almost one hundred years earlier and his efforts to encourage America to become involved, too. Extracts from James’s journals and letters chime strangely with the justifications of the contemporary war on terror, as if to indicate that there can indeed be just wars. Nafisi says of James: “While he

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mourned the mutilation of existence, he had endless admiration for the simple courage he encountered, both in the many young men who went to war and in those they left behind” (214). Even some of the images have a familiar ring; James wrote to Edith Wharton of the war as a “crash of Civilisation” (quoted on 216). But Nafisi also speaks for James, too, making him acknowledge “Europe’s depravity, it’s fatigue with its own past,” sounding for all the world like Donald Rumsfeld lambasting “Old Europe” for its skepticism about the new imperial realities of the early twenty-first century.48 This whole peculiar insertion makes sense only as a coded engagement with issues of courage and a sense of civilization under threat that form part of the patriotic rhetoric of the Bush era. It is sometimes said that an author writes with one eye on a particular audience or type of reader. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi turns full face toward an obviously non-Muslim American reader with a stare of disconcerting fixity, willing—almost begging—that reader to respond in the desired manner to the lesson she seeks to inculcate. To that end, nothing is left to chance, no room allowed for dissent from the book’s determined humanist message. Nafisi’s Islamophobia exists in her text’s surface-level endorsement of the neoconservative culturalist suspicion of Islamic societies as hostile and inferior and operates through aesthetic value judgments as much as through a depiction of the miasma of Orwellian tyranny that pervades Iran and overshadows the lives of her students. Nafisi proposes that the Euro-American novel embodies certain political potentialities—democracy through polyphony, dialogicality, and choice— even as she claims that the greatest novels are apolitical. Moreover, her attribution of these qualities to each of her chosen writers exists in tension with the stark fact that they are nowhere to be found in her own work; she always, but always, has the last word. Writing of Nabokov’s particular skill in taking us inside the mind of the monstrous Humbert, Nafisi notes how Lolita remains Humbert’s creature, seen always through his eyes and only “in passing glimpses” (36). Quoting Nabokov, she calls this technique “solipsization” (37). As elsewhere, we are primed to interpret this observation as a comment on the proprietorial relationship of the Islamic Republic to its citizens, especially its women. Yet it also serves accurately to describe Nafisi’s own relationship to all the characters that frequent the pages of her memoir, including those whom she calls “my girls” (51).49 We are told that true novelistic villains, as exemplified by

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Mrs. Newsome, the tyrannical matriarch in James’s novel The Ambassadors, have “dictatorial minds” (249). Nabokov’s skill and his “beautiful language” (41) unnervingly lead us into complicity with this monster, who is “a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives . . . Humbert, like most dictators was interested only in his own version of other people” (48). Here for once, in a text that constantly strives to keep all its elements firmly within its rigid grip, is an irony that manages to be entirely unself-conscious.

In his classic statement on “the concept of realism in literary scholarship,” Rene Wellek identified how “impersonality” came to be the main requirement of realism: “the complete absence of the author from his work, the suppression of any interference by the author.”50 Clearly, the memoir form suits Azar Nafisi as a writer disinclined to allow autonomy to her characters in the more usual novelistic way. In that sense, the truth claims of Reading Lolita in Tehran lie elsewhere—that is, in the deployment of detail that creates verisimilitude and draws in the reader. Matthew Potolsky offers an insight into this process that has much to tell us about how Muslim misery memoirs gain the assent of their Western audience: “Details in realist works highlight the artist’s observational fidelity. . . . Yet the realist detail is also a highly conventional stylistic technique. Jakobson, for example, argues that realist details are based on . . . metonymy. Unlike metaphor, which compares dissimilar things, metonymy substitutes one thing for something associated or close to it. . . . Realist metonymies create an entire world by way of such associations: one or two details imply the possibility of infinite details ‘outside’ the scene that might have been described.”51 Realist details in Muslim misery memoirs rely on such associations, but they are always deeply imbued with a particular kind of exoticism. As Graham Huggan has pointed out, the exotic is a “mode of aesthetic perception” rather than an innate characteristic of what is being observed.52 I want to suggest that Nafisi’s truth claims are bolstered by a deployment of the exotic, with particular political effects that are consistent with the colonial way of looking, in which the modern exotic has its roots. Reading Lolita in Tehran and other Muslim misery memoirs employ what I would call “exotic metonymy” as a way to produce reality effects. Certain items such as foodstuffs, home comforts, and aspects of the environment are

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foregrounded in such a way as to stand in place of other facets of the culture that are less integral to the picture the author wishes to convey or to downplay. For example, in Reading Lolita in Tehran, the world of Nafisi’s literary salon is conjured with images of its “necessary components”: “misty windows, steaming mugs of coffee, a crackling fire, languorous cream puffs, thick wool sweaters and the mingling smells of smoke, coffee and oranges” (257). At other times, Nafisi eats baked piroshki and café glace while looking out at the snow-capped mountains. However, in Muslim misery memoirs such images tend to perform the particular function of obscuring overall social complexity and, in particular, class or ethnic inequality. Three dimensionality is sacrificed to a flat depiction focusing on the tribulations of a small social circle and their importunate oppressors, taken then to be representative of the whole. Thus, in the text’s exotic metonymy, the realities and most of the people are evacuated from its version of Iran, and set in their place (standing in for them) are exotic foodstuffs, oppressed women, and religious fanatics. In Nafisi’s book, such metonymy is used to valorize the avowedly secular and sensual: details of comparative luxury and indulgence provide some relief from the stifling expectations of the ruling religious ideology. These are the two polarities with precious little in between. However, there is another mode of exotic metonymy having to do with Islam that is anything but cozy. Huggan argues that in the exotic “authenticity is invariably manufactured to meet a set of ideological needs.” It is judged according to certain criteria set by the dominant viewing culture, which include “the perceived need to recapture a sense of threatened cultural identity . . .; the desire to rejuvenate one culture by siphoning off the attributes of another; the repressed wish to save face, or salve conscience, by praising a culture . . . that one has previously insulted; and so on.”53 Such categories certainly account for that kind of warm, appealing exoticism whereby consumers can sample artifacts from other parts of the world—a Nigerian mask, a Jaipuri rug, and so on—in a way that gives the impression of being neutral or even affirmative. However, none of these explanations quite captures the resonance of the exotic gaze when focused on the Islamic world more broadly. Here, rather than rejuvenation, belated praise, or the comforting lure of food or fabrics, the exotic is affected directly by politics. With Muslim misery memoirs, the Western publishing industry and its readers are attracted to books that claim to give us the inside story on Muslim cultures

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because they seem to offer a handle on what is both alien and threatening. The artifacts of “soft” exotic culture, such as local cuisine and folk practices, are packaged attractively to emphasize a common yet culturally unfamiliar humanity, but they are always also either implicitly or explicitly contrasted with the repressive surrounding dominant political, social, and religious formation of Islam. In the modern “global village,” items from India, the Caribbean, and parts of Africa lend themselves quite readily to conventional exotic commodification. For Muslim societies, in contrast, the Western desire to claim and domesticate them remains but is always marked by an Islamophobic estrangement that gives that desire a certain urgency and aligns it with existing discourses of civilizational threat. An example of this is the way in which the Afghan national sport buzkashi is invoked in post-9/11 novels about that country. Both Khaled Hosseini and Åsne Seierstad mention the sport in their works, The Kite Runner and the best-selling journalistic account The Bookseller of Kabul (2004), respectively, as does Nadeem Aslam in The Wasted Vigil (2009), a text I explore in chapter 6. Buzkashi involves teams on horseback attempting to drag an animal carcass toward a target area, while opponents try to dispossess each other by any means necessary in a melee of hooves and dust. Hosseini briefly mentions a buzkashi game that his protagonist, Amir, sees as a child with his father, during which Henry Kissinger is pointed out to him as a fellow spectator in the stands—the closest Hosseini comes to acknowledging the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan’s travails.54 Seierstad, as befits the ethnographic tenor of her book, provides a more detailed description of a “buzkashi fight,” focusing on participants’ costume and venturing a reading of the sport’s sociological significance: “To emerge as a strong leader it is necessary to take part in buzkashi fights and not merely ride around in circles outside the chaos, but commit oneself to the heat of battle. But everything has a price. Sometimes mighty men pay to win.”55 Seierstad’s description gives a good indication of the metonymic potential of the sport, encapsulating ambition, violence, and, where necessary, corruption: all facets of modern Afghanistan, according to the Western view. Buzkashi in these novels is an exotic folk curiosity with the frisson of a blood sport, channeled to metonymically figure the marshal qualities and effortless horsemanship of a warrior society. Yet its tinge of unruliness and threat becomes more troubling when linked in the reader’s

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mind with the supposedly aggressive religion of Islam overlaid on the same geographical terrain. The sport suggests a pathological propensity to violence, an unpredictability that, along with Afghanistan’s famously inhospitable landscape—the graveyard of armies down the centuries— broods over everyday life. Kite fighting performs a similar function in Hosseini’s novel. It is explicitly linked to warfare: its young adherents compare the “battle scars” caused by the sharp glass glued to kite strings to help bring down opponents’ kites, and there are no “rules,” only customs—an observation designed to resonate with what the reader may know of the Afghan polity at large (43–45). Kite fighting and the retrieval of fallen kites—kite running—may form one of the childhood bonds between Assef and his closest companion, Hassan, and be the means by which the adult Assef finally bonds with Hassan’s son, Sohrab. Yet the prestige the activity confers, which draws adult onlookers, too, clearly invests it with a greater significance. The use of kite running is, therefore, both metaphorical and metonymic. It is of a piece with the novel’s more general deployment of details that are frequently culturally didactic and quasi-ethnographic. Exotic foods are again presented; Eid is explained for the uninitiated; and when Amir returns to a denuded Kabul as an adult, we have a lengthy journalistic description of the privations of life under the Taliban. As in Nafisi’s book, such impressions, fed to us by our focalizer Amir, now a resident of the liberal city San Francisco, flatters a readerly sense of cultural superiority at the same time as it evokes a familiar image of the perennially failing Muslim nation.56 In fact, the obvious binary oppositions that form the novel’s spine are, if anything, more calcified and noticeable than they are in Reading Lolita in Tehran. Truth is opposed to lies: innocence to guilt; freedom to tyranny; cowardice to bravery; optimistic, fair-minded America to melancholic, self-destructive Afghanistan; and action to the rather slippery and unsatisfactory activity of writing. Encompassing all is the contrast of good and evil, invoked at the start by Rahim Khan’s call to Amir, urging him to return to Afghanistan, where “there is a way to be good again” (2, emphasis in original). Thereafter, the novel is structured in three unequal sections outlining the childhood bond between Amir and Hassan, sundered by the  former’s cowardice when he forces Hassan from the family home to assuage his own sense of guilt at not intervening when his friend is raped by

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the local bully; Amir’s travails in America as a refugee with his ailing father; and Amir’s return to Afghanistan in 2001 to rescue the now dead Hassan’s endangered son, Sohrab, and to atone for his earlier sins. Direct, plain language once more adds to the power of this retrospective rite-ofpassage novel. Amir tells us: “I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975” (1). Despite its sharp evocation, especially of an Afghan childhood in the 1970s, The Kite Runner is somewhat overplotted and intrusively patterned, its coincidences and the reappearance of characters such as the bully turned Taliban leader Assef introducing an almost fabular quality that emphasizes the text’s artifice. Indeed, some critics have been encouraged by this artifice to read the text as an allegory of, variously, nation building, human rights discourse, or transnational identity.57 Encouragement for this approach can be found in the plentiful supply of correspondences between the protagonist’s life and national and international events. When Amir becomes a writer, his first novel is published in 1989, “the year that the cold war ended, the year the Berlin Wall came down[,] . . . the year of Tiananmen Square,” and the year of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (160). Similarly, Hassan ends up living near Bamiyan, where the famous Buddhist statues fall victim to Taliban dynamite, and the broken bodies of the inhabitants of Kabul symbolize a broken Afghanistan. Most strikingly, Hassan’s rape by Assef prefigures the subsequent rape of the entire nation by the Deobandi extremists who count Assef as one of their number. Hosseini does not dehistoricize Afghanistan to the extent that Reading Lolita in Tehran does Iran. Nevertheless, The Kite Runner’s view of history is highly selective. At one point, the adult Amir’s guide in Kabul curses, “The people behind the Taliban. The real brains of this government . . . Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis” (227). We might consider this list incomplete if we trace to source the rise of the mujahideen as an anti-Soviet fighting force in the 1980s, before it spawned the Taliban. Ahmed Rashid describes how “between 1982 and 1990 the CIA, working with the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan] and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, funded the training, arrival and arming of some 35,000 Islamic militants from 43 Muslim countries in Pakistani madrassahs to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. This global jihad . . . was to sow the seeds of Al Qaeda.”58 Hosseini fails to include this important point, nor does he show how the withdrawal of U.S. interest in Afghanistan after the Soviet drawdown left a vacuum that was

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filled by long-standing ethnic tensions, leading to civil war, after which the Taliban—formed by Mullah Omar in the mid-1990s and soon attracting the interest of the newly arrived Osama Bin Laden—took power across the country. Once more, the avowedly partial view, first of the child and later of the expatriate, obviates any need to paint a fuller picture. Nonetheless, history does have consequences for the main characters. At the heart of Hosseini’s book is the legacy of Afghan ethnic inequality and violence that always haunts the relationship of the Pashtun Amir and the Hazara Hassan. Amin Saikal has described how earlier attempts to build an Afghan nation from various ethnicities and a complex system of clan and patronage tended to take on an ethnic coloring. For successive rulers trying to bring together these fissiparous elements, “a modicum of national cohesion was maintained by instituting a single group (Pashtuns) as an overlord vis-à-vis all others.”59 Amir and Hassan are the direct inheritors of such divisive policies. The Hazaras are a Persian-speaking minority from central Afghanistan, who may have central Asian or Mongolian heritage. Constituting around 20 percent of the population, they have been subject to systematic discrimination by the Pashtun majority, with massacres and ethnic cleansing used to displace and demoralize them.60 Despite their childhood bond, Amir is always aware that Hassan is “just a Hazara,” even using the observation to justify fleeing the scene when Hassan is assaulted (68). He acknowledges his own class and ethnic privileges, but the layer of  historically ingrained prejudice remains. Despite his protestations about the boys’ youthful closeness, their relationship is always marked by power. Moreover, when it emerges that Hassan is in fact Amir’s halfbrother—sired by Amir’s father on his Hazara servant’s wife in an act of appropriation clearly redolent of the wider ethnic imbalance—the book’s central relationships likewise take on a symbolic quality. The sensitive and bookish Amir is forever trying to gain paternal approval from Baba, his father, a self-made businessman and philanthropist whose physical prowess and civic-minded generosity have made him a local legend. The irony is that their reconciliation—after Amir wins the annual kite fight— takes place at the cost of Hassan’s humiliation and banishment. Sunni Pashtuns always win, and Shia Hazaras are always beaten. This sectarian, ethnicized discourse is also central to the outlook of the novel’s unequivocal villain, Assef. A gigantic figure with steely blue eyes that betray the madness within him, Assef displays a villainy and sadism so

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extreme as to be almost parodic. Not only does he personally take the lead in a public stoning, but he is also guilty of homosexual rape, pedophilia, and drug abuse. These composite sins cast Assef as the embodiment of the hypocrisy and excesses of the Taliban. Yet he is also half-German, with an unbounded admiration for Hitler, wishing to build a homeland based on racial purity that will exclude the likes of Hassan: “ ‘Afghanistan is the land of Pashtuns. It always has been, always will be. We are the Afghans, the pure Afghans, not this flat-nose here. His people pollute our homeland, our watan. They dirty our blood.’ He made a sweeping, grandiose gesture with his hands. ‘Afghanistan for the Pashtuns I say. That’s my vision’ ” (35). Assef’s mixed Afghan–German heritage not only belies his insistence on racial purity but also strikes an odd note in the book’s unfolding of modern Afghanistan’s ills. In fact, I would argue that Assef’s hybrid background is designed to offer a point of recognition to the Western reader, whose sense of what actually constitutes a tyranny in need of confrontation may have been blunted or confused by the chaotic history of Afghanistan, where no one ever seems to fully take charge. Assef-as-Nazi makes him a recognizable figure of threat, a viable enemy. As Kristy Butler says, “What seems like a frightening plan for Afghanistan’s future aligns with a terrifying reality that haunts the West’s past. . . . The West cannot ignore this evil once it is identified.”61 In this respect, Assef may be a further example of that tendency within Western political rhetoric over the past half-century or so to portray every figure with the temerity to oppose the West and its agendas—from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and Osama Bin Laden—as a reincarnation of Hitler.62 Assef must be “domesticated” as a Nazi to make his threat palpable: the Taliban are too distant and amorphous to work the trick on Western readers. The stark delineation of good and evil in the book is consistent with a simple, homespun morality wherein political forces are compressed into questions of personal conduct. The heavily literalized David-and-Goliath battles between Assef and his Hazara victims culminate when Sohrab blinds Assef with a slingshot. It is not necessary to explore all the cultural resonances of employing that particular story (twice in fact) as a symbol of good triumphing against overwhelming odds. Instead, we may simply note it as consistent with a worldview where moral instruction comes courtesy of the John Wayne Westerns that Amir and Hassan enjoy watching as boys, in which redemption takes place through action and, more specifically,

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revenge. When Sohrab expresses remorse at the blinding of Assef, Amir counters, “There are bad people in this world, and sometimes bad people stay bad. Sometimes you have to stand up to them. What you did to that man is what I should have done to him all those years ago” (278).63 In any case, what is important is that this universal morality needs no religious underpinning. Whereas Baba is a militant agnostic whose somewhat flexible personal morality is revealed to be a matter of convenience, Amir’s skepticism gives way to a rediscovery of faith as he waits for news after Sohrab’s suicide attempt. Yet it is made clear that the God Amir rediscovers is not of the severe Deobandi type. Rather, he finds God in the house of science, the hospital where he falls to his knees to pray for Sohrab’s recovery. By contrast, mosques are at the very least ambiguous spaces, often architecturally beautiful but also the habitat of blinkered mullahs and their absurd diktats. Most of all, religion should not be imposed on others. As David Jefferess puts it, “By conforming to the narrative expectations of the western reader, and affirming the dominant cultural values of that reader (i.e. religion as personal), the novel translates difference into sameness.”64 Hosseini’s broad-brush approach results in a rattling good yarn, well told. However, at points a more persistent, explicit anxiety about the efficacy of storytelling and of writing in particular troubles the novel. The text is especially interested in the tension between open and honest communication and types of mask and deceit. Amir is a wordsmith and ultimately a successful professional writer. As he comments early on, “Words were secret doorways and I held all the keys” (26). Indeed, he uses literacy as a weapon. He toys with Hassan, bowdlerizing those stories he reads to his illiterate friend and inserting his own flights of fancy into them. His devious act of planting money beneath Hassan’s pillow and then lying about it as part of a plan to be rid of Hassan’s conscience-troubling presence is symptomatic of the way that words act as a protective screen between Amir and the world and his responsibilities in it. By contrast, Hassan is always entirely open and honest, a literalist to the point of naivety. His fidelity to Amir and insight into the other’s conflicted feelings cause him to admit the theft, thereby disgracing himself and his father and ensuring his removal from the home—all to assuage Amir’s unease. Amir, the manipulator of words, confesses: “To this day I find it hard to gaze directly at people like Hassan, people who mean every word they say” (48).

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On a more fundamental level, too, the adult Amir feels discomfort in his chosen profession. He displays qualms about the adequacy of writing to do justice to his experiences and those of others. Just as Baba sneers at Amir’s childhood ambition to be a writer—“Stories, you mean. You’ll make up stories” (117)—so, as an adult, Amir is repeatedly questioned in ways that gnaw at the utility of his vocation in an age of war and terror. He responds to his future father-in-law’s inquiry “Will you be writing about our country, history perhaps?” with an embarrassed “I write fiction” (121) and has to explain when asked by a character in bombed-out Kabul if he writes about Kabul’s contemporary fate, “Well, I’m not that kind of writer” (206). In a novel where Baba perpetrates the biggest lie of all—hiding his paternity of Hassan—while still insisting that lying (that is “stealing the truth”) is the worst kind of theft, the whole notion of weaving a world in words is called into question. After all, what is fiction making if not lying? Anxiety about the status and relevance of fiction is also woven into the novel’s resolution. It troubles the otherwise highly conventional ending, when Amir and Sohrab repeat the earlier kite battle, now in the safety of a San Francisco park. Even as the narrator Amir sets up his somewhat sentimental denouement, he reflects on the inadequacies of fictional consolations: If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab, and me ends with happiness, I wouldn’t know what to say. Does anybody’s? After all, life is not a Hindi movie. . . . Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end, kamyab, nah-kam, crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis. . . . Closing Sohrab’s door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night. (411–13)

Although such moments gesture to a truth claim that transcends literary clichés, they are frequent enough to form something like an existential crisis in the novel. They draw our attention back to other aspects that seem either undercooked or overdetermined by an imposed fictional pattern. For instance, the character of Hassan—with his doglike devotion to his “master” Amir, his odor of sanctity, and his status as sacrificial lamb, raped, wrongly condemned for theft, and then senselessly murdered—never rises

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above the level of archetype of victimhood. Although he may indeed allegorize Hazara suffering under the Taliban, in this story he acts mainly as a function of Amir’s exculpatory narrative arc. Hassan dies (symbolically more than once) that his master might live—and live in luxury, too, in the Land of the Free, “where you could step into a grocery store and buy any of fifteen or twenty different types of cereal. The lamb was always fresh and the milk cold, the fruit plentiful and the water clear” (232). The events we read of come about only when a call from the past stirs memories long buried. Hassan operates as friend, support, and prompt to conscience but never really exists as an individual in his own right. In the end, we may ask whether The Kite Runner is in the business of depicting ethnic inequality in Afghanistan, critiquing it from an American perspective, or—in the narcissism of the narrating voice—merely reinforcing it.

I have tried in this chapter to indicate the ways in which Muslim misery memoirs partake of but at the same time always problematize the ideological messages of war-on-terror discourse. In doing so, I am working against the grain of the majority of criticism thus far produced on the subgenre, which is more often concerned with locating the novels as part of an overarching political discourse concerned to marginalize Muslims in the interests of geopolitical imperatives.65 This other kind of criticism performs the inestimable service of demonstrating how Muslim misery memoirs occur in specific contexts and are but a single brick in the ever-rising wall of imagery by which prejudice against Muslims may be fostered and consent to Euro-American domination manufactured. Hamid Dabashi’s comment about Reading Lolita in Tehran—that it is “the necessary emotive addendum to Fukuyama and Huntington/Lewis’s dual thesis of civilisational conflict”66—can equally apply to The Kite Runner. Their truth claims support a “new common sense”67—a new reality, I would say— about Muslims that relies on tropes of threat and victimhood equally. This new common sense serves to normalize certain attitudes and thereby certain policies, too. Moreover, as products in a global market, Muslim misery memoirs “connect publishers, readers and critics in the ebb and flow of ideoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes and ethnoscapes,” those “global networks of communication, trade and migration” by which modern reality is formed, according to Gillian Whitlock (drawing on Arjun Appadurai).

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Each of the texts I have examined “trades as a lucrative commodity in global networks sustained by desires for exotic orientalisms.”68 The Islamophobia in these texts is often identified on the level of content and message. I have tried to show in this chapter that aspects of form— such as the use of omniscience or the promotion or downplaying of different voices—may also underpin this project but that, as often as not, these same tactics expose the effort involved in constructing a unified vision supportive of power agendas. The texts are always conflicted, even as they make their self-confident claims to credibility.

Chapter Four

MIGRANT CARTOGRAPHIES Islamophobia and the Politics of the City Space in Amy Waldman and H. M. Naqvi

When we think about Islamophobia, we tend to envisage direct hostility to Muslims, their belief systems, and their culture that might lead on to discrimination or violence. It may be practiced through prejudicial statements or direct physical harassment. However, if, as I am arguing, we need to think more broadly about the legitimizing frames of thought that allow Muslims to be “Othered” in a whole variety of ways—through pathologization, traditions of “common sense,” or ways of reading texts—we can extend our field of study. We ought also to consider the practical impact of such Othering: the way that day-to-day life can be constrained and opportunity restricted. For instance, Muslims can be victims of discrimination in spatial terms. The widespread securitization of nations and populations that took place after the 9/11 attacks had Muslims firmly in its sights. From restrictions on movements at border checkpoints and on transport systems to surveillance and limitations on Muslims within nations, Islamophobia finds one of its most effective vehicles in the policing of Muslims through space. President Trump’s infamous ban on travelers to the United States from some predominantly Muslim countries, coupled with other Islamophobic moves in the name of homeland security, reflect the policing of Muslim bodies in space. In the next chapter, I focus on attempts to cross borders of various kinds as they are dramatized in three contemporary thrillers: a form in which

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national security imperatives drive much of the action. In this chapter, I explore the politics of space in New York City as played out in two novels with an immediate post-9/11 setting—The Submission (2011) by Amy Waldman and Home Boy (2009) by H. M. Naqvi.1 At a moment when the United States was projecting itself as the leader of the fight for freedom around the world, it was busy at home enacting ethnically targeted legislation that would have as its effect the securitization of minorities in general and of Muslims in particular. The principle aim of this legislation was to govern movements in space. Among the innovations introduced after 9/11 was the National Security Exit–Entry Registration System (NSEERS), which streamlined the documentation, detention, and eventual deportation of Muslims from a prepared list of twenty-five largely Muslim countries.2 “Even more sinister,” remark Neil Smith and Setha Low, “the Patriot Act (2001) thoroughly spatialized its circumspection of the public sphere with the invention of ‘homeland security,’ as a cabinet level preoccupation. Consequently, the domestic public sphere suffered a clampdown, with library accounts, university computers, bank accounts and other modes of daily communication placed under unprecedented surveillance.”3 In the two novels, set almost exclusively in New York, we see a contest over sites and spaces between Muslim migrant subjects, on the one hand, and individuals and institutions committed to policing, segregating, and in effect “decontaminating” a city polluted by the 9/11 attacks, on the other. Michel De Certeau remarks of the production of the city space that it depends on “rational organization” that must “repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it.”4 This is a battle we see played out at close quarters in Waldman’s and Naqvi’s novels, where Muslim characters have their freedom curtailed and their movements and motives questioned. Space is demarcated in particular ways, in keeping with a longer American literary tradition—from The Great Gatsby to a raft of novels by African Americans, such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ann Petry’s The Street, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain—where social and racial prejudice and segregation vie with the promised opportunity to remake the self offered by the city. Equally, as in later New York novels such as Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, and Teju Cole’s Open City, the city must be remapped, reclaimed, and constantly traversed, but it can never be fully owned by any one group.5 Characters in The Submission

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and Home Boy mark their terrain and move, often uneasily, across the city, transgressing imposed boundaries but finding always that there is a price to pay for doing so. These two books offer perhaps our most direct engagement with Islamophobia as a form of cultural racism—with all its posturing and denunciation, implications and insinuations—but one that still most often matches up with an old-style ethnic racism, too. Yet even while they describe attempts to restrict and expel the Muslim from the space of the post-9/11 metropolis, the very act of inscribing the struggles over this project works to preserve the Muslim presence, just as it reveals the city space itself to be  the conflicted site of fierce and uncertain microcontests. The stories they tell describe Islamophobia but also reflect on how it is produced—via political expediency, media manipulation, social networking, and word of mouth. In that sense, both are about space but also about the ability to tell stories about space, to claim its meaning for oneself. To borrow from Angus Cameron and Ronen Palan, we can say that “the production of the spatial environment is, like fiction, subject to a process of ‘emplotment’ ” and that “the imaginary maps that are produced by literature . . . are not socially ‘neutral’ with regard to their subjects.”6 They include and exclude. To emplot space is therefore also to emplot Islamophobia. The fight over the different “versions” of New York and its spaces in these works is, in the end, about who has the right to belong. Given the American literary tradition, described earlier, where the forging of a sense of identity plays out through movements from the South to the North and from the country to the city, we might not be surprised that migrancy is a key trope in writing by minorities. Migration produces tensions because it confronts those nominally “in possession” of a space with those now staking their own claims to that space. For this reason, we can follow Doreen Massey in noting that space, even when seemingly holding out the promise of liberty, is not a site of romantic freedom but permanently under construction through social interactions marked by plurality and difference.7 Another well-known theorist of space, Edward  W. Soja, takes a Foucauldian perspective in accounting for the struggle for power over space when he reminds us that “disciplinary power proceeds primarily through the organisation, enclosure, control of individuals in space.” Under advanced capitalism, he says, “the organization of space becomes

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predominantly related to the reproduction of the dominant system of social relations.”8 Both novels, as novels, are in the business of describing characters moving through spaces. In the urban environment, with its mix of private and public spaces, such movements have to do with enforced limitations, the channeling of bodies in some directions and not others.9 The Submission and Home Boy are interested in the transgression of permitted possibilities—by Muslim and non-Muslim characters—as well as in the forces employed to preserve the notion that certain spaces are for some people and not for others. Islamophobic exclusivity in these texts is particularly poignant in that it is played out on the streets of New York, the prime site of multicultural conviviality. New York’s tradition of welcoming all comers means that the national backlash against a minority deemed to have attacked the United States on 9/11 is felt most acutely there. If, as De Certeau insists, moving about the city is an experience “broken up into countless tiny deportations” interspersed with relationships and intersections,10 after 9/11 the intersections were regulated, the relationships sundered, and the deportations in some cases all too literal. What we see employed by the authorities in both texts are what Henri Lefebvre has described as techniques of “colonization” imported into the nations of the West as their actual empires were lost: forms of population control wherein “the role of political authority in reproducing relations of power and domination [works] through the territorial organisation of centre and periphery.”11 In the novels, Muslims have to fight for the right to shape space as they would wish, against a range of forces determinedly resisting them. The legislative targeting of Muslims after 9/11 would seem a model instance of such colonization bearing the racialized flavor of similar postimperial tactics in Europe over issues such as the wearing of head scarves and burkas and the public display of Muslim religiosity. Lefebvre says, “Wherever a dominated space is generated and mastered by a dominant space—where there is periphery and centre—there is colonisation.”12 More broadly, a range of modern territorial phenomena—gentrification, so-called white flight, the rise of surveillance cameras and gated communities— attest to new patterns of core and periphery that often involve the physical and discursive marginalization of minorities and immigrants. The racialization of everyday space, which is a striking feature of the war on

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terror, is linked through colonial practices to a neoimperial mindset epitomized by the George W. Bush administration in the years after 2001. This linkage provides fertile ground for the growth of Islamophobia. *

*

*

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilised before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide—extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal opposition of races and styles, contrast between yesterday’s buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today’s urban irruptions that block out its space.13

At the start of the third chapter of The Practice of Everyday Life, De Certeau offers this evocative description as a way of marking the distance between the viewer on his lofty perch and therefore liable to imagine he has a commanding overview of the city and the “practitioners” of life in the city who scurry about down below. He uses the word texturology to describe both perspectives: the notion that the city can somehow be possessed and made to yield to a reading by the viewer with some kind of superior vantage point and the network of moving, intersecting “writers” in the streets. Vision may give the illusion of the city transformed into a singular text, but lived reality composes “a manifold story that has neither author nor spectators, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of space: in relation to representations it remains daily and indefinitely other.”14 Glossing this idea, Neil Campbell and Alistair Kean add the note of conflict: “a city is a gathering of meanings in which people invest their interpretation and seek to create their own (hi)story,” forming “a chain of meanings in competition with one another, with certain interpretations emerging at specific points in time with more authority and subsequent power than others.”15 This useful linking of space and stories reminds us that both phenomena depend on the establishment and transgression of frontiers; fiction depends on characters straining against or being able to overcome

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barriers to their progress, just as frontiers exist to impede, at least temporarily, movements in space. The multicultural, variegated nature of New York makes it what Leonie Sandercock has called a “mongrel city,” in which diversity results in two kinds of struggle over space: “one a struggle of life space against economic space, the other a struggle over belonging.”16 Characters in both The Submission and Home Boy experience these two kinds of struggle as they negotiate the demands of an unequal globalized employment market while also confronting racism and Islamophobia. I want to suggest that this battle is also one over values, with the life-worlds of Muslim subjects in direct conflict with those forces seeking to impose an order that aims at the retrenchment of a particular white, Protestant national identity of the kind that has been taken to be under siege since the 1960s. This dimension in the struggle for the city takes the form of attempts to plan and control space and reciprocal efforts to resist the imposition of particular visions of order. In The Submission, these concerns are front and center because the story itself is about the planned enclosure and landscaping of city space for the purposes of memorialization. Early on in Amy Waldman’s novel, the protagonist, Mo Khan, is plucked from a security line at the Los Angeles airport and subjected to a grilling by a burly border official who questions the Muslim American architect’s loyalty. After a menacing exchange, silence descends: “No one spoke. They waited. In architecture, space was material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air. Silence that sucked at your will until you came spluttering to the surface confessing your sins or inventing them.” Couched in the spatial metaphor of suffocation and drowning, Mo’s feelings testify to a sense of spatial as well as legal disadvantage as he languishes in the interrogation room with the natural light blocked out “to create the ambience of a cell.” Mo reflects: “Someone among them understood the manipulation of space.”17 The Submission tells the story of the controversy that results when a Muslim architect wins an anonymous competition to design a memorial for what are in all but name the World Trade Center attacks and their victims. It captures the Islamophobic backlash in the immediate years after the atrocity and picks up on more pervasive aspects of anti-Muslim prejudice. With its focus on the feelings of those directly affected by the tragedy

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of September 11, the novel has sometimes been read as an addition to that body of trauma fiction by which American authors tried to make sense of the events on that day. However, The Submission has a much more critical take on the trauma line, exploring the degree of self-indulgence and political grandstanding sometimes involved in its claims. Moreover, it departs from earlier novels in aiming for a balance of the personal and the political, the sense of domestic loss and the cultural and political consequences of its official enshrinement.18 Most notably, the novel carries strong echoes of the Ground Zero Mosque controversy. In the spring of 2010, news came of plans to build a thirteen-story Islamic community and cultural center in Park Place, Lower Manhattan, a few blocks away from Ground Zero. The aim was to create what James Fenton has described as a Muslim version of the famous Ninety-Second Street Y, a broad-based Jewish cultural center. However, the Islamic basis of the development, including prayer facilities, and its proximity to the Twin Towers site led to Park 51 being dubbed by protesters the “Ground Zero Mosque.”19 Anti-Islamic agitators grouped together to oppose the development of what they saw as, in effect, a celebration of the attacks and a bridgehead for an Islamic takeover of America. Nathan Lean traces the orchestration of the protests back to “a tight-knit and interconnected confederation of fear merchants[,] . . . [b]igoted bloggers, racist politicians, fundamentalist religious leaders, Fox news pundits and religious Zionists,” making up what he calls “the Islamophobia industry.”20 Leading the protests were Pamela Geller, professional anti-Islam blogger, and Robert Spencer, founder of the controversial Jihad Watch project. Together they formed the American Freedom Defense Initiative and, in alliance with campaigning group Stop Islamization of America and backed by powerfully connected rightwing bodies such as the Hudson Institute and David Horowitz’s Freedom Center, held rallies near the site and toured news studios denouncing the Ground Zero Mosque as a potential terrorist command center and an insult to the dead of 9/11.21 The scenario described in The Submission carries strong echoes of the Ground Zero Mosque affair, even though the novel’s drafting was well advanced before the controversy broke.22 In Waldman’s text, there is the same concern that Mo Khan’s memorial design is secretly a “Victory Garden”; that it dishonors the dead and insults their families; that Islam builds monuments at the scene of its triumphs; and that all Muslims are

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inherently deceitful and secretly support terrorism. Rallies are held against the design; so-called experts inveigh against “decades of multicultural appeasement” (116); and shock jocks denounce “raging ragheads” (187). Waldman shows the escalating hostility and anger caused by the revelation of the winning designer’s Muslim background. An unstoppable and all too credible scenario unfolds involving bloggers, the media, Islamophobic attacks, and answering vigilantism as American Muslims organize to defend themselves. Waldman sets out those interest groups and tactics that have come to the fore in recent battles over Islam’s place in the United States. We meet members of the 9/11 families group, who feel betrayed that their representative on the memorial selection committee has approved Khan’s design; blue-collar protestor Sean Gallagher, whose firefighter brother was killed in the Twin Towers and who now labors always in that brother’s shadow, unable to bring himself to follow his better instincts and compromise; Debbie Dawson, professional anti-Islam campaigner—a fictional stand-in for Pamela Geller—who throws out menacing references to taqiya and dhimmitude and cherry-picks the most warlike aspects of the religion to hype up the threat to America; Alyssa Spier, ambitious and unscrupulous reporter from the New York Post who sees the story as a career opportunity; and scaremongering politician Governor Geraldine Bitman, on her way to becoming vice president.23 On the other side, defending Khan, are members of the Muslim American Coordinating Council (MACC) and their opportunistic leader Issam Malik, who prove to be no less adept at marketing and manipulation than their opponents. In the febrile post-9/11 atmosphere, these various parties line up to contest a battle over Khan, his garden, and the meaning of being Muslim in America. At the eye of the storm are the three main characters, whose deliberations and motives tend to be rendered in more detail and are mixed and often contradictory. The wealthy liberal widow Claire Burwell is the 9/11 families’ representative on the judging panel. She begins as a trenchant supporter of Khan and his design but begins to have doubts as the architect digs his heels in and avoids answering his critics’ suspicions and the charges made against him. Mo Khan himself is a westernized, secular rising star of architecture who wins the contest but then refuses to explain the meaning and symbolism of his design or to withdraw it despite mounting opposition. At the other end of the social scale is Asma Anwar, wife of a Bangladeshi illegal immigrant killed in the Twin Towers who briefly

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becomes a cause célèbre when she shakes off the shackles of her gender to speak out on behalf of ordinary Muslims during a public inquiry into Khan’s design. The Ground Zero site means different things to different people. On the one hand, it is a memorial, sacred ground, sanctified by the events of September 11; on the other, it is a site for the physical and symbolic reconstruction of an idea of New York and of American power more generally. Tim Gauthier captures the paradox well when he describes Ground Zero as being both a “tabula rasa on which a multitude of narratives might be written” and (quoting Marita Sturken) an “ ‘overdetermined space . . . inscribed by local, national and global meanings, a neighborhood, a commercial district, a site of memory and mourning.’ ”24 The central issue raised by the Ground Zero Mosque controversy and echoed in the novel concerns official and unofficial codings of the space. There is a tension between planned space and the personal stories about it in which people invest. With Ground Zero, the questions are: Whose stories should win out and be preserved? Who should have the right to shape space and its meaning? In this respect, The Submission offers us an intriguing inversion of the usual “Muslims oppose freedom of expression” strand of Islamophobia; here it is the Muslim protagonist’s own artistic vision that is to be censored in the interest of others’ sensitivities. De Certeau observes the power of proper names in shaping space—here reflected in the use of the soubriquet “Ground Zero Mosque” instead of the official name, “Park 51.” Crucially, names not only “make habitable or believable the place that they clothe with a word” but also “recall or suggest phantoms (the dead who are supposed to have disappeared) that still move about, concealed in gestures and bodies in motion.”25 It seems hardly necessary to point out the relevance of this description to the Ground Zero situation, in which the dead are made to live on through the right of ownership staked by relatives. De Certeau distinguishes between the “strategies” employed by official forces (governments, urban planners, landowners) with power over space and everyday practices, what he calls the “tactics” deployed by those using space, “seized on the wing . . .‘ways of operating’: victories of the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong.’ ”26 We might include protests in the category of tactics. Certainly, in The Submission the antigarden protestors are galvanized by the decision of an officially empowered body to entrust the memorial to a Muslim. Their understandable emotional

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attachment can be seen as one of those “superstitions: superogatory semantic overlays,” that De Certeau refers to,27 which frustrate officials and developers by confronting them with the imaginative investment people make in spaces, one that will not yield to profit margin or balance sheet. Yet The Submission presents us with a quandary in that “tactical” interventions are being made by two antithetical factions. Rival groups, pro- and anti-Mo and his design, square up at the site; Muslim women’s hijabs are pulled off; and Muslim communities organize patrols in their defense. Considering all this in the context of the broader post-9/11 clampdown on Muslims, we might say that Islamophobic power “strategies” can still deploy disruptive “tactics,” encouraging a “superstitious” investment in Ground Zero to further agendas of Muslim marginalization and even expulsion that are already well advanced elsewhere. All characters and shades of opinion converge on the garden design Mo has conceived to commemorate the 9/11 dead. Here is played out a struggle between legitimate and alien space. Early on we have a description of the garden: The concept was simple: a walled, rectangular garden guided by rigorous geometry. At the center would be a raised pavilion meant for contemplation. Two broad, perpendicular canals quartered the six-acre space. Pathways within each quadrant imposed a grid on the trees, both living and steel, that were studded in orchard-like rows. A white perimeter wall, twenty-seven feet high, enclosed the entire space. The victims would be listed on the wall’s interior, their names patterned to mimic the geometric cladding of the destroyed buildings. The steel trees reincarnated the buildings even more literally: they would be made from their salvaged scraps. (4)

Claire sees the garden as a cathartic place that “speaks to a longing we have for healing” (5). However, when the winning architect’s background comes to light, every aspect of the design is picked over by those who see it as something altogether more sinister. Whereas Mo claims its mix of styles as distinctively American (218), his critics point to its rigorous geometry as recalling a martyr’s paradise.28 The posturing and historical selectivity involved in claiming spaces or styles as “belonging” exclusively to one particular culture are demonstrated when objectors suggest that a walled garden is “un-American” in contrast to the unbounded nature encountered by the Puritan fathers—for all the world as if North America

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had remained pristine and undeveloped for the subsequent 350 years. It is left to the Bangladeshi immigrant Asma to outline how America is like a garden, made up of “all the people Muslim and non-Muslim, who have come and grown together” (231).29 After much badgering, incentives, and threats, Mo condescends to offer an explanation of his design at the public inquiry: “Life goes on, the spirit rejuvenates—this is what the garden represents,” he claims. “But whereas the garden grows, and evolves and changes with the seasons, the wall around it changes not at all. It is as eternal, as unalterable as our mourning” (217). The scene in which he gives this explanation is strange and unsettling. Mo has been insistent throughout that the garden must be accepted on its merits, without the culturalist objections Islamophobes might project onto it. He is extremely resentful of the deliberate misinterpretation to which his work has been subject. However, at the last minute he has a change of heart and ventures this somewhat bland and insipid reading of the garden’s symbolism. Matters are further complicated by our discovery—very late in the novel—that the garden has indeed been influenced by the Islamic gardens of the East. Its lines recall the description we are given of Babur Gardens, a park built for the first Mughal emperor, which Mo stumbled across on a post-9/11 visit to Kabul. Tim Gauthier suggests that this late revelation might encourage in the reader misgivings about Mo, a character with whom we have developed an intimate relationship courtesy of the omniscient third-person technique that is free to swoop down into the consciousnesses of the main characters in turn.30 In fact, we are never really in much doubt about Mo’s intentions, which are benevolent but perhaps complacent and colored by personal ambition. He is just about the most unlikely sleeper agent one could imagine, and unless one is to embrace the paranoid idea pedaled by some of the clearly discreditable characters that all Muslims are somehow brainwashed from birth and preprogrammed toward extremism, there is never any real possibility that the garden contains some coded Islamist message. In the light of Mo’s prickly personality, his anodyne description of the garden’s symbolism at the inquiry seems more likely to be a deliberately bland rehearsal of secondhand, expected phrases, a literalist sop thrown out to his persecutors in the audience. Mo’s previous determination to allow the design to speak for itself, in tension with the way extreme readings of this space have proliferated in absurd and unexpected ways, means that by this stage no one

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is really listening; Mo’s version of its meaning is now only one of many, with no more authority than any other.31 Mo’s deliberately antagonistic stance is symptomatic of the novel as a whole, wherein all relations and interactions are colored by struggles over power, marked by characters’ unwillingness or inability to understand one another. We see a play on the title, with three meanings of the term submission in circulation: a translation of the name “Islam”; Mo’s architectural submission; and the way characters try to get others to submit to their will or viewpoint. Conservative opponents of the garden attempt to defeat liberal supporters, and vice versa, while individual characters try to select the most advantageous circumstances in which to impose their will on others. The influential chairman of the judging committee, Paul Rubin, attempts to bring the opposing factions into line so as to minimize the crisis, while in turn watching helplessly as his authority is eroded by Governor Bitman’s machinations. His efforts to persuade Mo and Sean of the benefits of compromise, using the caché his social position confers, are unsuccessful. Similarly, Alyssa Spier is willing to use veiled threats and blackmail to gain the upper hand in her newspaper’s circulation battle with its rivals. Once more, these contests often take place via movements across different spaces. Characters are forever leaving their comfort zones and risking exposure by venturing into alien spaces. The working-class Sean in particular is struck by social anxiety induced by the spaces he has to enter to speak with the great and the good—for instance, being patronized by Paul at a Madison Avenue café populated by flunkies and hangers-on. He feels he is “a no-name worthy of addressing but not worthy of knowing. An audience not a player, unshaven in his Windbreaker because he hadn’t wanted to be late” (129). Upon undertaking an attempted reconciliation meeting in the MACC offices, he feels outnumbered by the brown faces around him (179), and when in Manhattan he walks around Debbie Dawson’s apartment “trying to look like he belonged. But he didn’t . . . and he winced to realize that it was the architect Khan who would fit better here” (165). Mo himself, in an ill-judged attempt to beard the opposition lion in its lair, finds himself publicly outwitted and humiliated when interviewed on air in the studios of conservative radio talk show host Lou Sarge (187). So movements beyond one’s accustomed space carry a cost. Yet so too does intransigence. Mo, the Muslim American architect whose family migrated from India, reflects at one point that he seems “bound to disturb

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every space he entered” (197). Yet his refusal to explain and interpret his design need not be read simply as egotistical misjudgment or a lack of flexibility. In a brilliant reading of the final meeting between Mo and Claire— the latter increasingly disconcerted by Mo’s attitude and seeking specific reassurances as the price of her continued support—Uzma Jamil sees Mo as contesting the Orientalist and Islamophobic assumptions underpinning Claire’s concerns. Jamil observes how their conversation “revolves around two main questions. Who speaks for and about Islam and Muslims in the West? Who constructs the categories used to give meaning to the Muslim subject in the war on terror?”32 In their meeting, Claire is ostensibly seeking reassurances that Mo has not secretly smuggled into his design some kind of symbolic endorsement of Muslim supremacy. However, as Jamil points out, what she really seeks is a validation of the categories of knowledge she has taken on board from the wider discourse, in which Muslims— even the seemingly secular ones—must be constantly vetted in case they demonstrate signs of their propensity for treachery and violence. In Islamophobic discourse, asserts Jamil, “Muslims are asked to soothe the fears of the west [sic] and to defuse their anxieties by reassuring them that they are ‘good Muslims’ or ‘moderate Muslims,’ not the violent, blowing-up-things kind of ‘bad Muslims.’ However, both ‘good Muslims’ and ‘bad Muslims’ confirm and validate the superior position of the west.”33 In other words, what Claire is seeking is the validation not simply of her views but also of the epistemological categories on which they are based, in which American innocence must be tacitly endorsed by the Muslim, who is required to “prove” good intentions that would otherwise remain in question. In essence, we have a playing out of an old-style Orientalist interrogation scene, in which the privileged Westerner demands that the Other yield knowledge to her, the actual meaning of which will be made to fit her preconceptions. The crux of the scene comes when Claire insists on Mo’s moral responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, despite his apparent secularity: “ ‘Followers of your religion have caused enormous pain, And for all of us it’s very difficult to sort out what Islam actually means or encourages. . . . A lot of Muslims who would never commit terrorism still support it, for political reasons if not religious ones. . . . So it’s not unreasonable for me to ask where on that continuum you sit. To learn at the hearing that you’ve never denounced the attack—I’ll be honest, that was upsetting. Why haven’t you?” (270, emphasis added).

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The liberal Claire, who up to this point has stood out in defense of the committee’s original selection of Mo’s design, here exposes the assumptions underpinning her interrogation: that there is a difference between Mo and the rest of “us” and that Muslim opinion forms a “continuum”— apparently with the qualities of a conveyor belt to terrorism—along which adherents of the faith obviously position themselves. For all Claire’s initial sympathy, her classic liberal position here is revealed as both reductive and self-serving. Mo responds to these sallies with a combination of flippancy and sarcasm, before making the salient point that other architects have not had their work judged by reference to their cultural background. As Jamil says, the encounter “illustrates one of the distinctive premises of Orientalism, the power of the west to determine the meaning of all things Muslim which is based on a denial of Muslim agency.” Moreover, the issue “is not just that Khan is unable to explain what the garden design means, but rather that it can only mean what [Claire] already ‘knows,’ i.e. that all Muslims are terrorists.”34 In a final exasperated outburst, Mo challenges Claire to think about what a reversal of these assumptions would look like by suggesting that her dead husband, Cal, “deserved” what he got as a taxpayer helping to fund American foreign policy in Muslim lands. Claire, shaken but unable to process the double standard Mo’s shock tactics have exposed, storms out, and they never see each other again. The irony is that both Claire and Mo are playing a part in this encounter, exaggerating their differences for rhetorical purposes. Their confrontation is the culmination of respective journeys away from positions of principle and compromise and toward inevitable antagonism. They, along with others, such as Sean, are faced with questions about how to reconcile their responsibility to themselves—their conscience and core sense of values— with the sometimes conflicting interests of the groups to which they belong. Claire is not above manipulating her status as a 9/11 widow to advance her cause, while Sean fights his empathetic instincts with feelings of guilt and responsibility toward his dead brother, Patrick. For these characters—and for the Bangladeshi 9/11 widow, Asma—the contours of private grief and mourning are constantly at war with the necessary public personae they are made to project. However, the text shows us that whatever posturing might take place is a product of a context in which Islamophobia and rampant stereotyping put pressure on participants, driving a wedge between sense of self and

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public image. Mo is at the center of a perfect storm of misrepresentation. As a Muslim, he is automatically branded a terrorist by the right-wing press. When news spreads that a Muslim has won the memorial design competition, in the absence of a photograph newspapers mock up a silhouette headshot of a terrorist in a balaclava (51–52). In her stories about him, Alyssa Spier writes in clichés and prefers to use his full first name, Mohammed, because “Mo didn’t have the ring—theological, historical, hysterical” (96)—to elicit the required response. If Islamophobic stereotyping is the most blatant and obvious in the book, Mo also feels under pressure from more well-meaning attempts to manage his image through public relations. The attempts by Issam Malik’s organization, MACC, to “humanize” him as a proud American (172) and to make him a figurehead for other campaigns (80) feel just as artificial to him. We are invited to reflect on the extent to which Mo as a public figure is made up by others—a patchwork of their darkest fears or utopian fantasies—and the extent to which identity is continually being shaped by experience. In the maelstrom of controversy, Mo—like Claire, who imagines her identity in terms of a series of nested matryoshka dolls—has difficulty locating a final, core identity for himself, something that might in the end have a liberating effect. He tells a girlfriend, “Everyday I’m different. . . . I’m not the person you met three weeks ago. If this keeps up, in two weeks I won’t be the person you know now. You can’t misrepresent an object in motion”(155).35 To some extent, though, Mo and Claire have the luxury of being able to reflect with a degree of ironic distance on the media circus of which they are part. Their position is different from that of the many migrant New Yorkers who dot the novel. From Indian restaurant workers and Pakistani news vendors to Bengali storekeepers and Muslim subway station managers, the life of South Asian citizens of New York is depicted as precarious after 9/11, even as they go about their daily business. In some respects, Mo, the ultimately successful, renowned architect, and Claire, the privileged white woman, emerge relatively unscathed from the controversy and its fallout. The same cannot be said for the book’s main representative Muslim woman, Asma Anwar. Her illegal immigrant husband, Inam, is another Twin Towers victim. As an undocumented worker with no official right to be in the country, Inam enjoys no legal recognition; to all intents and purposes he does not exist.

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How could you be dead if you did not exist? Of the forty Bangladeshis reported missing to their consulate in the days after the attack, only twenty-six were legal, and Asma Anwar’s husband was not among them. The undocumented also had to be uncounted, officials insisted. The consulate could not abet illegals, even posthumously. They were very sorry about Inam, “if indeed he had existed” rolling off their tongues as often as Insh’Allah, but they could do nothing about repatriating the body, if it were found, or helping with funds for the widow. (70)

The labor flows required by globalization are not always accompanied by citizenship rights.36 Saskia Sassen has described how the spread of globalized employment patterns has resulted in the proliferation of low-paying jobs often taken up by immigrants. In addition to casualization, neoliberal economics ensures that “a large array of activities that were being carried out in large-scale, vertically integrated firms in the postwar decades are today increasingly characterized by small-scale, flexible specialization and subcontracting.”37 Shortcuts taken to avoid national insurance and tax are common. Such is the fate of Asma’s husband: “The subcontractor who had employed Inam as a janitor argued similarly: there was no Inam Haque, since he had taken the job using a fake name and social security number. The subcontractor had insisted on this pretense of legality, but now used it as an excuse to deny Asma help” (70). To add insult to injury, Inam will not be named on the official memorial for the same reason. As a Bangladeshi woman, Asma’s ability to traverse even the immigrant spaces of New York is severely circumscribed. She rarely ventures out from her home in Little Dhaka, as their part of Brooklyn is known, considering Manhattan “like another country” (71). Moreover, in a move that perhaps indicates that The Submission, despite its concern for stereotyping in the media, does not always escape stereotypes of its own, the restraints on Asma are depicted as cultural as well as Islamophobic. She begins as the archetypal oppressed Muslim woman, cowed by the patriarchal conventions of her community. Her tentative attempts to break free of tradition are crushed under the weight of convention and respectability—as when she attempts to rescue a neighbor from domestic abuse but finds her efforts rejected even by the victim, whose concern is primarily for reputation. Arin Keeble suggests that “the characterization of Asma that emerges,” despite this surface image, “is of a strong compassionate woman who won’t accept

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her husband being written out of history.”38 That may be so, but her ultimate fate reveals the combined weight of a paranoid host nation and an imposed collective responsibility to community. Her decision to speak up for Mo’s design at the public hearing brings plaudits from many Americans, who see her as acting against silencing oppression by Muslim males. Yet it also brings renewed scrutiny to her own residency status and that of fellow members of the Bangladeshi community in New York, many of whom are also irregular, and leads to an order for her expedited removal from the country.39 Her murder at the hands of an unknown knifeman— Is he a right-wing extremist or an outraged Bangladeshi community member?—takes place in the full glare of the nation’s media, for whom she has become a cause célèbre. In Waldman’s novel, there is no question but that those most directly at risk from hatred and Islamophobia will always pay the highest price. So The Submission is a novel that explores entrenched positions but also digs down to expose the dangers and doubts that often lie beneath uncompromising public posturing. Moreover, as Sonia Baelo-Allué has observed, focalization that shifts between the main protagonists sheds deliberately uneven light on the debates, producing a “constant crisscrossing of perspectives.”40 This is particularly the case in the epilogue, which fastforwards twenty years to a time when the furor has died down, Mo is a celebrated architect now living in India, and his garden—ultimately withdrawn as a 9/11 memorial—has been built instead as a pleasure garden for a rich Muslim patron in the Middle East. The surviving characters get a chance to reflect on others and on their younger selves when Claire’s son puts together a documentary on the garden affair. One of the questions the novel raises but necessarily leaves unanswered is whether any common ground, any single truth, can be found through reflection. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this urge to measure and judge warring positions against one another, The Submission ends up falling into the classic liberal trap of seeing both sides of an argument but being unable to accept the necessity of choosing between them. For instance, the text’s urge to recuperate its Muslim characters onto the “good Muslim” side of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” balance sheet merely leaves the criterion in place. There is never any chance that Mo will turn out to be a “bad Muslim” in these terms, so the book’s much-vaunted ambivalence is slightly bogus. Although it aims to get beyond these categories, its deployment of

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representative types does not, in the end, challenge conventions of framing. It is more successful in understanding Mo’s intransigence and hostility as a piece of defensive self-stereotyping and a (perhaps necessary) tactical betrayal of his better judgment. Yet the very fact that Mo is brought to explain at all—after such determined resistance—indicates a degree of uncertainty about where the reader’s sympathies may be heading. The explanation seems slightly out of character and more like part of a deliberate liberal softening by Waldman to make Mo more “acceptable” to us by diluting the enigma. This structuring liberalism is apparent elsewhere, too. Among those Muslims supporting Mo are MACC members and their leader, Issam Malik. MACC’s interest in co-opting Mo for its other, related campaigns is seen as intrusive and reprehensible, and Malik—whom Mo views as “an unctuous phony” (173)—ends up on the lecture-tour circuit, butting heads with Debbie Dawson in a grotesque form of political gladiatorial pantomime. Yet aligning MACC with the multiple, interconnected forces of Islamophobia tearing into Mo implies some kind of parity—as well as impugning the work of MACC’s real-life counterpart, the Council on American–Islamic Relations—when it is surely disingenuous to suggest that the two sides are equivalent in terms of reach, media access, or influence. Finally, the book’s liberal utopianism is evident in its epilogue. Not only is Mo now rich and internationally celebrated, with a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Architecture, but we are told, “American Muslims were now, if not embraced, accepted. Trusted. Their rights unquestioned” (287). Just like that! With no explanation. Islamophobia is here mapped onto and equated with all those previous struggles against discrimination, from anti-Catholicism to civil rights, in a patriotic reiteration of America’s inherent capacity to integrate and forgive.41 Nothing is said about the struggles, bloodshed, and loss of life that always accompany this drawn-out and painful process. American Muslims have somehow effortlessly entered the sunny uplands of the future, conveyed there by some painless magical process we are not permitted to witness. So although The Submission is an impressive, morally responsible engagement with contemporary Islamophobia in some of its rawest manifestations, perhaps it has not successfully balanced personal and political trauma, as others have claimed it has. Rather, it seems to have a Forsterian

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quality to it: advancing the claims of liberal humanism while acknowledging a context in which personal relations are doomed by ideological forces. Even so, it manages to raise some of the key questions facing Muslims in the West today: Can the American multicultural dream survive? Should Muslim Americans’ claims to the First Amendment be respected? What are Muslims allowed to say about 9/11, and can they stake a claim to it as fellow victims? These questions are also at the heart of H. M. Naqvi’s novel Home Boy.

At one point in Home Boy, we are told, “Every New Yorker has a 9/11 story, and every New Yorker has a need to repeat it, to pathologically revisit the tragedy, until the tragedy becomes but a story.”42 For many in New York’s migrant communities after 9/11, their story has to do with detention, prosecution, and even deportation. Kim Rygiel is among those who have tracked the effects of Islamophobic national security policies pursued after September 2001, with its targeting of Arab and South Asian Muslim communities as well as of immigrants and nonstatus residents more broadly: “Immediately after 9/11 some 1200 individuals were arrested and detained in the United States without charges being laid or access to lawyers.”43 The effect of the NSEERS program was felt all across the Muslim community, as were the results of increased racial profiling in policing and at ports of entry to the country.44 Such measures fed on and in turn fueled increased suspicion of Muslims after the attacks. Nathan Lean reports how in 2002 “an annual report released by the FBI showed that the crimes against Muslims had increased by an eye-popping 1600  percent; 28 incidents were reported in 2000 and 481 were reported two years later.”45 Home Boy tells of Shehzad, also known as Chuck, a young Pakistani finance worker in New York and how his life is transformed after the 9/11 attacks. The story is related from Chuck’s first-person viewpoint and includes numerous flashbacks to his childhood in Karachi, early days in New York, and immersion in the hedonistic round of drinking, clubbing, casual drugs, and sex he discovers amid the throbbing nightlife of the Big Apple. As self-styled “Metrostanis,” Chuck and his compatriots—Jamshed (a.k.a. Jimbo), musician and DJ, and Ali Chaudhry (a.k.a. AC), dandy and would-be intellectual—are at first able to float along as part of the city’s dynamic multicultural youth scene, until 9/11 splits this scene

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open, scatters those who make it up, and plunges the friends into a nightmare ride of racism, incarceration, and mistreatment at New York’s notorious Metropolitan Detention Center, “America’s own Abu Ghraib” (105). As a new arrival in New York, Chuck decides early on to heed AC’s advice to walk the city and take it all in. In this way, he first meets Jimbo, who is performing in an impromptu street jazz concert. In all its mixing and impurity, New York at first absorbs and welcomes Chuck: he feels he has “claimed the city and the city had claimed me” (3). The feeling of being “at home” works its way out in the command of space and the emphasis on precise topography. The first few pages name-check the Bronx, Jersey City, and Chelsea, and Chuck describes the boys’ lifestyle in geographical terms: “We slummed in secret cantons of Central Park, avoided the meatpacking district, often dined in Jackson Heights” (1). Like the questing, peripatetic protagonists of Auster’s New York Trilogy, Chuck and his friends undertake journeys in search of pleasure or the latest buzz that display the city’s diversity: “Each turn promised something else. You would see crazy fistfights in Yonkers, crazy wedding parties in Chinatown. You would meet the great celebrities of our age, raise your thumb to that naked Cowboy guitarist in Times Square” (62). When, having lost his job in the stock-market crash of early 2001, Chuck takes unofficial employment as a cab driver, he learns that “South Asians comprised a third of the New York cabbie population” (36). The preparatory driving course teaches him “the topography of each borough, including each hotel, hospital, highway, extension and dead end” (37), and the test at the end of the course involves map reading and a multiple-choice section on junctions, bridges, and other landmarks. One question also offers an impromptu introduction to America’s ongoing history of racial diversity and cultural integration (39): ANOTHER NAME FOR WILLOWBROOK PARKWAY IS

A. Malcolm X Boulevard B. Jackie Robinson Parkway C. Martin Luther King Junior Expressway D. H. Rap Brown drive E. Master Fard Mohammed Parkway

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Chuck and his friends are at first able to shape this world to the image they desire, appropriating space in the type of tactical interventions described by De Certeau, which challenge the “grid of ‘discipline’ ” imposed by the civic authorities.46 Their hedonistic lifestyle takes them sailing through artificial social and spatial divisions. Despite being migrants on the fringes of respectable city life, they find themselves very much at the center of the social scene. The nightclubs they frequent seem to welcome all comers, and hierarchy, such as it is, depends on fashion sense and being conversant with the latest subcultural styles. Although their New York is essentially formless and protean, the boys create their own stories and centers of energy wherever they congregate to while away the evenings.47 Interest in the latest trends and the carefully cultivated, coiffed look of the denizens of New York’s club scene form part of what Chuck calls their “symbolic interactions” (15). For him, watching the bright birds of the Tja! Club parading their plumage is as much part of the pleasure as the music or the promise of scoring some more drugs. The flaneur quality in Chuck’s relationship with the city, whether he is on the move or observing what he calls “the masquerade” (17) from a favorite bench in Washington Square, underlines the way in which the inhabitants of a cosmopolitan city such as New York are always performing for each other. Indeed, Home Boy invests much in the way identity is performed. The boys’ lifestyle has its own rituals, scripts, and catechisms. At different points, Chuck takes on the roles of dutiful son, detainee, and battle-scarred foot soldier of globalization. Later on, with money running out, he attends an interview for a new job in finance, self-consciously aware that although he talks the talk of a highflying corporate analyst, he is wearing a borrowed tie, a suit bought on credit that must be returned, and lizard-skin cowboy boots (154–59).48 It is only with the benefit of hindsight, after he has experienced the “performance anxiety” (105) provoked by arrest and imprisonment, that he can look back on the “mere sense of spectacle” of his early days in the city as a product of “our own selfish motivations and exigencies” (6). From being a “Home Boy”—a hip and trusted member of the New York scene—Chuck becomes persona non grata, told to “go home, boy” (119), by an interrogator at the Metropolitan Detention Center, and his grip on his oncecherished New York life begins to weaken. Image and reality, so blithely collapsed in the superficial world of the club scene, are forcibly sundered

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by the grim post-9/11 condition, where the pleasures of seeing and being seen are replaced by surveillance and scrutiny. With the world suddenly polarized, the hybrid identities so carefully cultivated by the boys and reflected in their monikers come under pressure. These identities work in a city open enough to embrace all comers and allow new communities to enter and shape it, but they become unwelcome signifiers in the world of the Bush war on terror, with its effective reimposition of a white, Anglo-Saxon hegemony.49 Before 9/11, the boys are free to shape their own sense of themselves. The retrospective opening lines of the novel register the loss of this freedom: “We’d become Japs, Jews, Niggers. We weren’t before. We’d fancied ourselves boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men, AC, Jimbo and me. We were mostly selfinvented and self-made and certain we had our fingers on the pulse of the great global dialectic” (1). Now, joining the ranks of the historically ostracized, these young Pakistanis in America discover they have become what Birte Heidemann calls “the villains of modern civilisation.”50 As a cabbie, Chuck’s ability to move fluently through rich and poor areas and across ethnic divides represents the potential to connect the city’s diverse communities. However, this potential is quashed after 9/11 by the aggressive policing of difference. Communities are caught up in the sweeps that take place as the authorities look for potential terrorists and illegal immigrants, whole areas are decimated, and the vibrant intercultural life of the city is disrupted. With the loss of the old freewheeling way of life, and with movements across New York now restricted by roadblocks and random searches, the boys decide to undertake a trip to Connecticut to try to find their friend Mohammed Shah, also known as “the Shaman,” a Gatsbyesque high liver and party host who has been missing since the Twin Towers fell. The journey out from New York, where immigrant communities suffer direct surveillance and harassment, becomes a nightmare descent into a suburban America where strange faces—especially brown ones—are met with suspicion. After breaking into the Shaman’s locked house but failing to find him at home, Chuck and his friends are arrested, and Chuck’s irregular employment status brings him under scrutiny. In a scene heavy with irony, they are manhandled and abused by FBI agents as President Bush’s famous address to Congress on September 20 plays on television, invoking “an age of liberty here and across the world.” The FBI

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agent barks, “YOU NEED TO TURN THAT OFF RIGHT NOW” (98–102, capitalization in the original). National security discourse permits state crimes. Lean describes the roundup of Pakistani-origin Muslims after 9/11 on feeble pretexts such as having “erratic schedules,” and the harsh treatment they endured.51 Chuck is hooded and beaten up in the detention center, and when he demands to make a phone call with the declaration, “I know my rights,” he is abruptly reminded: “You aren’t American!. . . You got no fucking rights ” (107).52 The racism resurgent after 9/11 is also evident in the interrogation scene. An inquisitor dubbed “Grizzly” pursues a line of questioning based on the presumption that Chuck, as someone of Muslim background, has some sort of “authentic” inside knowledge about terrorism: “he figured I would have special insight into the phenomenon—knowledge of the relevant fatwa, or some verse in the Koran—just as a black man, any black man, should be privy to black-on-black violence or the allure of a forty ounce” (115). Another interrogator takes a harder line, threatening to put Chuck on a plane with “a one-way ticket back to Bumfuckistan”; guards call him a “sand nigger”; and he is forced to strip (107–8). He experiences for the first time a true understanding of the racist policing that seems so endemic to American society. In contrast to the painless transition to Muslim acceptance offered at the end of Waldman’s novel, Naqvi’s take on social “progress” is much more acerbic: “I understood that just like three black men were gangbangers, and three Jews a conspiracy, three Muslims had become a sleeper cell. And later, much later, the pendulum would swing back, and everybody would celebrate progress, the storied tradition of accommodation, on TV talk shows and posters in middle schools” (121). Chuck is finally released, but he is badly shaken by his experience and after a breakdown and failed suicide attempt decides to leave America and return home to his mother in Karachi.53 Although he has the offer of a prestigious new job to regularize his status and the possibility of a budding romance with Jimbo’s younger sister, his illusions of America as a place that welcomes immigrants and cultural difference have been shattered by the direct confrontation with institutional bigotry. The idea of home, so makeshift for the migrant and the exile, comes once more to be associated with the comparative comforts of family and the old country. To be sure, there is always a sense that Chuck and his friends are leading a double life. At one point, Jimbo’s white, socialite girlfriend observes the difference in the boys’

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behavior when they are out on the town compared to when they are visiting relatives in the city: “You guys are like one way here, like hardcore, homeboys or whatever, but when you guys go home, you become different, all proper and conservative. You have to decide what you’re about” (73). This intervention from a sympathetic character serves to point up the shifting location of home for the boys as well as the value of familial and cultural support networks that come to the fore in times of trouble. However, it also carries unfortunate echoes of the Bush ultimatum that America now requires uniformity and conformity. The in-between spaces that made New York a home for Chuck and his friends are no longer available. Interestingly, the novel has what might be described as a double ending: two differently keyed scenes reveal what became of the elusive Shaman and suggest that the migrant to New York might nowadays be in search of a place that no longer exists. In the first ending, Chuck—packed and on the verge of leaving for Karachi—discovers Mohammed Shah’s fate in the “Portraits of Grief” section of the New York Times.54 He was killed at the World Trade Center. Headlined “mohammed ‘mo’ shah: no friend of fundamentalism,” the column paints a picture of someone unrecognizable from the partythrowing, cigarette-smuggling, pornography-consuming man about town Chuck remembers. He is made into an archetypal “good Muslim,” fixed and valorized in death; a coworker in their insurance company declares, “He was like us . . . he wanted to get married, start a family, and all that good stuff” (213–14, emphasis added). The short obituary co-opts Mo as it misrepresents him—the final instance of the split between appearance and reality that has been at the heart of the novel’s preoccupations. Chuck reflects on what has been left out: “The story was simple, black-and-white: the man was a Muslim, not a terrorist” (214). Yet even in that designation, all nuance, any sense of the flesh-and-blood being behind the labels, with all his flaws and foibles, is obscured. There is no space for the real Mo Shah outside of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” paradigm. The other ending takes the form of a short epilogue. Instead of the family reunion in Karachi we might be expecting, the novel gives us a description of a migrant’s arrival in New York. This may amount to a flashback, returning us to Chuck’s early and only partly narrated first days in the United States. However, the switch to the second-person pronoun you draws us in as the putative subject of the scene and gives it a broader, symbolic resonance. In one reading, this ending could be an imaginative attempt to turn back

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the clock to before September 11, 2001, and thus to reclaim the past for its unrealized possibilities—much as the final pages of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2006) includes cathartic images of the famous falling man from the North Tower of the Word Trade Center, which, when used as a flicker book, reverses the plunge and returns the tiny figure to the top of the building and to life.55 However, in view of what has gone before in the novel, the epilogue perhaps more compellingly gestures toward the continued allure of New York as the great melting-pot city for all those migrants who come to buy into its dream, as yet unaware of the modern carceral nightmare it has become. These endings sum up the only two apparently available trajectories for Muslims in the United States after 9/11: to be valorized as “one of us after all,” in this case through victimhood and death, or to leave the United States and return “home” to those lands “you” have so unwisely and suspiciously left in the first place. If this choice seems unduly defeatist, it at least has the virtue of avoiding the more bland, comforting vision offered by Waldman, in which America’s innate instinct for fairness and capacity to assimilate appears to have worked its magic twenty years after the end of the main action. In Home Boy, the corresponding epilogue is set adrift in space and time, giving it an eerie transcendent quality, as the Empire State Building, Chrysler Tower, and World Trade Center loom outside the taxi window as it propels “you” into a future that is also somehow the past. The myth of America and especially of New York will always be there, forever fresh and alluring to the migrant, even if it is based on a fantasy: “A warm breeze ruffles the hair. You start humming, ‘Start spreading the news . . .’ You realize you never knew all the words” (216, ellipses in the original).

Moustafa Bayoumi justifies borrowing the question “How does it feel to be a problem?” for the title of his book on Muslim American experience after 9/11: “Just over a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois asked that very question in his American classic The Souls of Black Folk. . . . A century later, Arab and Muslim Americans are the new ‘problem’ of American society.”56 Bayoumi is here encouraging us to make connections between historical marginalization and contemporary practice. These parallels are spelled out in Home Boy, too, dramatized by Chuck’s experiences and articulated in the comparison between the treatment of Muslims after 9/11 and the internment

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of Japanese Americans at the start of the Second World War (136)—parallels that once more became irresistible when President Trump’s plans to deal with the “Muslim problem” emerged in 2017. Traces of history are also there in the various strata of experiences that have shaped New York in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, written in street names as well as carried in popular culture and in the slang and idioms of the street that Naqvi’s book ably captures. It would, I think, be misguided to claim that Naqvi’s narrative is somehow more “authentic” than Waldman’s—to do so would be to fall into the trap of seeking that ethnic representativeness on which Chuck’s interrogation is based. Waldman’s book is in some ways more ambitious in that it confronts directly the public mechanisms by which Muslims are marginalized. Even so, Naqvi’s novel shows itself less inclined to settle for a liberal, individualist, broad-based empathy—a weighing up of pros and cons—that is perhaps the price of taking a more synoptic approach. Both novels acknowledge that the ownership of space is what is at stake after 9/11 and that the ability to shape one’s environment and move around in it is suddenly thrown into doubt. The apparatus of national security that was hugely augmented in Western nations after 9/11 has resulted in a whole raft of new legislation and technologies putatively designed to bolster “security” and fight the terrorist threat but all too often used for ethnically and culturally targeted policing that treats all Muslims as potential enemies. The Islamophobia that lurked in the implementation of security measures after 2001 became overt and mainstreamed in the Trump election campaign of 2016. At an earlier moment in time, characters in the two novels discussed here experience the effects of this targeting to varying degrees, and even non-Muslims find their freedoms curtailed and their complacency sometimes challenged. What emerges most clearly, though, is that those Muslim figures with the most tenuous hold on America—the undocumented, such as Asma and Inam—and those who suddenly become unemployed and therefore vulnerable—such as Chuck—are always the ones who experience Islamophobia most directly. At the same time as America was trying to secure its streets through homeland security measures, it was also seeking to redefine international spatial configurations through an interventionist foreign policy. Afghanistan and Iraq as well as their neighbors became the testing ground for the  American ability to create the New World Order. The catastrophic

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hubris and ill-preparedness that led to chaos in both arenas is properly part of another story. However, safety at home becomes, in war-on-terror discourse, intimately connected with the ability to secure borders and restrict population flows. As Elspeth Guild has put it, “The border as a line which separates different territories of sovereignty is one of the most cherished fictions in international relations.”57 The discrepancy between this fiction and messy reality provides the focus for another group of novels that form the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter Five

STATES OF STATELESSNESS Islamophobia and Border Spaces in the Post-9/11 Thrillers of John Le Carré, Dan Fesperman, and Richard Flanagan

In his address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush effectively inaugurated the war on terror by offering an uncompromising ultimatum: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”1 Striking the keynote in a civilizational struggle, this speech and others like it allowed for an understanding of political conflict that took on a moral flavor and that—despite the notoriously porous nature of the terrorist threat—conveniently situated the conflict in the known and more manageable confines of nations. In its geopolitical guise, the ultimatum indirectly created the conditions for Islamophobia to be played out over the globe as well as among the multicultural countries of the West. In aesthetic terms, it prepared fertile ground for the thriller genre, in particular the spy thriller, with its interest in the possession of knowledge, covert action, group rivalries, and paranoid visions of the nation under threat.2 The novels I look at in this chapter interrogate this notion of “choosing sides” and an inviolable dividing line—ideological, cultural, and sometimes geographical—between “us” and “them.” Although only one of them belongs fully to the spy genre—in the sense of being about state security agencies fighting rogue or nonstate elements—all three depend on the discovery, withholding, and manipulation of valuable knowledge. I also argue that John Le Carré, Dan Fesperman, and Richard Flanagan are interested

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in testing and transgressing discursive constructs of essential difference and—directly or indirectly, successfully or otherwise—challenging the Islamophobic truisms that emerge from the mentalities these constructs foster. The novels I focus on—A Most Wanted Man (2008) by John Le Carré, The Warlord’s Son (2004) by Dan Fesperman, and The Unknown Terrorist (2006) by Richard Flanagan3—are full of border crossings, displacements, and uncanny returns, seeking ways to symbolize experiences of exclusion that have come to the fore as the increasingly paranoid modern nation attempts to secure itself in ever more extreme and inequitable ways. This reading therefore stands in opposition to conventional perspectives that identify an inherent conservatism in a genre that relies to a large degree on linearity—the deferred but ultimately guaranteed revelation of secrets— and that pits the agents of the nation-state against forces that often have apocalyptic designs on its citizens, drawing the reader into an imaginative complicity that in the war-on-terror context is often overtly Islamophobic. However, I would argue that it is the thriller’s inevitable and inherent juxtaposition of contending ideologies that gives it the potential for a dialogic engagement that moves beyond the reductive binaries of war-on-terror discourse and that, within its limited means, exposes and challenges Islamophobic assumptions. A Most Wanted Man, The Warlord’s Son, and The Unknown Terrorist can be classed as belonging to the thriller genre. Yet none is given over entirely to high-octane action or tortuous intrigue for its own sake. Instead, each seeks to dramatize some of the defining ideas of the war-on-terror moment: ideas having to do with belonging and displacement; the implementation and extension of draconian security laws and their effects; and the relegation of certain characters to the infrahuman status of the “rightsless subject.” Moreover, all three are about stories: battles over truth, where contending versions of events and motives clash. Each novel asks what happens to the truth when it falls prey to political expediency. Characters operate in a market for ideas and information, where the “customers” are either intelligence agencies or newspaper editors or media consumers. In each, characters end up being sacrificed to meet the demands of certain dominant sets of interest. Thus, perhaps uncharacteristically for the genre, these novels articulate a liberal vision that rejects exclusionary binaries. Yet each in its own way also runs up against the limits of the liberal critique of a struggle with

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strong ethnically marked dimensions. Although they bring culturally different characters into proximity and often into positions of codependency, utilizing the polyphonic, dialogic potential of the novel form, they also offer a certain resistance to placing the direct experience of Islamophobia center stage. Whether for reasons of literary ethics—the desire not to “speak for” a cultural Other in a situation where dominant Western discourses do little else—or out of a timidity about the possibilities for crosscultural readerly empathy, the texts in the end fight shy of dramatizing Muslim suffering in the war on terror. Although these novels are acute in their critique of the post-9/11 context, with its curb on civil liberties and resurgent imperial adventurism, they are less certain about the possibilities of imagining a space beyond the Islamophobic present. It is certainly the case that the post-9/11 years presented thriller writers with a surfeit of material. Nation-states have appropriated the discourse of human rights as a way of justifying interventionism while, in practice, denying the rights of many of those with whom they come into contact. Costas Douzinas sums up the new reality for Muslim subjects: State practices which had been universally condemned . . . have become popular again. Torture returned in Western camps and prisons, most famously in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. But torture is also extensively outsourced. “Rendition” flights take suspects to secret camps in countries where torture takes place without embarrassment or restraint. Confessions and evidence obtained through torture are then used against others in clear violation of the legal principle that information obtained through the use of violence has no probative value, is morally reprehensible, and should be legally inadmissible.4

One is reminded of Max Weber’s famous observation that control over the use of violence is claimed as the prerogative of the modern nation-state.5 In circumstances where this right is invoked, as it is in some supposed antiterror initiatives, it is then only a short step to the justification of terroristic tactics, such as torture, that the liberal state ordinarily repudiates. This process explains the resurgence of interest in the work of the twentiethcentury German jurist Carl Schmitt, who anticipated the consolidated use of power and violence in the move from the Weimer Republic to the Third Reich. Most famously, Schmitt’s work identifies the “state of exception”— where the normal rules of law can be suspended to save the state from

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imminent threats—as being characteristic of this new dispensation: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. . . . What characterises an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order. In such a situation it is clear that the state remains, whereas law recedes.”6 Here we reach the dark heart of modern Islamophobia as a fully implemented system of discrimination in that it is the modernday Muslim subject, not only in the battleground countries of the war on terror but also in the West, who becomes the subject placed outside the law and thus may be imprisoned or killed with impunity—the homo sacer in Giorgio Agamben’s well-known phrase.7 For all those Western declarations of concern for the rights of women, children, and minorities in the spaces of the East, security always outweighs rights—or perhaps we should say that rights are reinterpreted selectively in the interests of national security. This is evident in the arguments raised in favor of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques both by members of the Bush administration in the first decade of the twenty-first century and, more recently, in the rhetoric of Donald Trump. In an essay lambasting the war-on-terror thriller’s role in normalizing state-sanctioned terror, David Holloway has argued that the shift in political ethics that led to torture at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as well as to practices such as extraordinary rendition, waterboarding, and so on has been legitimized in popular-culture forms that often make these practices part of a desperate race to save innocent lives—a scenario familiar from hit TV series such as Fox’s 24 (2001–2010).8 Taking as his examples a number of popular thrillers rushed out in the early years of the war on terror, Holloway identifies a normalization of torture through its repetition in the plots of post-9/11 thrillers, even where authors might take an oppositional stance to the practice.9 Although accepting that novels offer a fairly sophisticated welding of state power to moral consciousness through the reader’s personal interpretative relationship with the text, he suggests that the thriller’s traditional fast pace naturalizes a hegemonic worldview by allowing limited room for reflection. For Holloway, readers of thrillers occupy a “thoroughly abject, feminized [sic] position . . . in relation to what they read.” We enjoy such novels because we know “that our abjection as readers is merely the prelude to enlightenment and ‘mastery’ over the fictive world,” which will come with conventional closure and disclosure. In other words, we are passive counters in a “pleasurable process of

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interpellation.”10 Holloway’s essay is notable for an excellent synopsis of context that draws together the ever more desperate U.S. quest for diminishing energy resources with the rise of anti-American Islamism. Yet even setting aside the curious gendered language Holloway uses to indicate the thriller reader’s supposed passivity, his direct translation of coercive imperialism into the structure of genre literature, resulting in a willing abasement of the reader to imperial ideology, is surely too totalizing. Quite apart from the general fact that narrative pleasures are more variegated and ambiguous than Holloway allows, there is no obvious reason why questions of form should simply reflect wider political preoccupations so directly. As we have already seen in this book, at best they refract them. Holloway’s examples are persuasive in showing how in some thrillers the imperative of preserving a notional “right to life” is pursued through illegal and coercive means so as to infringe the same rights in others—an all too real equation solved through recourse to extreme violence by agencies in  the world outside the text. However, in the generalizing conclusions Holloway reaches there is no place for what one might think of as those more liberal thrillers—texts such as John Le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man (2008)—that expose the human cost of practices such as torture and the targeted abduction and extradition of stateless Muslims as well as the machinations, careerism, and duplicity of Western security services.

The novels featured in this chapter test the boundaries of the thriller form. They have ambitions to move beyond the pot-boiler type with its frantic action and instead delve deeper into characterization and human psychology, considering how the latter are affected by an unforgiving political context. In the case of John Le Carré, the superior thriller is his stock in trade. Along with his predecessor Graham Greene, Le Carré is often credited with giving a literary legitimacy to the spy thriller by making it a vehicle for the exploration of questions of morality, motivation, and identity. His long career has seen him move from producing celebrated novels of Cold War intrigue, such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), and Smiley’s People (1979), to having a contemporary focus on matters such as greed within the multinational pharmaceutical industry, as in The Constant Gardener (2001), and millionaire Russian gangsters, as in Our Kind of Traitor (2010). In fact, we

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could say that Le Carré’s oeuvre as a whole has continually probed the always somewhat tendentious critical distinction between so-called high literature and the most ambitious popular forms. John L. Cobbs gives this point an interesting twist when he argues that Le Carré’s type of writing should be seen as part of the central tradition of the literary novel, even if its history has not always been understood in this way: A century or more ago politics on the international scale was one of the great themes of fiction, as War and Peace, The Charterhouse of Parma and dozens of other major novels attest. But with the twentieth century serious fiction shifted towards the psychological, the novel of inner rather than outer development. Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence and Faulkner turned toward the individual mind as the great subject of fiction, and even writers intensely conscious of political forces, such as Camus, tended to treat them primarily as aspects of the self. . . . Not only are political forces created by the minds that perceive them, but the true focus of fiction is on the perception itself. The mind shapes the political world. Le Carré reverses the equation, maintaining that individual human minds and lives are shaped by the political forces that act upon them.11

Le Carré’s achievement has been to establish a balance between psychological and historical foci, and in several of his recent novels the shaping pressures deforming his characters’ lives are Islamophobia and the war on terror.12 A Most Wanted Man sees Le Carré exploring the human cost of the practice of targeted abduction of Muslim individuals known as “extraordinary rendition.” Focalized alternatively by the main protagonists—Annabel Richter, idealistic and determined young human rights lawyer; Tommy Brue, jaded British scion of Brue Frères Bank in Hamburg; and Gunther Bachmann, maverick German intelligence agent—it tells of the fate of a stateless Chechen Muslim, Issa Karpov. At the start, Issa has made his way to Hamburg, having escaped from detention and torture in Russia, where he has been falsely implicated in radical Islamist activity. But Issa is also the illegitimate son of a now deceased Soviet army general who has lodged in an illicit account at Brue Frères Bank the ill-gotten gains made by looting, raping, and murdering his way through Chechnya during the 1980s. These so-called Lippizaner accounts—where “black” money can slowly be made to turn “white”—have been set up by Tommy Brue’s father and

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predecessor as bank president at the behest of the British secret service in return for General Karpov’s willingness to trade secrets during the dying days of the Soviet Union. Annabel conscripts a smitten Tommy Brue in her attempts to regularize Issa’s residency status by trying to gain access to his inheritance, at first unaware that German intelligence’s warring factions are already tracking Issa and his would-be benefactors. Issa wants nothing to do with what he sees as his father’s blood money, until Annabel— persuaded by Bachmann that cooperation with his team is Issa’s only hope—convinces him to withdraw the money and transfer it immediately to the account of a shady Muslim philanthropist, Dr. Abdullah. The authorities in Germany and beyond suspect Abdullah of financing terrorism and want to entrap him, using Issa as bait. However, Annabel and Tommy’s hopes are ultimately dashed when outside forces from MI5 and the CIA— with the connivance of the more conservative elements of the German hierarchy—gate-crash the transfer meeting, sabotaging Bachmann’s plans to “turn” Abdullah in order to trace the real terrorists. The last we see of Issa and Abdullah is as they are bundled into the back of an unmarked van before, we presume, being “rendered” to an undisclosed location for rather more heavy-handed treatment. The book is, thus, in part about the sins of fathers and how they can return to haunt the present, the personal colliding with the political to produce what the novel describes as “untidy history.”13 At the start, Hamburg is a city still trying to expiate its own guilt at playing host to the 9/11 plotters, the so-called Hamburg Cell. As the story progresses, the different responses to the resulting political pressures are played out in the complex internal politics of the German intelligence and security communities— a running feud “between those determined to defend civil rights at all costs, and those determined to curtail them in the name of national security” (103). Into this cauldron comes Issa, arriving at Hamburg’s railway station—itself a place of transit and provisionality—where he first appears on the security radar. Issa’s flight from Russia has taken him through Turkey, Sweden, and Denmark and finally to the house of Melik, a young Turkish boxing champion, and Melik’s mother, Leyla, who embrace the Islamic injunction to charity by taking in the damaged fugitive. As Issa’s new hosts soon discover, his body bears the marks of torture: bruises, whiplashes, cigarette burns. (Ironically, much of the information the German authorities have linking Issa to Chechen radical groups has

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been obtained under torture by the Russians.) Issa’s treatment is indicative of the moral collapse heralded by the war on terror. Sidestepping the basic provisions of the Geneva Conventions, the United States and some of its allies created after 9/11 a legal black hole in which abuses of basic human rights could take place. They did so by declaring their Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners “illegal enemy combatants,” thereby denying them the status of prisoners of war, with its attendant rights. At the same time, the ethics of torture were openly debated by North American public intellectuals such as Alan Dershowitz and Michael Ignatieff, who employed the same kinds of apocalyptic, “ticking time bomb” scenarios as the popular thriller to argue for the regulated use of enhanced interrogation as “a grim necessity in an age of wars fought by virtuous ‘lesser evils.’ ”14 In Le Carré’s novel, the expedient contrivance of the “nation in danger” is seen to have global consequences, especially for minorities such as Issa. As Leyla says, “Everyone persecutes Chechens. . . . Not only Chechens but Russian Muslims everywhere. Putin persecutes them and Mr Bush encourages him. As long as Putin calls it his war on terror, he can do with the Chechens whatever he wishes, and no one will stop him” (9). The same kind of ominous legal vacuum sucks in Issa. He is “stateless, homeless, an ex-prisoner and illegal” (10), and his precarious status endangers the residency arrangements of his hosts, Melik and Leyla. It also brings him under the wing of Annabel, in-house lawyer for Sanctuary North, a  charitable foundation “for the protection of stateless and displaced persons” (33). The organization’s clients are described—in a nod to Frantz Fanon—as “the wretched of the earth,” those displaced and traumatized by conflict around the world. Annabel takes up Issa’s case in an attempt to regularize his status. As a functionary of the law—albeit with a radical bent—Annabel is used to taking on the cases of those who may be legally unsaveable. Motivated by human sympathy, her operations run parallel to those of Dr. Abdullah, who also sees himself as functioning on behalf of history’s forgotten victims but whose methods result in further mayhem and bloodshed. Indeed, questions about the relative merits of the law and the possibility of legal solutions in an age when law is placed at the service of repressive, Islamophobic state policies run through the book. The tension between statutes and the disorderly realities of life is a recurring preoccupation, taxing Annabel as she aims to serve Issa by putting his life above the letter of the law. Channeling Carl Schmitt, she talks about

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Germany’s—and the West’s—long history of finding the right legal reasons for doing the wrong thing: “In my law school we talked a great deal about law over life. . . . It’s a verity of our German history: law not to protect life, but to abuse it. We did it to the Jews. In its current American form it licenses torture and state kidnapping” (92). Annabel at first seems, to the banker Tommy Brue, a “sovereign young woman,” capable and determined. However, her actual autonomy is shown to be severely limited, not simply by the repressive legal framework with which she deals professionally but also when she is forcibly co-opted by Bachmann and made to assist in his plan to use Issa to draw out Abdullah. If Issa is a kind of prisoner, even while he is still at large, Annabel comes to be owned and manipulated by Bachmann after he has coerced her to cooperate. In a play on the popular understanding of the meaning of the name “Islam,” Annabel is required to “submit” when first abducted by Bachmann’s team (195). She is held in detention while Bachmann explains the realities of her situation: “Nobody, not even Issa, can describe to you what it feels like to lose your freedom, but now you are beginning to learn” (194). With both Annabel and Tommy now acting at the behest of German intelligence, there is a double irony at work when the released Annabel assures Issa, “We would do anything on earth to set you free” (207). Sadia Abbas is unpersuaded that Annabel’s brief experience of incarceration equates to Issa’s lifelong one. Instead, she reads the lawyer’s character as an embodiment of an impotent liberal guilt working its way through A Most Wanted Man. Annabel’s wealthy family connections ensure that she is never in the same kind of mortal danger as Issa. Rather, her status as figurehead of liberal remorse for Islamophobia is inscribed by her habit of respectfully donning a head scarf when in Issa’s presence— something Abbas sees as an example of “left-liberalism’s intense anxiety about doing right by Muslims” and at the same time an act that “displaces the contempt for women in Issa’s version of Islam” and “works as an erasure of struggles over patriarchy and misogyny in Muslim contexts.”15 Abbas’s reading correctly identifies a basic liberal ambivalence at the heart of Le Carré’s novel but misrecognizes it in the ambiguous and highly charged interplay between Issa and Annabel. Reading the book as motivated by the desire to “make restitution for America’s conduct in the War on Terror”16 miscasts Le Carré as some kind of spokesman for the United States rather than as a dissident voice critical of broader Western complicity with

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the neoconservative agendas of Washington; it also risks misinterpreting the text as a ceremonial act of contrition rather than as a complex and ambivalent novel. In fact, what are at stake here are types and degrees of innocence and guilt. In addition to the difficulty of establishing Issa’s “guilt” in relation to terrorism—his background is murky and Russian reports unreliable—the novel is concerned with the construction of a narrative of guilt by association, favored by Bachmann’s hawkish intelligence nemesis Arnie Mohr, who bases it on Issa’s known contacts. Untraceable Muslims are automatically treated with suspicion, even when, as in this case, the supposed “evidence” seems not to fit the personality of the accused. Issa (the Muslim Jesus) is in this tale a Man of Sorrows, an innocent abroad who becomes, in the end, a sacrifice. With his childlike perspective and uncompromising religious principles, Issa barely avoids being a stereotype of the male Muslim victim. A much less developed and believable character than Annabel, Tommy, or Bachmann, Issa seems to exist simply to point up the double dealing and hypocrisy of the war on terror and its travesties of justice. In the novel’s terms, he remains one of the Muslim wretched of the earth, oppressed on the basis of religion and ethnicity and, as representative of one of the late twentieth century’s most intractable conflicts, the ultimate stranger in the era of revived warrior nationalism.17 The novel returns to Le Carré’s favorite theme of identity and how it can be forged, constructed, donned, and doffed. With the plethora of false identities and code names circulating, the novel questions whether anyone can simply “be themselves.” Annabel and Tommy act out the parts written for them by Bachmann in a play the final act of which is disrupted by the intervention of the Americans, who tear up the “script” by plucking Issa and Abdullah off the street after the money has been transferred. Both Muslim men are forced to undergo the experience of abduction and rendition, which was the fate of hundreds of their coreligionists in the years after 2001, until an international outcry put an end to the practice.18 As Ahmed Rashid points out, “Rendered prisoners were truly ‘ghost detainees,’ with no rights, no prospect of a trial, and a future of permanent detention by unsavoury regimes. CIA snatch teams could pick up prisoners anywhere in the world.”19 For those who were brought to trial, the exercise of justice was placed in the hands of secret and unaccountable military tribunals— part of what Judith Butler describes as “a broader tactic to neutralize the

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rule of law in the name of security.”20 Their shoddy practices call to mind the way in which the case against Issa—such as it is—has been cobbled together with hearsay and secondhand reports constituting evidence. This “cowboy tradition of vigilante justice”21 is articulated at the end of the novel by the CIA agent Newton, who tells Bachmann, “Justice has been rendered, man. . . . Justice from the fucking hip, man. No-crap justice, that kind of justice! Justice with no fucking lawyers around to pervert the course” (338–39, emphasis and ellipses in original). Those who have been trying to help Issa discover what both Douzinas and Agamben have remarked upon: that humanity comes to be equated with national citizenship and rights follow from this equation.22 Human rights are national rights. They do not exist without the guarantees only nations can give. As a stateless person, Issa falls outside this protection. The excluded have no rights. Some of the most striking parts of the novel are where Le Carré reveals how the narratives relied on by the security services are often incomplete, incorrect, hypothesized—constructed to answer the needs of neatness and political policy. The novel is made up of stories—and of stories within stories—reflecting the spy’s trade but also acting to expose the potential abuse of language in the interests of power. In this context, the “truth” comes to be what the important people are predisposed to believe. For example, in the chapter where German intelligence is attempting to piece together the accounts of its field agents who have been tracking Issa’s movements, it finds their reports to be riddled with rumor and inaccuracy: one agent believes Leyla is a dangerous fantasist; another, wildly and on little evidence, classifies Melik as a potential radical and has the Sunni Issa attending a Shia mosque; while yet another speculates that the British banker Brue might be a light-skinned Turk or Arab (106–14). These snaking, contradictory stories illustrate the precarious underpinning of moral absolutes in a situation where the West emphasizes its superiority while employing means hardly more scrupulous than those of the terrorists it hunts. The most authoritative and “authentic” interpreter— Bachmann’s Muslim informant, “Professor” Aziz—brings his skills to bear on Dr. Abdullah. Aziz’s role is to speculate on the difference between Abdullah’s apparent persona as a humble philanthropist and his suspected one as a terrorist financier. In the process, Aziz raises the insoluble paradox that lies at the heart of A Most Wanted Man: “[Should] good men accept a little bit of bad as a necessary element of their work[?]” (256, emphasis in

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original). Abdullah’s answer involves allowing a small part of that wealth he uses to alleviate Muslim suffering to be diverted into violent activities. Aziz tacitly condemns him for his inability to resolve the moral conundrum of doing a little bad that good may come. Yet, of course, this challenge is also faced by the Western agents in the novel, too. Bachmann must lie, manipulate, and if necessary sacrifice his human assets for a presumed greater good. His benevolent intentions—keeping German citizens safe— may be tarnished by the means necessary to carry them out. His more conservative brethren and the Americans are depicted as much less concerned with niceties in their aggressive pursuit of victory in the war on terror. Thus, moral absolutes jostle with and merge into the compromised realities of ground-level tactics. In the end, Issa and Abdullah are “rendered,” and Annabel, Tommy, and Bachmann are left dazed and defeated on an empty Hamburg street. The novel exposes the ingrained prejudice, based on race, culture, and religion, that has replaced the ideological struggles of the old Cold War at the heart of modern global conflict. A Most Wanted Man is at its strongest when charting those narratives that can be spun to make people believe in a pervasive Islamic threat. Warring versions of stories and the difficulty of drilling down to find the truth (and then getting it out into the world) are also central to the two other novels I wish to address in this chapter. In each case, there is a price to be paid for the truth, and a blood sacrifice is required.

The dubious conduct of the war on terror is also the backdrop for two post9/11 novels by the former Baltimore Sun war reporter turned novelist Dan Fesperman, a writer whose work also invites comparison with Le Carré’s and Greene’s. His book The Prisoner of Guantánamo (2006), in addition to being a taut thriller, is an exposé of the position of internees at America’s most famous offshore penitentiary and a meditation on types of imprisonment and the double dealing of vested interests.23 However, here I wish to focus on his earlier novel The Warlord’s Son (2004), which once again explores the notion of “sides” and in which characters cross borders both geographical and cultural, learning more about themselves and the realities of their position in the process. Indeed, borders became somewhat porous in political terms as the interventionist policies adopted by the West in face of the Kosovo crisis of the

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late 1990s were extended after 2001. In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 1999, Secretary-General Kofi Annan identified a shift in the concept of sovereignty from the national to the individual. As Sungur Sarvan points out, it followed that “where a state violates human rights, the ‘international community’ has the ‘right to intervene,’ militarily if need be, in the internal affairs of that state.”24 This definition inaugurated the notion of “cross-border rights,” those rights that can be “defended” by an outside force. It was a short step from this notion to the policy of “regime change” pursued by the Bush administration in the first years of the twenty-first century. This sea change in foreign relations was cemented in 2005 by the United Nations’ adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which boldly declares that “sovereignty no longer exclusively protects States from foreign interference”25 and that states may be seen to forfeit their sovereignty if they fail adequately to protect their populations from human rights violations. The Bush government’s first intervention was the less globally controversial invasion of the dysfunctional state of Afghanistan in November 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks. In its wake, a posse of press and media scrambled for the best positions from which to report back on the progress of the campaign and for the best stories. In The Warlord’s Son, burned-out war reporter Stanford J. Kelly—known as Skelly—is sent on one last assignment to the Pakistan–Afghanistan border by the editor of his provincial midwestern newspaper to cover the movement of troops into Afghanistan in the early days of the invasion. Along with his local fixer, Najeeb, the eponymous warlord’s son, Skelly eventually hooks up with an advanced guard of local militia going over the border, led by one of several tribal chiefs ambitious to stake their claim in the new Afghanistan that will emerge once the Taliban has been dislodged. At the same time, in a subplot, Najeeb’s secret girlfriend, Daliya Qadeer, daughter of a government minister, must escape from imprisonment by her disapproving family and follow Najeeb across the border, too, undertaking a number of transgressions of her own in the process. Just as Skelly struggles to keep up with the local intrigue and turf wars that lead to a succession of betrayals, skirmishes, and summary executions in this lawless land, so too Najeeb finds himself at the mercy of others’ agendas when he is forcibly recruited by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and required to report back on the activities of the warring factions. To

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complicate matters further, Skelly discovers that both the U.S. State Department and a Western-based energy company with designs on potential gas and oil supply routes are also dabbling in regional tribal politics. These agents’ motives remain unclear until the end, when local and international interests collide and a tortuous chain of connections and interests is revealed. During their adventure, Skelly and Najeeb are passed between rival warlords, get captured, escape, are recaptured, and so on, before the denouement sees Skelly, now separated from Najeeb, cornered and killed by a particularly vicious warlord and ally of Osama Bin Laden. So far, so exciting. One might expect such twists and turns in any thriller worthy of the name. However, I wish to argue that Fesperman goes further by deploying a formal corollary for the frequent crossing and recrossing of borders undertaken by his characters as his text slowly morphs from a thriller into a modern-day Western. At the same time, Skelly is forced to confront and overcome borders in his own thinking, recognizing his lack of knowledge and therefore his dependency on Najeeb, with whom he has become increasingly close. Like Le Carré, Fesperman employs an alternating point-of-view technique that sees chapters focalized by Skelly, Najeeb, and Daliya in sequence. This technique allows for a view from either “side” of what at first appears an unbridgeable cultural divide but as the novel goes on becomes increasingly permeable as characters confront and cross their own mental borders. Indeed, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the book is only ever notional. The porosity of the actual border in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas soon becomes clear to the disorientated Skelly as he ventures across unmarked terrain, all of which looks the same to him. Najeeb tells him: “Up here the border does not matter” because tribal divisions are more pertinent, and Skelly soon comes to think of the idea of borders as “a construct of foreigners” and a colonial hangover.26 Those with experience recognize the absurdity of trying to police the nine -hundred-mile-long border, a problem that has haunted politicians and military commanders through the ages: “ ‘The border is now sealed,’ the government regularly proclaimed, while those in the know suppressed laughter, certain that the longstanding ebb and flow of humans and weapons would continue as it had for centuries, as undisturbed by bombing as it was by border police” (59). In fact, the concept of sides is already problematized in the two main characters. Najeeb is Western educated and something of a cultural hybrid,

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with fond memories of U.S. college life and early romantic encounters as well as eclectic tastes that allow his Quran to nestle on the bookshelf next to works by Paul Auster and Phillip Roth. The text confronts binary expectations head on, telling us, “When choosing sides was the order of the day, Najeeb remained dangerously neutral” (17). Pavan Kumar Malreddy makes the point that Najeeb is domesticated for us as part of the novel’s revival of  Orientalist tropes. His virtues are those recuperable by “Western” standards—reason, a sense of justice, loyalty—and he has “the right combination of Western and Oriental temperament to give Skelly [and hence the reader] a sneak peek inside Pakistan’s tribal aristocracy.”27 There is some truth in this description, just as it is fair to say that Najeeb’s budding romance with Daliya is made palatable for us as a love match in the “starcrossed lovers” tradition, wherein their illicit encounters are construed as a political act against stifling and repressive conventions. In fact, in some ways Daliya is the most radical figure in the novel, striking back against gender expectations by setting out in pursuit of Najeeb dressed as a boy in order to navigate the tribal regions more easily and by drawing on a loose network of women for support, including her former university tutor, an aid agency representative, and the head of a women’s clinic. As she travels, she experiences “a burgeoning sense of crossing new boundaries, of breaching the forbidden” (179). Gender power relations are upturned most memorably when Daliya facilitates Najeeb’s escape from capture by dressing him in a burka! Without insider advantages, Skelly is at first left to his own devices as he tries to make sense of his new surroundings. He employs personally familiar categories and cultural parallels to render what he sees: the hiss and pop of a lantern recalls “boyhood campouts”; the elaborate greeting given to a warlord is compared to the Pledge of Allegiance; and scampering village boys remind him of prairie dogs (291, 123, 265). In particular, he is thrown back on previous textual apprehensions of the East as a way of articulating his impressions: the white shalwar kameez that his short-lived first fixer wears is like “something out of the Arabian Nights” (32), and a nighttime scene evokes “silver spear points and galloping sultans” (329). Indeed, the book records an education of sorts for Skelly, who arrives in Pakistan with a ready stock of Orientalist clichés about the East and perceptions that are mostly colonial in origin. Always the jobbing writer, Skelly is constantly working through available narrative forms to try to

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come to terms with his linguistic and cultural disorientation as well as to sketch out reports to be sent back to his readers in the United States. Kipling is repeatedly invoked as the literary authority from which the most readily available images derive. Modern-day imperial adventurers rub shoulders with horsemen on the Silk Road; armed warriors populate mountain passes, “just the way Kipling had described them” (155); and in the cool hills “you could easily imagine you were at a government resthouse in the 1800s, stopping for tea on your way across the Empire” (188). Malreddy has objected to these features of the narrative. He sees The Warlord’s Son as marked throughout by “aggressive,” “frenzied,” and “knee-jerk Orientalism” that simply recycles stereotypes in the interests of lurid sensationalism.28 Fesperman does employ and trade on certain exoticist clichés, especially early on, but his use of them is mitigated by being part of what is actually an insistent questioning of the reliability of his protagonist as focalizer. Malreddy is too quick to conflate character and author and ignores the deliberate distance used to point up Skelly’s responses as limited and partial. Indeed, the story comes increasingly to be about the gradual development of Skelly’s perspective from Orientalism to a kind of relativism. As a result, Malreddy misses the critical awareness—not to say the irony—in statements such as “And now here was Skelly, scribe of the West, trying to make sense of these imponderable rustics for the enlightenment of the plainfolk back home” (305). In a rush to condemn Fesperman for tarring local customs and practices as diabolical, Malreddy misreads as lazy those passages that in fact register Skelly’s unsettling lack of understanding of what he sees. Thus, when we learn that tribesmen prostrating in prayer look as though they are “speaking into the ground, casting spells on the land itself” (254), what we are witnessing is less lazy scaremongering than an eruption of the uncanny. Of course, it could be objected that the colonial space as uncanny is itself a long-established Orientalist trope. However, the uncanny’s radical potential has been reclaimed by postcolonial critics such as Homi K. Bhabha, for whom it is produced in the process of displacement that is characteristic of migration.29 Sigmund Freud’s original formulation emphasizes the centrality of foreign-ness and familiarity in the production of the uncanny. He says, “The uncanny [the ‘unhomely’] is what was once familiar [‘homely’].”30 I would argue that this nexus is also at play in The Warlord’s Son. In the novel, Skelly recalls how watching 9/11 unfold on a TV screen in Radio Shack dislocated him, as the event did millions of Americans. Suddenly,

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the banal routine of his domestic reporting duties comes to seem meaningless, if not actually sinister. He thinks how for a time he had swapped war reporting for “the local version of Siberia, 40 miles up route 19 to Warren County with its Wal-Marts, belt roads and Assemblies of God. . . . After so many years he found himself struggling to make sense of his homeland. America, it seemed, had turned into a land of big box stores and hundredchannel cable” (29). Home has become just as unsettling as Peshawar or Jalalabad. The uncanny is also, as Hugh Haughton puts it, “a survival from the abandoned culture of our own childhood, bearing the Gothic signature of our own earliest terrors and desires.”31 At one point, while being led by a young local boy through nighttime village streets to meet the chieftain who will lead them into Afghanistan, Skelly finds that a random series of images from his own past spring to mind: a wizened old man looks like a fairytale sorcerer; the clang of a gunsmith’s hammer calls to mind the “Elves and Dwarves” of fairytales; his mute guide calls up an unbidden biblical verse—“And the children shall lead them”; and the camp is so eerie that Skelly expects at any moment to see “a headless horseman gallop past” (205–7). He muses: “Were others similarly afflicted with this stream of banalities and clichés . . . quotes and phrases dislodged from deep memory banks and careering haphazardly. Snatches of old advertising jingles and glib voices from his childhood. In the bouncing taxi ride out here he had recalled the phrase ‘Where the rubber meets the road.’ Firestone? Age ten? Good Lord, where did it all come from and why?” (206). In Freud’s terms, Skelly is experiencing the power of repetition at the heart of the uncanny: “a regression to times when the ego had not yet clearly set itself off against the world outside and from others.”32 Yet rather than leave us “at home” in the unhomely space of Skelly’s disoriented groping after meaning, the novel switches to the perspective offered by Najeeb—Skelly’s literal and figurative translator—to historicize the things the American sees only from a distance. For instance, Najeeb “translates” a legless beggar who shuffles by and unnerves Skelly: “Mine victim. . . . The camp is full of them. If you think gun smuggling is big, you should see the black market in artificial legs” (207). Thus, rather than the novel painting a two-dimensional picture of a valiant Westerner confronting baffling primitive barbarity and bringing it under the sway of reason through narrative, the presence of Najeeb as a key focalizer takes us into

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this world of pride, feudal power, and shifting allegiances, giving us a more authoritative and historically resonant picture of the life-world behind the turmoil. Indeed, it is significant that as Skelly’s and Najeeb’s destinies become entwined and their safety dependent on mutual trust, their ways of seeing begin to blend, too. They discuss religion and women, and the fixer comments on Skelly’s professional habit of leaving his wife stuck at home while he crosses the globe: “Your marriage sounds very Pashtun, you know,” to which Skelly replies with amusement, “The American Midwest as sort of purdah. . . . Works for me. Not sure how they’d feel about it in Illinois, though” (279). Similarly, their stirring sense of kinship is furthered by a shared interest in the holy trinity—“supermarkets, libraries and women” (277). In fact, just as its characters draw closer to one another as they cross and recross borders, so, too, the novel itself enacts its own transgressions in generic terms with the aim of exploring what unites cultures as well as what divides them. As Skelly and Najeeb travel deeper into Afghanistan, the textual elements come more and more to resemble those of that preeminent narrative form of the forging of America at its frontiers, the Western. Skelly experiences an unexpected familiarity not only through those unbidden intrusions of memory but also because his experiences have the quality of the already read—even to him. So, for example, our protagonists are forced to witness the summary justice meted out to those judged traitors when the captured leader of a raiding party and his deputies are lynched (352–53). By this point, we have come to realize that what we are reading is in fact an archetypal frontier narrative—a sort of transcultural Western (an Eastern Western, if you will)—complete with raiding parties, nights spent around campfires under the stars, ambushes in rocky ravines, banditry, warring tribes, and makeshift gallows. The aim of all this is not so much to indicate a simple intercultural resemblance or to suggest that Afghanistan resembles the United States of 150 years earlier. Rather, it is to reveal how our perceptions of the Other are always fashioned with the cultural tools we have available to us. In Skelly’s case, these tools include imperial adventure fiction and the cowboy films and serials beloved of mid-twentieth-century popular culture. Edward Said, that most astute critic of the persistence of past ways of seeing, cites

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Pierre Bourdieu’s notion that “places—be it a problem suburb or ghetto or Chechnya, Kosovo, Iraq or Africa—are phantasms, which feed on emotional experiences stimulated by more or less uncontrolled words and images, such as those conveyed in the tabloids and by political propaganda or rumor.”33 Afghanistan is another such place. To the regular news reports of war and tribal bloodshed we must here add that deeper and in a way more intangible myth of the primitive, in all its guises, on which Skelly initially draws. The point, however, is not to see this position as the final one but as a starting point from which to move forward, to reach out, to cross another kind of border. As his meanderings take him back and forth across the border, Skelly can be seen to be unwittingly taking on the role of the “specular border journalist” proposed by Karim H. Karim.34 This idea, in turn, draws on an essay by Abdul R. JanMohamed that emphasizes the need for intellectuals to “transcend those deep ideological allegiances to ‘group,’ ‘nation,’ ‘race,’ ‘gender,’ or ‘class’ that lead to the Manichean valorisation of one side and the reciprocal devaluation of the other.”35 Lamenting the parochial, unquestioning patriotism that swept over American journalism in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Karim for his part advocates a new type of journalism, kicking against the demands of simple national interest and based on critical self-consciousness and cultural disengagement to allow for a global, nonhierarchical kind of reporting. Karim says: “The foreign correspondent, by learning to question the essentialist bases of her own socialization and placing herself in the Other’s shoes, could genuinely begin to understand the people she is covering. The ideal of specular border journalism has the potential for providing genuinely global narratives that are not monolithic but pluralist, in which cultures are not arranged hierarchically.”36 It would be too much to claim that Skelly deliberately adopts such a position. Rather, he learns to take a broader, more relativistic view of cultural difference courtesy of the bond he develops with Najeeb and the new perspectives that relationship opens up. Finally, in the closing pages, he is forced to confront the realization that the relief he feels when temporarily “back among his own people, his own tribe” (456), is based on an illusory sense of safety. (The State Department and energy company goons—alarmed that Skelly is about to expose their manipulation of warlord rivalries for personal gain—conspire to lead him into an ambush,

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where he is cut to pieces by one of their local proxies.) It is not nation or culture or race that offers a sense of home in this text but the recognition of connectedness with an Other—in other words, of crossing borders. Skelly never gets to file his story. The fact that he is as much a victim of Western meddling as of Afghan “barbarism” testifies to Fesperman’s liberal credentials and clear-eyed determination to confront political and economic power plays in which the writer and the truth are the first casualties. As in some of Le Carré’s recent novels, the fate of hard-gained knowledge is left ambiguous at the end of The Warlord’s Son. Will anyone ever be able to tell the whole story? Or will malevolent forces suppress it “in the national interest”? Although The Warlord’s Son confronts Islamophobia only indirectly—via Skelly’s unease at the proximity of devout religiosity and coldblooded murder he witnesses—the essential cultural differences and value judgments on which Islamophobia feeds are central to the book. The protagonist’s new outlook comes at the highest possible price, but the novel itself offers a working through of intercultural consciousness where mutual vulnerability produces the space to think (and write) differently.37 On the levels of both form and content, Fesperman’s novel enacts a crossing of those borders that were elsewhere being furiously reinforced and policed in the days after 9/11. As such, it is concerned to keep open a line of communication in a world where civilizations need not clash.

In his attack on the specious, self-serving discourses dominating the news reporting of violence and Islam, Karim H. Karim identifies the existence of certain recurring frames: “a set of journalistic narratives on ‘Muslim terrorism’ ” that “help shape the cognitive scripts for reporting acts of terrorism.”38 These frames determine the way events are rendered and influence how they are perceived by audiences. Richard Flanagan’s novel The Unknown Terrorist is concerned with the utility of just such news media frames and also how they are open to manipulation and extension. Their ubiquity and dissemination in a globalized media landscape testify to a practical concern for what certain types of story are worth in a market. In the case of Muslims and terror, this becomes, in effect, a market for Islamophobia. Yet news discourse is only one vehicle for this market; the others include popular-cultural forms such as film, television, and literature; the terrain of social media; the utterances of politicians; and so on.39 In a wry

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“note on sources” at the end of his novel, Flanagan comments: “I took this novel from everywhere—ads, headlines, gossip, bar talk, along with the grabs of politicians and the sermons of shock jocks—no-one, after all, was doing contemporary fiction better.” 40 The Unknown Terrorist is certainly dogged in its pursuit of media manipulation and its human consequences. However, as I argue, Flanagan’s approach also points up some of the shortcomings in the liberal novel’s treatment of Islamophobia: limitations we can also see in the Le Carré and Fesperman novels. These limitations have to do with the fact that the characters who experience discrimination and exclusion most directly or toward whom our emotional investment is directed tend not to be Muslim. Setting aside real-world inequalities, these novels tacitly assume that the reader will more readily identify with the quandaries of protagonists who share a known, familiar cultural orientation. After a one-night stand with Tariq, a computer programmer and drug mule, Gina Davis (a.k.a. the Doll)—stripper and pole dancer at a nightspot frequented by the rich and powerful—finds herself on the run in Sydney, Australia, as police hunt her and her lover, a suspected Islamist terrorist. Matters take a dark turn when Tariq turns up dead in the trunk of a car, and his presumed accomplice, the Doll, is branded “the unknown terrorist” by ravenous journalists. On the run through a cityscape marked by extremes of wealth and poverty, the Doll undergoes a harsh education in the reality of this media-fixated society where corruption is king and a person’s worth is measured by his or her wealth and access to the levers of political power. While in hiding, she becomes the unwitting star of news bulletins and pseudodocumentaries. With her career as a stripper turned supposed terrorist, the Doll represents the perfect “story”: a blend of sex and violence that sends TV and radio discussion shows into a frenzy. Her decidedly “un-Islamic” lifestyle is projected as the perfect deep cover for a terrorist and feeds paranoia in a society where everyone can fall under suspicion. Orchestrating this reaction is Richard Cody, TV host and ace reporter whose career at the start of the novel is on the slide and who thus sees the Doll as his passport back to prominence. In cahoots with a battery of careerist politicians and rent-a-quote security experts, Cody concocts a version of the Doll’s life and motivations unrecognizable to her as she vainly tries to evade capture by the authorities and the stereotyping snares of his narrative.

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As the Doll moves through a city given over to the hedonism of the annual Mardi Gras but also stalked by casual violence, decay, and sudden death, she loses her initial optimistic materialism, and her mood turns from fear to anger. Hunted and haunted, she turns into the personification of violated femininity—a vengeful version of the Black Widow persona she has previously burlesqued in her act. In the violent denouement, a shavenheaded Doll shoots dead her tormentor Cody in the pole-dancing club where she used to work, before being gunned down by the detective who has been trying to save her. Throughout the novel, we have been made aware that the Doll is a generally well-intentioned victim of both personal circumstances—which include an abusive father and a stillborn baby son— and of society’s objectification of women and cultural Others. The book insists that human beings are more—and more complex—than the simplified stories that are told about them. Even so, she ends up caught between the stereotypes, forced to play out an end that, it feels, might almost have been prescripted by the screenwriters of the movie her life story will surely become. No longer just a doll, at the end she appears to be an automaton fulfilling programmed instructions from the cultural zeitgeist. There is a sense that by embracing her fate, the Doll, with no way out, has finally turned into the murdering madwoman the press have invented. After 9/11, Australia joined other Western nations in ramping up its security measures. The National Security Information (Criminal Proceedings) Act of 2004 was followed by the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2005, each building on the increased powers given to the Australian Intelligence Security Organization through the Intelligences Services Act of 2001. In addition to the usual increased capacity to intrude on citizens’ lives, potential curbs on freedom and normal legal practices were introduced.41 As Richard Jackson puts it, constructing the supreme emergency “creates a situation of extreme crisis . . . where normal politics is suspended and where the usual checks and balances on the exercise of power can be dispensed with”—the idea being to produce a sense of paranoia where the public “feels grateful to the state for relieving an anxiety which was encouraged by officials in the first place.”42 This is certainly the process The Unknown Terrorist is interested in. The novel is concerned with power and the media as well as with the power of the media. It charts what Simon Cottle would call the “mediatizing” of terror: the way media take on a “performative” and “constitutive” rather than

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a neutral or reflective role in relation to conflicts.43 Mediated images are used to construct an incriminating story about the Doll as she goes on the run. Just as she has embodied a mediated “female ideal” in her sexualized performances—“the ideal of beautiful women as cadaverous children” (6)—so the image of her as dangerous terrorist is propagated through television and radio news bulletins, talk shows, and the ranting of shock jocks. At one point, seeking temporary refuge in a shopping mall, the Doll comes across a giant plasma screen showing footage of a terror news montage that weaves her image into a story of international conflict and atrocity, presided over by a “monstrous,” outsized Richard Cody as anchorman (148–49). (Ironically, during the Doll and Tariq’s brief time together, she learns that Tariq is an expert in raster graphics, digitally manipulating images to turn them into something else—“What they’d like to do to real people if they could,” as he acerbically remarks [76].) Her trumped-up crime is the latest symptom of a society where interpersonal trust is discouraged in favor of infantilized reliance on mediated images and government authorities. The relationship of power and wealth to access to, and manipulation of, media messages has become central to this society. As the Doll has learned early on, money brings a degree of freedom. She fetishizes designer goods and dreams of making enough money from stripping and dancing for rich clients to leave the adult-entertainment business. She is aware of the attraction of wealth and power, inscribed in the glossy commercial images encountered everywhere in day-to-day life. Her ambition is to buy an apartment, transform it in line with the popular styles touted on makeover shows and in magazines, and then “trade up,” preferring, while working under the lascivious gaze of her audience, to focus on “all the things money could buy . . . all the things money made her feel” (34). Yet behind the scenes, her life and those of her fellow citizens are being manipulated by well-connected vested interests. Several episodes take place in the homes of the super-rich, such as the cliff-top mansion of Frank Moretti, a disabled art collector and drug baron with whom the Doll has a weekly stripping appointment, and the Double Bay residence of his influential namesake, Katie Moretti, where the great and the good of Sydney society gather to indulge in “the gossip that traded knowledge for money and power” (23). In their ability to decide the fate of those beneath them, whose lives they do not understand, these individuals are all powerful but short-sighted. We

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are told: “Like reptiles waiting to strike, they gazed out on Australia, unable to see anything” (25). In Flanagan’s somewhat polemical version of contemporary Australia, citizens are tranquilized by their passive participation in mindless consumption, accepting what is sold to them by a sensationalist media and advertising industry as part of a quest for happiness through instant gratification. Consumption brings “purpose and order” for the shoppers in the malls and high-end boutiques, deferring an engagement with their own mortality, but as the Doll soon comes to realize, this mode of consolation has meaning only “as long as everyone agreed it had” (179). Those who fall through this comforting net fight it out for scraps on street corners and in alleyways in the stench of poverty. It is the Doll’s fate to move from glimpsing the former way of life to an up-close engagement with the latter as she moves through the byways of Sydney, trying to keep out of sight. In this world, everything—love, hate, beauty, and art—is a commodity among other commodities. Frank Moretti’s house dazzles with its taste and opulence, a cornucopia of Etruscan mosaics, Aboriginal art, and works by Constantin Brancusi, Sean Scully, and Joan Miró: “every decoration working towards some greater whole” (128). Even women become commodities as Moretti talks of the other strippers he has employed “as though they were paintings that could be bought and sold” (136). One of Flanagan’s themes is the way sexual objectification and aggression against women folds into racism and Islamophobia. As part of the Doll’s special act for visiting U.S. marines, she performs in the guise of the “Black Widow”: “she would appear in a long black dress and hijab, then slowly strip to crotchless black knickers and an open cup black bra. . . . And as she did so Ferdy [the owner of the club], using a data projector, would cover her flesh with swirling Arabic lettering which he claimed to the audience was ‘the Black Widow’s most sacred book,’ the Koran” (41). This seedy display, which in its calligraphic details recalls Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh’s controversial film Submission (2004), reveals the fetishization of the female Muslim Other as object of military intervention—the performance is accompanied by “explosions, screams and a thudding rhythm” (40)—and as veiled and thus all the more alluring focus of sexual fantasy. Never was racism’s flipside in desire illustrated so starkly as in this show for the club’s paying punters.

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The Doll-as-terrorist meme takes its place among security threats, sex scandals, and celebrity gossip, gaining traction through repetition on news channels, discussion programs, and radio phone-ins. Richard Cody knows that its success is dependent on how the pieces are soldered together, how the core material of a life story needs “key dramatic elements” introduced or accentuated. Tariq is a predictable entity, one of the “dangerous Islamic types” well known to media audiences. But the Doll is different, “one of us,” an Australian girl who appears to have turned, an “unknown terrorist.” Cody’s boss, Jerry Mendes, encourages him: “People want an exalting illusion, that’s what they want. Find that story, ginger it up with a few dashes of fear and nastiness, and you’ve got gold. True gold” (26–27). Susan D. Moeller has described how considerations of audience numbers and interests dovetail with the profit motive in what she calls “ ‘Big Story’ coverage.” In the reporting of terrorist incidents, certain events are typically hyped if they appear directly to affect a news carrier’s target audience, emphasizing the threat. With cuts to news budgets and the imperative of retaining one’s market share, a kind of saturation coverage is encouraged, making a direct appeal for the reader’s or viewer’s attention. “ ‘Big Story’ coverage means wall-towall reporting. . . . You know it’s a Big Story when there is nothing else on  the news. Big Stories occur when there is a critical mass of media coverage. . . . [They are] why you see the same news no matter what TV station you turn on, which site you surf to, or what front page you look at.”44 As Cody works his dubious magic and his invention commandeers the airwaves, the Doll becomes one such story. The complicity of the government security sector and the media in ratcheting up levels of fear among the populace is also central to The Unknown Terrorist. Cody’s high-powered contacts provide direct assistance in spinning and spreading the Doll’s story in a post-9/11 world where the specter of Islamist terrorism is repeatedly invoked to justify repressive legislation, the suspension of due legal process, and the fostering of fear and hatred toward Muslims. The casual racism depicted throughout is shared by the Doll herself. She claims to be “equally racist about everybody,” and an accidental collision with a woman in a burka allows her to give vent to her Islamophobia: The Doll’s mind leapt back to the police with their guns and black uniforms looking like death, to the television report the day before about the Homebush bombs,

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and then the woman appeared to the Doll not as another woman, but as something terrifying and unknown, an evil spectre she had seen so often in films, a short and stubby Darth Vader. The woman, for her part seemed to be saying that it was the Doll’s fault, though exactly what she was saying the Doll couldn’t understand because she was talking in a strange language. Maybe it was an accusation or maybe it wasn’t. It was impossible to say. . . .“Fuck off!” the Doll yelled, “Just fuck off back to wherever you’re from.” (93)

A passer-by stops to offer congratulations: “ ‘Good on you,’ a middle-aged man in a canary yellow shirt said in slightly trembling but loud voice. ‘They won’t integrate, you know’ ” (93). Among Sydney’s movers and shakers, Richard Cody articulates a slightly more sophisticated but nonetheless similar Islamophobic argument, echoing Ignatieff and Dershowitz, as he attempts to recover some prestige after his demotion at the beginning of the novel. “The era of sentimentality is over,” he opines. “Our civilisation is under attack—why, even an afternoon such as this would be illegal under the new barbarians—neither wine, nor women allowed to dress as they wish, nor dancing . . .” . . . Richard Cody then argued for the necessity of torture, properly managed. Proper management, sensible policies, agreed procedures—it was possible, after all, to civilise something as barbaric as warfare with the Geneva Convention, and now we needed a Geneva Convention on how we might conduct torture in a civilised fashion. (31, first set of ellipses in the original)

Flanagan’s bleak irony is fully employed here: even Cody shocks himself with his tirade, realizing that he doesn’t really believe what he has just said but simply wishes to employ “grand” words to impress the assembled power brokers at Katie Moretti’s party. Nevertheless, the forces working behind the scenes in this novel are deadly serious about such things. Fear is the novel’s most useful commodity. Security gurus and government apparatchiks privately emphasize the value of keeping citizens in fear and thus quiescent. As the Doll remarks to her best friend, Sally Wilder, “People like fear. We all want to be frightened and we all want somebody to tell us how to live. . . . [I]f you can make up a terrorist you’ve given people

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the Devil. They love the Devil. They need the Devil. That’s my job. You get me?” (166). In his classic study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Stanley Cohen shows how collective fears are amplified by the media and made to focus on a symbolic Other (the “folk devil”) but at the same time expose important fault lines within society.45 Flanagan’s novel suggests that stoking such fears became a central tactic of governance after 9/11, invoked in support of the expansion of Western military power and state surveillance.46 In this context, the folk devil must then undergo a ritual casting out from society. In part, this ritual is conducted through Cody’s media campaign of vilification. It is augmented by bandwagon-jumping politicians, keen to look tough—such as Flanagan’s fictional leader of the Opposition, who takes to the airwaves to brandish the threat of enforced statelessness: “Terrorists are not Australians. . . . Either you are with Australia or you are no longer Australian and have lost your right to the rights of other citizens” (158–59). By the power of nightmares, the liberal authoritarian state is to purge itself of its unwanted members. On her journey, the Doll comes to a realization of her position on a historical continuum of gendered scapegoating and sanctified retribution. In Frank Moretti’s library, she finds in a book a photograph in which a French female collaborator at the end of the Second World War is getting her head forcibly shaved as a mark of shame, to the delight of laughing, mostly female onlookers (174). Later, a cable-channel documentary records the discovery of a preserved threethousand-year-old female body in a Swedish peat bog: “The fossil woman had been drowned, weighed down with stones tied to a noose around her neck, Her head had been shaved. A ritual death, a German expert said, for some crime that no one could know” (199). Feeling a sense of kinship with these historical female outcasts, the Doll makes preparations for her own ritual death by shaving off her hair before embracing her position as the blood sacrifice this warped society demands. Long before this, the Doll is already a marginal figure: certainly beyond the limits of respectability as a sex worker, although “providing a service” in the valorized terms of commodity culture. Falsely accused and pursued, she is ejected from society, becomes persona non grata—another homo sacer and victim of the war on terror. However, the success of the ritual casting out is guaranteed only when ordinary citizens can be made to implement it.47 The unusual thing about The Unknown Terrorist is that it is a white Australian non-Muslim rather than a Muslim who undergoes this

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process. The Doll is forced to inhabit the space in contemporary demonology occupied by the Muslim, but in the novel as a whole Muslims are almost entirely absent. In reality, as Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein point out, “[The] racial-cultural identity of the ‘true nationals’ remains invisible, but can be inferred (and is ensured) a contrario by the alleged quasi-hallucinatory visibility of the ‘false nationals’: the Jews, ‘wogs,’ immigrants, ‘Pakis,’ natives and blacks.”48 Likewise, in her book Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, Sherene H. Razack is at pains to emphasize the ethnicized nature of the discrimination by which the Muslim subject is evicted from the normal safeguards of citizenship and links it to the very construction of the unified “white” nation. Exposing how a concocted discourse of racial exclusion becomes a valid option for majority communities, she says: “I am particularly interested in how such evictions of racialised peoples makes possible the production of white identities—as kin groups, families, nations. . . . Such a racially homogeneous community is nevertheless made up of subjects who imagine themselves as raceless individuals, consumers and agents . . . in other words, as citizens who have the freedom to make their own choices.”49 In enumerating all this injustice, The Unknown Terrorist sometimes teeters on the verge of stridency and even nihilism in its tone. What chance is there for a society so hopelessly compromised by superficial values and malevolent manipulation? Even so, as an account of the way a neoliberal culture of amoral, rampant individualism and inevitably unsated desires must create its own demonic Other in order to cohere, the novel brings together much that is indicative of the contemporary world and its response to challenges to its unjust, inequitable structures—responses that find an outlet in Islamophobia. With that in mind, we could say that despite containing (or perhaps because it contains) no actual terrorists or Islamic fundamentalists whatsoever, Flanagan’s novel offers a particularly clear picture of the role of decadence, intellectual malaise, sensationalism, instant gratification, and the political uses of fear in creating the conditions for antiMuslim prejudice. Yet in the end the absence of the Muslim object of prejudicial treatment is somewhat unsettling. Flanagan’s point is that anyone, black or white, Muslim or non-Muslim, could become the object of state violence and expulsion. But the fact that this scenario plays out through the experience of a white Australian woman—albeit working class and

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disenfranchised—somehow implies a humanistic leveling at the cost of the specifics of cultural experience. As in A Most Wanted Man, where the more fully rounded characters are the non-Muslim Europeans, and in The Warlord’s Son, with its focus on the American journalist Skelly, so in Flanagan’s novel our concern is invited for the wronged non-Muslim caught in the fallout of the war on terror. In each case, the Sacrifice—he or she who suffers the effects of neoimperialism and racism—tends to be a white Westerner. Thus, it seems, the limitation of the liberal thriller is set by a racialized hierarchy of sympathy in which those characters with whom we can be most readily expected to identify are those who are most like “ourselves.” The bigger question, then, is whether these novels in some sense culturally appropriate the experience of Muslim suffering, domesticating it for the delectation of a presumed white, non-Muslim readership. The Unknown Terrorist gestures toward the double standard by which Muslim rights and lives are treated as if they have less value than those of non-Muslims. The sadistic Frank Moretti keeps a “Cabinet of Human Comedy” containing historical items commemorating cruelty: a letter by Stalin; a machete from the Rwandan genocide; shoes from an Armenian mass grave. Among his trove is a Dutch pistol from the forces that failed to protect the Muslim Bosniaks of Srebrenica from massacre in 1995. He remarks: “ ‘The Serbs killed eight thousand civilians left unprotected. And this Beretta . . . meant to protect all those people, never used.’ He was laughing. ‘That’s something, eh? Three thousand Americans die and it changes history. Eight and a half thousand Muslims die and it’s forgotten’ ” (134). In his own distorted way, Moretti is here calling attention to the disparity in what Judith Butler calls “grievability”: the degree to which lives lost can be publically recalled and commemorated. Butler points out the vast discrepancy between the recording and individualization of those lost in the United States on 9/11 and the countless, nameless, faceless others subsequently killed in the war on terror. She argues that it will not be until we in the West can face up to our common capacity for loss and the shared need for grieving that we will begin to see the Other as human like ourselves.50 Without suggesting any facile equivalence between the worldly and the textual, it must be asked: Is it too much to see the liberal thriller as raising the question of when life can be said to be “readable”? What types of experience, culture, and mindset can be foregrounded and valorized in a form that claims depth and breadth but that often resorts to the comforts

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of the known and familiar? In The Unknown Terrorist, readerly identification is invited with an experience of injustice, not with a culturally different subject. It could be objected that these liberal writers are simply behaving ethically in refusing to speak for and thus to an extent co-opt Muslim experience. However, it is surely ironic in a novel such as The Unknown Terrorist, centrally concerned with the importance of having control over your own story, that the Muslim viewpoint is kept out of the picture entirely. Discomfort with the kind of story the Muslim subject might want to tell, if allowed to do so, appears deeply ingrained in the three thrillers we have looked at. It might even be possible to consider their prevarications an instance of latent Islamophobia: that unconscious prejudice against the kind of unpredictable personal coordinates the observant Muslim character might display. (Issa in Le Carré’s novel takes us some way in that direction, but his religious conservatism is disarmed by the weight of Western perfidy bearing down on him.) Although we are always aware that somewhere beyond the book covers real people are suffering hardship and death because of neoimperialist policies and the forces they have unleashed, these policies and forces’ imprint in the post-9/11 thriller is secondary to considerations of Western ethics and Western moral scruples. In the end, the liberal thriller seems to have a strange, evasive relationship to confronting Islamophobia, dodging any engagement with the real racial-cultural coordinates of resurgent majoritarian nationalisms. Although scrupulously not claiming to speak on behalf of suffering Muslim victims in the war on terror, the liberal thriller writers I have examined here nonetheless reaffirm a culturalist bias in choosing not to imaginatively enter the space of the real victims of Islamophobia.

Chapter Six

ISLAMOPHOBIA AND THE GLOBAL NOVEL “Worlding” History in Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie

The internationalization of the war on terror affected countries in every part of the world. The United States brought nations on side with a combination of incentives and threats, rewards and sanctions. Yet the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—with their huge loss of life and inconclusive outcomes—were only the public face of a tentacular set of connections that involved the co-optation of military and security forces from across the globe as client actors. In fact, these tactics can be set in a much longer context, from the Vietnam War through “proxy wars” in countries such as Angola and Mozambique, where the United States financed and trained anti-Communist elements, to the Contras in Nicaragua and the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Mahmood Mamdani describes the attraction of this form of distanced “low-intensity conflict”: “it offered the prospect of waging war without declaring it, without a draft, with few soldiers deployed, and with even fewer returning home in body bags.”1 U.S. strategic interests in the 1980s, specifically the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, were pursued through networks of trained fighters: those jihadis whose tactics are now employed often against Western targets. However, as the pendulum swung back toward direct U.S. military intervention at the time of the war on terror, invading armies were often accompanied by a phalanx of private companies keen to increase their profit margins by offering security, interrogation, and other “services,” and they

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were followed in unseemly haste by aid agencies and building contractors with an eye on the opportunities afforded by “reconstruction” after the destruction of war.2 Thus, military shock and awe advanced in tandem with corporate interests. In that regard, the “global war on terror” has been just that: a war to advance globalization, in which globalized forms have been tools to achieve this end. Pascal Zinck sums up this approach: “In its global war on terror . . . the U.S. uses free market ideology to privatise war, generate profits through unscrupulous labour practices, commit atrocities by proxy, and outsource death to foreign others, mostly Third World paupers.”3 Yet there is a more ostensibly benevolent globalization at work in those fictions that have attempted to trace the origins of the current world situation. Nadeem Aslam’s novel The Wasted Vigil (2008) opens with the image of hundreds of books nailed to the ceiling of a house near the Afghan town of Usha in Kandahar. They have been secured there in the hope that marauding Taliban forces will not find and destroy them. We first see them through the eyes of Lara, a visitor from Russia who has arrived in search of her brother, a soldier missing since the era of the Soviet occupation. We are told, “When enough light began to enter the house, she placed mirrors on the floor to look at the books overhead, though not all of them had been nailed with the titles facing out, and any number of them were in languages she did not possess.”4 This striking description serves to introduce the novel’s concern with the fate of human cultural expression in a lawless and violent land; the international, polyglot nature of the library also gestures toward a committed eclecticism redolent of the novel’s prevailing cosmopolitan value system. Whereas writers such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and company arguably take on board the clash-of-civilizations model and write from within its assumptions—explaining or lamenting seemingly irrecoverable difference and taking a stand for so-called Western values—Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie might more truly be termed world or global writers. Their stories cover different geographical locations, contain an international cast of characters, and critically trace the courses and consequences of economic, political, and military globalization. They contest the notion of a clash of civilizations and oppose overt Islamophobia with a more nuanced sense of the multiple possibilities for Muslim identities in the modern world. Both are writers of Pakistani origin, and the recent political

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past of South Asia and its Muslim diaspora, together with the region’s much longer history of overlapping cultural traditions, strongly inform their work. Yet the work of these cosmopolitan writers, moving between East and West yet never entirely at home in either, conveys a sense of estrangement and a sharpened awareness of the scope and continuities of imperial and postimperial power politics. This transnational quality moves us beyond habitual ways of recognizing and containing literature within nationalist compartments—an approach perennially favored by university departments and bookstores. Aslam and Shamsie anticipate and take part in a globally connected world, but always with a keen eye to the injustices accruing from that unfettered, aggressive globalization that so often finds its enforcement through national state apparatuses. Indeed, Zinck has claimed of such work that it “offers an insight into Islamic terrorism, not perceived as merely a response to Islamophobia, but as a reaction to and a by-product of cultural globalisation.”5 At the same time, the novels by these authors also serve to add a fresh perspective to those themes of realism and humanist empathy, migrant space and borders, and the dangerous lure of nationalist identifications this book has traced. In this chapter, I address the possibilities opened up for contesting Islamophobia by Aslam’s novel The Wasted Vigil and Shamsie’s novel Burnt Shadows (2009).6

Pakistan has been the fulcrum of international politics in South Asia since its painful birth during Partition in 1947. Beset by territorial disputes, regional rivalries, a religious politics enshrined in the country’s very creation as a homeland for India’s Muslims, and an unstable democracy frequently collapsing into periods of military dictatorship, it has struggled with the contending demands of its own national identity and the pressures exerted by outside forces in pursuance of their own strategic ends. Pakistani domestic and foreign policies have from the start been shaped by a felt need for parity with neighboring India. Specific disagreements with India, such as the dispute about the fate of Kashmir after independence, led Pakistan to search for international relationships that would aid its own security. In the early years after the Second World War, Pakistani anxieties met with the U.S. desire for client states in South and Southeast Asia to combat the regional threat from the Soviet Union. In

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particular, the United States was concerned over India’s early policy of nonalignment in the Cold War, which in Washington was felt as sympathy to communism. As Farzana Shaikh points out, the United States was especially interested in Pakistan’s location and its “contiguous border with the Soviet Union, which could serve as the site of U.S. bases, and Pakistan’s proximity to the Persian gulf [sic] which could enhance its role in defending vital oil routes.”7 Thus, Pakistan became an important player in the international anti-Communist alliance of the 1950s and 1960s: a position that—rather ironically for a new nation—set it against that popular antiimperial sentiment widespread during the period as decolonization and anticolonial nationalist crises in Iraq, Egypt, the Republic of Congo, and Indochina drew popular support across the Third World. Saadia Toor argues that Washington saw the military in postcolonial societies as a Cold War asset and “the institution best able to contain ‘communist expansion and penetration.’ ” At the same time, another tactical prong was provided by Islam, which was seen as potential bulwark against communism.8 The development of a particular kind of political Islam was further stimulated by Pakistan’s increasingly close relationship with Muslim countries in the Middle East: a rapprochement that began in earnest after the oil crisis in 1973, when the oil-producing nations of the region were able to flex their economic muscle on the world stage. The government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto looked to these countries for economic support, but in the process Saudi influence in Pakistan began to increase, with a resultant hardening of religious attitudes and an ambition among Islamic religious parties to take center stage in politics.9 Bhutto was unable to control these forces, which resulted in his own deposition and execution at the end of 1970s. There followed a decade of military rule under General Zia ul Haq, which saw Bhutto’s rather lukewarm “Islamic socialism” replaced by Zia’s economic liberalization policies—advancing enterprise as the main engine of growth, opening up new sectors to private ownership, and generally following the international economic trends of the 1980s spearheaded by the Reagan and Thatcher governments. In that decade, financial and military aid was forthcoming from the United States as Pakistan’s strategic value was increased again by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, while the economy was also boosted by remittances sent home from Pakistani workers in the Persian Gulf.10

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However, neoliberal economic policies were not matched by social liberalism. The 1980s also saw Zia’s infamous “Islamization” campaign of legal and educational reforms. These reforms included the imposition of a strict, punitive, religiously sanctioned penal code to be implemented by sharia courts. The most controversial components of this Islamic law code were the Hudood Ordinances, which prescribed harsh punishments for offenses. The new code also discriminated against women, stripping them of much legal protection and reducing the value apportioned to a woman’s testimony in court to half that of a man’s.11 Throughout the decade, Zia’s regime was boosted by U.S. support as it shared the burden of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Ian Talbot describes how Pakistan’s aim in Afghanistan was to create a client state that would offer “ ‘strategic depth’ in the event of a future war with India” and that could operate as a training base for preparing Islamic insurgents for the struggle against Indian forces in Jammu and Kashmir.12 Depicting the anti-Soviet struggle as a “jihad” was an effective way of securing volunteer mujahideen from all parts of the Muslim world for these other struggles, too. After 9/11, this close cooperation between the United States and Pakistan was revived in the interests of Operation Enduring Freedom, with its aim to oust the Taliban. Pakistan shared intelligence and provided logistical support to the allied forces.13 At the same time, General Pervez Musharraf furthered economic liberalization, including more privatization, the removal of welfare subsidies, and the use of draconian new antiterror legislation to curtail collective action by workers—producing what Toor describes as “a neoliberal security state in Pakistan.”14 Overall, however, the years since 9/11 have seen difficult relations between Pakistan and the United States, with the Americans criticizing Pakistan’s half-hearted pursuit of Islamist militants, who retain significant support in military and security circles in Pakistan. Continued Islamist activity, fanning out from the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan, has been combated by the use of unmanned U.S. drone planes to identify and strike at supposed militants’ bases—with resultant loss of civilian life—but the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, discovered in a fortified compound in Abbottabad in 2011, by a team of U.S. marines was seen as a  violation of Pakistani national sovereignty and put a further strain on relations.15

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Pakistani literature has kept in step with this fraught history. Toor’s book The State of Islam is particularly useful in revealing the dialectic of culture and politics that was present even before 1947. She describes how in the 1930s a left-leaning radicalism emerged among intellectuals on the Subcontinent, influenced by both the anticolonial struggle and revolutionary socialism in Russia. This radicalism resulted in the establishment of the All India Progressive Writers Association, a literary organization with links to communism, whose members included Sajjad Zaheer, Mulk Raj Anand, Muhammad Din Taseer, and the unofficial poet laureate of Pakistan, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. After Partition, some members of this group reconstituted as the All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association, with the aim of using their writing to shape the new nation. However, factionalism and the prevailing anti-Communist atmosphere meant that the group was soon subject to persecution. Toor describes how in a bid to curry favor with the Americans Pakistan banned the Communist Party in 1954 and signed the Mutual Defense and Assistance Pact with the United States. To combat leftleaning intellectuals, a Pakistani branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was set up with the backing of the CIA as part of that attempted cultural rollback of the Cold War years that resulted elsewhere in the establishment of CIA-funded magazines such as Encounter and the Partisan Review.16 Although repressive regimes have repeatedly blighted Pakistan’s history, often with American support, writers have continued to articulate opposition to the status quo. Thus, Pakistani literature has always, by necessity, been inherently internationalist in outlook.17 It grows from soil watered by the streams of global realpolitik and is nurtured and shaped by the fact that the country was carved out of preexisting regional cultures with little in common beyond a will to believe in the new nation. Salman Rushdie has famously accounted for Pakistan’s failures by suggesting the country is “insufficiently imagined.”18 It may perhaps be truer to say that Pakistani literary imaginings are instead haunted by all the other national and regional imaginings through and against which the Pakistani sense of nation has been constructed. Indeed, Pakistani fiction has always by necessity been international in its concerns and themes—facing at least two ways.19 Writing of contemporary novels by diasporic Pakistanis such as Aslam and Shamsie, Cara  N. Cilano identifies their quest for “imaginative alternatives to dominant forms of identification,” such as nation or exclusivist types of

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culture. Their geographical range and international cast of characters moving between locations suggest, at times, “an attempt to transcend the pull of a shared national affect and, at others, the draw such attachments have in contexts overdetermined by conflict.”20 In this regard, Pakistani fiction writers’ work appears consonant with those calls for a planetary perspective in cultural politics to transcend the limitations of the national (too narrow and exclusive) and the global (too complicit with the economic flows of modern transnational capitalism). Critics such as Gayatri C. Spivak, Masao Miyoshi, and Paul Gilroy have, in their different ways, advocated types of “planetarity” as a way beyond the self-interest and short termism of contemporary international perspectives. Gilroy writes of the “planetary humanism” necessary to reconfigure intercultural relations on a more open and egalitarian footing, and Miyoshi argues that the new role of literary studies should be to contribute to replacing exclusivist imaginings with ones that emphasize our “common bonds to the planet.”21 The most thorough working out of this concept appears in Spivak’s philippic Death of a Discipline (2003). Attacking conservative area studies for its complicity with U.S. power and cultural studies for its lack of rigor and its obsession with the contemporary, Spivak argues for a reinvigoration of comparative literary studies that will be more truly attentive to languages and cultures beyond the metropolitan centers. Noting the importance of migration to shaping the modern world, Spivak observes that “whatever our view of what we do, we are made by the forces of people moving about the world.”22 For her, planetarity stands as a means of allowing for and recognizing interconnectedness while also honoring difference: I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere. . . . The globe is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think we can aim to control it. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. . . . If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents[,] . . . alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away.23

I want to suggest later that this view, although attractively holistic, is too quick to jettison the “global” as a category of critique. However, for now I

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merely point out the relationship between Spivak’s planetarity and the aims of world literature, a relationship that Spivak and others have seen as a desirable response to a dangerously fissiparous world, attainable in the realm of cultural criticism through a critically self-aware, rejuvenated comparative literature. The introduction to this book suggested some of the strengths and weaknesses of this response to a world plagued by cultural essentialism and Islamophobia. What does seem potentially useful is the idea of reading as proactive in situating itself—as well as the cultural commodities it examines—within networks of power. Reading is thus no longer a mode of passive reception or of reassembling known elements within an ideology that remains the unacknowledged norm. It becomes instead a mode of engaging with difference wherein critical practice transforms not only its object but itself, too. David Damrosch suggests that world literature is “not a canon of texts but a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with the world beyond our own place and time.”24 Theo D’haen glosses this definition in  terms of the task of the world literary critic, which is “to bring out the  strangeness of the work[,] . . . thus offering a new and different perspective . . . and in the process also disengaging the reader or student from his unconscious immersion in his own culture.”25 I would argue that this active idea of defamiliarization can profitably be brought to bear on Aslam’s novel The Wasted Vigil, which in its own right encourages a sense of overlapping histories and textualities. The novel is in essence concerned with “How stories travel—what mouths and minds they end up in” (25, emphasis in original). The house of the English Muslim convert Marcus Caldwell to which each of the main characters comes, is a “house of readers”: confronting all with the need to read each other’s experiences while also reading the tangled histories that have brought them there with all the attention and care they would lavish on one of the books suspended from the ceiling. Marcus observes, “Through stories we judge our actions before committing them” (87). This concern with listening to the stories of others is also reflected in the novel’s fluid form, shaped by the characters’ consciousnesses and memories, where multiple focalization and polyphony take us into the minds of, among others, Lara and Marcus; David Town, former CIA agent and gem dealer; Zameen, Marcus’s daughter, abducted in the 1980s and later killed; and the would-be suicide bomber Casa and his ideological opposite number, James Palantine of the U.S. Special Forces. The

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story traces these characters’ various personal quests as affected by the larger forces of the history of which they are part.

Aslam’s novel is set against the backdrop of the deposition of the Taliban and the Western coalition’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Yet it ranges further back in time to the era of the Soviet occupation and beyond in its exploration of the present moment and its conflicts. It is marked throughout by a view of the contemporary situation in war-torn Afghanistan as the product of decades—indeed centuries—of international global geopolitics: the ebb and flow of war and peace, art and trade. In this sense, Aslam is aware that globalization and interconnectedness carry within them both the potential for greater understanding and the possibility for more efficient and widespread destruction. If intercultural literature after 9/11 is a dialogic critical experience— involving reader and writer and requiring some attention to the drivers behind the privileging of certain kinds of text—then we need to think again about the “world” in world literature: Whose world is being depicted? What worldview being reinforced? And so on. Djelal Kadir cautions us that literature is produced “by acts of management and negotiated processes of cultivation,” none of which is distinterested: “The re-emergent conjunction between the globalisation of the world from decidedly local and uncontestable sites of power . . . in ways that fit the pattern of imperial hegemony, on the one hand, and the upsurge of a discourse of/on world literature and globalisation[,] . . . on the other hand, is a coincidence that bears examination.” He advocates treating the term world in world literature as a verb: “To world, and to globalize . . . would then be imputable actions rather than anonymous phenomena. The virtue of imputability resides in the prospect of being able to trace responsibility and consequence.” Because literature is a form of situated cultural practice, “the compelling question becomes, [W]ho carries out its worlding and why?” In an echo of Homi Bhabha, Kadir suggests that interest in world literature has arisen at times of “historical trauma” and imperial adventurism: the post-Napoleonic age of the burgeoning European empires and the post-9/11 world of the war on terror. His description of the latter is redolent of the organizing dichotomies of The Wasted Vigil, too: “ethno-nationalism in the name of cultural identity in tandem with

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a resurgence of imperial hegemony in the ostensible spirit of liberation of the oppressed.”26 The “worlding” undertaken by Aslam’s novel comes in part from those preceding writers whose stories provide intertextual markers for the reader and who are often directly name-checked. The book’s global bearings are confirmed by an international array that includes Virgil, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Akhmatova, St. Augustine, the Quran, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ferdowsi’s epic poem the Shahnama, “Rapunzel,” Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, the biblical story of David and Jonathan, First Corinthians, and William Blake, among many others. They represent a human inheritance of knowledge to set against the fundamentalist nihilism of the Taliban with their contempt for culture and original thought. The novel’s epigraph, from the fifteenth century Persian poet Daulat Shah of Herat, testifies to a faith in art’s ability to build bridges: And the poet in his solitude turned towards the warlord a corner of his mind and gradually came to look upon him and held a converse with him.27

Aslam’s novel identifies with those, however imperfect, who are able to respond to the beauty of human cultural activities, seeing in them a shared instinct for self-expression that transcends time and place while also being shaped by their vicissitudes. In contrast to those who share the inclusivity of this spirit are those motivated by an intolerant religious and cultural zeal. Foremost among them is Casa, an orphan whose fate it is to have been trained up as a jihadist fighter. His frame of reference is always and only the Quran and apocryphal stories of the prophet, his worldview composed of rumor and propaganda. His is a totalizing outlook, “devoid of nuances” (357), requiring global submission to Islamic hegemony. His version of Islam operates through violence and fear. The omniscient voice intervenes to tell us that “at the very core of him was the belief that human beings had little to offer beyond cruelty and danger” (221). Casa and the Taliban are “against culture,” following a vengeful and paranoid Deobandi God of prohibitions, who is enraged equally by the representation of living creatures and by the saints and shrines of Sufism.

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Despite odd flickers of life, Casa remains a character so narrow in outlook as to appear only semiconscious. In a novel anxious to extend its sympathies to struggling souls in their quest for meaning, the brainwashed Casa stands beyond the pale of readerly empathy—detached, disorientated, and disorientating. We learn of his orphaned status, but the uneasy blend of omniscience and free indirect speech used at one point to describe his weak sense of himself renders his alienation but also denies us the usual means by which to identify with him: “He doesn’t even know his own name, doesn’t even know how he ended up in the orphanages and madrasas. A nameless child becomes a ghost, he had been told once, because no one without a name can get a firm enough foothold in the next world. It roams the world, making itself visible to the living in order to be addressed in some way—The Long-haired One, The One who has Green Eyes—but humans run away from ghosts and won’t address them” (334). The neutral, deadened tone is of significance here. There is an attempt at a submerged pathos, but in the end Casa remains a blank, his background evacuated and his personality a void that has been filled in by others with nefarious ends in mind. Cilano has suggested that Casa is an “absence,” yet one historicized through reference to a madrasa education that situates him as a product of the Islamization moment of the 1980s. He is thus both “an existential cipher and a product of history.”28 However, I would argue that the use of insistent negatives in the passage also says something about Casa’s status as a figure that we are, in the end, not being invited to identify with. Indeed, it is here, in the black-and-white framing of motivation and thus in the manipulation of our sympathy for liberal ends, that some of the ambivalences in Aslam’s worlding begin to appear. There is a strong investment here in the old humanist idea that exposure to literature and being widely read make one a better, morerounded person. Marcus, Lara, and David—all hailing from the nonMuslim world—are to varying degrees perspicacious and well read: able to swap literary quotations and trade historical anecdotes in vast quantities.29 Casa, in contrast, is a creature finally to be pitied for his untutored lack of self-awareness. When late on he finds in a cellar a notebook and pen, “he begins to write. . . . Sentences about himself. The truth. He can only say it in the dark” (377, ellipses in original). Yet when he moves the page within range of a lamp, he discovers that nothing has come out: “for some reason the pen had held onto its ink” (378). Casa is quick to attribute the failure to

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Allah’s displeasure. Yet by this stage we have been prepared to recognize that, from a literature-as-human-experience point of view, Casa is necessarily beyond words—about to write himself out of the story altogether with an act of apocalyptic violence. Thus, he cannot articulate his own story; only the benevolent narrator can do that for him. There is, of course, nothing untoward in Aslam’s declaring for art and literature over indoctrination: growing up the son of a Communist activist and eventually fleeing General Zia’s military dictatorship in Pakistan may well have sharpened his acuity in portraying the dead hand of religiously justified censorship. However, speaking on behalf of this illiterate Afghan boy does bring responsibilities with which Aslam is perhaps somewhat cavalier. He is not above omniscient intrusion when it seems necessary to emphasize the boy’s closed-mindedness. Similarly, there are significant quirks of tone, as when the culturally monomaniacal Casa unfeasibly relativizes his worldview by crediting the self-sacrificing passengers aboard United Flight 93 on 9/11 with the same motives as “martyrdom bombers” (250). There is also the insistent deployment of free indirect speech, punctuating the characters’ thoughts and dialogue with something more distanced and therefore seemingly objective; the stream of thought conveying Lara’s nighttime dash to try at last to discover the fate of her brother is punctuated by a much cooler “external voice” regaling us with the highly debatable assertion that “the religion of Islam at its core does not believe in the study of science” (133). This manipulation of the text’s polyphony contributes to a sense that Aslam is trying to “have it both ways”: to condemn the excesses of religious fundamentalism but also to claim the ability to penetrate the conflicted inner worlds of its adherents to find the embers of a common humanity after all. Central to The Wasted Vigil are the themes of broken families and lost loved ones. Lara comes to Usha in search of her brother. Marcus has over time lost a wife, a daughter, and a grandson—as well as one of his hands—to the pitiless brutality of the Taliban; in flashback, we learn of his daughter’s own lost lover and her first meeting with David Town; and David’s own brother, Jonathan, is missing and presumed killed in Vietnam. The idea of wanting to find out what happened to these loved ones and to be able to lay them to rest and gain closure threads the book together. Aslam invokes the classical stories of Priam begging Achilles for the body of Hector and Antigone’s defiant determination to give her brother due burial against Creon’s

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orders. In a minor substory from the Soviet era, we learn of a young girl who hid among the reeds by a river after an atrocity that claimed her father and brother: “She wanted to collect as much of the remains as she could, to provide a grave for them. . . . The dead were dead. . . . She was alive and had her responsibilities and her love” (364). Here in contemporary Afghanistan, the age-old battle between human kinship and the requirements of ideology still plays itself out. To put one’s faith in religious or nationalist dogma requires a kind of moral blindness to human suffering—something that David painfully learns when his youthful U.S.-centered political certainties crumble in the face of the conflicting demands of love. His early position is replicated in the new generation by James Palantine, son of an erstwhile friend for whom ideology outweighs the personal: he berates David for not being able to bury his personal feelings in the interests of America’s strategic priorities (387). Palantine acts as Casa’s opposite number in terms of uncompromising zeal. He comes to personify the U.S.-led war on terror, investing fully in the American nation and its symbols and seeing himself as defending it against a rampaging monolithic Islam with designs on the homeland: “Al Qaeda hiding in the mouth of the Golden Eagle. . . . They want to do to the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore what they did to the Buddhas of Bamiyan” (380–81, ellipses in original). Later on, when Palantine has captured Casa and is torturing him for information, he tells an appalled David, “It’s nothing personal against this man. . . . It’s not between him and me. It’s between them and us” (411). His view of the Islamic enemy demands a dehumanization that, in his willingness to employ “enhanced interrogation techniques,” reflects his own limited conceptions of what is human and inhuman. For David, the quest to discover what happened to his former lover, Zameen, causes a revision of his previous temporizing outlook. As a young man in 1979, he found himself caught up in a mob attack on the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad inspired by the recent revolution in Iran, an event that provided him with his first lesson in the inextricable link between the political and the personal. Having waited many hours for relief in the besieged embassy, David was later stunned to learn that President Carter thanked the new Pakistani dictator, General Zia, for his swift response. Subsequently, as a dutiful intelligence officer, “David himself was present on a number of occasions where the man [Zia] was extravagantly celebrated and

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flattered, his own voice adding to the dishonest chorus” (108). Of course, Zia had just deposed and executed the elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and was about to commence his Islamization program in Pakistan with the full connivance of the United States, which was grateful for this reliable ally in the fight against a Soviet Union that by the end of the year would demonstrate its own imperialist intentions by invading neighboring Afghanistan. Thus are individuals caught up in the unceasing machinations of warring empires. The personal/political nexus results in tragedy for David when he finally discovers the fate of Zameen, shot by a local warlord, Gul Rasool, with the backing of the CIA, which thought she might be an enemy agent. In the world of espionage, where principles come a distant second to expendability and deniability, Zameen’s fate feels as arbitrary as the alliances that have led to it. We learn that Gul Rasool has ended up a valuable U.S. ally in the war on terror in Afghanistan simply because he made himself available to U.S. troops when they arrived—with large cash incentives—in the invasion of 2001 and at the same time made sure that a rival warlord was temporarily incapacitated and therefore ended up on the “other side.”30 For fully committed combatants such as Casa and James Palantine, war provides a desirable clarity in one’s relationship with the world, avoiding the mess and complication of actual human interaction. The Wasted Vigil reminds us how the twenty-first-century conflict is simply the latest in a series that can be traced back through the Soviet moment to the British Empire’s Afghan wars in the nineteenth century. Other wars, ancient and modern, are also echoed: from the early settlers’ struggles against Native Americans in North America through Britain’s campaign in Waziristan in the 1930s to the Vietnam War, which swallowed up Jonathan Town. David reflects: “A different war—but maybe at some level it was the same war. Just as tomorrow’s wars might be begotten by today’s war and a continuation of them” (368). History is thus a palimpsest in the novel. The past affects the present, and its traces can still be seen by those who care to look. It washes over places, turning them from trade routes to military conduits; over times, in the ebb and flow of the Buddhist and Islamic eras, whose traces coexist despite Taliban attempts to expunge them; and over events—David learns of Zameen’s fate in a restaurant near the World Trade Center on the day of

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the first, failed Islamist attempt to bring down the towers in 1993. The book is interested in just such connections, depicting them as the equivalent of those literary texts that, taken together, tell the greater tale of collective human striving. For the characters, each contending with his or her own emotional and physical pain, connection is possible through shared suffering; Lara reflects on the mutilated Marcus and feels comforted by their “fellowship of wounds” (10). The brief consolation of connection is elsewhere found in such random things as the tumbling colored cotton reels that fall at David’s feet in the Street of Storytellers, leading to his first meeting with Zameen, or raindrops pooling on a nasturtium leaf. The most insistent symbol of the power of historical continuity and human connection is the giant carved Buddha’s head half-buried in the cellar of Marcus’s house. Its impassive expression and supposed mystical powers hark back to a time before the arrival of Islam, and it comes to signify an alternative spirituality open to all who can welcome its healing balm. The Buddha also becomes an image of “the meeting of continents.” Marcus recalls: “It was here in Afghanistan that the Buddha had received a human face, the earlier representations of him having been symbols—a parasol, a throne, a footprint. A begging bowl. The Greeks in Afghanistan gave him the features of Apollo, the god of knowledge, the god who repented. The only Asian addition to Apollo was a dot on the forehead and topknotted locks” (226). Aslam has commented that his novel was a response to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001, an imaginative replaying of attempted destruction but in this case ending in survival and triumph.31 In the novel, legend has it that the Taliban have tried to destroy Marcus’s Buddha with bullets but retreat terrified, having succeeded only in loosing streams of golden light from the stone wounds. The book ends with Marcus accompanying the Buddha’s head on an American military helicopter flight to the National Museum in Kabul, away from the turmoil of Usha, with its battling tribes and warlords. Madeline Clements has described how this ending can be read as a reaffirmation that Western forces and imperial archival institutions are in the end the only ones to be trusted with custodianship of the relics of Afghan antiquity.32 Certainly, taking the Buddha to an area of comparative safety controlled by the United States and its allies underlines the nagging suspicion that only the West truly understands the importance of cultural heritage. It can be seen as, in James Clifford’s terms, an act of “ethnographic salvage,”

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rescuing peripheral cultures from the threat of “dissipation, contingency and loss” if left in situ.33 However, it is possible to argue that rather than simply endorsing this measure, the novel in its closing pages is, in fact, pointing out the further consequences of imperialism: revealing those ongoing local, national, and international compromises—the desire to shepherd the past as well as dictate the future—that are the reality of dominance in the global context. As such, Aslam’s novel could be read as responding to Amitava Kumar’s call for attention to be paid to “how literature . . . reveals local or  national [or, indeed, international] realities of dominance, suppression, oppression and exploitation in a global context.”34 Thus, connections in the book may be negative—David dies embracing Casa as the young Islamist blows himself up—but they can also be positive and therapeutic, reassuring characters of the essential links between them despite the separatist thrust of striving ideologies. It is possible to argue that sometimes the book’s symbolic historical connections feel forced, as in some of Marcus and Lara’s exchanges. Nonetheless, in its determination to measure the scope of international connectedness in temporal as well as geographical, military, or economic terms—and to record the cost to individuals—The Wasted Vigil is a global novel par excellence. In the end, however, its worlding of the post-9/11 novel at times seems to fall prey to the Othering conventions of the very literary culture it seeks to celebrate. It may be instructive here to think of The Wasted Vigil alongside those Muslim misery memoirs identified in chapter  3. In a certain light, this novel seems an intelligent reworking that broadens the scope and historicizes the story of oppression in Muslim countries. However, it could be argued that its very success as a novel—its ability to move the reader to empathy with familiar forms of human suffering—works to mitigate the specificity of the history it charts. In a sense, the novel must universalize characters’ experiences before it can be sure that they will evoke the required empathy. In the same way, its characteristic polyphony operates as a formal correlative for the inclusivity of both Sufism and Buddhism, the two valorized belief systems recuperable by secular humanism, projected as alternatives to boneheaded Islamic fundamentalism. In the end, is The Wasted Vigil too ready to frame Afghanistan in those approved ways we have already witnessed in The Kite Runner—as an irredeemable blank space of tribalism, brutality, misogyny, and repression? Is the

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novel’s act of worlding undermined by the manner in which it reinforces and recycles the West’s existing prejudices?

The militarization of the tribal areas along the porous Afghan–Pakistan border and these areas’ position at the fulcrum of international power politics for the past thirty years are themes that unite The Wasted Vigil and Burnt Shadows. Both novelists trace, through plot and character, the phases of American meddling in the region. They also remark on its international dimension. In her essay for Index on Censorship, entitled Offence: The Muslim Case, Kamila Shamsie offers a potted history of Pakistan from its inception to the present, noting how the Islamist tenor of the U.S.-prompted anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan fed incestuously on the ruthless Islamization program undertaken by Zia in Pakistan in the 1980s. She describes how in the decade after the Soviet invasion “Pakistan was the U.S.’s most necessary ally in the cold war [sic] and . . . the conduit through which arms and finances passed into the hands of the mujahideen. . . . [But [t]he Afghan war brought ‘the Kalashnikov culture’ to Pakistan as the country became ‘the world’s largest open market in arms.’ ”35 The CIA worked closely with Pakistan’s own Inter-Services Intelligence to run a proxy war through third-party militias composed of Muslims drawn from around the globe. Such webs are central to the critique offered by Burnt Shadows. Sticky and intractable, they span decades and continents, forming a contrast to the webs of affection that support the novel’s hybrid families, the TanakaAshrafs and the Weiss-Burtons, whose threads are spun in the shadow of some of the twentieth century’s darkest international moments. Yet the two novels’ attempts at worlding differ in important ways: in The Wasted Vigil, war constantly circles around the central characters in their small Afghan town and encroaches on them in the benighted, claustrophobic space of the house where the Job-like Marcus waits for the latest trial to be visited upon him. In Burnt Shadows, characters travel the world yet are still ensnared in webs of destructive nationalism and communalism. Burnt Shadows is, like The Wasted Vigil, constructed as a blend of omniscient narration and polyphony. The story of late-twentieth-century global politics unfolds through the experiences of a range of characters: Hiroko Tanaka, survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945; her eventual husband, the Indian Muslim Sajjad Ashraf; their son, Raza; and

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two generations of the Burton family, with whom their lives intertwine. The novel is blocked around significant crisis points, including prePartition India, Zia’s Pakistan just after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the post-9/11 moment of the war on terror. Flashes of memory fill in the intervening years for characters and the reader. Indeed, the novel has a particular interest in time, something indicated in the opening pages, where a fragment of prologue offers us a proleptic snapshot of the novel’s end, with a shackled Raza awaiting his inevitable transfer to Guantánamo Bay. This foreshadowing continues with the first words of the novel proper: “Later, the one who survives will remember that day as grey.”36 These words immediately throw us into the future beyond an as yet unnamed tragedy. They work with the central symbolic image of webs and shadows to establish a delicate interconnectedness buoyed by memory. But they also gesture toward the slipperiness of the past; we are then told that the weather was actually sunny on August 9, 1945, the day of the Nagasaki attack. Viewed from a retrospective vantage point that takes in the more recent moment at which the novel ends, the idea of a cataclysm descending from clear blue skies calls forth images of New York on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. This link is not stated for us. Rather, the temporal resonance—like others, such as that between Japanese wartime mistrust of Europeans and post-9/11 Islamophobia—is left for the reader to pick up on. Indeed, there is a kind of decentering at work in Burnt Shadows. Strictly speaking, the novel avoids directly addressing those historical crisis points that shape its story: we are shown the lead-up to Partition in 1947, not the communalist carnage that scarred its enforced migrations; the narrative deals with the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, not the attacks themselves; and the bombing of Nagasaki is indicated only in fragments—it is, as Hiroko observes, “that unspeakable day” (99). In an interview, Shamsie was prompted to consider the political significance of this strategy: “The very fact that the book ‘skips’ 9/11 and picks up with the war in Afghanistan and the Indo/Pakistan stand-off knowingly undercuts the mythologizing that has taken place around 9/11 and given it a narrative primacy over all other world events of the last few decades. I don’t see history that way, so of course my novels won’t reflect history that way. . . . I didn’t sit down and think, ‘how do I de-centre America,’ but that de-centring followed from the way I view interconnected world events.”37

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The reader’s perspective is, therefore, being carefully manipulated in the opening pages and, in fact, throughout the novel. There are points where we discover that we have been subtly wrongfooted: as when at the end of an intimate conversation between Hiroko and her new friend Elizabeth (Ilse) Burton we are told retrospectively that they have slipped from English into German (70) and later when we hear that their respective offspring, Raza and Harry, have been switching from Urdu to Pashto via German (163). In a novel written in English, such shifts are merely narrated and not shown via any transcription. They serve as gentle jolts reminding us that we are entering a polyglot world, on the fringes of Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking hegemony, where deeper feelings are best expressed through vernacular forms closer to the characters’ emotional life-worlds. This approach is of a piece with the book’s concern for communication beyond the level contaminated by considerations of status and nation. When Raza is suspected of participating in Harry’s assassination and goes on the run from his American pursuers in Afghanistan, he glimpses, while hiding under a pile of sacks on the back of a truck, a group of colorful nomad women making their way across the desert. We learn that “just that glimpse moved Raza into a profound melancholy. No, not melancholy. It was uljhan he was feeling. His emotions were in Urdu now, melancholy and quiet abutting each other like the two syllables of a single word” (332). Perhaps this is no more than a token gesture toward including the perspectives of those outside of the monolingual orbit of the West. Nonetheless, it does symbolically allow a platform for alternative experiences—just as, later in the book and in contrast to its predominantly middle-class cast of characters, we meet the Afghan mujahideen gunrunner turned New York cab driver Abdullah, a man who has lost his old home without ever gaining recognized “legal” status in his new one. Shamsie appears to have considered, as a challenge to form, the question of how to guard against merely reproducing the value judgments dictated by economic and political power. As such, she might be said to be offering a fictional correlative for that “planetarity” advocated by Spivak: a mode of ethical critical engagement with inequalities of power that allows Otherness to flourish while eschewing mastery over it.38 Part of this project involves attending to non-Western cultures in their own languages. Spivak claims that translation is always a watering down of difference, a way

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of continuing to privilege the European languages into which most translations are rendered. And, of course, translating invariably carries with it shortcomings. Nuanced concepts cannot be fully translated, where meaning has to be felt in between the words, so to speak—as when Raza and his mother invoke the incomparable Japanese aesthetic idea of the value of imperfection and transience, “wabi-sabi” (200). Burnt Shadows is shot through with the poignancy accompanying the loss of the life-giving homes—geographical, cultural, and personal—that characters leave behind them. In one way, loss is an inevitable consequence of the passage of time. Different figures have different attitudes to the past: some seek to flee it and its limitations, whereas others hold it fast or feel nostalgic yearning for it. Yet traces of the past always persist in the present, whether through the cherished memories of lost loved ones such as Konrad Weiss, incinerated at Nagasaki, or in the incalculable way the consequences of national strategic interests play out over time. Like Hiroko, one can seek connections between past and present (and between people and times) despite all obstacles, or one can settle into the deceptively comforting yet deadly complacencies of patriotism, as to differing degrees do Harry Burton and his daughter, Kim. International connections take on flesh-and-blood form in the second generation. Raza is halfJapanese and half-Pakistani (his father, Sajjad, having had to shed the status of an Indian Muslim to take up residence in Karachi on the other side of the new border). Harry Burton is the product of a German mother and an English father but eventually becomes an American and, as a spy and subsequently a private-security operative, a gatekeeper of U.S. interests and a functionary of neocolonialism. We are told that the opportunities a “liberated” Afghanistan affords his employer “had the shareholders giddy with prospects both short-term and long” (274). Just as Burnt Shadows is alert to those fragile human connections so easily shattered by the raucous insistence of group and national affiliations, so, too, it represents the confluence of economic and military globalization in its depiction of the operations of the private contractor Arkwright and Glenn. Harry and Raza end up working for this company, which runs a camp in Afghanistan serving U.S. military needs.39 The company’s presence is consistent with the expedient view of Afghanistan as a site of corporate interests. Writing of the first president of post-Taliban Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, Amin Saikal points out how he was already known to American

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policy makers: “He and [Zalmay] Khalizad [a leading neoconservative and soon-to-be U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan] had served as advisors to the Union Oil Company of California (UNOCAL), which, up until 2001, had been negotiating the construction of a pipeline with the Taliban to deliver gas from Turkmenistan to South Asia through Afghanistan.”40 This tendency to employ “tame” in-house expertise ran in tandem with a reconstruction-and-relief strategy that was sketchy and ineffective and seemed concerned mainly with awarding contracts to Western businesses or local allies and cronies. Ahmed Rashid notes the extent of private involvement in the overspill from America’s wars: “Contractors carried out interrogations, ran jails, provided bodyguards, carried out drug eradication, trained the police and army, rebuilt walls and schoolhouses. . . . With the kind of button-down security in place in Afghanistan, these people were virtually unaccountable.”41 Moreover, according to Saikal, between 2002 and 2008 not only was much of the promised international relief money for Afghanistan not delivered, but also, “from the amount [that was] distributed, 40% went back to the donor countries in consultancy fees and expatriates’ pay, with most of the remaining funds being spent on UN  and non-governmental organizations’ operations and foreign contractors and sub-contractors.”42 Reconstruction projects that could have been completed by local firms were contracted out to U.S. companies, which carried out the work at a greater cost, leading to inefficiency and waste— but at a profit for the companies themselves—causing Afghans to complain that they were being squeezed out of their own rebuilding.43 In short, Afghanistan after 9/11 provided a virgin site for an experiment in the ultimate logic of globalized neoliberal economics. However, just as globalization in effect often leads to divergence and conflict rather than to convergence, so in Burnt Shadows Hiroko comes to recognize that difference and discrimination are as important as connection and uniformity. The insight becomes particularly important after 9/11, when the United States sought to construct a “coalition of the willing” for action in Afghanistan and at the same time demanded acknowledgment of its own “victim” status as a prelude to its imperialist interventions. The claim that, in Le Monde’s famous post-9/11 phrase, “today we are all Americans”44 is one at which Hiroko baulks, given her own experience of a much larger atrocity at Nagasaki. Late in the novel, after she has migrated to New York, she studies those posters of the missing seemingly pinned to every

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available square foot of space in the days after the attacks. One in particular catches her eye: It consisted of a picture of a young man and the words: missing since 9/11. if you have any information about luis rivera please call . . . Hiroko thought of the train station at Nagasaki, the day Yoshi had taken her to Tokyo. She stepped closer to take in the smile of Luis Rivera, its unfettered optimism. In moments such as these it seemed entirely wrong to feel oneself living in a different history to the people of this city. (274, ellipses in original)

Even though Hiroko experiences the same sympathy and desire to reach out to the bereaved, her sense of loss is tempered by the personal recollection of a previous experience of unimaginable brutality—inflicted of course by the United States—that prevents her from accepting the seductive myths of U.S. innocence and exceptionalism circulating at this time. The novel is thus opposed to the kind of simplistic moral equivalences that run through some literary accounts of recent history. At the same time, Shamsie does share the desire to celebrate those spaces of mixing that are always vulnerable to the depredations of purists. Each section of the novel is set in a different part of the world: Japan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the United States. We witness the strain as old worlds come to an end and new configurations emerge, often in violence, as characters struggle with the desire for continuity and the need “to learn how to live in a new world. With new rules” (113). Before the Second World War, the trading city of Nagasaki is a space where the styles and tastes of Japan and Europe mix freely, as reflected in the city’s hybrid architecture. It seems a hopeful place for the flowering of Hiroko and Konrad’s cross-cultural romance. But with the onset of war, fraternization is discouraged, and purity and patriotism emphasized, before an equally uncompromising nationalism far away develops the bomb that obliterates all distinctions. The second section, located in Delhi, takes us into the consciousness of Sajjad, for whom his “Dilli,” city of the heart, a “warren of by-lanes and alleys” (33), is contrasted with Delhi, stuffy and hierarchical capital of the soon-to-depart raj. Sajjad traverses these different domains, largely unaware of the communalist stirrings that will soon tear the city apart. Similarly, the port of Karachi, where Hiroko and Sajjad find shelter after Partition, sees its eclectic cosmopolitanism undermined in the 1980s as a new wave of Islamic purism sweeps

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the nation. New York, to which the widowed Hiroko makes her way in the last section, seems at first a welcoming city of diversity where nothing is “foreign,” its “forward-strutting nature” (269) setting it against the national insistence on orchestrated grief after 9/11. However, she soon discovers that it is now also a place of fear and paranoia for its Muslim population, increasingly under scrutiny by law enforcement agencies. Finally, the wilds of Afghanistan, which some, such as Abdullah, call home, have been transformed once again into a theater of war but also a site of profit for an imperial service sector providing support to U.S. troops. The paradox of a nation that was built by migrants and that supposedly embraces all comers but that can at the same time pursue an aggressive racialized foreign policy while vilifying a small minority at home exercises Hiroko in the closing stages of the novel. Hiroko is the novel’s most planetary thinker in the Spivakian sense. For her, nations, along with certain aspects of national culture, encourage irrational, sometimes inhuman behavior. They demand conspicuous loyalty in wartime, as Hiroko’s own father, a dissident artist and therefore branded a traitor, has already discovered at the start of the book. They also require at times an unreasoning fervor that excuses all sorts of excess. Hiroko recalls the blind fidelity of the young kamikaze pilots she once taught, comparing their passion to that of the religious hard-liners stirred to action in Karachi—and, by unspoken extension, to the fanaticism of the 9/11 attackers. In America, an enforced patriotism with a certain ethnic bias came to the fore in the first years of the twenty-first century and, if anything, has grown more emboldened in the years since 9/11. Nationalist devotion bears comparison with religious zeal. At times, the two directly merge, as in Zia’s Islamic nationalism. Although not a believer, Hiroko can appreciate the comfort that faith in a divine power may provide. However, when morality gives way to moralizing, and when that moralizing is used to excuse acts of violence, she finds faith unconscionable. Her principled antinationalism has a Joycean strain: she chooses to fly by the nets of nationality and religion (though significantly not language). Even so, “she felt about people who believed in the morality of their nations exactly as she felt about those who believed in religion: it was baffling, it seemed to defy all reason, and yet she would never be the one to  attempt to wrestle the comfort of illusory order away from someone else” (329). Spivak describes the planetary subject: “To be human is to be

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intended toward the other. We provide for ourselves transcendental figurations of what we think is the origin of this animating gift: mother, nation, god, nature. These are names of alterity, some more radical than others. Planet-thought opens up to embrace the inexhaustible taxonomy of such names.”45 The same openness is characteristic of Hiroko Tanaka. Her own life story demands nothing less. Although Burnt Shadows valorizes mixing, its emphasis comes increasingly to be placed on experiences of forced migration. Cilano makes the point that novels such as Burnt Shadows and The Wasted Vigil perform a useful corrective to the more uncritical celebrations of migrancy that have circulated in postcolonial studies in the past thirty years or so. She points out how “these novels’ deployment of migrancy has none of the freefloating or archimedian privileges associated with cosmopolitanism or certain versions of transnationalism. This migrancy isn’t about hybridity or translation, either. Instead, these fictions figure and, in some cases, ironize migrancy as a brutal encounter that is, because of its longer historical perspective, neither a pre-determined, inevitable clash, nor a necessarily optimistic exchange.”46 In Burnt Shadows, all characters feel themselves to be outsiders in some way. Hiroko’s peregrinations are mostly chosen ones, for all their sense of urgency. They are the product of personal loss and the pressing desire for a new life experienced as a process of shedding skins (223). By contrast, the novel also considers the fates of those forced to relocate by urgent political necessity and thus to become refugees or asylum seekers. An important distinction is drawn between those whose migration is to some extent voluntary and those whose moves are forced by factors such as poverty and war. While on the run, Raza encounters one such group, crammed into the tiny space beneath the deck of a cargo boat. He travels with them for a while, his eyes now opened to the desperation driving the wretched of the earth: “I will never be the same again, Raza thought . . . I never want to be the same again” (338, italics in original). The inhuman treatment of human beings—the reduction of people to the less than human—provides an insistent motif from the moment Hiroko’s charred father drags himself, lizardlike and dying, through the rubble of Nagasaki. Part of the horror of Burnt Shadows lies in its exposure of the fact that such sins can be the product of expediency and willed ignorance as much as of premeditated acts. Much later Hiroko reflects on what she has learned in an observation that sums up the

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novel’s politics: “When Konrad first heard of the concentration camps he said you have to deny people their humanity in order to decimate them. You don’t. . . . You just have to put them in a little corner of the big picture” (362). In these conditions, Raza at last comes to understand the literal impact of a world order that treats communities and sometimes whole nations as expendable. In search of adventure and a place in the world, he has intermittently concocted alternative identities for himself, becoming “Raza Hazara” as a youth in order to experience the exhilaration of serving the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan with his new friend Abdullah, but subsequently styling himself “Raza Konrad” when he sells his services to the private security firm of Arkwright and Glenn. As Harry shrewdly observes, Raza’s reshaping is a “reflexive act rather than an adaptive response” to circumstances (282). Yet Harry cynically cultivates these protean qualities, the sense of rootlessness in the young man. After his own faintly ludicrous pseudocolonial attempts at undercover activity, Harry identifies in the young Raza—with his mixed heritage—the same potential to “pass” effectively in the conflict zones of South Asia as Kipling’s fin de siècle boy spy, Kim. He fails to consider the price that must be paid for a permanently itinerant sense of self, serving a distant and indiscriminate power. When Raza is falsely charged with having a hand in the assassination of Harry, Raza recognizes that he, as a Pakistani national, has always been powerless—like those “TCNs” (third-country nationals) conscripted to fight for U.S. interests in Afghanistan but who are objects of suspicion, discriminated against even in the funerary rights they are granted after death. In deciding to flee rather than participate in a rushed, unaccountable judicial process that is already loaded against him, Raza embraces his provisionality and begins a process of “unbecoming” (308), ditching the documents that make him legal but traceable. He is forced into an awareness that all identities, approved and vilified, exist only by dint of global technologies of control: “One phone call . . . and he would enter data banks the world over as a suspected terrorist. His bank accounts frozen. His mother’s phone tapped. His emails and phone logs, his Internet traffic, his credit card receipts: no longer the markers of his daily life . . . but a different kind of evidence entirely” (307). His only redemption is to change places with his now hunted friend Abdullah, donning his coat so as

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to be identified and detained as an illegal Muslim immigrant of dubious motives, with all the inevitable consequences in the Age of Terror: a selfless act of heroism leading to a different kind of martyrdom. In the end, we return to the question of language and culture. That which gives one an identity, which connects one to a community and a home, may also in the end be the means by which one is marked and categorized as Other. Entering another language means opening oneself to a deeper engagement with other cultures. All the main characters in Burnt Shadows are multilingual, and the teaching and learning of languages are what has brought them together. Hiroko has been a translator and language tutor, who later learns Urdu from her future husband, Sajjad. She ensures that their son is similarly multilingual, something that leads him to bond with Abdullah but also later to be of use to American security interests. Webs of language are woven for good and ill. Language can bind people together but in that slippery and elusive quality that makes the task of the translator so treacherous it also serves to accentuate difference. Just as various supposed community characteristics are embodied in language—the clipped, assertive English of the colonialist James Burton, the lyrical and sympathetic Urdu of Sajjad—so that which escapes language, is untranslatable or remains unspoken or unspeakable, gestures toward the limitation of language as communication. Burnt Shadows appears to want to take us through language in order to understand those deeper levels of connectivity that we and our governments ignore at our peril.

Both The Wasted Vigil and Burnt Shadows are concerned to make us feel with the protagonists, to create an authenticity that will bring us nearer to their experiences. Moreover, both are imbued with an underlying liberal humanism that means that, in the end, their efforts at evoking a particular kind of empathy in the reader and securing assent to certain values are of a recognizable, placeable kind. As Tariq Rahman has observed, the origins of the Pakistani English novel lie in the nineteenth-century colonial moment, when English-language education and its supreme literary examples were rolled out in India. Rahman argues that the shaping philosophical and political ideas of that moment are still traceable in Pakistani writing today in an outlook that is “anthropocentric, secular and, in some sense of the word, liberal . . . a more or less vague consensus of opinion about the

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desirability of democracy in politics, some less than orthodox version of Islam in religion and some kind of mixed economy in the distribution of wealth.”47 Although I would argue that Shamsie takes this position as a departure point from which to interrogate the complacencies of such an outlook—particularly when it translates into aggressive nationalist policies designed to secure power—both she and Aslam choose to articulate their inclusive liberal vision through conventional stories structured through binary tropes of aggressor and victim, where respective roles are for the most part clearly defined. To conclude, I return to those questions about worlding, globalization, and planetarity raised earlier. Spivak’s intervention, emphasizing local linguistic knowledge and a nonjudgmental openness to difference, highlights the importance of an ethical reading of culturally different texts. As valuable as such projects may be, however, they run the risk of a kind of disembodied utopianism, relying on an ability to be somehow on the outside looking in at a world riven by power imbalances and injustice. We may feel that such moral high ground is a long way off as we struggle with everyday situations that position us in networks of power among which we grope uncertainly, our own small-scale local negotiations presenting themselves as more pressing. This negotiated nature of lived experience is why I would ultimately propose the phrase “the global novel” as a description of what Aslam and Shamsie are producing. The term global in my usage suggests that these novels describe subjects and situations that are the result of the logic of globalization, at the same time thereby criticizing, exposing, and awakening in the reader a new awareness of the costs of that process. Inasmuch as the contemporary novel itself takes its place in a globalized market for ideas, the addition of an element of distancing or defamiliarization— worlding, in Kadir’s terms—at least allows conventional reactions and expectations to be bracketed and exposed to scrutiny. As we have seen, writing a “world novel” is not a smooth process, and there is always the possibility that to explore the outcomes of global power through one of its major cultural vehicles is to risk reproducing some of its foundational assumptions about art, life, and the relationship between them. Here we are taken back to the question of realism and its relationship with the historical project and mixed consequences of humanism. If  humanism is the great sine qua non of Western political and cultural life—larger than a discourse, experienced as more intrinsic than mere

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ideology—then realism, as the dominant aesthetic growing within the humanist world, must be understood as a particular kind of historically traceable construct with an ambivalent relationship to power. Realism has been the vehicle for some of the most stringent novelistic criticisms of the status quo while at the same time reproducing assumptions about normality and humanity that work to pathologize those who exist outside its orbit. Its truth claims—enshrined in literature through widely varying forms of mimesis—confirm our view of a knowable world, even as they lend themselves to a political challenge to the injustices and commonplaces of that world. As allusive yet broadly realist writers, even with their international, intercultural influences, Aslam and Shamsie seem to stand within this tradition. The ubiquity of the liberal view is reflected in the fact that, in the end, Aslam’s attempts to render the inner life of an Islamist militant hardly differ, in their awkward lacunae, from Updike’s labored, hamstrung efforts. Shamsie’s characters are more nuanced, but the narrative arc on which they are perched still describes a battle between models of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Both writers produce global novels in the sense that they deal with the consequences of the globalization of people and ideas, but they operate from within the historical discourses that have helped to naturalize that very same formation. The question, therefore, is whether what is needed to world the post-9/11 novel successfully is something more sly, more elusive, and more oblique.

Chapter Seven

MARKETING THE MUSLIM Globalization and the Postsecular in Mohsin Hamid and Leila Aboulela

In this last chapter, I wish to bring together the two senses in which I have been exploring Islamophobia in this study: the formal and the thematic. My aim is to use two widely praised recent literary texts—Minaret (2005) by Leila Aboulela and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid—to explore starkly divergent literary responses to the Othering of Muslims.1 The Reluctant Fundamentalist explores the conditions for alienation and active Islamophobic discrimination after 9/11, linking it to global economic inequality and exploitation; Minaret offers a partial critique of that normative materialist and secularist individualism against which religious faith—in particular proactive Islamic faith—is viewed as aberrant and incomprehensible. My interest is in exploring the extent to which these two texts acknowledge a need to find a form that not only conveys experience but also inscribes an awareness of how those experiences can be read (and misread) as a result of prevailing anthropological views of what a “Muslim text” can and should do. From there, we can ask whether the most effective imaginative modes of combating Islamophobia are to be found in a head-on engagement that seeks to reassert the value of a life oriented around Islamic subjectivity, or whether a more oblique approach that plays with readerly expectations and hence prejudices can more effectively destabilize norms of thinking. The distinction at first sight appears to be between a novel that challenges established ways of seeing and one that

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attempts to convey the immediate personal experience of life and faith from an Islamic perspective. Nonetheless, we will see that both The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Minaret face similar challenges in terms of negotiating their place in what we might call a literary “market for the Muslim.” This global market is both a commercial one, in the case of Hamid’s text, and, for Aboulela’s novel, a critical market for interpreting the Muslim writer that maps onto prevailing orthodoxies about how secular modernity is the defining feature of a West that has evolved beyond the irrational consolations of religion. We need to think about how these categories operate, how they are circulated in a world eager for answers to “the Muslim problem,” and—most crucially—what they leave out.

Suman Gupta quotes Anthony Giddens’s definition of globalization as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.”2 Against this somewhat neutral description, there is the term’s probably more familiar use as a marker of the extension across the world of a particular economic model serving the interests of a free-market capitalism hailing primarily from the United States and Britain. In Walden Bello and Marylou Malig’s more sanguine account, globalization comes to mean “the accelerated integration of capital production and markets globally, a process driven by the logic of corporate profitability.” Although this project dates back to the imperial age, in its latest phase it is “focused on ‘liberating the market’ via accelerated privatisation, deregulation and trade liberalisation.”3 In the context of the war on terror, the logic of economic liberalization is pushed still further, not simply in the “privatization” of security treated in Shamsie’s novel Burnt Shadows but also in arrangements for the postwar reconstruction of the national infrastructures of war-on-terror battlegrounds. As Sungur Savran remarks, “The sight of so many governments scrambling for a piece of the cake for their national companies in the so-called reconstruction of Iraq [and Afghanistan] should have reminded the theorists of globalization that nation-states still represent the interests of their own capital.”4 Against this backdrop, we have seen how writers incorporate an awareness of Islamophobia into their texts in various ways: some directly and thematically, others through the deployment of form and genre. In each

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case, their status as successfully published and marketed international writers positions them and their works within what has come to be known as the culture industries, a global, multi-million-dollar enterprise with numerous genres and markets, suppliers and consumers.5 In the market for literature, English-language texts have a distinct advantage over texts in other—especially non-Western—languages. As Paul Jay notes, “Western Literature [sic] has been caught up in the transnational flow of commodities and cultures at least since the rise of trade and colonial expansion,” but now “the expansion of diasporic English dramatically underscores the sense in which contemporary writing is produced in a postnational, global flow of deterritorialized cultural products appropriated, translated and recirculated worldwide.”6 The question then becomes whether literature can effectively contest capitalist social relations, which in their globalized form have often driven Islamophobia, from a position so firmly embedded within them. Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes its place as one such diasporic English-language text that has reaped the rewards of its position as a successful global commodity. It was shortlisted for Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Man Booker Prize, in the year of its publication; has received numerous other plaudits; has been translated into more than twenty languages across the world; and was made into a successful Hollywood movie. Therefore, both novel and author could be said to be beneficiaries of the globalized book market. Yet what is noticeable is that the text inscribes an unease about the status of writing as part of its broader recognition of the imperialist agenda of a war on terror pursued by economic and ideological as well as political and military means. Near the end, the protagonist, Changez, notes his dawning recognition “that finance was a primary means by which the American empire exercised its power.”7 Leerom Medovoi has claimed that The Reluctant Fundamentalist engages with what the Italian political economist Giovanni Arrighi called “the terminal crisis of American world-system hegemony” through its insistent focus on contemporary finance and “the historical rise and fall of empires,” such as those of the Ottomans and Mughals, whose fate is juxtaposed with an America tottering after the 9/11 attacks.8 Although broadly agreeing, I argue that the novel’s trenchant criticisms of American rapaciousness and ambition take shape through a foregrounded awareness of the nature and status of authorship and fiction making in a

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global market. This awareness can be seen in the fate of writers and publishers in the story and is related to Hamid’s own position as a “culturally authoritative” producer of global commodities. However, because there is no space outside this market for the modern author who seeks an international readership, the text is able only to point to its circumscribed position, not to transcend it. The result is what Geoffrey Nash has called The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s “purposive ambiguity”: “operating entirely within a western discourse it mounts a guarded resistance on behalf of the precariously placed stranger while still making overtures of reason to an audience he [Hamid] perhaps wishes to placate.”9 The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novel that discomfits the reader and forces him or her to think about what lies behind the totalizing categories “East” and “West,” “them” and “us,” and so on. The novel tells the story of Changez, a young middle-class Pakistani who comes to study at a prestigious university in the United States and who is then cherry-picked for a high-flying job with Underwood Samson, a New York firm specializing in valuing companies for takeover. Changez at first identifies fully with his privileged new life serving global capitalism and, most importantly, falls in love with the wealthy, beautiful, young, would-be novelist Erica. But their relationship is stymied by her continued fixation with her dead lover, Chris, and it falls apart after 9/11 when Changez finds himself adrift in an America seeking the reassuring cultural and national certainties of an older time and that becomes insular and unwelcoming. An epiphany caused by a talk with a left-wing Chilean publisher, whose company Changez has been sent to evaluate for takeover, leads him to consider his own position in a scenario where sides are being chosen, and so—with Erica having disappeared and possibly committed suicide—he returns to Pakistan and establishes himself as an anti-American firebrand lecturer, a decision that may or may not have set a U.S. agent on his tail. I have argued elsewhere that this novel answers Richard Gray’s call for a “deterritorialization” of post-9/11 American literature: an idea that can be applied more broadly to all English-language fiction attempting to deal with the fallout from the atrocity. Faced with what he sees as the parochialism and timidity of war-on-terror novels, Gray suggests that writers need to expand and defamiliarize their imaginative territory, to find a space between or at least from which to try to do justice to conflicting political interests and positions.10 Instead of simple empathy, the novel form needs

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to explore the contradictions that animate debates in the world today, making the text a site of struggle for these different versions. This might mean trying to come at things aslant—from an oblique angle, so to speak. And it may well mean a need for new or more experimental types of narrative structure. The Reluctant Fundamentalist fulfills this requirement by posing a number of such interpretative challenges to the reader, not least in the fact that the entire text is a monologue by a narrator whose reliability, as time goes on, appears highly questionable. This formal choice of the dramatic monologue, along with Changez’s selective editing, contributes to the deliberate evasiveness of what Changez calls at one point “the confession that implicates its audience” (70).11 The novel plays out as a one-sided conversation between Changez and his suspicious American interlocutor at a restaurant table in Lahore. As the evening wears on, a sense of menace develops, although it is unclear when the novel ends in the deserted nighttime streets whether Changez is to be assassinated by his auditor, an overattentive waiter is lurking ready to ambush the American, or, indeed, the whole scenario has been the work of Changez’s imagination. In fact, how to read the ending is just the most obvious of a number of interpretative problems the novel throws up and readerly discomfort is increased—and complicity suggested—by the second-person mode of address. As Sarah Ilott observes, “The American is aligned with the reader through the pronoun ‘you’ that speaks of the American specifically, but also interpolates the reader.”12 The somewhat vertiginous sense of uncertainty and powerlessness Changez identifies in his auditor becomes ours too when Changez, anticipating an objection to part of his story, unnervingly insists, “There is no reason why this incident would be more likely to be false than any of the others I have related to you” (152), and later confesses to having been “plagued by paranoia” (183). But the identification also constructs an implied reader who will share much of the ignorance and prejudice Changez “reads in” to his American guest.13 Moreover, the dramatic monologue enables us to see the world from Changez’s point of view, but what it prevents us from doing at all is finding out for sure about his American interlocutor. Who is he? Is he, as Changez seems to imply, an American agent sent to kill him? Or is he just a passing tourist who has chanced upon this restaurant in Lahore’s Old Anarkali district? We do not know. We are never told. And that is the point of the form.

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Its one-sidedness actually performs that archetypal novelistic trick of taking us inside the head of the character, but, in so doing, it refuses us the normalizing consolation of a dialogue. As a result, we find ourselves almost forced to respond in ways dictated by Changez; we become the uninstructed addressee, with all the agendas and prejudices our storyteller slyly suggests. Although a liberal Western reader may baulk at being asked to identify himself or herself with someone who may well be a cold-blooded CIA assassin, the novel suggests a continuum of assumptions working to normalize the Othering of Muslims, which include liberal complacency as surely as neoconservative antipathy. As Hamid himself has observed, “The narrative is a Rorschach inkblot test exposing our own interpretive strategies, histories and desires.”14 Such slippery narrative strategies in themselves might serve effectively to illustrate a possible deterritorialization of the standard Islamophobic perspective of war-on-terror discourse, with its instrumentality and willed antihistoricism. Yet the novel also directs us firmly toward the economic dimensions of the cultural and national inequality it describes, both through their direct enumeration and through a repeated metaphorical register. In narrating his admission to Princeton as one of a select few overseas students, Changez describes the transaction: “We international students were sourced from around the globe, sifted not only by well-honed standardized tests but by painstakingly customized evaluations . . . until the best and the brightest of us had been identified” (4). Economics are mixed with prostitution immediately after this, when, describing the corporate recruiters who come onto campus to pick the best of the crop, Changez notes how, “every fall, Princeton raised her skirt and . . . as you say in America—showed them some skin” (4). And, significantly, once employed by Underwood Samson, Changez finds that the creativity he has valued at Princeton has now “ceded its primacy to efficiency” (37, emphasis in original). Underwood Samson’s guiding instructions to the cream of its own crop is to “focus on the fundamentals” in their role of assessing the likely value of businesses that may attract the attentions of rapacious larger companies. This focus reflects the creed of “maximum productivity” by which all instinctual and non-profit-driven activity can be disregarded in the rush to increase profit margins.15 Changez’s boss, Jim, explains his role in terms that suture together evolution and economics to imply the inevitability of globalization. When

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Changez becomes deflated by local resistance to his attempts to cut the “fat” off an ailing New Jersey cable operator—a process that will result in outsourcing, consolidation, and “headcount reduction”—Jim consoles him with a personal history of neoliberal economic realities: “The economy is an animal. . . . It evolves. First it needed muscle. Now all the blood it could spare was rushing to its brain. That’s where I wanted to be. In finance. In the coordination business. And that’s where you are. You’re blood brought from some part of the body that the species doesn’t need anymore. The tailbone. Like me. We came from places that were wasting away” (97, emphasis in original). Medovoi correctly identifies that “both emotional life and finance capital in this novel operate according to a common logic of investment.”16 Indeed, throughout the text Changez himself is keen to invest in identities and status symbols that will secure his in fact always provisional and tenuous position as a migrant in America. From Princeton to Underwood Samson via a fascination with smart suits, high living, and easy credit for the rich, Changez in the first half of the novel is in thrall to what globalization has to offer him personally. This idea of investment can even be extended to his central relationship with the ill-fated Erica. Picking up on the novel’s rather heavy-handed allegorical framework, Medovoi remarks that it makes sense for Erica, as “AmErica,” to go into a precipitous decline after 9/11: “If Erica represents a belle-époque America already ‘cracked’ by everything represented in the death of her ‘first Chris’—the Vietnam War, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the dismantling of its Fordist industrial economy, and the vulnerability of an economy increasingly dependent on finance and debt managed by Wall Street—then the strike against the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan represents the loss of her ‘second Chris,’ Changez himself.”17 The Reluctant Fundamentalist is shaped by an awareness of the extent and cost of international capitalist practices—even hinting that 9/11 can be read as a response to a world unfairly skewed in the interests of Western-based economic and strategic interests. Yet at a deeper level the text is somewhat conflicted about its own status as a commodity in this global market and indirectly about the status of its author, too. The novel reflects on its own inevitable position as part of a world literary system that arguably trades in and profits from the stereotyping of Muslims. *

*

*

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The particular self-consciousness at work in The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a product of its position as a commodity in a market: the kind of market it otherwise critiques. Yet I would argue that it is also a result of Hamid’s own status as a cosmopolitan author and what is expected of him within that role. Claudia Perner, among others, has noted how Hamid has effectively accepted the role of “mediator of Pakistan to the West” in his frequent opinion pieces in Western newspapers. Producing articles with titles such as “Pakistan Must Not Be Abandoned” (Guardian, October 15, 2001); “Pakistan’s Silent Majority Is Not to Be Feared” (New York Times, March 27, 2007); and “Why Do They Hate Us?” (Washington Post, July 22, 2007), Hamid is a much sought contributor to contemporary debates, whose immersion in the cultures of both East and West—he was part educated and employed for many years in the United States and Britain—give him a perceived authority.18 Kamila Shamsie frequently exercises a similar prerogative, and there is much to be gained from a greater attention to those who may articulate views beyond the myopia of Western strategic interests, no matter how circumscribed they are by class privilege. Yet I would suggest that Hamid’s articles, like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, can be read as part of what Graham Huggan has called “staged marginality”—not staged in the sense of being fake but performatively “simulating the conditions in which the dominant (in this case white Anglo-Saxon) culture perceives . . . marginalised people.”19 The reception of Hamid’s work, as much as anything intrinsic to it, gives it something of the quality of those minor literatures identified in the postcolonial context by David Lloyd and Abdul JanMohamed, drawing on original definitions by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Among the salient features of this form of writing, produced by a minority in the language of the majority culture of which he or she is also a part, are “the questioning or destruction of the concepts of identity and identification, the rejection of representations of developing autonomy and authenticity[,] . . . and accordingly a profound suspicion of narratives of reconciliation and unification.”20 The Reluctant Fundamentalist inscribes these features in the experiences of Changez, whose overall story punctures the notion of an easily identifiable “us and them” and whose sense of identity fluctuates throughout the novel. From early endeavors to submerge his “Third World” sensibility and identify completely with the sleek world of global capitalism, Changez

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performs a volte face—his eyes having been opened by the Chilean publisher Juan Bautista—and ends up seemingly ensconced in a Pakistani identity that defines itself explicitly against America and its imperial policies around the globe. However, the first half of the book works directly against any such thing as an essential identity as this chameleon takes on the hue of his environment. As his perspective changes, he comes to observe that “my Pakistaniness was invisible, cloaked by my suit, my expense account, and—most of all—by my companions” (71). Yet even this observation may not indicate a belated discovery of “true” identity. Later, thinking back on his failed romance with Erica, during which he acted out the part of her dead boyfriend during sex, he concedes: “I lacked a stable core. . . . Probably this was why I had been willing to try to take on the persona of Chris, because my own identity was so fragile” (148, emphasis in original). Finally, in a semisurreal scene in which he fantasizes the presence of his now long lost love with him on the streets in Lahore, he confesses to being “transported”—a word conjuring the idea of a dream as much as any geographical movement: “Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us” (173–74). The fluidity of identity implied here means that Changez’s marginality is always to some extent recuperable for a Western audience who might have been alienated by actual confessions of terrorist activity or a sudden discovery of religious conviction. The fact that Changez ends up the figurehead for a broad coalition standing up against American meddling in South Asia and not a foaming Islamist militant allows for his critique to find its target audience—primarily liberal Westerners who are more likely to accept criticism that comes from within a narrative of secular nationalism. This is not to suggest that Hamid is being deliberately duplicitous or consciously tactical. Rather, being such a figurehead is an approved function of the Third World cultural representative, one whose sanctioned role is to speak from a place nominally “outside” hegemonic discourses and to present the hegemon with uncomfortable truths about itself. As Timothy Brennan says of such writers,

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Their esteem in U.S. magazines, reviews and seminars does not come in spite of their backgrounds . . . but precisely because of them. Whenever they write the banners “India,” “Latin America,” or “Africa” [or “Pakistan”] are never out of sight. Being from “there” in this sense is primarily a kind of literary passport that identifies the artist as being from a region of underdevelopment and pain. . . . All are fresh, political writers of epic events (if not writers of epics) who are critical of the West but only as those whose sympathies finally belong here.21

Although Brennan is here describing the generation of postcolonial writers from the 1980s, such as Salman Rushdie, his description of a process of marketing and acceptance is still applicable in the case of writers such as Hamid—even if we might jettison the implication of bad faith that is never far from the surface in Brennan’s reading. One of the most cogent analyses of the position of the postcolonial author under these conditions is Sarah Brouillette’s book Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Brouillette extends but nuances Huggan’s idea of “strategic exoticism”—the way in which an author takes up an exotic positionality in his or her writing the better to expose the stereotypical expectations of a comparatively unreflective reader. Instead of the authorial better knowledge implied in Huggan’s schema, Brouillette suggests that “writers’ relationships to their ostensible communities are as likely to be agonised and alienated as they are to be opportunistic” because “postcolonial literature evinces a complicated process of indulging, resisting and critiquing its imagined consumption.” She sees “the industry of postcoloniality” as displaying “a touristic conscience” that “fuels the way authors respond to their own reception and market positioning” and where a set of literary strategies evolves, dependent on “shared assumptions between the author and the reader,” with the aim of mitigating “postcoloniality’s touristic guilt” about consuming the products of other cultures. Brouillette recognizes how the desire among readers for education about the supposed realities of other cultures produces a market for texts “that fulfil that interest most often . . . with a broadly anti-imperialist political liberalism.”22 Yet, I would argue, the contemporary recognition of literature as an economic commodity in these terms is in tension with its historical symbolic capital and with the traditional premium, so to speak, set on the transmission of ideas as a good in itself. Although a distinctly post-Enlightenment

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formation, as we have seen, having Romantic and indeed imperial antecedents, the same notion of the free circulation of ideas can be found in the historical model of a “world republic of letters” that stands behind some accounts of world literature today.23 Now, as a commodity susceptible to the same economic vicissitudes as any other, literature—along with literary studies—occupies a more provisional status in global networks of exchange.24 I want to argue that The Reluctant Fundamentalist incorporates awareness of the reduced status of literature and creative writing as ends in themselves when confronted by the forces of economic “reality.” Changez’s mission to value a book publisher in Chile brings him face to face with the different priorities of art and economics. His boss, Jim, explains that “the prospective buyer—our client—was unlikely to continue to subsidize the loss-making trade division with income from the profitable educational and professional publishing arms. Trade, with its stable of literary— defined for all practical purposes as commercially unviable—authors was a drag on the rest of the enterprise; our task was to determine the value of the asset if that drag were shut down” (142). Yet this view is immediately contradicted when the venerable but razorsharp publisher Juan Bautista responds to Jim’s proclamation that he knows about books, having specialized in the media industry, with the retort, “That is finance,. . . I asked what you knew of books” (141–42). It is initially a shared literary inheritance that brings together Changez, whose uncle was a poet, and Juan Bautista, publisher and custodian of the spirit of Third World anticolonialism inherited from his beloved Pablo Neruda. Hamid is, then, in some respects critiquing the globalizing of media and culture that his own novel is a part of. Yet he also attempts to mitigate the functionalist view through a renewed attention to story making. The Reluctant Fundamentalist in fact performs the manipulation of literature through globalization via its consideration of authorship and the literary. This manipulation can first be seen in the fate of the novel’s creative writer, Erica. We could say that Erica represents the unsuccessful writer, the one who fails to reconcile herself to contemporary market realities. Her excitement at acquiring a literary agent is not at first tempered by his warning that the novella—her preferred form—is “a platypus of a beast” and notoriously difficult to market (87). Yet as her psychological problems mount, she can no longer find refuge in writing and ignores her agent’s calls: “I used to

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turn to it, my writing, when I needed to get something out that was stuck inside. But I can’t get it out now. It pulls me in, you know? I dwell on it instead of writing it” (111–12). Finally, after her disappearance, when Changez brings himself to read her manuscript, his disappointment is palpable: “I could not locate Erica in the rhythms or sounds of what she had written; it seemed a mistake” (166). Yet against Erica’s failure it is possible to read Changez—and indirectly through him Mohsin Hamid himself—as the image of the successful fiction maker. Brouillette has noted how literary texts by postcolonial writers often sit alongside the paratexts of authorial marketing, such as press interviews and media features (and in Hamid’s case journalistic forays) in a process of “authorial branding.” Taken together, these texts and paratexts emphasize commodification, whereas “the figure of the author becomes . . . a way of concealing mass production in individualism.”25 The emphasis on the supposedly authentic postcolonial writer is a response to perceived niche markets, and the public persona of the writer is, to that extent, a sign of the historical “convergence between the market position of postcolonial literatures and the market function of signatured authorship.” Far from writers being passive in this process, we can detect what Brouillette calls a “trope of self-authorization through awareness of the political uses or appropriations of one’s works.”26 I would argue that this insight encapsulates The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s concerns and the mode of their inscription: what the story tells, to whom, and how it is told. In other words, the novel enacts a “return of the author” as what Gupta calls an “explanatory construct, as a subject in whom intellectual property is vested, as an implicit biographical subject or historical reference point.”27 The novel can be seen to have a double author: Mohsin Hamid the historical personage—author and authority on Pakistan—and Changez the knowing, manipulative author of the narrative we are given to read. Gupta sees the portrayal of fictional authors in a number of recent novels as redolent of an anxiety about the status of writing in the modern world. Looking at works by Don De Lillo, Gilbert Adair, and Orhan Pahmuk wherein the author character ultimately dies, he suggests that “this sort of death of the author has to do with a social condition where authors and their texts are dissociated from each other[,] . . . where authors are misrecognised or simply not recognised in their works.”28 This disassociation is in large measure a result of the dominance

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of an audiovisual-centered culture in which writers’ work is increasingly marginal and irrelevant. Those other kinds of cultural producers are more adept at “reconstitut[ing] the social sense of the world, and mould[ing] consumer expectations, in a way that authors and their literary products are unable to work against or alongside—which defeats . . . these authors and their works, and effectively kills them. . . . What’s left is what can be coopted into the news and media world, the audio-visually consuming consciousness, which defeats and erases them as authors.”29 This process has implications for Hamid’s novel, where Changez, the intradiegetic author of the tale told to the American, may or may not be about to die at the end of the book. Yet that outcome is less significant than the fact that he has already woven his own legend—one consciously in alignment with the types of stereotype the media will concoct. Changez mentions with unconvincing coyness his own incendiary media appearances in which he rails against the United States: “I was perhaps more forceful on this topic than I intended” (182); and such outbursts may possibly have brought him to the attention of the CIA. He is, in effect, consciously pandering to the image of the “fundamentalist” that will be eagerly beamed around the world as the required mediated Muslim “type”—a sort of off-the-shelf Islamic Rage Boy, complete with beard, slogans, and flag burning.30 As such, it might be claimed that Hamid here exposes the latent Islamophobia in the label Islamic terrorist, which refuses an engagement with historical causality for the easier explanation of irrational religious zeal. After all, as Changez picks out just a few of the myriad instances of U.S. interference in the affairs of other nations— “Vietnam, Korea, the straits of Taiwan, the Middle East, and now Afghanistan” (156)—he is simply reflecting the rhetoric of the majority of those who do undertake attacks against American targets, from Ramzi Yousef, the World Trade Center bomber in 1993, to Osama Bin Laden. Such figures tend overwhelmingly to justify themselves by referring to what they see as U.S. imperialism rather than by calling up specific religious justifications.31 Thus, on one level, the novel offers a cogent critique of what Revathi Krishnaswamy calls U.S. “imperiality”: the post-9/11 attempt ideologically to merge “the American nation-state with the state of the globe.”32 However, a degree of ambivalence can be detected in the way this critique is advanced in terms of the text’s own status and its engagement with the sites of imperialist exploitation it visits. For example, the reading invited by

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Changez’s encounter with Juan Bautista, during which the publisher tells him about the janissaries—Christian boys captured by the Ottomans and made to fight against their own side—is one of a political awakening to the realities of his own position as a “modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine” (152). In short, Juan Bautista demystifies the ongoing realities of empire for Changez, leading to an epiphany whereby he realizes his connectedness to other global subjects of American imperialism. Yet although the ultimate result of this demystification is Changez’s effective withdrawal from employment at Underwood Samson, given the text’s inevitable position within circuits of global economic power, it seems too much to claim, as does Ahmed Gamal, that “The Reluctant Fundamentalist conceptualizes the necessary break from the world capitalist system and the refusal to submit to the imperatives of globalisation.”33 How could it do so when its very existence and circulation depends on these things? Similarly, there is something general and evasive about the novel’s analysis of the effects of empire. Leerom Medovoi is right to point out that the text hinges on Changez’s two destabilizing encounters: with the jeepney driver in Manila, whose hostile stare awakens him to their shared “Third World sensibility” (67), and with Juan Bautista. Medovoi describes these encounters as moments of “triangulated reidentification” with the victims of empire.34 The novel is alert to continuing paradigms of development and underdevelopment that have left Manila and Valparaiso (like Lahore) scarred by vast disparities between rich and poor. What it is, perhaps, less ready to confront are the political consequences of enforced U.S. clientism in these countries. In the previous chapter, we saw the legacy of General Zia, America’s most loyal ally in Pakistan’s factionalized, unequal, and communalist recent history. Elsewhere, in moves to secure American interests abroad, economic destabilization was accompanied by what Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky call “direct political terror.”35 The U.S.-backed coup in Chile in 1973 brought to power the military dictator General Augusto Pinochet, whose legacy, apart from the torture, disappearance, and murder of thousands of opponents, was the so-called economic Miracle of Chile, where—under the influence of American neoliberal economists— Pinochet embarked on a program of deregulation, privatization, and the restriction of trade unions.36 The legacy of this program persists in the Chile Changez visits, where opposition is embodied by the Third World

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liberationist poet Pablo Neruda, whose death coincided with the rise of Pinochet, but where no other more recent signs of resistance are in evidence. In the same way, Changez remarks on the gap between Manila’s slums and “the walled enclaves for the ultra-rich” but not on the U.S. Cold War support for a series of strong men, such as the tyrannical oligarch Ferdinand Marcos, with the aim of securing Filipino naval bases, or on the subsequent economic liberalization program followed by Marcos’s successors. Of course, Hamid is not writing a comprehensive historical epic, and the miniaturist qualities of his short novel—combined with Changez’s subjective narrative—preclude anything more than hints at the histories of these  regions. Even so, to attribute the responsibility for contemporary flashpoints—Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Iraq—to “the advancement of a small coterie’s concept of American interests” (178) is surely too shortsighted for the supposedly savvy political animal Changez has become by the end of the book. For one thing, it implies that these problems are all the fault of the George W. Bush administration and the neoconservatives who have hijacked the White House. Presumably, then, the solution is simply to remove this clique, and a more just world will result.37 Not only does this diagnosis militate against the attempt to provide a historical sense of injustice, but it is also willfully blind to the fact that such economic and political international meddling has been structural, intrinsic to U.S. domestic and international policies since at least the 1950s and the rise of Dwight Eisenhower’s famous military-industrial complex. Likewise, a very noticeable absentee from the list of global flashpoints stirring anti-American sentiment is Palestine. A sense of injustice at the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is probably the single biggest driver of anti-Americanism, and yet it is absent from Changez’s litany. It would be unfair to suggest authorial pusillanimity over the matter. Nonetheless, the absence goes along with Changez’s controversial (but wholly subjective) response to the 9/11 attacks—“I smiled” (72)—to soften or make more personal his objections to the United States. It works with Changez’s admission, almost on the last page, of another potential motive for his high-profile dissidence: “Later, it occurred to me that in addition to expressing my dismay, I was possibly trying to attract attention to myself; I had, in my own manner, issued a firefly’s glow bright enough to transcend the boundaries of continents and civilizations. If Erica was watching . . . she

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might have seen me and been moved to correspond” (182). The brief reappearance of the unsatisfactory love plot here suggests mixed motives. It takes the story off in the same direction one finds in writers such as Rushdie, where political or religious feelings are seen as implausible as drivers for action, but love and loss are universal motives.38 Bruce Robbins is rather more clear-eyed, even as he invokes the caustic phrase “chickens coming home to roost,” used about 9/11, when noting the effects of “years of bipartisan U.S. support for corrupt and undemocratic Arab regimes and Zionist outrages against Palestinians, about global economic networks seemingly designed to ensure that Egyptian or Pakistani or Indonesian farmers will never approach the income or life expectancy of American sales clerks and waitresses. . . . [T]he policies of the U.S. government, the WTO [World Trade Organization], the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank may not explain the motives of the killers, but they explain why the killers received and receive such widespread support.”39 In the end, all these would-be motives for Changez are played down. He prefers to talk more generally about “empire” in the abstract and euphemistically of those “tantrums” (168) through which America rocked the world after September 2001. The result is a story more palatable to an international but mainly Western, English-language readership: much more the kind of fair that can raise acceptable and limited criticisms of the West based on what it does rather than ontologically what it is, the kind that can unsettle the liberal reader but need not disturb his or her sleep.40 The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s deterritorialization of the post-9/11 novel is, thus, limited to the level of form—the disconcerting dramatic monologue that challenges prior certainties—rather than of content. We should note, however, that this is less a criticism of Hamid than a result of his and the novel’s position in a market for postcolonial writing that allows for—indeed courts—political criticism of a certain strength. The text parodies the prejudices of a projected readership that, in Ilott’s terms, “prefers broad analysis and general stereotypes.”41 In throwing these prejudices back at the reader and the American interlocutor, Hamid brings us uncomfortably close to having to revise the coordinates of “commonsense” positions about Muslims and fundamentalism. To that extent, the book directly counters many of the main foundational tenets of Islamophobia. But, of course, it is possible to expose and ridicule such prejudices and stereotypes only by repeating and reinhabiting them. Beyond this, the central paradox

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of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is that Hamid reintroduces and foregrounds the economic coordinates of neoimperialism while at the same participating in its processes and benefits as a celebrated cosmopolitan writer. This is a bind from which novel and author cannot escape. They can only flag it up as a condition for the existence of interrogative postcolonial writing in a globalized market.

The Sudanese diaspora writer Leila Aboulela’s debut novel The Translator was published to critical praise in 1999, with Britain’s Muslim News announcing that it was “the first halal . . . novel written in English” on account of its foregrounding of issues of Islamic faith in the life and choices of its central protagonist.42 Since then Aboulela has developed a reputation as a writer for whom the imperatives of belief are at the center of her work. However, she is also aware of the governing critical paradigms within which her writing is likely to be received and judged: those of culturalist politics and postcolonialism. Geoffrey Nash quotes an interview in 2007 in which Aboulela acknowledged that “in a secular climate, faith is seen as either part of culture/tradition or it is seen as political. . . . Muslims need, for practical purposes, to talk in this . . . language.”43 In his view, “rather than conform to the stale Orientalist discourse of much western writing on Islam, fictional or otherwise, Aboulela adopts a subtle transgressive discourse which engages with Orientalist and postcolonial tropes in such a way as to project herself . . . as a representative for Islam.”44 Although this is an accurate description of the reading Aboulela’s work invites, the tactic of adopting the language and concerns of prevailing discourses may yield ambiguous results, framing her fiction as the “answer” to a question posed by—and in the terms of—a non-Muslim, curious, but also possibly hostile audience. Moreover, the matter of her representative status raises other questions, both about the possibility of one émigré Sudanese writer being able to effectively represent the enormous panoply of Muslim regional and doctrinal variants as well as about the value and co-optability of representativeness itself. In fiction as elsewhere, the terms of such representativeness are always ultimately determined by operations of power, discursive frames that limit how and what will be recognized as representatively Muslim.45 I argue that this tension is at the heart of Aboulela’s second novel, Minaret, lending it a

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distinctive shape in terms of plot and characterization but at the same time setting it at odds with established generic conventions and available modes of critique. Despite this tension, in some of its key motifs, imagery, and patterning, Minaret problematizes the presumed distinction between the secular, the religious (and the postsecular), indicating cross-cultural historical continuities common to story making but often overlooked by culturally entrenched critical paradigms. Sadia Abbas identifies a certain liberal exoticism at play in the enthusiastic reception of Aboulela among reviewers and critics. Her work is seen to satisfy a desire to find an acceptable voice that can articulate the resurgent Islamic consciousness in fictional form. Abbas claims that “the increasingly outmoded liberal desire for the heroic author and the more recent one for the pious Muslim woman who can certify liberal noblesse converges in the pious Muslim woman as celebrated author. . . . Yet perhaps most intriguing is the relation between religion and secularism in Aboulela’s novels. For what this Islam, and its most intellectual proponents, also seeks to inhabit is the privileged space of the critique of secularism in its colonial and ostensibly most Protestant guises.”46 In other words, Aboulela’s novels explore the same sort of terrain as that recent mode of interdisciplinary inquiry that has come to be known as postsecularism. Postsecularism, a catch-all term for a series of critical positions that question the normative supremacy of secular perspectives on the world, has gained an increasingly high profile in recent years, particularly since the 9/11 attacks and the need to reappraise the nature of faith as a driver for political action in the world. It is a controversial term for a multifaceted and even contradictory set of ideas, being understood variously as the return of public religious group feeling; a postcolonial backlash against Enlightenment rationalism and its secular assumptions; an extension of the relativizing tendencies of antifoundationalist theoretical schools; or a self-critical tendency within the Enlightenment’s own tradition of questioning. Postsecularism has been made to encompass those critics, such as Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, who might otherwise be defined as antisecularist: opposing the universalist assertions of the “secularization thesis” by which modernity is understood in terms of the expulsion of religion from the public realm and including viewpoints, drawing on contemporary critical theory, that seek to destabilize or deconstruct the religious/ secular binary.47

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Recent attacks on Aboulela by critics such as Sadia Abbas and Waïl Hassan have focused on the pious passivity displayed by Minaret’s protagonist Najwa and the way the novel as a whole appears to endorse types of female renunciation and doctrinal orthodoxy favored by the stricter Salafi theology currently gaining ground in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.48 They cite approving comments made by the protagonist about sharia punishments and her desire to subjugate herself to protective males. Abbas in particular picks up on Saba Mahmood’s influential analysis of those orthodox Muslim women in Egypt’s dawa movement, for whom piety “is performative, behavioural and yet creative of subjectivity.”49 These insights can be applied to Najwa’s choice to renounce the secular satisfactions of romantic love and material independence in favor of subordination to religious norms. This position not only chooses submission over willed action in the world but also, in Aboulela, is dismissive of other modes of agency, such as feminism and Marxism, whose materialist focus dooms them as forever unsatisfactory to the woman of faith. Hassan sees Najwa’s choice as a complete disavowal of freedom and agency that plays into the hands of right-wing interpretations of Islam.50 From a formal perspective, I prefer to attribute the peculiar tensions engendered by aspects of Minaret to two sources: first, readers’ discomfort in the mismatch between their expectations of the genres of which this novel partakes—the bildungsroman and the romance—and the plot resolution; and, second, the novel’s refusal to take on the challenge of finding an alternative to prosaic realism as a vehicle for espousing transcendental belief. In the Western tradition, the bildungsroman has usually been defined in relation to active self-realization through material or social integration and reward or, conversely, through rejection of such goals. The development of the self is commensurate with a “coming in” to the bosom of society in the classic realist novel. Conversely, within literary modernism these comforts may ultimately be rejected, but they are rejected by the heroic will of agents who prefer isolation or even death to social conformity.51 In the romance, the main narrative energies are directed toward emotional and erotic fulfillment. A novel such as Minaret that deliberately rejects both models, without any compensatory material advancement or sense of secular gender solidarity, seems to transgress some of the basic “rules” of literature as it is understood to have developed.

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In other words, Minaret appears to reveal the difficulty of attempting to move the secular individualist form of the novel back to its spiritual roots, to fill an art form etched by three hundred years of secular individualism with a sense of God as a real presence. The difficulty of this task is reflected in the novel’s interpretative crises and challenges and in the collision between its spiritual agenda and the banality of its chosen form. Even so, close analysis of some of the novel’s structuring themes and its overall shape reveals that it inherits traits characteristic of much older forms of storytelling that have their origins in a worldview with points of commonality between Islam and the European tradition.

Minaret tells the story of the protagonist Najwa’s fall from the elite social strata in Sudan in the 1980s; the loss of her family; her lonely exile as a nanny to a rich Muslim family in London; the tentative romance she begins with the son of the family, leading to her dismissal; and the gradual rediscovery of her Islamic faith. The story is narrated in straightforward prose and in sections that alternate between her past life in Khartoum and present-time predicament in London. We see the blinkered complacency of her pampered youth suddenly shattered by a coup that deposes the regime her father serves, at the same time exposing his corruption and the fact that her family’s privileged life has been built at the expense of Sudan’s workers and the poor. Yet the novel’s concern is clearly not with the national politics of Sudan, but with Najwa’s gradual awakening from the false, superficial values that have characterized her thinking. It is a long journey to enlightenment, with many a snare along the way: she embarks on an affair with the arrogant, unfeeling Marxist activist Anwar, and her drug-dealing brother, Omar, ends up in prison. Yet there are also beacons, such as the patient female preacher Wafaa and the teacher Um Waleed, who gently lead Najwa back onto the path of Islam, along with a supportive network of women at the mosque. Above all, there is Tamer, who becomes her lover, the only male in the St. John’s Wood household where she works. Tamer has a religious conviction that is presented as preferable to the shallow selfishness of others in his family. Yet Najwa is always aware of the immaturity of her much younger lover, manifest in some of his more uncompromising statements and, ultimately, his infatuation with her. Their romance is broken off at the

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end through the intervention of Tamer’s mother, who pays Najwa money to stop seeing him. For Najwa, her spiritual quest and the development of a pious religious identity mark the culmination of a process of “return” to Islam, even as her family’s travails have led her far away from her birthplace in Khartoum. The book’s main geographical locations present one of its central contrasts—between types of restraint and freedom. Khartoum is the place of Najwa’s pampered childhood, a city of parties, university, home, and family. London is initially identified with youthful shopping expeditions, luxury items, and freedom. However, as the book moves back and forth between the early days of her exile after the coup and her increasingly isolated later life without family or friends, London comes instead to embody “an empty space called freedom.”52 She reflects: “I also thought no one could see me in London, I was free. But you can’t be free of yourself” (212). Or of God, it turns out, because her sense of his presence and of the degree to which her perceived moral laxity must offend him becomes a more insistent theme as the book goes on. The kind of independence offered by the anonymous British metropolis is merely another kind of prison, like that which comes to hold her brother after his conviction for drug-related crimes: it “contains” but it does not “purify” (193). For the latter, Najwa must reject the “western” lifestyle in which she has been wallowing. In fact, Najwa’s moral offenses may seem rather small to the nonreligious reader. Although her early relationship with Anwar turns sexual in a creepy and abusive way, she seldom has the means, will, or appetite to engage in what most readers might feel to be seriously immoral activity. However, this different way of reckoning morality is an essential component of Minaret’s move away from established notions of a good or bad, moral or immoral life. As we shall see, good conduct stems from the performance of appropriate faith, not from balanced judgment exercised in relation to reason and ethics. The move from Sudan to London underlines this shift. Geoffrey Nash has observed that “the forces diffused from the globalising West also act so as to draw populations from the East and in the process re-birth them. Women characters . . . are enabled by the metropolitan space to rediscover . . . [and] better understand their faith commitment.”53 An example of this process can be seen in the novel’s one instance of overt Islamophobia. While traveling home on a night bus after a Quran study

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session at the mosque, Najwa is harassed by three youths who verbally abuse her and pelt her with missiles. One of them approaches her: “He says, ‘You Muslim scum,’ then the shock of cool liquid on my head and face. I gasp and taste it, Tizer. He goes back to his friends—they are laughing. My chest hurts and I wipe my eyes. . . . I bite my lips and they taste sweet. It could have been beer but I have been lucky” (81). What is notable here is the greater distress caused to the former party girl Najwa by the  momentary fear that she might accidentally have imbibed alcohol than by the physical assault she has suffered. Her paralyzed endurance is horrifyingly believable, but her mental responses are already attuned to the greater danger of defilement. As her faith grows, Islam for Najwa becomes consolation and explanation as well as a mode of punishment. The book appears to advocate a necessary purging in gaining true piety, with the refrain “wash my sins with ice” encapsulating Najwa’s mindset (35, 159). Islam in Minaret is about deferred rewards, the bringing of human will into line with divine requirements, and scriptural literalism. Najwa comments on how she lives to bury her desires, not indulge them, and she is exhorted by a friend to “think of all the reward from Allah you’re getting” for abstemiousness (105). If anything, her young suitor, Tamer, is even more devout, being committed to a literal belief in Quranic descriptions of the Day of Judgment and other aspects of doctrine and attributing his sister Lamya’s haughty cruelty to a lack of religiosity. Tamer returns from a Ramadan retreat with “his eyes clear and shining, as if he could see other things” (189), burns to undertake the hajj, and proceeds to insist on Islamic observances such as the hijab and halal food. However, although these are signs of laudable faith, there is a sense that Tamer’s dogmatism is part of his immaturity. When he quarrels with Lamya, we are told that his “rebellion is half-formed, half-baked, it lacks a focus and a goal” (220). His act of kissing Najwa can be read as a burst of youthful impulse, and when she loses her job after their liaison is discovered, Tamer lashes out against his family, leading her to observe that “he is like someone else, a common rebellious teenager” (254). Indeed, the central Najwa–Tamer relationship bears the hallmarks of the romance form while at the same time subtly transvaluing and diverting that form. The search for love is a central theme of the book. However, a distinction is drawn between sexual love and spiritual love, or love for the Prophet. Najwa’s sexual consummation with Anwar leaves her feeling

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fragile and soiled. By contrast, Tamer shares her religious priorities. However, it is noticeable that he operates to reconcile the spiritual and the sensual—the latter still a powerful force in Najwa’s makeup. There is much emphasis on touch in both relationships: Najwa experiences an acute physical response to both men—even via simple physical proximity. Tamer’s first kiss immediately follows the religious outrage he and Najwa share over a party guest’s sacrilegious use of the hijab in an impromptu striptease, and their first encounter in the lobby of the St John’s Wood apartment has an erotic edge that is nonetheless couched in religious terms—a breathless Najwa feels she can almost “smell Paradise” on him (3). Thus, the usual romance dynamics are set in play. What differs in Minaret is that they are figured through Islamic ideals and their attendant imagery. This figuration subtly prepares us to accept—or at least expect—that the same ideals will determine valorized characters’ choices, even if that means a rejection of the usual love story resolution. The self-effacing qualities that lead to this result are prominent in Najwa throughout the story. All of her decisions tend toward the consolidation or preservation of community and family rather than toward the individual fulfillment expected of a novelistic protagonist. Losing her own family makes her acutely aware of the value of kinship support networks, and she gives up Tamer in part to stop him from “sinning” against his mother through disobedience and with the aim of keeping his family together. Najwa’s narrating voice rationalizes her acceptance of the bribe in terms of releasing her young lover back to his mother, and on the final page, halfdreaming, she wonders whether she really loved him at all. This tension between the individual and the collective recurs in the question of how Islam relates to identity. At one point, Tamer and Najwa directly discuss their sense of identity. Rejecting any notion of being Western, they both settle on “Muslim” as the identity marker they are most comfortable with—in contrast to Lamya, whom Tamer believes considers herself Arab (110). This is a crucial distinction and one remarked upon in Saba Mahmood’s analysis of Egyptian Muslim women when she notes the Western critical tendency to misread Islamist movements as “a recoding of [Arab] nationalist sentiment in religious idioms.”54 Both Mahmood and Aboulela reject this as an inaccurate understanding of the role of Islam as  an all-encompassing internationalist solidarity; in Minaret, Najwa remarks on the many nations represented in the weekly Quran classes she

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attends at her local mosque. In pitting the religious against the national and the personal against the political, the novel clearly seeks to endorse the former in each case. The real politics of the book lie in the distinction between believers—such as Najwa, Tamer, and the women at the mosque—and unbelievers—such as Omar, Anwar, and Lamya. The former are honest, open, spiritually questing, and religiously observant. The latter are feckless, insensitive, materialistic, and selfish. Although the sacred and profane are always proximate, prone to bleed into one another if vigilance is not maintained, Najwa’s transformation is achieved through a humility that, when rerouted via religious faith, finally results in acceptance and peace. It is not the product of self-assertion or personal ambition. As such, it could be argued that Najwa practices what Mahmood has called a “politics of piety.” In this view, self-realization, which in the liberal tradition is linked to individual autonomy and willed action, is instead located in and through dutiful religious behavior. Mahmood draws on the work of Talal Asad, for whom Western definitions of “agency” emphasize autonomy and what he calls “history making” through public participation to “create the future” in some way.55 Asad points out that agency has historically and culturally different meanings. When the West looks at the Muslim woman—often veiled and apparently subservient—it is as a passive victim against which the assertive, public Western woman can be juxtaposed. He points out that “the right of the individual to the pursuit of happiness and self-creation, a doctrine easily assimilable by secular nationalist thought, is countered by Islamists (as in classical Islamic theology) by the duty of the Muslim to worship God as laid down in the sharia.”56 Mahmood extends this exploration of countervailing types of female agency in The Politics of Piety, her anthropological study of religious practice and identity formation among women involved in Cairo’s da’wa, or mosque movement.57 According to Mahmood, the faithful subject is produced through the performance of pious behavior and ritual rather than such behavior and ritual symbolizing an inward state of faith. She goes on to oppose the Kantian model of ethics, based on the exercise of reason, with an older Aristotelian tradition in which “morality was both realized through, and manifest in, outward behavioural forms.”58 This distinction also has implications for the idea of freedom, which in the Islamic tradition Mahmood is invoking is realized by submission to forms of religious

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authority rather than by struggle against restraining traditions that must be overcome, as in the more familiar Enlightenment idea. Autonomy, figured as individual choice and free will, is seen as part of the liberal tradition particularly dear to Western feminists, who frequently fail to see the choice of Islamic piety among women as genuine or legitimate. Mahmood points out that “illiberal” choices can be autonomous, too—not simply imposed by oppressive patriarchy. In this view, the pious subject comes into being through bodily acts such as veiling, avoiding eye contact with men, and scrupulously performing prescribed domestic duties. Such things “are the critical markers of piety, as well as the ineluctable means by which one trains oneself to be pious.”59 A similar idea of piety through submission animates Minaret. In addition to donning the hijab and becoming more regular in her prayers and mosque attendance, Najwa indulges in elaborate fantasies of submission to protective males, at one point even wishing herself a concubine in an Arabian Nights–type world, “with lifelong security and a sense of belonging” (215).60 If all novels tend to be about personal transformation in some form or another, in Minaret the agent of transformation is different: good religious observance and submission rather than weathering life’s vicissitudes and winning through to a new place in the world. Nowhere is this existential shift more clearly evident than in the mosque, which operates for Najwa as a place of safety and respite. Here she learns the true meaning of the ummah, through the international cast of worshippers, while the Quran classes she attends reshape her moral sense. At one point, Najwa describes how in these classes “I learn to pronounce the letters correctly, when to blur two letters together, when to pronounce the n in a nasal way, for how many beats to prolong a certain letter. This concentration on technique soothes me; it makes me forget everything around me” (78–79). The emphasis on performance, technique, and ritual here is not simply about liturgical consolation or the concentration required to master Quranic Arabic. Rather, it draws our attention to a way of engaging with textual material quite different from protocols of reading that are normally hermeneutic and concerned with extracting meaning. Although the implications of this ritualistic approach are not followed through in Minaret, they are of a piece with the broader question of reading people as well as texts. Mahmood rejects the tendency in Western discourses to read women’s modes of dress and behavior in Islam as somehow

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symbolizing identity. In her study of the mosque movement, she insists that bodily practice should not be read as politically symbolic but rather as “the terrain upon which the topography of a subject comes to be mapped.”61 Ritualized behavior constitutes the pious self. It does not symbolize it.62 This is part of Mahmood’s modification of Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, wherein resistance can be articulated by exaggerated or parodic performance of, for instance, gender norms.63 For Mahmood’s mosque women, performance is not about subverting norms but about upholding them. Moreover, language-based approaches such as semiotics miss the point for Mahmood because performance is intrinsic to the creation of identity, not an expression of it. This supposed failure to distinguish between the lived and the symbolic is at the heart of Asad and Mahmood’s postsecular challenge to literature and literary criticism, too. For the religious subject, the “image”— Mahmood prefers the word icon—is intrinsic to a sense of self, not simply a sign to be read semiotically. According to Enlightenment modernity, which follows the Protestant line of development, religious signs are not embodiments of the divine but instead stand in for it. Muslims’ intrinsic view of images as sacred leads to what the West considers “improper reading practices”—for instance, in the Danish cartoon controversy of 2006, when international Muslim outrage at representations of their prophet was depicted in Western media as a rampant (and violent) misreading.64 The postsecularist line traces this stark difference of interpretation back to the principle of separation between the subject and the object, the signifier and the signified, and Kant’s insistence on the preeminence of reason in judgment. Michael Warner, drawing a distinction between critical reading, which relies on the notion of subject/object distance, and what he terms “uncritical reading”—that rapt, devotional mode of reading that aims to ingest rather than to analyze—notes that the Western tradition is comfortable with “the normative ideals of our own critical activity” but struggles to assimilate reading practices “that cultivate piety.”65 The move from pious to critical reading is central to our understanding of the development of the novel form in the Enlightenment era. It seems to go along with the shift from the intensive, repeated reading of religious and devotional texts to that extensive reading characteristic of the new market for fiction that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I wish to argue that this distinction is sometimes overstated and can be misleading.

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As Asad observes, Islamophobic discourse insists that the Quran forces a literalist interpretation—and therefore a prescribed set of actions—on its adherents, whereas the Bible allows for and has thus been repeatedly subject to critical interpretation. He has described the distinctions between the Western critical tradition that in the nineteenth century treated even the Bible as a literary text to be historicized and decoded and an Islamic tradition that operates from the firm conviction that the Quran is divinely revealed. He has also made the point that the so-called post-Romantic “disenchantment” of myth—which paved the way for the realist novel— has caused the “inspired” author to take over the status of all-powerful creator, just as culture itself has taken up the space of the sacred previously occupied by religion.66 This is all true as a description of the development of a dominant mode of literary criticism and has implications for our reading of Aboulela, which I explore later. However, when put into practice by the postsecularists, it fails adequately to distinguish between criticism, critique, and actual literary practice. Whereas criticism is a practice—something we do to texts and societies— critique, according to Judith Butler, is “an inquiry into the conditions of possibility that make judgement possible.”67 If, as Asad suggests, secular critique has become a modern theology serviced by the academic humanities, especially literary criticism,68 this development would in part explain the difficulty criticism has in dealing with a novel such as Minaret, where the attitude to religious orthodoxy is accepting and not questioning and where doctrine is embodied in the pious subject herself and not played out and tested in the plot. However, the postsecularists leave this problematic unresolved, merely pointing to the conflict between worldviews. In this understanding, literature itself becomes part of the problem, effectively a tool in the clash of civilizations. For example, writing of the Satanic Verses affair of 1989, Asad remarks: “In reading imaginative texts, we inevitably reproduce aspects of ourselves. . . . We are all already-constituted subjects, placed in networks of power, and in reproducing ourselves it is also the latter we reproduce. To do otherwise is to risk confronting the powers that give us the sense of who we are, and to embark on the dangerous task of reconstructing ourselves along unfamiliar lines. It is understandably easier to use our readings to confirm those powers.”69 Do our readings really always confirm power? Are we all such passive consumers, seeking a quiet life when we read? By any standards, this is an

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extraordinarily sweeping description of the complex processes of reading and critical engagement. Asad here overlooks a century or more of Marxist criticism, to say nothing of other political schools such as feminism, race studies, and queer theory, which continue to challenge discourses of power in the interpretations they offer. Techniques of reading against the grain, along with that relative autonomy of literary texts that I have been keen to foreground in this study, reveal this argument as cripplingly limited. Moreover, Asad’s view is paradoxically reminiscent of just those readings for content that pigeonhole Muslim texts as always answering particular questions dictated by the external world. Instead of anthropological readings extracted by reviewers, here we have an anthropological reading by an anthropologist that is, unfortunately, no less narrow.70 If this were all there were to say, then we could, by extension, suggest that Leila Aboulela is wasting her time writing novels. Her attempts to articulate an experience unrecognizable in the available terms of secular literary critique would be doomed to failure from the start. Yet this need not be the case. Although we should still be wary of the pitfalls of reading practices that may foreclose certain understandings of experience, we can nonetheless return to questions of form, both to note those obstacles to conveying faith and to register the immanent means by which the novel as a form is always already marked by the shape, idioms, and imagery of religion. I begin with the canonical account of the secularization thesis and its link to the rise of realism, before suggesting that the spiritual/ secular distinction is at the very least overstated in accounts of literary fiction.

Aboulela employs a flat, direct narrative style, at once attuned to the generally mundane nature of existence. However, she is at the same time trying to persuade us of the reality of Najwa’s spiritual awakening and to get us to accept her understanding of providential intervention. In the absence of bringing in God himself as a character who can be represented and questioned—something that would be blasphemous and not at all “halal,” as Abbas has pointed out71—we are simply expected to accept Najwa’s conclusions about the divine guiding hand leading her back to a righteous path. As such, we might say there is a mismatch between the novel’s form and its putative message.

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This limitation is also reflected in the short shrift given to those other explanatory narratives—such as female self-determination or Marxism— embodied by other characters. The first-person narrative focalization through Najwa avoids or rejects them out of hand. Her narrow point of view is deemed not to require any mimetic backup through the usual literary devices such as irony or gradations of authority among the texts’ voices. Hassan argues that “in Aboulela’s episteme of faith, there is neither room nor use for irony. In matters of faith, the faithful lack a sense of irony, because irony identifies a discrepancy or a lack that diminishes the status of its object. By contrast, faith elevates and exalts.”72 This line is tempting but does not stand close scrutiny. Aboulela’s novels are, in fact, always worrying away at the fact that the faithful are constantly being frustrated—in personal ways or in terms of their proselytizing mission—by the resistance of the unfaithful in refusing to yield to their viewpoint. As such, lack and imperfection are at the heart of her books: the lack engendered in living in a world that is less than perfect and that has not been brought into conformity with God’s law. In view of this, irony’s absence is a stylistic choice, not—as Hassan implies—an organic expression of a spiritual outlook. Irony could be employed at the expense of a number of targets in Minaret (Marxists, hypocrites, secularists). The fact that it is not appears to be a sign of Aboulela’s discomfort with a meaningful polyphony—one that would necessarily give more of a voice and historical rationale to such alternative perspectives. If no persuasive dissenting views are articulated, it is then unnecessary to differentiate between them. The same first-person narrative voice that guarantees the novel’s authentic feel also excludes any contending discourses. This exclusion contributes to the rather flat, “take it or leave it” nature of Aboulela’s account of God’s reappearance in Najwa’s life. Prosaic realism thus arguably hampers readerly identification, enforcing a distinction between those for whom the necessary willing suspension of disbelief required by all literature extends only to the limits of the empirically credible, and those willing to go along with an internally imposed schema wherein God is effectively both authority and author of the outcome. The challenge of producing a religious novel may appear, on the face of it, to be simply a matter of writing sympathetically about religious characters and perspectives. However, in the Western (and specifically English) novelistic and critical tradition—within which postcolonialism occupies

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an important but contested space—one must contend with what is often taken to be the three-hundred-year-old drift away from spirituality and faith toward a materialist working out of narrative plot and human choices.73 As many critics have shown, the English novel begins in large measure from the Puritan spiritual autobiography, with the work of John Bunyan being the most familiar example today. However, because of the clearly allegorical and other-worldly focus of a text such as The Pilgrim’s Progress, classical accounts of the rise of the novel, such as that by Ian Watt, tend to exclude this type of writing as not displaying enough of what Watt calls “formal realism”: a worldly particularity of place, time, and character, reflecting Cartesian and Lockeian ideas of reason and the self.74 In this account, the breakthrough text that combines spiritual and particularist tendencies in just the right measure to be “a novel” is Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe. Defoe’s shipwreck story famously begins by following the prodigal sin–repentance–redemption model of the spiritual autobiography but soon loses it in describing the physical travails and material rewards of its hero, Robinson, as he works hard and escapes the island, to find he is rich. As Leopold Damrosch puts it, in the end Robinson Crusoe “exalts autonomy instead of submission.” It “reflects the progressive desacralising of the world that was implicit in Protestantism.”75 The story of the English novel for the next two hundred plus years is supposedly about the increasing marginalization of religion—even when Victorian authors paid lip service to it—and, crucially, the playing out of moral questions on the level of character and event. God does not intervene directly, and where the guiding hand of Providence is seen, it tends to be equally explicable in terms of coincidence or, in other cases, heavy-handed omniscient meddling by the author. However, I would suggest that the structuring principles of the religious narrative do not actually disappear but are instead absorbed into the themes, idioms, and plot paradigms of the novel and continue to be evident to this day. For instance, the novel’s ongoing concern with appropriate ethical behavior has its origins in the religious roots of narrative. Significantly, even as agnostic an author as George Eliot in the mid–nineteenth century was concerned primarily with authority and right behavior—albeit in a world without God—to such an extent that Comtean positivism blends with Feuerbach’s so-called religion of humanity to make kinds of redemption central to novels such as Adam Bede (1859), Silas Marner (1861), and

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Middlemarch (1871–1872).76 That least “respectable” of novelists, D. H. Lawrence, likewise uses human relations—albeit physical—to construct a new morality and explore the possibility of redemption from the atrophying effects of modernity. And this is to say nothing of those Catholic novelists, such as Graham Greene, for whom questions of ethical behavior are played out in the “real world” of war, espionage, and gangsters but whose believing protagonists face the rather more pressing and unavoidable threat of eternal damnation.77 The postsecularists are on more solid ground in acknowledging that “the religious and the secular are co-constitutive, indelibly intertwined, each structuring and suffusing the sphere of the other.”78 In the case of Abbas and Mahmood, however, this insight comes to be less important than enumerating the inadequacies of secularism in its dealings with religion.79 Were we to explore this insight further and apply it to a literary text such as Minaret, we would see that a number of the book’s motifs and assumptions make a broad appeal to deep structures of feeling that go beyond a supposed Western/Islamic divide. One way of apprehending this appeal is to revisit the work of Northrop Frye, the distinguished twentieth-century Canadian critic famous for his development of archetypal criticism. Frye’s career is informed by a sense of the persistence in Western literature of primitive formulas in repeated metaphors and plot devices in canonical texts. Drawing on Giambattista Vico and William Blake, Frye recognizes that literary structures develop from ancient poetic and mythological archetypes and share some of their formal preoccupations and qualities. In particular, he identifies the Bible as the source of the mythological framework for Western literature.80 This explicitly Christian heritage might make Frye seem an unlikely filter through which to approach Leila Aboulela’s avowedly Islamic text.81 However, his general points about mythological structures as well as some of the formal features he identifies serve to open a different way of looking at Minaret, one that acknowledges continuities among Christian, Islamic, and secular narrative paradigms. Of particular interest is the notion of a “mythological universe,” which Frye calls “a vision of reality in terms of human concerns, hopes and anxieties.”82 Such a vision is fed and takes its shape from the narrative body of religious and historical revelation through which a society comes to understand itself.

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According to Frye, the mythological universe has two aspects: “In one aspect it is the verbal part of man’s own creation, what I call a secular scripture. . . . The other is, traditionally, a revelation given to man by God or other powers beyond himself. . . . Somehow or other, the created scripture  and the revealed scripture . . . have to keep fighting each other, like Jacob and the angel, and it is through the maintaining of this struggle, the suspension of belief between the spiritually real and the humanly imaginative, that our own mental evolution grows.”83 This is a good description of what we might call the persistence of religion in the novel form, something that helps to make Minaret more comprehensible in terms of Western narrative traditions. The persistence of religion is also apparent when Frye identifies motifs of descent and ascent, falling and rising again, as characteristic of the romance narrative archetype. These motifs take the form of descents into the underworld in classical tradition and of falls from and ascents to a state of grace in religious narratives. The same idea, of falling and then being lifted up, is to be found in both Christian and Islamic traditions and is also prevalent in Minaret, where Najwa’s life after her family’s fall in the coup is marked by a descent in status. The opening lines of the novel tell us: “I’ve come down in the world, I’ve slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn’t much room to move” (1). Her London working life as a cleaner and then nanny to rich clients is punctuated by trips up and down elevators and escalators—she often bumps into Tamer “on the landing” (100). And she reflects at one point on the Quranic verses from “The Heights”: “The Heights are a mountain that stands between Paradise and Hell. These men are stuck in the middle, desiring Paradise and fearing Hell, able to see both” (257).84 Overall, the narrative describes a slow climb back up, not to a life of luxury but to the far more valuable reward of a godly one.85 But Frye’s model makes clear that the authority of mythological systems is based on their endorsement by a situated tradition: “Belief, I am saying, is essentially a form of attachment to a community: in other words belief is  also primarily social in reference.”86 This encapsulates the challenge for Aboulela as a diasporic subject and a Muslim addressing an audience and a literary community that for the most part will not share her beliefs. She is attempting to articulate a mythic tradition perceived to be different to that of its recipients, thereby running the risk of exoticism or dismissal. In fact, as I have shown here, commonalities of narrative structure,

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having their origins in religious and mythic sources that do not obey such boundaries, are at least as significant as cultural differences. However, it is precisely the anthropological desire for a “different” spokesperson, an authentic Other who will take us inside the devout Muslim’s experiences—a mode of reading with which Aboulela chooses deliberately to conciliate— that will result in such commonalities being downplayed or overlooked. The controversial ending, where Najwa accepts a payment from Tamer’s mother to give him up, may prove disquieting for readers steeped in the tradition of secular romance with its normative expectations. The presence of monetary exchange—in effect a bribe—in parting the two lovers stands in striking contravention of what would ordinarily be considered a satisfactory romance resolution. The news that she will use the money to pay for a pilgrimage to Mecca, although consistent with her burgeoning spiritual sense, denies the reader the consolation either of “true romantic love” or enhanced social agency. (It is rather as if Jane Eyre, at the end of that novel, had thrown up the hope of a reunion with Rochester to follow the missionary St. John Rivers in ministering to the heathen hordes of India.) That it jars as a denouement is testimony to a kind of generic idealism in the response to romance fiction, where a certain emplotment and narrative trajectory are expected automatically to result in a particular kind of outcome. In effect, Najwa’s decision cements a communalist rather than a communitarian or individualist resolution. A communitarian outcome would result in social (re)integration, as in the marriage resolution much favored in nineteenth-century fiction. An individualist one would look more like the typical modernist ending as famously described by Raymond Williams, involving “a man going away on his own, having extricated himself from a dominating situation and found himself in so doing.”87 By contrast, Minaret’s conclusion is communalist in that Najwa chooses to valorize one particular group—the Islamicly devout and observant—against a distinct other group—the profane and the unbelievers—rather than to recycle humanism’s usual accommodation with a bigger imaginative universe populated by those who are broadly sympathetic to an inclusive set of moral abstractions. To that extent, the novel feels dogmatic, not, as is the case in most literary fiction, pragmatic. Of course, Najwa does develop and gain self-knowledge throughout the novel. Her judgments are really made questionable only by the normalized course of the secular romance. Indeed,

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one might say that in asking awkward questions of an assumed reader’s imaginative priorities and expectations, Minaret destabilizes the tacit assumptions of that mindset in a way that can be deemed postsecular. However, as I have tried to show, it does so through the use of narrative tropes that have cross-cultural resonances and that, far from reemerging as “postsecular,” actually never went away. The Bible as the starting point for a Western conception of collective imaginative endeavor offers a counterpoint to the postsecularist insistence on Kantian reason as the basis of the modern self. Although we can say that both Christian and Enlightenment traditions feed modern liberalism, they are faced today by societies in the West that are extremely diverse, containing a number of histories and traditions that make a claim on identity and representation.88 If the Enlightenment paradigm is often the stick used to beat the “unenlightened” Muslim subjects of Western multicultural states, then a stronger sense of a shared narrative lineage—including but going beyond the recognition that many biblical and Quranic stories have the same Abrahamic roots—becomes necessary. In literary criticism, Frye’s ideas both indicate the perceived homogeneity of a Great Tradition viewed as the efflorescence of a particular culture and indirectly point up the need for a broader, more comparative understanding of how the collective imagination might come to be figured in today’s multicultural societies. A necessary tool in the fight against Islamophobia would then be a developed theory of how Christian and Islamic heritages have historically been mutually constitutive on the level of narrative and story types, with the emphasis on what they have in common rather than simply reflexive retreats to discrete categories such as “Islamic” and “Judeo-Christian” as soon as the question of “our culture” is raised.89 Developing this theory is properly the task for another study, and I raise the prospect hesitantly here in the full knowledge of how prevailing Islamophobic discourses insist on separation. Postsecularists such as Asad and Mahmood engage in the important task of explaining aspects of Muslim cultural practice and historical traditions to an untutored and often antipathetic Western audience. Nevertheless, their insistence on essential cultural differences and authenticity may, in the final analysis, contribute to the frame wherein Western and Islamic cultures are seen on an inevitable collision course.90 In the end, we return to the matter of Aboulela’s attempts to convey religious devotion in a secular world. Minaret aims to gesture outward, so to

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speak, to signify something external to itself—that is, pious Muslim femininity—but it cannot then escape the accompanying pull of world politics: both the toxic prevalence of Islamophobia and the often ugly consequences of Islamist ideology in countries such as Sudan. More than this, however, the novel cannot evade the anthropological desires of nonMuslim readers, even those of a liberal, postcolonial bent. The very nature of its transparent realist form means the text is always to some extent caught by prevailing modes of reading. Although expectations of genre may be destabilized, prevailing prejudices are not. Aboulela’s choice to present directly an experience of Muslim femininity already overdetermined by critical and political exegeses is a pioneering attempt to set the record straight. Yet it is one that, arguably, is entirely recuperable within the terms of the framing discourse about Muslim women’s perennial, self- defeating victimhood. However, if we take a more careful look at the underlying themes and tropes on display in Minaret, we may begin to see that religious and secular narrative forms share a common lineage that gives the lie to the Islamophobic insistence of separate lines of development.

In their two very different novels, Mohsin Hamid and Leila Aboulela make interventions in a literary marketplace eager for texts that will give an insight into that most elusive (because nonexistent) space, “the Muslim mindset.” It is a somewhat curious truism that the novel, that preeminent vehicle for the dissection of individual human experience, should, when it comes to texts by Muslim writers, be suddenly seen to take on the qualities of a collectively representative document. Hamid is, of course, playing with just such interpretative tendencies in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, reeling in the reader along with Changez’s silent antagonist. Aboulela, conversely, makes a genuine attempt to communicate one particular mode of Muslim subjectivity, albeit with a certain degree of blind faith in the communicative potential of literary fiction. That her novel may signify something else out in the wide world where Muslim religiosity is always seen as potentially suspect does not invalidate the attempt. Indeed, this mismatch between apparent intention and reception is one of the most fascinating aspects of these novels. For this reason, I have chosen in this chapter to focus on modes of reception and to register the distance between the type

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of reading a text invites and how that reading almost inevitably comes to be inserted into prevailing discourses about Muslims and the world that are limited and stereotypical. Whether with respect to the demands of a global market for “Third World” writing that will give “us” an insight into how “they” think or to a complex, interdisciplinary critical discourse that posits a secular/religious divide as indicative of a civilization’s modernity, the terrain of reception for Muslim novels is never neutral. In view of this, the challenge of finding ways to break down and break out from the anthropological gaze seems likely to preoccupy writers for years to come.

CONCLUSION Toward a Critical Muslim Literary Studies

Anyone observing the exponential increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric over the past few years will have noted something incommensurate about the Islamophobic backlash when compared to the actual supposed “threat” from immigration or even terrorism. This imbalance should prompt us to think about what is really at stake in phenomena such as so-called white flight from areas with high numbers of migrants, working-class racism, and the hardening of refugee policies in response to a humanitarian crisis in the Middle East in large measure caused by destabilizing Western interventions. I would contend that the fixation with Islam offered by Islamophobia provides a useful cover, a means of evading the numerous specific local, regional, and global issues that cause diverse and otherwise antagonistic solidarities to emerge under the rallying banner of Islam. Thus, although Islamophobia fetishizes Islam as the cause and explanation of violence, the phenomenon of anti-Muslim prejudice serves a useful purpose for Islamophobes in screening out the tortuous results of decades of geopolitical meddling by the West across large swathes of the world where Muslims are in the majority. It should be no surprise that with the population movements engendered as globalization has gathered pace, some of the tremors caused by its inequitable effects should begin to be felt in the countries of the West itself.

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The valorization of a particular model of autonomy fetishizing economic advancement, which is then exported as a universal good, is central to the story told in this book. It operates both to affect the material market for stories about the Muslim other and to create a market for certain ideas and styles. It is for this reason that the move from community to economic autonomy seen in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is so indicative. Nazneen’s final success is in realizing a role as a proactive capitalist agent (a “striver” instead of a “skiver” in popular parlance). I have suggested that this ending inscribes a “coming in” from misguided communalist values to individual ones lauded and rewarded by the state. However, if we read this ending against its utopian grain—considering the solidarities broken or left behind on Nazneen’s journey—we can see a refutation of the kinds of unity capable of at least making a dent in the smooth functioning of neoliberal capitalism. Hence, the importance of returning to center stage the fact that tensions between the white working class and Muslims—although dressed up as cultural—are in fact a struggle for shrinking resources in the increasingly privatized modern nation, a struggle infamously enshrined in the “immigrants taking our jobs” narrative. It is in politicians’ interest to disguise this struggle by projecting it as being about incompatible values. Therefore, one aim of this book is to reiterate a commonality of interest among those who have been victims of neoliberalism’s global advance and to suggest that stoking the fear of Muslims is the price we pay for extending the global reign of liberal values, understood as a panoply of wide-ranging invocations of “freedom,” privileged among which are individual autonomy and our supposed choice as actors in so-called free markets. In this regard, those texts that record the constraints on movements in space—dealt with in chapters 4, 5, and 6 here—perform the service of reminding us of the real-life implications, for citizenship and freedom, of the discursive marginalization of Muslims. Some non-Muslim authors’ reticence about “speaking for” Muslims, manifested in their focus on how these constraints affect white non-Muslim characters instead, does at least have the virtue of reminding us how Islamophobia leads to curtailments on freedom for us all. Islamophobia implies a call to the wider community to orient itself around a set of oppositions that are then repeatedly evoked to keep the threat from the Muslim permanently before our eyes. The ideological utility of this process needs no elaboration.

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As far as literature and literary studies are concerned, much is made of an openness to culture as shared human heritage. Certain formal qualities in prose fiction are said to enshrine this openness. However, as we have seen, the novel’s dealings with Islamic political identity claims suggest there is actually a limit to this empathetic magnanimity: How does the supposedly capacious and liberal novel accommodate values that are antithetical to its own assumptions? This study suggests that although it is impossible to overcome inherent boundaries within the form and the outlook it encourages—which are in any case generically constitutive—it is possible to gesture to the existence of these tensions, albeit often obliquely and through a dramatized bracketing of the commonplaces by which literary criticism and reception seek to tame and domesticate difference. Looking closely at Islamophobia as it appears in the contemporary novel is not simply about elucidating instances of bigotry or violence, important as they are. The question is more about global citizenship, as envisaged directly in some of the novels. It is to do with complacency and common sense as much as with active hatred and prejudice because all four occupy a continuum and cannot in the end be conveniently separated. Islamophobia seeps in through the cracks of daily life, through hints and rumors, newsfeeds and tweets, in journalists’ articles and politicians’ utterances. Because such statements have become more overt in their hostility to Islam in the past twenty or so years, they provide the background noise to much of contemporary life. Behind them lie the real injustices, whether the steady stream of anti-Muslim violent rhetoric and actions in Britain, the United States, and Europe or the running sores of Kashmir and Israel/Palestine in world affairs. Thus, more important than simply writing “authentically” or being a spokesperson for a misunderstood culture or a misrepresented religion are challenging and at times deconstructing the categories of knowledge and the frames through which the debate is constructed—frames that are governed by prevailing political interests filtered to us as common sense and of which literature is also a part. Politics and culture in the modern era both are subject to and manifest themselves through the various forces of globalization. The most ambitious novelists addressed in this book ask questions of the standard invited reactions to and positions on the post9/11 world. In their novels, it is never enough merely to be liberal-minded or sympathetic to the tribulations of Muslims; the reader must also

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understand that entire ways of seeing and representing the world participate in a struggle over meaning and reality with political implications. Each author, in his or her own way, undertakes what, to call on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase, we might describe as a “provincialization” of Western categories and modes of constructing the “normal” and the “Other.”1 Although these authors are often highly critical of political Islam, in their view Islamophobia is an inevitable result of a blinkered perspective that takes Euro-American economic, military, and political interests as the unquestionable motor of history and Western justificatory schema as the sole arbiter of ethical judgments in the present. While dramatizing stories of individual suffering, the most politically aware of the novelists recognize that would-be autonomous actors are circumscribed by larger forces. Literature is part of a global culture industry caught, like all other industries, in the ebb and flow of economic forces. The difference is that although literary fiction’s products take their shape and substance partly in response to these forces, as an art form it is uniquely placed to point out  those exclusionary discourses that deem one particular version of history—one particular way of life—superior to another. Thus, we need a provincialization of literary studies, too, an archaeology of knowledge, to introduce a greater degree of self-reflexivity into the Western reader’s and critic’s engagement with culturally different texts, especially those by Muslim writers. Such self-reflexivity has been evident in a range of scholarly disciplines in recent years, from critical race studies to critical security studies to critical migration studies.2 Now we need a critical Muslim literary studies, too. It is not enough to rely on the inherent liberality of novel writers and readers or on the automatic response of so-called political correctness. It is necessary to dig down, recognize, and historicize the assumptions and categories that color our reception of novels by and about Muslims and to acknowledge how they can be a part of the creation and fetishization of difference. This certainly means challenging the critical commonplaces by which Muslim subjects are always expected to write and answer back to agendas about them set elsewhere. It might also mean that Muslim-background writers reject the West as an implicit addressee altogether—a rejection that would call for sacrifices, given the locations of global markets, but that might lead to the kind of indigenous self-empowerment black communities in the United States have long sought to foster. Indeed, this kind of

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direct action becomes more imperative as modes of knowledge production fragment and are decentralized. In the age of social media, when grotesque stereotypes of Muslims circulate widely, the main enemy is, perhaps, no longer Orientalist scholarship and its policy effects on the ground, but the quick-fix populism peddled by politicians. The year 2016—in which the Brexit vote in Britain saw a spike in anti-Muslim hate crime and the U.S. presidential election was won by a candidate running on an explicitly Islamophobic platform—appeared to many as the moment when something fundamental shifted in modes of knowledge production and circulation. Hamid Dabashi notes how what he calls “interested knowledge” is now produced away from academia by bodies such as think tanks. Information is tailored to the demands of those who commission it, resulting in a sort of privatization of knowledge leading to a short-term, disposable product: “fast-knowledge produced on the model of fast food.”3 Add to this the power of the Internet, where any theory, no matter how extreme, can take root and find an audience, and you have all the conditions for that kind of “post-truth” politics recently identified as marking contemporary democracy: a hodge-podge of rumor, innuendo, and personal grouse with which unscrupulous politicians can build a support base.4 If there is no longer even the pretence of objectivity in knowledge production—and if experts are scorned and marginalized—then the field lies open to demagoguery, where the most successful exponent of politics will be the one who can cater to the most prejudices. As Dabashi puts it, the heterogeneous nature of knowledge production in the past few years points “to a degenerative meltdown where the Hegemon cannot produce a single legitimizing idea that in fact sustains any claim to authority beyond what brute and vile power can generate and sustain.”5 When it comes to Islamophobia, populist modes of knowledge production and opinion formation allow open season on Muslims to be declared. The justification of torture, belief in conspiracies, institutionalized racism, Islamophobic policies, and scapegoating all become “respectable.” The nihilistic anarchy and cutthroat hyperindividualism threatened by a world governed by devalued information, personalized pseudodata, and normalized distrust will most affect those already marginalized. In this climate, the more moderate and moderating qualities of literature can be valuable. Fiction’s requirement that we engage with it in depth

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and with a degree of concentration unavailable in many other areas of modern life seems to offer the possibility of more measured and historically informed appreciation of others’ experiences. With all its culturally constrained pitfalls, the empathetic invitation of literature requires us to see things differently. I have been at pains in this book to acknowledge this inherent potential, while also warning of the dangers of the kind of unconscious intellectual parochialism that can sometimes color engagements with this writing. In her account of the decisive influence of Protestant aesthetics in preparing the ground for Islamophobia, Jo Carruthers concludes: “because it is a specific construction of Englishness (that itself engenders Islamophobia) that has been passed on, the expulsion of Islamophobic sentiments is dependent upon an interrogation of Englishness.”6 My concluding point is similar: we will not properly begin to understand the coordinates of Islamophobia until we have critically considered those frameworks—political, cultural, and aesthetic—through which the sense of “Western-ness” is constructed.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Martin Amis, in Ginny Dougary, “The Voice of Experience: Martin Amis,” Times Magazine, September 9, 2006 (throughout this book, ellipses indicate my deletion of material in quotes from both fiction and nonfiction sources unless otherwise noted). This interview provoked immediate controversy, much of it played out in the pages of the Guardian newspaper. There were ripostes from the journalist Ronan Bennett, the critic Terry Eagleton, and the novelist Kamila Shamsie. See  Ronan Bennett, “Shame on Us,” Guardian, November  19, 2007; Terry Eagleton, “Rebuking Obnoxious Views Is Not Just a Personality Kink,” Guardian, October 10, 2007; Kamila Shamsie, “Martin Amis’s Views Demand a Response,” Guardian, November 19, 2007. Yet Amis also had his defenders. See Christopher Hitchens, “Martin Amis Is No Racist,” Guardian, November  21, 2007, and Ian McEwan, “Martin Amis Is Not a Racist,” Guardian, November 21, 2007. 2. “Anti-Islam Hate Crimes Triple in London After Paris Attacks,” BBC News, December 4, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk /news/uk-england-london-34995431; Matt Zapotosky, “Hate Crimes Against Muslims Hit Highest Mark Since 2001,” Washington Post, November 14, 2016; Catrin Nye, “Islamophobic Tweets Peaked in July,” BBC News, August 18, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk /news/world-europe-37098643; Linda Sarsour, “A Muslim Woman Was Set on Fire in New York. Now Just Going Out Requires Courage,” Guardian, September 13, 2016. 3. “Lady Warsi Claims Islamophobia Is Now Socially Acceptable in Britain,” Guardian, January 20, 2011. 4. Jack Blanchard, Julia Rampen, and Dan Bloom, “David Cameron Sparks Fury with ‘Racist’ Attack on Sadiq Khan,” Daily Mirror, April 20, 2016; Simon Hattenstone, “David Cameron Accused of Racial Profiling in London Mayoral Letter,” Guardian, March 28, 2016; Miqdaad Versi, “Like Sadiq Khan, Muslims in Public Life Are

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Being Branded as Extremists,” Independent, March 4, 2016, http://www.independent .co .uk /voices /like -sadiq -khan -in -public -life -are -being-branded -as - extremists -a6912056.html. 5. Although this first order was struck down by the courts, at the time of writing another is in preparation. See Evan Annett, “Trump’s Original Immigration Ban: How It Was Introduced, and How the Courts Shut It Down,” Globe and Mail, February 23, 2017, and Moustafa Bayoumi, “Donald Trump Has Made It Clear: In His America, Muslim Citizens Don’t Exist,” Guardian, November 8, 2016. 6. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001); Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006). 7. Theodor  W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 6. 8. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), 92, and The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 5. 9. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 89. 10. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam (London: Vintage, 1997), 162–63. 11. Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation After 9/11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 12. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Dover, DE: Consortium, 1992). For more on this controversy, see Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, eds., The Rushdie File (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press; London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1990); Shabbir Akhtar, Be Careful with Muhammad: The Salman Rushdie Affair (London: Bellew, 1989); Ian Richard Netton, Text and Trauma: An East–West Primer (London: Curzon Press, 1996). 13. See Peter Morey, “Salman Rushdie and the English Tradition,” in Abdulrazak Gurnah, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29–44. 14. Quoted in James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 1986), 40. 15. Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012). 16. In the Black Swan edition of Brick Lane (2004), a number of such responses are evident in the endorsements at the front of the book: Margaret Forster thanked the novel for “taking me into a life and culture I know so little about”; the Evening Standard reviewer felt that Ali had opened up “a fresh, rich and hidden world”; and the New Statesman reviewer likewise invoked the “hidden-world” trope, suggesting that Brick Lane “allows the reader a detailed and fascinating glimpse into British Bengali culture” and enthusing, “I certainly feel more informed about the people who are my next-door neighbours than I did before I read this book.” 17. Gayatri C. Spivak, quoted in Anthony C. Alessandrini, “Reading Bharati Mukherjee, Reading Globalization,” in Amitava Kumar, ed., World Bank Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 265. 18. This is not the same as saying that all writers of Muslim background everywhere produce texts that reinforce or are delimited by this frame. Clearly, Muslim writers choose topics and forms as varied as their own experiences. Here, however, I describe the dominant current mode of understanding texts that address or emerge from the Muslim world and find an audience outside it.

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19. Madeline Clements, Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 96. 20. Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2007), 35. 21. Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 18. 22. See Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 37–40. 23. Muneeza Shamsie notes how “all good literature is trans-geographical,” going on to show how the spread of Islam created new literary genres as preexisting forms met and melded. She cites the example, given by Maria Rosa Menocal, of how the vernacular Arabic poetic form muwashshaha arose from Hispano-Arabic roots and spread to influence Provençal troubadour poetry and thereby the entire European medieval tradition of courtly love poetry (Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English [Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 2017], 2–3). 24. Salman Rushdie, “Is Nothing Sacred?” in Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta/ Penguin, 1992), 420. 25. Ahdaf Soueif, “In Times of Crisis, Fiction Has to Take a Back Seat,” Guardian Review, August 18, 2012. The novelist Sue Monk Kidd writes, “While, as a writer, I want to affect the reader’s mind . . . what I wish for even more is to jolt the reader’s heart. I want my words to open a portal through which the reader may leave the self, migrate to some other human sky and return ‘disposed’ to otherness” (quoted in Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 124). 26. On the dangers of universalizing empathy, see Keen, Empathy and the Novel, 160–63. 27. AbdoolKarim Vakil, “Is the Islam in Islamophobia the Same as the Islam in AntiIslam? Or, When Is It Islamophobia Time?” in S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil, eds., Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (London: Hurst, 2010), 37. 28. Chris Allen’s book Islamophobia (London: Routledge, 2010) attempts to trace the contested coinage of the term as well as some of the potential definitions and instances as well as to point out how more precise usage in the future might clarify and enable questioning and resistance to anti-Muslim prejudice. 29. Quoted in John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin, Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xxii–xxiii. 30. Fred Halliday, “ ‘Islamophobia’ Reconsidered,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 5 (1999): 892–902; Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), 131. 31. Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2012). 32. Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 63–80. 33. Kumar, Islamophobia, 154. 34. Stephen Sheehi, Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2011), 40. 35. Salman Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2003).

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36. Indeed, we might say that Islamophobic scapegoating is one of the few growth industries that has survived the shift from the globalized world of the late 1990s and early 2000s to the era of renewed petty nationalism and rhetorical protectionism since the economic crash of 2008. It serves its purpose to distract in both of these phases of capitalism. 37. Sherene H. Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 8. 38. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Journal of Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22. The phrase “clash of civilizations” was brought into common use by Huntington’s article, but it has its antecedent in a piece written three years earlier by the Orientalist Bernard Lewis that purported to trace “the roots of Muslim rage.” See Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1990, 47–60. 39. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, 2nd  ed., trans. Russell Moore and James Membrez (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 7. 40. Stuart A. Scheingold, The Political Novel: Re-imagining the Twentieth Century (New York: Continuum, 2010), 4. See also Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew, eds., Modernity and Its Future (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 2. 41. Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: New Press, 2006), 33. 42. V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (London: Picador, 2001), 193–94, emphasis added. 43. Gayatri C. Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 21. 44. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 25, 44, 48, 52. 45. See, for example, Geoffrey Nash, Writing Muslim Identity (London: Continuum, 2012), 4; Amin Malak, Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 16–17; Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 19. 46. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 119; Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (1994): 328–56. 47. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 48. As described in Theo D’haen, The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (London: Routledge, 2012), 5–8. 49. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh, eds., Literature and Globalization: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2011), 101. 50. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 61–62. 51. Waïl S. Hassan, “World Literature in the Age of Globalisation: Reflections on an Anthology,” College English 63, no. 1 (2000): 39. 52. Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, 56.

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53. Alan Freeman, “The Inequality of Nations,” in Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky, eds., The Politics of Empire: Globalisation in Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 57. 54. Amin, Eurocentrism, 78, 82–83. 55. Amin, Eurocentrism, 49. 56. Malak, Muslim Narratives, 6. 57. Nash, Writing Muslim Identity; John  C. Hawley, ed., The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam’s Impact on Contemporary Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1998). 58. Abdul Rahman Munif was the author of the so-called Cities of Salt Quintet (1984– 1989), detailing the depredations caused by Western oil and business interests in the Arabian Peninsula as well as the corruption of the comprador Saudi political class. His books have recently begun to be translated into English by Vintage and Quartet Books.

1. ISLAM, CULTURE, AND ANARCHY 1. Geoffrey Nash, Writing Muslim Identity (London: Continuum, 2012), 1. 2. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 9. 3. Said, The World, 11. 4. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Three Leaves Press, 2004), 16–17. 5. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 13. 6. Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005; reprint, London: Vintage, 2006); John Updike, Terrorist, paperback ed. (London: Penguin, 2007); Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11: 2001–2007 (London: Vintage, 2008). All references are to these editions. 7. Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy, and Polemic After 9/11 (London: Continuum, 2010), 11. 8. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2004), 98. 9. Regarding this sense of a loss of patriarchal power in post-9/11 rhetoric, Richard Jackson highlights the emphasis on children as orphans in the speeches of George W. Bush (Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, and CounterTerrorism [Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005], 34–35), and David Holloway notes the preponderance of “stories about . . . the failure to protect children” in early novelistic responses (9/11 and the War on Terror [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008], 108). 10. See Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America (New York: Picador, 2007). Linda Kauffman describes the post-9/11 “construction of a consensus in a Eurocentric and largely masculine form” (“World Trauma Center,” American Literary History 21, no. 3 [2009]: 651). 11. Tim Gauthier says of Saturday: “The novel can thus be read as a conversion narrative in which the aggressor is altered by his exposure to those very qualities he seeks to destroy” (9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015], 172).

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12. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reason of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 206. 13. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 227, 302. 14. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 37. John C. Hawley contests this assertion, which Asad also makes in Genealogies of Religion, suggesting rather that there “has been a long classical tradition in Arabic criticism and theory which is called i’ jaz alQur’an that approaches the text of the Qur’an using literary critical and rhetorical concepts” (“Introduction: Contemporary Islamic Encounters with the Printed Word,” in John C. Hawley, ed., The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam’s Impact on Contemporary Literature [New York: Peter Lang, 1998], 17). 15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap. 13, in M. H. Abrams, gen. ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, 6th ed. (New York: Norton, 1962), 387. 16. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Abrams, gen. ed., Norton Anthology, 2:765. 17. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), 63–64. 18. See Stefan Collini, Arnold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), and Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848–1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 19. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 6. See also F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930). 20. Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 343, 346. 21. Sadia Abbas in fact sees critiques such as those by Asad and Mahmood as in a sense Arnoldian because they rely on interpreting religion as if it were culture (At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament [Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2014], 95). 22. Talal Asad, “Freedom of Speech and Religious Limitations,” in Craig Calhoun, Mark Jurgensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, eds., Rethinking Secularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 293. 23. Asad, “Freedom of Speech,” 292. 24. Jo Carruthers, England’s Secular Scripture: Islamophobia and the Protestant Aesthetic (London: Continuum, 2011), 103. 25. See Nash, Writing Muslim Identity, 27. 26. Asad, “Freedom of Speech,” 294. 27. Amis, The Second Plane, x; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 28. In another essay, “Bush in Yes-Man’s-Land,” from 2006, Amis reflects that a sectarian Sunni/Shia war is one possible outcome of present conditions, but he hopes it will be “merely a Thirty Years war, and not a Hundred Years War. After that we can look forward to a Renaissance, then a Reformation, followed in due course by an Enlightenment” (153). The tendency to repetition here, belying Amis’s supposed “war against cliché,” is indicative of how in Second Plane the argument is never knowingly underegged.

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29. Annabelle Sreberny, “Trauma Talk: Reconfiguring the Inside and Outside,” in Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan, eds., Journalism After September 11 (London: Routledge, 2002), 229. Martin Randall makes a similar point about the use of the term we in Ian McEwan’s post-9/11 essay “Beyond Belief” (9/11 and the Literature of Terror [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011], 17). 30. On the matter of Leavis’s Puritan preferences, see Raman Selden, Practising Theory and Reading Literature: An Introduction (Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 22–23. 31. Bradley and Tate, New Atheist Novel, 39. 32. Coincidentally, as M. Hunter Hayes points out, the youthful Amis reviewed Nor Shall My Sword upon its publication and, in his literary journalism at least, can be seen as a “reluctant Leavisite” (“A Reluctant Leavisite: Martin Amis’s ‘Higher Journalism,’ ” in Gavin Kuelks, ed., Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond [Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006], 197–210). 33. F. R. Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion, and Social Hope (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), 169. 34. Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword, 190. A decade later Q. D. Leavis ends her consideration of the “Englishness of the English novel” with a lament that “unassimilated multiracial minorities,” among other ills, mean that the conditions in which the great tradition of English writing prospered are no more (“The Englishness of the English Novel,” in Collected Essays: The Englishness of the English Novel, vol. 1, ed. G. Singh [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 325). 35. Bradley and Tate, New Atheist Novel, 16. 36. Bradley and Tate, New Atheist Novel, 11. 37. McEwan, Saturday, 56; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 38. Nash says, “The major trope that accompanies the panic about terrorist attacks from outside in the novels . . . is that of loss of memory and/or mental disintegration” (Writing Muslim Identity, 95). 39. Molly Clark Hillard, “ ‘When Desert Armies Stand Ready to Fight’: Re-reading McEwan’s Saturday and Arnold’s Dover Beach,” Partial Answers 6, no. 1 (2008): 181–82. 40. Tim Gauthier quotes an interview with McEwan in which the author states: “I’m not writing an allegory here. I am not making [Perowne] stand for something. But nevertheless, just a little or maybe a lot below the surface in his confrontations with Baxter is an echo of the confrontation of the rich, satisfied, contented West with a demented strand of a major world religion” (9/11 Fiction, 174). 41. Stephen Morton, “Writing Muslims and the Global State of Exception,” in Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin, eds., Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing (New York: Routledge, 2012), 22–23. By “7/7,” Morton refers to July 7, 2005, the day when a series of coordinated suicide bombings occurred in London. 42. Robert Eaglestone describes how Baxter comes to be overdetermined. He is “a metonym for illness, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, the anti-war demonstration, terrorism, the war on terrorism: in short, anything that disrupts Henry Perowne’s organised life” (“ ‘The Age of Reason Was Over . . . an Age of Fury Was Dawning’:

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Contemporary Fiction and Terror,” in Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, eds., Terror and the Postcolonial [Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2010], 365). 43. Nash notes how “parents display heightened anxiety towards their offspring owing to their perceived inability to protect them from a world of potential terrors” (Writing Muslim Identity, 96). 44. Dominic Head, Ian McEwan (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007), 183. 45. Elaine Hadley memorably registers incredulity that McEwan “has offered up duct tape and plastic sheeting as a response to the unknown agents and unpredictable consequences of a new world order” (“ ‘On a Darkling Plain’: Victorian Liberalism and the Fantasy of Agency,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 1 [2005]: 97). 46. Gauthier notes how Baxter’s awestruck response to “Dover Beach” means that his “ ‘difference’ is erased and he proves himself open to conversion; he shifts from being a troubling and unpredictable other to a civilizable entity” (9/11 Fiction, 178). 47. This determinism, coupled with faith in the humanistic educational potential of “Dover Beach” seems to bear out Edward Said’s warnings about that narrow type of European-dominated humanism that came back into vogue after 9/11, “proving” “in the worst Darwinian sense that some people deserve ignorance, poverty, ill-health and backwardness according to the free market” (Humanism and Democratic Criticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], 22). In Saturday, liberal humanist values are guaranteed by a market rationale of cultural and economic winners and losers, too. 48. Gilroy, After Empire, 98–108. 49. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (2003; reprint, New York: Norton, 2004). 50. Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 31. 51. It would be possible to plot a similar trajectory by looking at the way in which Romantic nationalist and modernist strains rejecting liberalism, democracy, and freedom can be traced into the twentieth century in the work of Ezra Pound, the Futurists, and the Vorticists. 52. Berman’s book was warmly received, especially among liberals, who needed their sinews stiffened for the coming struggle. One can also see why Terror and Liberalism found such an enthusiastic audience among journalists and commentators: with its sweeping generalizations compellingly stitched together to form a continuous tapestry of two hundred years of history, it is an impatient person’s idea of a good history book, offering a key to all modern mythologies and explaining how we have arrived at this point. Unfortunately, the book is instead a simple, tub-thumping polemic on behalf of that humanitarian imperialism that was popular for a few years at the start of the twenty-first century. 53. Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 70–71. 54. Richard Gray, “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis,” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (2009): 136; Michiko Kakutani, “John Updike’s Terrorist Imagines a Homegrown Threat to Homeland Security,” New York Times, June 6, 2006. 55. Anna Hartnell, “Violence and the Faithful in Post-9/11 America: Updike’s Terrorist, Islam, and the Specter of Exceptionalism,” Modern Fiction Studies 57, no.  3 (2011): 478.

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56. Updike, Terrorist, 3, emphasis in original; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 57. Nash, Writing Muslim Identity, 105. Anna Hartnell makes the salient point that “the attitude with which Jack Levy looks at the town of New Prospect is one of distaste, which contrasts sharply with that of Henry Perowne as he surveys his beloved London from his Charlotte Street bedroom window in McEwan’s Saturday” (“Violence and the Faithful,” 486). The difference is, crucially, one of class: Perowne’s privileged position is reflected in his heightened ability to survey the city; Levy and his wife are down among the flotsam and jetsam of urban life. 58. Richard Crownshaw, “Deterritorializing the ‘Homeland’ in American Studies and American Fiction After 9/11,” Journal of American Studies 45, no. 4 (2011): 760. 59. Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 24–27; Tariq Ramadan, Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity (Leicester, UK: Islamic Foundation, 2001), 203–28. In truth, this is a three-way interaction because Ramadan is reading Albert Camus’s argument in The Rebel as a way to explain the centrality of doubt and rebellion to Western thinking and their absence, for Ramadan, in the Islamic tradition. 60. As Ramadan observes, however, in the Islamic tradition the son chosen for sacrifice is most often identified as the eldest, Ishmael (Islam, 298). 61. Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 26. 62. Karen Armstrong, In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis (London: Vintage, 2011), 67. For the biblical story, see Genesis 22:1–18. 63. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 11–12. 64. Both of these positions are slightly caricatural. Ramadan’s description of an Islamic faith resistant to critical skepticism seems rather to describe those hegemonic formations that have channeled interpretation in particular ways, for all his argument’s claims to be describing a supposedly universal experience for believers. Berman wants to prove that doubt and questioning are what make the West qualitatively different from Islam. In chapter 7, I say more about the historical limitations of this project and its failure to account for the persistence of the religious in Western thought and art. 65. Ramadan, Islam, 212. 66. Anna Hartnell argues that Updike’s novel offers us a “rendering of Enlightenment discourses of secularism that privilege Christian—and specifically Protestant— forms of faith” (“Writing Islam in Post-9/11 America: John Updike’s Terrorist,” in Ahmed, Morey, and Yaqin, eds., Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing, 136). For her, this is the reason why the novel fails to render a convincing Muslim mindset. 67. For the complex role played by the CIA “mole,” Charlie Chehab, see Peter C. Herman, “Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture: John Updike’s Terrorist,” Modern Philology 102, no. 4 (2015): 708–9. 68. David Simpson, “Telling It Like It Is,” in Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, eds., Literature After 9/11 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 219. 69. Pankaj Mishra, “The End of Innocence,” Guardian, May 19, 2007, emphasis added. Nash points out that texts by British and American novelists after 9/11 bear “the imprint of western neuroses rather than . . . Arab or Muslim ones” (Writing Muslim Identity, 108).

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2. FROM MULTICULTURALISM TO ISLAMOPHOBIA 1. Hanif Kureishi, review of You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom by Nick Cohen, Independent, January 27, 2012. Kureishi was a prominent supporter of Rushdie during the darkest days of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him. 2. Hanif Kureishi, The Black Album, paperback ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1996); Monica Ali, Brick Lane, paperback ed. (London: Black Swan, 2004). All references are to these editions. 3. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 260. 4. Rehana Ahmed, Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class, and Multiculturalism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2015), 8. 5. Sukhdev Sandhu, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (London: HarperCollins, 2003), 225. 6. A. Sivanandan, A Different Hunger: Writing on Black Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1982), 8–9. 7. Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), 48–49. 8. Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, 53. 9. James Procter, Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 7. 10. Tariq Modood, “ ‘Difference,’ Cultural Racism, and Anti-racism,” in Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, eds., Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-racism (London: Zed Books, 1997), 157. 11. For an encapsulation of what is at stake in the redistribution-versus-recognition debate, see Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition: A Political–Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (London: Verso, 2003). 12. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25. 13. Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, 58, 72–73. 14. The Swann Report: Education for All (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1985). 15. Bhikhu Parekh, The Parekh Report: The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain (London: Profile Books, 2000). 16. “Robin Cook’s Chicken Tikka Masala Speech,” Guardian, April  19, 2001. Sara Upstone describes the upsurge of interest in turn-of-the-millennium “Asian Cool” in films, television shows, and pop-music acts, including the films East Is East (Ayub Khan-Din, 1999) and Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2002); the BBC comedies Goodness Gracious Me (1998–2001) and The Kumars at Number 42 (2001–2006); Asian Dub Foundation; and Punjabi MC (British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First Century Voices [Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010], 3). See also Rupa Huq, “Asian Kool? Bhangra and Beyond,” in Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk, and Ashwani Sharma, eds., Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music Scene (London: Zed Books, 1996), 61–80.

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Two novels from the period that might be taken as representative multicultural texts in that they thematize negotiations around race, culture, and difference but ultimately resolve tensions leading to a positive outcome, are White Teeth (2000) by Zadie Smith and Anita and Me (1997) by Meera Syal. 17. Both Rehana Ahmed and Ben Pitcher share a certain skepticism about the seriousness of New Labour’s commitment to multiculturalism, pointing out inconsistencies in rhetoric and practice. See Ahmed, Writing British Muslims, 9, and Ben Pitcher, The Politics of Multiculturalism: Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 15. 18. Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 133–34. 19. Michel Wieviorka, “Is It so Difficult to Be an Anti-racist?” in Werbner and Modood, eds., Debating Cultural Hybridity, 142. For his part, Tariq Modood sees cultural racism as the historical “norm” of racism from which phenotype racism is a temporary departure (“ ‘Difference,’ ” 155). 20. Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, 41, 63, 68. 21. For a somewhat different view of the same phenomena that engages directly with Malik’s arguments, see Anshuman A. Mondal, Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech After Rushdie (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 22. Sivanandan, A Different Hunger, 22. 23. Anshuman Mondal gives one of the most cogent analyses of the disequilibrium of power whereby privileged liberal commentators use their cultural capital to attack those few and limited means by which minorities may make their voices heard (Islam and Controversy, esp. chap. 1, “From Blasphemy to Offensiveness: The Politics of Controversy,” 13–31). 24. Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, 198–202. 25. Rehana Ahmed has noted how this debate was throughout marked by fault lines of class, race, and religion as the culturally privileged author, Monica Ali, and her reviewers sought to invoke individual imaginative freedom against the collective outrage of those taken to be the book’s subjects. She points out that “an absolute advocacy of individual rights obscures the social hierarchies which give some individuals more access to those rights than others[,] . . . [while the protestors’ concerns were] in part rooted in their vulnerability as members of a minority racialised group with a history of poverty and exclusion.” She also makes the important observation that the difference between the Rushdie and Brick Lane controversies lies in the fact that the former was grounded in the assertion of a group religious identity, whereas the latter was concerned with local and cultural disrespect (“Brick Lane: A Materialist Reading of the Novel and Its Reception,” Race and Class 52, no. 2 [2010]: 25–42, quote on 29). Nonetheless, after 9/11 all collective action involving Muslims was deemed suspect and seen to feed into a view that Islam was the cause of unsettlingly “alien” social practices. 26. Germaine Greer, “Reality Bites,” Guardian, July 24, 2006; “The Trouble with Brick Lane,” Guardian, October 27, 2007. 27. An example of such earlier critical studies of British multicultural literature would be A. Robert Lee’s edited collection Other Britain, Other British (London: Pluto Press, 1995), in which an awareness of hybridization as an ongoing process is offset by the volume’s arrangement, which results in the discrete treatment of writers of

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Caribbean, Asian, Irish, and Australian origin rather than in a focus on the evolution of Britishness itself. 28. Quoted in Kobena Mercer, “Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation,” in Kobena Mercer, ed., Black Film, British Cinema, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) Documents no. 7 (London: ICA, 1988), 12. 29. Mercer, “Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation,” 12. 30. Mercer, “Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation,” 11. 31. Ahmed, Writing British Muslims, 17. 32. As Ruvani Ranasinha remarks, “The burden of representation assumes and privileges realism” ( Hanif Kureishi [Plymouth, UK: Northcote House, 2002], 46). 33. David Theo Goldberg, “Introduction: Multicultural Conditions,” in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 13–14. This is a point with which numerous critics have concurred. Masao Miyoshi, for example, cites as one of his problems with multiculturalism that it effectively substitutes race and gender, seen as more “authentic” and unchangeable identity markers, for the potentially alterable marker of class—a move that works in the interest of existing material hierarchies, making them more likely to be favorable to multiculturalism as it ceases to be a subversive program (“Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality,” in Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh, eds., Literature and Globalisation: A Reader [London: Routledge, 2011], 137). Similar criticisms of identity politics are advanced by Timothy Brennan and Tariq Ali, among others. See Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 118, and Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad, and Modernity (London: Verso, 2002), 337. 34. Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking About Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (1997): 378–95. 35. Slavoj Çiäek, “Multiculturalism, or, The Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (1997): 44. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam reprove Çiäek for the counterintuitive charge that multiculturalism is racist. For them, he ignores the radical manifestations of multiculturalism built “from below” by communities themselves as part of the fight against corporate global capitalism (“Cultural Debates in Translation,” in Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley, eds., The Postcolonial and the Global [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008], 124–31). 36. Christian Joppke, “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy,” British Journal of Sociology 5, no. 2 (2004): 243. 37. Sandhu, London Calling, 228. 38. Sandhu, London Calling, 240. 39. Ahmed, Writing British Muslims, 95. 40. Kureishi himself recognizes the attraction of religion as a bulwark of certainty against the fluidity of the postmodern world. In his essay collection The Word and the Bomb (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), he suggests that “fundamentalist Islam is an ideology that began to flourish in a conspicuous age of plenty in the West, and at a time of media expansion” (84). Even if this explanation might be too “Westcentric,” it is clear that texts such as The Black Album and “My Son the Fanatic” inscribe what Sara Upstone has called a “postmodern didacticism,” directing our sympathy for characters according to whether they embrace the fluidity and

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potential for reinvention offered by modern popular culture and urban living (British Asian Fiction, 44). 41. Upstone, British Asian Fiction, 46. 42. Kureishi, The Black Album, 178; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 43. However, The Black Album shows the most tolerance to Riaz’s group—and invites the most readerly identification—when the group takes a stand to protect a local Bengali family threatened by racists, patrolling their estate and setting up camp in their cramped flat. Here, they are shown inheriting the kind of vigilante role once performed by those old-style antiracists celebrated by Kenan Malik, whose rhetoric was matched by action in defense of communities. This role reasserts the importance of race and racism even as the main thrust of the narrative records the end of recognizable class-based politics and its supercession by cultural identity claims. 44. Tracey takes offence at the protagonist Karim’s hammy portrayal of an elderly Asian man, suggesting that it simply confirms white stereotypes about Asians as “funny, with strange habits and weird customs. To the white man we’re already people without humanity.” Against Tracey’s assertion of necessary black political solidarity, Karim argues for the individuality of his performance, that it is about “one old Indian man” and does not claim to represent an entire culture (Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia [London: Faber and Faber, 1991], 180). 45. As Ranasinha puts it, Kureishi’s work “ does not present an undiscriminating picture of the dominant majority. However, he uncritically reflects and embodies rather than questions its predominant fears, prejudices and perceptions of devout British Muslims as ‘fundamentalists,’ constructed as particularly threatening to the West” (Hanif Kureishi, 82). 46. Ranasinha, Hanif Kureishi, 89. 47. See Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy, and Polemic After 9/11 (London: Continuum, 2010). 48. Bart Moore-Gilbert, “From ‘the Politics of Recognition’ to ‘the Policing of Recognition’: Writing Islam in Hanif Kureishi and Mohsin Hamid,” in Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin, eds., Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing (New York: Routledge, 2012), 190–91. 49. Geoffrey Nash says of writers such as Rushdie, Kureishi, and Ali that while their sympathies “may be with the individual migrant (a Shahid in The Black Album or a Nazneen in Brick Lane) these [sympathies] usually do not extend to migrant communities, and their fiction more often than not incorporates two-dimensional versions of Islam and Muslim fundamentalists” (Writing Muslim Identity [London: Continuum, 2012], 12). 50. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 51. See, for example, Joppke, “The Retreat of Multiculturalism,” and Milton Fisk, “Multiculturalism and Neoliberalism,” Praxis Filosofica 21 (2005): 21–28. 52. Will Kymlicka, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” in Peter  A. Hall and Michele Lamont, eds., Social Resistance in the Neoliberal Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 99. 53. Kymlicka, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” 107. 54. Kymlicka, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” 111.

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55. Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (London: Continuum, 2003), 102. This view ties in with the analysis offered by Katherine  E. Brown, who has noted an alternative to the securitized Muslim of the war-on-terror years in the validated figure of the Muslim who is normalized via participation in sanctioned economic activities. Citing examples such as James Caan, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and television celebrity on the BBC show Dragon’s Den; Emel, the Muslim lifestyle magazine; and the women featured in the Times magazine “Muslim Women Power List” for 2009, Brown argues that the “good Muslim” is the one who can be demonstrated to share the values of entrepreneurialism. Their philanthropy and quality as community role models are commensurate with their embodiment of the lesson that self-help and hard work are more laudable than collective lobbying. Brown describes this combination as “meritocratic materialism,” pointing out that the good Muslim, “the “normal Muslim,” is the one we can do business with (“Contesting the Securitization of British Muslims: Citizenship and Resistance,” Interventions 12, no. 2 [2010]: 171–82). 56. Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review 56 (2009): 103. 57. Fraser, “Feminism,” 108. Fraser says: “The turn to recognition dovetailed all too neatly with a rising neoliberalism that wanted nothing more than to repress all memory of social egalitarianism” (109). 58. Fraser, “Feminism,” 110. 59. Sara Upstone, “Representation and Realism: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane,” in Ahmed, Morey, and Yaqin, eds., Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity, 167–68; Ahmed, Writing British Muslims, 134. 60. Nash remarks that Nazneen “fulfils the function of the Muslim woman who is liberated from her native culture to achieve freedom and independence in the West[,] . . . [whereas] [h]er beautiful, rebellious sister Hasina is less fortunate for although she exercises the right to choice and elopes with her lover there is no room for feminist enfranchisement at home in Bangladesh. Her fate is to be conquered by Third World poverty and patriarchy” (Writing Muslim Identity, 37). 61. Ali, Brick Lane, 54; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 62. Chanu’s argument here is met with the dismissive cry “Crap!” from the westernized wife of his friend Dr. Azad, who, along with her daughter, has apparently had no problem integrating in Britain. 63. Dave Gunning remarks: “The decision to dress in one way or another is literally to place oneself inside . . . pre-existing codes. Costume provides a crucible for Ali’s exploration of the relation between individual agency and socially determined standards” (Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012], 98). 64. Ahmed, Writing British Muslims, 133. 65. If Mrs.  Islam, the moneylender with whom Nazneen and her husband become embroiled earlier, represents both the “bad,” usurious face of business—and, in her name, the censorious and restrictive face of religion—then Nazneen’s confrontation with her, during which she accuses the old woman of charging riba, or interest, marks the moment when Nazneen finally shakes off her bondage to community traditions and conservative religious practice. As Stephen Morton has put it,

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“Nazneen’s challenge to Mrs Islam is the condition of possibility for both her economic sovereignty and for Nazneen to emerge as the heroic female individual of the neoliberal bildungsroman” (“Multicultural Neoliberalism, Global Textiles, and the Making of the Indebted Female Entrepreneur in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane,” in Amina Yaqin, Peter Morey, and Asmaa Soliman, eds., Muslims, Trust, and Multiculturalism [Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018], 198; see also Gunning, Racism and Antiracism, 103). 66. Michael Perfect, “The Multicultural Bildungsroman: Stereotypes in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43, no. 3 (2008): 119. 67. See Sarah Morrison, “Mums Do the Business: The Number of Female Entrepreneurs Who Juggle Work and Looking After Their Children Is Growing Fast,” Independent, September 28, 2013, and Becky Barrow, “Boom in Business Tycoon Mums,” Daily Mail, September 15, 2006. It is noticeable that both Morrison and Barrow separate childcare from “work,” as if there were no work involved in the former. For a scholarly take on the phenomenon of mumpreneurs and the novel, see Roberta Garrett, “Novels and Children: ‘Mum’s Lit’ and the Public Mother/ Author,” Studies in the Maternal 5, no. 2 (2013): 1–28. 68. Kymlicka, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” 109. 69. Christina Scharff, “Disarticulating Feminism: Individualization, Neoliberalism, and the Othering of ‘Muslim Women,’ ” European Journal of Women’s Studies 18, no.  2 (2011): 119–34. For the broader phenomenon of young women disavowing feminism in the neoliberal era, see also Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009).

3. MUSLIM MISERY MEMOIRS 1. The American journalist Ron Suskind, recalling a meeting with a senior White House adviser during President George W. Bush’s first term, describes a curious turn in the conversation. The aide suggested that journalists such as Suskind are “in what we call the reality-based community,” where “people believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” However, the aide was about to disabuse Suskind of any such assumption: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you study that reality—judiciously, as you will—we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do” (Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George  W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October  17, 2004, http://www .nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html). 2. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, tenth anniversary ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009). 3. Marc W. Herold, “Afghanistan as an Empty Space: The Perfect Neo-colonial State of the Twenty-First Century,” posted February 26, 2006, https://www.scribd.com/ document/13671512/Marc-W-Herold-Afghanistan-as-an-empty-space, 81, 98. 4. Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Threat to Global Security (London: Penguin, 2009), xlvi, lv.

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5. Rashid, Descent Into Chaos, xlvi. See also Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press; Black Point, Canada: Fernwood, 2011), 12. 6. Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush.” 7. Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (London: HarperCollins, 2004); Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). All references are to these editions. 8. There is, in fact, a host of such Muslim misery memoirs on the market. Dohra Ahmad refers to the seamier examples as “pulp non-fiction” (“Not Yet Beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in American Popular Literature,” Social Text 27, no. 2 [Summer 2009): 105–31). Lila Abu-Lughod describes how mass-market commercial publishing is obsessed with them: “This industry commissions and promotes a genre of books that one can identify, and judge, by their covers. We see them at airport bookstores. The copycat images are of women wearing black or white veils, showing only their eyes—or sometimes one eye. The titles are variations on a theme: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia; Sold: One Woman’s True Account of Modern Slavery; My Forbidden Face; Without Mercy; Burned Alive; Married by  Force. They are often personal stories ‘as told to.’ Disdained by respectable writers . . . this genre underwrites their work” (Do Muslim Women Need Saving? [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013], 79). 9. Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 1–9. 10. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 244. 11. Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? 31. 12. Quoted in miriam cooke, “Islamic Feminism Before and After September 11th,” Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 9 (2002): 235. 13. Quoted in cooke, “Islamic Feminism,” 235. 14. Ahmad, “Not Yet Beyond the Veil,” 109. 15. Roksana Bahramitash, “The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism, and Orientalist Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 222, 223. 16. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 250. 17. See John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (London: Routledge, 1989), 75. 18. Fatemeh Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 4. 19. Dabashi, Brown Skins, White Masks, 16. We might also recall Mary Louise Pratt’s coinage autoethnography for that kind of writing that engages with minority subjectivity on the colonizer’s own terms (Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [New York: Routledge, 1992], 7). 20. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Glyph 7 (1980): 203–4. 21. Gillian Whitlock, “From Tehran to Tehrangeles: The Generic Fix of Iranian Exilic Memoirs,” ARIEL 39, nos. 1–2 (2008): 8. Tzvetan Todorov makes explicit the link between genres and ideologies when he writes that “each era has its own system of genres, which is in relation with the dominant ideology etc. Genres, like any other institution, reveal the constitutive traits of the society to which they belong” (“The Origin of Genres,” New Literary History, Autumn 1976, 163).

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22. Quoted in Whitlock, “From Tehran to Tehrangeles,” 22. 23. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and SelfRepresentation (London: Routledge, 2009), 70, 71. 24. Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars, 136. 25. Iran is a particularly fruitful source of memoirs by women, although many are written by women now in exile in America. Among recent examples are Azadeh Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005), and Tara Bahrampour, To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). These books join older examples such as Shusha Guppy, The Blindfold Horse: Memories of a Persian Childhood (London: William Heinemann, 1988). Another celebrated recent instance of the Iranian women’s memoir is Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis (London: Vintage, 2008). It tells the story of the author’s childhood and teenage years, much of it spent under the consolidating power of the Islamic Republic. Like Nafisi, Satrapi can be identified with a bourgeois secular nationalism, but this time with a strong leftist edge. Persepolis covers the same span of time as Reading Lolita in Tehran, but Satrapi’s response to events is more open and interrogative than Nafisi’s and includes a healthy dose of skepticism about the West’s sudden interest and meddling in the region. The egoism and independence of spirit of the young protagonist, viewed with the benefit of adult hindsight, means that the text has none of the complacent certainty that underpins Nafisi’s work. 26. Dabashi, Brown Skins, White Masks, 13, 69, 77. 27. Nikki R. Keddie, Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995), 26. 28. Michael Axworthy, Iran: Empire of the Mind (London: Penguin, 2008), 251–63. 29. Keddie, Iran and the Muslim World, 13. 30. Axworthy, Iran, 204–43. 31. Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran, 19; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 32. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4. 33. This displacement of heterosexual romance sounds like a wry and worldly-wise subversion of the usual literary consolation offered to women, until one considers that Nafisi’s author-narrator is a proxy for the traditional male gaze here, offering us the age-old Orientalist delight of a peek beyond the veil or inside the harem. 34. By contrast, the Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur—whose experiences of state brutality included periods in prison, leading to mental breakdown—is very clear when she says, “Islam was not the cause of the ills of Iran. It was the fundamentalist interpretation of the faith that had brought about the tragedy that continued to unfold” (Kissing the Sword: A Prison Memoir, trans. Sara Khalili [New York: Feminist Press, 2013], 197). 35. Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars, 9. 36. Ahmad, “Not Yet Beyond the Veil,” 120. 37. Keddie, Iran and the Muslim World, 253–56; cooke, “Islamic Feminism,” 227–35.

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38. Dabashi notes in Reading Lolita in Tehran a systematic exclusion of the many Iranian creative writers who have made that literature so dynamic: “Forough Farrokhzad, Sohrab Sepehri were dead, but was their poetry buried with them? What about Ahmad Shamlou, Harshang Golshiri, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, Simin Daneshvar, Sharnash Parsipur, Simin Behbahani, Moniru Ravanipour, Mahshid Amirshahi—were they all dead, non-existent, expelled to obsolescence?” (Brown Skins, White Masks, 78). Likewise, Nafisi makes nothing of the considerable contribution to world cinema by Iranian directors. On this point, see Gonul Donmez- Colin, Women, Islam, and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), esp. chap. 5, “Women Heroes of the New Iranian Cinema,” 155–86. 39. See David Theo Goldberg, “Introduction: Multicultural Conditions,” in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 1–29. 40. Goldberg, “Introduction,” 11. 41. Edward  W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 44. 42. See Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Jacques Barzan, From Dawn to Decadence (London: HarperCollins, 2001); Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001); and Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). For Kimball in particular, the antifoundationalist theoretical attack launched by critical schools such as poststructuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism constitutes an attempt to subvert the very foundations of liberal democratic society. Although he is not unusual among his peers in taking this view, his apocalyptic tone gives some indication of what he considers to be at stake. 43. For this collection, September 11: What Our Children Need to Know, see https:// www.catholiceducation .org /en /education /catholic - contributions /september-11 -what-our-children-need-to-know.html. 44. In her Euro-American bias, Nafisi is at odds with another contemporary Iranian text about the struggle for creative self-expression in the face of censorship and repression: Shahriar Mandanipour, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, trans. Sara Khalili (London: Abacus, 2011). The latter novel draws on a range of world texts— from the epic of Khosrow and Shirin to novels such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by Milan Kundera via The Blind Owl (1937) by Sadeq Hedayet and Iranian children’s school primers—in constructing an internationalist aesthetic with which to tell the metafictional story of its symbolic lovers. 45. Geoffrey Nash describes Nafisi as aligning with the “bourgeois nationalist” phase of Iran’s political development (Writing Muslim Identity [London: Continuum, 2012], 58). Nafisi remains silent about the abuses committed by the shah’s regime, even though her father was imprisoned when he eventually fell from favor. 46. Fatemeh Keshavarz has astutely noted that Nafisi’s liberal humanism is leavened with a dose of Bakhtinian formalism (Jasmine and Stars, 92); the Russian critic was one of the first to directly suggest a correlation between the many-voiced qualities of the novel and the democratization of society. 47. It is for the same reason that the young women’s voices in Reading Lolita in Tehran, despite each one’s carefully outlined tribulations and sense of entrapment, tend to

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be hard to distinguish, overwhelmed as they are by the strident tone of their narrator and teacher. 48. “Outrage at ‘Old Europe’ Remarks,” BBC News, January 23, 2003, http://news.bbc .co.uk /1/hi/world/europe/2687403.stm. 49. Similarly, Keshavarz has remarked that Nafisi’s characters, unlike the characters of those novelists she praises, “do not change, and they most certainly do not grow” (Jasmine and Stars, 113). 50. Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. and intro. G. Nicholls Jr. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 247. 51. Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis (London: Routledge, 2006), 99. 52. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), 13. 53. Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 156. 54. Hosseini, The Kite Runner, 19; subsequentl references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 55. Åsne Seierstad, The Bookseller of Kabul, trans. Ingrid Christopherson (London: Virago, 2004), 154–55. See also G. Whitney Azoy, Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). 56. David Jefferess notes how reviews of The Kite Runner commonly accentuate its supposed ethnographic value (“ ‘To Be Good (Again)’: The Kite Runner as Allegory of Global Ethics,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45, no. 4 [2009]: 389), something Kristy Butler also finds true of online reader reviews (“Invading Ideologies and the Politics of Terror: Framing Afghanistan in The Kite Runner,” in Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin, eds., Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing [New York: Routledge, 2012], 149–63). 57. See Jefferess, “ ‘To Be Good (Again),’ ” and Georgiana Banita, “The Kite Runner’s Transnational Allegory: Anatomy of an Afghan-American Bestseller,” in Sarah Churchwell and Thomas Ruys Smith, eds., Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers: From Charlotte Temple to The Da Vinci Code (London: Continuum, 2012), 319–39. 58. Rashid, Descent Into Chaos, 39. 59. Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I. B. Taurus, 2012), 40. 60. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 40. 61. Butler, “Invading Ideologies,” 161. 62. As Tariq Ali points out, “Ever since the Second World War the name of Hitler and his philosophy has been recklessly evoked to drum up support for Western wars. It is an interesting reflection on the recent history of the West that it has to reach over half a century back before it can conjure up a justifiable war and an enemy rooted in popular memory. . . . Saddam Hussein only became Hitler when he misread U.S. signals” (The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad, and Modernity [London: Verso, 2002], 310). 63. As Jefferess points out, “This rhetoric echoes . . . the West’s—and particularly George W. Bush’s—rhetoric of the so-called War on Terror: there are bad people in the world who deserve punishment” (“ ‘To Be Good (Again),’ ” 397). 64. Jefferess, “ ‘To Be Good (Again),’ ” 393.

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65. Abu-Lughod says: “It does not so much matter whether those memoirs are truth or fiction; the question has been how they function in the world into which they are inserted” (Do Muslim Women Need Saving? 107). 66. Dabashi, Brown Skins, White Masks, 13. 67. Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? 80. 68. Whitlock, “From Tehran to Tehrangeles,” 15, 23.

4. MIGRANT CARTOGRAPHIES 1. Amy Waldman, The Submission (London: William Heinemann, 2011); H. M. Naqvi, Home Boy (2009; reprint, London: Penguin, 2011). All references are to these editions. 2. Uzma Jamil notes that NSEERS “did not net any terrorist ‘sleeper cells,’ but did disrupt families, communities and neighbourhoods, while cementing the public’s negative perceptions of Muslims as both collectively guilty and threatening” (“Reading Power: Muslims and War on Terror Discourse,” Islamophobia Studies Journal 2, no. 2 [2014]: 33). 3. Neil Smith and Setha Low, “Introduction: The Imperative of Public Space,” in Setha Low and Neil Smith, eds., The Politics of Public Space (London: Routledge, 2006), 13. 4. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 94. 5. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1926; reprint, London: Penguin, 1950); Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; reprint, London: Vintage, 2000); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; reprint, London: Penguin, 1965); Ann Petry, The Street (1946; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998); James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1954; reprint, London: Penguin, 1991); Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (1985; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1987); Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (New York: Vintage, 1984); Teju Cole, Open City (London: Faber and Faber, 2011). 6. Angus Cameron and Ronen Palan, “Performative Discourse and Social Form,” in Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh, eds., Literature and Globalization: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2011), 80. 7. Doreen Massey, On Space (London: Sage, 2005), 9, 152. 8. Edward  W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 63, 91. 9. Neil Smith and Setha Low comment that “public space is traditionally differentiated from private space in terms of rules of access” (“Introduction,” 3–4). 10. De Certeau, Everyday Life, 103. 11. Quoted in Stefan Kipfer, “Fanon and Space: Colonization, Urbanization, and Liberation from the Colonial to the Global City,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (2007): 720. 12. Quoted in Stefan Kipfer, Christian Schmid, Kanishka Goonewardena, and Richard Milgrom, “Globalising Lefebvre?” in Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid, eds., Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2008), 294.

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13. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 91. 14. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 93. 15. Neil Campbell and Alistair Kean, American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 162, 163. 16. Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st  Century (London: Continuum, 2003), 4. 17. Waldman, The Submission, 27; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 18. Sonia Baelo-Allué, for example, sees The Submission as being about “the cultural trauma of a nation trying to close its wound by choosing a fitting memorial” but always retaining a combination of “the global and the local, the numbness of psychological trauma with the polyphony of cultural trauma, and which is rooted in both the domestic and the personal but does not ignore globalisation and the way it affects all types of identity” (“From the Traumatic to the Political: Cultural Trauma, 9/11, and Amy Waldman’s The Submission,” ATLANTIS 38, no. 1 [2016]: 170, 169). 19. James Fenton, “The Ground Zero Mosque Would Heal Old Wounds,” London Evening Standard, 6 August 2010. 20. Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 10. 21. Lean, Islamophobia Industry, 47–65. Robert Spencer claimed, “The placement of mosques throughout Islamic history has been an expression of conquest and superiority over non-Muslims,” implying that this motive was behind the Park 51 plan (quoted in Lean, Islamophobia Industry, 63). The Ground Zero Mosque affair was only one of a number of similar controversies across the United States. Chris McGreel describes the backlash against a proposed mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, also in 2010, and sees it as part of an upsurge of anti-Muslim feeling at that time (“ ‘We Are the Target Now’: Hate Grows for Islam in the U.S.,” Guardian, September 11, 2010). 22. As Waldman noted in a conversation on Newshour, PBS, September  7, 2011, http: //www.pbs .org /newshour/art /conversation -amy-waldman -author - of-the -submission. 23. The term taqiya refers to permitted dishonesty about one’s beliefs if faced with persecution. The term dhimmitude is a modern neologism implying servility or submission to Islam by non-Muslims and is used polemically by Islamophobes. In terms of the individuals depicted in the novel, although it is invidious to claim direct parallels—and we should recall that The Submission is not a roman à clef—Alyssa Spier does seem to echo real-life New York Post journalist Andrea Peyser, who picked up and promoted the Geller campaign against the Ground Zero Mosque (Lean, Islamophobia Industry, 67). 24. Tim Gauthier, 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 195, 194, ellipses in original. 25. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 105. 26. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xix. 27. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 105. 28. As John Brookes points out, the design of the Islamic gardens of Persia, Moorish Spain, and South Asia draws inspiration from Quranic descriptions of paradise as

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a place of order, harmony, and plenty, although the gardens’ main purpose is to encourage rest and contemplation in the here and now (Gardens of Paradise: The History and Design of the Great Islamic Garden [London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987], 23). The privileging of geometry and abstract forms results in part from the prohibition on the depiction of living beings (see Jonathan Glancey, “The Ideal Dome Show,” Guardian, June 17, 2002). 29. Inasmuch as the quartered garden (chahar bagh) is a feature of Islamic garden design—reaching its peak in South Asia during the Mughal era—Mo’s design clearly brings in Islamic elements. Brookes describes the chahar bagh’s origins in pre-Islamic Persia, where the necessities of irrigation led to the development of a style segmented by watercourses (Gardens of Paradise, 17–18). 30. Gauthier, 9/11 Fiction, 209–11. 31. Gardens are an example of what Michel Foucault calls “heterotopian space,” able to bring into proximity different types of space not usually seen together (“Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 [1986]: 25–26). What we find in The Submission, however, is a fight over what kinds of space ought to make up this heterotopia—a battle with cultural difference at its heart, where some elements are seen as unacceptable owing to their perceived provenance. Jo Carruthers has described how gardens historically have been seen as symbolizing the possibility for an ideal social order. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman, she says: “The garden’s boundaries enclose and protect those inside, strengthening the group’s identity” and creating a “boundary against the undesirable.” In gardens, of course, undesirable things can be pruned or weeded out. The alien threatens this control “ ‘by blurring the boundary of the territory itself and effacing the difference between the familiar (right) and the alien (wrong) way of life.’ The garden is, then, a space that specifically keeps out those identities that threaten those inside” (England’s Secular Scripture: Islamophobia and the Protestant Aesthetic [London: Continuum, 2011], 2). This comes to be what is at stake in Mo’s design. 32. Jamil, “Reading Power,” 31. 33. Jamil, “Reading Power,” 33. 34. Jamil, “Reading Power,” 38. 35. Arin Keeble suggests that The Submission rejects pure, authentic notions of identity and emphasizes internal divisions within characters as a way of undoing the reductive polarization of a clash-of-civilizations viewpoint (The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics, and Identity [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014], 168, 170). 36. As Liette Gilbert and Mustafa Dikeç say, “Whether through recurrent support for guest-worker programs or through unenforced employers’ sanctions and the targeting of professional qualifications, low-skilled immigrants have found themselves caught between economic and political alienation (i.e. in low-paid jobs and with temporary or ‘illegal’ status)” (“Right to the City: Politics of Citizenship,” in Goonewardena et al., eds., Space, Difference, Everyday Life, 256). 37. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 250. 38. Keeble, The 9/11 Novel, 171. 39. For more on the fast-track system of deportation introduced after 9/11 and known as “expedited removal,” see Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 14.

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40. Baelo-Allué, “From the Traumatic to the Political,” 174. 41. Baelo-Allué observes that “American national identity is based on the idea that one can always heal and place the past in its proper context” (“From the Traumatic to the Political,” 171). 42. Naqvi, Home Boy, 94; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 43. Kim Rygiel, “Protecting and Proving Identity: The Biopolitics of Waging War Through Citizenship in the Post-9/11 Era,” in Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel, eds., (En) gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics (London: Routledge, 2016), 156. 44. Daniel Kanstroom informs us that in 2004 “the [D]epartment of Homeland Security (DHS) detained over 235,000 people for at least twenty-four hours” (Deportation Nation, 4). See also Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin, 2008), 4, 34. 45. Lean, Islamophobia Industry, 1. 46. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xiv. 47. Stefan Kipfer and his colleagues suggest that the “struggles of peripheralised social groups against segregation and for empowerment can produce their own forms of centrality,” and they cite subcultural groups as a prime example (“Globalizing Lefebvre?” 296). 48. Moustafa Bayoumi registers how Arab and South Asian men experienced an earnings decline after 9/11 as the event “negatively affected the labour-market income of those most closely associated with the ethnicity of the terrorists” (How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? 194). 49. Robin Cohen comments that post-9/11 legislation “provided the occasion for a reaffirmation of singular national, monochromatic identities and an attack on multiculturalism, diversity and immigration ‘of the wrong sort.’ . . . The neoconservative and conservative right in the USA and Europe has seized the political moment afforded by the terrorist threat to question both the extent of migration and the degree of recognition afforded to migrants’ home cultures, religions, languages and social practices” (Migration and Its Enemies: Global Capital, Migrant Labour, and the Nation-State [Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006], 198, 202). 50. Birte Heidemann, “ ‘We Are the Glue Keeping Civilization Together’: PostOrientalism and Counter-Orientalism in H.  M. Naqvi’s Home Boy,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 3 (2012): 291. 51. Lean, Islamophobia Industry, 153. 52. For more on the noncitizen’s lack of rights in this situation, see Kanstroom, Deportation Nation, 4. 53. Asma Mansoor reads the ending of the novel as a reassertion of Chuck/Shezad’s Pakistani identity (“Post-9/11 Identity Crisis in H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy,” Pakistaaniat 4, no. 2 [2012]: unpaginated), and Birte Heidemann sees the decision to return home as a “counter- Orientalist gesture” (“ ‘We Are the Glue,’ ” 298). However, in context it is hard to see the ending as anything other than a defeat and, more importantly, a direct indictment of Bush’s America and its attitude to Muslims. 54. Barbie Zelizer has described the effectiveness of the New York Times “Portraits of Grief” section— “a memorial to those killed on September 11 that featured photographs and short vignettes about each person lost”—in moving people through the

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grieving process (“Photography Journalism and Trauma,” in Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allen, eds., Journalism After September  11 [London: Routledge, 2002], 55–57). 55. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (London: Penguin, 2006). 56. Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? 2. 57. Elspeth Guild, Security and Migration in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 176.

5. STATES OF STATELESSNESS 1. President George W. Bush, address to Congress, September 20, 2001. The full text of this speech is given in the appendices to Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005), 194. 2. For these generic features of the spy thriller, see David Seed, “Spy Fiction,” in Martin Priestman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 115. 3. John Le Carré, A Most Wanted Man (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2008); Dan Fesperman, The Warlord’s Son (2004; reprint, New York: Vintage, 2005); and Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist (2006; reprint, London: Atlantic Books, 2007). All references are to these editions. 4. Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Abingdon, UK: Routledge Cavendish, 2010), 4. 5. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), 78. 6. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 8, 12. 7. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8. Agamben goes on to say: “The relation of exception is the relation of a ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it, but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable” (28). 8. David Holloway, “The War on Terror Espionage Thriller and the Imperialism of Human Rights,” Comparative Literature Studies 46, no. 1 (2009): 22–44. 9. Holloway’s textual examples include Memorial Day (2004) by Vince Flynn, A Hostile Place (2003) by John Fullerton, Overkill (2004) by James Barrington, and Empire State (2003) by Henry Porter. 10. Holloway, “The War on Terror Espionage Thriller,” 39–40. 11. John L. Cobbs, Understanding John Le Carré (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 22–23. 12. In addition to A Most Wanted Man, two other recent Le Carré novels take as their backdrop the war on terror and its moral consequences: Absolute Friends (2003) and A Delicate Truth (2013).

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13. Le Carré, Most Wanted Man, 165; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 14. Holloway, “The War on Terror Espionage Thriller,” 24. See also Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), and Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 15. Sadia Abbas, At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2014), 51–53. 16. Abbas, At Freedom’s Limit, 50. 17. Adam Sisman recounts how Issa, like other characters in the book, was based on a real encounter experienced by Le Carré (or, to use his real name, David Cornwell): “He remembered a tall, emaciated boy named Issa . . . whom he had met in Moscow in 1993, the product of the union between a colonel in the Russian army of occupation in Chechenia and a Chechen village woman, whose family had killed her, as a matter of honour, after deciding that she had acquiesced in her rape. When the colonel had been posted back to Moscow, he had taken Issa with him and tried to turn him into a good Russian; the young man had converted to Islam in memory of the mother he had never known, and taken up the cause of Chechen separatism to spite his father” (John Le Carré: The Biography [London: Bloomsbury, 2015], 574). 18. Derek Gregory writes: “It is estimated that 100–150 people have been rendered under the revised program and taken to jails in Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Uzbekistan: all of which have been criticised by the State Department for gross violations of human rights” (“Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison,” in Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, eds., Terror and the Postcolonial [Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2010], 83). 19. Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Threat to Global Security (London: Penguin, 2009), 305. 20. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 67, 69. 21. Butler, Precarious Life, 84. 22. Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire, 98–99, 107; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 126. 23. Dan Fesperman, The Prisoner of Guantánamo (2006; reprint, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2007). 24. Sungur Savran, “Globalisation and the New World Order: The New Dynamics of Imperialism and War,” in Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky, eds., The Politics of Empire: Globalisation in Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 141. 25. Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, http://www.un.org /ar /preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/osapg_booklet_eng.pdf. 26. Fesperman, The Warlord’s Son, 379–80; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 27. Pavan Kumar Malreddy, “ ‘Pulp Orientalism’: Endosmotic Banality, Terra Necro, and ‘Splintered’ Subjects in Dan Fesperman’s The Warlord’s Son,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 3 (2012): 270. 28. Malreddy, “ ‘Pulp Orientalism,’ ” 265, 268. 29. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 9–13.

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30. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), 151. 31. Hugh Haughton, introduction to Freud, The Uncanny, xlix. 32. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 143. 33. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 82. 34. Karim H. Karim, “Making Sense of the ‘Islamic Peril’: Journalism as Cultural Practice,” in Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan, eds., Journalism After September 11 (London: Routledge, 2002), 110. 35. Abdul  R. JanMohamed, “Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual,” in Michael Sprinker, ed., Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 110. 36. Karim, “Making Sense of the ‘Islamic Peril,’ ” 112. 37. The importance of a consciousness of mutual vulnerability is central to the argument developed by Judith Butler in Precarious Life, where relationality and interdependence offer a way beyond hostile binaries. 38. Karim, “Making Sense,” 102. See also Julian Petley and Robin Richardson, eds., Pointing the Finger: Islam and Muslims in the British Media (Oxford: Oneworld, 2011). 39. For a consideration of the connectedness of these discourses, see Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation After 9/11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 40. Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist, 325; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 41. On changes to the law in Australia, see Jen Webb, “Distant Context, Local Colour: Australian ‘Post-September 11’ Fiction,” in “Common Readers and Cultural Critics,” special issue of Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (2010), https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu .au /index .php/JASAL/article /view/9622. 42. Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, 98–99, 101. 43. Simon Cottle, Mediatized Conflict: Developments in Media and Conflict Studies (Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2006), 9. 44. Susan D. Moeller, Packaging Terrorism: Co-opting the News for Politics and Profit (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 39–45. 45. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: MacGibbon and Key, 1972). 46. Richard Jackson describes how states deliberately construct extreme threats from the outside in order to justify disciplining the domestic populace. Moral panics and folk devils provide a ready means to achieve this construction. Moreover, “some fears are better than others for politicians, because some fears—such as the fear of being without health care or employment—are not amenable to quick-fix solutions and carry the risk of policy failure. The fear of terrorism, on the other hand, is perfect for the authorities because it is ubiquitous, catastrophic, opaque (reliant on government control of secret information) and rooted in deep cultural anxieties” (Writing the War on Terrorism, 117). 47. “In many cases, the creation of widespread moral panics can lead to ordinary citizens acting as the primary agents of censure themselves” (Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, 116).

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48. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 60. 49. Sherene H. Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 7–8. 50. See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), and Precarious Life.

6. ISLAMOPHOBIA AND THE GLOBAL NOVEL 1. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Three Leaves Press, 2004), 98–99. 2. Two of the most notorious examples of corporate profiteering from the wars of the early 2000s were the Halliburton oil field services corporation, whose former chairman was George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, and which was awarded an exclusive $7 billion contract for work in Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion, and the Blackwater private military and security consultancy company, a service provider to the CIA, whose employees were convicted in 2007 of the murder of fourteen Iraqis in Baghdad. 3. Pascal Zinck, “Eyeless in Guantanamo: Vanishing Horizons in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows,” Commonwealth 33, no. 1 (2010): 50. 4. Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil (2008; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 11; subsequent references are to this edition and are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 5. Zinck, “Eyeless in Guantanamo,” 45. 6. Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows (London: Bloomsbury, 2009); all references are to this edition. 7. Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (London: Hurst, 2009), 192. 8. Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 83, 85. 9. Toor, State of Islam, 121–22. Another result of this shift in Bhutto’s focus was the declaration in 1974 that the Ahmediyya community should no longer be recognized as Muslims within Pakistan owing to heterodox aspects of their beliefs. As commentators have noted, this declaration gave a green light to religious interests to push for ever more aggressive and narrow definitions of Islam and therefore of “Pakistaniness.” 10. Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan, 126–32. 11. Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan, 101–4. As Saadia Toor notes, these reforms also resulted in the erosion of minority rights, with spurious prosecutions and personal vendettas being played out against anyone who it could be suggested was showing disrespect to Islam and its prophet (State of Islam, 6). 12. Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A New History (London: Hurst, 2012), 137. 13. Talbot observes how Pakistan’s cooperation led to “the influx of foreign aid [to Pakistan] . . . and the rescheduling of debt by the Paris Club of donors to help the accelerating growth rates. President Bush’s removal of economic sanctions, which had been in place since the nuclear tests and the Musharraf coup, paved the way for over $600 million in economic support funds to be received in 2002” (Pakistan, 173).

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14. Toor, State of Islam, 187–89. 15. For an anthropological account of the impact of drone attacks on the tribal societies of the border regions, together with an account of those societies’ sociological and historical background, see Akbar S. Ahmed, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013). 16. Toor, State of Islam, 11, 53–58, 79. See also Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999). 17. For an example of the cosmopolitan aesthetics of Pakistan’s most famous poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, see Amina Yaqin, “Faiz Ahmed Faiz: The Worlding of a Lyric Poet,” and Christina Oesterheld, “Faiz’s ‘Internationalist’ Poetics: Selected Translations and Free Verses,” in special issue on Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Pakistaniaat 5, no. 1 (2013): i–xix and 34–61. 18. Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 87. 19. For example, in classic Partition narratives such as Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man (London: Penguin, 1989) and the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s celebrated short story “Toba Tek Singh” (1955, in Toba Tek Singh: Stories [New Delhi: Penguin India, 2011]) as well as in recent counterparts, such as Sorayya Y. Khan’s novel Five Queen’s Road (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009), characters are forced to choose between their Indian homes and the new nation of Pakistan, with consequences for their well-being and even their lives. There are also writers with avowedly international influences, such as Zulfikar Ghose, who draws on Latin American influences in novels that blend realism and fantasy. 20. Cara  N. Cilano, Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English: Idea, Nation, State (London: Routledge, 2013), 1, 194. In the same vein, Muneeza Shamsie writes of the upsurge of interest in Pakistani art and literature in the early twenty-first century: “This period also witnessed an unprecedented flowering of international acclaim for new, multicultural and multi-dimensional art forms by Pakistanis, a fusion of the old and new across the borders and nations. Pakistani pop music, paintings, sculptures, and films drew audiences from New York and London to Dubai and Singapore. Pakistani–English literature was a leading light in this new firmament” (Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English [Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 2017], 382). 21. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), and After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2004); Masao Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality,” in Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh, eds., Literature and Globalisation: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2011), 138. 22. Gayatri C. Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 3. 23. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72–73. 24. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 282. 25. Theo D’haen, The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (London: Routledge, 2012), 70.

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26. Djelal Kadir, “To World, to Globalize— Comparative Literature’s Crossroads,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 1 (2004): 2, 7, 6. See also Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 12. 27. Note that it is the poet who is doing the turning here, not the warlord. For an interesting alternative perspective on the literary culture of some of Afghanistan’s combatants, see Alex Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, eds., Poetry of the Taliban (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 28. Cilano, Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 217. 29. In fact, the many quotations strike a note of bibliophilic archness that at times drowns the story in a sea of disconnected but heavily symbolic detail. Sadia Abbas describes Aslam’s “poetics of hyper-aestheticism and sentimental excess” as “a complex substructure of Sufi thought and aesthetic practices, and a relentless proximity between exaggerated, grotesque and almost unbearably violent imagery and images of powerful, wrenching beauty.” She names this style—with its interest in history—“Cold War Baroque” (At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament [Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2014], 154–55). 30. Ahmed Rashid has described the “warlord strategy” by which the United States sought to smooth the path for the postinvasion governance of Afghanistan. A decision was taken to work with existing societal structures, which included the “rapacious, corrupt and ruthless” warlords who had emerged during the civil war of the 1990s: “Washington was distracted by preparations for the war in Iraq, unwilling to put U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan to maintain the peace or spread the money needed to reinforce the government’s authority. As a result, the warlords were seen as a cheap and beneficial way to retain U.S. allies in the field who might even provide information about al Qaeda” (Descent Into Chaos: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Threat to Global Security [London: Penguin, 2009], 127, 129). 31. “Nadeem Aslam,” in Claire Chambers, ed., British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 137. 32. Madeline Clements describes the curatorial tendency among the Western characters in Aslam’s novel, which stands in stark contrast to the heedless, proactive destructiveness of the Taliban. She says of Aslam that “his ‘museum’ fictions . . . may better be characterised as ‘mausoleum’ fictions: stately literary edifices in which the artefacts treasured by (largely European or Western-educated) curators of heterodox Islamic tradition are carefully interred, moribund symbols of an earlier time of tolerance for whose resurrection Aslam keeps ‘vigil,’ yet retains little hope” (Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, and Shamsie [Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016], 91). 33. James Clifford, quoted in Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), 157. 34. Quoted in D’haen, Routledge Concise History of World Literature, 136. 35. Kamila Shamsie, Offence: The Muslim Case (London: Seagull Books, 2009) 54–55. 36. Shamsie, Burnt Shadows, 5; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 37. Harleen Singh, “A Legacy of Violence: Interview with Kamila Shamsie,” ARIEL 42, no. 2 (2012): 159. 38. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 71–102.

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39. For a detailed account of this type of arrangement, see Peter W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). See also Deborah Avant, “The Implications of Marketized Security for IR Theory: The Democratic Peace, Late State Building, and the Nature and Frequency of Conflict,” Perspectives on Politics 4, no. 3 (2006): 507–28. 40. Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I. B. Taurus, 2012), 240. 41. Rashid, Descent Into Chaos, 304. 42. Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 263. 43. Marc W. Herold, “Afghanistan as an Empty Space: The Perfect Neo-colonial State of the Twenty-First Century,” posted February 26, 2006, https://www.scribd.com/ document/13671512/Marc-W-Herold-Afghanistan-as-an-empty-space. 44. Jean-Marie Colombani, “We Are All Americans,” Le Monde, September 12, 2001, reprinted in World Press Review 48, no.  11 (2001), http://www.worldpress.org /1101we_are_all_americans.htm. 45. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 73. 46. Cilano, Contemporary Pakistani Fiction, 193–94. 47. Tariq Rahman, A History of Pakistani Literature in English (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1991), 223, 231.

7. MARKETING THE MUSLIM 1. Leila Aboulela, Minaret (2005; reprint, London: Bloomsbury, 2006), and Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007). All references are to these editions. 2. Quoted in Suman Gupta, Globalization and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 3. 3. Walden Bello and Marylou Malig, “The Crisis of the Globalist Project and the New Economics of George W. Bush,” in Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky, eds., The Politics of Empire: Globalisation in Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 85. 4. Sungur Savran, “Globalisation and the New World Order: The New Dynamics of Imperialism and War,” in Freeman and Kagarlitsky, eds., Politics of Empire, 123. 5. As George Yudice points out, “U.S., GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] and WTO [World Trade Organization] negotiators have defined cultural goods such as films, television programmes, video and audio recordings, and books as commodities subject to the same kinds of trade conditions as cars and clothing” (“Free Trade and Culture,” in Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh, eds., Literature and Globalization: A Reader [London: Routledge, 2011], 71). 6. Paul Jay, “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English,” in Connell and Marsh, eds., Literature and Globalization, 107–8. 7. Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 156; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 8. Leerom Medovoi, “Terminal Crisis? From the Worlding of American Literature to World System Literature,” American Literary History 23, no. 3 (2011): 644, 653. 9. Geoffrey Nash, Writing Muslim Identity (London: Continuum, 2012), 111. It is here that the insights of world literature, with its attention to markets and “flows”

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become most useful. We can say, with Pascale Casanova, that the “world literary space” is characterized by an “unequal trade” between center and periphery and that the ironic and complex work of a writer such as Hamid acknowledges the preeminence of the values represented by the literary center in defining the truly modern “literature of the present” (The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004], 20, 94). 10. Peter Morey, “The Rules of the Game Have Changed: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Post-9/11 Fiction,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47, no. 2 (2011): 135–46. See also Richard Gray, “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis,” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 128– 51. Gray praises Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The Road (2006)— which he also reads as a distinctly post-9/11 story—for deterritorializing American fiction. I think the same could be said of Phillip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America (2004), which imagines what history would have been like if a Nazi sympathizer had been elected president of the United States in the 1930s but in which the themes of stigmatization, arbitrary government power, and mass hysteria clearly echo the immediate post-9/11 moment. In fact, in the era of Donald Trump and mainstreamed Islamophobia, Roth’s novel almost seems less a counterfactual dystopia than a piece of documentary realism. 11. In its use of the dramatic monologue form, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is clearly indebted to Albert Camus’s existentialist novella about guilt and confession The Fall (1956), another story with an egotistical and untrustworthy narrator. In the character of the American “agent” and with its interest in the cost of U.S. interference in global affairs, Hamid’s novel also calls forth echoes of The Quiet American (1955), Graham Greene’s drama about war, innocence, and culpability. 12. Sarah Ilott, “Generic Frameworks and Active Readership in The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 5 (2014): 574. 13. This is one way to understand the frequent awkward insertions of sociological and historical information about Pakistan that dot the text; they may be for an uninitiated Western reader of the novel, but they can also be read as part of Changez’s strategy of instructing but also unsettling the intradiegetic listener, who has only a basic knowledge of the culture into which he has stumbled. 14. Quoted in Margaret Scanlan, “Migrating from Terror: The Postcolonial Novel After September 11,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46, nos. 3–4 (2010): 277. 15. Changez’s emphasis on Underwood Samson’s market fundamentalism recalls Anouar Majid’s observation (quoting Harvey Cox) that the rhetoric and veneration once the preserve of religion are nowadays employed to laud the mysterious workings of the market: “Finding more analogies and indications that The Market has become the undisputed God of the present, Cox begins to wonder ‘whether the real clash of religions (or even civilizations) may be going unnoticed,’ since it has now become clear that ‘for all the religions of the world, however they may differ from one another, the religion of The Market has become the more formidable rival, the more so because it is rarely recognized as a religion’ ” (Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000], 155). 16. Medovoi, “Terminal Crisis?” 650. 17. Medovoi, “Terminal Crisis?” 656.

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18. Claudia Perner, “Tracing the Fundamentalist in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” ARIEL 41, nos. 3–4 (2011): 23. See also Hamid’s collection of essays Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London (Haryana, India: Penguin, 2014). 19. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), 88. 20. David Lloyd and Abdul JanMohamed, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 381. See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), especially the chapter “What Is a Minor Literature?” 16–27. 21. Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 38–39. 22. Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), viii, 5–7, 60. Brouillette focuses on literary culture as a process of production and exchange, where books are commodities subject to the same trading conditions and requiring the same targeted marketing strategies as other commodities. Looking specifically at the publishing industry, she points out how it has been absorbed into a consolidated pattern of media ownership where five large transnational companies dominate the entertainment market: Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Viacom, and Bertelsmann. “Bertelsmann, for example, is the largest book publisher, with 10 per cent of all English language book sales worldwide. . . . In 1998 it acquired Random House, one of the largest publishers of literary fiction, with upwards of 100 houses in 13 countries under its umbrella, including Alfred A. Knopf, Pantheon, Fawcett, Vintage and Doubleday” (50). For our purposes, we can update this story by observing that The Reluctant Fundamentalist was first published by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin, owned at the time by Pearson but since 2013 jointly owned with Bertelsmann under the name “Penguin Random House.” 23. See Casanova, World Republic of Letters. For the colonial dimensions of English literature as played out in India, see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 24. Cary Nelson has described the decline in poetry publishing over the past twenty years and connects it to a neoliberal instrumentalization of education as merely a channel to service the wider economy, wherein the humanities are “unnecessary to human capital development.” In such a scenario, “literature finds itself out of the exchange loop. . . . The time when literary studies and the humanities in general had a more symbolic form of cultural capital is coming to an end” (“Consolations for Capitalists: Propositions in Flight from World Bank Literature,” in Amitava Kumar, ed., World Bank Literature [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003], 6, 10). 25. Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, 66. 26. Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, 70–71, 74. 27. Gupta, Globalization and Literature, 151. Gupta is, of course, also invoking and  inverting Roland Barthes’s influential essay from 1968, “The Death of the Author” (in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath [London: Fontana, 1977], 142–48).

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28. Gupta, Globalization and Literature, 152–56. The novels Gupta cites are Mao II (1991) by Don DeLillo, Love and Death on Long Island (1990) by Gilbert Adair, and Snow (2002) by Orhan Pahmuk. 29. Gupta, Globalization and Literature, 155. 30. For an analysis of the phenomenon of Islamic Rage Boy, a Kashmiri protester whose image went viral and became the symbol of irrational Muslim fanaticism, see Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation After 9/11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 22–30. 31. Sankaran Krishna, Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 149–51. 32. Revathi Krishnaswamy, “Postcolonial and Globalization Studies: Connections, Conflicts, Complicities,” in Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley, eds., The Postcolonial and the Global (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 12. 33. Ahmed Gamal, “The Global and the Postcolonial in Post-migratory Literature,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 49, no. 5 (2012): 604. 34. Medovoi, “Terminal Crisis?” 648. 35. Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky, “Introduction: World Empire—or a World of Empires?” in Freeman and Kagarlitsky, eds., Politics of Empire, 12. 36. Alan Angell, “Chile Since 1958,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 8: 1930 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 318. 37. Compare Savran, “Globalisation and the New World Order,” 118. 38. See, for example, Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (London: Vintage, 2006). 39. Bruce Robbins, “Afterword,” in Kumar, ed., World Bank Literature, 297–98. 40. The same is true of Mira Nair’s somewhat curious film adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist in 2012, starring Riz Ahmed and Liev Schreiber. In this movie, the prevailing suspense of the book is dispensed with almost immediately as Changez unfolds his story to a man we know from the outset to be a CIA agent. This change immediately turns the film into a more conventional thriller and removes that enabling doubt through which prejudices can be confronted. Even more curious is the fact that Nair—director of the successful movie Monsoon Wedding (2001)—at one point decides to send Changez back to Pakistan to attend a relative’s wedding that is every bit as colorful and conventionally exotic as that in her previous feature. (There appears to be nothing very “strategic” about Nair’s exoticism here.) Finally, it is interesting to note that Mohsin Hamid participated in producing the screenplay. 41. Ilott, “Generic Frameworks,” 581. 42. Quoted in Sadia Abbas, At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2014), 87. 43. Quoted in Nash, Writing Muslim Identity,120. 44. Nash, Writing Muslim Identity, 45. 45. See Morey and Yaqin, Framing Muslims, especially the chapter “Representing the Representatives: The Limits of Cultural Identity,” 79–111. 46. Abbas, At Freedom’s Limit, 5. 47. See in particular Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity (Stanford, CA:

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Stanford University Press, 2003). See also Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Michael Kaufmann describes how “postsecular thought stems from a desire to resist any master narrative—whether it be a supersessionary narrative of secularisation, or a triumphal narrative of the return of religion.” It instead aims to “deepen our awareness of the historical valences” of the terms religious and secular and to complicate our understanding of the relationships between them (“Locating the Postsecular,” Religion and Literature 41, no. 3 [2009]: 68). 48. Abbas, At Freedom’s Limit, and Waïl S. Hassan, “Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” NOVEL 41, nos. 2–3 (2008): 298–319. 49. Abbas, At Freedom’s Limit, 62. 50. Hassan, “Leila Aboulela,” 313. 51. Among the most immediately obvious models for these two lines of development in the English novel are Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce. 52. Aboulela, Minaret, 175; subsequent references are given parenthetically by page number in the text. 53. Nash, Writing Muslim Identity, 47. 54. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 118. 55. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 19. 56. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 198. 57. The da’wa, “call” or “summons,” to believe in the true religion of Islam is practiced in the mosque movement by female da’iya, or teachers, whose job it is to guide their flock in righteous Islamic living, the negotiation of everyday challenges and moral conundrums, and correct dress and behavior. The da’wa movement also has welfare and charitable dimensions, too. See Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 57–58. 58. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 25. 59. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 158. 60. Waïl Hassan is particularly exercised by such fantasies, seeing the “absurd preference for slavery in an idealized fantasy of the past” as part of the “reactive,” “regressive” politics of Minaret, which contain “all the elements of fundamentalism” (“Leila Aboulela,” 315–16). 61. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 121. 62. Stathis Gourgouris has criticized this insistence that aspects of behavior among Muslim women, such as veiling, should be read as an immanent technique of self-creation and not symbolic of identity. For him, it is a kind of evasive Doublespeak: “Is not the veil a sign of the devout Muslim? If not, then what is it? An empty signifier?” (“Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood,” Public Culture 20, no. 3 [2008]: 458). 63. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999). 64. Saba Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013), 67. 65. Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” in Jane Gallop, ed., Polemic: Critical or Uncritical (New York: Routledge, 2004), 33.

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66. See Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 287, and Formations of the Secular, 9–14, 44. 67. Judith Butler, “The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood,” in Asad et al., Is Critique Secular? 109. 68. Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” in Asad et al., Is Critique Secular? 48. 69. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 270. 70. We may recall Northrop Frye’s lament that many critics have “Platonic minds, in the sense that they attach what for them are the real values of literature to something outside literature which literature reflects” (The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976], 25). 71. Abbas, At Freedom’s Limit, 72–96. 72. Hassan, “Leila Aboulela,” 311. 73. In this argument, I am largely following the secularization thesis as it has been applied to the English novel, with a full awareness that there is much more to be said about its nuances and sometimes outright contradictions as it plays out in slippery literary texts. Indeed, my point is to indicate the inadequacy of this thesis to a proper understanding of literary texts such as Minaret and to suggest a divergence between literary practice and critical modes of apprehending that practice when it comes to certain kinds of cultural difference. 74. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957; reprint, London: Pimlico, 2000), esp. chap. 1, “Realism and the Novel Form,” 9–34. 75. Leopold Damrosch, “Myth and Fiction in Robinson Crusoe,” in Michael Shinagel, ed., Robinson Crusoe (New York: Norton, 1994) 374, 379. 76. See Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 11, 51. It is also worth remembering the extent to which the lapsed Nonconformist Eliot makes religious stories, references, and quotations central to her work: from the angelic child Eppie in Silas Marner to the famous closing lines of The Mill on the Floss, which quote from 2 Samuel 1:23, “in their death they were not divided,” to describe the turbulent siblings Tom and Maggie Tulliver. 77. In some ways, as a Catholic writer Greene sits closer to Aboulela in terms of the role of ritual and outward observance in his worldview. For example, in The Power and the Glory (1940) the whiskey priest, on the run in Mexico from his Communist persecutors, attaches great significance to his communion wine and portable altar and feels their loss grievously. The book is about martyrdom rather than the rediscovery of faith, but, as in Minaret, holiness and a kind of heroism are central motifs in it. Heroism is defined in part by the whiskey priest’s sense of duty and is made manifest in the spirit of charity that works in him and that leads him in the end to return to absolve the dying American killer, thus ensuring his own capture and death. The priest’s holiness comes through his interaction with others—those to whom he ministers and from whom he hears confession—whereas in Aboulela’s novel holiness is achieved through personal inner perfectibility and a sense of closeness to God. The treatment of other people is less important here in the definition of goodness. 78. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, “Preface, 2013,” in Asad et al., Is Critique Secular? x. See also Michael Kaufmann’s introduction to a forum section devoted to the postsecular in the journal Religion and Literature, where, among numerous useful insights, Kaufmann insists on the need to historicize and

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complicate our understanding of the relationship between religion and the secular, while also warning against any oversimplified separation between them (“Locating the Postsecular” ). 79. As when Mahmood describes what she calls “normative secularity,” by which, “once religious doctrine is shorn of its manifest forms, and divinity of its worldly presence, scripture can then be read for its symbolic significance” (“Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 [2006]: 342–43). 80. See, in particular, Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Orlando, FL: Harvest Books, 1982); and Secular Scripture. 81. Edward Said, for example, has criticized formalist approaches such as Frye’s as being based on an idea of an essential “man doing service as the embodiment of a Judeo-Christian Eurocentric norm” and eschewing the historical and ideological circumstances shaping genres and texts (Humanism and Democratic Criticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], 39). Although the notion of archetypes seems to lend itself to transcendent models and dehistoricized abstraction, I am arguing here that this need not be the case. 82. Frye, Secular Scripture, 14. 83. Frye, Secular Scripture, 60–61. 84. Sura al-Ar’af (The Heights) 7 (1–206). The Heights are the barrier that will divide the saved from the damned on the Day of Judgment. The point here would be to say that as a narrative archetype this sura can be linked with any one of several corresponding biblical passages, such as the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31–46). Similarly, in the broader mythological universe of Islamic cultural traditions, the fall of Iblis, like the fall of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost— one of Frye’s touchstone texts—is read ambiguously within the artistic tradition of Sufism as an act both of disobedience and of heroism (although it should be pointed out that whereas Milton’s Satan refuses to bow before God, Islam’s Iblis refuses to bow before Adam because none but God deserves that degree of reverence). See Peter J. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Iblis in Sufi Psychology (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983). 85. Frye says, “Ascent themes introduce us to . . . the growing of identity through the casting off of whatever conceals or frustrates it” (Secular Scripture, 140). 86. Frye, Secular Scripture, 171. 87. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 313. 88. For more on these contending political formations in Britain, see Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 89. It is often suggested that an Arabic influence can be seen in the work of Dante and other Italian writers of the Middle Ages. The seminal work in this still undeveloped field remains Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). A more recent volume that attempts to build on Menocal’s work is Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette, eds., A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).

289 CONCLUSION

90. In his essay “Why I Am Not a Postsecularist,” Aamir R. Mufti suggests that postsecularism depends on “a jargon of authenticity.” He is also dismissive of the postsecularist claim that one must be able to step outside of the Enlightenment tradition for the purpose of critiquing it: “Enlightenment is an encompassing logic of bourgeois modernity, within and against which different groups struggle in widely different ways, and not something to be selected or rejected at the great salad bar of modern life” (“Why I Am Not a Postsecularist,” boundary 2 40, no. 1 [2013]: 11–12).

CONCLUSION 1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 2. Elspeth Guild, Security and Migration in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 2. 3. Hamid Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2015), 213. 4. See Alison Flood, “ ‘Post-truth Named Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries,” Guardian, November 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/15/ post-truth-named-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries. See also William Davies, “The Age of Post-truth Politics,” New York Times, August 24, 2016, http:// www.nytimes .com /2016 /08 /24 /opinion /campaign -stops /the -age - of-post-truth -politics.html?_r=0. 5. Dabashi, Post-Orientalism, 280. 6. Jo Carruthers, England’s Secular Scripture: Islamophobia and the Protestant Aesthetic (London: Continuum, 2011), 99.

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INDEX

9/11: backlash against multiculturalism after, 18, 32; human rights after, 27, 96, 154–63; increase in crimes against Muslims after, 144; interest in world literature after, 191; interventionist foreign policies after, 155; literary responses to, 2, 26, 34, 132, 150, 214–15, 261n69; restriction of rights after, 27, 127–28, 135, 144–51, 155, 174. See also security policies after 9/11; war on terror Abbas, Sadia: on Leila Aboulela, 228, 229, 238; on Nadeem Aslam, 281n29; criticism of secularism, 241, 258n21; on John Le Carré, 161 Aboulela, Leila: The Translator, 227. See also Minaret Abu-Lughod, Lila, 98, 268n8, 272n65 Adorno, Theodor, 4 Afghanistan: British Empire’s Afghan wars, 196; buzkashi, 117–18; feminism in, 107–8; history of ethnic inequality in, 120–24; invasion in 2001, 95–96, 165, 191, 196, 200, 203; novels set in, 117–24, 165–72, 184–99; postwar reconstruction of, 96, 184, 203, 212; as site of globalized neoliberal economics, 183–84, 202–5,

212; Soviet occupation of, 119, 183, 185–87, 191, 196, 199–200; the Taliban, 99, 119–21, 160, 165, 187, 192; trope of oppressed Afghan women, 98, 99; U.S. interventions in, 27, 99, 117, 119, 151, 165, 183, 187, 199, 223 Agamben, Giorgio, 156, 163 Ahmad, Dohra, 99, 107, 268n8 Ahmed, Leila, 98 Ahmed, Rehana, 67, 74, 78, 87, 91, 263n25 Ali, Monica. See Brick Lane America. See United States Amin, Samir, 16, 22 Amis, Martin: certainty, 55, 64; clash of civilizations, 184; imperial melancholia, 57; F. R. Leavis, 38, 51, 64; on Muslim “threat,” 1; The Second Plane, 40–44, 51, 55; secularism, 5, 24, 83 antiracism, 25, 68–72, 80, 143, 265n43 Arnold, Matthew, 35, 37–38, 47, 50–51, 64, 258n21 art and literature: as antidote to fundamentalism, 10, 65, 81–82, 192–94, 281n32; as challenge to Islam, 58–59; as replacement for national religion, 37, 39, 237; power to subjugate the savage, 34; as redemptive, 51, 55. See also literature

308 INDEX

Asad, Talal: insistence on cultural difference, 244; on interpretation of religious and literary texts, 36–37, 39, 236–38; on Islam as threat to modernity, 33–34; on Islamic ideas of agency, 234; on Islamophobia, 40; on multiculturalism, 66; as postsecularist, 228 Aslam, Nadeem: Maps for Lost Lovers, 7; as world writer, 184–85, 190–93, 198–99, 209–10. See also Wasted Vigil, The “atheist novel,” 34, 44–45. See also secularism Auster, Paul, 127, 145 authenticity: emphasis on in marketing Muslim writers, 6–9, 26, 66, 222; and realism, 75, 100–103, 115–16. See also burden of representation; cultural authority Bayoumi, Moustafa, 150, 275n48 Berman, Paul, 53–54, 60–61 Black Album, The (Kureishi): burden of representation, 66, 73, 82–83; critique of capitalism, 78; culture as antidote to religious fundamentalism, 81–82; exploration of religious fundamentalism, 65, 78, 81–84; identity politics, 79–84; individualism, 26, 66–67, 79; multiculturalism, 78–79, 84, 94 borders, 27, 126, 152, 154, 164–67, 170–72 Bradley, Arthur, 34, 43 Brennan, Timothy, 9, 219–20, 264n33 Brick Lane (Ali): burden of representation, 6, 25, 66, 73, 75, 254n16; controversy, 6, 73, 75, 263n25; disenchantment with multiculturalism, 25–26, 66, 86–87, 93; economic self-assertion, 67, 84, 91–94, 248; gender, 87–89; individualism, 84, 90, 92–93; neoliberal co-optation of multiculturalism, 76, 84, 87, 93; rejection of collective solidarity, 66–67, 84, 87, 89–90, 93; use of realism, 67, 75 Brouillette, Sarah, 9, 21, 220, 222, 284n22 burden of representation: Leila Aboulela, 28, 227, 243, 245–46; Monica Ali, 6, 25, 66, 73, 75, 254n16; as aspect of multiculturalism, 73–74; Hanif Kureishi, 66, 73, 82–83; market for the Muslim and, 6–7; use of

realism and, 74–75, 227, 264n32. See also authenticity; cultural authority Burnt Shadows (Shamsie): decentering, 200–202; evocation of empathy, 208; expendable populations, 207; globalization, 202–3; as global novel, 209–10; language and culture, 201–2, 208; liberalism, 208–10; migrancy, 206; nationalism, 199, 204–6, 210; realism, 209–10; Western intervention in Muslim countries, 27, 199, 202–3 Bush administration (George W.): faithbased, 96; doctrine of integration, 96, 149; Islamophobia, 13; moral claims for foreign policy, 26, 99; Nafisi’s connections with, 103; neoimperialism, 95, 130, 156, 165, 225, 267n1; reinterpretation of rights post 9/11, 54, 156; relationship with Pakistan, 279; rhetoric of war on terror, 99, 114, 147, 153, 257n9, 271n63 Butler, Judith, 162–63, 181, 236, 237 capitalism: co-optation of multiculturalism by, 75–76, 85–86; and foreign policy, 14, 21–22; literary critiques of, 78, 212–14, 217. See also globalization; neoliberalism Carruthers, Jo, 39, 252, 274n31 Casanova, Pascale, 19, 282n9 certainty, 45, 62, 64, 79, 97, 264n40. See also doubt Certeau, Michel De. See De Certeau, Michel Cheney, Dick, 96, 110, 279n2 choosing sides in war on terror, 42, 153, 164, 166–67, 214 Cilano, Cara N. 188, 193, 206 “clash of civilizations,” 2, 15, 53, 184, 237, 256n38 Clements, Madeline, 7, 197, 281n32 citizenship rights, 19, 27, 87, 141–44, 163, 248 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 5, 37 collectivism: in The Black Album, 83–84; in Brick Lane, 66–67, 84, 87, 89–90, 93; in conflict with individualism, 25–26, 233. See also identity: group communalism, 90, 199, 200, 204, 224, 233–35, 243, 248 communal solidarity. See collectivism constructs of essential difference, 62, 153–55, 167–72. See also exoticism; Orientalism; Othering

309 INDEX

cosmopolitanism. See global novels; world writers critical reading, 24, 55, 60–64, 236–37. See also interpretation of religious texts cultural alienation, 54–56 cultural authority, 214, 218, 219–20, 222. See also authenticity; burden of representation culture talk, 32–33 culture. See art and literature Dabashi, Hamid, 101, 103, 124, 251, 270n38 Damrosch, David, 19, 190 Danish cartoon controversy, 73, 236 Darwinism, 45, 260n47 De Certeau, Michel, 127, 129, 130, 134–35, 146 deterritorialization of the novel, 213–16, 226, 283n10 doubt, 24, 35, 55, 59–64, 79, 261n59, 261n64. See also certainty Douzinas, Costas, 155, 163 exoticism: exotic idiom, 3, 6–7; exotic metonymy, 97, 115–18; liberal, 228; strategic, 220, 285n40. See also Orientalism; Othering extraordinary rendition, 156, 158–64. See also human rights; war on terror fear. See Islamophobia: uses of fear feminism, 86–87, 93–94, 98–99, 106–8, 235. See also gender Fesperman, Dan: The Prisoner of Guantánamo, 164. See also Warlord’s Son, The fictional authors, 122–23, 222–23 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 111, 112–13, 127, 147 Flanagan, Richard. See Unknown Terrorist, The Foucault, Michel, 128, 274n31 freedom of speech, 5, 65, 72–73, 262n1 Freeman, Alan, 21, 224 Freud, Sigmund, 59, 168–69 Frye, Northrop, 241–42, 244, 287n70 Geller, Pamela, 14, 132, 133, 273n23 gender: archetype of oppressed Muslim woman, 97–98, 141; female agency, 229, 234–36, 245; female Muslim as object of

military intervention, 98–99, 176; male gaze, 57–58; sexual objectification, 175–76; traditional gender roles, 87–89; women’s rights, 99. See also feminism genre, 101–2, 153–54, 157–58, 170, 229–30, 243, 245. See also memoir form; romance form; thriller form Gilroy, Paul, 35, 52, 189 global inequality, 14–15, 28, 76, 85–86, 94, 180, 201, 211, 216–17, 247 globalization: of conflict, 27, 183–85, 190–91, 195–96, 202–3; of cultural politics, 189–90; definition of, 212; labor flows, 141; of literature, 21, 28, 212–14, 218, 221–22, 226–27. See also capitalism; global novels; neoliberalism; world writers global novels, 190–93, 198–99, 209–10. See also world writers Goldberg, David Theo, 75, 109, 264n33 Gray, Richard, 55, 214. See also deterritorialization of the novel Greene, Graham, 157, 164, 241, 283n11, 287n77 Ground Zero Mosque. See Park 51 Guantánamo Bay, 16, 155, 156, 164 Gupta, Suman, 212, 222 Hamid, Mohsin: as beneficiary of globalized book market, 213–14; as cultural authority, 214, 218, 219–20, 222; journalism, 218, 222. See also Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Hassan, Waïl, 21, 229, 239, 286n60 Hawley, John, 23, 258n14 Holloway, David, 156–57, 257n9 Home Boy (Naqvi): cultural racism, 128–29, 131; hybrid identities, 27, 146–49; spatial politics, 27, 127–29, 145–47, 151; post–9/11 restrictions on Muslims, 27, 127, 144–51 homeland security. See security policies after 9/11 homo sacer, 27, 156, 179–80. See also citizenship rights; human rights Hosseini, Khaled. See Kite Runner, The Huggan, Graham, 115–16, 218, 220 humanism, 16, 34–35, 38, 64, 81, 108–11, 114, 144, 193, 208–10, 243, 260n47. See also liberalism; secularism

310 INDEX

human rights: expendable populations, 181, 207; and Islam, 99; as justification for interventionism, 155, 165; and modernity, 107; stateless persons, 160, 163; and war on terror, 27, 96, 154–63, 179. See also citizenship rights; homo sacer; torture Huntington, Samuel P., 15, 124, 256n38 hybridity. See identity: hybrid identity: cultural, 80–81, 85–86, 89, 116, 191, 208; ethnic, 71–72; fluid, 207, 218–19; group, 5–6 66–67, 83, 90, 92; hybrid, 27, 146–49, 166–67; identity politics, 18–19, 25, 69–72, 79–86; national, 185; performance of, 146, 207; political, 12, 71, 80, 249; religious, 67, 71, 72, 79–80, 231, 233–34, 236; as theme in fiction, 140, 157, 162, 218 Ilott, Sarah, 215, 226 individualism: critique of, 180, 211, 251; as opposed to collectivism, 25–26, 66, 84, 86, 90, 92–94, 233; economic, 26, 66–67, 84; secularist, 66–67, 211, 230; in Western discourse of freedom, 28, 234–35. See also neoliberalism interpretation of religious texts, 33, 36–37, 39, 60–64, 236–38. See also critical reading interventionist foreign policies: American, 32, 139, 151–52, 183–84, 203, 219; extension of post 9/11, 164–66; impact of, 27, 199, 247. See also neoimperialism Iran: feminism in, 107; Iran–Iraq War, 113; represented as oppressive, 102–3, 105–7, 112, 114, 116; Revolution of 1979, 71, 103–4, 108; U.S. involvement in, 22, 104; writers from, 269n25, 270n38. See also Reading Lolita in Tehran Iraq: decolonization, 186; Iran–Iraq War, 113; Iraq War, 45, 48, 95, 151–52, 183; postwar reconstruction of, 212; as site of globalized neoliberal economics, 279n2; U.S. involvement in, 225 Islam: and feminism, 107–8; and ideas of agency, 234; and identity, 67, 71, 231, 233–34, 236; political, 22, 186, 250; religious practices, 106, 129, 176. See also Quran; religion Islamophobia: attacks on Muslims, 144, 231–32; compared with other forms of

racism, 12, 25; definition of, 12; Islamophobic groups, 13, 132–33; Islamophobic security measures post 9/11, 2, 54, 126–27, 145, 147–48, 151, 161; “rational Islamophobia,” 39–40; of the state, 13–14, 157, 160, 163–64; stereotypical portrayals of Muslims, 74–75, 100, 132–33, 141, 177, 223, 226, 251; uses of fear, 13, 95, 177–80, 248, 265n45, 278n46 James, Henry, 111, 113–14, 115 JanMohamed, Abdul, 171, 218 Kadir, Djelal, 191, 209 Kant, Immanuel, 36, 37, 234, 236, 244 Karim, Karim H., 171–72 Keddie, Nikki, 103–4, 107 Keshavarz, Fatemeh, 101, 102, 107, 270n46, 271n49 Kierkegaard, Søren, 38, 61, 63 Kipling, Rudyard, 168, 192, 207 Kite Runner, The (Hosseini): Afghan history, 119–21; authenticity, 26, 101; exotic metonymy, 117–18; fictional authors, 122–23; Muslim countries as oppressive, 26, 97, 124, 198–99; representing Muslim countries to Western audience, 97, 101, 122, 124; secular morality, 121–22; U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, 117, 119; Western culture as superior, 118 Kosovo, 164–65 Kureishi, Hanif: British Asian experience of popular culture, 77; The Buddha of Suburbia, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84; burden of representation, 66, 73, 82–83; freedom of speech, 65, 72–73, 262n1; multiculturalism, 25; My Beautiful Laundrette, 67, 78; “My Son the Fanatic” (short story), 65; My Son the Fanatic (film), 67; Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 78; secularism, 83; The Word and the Bomb, 264n40. See also Black Album, The Kymlicka, Will, 85–86, 93 Law, William, 5 Lean, Nathan, 13, 132, 144, 148 Leavis, F. R., 35, 37–39, 42–44, 51, 64

311 INDEX

Le Carré, John. See Most Wanted Man, A Lefebvre, Henri, 129 Lewis, Bernard, 103, 124, 256n38 liberalism: autonomy, 234–35; and freedom of expression, 72–73, 82; liberal humanism, 35, 81, 108–10, 208–10; liberal novels, 34–35, 55, 78, 142–44, 154–55, 161, 172–73, 181–82; and multiculturalism, 76, 84–85; nineteenth-century, 51, 53; novel as liberal medium, 3, 8, 24, 82, 112, 249; as totemic Western value, 7, 31, 64; views on war on terror, 53–54. See also humanism life writing. See memoir form literature: as bastion of Western freedom, 34, 36, 105; claims of universalism, 108–11; globalization of, 21, 28, 212–14, 218, 221–22, 226–27; and politics, 4; of personal development, 8; Western tradition of, 239–40. See also art and literature McEwan, Ian: certainty, 55, 64; “clash of civilizations,” 184; imperial melancholia, 57; Saturday, 45–53; secularism, 5, 24, 44–5, 83 Mahmood, Saba, 38, 228–29, 233–36, 241, 244 Majid, Anouar, 19, 283n15 Malik, Kenan, 68, 71–72, 265n43 Malreddy, Pavan Kumar, 167, 168 Mamdani, Mahmood, 32–33, 183 market for the Muslim, 6–9, 21, 28, 212–46 media: British, 14, 65; creating fear, 177, 179; framing of Muslims, 4–5, 172; manipulation, 128, 172–75, 177, 179; reporting on Islam, 172, 174–75, 236; social, 1, 172, 251; stereotyping of Muslims, 100, 132–33, 141, 177, 223, 251 Medovoi, Leerom, 213, 217, 224 memoir form, 26, 102, 104, 115 Mercer, Kobena, 74 migrancy, 128, 206 Minaret (Aboulela): burden of representation, 28, 227, 243, 245–46; communalism, 233–34, 235, 243; conveying religion to secular audience, 227, 229–30, 238–39, 244–45; female agency, 229, 234–36, 245; freedom, 231,

234–35; genre, 229–30, 243, 245; identity, 233–34, 236; Islamophobia, 231–32, 245; narrative style, 238–39; politics of piety, 234–36; postsecularism, 28, 211–12, 228, 244; reception, 228–29, 245–46; romance, 229, 232–33, 243 minor literature, 218 Miyoshi, Masao, 189, 264n33 modernism (literary), 45, 64, 229, 243, 260n51 modernity: centrality of art to, 50; and human rights, 107; Islam as threat to, 33–34; “liquid modernity,” 85; and secularism, 16, 33, 36, 228, 246; as totemic Western value 64, 212 Modood, Tariq, 69, 71, 263n19 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 83, 102 Morton, Stephen, 49, 266n65 Most Wanted Man, A (Le Carré): absence of Muslim viewpoint, 161–62, 173, 182; genre, 153–54, 157–58; human rights during war on terror, 27, 157, 158–63; identity, 162; liberalism, 154, 161; morality, 160, 163–64; state Islamophobia, 157, 160, 163–64; stateless persons, 160, 163 multiculturalism: backlash against, 18, 24–26, 32, 66, 84, 86–87, 93, 109–10; challenge to, 12, 94; co-optation by neoliberalism, 76, 85–86; history of in Britain, 66–73; multicultural literature, 4–5, 73–74, 78–79, 84 Munif, Abdul Rahman, 28, 257n58 Muslim misery memoirs, definition of, 97–101, 268n8 Muslim perspective: absence in literature, 161–62, 173, 179–82; in literature, 55, 64, 210 Nabokov, Vladimir, 43, 113, 114–15 Nafisi, Azar. See Reading Lolita in Tehran Naipaul, V. S., 16–17 Naqvi, H. M. See Home Boy Nash, Geoffrey: on Aboulela, 227; 231; on anxiety about terrorist attacks, 259n38, 260n43; on cultural struggle, 31; on Hamid, 214; on Muslim writing, 23; on Nafisi, 270n45; on postmodern America, 56; on post-9/11 novels, 261n69; on Rushdie, Kureishi, and Ali, 265n49, 266n60

312 INDEX

nationalism, 11, 32, 69, 185, 204–6, 210 “native informers,” 101, 103. See also authenticity; burden of representation; cultural authority neoconservatism, 96, 103, 110, 114, 162, 203, 216, 225 neoimperialism: America as sole superpower, 95– 97, 213, 267n1; effects of, 181–82; imposition of American political and economic model, 13, 219, 223–25; justification of, 7, 101, 124, 155–57, 191– 92; literary critique of, 8; post-9/11 mindset, 130, 165. See also interventionist foreign policies neoliberalism: co-optation of multiculturalism, 75–76, 84–87, 93; critique of, 223–25; economic and social problems of, 14, 248; and individualism, 25–26, 66; in Pakistan, 186–87; privatization of war, 183–84, 202–3, 212, 279n2; rejection of multiculturalism in, 66. See also capitalism; globalization news. See media novels. See literature Orientalism, 17, 97, 101, 167–68, 227, 251. See also exoticism; Othering Othering, 33, 62, 126, 179–81, 198–99, 201, 208, 211, 216. See also constructs of essential difference; exoticism; Orientalism Pakistan: Islamization of, 187, 193, 196, 199; literature of, 188–89, 208–9; relations with U.S., 119–20, 185–88, 195–96, 199, 224 Palestine, 90, 225–26, 249 Park 51, 132–35, 273n21. See also 9/11 planetarity, 189–90, 201, 209. See also globalization; global novels; world writers politics of piety, 234–36 polyphony, 3–4, 112–14, 190, 194, 198–200, 239 postcolonialism, 8, 18–19, 168, 206, 227–28, 239–40 postcolonial literature, 21, 220, 222, 226–27 postimperial melancholia, 35, 52, 57 postsecularism: and authenticity, 244, 289n90; challenging secularity of

literature, 28, 211–12, 236–37, 241; definition of, 228, 285n47; and literary criticism, 9–10, 287n78 Protestantism, 35, 38–39, 62, 64, 131, 228, 236, 240, 252, 261n66. See also interpretation of religious texts; religion Quran: descriptions of paradise in, 273n28; interpretation of, 33, 36, 62, 237; shared narratives with Bible, 60, 242, 244; study of, 235, 242 racialization of space. See spatial politics racism: cultural, 25, 71, 128–29, 131–33, 135–36, 138–44; ethnic, 25, 128; Islamophobia compared with other forms of, 12, 25; in state institutions, 70, 148, 251. See also antiracism; Islamophobia Rahman, Tariq, 208–9 Ramadan, Tariq, 60–61 Ranasinha, Ruvani, 83, 264n32, 265n45 Razack, Sherene, 14, 180 Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi): authenticity, 26, 102–3; feminism, 107–8; form and genre, 102, 104–5, 111–13, 115–16; multiculturalism, 109–10; Muslim countries as oppressive, 103–7, 114; polyphony, 3–4, 112–14; Western culture as superior, 3–4, 26–27, 103, 108–11, 114, 118; universalist claims for literature, 108–11 realism: and authenticity, 74–75, 100–3, 115–16, 264n32; and humanism, 209–10; literary traditions of, 227, 240; and readerly identification, 67, 239 regime change. See interventionist foreign policies; neoimperialism religion: mediation of to secular audience, 227, 229–30, 238–39, 244–45; portrayal of religious fundamentalism, 65, 78, 81–84, 192–94, 210; religious identity, 67, 233–34, 236; religious roots of Western literature, 240–44; role in Bush administration, 96. See also Islam; Protestantism Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Hamid): critique of neoliberalism, 28, 211, 216–17, 223–25; criticism of America, 213, 217, 223–26; fictional authors, 222–23; film

313 INDEX

adaptation, 285n40; global economic inequality, 211, 217; identity, 217, 218–19; interpretative challenges, 214–16; Islamophobic discrimination, 211, 223, 226; as minor literature, 218; novel as global commodity, 28, 212–14, 218, 221–22, 226–27 romance form, 229, 232–33, 242, 243 Romanticism, 5, 13, 37, 39, 59, 98, 221 Rumsfeld, Donald, 96, 114 Rushdie, Salman: as cultural representative, 220; on culture as antidote to religious fundamentalism, 10, 65; “Is Nothing Sacred?” 10; Joseph Anton, 5; on Pakistan, 188; The Satanic Verses, 5, 81; on secularization as guarantee of freedom, 5; secularism, 83. See also Satanic Verses affair Said, Edward: on culture and the nation-state, 31–32; on humanism, 260n47; on literature and politics, 4; on multiculturalism, 109–10; on perceptions of the Other, 170–71; on literary critical approaches, 21, 288n81 Saikal, Amin, 120, 202, 203 Satanic Verses affair, 5–6, 24, 34, 36, 38, 65, 71, 73, 82, 263n25. See also Salman Rushdie Schmitt, Carl, 155–56, 160 secularism: and critiques of religion, 44–5, 83, 258n21; as guarantee of freedom, 5, 79; as feature of modernity, 16, 33, 36, 228, 246; and the novel form, 28; as safeguard against extremism, 24; as totemic Western value, 31, 38, 64. See also postsecularism security policies after 9/11: Islamophobic, 2, 54, 126–27, 145, 147–48, 151; as justification for state crimes, 148, 155, 160; and the law, 161–63; restriction of rights in, 154, 156, 159–60, 174 Seierstad, Åsne, 117 Shamsie, Kamila: as contributor to Western debates, 218; Offence, 199; as world writer, 184–85. See also Burnt Shadows Sheehi, Stephen, 13–14 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 37, 41, 42 Slaughter, Joseph, 8

Soueif, Ahdaf, 10–11 spatial politics, 27, 126–31, 134–37, 141–47, 151–52 Spencer, Robert, 14, 132, 273n21 Spivak, Gayatri C., 6, 17–18, 189–90, 201, 205, 209 states of exception, 27, 174, 177 stereotypes. See Islamophobia: stereotypical portrayal of Muslims; media: stereotyping of Muslims Submission, The (Waldman): citizenship rights, 141–44; cultural racism, 128, 131–33, 135–36, 138–44; post-9/11 restrictions on Muslims, 27, 127–28, 135, 151; spatial politics, 27, 127–29, 131, 134–35, 137, 141–44; trauma fiction, 131–32; U.S. history of racial diversity, 135–36 surveillance, 19, 27, 29, 126–27, 147, 179 Suskind, Ron, 96, 267n1 Tate, Andrew, 34, 43 Terrorist (Updike): art as challenge to Islam, 58–59; contemporary American malaise, 24, 54–57, 59; critical reading as redemptive, 24, 55, 60–64; cultural alienation, 54–56; doubt, 55, 59–60, 62–64; gender, 57–58; Muslim perspective, 55, 64, 210; reception, 55 Thatcher, Margaret, 69, 78, 84, 91, 186 thriller form, 54–55, 126–27, 153–57 Toor, Saadia, 186, 187, 188, 279n11 torture, 155–57, 159–61, 178, 251. See also human rights Trump, Donald, 2, 13, 15, 126, 151, 156 United States: anti-Americanism, 53, 56, 105, 157, 219, 225; anti-Communist foreign policy, 21–22, 188; antiracist movements, 69, 72, 143; contemporary American malaise, 24, 54–57, 59, 169; culture wars, 26; economic basis of power, 213; freedom as totemic American value, 26, 59, 95, 112, 118; history of international intervention, 32, 54, 98, 104, 119–20, 183, 188, 199, 224–225; history of racial diversity, 127, 135–36, 143, 145, 150; Islamophobic security measures post 9/11, 2, 54, 126–27, 145, 147–48, 151, 161; media stereotyping of Muslims, 100,

314 INDEX

United States (continued) 132–33; literary tradition, 108, 111, 114, 127, 128; multiculturalism, 109, 144; neoimperialism, 7, 13, 95–96, 124, 219, 223–224; interventionist foreign policy post 9/11, 32, 139, 151–52, 183–84, 203, 219; relations with Pakistan, 119–20, 185–88, 195–96, 199, 224; rise of Islamophobic groups, 13, 132–33; state Islamophobia, 13–14 universalist claims for literature, 82, 108–11, 198 universalization of Western values, 16–18, 36, 228 Unknown Terrorist, The (Flanagan): absence of Muslim viewpoint, 173, 179–82; fear, 177–80; gender, 173–76; genre, 154; identification with non-Muslim characters, 173, 179–82; Islamophobia, 176–82; marginalization, 27, 179–80; media manipulation, 172–75, 177, 179; states of exception, 27, 174, 177 Updike, John, 24, 38, 55, 61. See also Terrorist Upstone, Sara, 78–79, 87, 262n16, 264n40 veiling, 25, 106, 129, 176, 234–35, 286n62. See also gender; Islam Waldman, Amy. See Submission, The Wallerstein, Immanuel, 16, 180 Warlord’s Son, The (Fesperman): absence of Muslim viewpoint, 173, 181–82; borders, 27, 154, 164–67, 170–72; constructs of essential difference, 153–55, 167–72; exoticism, 167–68; genre, 154, 170;

liberalism, 154–55, 172; the uncanny, 168–69; Western interventionism, 164–66, 172 war on terror: antiwar protests, 45, 49–50; choosing sides in, 42, 153, 164, 166–67, 214; culture as battleground in, 26; globalization of conflict, 183–85, 202–3; human rights abuses during, 27, 96, 154, 156, 160, 179; justification of, 113; Muslim suffering during, 155–56, 181, 182; as neoimperialism, 130, 213; privatization of, 183–84, 212; racialization of space during, 129–30, 152; support for, 53–54; use of fear, 13, 95; women’s rights as justification for, 99 Wasted Vigil, The (Aslam): culture as antidote to fundamentalism, 192– 94, 281n32; evocation of empathy, 198, 208; globalization of conflict, 27, 184–85, 190–91, 195–96; as global novel, 190–93, 198–99, 209–10; history, 27, 195–98; liberalism, 193, 208–9; loss, 194–95; migrancy, 206; Othering, 198–99; portrayal of religious fundamentalism, 192–94, 210 welfare state, 66, 69–70, 85–86 Whitlock, Gillian, 101, 124–25 Wolfowitz, Paul, 96, 103 women. See feminism; gender world literature paradigm, 18–20 world writers, 184–85, 190–93, 198–99, 209–10. See also global novels Zia ul Haq, 186–87, 194–96, 199, 200, 205, 224 Zinck, Pascal, 184, 185 Çiäek, Slavoj, 76, 264n35