Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film: Transcultural Identity and Migration in Britain 9780755601714, 9780755601745, 9780755601721

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Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film

Gender and Islam Series Series Editors Professor Nadia Al-Bagdadi, Central European University, Hungary Professor Randi Deguilhem, National Institute of Scientific Research (CNRS), France Professor Bettina Dennerlein, University of Zurich, Switzerland Advisory Board Madawi Al-Rasheed, Middle East Centre, London School of Economics, UK Kathryn Babayan, University of Michigan, USA Jocelyne Cesari, Berkley Center, Georgetown University, USA, and University of Birmingham, UK Dawn Chatty, University of Oxford, UK Nadia El Cheikh, American University of Beirut, Lebanon Hoda Elsadda, Cairo University, Egypt Ratna Ghosh, McGill University, Canada Suad Joseph, UC Davis, USA Published and Forthcoming Titles Queer Muslims in Europe: Sexuality, Religion and Migration in Belgium, Wim Peumans Mainstreaming the Headscarf: Islamist Politics and Women in the Turkish Media, Ezra Ozcan Masculinities and Displacement in the Middle East: Syrian Refugees in Egypt, Magdalena Suerbaum Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures: Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present Day, Aymon Kreil, Lucia Sorbera and Serena Tolino (Eds) The Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary Turkey: Reproduction, Maternity, Sexuality, Hilal Alkan, Ayşe Dayı, Sezin Topcu and Betül Yarar (Eds) Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film: Transcultural Identity and Migration in Britain, Peter Cherry

Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film Transcultural Identity and Migration in Britain Peter Cherry

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 This edition published 2023 Copyright © Peter Cherry, 2022 Peter Cherry has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. vi–viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Adriana Brioso Cover image: Is this the Man VI, 2010, Ink and acrylic on polyester film, Signed on reverse, 137x84cm © Faiza Butt/Grosvenor Gallery All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-7556-0171-4 PB: 978-0-7556-4467-4 ePDF: 978-0-7556-0172-1 eBook: 978-0-7556-0173-8 Series: Gender and Islam Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Content Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Textual Notes

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Writing British Muslim Masculinities

1

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Part 1  Writing British Muslim Masculinities before and after The Satanic Verses Affair 1 2 3

Muslim Masculinities on the Move: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) Sacred and Secular Masculinities: Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) Between Men, Desiring Men: Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette and Sally El Hosaini’s My Brother the Devil

27 47 73

Part 2  Writing British Muslim Masculinities after 9/11 4 5 6

British Muslim Masculinities in the Metropolis: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2004) and Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag (2004) Mapping Masculinities: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014) Fathers, Brothers, Sons: Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018)

107 141 169

Conclusion: Untranslated Men?

203

Notes Bibliography Index

209 231 247

Acknowledgements The book in your hands started life as a PhD thesis. My profound thanks are due to all who helped this project into the form that is in today. First and foremost, I owe a very large debt of gratitude to my former PhD supervisor Frauke Matthes, whose intellectual energy and meticulous insight are an inspiration for me. Under her guidance and support, I have become a sharper, more perceptive and more confident reader of texts. I also want to thank Carole Jones who, as my secondary supervisor, was encouraging, enthusiastic and enriched my work with her recommendations. Although she left for pastures new, Marilyn Booth also acted as a co-supervisor in my early days and her influence can still be found in many of my arguments. There are other members of staff at the University of Edinburgh who also deserve thanks for their comments as my external readers at different points during my study – so I also thank David Farrier and Michelle Keown. Aaron Kelly was also a sensitive internal examiner and I am grateful for his time and input. My external examiner, Brian Baker, was excellent in his role, and he has continued to be encouraging since I graduated. His thoughtful comments shaped much of what is now in the book. I extend my gratitude to the anonymous peer reviewers whose feedback has further developed this book. I would also like to thank John McLeod, for sharing an unpublished conference paper with me which helped me think through some of my ideas on diaspora and ‘postmigration’ and Rachael Gilmour for sending me a PDF copy of her book Bad English as I was putting together the final edits. I am also grateful to a number of scholars in the UK, Turkey and further afield for giving me the opportunity to share my work and help me refine arguments: in particular, Alberto Fernández Carbajal invited me to present at the University of Leicester and Sıla Şenlen Güvenç invited me to present at the University of Ankara. Participating in East West University, Dhaka’s conference on translation also helped me gain perspective on my readings of Zia Haider Rahman and Monica Ali’s work and so I would like to thank the Department of English at East West University for the opportunity to attend. I would also like to put in writing that both my interests in many of the topics I explore in this book and my decision to pursue postgraduate research were sparked by a course on Postcolonial Literature that I took as an undergraduate at Goldsmiths. Bart Moore-Gilbert passed away when I was in the final stages of writing my PhD thesis, but he was in my thoughts often, not least because it is impossible to write about Hanif Kureishi without referencing his work. I signed the contract for this book while completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the British Institute at Ankara. I thank the BIAA for allowing me to work on this project alongside my postdoctoral research. To this end, I want to thank Lutgarde Vandeput, John McManus, Laura Pitel, Gülgün Girdıvan and Işılay Gursü, but single out Leonidas Karakatsanis who was my first friend in Ankara and acted as an academic

Acknowledgements

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advisor to me during my fellowship, offering thoughts on my book proposal and on my decision to take up a full-time job at Bilkent University. I am hugely grateful to all at IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, but I particularly want to thank Sophie Rudland who has been so approachable, understanding and interested in my work and Yasmin Garcha for her help with the final stages of this book. I am also thrilled that the Grosvenor Gallery gave permission for the front cover which is from a series of pieces by Faiza Butt which explore notions of profiling, race and masculinity entitled Is This the Man? The majority of the work on this book was completed whilst working as assistant professor in Comparative and World Literature at Bilkent. I thank my colleagues Mehmet Kalpaklı and Zeynep Seviner for their support while working on the book. In particular, this book in its current form owes a lot to conversations and incisive comments from Etienne Charrière who very kindly read each chapter after I finished drafting and redrafting. I cannot sufficiently express how much I have benefitted from his support. I want to thank a number of fellow travellers on the Edinburgh postgraduate circuit who variously provided mutual proofreading, moral support or refined my work through constructive discussion or argument, a number of whom have since become great friends: Anna Girling, Raph Cormack, Michelle Devereaux, Shuangyi Li, Sarah Irving, Sarah Arens, Nick Spengler, Santi Bertrán Pèrez, Imogen Block, Sibyl Adam, Barbara Tesio, Yanbing Er, Ian Giles, Kate Dunn, Muireann Crowley and Paul Leworthy. To this end, Annie Webster deserves a special mention for reading through and commenting on parts of this book. There are also a number of friends from London, Sussex, Istanbul, Ankara and beyond who I also want to acknowledge for their friendship and interest: Divin Gençoğlan, Thomas McMullan, Nicola Bell, Richard Bell, Amy Zima, Chris Lloyd, Usman Ahmedani, Ömer Kazancı, Sofia Lazaridi, Panos Paris, Rachel Ainsworth, Aaron Bailey Athias, Kirsty Bennett, Feras Alkabani,  Ailie MacDonald Wilson, Hugh Tanton, Jenny Robertson, Laura Martin, Shula Hawes, Becky Balfourth, Oskar Wedahl, Andrew Cruickshank and Şima İmşir. Two of my closest friends – William Armstrong and Rosie Blunt – deserve a special thank you for listening to my moaning, pontifications and also simply for being there at difficult times before, during and after this book came into being. I also want to thank Caroline Michael for her invaluable sense of perspective. My sister Eleanor Taylor, her husband Steve Taylor and my beautiful niece and nephew Alicia and Edward have always had my back and provided me with a place to stay. Whenever I read Alicia and Edward stories, I can’t help but hope that they’ll also develop a love of literature, like their uncle. My mum and dad, Elizabeth and Nigel, have always encouraged me to perform to the best of my abilities and fulfil my potential. Parts of Chapter 3 were published in June 2017’s edition of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature in an article entitled ‘I’d rather My Brother Was a Bomber than a Homo’: British Muslim masculinities and homonationalism in Sally El Hosaini’s My Brother the Devil (2012). I am grateful to Rehana Ahmed, Rachel Carroll, Claire Chambers and my anonymous peer reviewer for their comments which have bolstered my reading of the film. The final edits of this book were completed as the COVID-19 pandemic upended everyone’s lives, further complicating a situation that was already difficult for

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colleagues and friends in universities in both the UK and Turkey. In Britain, the effects of government cuts and precarious workforces are keenly felt across the university sector. While in Turkey, the government has waged war on academic freedoms and LGBTIQ rights in the country, particularly targeting colleagues and students at Boğaziçi University but with toxic ripple effects across all higher education. I do not know whether I will remain in academia, but I hope that this book (flawed as it inevitably is) does justice to the opportunities that higher education gave me and all those who helped me along the way, as well as generating new debates about some key issues.

Abbreviations and Textual Notes To reduce the number of endnotes, I use in-text citations for primary texts. These consist of the author’s surname and the page number, for example: (Ali, p. 213) for Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. However, as I quote from a number of texts by Hanif Kureishi, I distinguish between these by including the initials of the text. For instance, when quoting from his novel The Black Album, I reference the novel like so: (Kureishi BA, p. 141). Full publication details of the editions cited can be found in the bibliography. The Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) referencing system is used throughout the book.

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On 20 October 1988, Syed Pasha, Secretary of the Union of Muslims in London, wrote to the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher calling for the novel The Satanic Verses to be banned and the book’s author Salman Rushdie to be prosecuted, both on the charge of blasphemy. However, the organization, and many other British citizens, soon discovered that the arcane British blasphemy laws did not apply to them as they only protected perceived insults to Christianity. In fact, the last successful blasphemy trial in the UK had been the case against James Kirkup for his controversial poem, ‘The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name’ (1976), which depicted a Roman Centurion having sexual intercourse with Jesus Christ.1 The Union of Muslims would also receive little sympathy from the British government as Syed Pasha received an unambiguous response from the prime minister on 11 November, where she wrote that ‘there are no grounds on which the government would consider banning’ the novel.2 Nevertheless, what this incident reveals is how Rushdie’s novel was a conduit through which groups of Muslims publicly expressed their Islamic faith and, perhaps even more crucially, made a claim for British political subjecthood through a participation in the judicial system. The answer that came from the government refused to engage with this position, and indeed, it was three years before the judiciary clarified that blasphemy claims applied only to Christianity. This initial phase of the controversy, occurring not long after the novel’s publication on 26 September 1988, has been overshadowed by the more dramatic and more widely publicized events of the so-called Satanic Verses Affair, which include the bookburnings in Bradford; the protests in the UK, Pakistan, India, Iran and South Africa; the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death pronounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran; the book’s banning and censorship in a number of countries like India, Canada and South Africa, the assassination of the Japanese translator of the novel and an attempted assassination of the novel’s Turkish translator.3 Scholarship by critics such as Rehana Ahmed, Claire Chambers, Frauke Matthes, Esra Mirze Santesso, Geoffrey Nash, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin has persuasively argued that the Satanic Verses Affair marks a watershed moment both for the politicization of some Muslims in Britain and globally as well as for Britain’s own engagement with its Muslim populations.4 However, the fact that one of the most powerful images of the debate remains the visage of bearded book-burning men in Bradford means that questions of gender, as well as cultural production, are also intrinsically tied to the other issues of nationality,

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culture, migration, race and religion that came to the fore through The Satanic Verses debacle and, this book argues, have never gone away since. In their study Framing Muslims, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin identify the importance of masculinity to discourses about Muslims in Britain (and the West more broadly) through their analysis of the ‘Islamic Rage Boy’ stereotype. Noting the widespread distribution and reproduction of the angry, bearded Muslim male as ‘probably the most recognizable of all widely circulated Muslim stereotypes’,5 Morey and Yaqin observe that his ‘unkempt and ranting visage’ stands in for a particular type of masculinity that is predicated on illiberal approaches to gender and sexuality, vicious anti-Western sentiment, and a slavish devotion to a fixed and rigid Islam. The circulation of ‘Islamic Rage Boy’ image in cultural production, merchandise and on the internet is therefore crucial not only in ‘cement[ing] the threatening strangeness of the Muslim Other’, but also in representing British (and Western) masculinities in counter-image as rational, liberal and open-minded.6 Morey and Yaqin’s reading of the ‘Islamic Rage Boy’ image and its emergence in the post-9/11 cultural landscape corresponds with the work of Jasbir K. Puar and Junaid Rana who have respectively pointed to the escalation in hate crimes, systematic violence and transnational monitoring apportioned to Muslim, or as Puar puts it ‘Muslim-look-a-like’, bodies as a recalibration of the twenty-first-century racial order.7 Whilst this widespread process of racialization and profiling effects all whose characteristics are deemed to ‘look’ Muslim, this book focuses particularly on British Muslim male bodies and subjectivities as a locus of anxieties about definitions of race, cultural and gendered identity in contemporary British diaspora literature and film. This book works to expand and develop existing scholarship in the fields of British Muslim cultural studies and masculinity studies in two productive ways. First, as previously mentioned, this book surveys how cultural production from diaspora writers of both Muslim and non-Muslim cultural heritage approaches Muslim men as racialized and gendered subjects and bodies in contemporary Britain. As such, this study participates in debates laid out by Shu-mei Shih in her conception of ‘comparative racialization’ whereby Shih calls for literary and cultural criticism that engages with how processes of racialization manifest intersectionally with other assemblages of identity, move beyond Black/White binaries and are constructed and interpellated within complex local and transnational networks.8 Second, this study engages with broader questions about the relationship between migration, diaspora and masculinity and how, ultimately, transnational movement transforms identities. Contrasting with popular images of the British Muslim male as ‘stuck’ in values that originate from elsewhere, the novels and films in this book paint a very different picture of British Muslim masculinities as complex, varied and contradictory thereby challenging stereotypes by exposing the heterogeneity within British Muslim practices of masculinity. In my selected corpus, the protagonists examine differences and similarities between ethno-religious and cultural conceptions of masculinity and explore the possibility of creating transcultural gender practices that draw across the British, Muslim and diaspora cultures with which they have affiliations and live within as citizens in contemporary poly-cultural Britain. However, it would be remiss not to emphasize that these literary and cinematic texts also all show how the late twentieth

Writing British Muslim Masculinities

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and early twenty-first centuries’ climate of increasing Islamophobia and anti-migrant rhetoric profoundly frustrates exchange and encounter between British and Muslim cultural identities. Transcultural exchange in the body of writing and film that I analyse takes place within highly unequal and uneven dynamics of power.

British Muslims Despite the critical focus on cultural production written during or after events such as the Satanic Verses Affair, 9/11 and 7/7, Western (and specifically British) racialization, essentialization and misrepresentation of Muslims is not a recent phenomenon. Islam and Muslim cultures have been ‘demonized as an object of counter-identification for the West’ since the birth of Islam, as notably expressed during the Crusades that took place during the eleventh to fifteenth centuries.9 In his influential 1978 study Orientalism, Edward Said surveys an exhaustive corpus of eighteenth-, nineteenthand twentieth-century Western European literature, art, ethnographical and travel writings to trace how Islam and Muslim peoples were rigidly stereotyped into the West’s ‘Other’. The crux of Said’s argument is how homogenized representations of Islamic faiths and Muslim cultures that have depicted Muslims variously as despotic, backward, uncivilized and sexually perverse legitimated the West’s imperialist incursions into and domination over the Muslim world. Said observes how British (and French) translators, anthropologists, novelists and writers, such as Richard Burton and Lord Byron, were particularly influential in propagating notions of intractable Muslim cultural inferiority during Britain’s colonization of vast swathes of Muslim people.10 Orientalized depictions of the Middle East overlooked and erased the ways that the Muslim-majority Middle East and Christian-majority West had been working against rigid East–West binaries and had been mutually shaping each other in fields as varied as literature, language, art, mathematics and science for centuries. As Byron Porter Smith’s monograph Islam in English Literature testifies, Islamic religious narratives, folk tales from the Middle East and even the life of the Prophet Muhammad have in fact influenced a wealth of canonical English literature ranging from the work of William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, John Bunyan and John Dryden.11 Claire Chambers’s Britain through Muslim Eyes also identifies a number of South Asian writers such as Atiya Fyzee, Maimoona Sultan and Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin who were deeply influenced by travels to Britain in positive and ambivalent, as well as negative, ways.12 Furthermore, Nabil Matar’s work on Islam in Early Modern Britain is an important touchstone as Matar observes how cultural texts from the late medieval, Tudor and Stuart periods depict Muslims, sometimes referred to as Turks or Moors, as racialized with ‘dark-skin’ and evoked as malevolent subjects who ‘raged and lusted, killed their children or enslaved and brutalized children’.13 As Nasar Meer points out, Matar’s scholarship challenges the notion that the racialization of Muslims is a solely post-Satanic Verses or post-9/11 experience and, often in dialogue with racialized depictions of Jews, these representations served to install intransigent notions of Christian-majority Western difference.14

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Returning to the central arguments of Said’s paradigm, his conception of Orientalism has received a number of critical responses that have sought to productively question the aforementioned model. Sadik Jalal Al-Azm, for example, accuses Said of reverse essentialism by ignoring British and French resistance to the colonial project and, in so doing, reinforcing the East–West dichotomy that his study aims to deconstruct.15 Perhaps the most famous criticism, however, is set out by Aijaz Ahmad who, in his book In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, admonishes Said for underplaying the role of capitalism in the European colonial project.16 For Ahmad, Said’s argument risks de-emphasizing economic and material factors in motivating colonialism in favour of a model that stresses civilization clashes. In differing ways, other theorists such as Arif Dirlik, Neil Lazarus, Masao Miyoshi and Benita Parry have all observed a common tendency in postcolonial literary studies, of which Said’s Orientalism can be considered a foundational text, to skirt over the centrality of capitalism to colonialism and subsequent discussions of postcolonial identity, particularly in the context of a globalized present.17 Whilst it is beyond my purview to detail these critical positions in this book, my study should be read as maintaining a heightened awareness of the socio-economic inequalities that govern representation and engagement with Muslim subjects and bodies, as well as the intersectional ways in which gender, race, class and ethno-religious identity assemblages work along and across one another in asymmetrical ways. Underscoring the significance of economic factors in the development of British Muslim identities, the majority of Muslims in Britain are descended from labour migrants who arrived during the biggest wave of migration from the end of the Second World War in 1945 and into the 1950s and 1960s. Following the traumatic division of the Indian subcontinent into two independent states by the British colonial administration, the Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, in 1948, many Pakistanis migrated to the UK, settling in cities such as London, Birmingham, Bradford, Glasgow and Leicester, in search of better working and economic conditions.18 Initially, the British government welcomed these workers as a chance to boost the country’s declining economy. However, a significant proportion of the British mainstream population were less accommodating. Whilst Sukhdev Sandhu writes that South Asians, both Muslim and non-Muslim, were ‘demonized far less than Caribbean immigrants, who were routinely depicted as drains on the taxpayer’s coffers and red-blooded menaces to society’, conditions in Britain for many were certainly not easy.19 The rhetorical focus on ‘Blacks’ is best articulated in a notorious address by the then-shadow secretary of defence Enoch Powell on 20 April 1968. Since known as ‘the Rivers of Blood’ speech, Powell drew on biblical and classical allusions to describe how Britain would face apocalyptic destruction of its land, resources and culture if current levels of migration were to be maintained.20 It is no coincidence, then, that Hanif Kureishi recalls how he was traumatized by Powell and the subsequent emboldening of aggressively racist views and violence that the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech encouraged and unleashed.21 Within this context of widespread physical and structural racism, immigrants to Britain frequently organized under ‘a mosaic of unities and organizations’ which ultimately ‘would resolve itself into a more holistic, albeit shifting, pattern of black unity and black struggle’.22 However, ‘[A] series of upheavals in the 1970s and 1980s

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catapulted Muslim identity to the forefront of global affairs in ways that suggested a limit to multiculturalism’s cosy accommodations.’23 Citing the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Satanic Verses Affair as two significant examples, Morey points to both ‘an emergence of a Muslim political entity’ and ‘a recalibration of racism around matters of culture rather than ethnicity’.24 One aspect of this burgeoning Islamophobia is that the Satanic Verses Affair of 1989 is often problematically represented in a manner that suggests universal outrage from Muslims and so it is crucial to note here that there were a number of religious and secular Muslim voices that opposed the novel’s suppression.25 Nevertheless, it is also vital to ground the protests in the racial, socio-economic and cultural marginalization of many of the protestors. Rehana Ahmed stresses that class, race and religious beliefs were indistinguishable from one another during the Bradford protests against The Satanic Verses. For her, the anger of the Muslim men in Bradford was often not a genuine performance of Islamic piety but rather what Ahmed describes as ‘a sense of their marginalisation as Muslims’.26 Ahmed, therefore, shows how the Satanic Verses Affair became a focal point in which widely held feelings of disempowerment and threat from a majority white, secular population were manifested in violent protest against Rushdie, a figure who was roundly respected by a British cultural elite. The 9/11 attacks upon New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon by the Islamist terrorist organization al-Qaeda mark another key moment in British Muslim identities.27 Puar, in her work on Islamophobic attacks on Sikhs in the United States, for example, has shown that those whose racial or sartorial appearance was perceived as denoting an Islamic faith or Muslim cultural background faced a range of horrific hate crimes in the years and months following the attacks.28 Sara Ahmed has meanwhile written on how increased profiling and surveillance of certain bodies in both the US and UK contexts means that ‘the word terrorist sticks to some bodies […] just as it slides into other words in the accounts of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (such as fundamentalism, Islam, Arab, repressive, primitive)’.29 Meanwhile Talal Asad has noted how phrases such as ‘the Islamic roots of violence’ lead to an increasing view that Islam supposedly vindicates acts of terrorism.30 These Islamophobic viewpoints are increasingly pervasive in the contemporary juncture and leave little space for alternative voices that posit more nuanced analyses of Islam and Muslim communities as well as self-representation from British Muslims themselves. Although there are a variety of divergent public voices from British Muslims, including the Marxist novelist and critic Tariq Ali, the journalist and founder of the organization British Muslims for Secular Democracy Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and public intellectuals, academics and writers like Kenan Malik, Tariq Modood, Ziauddin Sardar and Mona Siddiqui, that have contested negative stereotypes of British Muslim men as potential terrorists, misogynists or homophobes, their voices are often drowned out by the cacophony of vituperation that characterizes British Muslim representation.31,32 With regard to Britain, Khadijah Elshayyal, Tania Saeed, Alana Linten and Gavan Titley note how women of colour who wore veils, regardless of their religious or cultural background, were singled out for abuse and were more likely to be stopped and searched by security forces.33 While Peter E. Hopkins’s work has shed light on how post-9/11 Islamophobia interviews with a range of young British Muslim men from a

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variety of different class backgrounds, Hopkins interprets the 9/11 attacks as a watershed moment whereby the Muslim male body became stereotyped as a visible cipher for ‘otherness’. Racial appearance, facial hair and clothing, then, became perceived as conspicuous symbols of threat in an atmosphere that has uniquely impacted on the lives of British Muslim men.34 Such racist and Islamophobic profiling was abetted by the incidents of 7 July 2005 in which four young British-born Muslim men detonated four bombs on London public transport and, more recently, with instances of Britishborn Muslims moving to countries like Syria and Iraq to support the foundation of an Islamist state (Daesh). Given both the long history and recent upsurge in British Islamophobic and racist discourses on Muslims, I have carefully considered how I describe identities in this book. I am aware that, for some, the classification ‘British Muslim’ continues traditions of monolithic representation as it essentializes people by subsuming a number of heterogeneous cultures under one convenient label whilst also yoking their cultural identity to a religious faith.35 Such views are becoming increasingly more pronounced in the contemporary moment as the term ‘British Muslim’ can be used with little awareness for the disparate groups it supposedly describes which, for example, can include individuals of Turkish, South Asian, Arab, Malaysian, Eastern European, North African and sub-Saharan African descent, as well as many other places. Whilst I recognize the inherent difficulties in using the term ‘British Muslim’ for the aforementioned reasons, I maintain there are specific sets of issues that my texts explore that not only necessitate the use of the label ‘British Muslim’ but also mean that it remains the most productive one. As Rana puts it: Without a doubt, the diversity of the Islamic world in terms of nationality, language, ethnicity, culture, and other markers of difference, would negate popular notions of racism against Muslims as a singular racial group. Yet, current practices of racial profiling in the War on Terror perpetuate a logic that demands the ability to define what a Muslim looks like from appearance and visual cues. This is not based purely on superficial cultural markers such as religious practice, clothing, language, and identification. A notion of race is at work in the profiling of Muslims.36

Rana’s viewpoint is shared by Shih who writes that ‘religion has returned as a fundamental category of difference, taking on a content similar to race, Islamophobia looking to attach a vilifiable race to the immense racial, cultural and national diversity of those who profess the Islamic faith’.37 For Shih, ‘Islamophobia as a pathology in search of a race may be the ultimate exemplification of how racialization is a social process that has nothing to do with biology, and, in this case, even with phonotype.’38 To this end, Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood provide an interpretation of the identity label through their theorization of post-9/11 Islamophobia in Britain that is flexible to intersections of gender, race, religion and culture. According to Meer, Islamophobia ‘draws upon signs of race, culture and belonging in a way that is by no means reducible to hostility towards a religion alone, and compels us to consider how religion has a new sociological relevance because of the ways it is tied up with community identity, stereotyping, socio-economic location, political conflict and so forth’.39 As such,

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Modood posits that defining religion as a ‘belief that can be voluntarily renounced’ and race as ‘one’s immutable biology’ is a simplification of the complex discourses surrounding religion and ‘cultural otherness’.40 Emphasizing that discrimination of Muslims works not only on biological terms but also on cultural terms, Meer and Modood stress that Muslim identities should not be reduced to frames of religious belief as ‘people do not choose to be or be born into a Muslim family’ yet the inventory of essentialized characteristics, such as beards and head coverings, ensure that it is difficult to separate ‘the impact of appearing Muslim from the impact of appearing to follow Islam’.41 Modood, in a sole-authored work, proposes that Muslim identities be considered ethno-religious precisely to emphasize the interlinking of racialized, religious and cultural discourses, whilst not reducing definitions of Muslim identities to religious belief.42 This book broadly follows Modood’s logic by reading Muslim masculinities as ethno-religious identities in fiction, therefore examining how male bodies are racialized and gendered as ‘British Muslim’. Nevertheless, it is essential to emphasize that this is a study on cultural production which examines Muslim masculinities within contemporary British literature and film. The book’s main sources are fictional texts in the forms of novels and films. Ahmed, Chambers, Matthes and Morey have all explored, in different contexts, how political events since the Satanic Verses Affair and 9/11 have resulted in increased curiosity about texts discussing Muslim diaspora and migrant communities within Britain, the United States and Germany, respectively. Their work has also engaged with how marketing forces in Western Europe and North America have been keen to turn this curiosity into profit by publishing novels, memoirs and releasing films from writers and filmmakers with a Muslim background. Chambers, for example, has also shown how the design of book covers is part of this Orientalist marketing agenda.43 Focusing on the UK context, Chambers has suggested that this flurry of new writing be considered as an emergent canon of ‘British Muslim writing’.44 My study, however, treads a slightly different path. Specifically, I am bringing together literary and cinematic texts from male and female cisgender diaspora authors of both Muslim and non-Muslim heritage together for scrutiny. In this way it responds to Shih’s conception of racialization as asymmetrical globalizing and regionalizing processes informed by legacies of, and ongoing inequalities of, (neo)colonialism and capitalism that are best understood when read comparatively across cultural mediums and in texts by artists with a range of different diasporic and cultural backgrounds. Furthermore if, as Rehana Ahmed has written, ‘the British Muslim has become a cipher for the excesses of multiculturalism’, then, I argue it is also a gendered discourse in which Muslim men are discursively constructed as a particularly egregious component of this cipher.45 I therefore suggest that critically reading fictional output from British diaspora writers of male and female cisgender identity is best placed to explore the intersectional ways that assemblages of race, gender, sexuality, cultural identity, religion and class coalesce and figure in transcultural explorations of British Muslim masculinized subjectivities. Nevertheless, I accept that there are still limitations to this approach. Significantly, work by diaspora writers of non-Muslim heritage that I examine in this monograph

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frequently contains sharp insight into the pernicious effects of deprivation, racism and Islamophobia, however texts by these authors do not always explore Islam’s tenets and praxis with as much as subtlety as some of the authors of Muslim heritage who have more of an insider’s view. Another potential problematic in this study is the exceptional status of Sally El Hosaini’s film My Brother the Devil which is the only text in the book’s corpus to focus on British Arab Muslim masculinities. In contrast, all other cultural products in this monograph focus on British South Asian Muslim masculinities. Even so, I argue that the transcultural environments that protagonists in the novels and films live within are such that their Muslim identities are shaped by interaction and exchange with a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim influences in both a local and a globalized sense. Furthermore, my decision to broaden the remit of texts analysed in this book relates not only to factors of racialization as observed by Shih, Rana and Puar, but also to my own positionality as a scholar working with textual and cinematic representations and engagements. Thus, while I view literary and cultural criticism as a political endeavour, I also want to impress that this study does not aim to offer any insight on realities best served by social science disciplines or theological readings best suited for Islamic studies scholars. To this end, I have kept Toni Morrison’s powerful remarks about the teaching of African American literature in mind during all of my readings. In a 1989 interview with Time magazine, Morrison cautioned that ‘Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form’.46 Rather, then, my study approaches its corpus as literature and film which is nevertheless affected by material inequalities specific to Muslim peoples in the UK and also speaks, in Raymond Williams’s sense, to structures of feeling that emerge in literary and cultural texts that can challenge, call into question or reinforce dominant hegemonic discourses.47 My own experiences as a white British man who has lived and worked, on and off, in a Muslim-majority country has taught me much about the diversity of different Islamic doctrines, belief systems and Muslim cultures. Although, in Britain, those who identify as, or are identified as, Muslims are subject to racist and Islamophobic measures, the view is different from Turkey where an authoritarian government increasingly uses Islam to justify curtailing press and civil freedoms, particularly of non-Muslim minorities and atheists; therefore, what a ‘British Muslim’ is should be understood very differently from what a ‘Muslim’ is in Turkey, for example. Furthermore, I recognize that, as a comparative literature scholar, I am not trained in Islamic studies and so my critical readings of literary and cinematic texts are rooted in the practices of literary and cultural theory and criticism.

Masculinities Sensitivity is also required when defining the slippery concept of masculinities which, for the most part, I refer to in the plural to emphasize the different varieties and forms gender practices can take. In order to conceive of how socio-economic, cultural encounters and discourses of ethno-religious identity shape masculinities, the work of Raewyn Connell is particularly illuminating. In her influential 1993 study Masculinities, Connell proposes a framework for defining masculinities as

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heterogeneous and continually shifting patterns of social practices that are generally associated with the position of men in any society’s set of gender relations.48 Connell argues that masculinity, like all forms of gender behaviour, is a social practice that constantly refers to bodies and is shaped by what bodies do. However, it is not a social practice reduced to the body. To this end, whilst it is customarily men who enact or perform patterns of practice that are socially or culturally defined as masculine (these often including being a family’s breadwinner or showing physical strength), this is not exclusively the case. This standpoint opens up possibilities for those who do not have a male body to perform behaviours that are defined as masculine. As J. Jack Halberstam has importantly demonstrated in his landmark book Female Masculinity, masculinity is not solely a male gender practice and can be performed by those not born with a male body.49 Nevertheless, the texts that I examine, and all of the texts I surveyed for inclusion in this study, explore masculinity only as practised by cisgender protagonists who are born into and identify with male bodies.50 Separating masculinity from its exclusive association with male anatomy, however, also enables Connell to examine the ways in which masculinity is socially constructed. My book, therefore, takes a similar approach to Connell in viewing masculinity as pliable and subject to alteration. In other words, like Simone de Beauvoir’s famous assertion regarding female identities, my study is premised on the notion that ‘men are not born; they are made’ and as such ‘they construct their masculinities within particular social and historical contexts’.51 Connell’s theorization upon the socially constructed nature of masculinities is crucial for my own reading of the literature and films in this book whereby I argue that the male protagonists are negotiating their own gendered behaviour against the backdrop of living in a new country with separate, and sometimes contrasting, gender expectations, as well as post–Satanic Verses Affair and post-9/11 discourses of gendered racialization. For the subsequent diaspora generations, whose lives are also shaped by their parents’ migration, the socially constructed nature of masculinities becomes particularly apparent as they translate across differing perceptions of male gender performance. By assuming a social constructionist approach to masculinities, my readings are also greatly influenced by Judith Butler’s conceptualization of gender as performative.52 Butler’s notion of gender performativity, as unconsciously repeated sets of norms that are learnt through culture, is the point from which I understand why and how masculinities are practised. Citing John Searle’s work on illocutionary speech acts, or speech acts that do something as opposed to speech acts that only mean something, Butler describes how the phrase ‘it’s a girl’ is a performative act as it inaugurates a child’s being in the world by sexing and gendering the body as female. Thus, Butler argues that ‘sex’ is in itself something that is also gendered and, as such, it is therefore impossible to talk about anything as ‘authentically male’ or ‘authentically female’, or indeed speak of a gender or sex binary at all. Nevertheless, a doctor’s pronouncement of ‘it’s a girl’ initiates a series of connotations, assumptions and discourses that will be endlessly repeated and performed by the subject throughout their life. By repeating these societal conventions of gendered being, individuals play their part in making them seem ‘real’, however, Butler warns us to remain vigilant to the inherently constructed nature of gender and sex definitions. In Butler’s words:

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Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film Gender cannot be understood as a role which either expresses or disguises an interior ‘self,’ whether that ‘self ’ is conceived as sexed or not. As performance which is performative, gender is an ‘act,’ broadly construed, which constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority.53

For Butler, gender is ‘a corporeal style, an “act,” as it were’.54 This corporeal style reveals no essential or inherent truths but rather points to a series of culturally and historically formed ways of performing gender that are also intimately connected to discourses of capitalism as, for example, in the archetype of the hegemonic masculinized businessman. The production and maintenance of gender, then, is performed through a mixture of bodily, communicative and thinking practices that can inform how individuals style their hair, walk or how they dress. Viewing masculinity as a set of performances, then, allows me also to see how the male protagonists repetitively enact certain masculinized practices and why encountering divergent gender performances disrupts or challenges an internalized routine that has been inculcated within the masculinized subject since birth. Furthermore, Butler’s model also casts gender as an active habit hence she talks about subjects ‘doing their gender’. Subsequent theorists such as Saba Mahmood and Caroline Ramazanoğlu have pushed this further to show how assemblages of race, ethnicity, cultural background, socio-economic class, religion and sexuality coalesce and influence the way that individuals ‘do’ their gender.55 However, in her study of Islam in British and German transcultural literature, Matthes makes a crucial distinction to the Butler model by observing how performances of gender are consciously re-valued by Muslim protagonists in a non-Muslim environment.56 This can take the form of defensive performances aimed at ‘preserving’ a notion of ‘essential’ gender identity or in allowing different forms of masculine practice to influence their identity. In either of these two examples, ways of ‘doing’ masculinity are changed or renegotiated in ways that reveal the dynamics between British and Muslim conceptions of gender as well as expose a plurality of different masculinized gender behaviours. I perceive masculinity not as a fixed phenomenon, but rather a complex, varied, contradictory and intersectional assemblage of different performative practices, with several different formulations of masculinity able to coexist and compete within the same cultural context and historical moment. In referring to intersectionality, I am drawing on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework for interpreting the connections between racism and misogyny as mutually constructing sites of oppression for women of colour.57 From the vantage point of masculinity studies, Crenshaw’s work has been productively used by A.-D. Christensen and S. Qvotrup Jensen to magnify the ways that categories of ‘class, race/ethnicity and sexuality can support the dominant position and male privilege of some men because it strengthens the legitimacy of their masculinity’.58 However, especially relevant for my purposes, the social psychologist Rusi Jaspal and Marco Cinnirella’s work on Muslim men in Britain who identify as gay paints a more complex picture of men who perceive their different social identities as in competition with one another and vying for dominance.59 Acknowledging the ways that different aspects of identity frequently worth with and against each other, I frequently refer to identity as an ‘assemblage’. In fact, Puar argues

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for a supplanting of intersectional models of identity which ‘presume that components – race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion – are separable analytics and can thus be disassembled’ in favour of assemblage as a framework which is ‘more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against the linearity, coherency, and permanency’.60 Puar advances the concept of ‘assemblage’ in place of intersectionality as a mode for interpreting identity as it reasserts the asymmetrical and slippery nature of selfhood. First used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their work A Thousand Plateaus (1980), assemblages are understood as ‘collections of multiplicities’ that stress the fluidity, exchangeability and multiple functionalities that govern social relations.61 As opposed to intersectional approaches, assemblage is ‘a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks’ that ‘draws together enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect, organic and non-organic forces’.62 While I concur with Puar that intersectionality may evoke a more rigid and fixed definition of identity than is expressed in the transcultural milieu of the diasporic protagonists explored in this book, I also do maintain that intersectionality enables a critical reader to remain steadfast to structural forms of oppression that govern and besiege the lives of those who are racialized. Consequently, rather than seeing these two models of identity in conflict, I find it productive to use them together to explore how my protagonists’ identities are at once intersectional in a socio-political sense and forged through transcultural assemblage that demands movement between multiple practices and mores of masculinity. Indeed, in Chapter 5, I discuss how two texts, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2012), necessitate the careful thinking of assemblage models of identity within the context of globalized neoliberalism and the racialized Muslim body. Connell’s concept of ‘multiple masculinities’ follows in this path of intersectional and assemblage approaches to masculinity. At the root of Connell’s theorization is that masculinity affords men power through what she terms the ‘patriarchal dividend’; however, not all men benefit in the same way.63 For Connell, the patriarchal dividend refers to a structural composition in most societies whereby men have greater access to institutional power, economic resources, respect, service, sexual pleasure and control over one’s body than women. Connell argues that both men and women can be complicit with these concepts and, through institutions such as the family, seek to mould men into these systems of power. Whilst the gender relations in the literature and films that I analyse broadly support this view, the male protagonists that I examine are generally marginalized upon racial, religious and cultural grounds by a white British majority. As such, they clearly do not have access to the patriarchal dividend in the same way as their white peers. To address precisely this discrepancy, Connell formulates a hierarchy of masculinities which is based on relations of power. At the top of this hierarchy is a range of behaviours, ideas and gender norms that constitute a dominant form of being a man, which Connell labels ‘hegemonic masculinity’. In Connell’s theory, ‘hegemonic masculinity’ can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which ‘embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’.64 Connell asserts that this is not a universalizing gender identity and thus hegemonic masculinity

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differs according to historical moment, class positioning and cultural locale. Nevertheless, it is this iteration of masculinity that benefits most comprehensively from the patriarchal dividend. Hegemonic masculinity, however, relies on positing itself in contradistinction to other forms of masculinity. In that homosexual men engage in sexual activity with other men, which is symbolically associated with femininity, they are an example of what Connell terms a ‘subordinated masculine identity’.65 By virtue of their racial, ethnic and often-underprivileged economic status, migrant men are identified in Connell’s framework as constituting a form of ‘marginalised masculinity’.66 Her reasoning is that migrants have generally moved from a poorer country to a richer one, are living in an environment in which their native language is not the common language, often have a different religion with differing cultural values and are much more likely to face forms of racial or cultural discrimination. Furthermore, Connell observes how many men who fall within her conceptualization of marginalized masculinities tend to perform variations of what she terms ‘protest masculinities’. Specifically, Connell argues that certain groups of men who are materially, socially or economically deprived tend to exaggeratedly perform aspects of hegemonic masculinity in an attempt to project their strength in the face of marginality. Connell notes that for these men, protest masculinities represent ‘a response to powerlessness, a claim to the gendered position of power, a pressured exaggeration of pressured of masculine power’.67 Protest masculinities, then, can take the form of spectacular displays of strength, emphasizing their strength and power in riposte to their disempowering socio-economic conditions in which their claims to the patriarchal dividend are ‘constantly negated’.68 The sociologists Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill assert that protest masculinities are often expressed through excessive sexuality, violence or performances of control.69 However, Haywood and Mac an Ghaill point out these are vulnerable and unstable masculinities that are prone to violent reassertion when they appear threatened, such as an occasion when the emasculating conditions of the male are likely to be revealed. Likewise, Connell, Haywood and Mac an Ghaill all underline the collective aspects of protest masculinity in which marginalized men find solace in forming groups or gangs through which they are able to tackle their shared sense of disempowerment in solidarity and aim to achieve the respect of their fellow gang members. Indeed, it is into this categorization of ‘marginalized masculinities’ and practices of ‘protest masculinity’ that most protagonists in my literary and cinematic corpus theoretically fall and there are numerous examples of the aforementioned forms of behaviour throughout my book. However, I also argue for a nuancing of Connell’s model here as she overlooks the ways in which these marginalized constructions of masculinity are subject to internalized processes of domination, disruption and transformation. From a contemporary viewpoint, for example, it must be asked whether such a neat categorization withstands analysis when a public figure such as Sadiq Khan, a British-born man of Pakistani heritage with a well-publicized Islamic faith, serves as Mayor of London. Admittedly, Khan’s public image which rests on well-pressed suits and tidy hairstyles would, at least superficially, serve to show his hegemonic masculine credentials, but even so, his career shows that mainstream British

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conceptions of hegemonic masculinity need to be rethought along the lines of race and ethnicity. Furthermore, Connell’s view of homosexual men enacting a subordinated form of masculinity is challenged by recent history in which same-sex marriage has been legalized in much of North America and Western Europe leading to an increasing visibility of white, affluent, politically conservative gay men. Both of these examples therefore serve to show how Connell’s classifications need to be continually adapted and reformulated to accommodate the ways that masculinity (and gender) are in a constant state of flux. Nevertheless, in this century’s climate of Islamophobia, cases such as Sadiq Khan’s career trajectory are unfortunately a rare phenomenon. Hopkins’s work on the ‘increasing levels of harassment, violence and scrutiny’ that Muslim men have come under since the 9/11 attacks upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon serves to prove this.70 In this regard, I view my protagonists as existing mostly from a perspective of marginalization at the hands of a majority white population. As such, I perceive their masculinities as being constructed and performed within this context of marginalization. Connell’s theorization is therefore instructive for my purposes as she highlights how certain performances of masculinity depend on the subordination of others including the existence of culturally exalted forms of ‘doing’ masculinity. In the context of my book, British Muslim men are often depicted as this ‘other’ against which white British masculinities construct, practise and perform their masculinities. A disclaimer, however, is necessary at this point. As my study focuses on masculinities as they appear in cultural production, and in light of my training as a comparative literature scholar with a special interest in migration, postcolonial and gender studies as they pertain to fiction, literary and cinematic texts do not always neatly map onto social scientific models. In fact, as demonstrated by Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, for example, where male protagonists turn into angelic and devilish beings, cultural production can actively resist social scientific diagnosis. Connell and Butler’s insight therefore provides working definitions and understandings of what masculinity is and how it is performed but there will be occasions where we meet with practices of masculinity that defy social scientific explanations. To this end, my readings of masculinity are also deeply indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work which is both highly influential within the interdisciplinary terrain of gender studies and in literary criticism.71 While Sedgwick’s concepts of ‘homosocial desire’ and ‘homosexual panic’ will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3 of my book, it is nevertheless paramount to briefly recapitulate how her ideas shape my understanding of masculinity as a textually represented form of gender practice. For Sedgwick, ‘homosocial desire’ refers to social connections and networks forged between men, through friendships or intimate collaborations with other males that sustain patriarchal gender orders. Within her nineteenth-century literary context, then, Sedgwick identifies male homosocial bonds that require the subordination or exclusion of women and are therefore important ways through which patriarchal masculinity is performed in the public sphere. Sedgwick conceives homosocial desire as an anxious construction, however, that manifests in displays of rivalry, hostility or admiration as patriarchy requires that men constantly compare and compete with one another in their heterosexuality and their ability to meet standards of hegemonic

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masculinity. Nevertheless, Sedgwick also describes how homosocial networks also carry the potential of turning into romantic or sexual feelings for other males. She argues that homosocial desire is therefore accompanied by ‘homosexual panic’, or the fear that men may start to romantically or sexually desire one another, and so this results in ever more conspicuous and ostentatious displays of heterosexuality. Beneficial for my study, then, Sedgwick finds different relationalities and forms of homosocial desire and homosexual panic within a range of British nineteenth-century literary texts and identifies these through close reading of what is said, what is not said and what is implied within the novels she analyses. Sedgwick’s criticism focuses not on biography but offers a socio-political, historically informed critical reading of her texts that makes clear the often-hidden patriarchal and heteronormative scripts that are enshrined in literary texts and motivate the characters in the novels she opens up to scholarly scrutiny. Using Sedgwick, Butler and Connell’s work as a framework with which to interpret masculinities rather than explain them, I ask how literature and film presents men travelling with concepts, ideals and norms of masculine performances and how these are reconstituted into a UK context. My book questions to what extent male protagonists renegotiate their hegemonic masculine identifications, practices and sensibilities embedded in their ‘old’ gender relations from their marginalized position, and how subsequent generations construct their masculinity in dialogue or in contrast with their migratory background and cultural heritage. The literary and cinematic texts that I analyse shed light on these processes by creatively imagining these negotiation processes and magnifying the heterogeneous nature of British Muslim masculinities. As a final remark, it is germane to point out that the corpus of my study has been written by both male and female cisgender authors. This is a conscious decision to impress that masculinities are socially constructed forms of gender practice that are relational and, crucially, to shed light on how women writers frequently have especially penetrating insight into the toxic effects of patriarchal masculinity. Nevertheless, my readings exercise the valuable caution offered by Katharina Rennhak and Sarah S. G. Frantz in their collection Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750–2000, when they remark that ‘women novelists not only deconstruct patriarchal structures and discursive strategies, but also participate in the construction of ideal masculinity’ whether these imaginings are critical or complicit with regimes of patriarchy.72 With this in mind, my choice of texts should be read as part of a pro-feminist masculinity studies agenda that encourages the dismantling and dismembering of patriarchal oppression and observes how fiction is often a privileged site through which to dissect patriarchy and imagine more fair and equal futures.

Diaspora, cultural translation and transculturation Before we launch into a roadmap of the book’s structure, it is crucial to get a better purchase on some critical terminology that I will be deploying throughout the book and why I am applying it to the context of British Muslim masculinities. The common feature shared by authors, and their fictional protagonists, in this study is that they

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have either migrated to the UK or been born in the UK to parents who have migrated from elsewhere. To this end, I refer to my writers and protagonists as diaspora as they have migrated to Britain or, by virtue of their parentage, have inherited a complex set of cultural allegiances with their country of heritage and their British environment. As Michelle Keown, David Murphy and James Procter explain: The term [diaspora] once referred to the dispersal of the Jews, but within contemporary cultural analysis the term is now more likely to evoke a plethora of global movements and migrations: Romanian, African, black, Sikh, Irish, Lebanese, Palestinian, ‘Atlantic’ and so on.73

For them, the term has also ‘evolved to operate as a travelling metaphor associated with tropes of mobility, displacement, borders and crossings’ thereby speaking to an array of diverse individuals and groups migrating away from economic, political or even climate hardships.74 James Clifford in an influential book in the field of diaspora studies describes how: Diaspora discourse articulates, or blends together, booth roots and routes to construct […] alternative public spheres, forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference.75

By foregrounding movement, Clifford, like theorists Avtar Brah, Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, mobilizes a conception of diaspora that does away with essentialist notions of race, nation and origin, and points towards transnational and transcultural ways of being.76 However, I do also recognize Procter’s discomfort with the way diaspora evokes an overly romantic conception of identity that obscures material issues such as ‘the issue of settlement’ which can, for example, take the form of racism, Islamophobia, or even, quite literally, housing.77 For Procter, the ‘politics of place, location and territory’ is often ‘deferred’ in rhetorical and overly theorized notions of diaspora.78 In fact, I would potentially be bolder and state that the theoretical looseness of the term does concern me – is it ethically sound to conflate the Rohingya, who are fleeing ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, with Polish labour immigrants to Britain? For these reasons, I do insist at certain points in the study of referring explicitly to ‘migration’ when talking about political or social issues that pertain to first-generation immigrants in Britain. While I do encourage a discussion of how we might distinguish rather than elide radically disparate circumstances that are sometimes banded together in diaspora terminology, I also acknowledge productive usage of the term for my study. Specifically, the term ‘immigrant’ refers only to those who physically migrate to another country. In recent years, there has been some discussion around the term ‘post-migrant’ to convey the experiences of subsequent generations who did not migrate themselves but maintain emotional, cultural or imaginative bonds with another country or culture with which they have a familial link yet this seems to me to be a term that is insufficiently equipped to describe the transcultural experiences of life within contemporary Britain. My chief concerns with the term ‘post-migrant’ are threefold: one, much like the term

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‘post-racial’, the prefix suggests that something about the migrant experience needs to be overcome or assimilated; second, it also retains a focus on the migration of previous generations; and third, it points towards a line of enquiry frequently referred to as ‘migrancy’ that celebrates and aestheticizes the figure of the migrant as a figure of cosmopolitan possibility within frames of neoliberal multiculturalism and unchecked privilege. Regarding the latter point, Anusha Kedhar and Jodi Melamed warn that we remain vigilant to the ways that multiculturalism as a concept is mobilized within neoliberalism. For Melamed, neoliberalism and multiculturalism are complicit ideologies that insist on viewing cultures through a lens of social and economic individualism thereby enabling states and governments ‘to disavow [their] own complicity in racist, classist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic violence, while simultaneously positioning itself as the arbiter and protector of difference’.79 Melamed continues that the absorption of anti-racism campaigns often elides the ways that neoliberal economic structures perpetuate racism, for example, ensuring that racialized subjects earn less, live less longer and inhabit less safe housing than their majority white compatriots. According to Kedhar, state-sponsored anti-racism projects show that ‘if immigration laws use race as a technology to determine the kinds of otherness that are palatable to the state, multicultural policies use race as a technology to determine the kinds of otherness that are desirable, marketable, and palatable to (white) audiences’.80 My critical engagement with theories of transculturation and cultural translation is intended to challenge this notion of social and economic individualism by stressing how British Muslim masculinities are ethno-religious diasporic identities forged through cultural and social contact and entanglement within a poly-cultural, yet unequal, milieu in which Muslim subjects are influenced by a range of different Muslim and non-Muslim cultures that co-exist within the protagonists’ contexts as well as by the materialist circumstances of inequality, classism, racism, Islamophobia, misogyny and homophobia. As Emily Apter reminds us in an important intervention in translation theory, the world is saturated with border controls and checks thereby making the migrant’s life one of exceptional difficulty.81 For Apter, the politics of what literary works are translated and promoted abroad depends on a system of global hierarchies and expectations thereby mirroring some of the actual situations of border checks and controls that migrants themselves are forced to confront. To this end, notions of cultural translation are also worth bearing in mind for the beneficial manner with which they help me understand how protagonists in my corpus make sense of and adapt to their surroundings. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s claim in his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923) that within linguistic translation there is an element that remains ‘untranslatable’ and therefore impossible to render in another language’s prose, Homi K. Bhabha suggests that migration exposes a similar pattern of ‘gaps’ and ‘impurities’ between cultures.82 Thus, like linguistic translation, a ‘true copy’ cannot be recreated as cultures are not fixed or stable entities. While all of the texts that I examine in this book are written in English, aspects of cultural translation theory, as deployed by Bhabha, are helpful. In particular, Bhabha argues that migration is a translative process where the migrant and subsequent diasporic generations must negotiate their own identity in dialogue with other cultures they encounter thereby offering the possibilities for new cultural identities.

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Bhabha argues that ‘[migration] is the opposite of historical colonialism, part of whose self-given task was to reproduce an original culture and to map the political, social, ethical, and aesthetic frameworks of that original onto other cultures’.83 Translation then, Bhabha opines, is an apt metaphor as the migration process is a journey through which power dynamics, complicities and interrelations between cultures are thrown into sharp relief. Crucially, whilst cultural translation offers opportunities for new cultural identities, it is also fraught with existential difficulties. Therefore, as with linguistic translation unmasking inequalities and power dynamics between ‘global’ and ‘periphery’ languages, migration reveals disparity between cultures. Concerning language, Aamir R. Mufti has drawn attention to such relationships of power in his book Forget English! where he points to the stultifying and neo-Orientalizing effects that the global dominance of the English and Anglophone canons and texts has had on the study and research of postcolonial and World literatures.84 To some extent, I reflect upon this in my reading of Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag (2004) in the book’s fourth chapter as the novel brings together different languages and linguistic registers thereby opening up discussions on the historical and neocolonial dominance of English. However, while I recognize Mufti’s criticisms, my study asserts that issues of mistranslation and linguistic inequalities can still occur even within a language as hegemonic and ubiquitous as English. One particular area of mistranslation is, Talal Asad proposes, understandings of secularism. Throughout his career, Asad has engaged in an extensive critical exploration of the assumptions underpinning concepts of secularism. Indeed, as we will see in the first chapter of this book, his work on the Satanic Verses Affair has been a crucial intervention. In particular, his influential study Formations of the Secular draws attention to how secularism is all too often used reductively to imply a univocal and totalizing principle rooted in a specifically Western European concept of genealogy whereby Enlightenment thought demanded religious authority gives way to reason and criticism. Rather, secularism should be understood as a proliferation of different approaches to religious faith and its relationship to the self, society, and public and political life. Distinguishing between ‘secularism’, as ‘an enactment by which a political medium (representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class, gender, and religion’ and ‘the idea of the secular’,85 Asad writes: ‘The secular’ should not be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually emancipates itself from the controlling power of ‘religion’ and thus achieves the latter’s relocation. It is this assumption that allows us to think of religion as ‘infecting’ the secular domain or as replicating within it the structure of theological concepts. […] Secularism doesn’t simply insist that religious practice and belief be confined to a space where they cannot threaten political stability or the liberties of ‘free-thinking’ citizens. Secularism builds on a particular conception of the world.86

Striving to understand that concepts such as ‘the secular’ and being open to all the multifarious meanings the term can mean, is an essential endeavour. This is especially relevant for the current historical moment in which migrants to Britain are repeatedly

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demonized by political parties such as United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), are subject to harsh political manoeuvres at the hands of the current Brexit-enforcing Conservative administration, and face increased suspicion from members of the general public and popular press.87 The creation of ‘new’ cultural identities is therefore not always informed through positive encounters, as the majority of the literary and filmic texts under analysis show. Indeed, many masculinized characters seek to expunge elements of their identity that they perceive as indicating a Muslim cultural background attempting to exaggeratedly perform traditional British cultural mores. Through these instances, however, the aforementioned ‘gaps’ and ‘impurities’ between cultures are only further magnified. The term ‘diaspora’, as I use it, allows me to pay attention to translative processes, by maintaining a focus on the socio-economic and political inequalities facing immigrants, and second, affords me flexibility to write about those who made journeys of migration and subsequent generations whose identities and lives are shaped by previous generations’ journeys. Furthermore, as in the work of Brah, Clifford, Gilroy and Hall, diasporic identities are not conceived as homogenous thereby also taking into account the various and untidy ways that subjectivities are formed and negotiated through transcultural exchange and entanglement within the contemporary world. Diaspora also productively relates to the theoretical paradigm of transculturalism. Transculturalism sharply distinguishes itself from models of interculturalism and multiculturalism by arguing that diaspora and immigrant subjectivities combine ‘plural affiliations and multiple, multi-layered identities’.88 As Matthes points out, both interculturalism and multiculturalism imply ‘that any given traditions are to be considered in isolation rather than in interaction; it traditionally understands culture as something separate, thus stressing difference’.89 In a specifically British context, Graham Huggan expresses disquiet with understandings of multiculturalism during the Tony Blair–led centre-left New Labour administrations in the 1990s and 2000s.90 This is a period during which the majority of the novels and films that I analyse were written and produced. Huggan remarks how the then-government’s much publicized and celebrated notion of multiculturalism exposed two incompatible discourses: a modernization one, in which all ethno-racial communities were to be viewed as British, and an integrationist one, in which people of colour and faith communities were encouraged to submit to a one-size-fits-all notion of Britishness, that still viewed many Muslims as existing outside of British codes of identity whether through their clothing or everyday practices. Multiculturalism, then, led to virtual communities that gave the impression of counteracting racial discrimination but ultimately reinforced cultural difference and separatism in a manner that is comparable to those diagnosed by Jodi Melamed a few pages previously. Such formulations of cultural diversity are inconsistent with the ways that I believe the protagonists in the literary and filmic fiction under analysis appropriate and negotiate different cultural markers. As such, I refute perceptions that the fictional works under examination, are existing ‘inbetween’ static cultures. Thus, like Leslie A. Adelson in her study on German Turkish writing, I posit that there are no ‘clear and absolute boundaries’ in the writers and film-makers’ perception of identity.91 In line with theorizations of transculturalism penned by Wolfgang Welsch and Mary Louise Pratt,

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then, I understand the corpus of literature and film in this study, and their protagonists as ‘moving between the different cultures, languages, histories available to them’.92 In a somewhat utopian essay entitled ‘Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’, Welsch argues that ‘we are cultural hybrids’ now and that the conditions of contemporary globalization have ensured that ‘there is nothing exclusively foreign’ nor can we identify something as belonging exclusively to one culture. Welsch’s vision is, I think, fairly criticized by Huggan when he describes transculturality as conjuring ‘up a far more positive picture of the world than a more historically informed and, particularly a more economically driven argument would allow’.93 Indeed, with reports of rising Islamophobia and anti-migrant discourses targeting British Muslim men following the Brexit Referendum of 2016, Welsch’s approach could be seen as, at best, optimistic. Whilst I take issue with some of Welsch’s more utopian tendencies, not least because his conceptualization does not adequately take into account how travel is not a uniform experience and that it often privileges white and economically affluent subjectivities, Welsch does capture how immigrant and diaspora subjectivities move between and incorporate different cultural markers in an uneven and unconscious manner. Mary Louise Pratt, on the other hand, observes that transculturation is far from a solely contemporary condition and argues that transcultural exchange played a formative role in the development of European modernity. Particularly germane to my context, Pratt’s model of transculturation asserts that transcultural exchange takes place within ‘highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’.94 She opines that ‘while subjugated peoples cannot readily control what the dominant culture visits upon them, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, how they use it, and what they make it mean’.95 Although her theory is set out in relation to travel writing, I argue that Pratt supplies an inspiring and fruitful model with which to constructively read diaspora identities and cultural production. Pratt’s conception of transculturation, therefore, both affords agency to the diasporic subject as an active participant in choosing and recasting what aspects of culture they choose to associate with and speaks to the untidy and variable conditions of a globalized system where diasporic subjects consume media and cultural production from all over the world. Indeed, it should be stated here that all of the writers and filmmakers whose work is discussed in this book are also to a certain extent ‘postcolonial’ in that, while all living and working in Britain, their heritage is from countries that were colonized and this history of imperial domination features in the relationships between cultures that the writers and filmmakers move between. Indeed, familiar concepts of postcolonialism, such as the ‘Other’, are part of my analysis in order to understand this complex heritage of colonial subjugation. However, I want to push these conceptions further by stressing the ways that writers and filmmakers go beyond colonialism’s imperative to supplant one culture upon another and the postcolonial author’s duty to ‘write back’ to hegemonic power dynamics. The transcultural writer, then, seeks to expose similarities, differences and conflicts between cultures and thereby dismantles cultural hierarchies. Rather than ‘writing back’, Sissy Helff contends that transcultural writers often promiscuously mix together various literary reference points and genre forms that have origins in the diverse locations from

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which authors have attachments.96 Instead of hybridizing national forms of literary aesthetics, transcultural authors evoke a worldly textuality that seeks not only to depict an increasingly interconnected world but also strives to disrupt power dynamics that frequently underpin globalization. In film too, David MacDougall makes the case for a transcultural cinema that fuses together a complex array of different narrative forms and styles that originate from disparate parts of the globe.97 MacDougall explains that the nature of film-making contributes to a transcultural perspective as any one film production tends to employ producers, cinematographers and technicians that are from a variety of different places in the world. Moreover, the screening and marketing of cinema at international Film Festivals in places such as London, Berlin, Istanbul and Mumbai also ensures that viewings of films are juxtaposed with motion pictures from many varied countries. As such, the average Western filmmaker is increasingly aware and knowledgeable of cinematic trends from across the world. Nevertheless, transcultural methodologies are not common in Anglophone cultural criticism. As demonstrated by Matthes’s book on Islam in transcultural British and German cultural production and John McLeod’s recent study on transcultural adoption in British writing and cinema, transcultural approaches are achieving growing recognition in the fields of literary, film and postcolonial studies.98 However, postcolonial critiques that argue for a multicultural understanding of cultural production from Britain’s diverse diaspora populations remain the dominant mode of critical enquiry for a corpus such as mine. By reading my texts as transcultural literature and film, I hope to broaden the remit of postcolonial theory, by arguing that there are generations of British writers and filmmakers of non-British heritage who are invested in dynamic forms of cultural enterprise in which the limitations and boundaries of cultures are thrown into question, and, how fictional explorations of British Muslim masculinized subjectivities as racialized, offer the possibility for reading what bodies are invited into or rejected from transcultural notions of Britishness. As Sara Ahmed has written, if terms like ‘terrorist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ ‘stick’ to racialized Muslim and Muslim look-a-like bodies, then how can writers use fictional depictions of British Muslim masculinized bodies and subjectivities to expose and reject such associations and assess the limits of narrow conceptions of transcultural Britishness?99 My corpus is invested in expanding and challenging notions of what it means to be British, Muslim and have postcolonial heritage. Thus, my book appropriates the term ‘transcultural’ for thinking through how the literary and cinematic texts under analysis move between and incorporate a variety of different ethno-religious and cultural assemblages of masculinity.

Scope of the book The book is comprised of two parts entitled ‘Writing British Muslim Masculinities Before and After The Satanic Verses Affair’ and ‘Writing British Muslim Masculinities After 9/11’ which include three chapters respectively. These chapters are best read as six different, but interrelated and connected, readings of a select corpus of texts by

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British diaspora writers and filmmakers that explore particular contextual or thematic foci relating to British Muslim masculinities. The first section consists of three chapters that, in various ways, read texts that explore the emergent figure of the British Muslim male archetype. Within this section, Chapters 1 and 2 complement each other by examining the Satanic Verses Affair and the powerful effect of this novel on fictional engagements with diasporic masculinities. As such, my first chapter ‘Masculinities on the Move’ reads Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988) as both a novel and an event through which Muslim masculinities become racialized and distinguished from other forms of immigrant and diasporic masculinities. However, as emphasized by the chapter’s title, my discussion also examines how notions of migration, masculinity and transculturation are addressed in the novel thereby arguing that there are factors in the novel itself that also call for a deeper engagement with how Muslim masculinities specifically are shaped and changed by migration to non-Muslim majority societies. The second chapter ‘Sacred and Secular Masculinities’ pairs Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) for an analysis of how the Satanic Verses Affair is imagined in two novels from British diasporic writers. Interpreting them in the context of Terry Eagleton’s writing on the ‘novel as an event’, I have chosen Kureishi and Smith’s novels as they are two prominent examples of literary texts that respond to both Rushdie’s novel and the controversy it caused, as well as the emergence of a politicized British Muslim identity, through diasporic male protagonists that are struggling to construct a fitting identity. This first section of the book closes with my third chapter ‘Between Men, Desiring Men’ that considers cinematic representations of queer diasporic men both before and after the Rushdie Affair. Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears’s classic 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette presages the notion of homonationalism that, I argue, is exhibited in Sally El Hosaini’s 2012 film My Brother the Devil. First, using Sedgwick’s conceptualization of homosociality, I address the manifestations of patriarchal masculinity within the two film’s all-male gangs and collectives.100 This leads me to probe how lead protagonists Omar and Rash’s homosexuality serves as an alternative form of masculinity that is less aggressive and allows for transcultural forms of hybridized gender practices. Nevertheless, the utopian function signalled by their same-sex sexuality is undercut by the ways that their love affairs allow for forms of social mobility that indicate their new-found belonging within an economically driven form of Britishness. The work of Jasbir K. Puar and Lisa Duggan, then,101 enables me to read how Omar and Rash become emblematic of the strategic incorporation of certain affluent, neoliberal gay masculinities at the expense of racialized immigrant and diaspora masculinities within the latter half of the twentieth century. The second section of my book, ‘Writing British Muslim Masculinities after 9/11’ consists of three chapters that, following events such as 9/11, 7/7 and the development of Daesh, analyse literary texts that explore how British Muslim male protagonists construct their masculinity in relation to globalized conditions of the twenty-first century. The first chapter, ‘British Muslim Masculinities in the Metropolis’, explores the significance of the urban environments of London and Glasgow. In this chapter, I pay particular attention to how the transcultural traffic of city spaces emerge as

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crucibles for transformative gender and cultural identities in the immigrant and diasporic protagonists that populate Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag. By reading how interaction with Muslim and non-Muslim cultures in Brick Lane’s London and Psychoraag’s Glasgow is experienced by protagonists Chanu, Karim and Zaf, I posit that cities emerge as inevitably pluralising locations that shape cultural practices of masculinity in a range of ambivalent ways. Simultaneously, my dual focus on a novel set within the globally populated British capital city of London and Scotland’s biggest city, Glasgow, further unpacks the diversity encapsulated within British identities. My fifth chapter, ‘Mapping British Muslim Masculinities’, takes a more theoretical approach to the notion of location thereby exploring how protagonists in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014) struggle to ‘locate’ themselves and so retreat into violently patriarchal forms of masculinity. Characters such as Chotta and Barra in Aslam’s novel, and Zafar in Rahman’s text, transpose questions of masculinity onto women’s bodies which they physically and emotionally abuse. Male characters who resist such aggressive constructions of patriarchal masculinity, however, are silenced and murdered in these novels. Drawing on postmodern theories of identity espoused by critics like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who, in their concept of rhizomatic identities, celebrate a fluid and untethered sense of self, this chapter argues that Aslam and Rahman’s novels reject such theorisations of the migrant self as shown in their male characters’ retreatment into pugnacious and threatening forms of masculinity as a means to reterritorialize themselves.102 The book’s final chapter brings discussion up to date by considering home and family spaces in two recent novels, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018). Each of these texts is preoccupied with notions of fatherhood, family and finality as male protagonists mourn the loss of deceased fathers and close with the tragic passing of young British Muslim men. In these two novels, that speak to contemporary political events in Britain and further afield, I observe how Shamsie and Gunaratne navigate the thorny terrain of presentday Islamism which is often read through problematic ‘crisis of masculinity’ narratives. Furthermore, using the work of Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe, I explore each text’s metaphorical deployment of death. I argue that the novels pose important, and crucially unresolved, questions about necropolitics and the validity and longevity of the British Muslim male archetype more broadly. My study aims to complement pre-existing scholarship on the films, novels and authors in this study. However, it addresses a conspicuous lacuna in these studies as very few of these critical analyses have considered masculinity in relation to this literary and cinematic corpus. Notable exceptions include: Morey and Yaqin’s writing on the figure of the ‘Islamic Rage Boy’, an article by Ahmed in which she examines representations of British Muslim masculinity in Kenny Glenaan and Simon Beaufoy’s film Yasmin (2004), a chapter of Matthes’ monograph Writing and Muslim Identity where she analyses comparative constructions of Muslim masculinities in Kureishi’s The Black Album and My Son the Fanatic with the German Turkish writer Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak and Fernàndez Carbajal’s Queer Muslim Diasporas in Literature and Film

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which includes substantial critical readings of queer Muslim identities in fiction from across the world.103 Nevertheless, my book differs from these studies in valuable ways. In the first instance, Morey and Yaqin’s work on the ‘Islamic Rage Boy’ centres upon the accumulative effects of stereotyping on British and American Muslim men rather than investigating cultural responses to this misrepresentation. Ahmed’s article, meanwhile, focuses on British Muslim masculinity as represented by a white British writer screenwriter (Beaufoy) and a director of the same ethnicity (Glenaan). Fernàndez Carbajal, on the other hand, focuses solely on constructions of gender and sexuality that resist heteronormativity. Matthes’ contribution is the closest to my purposes as she pursues notions of transculturality in relation to masculinity within her selected texts. Even so, Matthes’ examination of masculinity is a constituent part of her broader research into engagements with Islam in British and German immigrant and travel writing, therefore, her useful intervention is limited to a chapter rather than being the basis of a study. Matthes’ reading is also constrained by a concentration on the young men’s practices of masculinity rather than exploring gender practices of older generations of immigrants too. This book is therefore the first comprehensive and substantive comparative analysis of British Muslim Masculinities that draws on and imbricates a mix of gender, migrant, diaspora, postcolonial, transcultural and comparative theoretical frameworks. As such, this book contributes both to the aforementioned field of British Muslim cultural studies, as represented by work from Ahmed, Chambers, Fernández Carbajal, Sarah Illot, Amin Malak, Matthes, Morey and Yaqin, Geoffrey Nash and Esra Mirze Santesso, and to studies that explore cultural depictions of masculinity in which immigrant and diaspora perspectives are often underexplored.104 To this end, my work is also in conversation with work by Brian Baker, Carole Jones and Berthold Schoene-Harwood, who have examined masculinity in contemporary British cultural production,105 thereby responding to Baker’s call for more critical angles in which ‘an analysis of the dominant and subordinate forms of masculinity helps to reorganise the fields of Gender Studies towards the subject and helps undo (or at least bring into view) problematic male/female, masculine/feminine binaries of earlier discourses on sex and gender.’106 As an increasingly prominent ‘other’, literary and cinematic depictions of British Muslim masculinities present a beneficial case study in developing the kinds of perspectives that Baker outlines. Indeed, a thorough critical and comparative reading of the gender practices and performances that constitute British Muslim masculinities across a select sample of cultural texts provides a valuable insight into how forms of masculinity travel, change, adapt and are disparaged. British Muslim Masculinities are slippery, diverse, heterogeneous identities that comprise of a vast array of different religious perspectives, regional and national allegiances, class positionings and sexualities, a transcultural reading of these identity assemblages is best placed to challenge stereotypical archetypes and to capture this unique and continually shifting diversity. In her polemic Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues for a reconceptualization of comparative literature after the events of 9/11 that is sensitive

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to how literature ‘cannot predict but prefigure’.107 By referring to literature’s ability to prefigure, Spivak affirms literature as an unverifiable cultural form that is intimately related to the worldly material context in which it was produced yet cannot be ‘tied to a single “fact”’.108 The act of reading literature, therefore, necessitates reflective and sustained thinking, rather than quantifiable truths, which is often at odds with the impulsive and fast-paced conditions of contemporary life. It is this perspective and conception of the comparative literature discipline I take forward in critically reading British Muslim subjectivities in contemporary literature and film.

Part One

Writing British Muslim Masculinities before and after The Satanic Verses Affair

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1

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

Writing on the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Or, Virtue Regained (1740),1 Terry Eagleton describes how the novel’s perceived pornographic qualities sparked transnational protests, translations and literary imitations, such as Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741).2 Richardson’s Pamela, Eagleton argues, was less so a novel than ‘a cultural event […] a multimedia affair stretching all the way from domestic commodities to public spectacles, instantly recodable from one cultural mode to the next’.3 In the first two chapters of this book, I mobilize Eagleton’s reading of Pamela to claim that Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) can be read as a more recent iteration of a novel and an event which led to cultural production, public debate and demonstrations that continue to influence how writers, filmmakers, artists and the general public read, represent and react to Muslim migrants – and particularly male Muslim migrants. In this chapter, I begin by exploring how Rushdie’s controversial novel explores migration as a process that inevitably, and irrevocably, transforms gender practices. As this chapter will explain, Rushdie’s novel follows the lives of two male protagonists whose gender practices are the site where anxieties about migration most intensely manifest. Questions of gender, and specifically masculinity, are therefore inextricable from Rushdie’s exploration of migration and identity in The Satanic Verses. Born in Mumbai (then Bombay) on 19 June 1947, just less than two months before India would receive independence from Britain in August 1947, Salman Rushdie migrated to Britain, aged fourteen, to attend the renowned Rugby School and eventually studied History at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Briefly moving to Karachi in 1968, where his Kashmiri Muslim family had since relocated, Rushdie returned to Britain in the 1970s where he embarked on a lucrative career working in the London office of the advertising firm Ogilvy and Mather. While working in advertising, Rushdie was credited with coining a number of memorable slogans through which he demonstrated his sharp abilities in wordplay, such as conceiving the portmanteau ‘irresistibubble’ to promote the bubbly textured chocolate bar Aero and ‘Naughty. But nice’ to advertise the UK Milk Board’s Fresh Cream Cake range.4 However, it is with the commercial and critical success of his second novel Midnight’s Children (1981) that Rushdie was able to commit to writing full-time.5 Midnight’s Children received that year’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Man Booker Prize – subsequently also being twice voted the ‘best of all winners’ in

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ceremonies celebrating the Man Booker’s twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversaries. Midnight’s Children, along with his third novel Shame (1983),6 kick-started what the critic Aijaz Ahmad dismissively refers to as the ‘exorbitant celebration of Salman Rushdie’.7 Ahmad’s cynicism refers to how Rushdie’s early fiction was often marketed to satisfy predominately white British middle-class tastes for exoticized narratives of hybrid worlds and identities. Both Ahmad and M. Keith Booker go further by arguing that much of Rushdie’s success is built on his privileged background, a careful staging of diasporic hybridity and an experimental writing style that, as Andrew Teverson summarizes, ‘conforms to the kinds of discourses authorised by the Anglo-American academy’.8 As Susheila Nasta points out, critical acclaim of Rushdie’s originality has often been at the cost of recognition for other British postcolonial writers from earlier periods, such as Sam Selvon, who were writing complex, formally experimental fiction that made use of diverse transcultural influences long before Rushdie put pen to paper.9 Nevertheless, few can argue that Rushdie’s early work made an immutable impact on the British literary and cultural landscape. Throughout the 1980s, Rushdie produced a number of intellectually rich and commercially successful novels that combined a preoccupation with history, a critical awareness of the postcolonial conditions of South Asia alongside a transcultural writing style that drew on influences from Latin American magical realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges), Eighteenthcentury European satirical writing (Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift), Indian traditions of storytelling and myth (the Mahabharata), modernist and postmodernist experimentation (James Joyce, Italo Calvino), cinema, popular music and more. In the public eye, however, it is probably with his fourth, and most controversial, novel The Satanic Verses, that Rushdie’s reputation rests. In Rushdie’s own words, ‘The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs … It is a love song to our mongrel selves.’10 However, as John J. Su remarks, the novel refrains from reproducing a simplistic binary between ‘hybridity and purity’.11 Simon Gikandi, in a famous critique of the novel, observes how The Satanic Verses challenges not only the arguments of nationalists, who favour notions of authenticity and purity, but also those of liberal intellectuals who cherish notions of hybridity. Rather, Gikandi posits that the novel ‘insists on being read as a set of irresolvable oxymorons’.12 In this manner, Rushdie seeks to capture the potentially disorienting nature of migration. Indeed, the novel opens chaotically with the explosion of an airplane over the English Channel. Blown out of their London-bound flight by a Sikh separatist group, the two main protagonists Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta grab onto each other to survive and fall to a safe but bewildering landing on British soil. Their explosive entry to Britain is also conceived as a rebirth as the pair fall from an airliner that ‘cracks in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery’ (Rushdie, p. 4). Landing amidst all the debris of the plane, the two men must now find their way around in what is a new landscape for Gibreel and, for Saladin, a previously familiar country that is now irrevocably transformed by his unorthodox landing. The two men will never be the same again and will undergo a range of metamorphoses while they make sense of their relationship with their new surroundings.

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Despite the vast amount written on Rushdie’s novel, few critics have read the text through the lens of gender, although an important intervention on women characters in The Satanic Verses by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak will be explored shortly, and fewer still have explored the ways that practices of masculinity are challenged, complicated and reconstructed in the novel. This is a striking lacuna as much of The Satanic Verses focuses on the intimate yet fractious relationship between the two central male migrant protagonists, Gibreel and Saladin. Even before the pair have landed in Britain, the omniscient narrator observes the inherent gendering of migration by remarking at how among the detritus of the explosion, are the physical remains of ‘a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia’ and ‘a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever reasonable doubts’ (Rushdie, p 4). This passage highlights how immigration control subjects women to questions of a sexual nature and renders them as both ‘legal appendages’ and sexual objects to male migrants. Furthermore, through the depiction of male genitals and of children, the text also points towards omnipresent xenophobic paranoia about the sexuality of male migrants and, in the then–British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s own words, Britain being ‘swamped’ by migrants as couples are reunited. My reading of The Satanic Verses responds to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s insightful critique of Rushdie’s representation of women characters in The Satanic Verses. For Spivak, female protagonists are denied the psychological complexity afforded to the male characters that populate the text and thus the novel is written on the register of male bonding and unbonding, the most important being, of course, the double subject of migrancy, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. The two are tortured by obsession with women, go through them, even destroy them, within a gender code that is never opened up, never questioned, in this book where so much is called into question, so much is reinscribed.13

In this passage, Spivak not only draws the reader’s attention to the problematic representation of women characters that are superficially imagined with little or no inner lives, but also observes how male characters are ‘obsessed’ with women as a critical marker of their own sense of self. I agree with Spivak’s criticism, but also position this chapter as unpacking this latter point of order as the characters of Saladin and Gibreel perform their masculinity within codes of compulsory heterosexuality, homosocial desire and homosexual panic that reduce women to objects through which these two male-bodied subjects seek to attain and demonstrate their masculinity. I will explore how patriarchal and misogynistic constructions of masculinity emerge as a locus through which the protagonists struggle to translate themselves into their British cultural setting. Consequently, I will be engaging with how the novel shows the refashioning of masculinity through transcultural exchange and encounter yet still at the cost of oppression of women protagonists. I argue that Rushdie’s text reads the existential difficulties and hardships of migration through Gibreel and Saladin’s homosocial desire for one another thereby showing how male rivalry and anxious, repressed sexual desire becomes a way of holding their unsteady sense of self together.

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In doing so, The Satanic Verses offers a variety of rich and incisive readings for the ways in which patriarchal masculinity is shaped by migration, and, by exposing these readings in tandem with Eagleton’s notion of ‘the novel as an event’, I demonstrate how the fictional archetype of the Muslim male migrant became discursively constructed as an obtrusive figure in conversations about migration and national identity in contemporary Britain.

‘Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that’ In its dominant narrative thread, The Satanic Verses explores how ‘[migrants] impose their needs on their new earth, bringing their own coherence to the new-found land, imagining it afresh’ (Rushdie, p. 458). Rushdie’s novel addresses the tension between the transcultural possibilities and existential pain that migration brings with it in a complex ‘multitudinous and polyvocal narrative’ that is ‘part fantasy, part “sociopolitical” and, through the multiple shifting viewpoints and transformations of Gibreel and Saladin, frequently resists interpretation’.14 Both in its literary form and in its characterization, then, The Satanic Verses conveys multiple features of what I term ‘transcultural narrative’, as elaborated in the introduction of the book. For most of the novel, this shape-shifting narrative is told through the perspective of two male migrants from India – Salahuddin Chamchawala and Gibreel Farishta – who perceive their host nation in antithetical ways. Saladin, for instance, is a staunch Anglophile who is ‘seeking to be transformed into the foreignness he admires’ while Gibreel, prefers ‘contemptuously, to transform’ (Rushdie, p. 426), thereby suggesting a transcultural identity that is able to draw from a range of different cultures he encounters. However, as the narrative unfolds, their futures are increasingly bound together and both are forced to transform through their experience of migration. Salahuddin Chamchawala is an actor who was born in Bombay but, after a privateschool education in England, turns his back both on his Indian homeland and his devout Muslim father to become a ‘goodandproper Englishman’ (Rushdie, p. 43). Saladin’s devotion to England, and even his desire to leave, is presented as a rejection of paternal influence as he is ‘convinced that his father would smother all his hope unless he got away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and himself ’ (Rushdie, p. 36). Indeed, his father is an overbearing presence in his enormous size that literally towers over him, both through his hegemonic position in the local community as an affluent businessman and through his strict adherence to Islam. Saladin’s Anglophilia, and his reasons for migrating, are therefore grounded in his repudiation of a localized form of hegemonic masculinity and a desire for more freedom away from paternal constraint. Ironically, his attempts to cut himself off from his Indian Muslim heritage and reconstruct himself as what the British politician Thomas Babington Macaulay infamously referred to as ‘brown-skinned Englishmen’, who would be ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’, are undercut by the Anglicization of his name to ‘Saladin Chamcha’.15 Saladin, for example, calls to mind the warrior sultan of Egypt and Syria Saladin, who led the Muslim military

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campaign against the Christian crusaders from Europe. Yet, in the novel’s protagonist Saladin, this name is ironically reversed, as the character Jumpy Joshi notes, ‘He was a real Saladin […] A man with a holy land to conquer, his England, the one he believed in’ (Rushdie, p. 174), implying Saladin’s religious-like devotion to England. Saladin’s surname is also cognate with the fictional protagonist Gregor Samsa of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis transforms from a human into a beetle, presaging Saladin’s eventual metamorphosis into a devil-goat which functions as an allegory for the ways he is viewed by anti-immigrant discourses in 1980s Britain and of the transformative power of migration upon formerly entrenched identities.16 However, Saladin’s shortened surname also translates into Hindi and Urdu as ‘spoon’ thereby both bringing to mind a sense of superiority, as in the British idiom ‘born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth’, and sycophancy, as in the Hindi and Urdu idiomatic use of spoons to signify someone who uses excessive flattery to people in positions of power. Andrew Teverson points out: Chamcha, in this incarnation, is representative of a class of migrants well-theorised in discursive accounts of post-colonial diasporic identities. He is a near relative of the psychologically traumatised ‘native intellectual’ in Frantz Fanon’s writings, who has internalised the racism of a dominant white culture to such a degree that he attempts a ‘hallucinatory whitening’.17

Indeed, Saladin faces institutionalized and systematic racism throughout his life but, until his transformative encounter with Gibreel, he is blind to the multiple ways that British society is prejudiced against him. As an actor, for instance, he is refused a place on screen as ‘his face is the wrong colour for their colour TVs’ (Rushdie, p. 61) and instead he works only as a ‘voice-over’ for advertisements due to his unique ability to mimic different accents. His mimicry has been developed through years of parroting English customs in order to assimilate, for which he has been rewarded with a house in the moneyed London area of Notting Hill and marriage to a wealthy English woman named Pamela Lovelace whose voice stank of ‘Yorkshire puddings and hearts of oak’ (Rushdie, p. 180). Significantly, the character’s name also echoes two novels by Samuel Richardson – namely Pamela; or, a Virtue Regained (1740) and the villainous Robert Lovelace in Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady (1748).18 While the protagonist’s first name hints at the titular character of Richardson’s text which, like The Satanic Verses caused a furore when it was published, Rushdie’s recycling of the surname ironically subverts the power relationship in Richardson’s novel whereby Robert Lovelace lusts after Clarissa and manipulates her to receive sexual gratification. Here, in Rushdie’s text, it is Saladin who is actually using and manipulating Pamela Lovelace’s body to gain access to upper-class Britain. Yet his work in advertising also exposes the racist undercurrents of Britain, as explained by the media executive Hal Valence: Within the last three months, we re-shot a peanut-butter poster because it researched better without the black kid in the background. We re-recorded a building society jingle because T’Chairman thought the singer sounded black,

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Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film even though he was as white as a sodding sheet, and even though, the year before, we’d used a black boy who, luckily for him, didn’t suffer from an excess of the soul. We were told by a major airline that we couldn’t use any blacks in their ads, even though they were actually employees of the airline. (Rushdie, p. 267)

Despite these experiences of racism, Saladin’s uncritical appreciation for Britain remains undeterred up to the point when his fall from the airplane, with Gibreel, symbolically signals the onset of his gradual realization of the extent of racist prejudice in the UK. Saladin and Gibreel first meet on a flight to London from Mumbai and strike up a conversation about both being actors. Gibreel enjoys extraordinary success on screen as a Bollywood superstar who was so in demand that he once worked on ‘eleven movies’ simultaneously (Rushdie, p. 11). In contrast to Saladin’s mimicry, Gibreel’s success is due to his ability to transform through his acting roles, as the omniscient narrator remarks, ‘Gibreel had spent the greater part of his unique career incarnating, with absolute conviction, the countless deities of the subcontinent in the popular genre of movies known as “theologicals”’ (Rushdie, p. 16). Gibreel is hired to play the part of Ganesha in six films, which requires him to wear an elephant mask, and of Hanuman, which leads him to don a monkey tail, ‘proved so popular that monkey-tails became de rigeur for the city’s [Mumbai] young bucks’ and also made him ‘irresistibly attractive to women’ (Rushdie, p. 24). With this acting success, then, he fell into a ‘an avalanche of sex’ whereby ‘several […] young ladies asked him if he would keep the Ganeshmasks on while they made love, but he refused out of respect for the dignity of God’ (Rushdie, p. 25). Gibreel enthusiastically embraces his popularity with women as he had previously been unsuccessful in attracting the opposite sex. Female attention, then, becomes a way through which he validates his masculinity, as the text continues: ‘[Women] were vessels into which he could pour himself, and when he moved on, they would understand that it was his nature, and forgive’ (Rushdie, p. 26). As befits an indulgent lifestyle, Gibreel develops an illness that results in not only a career break but also a loss of his Islamic faith and a fractured sense of self which is interrogated throughout Rushdie’s novel. DCRA Goonetilleke argues plausibly that Gibreel’s exposure to Hinduism is conceived as a corrupting influence, which damages his sense of self as a Muslim.19 Yet, Gibreel’s religious and cultural identity is also deeply connected to his masculinity and his sexuality. By crossing sectarian and religious boundaries and performing Hinduism, he has been able to attain valued aspects of hegemonic masculinity, such as sexual success, fame and wealth. His own Muslim self, however, was unable to deliver women to his bedroom and so he believes that, when not acting as a Hindu, he is a ‘creature of surfaces’ (Rushdie, p. 27). This is even more apparent when, after demonstratively rejecting Islam by filling himself with varieties of pork meat, he lays eyes on Alleluia, or Allie, Cone. He instantly falls in love with Allie Cone deciding then and there to pursue her to England. The effect she has upon Gibreel is evoked by her name, which resembles both a word for religious rejoicing (Hallelujah) in Hebrew and the Islamic word of God – as Søren Frank points out ‘Allie replaces Allah’.20

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What this aspect reveals, then, is that women play a dominant role in how Gibreel defines his masculinity. Even Gibreel’s name emphasizes the influence that women play on his sense of self as the reader learns that, following his mother’s death, Gibreel rejects his patronymic moniker and rebrands himself with the name that his mother used to call him. Rejecting his name is striking as he was named ‘Ismail after the child involved in the sacrifice of Ibrahim, and Najmuddin, star of the faith; he’d given up quite a name when he took the angel’s’ (Rushdie, p. 17). Ismail, as the text notes, was the son of Ibrahim, a figure who, according to Islamic, Jewish and Christian belief, was challenged to sacrifice his son in order to show his faith in God. By embracing his mother’s preference of name, he is symbolically enacting a role-reversal and, much like Saladin’s migration to Britain, is killing off his father’s influence. Furthermore, by taking up the name Gibreel, he is connoting himself with the messenger of God, the Archangel Gabriel, from whom the Prophet Muhammad received divine messages recorded in the Koran. He explains to Saladin before the fateful crash, ‘my mummyji, Spoono, my one and only Mamo, because who else was it who started the whole angel business, her personal angel, she called me farishta [Urdu and Hindi word for angel], because apparently I was too damn sweet’ (Rushdie, p. 17). As will be discussed later in the chapter, Gibreel’s belief that he is indeed an angel messenger, and his controversial dreams in which he reimagines sections of the Koran, can be traced back to his anxious desire for female attention in order to feel that he is performing a hegemonic form of masculinity, from both his mother and Allie Cone. However, the text also implies that some of this anxiety about gaining women’s sexual attention may also be explained by repressed homosexual tendencies. The reader learns that the thirteen-year-old Gibreel left colonial-era Poona [now Pune] for Bombay [Mumbai], ‘his first migration’ (Rushdie, p. 17), for work as a tiffin-seller and was taken in by a man named Babasaheb implying that he is both his new father, as Baba is the Hindi and Urdu word for ‘father’, and his owner, as the term ‘saheb’ is often used colloquially throughout India to refer to a ‘master’. However, as he gets older, he is alarmed by a ‘dream of marrying the Babasaheb’ that ‘brought him awake, flushing hotly for shame, and after that, he began to worry about the impurity in his make-up that could create such terrible visions’ (Rushdie, p. 22). Gibreel’s putative homosexuality (and possible incestuous desire for a father figure) also seems to have been recognized by Babasaheb who cites homophobic reasons for firing him from his job and forces him out, saying, ‘Boy like you is too damn good-looking to carry tiffins on his head all his life. Get gone now, go, be a homosexual movie actor. I fired you five minutes back’ (Rushdie, p. 23). Gibreel’s anxiety surrounding his masculinity, and the desperate need for females to give him attention, is therefore forged through a complex relationship to men in his life. Gibreel and Saladin’s intimate relationship lends more opportunities for reading Gibreel as a protagonist with potentially repressed same-sex desires. As they tumble to the Earth from the exploding airplane, Gibreel clings onto Saladin in a tight embrace. Although the most obvious reading of this scene is of twins sharing a placenta, I argue that this moment signifies a moment of homoerotic intimacy, which results in each character transforming themselves in terms of cultural and gendered identities. Saladin, for example, is described as overriding his stoic instinct to push away male intimacy

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and instead ‘opened his arms and Farishta swam into them until they were embracing head-to-tail’ (Rushdie, p. 6). Thus this moment of male–male closeness triggers a set of transformations through which the characters physically change into non-human bodies. Due to these metamorphoses, the cultural values of their homeland and their host nation, particularly those pertaining to practices of gender, are continually reassessed, revalued and redrawn into transcultural masculinities that attempt to create new ways of being through the range of different cultural understandings of gender available to them. Indeed, their homoerotic embrace, which conveys notions of twin-like sameness, is paradoxically the moment where they are briefly united, ‘Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish fall’ (Rushdie, p. 4), and then changed into two different opposing forces, as in each others’ arms, they become ‘metamorphic, hybrid’ (Rushdie, p. 6). It is at this point where that they ceased to be ‘just two brown men, falling hard’ (Rushdie, p. 5) and change into a devil-goat (Saladin) and an angel (Gibreel). This is also a division between the divine and the animal, between the high and the low, for Saladin, the fall is a relegation to the nature of a chthonian deity, while for Gibreel the fall is an elevation into the supposed messenger of God. While Gibreel’s life has always been characterized by the ability to shape-shift and assume new personas, this male–male moment of intimacy also leads to Saladin’s gradual arrival at a radically different Weltanschauung through which his visions of a benevolent Britain will not survive. Their arrival to Britain, on the beaches of Hastings, marks a new point from which the two protagonists’ cultural and gendered identities will never be the same again. It is also a scene brimming with metaphors and references that point to new transcultural beginnings and fusions. The plane, for example, explodes in ‘a big bang’, thereby evoking the celestial longue durée, and is ‘followed by falling stars’ which bring to mind the birth of Christ in the Nativity (Rushdie, p. 3). It is particularly striking, however, that Saladin and Gibreel are hurtling towards Hastings Beach. The Hasting coastline is where William the Conqueror arrived in 1066 and, after winning the Battle of Hastings in the same year, united the various tribes living within England. Hastings and 1066, therefore, are frequently invoked as starting points in the English national narrative, as suggested by R.J. Yeatman and W.C. Sellar’s classic irreverent history of the country entitled 1066 and All That.21 Crucially, the place of landing for Saladin and Gibreel introduces a powerful and controversial reading of this migratory journey as the arrival of two Indian-born men of Muslim heritage is also textually related to the invasion of William the Conqueror. Much as William the Conqueror, later William I, is credited as a founder of the English nation, he too, the novel infers, was an outsider from foreign lands. In other words, foreigners arrive to Britain throughout history and it is through these arrivals that a nation comes into being. Beyond this British historical reference, Saladin and Gibreel’s descent into Hastings is also marked by allusions to both British and Indian cultural heritage. One the one hand, Saladin and Gibreel’s fall calls to mind the celebrated British film A Matter of Life and Death (dir. Powell and Pressburger, 1946) in which a British airman whose airplane has been shot down allegedly cheats death. He is then forced to defend his right to live and stay with the US-American woman he loves in a courtroom scene in Heaven that literally puts his Britishness on trial. In one of the film’s most famous

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scenes, the celestial judge asks the pilot’s British lawyer to account for Britain’s colonial record in front of a jury composed of people from South Asia, Africa, Ireland and the Caribbean. In so doing, Rushdie’s novel intertextually aligns its interrogation into discourses of migration and Britishness with the anxieties about the morality of the British colonial project conveyed in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film. Moreover, as the pair are catapulted from Air India flight 420, Gibreel sings a ‘gazal’ or ghazal with lyrics that express a desire for transcultural reincarnation, ‘to be born again […] first you have to die’ (Rushdie, p. 31), followed by lines of song that celebrate transnational exchange, ‘O, my shoes are Japanese […] These trousers are English, if you please. On my head, read Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that’ (Rushdie, p. 4). Stephen Morton explains that the ghazal is a ‘form of lyric poetry written in couplets with a regular metre and rhyme scheme’ that was initially written in Arabic during the late sixth century, travelled through Persia and became a popular form of Urdu court literature during the period of Mughal control in North India. Morton notes therefore that Rushdie’s use of the ghazal in the novel ‘locates his engagement with the Islamic world in terms of India’s Muslim cultural inheritance’.22 True though this may be, I would argue that Rushdie reconfigures the ghazal in this passage to carry the transcultural experience of Gibreel and Saladin, much like how the ghazal travelled from Arabic-speaking geographies through to Anatolia and the Balkans in the West and to the Indian subcontinent in the East, thereby bringing the literary genre into connection with transnational literary and cinematic intertexts. Ashley Dawson, for instance, shows how the song Gibreel sings is lifted from Raj Kapoor’s 1955 Bollywood blockbuster Shree 420.23 The song’s lyrics in particular are taken from Shankar Jaikishan’s ‘Meera Joota Hai Japani’, which translates into English as ‘My Shoes are Japanese’, in which the singer boasts pride in being Indian despite the clothes having been made in different countries, as Dawson explains, it is a song ‘that emphasized the adaptive capacity of Indians’.24 Drawing on the critic Sumita Chakravarty’s research on Indian popular cinema, Dawson argues that Gibreel invokes ‘the malleable persona of the male film protagonist [which] serves as an allegory of the successful fusion of the multiple forms of difference, from class to caste to religion to region, that characterize the Indian nation’.25 Gibreel’s singing, then, brings this tradition of adaption and malleability to the shores of Britain and suggests that he will be able to fuse new forms of identity that combine both his Indian Muslim heritage and his new homeland of Britain. This is encapsulated in one of the most quoted parts of the novel: How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly? (Rushdie, pp. 8–9)

The opening of the novel is therefore a scene of transcultural possibility in which religious, cultural and historical grand narratives are all evoked, fragmented

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and enmeshed together to suggest renewal, rebirth and recycling, through the homoerotic bonds between Gibreel and Saladin.

‘I put down roots in the women I love’ Rushdie’s novel is well known for its controversial depiction of Islam, but The Satanic Verses also contains what Joy Wang interprets as other ‘lesser known instances of heresy’, such as ‘Saladin Chamcha’s irreverent fantasy about the Queen of England as the object of his fervent sexual desire’26 (Wang, 52). Confined to a hospital bed, unable to contact his wife Pamela and transformed into a demonic goat-like being, Saladin ‘found himself dreaming of the Queen, of making tender love to the Monarch. She was the body of Britain, the avatar of State, and he had chosen her, joined with her; she was his Beloved, the moon of his delight’ (Rushdie, p. 169). While I would hesitate to conflate sexually fantasizing about the British monarch with Rushdie’s inflammatory representation of Islam under the moniker of heresy, Saladin’s lustful dreams about the Queen metaphorically capture both his intense attraction towards Britain and, through their impossibility, how he is excluded from fully and satisfyingly identifying as British. Ironically, just as Saladin erotically covets the literal body of the State, his own body has been transformed into what the white British state views him as. Not long after Gibreel and Saladin’s fall to the Hastings beach, Saladin is captured by police officers on the search for illegal immigrants. Thrown into the back of a police van, or what is colloquially known as a ‘Black Maria’, the metamorphosis of Saladin into a sort of devilish goat that began when his body was embraced by Gibreel goes into overdrive. Despite Saladin’s obvious alarm at both the situation and his new visage, the police do not react at all. Rather, the three policemen treated the horned and hoofed appearance of Saladin as ‘the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine’ (Rushdie, p. 158). This disturbing metamorphosis, then, serves as a metaphor for how the British state dehumanizes undocumented migrants – a status they now incorrectly classify him with after witnessing his fall from the airplane. Within the walls of the police van, the officers indulge in a torrent of humiliation that focuses on Saladin’s sexuality and his bodily functions by stripping his clothes off him. In the process, it is revealed that Saladin’s sexual organs have also undergone a transformation: Saladin was also taken aback by the sight of his phallus, greatly enlarged and embarrassingly erect, an organ that he had the greatest difficulty in acknowledging as his own. ‘What’s this then?’ joked Novak – the former ‘Hisser’ – giving it a playful tweak. ‘Fancy one of us, maybe?’ Whereupon the ‘moaning’ immigration officer, Joe Bruno, slapped his thigh, dug Novak in the ribs, and shouted ‘Nah, it aint. Seems like we really got his goat.’ ‘I get it,’ Novak shouted back, as his fist accidentally punched Saladin in his newly enlarged testicles. ‘Hey! Hey!’ howled Stein, with tears in his eyes. ‘Listen, here’s an even better … no wonder he’s so fucking horny’. (Rushdie, p. 157)

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Through their degrading ridicule of Saladin’s genitalia, the immigration officers are drawing on racist tropes surrounding the penis size of male migrants and their supposedly animalistic sexuality. As theorists of masculinity such as Susan Bordo have noted, there is a pervasive connection between penis size and masculinity that exists in many cultures across the world.27 The possessor of a large penis or at least a man who is believed to have a large penis is thought to have closer claims to a tough, resilient, virile masculinity. Men with smaller penises are, in contrast, often depicted as weaker and more effeminate. Saladin’s penis, however, disrupts this trope by turning the migrant’s virile member into the centre of a circus-like game in which an ithyphallic figure far from being revered is instead turned to the object of verbal and physical abuse. Saladin’s gigantic genitalia in fact dehumanize him in a paradoxical fashion in which a throbbing erection symbolizes emasculation and abjection. Saladin’s transformation, and his treatment in the Black Maria, calls to mind Judith Butler’s work on ‘abject bodies’. For Butler, the formation and construction of subjecthood is always in relation to ‘abject’ bodies which ‘constitute that site of dreaded identification against, which – and by virtue of which – the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life’.28 Within Butler’s schema, abjection refers to bodies and populations that are excluded from normative ideals of subjecthood and regarded as ‘unintelligible’. As she writes in Bodies That Matter, the logic of heteronormative patriarchy ensures that heterosexual bodies are constructed as real because their sexual habits are viewed as natural and intelligible. Within this economy of gender and sexuality, queer bodies are considered abject as their desires are perceived by this same system as unnatural and unintelligible. In order to be a subject, then, a person must reject the abject which can, for example, be defined as gender practices, sexual or bodily acts that defy a normative social order. By assigning a body or population ‘abject’ status, societal and governmental apparatus can therefore legitimate physical and structural violence on those bodies as they have relinquished their claims to subjecthood. As such, the police officers feel no shame about assaulting Saladin’s abject body which, in its goat-like appearance, is perceived as animalistic and non-human. Whilst running the risk of presentism, Lindsay A. Balfour notes how there are disturbing parallels between the treatment of Saladin’s abject body in the back of the police van and the treatment of terrorist bodies in internment camps, such as Abu Ghraib.29 Indeed, as Jasbir K. Puar has noted, circulated photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib served to make the terrorist body abject as images obscured their facial characteristics thereby showing prisoners as faceless figures covered in blood, urine, faeces and vomit.30 According to Julia Kristeva, bodily fluids play a key role in constructions of the abject as they are viewed as repulsive or disgusting and should be cast out to preserve a sense of normative subjectivity.31 Balfour therefore reads Saladin’s transformation and, as I will shortly elaborate, his bodily excretions in the Black Maria as evidence of his abjection in a manner that prefigures the Abu Ghraib photographs. However, Puar also notes that the images that came out from Abu Ghraib often depicted prisoner bodies as naked, thereby drawing attention to their male genitalia, with US soldiers manipulating their bodies to show them in sexual and intimate acts with one another. Puar argues that these photographs represent a very specific form

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of homophobia that links male–male sexuality with shame, humiliation and abjection, thus ‘queerness as sexual deviancy is tied to the monstrous figure of the terrorist as a way to otherize and quarantine subjects classified as “terrorists”, but also to normalize and discipline a population through these very monstrous figures’.32 While Saladin is not a terrorist, he is still subject to similar forms of humiliation whereby the immigration officers not only reduce him to the status of a non-human rolling in his own faeces, but also mock him for his ‘greatly enlarged and embarrassingly erect’ penis and possible homosexuality. In some respects, Rushdie’s muted characterization of Saladin as queer and abject by the police could be interpreted as a reflection of how queer bodies during the height of the AIDS crisis, which coincides with the novel’s publication, were associated with death and disease. Thus, Saladin loses control of his bowels and defecates inside the police van thereby further demonstrating his descent into animality and abjection. As his abusers force him to eat his stool, Saladin protests at how he has been misclassified and argues for his status as an intelligible subject: The humiliation of it! He was – had gone to some lengths to become – a sophisticated man! Such degradations might be all very well for riff-raff from villages in Sylhet or the bicycle-repair shops of Gujranwala, but he was cut from a different cloth! ‘My good fellows’ he began, attempting a tone of authority that was pretty difficult to bring off from that undignified position on his back with his hoofy legs wide apart and a soft tumble of excrement all about him, ‘my good fellows, you had best understand your mistake before it’s too late’. (Rushdie, p. 158)

Distinguishing himself from the less affluent, and therefore abject population, of South Asian Muslim migrants from the Sylhet region of Bangladesh who, are particularly associated with the Tower Hamlets region of London and will be discussed in later chapters through both Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know, and those from the modern Pakistani city of Gujranwala, often connected to the Northern British city of Bradford, Saladin differentiates himself as a subject – in this case as an Indian-born British citizen and as someone from a supposedly more respectable class. In other words, Saladin is vividly confronted with how white British racists do not hold the same hierarchy of South Asian migrants and that, in their eyes, he is indistinguishable from other forms of abject South Asian migrants. He is, therefore, made into precisely what white racist British perceptions are of him – dehumanized, abject, powerless, queered and, consequently, emasculated. Saladin’s frantic pronouncement that in this ‘moderate and common-sensical land’ there could not possibly be ‘room for such a police van’ is repeatedly challenged throughout the rest of the novel (Rushdie, p. 158). The protagonist’s fall from the sky, then, also reflects a downward spiral in social terms as he is no longer classified as a ‘goodandproper Englishman’ (Rushdie, p. 43) and circumstances ensure that he encounters a different side to migrant life in the British capital, a city that is ‘visible but unseen’ (Rushdie, p. 350). Finding shelter in the loft of the Shaandaar Café, owned by Bangladeshi migrants of the kind he previously looked down upon, he is told stories

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of racism and bigotry which correlate with his own horrific experiences in the police van. However, as Andrew Teverson observes, Saladin ‘remains an unwilling student of his experiences’ and one such way he is resistant to adapt is through his continuing obsession with British women who signify emblems of the Anglophilia he desperately tries to cling to even when he is faced with a mounting pile of evidence that Britain is rejecting him.33 Alongside his sexual fantasies about the Queen then, Saladin has fixations with two other British women: his wife Pamela and the mountain-climber Alleluia Cone. In the first instance, Saladin’s attraction to Pamela is entirely predicated on her Englishness, as Saladin ‘pursued her for two years. England yields its treasures with reluctance. He was astonished by his own perseverance and understood that she had become the custodian of his destiny, that if she did not relent then his entire attempt at metamorphosis would fail’ (Rushdie, p. 49). At this juncture, it is worth dwelling on the intertextual significance of Pamela Lovelace’s name again as her Britishness, or rather ‘Englishness’ in this instance, is constructed through reference to two novels by Samuel Richardson that, as previously elaborated, caused a transnational publicity stir in eighteenth-century Britain that, to some extent, prefigure the furore over Rushdie’s own novel. Furthermore, while Pamela problematically represents ‘virtue rewarded’ as she marries her sexual abuser in Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded, Lovelace is the surname of the libertine who tries to corrupt the titular character Clarissa in Clarissa; Or, the History of a Young Lady thereby presenting a threatening masculinity to the novel’s central protagonist Clarissa. By referencing Richardson, Rushdie is therefore aligning Saladin’s desperation to ‘attain’ Britishness with the sexual abuse that Pamela and Clarissa suffer in Richardson’s canonical novels. In fact, there is also metafictional significance in Rushdie’s choice of naming as he is associating his own fictional project, and it is worth keeping in mind that this is the first of Rushdie’s novels to be set entirely within the UK rather than India or Pakistan, with two of the earliest and most formative novels in the British literary canon. His novel, then, can be read as metaphorically captured in the characterization of Saladin who is negotiating British national and cultural identity, as well as claims to the British literary canon, evoked by the strikingly named Pamela Lovelace. As befits a relationship based on a mixture of frenzied desire for Britishness and superficial love, one which was a ‘picture postcard’, the marriage breaks down in the novel as Pamela conducts an extramarital affair with Saladin’s friend Jumpy Joshi which brings her to the stark realization that, for Saladin, ‘I was bloody Britannia. Warm beer, mince pies, common-sense and me. But I’m really real, too […] I really really am’ (Rushdie, p. 175). Like his feelings for the British monarch, the significantly named Pamela Lovelace is characterized almost as a border guard, through which sexual intercourse and romantic union, he can attain Britishness, as Saladin reflects: ‘I put down roots in the women I love’ (Rushdie, p. 59). Far more significant for plot development, however, is Saladin and Gibreel’s competitive, jealous desire for Allie Cone. Allie Cone is a complex presence in the novel that illuminates racial hierarchies within migrant’s claims to Britishness. For, although she was born in Britain and therefore holds British citizenship from birth, Cone’s mother and father are Polish Jewish migrants who came to the UK following the Second World War. Owing to his traumatic internment in a prison camp during the

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Holocaust, Allie’s father Otto zealously embraces Britain as a new home by, like Saladin, Anglicizing their surname from Cohen to Cone and developing an Anglophile bias which led him to behave like ‘a pantomime member of the English gentry’ (Rushdie, p. 297). In ways that sharply resemble Saladin, Allie describes how her father was no ‘melting-pot man’ and sought to expunge traces of his background in order to be regarded as British. Saladin’s fascination with Allie, and Otto’s performative Englishness, are all the more pointed when read alongside Thatcherite discourses on race, immigration and nationality. In 1981, the Margaret Thatcher administration had overseen a new Nationality Act that stripped many migrants of British citizenship despite their years of working and living in the UK. Under new legislature, migrants to Britain who had not applied for nationality status beforehand now had to prove that one of their grandparents had been born in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. This resulted in people who had previously built up Britain’s post-war economy, such as the Windrush Generation from the Caribbean and immigrants from South Asia, having their Britishness taken from them. Paul Gilroy identifies the 1981 Nationality Act as a marker of the New Right’s ‘new racism’ and describes how it discriminated against British people of colour yet, under this legal ruling, migrants such as Allie Cone would be also come under pressure.34 Nevertheless, Allie’s migrant background plays no role in Saladin’s desire for her; instead, Saladin fixates on her whiteness. For example, she is associated with ice and snow through her hobby as a mountain-climber and so her beauty is contained in ‘the miracle of her skin. Alleluia Cone, whose iciness could resist the heat of the eight-thousand metre sun. Allie the snow maiden, the ice queen’ (Rushdie, p. 195). Saladin grants Allie power over him, as evidenced in the characterization of her as a queen, yet also demonstrates that his power, and his attraction to it, is literally just ‘skin-deep’. Saladin’s superficial obsession with Allie ignores her migrant background and ‘projects an imagin[ed] unity and identity’ onto white Britishness that precludes considering how many white British citizens have cultural heritage and connections outside the UK.35 However, it is Allie’s relationship to Gibreel that fuels Saladin’s feelings towards her. Having left the Shaandaar Café and now staying at Club Hot Wax, Saladin begins his transformation back into a human. At the Club Hot Wax, wax effigies of racist British politicians such as Enoch Powell and Oswald Mosley are burned and statues of migrants who have contributed to British culture ‘since de-Rome-Occupation’ (Rushdie, p. 292) such as Mary Seacole and Grace Jones are revered on a nightly basis. While in the Club and witnessing their rituals which, ironically critique the term ‘melting pot’ as a metaphor for bland assimilation and poke fun at the famous British tourist attraction Madame Tussaud’s for its celebration of a conservative vision of Britishness, Saladin erupts in rage at his present condition and vows revenge on Gibreel. His explosion in anger results in his metamorphosis back into human as he is ‘humanized – is there any other option to conclude? – by the fearsome concentration of his hate’ (Rushdie, p. 294) and he embarks on a quest to find Gibreel. Eventually, tracking him down at a party, he is infuriated to see his nemesis with the woman he came to England to be with, Allie. A woman who, at least on first impression, resembles the Britishness he so pines for.

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Saladin, then, uses his talent for mimicry to make multiple phone calls to Gibreel where he falsely poses as Allie’s endless lovers. By phoning Gibreel and adopting different voices, Saladin literally enacts a form of satanic verses aimed at disrupting Gibreel’s fragile hold on his identity. As has been elaborated, Gibreel’s own sense of selfworth is intimately connected to female sexual validation. While for Saladin, British women act as guarantors to a British national identity. Saladin’s attempts are successful and Allie leaves Gibreel, leaving the pair without a physical claim to whiteness nor Britishness and only with one another.

‘Forever joined’ Saladin’s transformation triggers his loss of belief in Britain and a burgeoning sense that he needs to negotiate a new transcultural self to survive. However, the novel’s most controversial metamorphosis happens to Gibreel whose loss of faith in Islam, and the break-up of his relationship with Allie Cone, is accompanied by a series of hallucinatory visions through which he believes himself to be the Angel Gibreel. These revelations appear in four ‘dream’ chapters that are scattered throughout thereby evoking a series of ‘ontologically uncertain fictional interventions that exist in their own right and as dreams that appear to be products of the increasingly disorientated imagination of Gibreel’.36 All of these dreams, as Teverson observes, present a revelation of a different kind and, when read alongside the novel’s interrogation of nationhood and belonging through Saladin, question the legitimacy of religious grand narratives.37 Most contentiously, some of these sequences are set in a fictionalized version of seventh-century pre-Islamic Arabia and trace the revelation of the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad, who appears in the novel under the name Mahound. Rushdie’s decision to rename the Prophet has been regarded by some as one of the novel’s most offensive features, as ‘this was originally a derogatory reference for the false Prophet of the Moors used by the medieval European crusaders’.38 As Robert Mills shows in his study Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages, the name Mahound also connotes what were perceived as abject same-sex sexual practices in the Middle Ages. In William Dunbar’s Middle Scots poem ‘The Dance of Seven Deadly Sins’, for instance, the Prophet is referred to with this name and described as having a predilection for anal sex with other men which was supposed to discredit him and discredit the Islamic religion.39 As well as this highly charged and conceivably offensive moniker for the Prophet Muhammad, one character who appears in the dream chapters, Salman-thePersian, also casts doubt on the veracity of the Prophet’s visions by describing him as ‘a businessman and a damned successful one at that’ who can convince his peers and makes ‘revelations of convenience’ (Rushdie, p. 364). One of these ‘revelations of convenience’ relates to the Prophet’s sexual virility. In the novel, the Mahound protagonist insists that men with suitable financial circumstances can marry four women while he can take twelve wives. The text’s engagement with the Prophet’s multiple wives relates to a trope in Orientalist literature which, as Ruth Roded points out, sought to exaggeratedly represent Muhammad as licentious and sexually depraved as a means to demonize Islam and expose it as a supposed false

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religion.40 However, this episode can also be read as a religiously inflected manifestation of Gibreel’s tendency to measure his self-worth according to female sexual attention which brought about his career crisis and loss of faith in the first place. Much has been written by scholars such as Anshuman Mondal and John Erickson on how these sections of the novel relate to Islamic history and theology, as well as their potential for blasphemous reading.41 Another particularly inflammatory incident, for instance, is Rushdie’s reimagining of the Prophet’s wives as sex workers. I do not wish to intervene in or pass judgement on these debates, however it is worth highlighting that Rushdie’s irreverent representation of the Islamic revelations is part of the novel’s broader aim to satirize and question so-called grand narratives of nationhood and religion. Indeed, the template for Gibreel’s supposed revelations is the unsubstantiated incident of the ‘Satanic Verses’. These refer to a group of verses which ‘is recorded by two early Islamic authorities, Al-Tabari and Ibn Sa’d, and concerns verses that were “delivered” to Muhammad in the course of the fifty-third chapter [of the Koran]’. These groups of verses ‘allow a semi-divine or intercessory status’ to three female pagan goddesses, Al-’Lat, Al-’Uzza and Manat. As Erickson explains, these verses are considered blasphemous because ‘they eroded the authority and omnipotence of Allah’.42 Elsewhere, Mondal points out that Rushdie deviates substantially from the ‘conventional historical accounts of the Prophetic sira and the social, religious and political milieu he inhabited’.43 Drawing particular attention to the ‘Return to Jahilia’ part of the novel, wherein Gibreel ‘found himself spouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation, Salman said, rules about every damn thing’ (Rushdie, p. 363–4), Mondal observes how Rushdie exaggerates the lifestyle guidance and prohibitions revealed by the Prophet Muhammad for supposed comic effect thereby seeking to criticize a supposedly rigid and rule-bound lifestyle. For Talal Asad this is conceivably the most blasphemous aspect of the novel as these mistakes and reinterpretations suggest human corruption of the literal word of the divine.44 Furthermore, in the novel’s engagement with rulings regarding the slaughter of animals, Asad argues that Rushdie is implicitly referencing a 1984 media-fuelled controversy regarding halal meat production in which the Thatcher government commissioned a report that recommended Islamic practices of preparing meat be made illegal.45 Regardless, in Rushdie’s text, the Satanic Verses, and historical inaccuracies in the revelation of Islam, are evoked as a way of critiquing ‘official’ narratives that erode alternative readings. This also has significance to the novel’s engagement with migration as a process that can draw attention to the artificial cohesion offered up by discourses of national belonging. This is best exemplified when Gibreel has been spurned by Allie Cone and so drifts through London losing grip with his sense of reality and sanity, matched by the city’s discombobulating ‘fogs’ (Rushdie, p. 352). Under the impression that he is ‘Archangel Gibreel, the angel of Recitation’ (Rushdie, p. 315), he is troubled by visitations from ghosts of previous generations of migrants to London and so decides to use his celestial power to ‘tropicalize’ London (Rushdie, p. 352) as a way of imposing clarity and clearing the fog. In his reading of the novel, John McLeod convincingly identifies temperature as a central motif in some of the protagonists’ resistance to the transcultural uncertainties of migrant identities and their attempts towards clarity.46

Muslim Masculinities on the Move

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Gibreel, in this incarnation, resists his previous cultural pliability and now protests against London’s ‘conglomerate nature’ (Rushdie, p. 398) as a city inhabited by migrants from all over the world. McLeod writes that Gibreel is defeated by ‘the city that defies the cartographic certainty and manageability epitomized by the copy of the London A-Z which he carries in his pocket’.47 Convinced of his supra-human abilities as an archangel, Gibreel decides to heat up London as ‘truth is extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him not her; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. In brief it is heated’ (Rushdie, p. 354). By doing so, McLeod adroitly notes that Gibreel’s desire to change the temperature also links him with a character from another one of his dreams, an exiled Imam who is forced to relocate to London for his literalist approach to religion. Connoting with the ultra-conservative Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who was exiled before returning to Iran to oversee its transformation into an Islamic Republic, the Imam shuts his curtains and turns up his central heating to ‘full blast day and night’ so as to recreate ‘the dry heat of the Desh’ (Rushdie, p. 208). In Gibreel’s vision, the Imam puts his faith in religion against what he perceives as ‘the greatest of lies – progress, science, rights’ (Rushdie, p. 210) and so McLeod identifies Gibreel’s desire to impose a hot climate on London, thereby ridding the city of obscuring weather conditions like rain and fog, as dovetailing with the Imam’s opposition to a society that lives with plurality, partiality and doubt. Gibreel changes the climate by blowing a trumpet which, he believes is his ‘instrument of divine judgement’, that produces ‘little buds of flame’ (Rushdie, p. 461). These flames engulf the heavily migrant-populated Brickhall which is a fictional region of London that combines the names of Brick Lane and Southall; two areas of the British capital that are known for having a large South Asian immigrant population. At the same time, however, a riot is also breaking out on the streets of Brickhall, which begins at one of Saladin’s places of refuge, the Club Hot Wax. In another oblique reference to popular expressions of multicultural assimilation encapsulated in the term ‘melting pot’, the Club is ruined in the fire along with both the statues of racists that are burned every night and the effigies of people with migrant heritage who have contributed to British history and culture. The fiery protests in Brickhall have been caused by the Brickhall population’s outrage at the death of Dr Uhuru Simba who was killed when in police custody in a set of circumstances that call to mind Saladin’s experience in the police van. Dr Simba was held as a suspect in the Granny Ripper case, a series of murders that recall the nineteenth-century Jack the Ripper crimes and have often been a source of xenophobic accusation with commentators in both Victorian and contemporary Britain often claiming the murders were perpetrated by foreigners.48 James Procter and John McLeod have written incisively on the rioting scenes in the novel and how they relate to the reporting of protests in Brick Lane and Southall against the aforementioned 1981 Nationality Act.49 McLeod especially notes that the riots ‘give credence to [Enoch] Powell’s proleptic racializing rhetoric’ in which he infamously claimed that increased immigration to the UK from former colonies would result in widespread rioting through which the streets of Britain would flow with ‘rivers of blood’. Speaking in 1968, Powell and his approach to immigration was nevertheless greatly admired by Thatcher and this is clearly referred to by Rushdie, when Gibreel describes how the ‘street has become red hot, molten, a river the colour

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of blood’ (Rushdie, p. 462). While, as McLeod points out, earlier in the novel Pamela’s new lover Jumpy Joshi has ‘reclaim[ed] the metaphor’ (Rushdie, p. 186) in a poem about immigration, Rushdie’s aestheticization of the riots is somewhat more ambiguous and the sudden narrative shift away from the protests to the reconciliation between Gibreel and Saladin makes it all the more ambivalent.50 It is also, of course, extremely ironic that such images of fire and destruction appear in the novel when The Satanic Verses caused rioting amongst some Muslims following its publication – a topic that will be addressed in the next chapter of this book. Dr Simba’s death and the Granny Ripper crimes are all unbeknownst to Gibreel, however, who surveys the wreckage with pride as the city ‘cleansed itself in flame, purged itself by burning down to the ground’ (Rushdie, p. 461). But Gibreel has a sudden mood change when he sees his now former-friend and rival Saladin cowering underneath a burning pillar in the Shaandaar Café. Gibreel comes to his rescue by exhaling breath that ‘slices the smoke and fire like a knife’ and then carries him ‘along the path of forgiveness, into the hot night air; so that on a night when the city is at war, a night heavy with enmity and rage, there is this small redeeming victory for love’ (Rushdie, p. 468). Gibreel’s act of love challenges him to see beyond his ‘angelic’ incarnation’s desire for absolutism and purity and, in a scene of heroism tinged by homoeroticism, he forgives his friend. Like in the novel’s opening, the two are shown to be ‘forever joined […] their arms locked around one another’s bodies, mouth to mouth, head to tail, as when they fell to earth’ (Rushdie, p. 353). It is through their love, then, that the two repudiate absolutes, grand narratives and learn to embrace change. *** The significance of the relationship between Gibreel and Saladin and what it represents to the novel’s engagement with migration and transcultural identities, is best encapsulated by the Bangladeshi proprietor of the Shaandaar Café, Muhammad Sufyan. When Saladin is taking refuge in the upstairs quarters of the cafe, following his violent experience in the police van and desperation for revenge upon Gibreel, Muhammad Sufyan muses: ‘Question of mutability of the essence of the self ’, he began, awkwardly, ‘has long been subject of profound debate. For example, great Lucretius tells us in De Rerum Natura, this following thing […] “Whatever by its changing goes out of its frontiers,” – that is bursts its banks, – or, maybe, breaks out of its limitations, […] brings immediate death to its old self ’. However, up went the ex-schoolmaster’s finger, ‘poet Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, takes diametrically opposed view. He avers thus: “As yielding wax” – heated, you see possibly for the sealing of documents or such, – is stamped with new designs And changes shape and seems not still the same, Yet it is indeed the same, even so our souls,’ – you hear, good sir? Our spirits! Our immortal essences! – ‘Are still the same forever, but adopt In their migrations ever-varying forms’. (Rushdie, p. 276)

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If, as Andrew Teverson argues, Saladin represents a ‘Lucretian migrant because he seeks to bring death to his old Indian self ’, then Gibreel ‘is like the transformed beings that appear in Ovid because he is moulded into new shapes by his English encounter but remains unerringly scornful of all things English’.51 Over the course of the novel, the struggle between these two ways of translating the migrant self are played out in the homoerotic rivalry and relationship between these two men. Even at the end of the Brickhall fire, the two men save each other again and, in a mirroring of the homoerotic embrace that opened the novel, the opportunities for new beginnings emerge out of the chaotic fire. Ultimately, the novel suggests that neither way offers a satisfying model for fashioning migrant selfhood. Rather, a mixture of these approaches that accepts how ‘the self changes and it remains the same, or, rather, elements of it change, and elements of it are transformed; some aspects of identity are translated, and some remain untranslatable’ is championed.52 Through Rushdie’s characterization of two male protagonists who perpetually transform, conflict with one another, resist interpretation, but are in love with one another, he depicts the difficulty yet crucial importance of developing a transcultural self that brings together aspects of the different cultures with whom one may have allegiance and forges new ways of being. Migration, the novel suggests, is an existentially difficult process in which a range of behaviours and patterns believed to be part of an ‘essential self ’ are exposed as culturally contingent and so must undergo painful metamorphosis but it is also precisely how ‘newness is brought into the world’ (Rushdie, p. 8). For all its exploration of newness and transculturality, Rushdie’s novel also became the catalyst for widespread transnational demonstration and protest over its supposed blasphemous engagement with Islam resulting famously in Ayatollah Khomeini’s pronouncement of a fatwa calling for the novel’s destruction and Rushdie’s murder. The publication and ensuing protests over The Satanic Verses ignited new discourses surrounding masculinity, class and migration that now distinguished Muslim migrant masculinities from previous more encompassing classifications, such as Black British and British Asian masculinities and identities. Reactions to the novel led to larger groups of people identifying as British Muslim and, in a gendered sense, the Bradford book-burnings of Rushdie’s novel gave birth to the now-familiar stereotype of the British Muslim male as a ‘third column’ who defines himself against the socalled values of secularism and individualism said to define Britain. In the chapter that follows, I will be reading subsequent novels that discuss migration and masculinity in the context of the Rushdie Affair, interrogating how these texts position themselves as transcultural narratives vis-à-vis The Satanic Verses, and exploring how these texts engage with the rapidly growing British Muslim identity label and its capacity as a transcultural identification.

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2

Sacred and Secular Masculinities: Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000)

Just as Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741) was a response, albeit parodical, of Richardson’s Pamela (1740), and the ensuing moral panic over sexuality that the eighteenth-century novel instigated, I read Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) as texts that respond to Rushdie’s controversial novel and the series of events and debates that followed its publication.1 The Black Album and White Teeth are two novels that both explore the lasting impact of The Satanic Verses Affair on Britain through the eyes of young male diaspora protagonists. Through the characters Shahid Hasan in The Black Album and Millat Iqbal in White Teeth, these novels imagine alienated young men who, in their search for a fitting identity, develop a sense of self and purpose in relation to the protests following The Satanic Verses controversy. Crucially, it is through political activity, demonstrations and protests engendered by Rushdie’s novel that male characters in all texts cultivate new perceptions of themselves as British Muslim and begin to construct their masculinity in accordance with the gender practices of their British Muslim peers. In this chapter, I return to the notion of The Satanic Verses as an event by examining how Rushdie’s novel is, to paraphrase Terry Eagleton, textually and culturally recodified into cultural production to explore the emergence of British Muslim identities, the racialization of British Muslim masculinities and new forms of politically engaged transcultural fiction.2 14 February 2019 marked thirty years since the pronouncement of the fatwa and the Bradford protests. Foremost among the commentators for this occasion was Hanif Kureishi who spoke on the subject on public radio and penned an article about the novel’s dramatic reception for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). In an interview, Kureishi stated that the combined effect of the Bradford book-burnings, the pronouncement of the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death and the assassination of translators, changed the ‘very notion of writing’ as ‘writers had to think about what they were writing in a way that they never had before’.3 Zadie Smith echoes Kureishi’s thoughts in her memories of the Satanic Verses Affair: I remember it being a constant argument at dinner parties, or in the playground, or on the bus. It would always come up one way or another. There were people who supported the fatwa very strongly and who still feel that way. Then there is the

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Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film other side, who feel absolutely, as I do, that a writer deserves his personal freedoms and that any questioning of it is kind of horrific.4

The incidents of 1989 marked not only a rethinking of the politics of fiction but also a social shift whereby some immigrant and diaspora populations who had previously been considered Asian, ‘a term vague and inaccurate enough not to be as offensive as some of the other words used for us’, had begun to associate themselves with the label Muslim.5 Kureishi’s impetus for writing The Black Album was therefore borne out of a desire to understand what The Satanic Verses affair had ignited in literature and society, explaining that while ‘[Rushdie] wrote a book about religion’, his was ‘about what people might do in its name’.6 Born in Bromley, South London, in 1954 to a Pakistani father and an English mother, Kureishi has emerged as a distinguished writer of contemporary Britain across literary, cinematic and theatrical mediums. The Black Album is a germane example of Kureishi’s creative dexterity as he wrote the novel in 1995 and later adapted it for the stage in 2009. In the interests of maintaining a focused comparative reading in this book, however, I will only be discussing the novel. Having started his career as a playwright, Kureishi made his formidable reputation as the screenwriter of the successful My Beautiful Laundrette (1986), discussed in the following chapter, and eventually went on to write a number of profitable and critically acclaimed novels. His first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award and received the praise of, amongst others, Salman Rushdie. Informed by visits to mosques and interviews with congregations in London and Bradford in the aftermath of the Satanic Verses Affair, Kureishi’s second novel, The Black Album, traces Shahid Hasan’s identity struggle as he navigates the seemingly contradictory attractions of Islamism and hedonism. Kureishi had previously experimented with the same themes in a short story, published in 1994, entitled ‘My Son the Fanatic’ which was also adapted into a film directed by Udayan Prassad in 1997. Both ‘My Son the Fanatic’ and The Black Album characterize the allure of a reactive and literalist version of Sunni Islam through a set of opposing binaries in which a pugnacious and illiberal set of beliefs, buttressed by a selective reading of Islam, are contrasted with a lifestyle that celebrates supposedly ‘postmodern’ approach to sexuality, art and music. However, in the interests of space and coherence, I have opted to concentrate entirely on Kureishi’s novel. Although My Son the Fanatic, which traces a young man’s rebellion against his father’s dogmatic atheism, and love of Jazz music, by joining an Islamist group, is pertinent to the topic of this book, I have chosen to pursue a comparative approach to The Black Album and White Teeth that, I believe, shows how these two novels are in conversation with one another and provide a response to the Satanic Verses Affair through constructions of masculinity. Furthermore, as Anshuman A. Mondal and Kavita Bhanot have explained respectively, The Black Album can be considered an origin text in which the post-Satanic Verses Muslim subject was ‘fixed’ in literary and cultural representation – including in Kureishi’s own later publications like ‘My Son the Fanatic’ and Smith’s novel.7 Nevertheless, for readers who want to explore masculinities in both the aforementioned short story and film, there is thoughtful scholarship by Frauke Matthes and Elahe Haschemi Yekani.8

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The Black Album characterizes the opposing forces of Islamism and hedonism through two sets of characters. On the one hand stands Shahid’s university friends Riaz and his ‘brothers’ who all espouse a politicized form of literalist Sunni Islam, gender essentialism and sexual restraint. On the other lies Shahid’s Cultural Studies lecturer Deedee Osgood, who encourages her student to find himself through Marxism, promiscuous sexuality, literature and pop culture, and mind-altering drugs. In the backdrop of Shahid’s identity crisis, his Thatcherite ‘yuppie’ brother Chili’s personal life is similarly in disarray as he fights addiction to drugs, sex and consumerism. All of these narrative strands come to a head with the publication of a controversial novel which, although not mentioned is clearly Rushdie’s novel, that provokes Riaz’s gang’s fury and results in Shahid choosing between the different lifestyles on offer. The Satanic Verses makes a veiled but nonetheless obvious appearance in Zadie Smith’s celebrated debut novel White Teeth. In White Teeth, Smith renders a post– Second World War British history of migration and multiculturalism in fiction and so the inclusion of an Islamist group that protests an ‘offensive novel’ crucially marks The Satanic Verses as a major rupture in discourses of migration, race, gender, and national and cultural identities in contemporary Britain. Indeed, White Teeth was among the first novels to be published in the UK in the new millennium; timing that was almost certainly deliberate as it coincided with a series of timely discussions about Britishness. In particular, 2000 also saw the publication of the Parekh Report, a governmentcommissioned survey of race relations in the UK which highlighted how the country was at a ‘turning point in its history’. As one of its recommendations, the Parekh Report called for Britain to ‘rethink’ both its ‘“national story and national identity”’ so as to embrace racial and cultural diversity.9 While White Teeth was written and published before the release of the report, the novel certainly took part in this rethinking. In an article for the New York Times, the British-Pakistani journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown singled out White Teeth and its author as representative of a newly energized, dynamic British culture that was becoming increasing at ease with its multicultural, postcolonial identity.10 Born in North London to a Jamaican mother and an English father in 1975, Smith was educated at a comprehensive school and later read English Literature at Rushdie’s alma mater King’s College, Cambridge. Upon release, White Teeth, like The Black Album, came with endorsements from Rushdie who claimed that he was ‘delighted’ by this ‘astonishingly assured debut’.11 Like Rushdie’s breakthrough novel Midnight’s Children, White Teeth also picked up 2000’s James Tait Black Memorial Award as well as other accolades, including the Whitbread Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. White Teeth focuses on three diverse sets of families living in North London: a white Englishman named Archie Jones, his black Jamaican wife Clara and their child Irie who negotiates her different cultural backgrounds; Samad and Alsana Iqbal who migrated from the newly created Bangladesh and have two twin sons named Magid and Millat whose lives are shaped by their father’s guilt at raising them in a majority non-Muslim environment and, eventually, through The Satanic Verses affair; and finally Marcus and Joyce Chalfen whose marriage is ‘a cross pollination between a lapsed-Catholic horticulturalist feminist, and an intellectual Jew’ (Smith, p. 309), and who have a child named Joshua who, comically mirroring Millat’s membership of an Islamist group, joins a radical animal rights organization.

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White Teeth is a rich text that contains an array of penetrating insights into migration, race and gender. Within the Iqbal family alone, the novel explores what Sarah Illott has read as the ‘homosocial’ relationship between Samad and Archie Jones, Samad’s extramarital affair with a white British woman and his anxiety about masturbation habits; these last two factors result in Samad kidnapping his son Magid and sending him to Bangladesh for an upbringing that is ‘uncorrupted’ by the supposedly loose morals of Britain.12 Later in the novel, Magid returns to Britain and Samad is horrified to find that his son is now ‘more English than the English’ (Smith, p. 406). His years in Bangladesh, then, have led him to reject Islam in favour of a dogmatic faith in the power of science. However, for the purposes of my chapter, I am focusing almost entirely on Samad’s other son Millat whose development of Islamist beliefs, in the context of the Satanic Verses Affair, speak closely to the arguments I am building about the event of The Satanic Verses controversy and subsequent emergence of British Muslim masculinities. As will become clear in the following pages, it is through Millat that Smith shrewdly dissects and critiques the emergence of new Muslim masculinities in the wake of the 1989 controversy. Although The Satanic Verses is never mentioned explicitly in Kureishi’s or Smith’s novel, the debates surrounding the controversial text and its impact on the cultural landscape of Britain are explored through Millat Iqbal and Shahid Hasan’s respective membership of Islamist groups. However, both Kureishi’s and Smith’s texts can be argued to reconfigure the Satanic Verses Affair not as a widespread objection of the novel’s contentious approach to Islam but more likely rooted in a form of masculine protest against Britain’s failure to address systematic racism. Racism that, for instance, ensures the socio-economic deprivation of the majority of second-generation diaspora populations, and, with it, an uncertain, precarious future. Similarly, both novels critique millennial discourses of Britain’s so-called liberal multiculturalism, observe the emergence of the British Muslim male as a racialized and gendered figure that disrupts these aforementioned discourses, and develops transcultural perspectives that reshape Britishness, Muslim identities and masculinities. It is through both novels’ sustained engagement with Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses that many of these themes come into clearer focus.

‘No man’s land’ In his essay ‘Sex and Secularism’, Kureishi diagnoses the development of Islamisms in the UK as part of a ‘new Islam [that] is as recent as postmodernism’.13 These forms of politicized Islam, he continues, ‘began to flourish in a conspicuous age of plenty in the West, and at a time of media expansion’.14 According to him, postmodernity has resulted in the erosion of grand narratives that previously provided a fixed sense of self and belonging, as Kureishi explains: Clearly where there is a ‘crisis of authority’, when, it seems, people aren’t certain of anything because ancient hierarchies have been brought down, the answer is to create a particularly strict authority, where troubling questions cannot be admitted.15

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Citing these excerpts from Kureishi’s essays, Dave Gunning remarks that the literalist version of Sunni Islam encountered in The Black Album is precisely a ‘reactive philosophy that offers answers to troubling questions of contemporary identity’ by enforcing a set of rigid rules about practices of gender, sexuality and belief.16 In both The Black Album and White Teeth, the appeal of repressive, inflexible and politicized systems of Islamic faith is presented almost exclusively through young male protagonists and emerges as a form of masculinized revolt against the anonymizing effects of racism and marginalization from a normatively white British society. In Kureishi’s novel, for example, Shahid had never comprehensively encountered Islam prior to moving to London and meeting a group of Muslim classmates. Shahid was raised in a household that was negatively disposed to religion, as demonstrated by the attitude of his deceased father. Referred to as Papa, Shahid’s father is described as a liberal atheist who arrived in Britain to ‘make an affluent and stable life’ away from what he perceived as the corrupt and overly pious Pakistan, a place in which he believes ‘religion [is] shoved down everyone’s throat’. In contrast, Papa celebrates what he views as a relatively more secular and meritocratic society in Britain, as evidenced by Shahid’s recollection that ‘at home, Papa liked to say, when asked about his faith, “Yes, I have a belief. It’s called working until my arse aches!”’ (Kureishi BA, p. 92). Shahid is therefore embarrassed when he moves to London for college and discovers that most of his peers are second-generation diaspora, like himself, who, unlike him, are all also followers of Islam. He reflects therefore on his lack of knowledge about both Pakistan and Islam; the narrative voice explains: Shahid was afraid his ignorance would place him in a no man’s land. These days everyone was insisting on their identity, […] Shahid, too, wanted to belong to his people. But first he had to know them, their past and what they hoped for. (Kureishi BA, p. 92)

Islam, then, appeals to Shahid within the context of his own sense of anonymity compared to a majority white population and his fellow diasporic peers who have found meaning in religion. When Shahid first arrives in his college dormitory, he articulates feeling marginalized after years of racism and exclusion in predominately white British settings. Thus, he hopes that university will be a new beginning through which he will meet ‘interesting Asian companions’ (Kureishi BA, p. 15). Shahid is initially pleased to meet two British Pakistani young men named Riaz and Chad who confess to having had similarly isolating experiences. Offloading the trauma of physical and emotional bullying at school for his racial and cultural differences, Shahid summarizes his discrimination as leaving him with the feeling that ‘there was something [he] lacked’ as ‘everywhere [he] went [he] was the only dark-skinned person’ (Kureishi BA, p. 10). Shahid’s experiences of racism are not only reduced to externalized forces but they are also internalized thence creating a profound sense of his otherness. His family, for instance, were unsympathetic to anguish as he was dismissed by his mother who ‘hated any talk of race or racism’ (Kureishi BA, 73). Unable to unburden his feelings of humiliation with his family, Shahid drives his racism inwards towards self-hatred as he flirts with joining

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the far-right national movement, the British National Party (BNP), and divulges that his ‘mind was invaded by killing-nigger fantasies’ (Kureishi BA, p. 11). Amidst this pernicious build-up of hatred, Shahid is comforted by Riaz and Chad’s friendship as he feels as if they ‘were the first people he’d met who were like him’; their shared racial background means that Shahid ‘didn’t have to explain anything’ (Kureishi BA, p. 57). The connections that Shahid develops, then, are forged out of his vulnerability as a young man of minoritarian racial and ethno-cultural background. Shahid shares much in common with Smith’s protagonist Millat Iqbal who is similarly wounded by the marginalizing effects of racism. However, unlike Kureishi’s protagonist, Smith connects Millat’s sense of exclusion more closely to racist British stereotypes: He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a film-maker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshipped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. (Smith, pp. 233–4)

Millat’s identity is therein reduced to a series of essentializing stereotypes that deny his individuality and simplify his cultural heritage. Ignoring both the diversity of South Asian immigrants in Britain and the political divisions in the region, Millat is referred to as ‘Paki’ as opposed to ‘Bengali’. He is also misclassified on religious lines as he is associated with ‘worshipping elephants’ therefore connoting Hindu beliefs and rituals. He also explains how these stereotypes translate into expected career paths (‘a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a film-maker’) (Smith, p. 233); jobs that, Millat believes, are unglamorous and lack the masculine prestige of being a footballer or filmmaker. In both texts, Shahid and Millat countermand their sense of powerlessness by reshaping themselves to fit into homosocial groupings in their respective settings. In White Teeth, Millat’s first allegiance is to the ‘Raggastani crowd’ (Smith, p. 269) whose collective identity is remarkably transcultural as the group ‘spoke a strange mix of Jamaican patois, Bengali, Gujarati, and English’ (Smith, p. 231). Befitting a group with such a diverse migratory background, the Raggastani espouse an ethos and manifesto that was equally a hybrid thing: Allah featured but more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a hard-as-fuck geezer who would fight in their corner if necessary; kung fu and the works of Bruce Lee were also central to the philosophy; added to this was a smattering of Black Power (as embodied by the album Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy); but mainly their mission was to put the Invincible back in Indian, the Bad-aaaass back in Bengali, the P-funk back in Pakistani. (Rushdie, p. 231)

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The Raggastani group push back against the erasing effects of racism by forming a collective, shared network of affiliation. Although drawing on Islam, the Raggastani collective’s conception of the religion has conspicuously little to do with religious scripture and is mediated through the borrowing of African American music and Sino-American popular cinema. Rather, the juxtaposition of Allah with figures such as Bruce Lee illuminates the group’s sense of disempowerment. Bruce Lee, for instance, was a famed martial arts star whose masculine physical prowess and strength meant that he overcame racial marginalization to be celebrated as a global Hollywood star. In fact, Smith’s invocation of Lee adds a significant layer of complexity, as not only is Lee an intertextual reference to Chinese migration to the United States but, as Chris Berry argues, his athletic, bare-chested performances challenged notions of white hegemonic masculinity in Hollywood and subverted dominant representations of Chinese men presenting a feminized gender identity.17 Furthermore, Lee is a rather contradictory figure with regard to migration politics and colonial discourses, as in the film Enter the Dragon, his character works with the British secret services against Chinese drug lords, whereas in Fist of Fury, Lee’s protagonist fights Japanese imperialism in China and protects his fellow Chinese immigrants against injustices waged by Thai factory owners in The Big Boss. As such, these contradictions point to an incoherence in the transcultural network of references upon which the character’s masculinity is built. However, the group also refer to a number of musical influences, such as George Clinton and Public Enemy. While Public Enemy produced a hip-hop oeuvre that expressed many of the frustrations and concerns of African Americans at the hands of a majority white society, George Clinton’s masculinity is combative in a conspicuously different way. In his song ‘P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)’, Clinton explicitly tells his listeners to ‘dance [their] way out of constriction’ thereby calling for playful performativity as a counter-discourse to normative behaviour. Giuseppe Zevolli, for instance, points to how Clinton’s stage performances frequently involve him stripping away multiple layers of costumes to reveal his naked body at the end of the concert.18 Combining Afro-futuristic iconography, subversion of masculinity, political lyrics that make pronouncements on racial politics in the modern United States and bombastic funk music that draws on a range of different genres, Clinton sends up the masquerade of straightjacketed identity, critiques the status quo and celebrates the creative. By invoking Bruce Lee and Public Enemy, alongside Clinton, the group betray a lack of genuine religious fervour and instead show themselves to be presenting a playful protest masculinity that is forged as struggle against the disempowering effects of racist exclusion. However, for all their posturing, the Raggastani group’s political commitment is rather superficial as demonstrated by the Raggastani ‘uniform’ which comprised ‘everything, everything, everything [that] was Nike™’ (Smith, p. 232). Far from critiquing the socio-economic structures that ensure their marginalization, then, the text’s narrator describes how wherever the group went ‘the impression they left behind was of one giant swoosh, one huge mark of corporate approval’ (Smith, p. 232). The group’s anti-establishment rhetoric is therefore a performed construct that is predominately cosmetic in its effect, shown by their desire not to be ‘fucked with anymore’ rather than engage in any demonstrable form of social protest. Indicative of the Raggastani group’s superficiality, Millat later graduates to a more politicized social grouping with the ridiculously named KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal

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and Victorious Islamic Nation). KEVIN’s code of membership stresses abstinence from sex, drugs and alcohol; rules all based on selective readings of Islamic theology. Millat poses a ‘big experiment’ for the group as they seek to distract him from intoxication and intercourse thereby steering his attention towards ‘the fucking spiritual war going on’ (Smith, p. 295). Suggestive of his failure to pass the ‘experiment’, Millat’s dedication to KEVIN’s vision is consistently exposed as feeble as he fails to read the group’s leaflets and contravenes moral teachings by clandestinely drinking Guinness and receiving covert oral pleasure from a classmate with the affluent-sounding name Tanya ChapmanJones. The fellatio that Millat receives, which did not require ‘Millat to touch her at all’, particularly locates his affiliation with KEVIN as a form of youthful rebellion, as ‘it was a mutually beneficial arrangement: she was the daughter of a judge and delighted in horrifying the old goat, and Millat needed ejaculation with no active participation on his side’ (Smith, p. 444). Rather than religious reasoning, the group’s violent activism appeals to Millat as a way to repudiate his experiences of racist exclusion and so joins their clarion call to ‘make our mark in this bloody country’ (Smith, p. 295). As such when Millat is recruited for a book-burning of an unnamed novel that is suspiciously like Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, he feels liberated by seeing other diasporic men who ‘were angry and Millat recognized that anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands’ (Smith, p. 233). In The Black Album, Shahid similarly wants to ‘make his mark’ and therefore becomes increasingly close to Riaz and his ‘brothers’, as his group of Islamists are termed. Thus, Shahid’s feelings of otherness find solace in the group’s extremist version of Islam. Pouncing on Shahid’s anxieties, the group offer him a compensatory identity in which young diaspora men like him can unite around a rigidly defined and literalist interpretation of Sunni Islam. As many critics such as Frauke Matthes and Bart MooreGilbert have pointed out, the group’s conception of Sunni Islam is conspicuously naive and underdeveloped.19 Their collective beliefs are markedly similar to those espoused by KEVIN and never stray further than abstention from alcohol and sexual intercourse, public displays for oppressed Muslim communities across the world and an insistence upon praying five times a day. Although women appear from time to time within their meetings, the group are also markedly homosocial in that they uphold gender segregation and also take an unyieldingly essentialist approach to gender roles and practices. Although writing on Riaz’s brotherhood in The Black Album, Matthes makes a point that equally describes the sexuality of KEVIN members when she notes how abstention from sex enacts a form of ‘masculine struggle’ against the disempowering forces of racism and structural violence.20 This is configured by both the brothers’ and KEVIN’s belief that sexual self-restraint strengthens a masculine resolve that stands in opposition to the normatively white British population’s sexual impurity and, therefore, the decay of ‘god-given’ male attributes of strength, power and domination. Riaz and the brothers’ censorious approach to sexuality also contradicts the brazen promiscuity enjoyed by Shahid’s older brother Chili and affords Shahid a space in which he can compensate for his comparatively less successful love-life. Kureishi paints a picture of Shahid growing up in a household where Chili’s heterosexual conquests were celebrated by Papa who asked to be kept informed of his eldest

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son’s sexual dalliances and delighted in hearing stories of his romantic trysts. Chili’s purportedly light-hearted sexuality contrasts with Shahid’s romantic endeavours which result in him being rebuffed or, as in one instance, having his father have to book an abortion for an accidental pregnancy. Shahid is therefore resentful as ‘Papa wanted [him] to emulate Chili’ (Kureishi BA, p. 52) and only exacerbates his sense of masculine failure. Like Shahid, the group are all young diasporic men who share a cumulative sense of disempowerment. As Mark Stein points out, the best illustration of this pattern is found in the figure of Trevor Buss’s alias Chad.21 Born as Trevor Buss and subsequently adopted by a white British couple, Chad is described as a ‘soul [that] got lost in translation’ (Kureishi BA, p. 107). Surrounded by white peers who had no need to negotiate or reflect upon their belonging, Trevor struggled to derive a similar sense of belonging to England. ‘Church bells’ and ‘English country cottages and ordinary English people … the whole Orwellian idea of England’ (Kureishi BA, p. 107) ‘signalled exclusion’ to him thereby suggesting that his claims to Englishness are foreclosed by his need to ‘acquire’ an English heritage.22 Within this white English milieu, he describes frequently being mistaken for a street robber, thereby evincing the racially pernicious connections that many white English made between people of colour and crime. On the other hand, when asking for salt in a Pakistani restaurant in Southall, he recalls being mocked for his accent when speaking Urdu. In this instance, Chad is reminded that despite his linguistic abilities, he is ‘outside’ of Pakistani codes of behaviour, as his accent marks him as foreign and he therefore, just as with his white peers, needs to ‘acquire’ a Pakistani heritage. Tellingly, his ‘outsiderness’ becomes apparent when he visits Pakistan and describes feeling even more alienated: ‘But in Pakistan, they looked at him even more strangely. Why should he be able to fit into a Third World theocracy?’ (Kureishi BA, p. 107). Thus, in both contexts, he is prevented from fostering allegiance and is regarded as an ‘other’. Like Shahid and Millat, then, Chad feels as if he ‘lacks’ an identity. His failure to find affiliation with any of these place-bound groups leads Trevor to leave his adopted family, change his name to Chad and pursue a life of crime to express his frustration. It is not until he finds Riaz and succumbs to his Islamism that he finds a coherent sense of self. In other words, it is the homosocial environment of the Islamic brothers that offers some answers to his existential uncertainties and his acute feelings of disorientation and emasculation. The forms of anti-social Islam that Kureishi and Smith’s young protagonists espouse are all rooted in the characters’ shared desire for belonging. These dogmatic forms of Islam provide young men with identities based on their sense of difference. To this end, both sets of protagonists closely resemble Connell’s theorization of protest masculinities, a concept that was defined in the book’s introduction and will also be observed when analysing other forms of masculine protest in the book’s corpus. To recapitulate this concept briefly, Connell argues that certain groups of men who are materially, socially or economically deprived tend to exaggeratedly perform aspects of hegemonic masculinity in an attempt to project their strength in the face of marginality. Connell notes that for these men, protest masculinities represent ‘a response to powerlessness, a claim to the gendered position of power, a pressured

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exaggeration of masculine power’.23 KEVIN and Riaz’s brotherhood invite such an interpretation with groups of men quite literally engaging in protest as a riposte to perceived societal injury. Ultimately, Kureishi’s and Smith’s use of comic register when writing about their novel’s respective groups suggests that Islamism is nothing more than a youthful rebellion and that, from their end-of-the twentieth-century perspectives, neither writer views the emergence of politicized, essentialized versions of Sunni Islam in Britain as especially dangerous. This point is most clearly expressed by the name of Smith’s fundamentalist group which brings to mind connotations of middle-aged British men and an absurd episode in The Black Album where Riaz’s gang flock to see an aubergine that reputedly depicts divine inscriptions. In fact, one of the novel’s final passages shows the once-believed-to-be holy aubergine as deflated and flaccid; now a humorously phallic indicator of the brotherhood’s lack of power. Furthermore, in each novel, the generally immature skirmishes of Riaz’s group and KEVIN are contrasted with the background bombings of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in London thereby implying that separatist terrorism is a more serious threat to Britain. References to IRA violence, however, can also be read a little less charitably as a glossing over of British colonialism in Ireland, as IRA violence similarly has its roots in the racial, religious and cultural politics of modern Britain that marginalize the Northern Irish Catholic population. As is proposed by Guy Gunaratne in his 2019 novel In Our Mad and Furious City, and discussed in the last chapter of this book, maybe there is more affinity between the violent protests of the IRA and Islamist groups than initially seems the case. Moreover, by alluding to the IRA, Smith’s novel also implicitly hints at connections between the postcolonial subjugation endured by the Bengal region of South Asia and Ireland, most notably both areas of the British Empire suffered devastating famines.24 Even so, The Black Album is arguably more sensitive in its engagement with Islamism as shown by Shahid’s moving confessions and the way he also perceives the ‘mad kindness’ in Chad’s eyes as he discusses the residual hurt of his teenage years. There is a suggestion in Kureishi’s text that the young men may form a genuinely openminded and accepting form of transcultural Islam, as when attending the mosque Shahid finds: Men of so many types and nationalities – Tunisians, Indians, Algerians, Scots, French – gathered there, chatting in the entrance, where they removed their shoes and then retired to wash, that it would have been different with prior knowledge, to tell which country the mosque was in. (Kureishi, p. 131)

Although only describing diversity amongst male worshippers, the ‘uncompetitive, peaceful, meditative’ (Kureishi, p. 132) environment of the mosque is contrasted only a few pages later when the narrative voice describes that Shahid ‘found it difficult to reconcile what went on in the mosque with the bustling diversity of the city’ (Kureishi, p. 133). For Mondal, this anomaly is indicative of a broader issue with Kureishi’s novel whereby the transformative political potential signalled by transnational, transcultural

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and cross-class interaction at the mosque is frustratingly left ‘unexplored through a failure of imagination as much through ignorance’.25 I tend to agree with Mondal, and a similar criticism posed by Claire Chambers, that Kureishi’s rendering of Islam, and the mosque space, is rather superficially engaged with and all too often falls into an easy binary of liberalism versus dogmatic religion that overlooks the influence of class and the inevitable transculturation within the mosque itself upon the young men themselves.26 Nevertheless, Smith’s naming of the group as KEVIN, as well as Kureishi’s exploration of racism, serves to suggest that the fault for articulations of Islamism lies firmly within the exclusionary racial and cultural politics of modern Britain – a point that will be examined in greater detail through Smith’s and Kureishi’s intertextual engagements with the Satanic Verses Affair in the following section.

‘Dirty book’ For many, one of the dominant images of The Satanic Verses Affair is the now-familiar image of the angry Muslim man burning a copy of Rushdie’s novel in Bradford’s city centre, a scene that Kenan Malik described as ‘a portent of a new kind of conflict and of a new kind of world’.27 In contemporary reportage, these images were compared to the destruction of books deemed unpalatable by Nazi Germany and to the burning of Jewish and Muslim writing during the Spanish Inquisition. Both of these analogies served to infer that Muslims in Britain were a homogenous group that shared undemocratic, backward and uncivilized values at odds with the enlightened attitudes of modern Britain. The Times, in particular, emphasized that the Muslim protesters, despite often having been born and raised in Britain, were ‘newcomers’ who ‘should accept that Britain is a democracy in which Parliament makes law applicable to all’.28 The common view was that Muslims were an angry, amorphous mass of people who had failed to integrate. With Bradford’s Victorian neo-gothic City Hall as the backdrop to the burning, James Procter summarizes: During the book-burnings, the solid Victorian masonry of City Hall was temporarily dislocated from its firm foundations. As protestors congregated in front of the building, it floated on a crowd of Muslim protesters and protesting banners.29

Nicole Falkenhayner regards these instances as ‘rhetorical distancing’ through which Britain absolved its responsibility in causing the atmosphere that led to The Satanic Verses Affair.30 Instead, many media commentators viewed the protest as an expression of a monolithic and allegedly intolerant Islamic religion and Muslim culture. Such logic refuses to engage with Islamic and Muslim diversity and ignores the toxic effects of Britain’s racial, cultural and class inequalities that might have led groups of a disenfranchised Muslim minority to erupt in a such an act. To this end, Kureishi and Smith’s novels serve a didactic purpose in fictionally examining the marginalization that groups of young Muslim men felt during the late 1980s, placing this within a long historical continuum of colonialism and showing how this translated into anti-social

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behaviour. However, at times, each novel also gives recourse to the kinds of stereotyped imagery found in contemporary media and, in so doing, lends male protagonists little agency beyond the animated throngs of book-burners that they found themselves among. In Framing Muslims, Morey and Yaqin have examined at great length how the angry Muslim male is often taken to represent the purportedly backwards and uncivilized values of an essentialized and monolithic Islam. As I discussed in the introduction, they refer particularly to the widely circulated image of Shakeel Ahmed Bhat and photographs of his participation in demonstrations against Indian violence in Kashmir, cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and the decision of the British government to award Salman Rushdie with a knighthood. While this reproduction of Bhat’s image, always taken out of context and copied onto all manner of racist propaganda to poke fun at an abstracted understanding of Islam, demonstrates the transnational dimensions of Islamophobic imagery and antagonism against Rushdie, Morey and Yaqin curiously neglect to explore the initial protests against Rushdie in 1989 as one of the origin points for the post-9/11 transnational distribution of the ‘mad, marauding Muslim male’.31 Kureishi’s The Black Album and Smith’s White Teeth, I argue, give a literary precedence to many of the depictions of the Muslim male’s othered identity as an irrational, dangerous and problematic presence in the supposedly enlightened West. Indeed, Falkenhayner points out that Kureishi’s staging of a book-burning is a ‘tenpage long sequence’ in which ‘moral decisions appear as gut feelings’ as opposed to rational protest.32 For example, Shahid challenges Chad by saying ‘This man, whatever he’s done, I know he hasn’t spat on us or refused us a job. He never called you Paki scum, did he?’ Chad’s face turned the colour of clay. Stamping his foot, he pulled Shahid round. ‘How many times do we have to repeat, this bastard smeared shit over our faces’. (Kureishi BA, pp. 217–18)

Chad’s reaction is emotional and demonstrates his feeling of social injury. Notably, Chad has not read the novel, but he is motivated by visceral anger at the text’s alleged blasphemy towards his religion. Crucial in this context is Chad’s identity realignment, as he announces to Shahid, ‘No more Paki. Me a Muslim. We don’t apologise for ourselves neither. We are a people who say one important thing – that pleasure and self-absorption isn’t everything’ (Kureishi BA, p. 128). Having overcome his sense of alienation as Trevor Buss, he identifies strongly as a Muslim and burning the ‘offensive’ book becomes a performative display of his new Muslim identity. One of the few female characters among Riaz’s followers also echoes this need to defame the novel as a means of acquiring a wholesome identity, telling Shahid that ‘we’ve got to believe in something’ (Kureishi BA, p. 220). Despite his initial disgust, Shahid is inspired by the community feel of the event. Extraordinarily, the gathering is equated to a ‘teenage rave in Kent’ (Kureishi BA, p. 220). This is an intriguing analogy as it connects the book-burning scene with druginfused rave subcultures that are often associated with a particular musical genres and

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lifestyles that emerged in Britain during the latter years of the twentieth century, for example bands like the Happy Mondays in the 1980s and Underworld in the 1990s. Raves call to mind groups of young people listening to repetitive music and consuming drugs such as ecstasy and MDMA whose effects are captured by their colloquial classification as ‘love drugs’. Kureishi’s imagery therefore encourages the reader to view Shahid as becoming intoxicated by the group around him and consequently losing control of his rationality. Within this drug-like state, Falkenhayner intimates that ‘the questions of morality start to break down’:33 He couldn’t begin to tell the sane from the mad, wrong from right, good from bad. Where would one start? None of this would lead to the good. But what did? Who knew? What would make them right? Everything was in motion; nothing could be stopped. The world was swirling, its compasses spinning. History was unwinding in his head into chaos, and he was tumbling through space. (Kureishi BA, p. 220)

The delirious undoing of his sense of rationality in this passage is also reminiscent of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. More specifically, Shahid’s experience ‘alludes to Gibreel and Saladin’s tumbling from the sky in a delirium of songs, apparitions and shapeshifts’.34 Nevertheless, while Rushdie’s novel uses Gibreel and Saladin’s fall to signify the disorienting effects of migration as a difficult, but ultimately celebratory, process through which borders evaporate and migrants are forced to reinvent themselves, Shahid in the crowds experiences an erasure of identity as he is subsumed within the mob mentality. Shahid, therefore, no longer wants the ‘event to be interrupted. He certainly wouldn’t have turned away in disgust. He wanted to witness every page in flames’ (Kureishi BA, p. 222). Kureishi’s text reimagines the book-burning in the symbolically charged setting of a London higher education college. In so doing, Kureishi highlights the political nature of the event by transposing the protest to a seat of learning and free speech in the British metropole. Yet the link with the Bradford incident of January 1989 is clearly implied in the description of the book going up in flames. Recalling the famous photograph of men hoisting a burning copy of Rushdie’s novel nailed upon a pole, Kureishi’s novel relates how Chad tilted the book. Its pages quivered in the breeze like birds’ wings. Hat thrust a lighter into them. At once Sadiq and Tahira jumped back. Smoke hugged the volume before bulging away into the air. People hooted and clamoured as if they were at a fireworks display. Fists were raised at the flaming bouquet of the book. And former Trevor Buss and Muhammad Shahabuddin Alia Shah, alias brother Chad, who was brandishing at the sky, laughed triumphantly. (Kureishi BA, p. 224)

Kureishi’s recreation of the Bradford protest firmly and almost conclusively means that the reader can identify the offensive book as being The Satanic Verses. Furthermore, the imagery of fireworks is redolent of the ‘Fireworks Night’ tradition that takes place

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across England on 5 November to commemorate a foiled attack on the Protestant country’s national parliament by oppressed Catholics led by Guido Fawkes. In so doing, the passage hints towards the Satanic Verses Affair as being part of a tradition of religious and cultural dissent against the UK establishment. Smith, on the other hand, retains the Bradford setting but mediates the event through television thereby her version ‘creates the effect of relating an actual historical event’.35 As was mentioned in my introduction to this chapter, Smith’s novel is a fictional history of post-war migration to Britain as told through three families. The novel frequently traces the ways that historical events interweave with personal histories. For example, Samad Iqbal, and by extension his sons Millat and Magid, is allegedly descended from the real-life figure of Mangal Pandey – referred to in the novel as Mangal Pande. Pandey was an Indian soldier who played a central role in the outbreak of the Sepoy War of 1857, sometimes problematically referred to as the Indian Mutiny, against British colonial rule.36 Formally breaking out on 10 May 1857, the Sepoy War demonstrates the ways that colonization in South Asia was fundamentally an economic exercise that thrived on the subordination of racialized subjects. Priyamvada Gopal explains that the ‘provocation’ for the uprising has ‘traditionally been attributed to the controversial cartridges for the new Enfield rifle, which had been provided to the native regiments of the East India Company’s army, greased, as it was rumoured, with pig and cow fat – thereby violating the religious sensibilities of Muslim and Hindu infantrymen’.37 Yet, as Gopal points out, this was a convenient explanation that rooted the protests in religious difference and refused to engage with how Indian populations were challenging their subjugation by an immoral and economic power using their labour to increase their profit. As a consequence of the 1857 Sepoy War, the East India Company, which had been set up as a trading company that enslaved people and plundered resources from South Asia for profitable gain, relinquished control of vast swathes of the Indian subcontinent and handed their authority over to the British state. Whether the ‘rumours’ about religiously unsound practices are true or not, this episode reveals a much longer history of ethnoreligious injustice perpetrated by the British, with the explicit support of the UK state, for the purpose of capitalism. Building a link between this heritage, the chapter that discusses Millat’s involvement in the Bradford book-burning is called ‘Mutiny’ and begins with Samad talking about his family’s involvement in the 1857 insurrection thereby connecting the anti-Satanic Verses agitation within this long history of colonial subjugation and anti-colonial dissent. As such, Smith is encouraging readers to make a link between different forms of rebellion and ambivalently locating the Bradford demonstrations as a form of anti-establishment protest. Significantly, the 1857 Sepoy War is reported through Samad’s inherited family memories. The Second World War is also incorporated into the novel but through flashback third-person narration of Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones’s experiences. Emphasizing the changes in how people witness historical moments, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the event quite clearly based on The Satanic Verses Affair are therefore filtered through media consumption rather than through first-person recollection. The use of media in Smith’s novel also serves to show how the images of masculinity so closely associated with the 1989 book-burning were produced and imprinted on

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cultural memory. In fact, media reportage of the anti-Satanic Verses commotion is precisely the driving force for Millat’s decision to take arms: In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognised that anger, thought it recognised him, and grabbed it with both hands. (Smith, p. 234)

As I discussed earlier in this chapter, Islamism presents Millat (and Shahid, Riaz and Chad) with an opportunity to rise above their shared sense of anonymity and claim a public presence. In an intertextual link to Kureishi’s description of Shahid feeling as if he were at a rave, Smith even notes how the book-burners find a feeling of community together in their mission to attack The Satanic Verses while their peers ‘the happy acidheads danced through the Summer of Love’ (Smith, p. 232). For Smith’s protagonists, they are united in their desire to destroy the novel and crave the media spotlight as a corrective to their feelings of invisibility and an amplified of their protest at British society. The role of media visibility in how the book-burning is witnessed through the televisual spectatorship of Millat’s parents Samad and Alsana, who see their son on the television news: ‘Oh dear God!’ screamed Alsana, the smile leaving her face, falling to her knees in front of the television, tracing her finger past the burning book to the face she recognised, smiling up at her through the light tubes, her pixelated second-son beneath her picture framed first. (Smith p. 236)

Conveying the book-burnings through media images means that Smith’s novel is able to incisively show The Satanic Verses Affair was a visual spectacle of masculine protest that reshaped and refreshed discussions about immigration, gender, religion, race and the novel as an arbiter of these discourses. Like Kureishi’s protagonists, neither Millat nor his compatriots had read the book as ‘you don’t have to read shit to know it’s blasphemous’ yet their protest is intimately connected to mutual feeling of shame and harmed masculine prestige, as marginalized second-generation migrants. This is especially palpable through the words of Rajik: ‘Allah’ll fuck him up, yeah?’ cried Rajik, the least intelligent, who thought of God as some kind of cross between Monkey-Magic and Bruce Willis. ‘He’ll kick him in the balls. Dirty book’. (Smith p. 233)

Thus, the group characterize Allah as a form of tough ‘hard man’ who is able to portion out revenge upon the male author by assaulting him in his genitals. Even these conceptions of the divine are read through media products as Allah is imagined in the

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cross-pollinated form of Bruce Willis’s macho film persona and a warrior character in a cult 1980s television series. Interestingly, the two dissenting voices in both The Black Album and White Teeth come from women. Underscoring the ways that the protests were heavily reported as being dominated by men, Shahid’s teacher and lover Deedee Osgood challenges the protesters in a manner that programmatically associates her with liberal backlashes to the Bradford Affair. For example, she draws on so-called Enlightenment values of free speech to which they respond by claiming that she is a ‘white supremacist’ and they, in fact, are enacting democracy as the majority of students are offended by it (Kureishi p. 223). As will become apparent in the next section of my chapter, Osgood is constructed in binaristic opposition to the brothers through her unconventional teaching style that rallies against canonziation (she teaches Shakespeare alongside Prince), encourages students to find themselves through Marxist, feminist and postcolonial theories and includes, for some like Shahid, extra-curricular trips to her bedroom. Yet despite her anti-racist politics, the brothers declare her as ‘a white supremacist’ and ‘one of the authorities’ who want to ‘muzzle’ the free speech of racial and ethnic minorities (Kureishi BA, p. 232). Emphasizing the masculinist logic beyond their protest, they throw misogynist insults back at her and talk of their marginalization in the face of a normatively white milieu. In spite of her feeble remonstrations, she flees the scene in horror at watching the book go up in flames. White Teeth, however, incorporates a more thoughtful opposition through Alsana Iqbal who argues for compromise. Her frustration with her son (and her husband’s tacit indifference to Millat’s attendance at the book-burning) inspires her to undertake a startling protest of her own. When Millat comes home to London from Bradford, he finds a number of his most-loved novels, DVDs and CDs burning in the garden; these include gangster films such as The Godfather Trilogy, hip-hop albums and a signed photo of Public Enemy star Chuck D. The culprit is his mother who justifies her actions by stating that ‘everyone has to be taught a lesson […] Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people’s things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what’s coming, sooner or later’ (Smith, p. 237). The cultural products that Alsana burns, as the next section of my argument will explore, show the artificial nature of Millat’s dislike of the ‘offensive’ novel. Millat claims only to have read relevant photocopied sections of The Satanic Verses yet the novels, films and albums that he admires all contain constructs of aggressive masculinity, as in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, and, in the case of Public Enemy, espouse atheism; all films, books and albums that would not pass KEVIN’s strict censorship. Alsana’s bonfire of Millat’s loved cultural products in the family backyard garden also reveals her sharp reading of Millat’s behaviour as little more than cosmetic rebellion – Allah is not really ‘sacred’ to him but certain gangster movie franchises are. Both texts serve to show the huge importance of The Satanic Verses Affair as both a textual and cultural event that led to the emergence of new racialized and gendered British Muslim identities. Beyond these fictional representations of book-burning in the years following the Bradford case, Kureishi and Smith also weave intertextual references to Rushdie’s novel into their fiction therein further imprinting the significance of this incident upon the topics of race, class, diaspora identities and gender

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they examine. In White Teeth, for instance, the Iqbal family have two twins who have qualities reminiscent of Rushdie’s protagonists Gibreel and Saladin. To a considerable extent, Millat mirrors Gibreel as an unpredictable extroverted character who acts on impulse. Millat’s brother Magid, on the other hand, who is sent away to Bangladesh and reappears as ‘more English than the English’ recalls Saladin’s Anglophile character (Smith, p. 406). Biographical information on Smith, however, reveals that the novel has certain roman-à-clef tendencies and Magid is in fact based on the brother of an ex-boyfriend of hers. Astonishingly, the influence for Magid appears to be the writer Zia Haider Rahman whose novel In The Light of What We Know will be discussed in Chapter 5.38 The most obvious intertext, however, is in Shahid’s relation to the character of Salman the Persian in The Satanic Verses. In Gunning’s words, Rushdie’s novel sees Salman the Persian ‘deliberately rewriting parts of the recitation dictated to him by Mahound, Rushdie’s fictionalized distortion of the Prophet Muhammad’, while in The Black Album, ‘this transgression is echoed when […] Shahid Hasan, is given the poems of Riaz Al-Hussain, the mentor in the Islamic group, to transcribe and rewrites them as something close to pornography’.39 Therein, one of the most controversial features of Rushdie’s novel is refashioned within the structure of Kureishi’s novel. The Satanic Verses had a demonstrative effect on how male, racialized bodies were read in an increasingly anxious and hostile Britain, leading Kureishi and Smith each to write novels that addressed the emergence of British Muslim masculinities as a form of racialized ‘other’ in novel form. Despite this, each novel’s exploration of The Satanic Verses event is uneven and, potentially complicit with the kind of problematic stereotypes that Morey and Yaqin find in post-9/11 depictions of angry Muslim men. Writing on The Black Album, Moore-Gilbert takes issue with Kureishi’s decision not to name Salman Rushdie or The Satanic Verses explicitly. Moore-Gilbert suggests that ‘this has serious implications for the text’s representation of Islam’ as ‘one may infer from The Black Album that Muslims may be likely to react in a similar way to any kind of artistic interpretation of Islam’.40 This is a criticism that can also be extended to Smith’s White Teeth which similarly also does not name the book or its author despite heavy inferences. Nevertheless, Smith’s novel is arguably more adept at expressing the ways that the book-burning in Bradford came to symbolically represent shifts in Britain through the new Muslim male folk devil and the way media output circulated and mediated this new racialized, gendered identity assemblage.

‘All my life I wanted to be a Muslim’ Despite occurring in the Yorkshire city of Bradford, the book-burning had aforementioned implications across countries like Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Japan, United States and South Africa with similar expressions of condemnation at Rushdie’s treatment of Islam. What was on the surface a novel about the existential complexities of being a migrant to Britain became a global controversy as a spotlight was sharply turned on male immigrants from a Muslim background living in Britain. This international attention towards young migrant and diaspora men in Britain is captured by both Kureishi and Smith in The Black Album and White Teeth through a complex

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array of transnational intertextual references. I argue that these references not only point to the transnational circulation of a post-Satanic Verses affair British Muslim male stereotype but also express the protagonists’ cultural allegiances and give insight into how they negotiate their masculinity in relation to both this controversy and their milieu. Millat’s shallow devotion to KEVIN is best expressed, for example, through his own self-image as a gangster. Drawing on popular Hollywood films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Brain De Palma’s Scarface (1980) and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), Millat views himself as being ‘the first into the battle come jihad, cool as fuck in a crisis, a man of action, like [Marlon] Brando, like [Al] Pacino, like [Ray] Liotta’ (Smith, p. 445). All three of these Italian American actors achieved international fame in roles where they played first- or secondgeneration Italian or, in the case of Pacino in Scarface, Cuban migrants who fought back against the disenfranchising experiences of poverty and racism by performing pugnacious and swaggering displays of masculinity. As Fred L. Gardaphé points out, the archetypal Italian American gangster, portrayed most memorably by the actors that Millat mentions, combats societal subordination with visceral allegiance to his family or community and extravagant displays of masculine force and wealth, that recall Connell’s formation of hegemonic masculinity, therein constructing an alternate society where their gang are in positions of power.41 Millat is therefore aligning his own identity struggle with the violent affirmation of masculinity depicted by Brando, Pacino and Liotta in gangster cinema, thus Millat equates membership of KEVIN to ‘being in real-life mafia’. Andrea Ciribuco notes that Millat also embraces the patriarchal logic of gangster tropes and translates it into KEVIN’s Islamic lifestyle.42 His ‘most shameful secret’, for example, is that, whenever he opened a door […] the opening of GoodFellas ran through his head and he found this sentence rolling around in what he presumed was his subconscious: ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.’ He even saw it like that […] like on a movie poster […] He tried to fix it, but Millat’s mind was a mess and more often than not he’d end up pushing on the door, head back, shoulders forward, Liotta style, thinking, ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Muslim’. (Smith, p. 446)

Converging ‘Muslim’ and ‘gangster’ labels therefore comically exposes the masculinist logic behind Millat’s mission in KEVIN. For Millat, ‘being a Muslim’ is rhetorically connoted to ‘being a gangster’ in that both sets of belonging are supposedly defined by their antagonistic and adversarial response to societal disadvantage. Ironically, Millat’s father, unlike Shahid’s in The Black Album, has always boldly identified as a Muslim and encouraged his sons to follow suit. However, Samad Iqbal is associated with the same forces of disempowerment and emasculation that he believes KEVIN remedies. Again emphasizing the idea of a lifetime and therefore long-standing social imagery, Millat describes how ‘all his life, he wanted a Godfather, and all he

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got was Samad. A faulty, broken, stupid, one-handed waiter of a man who had spent eighteen years in a strange land and made no more mark than this’ (Smith, p. 505). Therefore, gangster tropes are recycled to explain his social injury and his membership of KEVIN as a group concerted effort to ‘make a mark’ (Smith, p. 505). Gangster movie metonymy is even used by Millat to interpret KEVIN’s strict policing of gender. When joining KEVIN, he is encouraged to break up with his girlfriend as their relationship is incompatible with the celibacy that the group advocates. However, Millat assesses the situation through the lens of mafia cinema: ‘But he minded about Karina Cain, because she was his love, and his love should be his love and nobody else’s. Protected like Liotta’s wife in GoodFellas or Pacino’s sister in Scarface. Treated like a princess. Behaving like a princess. In a tower. Covered up’ (Smith, p. 374). Ciribuco points out that, even though he does terminate his relationship, Millat understands ‘the religious argument for “covering up” women as compatible with his fascination with Mafia movies within a patriarchal fantasy of “protection” and control’.43 Like Ciribuco, then, I read this as an inventive form of translation on Smith’s part whereby gangsterism and Islamism are compared and recontextualized. In doing so, both gangsterism and Islamism are revealed as forms of reactive and anti-social masculine protest to the disempowering effects of marginalization. Indeed, gangster and mafia imagery also appear in Kureishi’s novel as Millat’s selfidentification with gangster films echoes Chili’s fondness of the genre in The Black Album. Owing to his voracious consumption of films such as ‘Once Upon a Time in America, Scarface, and The Godfather’ which he watches as ‘career documentaries’ rather than fictional narratives (Kureishi BA, p. 53), Chili resents his deceased father for coming to England and not raising him and Shahid across the Atlantic. Chili perceives England as ‘small-town’ and argues that if his father had ‘stood in line on Ellis Island with the Jews, Poles, Irish and Armenians’ then their family would have ‘real glory’ (Kureishi BA, p. 53). Chili’s superficial reasoning engages only with a form of cultural production that glamourizes life as a rich and powerful male of immigrant descent in the United States but, like Millat’s condemnation of Samad in gangster tropes, finds fault with a father figure who has apparently handicapped their ability to be successful. Wherever possible, Chili tries to live up to this gangster image through bedding a variety of female suitors and developing a cocaine habit that eventually leads to less glamorous end, much like Tony Montana in Scarface. In his family life too, Chili’s wedding video is likened to the garish matrimonial ceremony of Don Corleone’s daughter in The Godfather, as the film lasts ‘longer than The Godfather (both parts)’ and becomes ‘essential viewing all over Karachi and even Peshawar’ (Kureishi BA, p. 7). Both Millat and Chili, then, are striving for extravagant displays of authority and power with which they can prove their success against the odds. Yet both Kureishi and Smith effect critical interventions into the archetypal model of the gangster or mafia movie in their novels. For instance, Ciribuco notes how attachment to the immigrant family unit in gangster films does away with ‘the discursive quality of multiculturalism’ by ‘presenting an immigrant environment where monolithic and patriarchal codes of honor are enforced’.44 Concerning Millat and Chili, however, their ‘gangsterism’ ultimately rejects the family unit but retains precisely the monolithic and patriarchal constructions of masculinity that Ciribuco observes. Millat

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in particular finds alternative belonging with the homosocial collective of KEVIN and at least outwardly seeks to follow their unbending notions of masculinity. Still, in each novel, these forms of gangster-like behaviour foreclose any solution to their sense of masculine disempowerment. Chili, for instance, ends the novel with a cocaine addiction and, somewhat ironically, realizes that he must follow in his deceased father’s footsteps by helping his mother manage the family travel agency; sending people to the United States for their holidays rather than moving there himself. In White Teeth, Millat’s obsession with gangster films also comes under scrutiny from his fellow KEVIN members who view all Hollywood films as a capitalist distraction from the transcendental values of their interpretation of Islam. Despite concerted attempts, Millat is unable to shake off his appreciation for the genre and his self-image as a mafioso, bemoaning his lack of resolve: ‘Was it his fault if Channel 4 ran a De Niro season? Could he help it if Tony Bennet’s “Rags to Riches” floated out of a clothes shop and entered his soul?’ (Smith, p. 446). Gangster imagery, then, provides a very powerful vocabulary through which he is able to articulate his inadequacies and, in contrast, the hell-and-damnation vision of his compatriots is unable to hold the same appeal to him. Interestingly, Shahid is also fascinated by aspects of popular culture but to a completely different end. When away from Riaz and his ‘brothers’, Shahid spends much of his time blaspheming against the group’s stringent gender practices. The brothers’ ‘masculine struggle’ is offset by Shahid’s connection with his white British lecturer Deedee Osgood. Deedee is an arresting character whose unorthodox pedagogy includes dismantling cultural hierarchies by delivering lectures on the history of funk music alongside lessons on the writer Ivan Turgenev, enlightening her students about their position in society through expounding Marxist, feminist and postcolonial perspectives, and, in the case of Shahid, transcending the boundaries of the classroom through introductions to sex and drugs. Deedee, then, symbolizes the novel’s alternative to the forms of belonging proposed by the compensatory protest masculinity of Riaz and the gang. Sarah Ilott observes how the possibilities that Osgood represents are inscribed within her name: D. Osgood: do is good. Deedee’s ‘dos’ (encouraging him to partake in new experiences, be they gastronomic, hallucinogenic or sexual) rival his religious friends’ ‘do nots’ (not partaking in sexual activities, not being friendly with white women and not taking mind-altering substances).45

Under her auspices, Shahid’s eyes are opened to more fluid and indefinite gender constructions that stress experimentation, playfulness and performativity. In stark contrast to Riaz and the brothers’ abstention from sex so as to pour libidinal energies into politicized religiosity, Deedee and Shahid enjoy a frenetic sexual relationship that often overturns or pokes fun at male dominance over women. Gender, racial, cultural and ethno-religious power relations are most clearly subverted or challenged in Deedee and Shahid’s sexual encounters with one another. For instance, Deedee is depicted as instructing her younger male lover about the mechanics of different sexual positions and often assumes the dominant position

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during intercourse. Throughout the novel, Deedee controls the sexual intercourse they share, consuming Shahid ‘as if [he was] a piece of cake’ (Kureishi BA, p. 117). Drawing on the common English idiom ‘as easy as a piece of cake’, which implies a task which is very easy to do, this simile indicates Shahid’s weakness and therefore someone who is easy for Deedee to dominate. Even when she performs fellatio on him, she is in control of her lover’s pleasure as, ‘He’d never experienced lips that could make you feel that you could inhale your soul through the end of your dick’ (Kureishi BA, p. 120). Gunning remarks that this description of oral sex not only suggests dominance over Shahid, but also implies his submission to Deedee’s sexual energy and her ideology of hedonism. Moore-Gilbert, meanwhile, draws attention to Deedee’s exoticization of the British Pakistani Shahid and his ‘café-au-lait’ skin (Kureishi BA, p. 210). Moore-Gilbert argues that Kureishi ‘rearranges the terms of the colonial trope without disturbing the racialized power relations that underpin it’.46 Building on Moore-Gilbert’s observation, the text’s references to Shahid’s skin resembling a consumable coffee drink also suggests Deedee’s sensual pleasure in the authority she brandishes over her student as an older, white woman with more sexual experience. In other words, Deedee buttresses her personal worth and sexuality through her domination over the directionless young man in a manner which mirrors the racial and cultural politics of colonization. Deedee, however, also encourages Shahid to experiment with his gender identity by applying makeup cosmetics. Prior to a boisterous bout of intercourse, she paints her lover’s face with eyeliner, lipstick and blusher, all completed whilst listening to the singer Madonna’s track ‘Vogue’. Stereotypically perceived as products that enhance female beauty, the application of cosmetics on Shahid’s face by Deedee both reasserts her control over him and liberates him from the stranglehold of a fixed, determined masculinity, as ‘he liked the feel of his new female face. He could be demure, flirtatious, teasing, a star; a burden went, a certain responsibility had been removed’ (Kureishi BA, p. 117). Moreover, once his face has been altered by makeup, he wonders ‘what it might be like to go out as a woman, to be looked at differently’ (Kureishi BA, p. 118), thereby abdicating his male identity entirely. This interest in gender-bending marks a sharp contrast to the inflexible masculinity of Riaz’s Islamists and the enjoyment that Shahid derives from this experimentation inspires his abandonment of his peers in favour of Deedee’s hedonistic lifestyle. Through his dalliances with Deedee, Shahid’s interest in Islam dissipates entirely therefore exposing his superficial adoption of the group’s Islamism as merely a way to ‘belong’. In his sexual adventures with Deedee, Kureishi establishes sexuality as a corrective to the marginalization that Shahid previously felt. The pair’s shared love of the bi-racial musician Prince also comes into play here. As Christin Hoene describes, ‘References to Prince and his music permeate The Black Album from its title to the last scene, which shows Shahid and his lover Deedee on their way to a Prince concert’.47 Tellingly, the novel takes its title from Prince’s tenth studio album The Black Album, which was recalled from distribution shortly after its release. Released in 1987, Prince’s lyrics on the album share a number of thematic concerns with Kureishi’s novel: tracks such as ‘The Grind’ and ‘Superfunkacalafragasexy’ both examine sexual intercourse from a female perspective, and ‘Bob George’ explores hyper-masculine gender constructions within African American communities. Kureishi’s intertextual references to the album have further significance as Prince

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withdrew all copies of the album following ‘a dark night of the soul […] He [Prince] won’t get specific, saying only that he saw the word God.’48 As Moore-Gilbert notes, the title of Prince’s album is also a clear, and perhaps racially inflected, reference to The Beatles’ 1968 recording The White Album.49 For Kureishi’s purposes, The Black Album title not only connotes the influential British band but also points to racial politics in which Shahid’s peers increasingly reject all-encompassing racial labels such as ‘Asian’ and ‘black’ for ‘Muslim’. Like Prince’s album of the same name, then, tensions between religion, gender and sexuality are inscribed within Kureishi’s novel. Prince’s music and persona are crucially important for Deedee and Shahid. Prince’s music, which draws on an admixture of different genres ranging from funk, soul, blues, rock and hip-hop, serves as a rejection of the fundamentalists’ drive for ‘purity’ and their assertion that music is ‘forbidden’ (Kureishi BA, p. 130). Additionally, Prince’s lyrics, which often explicitly extol the virtues of sexuality, female beauty and homoeroticism, all give voice to Deedee’s promiscuous lifestyle. While, in songs like ‘America’ from his 1985 album Around the World in a Day, Prince also strongly denounced structural racism within the United States thereby speaking to the prejudices that Shahid encounters in his life. In his concerts and appearances, Prince also contrived an androgynous image that involved his use of cosmetics and the adoption of normatively female dress. Indeed, Deedee remarks on Prince that ‘he’s half-black and half-white, half man, half woman, half size, feminine but macho too’. To which Shahid responds ‘he can play soul and funk and rock and rap’ (Kureishi BA, p. 21). Moore-Gilbert summarizes: Kureishi most graphically represents pop at the crossroads not only of different cultural influences but as a site in which the plurality of identity – whether at the level of ethnicity, class, gender or sexuality – is celebrated. As such Prince’s music symbolizes those trends in the contemporary world which Kureishi most prizes.50

The invocation of Prince within the narrative, then, allows Kureishi to align his protagonist with Prince’s subversion of the narrow prisms of gender, sexual, ethnic and racial identities. Beyond what Prince represents as a challenger of normative racial and gender identities, he also embodied a perceptive awareness of what Judith Butler has termed the ‘performativity’ of identity. Prince’s donning of female clothes, his application of makeup, his homoeroticism, his mischievous approach to sexuality and his use of aliases became potent symbols of the socially constructed nature of identities. The application of make-up by Prince and the fictional protagonist Shahid, then, resonates with Butler’s conceptualization of drag acts as exposing differences between anatomical sex and socially constructed gender. In their ostentatious performances of femininity, drag impersonators make clear the differences between the anatomical sex of the performer, the gender of the performer and the exaggerated form of gender that the performer chooses to enact.51 In the case of Prince and Kureishi’s protagonist, both supplant the masculinity they are supposed to perform with imitations of femininity thereby both expanding definitions of masculinity and also exposing gender as performative.

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Before prematurely praising music and clothing as powerful ripostes to hegemonic normative identities in each novel, it should also be emphasized that music and clothing are also commodities that are produced and consumed within the framework of capitalism. bell hooks and Mark Anthony Neal have respectively written about how aspects of popular culture associated with African American masculinity, such as Hip Hop, are often shaped and workshopped according to sophisticated and developed ideas of what kinds of music and images will be economically advantageous for record companies that are generally run and owned by white businessmen.52 With this in mind, then, the radical potential of Butler’s model of performativity comes unstuck and its complicity with forces of commodification come to light. Deedee’s dressing up of Shahid, for instance, can be read increasingly within modes of white dominance and supremacy, as she moulds him to her tastes and her ideals of masculinity as if he is her doll. However, while the neoliberal politics of music and clothing consumption and commodification is indeed very pertinent to constructions of masculinity in each novel, both Kureishi and Smith also point to the subversive potential offered by music and clothing. Locating the cultural production and personas of Prince and George Clinton within each novel is part of this undermining, as Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer note, ‘George Clinton’s Parliament and Funkadelic, Cameo, and Prince, for instance, destabalise the signs of race, gender and sexuality; such artists draw critical attention to the cultural constructedness, the artifice, of the sexual roles and identities we inhabit. In this way they remind us that our pleasures are political and that our politics can be pleasurable’.53 Furthermore, where neoliberal ideologies, and their packaging within the consumption of music, cinema and clothing, are not undermined as within the music of Prince, for example, they are also shown to be present within the Islamist groups themselves thereby suggesting a deeply ambivalent viewpoint about the omnipresent power of capitalist consumption. Indeed, to think on Shahid and Millat’s gender performances a little further, both Kureishi and Smith present their protagonists’ expressions of religiosity in a similar frame of contrived performativity. Moore-Gilbert perceives that Shahid’s application of cosmetics mirrors his donning of the shalwar-kameez to pray. Furthermore, when Shahid puts on the shalwar-kameez, he similarly describes a revelatory feeling of belonging to Islam (Kureishi BA, p. 131). The whole experience of praying and religious meetings with his peers is figured as a performative action, as Shahid likens being with them to watching a film at the cinema. For Shahid, leaving Riaz, Chad and Hat was ‘like someone leaving the cinema’, where absorption in a fictional cinematic narrative comes to an end and he returns to a reality which is ‘more complex and inexplicable’ (Kureishi BA, p. 133). For Millat in Smith’s novel, KEVIN are similarly described in performative terms. The first time that Millat feels inspired to join the group is when he sees his friend Hifan dressed in a severe black suit. Having discarded the Nike-clad outfits of the Raggastani group, Millat overlooks the ‘sobriety that [the suit] is supposed to convey’ and instead boasts: ‘Hifan is the don. Look at that suit … gangster stylee’ (Smith, p. 294). Inspecting the suit by tracing his finger down the black lapels, he repeats, ‘Seriously, Hifan, man, you look wicked. Crisp’ (Smith, p. 295). When Millat puts on a suit, then, he also feels like he belongs to KEVIN. It is the visual and sartorial

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aspects of belonging, however, that capture Millat’s imagination rather than the dozens of religious leaflets that he never reads. When KEVIN launch a protest against the unveiling of a genetically modified mouse during the novel’s denouement, the full implications of this performativity become apparent, as, like Shahid’s invocation of cinema, Millat describes how he feels as if he were on television rather than these events happening in real life. The juxtaposition of these performances of identity, where Shahid is enacting a ‘gender-bending’ persona interchangeably with an Islamic religious identity and Millat’s struggle between identifying as gangster or an Islamist, ultimately suggests the instability and fluidity of all forms of identity. KEVIN and Riaz’s followers, however, are not cognizant of their own identity performances and believe that their religious faith provides clarity thereby enabling them to ‘swim in a clear sea’ and ‘see by a clear light’ (Kureishi BA, p. 79). For Shahid, however, through his sexual encounters with Deedee and their mutual passion for Prince’s music, the fissures and cleavages that govern identity construction are most apparent and the existential certainties that Riaz and his brothers espouse are exposed as precarious. In Smith’s novel, the ending is far more ambiguous and the text ends with a ‘freeze frame’ in which Millat is seen ready to take violent action against scientists presenting the results of their genetic modification experiments. Yet at this crucial point, the narrator of White Teeth takes control of the narrative and imagines the future where the character Iris takes care of a child whose father is either Millat or his brother Magid. In this alone, the novel suggests the preposterous nature of KEVIN’s notions of cultural purity, as well as those of the genetic engineerists, with Millat possibly being the father of a bi-racial child – and with that, the aggressive, hyper-masculine posturing of KEVIN is also shown to be a construction that has been unable to tame Millat’s sexuality. *** The Black Album and White Teeth are two of the most widely read and discussed British novels of the millennium era. Each of these texts have been described as ‘condition of England’ novels in their analysis of the racial, gender, cultural, national and economic ruptures that featured in the closing decade of the last millennium. The prevalence of The Satanic Verses Affair in these two texts speaks to the ways that this event shaped the cultural landscape of Britain. Furthermore, these two novels share significant similarities in their depiction of young, directionless men with migrant backgrounds who embrace a particularly rigid articulation of religion as a compensatory stance against a collective sense of disempowerment at the hands of a normatively white British society. In the process, these protagonists reject other labels of racial or cultural belonging, such as Black British or British Asian, for a ‘British Muslim’ identity which is constructed as a form of antagonism against the racist milieu they were raised in. Nevertheless, both of these novels also underplay the significance of the formation of new racial and gender assemblages that would soon be referred to as ‘British Muslim’, exposing them as performative and contingent. In The Black Album, Riaz’s brotherhood are dissipated and publicly shamed. The final clash of these ideas in the novel is represented in a physical fight between Shahid’s

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brother Chili and Riaz. Angered by Shahid’s decision to leave the group for Deedee’s dissolute lifestyle, Riaz and the brothers track down Shahid and Deedee in order to kill them. However, Shahid’s sexually promiscuous and morally dubious brother saves the pair by immobilizing Riaz and holding a knife to his throat. Pinning Riaz to the wall, he orders him to disrobe. This is a request that has the dual purpose of emasculating the brothers’ leader and enabling Chili to retrieve his own clothes as Shahid donated them to Riaz after a botched attempt to clean his esteemed friend’s laundry. However, this removal of his literal, biological brother’s clothing from Riaz’s corporeality reveals the leader’s ‘wan and skinny body’ (Kureishi BA, p. 268). The frailness and fragility of Riaz’s male body corporally represents his underlying vulnerability and therefore the volatile instability at the centre of the brothers’ collective identity. White Teeth concludes with Millat who, just paragraphs earlier had been convincing himself to stop watching gangster films, poised to fire on a group of scientists, one of whom is his brother Magid, for their involvement in a genetical engineering project. It is at this point that Smith’s narrator halts the narrative and digresses into an imagined future. Yet, as Ashley Dawson has written, does this ending hint towards a more dangerous future in which the real threats are not posed by the religious fundamentalisms signified by KEVIN, or the socio-economic inequalities that forged the group, but the return to eugenics under the guise of biotechnology? In support of this reading, it is worth noting that before the text ‘freeze frames’, Archie Jones jumps in front of Millat’s gun thereby suggesting it is him rather than the scientists who will face the bullet. Both KEVIN and Riaz’s brotherhood are therefore depicted as a form of masculine protest which, when compared to the potential dangers of technology or the frequency of IRA attacks in The Black Album, appear less urgent. Either way, these two texts each explore and engage the emergence of British Muslim masculinities and how the British Muslim male became a new figure of fear following the Bradford book-burnings. A further intriguing similarity is how these two novels frequently incorporate cinema and television into their discussions of British Muslim masculinities therein conveying the influence of cross-media platforms in the formation of this identity assemblage. However, in their sometimes contradictory invocation, such as Bruce Lee’s complicated relationship to discourses of migration and imperialism and the juxtaposition of George Clinton with mafia imagery, as well as the way that these cultural intertexts are implicated within capitalist frameworks of production and consumption, the two novels also point to fault-lines in this transcultural masculinity. It is for this reason now, that in the next chapter I turn to how two films explore the emergence of the British Muslim male as an axiomatically heterosexual subject.

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3

Between Men, Desiring Men: Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette and Sally El Hosaini’s My Brother the Devil

On 16 November 1985, attendees to the London premiere of Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette (dir. Stephen Frears, 1985) witnessed what was ‘almost certainly’ the first cross-racial kiss between two men in British film.1 Kureishi and Frears’s film, which was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Screenplay category at the following year’s Academy Awards, has achieved something which can be described as an iconic status for its depiction of a love affair between a British Pakistani man (played by Gordon Warnecke) and a white British man (played by Daniel Day Lewis) in the context of Thatcherite Britain. Filmed a few years before the Satanic Verses Affair, and the related moral panic relating to British Muslim men, I argue that Laundrette nevertheless laid groundwork for many attributes that would later come to be associated with British Muslim masculinities. This perspective will become clearer as my reading of Laundrette is paired with an analysis of Sally El Hosaini’s 2012 film My Brother the Devil which, released twenty-seven years later, explored same-sex desire within Britain’s Muslim diaspora population, thereby prompting a series of comparisons in the popular press with Kureishi’s pioneering film and exposing the infrequency with which nonheteronormative British Muslim identities are represented in cultural production.2 As Alberto Fernández Carbajal’s study Queer Muslim Diasporas in Contemporary Literature and Film makes clear, there are a number of queer artists, writers and filmmakers who identify as Muslim making challenging and engaging work around the world at the present moment.3 However, there are still only a handful of fictional texts that explore LGBTIQ+ characters with a Muslim cultural heritage or an Islamic faith. When gay or queer protagonists do appear it often unfortunately tends to imply that same-sex sexuality is in some way impermissible or impossible to reconcile with Islamic beliefs or a Muslim identity. For instance, Riaz and his ‘brothers’ in The Black Album launch into a spiteful glut of vituperation against gay people, stating that ‘homosexuals should be beheaded, though first they should be offered the option of marriage’ (Kureishi BA, p. 119). Meanwhile, in the popular film adaptation of Ayub Khan-Din’s play East Is East (dir. Daniel O’Donnell, 1999), the character Nazir flees his arranged marriage to live peacefully with a male partner away from the glare of his father and is subsequently estranged from the Khan family.

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All of these examples show how crucial heterosexual sexualities are to male protagonists in these texts but, simultaneously, how vital homosexuality is as an ‘other’ against which hegemonic masculinities are constructed. This chapter, therefore, probes this dynamic by exploring how homosexual desires and subjectivities are represented in these two films and how non-normative desires complicate processes of cultural translation and the formation of transcultural British Muslim masculinities. In so doing, my critical analysis of these two films brings to light a broader diversity of British Muslim masculinities that do not, for example, rest upon what Adrienne Rich refers to as ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ which, as Rich defines it, refers to how individuals are encouraged, socialized or even forced into accepting heterosexuality as the ‘natural’ state of sexuality.4 Rather, this chapter follows Judith Butler’s line that gender identities that do not conform to ‘compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality’ unmask how gender norms are socially instituted and maintained.5 Set in 1980s London, My Beautiful Laundrette traces the British Pakistani protagonist Omar’s transformation from an impoverished college applicant, who spends his days caring for his alcoholic migrant father, Hussein, into an enterprising young businessman. Mourning the loss of his white British wife’s suicide the previous year, Hussein has taken to his bed from which he consumes copious amounts of alcohol, harangues the current state of Britain and lectures Omar on how he should attend College. As the film develops, however, Omar goes against his father’s wishes by discarding plans for a university education and ingratiates himself with his entrepreneurial extended family. Headed by Hussein’s prosperous brother Nasser, Omar’s relations have formed a business conglomerate consisting of many Pakistani migrant men who, owing to a series of advantageous tax laws aimed at developing business ushered in by the Margaret Thatcher–led Conservative administration of 1979–90, have established a myriad of profitable businesses.6 In this instance, the film presents a hitherto overlooked portion of British Pakistani communities, showing many Pakistani migrants in positions of power such as landlords and proprietors of business. The cinematic representation of a privileged class of Pakistani diaspora thriving under the neoliberalism of Thatcher’s Britain is contrasted with a disadvantaged majority white population who are depicted as unemployed and materially deprived. As Rehana Ahmed explains, a unique and contradictory feature of Thatcherism was how it ‘combined an exclusionary, racialised British nationalism with an economic neoliberalism […] British citizens could be individualised and equalised, regardless of their racial or cultural affiliation, while their structural position in society, shaped partially by their racial or cultural affiliation, could be occluded’.7 To capture the powerfully subversive nature of Laundrette, then, we should be read it within its historical context, as the Thatcher government pursued ‘a purist, Powellite vision of Britain’, as exemplified by: Thatcher’s much cited speech of May 1978 in which she spoke of immigrants ‘swamping’ Britain and the Falklands War, with its accompanying rhetoric of nostalgia for empire, help[ing] to strengthen the identification of Britishness with an exclusionary whiteness and to construct Britain’s minorities as a threat to the cohesion and well-being of the nation. The tightening of immigration controls,

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particularly through the British Nationality Act of 1981, eroded the rights of non-white Commonwealth citizens to enter Britain; and an increasingly coercive authoritarian state targeted minorities through highly repressive police tactics.8

Laundrette deviates from narrative norms that focus on working-class Muslim diaspora communities suffering at the hands of structural racism and Islamophobia, such as in the previous novels discussed like The Black Album and White Teeth, and depicts a section of the British Muslim diaspora population that are actually complicit with dominant political and market forces. Throughout the film, Omar is seduced by the nouveau riche lifestyle of Nasser and his business associates. He emulates Nasser’s rise to wealth by working in his uncle’s garage and eventually managing his accounts. Quickly, Omar gains Nasser’s respect and is promoted to take charge of the family’s floundering laundrette. Whilst taking ownership of the laundry service, Omar employs his childhood friend, a white workingclass man named Johnny as an assistant. Living on the streets and sleeping anywhere with available shelter, Johnny is an unconventional choice as partner by virtue of his impoverished socio-economic standing and his white British background. Even more significantly, since his childhood friendship with Omar, Johnny has developed hostility towards the comparatively affluent Pakistani communities personified by Nasser. Johnny’s animosity has since mutated into reactionary far-right political views built upon feelings of displacement when viewing his and his white peers’ impecunity contrasted with the rich and extravagant Nasser and his migrant business associates. Begrudgingly, Johnny accepts the work out of desperation, leading Omar and Johnny to forge a successful partnership. The narrative twist, however, is that this business partnership soon blossoms into a love affair between the two men. In terms of Kureishi’s treatment of same-sex sexuality, My Beautiful Laundrette was written and released at a time when the then–prime minister Margaret Thatcher was advocating a return to ‘Victorian Values’, thereby looking back to a period when Britain mercilessly controlled and subjugated vast areas of world for profitable gain and instilled a repressive, heteronormative vision on the majority of the empire’s inhabitants. As Peter Jenkins summarizes, ‘Her agenda could have been written on a sampler. The individual owed responsibility to self, family, firm, community, country, God in that order. Economic regeneration and moral regeneration [would] go handin-hand’.9 Resultantly, Thatcher had set upon creating a society of eager, enterprising individuals with strong, white, nuclear, patriotic heterosexual families at its core. Symptomatic of this direction, Section 28 – legislation that aimed to prevent the ‘promotion of homosexual lifestyles’ – was passed in 1988.10 The implementation of Section 28 ensured that homosexuality was deemed inappropriate as a subject of the arts or as a topic of discussion in schools. The passing of this law had a detrimental effect on LGBTIQ+ rights in Britain by driving lesbian and gay visibility into further marginalization and buttressing perceptions that homosexuality was ‘not a viable family alternative’ to nuclear heterosexual families.11 Thus, it is in this context of increased homophobia and a return to ‘Victorian-era’ morals that My Beautiful Laundrette was written. Indeed, the film’s director Stephen Frears remarked that ‘if Laundrette had been made even two years later then [he does not] think it could’ve been released’.12

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It would be mere speculation as to whether Frears’s claims are substantiated, however in the context of the social, political and economic landscape of Thatcherite Britain, particularly with regard to gender, sexuality and immigration, then Laundrette was a deeply subversive film. The second film under analysis, My Brother the Devil, takes place in a more contemporary incarnation of London, but shares My Beautiful Laundrette’s ‘gritty’ focus on underprivileged quarters of the British capital as well as thematic preoccupations with complexes of masculinity, sexuality, race, ethnicity and class. Set in a run-down housing estate on the outskirts of East London, the film’s setting is a ‘site of social struggle and […] an emblematic space of marginality’ in which ‘young, disenfranchised men form gangs, roam the streets, playgrounds and stairways’ of the apartment blocks.13 Whilst Rash, Mo and their peers take to the streets, the brothers’ parents are confined to domestic spaces where they demonstrate their allegiance to their homeland by speaking Arabic and cooking Egyptian cuisine. The young men’s father works long-hour shifts as a bus driver for which he receives modest earnings and urges his sons to follow suit, bemoaning Rash’s resistance to seek work at the job centre. Within the sons’ logic, their father embodies their sense of marginalization and emasculation as his field of employment is one that is historically associated with immigrant communities and results in a humble salary. The father’s unfavourable working conditions and social marginalization are compensated initially by Rash and later on by Mo’s membership of an exclusively male gang demonstratively named Drugs, Money, Guns (DMG). Compared to their father, DMG members earn substantially more money selling drugs to other families on the estate and around the surrounding area. In part, DMG ensure lucrative sales through territorial fights with other gangs in the area to ensure their market dominance. Crucially, however, the young men in DMG forge a collective identity that supersedes their racial, ethno-religious and class marginality by ensuring financial income and asserting a compensatory hyper-masculinity with guns, violence and heterosexual sexual conquest as their defining features. This gang identity is, therefore, a consensual riposte to a system that provides diaspora youth with comparatively fewer opportunities for work and excludes them from mainstream political or social representation. The turning point in the narrative is the death of Izzy, a member of the gang and a close friend of Rash’s, during a ‘turf war’ with members of a rival gang. Following Izzy’s murder, Rash has an existential struggle with his gangster lifestyle and consoles himself through his friendship with the sophisticated, urbane and more moneyed Sayyid. Living in an upscale studio flat that is on the periphery of the estate, Sayyid, who had previously been a costumer for the gang’s drug dealing business and has a background in gangs himself, helps Rash through his trauma and also employs him as an assistant in his photography firm. However, it transpires that Sayyid has romantic designs upon Rash and makes an alcohol-fuelled attempt to seduce him. At first Rash appears revolted by Sayyid’s sexual attention; however, Rash eventually reciprocates his employer’s romantic advancements and the two embark on a love affair. In both My Beautiful Laundrette and My Brother the Devil the central male protagonists Omar and Rash subvert the gender expectations of their family and peers by engaging in romantic relationships with other men. To this end, I describe much of

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the behaviour and cultural bias amongst the films’ protagonists as ‘heteronormative’. I am referring here to Michael Warner’s use of the term to describe the positioning of heterosexuality as the ‘elemental form of human association, as the very model for inter-gender relations, as the indivisible basis of all community, and as the means of reproduction without which society wouldn’t exist’.14 Accordingly, assumptions that most people favour a heterosexual lifestyle underpin the majority of social and political thought as well as most everyday exchanges. In illustrating the accumulative effects of heteronormative thinking, Warner draws on Monique Wittig’s description of the ‘social contract of heterosexuality’, Wittig writes that ‘to live in society is to live in heterosexuality […] Heterosexuality is always already there within all mental categories. It has sneaked into dialectic thought (or thought of differences) as its main category’.15 Heteronormativity, then, refers to how dominant social, political and cultural discourses presuppose and propagate a paradigmatically heterosexual viewpoint. With reference to practices of masculinity, Raewyn Connell identifies how hegemonic masculinities are dependent upon heteronormativity. As all hegemonic identity formations necessarily require other subjectivities to subordinate in order to attain dominance, Connell argues that homosexual masculinities are afforded the lowest position in gender hierarchies amongst men. She observes that ‘gayness in patriarchal ideology is the repository of whatever is symbolically expelled from hegemonic masculinity, the items ranging from fastidious taste in home decoration to receptive anal pleasure’.16 Indeed, what Connell goes on to argue is that homosexuality not only refers to sexual behaviour between men but is also a catch-all term for a range of practices deemed effeminate and therefore demonstratively excluded from most definitions of hegemonic masculinity. Substantiating this claim, Connell shows how some men exaggeratedly perform behaviours associated with hegemonic masculinity to ensure they are not labelled homosexual. Most common amongst these, Connell claims, is derision and threats of violence against men that are perceived to behave in a manner suggesting their effeminacy and, by extension, their homosexuality. Connell explains that there is a ‘rich vocabulary of abuse’ that blurs both physical acts of sexual intimacy between men and femininity.17 Hegemonic masculinities are therefore not only heteronormative in that they require and propagate sexual attraction to females, but they also depend upon homosexuality as a foil against which culturally dominant models of masculinity can be defined against. Nevertheless, none of the protagonists in either film define themselves as gay nor do these films include a ‘coming out scene’ whereby characters are shown to associate themselves with a label for their sexuality. In this regard, I refer to my protagonists as queer and having ‘same sex’ sexual and romantic relationships in the films. I have chosen to use the term ‘queer’ in the spirit of Warner’s definition as it is an umbrella term that does embraces a range of nonnormative sexualities and gender performances that do not conform to a homo-/ heterosexual binary.18 Pertaining to queer sexualities, masculinity and Muslim identities, there is a rapidly developing body of work across the social sciences that details the rich diversity of sexualities and gender identities that coexist with Muslim ethno-religious identities, as well as the ways that homonormativity is ingrained within different forms of Muslim

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identity and Islamic beliefs. While it is beyond my purview to detail all of this academic literature, it is necessary to establish some crucial background at this juncture. Momin Rahman has explained, for instance, how Western colonialism brought specific forms of patriarchal heteronormativity to maintain the social order of women giving birth to future generations of racialized slaves and servants to ensure the economic dominance of the Western colonizer.19 However, this should not be read as claiming that precolonial Islamicate societies were not homophobic. Rather, Rahman shows that colonialism brought with it a Westernized legal system that ensured the persecution of same-sex sexuality and propagation of heteronormativity. Analogous with Christianity and Judaism, most doctrines of Islam regard homosexuality as prohibited because the Koran considers sexual activity outside of marriage as haram (prohibited). However, there are no explicit references to same-sex sexuality in the Islamic holy book. The parable of Lut is generally used as justification for the prohibition of homosexuality. As the Koran records it, Lut was commissioned as Allah’s messenger to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to preach monotheism and put an end to the citizens’ lustful and violent acts, including city inhabitants sexually violating their guests. Lut tried to convince the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah to abandon their aggressive sexuality; however, this was to no avail. Heeding Lut’s prayers, Allah sent two angels in the disguise of handsome young men to aid his prophet. However, the people of Sodom and Gomorrah overpowered Lut and sought to satisfy their sexual desires upon the two men. These men revealed their true identities as angels and, consequently, destroyed the cities and all inhabitants in punishment. Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle and Amanullah De Sondy’s work, in particular, include trenchant theological refutations of the supposed opposition to same-sex sexuality within Islam and shed light on a range of Islamic thinkers, practitioners and imams who have resisted heteronormativity.20 With Kugle arguing that it is the forced rape of males rather than the sexual practices that incurred divine retribution. However, as the work of social psychologist Rusi Jaspal shows, the majority of British Muslim men in Britain with a same-sex sexual orientation face a number of existential difficulties focused on the large proportion of Muslim communities that view homosexuality as a sin and heterosexuality as the only acceptable lifestyle. In research completed with Marco Cinnirella, Jaspal and Cinnirella paint a complex picture of British Pakistani men viewing their homosexuality as in competition with other facets of their identity – including their Islamic faith, cultural background, race and class.21 To varying degrees, their interviewees negotiate a relationship between these identities that, for some, sadly necessitates the foreclosure of sexual relationships but, for others, means that they do not see their Islamic faith being opposed to homosexuality thereby stressing the intersectionality of their identity. Jaspal’s other work, such as his research into perceptions of ‘coming out’ as gay with the sociologist Asifa Siraj, stresses that there are no clear-cut or absolute answers to negotiating same-sex sexuality as a British Muslim man.22 It is therefore, in the spirit and notion of intersectionality that I read these two films’ engagements with British Muslim masculinities and same-sex sexuality. Sally El Hosaini, the writer and director of My Brother the Devil, echoes Connell’s reading of homosexuality when she explains her inspiration for the film was because

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she wanted to ‘explore the importance of masculinity’ from the perspective of ‘outsiders and outcasts’.23 She adds that, although My Brother the Devil is focused on male homosexuality, her interest in individuals who traverse gender and sexual norms in British Arab Muslim migrant and diaspora communities was also the motivation behind her previous cinematic effort, her 2009 short film entitled Henna Night which focused on two British Egyptian women in a lesbian relationship.24 Both of these films, she argues, were made as part of her investigation into her own British Arab Muslim background. El Hosaini was born in Swansea to mixed Egyptian and Welsh parentage and grew up in both Wales and Cairo. Following her graduation from Durham University where she read Arabic and Middle Eastern Politics, El Hosaini taught in Yemen and became involved in the production of various documentaries and films based in or about the Middle East. Her desire to make films, she explains, comes from a keen sense that cinema should have social responsibility as filmmakers are ‘responsible for what [they’re] putting out into the world.’25 For Hanif Kureishi, however, his presentation of same-sex love in My Beautiful Laundrette represents a more oblique form of self-expression, as he claims ‘the two boys are really the two sides of me: a Pakistani boy and an English boy, because I’m half Pakistani and half English. I got the two parts of myself together … kissing.’26 Although in stark contrast to El Hosaini’s intentions, Kureishi also flippantly shirked off any moral responsibilities regarding the film by stating, ‘if it gives one person an erection and makes one person laugh then that’s good enough for me’.27 Kureishi’s provocations, however, belie the film’s importance as a cultural product that, as previously mentioned, was the first to explore complexes of same-sex sexuality, diaspora and British Muslim masculinities. Indeed, My Beautiful Laundrette is particularly celebrated as an innovative film for its refusal to adhere to what Stuart Hall calls ‘the innocent notion of the essential black subject’.28 Using ‘black’ as an expression of politicized cross-racial solidarity, Hall praises Kureishi’s film for the way it examines intersectional identities, thereby exposing how ‘the question of the black subject cannot be represented without reference to the dimensions of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity’.29 As Hall puts it, the film emphasizes transcultural ‘processes of mixing, of unsettling, recombination, hybridization and “cut-and-mix”’ on both a thematic and formal level.30 Cultural difference is, therefore, evoked as ‘a positional, conditional and conjunctural’ conceptualization in the film whereby a ‘heterogeneity of interests and identities’ are evinced.31 As such, issues of racial identity in the film are ‘constantly crossed and recrossed by the categories of class, of gender and ethnicity’.32 In this sense, Kureishi’s film presages many of the explorations into cultural translation and transcultural identities that have been interrogated throughout my book. It is vital to note here, however, how the term ‘Muslim’ does not appear in these then-contemporary responses to the film. Unlike the novel by Kureishi in this study, neither Muslim cultures nor Islamic faiths are conspicuously discussed in My Beautiful Laundrette. Released before the Satanic Verses Affair and 9/11, My Beautiful Laundrette precedes many of the global and local events that have mobilized the writers and filmmakers in this book to examine the interplay of British and Muslim cultures – including Hanif Kureishi himself in his novel The Black Album and short story ‘My

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Son the Fanatic’. However, in bringing Kureishi’s film together with My Brother the Devil for comparative analysis, I argue that it can be beneficial to consider My Beautiful Laundrette as foreshadowing key representational paradigms that underpin depictions of British Muslims in relation to homosexuality. Specifically, I am referring to how My Beautiful Laundrette presupposes aspects of what Lisa Duggan was to theorize as homonormativity and Jasbir K. Puar was later to refer to as homonationalism.33 In reference to the latter term, Puar argues that, in the United States, 9/11 marks a watershed moment for LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) mainstream and cultural representation as some lesbians, gays and queers were strategically embraced by the nation at a time of increased fear of Islamist terrorism from a racialized ‘other’. Puar writes: Even as patriotism immediately after September 11 was inextricably tied to a reinvigoration of heterosexual norms for Americans, progressive sexuality was championed as a hallmark of U.S. modernity. For despite this retrenchment of heteronormativity, the United States was also portrayed as ‘feminist’ in relation to the Taliban’s treatment of Afghani women (a concern that had been previously of no interest to U.S. foreign policy) and gay-safe in comparison to the Middle East.34

Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s writing on homonormativity, which refers to the absorption of some heteronormative ideals and constructs into some homosexual cultures and identities, Puar contends that the post-9/11 era heralded a shift whereby the heteronormative ideologies that underpin the American nation-state were ‘now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate the narrow racial, class, gender and national ideals’.35 In other words, while gay and queer people were historically rejected from the body of the state, the jingoistic atmosphere of post-9/11 United States led to a shift in some areas of political and social discourse whereby some groups of generally white, middle-class lesbians, gay men and queers were incorporated within imaginings of the nation due to their potential as economic contributors, consumers and reproducers through the legalization of same-sex marriage and reproductive kinship. Homonationalist discourses, then, distinguish homonormative gay, lesbian and queer identities as admitted within the body politic from ‘a perversely sexualized and racialized Muslim population […] who refuse to assimilate’.36 Thus, the accelerant narrative of progress for some LGBTIQ+ subjectivities is contradicted by the internal suppression and increased profiling and surveillance of non-white and immigrant communities associated with illiberal viewpoints and terrorism. Such ideological formulations preclude, for example, someone identifying as both Muslim and as lesbian, gay or queer at the same time. However, Puar argues that the gay or queer subject of colour can negotiate their belonging within the nation through adherence to neoliberal economic structures. In this sense, I argue that Puar’s model for conditional acceptance of gay or queer individuals of colour into the body of the nation has significant implications for the complex of race, ethno-religious, gender and sexual identities in Kureishi’s film. Crudely put, for the protagonist Omar, his same-sex sexuality becomes a way that he can negotiate his belonging within Britain at the expense of his ethno-religious and

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racial disempowerment. El Hosaini’s film, on the other hand, takes this negotiation of national belonging on sexuality grounds further by imagining a British Muslim protagonist whose love affair with an affluent, religiously observant British Muslim man leads to his social advancement out of financially unfavourable conditions and into a prosperous and aspirational social class. Despite the film’s accomplished exploration of economic and structural inequalities that affect the gang, as well as its laudable inclusion of a Muslim character with an Islamic faith who pursues a same-sex sexual and romantic relationship, I posit that My Brother the Devil still falls back on homonationalist binaries. By analysing the film, I contend that what Puar refers to as a ‘Muslim or gay binary’ should be considered in a British context to examine how certain ‘liberal’ Muslim subjectivities are incorporated within imaginings of Britishness, at the exclusion of Muslim subjectivities that do not fit these prescriptions.37 These are conceptions of British Muslim identities and masculinities that, my chapter aims to show, My Beautiful Laundrette first explored. I will come to this conclusion through two particular strands of argument. In the first section, I employ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorizations of homosocial desire and homosexual panic to explore how the all-male collectives in each film construct their masculinities based around intimate bonds through which males maintain practices of heteronormative masculinity. These performances of masculinity are competitively enacted against their sense of disempowerment at the hands of a majority white, nonMuslim society. In the second segment, I will show how homosexuality represents a liberating alternative to these forms of highly pressured, patriarchal masculinity but, using the work of Duggan and Puar, expose how same-sex sexuality ultimately entrenches socio-economic inequalities though Omar and Rash’s negotiation of an economically driven Britishness that forecloses transcultural exchange.

‘Drugs, Money, Guns! What the fuck else is there for us out here, cuz?’ Perhaps one of the most strikingly gendered images in My Beautiful Laundrette is Omar’s cousin, Tania, standing at the window of Nasser’s bedroom, bearing her breasts in disdain and derision at the all-male party inside. As Susan E. Lorsch relates, Tania looks squarely into the ‘film audience’ – and then into Omar – in ‘the hope that he is still unformed and malleable enough to resist initiation’ into the patriarchal world symbolized by Nasser’s bedchamber.38 Indeed, when the camera pans round the room, the viewer observes a gathering of men from a variety of different racial and ethnoreligious backgrounds who have joined together to discuss business deals, boast about their financial success, lambast other men for failing to earn enough money, make prurient jokes about women and consume excessive amounts of expensive alcohol which they offer up as toasts to the political status quo. Tania’s display, then, is a deeply ‘subversive gesture’ that both makes clear and undercuts the close male bonds that underpin hegemonic masculinities within the film.39 In the visual logic of the scene, women are reduced to the ‘outside’ of rooms where male-bonded success is celebrated and upheld. However, as Lorsch argues, the positioning of the camera allows Tania

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to ‘own the gaze’ so she flaunts herself directly at the audience and Omar thereby signalling the film’s ‘ideological independence’ and its interrogative stance towards the kinds of patriarchal, masculinist bias that are encountered within Nasser’s bedroom.40 I open my discussion with this scene as it eloquently conveys the significance that other men have upon gender relations and constructions within Kureishi’s film. In My Beautiful Laundrette, then, much of the film’s focal point centres upon a group of mostly Pakistani migrant businessmen who regularly throw lavish parties through which they express their claims to hegemonic masculinity by flaunting their extravagant wealth and achievements. Although, as I will argue in the following pages, these performances of hegemonic masculinity are exaggerated forms of protest masculinity fuelled by a common sense of inferiority due to their minority ethno-religious background in a majority white Britain. Similar patterns of protest masculinity are enacted by a clique of young men with migratory backgrounds in My Brother the Devil. These men, however, have significantly less access to power and wealth than the businessmen in My Beautiful Laundrette. In contrast to Nasser and his middle-aged associates, all of whom represent a business elite who gain their status and affluence by taking every advantage of generous Thatcherite tax reforms,41 characters such as Rash and Mo in El Hosaini’s film are much younger, British-born diaspora men who do not have access to similar methods of moneymaking. Yet, the gang (DMG) in My Brother the Devil still competitively enact many hegemonic masculine characteristics in riposte to their collective sense of marginalization. Likewise, this sense of exclusion is felt partly on a racial and cultural level as the men are ostracized from a ‘white’ British mainstream due to their diaspora backgrounds. Moreover, as this segment of my chapter will explore, both of these collective groups – or gangs – depend upon the exclusion of women and competitive displays of success, bravery and prosperity through which practices of masculinity are constructed and organized. The above patterns call to mind Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorizations on ‘homosociality’. As I explained in the book’s introduction, Sedgwick deploys the term ‘homosocial desire’ to refer to forms of solidarity forged between men, through friendships and intimate collaborations with other males that maintain and defend patriarchal gender orders.42 Homosocial bonds, then, are one of the central ways through which norms of patriarchal masculinity are performed in the public sphere. Crucially, however, Sedgwick describes homosocial affiliation as a form of male–male desire thereby evoking an affective or social bond between men that can be manifested in many different ways such as rivalry, hostility or admiration.43 By interpreting these bonds of male–male affiliation in the language of desire, it enables Sedgwick ‘to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual – a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted’.44 Thus, Sedgwick proposes that homosocial bonds are accompanied by an acute sense of anxiety – or ‘homosexual panic’ – that male–male connections may give way to same-sex sexual or romantic desire. Homosexual panic, Sedgwick opines, often takes the form of homophobic and chauvinistic language that focuses on sexual achievements with women as a means for men to defensively assert their heterosexuality amongst other men. Moreover, the figurative power of declaring someone homosexual also affords men a ‘mechanism

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of domination’ through which to blackmail and malign male rivals.45 Although homosocial networks uphold male superiority in patriarchal gender systems, they are also acutely contradictory phenomena built upon identification, competition and fear of other men. Homosexual panic, therefore, reveals the foundational anxiety underlying constructions of patriarchal masculinity in homosocial networks. Ostensibly, Sedgwick contends that the dual forces of homosocial desire and homosexual panic are inextricably linked within constructions of masculinity.46 Sedgwick’s argument that men’s practices of gender are highly organized by relations between men and, therefore, their performances of masculinity are enacted for the benefit of other men who have the power to grant men their hegemonic masculinity is particularly illuminating for how I interpret collectively forged masculinities in Kureishi and El Hosaini’s films.47 According to Sedgwick, males seek the approval of other males in attempting to improve their position in social hierarchies, using markers of hegemonic masculinity such as occupational achievement, wealth, power and status, physical prowess and sexual conquest. Thus, in this section of my argument, I will show how these theorizations of masculinity resonate with each respective groups’ enthusiastic embracement of hegemonic masculine practices, how these practices are collectively and competitively performed, and the ways in which the central protagonists Omar and Rash seek acceptance within these groups by emulating each collective’s behaviour and practice. To return to My Beautiful Laundrette’s scene in Nasser’s bedroom, for example, it is not only women who are excluded from the bedroom but also men who they deem to have a ‘weak’ masculinity. A case in point is Omar’s father, Hussein, who is not invited and is singled out for mockery as he is unemployed and has had a limited number of female sexual partners. Unlike Nasser, who is married to a Pakistani migrant wife but maintains a white British female lover named Rachel, Hussein is scorned for his faithful marriage to a white British woman named Mary with whom he enjoyed a sexual escapade in his youth. Hussein, therefore, flouts the hegemonic gender order by not marrying a Pakistani woman and refusing to see white British women as a sexual object through which one’s masculinity can be measured. Alongside his alleged lack of sexual prowess, Hussein is also mocked for being beaten down by his experiences of racism which have left him as a passive and enervated figure that languishes in bed. Nasser, on the other hand, is described as circumventing the structural racism of Britain in order to have a highly successful career thereby evoking his masculine strength in the face of adversity. To this end, Rachel has crucial significance for Nasser’s masculinity. Although married to a middle-aged Pakistani woman named Bilquis, Nasser spends most of his time (and money) upon the much younger and more glamorous British woman Rachel. Indeed, the attention he devotes to his English lover reveals a scarcely hidden preference for Rachel over his long-suffering wife. For instance, the sari-clad Bilquis is never seen outside of a domestic setting from where she prepares food that professes an allegiance to her Pakistani homeland. In contrast, Rachel is treated by Nasser to luxurious London restaurants and cocktail bars. By inviting Rachel to public events with other businessmen, Nasser enables a form of peer judgement upon himself in which he is seen to be commercially, professionally and sexually successful. Throughout

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the film, Rachel is dehumanized and becomes a sexualized and aestheticized ‘trophy’ of Nasser’s achievements. From her first appearance in the film, Rachel is established as a sexual being as Omar overhears her enthusiastic love-making with Nasser. While in the rest of the film, she is depicted as wearing extravagantly fashionable clothes and jewellery, all of which have been bought for her by Nasser. Rachel’s race is also a pivotal aspect of Nasser’s self-construction amidst his avaricious companions. The fact that Rachel is white enables Nasser to ‘show off ’ his ability not only to succeed in a society that marginalizes migrants and people of colour but also inverts colonial relations through masculinized sexuality. In other words, Nasser, the non-white migrant transgresses power hierarchies by sexually seducing and dominating a white woman from the former colonizing power. Rachel, therefore, serves as a symbol of Nasser’s own hegemonic masculine successes who is paraded for all the other businessmen to observe. Further indicative of women as markers of hegemonic masculinity, Nasser demonstrates the centrality of heterosexuality to his relationship to Britain when he tells Omar: ‘In this damn country that we hate and love, you can get anything you want. It’s all spread out and available. That’s why I believe in England. You just need to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.’ In this analogy, Nasser casts professional success in Britain as resembling the sexual domination of a woman. Tellingly, this metaphor does not depend on a mutual exchange of sexual pleasure but instead rests on a negative and forceful imagining of a male imposing himself upon a woman to fulfil his desires. Sexual and economic exploitation are therefore linked in a revealing analogy that reverses the stereotypical representation of the colonized as feminized.48 Nasser’s success in England, then, contests his marginalization and emasculation as a formerly colonized subject who has settled in the old imperial centre. Whilst England is depicted as a woman who needs to be sexually controlled in order to succeed, Nasser later summarizes the complex socio-political ailments that drove his family to migrate overseas in a similarly sexualized fashion. For Nasser, Pakistan ‘has been sodomised by religion. It’s beginning to interfere with the making of money.’ In this analogy, the comparatively more difficult ways to make money and therefore evince a vital component in hegemonic masculinity in Pakistan renders men as submissive, passive and emasculated. This is in stark contrast to the position of men in England who, if they learn to ‘squeeze the tits of the system’, are portrayed as being empowered. In this regard, Nasser’s sexualized imagery resonates with Leo Bersani’s contention that ‘heterosexual cultural fantasy promotes an analogy between passive anal sex, which represents a breakdown of bodily boundaries, and shattering of the male self that is equal to death’.49 Thus Bersani writes that, in heteronormative understandings of masculinity, the active role in sexual intercourse is always afforded to the male. The anus, therefore, is mapped as a site that is demonstratively not penetrated. In turn, this means that receptive anal pleasure results in a loss – or in Bersani’s terms death – of the masculine self as it subverts heteronormative bodily boundaries that categorically ensure that males are always sexually dominant. Working in Pakistan, then, is associated with a figurative loss of a masculine self as it results in less money and prestige within Nasser’s rigidly heterosexual masculine worldview.

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For Nasser and his business associates, the UK is, in their words, ‘a little heaven’ as the Thatcher administration’s neoliberalization of the economy ensured that men normally disadvantaged due to their minoritarian racial or ethno-religious background can succeed provided they follow the basic rules of capitalist investment. Nasser and his migrant companions use a combination of their business acumen and the economic climate of Thatcher’s Britain to translate their hegemonic masculine requirements of being a breadwinner and earning money into the environment of the UK. This is most clearly articulated in a revealing toast of champagne offered by Nasser to Omar and Johnny’s business: NASSER: And we’ll drink to Thatcher and your beautiful laundrette. JOHNNY: Do they go together? NASSER: Like dall and chipatis

Indeed, as Chris Ogden points out, Thatcher’s tax reforms which enabled many to ‘increase their net profit dramatically from gross earnings’50 were enthusiastically embraced by many migrants who were in turn encouraged by Thatcher’s praise of Indian and Asian shopkeepers as Britain’s new ‘meritocrats’.51 The character of Nasser is no exception to this rising class of prosperous migrants; at one point in the film Nasser proudly states that ‘there is no question of race in the new enterprise culture’. Hence, Nasser and his community of migrant businessmen are fictional incarnations of a Thatcherite archetype that used the neoliberalization of Britain’s economy to reverse colonial hierarchies and succeed in 1980s Britain. With this in mind, especially ironic that the laundrette which Omar and Johnny renovate had been called Churchill Laundrette, thereby connoting the celebrated British prime minister Winston Churchill, and is renamed Powders therein hinting at the expensive drug cocaine which, in popular culture, has frequently been associated with excesses of Thatcherite businessmen as famously shown in Alan Hollinghurst’s 2008 novel The Line of Beauty.52 Emblematic of the congregated men’s support for the Thatcher regime’s economic reforms, the bedroom scene is accompanied by a particularly 1980s synthesized version of the nationalist anthem ‘Rule, Britannia!’ as the men disparage Hussein for his unpatriotic, socialist beliefs and offer a champagne toast to Margaret Thatcher.53 The entrepreneurs ridicule Omar’s father for embracing an ideology which, in their mind, ensures limited access to markers of hegemonic masculinity and financial success. Towards the end of the scene, the men make plans for Omar to join their ranks by integrating him within their business plans therefore saving him from the emasculating influence of his father. The discussion of Omar’s future is markedly inflected with masculinist language, as Salim declares that they will ‘make him a man’ thereby divulging an implicit link between professional and financial success and masculinity. Indeed, association with the group is a way for Omar to combat his feelings of emasculation at home. The relationship between Omar and Hussein resembles a reversal of expected parent–child roles in which son Omar cares for his father by washing his clothes, cooking his dinner, doing household chores and even helps him go to the toilet. These are all tasks which in particularly patriarchal paradigms

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of hegemonic masculinity are symbolically excluded as ‘feminine’ and not befitting men. Tellingly, Omar and Hussein’s first scene together includes a close-up focus on a photograph of Mary besides Hussein’s bed. Eventually, it transpires that Mary had committed suicide the previous year to escape her husband’s abuse. Hussein’s violence, the audience learns, was a physical compensation for his feelings of disempowerment outside of the home. Put differently, he hit his wife as an expression of masculine power otherwise denied to him through his unemployment and the racial discrimination that he faced in his previous workplace. Therefore, on the grounds of his filial status, Omar is expected to fulfil the caring role of his deceased mother. At one point in the film, Omar’s attitude towards his father’s languid state becomes apparent when he describes hypothetically squeezing Hussein’s body only to be left with ‘two bottles of vodka and a flap of skin a bit like a French letter’. The ‘French letter’ that Omar refers to, is a popular euphemism for a condom thereby implying impotence, passivity and emasculation on the part of his father. Nasser’s business group, therefore, offer Omar an alternative vision of masculinity where he can atone for his own feelings of diminishment. Unlike his father, then, Omar’s Uncle Nasser is an entrepreneur who presides over a number of lucrative business ventures – car garages, property ownership and laundry services. Nasser’s success has led him to cultivate a flamboyant lifestyle in which he visits expensive cocktail bars, wears sharply tailored suits, keeps an English mistress and earns the admiration of a group of fellow businessmen with whom he meets regularly. A culmination of financial, professional and sexual success, combined with respect from his male peers, renders Nasser a contrarian figure to the apathetic Hussein. Consequently, Nasser becomes an attractive model of masculinity – and a substitute father figure – to the impressionable and vulnerable Omar. Nasser’s power, and the homosocial underpinning of this authority, are most conspicuous in the bedroom scene which I opened this section of my analysis with. In the centre of the shot, Nasser is sat cross-legged on his bed whilst seated beside him are his most trusted associates: Zaki and his business heir Salim. According to the setup of the scene, each man’s status in the group’s hierarchy is determined according to proximity to the most dominant male, Nasser. The majority of the men in the room, and especially those sat closest to Nasser, are rich and successful Pakistani migrants. Meanwhile, a British character, with an Irish-sounding name, called Dick O’Donnell and a nameless associate referred to in the script as ‘The Englishman’ are seated in subordinate positions around the bed implying their own inferiority. Although O’Donnell’s character is in the film only very briefly, it is perhaps noteworthy that Kureishi chooses a name that connotes Irishness thereby suggesting affinity, albeit, as hinted in the seating arrangement inferiority, with postcolonial migrants like Nasser, Salim and Zaki. Thus, the way the men are arranged in orbit around Nasser marks him as the epicentre of the conversation and natural focus of attention. In conveying Nasser’s sovereignty amongst the men, the shot draws on familiar Orientalist imagery of robed Sultans sat on beds with gathered male advisers assembled around.54 Further emphasizing this visual referencing, Nasser is notably dressed in traditional South Asian attire contrasting him with the besuited male crowd around him. This sequence, therefore, shows that it is these men that afford Nasser much of his power and status.

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Turning to the characters of Rash and Mo in My Brother the Devil, then, a number of intriguing similarities emerge. In the first place, Rash and Mo are attracted to the gang for comparatively similar reasons that Nasser’s group appeals to Omar. Like Kureishi’s young protagonist, Rash and Mo share a passive and enervated father who embodies their sense of marginalization and emasculation. Unlike Hussein, however, Rash and Mo’s father works long-hour shifts as a bus driver for which he receives modest earnings and urges his sons to follow suit, bemoaning Rash’s resistance to seek work at the job centre. Emphasizing a generational and cultural divide, Rash and Mo’s parents are confined to domestic spaces within Hackney, where they recreate their Egyptian heritage by speaking Arabic and cooking Egyptian cuisine. Therefore, their parents’ – and specifically their father’s – status is compensated by the perceived glamour of gang life and Rash and Mo’s hyper-macho posturing. Rash and Mo seek alternative masculine role models and reject their parents’ determination to preserve their Egyptian heritage. To this end, the gang’s appreciation of hip-hop ‘with its distinctive music (rap, reggae, DJing, human beat box), break-dancing, slang, fashion and graphics (graffiti and tagging)’, provides a riposte to their parents’ cultural allegiances to a geographically distant homeland and exclusion from a majority white British culture.55 Thus hip hop ‘signifies cultural and generational rebellion and […] serves as an important strategy of cultural hybridisation’.56 Contrasting with their parents’ desire to recreate ‘home’ whilst living ‘abroad’, then, Rash and Mo embrace transcultural lifestyles and reference points that are rooted in African American subcultures but have become increasingly referenced by young European secondgeneration immigrant communities, such as hip hop. In a similar vein, the aggression, physical prowess and hyper-masculinity of American cultural icons from a racial or ethnic minority, such as the character of Tony Montana in Scarface57 and the boxing champion Muhammad Ali, are referenced by the two brothers and their cohorts, serving as ‘emblematic embodiments of marginalized masculinity’ that compensate for their ‘lacking access to material goods’.58 The formation of the male gang in a marginalized, multiracial community such as that in My Brother the Devil is the result of a collective awareness that the socioeconomic possibilities afforded to white, middle-class men seem unattainable. Thus, the gang become a form of ‘protest masculinity’ much like Riaz’s group in The Black Album or the Bengal Tigers in Brick Lane. Connell’s theorization speaks to the young men in My Brother the Devil, who are defined negatively by the sum total of their possibilities and so construct a compensatory hyper-masculine identity that overlooks their diverse but marginalized ethno-religious differences whilst foregrounding their masculinity as both a solution to disadvantage and a means of reasserting themselves. For the men who join the gang, violence, (hetero)sexual conquest and crime become an opportunity to transcend the limited opportunities afforded by their class, race and cultural background as well as an important resource for re-affirming their claims to (masculine) power. Appropriately, the gang inscribe their veneration of illegal activity as a means of asserting their marginalized subjectivity through their name, ‘Drugs, Money, Guns’ (DMG). However, the film’s gang formation also closely resembles Sedgwick’s theorisation of homosocial networks as the bonds forged between the men in DMG are especially

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intimate. The terms used to communicate with each other emphasize their fraternal affiliation, thus fellow gang members are called ‘cuz’, an abbreviation of ‘cousin’, ‘fam’, alluding to ‘family’, and ‘bredren’, referring to ‘brethren’ or ‘brothers’. At one point in the film Mo explains that the gang are his ‘fam out here’, thereby demonstrating the closeknit nature of the gang. Notions of honour and loyalty are also deeply engrained in the psyche of the gang. Consequently, violent acts of reprisal are threatened or committed in revenge for misdeeds against their members, such as a plot to enact a reciprocal murder following the murder of a DMG gangster at the hands of a rival group. Affiliative connections are also physically demarcated with tattoos that imprint the gang’s initials, DMG, on their bodies. These tattoos act as ‘badges of honour’, decipherable only by other gang members, that visually distinguish them from other men and engrave a sense of belonging to the collective onto their bodies. The inclusive and exclusive power of these tattoos is significant – by marking their bodies with the tattoo, the gang members are simultaneously marking their belonging to a social group and excluding other men from the estate. The tattoo, then, works as a talisman that symbolizes dedication to the gang community and their values, as well as signifying a riposte to a majority white Britain that rigidly casts them into the margins of mainstream society. However, the young men depend on their peers not only as a source of kinship but also because male gang members grant one another status and prestige within their community. Rash’s sexual success with women and his physical strength, for instance, result in a comparatively high position within the DMG ranks. Within this logic, women, although vital for the construction of DMG’s heterosexual masculinity, function as tools through which men can exhibit and validate their masculinity for the benefit of other men. With the exception of the protagonist Aisha, who will be discussed in the next section, women are complicit with the hyper-masculine gender constructions performed by DMG gang members. This is illustrated by Rash’s mother Hanan who accepts her son’s financial subsidies despite knowing the immoral methods through which his money is earned. Meanwhile, young women on the estate with similar backgrounds to the DMG gang members, like Vanessa and Sonya, allow themselves to be manipulated for housekeeping or sexual services to the gang. Internalized hierarchical dynamics within DMG are strikingly similar to those found in Nasser’s group and reveal an abundance of correlations in homosocial constructions of masculinity. At the top of the hierarchy in DMG is the largely absent leader Lenny who commands the drug dealing from a deluxe apartment outside of the housing estate. In spite of his absence, Lenny’s home contains a wall of televisions that link to surveillance cameras thereby making his flat a panopticon space that records and polices the functioning of the gang and the estate’s inhabitants. To this end, Lenny is always cognizant of the happenings within the gang and his observation ensures that gang members are always kept in line. Just as Lenny has authority in a similar manner to Nasser in My Beautiful Laundrette, Lenny’s home is also filled with signs of prosperity such as widescreen televisions, state-of-the-art technology and two extravagant antique scimitars. These props all serve to communicate the lucrative revenue that Lenny obtains from his gang’s drug dealing and are extravagant signs of his own dominance. Particularly significant among these are two swords as they express both wealth and a reverence for violence and strength.

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Like the struggle for admiration from Nasser in My Beautiful Laundrette, a rivalry for the position of Lenny’s deputy is also apparent in My Brother the Devil. Subordinate to Lenny is a power struggle between two young British men of Arab descent – Rash and another gang member named Repo. For Lenny, the shrewd Rash is his ‘smart guy’ who is best suited to managing the gang’s drug trading and navigating their way around rival gangs in the vicinity. Repo, on the other hand, is more physically intimidating and is therefore described as a ‘hype mother-fucker’ who can coerce other gang members due to his threatening demeanour. Indicative of the inter-gang antagonism between Rash and Repo and the performative nature of this competitive hyper-masculinity are their differing responses to the murder of DMG stalwart Izzy. The stabbing of DMG member Izzy by an opposing gang led by the pugnaciously named Demon is a turning point in the film’s narrative that leads Rash to reflect upon the morality of his lifestyle and his peers’ irreverent attitudes towards death. Rash’s disquiet is exacerbated as his DMG cohorts decide that Izzy’s life should be avenged through a reciprocal murder upon Demon’s gang and that Rash should undertake the murderous revenge. Consequently, Rash is depicted struggling with grief for his deceased companion and with the proposed murder. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Rash is seen preparing for the murder in the bathroom of his parents’ flat. Set against an ominous soundtrack of foreboding ambient sounds that echo an accelerated heartbeat, the sequence vacillates between extreme close-ups of the gun as Rash fumbles in his attempts to load it, medium close-ups that record the reflection of his anguish in the bathroom mirror, and long-shots that emphasize his isolation in the private space of the bathroom. Given the cramped conditions of the family’s flat and the highly populated housing estate, the bathroom is a rare space of intimacy and privacy in which Rash is able to discard the machismo posturing enforced by the DMG gang. Correspondingly, as Rash endeavours to load the gun but consistently fails, he is shown wearing only his underwear and sporting pained facial expressions therefore evoking the protagonist’s vulnerability. Once the weapon is loaded, however, Rash’s DMG tattoo comes into shot and the camera completes a 360-degree turn in which Rash is transformed into his more usual ‘urban gangster’ appearance with a hooded jumper, T-shirt and keffiyeh scarf. Just as his body is now clothed, signs of his vulnerability are also erased from view and the camera is once more showing a stable long-shot. In a further metaphorical turn, Rash points the weapon at his reflection in the mirror thus enacting a symbolic act of aggression against his own perceived weakness. The accumulative effect of this sequence is the exposure of the performative – and therefore repressed anxiety – behind the gang’s collectively forged hyper-masculinity. As suggested by this sequence, Rash is unable to kill Demon, as he later remarks ‘death is real … once you dead you ain’t coming back – halas (done)’. Rash’s more sensitive reactions are derided by Repo as a sign of weakness and he goads him by unleashing strings of humiliating comments all centred on questioning his masculinity and his loyalty to the gang. Repo berates Rash for ‘not being a man’ and behaving like a ‘pussy’, the latter being a term referring to female genitalia and implying, in the masculinist sexual economy of language in the gang, that one is passive. Repo uses Rash’s inability to avenge Izzy’s killer as a tool for obtaining more influence within

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DMG through slandering his fellow gang member and by attempting to carry out the murder himself. In effect, Repo constructs a binary through which Rash is presented as effeminate and impotent whilst Repo embodies many of the masculinist tropes of bravado that the gang hold dear. The two groups of men in My Beautiful Laundrette and My Brother the Devil, therefore, collectively construct a form of masculinity that depends on competitive displays of material wealth, power, strength and heterosexual sexual conquest. It is through this competition to prove oneself as the strongest that the mechanisms of submission and domination operate amongst these groups of men. Thus, within these gangs, notions of power, strength, command, defiance, aggression, audacity, nerve and determination are ultimately exalted and those who fail to meet these exacting standards are maligned. In this respect, the two groups forge their collective masculinity firmly in a manner that resonates with Sedgwick’s concept of homosociality but also calls to mind Connell’s theorization of protest masculinities.59 Indeed, like Connell’s perception of protest masculinities as being formed when men do not have access to normative markers of hegemonic masculinity due to non-normative racial, ethnoreligious or class positioning, these two groups exaggeratedly perform defensive manoeuvres in order to facilitate the restoration of (lost) honour. For Nasser and his Pakistani migrants, this is to combat their sense of emasculation as men of colour who hail from a country that was colonized by Britain. While for the DMG gang, this is a toxic mix of being born to migrant parents whose lifestyles and behaviours betray an allegiance to places elsewhere alongside racial marginalization and socio-economic disempowerment. Their collective responses are to shore up their claims to hegemonic masculinity by forming gangs of men that foreground their access to physical and economic strength and performatively express their access to material wealth. Indeed, in both films, there is an acute sense that through money they can overcome their marginalization. In My Beautiful Laundrette, the character of Salim, for example, tells Omar that ‘without money, we’re nothing in this country’ and so therefore justifies the existence of their homosocial gang as a riposte to national and social exclusion due to their non-white backgrounds. Repo, in My Brother the Devil educes similar logic when he asserts ‘Drugs, Money, Guns! What the fuck else is there for us out here, cuz?’ Each group’s collectively forged aggression and competition then becomes a collective answer to feelings of marginalization which in turn is seductive to the central protagonists Rash and Omar, both of whom also feel marginalized on the grounds of their impoverished backgrounds. These homosocial gangs become the central way through which men combat their feelings of emasculation and construct a compensatory masculinity. In the next section of my argument, I will explore how same-sex sexuality disrupts these aggressive homosocial formations by serving a utopian function that crosses across class, race and ethno-religious barriers thereby signalling the existence of more transcultural forms of British identity that draw on different, pluralistic expressions of masculinity. Despite the gender-sexual utopianism that this same-sex sexuality represents, however, I will expose how same-sex sexuality only further ingrains forms of socio-economic inequality within each film.

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‘In this country that we love’ One of the most memorable scenes in My Beautiful Laundrette is Omar and Johnny’s love-making at the back of the laundrette. Away from the prying eyes of onlookers, Johnny embraces Omar only for his lover to pull away and recall Johnny’s betrayal of his friendship by participating in the infamous 1977 anti-immigration demonstration organized by the National Front.60 As the lighting casts patches of light and darkness upon the lovers thereby demonstrating their conflicting loyalties, Omar remembers: ‘It was bricks and bottles and Union Jacks. It was immigrants out. It was kill us. People we knew. And it was you! He [Hussein] saw you marching and you saw his face, watching you.’ In this moment of intimacy, Omar implicates Johnny in the racism-induced depression his family has suffered to which his lover apologizes and the two make love as a gesture of ‘racial reconciliation’.61 The next shot, then, is one of the film’s defining images with Omar’s head falling back onto his lover’s chest and succumbing to his caress before they make love. This scene neatly illustrates the ways that same-sex sexuality serves as a utopian function in the film insofar as it provides an alternative to the patriarchal homosocial masculinities of Nasser’s group and introduces a more pluralistic, transcultural form of British national and gendered identity. My Brother the Devil works on similar lines as Rash’s love affair with the urbane character of Sayyid initiates his upward mobility from marginalized subjectivity within the homosocial gang to a lifestyle of comparative wealth and opportunities as assistant to Sayyid’s photography business. Both couples, then, are romantic and business partners whose same-sex relationships subvert the homosocial and patriarchal masculinities previously encountered and interrogates racial, class and ethno-religious divides. In doing so, each film seeks not only to normalize male–male sexualities, as I will address in due course, but also to praise the potential of same-sex unions as an agent with which to frustrate or challenge ‘power relations determined by race, class, gender and sexuality’.62 However, I argue that these positive renderings of same-sex love are undermined by the ways that their samesex relationships simultaneously signal the central protagonists’ transformation into docile neoliberal subjects whose economic ideologies entrench patriarchal and racial inequalities. Thus, the utopian possibilities suggested by each romantic relationship come unstuck by both couple’s inculcation within capitalist worldviews in a manner which Puar’s concept of homonationalism will help me to uncover. Before coming to this conclusion and expanding on Puar’s thoughts, however, I will address the ways that My Beautiful Laundrette and My Brother the Devil render homosexuality as a positive form of sexual practice and identification. Further surmounting the ‘act of racial reconciliation’ that Omar and Johnny engage in through their love-making, then, another scene in My Beautiful Laundrette depicts Omar and Johnny facing each other on either sides of a one-way mirror.63 Looking into each other, this shot momentarily superimposes the two’s faces upon each other. Eva Reuschmann states that this is ‘the most striking visual image of Kureishi’s and Frears’s filmic construction of a new British identity, one neither traditionally Pakistani nor exclusively white British but both, altered and transformed by the changes each

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character has wrought in each other’.64 This frame is a powerful visual expression of the transcultural potential of the relationship as a conduit for mutual exchange and transformation between two constantly shifting cultural backgrounds thus, in this shot, hierarchies between the two different backgrounds that the men represent are visually destabilized. In this sense, this shot reiterates how same-sex desire is depicted as having a utopian function in the film that heals ethno-religious divisions and heralds a more pluralistic and inclusive form of national and gendered identity. In My Brother the Devil, the love affair between Rash and Sayyid has a similar vocabulary although the film centres more upon issues of class rather than race. In My Brother the Devil, same-sex desire is introduced to the film’s narrative as Rash forms a strong emotional and eventually sexual bond with the mysterious figure of Sayyid following the murder of Rash’s close friend Izzy by a rival gang. Rash’s meetings with Sayyid take on a therapeutic function for Rash who is struggling with grief and straining under peer pressure to carry out a reciprocal murder for Izzy. Obtaining Sayyid as a cannabis customer, then, is a fortunate move for Rash who is able to confide in his client as he is suitably removed from the rest of the gang and his family. Tellingly, Sayyid lives outside of the homophobic confines of the estate. Sayyid’s living arrangements position him as an ‘outsider’ figure geographically, as well as being different from the DMG gang in his French Moroccan background, his class positioning, his sexuality, his physical appearance and his cosmopolitan outlook. A combination of these factors not only differentiates him from the gang, but also highlights Sayyid’s respectability and affluence compared to those who live on the estate. Unlike the gang’s preference for hooded jumpers and tracksuit trousers, Sayyid cultivates a suave image by wearing freshly ironed shirts, a leather jacket and glasses. Specifically, his use of spectacles draws on well-established connotations of eyewear with intellect and effeminacy. Corresponding with tropes that associate glasses with acumen, Sayyid is well-read and encourages Rash to read about his heritage, namely about Islam and the political situation in his parents’ native Egypt. Contrasting with the cramped flats that the gang members and their family call home, Sayyid lives in a spacious two-floor apartment with a variety of modern contraptions and comforts. These signs of wealth and affluence are immediately attractive to Rash as it shows Sayyid fitting firmly within his ideas of hegemonic masculine achievement but in a much less threatening way than Lenny’s immoral path to hegemonic masculinity. In other words, Sayyid signifies a male who has many emblems of wealth, success and power but offers a much less confrontational version of masculinity than the gang. Taken out of the parameters of the estate, Rash is introduced by Sayyid to an inclusive side of Islam through discussions about the Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi and his support for peace during discussions about the pressures of gang life. Thus, Sayyid inspires Rash to investigate his own heritage which is normally suppressed by the gang’s prioritizing of a collectively forged homosocial identity over each gang member’s individual background. The new perspectives offered by Sayyid are metaphorically captured in a scene where Sayyid drives Rash outside of Hackney and to the shores of the River Thames. Here, Rash remarks that despite spending the entirety of his life in the East London

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borough, he had never visited the river banks. In this new setting, Sayyid mollifies Rash’s existential discomfort with the gang’s amoral ethics by offering him a paid job as his assistant. As Ed Guerrero writes on African American ‘hood cinema’, the restriction of filmic setting to housing estates acts as a spatial analogy for the lack of opportunities faced by immigrant working-class communities.65 Therefore, Sayyid and Rash’s trip outside of Hackney implies widened horizons as well as new opportunities and experiences away from the limiting confines of gang mentality. Through a combination of these factors – as well as his sympathetic ear – Sayyid is a personally attractive figure for Rash. Sayyid becomes even more alluring to the embattled Rash following his humiliation at a job interview in which Rash is turned away for not possessing the requisite qualifications. Following this negative encounter, Rash feels pessimistic about his future. The answer to his worries, however, is Sayyid offering him paid work as an assistant in his photography business. In summary, then, Sayyid represents a desirable form of masculinity not only in his material wealth and affluence, but also in the opportunities that he affords the impoverished and downtrodden Rash. In a surprising twist given the lack of suggestion beforehand, Rash’s admiration for Sayyid’s achievement transposes into sexual and romantic desire. Rash does not instigate this shift in their relationship but, unexpectedly, Sayyid kisses Rash while the two are drinking at his flat. Immediately following the homoerotic contact, the depth of Rash’s homophobia becomes apparent as he explodes in a fit of anger. Much of this anger is concentrated on masculinity – a sense that Sayyid has overstepped not only boundaries of friendship but also normative masculine behaviour. Hence, after the kiss, Rash erupts in a fit of questions and anxieties about Sayyid’s motives. Rash takes particular offence to Sayyid’s assertion that he believed that their friendship was a courtship thereby evoking Sedgwick’s conception of homosexual panic. Sedgwick elaborates that the potential for male–male bonds to evolve into sexual relationships is a source of acute anxiety for many men in homosocial, patriarchal environments. Perceiving same-sex sexuality as a threat to their masculinity, Sedgwick notes how the suggestion of homosexuality leads protagonists in her corpus of nineteenth-century literature to show signs of a ‘sometimes agonized sexual anesthesia that was damaging to both its male subjects and its female non-objects’.66 Sayyid’s insinuation that he believed Rash harboured sexual feelings for other men leads a similar reaction from Rash who engages in a series of exaggeratedly performed masculine activities aimed at evincing his own machismo to himself and any onlookers. Leaving Sayyid’s apartment, then, the camera shows Rash walking down a bustling London street in a particularly confident and aggressive gait. Whilst his walking pattern aims to convey a form of cool indifference in its slow but meditated steps, this constructed sense of confidence is undermined by erratic handheld camera shots that disorient the audience’s perception of the scene. Uneven camera movements are matched with a visually distorting background in which the London street backdrop is blurred, and an aurally discordant soundtrack in which the chatter of pedestrians and ambulance sirens merge with a dissonant ambient sound. The collective effect of these visual and aural patterns is to evoke a sense of foreboding and disquiet that subverts the image of control and confidence that Rash seeks to present.

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Rash’s disquiet is even more apparent in the following scenes in which he takes a shower. Like the street walking sequence, the camera maintains a close-up focus on Rash’s face whilst he showers. This spotlight upon Rash’s face enables the viewer to see that he is crying. Significantly, it is in the bathroom that Rash has a moment of emotional vulnerability. Like the scene in which he prepares his gun and is able to use the intimate space of the bathroom as a safe locale for the outpouring emotions, Rash chooses the bathroom as it is private and the water of the shower itself manages to obscure his own tears thereby also silencing his displays of vulnerability. A more aggressive attempt to regain his masculinity follows as Rash forces himself upon Vanessa – a girl from the estate that he has been ‘linking up’ or having casual sexual intercourse with. This is one of the film’s most uncomfortable scenes as Rash is depicted foisting himself upon an unwilling Vanessa who pleads him to cease. This desperate display of sexuality, then, is a performative act through which Rash seeks to dispel his feelings for Sayyid and regain his sense of lost masculinity following the homosexual sexual advance from his employer and friend. Rash’s rape of Vanessa also resonates with Sedgwick’s framework of homosexual panic as leading to troubling cases of misogynistic language and violence as a means to demonstrate one’s heterosexuality.67 Conversely, Omar and Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette do not have any process through which they dwell upon the subversive potential of their feelings for each other nor their attitudes towards their sexual orientation. The first moment in which the erotic nature of Omar and Johnny’s friendship and business partnership becomes apparent is when the two kiss abruptly in a car. In this respect, the incursion of homosexual desire upon the film’s narrative is, for some viewers at least, perhaps as unexpected as in My Brother the Devil. Unlike Rash in My Brother the Devil though, Omar does not try to make sense of his homosexual desire nor does he have any form of existential reflection upon his attraction to Johnny. This is particularly significant given the comparatively less commonplace visibility of non-heterosexual characters and storylines in cinema at the time. Bart MooreGilbert attributes this lack of a ‘coming out narrative’ as Kureishi wanting to normalize homosexuality within the context of Thatcherite Britain. As was explained in my introduction, the New Right’s support for what they perceived as ‘family values’ took the manifestation of an ‘assault’ upon homosexuals through the aforementioned Section 28 legislation, ‘the refusal […] to bring the homosexual age of consent into line with its heterosexual equivalent’ and the government’s ‘complicity in the representation of AIDS as a predominately “gay” plague’.68 In contemporary cinema and theatre, too, My Beautiful Laundrette was released only a few years following an infamous court case in which Christian morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse sought legal action against representations of penetrative male–male sexual intercourse in Howard Brenton’s 1981 play Romans in Britain.69 As such, Moore-Gilbert opines that by not including a coming out story, homosexuality is never challenged and therefore is never represented as anything other than ‘normal’.70 This, Moore-Gilbert adds, is a radical act in an age where homosexuality was demonized through a confluence of contemporary political and cultural discourses. Furthermore, this absence of a coming out narrative can be attributed to Kureishi’s broader claims on the fluidity of identity assemblages, an aspect he explored more

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comprehensively in his novel The Black Album which I analysed in the previous chapter. Indeed, coming out is an enunciative act in which an individual defines themselves or associates with a fixed sexual identity. In avoiding any form of coming out story, Kureishi is rejecting fixed forms of sexual selfhood and arguing for more fluid articulations of gender and sexuality. Indicative of this, the film’s persistent referencing of water and fluidity is significant. As Daniela Berghahn points out, the ‘sound of bubbling and gurgling water accompanies the title sequence and several subsequent scenes, especially those set at the Powders laundrette’.71 Likewise, Omar’s first appearance in the film is also a shot of him washing his hands in a sink whilst the film’s final sequence depicts Omar and Johnny splashing each other in the laundrette’s backroom sink. Water is also inscribed within the laundrette itself as the walls are ‘decorated in pastel shades with stylised images of giant blue waves’ and the sound of Johann Strauss’s musical tribute to the Central and Eastern European River Danube, the ‘Blue Danube’ waltz, sounds out across the room.72 All of these factors, Berghahn proposes, serve to show how the laundrette is a ‘utopian space’ in which divisions of race, class and sexuality ‘dissolve’.73 Fernàndez Carbajal also points to the queerness of the laundrette space as when Omar’s Papa visits the laundrette, he remarks, ‘I thought I’d come to the wrong place. That I was suddenly in the ladies’ hair-dressing salon in Pinner, where one might get a pink rinse’ therein the space is ‘purposefully queer: it could be a laundrette, but it could well be an Indian hairdressing establishment due to its flamboyancy’.74 However, such freedoms are also repeatedly complicated in the film. The interracial love affair between Omar and Johnny, for example, is contoured by racial hierarchies. Thus, while the mirror scene reflects the transcultural potential of a new British identity, this comes apart in the reality of their relationship which MooreGilbert argues inverts imperialist power relations: Johnny’s dependence on Omar plays off the colonialist trope of ‘the faithful servant’; and in providing Johnny with work, Omar contributes to his friend’s moral regeneration in a way that parodically recalls the colonialist project of ‘civilising’ the brutal natives. Instead of the white colonial male enjoying the native female […] the non-white Omar enjoys the native British man.75

At one point in the film, Omar vocalizes such power hierarchies during a fight with his lover. He shouts, ‘when we were at school, you and your lot kicked me all round the place. And what are you doing now? Washing my floor. That’s how I like it!’ In this sense, Omar’s relationship with Johnny reflects Nasser’s relationship with Rachel insofar as sexuality enables him to upset hegemonic racially determined systems of power by sexually ‘possessing’ Johnny. Nevertheless, there is a more troubling subversion of contemporary political discourses on race and sexuality in how Omar’s interracial homosexual relationship with Johnny enables both men to financially succeed and, therefore, meet standards of both Thatcherite neoliberal and Nasser’s hegemonic masculine definitions of success. Omar initially connects with Johnny as he needs an assistant to help him with the management of the floundering laundrette that Nasser gives him as part of a business

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challenge. Omar and Johnny had previously been close childhood friends; however, this had changed in subsequent years following Omar’s mother’s death and his father’s gradual decline. Within those years, Johnny had been a fictional incarnation of a generation of men who suffered in Britain’s sharp economic downturn during the late 1970s; an economic downturn that the Thatcher-led government sought to redress through funding competitive business and a return to Victorian-era morals.76 In this respect, there is a deep irony at work in how Omar and Johnny use the New Right’s free market economics to succeed despite their non-normative business and romantic partnership. Both are young working-class men who through thoughtful investment and hard work build a successful local business and, at the end of the film, look set to expand this business empire. Nonetheless, this success would not have been possible without the support and help of each other. This is ironically referred to when, at a family soiree where he first introduces Johnny as his business, though not romantic, partner, Omar audaciously remarks that ‘much good can come from fucking’. Quite literally, then, Omar’s business triumphs as well as both his and Johnny’s upwardly mobile ascension out of a working-class social status and into the realms of a hegemonic masculine perception of success due to the romantic and sexual relationship that the two have forged. These utopian elements of same-sex desire in the film are, of course, complicated by Omar and Johnny’s embracement of the New Right’s ideology of possessive individualism.77 As they achieve business and financial success with their laundrette, Omar looks to takeover over rival laundrettes and, in his tastes for suits, comes to ‘increasingly resemble that peculiarly 1980s figure, the self-centred and consumptiondriven yuppie’.78 Even Tania’s intensifying dislike for Omar is due to her ‘perception that Omar is getting as greedy as her father’.79 As Moore-Gilbert writes, the film concludes with Omar and Johnny mirroring an archetypal Thatcherite success story albeit with an inter-racial, homosexual relationship that counteracts the New Right’s discourses on race, gender and sexuality.80 Thus, when Nasser praised the political status quo as a source of social mobility for British people of colour, then, Kureishi’s film seems to suggest that sexuality can be added within this rubric. Berghahn’s aforementioned comments on the ‘utopian space’ of the laundrette come undone here, as while the laundrette does indeed give people marginalized by a sum total of their race, ethno-religious background and sexual orientation opportunities to thrive, these business ventures are conducted within a neoliberal system that ultimately entrenches socio-economic inequalities. Indeed, the laundrette itself sits as a flamboyant and ostentatious symbol of neoliberalism within a street of broken-down, dilapidated migrant businesses and shops whose impoverished owners are the victims of Thatcher’s free enterprise economy. In their complicity with the Thatcherite neoliberal narrative that business enterprise provides socio-economic mobility regardless of racial, gender or sexual background, then, Omar and Johnny’s relationship presupposes Lisa Duggan’s work on homonormativity and aspects of Jasbir K. Puar’s conceptualization of homonationalism. As was set out in the introduction to this chapter, Duggan coined the term ‘homonormativity’ to refer to the increasing number of ‘affluent lesbians and gays asserting nationalist, ruling class political ideologies’.81 In point of fact, the

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free market economics ushered in by the Thatcher administration have been noted by sociologists as a turning point in the emergence of British homonormativities as the then-government’s advocacy of private enterprise and aspirational lifestyles often encouraged all to set up businesses. This was provided that those with non-normative identities were prepared to be silent about their sexuality and prioritize what David Harvey terms ‘freedom of enterprise’ over ‘individual freedoms’.82 Thus, Omar’s insistence that he wants to ‘make big money’ when he takes over Zaki’s laundrette as a new business project with Johnny, embodies Duggan’s diagnosis of a new form of gay subjectivity that conforms to capitalist ethics whereby ‘you can get anything you want’ as long as you know how to ‘squeeze the tits of the system’. Despite Omar and Johnny’s ethno-religious, cultural and racial differences, as well as their non-normative sexuality, the unnamed English business associate of Nasser tellingly remarks that ‘England needs more young men like Omar and Johnny’ underlying further how these two men’s complicity with neoliberal discourses marks them as ideal national citizens and therefore, within their 1980s neoliberal milieu, resembling many features of hegemonic masculinity. Omar’s financial success despite his non-normative sexuality, as well as his racial and ethno-religious background, also mean he anticipates much of Puar’s conceptualization of homonationalism. Although writing from a post-9/11 perspective, Puar develops the framework of homonationalism to describe patterns in which the homonormative subject is increasingly incorporated within popular cultural, media or political discourses at the expense of a racialized ‘Muslim’ other whose visage is stereotyped and associated with terrorism. Nevertheless, Puar argues that the neoliberal economic policies of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Thatcher in the United Kingdom mobilized the homonormative model, thereby enabling the post-9/11 climate of Islamophobia to embrace homonormative subjectivities within the body of the nation due to their potential as economic contributors and consumers, whilst demonizing the ‘Muslim look-alike’ population for their supposed refusal to assimilate. To this end, Omar certainly fits with Puar’s contention that non-white, affluent gay men and lesbians are crucial to the functioning of this homonationalism as she explains: For the ethnic, heteronormativity is negotiable through the market, that is conspicuous consumption and high-skilled labor; for the homonormative, whiteness is mandated by the state but negotiable through the market, again both for labor and consumption. The figure of the queer or homonormative ethnic is crucial for the appearance of diversity in homonormative communities (arriving as the difference of culture rather than as simulacra of capital) and tolerance in ethnic and racialized immigrant communities (marked as an entrance of alternative lifestyle rather than through the commonalities of capital).83

Omar’s lucrative job, accumulative wealth and faithful consumption closely align his character with the homonormative model outlined by Puar. Significantly, Kureishi returns to the figure of Omar in his 2008 novel Something to Tell You. Omar, now described as ‘an Asian, gay millionaire with an interest in a football club’ who was ‘perfect leadership material’, makes a cameo at a social charity function where he speaks

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of surmounting racism and homophobia to achieve his business goals. Omar’s curious afterlife, then, as a figurehead for the shift in conceptions of British neoliberalism is closely in tune with theorizations of Puar’s homonormativity and homonationalism.84 Puar’s work, however, has even more plangency with the depiction of same-sex sexuality in El Hosaini’s film. Indeed, the gang closely align with Puar’s writing on the racial and sartorial profiling of a Muslim ‘other’ in the post-9/11 era. Specifically, DMG gang members sport hooded jumpers, a garment which when worn by a non-white male body has long been constructed as a symbol of inherent criminality. Such associations reached their apex in media reportage of the 2011 London riots that coincided with My Brother the Devil’s filming. Correspondingly, the housing estate and its inhabitants are kept under close observation by patrolling police forces or CCTV cameras, which are frequently within the film’s background or foreground shots. Surveillance cameras are particularly prominent during a sequence of photographs that accompany the film’s opening credits. These snapshots, which replicate the black-and-white colour scheme of CCTV recorded images, introduce the locale and thematic backdrop of the film. One image shows a group of young men of colour dressed in hooded jumpers pointing their middle fingers in a sign of defiance at CCTV cameras positioned at the edge of an urban housing estate. The prevalence of surveillance forces within the film accords with Puar’s observations on the marking out of those who appear Middle Eastern, Arab or Muslim: ‘identifiable as actual and potential terrorists, the members of this group are “dis-identified’ as citizens”.85 Many communities of colour, as Puar adds, have been admitted into the familiar stereotyped identity category of the ‘Arab terrorist’, denominating them in a differential, threatening relation to the (white) nation.86 Due to their racial–cultural backgrounds, clothing and appearance, the gang are clearly inscribed within such post-9/11 archetypes of the British Muslim male. My Brother the Devil replicates this discourse by including a fictional terrorist subplot within the film. Unable to vocalize that the reason behind his brother’s suspicious desertion from the estate is due to a love affair with photographer Sayyid, Mo reports that Rash is involved in ‘terrorist shit’. As the news spreads, the young men react with a mixture of admiration and bafflement at Rash’s alleged terrorist connections. One group of men praise him as being ‘fucking gangster’ and ask Mo whether his brother would be able to obtain weapons for them. These words, when coming from hoodieclad working-class men of colour, offer further evidence of what Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin label a ‘post-Huntington stereotype’.87 Drawing on a section of political theorist Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations (1996) where the writer opines that the mass appeal of transnational cultural forms mean that terrorists are no longer detectable through Islamic dress or outward declarations of piety, Morey and Yaqin note the increasingly prominent figure of the ‘Westernised’ Muslim posing a ‘menacing threat’ from within in recent cultural production.88 The conferral of hyper-masculine kudos onto Rash for his supposed involvement in terrorism as well as the young men’s desire to procure firearms offer cultural legitimation to notions that the terrorist threat to Britain exists in non-white, Westernized and materially deprived working-class communities. In the process, My Brother the Devil’s terrorist subplot inadvertently justifies discourses of surveillance upon multi-ethnic working-class communities in European suburbs.89

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The film’s discrete parcelling up of terrorism and homosexuality also reaffirms the mutually exclusive subject positionings of Muslim and queer identities. This is made conspicuous when Rash traces rumours of his involvement in ‘al-Qaeda shit’ to his brother Mo, and Mo responds by declaring: ‘I’d rather have a brother who was a bomber than a homo.’ Likewise, when the gang discover that the reason behind Rash’s atypical behaviour is due to his homosexual love affair with Sayyid, they respond by hatching plans to kill him. Their hatred stems from gender constructions which depend upon sexual encounters with women to express their masculinity and, consequently, their power within the community. Specifically, the language used by Repo and AJ to describe Rash evokes a rigid connection between sexuality and power, as Rash is labelled a ‘batty boy’, implying that he derives pleasure from being anally penetrated. Underpinning their use of the pejorative term is a view that the male’s role in sexual intercourse is exclusively penetrative. By potentially allowing himself to be penetrated by Sayyid, Rash has rescinded this supposed sexual dominance and, by extension, permitted himself to be emasculated therefore demonstrating a similar view of sexuality as Nasser’s when he equates masculine powerlessness with anal penetration in My Beautiful Laundrette. As Bersani argues, then, the male perineum is mapped as a site in which, if penetrated, a man abdicates his masculinity.90 In this sense, the murder of Rash would also strengthen their masculinity in a manner that accords with Connell’s contention that the homosexual male is always the negative ‘other’ against which heteronormative hegemonic masculinities uphold their dominance.91 Aside from these more violent instances of homophobia, Rash’s parents are also uncomfortable with their son’s sexuality, choosing to eject him from the family home. These incidents in the film’s plot have all the markings of what Puar describes as a ‘discourse attached to immigrant populations and communities of color about a more overt disapproval of homosexuality and a deeply entrenched homophobia’.92 The projection of an exceptional anti-LGBT prejudice onto immigrant communities, then, passes over crucial socio-economic questions of why certain portions of society are more homophobic than others, and ignores the way that debates on same-sex marriage, for example, reassert white privileges. In many respects, My Brother the Devil duplicates the discursive production of ‘Muslim migrant homophobia’ through the anti-gay prejudices tied to the pathologically violent gang and Rash’s underprivileged immigrant family. Thus, the multiracial, working-class neighbourhood of the Hackney housing estate is clearly presented as a space of virulent and visceral homophobia. Whilst it certainly depicts most of its characters as homophobic, the film does root much of the gang’s prejudices in the young men’s shared disenfranchisement. Links between the men’s deprivation and their subscription to a compensatory hypermasculinity that rests upon aggressive heterosexuality and criminality are transparent when Rash tries to end his association with the gang. It is at this point in the film that Repo, one of the most pugnacious gang members, accusatively points at his tattoo and, as I mentioned at the end of the previous section, barks: ‘Drugs, Money, Guns! What the fuck else is there for us out here, cuz?’ Repo’s statement implies that there are no opportunities for a man such as Rash without the fraternal bonds forged within the group and the gang’s communal allegiance to criminality and violence. In the latter sense, drugs and guns provide the men with money and material goods as well as a

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platform from which to compensate for their marginalization. Within this construction of a bellicose hyper-masculinity, there is no space for alternative masculine identities that, for example, include same-sex sexuality. Likewise, Mo’s friend and love interest Aisha is also a figure that complicates the uncritical accordance of homophobic views to Muslim immigrants. The hijab-wearing Aisha presses Mo to communicate with his brother despite his discomfort with Rash’s sexuality. Even so, there is little evidence to suggest that Aisha’s advice is driven by a liberal approach to sexual politics. Aisha is one of a handful of female characters, all of whom are peripheral and not as developed as their male counterparts. As such, her open-minded attitude towards Rash is also underdeveloped. Rather, Aisha’s comparatively more tolerant viewpoint fits with her principled outlook as she, for example, resists peer pressure to consume alcohol. In this sense, she encourages Mo to connect with his brother in order that he become closer to his family instead of developing his connections with the gang’s criminal lifestyle. Frustratingly, however, her perspective, much like the other female characters’ in the film, is left unexamined. Despite these caveats, the film still invokes homonationalist discourses, particularly through the character of Rash’s lover Sayyid. More broadly, Sayyid initiates Rash’s shift from affiliation with the DMG gang towards alternative forms of belonging. Rather than moving towards an inclusive gay or queer community, however, Rash’s trajectory is located within socio-economic terms, since the most significant aspect of Sayyid’s characterization is his privileged access to financial and material wealth. In essence, Sayyid’s depiction accords with the identity politics described by Puar in her concept of homonationalism. As previously outlined, one of the tenets of homonationalist discourse is that upwardly mobile homosexuals and queers are tenuously incorporated within articulations of nationhood due to their potential import as economic contributors and consumers. LGBT inclusion within the national narrative is at the simultaneous exclusion of the immigrant subject of colour, who is regarded with suspicion and essentialized as having regressive gender-sexual politics. Viewing Sayyid’s portrayal alongside the gang and the other communities on the estate, then, some homonationalist binaries within the film become apparent. Sayyid’s sophistication is poised against the brutal and primitive gang, signalling what Puar terms a ‘Muslim or gay binary’.93 Whilst Puar writes that this reductive approach to cultural representations of Muslim and homosexual identities generally dictates the gay subject as white, Sayyid’s French Moroccan cultural heritage and racial background conforms to a negotiation of homonormativity based on neoliberal economic structures, much like My Beautiful Laundrette’s Omar. Moreover, Puar’s comment on the necessity of people of colour to support homonormative ideologies as a symbol of diversity whose comparative affluence remains unremarked upon is especially relevant for examining the schematic depiction of Sayyid’s religious faith. As delineated above, the portrayal of a queer Muslim subject with an Islamic faith is certainly a rarity amidst an increasing viewpoint that to be Muslim is, self-evidently, to be heterosexual and homophobic. Despite El Hosaini’s admirable representation of a religious Muslim character with a non-normative sexuality, Sayyid’s religiosity is merely sketched and is too often conflated with Orientalized discourses of spirituality. Specifically, Sayyid lends Rash a copy of the Lebanese writer Khalil Gibran’s book,

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The Prophet (1923), hoping that it can educate Rash about his ethno-religious heritage and offer him support at a time of vulnerability.94 However, Gibran’s book is wrongly represented in the film as a biography of the Prophet Muhammad. Rather, The Prophet is a selection of prose poems penned by Gibran, a writer of Christian heritage, which takes teachings of the three major monotheistic religions and reimagines them as the words of a fictional figure. Gibran’s work, which has had a wide readership in the West as the most popular literary text translated from Arabic in the United States, is a puzzling choice to demonstrate Sayyid’s faith given its tangential relation to Islam.95 The book’s familiarity to Western audiences suggests a convenient packaging of Sayyid within recognizable and legitimized modes of Islamic belief, therefore endorsing a homonationalist analysis of the film. Fernàndez Carbajal, on the other hand, counters that Sayyid’s representation avowedly resists homonationalist or homonormative discourses. While rightly pointing to Sayyid’s use of religious texts such as the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad’s Sunnah as well as the protagonists’ difficult past growing up in Seine-Saint-Denis, a Parisian suburb with ‘a large Muslim population’, I would nevertheless propose that Fernàndez Carbajal overlooks Sayyid’s social, economic and cultural capital compared to the modesty of Rash and the DMG members.96 With his suave appearance, chic apartment and state-of-the-art technology, Sayyid is, despite his ‘humble origins’, quite clearly distinguished from the largely working-class inhabitants of the state and, as such, occupies a position of socio-economic power over the disadvantaged population of the estate.97 It is, therefore, crucial to ground Sayyid’s religiosity and his sexuality alongside his current socio-economic position to bring out the ways that homonationalist constructions of British Muslim masculinities function. While I do not mean to ascribe any malice to El Hosaini, or to disparage the significance of representing queer Muslim characters, I strongly endorse viewing these factors as intersectionally alongside issues of economic class. My Brother the Devil’s denouement buttresses homonationalist discourse in a scene where Rash’s father forces him to choose between different lifestyles. His father’s ultimatum is either to live with Sayyid and incur familial exclusion or to abandon both lover and career but re-join his family. The proposal pits Rash’s continued inclusion within the aggregate national, class, religious, ethnic and racial identities encompassed in the profiled ‘Muslim population or the “terrorist look-alike” population’ against incorporation within an unmonitored homonationalist grouping.98 His father’s threat to expel Rash only further entrenches perceptions that British working-class non-white communities are irrevocably homophobic and therefore legitimates their exclusion from discourses of national belonging. Consequently, Rash’s decision to move in with Sayyid signifies the championing of homonationalist identity politics within the film. Whilst the film’s final shots, which consist of Mo telling Rash that he supports and respects his lifestyle, offer some suggestion of reconciliation and tolerance, this is undercut by the family’s father in the previous scene. The father’s authority upholds homonationalist metonymy in the form of an unwavering patriarch with regressive gender and sexual politics who banishes his son from the family and prevents his wife from seeing her son, on the grounds that he is homosexual. The sequence depicts Rash’s choice in a manner that further engrains homonationalist patterns of class and

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sexuality as Rash’s downcast parents are pictured walking away towards a cluster of housing estates whilst Rash moves in the opposite direction, clutching a motorbike helmet for Sayyid’s vehicle. Sayyid’s motorbike is symbolically representative of his economic and material wealth as well as his ascendant status within society. Despite seeming to challenge Puar’s binary, the film fortifies perceptions of the homophobic Muslim ‘other’ and champions the homonormative through the characters of Sayyid and, eventually, Rash. Conclusively, each film represents an ambivalent engagement with same-sex sexuality. On the one hand, same-sex desires signal Omar and Rash’s graduation out of the homosocial patriarchy of their gang networks, but on the other hand, each filmmaker shows how homosexuality can be complicit with forces that oppress marginal racial and ethno-religious groupings. In El Hosaini’s film, this is a more surreptitious binary between ‘backward’ values, as personified in the murderous gang and Rash’s family, contrasted with Rash’s personal happiness with the affluent, affable and intellectual Sayyid. Whereas, in comparison, Kureishi’s film is a more complex assessment of conflicting identities that are never resolved. Nevertheless, same-sex sexual and romantic relationships lead both characters to embrace an economically driven conception of Britishness which enables them to evince forms of hegemonic masculinity that are identical to the aspirations of their heterosexual peers, that is the desire for power, wealth and prestige. *** Despite their non-normative sexualities, Rash and Omar end each film as the protagonists who are the closest to realizing hegemonic masculine ideals as well-off young men who are likely to financially succeed within their respective milieu. In My Beautiful Laundrette, Omar and Johnny’s loving relationship and lucrative laundrette – along with the promise of other laundry ventures – is contrasted with Nasser’s family breakdown following his daughter’s departure and Hussein’s bedridden alcoholism. Even the film’s last scene is a testament to the unity of Omar and Johnny in the face of heterosexual family disintegration as the two enjoy a moment of intimacy over the laundrette’s toilet sink. Nonetheless, this final scene of shared romantic joy is then ended by a closing of the door upon the couple, thus symbolically reinforcing that this is a secret love affair that is hidden from the other protagonists’ view. For whilst Omar and Johnny are undoubtedly the most happy and successful couple (and men) – their gay desire having been pivotal to achieving this status thus dethroning the axiomatic link between heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity – it is still a relationship that is cloaked in privacy. Therefore, while Kureishi questions constructions of hegemonic masculinity in the film by portraying two members of the all-male collective as engaging in a same-sex love affair and enacting a form of economic dominance, their sexual desires never actively disrupts or challenges the masculine status quo of the film as no character is forced to confront Omar and Johnny’s homosexuality. In fact, Omar, in particular, gradually becomes more complicit with many of the more enterprising features of the hegemonic masculinity by becoming more ruthless in his hunger for wealth and power whilst simultaneously maintaining a love interest that subverts

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traditional British and Pakistani Sunni Muslim constructions of masculinity. In so doing, Kureishi signals the formation of homonormative hegemonic masculinities. Similarly, My Brother the Devil finishes with Rash’s liberation from the brutal DMG gang and his poor immigrant family to pursue a more prosperous and promising lifestyle with his lover Sayyid. When viewed against his enervated father and the gang’s hypermasculine, the film ends with Rash and Sayyid as the wealthiest men with the most promising futures. Perhaps the only exception to this judgement is Rash’s brother Mo who, after initially being extremely prejudiced and homophobic towards his brother’s sexuality, cultivates a more tolerant attitude by displaying his acceptance of Rash’s same-sex desire. There is an implicit suggestion, then, that Rash’s homosexuality will enable Mo to overcome the more aggressive practices of masculinity he had previously encountered and develop a more inclusive worldview. As well as the opportunities in shifting Mo towards more open-minded and pluralistic forms of thinking and identity, Rash’s same-sex desire also provides the basis for Rash’s way out of poverty albeit in a homonationalist sense that fortifies socio-economic inequalities and the policing of the communities in which he was born and raised. Nonetheless, whilst the nature of Omar’s relationship to Johnny remains literally behind doors, the exposure of Rash’s sexuality results in an abrupt breaking off of connections to family and his roots. As such, the sexual and romantic as well as financial and professional success of Rash comes at the price of familial alienation and exclusion from his peers. Conclusively, both films problematize constructions of hegemonic masculinity implicitly in their narratives by showing queer male characters having comparatively easier access to resources with which to construct hegemonic masculinity than their heterosexual peers. Simultaneously, these forms of homosexuality necessarily involve an embracement of an economically driven national identity that disregards any sense of transcultural exchange which the relationship between Omar and Johnny, especially, could have resulted in. As such, both Kureishi and El Hosaini question the heteronormative impulses behind hegemonic masculinity and open up new imaginings for British Muslim constructions of masculinity. Nonetheless, it remains that whilst this same-sex desire positively changes and improves both Omar and Rash’s lives, opportunities and viewpoints, both films rest upon lead protagonists either keeping their same-sex sexuality silent or being excluded from their Muslim migrant families and communities. Both of the films examined in this chapter, and indeed the three novels discussed in the two previous, explore the lives of young British diaspora men of Muslim heritage in London. In the next section of my book, I probe the connection cities have to the formation of British Muslim masculinities – particularly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7 – by comparatively reading a novel set in Glasgow with a novel set in London.

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4

British Muslim Masculinities in the Metropolis: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2004) and Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag (2004)

Positioned at the foot of Brick Lane and upon the main thoroughfare of Whitechapel Road is a miniature replica of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka’s Shaheed Minar sculpture. The monument was originally built in Dhaka to commemorate those who died during the Bengali Language movement of 1952. Prior to Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971, citizens of modern-day Bangladesh, what was then called East Pakistan, faced widespread discrimination for speaking or writing in Bengali and Shahid Minar commemorates those who resisted the imposition of Urdu on schools, universities and official institutions. The construction of a replica monument in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets in 1999 has, Nilufar Ahmed writes, become ‘a focal point for the Bangladeshi community and their diasporic identity’.1 Ahmed continues that annual ceremonies, such as a ceremony of remembrance for those who died in the Bangladeshi Independence War and the Boishakhi Mela, are held at the London version of the monument and even broadcast on ‘Bangla TV and other British-based satellite channels that cater to the Bangladeshi community’ both within Bangladesh and abroad thereby underscoring how global and local constructions of Bangladeshi identity take root in this corner of the former colonizing power’s capital.2 However, this monument is also positioned in a park that carries a disturbing reminder of the hardships many Bangladeshi diaspora citizens of Britain suffer as the park is named after Altab Ali who in 1978, and at the age of twenty-five, was murdered in a racially motivated attack. Altab Ali Park, and the striking monument that it hosts, conveys how the urban fabric of London is marked by the history, language, marginalization, but also resistance, of the Bangladeshi diaspora in Britain. In fiction, and in histories of migration to Britain, however, diaspora populations in London tend to dominate the narrative, as the majority of the novels in this book demonstrate. In Suhayl Saadi’s 2004 novel Psychoraag, one of the focuses of this chapter, the character’s main protagonist Zaf mocks the textual and cultural power of London, dismissing certain music as ‘very London […] Straight faces, stiff lips. Mind the Gap! Ooh sooo cooooooool’ (Saadi, p. 20). Fascinatingly, the politics of multilingualism is central to the novel’s exploration of British Muslim masculinities,

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diasporic and transcultural identities, as the novel is written in a mixture of Scottish English that is inflected with words written in Scots, Gaelic, Punjabi, Urdu and draws on other languages that Zaf encounters in his daily life in multicultural Glasgow, such as Arabic and Turkish. Thus, while certain portions of the Bangladeshi British diaspora in London come to pay tribute to those who sacrificed themselves for their linguistic heritage, in Saadi’s novel, the global dominance of English comes under playful assault from a variety of local and global languages and linguistic registers in a text written from the perspective of a Scottish man of Pakistani heritage. Language is combined with music in Psychoraag as Zaf describes Glasgow as ‘one big hi-fi system’ (Saadi, p. 75) that comprises of sounds, voices and beats that are both global and localized, as stories of migration to Glasgow, Glasgow’s part in slavery and colonialism and sectarianism in the city all coalesce in language and music. Rachael Gilmour points out that when the novel was published, Saadi’s work – ‘on the grounds, perhaps, of a South Asian, postmodern linguistic experimentalism’ – was compared with Salman Rushdie’s, but Saadi refuted such comparisons with what he described as ‘the Hyper-Hip Multicoloured Multicultural Metropolitan London-Oxbridge “Liberal” Literary Mafia’.3 Instead, Saadi professed affinity with a range of Scottish writers, most notably with James Kelman, and his ‘concern with class and capital, and the material, historical and social dynamics of linguistic marginalisation’.4 This relationship to language is implicitly gendered as Saadi aligns his novel with a sub-genre of andocentric Scottish novels, such as those by James Kelman and, although generally set in Edinburgh, Irvine Welsh, that has tended to market a white, hyper-masculine form of Scottishness around the world that has subsequently become popular with cinema, such as Danny Boyle’s world-famous cult adaptation of Welch’s Trainspotting.5 To this end, Saadi can be viewed as opening up this canon of writing to include diaspora perspectives and trouble exclusive definitions of Scottishness. In the ensuing chapter, I will be critically reading both Saadi’s novel of a multilingual Glasgow and Monica Ali’s novel of Bangladeshi Londoners, Brick Lane (2003). The questions motivating this chapter are how the transcultural urban fabric of London and Glasgow, each city’s respective colonial past, their positions within the UK and their status as centres of global and local migration shape the constructions of British Muslim masculinity in each novel. Before I begin my critical examination of masculinities within the two novels, I will unpack the plots of each novel, contextualize their reception and set out the colonial histories to which each novel is responding. Monica Ali’s Brick Lane focuses on the lives of Bangladeshi inhabitants of a sequestered East London housing estate. The text is told through the perspective of a female protagonist named Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman from Sylhet who comes to London as a result of an arranged marriage to Chanu, himself a Bangladeshi migrant to Britain in the 1970s. Nazneen’s gradual adaptation to life in the UK also foments her self-realization as she comes-to-terms with the death of her baby son, rejects the prescribed housewife role imposed upon her by becoming a home-based garment worker, and eventually embarks on an extramarital affair with a vociferous and disaffected young British man of Bangladeshi heritage named Karim which she manages to conceal from her husband. Nazneen’s progressive self-fulfilment is contradicted by the novel’s male protagonists. Her husband Chanu suffers from a

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series of career setbacks that result in his return to Bangladesh without Nazneen, who chooses to remain in London. For the younger Karim, the novel also concludes with his troubling trajectory into Islamist extremism. Ali’s novel, then, presents London as an ambivalent space in which being in the city is a liberating experience for Nazneen. However, the city only emphasizes her husband Chanu and her lover Karim’s sense of marginalization and disenfranchisement. Ali’s novel was released to critical acclaim from corners of the academic and journalistic press, culminating in Brick Lane’s shortlisted nomination for 2003’s Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the US National Book Award.6 Ali herself was also listed as one of the decade’s twenty most promising literary talents by the literary magazine Granta, which also published an excerpt from the novel before it went to press. The novel also received popular and commercial success; Brick Lane won the WH Smith People’s Choice Award and the popular television show hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan chose the novel as part of their Book Club initiative to boost readership levels amongst their viewers in 2004. Rehana Ahmed summarizes the book’s appeal, ‘it was […] the first novel by a British writer of Muslim heritage to engage closely’ with working-class British Muslim immigrant life ‘subsequent to and in the context of events, including the 2001 race riots and the 9/11 terror attacks, that have cast a spotlight on Britain’s Muslim population’.7 Consequently, ‘the level of interest it generated in a media and reading public eager for a greater “understanding” for British Muslims is perhaps unsurprising’.8 The reception that Brick Lane received was not entirely positive. In December 2003, a few months after the novel’s publication, the Greater Sylhet Development and Welfare Council, ‘a nation-wide voluntary organisation that cites the welfare of Sylheti Bangladeshis in Britain as its primary concern’, penned a comprehensive letter protesting what they felt was a ‘shameful’ representation of Sylheti Bangladeshis as ‘backward, uneducated and unsophisticated’.9 The novel’s subsequent adaptation to cinema by director Sarah Gavron, released only a few months after the 7/7 London bombings (as described in my introduction), provoked further protest amongst the area’s large Bangladeshi immigrant community.10 In the words of Abdus Salique, the owner of a sweet-shop on the novel’s eponymous street and later Mayor of Tower Hamlets, the novel and film were ‘racist and insulting’.11 Unsurprisingly, then, the novel, and its incarnation on the screen, remains oft-quoted in discussions of representations of British Muslims in contemporary culture. One of the central points of controversy has been the writer’s own background. Ali was born in modern-day Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) but fled with her East Pakistani father and English mother during the country’s bitter War of Independence from Pakistan. Upon arrival in the UK, the Ali family settled in Bolton, Lancashire, and Monica Ali went on to study politics, philosophy and economics at Wadham College, University of Oxford.12 As such, Ali has a markedly more privileged background and experience as a migrant than her fictional creations who live in one of the most economically deprived areas of Britain. Tower Hamlets, the area that the novel is set in, has seen the ‘most sustained pattern of migration within London’ and, according to the 2011 Census, is home to 81,000 Bangladeshi immigrant and diaspora communities.13 The Bangladeshi communities have made an indelible mark upon the area which has

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become a tourist attraction in London for its South Asian cuisine and even for its use of multilingual road signs which are often used as superficial evidence for London’s multiculturalism. Undercutting these renderings, however, is Altab Ali Park which, as I previously mentioned, serves as a reminder for the violent racism suffered by British Bangladeshi populations. For some, Ali’s novel was perceived as additional fuel for attacks on an ‘already beleaguered community […] at a time of particular vulnerability and scrutiny’ by a writer whose background meant that she could comfortably claim an intimacy with a community she barely knew.14 Brick Lane’s depiction of an ‘enclosed’ working-class Bangladeshi community contrasts with the representations of Glasgow as a site of cross-cultural encounter and transcultural possibility that appear in Suhayl Saadi’s 2004 novel Psychoraag. Taking place over the space of a six-hour night radio broadcast, Psychoraag centres on a young Pakistani-Scot named Zaf, as he records his final show on a pirate radio station that was set up by fellow Glaswegian Asians. Emphasizing a dynamic coming together of cultures within the Scottish city, Psychoraag is narrated by a variety of different narrative voices, such as the omniscient narrator’s, which is written in an accented Standard English, and Zaf ’s internal monologues and stream of consciousness which are expressed in a demotic, vernacular Glaswegian Scots, peppered with his parents’ mother tongue Punjabi and other languages such as Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, Arabic and Turkish that the protagonist encounters within Glasgow. Zaf ’s radio playlist also adds to this transcultural polyphony as it includes music such as The Beatles and The Kinks, Scottish folk and Sufi devotional music. Psychoraag’s juxtaposition of different languages, dialects and music defies cultural hierarchies, with the novel shifting between a diverse array of cultural markers and associations. Like Ali, Saadi was not born in his novel’s setting but in the small town of Beverley in Yorkshire before moving with his Pakistani migrant parents to Glasgow at a young age. Like Hanif Kureishi, he began his writing career penning pornographic and erotic literature under the pseudonym Melanie Desmoulins.15 Saadi’s writing career has unfortunately taken a different direction to Ali’s; financial considerations have unfortunately compelled him to leave writing in order to pursue another profession. In 2013, he explained that he now works exclusively as a dentist in Glasgow.16 Nevertheless, both writers’ divergent transcultural backgrounds and attachments to their home cities play formative parts in each of their novels. Superficially, Psychoraag and Brick Lane present antithetical renderings of cities for young British Muslim men: Glasgow as a space of inclusion and London as a site of exclusion. This is reflected in each novel’s formal qualities; Psychoraag’s transcultural aesthetics are markedly different from Brick Lane’s more conventional realism that has been described by Michael Perfect as a ‘multicultural bildungsroman’.17 This dynamic extends to representations of diaspora communities in the novels more broadly, as the Glaswegian Muslims of Psychoraag are depicted as associating more freely with other communities, whilst the Bangladeshi Londoners of Brick Lane are portrayed as less open to cultural exchange. However, over the course of the chapter, this initial supposition will be disputed. The comparatively more positive portrayal of Glasgow and more negative evocation of London offer some sharp insights into similarities and

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differences between migrant and diaspora Muslim subjectivities within Britain that will be unpacked in due course. Bringing together a text set in Glasgow and a text set in London is especially productive. Just as identity assemblages such as ‘Muslim’ and ‘man’ should not be regarded as homogenous, nor should British identities. The 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, for example, has highlighted that the relationship between the four nations that make up the UK is at times discordant. Glasgow, in particular, had 53.49 per cent of its electorate voting in favour of cessation from the UK.18 As Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow has a distinct cultural identity both within Scotland and the UK at large. Assuming the title of ‘Second City of the British Empire’ during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owing to its vital role in the shipbuilding, steel, commerce and, until its abolition in 1833, slave trades that cemented Britain’s colonial dominance, Glasgow has been associated with many formative British political, cultural and artistic movements.19 These include the city’s affiliation with the economist Adam Smith whose work The Wealth of Nations (1776) theorized Free Market economics, as well as the Art Deco architecture and visual art of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Glasgow suffered an economic downturn in the 1980s, however, with the closure of industry at the hands of the Margaret Thatcher administration’s stringent neoliberal social and economic policy. Socio-economic depression was mirrored in the city’s cultural production and so the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a new distinctive literary voice that was often penned in vernacular Scots and focused on questions of class. Willy Maley explains that the novels of writers such as Alisdair Gray and James Kelman stemmed from the city’s movement from Second City of Empire to ‘postindustrial heritage museum’.20 Such literary and cultural redefinitions of Glasgow have only become more pronounced amidst Scotland’s greater political autonomy. Following a referendum in 1997, Scotland was afforded a devolutionary parliament in 1999 allowing the country more power over health, education and tax. After successive victories for the Scottish National Party (SNP) in devolved elections, Scotland held the aforementioned 2014 Independence Referendum only to ultimately remain within the UK but with the process exposing a number of differences within the nation, such as Glasgow’s overwhelming distaste for the British political status quo. Psychoraag’s conception and publication occurred between these historical shifts. Carla Rodríguez González, therefore, claims that the novel was born out of Scotland’s post-devolution confidence and is therefore invested in reframing Glasgow as a city of diverse transcultural exchange and co-existence.21 My analysis will show how such positive images are complicated in the novel but also the real-life situation of Muslim communities in Glasgow frustrates a simplistic image of a cheerfully multicultural city. Pakistani communities and peoples in Glasgow mark the largest migrant and diaspora communities in Scotland with most settling in the districts of Pollokshields, Pollokshaws, Govanhill, Newton Mearns, Bearsden, East Kilbride and Woodlands.22 This population came closer to the forefront of Britain’s attention on 30 June 2007 when a car filled with explosives was driven into the glass frontage of Glasgow International Airport. The drivers, both Bilal Abdulla and Kafeel Ahmed, were Glaswegian-born men of Pakistani heritage who explained their terrorism

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on the grounds of British foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sara Upstone points out that the attack signalled that Abdulla and Ahmed identified ‘a Scottish airport as a legitimate target of protest against the “British” establishment’, therefore asserting Scotland’s part in the larger UK.23 Consequent to the attacks, Muslim communities in Scotland – and specifically in Glasgow – reported heightened acts of Islamophobia and racism.24 In 2016, Muslim communities in Glasgow became again the object of media attention, following the murder of Asad Shah, an Ahmadi Muslim shopkeeper in the city’s Shawlands district. Asad Shah’s murder was perpetrated by a Sunni Muslim Glaswegian in an act of religiously motivated hatred towards different interpretations of Islam. The murder, therefore, was a grim incident that nonetheless exposed the diversity of Islamic faiths within the most populated Scottish city.25 London, however, is more well known as a place that has been shaped by diverging migratory trajectories because it occupies a different national and international significance as both the capital of the UK and England’s largest city. Home to approximately eight million people, the city’s dominance in British cultural and socio-political discourses is frequently invoked as a sign of Anglocentrism, and more specifically, bias towards the UK’s most affluent citizens in the South East of England. As such, attention on London is often charged with overshadowing other regions of the UK. Such remonstrations, however, tend to overlook the sharp divides within London’s socio-economic fabric. The so-called City of London, as a distinct area within London’s greater metropolis, is a concentrated pocket of transnational wealth which boasts globally influential banks, offices and businesses. This economically privileged workforce has settled mostly in areas of North and West London, as well as various commuter towns in the counties of Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Hertfordshire that make up the boundaries of the city. Conversely, sections of South and East London, such as the boroughs of Lewisham and Brick Lane’s setting of Tower Hamlets feature some of the highest levels of social deprivation and poverty within Great Britain and Northern Ireland. According to the UK-based poverty monitoring group, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the negative aspects of this socio-economic disparity disproportionately effects London’s substantial non-white population, with minority ethnic and racial groups in London suffering from unemployment and discrimination in the workplace at a higher rate than anywhere else in the UK.26 What should be apparent from these details, however, is that contemporary London’s global outreach is a defining feature of the city. At one end of the spectrum this is manifested in the Chinese, Malaysian and German banks in Canary Warf and, at the other end, it is demonstrated by the vast array of Afro-Caribbean, Latin American, Turkish, Arab and South Asian markets that line New Cross Road, Deptford High Street, Electric Avenue in Brixton, Harringay Green Lanes or Brick Lane in Tower Hamlets. At the current juncture, London is a transcultural metropolis whose influence extends beyond solely the UK. Transnational movement and migration has shaped and benefitted the city thereby changing both the urban and human geography of the metropolis with, as John McLeod, points out, particular areas of the city coming to be associated with distinct populations.27 McLeod rightly notes, however, that such a tidy mapping of London ignores ‘a number of different cultural constituencies whose members move through the city and interact with others’, thereby further expressing the complex meshing of different cultures within contemporary London.28 London,

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then, in the twenty-first century is a globalized metropolis in which an estimated 300 different languages are spoken.29 It was therefore, appropriate, when Sadiq Khan, a London-born politician of Pakistani heritage, was elected as London Mayor on 6 May 2016, thereby making him the first Muslim mayor of a major city in Europe.30 In the following pages, I examine how two novels by British writers of Muslim heritage address urban spaces and their influence upon British Muslim male protagonists. First, I delve deeper into experiences of the city by male protagonists. Second, I address how the urban environments of London and Glasgow impact on masculinized bodies in the texts. Third, I unpack the myriad of musical and literary references in each text and how these shape protagonists’ sense of belonging to the city. In all of these sections, I will be exploring how encounters and contact with the different Muslim and nonMuslim British cultures within cities influence how fictional migrant and diaspora male protagonists negotiate and translate their identities. Practices of masculinity are sites in which these transcultural encounters are particularly conspicuous as the ways male protagonists perform their gender differ according to the environs they are in, the people they are associating with and by extension, the cultures they are encountering. The forging of transcultural masculinities in cities, then, poses a case study for Sherry Simon’s assertion that cities are sites of circulation. Simon explains: What moves? Peoples, ideas, money, traffic, waste through sewage systems, underground rivers, gossip and rumour. All these different kinds of objects and commodities circulate in complex patterns of overlay, some random, some following pre-established pathways.31

This chapter argues that ‘masculinities’ should be added to Sherry’s list, as British Muslim masculinized gender practices are subject to the same complex patterns described above: challenged, reformulated and reasserted in ways that offer substantial import in understanding complexes of transcultural belonging, gender practices, cultural translation and urban marginality.

‘A pinch of New York dust blew across the ocean’ For Raewyn Connell, the relative ease of movement that men enjoy within cities is a vital factor in the construction of hegemonic masculinities, as it brings men into contact with other men from whom practices and performances of masculinity are observed, learned and reformulated. Prior to her gender transition, Connell wrote about the process of walking through the city for hegemonic masculinized bodies: To be an adult male is distinctly to occupy space, to have a physical presence in the world. Walking down the street, I square my shoulders and covertly measure myself against other men. Walking past a couple of punk youths late at night, I wonder if I look formidable enough. At a demonstration I size up the policemen and wonder if I am bigger and stronger than them if it comes to the crunch – a ludicrous consideration, given the techniques of mass action and crowd control, but an automatic reaction nonetheless.32

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Connell’s piece delineates how urban public space is gendered and how the seemingly egalitarian and innocuous process of walking down a street is informed by practices of gender. Cities, then, are important sites of cultural and gendered translation in which men learn about different forms of masculinity as they encounter people from a variety of different cultures. This segment opens the chapter’s interrogation of the role urban environments play in the constructions of British Muslim masculinities, by posing a question of how central male characters engage with their surroundings and the people they meet within their neighbourhoods. In Brick Lane, the protagonists live within a sequestered tower block in the London borough of Tower Hamlets in which they spend much of their time longing for a home that is ‘situated elsewhere and belongs to the past’.33 Frauke Matthes observes that this feeling of loss causes the majority of Ali’s characters to ‘re-create a home, a Bangladeshi diaspora, in East London’.34 London, and more specifically Tower Hamlets, is an alien space in which characters such as the loquacious moneylender Mrs Islam – and initially Nazneen – cocoon themselves from the non-Muslim cultures outside the estate’s boundaries thereby exposing their anxieties regarding cross-cultural exchange and encounter. The cohabitation of a small number of white, working-class populations within the tower block, however, leads the immigrant residents to be acutely conscious of their cultural difference. Consequently, a vast number of inhabitants refashion their home in a manner so that the culinary, sartorial and cultural norms of their homeland are recreated abroad. Indeed, many of the house-bound wives who feature in Ali’s novel also unite around Islam as a means of maintaining a connection with their homelands and providing ‘stability […] in a confusing world’.35 Although, as Dave Gunning mentions, Islam is sometimes depicted as a ‘malignant presence’ in the novel, most notably through the demonstratively named Mrs Islam who polices the estate through her gossiping and makes immoral economic demands upon Nazneen after her husband secretly borrows money from her.36 Mrs Islam’s name, then, suggests that religion can signify a malevolent force upon the personal and economic freedoms of the estate’s devout inhabitants. Furthermore, as Matthes points out, the community’s isolation is intensified by their monolingualism, as most of the novel’s characters speak only Bengali. By only knowing Bengali, the immigrant inhabitants segregate themselves within the housing estate’s diaspora thereby ‘open[ing] a gap between “inside”, the tower blocks as home, and “outside”, Brick Lane as part of the “larger outside” London’.37 This separation ensures a limited worldview in which attachments to a spatially and temporally distant homeland thrive and opportunities for cultural exchange are foreclosed. Speaking to this simultaneous sense of dislocation and belonging to elsewhere, many of the novel’s characters are portrayed as suffering from a ‘disease’ called ‘going home syndrome’, described as following: ‘This is another disease that afflicts us,’ said the doctor. ‘I call it Going Home Syndrome. Do you know what that means?’ He addressed himself to Nazneen.

She felt a heat on the back of her neck and formed words that did not leave her mouth.

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‘It is natural’ said Chanu. ‘These people are basically peasants and they miss the land. The pull of the land is stronger even than the pull of blood.’ (Ali, p. 32)

Crucially, however, the conditions that cause ‘going home syndrome’ overwhelmingly affect the novel’s female protagonists. Within the text, it is women who are sequestered in the tower block whilst their dual-lingual husbands traverse the city for work, and bilingual children attend local schools. This dialectic leads to a conservative gender construction in which females are expected to stay in the ‘inside’ sphere where they fulfil household duties such as preparing meals and cleaning, and their husbands have greater independence and freedom to access the ‘outside’ spheres of the city. In the context of Ali’s central characters Nazneen and Chanu, Chanu is especially enthusiastic for Nazneen to stay at home, to refrain from learning English and to perform a housewife role. When Nazneen challenges her husband over his insistence that she stay at home, he justifies his position: ‘Why should you go out?’ said Chanu. ‘If you go out, ten people will say, “I saw her walking on the street.” And I will look like a fool. Personally, I don’t mind if you go out but these people are so ignorant. What can you do? […] I am westernised now. It is lucky for you that you married an educated man. That was a stroke of luck.’ (Ali, p. 45)

Although keen to assert that he does not agree with the dominant gender constructions or religious beliefs of the diaspora community, Chanu still recreates these problematic practices by refusing Nazneen’s wishes to leave the home or pay for English-language classes. The reasoning is nonetheless rooted in his masculinity, and how other residents view his authority as husband and head of a household. From Chanu’s perspective, it is not Nazneen’s incursions into public space that are a cause of anxiety, but specifically that she may be seen outside of the home and therefore appear to be neglecting her domestic duties. Such an observation would encourage negative judgements on his inter-familial authority and the control he exerts over his wife amongst the milieu that he derides. Chanu’s rationale parallels claims by scholars of masculinity such as Raewyn Connell, Michael Kimmel and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who have exposed how masculinity is afforded to men by other men.38 In other words, it is other men’s perceptions of men that justify their claims to hegemonic masculinity. Lingering on the quotation longer – it is also significant that Chanu makes a distinction between what he perceives as a ‘Westernised’ masculinity which is characterized by education, secularism and a more egalitarian approach to women’s rights with the supposedly backward, rigidly pious and patriarchal masculinity of the diaspora community. Contrasting with other inhabitants of the estate and his wife, for example, Islam does not play a big part in Chanu’s life. At one point in the novel, Nazneen complains that Chanu built a high shelf for the family’s Koran ‘under duress’ (Ali, p. 19), implying his indifference towards Islam. Nazneen’s conflicting attachment to Islam is demonstrated by her wish for the Islamic Holy Book to be sanctified above

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the mundanity of Chanu’s Dickens novels and Shakespeare plays. This difference in priorities further resonates with Chanu’s claims to hegemonic masculinity. Indeed, having migrated to London from Bangladesh for economic reasons, the corpulent Chanu’s life is marked by his desperate attempts to evince gender practices and roles typically associated with hegemonic masculinity. In this instance, being the principal breadwinner for his family is a very strong part of Chanu’s sense of self. As such, Chanu’s distinctive habit of boasting about his education through references to his framed certificates that are demonstratively displayed in the family living room (Ali, p. 42), and his persistent quoting from classic English literature such as George Eliot, William Thackeray or Geoffrey Chaucer is significant. These performative expressions of knowledge and educational achievement are targeted at other men who he views as successful such as his white British boss, Mr Dalloway. Mr Dalloway, for example, is described as being a rich and prosperous man who is the key provider for a family household. Chanu’s choice of writers is especially telling, then, as if Connell’s assertion that a man’s claim to hegemonic masculinity privileges those from a nation’s dominant racial or ethnic makeup, then Chanu’s references to canonical English writers are also his attempts to prove his own claims to hegemonic masculinity within his London context.39 Chanu’s method for staking his claims to hegemonic masculinity is reminiscent of Sara Ahmed’s trenchant analysis of how migrants achieve conditional acceptance into the body of the nation on the grounds that they ‘play the national game’.40 Ahmed’s example stems from the British Indian director Gurinder Chadha’s film Bend It Like Beckham, a 2002 box-office hit in which a British Indian woman disobeys her parents’ wishes for her to pursue their perception of a gender normative lifestyle and becomes a successful footballer instead.41 The film’s subtitle succinctly expresses this gendered and cultural clash of generations with the phrase, ‘anyone can cook Alo Gobi, but who can bend it like Beckham?’ For Ahmed, the film’s commercial success is due to an elision of socio-political inequalities that blight migrant and post-migrant communities within Britain. Such uncomfortable questions are supplanted by stereotypes of a supposedly exceptional misogyny in non-white British households. ‘The national game’, a widely used phrase to describe Britain’s fondness for football, comes to resemble a movement away from the regressive gender dynamics and lifestyle of her family, and the main character’s embracing of a supposedly inclusive and tolerant Britishness. If Ahmed’s concept is unfastened from its association with football and broadened to other contexts, ‘the national game’ can be read productively as the tentative national inclusion of marginalized ‘others’ on the justification that they performatively express a penchant for time-honoured and culturally resonant British pursuits. This reformulation provides a fruitful template for thinking through Chanu’s fondness for canonical English literature. Indeed, the term ‘English literature’ is particularly appropriate in this instance as Chanu’s predilection is for conventional and uncontroversial classic writers and works. In summary, Chanu references William Shakespeare, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Geoffrey Chaucer within the novel. All of these writers are rather uncomplicatedly English – as opposed to Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish – and their position within the canon of English literary culture is undisputed. Furthermore, each of these writers, particularly Shakespeare,

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is often selectively invoked in conservative national imaginaries as being supposedly representative of a quintessential Englishness. Excerpts from the sixteenth-century playwright’s dramatic corpus, most notably the jingoistic speech by John of Gaunt in Shakespeare’s 1597 play Richard II, are regularly revived during moments of national sporting competition or political turbulence to foster nationalist sentiment.42 Referring to this culturally significant body of writing, then, works on an affective level as Chanu seeks to associate himself within unequivocal definitions of Englishness. While the writers that Chanu lists are quintessentially English, many are also transnational figures whose literature has been translated into countless other languages and, moreover, has been imposed upon the education systems of colonized and formerly colonized nations as part of the British imperial project. In the first sense, recent celebrations over the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth revealed the global reach of England’s most venerated author and how the playwright’s publications have been continually adapted in a number of different cultural locales thereby questioning his status as the sole property of England.43 In the second case, however, work by writers such as Shakespeare, the Brontё Sisters and Thackeray ‘played a key role’ in the ‘mental colonisation’ of colonized subjects by ‘naturalizing British values’ through colonial education systems in nations such as Bangladesh, India or Pakistan.44 Chanu’s reproduction of these writers and their works does not evoke the transnational appropriation of figures, such as Shakespeare; rather, he takes part in unreconstructed recitations of names, titles of books and occasionally quotations, thereby not passing any critical judgement or engagement with this literature and its accompanying national status. As a result, Chanu simply parrots these key paradigms of a decidedly English culture with its colonial implications intact. Just as football ingratiates Chadha’s female protagonist in Bend It Like Beckham into a popular recreational support enjoyed by British citizens from across regional and class divides, Chanu’s performative quoting places him firmly within specific, colonial renderings of Englishness. Ironically, Chanu’s persistent referencing of English literary and cultural heritage does not bestow him with the markers of hegemonic masculinity that he hopes it will. Instead, it is Chanu’s white British-born colleague Wilkie who receives the coveted senior position in Chanu’s workplace despite the protagonist’s remonstrations that he only ‘has one or two O-Levels’, drinks alcohol on lunch breaks and returns to the office late, and cannot quote from Chaucer or Thackeray (Ali, p. 37). Such is Chanu’s disenchantment following Wilkie’s success that he decides to resign from his job and finds alternative employment as a taxi driver. Chanu’s change in occupation status has symbolic ramifications with his relationship to London. Chanu previously worked as a clerk in the local council and, therefore, had direct involvement with the city, its inhabitants and how it was managed. Chanu’s failure to achieve a promotion, therefore, also figuratively ensures his removal from the city’s management. His consecutive job as a taxi driver, however, involves travelling around the metropolis often for long, unsociable hours during the night. The emblematic significance of this evening driving means that he moves from his direct involvement in the city’s functioning to literally driving around the city’s periphery in darkness.

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Chanu is a man whose racial and ethno-cultural background ensures that he is marginalized but seeks acceptance throughout the novel and his failure to do so leads to his relocation to Bangladesh. In contrast, the London born-and-bred protagonist Karim is acutely aware of his marginalization. When first encountered in the text, Karim is a timid and apprehensive figure whose speech is stammered and who makes fidgeting movements when he stands. Much of this diffidence is attributed to his experiences of racism during his teenage years in London. Karim describes being ‘beaten up the whole time’ and ‘chased home every day’ by his white peers (Ali, p. 260). Karim’s meetings with Nazneen present him with a therapeutic opportunity to address these feelings of marginalization and exclusion. As previously mentioned, the two eventually embark on an affair which Nazneen is able to keep secret from her selfabsorbed husband. The affair, and its relevance to Karim’s masculinity and Nazneen’s constructions of masculinity, I will address in the following section of the chapter; however, it is significant that Karim’s affair with Nazneen is simultaneous with the character’s increasing involvement with Islamist frameworks in the housing estate. After commencing the affair, he becomes involved with an organization called The Bengal Tigers that seeks to galvanize religious and political fervour amongst other British Bangladeshi men on the estate. Karim quickly rises within the ranks of the Bengal Tigers on the back of powerful speeches that take aim against a local racist, anti-migrant group called the Lion Hearts, and against white mainstream British society that ‘oppresses’ their local communities and other Muslim-majority societies internationally such as Palestine and Chechnya. However, Karim’s politics are also grounded in experiences that Muslims have on the estate in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, as the text relates: A pinch of New York dust blew across the ocean and settled on the Dogwood Estate. Sorupa’s daughter was the first, but not the only one. Walking in the street, on her way to college, she had her hijab pulled off. Razia wore her Union Jack sweatshirt and it was spat on. (Ali, p. 305)

Crucially, however, it is women who appear to be the most subjected to these attacks and, specifically, for how their clothing is perceived. This allows Karim to position himself as a protector of women. Nevertheless, Karim’s political activism and religiosity is largely ‘contrived in response to his feelings of personal disempowerment’.45 As Gunning remarks, Nazneen’s realization that when Karim uses the word ‘radical’ he generally means ‘right’ highlights the ‘lack of meaningful political foundations behind his beliefs’.46 Gunning adds that his religious faith is similarly ‘bogus’ as ‘he is able to read a Hadith concerning the wrongs of adultery with the same interest as articles on “The Islamic Way of Eating”, or “Sleeping the Islamic Way” without connecting these to his affair with a married woman’.47 His political and religious viewpoints are, like Kureishi and Smith’s protagonists in The Black Album and White Teeth, ostensibly a quest for a definitive identity that he feels has been denied to him:

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‘When I was a little kid … ’ He sat up and put his feet on the coffee table. It was as if he were taking possession of the room, marking each item as his own. ‘If you wanted to be cool you had to be something else – a bit white, a bit black, a bit something. Even when it all took off, bhangra and all that, it was Punjabi, Pakistani, giving it all the attitude. It weren’t us, was it? If you wanted to be cool, you couldn’t just be yourself. Bangladeshi. Know what I’m saying?’ (Ali, p. 263)

Tellingly, despite the group’s desire to appeal to Muslim communities across London, the group is configured as a group for young British Bangladeshi men, reinforced by the group’s choice of moniker: The Bengal Tigers. Thus, the feeble grounding of the movement is apparent to Chanu and eventually to Nazneen in the novel. Chanu remarks on The Bengal Tigers that ‘it could be about Islam, but I don’t think so. I don’t think it is’ (Ali, p. 464). Further belying the naïve intellectual justification for The Bengal Tigers, Nazneen compares the different effects that knowledge has on Chanu and her lover Karim: for Chanu, ‘the more he knew, the more baffled he seemed’ whereas Karim ‘grew confident the more he knew’ (Ali, p. 448). Likewise, in the riot scene upon the eponymous Brick Lane by the group, Nazneen realizes that ‘there were no white people at all. These boys were fighting themselves’ (Ali, p. 474). As their political and religious movement is born out of the need for self-assertion, then, it is also prone to self-destruction. Nevertheless, involvement in The Bengal Tigers endows Karim with a more robust sense of confidence, in a manner that resonates with Raewyn Connell’s writing on ‘protest masculinities’.48 As was explained in my introduction and discussed in previous chapters, Connell defines protest masculinities as exaggerated performances of compensatory hyper-masculinity, such as violence, crime or anti-social behaviour, that manifest when marginalized men experience social injury due to their lack of access to materials needed to construct a hegemonic form of masculinity. Karim’s sense of victimization, then, is combatted through his senior role within The Bengal Tigers. Tellingly, one of the principal aims of the group is to ‘take the streets’ as a means of visibly asserting themselves against marginalization (Ali, p. 400). In Claire Alexander’s work on young British Muslim men in London, she highlights how ownership of public space, referred to as ‘the street’, becomes a powerful site of identity contestation and challenge.49 Thus, as Sara Upstone adroitly observes, when Karim and the Bengal Tigers instigate public demonstrations upon Brick Lane, Ali’s characters are also making claims to ownership of London and the nation as a whole, in riposte to their teenage experiences of racism and continuing sense of marginalization. The latter, I would argue, takes on a particularly pointed significance when the geographical positioning of Brick Lane is considered, as the street lies in the glare of the skyscrapers and high rises of London’s Central Business District. In contrast, Zaf, the central protagonist in Saadi’s Psychoraag, has an altogether more fulfilling engagement with his home city of Glasgow. Rather than being situated in a segregated diaspora community that seeks to rekindle a sense of belonging to elsewhere as with Ali’s Bangladeshi Londoners, the Asian Glaswegians of Psychoraag

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mix with people from a variety of backgrounds and cultures. When Zaf imagines his audience, he captures this eclectic mix: It wasn’t just Zaf who wis on multiple wavelengths, the whole bloody population of Glasgow wis tunin in on totally different levels – each person wis listenin to a different Zaf, a separate show … Sometimes Zaf would try to picture his audience: ex-gangstas; hot blades; young women on the brink; minicab drivers who in another zameen, had been government ministers; doctors; nurses; lovers; members of wacky religious sects; madrasah junkies; off-duty, multiculturallyinclined strippers; curry-lovin polis; mothers whose babies wouldn’t go down; city biviis with kisaan-heid hubbies; mitai-makers; mult-balti millionnaires; tramps; migrants; clerks; parkin wardens; aficiandos of cross-over; kebab-shop runners; and internet-crazed insomniacs. (Saadi, p. 19)

Zaf ’s diverse listenership is matched by the disparate backgrounds of his colleagues at the radio station. The other DJs at his station, Radio Chaandani, also all hail from Glasgow but with parents who migrated to the Scottish city from a number of different places in South Asia, with varying Muslim, Hindu and Christian heritages. Moreover, the Asian community radio station emphasizes this bricolage of different cultures, as they broadcast from a deconsecrated church. Alongside the multicultural makeup of the radio station disk-jockeys and audience, the staff of the radio station are also open to non-heteronormative gender constructions and behaviours. This is demonstrated by the Radio Station manager Harry, who is described as homosexual and of whom the radio DJs are very supportive. The radio station is an embodiment of a hybrid, rather than exclusionary, multiculturalism, which fits with visions of Scotland as a supposedly more inclusive nation than its English neighbour. In point of fact, Saadi’s novel draws attention to the superficiality of the ‘Asian cool’ rhetoric that was embraced by writers in England, most notably Hanif Kureishi, and argues for new conceptualizations of identity that incorporate new forms of Britishness as well as pay attention to Muslim identities: Until recently, Latino had been hip but Paki hadn’t … Indian had always been hip but only if you were a guru, a communist or a sitar player. All that had changed in the last few years and now it wis cool – that was the word – cool to be connected some way, to the land which lay somewhere to the east of the Middle East. For some odd reason, however, Pakistan was seen differently. In fact, most of the time, it wasn’t seen at all … Pakistanis had remained inaudible. They had no music, no voice, no breath. (Saadi, pp. 73–4)

The redundancy of such labels is supplanted by the protagonist Zaf ’s attachment to Scotland – rather than Britain – and even more specifically to Glasgow. Highlighted by the quotation’s reference to music, the novel uses music as a metaphor for addressing the asymmetrical and palimpsestic nature of transcultural identity assemblage and

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formation. Thus, Zaf describes himself as ‘a sample of Pakistan, thrown in at random to Scotland, into its myths. And, in Lahore, he had felt like a sample of Glasgow in the ancient city of conquerors’ (Saadi, p. 227). This is a sample that harmonizes with Glasgow, a city in which music is inscribed on its architecture as ‘iviry block, iviry stane wis carved in equality. Iviry block wis cut wi a soang’ (Saadi, p. 348). Indeed, it is in the specifics of Glasgow’s concrete jungle that heterogeneous music – and identity assemblages – emerge: These peripheral estates consisted of great borin blocks of fast-food housing where nuthin ever happened. The inevitable video shops, the corporate pubs, the off licences filled with cheap toxic wine. Yet, from these post-war afterthoughts with their ration-sized rooms, there had arisen this amazing band of Riviera joy, of Californian harmonies and Rajasthani rock. (Saadi, p. 193)

In contrast to London’s Tower Hamlets, then, Glasgow is the setting for a dynamic transcultural Scottishness in which inhabitants are able to move between, draw on and create new forms of cultural attachment. However, such positive images are also complicated in the novel. Gilmour points out that Zaf ’s notion of himself as a ‘sample’ is superficial. For example, Zaf has never learned his parents’ mother tongue of Punjabi very comprehensively and laments how he cannot ‘converse’ in it and so ‘construct meanin from chaos’ (Saadi, p. 246). As such, Zaf speaks predominantly in English with his parents ‘except when they were angry or upset or when they had forgotten’ (Saadi, p. 162). As such, Gilmour states how sampling articulates a half-way position in which Zaf feels neither comfortable in English nor in Punjabi.50 Indeed, this is apparent when Zaf introduces his radio show in a diverse array of different languages: Hi there, samaeen. Sat sri akaal, namaste ji, salaam alaikum. Bonjour, Buongiorno, Subax wanaagsan, Nee-haa, Günaydin [sic], Buenos días, Dobro jutro, Làbas rytas, Bom dia, Mirëmëngjes, Guten morgen, Maidan mhaith dhuit, Molo, Boker tov, Shubh Subah, Kalai vanakkam, Go Eun A Chim. Hiya in fifty thousand tongues! (Saadi, p. 66)

This eclectic mix of languages never goes beyond a greeting of hello or good morning thereby suggesting a somewhat limited engagement with Glasgow’s cultural diversity. Saadi further complicates the alleged peaceful open-mindedness of Glasgow towards the novel’s denouement. Having programmed a long track to play, Zaf briefly leaves the cubicle to socialize at a party held for the end of the radio station in another part of the building. However, it transpires that his wine has been spiked with a hallucinogenic substance. Thus, whilst he plays a mixture of Celtic folk music and South Asian raag, his subconscious goes on an imagined foray into Glasgow. The imaginative flâneurie that Zaf ’s subconsciousness engages in calls to mind Michel de Certeau’s conceptualization of urban perambulations in his essay ‘Walking the City’. In the essay, de Certeau juxtaposes the ‘Concept-city’ of ‘officious discourse, where

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all is rational, planned and official’51 and a ‘metaphorical city’ which is absent of the ‘univocity or stability’ of the former type of city.52 The ‘metaphorical city’, therefore, is a ‘location of migration, mobility and instability’ that disrupts the concrete and regulated impression that governments and councils may wish to project about their urban centres.53 John McLeod writes, summarizing de Certeau: If the map is the defining representation of the Concept-city which colonizes space in order to produce a static depiction of the city as place, then the wanderings of those who tour the city write new scripts of city-space in the delinquent narratives of their passage.54

Emphasizing ‘what the map cuts up, the story cuts across’, Zaf ’s dreamlike wanderings counter the more positive images of the city by exposing rigid power dynamics between ghettoized cultures that were effaced in the previous articulations of a happy, multicultural Glasgow within the novel’s opening chapters. By utilizing this trancelike state in his character, Saadi is able to disturb literal embodiments of the city and expose the continuing insidious traces of cultural conflict that have been inscribed upon the city since Glasgow’s status as the ‘Second City of the British Empire’. When visiting Glasgow’s nineteenth-century Botanic Gardens, for example, Zaf remarks on the city’s links to the British Empire, as ‘giant plant specimens which had been uprooted from far-off countries and which, like caged aliens, contorted and seeped their way across the insides of the windows’ (Saadi, p. 342). Colonial power-relations are also re-inscribed within the city as Zaf notes when he wanders to Pollokshields, one of the most economically deprived quarters of the city with a large Pakistani migrant population. In this part of the city, where Zaf was born, he reflects on his father’s experiences of discrimination when he first arrived in the city, exposing the psychological effects of poverty and racism upon its population: ‘The Shiels was a ghetto of sorts, a mental ghetto, and yet, there was succour and a certain type of strength in that. In returning to the burning arc of its arms. To his maa. In the seed lieth redemption’ (Saadi, p. 383). The strength that Zaf refers to has presented itself in aggressive male gangs enacting protest masculinities. However, the protest masculinities encountered within Saadi’s novel are uniquely shaped by the Glaswegian city landscape and therefore my own reading of how these complex practices of bellicose masculinity are performed should be read as revising and lending Connell’s model of protest masculinities more contextual and transcultural nuance. Indeed, within the novel, protest masculinities are enacted in contrast to the previous generation of hard-working migrants: These were the sons and grandsons ae the kisaan who had powered the buses, the underground trains, the machines of the sweatshop underwear-manufacturers. […] With bare soles had they trodden out new, hard paths along the Clyde and they had clothed the lily-white bodies of whole generations of Scots and then, later, they had filled their stomachs too. You eat what you are. If that was the case, then Glasgae wis Faislabad a hundred times over. But their sons and daughters had gone in the opposite direction and had become Scots. Right down to their gangs and

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their dancing and their chip-bhatti sahib footba tops, they had sipped of the waters of the Clyde and had become cold killers. (Saadi, pp. 242–3)

Described here as driving transport, feeding and clothing generations of ‘lily-white’ Glaswegians, older generations of Pakistani migrants are associated with less wellpaid labour work that nevertheless facilitates the movement and functioning of the city. Despite the crucial importance of bus and train drivers, the work that firstgeneration migrants are associated with in the passage also ensures their invisibility as they are evoked as driving underground trains, working to clothe the population of Glasgow and, in the process, metaphorically cloaking themselves and driving themselves underground. The relative low income of these jobs, however, has resulted in subsequent second-generation diaspora Pakistani Scots erasing their background and engaging in gang violence in frustration at their relative lack of opportunities and marginalization. These forms of protest masculinity, then, are built out of a sense of inherited shame at the supposed invisibility of Pakistani immigrant contribution to modern Glasgow. However, as signalled by the intrusion of italicized words from South Asian languages in the quotation, this is not an easy form of identification and so the young men in Glasgow must, in Carla Rodriguez Gonzalez’s words, ‘decide whether to negotiate their contradictions and perform them positively, or to accept the collective definition the gangs can provide them with’.55 Much like the young men in Smith’s White Teeth, Kureishi’s The Black Album and El Hosaini’s film, many of the Glaswegian diaspora youth choose to join gangs thereby evincing a form of behaviour that Zaf describes as behaving like ‘Al Pacino in a shalvar kamise’ (Saadi, p. 104), thereby drawing on influences from Hollywood cinema and globally influential gangster films. Zaf ’s radio station represents a positive alternative space that affords people a place to explore their complex attachments to their environments and their transcultural heritage.56 Indeed, Zaf explains that in his radio cubicle, he feels ‘safe from gangs and girlfriends, past and future, safe from sticks and stones and from those he loved’ (Saadi, p. 8). However, it is significant that Zaf is able to develop this sense of selfhood and security through such a faceless and precarious enterprise. In the first instance, radio is a broadcast medium that involves only sound and so, like the older generation of Pakistani Scots whose identities were buried underground or through clothing, Zaf ’s experiences are relegated only to his voice. Even more crucially, Zaf is broadcasting from a pirate station that is soon to close thereby demonstrating the erasure of creative and productive spaces for working-class diaspora populations in the city. Of course, while the radio station was broadcasting, those who work for Radio Chandaani were also not supported by legal, financial or even structural bodies thus they were transmitting their shows from a dangerous, dilapidated building. This precarity only emphasizes the material deprivation and marginalization of Glaswegian diaspora youth. It will be clear by now that each novel engages with the city in markedly different ways. Whilst for Chanu and Karim, this is a space that only emphasizes masculine failure and calls their integrity into question, for Zaf this is a city that is praised for its

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transcultural possibility; however, the novel’s ending casts doubt over this previously optimistic image. In the following section, I will interrogate this further by examining how interaction with different men and women in the city changes their interactions with the body, and how sexuality and physicality are shaped by female and male bodies encountered within the city.

‘They were both conquering territories’ Cities are, Judith Butler reminds us, spaces of assembly where bodies of different sexes, sizes, races and sexual orientations meet and function within the same locale.57 To this end, both Ali and Saadi adumbrate how London and Glasgow are formative influences upon the masculinized bodies and sexualities of their male protagonists. In Brick Lane, Karim’s involvement in Islamism comes alongside a physical transformation that parallels the figure of the ‘Muslim male folk devil’ of the post9/11 era,58 whilst Chanu’s desperate attempts to be a successful migrant are countered by his overweight and dysfunctional body. Meanwhile, Zaf in Psychoraag displays anxiety over his raced corporeality which manifests itself in turbulent love affairs with a fellow Pakistani Scottish woman named Zilla and a white Scottish woman named Babs. The following pages tease out these aspects and argue that the urban settings of Glasgow and London play a formative role in shaping how male protagonists experience and relate to their bodies. Underpinning this argument, I contend that bodily experience is central to how male protagonists conceive themselves, construct their masculinity, and project their gendered identities for their male and female peers in their urban locales. The introduction of this book outlined the complex and mutually constructive interactions between the body and masculinity.59 As Raewyn Connell details, the male body is a crucial reference point of masculinity. Essentialist arguments, she explains, conceive masculinity as somehow ‘inherent in a male body or […] express something about a male body’.60 That is, that ‘either the male body drives and directs action (e.g., rape results from uncontrollable lust or an innate urge to violence), or the body sets limits to action (e.g., men do not naturally take care of infants; homosexuality is unnatural and therefore confined to a perverse minority)’.61 Connell astutely refutes these claims on the grounds that it ignores the pluralities of masculinity and ascribes a fixed set of generally negative and misogynistic characteristics to male bodies. Nevertheless, she also repudiates social constructionist perspectives that tend to view the body as ‘a more or less neutral landscape on which a social symbolism is imprinted’.62 Building on an interview with a middle-aged man who discovered his preference for same-sex sexual acts after his female sexual partner’s stimulation of his perineum, Connell concludes: Bodies are both objects and agents of practice, and the practice itself forming the structures within which bodies are appropriated and defined, we face a pattern beyond the formulae of current social theory. This pattern might be termed bodyreflexive practice.63

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In other words, Connell contends that male bodies are simultaneously constructed by and constructing masculinities. This perspective is particularly beneficial for thinking of the slippery relations between bodies and masculinity in Brick Lane and Psychoraag. Crucially, Connell’s concept of body-reflexive practice also has significant relevance when analysing male bodies in the city. As previously elaborated, cities are dynamic spaces of exchange and interaction in which identity assemblages are challenged, restructured and reformed according to the multiplicity of different peoples and cultures encountered. Elizabeth Grosz claims that these urban experiences have significant implications on corporeality. Grosz takes issue with humanist perspectives that regard the city as developed according to human needs and patterns of settlement as it privileges mind over the body. She also posits that isomorphic approaches that view cities and bodies as reflecting each other are flawed as they favour a ‘pervasive and unacknowledged use of the male and the masculine [body] to represent the human’.64 Rather, Grosz proposes that there is a two way linkage which could be described as an interface, perhaps as a co-building. What I am suggesting is a model of the relations between bodies and cities which sees them, not as megalithic total entities, distinct identities, but as assemblages or collections of parts, capable of crossing the thresholds between substances to form linkages, machines, provisional and often temporary sub- or microgroupings.65

Just as bodies and masculinities are constantly in flux and construct each other, then, Grosz argues for a similar mutually constructive relationship between bodies and cities. Bringing together Grosz and Connell’s model is particularly germane for thinking through how the masculinized protagonists in each text experience the urban environment on a physical level, and the effects of corporeal experience upon urban masculinities, as I will now demonstrate. Karim in Brick Lane offers a fruitful example of this relationality. Over the course of the novel, Karim undergoes a concurrent physical transformation alongside his political and religious involvement with The Bengal Tigers. When he is introduced to the reader, the narrative describes him as ‘sure of himself ’; however, this delineation is betrayed by his jittery movements, his speech impediment and his excessive perspiration (Ali, p. 210). As was previously mentioned, much of his awkwardness owes to his sense of marginalization. However, his meetings with Nazneen allow him a space to air his grievances and, on the back of his sexual relations with Nazneen, to atone for this disempowerment and gain confidence in his masculinity. His relationship with Nazneen is initially professional, as Karim works as a deliveryman for his uncle’s clothing factory in which Nazneen finds employment as a garment worker. However, Karim and Nazneen soon realize their mutual attraction for each other and embark on an affair. For Karim, this affair is couched in exoticized terms; thus he tells Nazneen that he is infatuated with her as ‘you are the real thing … the girl from the village’ (Ali, p.  310). Nazneen’s supposedly ‘authentic’ Bangladeshi identity is contrasted with British-born Muslim women who are pejoratively stereotyped into what he refers to as

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‘two types’: ‘There’s your westernized girl, wears what she likes, all the make-up going on, short skirts and that soon as she’s out of her father’s sight … Then there’s your religious girl, wears the scarf or even the burkha. You’d think, right, they’d be good wife material. But they ain’t. Because all they want to do is argue. And they always think they know best because they’ve been off to all these summer camps for Muslim sisters’ (Ali, p. 384). Underpinning Karim’s perspective are a number of masculinist factors. Sexual access to Nazneen’s body allows him to physicalize a connection with his own Bangladeshi heritage that he feels both isolated from and persecuted by. Furthermore, unlike the British-born Muslim women who are engaged in some degree of patriarchal rebellion, Nazneen is characterized as being inculcated within a gender order that upholds male superiority – and, by extension, his own power. Karim’s sexual power over Nazneen corresponds with his graduation from member to leader of the all-male Bengal Tigers. As Karim advances within the group, he also undergoes a physical transformation that mirrors the image of the Muslim male archetype as identified by Jasbir K. Puar.66 Puar notes how in the years following 9/11, a stereotyped image of the Muslim male, generally characterized through racial features and clothing, has come to feature increasingly in Euro-American cultural production as the secular West’s Other. Features such as beards and shalwar-kameez when worn by men of colour have become signifiers of a series of axiomatic values that oppose those values of individualism and freedom said to define Western nations. Puar explains the presence of the Muslim and Muslim look-a-like male body in the Western city is a cause of existential paranoia and has led to the dissemination of forms of domestic terror such as increased profiling and surveillance targeting men whose appearance meets these prescriptions. Karim’s adoption of facial hair and his new-found fondness for ‘panjabi-pyjamas’ as opposed to his usual T-shirt and denim jeans physically mark him within this paradigm (Ali, p. 320). This is an association that Karim would nonetheless seek to encourage as he leads talks and diatribes against what he perceives is a permissive and decadent British society. Indeed, his constructed image corresponds with the changes in how he practises masculinity. His embracement of a narrow, jejune and unsophisticated view of Islam paired with his naive political posturing are rooted in rebellious opposition to a white hegemonic British masculinity. Equally, Karim is also constructing himself antithetically to his father who represents a weak and ineffective masculinity. Much like Hussein in Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette, Karim’s father is described as a passive and enervated figure who is physically beaten down by his experiences of racially motivated discrimination. Although never appearing in the narrative, Karim’s father is depicted as a reclusive widower whose incursions into the novel are often telephone calls to his son with demands for food, supplies or expressing anxieties about Karim’s whereabouts. Interrupting a rendezvous with Nazneen, Karim sees an array of frenetic messages from his father, and remarks: ‘Nerves and worrying […] the man is a worrier’ (Ali, p. 362). Nazneen’s mental image of her lover’s father vindicates this impression. Thus, when viewing a group of men described as having ‘white beards tinged with nicotine, skullcaps and missing teeth. Dark, polished faces and watchful eyes […] They came with plastic Iceland bags and moved along like hospital patients’, Nazneen wonders, ‘if Karim’s father were amongst them’ (Ali, p. 462). Karim’s

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masculinity is practised in riposte to his feelings of disempowerment and also his father’s resignation to these adverse socio-political factors. Karim’s body becomes the battleground of these conflicts and, evincing the influence of his urban surroundings on his corporeality, he manufactures himself to embody negatively stereotyped and racialized male corporealities. It is not coincidental, then, that Karim’s last appearance in the novel is also the first and only time that he is seen outside of the Brick Lane and Tower Hamlets locality. Indeed, to break off the affair, Nazneen also displays a newly found confidence by travelling through the London Underground system to see him in the Central London neighbourhood of Covent Garden. There, amongst the throngs of tourists, he stands in a shalwar-kameez and a long, facially disfiguring beard. His physical transformation and his geographical incursion into Central London capture his newly found confidence and the commencement of new forms of masculine practice. While Karim’s body displays radical shifts and changes within the novel, Chanu’s physicality is static. More specifically, physical descriptions of Chanu remain fixated on his weight. After overhearing Chanu’s misogynistic description of her own body as ‘Not tall. Not short. Around five foot two. Hips are a bit narrow but wide enough, I think, to carry children […] Perhaps when she gets older she’ll grow a beard on her chin but now she is only eighteen’ (Ali, p. 23), Nazneen responds: Narrow hips! You could wish for such a fault, Nazneen said to herself, thinking of the rolls of fat that hung low from Chanu’s stomach. It would be possible to tuck all your hundred pens and pencils under those rolls and keep them safe and tight. You could stuff a book or two up there as well. If your spindle legs could carry the weight. (Ali, p. 303)

Nazneen’s description, which occurs at an early point in the novel, pinpoints the physical paradigms that shape Chanu’s body throughout the text. In a moment of petulance, even Chanu and Nazneen’s daughter Shahana asks whether her mother had ‘ever been in love’ with her father and ponders ‘maybe before he got so fat?’ (Ali, p. 303; her emphasis). Chanu’s overweight body comes to dominate his character which is similarly depicted as awkward, blundering and ultimately tragic. His cumbersome body, therefore, can be seen as a metaphor for his own struggles to evince the types of hegemonic masculinity described in the previous section of this chapter. Indeed, Chanu’s physicality is in stark contrast to the corporeal features that Connell identifies as being the hegemonic masculinized body. Emphasizing that ‘masculine gender is (among other things) a certain feel to the skin, certain muscular shapes and tensions, certain postures and ways of moving, certain possibilities in sex’, Connell defines a hegemonic masculine ideal as self-contained taught, muscular corporealities which emanate discipline and self-control.67 Deborah Lupton explains that the overweight male body, then, is constructed in opposition: Male fat bodies are portrayed as soft, flabby, lacking the muscularity and strength of the ‘normal’ idealized male body. They are therefore considered as far closer to

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the stereotypical feminine body in their softness, roundness and fleshiness. […] Fat men are viewed as effeminate rather than masculine in their soft roundness and lack of apparent virility. They lack the phallic hardness of the idealized male body, and thus the fat man is expected to lack sexual desire and be less attractive to women.68

Consonant with Lupton’s analysis, Jerry Mosher notes that dominant cultural representations of fat men constantly link their weight to childlike qualities and therefore lack the authority and power that are central to constructions of hegemonic masculinity.69 Chanu’s qualities accord with Connell, Lupton and Mosher’s interpretations of the overweight male body in representing a subordinated masculinity. Chanu’s inability to achieve a promotion and his difficulty in providing money for the family, then, have resonances in his physique. Literally, his difficulty in moving and walking in the city both due to his hefty corpus and through the painful corns he develops on his feet metaphorically relates to his own stagnant positionality and difficulty in evincing the hegemonic masculine ideals that he so ardently desires. It is also crucial to note, however, that the aforementioned representations of fatness are focused on Western societies. The Atlas of World Hunger points out that in Bangladesh, as with many non-Western societies, being overweight is often linked to signs of prosperity and wealth.70 Consequently, many men will try to present themselves as larger so as to performatively indicate their affluence thereby exposing links between overweight body types and hegemonic masculinity. Ali’s novel offers space for such a reading, in particular when Nazneen first arrives in London, she observes an overweight, tattooed woman who lives in the opposite tower block: ‘This woman was poor and fat. To Nazneen it was unfathomable. In Bangladesh it was no more possible to be poor and fat than to be rich and starving’ (Ali, p. 53). Chanu’s body, then, can be seen as a performative expression of wealth and his claims towards hegemonic masculine ideals. Ultimately, the reader is encouraged to view Chanu’s physicality as a sign of weakness within the text. Beyond his graceless appearance, his body is also portrayed as dilapidated in other ways. One of Nazneen’s most unenviable tasks, for example, is to tend to the corns in Chanu’s feet and to cut his nails. These are jobs which ‘had previously disgusted her, this flaking and scraping, but now it was nothing’ (Ali, p. 182). Nazneen’s service to Chanu’s body, then, whether through intercourse or podiatry, affirms a misogynistic hierarchy through which his sense of masculine self-worth is derived. It is only within the walls of the family household that he is able to maintain such a power dynamic since the outer, public sphere of the city only exacerbates his sense of worthlessness by offering successive career defeat and concluding with his nocturnal relays around the city as a taxi driver. Further signalling the ways that Chanu’s body becomes a physicalized canvas for his sense of disempowerment, he is diagnosed with a stomach ulcer mid-way through the novel and his pain means that he must stay at home. Where Chanu can be seen to have his marginalization expressed through his body and Karim reacts against his disempowerment by physical performance, the masculine insecurities that plague Psychoraag’s Zaf are evoked in exceptional ways.

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Similar to the protagonist Karim, however, Zaf is sensitive to his racial appearance and this is particularly discernible through his negotiation of sexuality and his romantic relationships with women. Zaf ’s anxieties about his background and his identity are mapped onto his frenetic love life with two women who, as Rodríguez González points out, come to symbolize two distinct but dominant communities within Glasgow.71 At the start of the novel, Zaf discloses his emotional fragility following his recently terminated partnership with the white, middle-class Babs, who represents the city’s Irish-Scottish Catholics. As the novel unfolds, however, Zaf ’s previous girlfriend, the drug-addicted, Pakistani Scot Zilla comes to the fore. Zaf ’s inability to move beyond these two relationships, and the geographic and cultural poles they signify, partially expresses the inherent complexities of transcultural heritage and belonging the novel is invested in examining. Indeed, in both relationships Zaf is in different hierarchical positions. With Babs, Zaf is ostensibly portrayed as being dependent on his lover. For the most part, this is captured in Babs’s relative ease in navigating the city and its environs by motorbike as opposed to Zaf ’s need to walk or use public transport. Tellingly, it is only when the pair are outside of Glasgow on a trip to the Scottish Highlands that power dynamics dissolve as ‘out ae the city, it wis jis him an her an he liked it that way’ (Saadi, p. 316). On returning to Glasgow, however, Zaf explains ‘the illusion of unity would evaporate mair quickly than dew aff ae granite’ thereby articulating the role that the city plays in forging their relationship and its inherent inequalities (Saadi, p. 318). For example, Zaf divulges that ‘she needed his brown-ness just as he needed her white. They were both conquering territories’ (Saadi, p. 27). Whilst he admits that his feelings may owe to her symbolic significance as white: ‘He wondered just how much of his love for Babs wis merely love for her as an icon’ (Saadi, p. 198). Zaf ’s partnership with Babs, then, is depicted as recapitulating the racialized and cultural power dynamics and divisions of Glasgow’s urban fabric. This relationality was also produced in Zaf ’s previous relationship to Zilla. In contrast to the safety and security that Babs represents for Zaf, Zilla is described as his ‘dark alter-ego’ (Saadi, p. 47). There is an element of irony in this evocation as it is precisely Babs’s ‘whiteness’ that ensures Zaf ’s movement into the comparatively more affluent area of Glasgow’s North, Kelvinside, and his departure from the ‘East-End slums’ that he grew up in and lived in with Zilla. As the novel elaborates: The auld East End that had gone from dirt-poor bothies to dirt-poor tenements and where, once, the city fathers had turned a country house into a loony bin – Garngad asylum. The asylum wis long gone but it seemed as though the inmates had hung around […] As though, somewhere along the bus route, they had been taken backward in time and now were half-runnin, not through Glasgow, City of Architecture, City of Culture, City of Kak, but alang the roads of something from Dickens’s time but without the corny consciousness. (Saadi, pp. 176–7)

Beyond Zilla’s association with less affluent areas of Glasgow, she also transforms into a progressively more sinister and ominous presence in Zaf ’s imagination. After imbibing

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the hallucinogenic-spiked alcoholic beverage, he visualizes her breaking into the radio cubicle and attacking him physically and sexually molesting him. This hallucination exposes Zaf ’s simultaneously intimate, fractious and self-hating relationship towards the ethno-cultural background that he shares with Zilla. Described variously as ‘black’ and ‘brown’, Zilla rips up Zaf ’s radio playlist and forces her body upon his. The experience is bewildering and distressing as with her ‘calloused’ hands she ‘grabbed his cock an began tae pull the skin up an doon like she wis haulin him fae the grave’ (Saadi, p. 387). By the end of their frenetic sexual encounter, the metaphorical significance of Zilla is clear as she was ‘a wimmin nae longer, sumthin else physical entirely’ (Saadi, p. 388), thereby marking her as an intangible threatening force that reminds him of his conflicted relationship to his own roots. Strikingly, she threatens Zaf that she will never leave his consciousness and declares, ‘Ah’m yer shaddae. Ah’m yer soul’ (Saadi, p. 184). Sexuality, and more specifically this disturbing sexual encounter with Zilla, therefore map Zaf ’s own complicated claims to national and cultural identity upon his physicalized body. Additionally, there is an irony in the racial and cultural binaries that the women represent. Babs works as a nurse, and therefore, is associated with a stereotypically ‘feminine’ job that involves healing or alleviating the body. Metaphorically, then, she comes to symbolize a redemptive force that can ‘cure’ his marginalization and administer his admission into the normatively white, non-Muslim Scottish nation. Even her name, Babs, brings to mind the blond-haired and buxom British film and television star, Barbara ‘Babs’ Windsor who is well known for playing an overtly sexualized and flirtatious nurse in the 1967 film Carry On Doctor.72 Zilla, on the other hand, is depicted as being addicted to drugs and, therefore, her body is in a state of physical and emotional dependency. While Babs represents redemption, then, Zilla is associated with the city’s ‘underground life’ of drink and drugs. Zaf ’s male body vacillates between these two female bodies for his sexual satisfaction, and ultimately is unable to find fulfilment with either. Zaf ’s sexuality, therefore, emerges as a complex site of transcultural negotiation between belongings to different urban identities that remain unresolved and in flux. For both sets of male protagonists, bodies and sexualities become sites through which constructions of masculinities are projected, contested and formulated. Urban environments play an essential role in these masculine corporeal formulations whether by wearing down male bodies into physical discomforts such as ulcers, captured metaphorically through corpulence, leading men to sexually construct themselves into dominant ethnicities, or causing them to rebel against these patterns of dominance by fashioning themselves into this century’s ‘folk devil’. The last section of this chapter will build on such representations by examining how each text’s engagement with literary and musical output further shapes complexes of urban belonging, nationality, cultural identities and masculinities.

‘Iviry block wis cut wi a soang’ A common particularity in Psychoraag and Brick Lane is the dense interweaving of references to British music and literature that are frequently made by male protagonists.

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As acknowledged previously, Chanu in Ali’s novel regularly punctuates his interactions with quotations and allusions to canonical English literature such as Thomas Hardy or Emily Brontё. These references serve a performative function for the character, as they are voiced around his white male colleagues to demonstrate his integration, or when surrounded by more successful migrants such as Dr Azad or with his family to display both his difference from the diaspora community within which he lives and his masculine dominance over women. To different ends, Zaf in Saadi’s novel mediates his identity and his attachments to Glasgow through music. Rather than Chanu’s public acting-out of familiarity with conventional emblems of British/English national culture, Zaf uses music to make the case for a more dynamic and hybrid national belonging. Music and literature are effective tools used by Ali and Saadi’s male protagonists to demonstrate belonging and subscription to assemblages of national belonging and gender practices. Specifically, the overt propagation of fondness for particular types of music and literature serves to associate oneself with a prescribed view of what constitutes hegemonic masculinity in Britain, or to propose more inclusive gender constructions that draw upon a range of cultural affiliations. In the subsequent pages, I will analyse these intertexts and what they reveal about the male characters’ relationships to their urban environments. It is my contention that music and literature respectively enable the figures of Chanu in Brick Lane and Zaf in Psychoraag to make sense of their surroundings and translate their identities into subjectivities that either attempt to combine their backgrounds into a transcultural form of British Muslim masculinity or reject heir migratory heritage entirely. To begin with the character of Chanu, I will return to Ahmed’s concept of the ‘national game’ that I explored in the first segment of my chapter. Perhaps the most ostentatious example of Chanu’s participation in the ‘national game’ occurs when he decides to take his family on a trip around Central London’s tourist sites. Despite ‘thirty or so years’ living in London, Chanu explains that he had been unable to visit some of the city’s most celebrated landmarks, such as the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral and Buckingham Palace, due to his work commitments, which left him ‘struggling and struggling’, and so with little ‘time to lift my head and look around’ (Ali, p. 289). His emphasis on work not only reiterates his investment in the hegemonic masculine ideal of family provider but also highlights how different sections of society experience the city. For tourists, London may present itself through its famous buildings, bridges, museums and river. Whilst for inhabitants, these are parts of the cityscape that one may view in passing from a bus or stroll past on the way to somewhere else. For the protagonist Chanu and his family, however, it is imbued with significance as they travel into the central zone of London on what they call a ‘holiday’ thereby exhibiting a form of veneration for the socio-historical resonances of London’s most celebrated buildings. Simultaneously, it is also an opportunity for Chanu to demonstrate his ‘superiority’ over his all-female family because he knows London much better than his wife and daughters and therefore he is able to ‘teach’ them about the city. Evincing his involvement in the ‘national game’, Chanu obstreperously recounts the chronological history of Buckingham Palace for his family and all passersby to hear. Significantly, Chanu’s knowledge of British history is focused on the fates and lives of the royal family therefore parroting a conservative and nationalistic vision

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of Britishness which he vociferously expresses his respect for. In so doing, Chanu is demonstrating his alignment with a time-honoured and culturally conservative British institution thereby showing his own integration within Britain. Crucially, the audience for Chanu’s referencing of English literature and history is his family, composed entirely of females as it is his wife and two daughters, and generally other men like the local general practitioner, Dr Azad, and his colleagues at the city council. Dr Azad is a singularly important figure for Chanu. From Chanu’s perspective, Dr Azad is educated, successful and well-connected thus his invitation to the family flat is treated with special care. In addition, Azad’s success is attractive to Chanu as he is a fellow Bangladeshi migrant and Muslim. When he first visits Chanu and Nazneen’s home, Chanu orders Nazneen to cut large pieces of meat in the various dishes she prepares so as to signal the family’s wealth in affording premier quality food. Chanu’s certificates from diploma courses in literature, history, sociology and philosophy, all of which are demonstratively hung in the living room, are also gestured towards during the meal. Besides Chanu’s desire to associate with Dr Azad as he is a ‘fellow intellectual’ and prosperous immigrant, he also wants closer affiliation with him due to the doctor’s supposed connection with his boss, Mr Dalloway (Ali, p. 35). As mentioned previously, Mr. Dalloway is Chanu’s manager at the city council and, during the first part of the novel, Chanu is keen to achieve a coveted promotion. However, this assumed relation between Dr Azad and Mr Dalloway is incorrect and results in an awkward dialogue whereby Chanu’s desperation to succeed is palpable: The thing is, with the promotion coming up, things are beginning to go well for me now. If I just get the promotion confirmed then many things are possible. […] ‘I’m sure you have a good chance.’ ‘Did Mr. Dalloway tell you that?’ ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Mr. Dalloway.’ The doctor shrugged his neat shoulders. ‘My superior. Mr. Dalloway. He told you I have a good chance?’ ‘No.’ ‘He said I didn’t have a good chance?’ ‘He didn’t say anything at all. I don’t know the gentleman in question.’ ‘He’s one of your patients. His secretary made an appointment for him to see you about his shoulder sprain. He’s a squash player. Very active man. Average build, I’d say. Wears contact lenses – perhaps you test his eyes as well.’ (Ali, p. 33)

This uncomfortable exchange unmasks the strength of personal meaning that Chanu attaches to the possibility of promotion and substantiates his frequent performances of knowledge and success. These exhibitions of achievement – whether through knowledge, ability to quote from canonical literature or brandishing his certificates – are points in which he is playing the ‘national game’ by showing reverence for English culture, his integration within it and his own claims to a specifically English imagining of hegemonic masculinity. As described in the section on constructions of the city and masculinity at an earlier point in the chapter, however, Chanu does not manage to

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receive this promotion, despite the ‘ignorance’ of his rival who is unable to quote from Chaucer, Dickens or Hardy. For Chanu, this failure has crushing personal consequences as he leaves his job thereby demonstrating how a career setback comes to symbolize his loss in the ‘national game’ and reinforces his marginalized masculinity. Yet Ali’s novel also exposes the insubstantiality of dominant and univocal approaches to complexes of gender, cultural and national belonging. Chanu’s perceptions on Dr Azad, as well as related expectations of hegemonic masculinity and national identity, are shattered when Chanu visits the doctor’s home. Feeling affronted at not having received a reciprocal invitation to Dr Azad’s home, Chanu locates the general practitioner’s house and visits there with Nazneen. Emphasizing the division of cities along class lines, Dr Azad lives in a house, as opposed to a flat, in a relatively affluent area of East London which is geographically close to Chanu and Nazneen’s home but symbolically distant, as Chanu remarks to his wife: ‘[This is] a substantial property […] This area is very respectable. None of your Sylhetis here. If you see a brown face, you can guarantee it’s not from Sylhet’ (Ali, p. 107). Dr Azad’s geographical positioning outside of the diaspora community reinforces Chanu’s prejudices that the tower block inhabitants are uncivilized and uneducated, a jaundiced outlook that fails to recognize the socio-economic structural factors ensuring the diaspora community’s lack of access to educational opportunities or means of social betterment. Chanu’s expectations are swiftly rebutted, however, as a woman in ‘Westernised’ appearance in the form of a short purple skirt and close-to-the-scalp cropped hair opens the door. It soon transpires that Dr Azad is married to an atheist Bangladeshi woman who drinks alcohol and enthusiastically praises what she perceives to be the comparative freedoms that she and her daughter experience, evidenced by their wearing of different types of clothing and moving more openly through the city. The meeting with Dr Azad at his home emphasizes that the doctor’s claims to be a moral guardian who berates young men of the diaspora community for ‘copying what they see here, going to the pub, to nightclubs’ is a façade (Ali, p. 31). Both Mrs Azad and her daughter are described as drinking alcohol and, whilst at their home, Nazneen and Chanu are also offered beer. Chanu accepts the alcoholic beverage but with some reluctance, as the narrative describes it was ‘as if he were proposing to lend her a kidney’ (Ali, p. 110). Indeed, his acceptance of the drink is also intended to prove his similarity to the doctor whom he holds in high esteem. Nonetheless, judging by Chanu’s uncharacteristic quiet demeanour when in the Azad household, the protagonist is challenged by Dr Azad’s lifestyle which he expected would meet his perceptions of hegemonic masculinity. For Chanu, these assumptions consisted of being a highly successful man that led a heteronormative lifestyle with obedient children and the trappings of wealth and respect. Ali’s inclusion of the Azad family, then, brings to light the illusory nature of hegemonic masculine scripts and the futility of Chanu’s own attempts to perform these. Where Chanu attempts to demonstrate his allegiance to Britain, and more specifically his London locale, through performances of what he perceives as markers of a national hegemonic masculinity, Psychoraag’s protagonist Zaf asserts that he finds his sense of place and selfhood through music. As has been referred to through the chapter, there is an underlying tension in the representation of music and the city in Psychoraag. Zaf

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feels affection for his Scottish home city as an idealized place in which transcultural and hybridized forms of identity are incubated and celebrated. Nevertheless, music is Zaf ’s primary source of identification, as the narrative acknowledges: ‘Music defined him. His identity lay not in a flag or in a particular concretisation of a transcendent Supreme Being but in a chord, a bar, a vocal reaching beyond itself. A harmony wheelin out there, beyond the beyond’ (Saadi, pp. 210–11). Zaf ’s identity, then, is portrayed as transcending national affiliation, as well as religious or ideological belief and, instead, is located in music which is characterized as defying localization, as it reaches ‘beyond itself ’. This utopian vision is undermined throughout the novel as Zaf ’s relationship to music is constantly mediated through Glasgow, a city which, as demonstrated in the first section of this chapter, is suffused with music and whose city quarters are depicted as emanating with their own beats, vibes and melodies. Christin Hoene interprets the protagonist’s identification with music as a ‘deliberate step, albeit reluctantly taken, as Zaf ’s instinct is to map his identity onto very concrete locations’.73 Indeed, Zaf does try to locate a sense of belonging to Pakistan, where his parents come from, and Scotland, the country of his birth. Eventually, he concedes that he belongs to neither. For example, when looking at a photograph of a young man demonstratively named Zafar in Pakistan, he laments: ‘In reality, he knew nuthin about the boy in the gao in Pakistan-before-it-wis-Pakistan – before the land had suddenly become pure, before it had been purged of somethin impure. He knew nuthin of the Scotland before. It wis a complete mystery to him and would remain so always’ (Saadi, pp. 210–11). Zaf shares a sense of estrangement from his parent’s place of origin and from Scotland where he feels ‘otherized’ on the grounds of racial and cultural difference. Zaf attempts to reclaim those places of potential belonging through the people he knows: stories of his parents’ past lives in Pakistan and their journey to Scotland are interwoven with more recent memories of turbulent love affairs with Zilla and Babs which, as the previous section argued, are used as attempts to foster localized attachment. Zaf turns to music to root himself and, in so doing, develops a model for transcultural forms of belonging. Being a disk-jockey (DJ) is especially appealing to him as ‘on the radio, everythin he did felt real. It wis the only place where he felt human – when he wis alone with just his voice’ (Saadi, p. 3). Working as a DJ attracts Zaf as it enables him to take control over the various assemblages of his identity, consciously manipulated by him in an authorial sense, as ‘he would interject before the end of a track or just as another wis beginnin. It was the mark of a DJ to do that – to overarch the artists, to butt in, to play God’ (Saadi, p. 3) From this vantage point, he is able to use music to explore his transcultural positionality as he plays music from the cultures that he feels allegiances towards and, in the process, examines the similarities and differences between these cultures. The chaotic arrangement of songs on Zaf ’s radio show, which juxtaposes music from a range of disparate places and, owing to his amateur DJ skills, often end up playing at different speeds or overlapping each other – expresses the frenzied and asymmetrical nature of transcultural identity construction – proposed by Stuart Hall as ‘constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference’.74 Music, then, poses a form of cultural translation in which his feelings of cultural difference towards Pakistan and Scotland can be

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redressed and analysed whilst new transcultural perspectives and forms of belonging to these places can be forged. Although he confesses to not having visited a masjid for a ‘long’ time, Zaf also uses music as a vehicle to access and express Islamic forms of spirituality. Thus, he is moved to recite the Shahada, or the statement that declares the oneness of Allah and the acceptance of Muhammad as Allah’s prophet, whilst he is listening to music to comfort himself. Music prompts him to ‘Thank the Lord’, even though he does not know who the ‘Lord’ is (Saadi, p. 207), as ‘talkin to God was a symphonic affair and Zaf hadn’t even grabbed the melody’ (Saadi, p. 278). Conspicuously evident in this last quotation is how Saadi’s protagonist does not foreclose the existence of a higher being nor the validity of religious worldviews, but rather evokes a fluid and conditional version of Islamic faith. Elsewhere in the text, Zaf encourages such a reading through his fondness for Sufi musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who also appears in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and his referencing to Persian Sufi poetry such as The Secret Rose Garden.75 These articulations of an inclusive and inquisitive Islamic religiosity are a constituent part of his unstable identity that translates and negotiates across geographic poles and cultures into a more transcultural way of being. Music is an ideal conduit for the processes of cultural translation that Zaf undertakes precisely because, as Hoene points out, ‘it is an art form that happens in time rather than being tied to place’.76 As such, Hoene explains that music is ‘constantly in flux, is constantly created and recreated, and therefore always dependent on its respective context of performance, of coming-into-being’.77 In this sense, the novel also uses the creative potential of music as a way of expressing the asymmetrical and fluid nature of transcultural identity construction that is forged upon the comparisons, entanglements and exchanges that take place when cultures come into contact. Zaf ’s radio playlist is a clear example of this as it subverts cultural hierarchies by bringing together different genres, styles and types of music from all over the world. Musical pieces as diverse as Indian classical raga, the American country and folk-rock band The Byrds, and the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ are thus ‘uprooted from their cultural contexts, their places of origin’ and broadcasted in juxtaposition on Zaf ’s radio show.78 Zaf has a particular tendency towards musicians who fuse different genres, styles, and cultures within their output, such as the British Indian band Cornershop, the British Asian electronica collective Asian Dub Foundation, and even the inclusion of Indian raga-inspired music by The Beatles. The latter is particularly significant owing to The Beatles significance as the most nationally and internationally celebrated British popular music band. By playing their track ‘Within You Without You’ from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a song which is noted for its use of Indian instrumentation such as sitar, dilruba and tabla and featured a collaboration with the London-based organization the Asian Music Circle, Zaf is highlighting transcultural perspectives within some of the most prominent figures of British culture. In this sense, Zaf can be seen to resist the kinds of ‘national game’ that Sara Ahmed proposes, and Brick Lane’s protagonist Chanu engages in, and produces a form of transcultural belonging through music. The novel’s formal qualities match this transcultural outlook. Hoene highlights that music is ‘a structuring agent in the novel that organises plot advancement’ whilst

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also offering insight into Zaf and the cultures that he lives and moves within.79 More specifically, the novel’s title includes the term ‘raag’ which is a form of improvisational South Asian music that draws on a variety of musical themes, genres and styles. Crucially, no performance of a raag is ever the same; it involves the participation of any number of different people who play an array of disparate instruments in a cyclical, temporally prolonged structure. Hoene quotes Martin Clayton’s definition of the musical style as something that ‘needs to be understood as an ongoing process of performance, interpretation and interaction’.80 As such, the novel’s fusion of Scots, Urdu and Punjabi phrases alongside its erratic temporal shifts across places and times and its blending of diverse musical styles offers a worldly textual interpretation of raag. Hoene comes to the same conclusion but understands this as a form of postcolonial ‘writing back’ to ‘linear narratives of imperial history writing’.81 This perspective, however, overlooks Zaf ’s relative distance from the postcolonial politics of his parents’ homeland and underplays the importance he attaches to fusion, meshing and creating forms of belonging that draw on the disparate geographical locations and cultures he is connected to. In this regard, Zaf ’s music evokes forms of transnational belonging evoked by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her concept of planetarity. Much like Zaf ’s culturehopping playlist, Spivak elucidates a new model for reading literature that is not bound by bordered landmasses with their own political creeds. Rather, Spivak argues for new forms of cultural perspective that disregard neoliberal discourses of globalization that depend on viewing the Earth as a globe with discontinuous nation-states and markets in favour of planetary thinking that stresses common history, environment and uncanny differences. Spivak expresses these sentiments eloquently when she describes air travel: My plane is flying now over the land between Baghdad, Beirut, Haifa, and Tripoli, into Turkey and Romania. I am making a clandestine entry into ‘Europe.’ Yet the land looks the same—hilly sand. I know the cartographic markers because of the TV in the arm of my seat. Planetarity cannot deny globalization. But, in search of a springboard for planetarity, I am looking not at [Josè] Martí’s invocation of the rural but at the figure of land that seems to undergird it. The view of the Earth from the window brings this home to me.82

For Spivak, planetarity offers a way to acknowledge collectivity, complexity and cultural difference that, does not deny the histories and realities of the capitalist enterprises behind globalization and colonialism, but also steadfastly refuses to succumb to the logic of domination and marginalization. Arguing that humans should imagine themselves as ‘planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities’, Spivak extrapolates that ‘planetary thinking’ must involve learning languages and celebrating cultural diversity in the face of the homogenizing forces of globalization.83 Music enacts a form of planetary thinking for Zaf that resonates with Spivak’s vision of non-hierarchical planetary belonging as music from a variety of locales are recontextualized within a planetary frame. As such, I argue, the novel is not just ‘writing back’ but also hinting towards transnational potentials of citizenship.

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However, it does only ever remain a potential. It should be apparent by now that Zaf ’s quest for belonging in music is a highly individualized and personal one. The music that Zaf plays is chosen as it closely links to his own personal history, ranging from songs that remind him of his parents’ migration from Pakistan to Scotland to songs that remind him of his tempestuous love affairs. As he tells his audience: ‘ye’ll huv noticed that the music’s swung aroon fae hard asian dub – city music, ye might say – tae airy-fairy Scoa’ish stuff. Weel, Ah don’t know aboot you but that’s whit maist ae us are livin, folks […] This is today’s music – it knows nae boundaries’ (Saadi, p. 30). A case in point is that Zaf ’s most frequently played tracks are by Scottish musical collectives, such as The Colour of Memory whose tracks are often sang in Scots Gaelic and are inspired by Scottish musical traditions, British Asian bands, and music from Pakistan such as Mohammad Rafi. Hoene notes that exactly half of the titles played by Zaf are pieces by British bands, while the other are South Asian bands. In particular, the first four songs Zaf plays are two songs by The Colour of Money and the Asian Dub Foundation, thereby asserting his own identity complexes from the start. This cultural bias can be probed further, however, as whilst it does identify the geographical poles in which Zaf ’s oscillates, it also reveals some flaws in the utopic vision that he offers his listeners. Firstly, Zaf ’s attractive vision for a placeless belonging in which music can foster attachment is undermined by his focus on musical production from places that have a personal resonance for him. In other words, music from places outside of South Asia or Britain is rarely played in his radio show. To this end, Igor Stravinsky and The Byrds are noticeable departures from the musical makeup of Zaf ’s broadcast; however, the position of both of these artists in the Western musical canon is a firm one. The Byrds, for instance, are a popular band that are a frequent linchpin for mainstream radio stations. Stravinsky, on the other hand, is a more complex case as he is a transnational musician who left his Russian homeland to settle in France, Switzerland and the United States.84 He is, nonetheless, very much identified as a composer who has contributed to a Euro-American modernist musical tradition and is therefore associated with a highbrow European culture. Consequently, Zaf ’s cavalier attitude to borders comes a little unstuck as it is primarily focused on his own personal situation. Secondly, and perhaps most conclusively, by the denouement Zaf feels even more displaced than at the novel’s start. Fuelled by the hallucinogenic-laced drink he imbibes, Zaf ’s show and his playlist fall into decay at the novel’s finale. Zaf spills a drink over the paper on which he has written his playlist which consequently disintegrates. Meanwhile, he loses control of the music system with songs repeating or playing over each other. This descent into chaos, mirrored by his hallucinations of Babs, Zilla and his father, disavows the more positive representations of multiculturalism that were previously encountered in the novel. At the novel’s end, and by extension the radio show’s conclusion, Zaf is left in a state of physical and emotional disquiet and instability. This conclusion, whilst arguably articulating the prospect that there is no absolute meaning in identity and attempts to define meaning are bound to result in chaos, also dispels the allegation that music can offer a robust form of belonging. On the contrary, music seems to exacerbate Zaf ’s feeling of discomfort and unease; a discombobulating collection of feelings that were perhaps anticipated by the radio

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show’s title, the Junnune Show, which translates in English to ‘madness; a trance-like state’ (Saadi, p. 425). Finally, Zaf ’s celebration of transcultural possibility and attachment through music elides the more difficult and complex questions of cultural encounters and engagement. For all his philosophizing behind the meshing of music from diverse cultural locales, they nonetheless do not address the issues of cultural prejudice which remain resolutely intact. Furthermore, Zaf ’s music is also uprooted and abstracted from all the material questions of its production and commodification within capitalist frameworks of inequality. Emphasized by his imaginary walk within Glasgow where socio-economic divisions of the city remain tangible despite the liberating spiritual quality of the music, the novel only ever presents music and the radio station as a precarious space of transcultural potential that nevertheless leaves cultural hierarchies in place and ultimately unchallenged. Reading Zaf ’s celebration of music in Psychoraag alongside Chanu’s championing of English literature and history in Brick Lane, then, both protagonists only ever engage with their respective choice of cultural production on a superficial level. Their enjoyment of music and literature fundamentally maintains and upholds power dynamics between the cultures they straddle and steers clear of any comprehensive cultural exchange and transcultural transformation. *** Both Psychoraag and Brick Lane offer demonstrative points of similarity and departure from each other in their exploration of British Muslim masculinities and their relations to the city. Brick Lane depicts much of this conflict as rooted in the protagonists’ investment in conceptions of a singular, fixed homeland. Rather than working to blend the different cultures they are positioned within, Chanu seeks to mimic his narrow understandings of English hegemonic masculinity by performatively asserting his reverence for London’s historical past and England’s literary heritage. His efforts are met with failure which is metaphorically captured in his cumbersome body which struggles through the British capital and is resigned to circulating its urban periphery as a nocturnal taxi driver. At the novel’s close, Chanu’s repeated setbacks lead to his own departure from the city and back to Bangladesh. Karim, on the other hand, faces his social disempowerment by embarking on an affair with a Bangladeshi migrant woman and transforming himself into a figure resembling this century’s stereotyped ‘urban folk devil’, the Islamist. Like Chanu, his sense of disillusion and disenfranchisement within their urban locale inspires these expressions of masculinity. On the surface, Psychoraag offers a more positive engagement with the city. Zaf thrives in the transcultural environment of the Glasgow radio station from which his music and his vocal register admix the cultures he lives within. The fertility and dynamism of this picture of transcultural Glasgow, however, overlooks questions of hierarchy and inequality between these cultures. This is expressed both through his highly subjective music choice which propagates a superficially positive view of transcultural encounter and in his turbulent love-life which is left unresolved and reinforces racial privileges in the city. The concluding images from Psychoraag, then, are of a man who is fragmented

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and disintegrating. Even the radio station, which serves as a space of transcultural cohesion, is set to close by the novel’s end. Fundamentally, though, both of these novels show how cities are spaces of potent and inevitable cultural encounter, exchange and transformation. Masculinities, in both texts, are where these transformations meet the most resistance and the most complexity. Psychoraag’s imagining of borderless belonging and planetary thinking is a thread that will be picked up in greater detail in my following chapter. In the next part of my book, I will be exploring two novels that navigate the mobility and immobility of masculinized Muslim bodies in the post-9/11 world and how each text argues for more a materialist understanding of how certain racialized subjectivities disrupt connections between identity, place and mobility.

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Mapping Masculinities: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014)

Both Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014) investigate the ways Muslim masculinities are shaped by location and community or lack thereof in the globalized twenty-first century. While the previous chapter in this book explored how the transcultural traffic of the modern city affects the ways Muslim masculinities are practised and embodied in urban environments, this chapter turns the focus onto the more nebulous concepts of belonging and transnationality. In differing but illuminating ways, Aslam and Rahman’s novels imagine dislocated characters and communities whose disorientation is both expressed and challenged through practices of masculinity. Maps for Lost Lovers, for example, depicts an isolationist diaspora community that, like Ali’s protagonists in Brick Lane, seek to recreate the affiliative practices of their homeland by producing ‘authentically’ local male subjects who will uphold the patriarchal gender order of Pakistan in Britain. On the other hand, through the character of Zafar in In the Light of What We Know, Rahman presents a form of paranoid and unpredictable masculinity that is unable to develop a sense of belonging and, therefore, being. The disruptive relationship between identity and place is captured in each novel’s metaphorical use of maps as a misleading and inaccurate way of visualizing place. Early on in Rahman’s novel, the text’s main protagonist Zafar discusses different forms of maps: the Mercator Projection, arguably the most familiar rendition of the globe, the Peter’s Map, which seeks to represent countries according to geographic size, and the London Underground map. In a footnoted conversation with the novel’s unnamed narrator, Zafar compares cartographical processes with literary translation: The cartographer’s job is to take the material on the surface of the globe – lakes, mountains, and cities – and represent these on a flat surface. The translator takes a poem, a piece of text, in one language and has the task of trying to represent aspects of the poem – rhyme, meter, rhythm, metaphor and meaning – in another language. A cartographer doesn’t give you a miniature globe with all the same details on it as the globe of the world itself has. Nor does the translator simply

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give you the poem in the original language along with a Hungarian dictionary. […] Both of them face the same problem, namely, they cannot capture everything exactly and they have to give up some things in order to convey anything at all. (Rahman, p. 24)

Just as translation is a process of negotiation between source and target languages and cultures, Zafar perceives maps as a translational practice. Maps cannot give an accurate representation of the world but rather a ‘sense of something whose truth is far richer but without which we would perceive nothing and never find our bearings’ (Rahman, p. 21). Notions of partiality and half-truths haunt Zafar throughout Rahman’s long and complex novel in which the central character obsessively collects and regurgitates different forms of knowledge in the hope of understanding his place in the world. Beginning with Zafar appearing at the front door of the novel’s unnamed narrator’s home in a delirious state, the novel traces Zafar’s extraordinary experiences, reveals the traumatic instances of his upbringing and ends with his near confession of sexual abuse in a labyrinthine and nonlinear fashion that mirrors the protagonist’s psychological and geographical disorientation. Zafar’s life, which bears some extraordinary similarities with his author’s life, was born in Bangladesh in the aftermath of the 1971 War of Bangladeshi Independence and subsequently raised on a London housing estate.1 Zafar’s prodigious mathematical abilities, however, precipitate his flight out of his impoverished background and into a scholarship at Oxford University. Studying at Oxford is followed by a number of prestigious and prosperous jobs: Zafar finds employment as a derivatives trader at a transnational finance firm based on New York’s Wall Street and later works alongside his fiancée for the UN in Afghanistan. However, Zafar’s crushing sense that he has transgressed the limits of his class, as well as his racial and cultural background, debilitates him throughout his life. Zafar develops a personal archive of knowledge relating to the multiple different places in which he finds himself and people he encounters there as a means of imposing control on his anguish. Yet, like the maps and translations he mentions, Zafar discovers that knowledge itself is a politically and culturally constructed concept. Paradoxically, the more knowledge he attains then the more intensely Zafar feels his background prohibits him from access to the ease of movement and privilege that his transnational Oxbridge-educated peers enjoy. By the end of the novel, Zafar’s growing internalized anger and resentment at his treatment by those more privileged than him are externalized in displays of aggressive masculinity that are enacted upon his fiancée. Zafar’s fury at the end of the novel can be understood in the context of Zia Haider Rahman’s response to Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth (2000) discussed in this book’s second chapter. As I mentioned in the second chapter, Smith and Rahman’s brother had been in a relationship and, allegedly, Rahman provided the influence for the character of the intellectual atheist Magid Iqbal who returns from Bangladesh as more ‘English than the English’ (Smith, p. 435). In a contemporary article in The Sunday Times, Rahman, whose name is given a different spelling, accuses Smith of downplaying racism in contemporary Britain in favour of comedy:

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Ziad [sic] Haider Rahman, the inspiration for Magid, one of the twin Muslim brothers at the centre of the novel, said Zadie Smith’s book, which was adapted for a television series, was divorced from reality. ‘Conspicuously absent from White Teeth is the anger’ he said. ‘We don’t see the very dark aspects of racism. That’s something that divides the book from reality.’2

Rahman’s novel, and indeed Aslam’s novel, is altogether more sombre and less jovial in tone to Smith’s text. The serious and, at times, distressing subject matter of In the Light of What We Know and, by extension, Maps for Lost Lovers can consequently be seen as a repudiation of the more light-hearted approaches of popular writers of immigrant and diaspora Britain like Smith and Kureishi. For Rahman, this change of tone was met with swathes of glowing critical attention, culminating in the novel winning 2015’s James Tait Black Award. However, the novel has so far gained little academic attention therefore making my critical reading of Zafar’s masculinity among the first. This lacuna is curious given the novel’s innovative, though not unprecedented, structure and complex questioning of issues surrounding race, identity, gender, class and transnational capitalist enterprise. Born in the Sylhet region of Bangladesh and raised in the UK, where ‘he grew up in poverty, in some of the worst conditions of a developed economy’, much of Rahman’s life mirrors his protagonist Zafar.3 Like his fictional creation, Rahman attended Ballilol College, Oxford, and subsequently worked in investment banking for the Goldman and Sachs firm in New York later changing career to be a corporate lawyer and eventually a human rights lawyer, specializing in corruption. As suggested by the title, Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers also explores the politics of location and mapping. Set in an unidentified Northern English town which closely resembles the city of Huddersfield, where the Pakistani-born Aslam lived with his family from the age of fourteen, Aslam’s protagonists rename their vicinity to reflect their affiliation to South Asia. Therefore, the town is evocatively renamed as Dasht-e-Tanhai (the Desert of Solitude) which both references a famous rhymed poem (nazm) by the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and speaks to the inhabitants’ sense of loss at migrating to Britain.4 These renaming practices not only show, in the words of Roger Bromley, how ‘a first generation [of South Asian migrants] stubbornly defining itself in ethnic terms’ but also, as Claire Chambers points out, uncover ‘a complex interchange between Europe and the subcontinent, as many of those of the familiar appellations they choose to replace […] hark back to colonialism’.5 For example, the narrative voice in the novel explains that ‘as in Lahore, a road in this town is named after Goethe. There is a Park Street here as in Calcutta, a Malabar Hill as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla Hill as in Dhaka’ (Aslam, p. 28). As Chambers remarks, this is not an example of what the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett referred to as ‘colonisation in reverse’ as inhabitants of Dasht-e-Tanhai retain expressions of British (and European) colonial power over place.6 Even in referring to ‘Bombay’ and ‘Calcutta’ instead of Mumbai and Kolkata, the residents of Aslam’s novel keep the Anglicized names of their places of origin rather than their postcolonial Indianized versions. However, it must also be noted that the naming of modern-day Mumbai is a particularly contentious issue that speaks to fault-lines within postcolonial India as some have claimed that

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the name change promoted Hindu Nationalist interests served by the Shiv Sena Party while others have argued that the name actually restores Marathi linguistic heritage and identity to the city. As such, Aslam’s protagonists could also be viewed as using the name Bombay to convey their distaste for Hindu Nationalist discourses.7 Regardless of place names, the families who live in Dasht-e-Tanhai also staunchly resist all non-South Asian influence. In contrast to the affirmations of the cultural anthropologist James Clifford who, in a much-quoted chapter entitled ‘The Pure Products Go Crazy’, suggests cultural heterogeneity is a symptom of the globalized twenty-first century, Aslam’s novel depicts an enclosed and isolationist community which, in Clifford’s terms, strive for received notions of ‘purity’ over plurality.8 However, as exposed by the renaming of streets, structures of purity are repeatedly shown to be fallacious in themselves. This is particularly the case with the novel’s narrative focus on the Aks family: Shamas, Kaukab, their two sons Charag and Ujala and their daughter Mah-Jabin. In the novel, devoutly Muslim Kaukab seeks to protect herself from Britain which she views as ‘a dirty country, an unsacred country full of people with disgusting habits and practices’ (Aslam, p. 267). She spends much of the novel in distress over her atheist husband Shamas who, owing to his mixed Muslim–Hindu parentage, is not ‘pure’ and by her children who have embraced unfamiliar ways of life to her, lamenting ‘my Charag, my Mah-Jabin, my Ujala. Each time they went out they returned with a new layer of stranger-ness on them until finally I didn’t recognise them anymore’ (Aslam, p. 146). The extent to which many of Dasht-e-Tanhai’s residents will go to protect their sense of ‘purity’ is demonstrated by a glut of patriarchal violence that dominates the novel. Despite setting the novel in 1997 and so in the aftermath of The Satanic Verses Affair, but before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, Aslam rhetorically connects the novel’s exploration of patriarchal brutality with the ‘fundamentalist violence of the World Trade Center attacks’, by stating in an interview: In a way, the book is about September 11 […] I asked myself whether in my personal life and as writer I had been rigorous enough to condemn the small scale September 11s that go on every day […] Jugnu and Chanda are the September 11 of this book.9

By rhetorically bringing together the 9/11 attacks with patriarchal violence in British Muslim communities, Aslam is making the case that Islamist terror is a transnational phenomenon that can find expression in large-scale terrorist attacks or small-scale acts of patriarchal brutality. While his comment also clearly flirts with post-9/11 Orientalist curiosity with Muslims in Britain, Maps for Lost Lovers does not problematically assume that Islam is inherently to blame. The novel contains many believers in Islam that do not follow the sentiments that Kaukab expresses but instead deftly explores how the anxieties of loss, disorientation and change of cultural traditions through migration provide a hothouse for rigid and oppressive forms of religious and cultural practice, especially in connection to gender. In both novels, protagonists combat a sense of disjuncture between the places they live in or visit and their subjectivity by actively shaping themselves or their

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surroundings. Characters, therefore, strive to be agents in their environment either, as in Maps for Lost Lovers, by cutting themselves off from a normatively white hegemonic society and performatively recreating an exaggerated conceptualization of South Asian Sunni Islam, or as in In the Light of What We Know, developing knowledge in order to pass into a normatively white upper-class milieu. Maps, as explicit or implicit metaphors, convey the ways that deterritorialization plays a central role in characters’ disoriented masculinity in Maps for Lost Lovers and In the Light of What We Know. To this end, both novels’ disruptive engagement with place resonates with Jean Baudrillard’s writing on maps as simulacra that blur boundaries between reality and representation.10 Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fable ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in which ‘the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory’, Baudrillard points that maps are a representation of reality yet are frequently misinterpreted as an exact replica and so, become, viewed as real as the real.11 Such an unmooring of the self from place prompts consideration of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of ‘rhizomatic identity’ which argues that selfhood should be seen as something constantly in motion, or in a ‘state of becoming’, rather than fixed, or ‘rooted’. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification’ as maps ‘can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or a mediation.’12 However, I would argue that these two texts work against this rather utopian imagery of maps which, as a scene in Zafar’s friend’s home demonstrates, can also be a representation of colonial power and domination. In fact, as will become apparent in this chapter, these are two texts that suggest that rhizomatic conceptions of identity can align with alienating, neoliberal models of unfettered circulation of capital, as in the case of Zafar, or the reinforcement of patriarchal and rigid constructions of Islam, as is the situation of Aslam’s protagonists. In the pages that follow, I argue that characters seek increasingly to view their alternative cartographical practices, such as renaming of places or their frenzied archiving of knowledge, as a means to reterritorialize and, therefore, to map themselves. However, through these attempts to map masculinities, the fallacious and constructed nature of their endeavours only becomes more apparent and men retreat into vicious and aggressive forms of embodied masculinity, such as sexual violence and domestic abuse, in order to try and reterritorialize themselves. I begin with two separate readings of place and gender in the two respective novels before finally discussing how women’s bodies play a central role in men’s negotiation of place, power and reterritorialization.

‘England was like living in one big brothel’ In Maps for Lost Lovers, the experience of migration is conceived as a disorienting process. In the first few pages, Shamas reflects on how there are no monsoons in Britain and so ‘to come to England was to lose a season’ (Aslam, p. 5), while the

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narrative mixes together Islamicate and British cultural references, comically recasting the British monarch as the caliph Harun al-Rashid when Shamas is reimagining an episode from the One Thousand and One Nights. Eventually, the novel’s omniscient narrative voice clarifies that this indeed is not Pakistan, explaining: Pakistan is a poor country, a harsh and disastrously unjust land, its history a book full of sad stories, and life is a trial if not a punishment for most of the people born there: millions of its sons and daughters have managed to find footholds all around the globe in their search for livelihood and a semblance of dignity. Roaming the planet looking for solace, they’ve settled in small towns that make them feel smaller still, and in cities that have tall buildings and even taller loneliness. (Aslam, p. 9)

Dasht-e-Tanhai is precisely one of these footholds where the mostly Pakistani inhabitants cling to the affiliative practices of South Asian Sunni Islam as a form of protection against the perturbing influence of Britain which is a country of ‘prostitutes and homosexuals’ (Aslam, p. 358). In order to preserve their links to Pakistan, Dashte-Tanhai residents develop an especially rigid form of Islamic belief that is upheld through the moral judgements and mutual surveillance of the town’s residents. Characters frequently inform on one another’s ‘blasphemous’ or ‘unislamic’ behaviour thereby constructing an isolating and suffocating environment in which the townsfolk never feel entirely comfortable. In fact, the community resemble, in Baudrillardian terms, a form of simulation in which Islam is abstracted into an extreme and literal version whereby the artificial nature of their Islamic beliefs is overlooked and embodied by citizens as something realistic and reflective of life in Pakistan. Kaukab, whose name ironically translates as ‘planet’ in Urdu, is an emblematic example of a Dasht-e-Tanhai inhabitant who is deeply religious, suspicious of other families and consumed by anxieties surrounding the non-Muslim cultures that exist beyond the neighbourhood’s boundaries. For example, Kaukab ‘barely knew what lay beyond the neighbourhood and didn’t know how to deal with strangers: full of apprehension concerning the white race and uncomfortable with people of another Subcontinental religion or grouping’ (Aslam, p. 32). This exclusion means that Kaukab develops a hostility towards the ‘whites’ and affectively associates the non-Muslim majority population with uncleanliness, immorality and vice, and therefore tries to safeguard her family from their allegedly corruptive influence. For instance, Kaukab recalls that ‘a bunch of [white] people in suits and ties’ on television had talked about how ‘all mothers secretly want to go to bed with their sons’ (Aslam, p. 293). Kaukab is ‘repulsed’ at the apparent degradation that this episode affords Britain, explaining that ‘these sorts of things were said by vulgar hawkers and fishwives in the bazaars of Pakistan, but here in England educated people said them on television’ (Aslam, p. 293). Kaukab’s suspicion of the non-Muslim populace of the Britain is also initially internalized within her own children, as when her son Charag first attends university, he conveys that ‘the sense passed on to him during his upbringing was that the differences between the whites and the Pakistanis were too many for interaction to take place’ (Aslam, p. 126).

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Some of this distrust, however, is not misplaced. The novel presents incidents of white racism against the inhabitants of Dasht-e-Tanhai, including threatening phone calls, racist abuse on buses and, as Gunning remarks, ‘the unconscious racism of the little white boy who struggles to describe a relative of mixed racial background’ by referring to them as ‘half Pakistani and half … er … er … er … human’ (Aslam, p. 10).13 These episodes exacerbate the anxieties of protagonists such as Kaukab thereby strengthening their resolve towards an uncompromising form of hard-line Islamic faith which prohibits transcultural interaction or exchange. The community’s determination to defend their way of life is most clearly depicted by the fact that the mosque manages to dissuade mothers from reporting sexual abuse committed by a local imam on their children as it ‘would give Islam and Pakistan a bad name’ (Aslam, p. 235). As such, the order of Dasht-e-Tanhai would be irreparably damaged as, if the police got involved and shut down the mosque no one would teach their sons to stay away from the whore-like white girls, and their daughters would run away from home and wouldn’t want to marry their cousins from back home, that the Hindus and the Jews and the Christians would rejoice at seeing Islam being dragged through the mud. (Rahman, p. 235)

This offensive response only underscores the poisonous paranoia that spreads throughout the streets of Dasht-e-Tanhai. What this incident also reveals is the crucial significance of gender practices and performances as sites through which the community express their devotion to their religious faith, maintain their cultural link to their homeland and evoke the fictional community’s ‘difference’ from their normatively white, non-Muslim peers. Every form of gender or sexual behaviour that does not accord with Dasht-e-Tanhai’s strict rulings is therefore punished – such as the exorcism and subsequent death of a young woman in the town who had fallen in love with a young Hindu boy. Another troubling episode that unveils the significance of masculinity in the community comes in the form of a threat from a mother to her daughter. Reprimanding the child for disobedience, the mother yells, ‘If you don’t behave, I’ll not only give you away to the whites, I’ll give them your brother too. They’d make sure he doesn’t learn to drive when he grows up and has to sit in the passenger seat while you drive. Do you want a eunuch like that for a brother? Househusbands, if you please! The mind boggles at the craziness of this race’ (Aslam, p. 221, Aslam’s emphasis). The mother’s blackmail packages xenophobia and patriarchal masculinity together into a single act of intimidation. Within her binary, normatively white Britain is associated with effeminacy and an abdication of supposedly anointed gender roles such as being a family’s breadwinner or driving a car, which functions as a potent symbol of control and authority. Kaukab is deeply invested in the forms of patriarchal masculinity that exist in the novel and laments her husband for not being ‘masculine’ enough. In particular, Kaukab is disturbed by Shamas’s atheism and socialist politics, all of which she attributes to Shamas’s father, and by extension her father-in-law, who was a Hindu. Shamas’s father Chakor, the reader learns, was born Hindu, but, due to a British air

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offensive on the city of Gujranwala in 1919, lost both his memory and his family. Having been found at a Muslim shrine in the region, he was subsequently raised Muslim and only discovered his Hindu roots later in life. Kaukab, however, is deeply troubled by her father-in-law’s Hinduism and disturbingly wonders whether Chakor’s corpse had been ‘spat out repeatedly by the earth’ for not being ‘purely’ Muslim. In the broader Dasht-e-Tanhai community, Kaukab and Shamas’s sons are also viewed with a degree of suspicion due to their background. As the murdered Chanda’s father voices, ‘In my opinion they are still infected with their father’s Hinduism. Lord Krishna and his thousand girlfriends, indeed! And they jeer at our Prophet, peace be upon him, for having just nine wives!’ (Aslam, p. 177). At another point in the novel, Shamas reflects on his father’s traumatic past and remembers how the discovery of his Hindu heritage led his masculinity to be questioned in attack where Muslim men told him that ‘the Hindu gods were ‘pretty boys,’ what with their rouged cheeks and lipsticked mouths’ (Aslam, p. 81). Shamas’s patrilineal Hindu ancestry goes against the community’s fevered but, as Shamas’s background makes clear, ultimately illusive desire for Muslim purity and therefore casts doubt over the Aks sons’ masculinity. Such prejudices are most likely behind Kaukab’s frustrations with Shamas who, she believes, has never behaved in a manner befitting the ‘head of the household’: Oh your father will be angry, oh your father will be upset: Mah-Jabin had grown up hearing these sentences, Kaukab trying to obtain legitimacy for her decisions by evoking his name. She wanted him to be angry, she needed him to be angry. She had cast him in the role of head of the household and he had to act accordingly. (Aslam, p. 111)

Owing to his failure to publicly perform what she perceives as hegemonic masculine practices, Kaukab holds Shamas accountable for a number of ills that have been brought upon the Aks family. Thus, Kaukab contends that their daughter Mah-Jabin’s ‘chances in life’ were ruined by him as he ‘didn’t want to move to a better neighbourhood and no decent family was ever going to ask for the hand of a girl living in a third-class neighbourhood’ (Aslam, p. 119). Further to these accusations, Kaukab berates her husband for a series of supposedly squandered or lost opportunities. These include: declining an OBE for which he was nominated in recognition for his work as a community officer, forcing their son Ujala to continue his education past the age of fifteen rather than join the job market at that age and not providing adequate resources so their son Charag could pursue a career as a doctor. Kaukab relates all of these failures solely to her husband’s non-conforming masculinity which, she believes, has been adversely affected both through his mixed Hindu–Muslim heritage and his migration from the supposedly religiously and morally ‘pure’ Pakistan to the ‘degenerate’ nation of England. Thus, Kaukab idealizes Pakistan as a place in which people behave according to supposedly appointed gender behaviours in society, thus she sees ‘nothing wrong with the status of women in Pakistan’ whereas ‘England was like living in one big brothel’ (Aslam, p. 347). In this sense, Kaukab is keen to prevent her children engaging in any form of cultural

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exchange and these anxieties are most clearly expressed through her assiduous efforts to ensure her sons practice a rigid form of masculinity that takes central themes from her religion and cultural background but exaggerates them due to her own anxieties about living within a non-Muslim environment. However, I argue that Kaukab’s anxieties about her sons’ masculinity has an additional and more complicated dimension. The sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti’s essay ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’ is instructive for thinking through Kaukab’s investment in religiously defined gender practices, especially when transposed to the predominantly non-Muslim environment of Northern England.14 In her article, Kandiyoti sets out a theory named the ‘patriarchal bargain’, which refers to ‘the existence of a set of rules and scripts regulating gender relations, to which both genders accommodate and acquiesce, yet which may nonetheless be contested, redefined and renegotiated’.15 Focusing on field work and studies conducted in a loosely defined area comprising of Turkey, Iran, the Arab Middle-East, South Asia and China, then, Kandiyoti notes ‘the implications of the patrilineal-patrilocal complex for women not only are remarkably uniform but also entail forms of control and subordination across cultural and religious boundaries, such as Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islam’.16 While these societies commonly experience patriarchy as male control over women’s lives and bodies, she writes that these cultures also tend to reveal patterns of women negotiating within these parameters for their own benefit thereby contesting assumptions of a straightforward binary of male dominance–female subordination. Thus within this system of power, male and female worlds have their own intricate hierarchical structures. Kandiyoti, for example, writes that whilst a young bride that marries into a family acquires the lowest position of power, ‘the cyclical nature of women’s power in the household and their anticipation of inheriting the authority of senior women encourage thorough internalization of this form of patriarchy by the women themselves’. Consequently, subordination to men is offset by the control that older women attain over younger women. In Maps for Lost Lovers, Kaukab gestures towards this bargaining structure when she finds out that her divorced son Charag has had a vasectomy. For Kaukab, her son’s infertility is upsetting for two reasons. First, because it ‘unmanned’ him and is ‘against Allah and everything that the Prophet, peace be upon him, has said’, thereby, as Maryam Mirza writes, shows how ‘masculinity is intimately tied in with male fertility and is primarily imagined within the narrow confines of orthodox religion’.17 But crucially, it also destroys any chance for Charag to remarry a Pakistani woman therefore denying Kaukab the chance to reap the benefits of patriarchal bargaining, thus she reflects on how ‘[a] marriage to a Pakistani girl was now an impossibility – who would want a neutered husband for their daughter? – and Kaukab was denied the ally the Pakistani daughter-in-law would have proved to be’ (Aslam, p. 58). A further troubling analogy for the patriarchal bargaining dynamic occurs when another of the novel’s mother figures discovers that her newly married daughter has been apprehensive about sex and, as such, refusing to consummate her marriage. She sets her son-in-law aside and tells him to ‘rape her tonight’ (Aslam, p. 88). The shocking exchange, and Kaukab’s dismay at Charag’s supposed ‘unmanning’, conveys the efforts that some mother figures take to uphold familial power structures.

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Kandiyoti summarizes that, in many family units, ensuring the ‘life-long loyalty’ of their son is an ‘enduring preoccupation’ for many older women living within the kinds of patriarchal societies that she analyses. These efforts become especially frantic when this order is challenged, she writes: Many women may continue to use all the pressure they can muster to make men live up to their obligations and will not, except under the most extreme pressure, compromise the basis for their claims by stepping out of line and losing their respectability. Their passive resistance takes the form of claiming their half of this particular patriarchal bargain – protection in exchange for submissiveness and propriety.18

Kaukab’s profound scrutiny of her sons’ behaviour to ensure they maintain what she perceives as hegemonic masculinity resonates with Kandiyoti’s findings. The reader learns, for instance, how Kaukab would send her daughter Mah-Jabin into Charag and Ujala’s rooms to ‘search for condoms, and addresses and phone numbers of white girls’. This is a suspicion that ‘had breathed itself into the house once when a girl from school had telephoned Charag about homework’ and results in Charag’s avoidance of the family as, during his teenage years, he felt as if ‘the magnifying glass through which he was kept in sight was burning him’ (Aslam, p. 128). Kaukab’s anxiety about her sons’ gender take on an even more disturbing form when she plies Ujala’s food with so-called sacred salt (Aslam, p. 304). Worried by Ujala’s rebellious and non-conformist nature, and disappointed by Shamas’s failure to enact discipline, Kaukab turns to an imam for advice. The imam provides Kaukab with some ‘sacred salt’, which in actual fact is a bromide, to lower his libido and make him more compliant, she explains: ‘I asked Allah to help me through that holy man. And it worked thanks to His blessing. After I started putting the sacred salt on your plate, you did become very kind and affectionate, mindful of the respect you owed to your elders’ (Aslam, p. 304). Kaukab is completely ignorant that the salt is a bromide and, upon discovering its potential health effects, is mortified that she fed her son the chemical compound. Yet, the incident shows how crucial maintaining the familial gender order is – as Maryam Mirza points out, ‘exponents of religious orthodoxy are thus shown to create “docile” male bodies’ which may be ‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’ in order to ‘restore parental, and by extension communitarian order’.19 As Mirza’s use of Foucauldian discourse serves to demonstrate, Kaukab’s own investment in patriarchal masculinity is not entirely rooted within genuine expressions of religiosity. By reading her tenacious efforts to ensure her sons’ compliance as constituents of a bargain with patriarchy, Kaukab’s motives are exposed as her own negotiation of power according to a Pakistani-based system of gender relations that are transposed to the novel’s British locality. Kaukab is thus more deeply attached to Islam than the other male members of her family – or her daughter – but rather as a means of upholding a gender taxonomy of her homeland. It is therefore not surprising that the Aks children move away from Dasht-e-Tanhai when they reach adulthood. Towards the end of the novel, however, Aslam engineers a tense family reunion in Daht-e-Tanhai where the family’s collectively suppressed anger explodes with sad consequences. The catalyst is a press-clipping of Charag’s recently

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opened art exhibition which features a reproduction of his four-foot painting The Uncut Self-Portrait. Charag’s painting is a nude self-portrait that features his body ‘standing in a pale grove of small immaculate butterflies, fruit- and flower-heavy boughs, birds, hoopoes and parakeets and other insects and animals, the mist rising from a lake in the background–and he has an uncircumcised penis’. Charag explains that his painting does not necessarily condemn circumcision but rather seeks to question the underlying logic of the practice: What I am trying to say is that it was probably the first act of violence done to me in the name of a religious or social system. And I wonder if anyone has the right to do it. We should all question such acts. (Aslam, p. 320)

Indeed, circumcision is an important physical marker of a localized form of masculinity which, in the context of migrant and diaspora communities, can be even more emphasized. Gargi Bhattacharyya observes that the ‘bodily modification of circumcision’ not only serves to demonstrate belonging within a community but also depends on ‘mythologies of sexual depravity and sexual dysfunction’ whereby the uncircumcised are constructed as ‘unclean and/or perverse’.20 However, it is crucial to note that circumcision itself is not a religiously ordained act in Islam, but is rather described as a recommended act in the Sunna (the recorded actions and words of the Prophet Muhammad). Nevertheless, circumcision of the penis has been widely interpreted as a ‘socially obligatory’ initiation into manhood and the wider transnational Muslim community or umma.21 During the partition of India and Pakistan, circumcision also became a crucial marker of ‘Muslimness’ and, by extension, ‘Pakistaniness’, therefore demonstrating the predominantly socio-cultural roots of the practice.22 For Charag, the potential religious or cultural meanings of the practice play no part in his own son’s circumcision, explaining that he and his exwife Stella decided to have their own son circumcised not for religious reasons, but because they believe it is ‘probably healthier’ (Aslam, p. 321). Mirza points out that ‘this contradiction suggests that more than the circumcision itself, he sees the blind following of religious dicta that may compel a parent to cause physical pain to his or her son as the ultimate act of violence’.23 This is clearly suggested in his painting, yet, in light of the Islamic history of the practice, I would argue that his artwork sheds light on how this practice is often falsely attributed to religion and instead serves to impress docile male bodies onto particular localities. In his painting, Charag undertakes a personal exorcism of the oppressive gender discourses he was raised and indoctrinated into within the Dasht-e-Tanhai locality and shows that all people should remain vigilant to received ideas of gender.

‘An exile is just a refugee with a library’ While Maps for Lost Lovers opens with a community in a state of long-term disorientation, In the Light of What We Know begins with the disoriented figure of a ‘haggard and gaunt’ man, aged somewhere in his ‘late forties or fifties’, appearing unannounced on

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the narrator’s doorstep in the early hours of a September morning in 2008. The novel’s narrator is initially disturbed by his night-time caller who ‘appeared to be in some state of agitation, speaking, as he was, not incoherently but with a strident earnestness and evidently without regard for introductions, as if he were resuming a broken conversation’ (Rahman, p. 2). Upon mentioning the name of the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, the narrator quickly understands that his guest is in fact an old friend of his named Zafar who, judging by his demeanour and unkempt beard, is in a state of some distress and disarray. Both Zafar and the persistently unnamed narrator met while studying mathematics at Oxford University and subsequently worked together as derivative traders for the same bank on New York’s Wall Street. Their relationship, however, is a complex entanglement of privileges, jealousies and rivalries that one has other the other thereby giving their friendship a decidedly homosocial quality. By referring to homosocial, I am drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept which, as discussed in previous chapters of the book, posits that gender roles are frequently constructed in accordance with the same-sex relationships and communities that a subject finds themselves within. For Zafar, many of the personal insecurities he feels are forged as a consequence of his intimate relationship with the narrator against which he is frequently comparing himself and competing with. This homosocial affiliation drives much of the paranoid behaviour of Zafar as their friendship crosses across significant material and socio-economic differences. For example, the university and career similarities between the pair, the narrator describes, are ‘the beginning and end of what we had in common’ (Rahman, p. 3). The reader learns that the narrator is from a privileged background whereby his mother’s family were Pakistani landed gentry, his grandfather served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States and his father was a Princeton graduate who, upon graduating with a doctorate in Physics, was subsequently employed as a professor at Oxford. In sharp contrast, Zafar was born in the largely rural area of Sylhet in Bangladesh and migrated with his family to Britain aged five before returning to Bangladesh for an interval when he was twelve. Unlike the narrator’s lineage of land owners, ambassadors and university professors, Zafar’s childhood, spent mostly on an impoverished London council estate, was supported by his father’s work as a poorly paid waiter in one of London’s many Indian restaurants. As the narrative develops, we also learn that Zafar’s heritage is a particularly fraught subject. His father, it transpires, is the brother of Zafar’s mother who was raped by a Pakistani soldier during the exceptionally violent 1971 War of Bangladesh Independence; a war in which Pakistan sought to punish Bangladesh for its fight for self determination, with a programme of what has subsequently claimed as ‘genocidal rape’ leading to the rape of an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Bangladeshi women.24 Within the first two chapters of Rahman’s novel, the narrator remembers the contrasting experiences of Zafar meeting his parents at university and him meeting Zafar’s parents in Oxford one early morning. Zafar’s experience is described as one of wonderment in which he stared at the family’s rich collection of books and journals. But it is a ‘framed and mounted’ Raj-era map of British colonies in India that captured most of his attention. In particular, Zafar ‘fixed […] on a map of the north-east corner of the subcontinent’ (Rahman, p. 5). The narrator continues by remembering how ‘only when the time came to move to the summer room for lunch,

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and my father rested his hand on Zafar’s shoulder, was my friend roused from his intense study’ (Rahman, p. 5). Significantly, the map that Zafar is preoccupied with is not a contemporary representation of the region but rather a colonial-era depiction of the Indian subcontinent and, the northeast corner, refers to East Bengal which now forms the nation of Bangladesh. Relating back to my earlier discussion on the representational qualities of cartography, the map prefigures the unequal structural relationship between these two protagonists and is suggestive of ongoing colonial power relations. As Pakistani and Bangladeshi respectively, the two characters are the children of colonized subjects yet the narrator’s global mobility, imagined in the novel as a form of worldly cosmopolitanism, is contrasted with Zafar’s situation as a child of labour migrants escaping the trauma of post-war Bangladesh. Indeed, Bangladesh’s encounter with colonialism is an especially unique one as it was colonized twice – first by the UK and then by Pakistan. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the country was part of the British-controlled Indian Raj. However, owing to its’ majority Muslim population, East Bengal was integrated within Pakistan and declared as an eastern exclave that was separated from West Pakistan by some 2,000 to 3,000 kilometres. Furthermore, most of Pakistan’s power and wealth were concentrated in the western exclave and those in East Pakistan faced wealth and development disparity with their compatriots in the West, and discrimination based on their cultural links to the West Bengal region of India through the shared language of Bangla. Urdu, the dominant language of West Pakistan, was imposed upon East Pakistan as its official language and recognition of Bangla became the focus point of the struggle for Bangladeshi national consciousness. The 1971 War of Independence came about following the victory of Bangla politician, and later founder of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League in the Pakistani elections. Pakistan refused to accept the party’s victory and so sought to aggressively suppress academics, intellectuals and journalists in the region which resulted in a full-scale war and Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan. The historical map on the narrator’s family wall hints at the continuation of colonialera power dynamics which, ironically, Zafar sees in the home of a moneyed Pakistani family. The narrator’s grandfather, in particular, served as an ambassador for Pakistan. Zafar’s awkward reaction to the map therefore serves to illustrate his position as a ‘doubly postcolonial subject’ whose very existence is actually as a consequence of Pakistan’s brutal treatment of Bangladesh. These unequal power dynamics between the two male protagonists are explored further when the narrator meets Zafar’s parents two years later: His father had a beard and was wearing a skullcap. Standing in gray trousers, Hush Puppies, and a green V-neck sweater, he greeted me with a smile, tilting his head in what seemed a rather deferential way. Asalaam-u-alaikum, he said, before breaking into Urdu, a language that I know Bangladeshis of a certain age could speak but that is today, in the main, the language of Pakistanis. I supposed that Zafar had mentioned to him that my family was Pakistani originally. When I responded that my Urdu was very poor, Zafar’s father looked disappointed, but then he took my hand into both of his, and, rather unconfidently, repeated hello a few times. (Rahman, p. 6)

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Compared to his friend, Zafar is disadvantaged according to a confluence of national, linguistic, cultural and socio-economic factors. In this meeting, Zafar’s father also appears to be acutely aware of privilege disparity as the narrator is unable to speak the language that was forced upon him during Bangladesh’s occupation by Pakistan. Furthermore, Zafar’s limited ‘cultural capital’ is shown by his adoptive mother’s response to the fabled spired skyline of Oxford. Noticing how her face ‘offered no sign of resemblance to Zafar, as if their respective faces were written in different languages’ (Rahman, p. 9), the narrator remembers that she ‘commented on how old everything in Oxford looked’ and asked why Oxford University couldn’t ‘afford anything new’ (Rahman, p. 6). Zafar consequently avoids his friend’s gaze and the narrator feels as if ‘a distance had opened up between him and me for reasons I did not grasp in their full subtleties’ (Rahman, p. 9). Zafar’s behaviour, however, suggests that, unlike the narrator, he has always been keenly aware of the differences between them. Initially, the narrator wonders whether Zafar’s reticence about introducing him to his family had been for religious reasons as he observes a particular ‘affected’ quality to Zafar’s parents’ pronunciation of Asalaam-u-alaikum which he believes denotes piety (Rahman, p. 21). Zafar’s shame, he hypothesized, may be because he knows that the unnamed narrator’s family have a sceptical attitude towards religious faith. The narrator’s father is a ‘quiet believer’ whose religious beliefs are loosely maintained as a way of ‘helping him to retain a link with his roots’ yet he ‘encouraged [his son] in a sympathy towards the numinous claims of faith without ever surrendering the authority of science’ (Rahman, p. 7). On the other hand, his mother ‘had only disdain for religion’ (Rahman, p. 8). Yet the narrator soon dismisses this thought and remembers how Zafar was ‘ashamed of his parents’ but, crucially, he was ‘more ashamed of being ashamed’ (Rahman, p. 7). As such, Rahman conceives the inequalities between the pair as something simultaneously material, insofar as Zafar’s relative lack of affluence compared to the narrator, but also intangible and deep-rooted therefore pointing to often undetected markers of class difference. This dynamic is striking when the narrator meets Zafar’s parents and so realizes that ‘the biggest difference between us […], the significance of which I did not begin to ascertain until two years after our first meeting, lay in our social classes’ (Rahman, p. 4). The relationship between the narrator and Zafar, then, illustrates the magnitude of material factors in dissecting and understanding contemporary British migrant and diaspora identities. By juxtaposing the affluent narrator and his Pakistani family with Zafar’s significantly less wealthy Bangladeshi background, Rahman offers a sharp corrective to stereotyped tropes in migrant fiction that emphasize racial marginalization at the cost of material poverty or class politics. Furthermore, in the narrator’s suspicion that Zafar is embarrassed by his family’s religiosity, Rahman also subverts expectations about Islam, as religion is underplayed as a source of oppression within a majority white secular society. Rather, the relationship between the pair, and Zafar’s anxieties, speak to Stuart Hall’s widely quoted diagnosis of racial and socio-economic politics, in which he argues that race is ‘the modality in which class is “lived,” the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and “fought through”’.25 Concomitant with Hall’s viewpoint, Zafar describes how class is ultimately the form of oppression that dominates his worldview, explaining that

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‘class isn’t something you look at, it’s not stuff around you. It is you, it’s the eyes with which you see the world’ (Rahman, p. 214). Oxford University, as one of the UK’s most revered and exclusive educational institutions that has provided instruction and networking for the nation’s most powerful, provides an appropriate setting through which to discuss the nexus of national, racial and class hierarchies that haunt Zafar in his vexed quest to develop a sense of belonging in the novel. Zafar finds a remedy for his feelings of exclusion through the pursuit and sanctification of knowledge, as he avows that ‘understanding is a mode of control’ which ‘subdues the unruliness of people in one’s head’ (Rahman, p. 385). Zafar uses knowledge as a panacea through which he can assuage his feelings of anxiety at having transgressed the supposed limits of his class and cultural background. However, the multiple different forms and types of knowledge in the novel also serve as Zafar’s attempts to understand the world around him. Rahman’s novel, then, repeatedly digresses into long exegeses on subjects as diverse as the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, doctrines of South Asian Sufism, the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, the architecture of Mimar Sinan and the novels of VS Naipaul, all reported by the unnamed narrator in a tone which is increasingly detached thereby evoking that Zafar is not particularly passionate about any of these subjects, but is rather massing an archive of knowledge and different modes of understanding the world. Emphasizing the therapeutic function of knowledge for Zafar’s damaged sense of self, some of the forms of knowledge that he rehearses are based on shaky analogies that qualify his feelings of injustice. This is particularly conspicuous in a section of the novel where the narrator and Zafar discuss national identity in a café overlooking the British Museum. Zafar points out the UK, as a union of nations including England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, is founded upon unstable and contingent identities. Using the example of James VI of Scotland who, upon the death of the childless Elizabeth I of England, inherited the crown of England and Wales, Zafar extrapolates: James, king of England, king of Ireland, and king of Scotland. He was an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scot, and king of separate states. So when an English patriot asks if it’s possible to be both British and Pakistani or British and Bangladeshi, it might be worth pointing out that for over a hundred years, the monarch of England had more than one national identity. (Rahman, p. 204)

While Zafar’s explanation exposes the selective racism and xenophobia within exclusive and chauvinistic discourses of British nationalism, it is worth noting that Zafar’s reading of James I’s national identity is anachronistic. Zafar’s reading conflates the still largely feudal structures of Early Modern Britain with modern conceptions of nationhood and national belonging. In introducing this anachronism into Zafar’s thinking, I argue that Rahman is exposing the dubious use of history to justify hegemonic articulations of exclusive national identity. The fact that Zafar makes this analogy while overlooking the British Museum is also significant thus, in sight of one of the British Empire’s most renowned monuments to the encyclopaedic classification

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and domination of cultures, Zafar imposes a similarly ahistorical and simplified reading of British national identities. The need to classify and map thereby understand his position in the society around him is ultimately what drives Zafar. It is therefore ironic that mathematics is the form of knowledge that Zafar most admires in the novel, describing it as ‘the product of the human mind turning to face itself ’ and a place of ‘necessary consequences, where no contingent fact is to be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or touched’ (Rahman, p. 130). In essence, then, Zafar admires mathematics for its focus on logic and cerebral power as a counter discourse to lived experience with its potential for emotional damage or social complexity. Evidentially, Zafar appropriates the words of the British mathematician Bertrand Russell to reflect the value of arithmetic in the face of social structures: Russell said he liked mathematics because it was not human and had nothing in particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return […] Mathematics doesn’t care about authority, it doesn’t care about who you are, where you’re from, what your eye colour is, or who you’re having supper with. (Rahman, p. 215)

As Zafar interprets Russell’s words, mathematics provides respite from the agonizing effects of social hierarchy and dominance. As Roberto del Valle Alcalá points out, ‘this disavowal of experience reaches its paroxysm in Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem’, the mathematical concept that Zafar most treasures.26 Gödel’s theorem asserts ‘the simple message that the farthest reaches of what we can ever know fall short of the limits of what is true, even in mathematics’ (Rahman, p. 9).27 What this means, then, is that truth and the search for an ‘authentic’ self is ultimately illusory as, in all endeavours, there is an absence of certainty and an impossibility to prove certain truths. This theorem is repeated many times throughout the novel and Zafar’s mentioning of Gödel on the narrator’s doorstep at the novel’s opening is what helps identify the dishevelled figure as Zafar. Yet, Zafar’s belief in the supremacy of the logical realm of mathematics over sociocultural forms of knowledge and lived experience is also exposed by the novel as cosmetic and superficial. Indeed, Zafar’s mathematical abilities enable his employment as a derivatives trader at a banking firm on New York’s Wall Street. Within the competitive, fast-paced environment of the banking sector, Zafar argues that class and racial barriers are surpassed by mathematical acumen, he tells the narrator that ‘finance is not about connections, it’s not about who you know but what you know; it isn’t like your grandfather’s world, with secret deals on golf courses and in country clubs, kickbacks and Swiss bank accounts’ (Rahman, p. 213). In his view, finance, described here in abstract terms, diverges from the narrator’s background of inherited privilege and champions a supposedly more egalitarian system which, in turn, is projected onto Zafar’s comparative experiences in the United States and the United Kingdom. As del Valle Alcalà puts it, Zafar constructs finance as ‘profoundly un-British in the sense that it openly challenges the old country’s onerous class complex, while being solidly

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consistent with America’s entrenched egalitarianism’.28 For example, Zafar applauds the US financial sector which ‘bears the forbidden fruits of egalitarian hope, and everyone, high and low, can shake the branches of that tree’ (Rahman, p. 121). However, Zafar’s reading of the US financial system is based on his own idealized fantasies and, therefore, reveals more about his anxieties than offering insight into the allegedly even-handed workings of the financial sector. This is particularly evident when he tells the narrator about his job interview with a bank manager: I have more fight than anyone needs for any job, I said. I’ve come a long way, from a mud hut in the rainy season in a part of the world you only know as a basket case of misery. I spent a year of childhood in the basement of a derelict house in two rooms and an outside lavatory, and when I try to remember the kitchen, I can only picture the half that didn’t have rats. I’ve grown up in some of the worst projects in London. I’ve been kicked and spat at because of my race, I’ve had teachers send me to remedial classes because they thought I was stupid when I was just silent, I’ve been beaten black and blue my whole short life and I’ve made it here. Have I got the fight? You tell me. (Rahman, p. 279)

Hearing this story, the narrator confesses that he envies Zafar, admitting that ‘I can find nothing heroic in my own story’ (Rahman, p. 279), yet Zafar then informs his interlocutor, with a wide smile on his face, that he said nothing of the sort. In this fictitious version though, Zafar is able to express his disadvantages and his social injuries in a performance of masculinity that re-affords him a kind of hegemonic masculine prestige that he feels the British class system has never been able to provide him with. Furthermore, Zafar professes his love for the United States in masculinized logic, declaring that ‘I love America for the clear idea behind the clouded reality […] I love her for her thought, first, of where you’re going, not where you’re from; for her majestic optimism against the grey resistances of Europe, most pure in Britain, so that I feel like – I am – a sexual being’ (Rahman, p. 19). Of course, Zafar’s comments essentialize, stereotype and overlook intricacies across the entire continent of Europe and the large, diverse nation that is the United States. In particular, he fails to engage with the fact that class distinctions are not unique to the United Kingdom and exist in different forms in other countries and also that ethnic minorities in the United States are also disadvantaged. Yet, his focus on sexuality, paired with performances of masculine bravado in the fake job interview, that are enacted in front of the privileged narrator, indicate that Zafar never truly believed that finance is an idealized realm of social equity. Rather, finance is decontextualized, depoliticized and romantically imagined as a form of theoretically democratic mathematical exchange that Zafar projects onto the United States to combat his social injury at the hands of the UK class system. In this regard, del Valle Alaclá is correct to diagnose the novel’s ‘UK-US pairing’ as a ‘telling sign of the discursive operation at work in exchanges between Zafar and the narrator’.29 Thus, Zafar contrasts his failure to develop a satisfying sense of belonging in Britain with his experiences arriving in the United States, asserting that ‘if an immigration

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officer at Heathrow had ever said “Welcome home” to me, I would have given my life for England, my country, there and then. I could kill for an England like that’ (Rahman, p. 107). Aside from the unequal politics of travel and migration that Zafar gestures towards, this description also embodies his feelings of exclusion suffered in Oxford thereby suggesting that the US–UK binary is mobilized as a manifestation of Zafar’s anguish that manifests as homosocial rivalry with the narrator. Zafar ultimately leaves the financial sector after witnessing incidents of implied corruption at the hands of a businessman whose son later reappears in a similarly compromising position as part of the US mission in post-9/11 Afghanistan. This loss of faith in the financial system however has a crushing effect on Zafar’s psyche and masculinity which centres around his relations with his fiancée Emily Hampton-Wyvern, who will be discussed in greater detail in the following section of this chapter.

‘Sex was the realm in which I took control of her being’ A common feature of both novels is the transposition of male anxieties onto female bodies. In both Maps for Lost Lovers and In the Light of What We Know, male characters engage in grossly misogynistic behaviour in the forms of violence, abuse, murder and rape. Sexuality, for the most part, is imagined as a theatre for pathological and unhealthy masculinities in each novel. For example, Zafar in Rahman’s novel links sexuality with violence when he describes how the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 resulted in him regaining his sense of masculine embodiment and power: Before 9/11, I was invisible, unsexed. How is that after 9/11 suddenly I was noticed– not just noticed, but attractive, given the second look, sized up, even winked at? Was the incidental effect of no longer being of a piece with the background, of being noticed, or was it sicker than that? Was this person among us no longer the meek Indian, the meek Pakistani, the sepoy, but fully man? Before 9/11, I was hidden behind the wall of colonial guilt after having been emasculated by a history of subjugation. (Rahman, pp. 19–20)

Zafar intimates that the violence of 9/11 overturned the collective effect of centuries of colonization at the hands of the British and translated into a new form of embodied masculinity. Building on Zafar’s evocative description of sexuality and power, I will argue in the following pages that sexuality and sexualized violence in these novels are, not unproblematically, used by each writer to convey the anguish that their male characters suffer in their attempts to develop belonging. This leads me onto discuss ethical problematics in each text’s discussion of migrant Muslim masculinities that I believe are not entirely resolved. Aslam’s novel weaves together many distressing stories in which women face gross injustice at the hands of men. One concerns the character Suraya and her extramarital affair with Shamas. Suraya has recently arrived in Daht-e-Tanhai where she begins searching for a new husband. Suraya, the reader learns, is on a mission to quickly

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marry then subsequently divorce a man in Dasht-e-Tanhai so that she can remarry her previous husband in Pakistan who had ‘accidentally’ repeated the word talaq (divorce) three times while drunk thereby, in the eyes of God, enacting a divorce. Her hope is that Shamas will fulfil this role, as Islam, she argues, allows for polygamous marriages, and then he will divorce her. Amidst her difficult circumstances, Suraya briefly conveys a sense of injustice with this aspect of Islamic law: ‘It is as though Allah forgot there were women in the world when he made some of his laws, thinking only of men,’ but swiftly renounces these thoughts as ‘all good Muslims must’ (Aslam, p. 150). Meanwhile, another female in the town fatally suffers under the strictures of patriarchy as her affair with a ‘secret Hindu lover’ is interpreted as a sign of possession by djinns, and so over the course of a few days, an Imam beats her to death (Aslam, pp. 185–8). However, the central focus of the novel is on the so-called honour killings of Jugnu and Chanda. It is this atrocity that frames Aslam’s novel, as the text begins in the months following the discovery of Shamas’s brother Jugnu and his lover Chanda’s dead bodies and closes with the conviction of Chanda’s brothers Barra and Chotta who, the reader learns, killed the pair for their allegedly ‘immoral’ partnership. Chanda, it transpires, had been married in Pakistan to an abusive and errant husband who had left one day and never returned. Unable to secure an Islamic divorce from her exspouse, Chanda had returned to Britain where she encountered more traumatic and uncomfortable experiences at the hands of her family. The novel recounts that ‘when both her marriages in Pakistan failed and she came back to England, Chanda had been asked by her brothers and father to consider wearing the all-enveloping burka’ as some male inhabitants of Dasht-e-Tanhai felt ‘awkward and ashamed when they were with their friends on a street corner and she went by’ (Aslam, p. 342). Such attempts at patriarchal control through the male members of her family lead her to confess in her diary, ‘I feel I am being erased’ (Aslam, p. 342). Contradicting the aggressively patriarchal masculinity of her father and brothers, Jugnu is described as cosmopolitan, rational and gentle. Explaining that ‘I was born into a Muslim household, but I object to the idea that that automatically makes me a Muslim,’ Jugnu contradicts the religious worldview of Chanda’s family, as well as many others in Dasht-e-Tanhai, by stating his views on the Prophet Muhammad as the following: I trust what science says about the universe because I can see the result of scientific methods all around me. I cannot be expected to believe what an illiterate merchant-turned-opportunistic-preacher – for he was no systematic theologian – in seventh-century Arabian desert had to say about the origin of life. (Aslam, p. 38)

For many, not least Kaukab, these views are regarded as blasphemous and so both Jugnu and his brother Shamas’s atheism is regarded with suspicion by the Dasht-e-Tanhai townsfolks. However, as Fiona McCulloch points out, it is not just his religious beliefs that set him apart from most men in the vicinity.30 McCulloch reads Jugnu as a figure who dismantles ‘the rigid cartographies of gender dichotomies’ in the novel, as he has studied in Moscow at a university whose name, ‘Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship

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University’, connotes both Communism and transnationalism, speaks Russian and has lived in the United States.31 Such a transnational trajectory also impacts his masculinity and so he is portrayed as presenting an androgynous gender identity visible since his early adulthood, ‘the gentle nineteen-year-old boy their mother always said was Allah’s way of compensating her for the daughter she always wished for’ (Aslam, p. 26). Even his profession and hobby as a lepidopterist indicates a more fluid, peaceable and transcultural masculinity, as moths and butterflies are creatures defined by their ability to transform, to fly and to appear in a vast array of different colours. As McCulloch notes, Jugnu’s cosmopolitanism is also transmitted to Shamas and Kaukab’s children through folktales about butterflies, including ‘an Irish law of 1680 which decreed that a white butterfly was not to be killed because it was the soul of a child, and how in Romania adolescent girls made a drink with the wings of butterflies to attract suitable partners’ (Aslam, p. 71).32 Kaukab is especially horrified when she discovers butterfly dust in the teenage Ujala’s underpants and learns that Jugnu had told Ujala that pubescent boys in the Ivory Coast ‘gather the colour’ from butterflies’ wings and ‘rub [it] into their armpits and genitals in the belief that pubic hair will grow, that it will bring on manhood and bestow virility’ (Aslam, p. 71). Kaukab’s dismay suggesting, then, that he will follow in his uncle’s footsteps rather than emulate the conservative, patriarchal masculinity of Dasht-e-Tanhai. The reason for Chanda and Jugnu’s deaths is rooted in Barra and Chotta’s sense of masculine shame, as they declare, ‘we are men but she reduced us to eunuch bystanders by not paying attention to our wishes’ (Aslam, p. 342). In other words, Chanda and Jugnu’s deviation from a rigidly defined patriarchal gender order leads to a sense of emasculation on the parts of her brothers. However, the court case reveals the gross hypocrisy underlying their logic, as the trial discloses how, in the minutes before ending Chanda and Jugnu’s lives, Chotta had recently discovered his unmarried female lover Kiran in bed with another male. Meanwhile, his accomplice Barra was inspired to commit murder as he ‘was returning from a visit to his wife at the abortion clinic’ where their child’s foetus was terminated on the grounds that they believed she was female. That evening, however, Barra discovered that the unborn child was actually male. Barra responded to the news in a furious rage, crying out ‘I am ruined’, and casts the blame on ‘white doctors’ who are supposedly trying to eradicate the community (Aslam, p. 349). Chanda’s death at the hands of the brothers, then, is intimately tied to their feelings of emasculation which is selectively interpreted as pursuing Islamic law. McCulloch quotes Radhika Coomaraswamy’s diagnosis of links between patriarchal masculinity and gender violence, as a vehicle for understanding the relationships between these discourses in Aslam’s novel: In many societies the ideal of masculinity is underpinned by the notion of ‘honour’ – of an individual man, or a family or a community – and is fundamentally connected to policing female behaviour and sexuality. Honour is generally seen as residing in the bodies of women. Frameworks of ‘honour’, and its corollary ‘shame’, operate to control, direct and regulate women’s sexuality and freedom of movement by male members of the family. Women who fall in love, engage in extramarital relationships, seek a divorce, or choose their own

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husbands are seen to transgress the boundaries of ‘appropriate’ (that is, socially sanctioned) sexual behaviour.33

McCulloch is right in arguing that Aslam imagines these articulations of gender relations within his British Muslim community in Dasht-e- Tanhaii. However, I would also emphasize that, for the characters of Aslam’s novel, these attempts at controlling women’s bodies are all the more frenzied and desperate owing to characters’ sense of deterritorialization as immigrants in Britain. Male characters’ sense of deterritorialization, then, leads them to use women’s bodies as a means of reterritorializing themselves and developing ways of belonging in their environment. In this way, some of the male characters’ desires to control women’s bodies in Aslam’s novel resembles the behaviour of Zafar in In the Light of What We Know. Specifically, much of Rahman’s novel focuses on Zafar’s psychological disintegration following his dramatic relationship with his upper-class British fiancée Emily Hampton-Wyvern. Their relationship, much like Zafar’s friendship with the narrator, is mostly predicated on Zafar’s fetishization of British class privilege in the face of his own marginalization. Tellingly, Zafar’s first mention of Emily occurs with a discussion about her family, leading the narrator to reflect: I see now, of course, that his relationship with Emily was never a relationship with one person, nor was it an engagement with only one family. But, in this relationship with a particular family, I think Zafar encountered a version of England, and even of the West (though he never presented it in such terms) – a version that had haunted him. In that relationship he had been forced to confront his own demons, as the expression goes. He would have suggested that this analysis was incomplete, and, it is fair to say, his own account did not frame the predicaments of his life in such stark simplicity. (Rahman, p. 16)

In fact, Zafar’s tempestuous relationship with Emily Hampton-Wyvern, although often obfuscated with references to literary texts and mathematics, is generally presented in rather frustratingly caricatured ways. In essence, Emily is a stereotyped imaginary of an upper-class British woman who is ignorant of her own privilege. Her privileged background is inscribed in her name as the double-barrelled surname calls to mind both a former royal residence named Hampton Court Palace and a type of heraldic dragon that is commonplace on coat of arms and insignia of the British aristocracy. Her treatment of Zafar is frequently rude and insensitive, she is always late for every occasion, while Zafar remarks ‘never once had she waited for me’ (Rahman, p. 453), and she is unsupportive when Zafar is faced with bigotry such as when her friend Tomaso insists on describing Zafar as ‘Indian’ rather than British Bangladeshi. Owing to their immense wealth, Zafar is often uncomfortable with Emily’s family. This is particularly demonstrated by an exchange where he reveals knowledge of building materials and therefore ‘about something that doesn’t properly belong to their orbit in life’. Building on the novel’s exploration of knowledge, the incident shows distinctly political aspects of knowledge (and ignorance)

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in which certain socio-political classes are not supposed to know information that betrays having had to work in sectors unbecoming of affluent people. At the same time, Emily displays staggering ignorance about Zafar’s own life and background. Following a period of separation with Zafar returning briefly to Bangladesh, Emily persuades Zafar to visit her in Afghanistan and help her in her work at AfDARI, a UN aid project. Zafar works out that this is not only because of his mathematical abilities and his ‘strategic thinking’, but also because she believes his background would cause him to inherently ‘know’ about the predicaments of Afghanistan. Emily is not alone in this assumption as Philip, one of her AfDARI colleagues, remarks to Zafar how ‘as a Bangladeshi and a Muslim you have a lot more credibility here’ (Rahman, p. 364), thereby ignoring both Zafar’s predominately British upbringing and the multi-religious and multi-cultural make up of both Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Nevertheless, it is crucial to note that Rahman’s novel complicates the unreconstructed orientalism of his British colleagues on the aid mission by also showing that the Pakistani intellectuals he encounters on the way to Afghanistan view him in a similar way, as the character of Dr Reza Mehrani declares ‘You’re one of us because you are Muslim and you are from here’ (Rahman, p. 301). Despite his protestations that he is Bangladeshi and a non-believer, Zafar is ignored and Mehrani chastises the ‘betrayal’ of Bangladeshis against the Indian subcontinent’s Islamic Republic of Pakistan. As such, from both Pakistanis, British and indeed even the Afghani character of Suleiman, Zafar is denied the chance to identify as British even while helping British diplomatic interests in Afghanistan. This partiality is painfully expressed when Emily asks Zafar about his time in Bangladesh in terms that suggest Britain cannot be home for him. Zafar reports the incident as ‘not an error, for there’s nothing else that some part of her wanted to say; not a Freudian slip, not when you mean one thing but say your mother. I’m curious to know what it’s like to go back home. That is what she’d said’ (Rahman, p. 352). According to Zafar, then, Emily regards him as ‘a passing fancy, a little exotica, a bit of rough’ (Rahman, p. 195). However, Zafar is also guilty of projecting an inverse form of exoticism upon Emily. When living in London, Zafar boasts of being able to exhibit a white, upper-class British girlfriend and professes that ‘he had fallen in love with her name, the whole of her name’ (Rahman, p. 172). Part of her attraction lies in a quality he refers to as ‘grace’ which ‘comes from an understanding, which resides in the muscle, of the relationship between the body and the world’ (Rahman, p. 190). In other words, Zafar admires the confidence and ease with which Emily is able to move through the world. His physicalization of her relative privilege is also translated into their sexual relationship. For Zafar, having sex was Emily was ‘extraordinary’, he continues that ‘it was almost always fucking, animal-like, but fucking in the head for me. It was not so much that she was good at sex but rather that the idea of Emily never failed to arouse me’ (Rahman, p. 384). His invocation of animality is significant as his sexual experiences with Emily are not about intimate gestures of love but rather ways of controlling her as he ‘learned more and more about the workings of her body, the pathways of stimulus and response’ (Rahman, p. 384). This carnal knowledge therefore becomes a metaphorical form of colonization, as Zafar seeks to sexually conquer and dominate Emily. Zafar continues:

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Sex was the realm in which I took control of her being, the only place where I could approach understanding, so that sometimes – quite often, in fact – her body became an extension of mine. The scents of my body came to remind me of her. You know, I hesitate to use the word control. I don’t recall any explicit evidence of a desire to control her, to control her actions or thoughts. But in the end, control is the right word, because I wanted to control the Emily in my head, which was the Emily that was more and more in control of me, of my mental composure, of my waking thoughts, more and more the source of my anxiety. (Rahman, p. 384)

Despite his disinclination for the word, Zafar is precisely enacting a form of misogynistic control over Emily’s body and, as with Aslam’s characters in Dasht-eTanhai, is seeking to territorialize himself by imposing himself on a woman’s body. In the instance of Zafar, this is acutely related to his own angst about his race, class and national background. This sense of power over Emily through sex is illusive, however, and he describes his sense of emasculation when, after an energetic bout of love making, Emily betrays a series of shocking moments of ignorance. During their post-coital pillowtalk, it becomes apparent that Emily does not know that Zafar is from Sylhet and that his native language is not Bangla but Sylhetti. Zafar’s sense of shame is further expressed when he remembers saying ‘the capital, Dhaka, in case she didn’t know, not to save her the embarrassment but to save me the embarrassment’ (Rahman, p. 353). Zafar’s attempts to control Emily, then, are momentary and followed by a sharp re-awareness of his marginal and less privileged position compared to her. Owing to this complex of power relations, Zafar is overjoyed when he learns that Emily is pregnant and so he enthusiastically welcomes the idea that having children with Emily will grant him access into the social sphere that he has always felt shunned by. Zafar’s desire for children, and children with Emily, is another aspect of his anxieties about being unrooted in Britain and so, unlike most ‘men in their twenties’, Zafar claims he has long fantasized about being part of a heteronormative family unit. Moreover, he is keen to expunge signs of his Bangladeshi Muslim background and instead confesses: Giving my child her family name was an act of cleansing to me. However distasteful that now sounds, that is what it meant. It was a means of overcoming the bonds with bastardy, with my parents, overcoming bondage. (Rahman, p. 461)

Referring to his background as something abject in his reference to both dirt and imprisonment, Zafar’s desire to have children with Emily has little to do with sincere aspiration but rather a way of removing his internalized shame, rooting himself and freeing himself from his anxieties. Thus, Zafar believes he is able to exorcise his feelings of abjection through procreation and family building with the affluent, upper-class Emily. Yet again, however, Zafar’s relationship with Emily is exposed as an unhealthy and unequal partnership that is dictated mostly by his own insecurities.

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Nowhere is Zafar’s narcissistic impulses regarding his relationship more evident than when Emily chooses to abort the foetus. Her reasoning is that Zafar has only recently been discharged from a mental health hospital following a bout of depression in the wake of his traumatic time assisting the aid mission in Afghanistan. For Zafar whose belief in the unborn child as a force that could root him and so, a ‘focus of a vision of the future, my vision, that had already acquired my love, not earned it, not deserved it, a love that went back through me, through generations upon generations’ (Rahman, p. 395), Emily’s decision is extremely distressing. Rahman’s choice of presenting the narrative in the form of reported conversations and notebooks, however, emphasizes how Zafar’s intense insecurities render him little ability to empathize with Emily. For instance, the reader is given just passing insight into Emily’s experience of the abortion or her pregnancy. In fact, in the short half-page in which Zafar drives back after Emily’s abortion, Zafar reaches for his silent fiancée’s hand and confesses to the narrator that he was in a state of mourning for the unborn child. Compounding these insecurities, Zafar also spends that time calculating and then discovering the sinister reason behind Emily’s abortion. By thinking about the necessary amount of time for babies to be conceived, he works that he could not be the father of the child as he was in a psychiatric ward for his depression during the requisite period. Eventually, by cross-examining Emily, he discovers that the child was fathered by his closest confidant, the novel’s unnamed narrator. As such, the narrator’s betrayal only confirms Zafar’s deep anxieties that, as a Bangladeshi-born man with a workingclass background, he has transcended his rightful status and position in society. Within such a mindset, Zafar realizes that ‘I had no control over Emily in my head, no power; we have no more control over the people in our heads than we do over ourselves’ (Rahman, pp. 534–5). Ultimately, Zafar commits a gross act of sexual violence against Emily while both are in Afghanistan. Having only closely missed death from a bomb attack on the British compound in Kabul as he was waiting for Emily’s tardy arrival, Zafar’s mental state turns away from the obfuscating cerebral world in which he has found solace for his lack of belonging and turns violently physical. He explains: Perhaps you think I should’ve been grateful to her: She had been tardy and that is what had saved my life. But you will have missed the point completely. I had been waiting for her all my life and never once had she waited for me, never a moment was she on time. Had she shown up earlier? Did she visit me in hospital? Had she even waited while I was there? The only future with her was short-lived. When a future had opened-up, a vision of a family came before my eyes, of love and affection and renewal and purpose, but she chose to shut that future out, and then, because of uncompromising mathematical reasoning, I understood–not learned, because she never told me– that child could not have been mine. Don’t tell me it was not yet alive. Don’t tell me it was not yet something. (Rahman, p. 534)

Setting out his grievances, the reader then understands through the flashbacks to Emily’s room and an insinuating passage where Zafar tells that the narrator that he ‘wanted to tell [him] something’ and be ‘explicit’ but cannot find the courage (Rahman, p. 547),

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that Zafar most likely raped Emily in her room on the British compound before flying to Islamabad and then to London. The probable rape of Emily is the end point of the novel and the engine behind Zafar’s imperative to confess everything to the narrator. Her rape also brings the narrative full circle as Zafar was brought into the world through rape and he enacts the same crime upon another woman. In his exacting of violent, sexualized revenge upon Emily, Zafar is also not too different from the misogynist men in Aslam’s fictional town of Dasht-e-Tanhai. Although divergent in their religious beliefs, both sets of men use women’s bodies as tools through which to reorient themselves and make amends for their sense of damaged or conflictual identity. Such depictions of women have led some critics to charge Aslam’s novel with both orientalism and misogyny. For Amina Yaqin, the sheer amount of murdered or raped women in Maps for Lost Lovers who face their brutality due to religious reasons makes it read like an inventory of different Islamophobic headlines woven together through a literary text.34 Yaqin argues that the ultimate result is a ‘reiteration of many negative stereotypes’ in which Aslam ‘deliberately critiques a conservative Islamic consciousness to underline progressive secular principles and in doing so flattens the complexities of faith-based identities’.35 However, before accepting Yaqin’s argument too prematurely, it is crucial to note Gunning’s point that Aslam’s novel represents a more egalitarian Islam in the form of Sufism.36 Indeed, at one point in the novel, the protagonists attend a concert by the famed qawwali singer and Sufi mystic Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.37 A strand of Islamic thought that is localized to different Muslim cultures and communities, Sufism tends to be inward looking and places importance on individual spiritual development rather than enforcing of outward religious convictions. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s practice of the qawwali – a devotional Sufi music that originates from South Asia – becomes a moment of brief trans-Islamic unity within Dasht-e-Tanhai. The narrative voice tells us that the Sufis are ‘the oppositional party of Islam’ and they give voice to ‘vulnerable women’ through their music (Aslam, p. 191). Indeed, Aslam’s narrator suggests that it is through gender equality towards women and the defeat of patriarchal masculinity that the Sufis believe: The poet-saints of Islam express their loathing of power and injustice always through female protagonists, as […] always it was the vulnerability of women that was used by the poet-saints to portray the intolerance and oppression of their times: in their verses the women rebel and try bravely to face all opposition. They – more than the men – attempt to make a new world. And, in every poem and every story, they fail. But by striving they become part of the universal story of human hope. (Aslam, pp. 191–2)

Through Sufism and its cultural expressions in music and poetry, then, Aslam portrays an Islamic movement that is more tolerant and open to gender equality than the literalist Islam practised by Kaukab and most of the community. Nevertheless, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s music renders the novel’s depiction of Islam within frames of religiosity that are, as scholars such as Farid El Asri, Sophia Rose Arjana, Alix Philippon and

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Anne-Marie Vuillemenot have argued, complicit with Orientalist commodification and essentialization of Islam.38 In particular, Al-Asri and Vuillemenot contend that qawwali music is part of a sanitized and commodified image of Islam that is increasingly divorced from its radical spiritual traditions. For them, this is particularly apparent in the commissioning of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to write music for Coca-Cola advertisements and, according to Philippon, the propagation of his work abroad by the Pervez Musharraf–led Pakistani government. Arjana, on the other hand, points to the ways that qawwqli music, as well as a range of other Sufi figures from outside South Asia, such as Rumi, are frequently invoked in Orientalized discourses of spirituality and marketed in a range of merchandise and lifestyle products that subsume the diversity of different Sufi traditions and abstracts movements such as the qawwali from their Islamic origins. However, it should still be stated that the supposed tolerance that Sufi beliefs are alleged to inspire in the novel still seem to have minimal effect on the community’s continuation to perform violence upon women’s bodies and, as such, I would argue is part of the novel’s rather uneven criticisms of Islam. A final point of contention exists in the novel’s formal qualities, as outlined by Gunning when he remarks that Aslam’s use of free indirect discourse enables him ‘to deal closely with questions of agency and freedom, in ways that complicate any notion that the restrictive elements of Islamic practice are simply imposed on women against their will’.39 Certainly, Aslam’s use of free indirect discourse alongside an omniscient narrator gives the novel a complex distancing technique. Gunning refers in this instance to the character of Suraya who, as quoted previously, briefly reflects on her hardship by wondering whether Allah had ‘forgotten’ women and then quickly retracts her thoughts.40 By using free indirect discourse that vacillates between outward dialogue and internal monologue, Aslam is able to show that the strictures of the community’s collective forged Islam and patriarchal masculinity are not programmatically accepted by his characters. It is harder, however, to be as even minded about Rahman’s novel. Emily’s rape and abortion are presented in a rather lopsided manner as Zafar’s perspective, mediated through the narrator, is the only version of events that the reader encounters. Likewise, Emily’s characterization all too often appears stereotypical in its depiction of upper-class Britishness and, with the exception of her mother Penelope’s occasional cameos, she is the only significant female presence in the text. It is hard, therefore, not to succumb to the feeling that Emily is an underdeveloped character who serves predominantly as a cipher representing myopic racial and socio-economic privilege. Even so, this has troubling ramifications to questions of gender as this is a novel in which the male character enacts violence upon a woman’s body yet simultaneously gives little space to female agency or resistance against male violence. This effect is exacerbated by the form of In the Light of What We Know which is recounted through reported conversations between the two main male characters and through the narrator’s piecing together of Zafar’s diaries. Furthermore, each chapter opens with sometimes two-pages worth of epigraph quotations that, as Rahman divulged in an interview with The Hindu, should be read as the narrator’s own interventions into the text.41 It should be noted, then, that, with the exception of writers George Eliot and Simone Weil and historian Dorothy Q. Thomas, most of these quotations are by male

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writers thereby only further underscoring the absence of satisfying female perspectives in the novel. Nevertheless, despite these unfortunate characteristics, Rahman’s novel certainly does not endorse any form of sexualized or gendered violence. In Zafar’s origin story, as well as his inability to adequately confess his crime to the narrator, the text conveys both the traumatic after-effects of misogynist brutality and Zafar’s deep sense of shame. Rahman’s novel, then, can be read as a didactic critique of socio-economic and racial exclusion and how this can be translated into anti-social performances of masculinity. When paired with Aslam’s discussion of gendered assault, both novels certainly identify the threatening and painful measures that men, and some women, will take in order to uphold patriarchal gender discourses in their respective fictional settings. *** At one point in In the Light of What We Know, Zafar makes a metafictional comment that appears to relate the approximate qualities of maps and translations as representations rather than realistic documents to the novel’s own mission by asking the narrator ‘why not think of a book in the same way you think of a map or a translation? It’s not perfect, far from it, but it’s something’. In both Aslam and Rahman’s novels, masculinities are evoked as messy and unpredictable forces that all characters try to map onto the places that they migrate or travel to. As such, both of these novels resist the kind of model identity set out by Deleuze and Guattari in their notion of ‘rhizomatic identities’. Far from being an emancipatory, liberatory ‘opening’ in which a constantly evolving self is unfastened from the chains of genealogy and rootedness, Aslam and Rahman’s texts indicate that an identity that is imagined as a map network with no clear centre can comfortably align with alienating and neo-liberal ways of being. For Aslam’s protagonists, this disoriented sense of self finds expression in aggressive patriarchal forms of Islam. While, for Zafar, this emerges both in his work for financial systems that perpetuate global economic inequalities and in his development into sexually violent forms of masculinity. In both instances, women’s bodies become objects upon which male subjects seek to reterritorialize themselves and find a way out of their sense of alienation brought on by their lack of belonging to a place. Furthermore, the classist, racist and Islamophobic views with which these male characters have to contend only exacerbate this atmosphere of lack as male characters feel marginalized by the country to which they are citizens. In conclusion, then, these two novels, I argue, point to fault-lines in postmodern conceptions of identity and urge consideration of the ways that migrant Muslim masculinities are racialized and classed in contemporary Britain, evoked in the way male characters resort to bellicose and threatening performances of masculinity. This perspective is an appropriate point at which to move on to the book’s final chapter which examines entwined notions of family, futurity and mortality in two recent novels in which British Muslim men meet early, tragic, and I propose, metaphorically significant deaths.

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Fathers, Brothers, Sons: Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018)

The final chapter of my book turns to two recent novels in which the deaths of young British Muslim male protagonists are a crucial point in each narrative’s exploration of British Muslim identities, race, class and performances of masculinity. British Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie’s seventh novel, Home Fire, tells the tale of the Pasha family whose lives are upturned after Parvaiz follows the path of his deceased jihadist father Adil by developing Islamist beliefs and boarding an airplane to Syria to join the Islamist terror organization Daesh. The British writer of Sri Lankan heritage Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel In Our Mad and Furious City, however, takes place over a dramatic forty-eight hours that begins with the vicious murder of a British soldier by two young British Muslim men on a London housing estate and concludes with a violent confrontation on the same estate between radicalizing members of the local mosque and a racist, nationalist political organization that bears significant resemblance to the English Defence League (EDL), thereby calling to mind the riots of earlier novels discussed in this book such as The Satanic Verses (1988), The Black Album (1995) and Brick Lane (2004). Through their shared characterization of deceased father figures and young male British Muslim protagonists who lose their lives, both novels tie their explorations of British Muslim identities and performances of masculinity to larger, elemental themes of mortality, futurity, biopolitics and necropolitics. In so doing, these two novels ask fresh questions about the valency of British Muslim identities and their relationship to other forms of racialized and gendered British identities in the twentyfirst century. Published within a year of each other, both Shamsie’s and Gunaratne’s novels received substantial critical acclaim culminating in a series of prize nominations and awards; notably, Home Fire and In Our Mad and Furious City were longlisted for 2017 and 2018’s Man Booker Prize, respectively. While neither made the Booker Prize shortlist, Shamsie’s novel picked up 2018’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and Gunaratne’s novel went on to be shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and to win 2019’s Jhalak Prize, an award that celebrates novels written by British-resident writers with a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) background, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Author’s Club First Novel Award. However, the pertinent point of comparison between these two novels is the way each text tackles of the thorny issue of Islamist radicalization

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from multiple perspectives.1 Home Fire and In Our Mad and Furious City are novels that investigate young men living in the British capital who witness the growing influence of extremist forms of Islamic belief within their neighbourhoods and render these experiences in multi-perspectival viewpoints. More specifically, both Shamsie’s and Gunaratne’s texts move between different protagonists’ perspectives thereby effectively producing a complex interrogation into the forms of anti-social religious and political doctrines that gain support among characters within each novel. A further point of similarity is how Home Fire and In Our Mad and Furious City engage in practices of intertextuality that, I argue, give a more complicated dimension to each novel’s exploration of radicalization, gender, race, ethnicity and nationality by tying contemporary interest in British Muslims to other forms of historical prejudice and marginalization. It is within the context of multi-perspectival viewpoints and intertextual rewriting that each novel’s shared preoccupation with dead or dying father figures also appears more meaningful thereby warning against the silencing, forgetting or ignoring of forms of historical injustice and what this means for the present-day figure of the British Muslim male. Shamsie’s novel was conceived as a rewriting of Sophocles’s play Antigone (441 BCE) transposed onto the contemporary world. Initially suggested as a project for theatre to Shamsie by Jatinder Verma, a co-founder of the British Asian theatre company Tara Arts, Shamsie chose to rework the story of Antigone into a novel exploring Islamophobia and the prohibitions of global mobility for British Muslims in the twenty-first century.2 The novel is told alternately through the perspectives of five characters: first, Isma Pasha who has recently moved to the United States to begin doctoral research; second, Eamonn Lone who is the son of the British home secretary who meets Isma while in the United States and falls in love with her sister when in the UK; Isma’s younger brother Parvaiz Pasha who develops Islamist beliefs and decides to leaves his life and family behind to work as a sound engineer for Daesh in Syria; Isma and Parvaiz’s sister Aneeka Pasha who engineers a romance with Eamonn in the hope of bringing her brother back to the UK only for her feelings to blossom into genuine love; and Karamat Lone, the British Pakistani home secretary who is keen to present himself as, in Isma’s words, ‘Mr. British Values. Mr. Strong on Security. Mr. Striding Away from Muslimness’ (Shamsie p. 54) so as to avoid associations with Islam in the context of rising post-9/11 Islamophobia and suspicion of Islam. In Shamsie’s novel, Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz live in the shadow of their jihadist father who fought for Islamist causes in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bosnia before being captured, tortured and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay prison. Most of the Pasha family are keen to disassociate themselves with their father’s life despite feeling the effects of his lifestyle choices when they are stopped for questioning while travelling abroad or when they are singled out for stop-and-search checks by police officers. However, Isma’s decision to relocate to the United States and Aneeka’s subsequent preference for moving out rather than continuing to lodge with her brother triggers a ‘crisis of masculinity’ for Parvaiz during which he meets the charismatic figure of Farooq. Farooq preys upon Parvaiz’s insecurities by feeding him a narrative that his sisters are an emasculating influence upon him and that they only provide him with a partial view of his ‘brave’ father who stood up for his religious beliefs and fought against

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the oppression of Muslim minorities across the world. Unsurprisingly, Farooq reveals himself to a fighter for Daesh who has been tasked with recruiting more members to take back with him to their occupied areas in Syria.3 Concocting a story that he will go to Pakistan to work on sound production for a film, Parvaiz boards the well-publicized flight route from London to Istanbul then onto Raqqa where he instead works as a sound engineer for Daesh’s media outlets. It so happens that while this is happening, Isma meets the character Eamonn in a coffee shop in Amherst, Massachusetts. Realizing instantaneously that he is the son of the politician Karamat Lone, Isma is at first suspicious of her new friend but eventually confesses her fraught family history to Eamonn as she becomes cognizant of her attraction towards him. However, Eamonn’s stay in the United States is brief and, shortly after discovering his father has been promoted to home secretary and therefore responsible for matters relating to security, terrorism prevention and immigration, he returns to the UK where he promises to pass on Isma’s gift to her grandmother. In the process, he meets Isma and Parvaiz’s sister Aneeka with whom he falls in love and the two embark on a passionate affair. Their relationship is initially planned by Aneeka as an opportunity for getting Parvaiz back to the UK however she eventually falls in love with Eamonn. In an aspect of the plot in which life imitates art, the home secretary refuses Parvaiz’s attempts to come home to the UK and, after being killed in a hit and run incident outside the British consulate in Istanbul, Karamat uses his powers to ‘denaturalize’ Parvaiz and therefore strip him of his British citizenship and impede his burial in Britain. As Claire Chambers points out, this incident predicted ‘the similar fate of the radicalized Shamima Begum’ who the-then British home secretary Sajid Javid who ‘eight months after Home Fire was published’ became ‘the first Muslim Home Secretary’, ‘similarly prevented from coming home to Britain in February 2019’.4 Prescient though it may be, this facet of the narrative is mostly clearly part of Shamsie’s reimagining of the conflict between King Creon (recast as Karamat Lone) and Antigone (rewritten as Aneeka) in Sophocles’s play.5 Taking place in the aftermath of a war in which the two sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polyneices (the equivalent of Parvaiz), have been fighting for the throne of Thebes, Sophocles’s play focuses on their successor King Creon’s decision to bury Eteocles and refusal to give burial rites to Polyneices as he had been fighting for a foreign army. His sister Antigone refutes the ruling of King Creon and buries Polyneices. Upon discovering that she has buried her brother, King Creon condemns Antigone to death while Creon’s son Haemon, whose name obviously connotes Eamonn, is also engaged to marry Antigone, tries to convince his father to drop charges by appealing to his sense of morality. Sophocles’s play concludes with Creon lifting charges on Antigone, however by the time he has made his decision, Antigone has taken her own life. When he discovers Antigone’s death, Haemon too commits suicide followed by Creon’s wife who cannot bear life without her son. Shamsie’s novel similarly concludes with the deaths of Aneeka, Eamonn and Karamat’s wife and daughter estranging themselves from their respective husband and father. Her novel, then, like Sophocles’s play aims to warn against the danger of entrenched worldviews and binary thinking which Shamsie observes in contemporary discourses surrounding Muslims in Britain, immigration and citizenship and seeks to dissect in her multi-perspective novel.

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Like Shamsie’s novel, In Our Mad and Furious City is told from the perspectives of five characters and is similarly keenly aware of literary history. Unlike Shamsie’s focus on protagonists with a Muslim cultural heritage, Gunaratne’s novel includes viewpoints from Londoners with a diverse variety of different cultural allegiances and backgrounds. Thus the novel’s events are recounted by Nelson, an immobile and ageing immigrant from Monsarrat who has lived in London since the 1950s and suffers from trauma relating to the racist prejudice he suffered during his life, his son Selvon who is a popular and confident young man who nevertheless derives most of his self-worth from prowess on football pitches and heterosexual sexual conquests, Caroline, an immigrant from Northern Ireland to London who is traumatized by her experiences of growing up amidst the religious tension of the so-called Troubles, her son Ardan who has limited confidence but evinces great talent for constructing rhymes to music, and finally, Yusuf whose recently deceased father was a moderate and open-minded imam at the local mosque.6 Since the death of his father, Yusuf ’s family has been rocked by controversy as his brother Irfan has been found in possession of underage pornographic material leading to Irfan’s wife leaving him. Following the death of Yusuf ’s father, the mosque has also gone through a distinct change in direction as his father’s successor, Imam Abu Farouk, has introduced a hard-line, more socially conservative form of Sunni Islam that has galvanized many disaffected young men and women on the London housing estate. Although not a rewriting, Gunaratne’s novel also features substantial intertextual connections that shed light on issues connected to British Muslim identities and masculinity. In the first instance, the novel’s Neasden setting, the area of London in which Gunaratne was born and grew up, is the same geography travailed in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000); a novel which Gunaratne has spoken of admirably.7 While the most immediately identifiable of the novels that Gunaratne’s novel enters into dialogue with is Sam Selvon’s classic modernist novel of Caribbean immigrants in London, The Lonely Londoners (1956).8 Sharing a London setting with Selvon’s novel, Gunaratne also creates a character who is named after the author and whose fictional father Nelson acknowledges the influence of Sam Selvon’s oeuvre in helping him overcome and resist the racism he encountered when he arrived in 1950s London. In his writing style, Gunaratne also mimics the accents and localized slang of his protagonists in a way previously pursued by Selvon in his atmospheric writing of Windrush generation Londoners. However, this form of accented writing, even when reporting the inner thoughts, reflections and dialogue of protagonists, also brings to mind more recent British writing, such as Suhayl Saadi’s Urdu-inflected Scots in his 2004 novel Psychoraag, discussed in Chapter 4 of this book. There is no evidence to suggest Gunaratne has read Saadi’s novel, however, in a public interview at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2019, the writer acknowledged that his writing had been influenced by the work of James Kelman. As mentioned in relation to Saadi’s Psychoraag previously, Kelman’s novels, most notably his Booker Prizewinning How Late It Was, How Late (1994), are written in Scots dialect and made liberal use of Glaswegian colloquialisms. Gunaratne’s novel, then, contains a range of different accented forms of British English to convey the novel’s plot and so is clearly reminiscent of Kelman’s prose.9

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Aside from the linguistic content of his novel, the structure of Gunaratne’s form also bears significant resemblance to Virginia Woolf ’s classic novel of London life, Mrs. Dalloway (1925).10 In her famous novel, which takes place over a day in June, Woolf ’s central protagonist Clarissa Dalloway prepares to hold a party and, as she darts across London, the free indirect discourse of the narrative flits between the external and internal thoughts of Clarissa as her attention shifts between all the different people and stimuli she encounters in 1920s London. Meanwhile, Clarissa’s party preparation coincides with war veteran Septimus Smith’s deteriorating mental health and subsequent suicide. Septimus and Clarissa’s lives briefly interact as she passes him on the street but his death casts an altogether for forbidding shadow when Septimus’s unsympathetic doctor William Bradshaw attends Clarissa’s party and speaks of his recently deceased patient. Septimus’s death is widely interpreted by critics such as Ariela Freedman, for example, as a sort of sacrifice for Clarissa as news of his passing leads Clarissa to reflect on her mortality and the value of her life.11 Gunaratne’s novel corresponds to Woolf ’s time frame as the narrative of In Our Mad and Furious City is slightly longer but nevertheless aims to present a short snapshot of time during a hot June in the British capital. Yet in contrast to the relative ease with which Woolf ’s protagonist Clarissa Dalloway moves across the city, Gunaratne’s text metaphorically expresses his characters’ socio-economic disadvantage by reducing their movements to within the London housing estate. Lastly, as has already been mentioned, Gunaratne’s novel is bookended by two distressing acts of violence as the novel opens with the murder of a British soldier and concludes with Yusuf ’s death during a riot organized by a fascist organization. It is my contention that Yusuf ’s death, which is implicitly announced at the beginning of the novel, works in a similar manner to Septimus’s suicide in Woolf ’s classic novel by alerting the estate inhabitants to the severity of social divisions on their estate. In the pages that follow, I will be discussing the performances of masculinity in each novel, the role families play in establishing these practices of masculinity and lastly exploring how both novels’ preoccupation with dead or dying father figures, alongside  younger men who lose their lives, intervenes in discourses surrounding British Muslim masculinities. In a short article for Wasafiri where In Our Mad and Furious City is mentioned, John McLeod explores these issues of finality, futurity and forgetting that I intend to develop in my readings of Home Fire and In Our Mad and  Furious City.  For McLeod, Gunaratne’s novel is one example of a number of recent texts by British writers of colour that carry ‘concerns about the possible waning cognisance and fading utility of the recent history of black British resistance’.12 Drawing on Sara Upstone’s study on race in contemporary British fiction in which she contends that much writing from British writers instigates ‘debates surrounding the extent to which it is possible to conceive of a future British society less dominated by racial prejudice and extending towards what has been called a “post-racial” culture’ and concludes that most of the texts she examines ‘are often hopeful in isolated, specific contexts, but more broadly are pessimistic about racial politics in Britain’, McLeod reads the figure of the declining or dead protagonist he identifies in Gunaratne’s novel, as well as recent texts by Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips and Diana Evans, as symptomatic of the pessimism that Upstone diagnoses.13

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I agree with McLeod that the declining protagonists Selvon, Caroline and, particularly pertinent to my topic, Yusuf and Irfan’s persistently unnamed father, function to a similar end thereby pointing to ‘interconnections between past radicalism and present criticisms that need to be critically (rather than reverentially or nostalgically) sustained and articulated as a matter of some urgency’, however this does not account for the younger men that also die in both Home Fire and In Our Mad and Furious City, thereby also extinguishing the possibility for the forms of critical rethinking and renewal that McLeod’s reading calls for.14 It is my contention that both Home Fire and In Our Mad and Furious City use the complex of declining, dying or dead figures who are both young and old to implicitly question the emergent ‘British Muslim’ category as a racialized form of identity within the multicultural environment of London and invite questions pertaining to Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe’s work on biopolitics and necropolitics which I will develop in my reading. Also, in their focus on male characters, these two texts introduce a significant gendered dimension to these questions by thinking through the British Muslim male figure and the extent to which its reading through gender and racial lenses is a wholly new form of stereotyping or whether it is rather a more recent iteration of established forms of myopic understandings of Britishness.

‘London’s scowling youth’ Of all the perspectives explored in these two polyphonic novels, the voices of young male protagonists are among the most dominant. In Gunaratne’s novel, the focus on young men is signalled by the text’s arresting prologue which reads akin to a chorus in which a disembodied yet collective voice that refers itself in the first-person plural speaks of the material circumstances that the young men live within as well as the violent events that precede and conclude the narrative. Famously associated with ancient Greek drama such as Shamsie’s source text, Sophocles’s Antigone, the prologue chorus has historically served to contextualize dramatic performances by providing audiences with background information and any crucial subtexts that the author of the play may want to make apparent. In the twentieth century, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht is known for reviving the chorus in plays such as The Threepenny Opera (1928) in which he argued that a choral voice foregrounded the fictionality of his text, thereby evading potential political censorship, and also created an ‘alienation effect’ which disrupted an audience’s tendency to become uncritically absorbed in the spectacle before them, something he compared to the ways that people can be enthralled by advertising and propaganda which carry the capitalist and normative discourses of the age.15 Retrospectively, after finishing the novel and reading the novel’s epilogue, the reader understands that this choral voice likely belongs to Yusuf who is speaking from beyond the grave however, I argue, that the prologue still functions in a way that accords with both ancient Greek and Brechtian uses of the chorus. Certainly, the choral voice of the novel’s prologue manages to create a Brechtian ‘alienation effect’ in which the reader is encouraged not only to view the narrative’s events as tragic but

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also to critically reflect upon them. Furthermore, the lyrical quality of the ancient Greek choral voice is also accomplished by pointed yet poetic statements contained in the prologue, such as ‘Violence made this city’ and ‘We were London’s scowling youth’ (Gunaratne, p. 2). The prologue, then, provides a crucial aspect of the novel’s reading experience whereby a critical stance is instilled within the reading audience and, through the pronoun ‘we’, suggests simultaneously that the voice belongs to one of the young men speaking from a celestial dimension while also communicating a communal experience that is shared by a number of young men on the estate and perhaps beyond. In effect, then, Gunaratne’s use of the first-person plural can be read in a manner not dissimilar to the ways that Dave Gunning reads Kureishi’s use of the pronoun in his 1986 essay ‘Bradford’ and his 1991 essay ‘Eight Arms to Hold You’ as a movement away ‘from the idea of unique subjectivity and towards the ideas of structural change, the notion that people are necessarily shaped in particular ways by the pressures of the historical situation around them’.16 Gunning remarks that Kureishi describes his male classmates with the pronoun ‘we’ as a means to express their unity thereby not ‘postulating homogeneity of thought among diverse individuals who make up the group, but rather only as an acknowledgement of the fact that they come from the same starting place, and are equally conditioned by the same social constraints and dynamics’.17 Gunning proposes that Kureishi’s use of ‘we’ in these essays from the 1980s reinforces notions of intersectional class oppression that cut across racial or ethno-religious divides. I suggest that the use of the first-person plural in these chorus sections serve a comparative purpose. In Our Mad and Furious City opens in the aftermath of the murder of a British soldier on a London street that was filmed on video camera by a witness. The death, and its’ filming, call to mind the killing of British soldier Lee Rigby in 2013 by two British Nigerian converts to Islam near a housing estate in the London district of Woolwich.18 However, Yusuf ’s apparitional voice in the prologue reflects that to see the video was ‘like watching our own faces made foul’ and recognize that ‘when we saw the eyes of the black boy with the dripping blade, we felt closer to him than the soldier-boy slain in the street’ (Gunaratne, p. 4). Yet, in line with the ancient Greek usage of chorus, the prologue makes clear that this ‘fury’ is due to the toxic mixture of socio-economic deprivation and marginalization suffered by the novel’s young men at the hands of a disinterested political system. Initially claiming that the novel’s young men are ‘born into menace from day dot’ (Gunaratne, p. 1), the prologue subsequently disproves this essentializing attitude by laying out a confluence of racial and socioeconomic factors that lead the estate’s male inhabitants towards violent expressions of masculinity in their struggle against the marginalizing effects of poverty. Emphasizing the geographic boundaries of the housing estate to evoke the men’s sense of their own limited futures, the prologue paints a picture of disaffected and disadvantaged young men who navigate their social deprivation alongside the competing forces of cultural heritage and transcultural forms of belonging on the multicultural estate as a metaphorical tug-of-war: We were London’s scowling youth. As siblings of rage, we were never meant to stray beyond the street. We might not have known it with our eyes so alight, but

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it was true. Our miseducation is proof, ennet. Those school corridors were like cold chambers, anyone who went to St. Mary’s would attest. Our bodies were locked for verbal assaults, our words clipped, and surging with our own code and fuck anyone who disagreed yuno? Violence shadowed our language and our lines tagged the streets. They’d read us on walls, in open seams, and dim lamplight. We’d cotch on park benches and waste air, sock-mouthed and bound, stupid to our fates the entire time […] For those of us who had an elsewhere in our blood, some foreign origin, we had richer colours and ancient callings to hear. Fight with, more likely, and fight for, a push-pull of ancestry and meaning. For me that meant Pakistan and its local masks, which in Neasden meant going mosque and dodging Muhajiroun. For my breddas on Estate, they were from all over. Jamaicans, Irish pikeys, Nigerians, Ghanaians, South Indians, Bengalis. Propper Commonwealth kids, ennet. Even the Arab squaddies from UAE. We’d all spy those private-school boys from Belmont and Mill Hill and we’d wonder, how would it have felt to come from the same story? To have been molded out of one thing and not of many? There was nothing more foreign to us that that. Nothing more boring and pale to imagine. Ours was a language, a dubbing of noise, while theirs was a one-note, void of new feeling and any sense of place. (Gunaratne, pp. 2–3)

Significantly, the narrative voice refers to language and music to convey the young men’s sense of difference and the ways they make sense of their background and milieu. By referring to their communal language and ‘dubbing of noise’, the choral voice suggests that the young men have developed a shared rhythm through which they find solidarity and a sense of community. As such, while the estate may be a space of economic disadvantage leading to performances of aggressive masculinity, it also has the potential to be a site of transcultural possibility, cohesion and creativity. The structure and linguistic forms that the novel takes also convey the transcultural fabric of the estate and the estate’s inhabitants. As has already been mentioned, the novel is told through a carousel of different, though predominantly male, voices that offer different perspectives on the British soldier’s death, life on the estate, each characters’ life history, the rise of an anti-social form of Islam in the mosque following the death of Yusuf and Irfan’s moderate father and the riotous clash between members of the mosque and a racist organization at the novel’s denouement. However, these aspects of the narrative are also conveyed in prose which demonstrates both a colloquial vocabulary that is spoken by all the young men of the estate regardless of their race or cultural heritage and the different forms of accented English spoken by older generations of British people who have migrated to the UK. The ways these perspectives in their idiosyncratic voices move between and through each other, then, conforms to the features of transcultural writing that I elucidated in this book’s introduction: that is the continually shifting perspectives and promiscuous movement within different cultural reference points that challenges notions of monocultural being and belonging. Furthermore, the text emphasizes the use of different forms of cultural expression, namely cinema and music, that the young men, who refer to themselves as ‘breddas’,

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or ‘brothers’, use to forge their collective transcultural masculinity. One indicative moment occurs when Selvon and Ardan meet Marc, a young French man living on the estate, and bond over how their friendship triad (Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf) share a mutual appreciation of Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1996 film La Haine which, as previously mentioned, is referenced in Sally El Hosaini’s My Brother the Devil (examined in Chapter 3 of this book).19 La Haine, as discussed in Chapter 3, is a film about three young men of North African heritage living within a multicultural but impoverished housing estate on the outskirts of Paris. While the film is stylistically referred to throughout El Hosaini’s film, and indeed includes one of the film’s central actors in the role of the suave and sophisticated Sayyid, La Haine is implicitly referenced in Gunaratne’s novel through its similar focus on three young men living on a diverse but economically underprivileged housing estate. In a further nod to the film, Selvon and Ardan meet Marc in a gym while preparing for boxing practice thereby associating his character with the Anglo-French boxer Hubert in Kassovitz’s film. Selvon gestures towards affinities between the two texts when he remarks that Marc is ‘not the Arabic sort but the same grimed-up Paris clan that come from the similar climate […] Makes me think that if breddas like him are in Paris then Paris must be just like London except for bare model gash and shit food’ (Gunaratne, p. 135). Thus, in this instance, Gunaratne’s protagonists are pointing at links between La Haine’s dissection of aggressive hyper-masculinity in the culturally and racially diverse Parisian banlieu and Gunaratne’s literary aims. A final point of connection between the Parisian context of Kassovitz’s film and the London setting of Gunaratne’s novel is made by Ardan who expresses a deep fondness for French Hip-Hop and, although he cannot understand French, connects with the rhythm and style of the music in a manner that resonates with the Prologue’s description of belonging through sound and language. Even Marc, Selvon describes, is shown ‘chatting in French patois to his boy Lou’ (Gunaratne, p. 135), thereby hinting at transnational forms of transcultural masculinity and diaspora identity that create new fusions of language and music. It is Grime music, however, that is the predominant form of cultural expression that Gunaratne’s protagonists connect with. Inherently transcultural, Grime music is a genre of music influenced by an array of transnational musical forms, including UK Garage, US Hip-Hop, Jungle and Jamaican dancehall, and ‘flourished during a period of stagnation in the UK Hip-Hop scene’.20 Identifying Grime as a ‘post Hip-Hop sociocultural development’, Richard Bramwell describes how many young working-class communities in East London felt disconnected from the rise of popularity in Hip-Hop and the tendency of Hip-Hop stars to wax lyrical about luxurious or wealthy lifestyles.21 Grime, then, arose through impromptu performances by working-class MCs in London’s East End and positioned itself against the increasingly polished production of Hip-Hop. Grime, then, is characterized aesthetically by a do-it-yourself aesthetic that recalls movements such as Punk and musically by a minimal, prominent rhythm, a very low-pitched bassline and vocals by an MC which often include politicized lyrics. As one Grime MC Nasty Jack explained to American documentary makers in 2006, ‘Most grime tunes are made in a grimy council estate […] Mum ain’t got enough money, everyone’s just angry. You need a tension release.’22

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In Gunaratne’s novel, all the young men are united in their enjoyment of Grime music and a particularly evocative part of the novel follows Ardan finding both aural and stress relief by listening to a string of Grime artists, such as Lethal Bizzle, Stormzy, Wiley and Kano. For Ardan, in particular, Grime music is a creative outlet as he writes his own lyrics to the beats of tracks through which he is able to express his frustrations about his relative shyness and physical weakness compared to Selvon and Yusuf. This culminates in a tense rap battle at the back of a London bus and the promise of a record deal after he performs for a music executive who employs Selvon’s lover Missy. It is worth noting here that, for a considerable amount of time, Grime music was viewed suspiciously as demonstrated by police raiding and criminalization of Grime performances. Yet, in Gunaratne’s novel, Grime is rightfully elevated as a form of genuine cultural expression borne out of socio-economic conditions that, when harnessed, can provide opportunities for practitioners in the scene. Nevertheless, it would not escape the attention of most contemporary British readers that In Our Mad and Furious City was released at the same point that Grime began enjoying mainstream success as evidenced by Stormzy’s much-praised headline slot in the 2019 Glastonbury music festival in which he spoke openly of racism in Britain to an audience of people able to afford the hefty three-figure cost of attendance and in Stormzy’s album Heavy Is the Heart achieving a number one position in the first 2020 UK music sales charts. While Gunaratne’s novel shines a light on this British transcultural genre, then, it is worth noting that the text should be considered as a force that continues Grime’s journey into the mainstream rather than an early proponent of a musical and cultural form that has, at times, been criminalized. Within this context, Gunaratne’s decision to single out the protagonist Ardan who was born to white Irish parentage as the novel’s most ardent admirer of Grime is significant as it shows that a genre stereotypically associated with young people of colour has actually, as Dan Hancox’s research shows, been a type of music performed and made by working-class communities in London that are both white and of colour.23 Besides the young men in Gunaratne’s novel, sound also plays an important part in the life of Shamsie’s young protagonist Parvaiz who is described as ‘a boy never seen without his headphones and a mic’. From a young age, Parvaiz is described as being exceptionally sensitive to noise and, somewhat meaningfully considering his later decision to join Daesh, finds ‘the sound of the world turned up just that little bit’ (Shamsie, p. 121). Parvaiz uses this keen sense of hearing to make sound projects that consist of recording all the various noises he encounters on an average day in his life. Dismissed by his sister Isma as ‘an obsession’ (Shamsie, p. 25), sound is nevertheless the way that Parvaiz makes sense of the world around him and is motivated by an ambition to make a twenty-four-hour track ‘that his ideal listener would play between midnight of one day and the next’ (Shamsie, p. 131). In some respects, then, Parvaiz’s aspiration to record soundscapes of his surroundings allows a form of aural panacea and expression similar to that of Ardan’s in Grime music. Crucially, though, while Ardan’s interest in Grime music demands little money and, even so, any drive he may have would be curtailed by his underprivileged background, Parvaiz is able to afford state-of-the-art equipment as:

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One night he sneaked out of the house when everyone had gone to sleep, took the bus to Central London, and waited from midnight until mid-morning outside a theatre in the West End for return tickets to the opening night of an Ibsen play that an actor recently elevated, via a superhero role, to the Hollywood A-list was using to reestablish his credentials as a serious thespian. Parvaiz bought two tickets with money he’d ‘borrowed’ from the household from the household account using Isma’s debit card, and quickly sold them both for an astronomical sum. (Shamsie, p. 26)

Deductible from this anecdote, then, is that Parvaiz is equipped with more entrepreneurial know-how and with more material wealth than Ardan in Gunaratne’s novel. Even being aware of an Ibsen play being performed in Central London suggests that Parvaiz enjoys more ‘cultural capital’ than Gunaratne’s protagonists who never go beyond the confines of their London estate. Parvaiz’s sisters, particularly Isma, are discouraging of their brother’s interest in sound and are unsurprisingly rather nonplussed at Parvaiz’s scheming to acquire technology in order to indulge his fascination. However, their response is also coated in essentialist attitudes to gender behaviour as, when recalling the Ibsen debacle, Isma remarks ‘boys are different from us […] [t]hey see what they want through tunnel vision’ (Shamsie, p. 27). Ironically using short-sightedness as a metaphor for ignorance and narrowmindedness, it is nevertheless sound that seems to grant Parvaiz his career opportunities thereby suggesting that the implied myopia belongs to Isma. As Claire Chambers explains: When he [Parvaiz] departs for the Islamic State, his cover story is a job opportunity sourced by his guitarist cousin in Karachi to work as a sound engineer for a television programme that bears striking similarities to the show Coke Studio. Pakistan’s legendary music television programme began broadcasting in 2008 using a format and sponsorship from the Coca-Cola Company, and continues to enjoy great popularity today.24

Of course, it is revealed that rather than working on the Coke Studio television programme, Parvaiz is going to Raqqa to become a sound engineer on the infamous propaganda videos made and circulated by Daesh. For Chambers, Parvaiz’s preoccupation with sound, and Isma’s failure to view her brother’s talents as lucrative, can be read as a reversed metaphor for the broader populace’s failure to ‘listen’ to the grievances and disaffection of some Muslim communities in contemporary Britain. When read in juxtaposition with Ardan’s potential Grime music career and how his friend Selvon supports his ambitions, then the cavalier attitude of Isma and the characters becomes all the more conspicuous. Nevertheless, in both texts, young men and their surroundings are threatened both by the rise of reactionary forms of Islam as well as by Islamophobia. Within the first chapter of In Our Mad and Furious City, Yusuf visits a nearby fried chicken shop that has been attacked by a far-right nationalist group following the murder of the British soldier that opens the novel. Standing amidst the ‘shards of swept glass’, Yusuf

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identifies a shift in how race is perceived by the majority white population of the area. Recalling how him and his friends on the Estate had ‘told crude racist jokes for fun’ but shirking off any responsibility for the current atmosphere of racism (Gunaratne, p. 31), Yusuf is confronted by the fact that the racists who attacked the chicken shop, some of whom he believes probably partake in the establishment’s fried food, would see little difference between him and the owner, Freshie Dave. Upon asking what their motives for smashing the windows were, Freshie Dave responds: ‘Our owner a Paki too. Got our faces, no?’ and ‘offered this as kinship, plugging his thumb at my face and his own’ (Gunaratne, p. 29). Yusuf speculates that ‘Pakistan was the linkage’ and yet he argues that this ‘faulty logic revealed the gulf between us’ (Gunaratne, p. 29). Indeed, while Freshie Dave is typified as one of a class of immigrant who arrive in Britain ‘on student visas with their silly smiles and were now serving up fried fat to sons of England’, Yusuf has only visited Pakistan once and so the nation has become ‘a fragmented memory’. He continues: He [Freshie Dave] knew nothing of or high school sieges, road banter, Premier League football, or anything else that made Estate living what it was. A world away for him. I watched Dave salt my chips. I had more in common with the goons that broke his window in truth. (Gunaratne, p. 30)

While Yusuf ’s assessment points to the vast differences in Dave and his own background, he is also forced to ruminate on Dave’s admission of racial kinship and wonder whether the playful racist remarks of his youth have had more sinister repercussions. He ruminates how: Somewhere between my time growing up and this, one world buckled into another. I used to know what the menace looked like. I’d see it on a road or in a flinch from a bully. But words were never dangerous. Now suddenly everyone had stopped telling borderline jokes for fun. Now we had Paki Terrorist spray-painted on the wall outside, burning cars on the news, smashed shop windows and dead soldierboys on road. These words Paki, which we did our best to pacify at school, had come back sharper and took chunks out of faces like my own and Freshie Dave’s. That was how we were really linked, ennet, by the threat of smashed-up windows and pictures of our mums crying in the Guardian. (Gunaratne, pp. 30–1)

According to the racist worldview, Dave and Yusuf ’s backgrounds are consequently immaterial and, as Yusuf realizes, they share a racialized appearance that ignores their individuality and stereotypes them into the amorphous body of the ‘Paki Terrorist’. In this respect, then, Gunaratne’s text points out the forms of contemporary racialization explored throughout this book. The Pasha family in Home Fire are also attentive towards the forces of racialization. Shamsie opens her novel with Isma answering questions from UK Border Control Authorities at London Heathrow Airport as she moves to the United States to start her PhD. During the exchange, in which she is asked her opinion on a range of

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socio-political issues including homosexuals, dating apps, the Queen, democracy, Iraq and even on the popular television show The Great British Bake Off, Isma reveals, through her inner monologue, that she had envisaged such a circumstance and that she had practised possible questions and answers with her sister Aneeka beforehand. Likewise, Aneeka evinces a shrewd awareness of what arises suspicion when she responds sarcastically ‘that’s a good idea when you’re GWM’, or ‘googling while Muslim’ (Shamsie, p. 67), when Eamonn tells her she can find out about a 1939 terrorist attempt by the Northern Ireland separatist movement, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), near to her house on the internet. Eamonn’s nonplussed reaction in which he asks her what ‘GWM’ means speaks to his contrasting experience as a man who, despite also having Pakistani heritage and a similarly racialized appearance, does not feel the need to exercise caution when surfing the web. Unlike the Pasha siblings, his father is a major British politician and he enjoys a comfortable existence within upwardly mobile strata of British society. However, Parvaiz fervently impresses that, of all the Pasha siblings, he is the one that has experienced the most racial profiling through stop-and-search checks. Although Aneeka deflates his perverse boast by stating that it has only happened twice and that ‘you said yourself that it was no big deal either time, so stop whining about it after the fact’ (Shamsie, p. 135). Nevertheless, what can be taken from Yusuf ’s dialogue with Dave and the Pasha family’s experience is that these characters’ racial appearance does, at times, hinder their mobility or open them up to greater possibility of antagonism than normatively white counterparts. It is this realization that inspires Isma’s academic research on ‘the sociological impact of the War on Terror’ (Shamsie, p. 40) with a special focus on profiling and interrogation tactics. Still, these forms of racialization, as depicted by Eamonn’s bewilderment, also mobilize on socio-economic lines and so the son of the home secretary is able to escape such forms of prejudice. Despite telling Isma that ‘it must be difficult to be Muslim in the world these days’ (Shamsie, p. 22), Eamonn clearly has never experienced anything similar to the Pasha children. Later in the narrative, when Eamonn enters into a romantic relationship with Aneeka, the kinds of realistic profiling that characters such as Parvaiz, Aneeka, Isma, Yusuf and Dave encounter are in fact a source of humour when attached to Eamonn’s body, as his friend Max teases Eamonn’s sudden reclusiveness: Twenty-something unemployed male from Muslim background exhibits rapidly altered pattern of behaviour, cuts himself off from old friends, moves under the radar. Also, are we sure that’s an evening shadow rather than an incipient beard? I think we may need to alert the authorities. (Shamsie, p. 84)

Quite clearly in Max’s response are all the categories of the Muslim male archetype identified by Jasbir K. Puar and discussed in this book’s introduction.25 Quite literally, Max’s comments, intended as a joke, reveal that the profiling and racialization of Muslim bodies is also negotiated within the structuring of class and socio-economic privilege. Within this frame, Parvaiz, and in fact Yusuf, are rendered as dangerous and

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threatening bodies, something I will unpack further in this chapter, while Max’s body and identity are rendered as safe due to his affluent background. Regarding wealth and class, both texts depict Islamism as a response to socioeconomic divisions and political injustices that is aggravated by profiling. The allure of ultra-conservative Islamic discourses to Parvaiz and the impact upon his masculinity is a subject that will be examined at length in the next section of this chapter. However, before doing so, it is germane to return to Gunaratne’s novel in which the emergence of a pugnacious and reactionary form of Islam is pitted against the transcultural masculinity that, as I have been outlining, is expressed through the young men’s shared ways of speech and in their fondness for Grime music. According to Yusuf, football is a passion and a ‘respite’ which nearly all the young men on the estate have in common, remarking that ‘of all the things I loved, I loved the time spent playing’. Proving his point, Yusuf goes from his experience at the chicken shop to a nearby park to indulge in a game of football with Selvon, Ardan and a number of other young inhabitants on the Estate, all of whose names speak to the rich diversity of the area, including ‘Sikh lads Gurpreet and Gushal’, ‘Chinese gamer kids’ and ‘Eastern Europeans’ (Gunaratne, p. 65). Undercut by references to ‘soft drugs passing between cliques like bubble gum’ (Gunaratne, p. 65), thereby implying the rise of illegal drug selling as a means of escapism and money-earning for young people in the underprivileged environment of the Estate, the match is disrupted by the incursion of two men from the so-called Muhajiroun, or the group that have taken over the local mosque following Yusuf ’s father’s death. Spotting Yusuf in the football playing crowd and, knowing he had missed morning prayers, the two Muhajiroun members Riaff and Kassim force Yusuf away from his multicultural gang of friends to a meeting at the mosque. Noticing his reluctance, Ardan shouts out to Yusuf to ask if he is ‘alright’ to which the two Muhajiroun react violently and punch Ardan to the ground (Gunaratne, p. 69). This threatening incident which takes place in the context of the Estate’s regular football matches, in which people of all different backgrounds unite to enjoy recreational sport, exchange mixtapes and swap intoxicating substances, signifies the major tension in the novel as disadvantaged young men face the temptation to move away from a transcultural form of masculinity which, as I will soon discuss, is forged in undesirable economic situations and is not necessarily empowering to women but still emphasizes community and affection for one another, towards a form of reactive Islam. In the following section, I will outline what this Islam consists of and how it challenges the forms of transcultural masculinity that thrive on the estate while showing how, in both texts, families present ambivalent forces that both push men away from and to these destructive forms of identity.

‘Fathers and sons, sons and fathers’ In her reading of Home Fire, Chambers observes that ‘Parvaiz experiences a crisis of masculinity precipitated in part by fellow British Pakistani Farooq’s charming machinations that recruit him to Daesh, combined with his sisters’ decision to sell the family house against his will’.26 To be sure, Shamsie’s text certainly provides ample

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material to substantiate this view. However, I contend that, in depicting Parvaiz as suffering from a crisis of masculinity, the plot of Home Fire rests on an assumption that masculinity is a stable signifier and, in so doing, surreptitiously endorses a narrative that, when closely analysed, seems to imply that unconventional and non-normative familial arrangements are at fault for the development of masculine anti-social behaviours. This is a problematic, I argue, that is not found in Gunaratne’s depiction of father and son relations whereby the character Yusuf ’s comparatively more complex character development provides him with critical distance through which to assess and interpret the shifts in gendered behaviour he encounters as the mosque changes direction following his father’s death. From the outset, Parvaiz is opposed to Isma’s plans to pursue a doctoral degree in the United States and reacts emotionally to his twin sister Aneeka’s proposal that they sell the family home for extra income and move in with their Aunt Naseem. Parvaiz regards these plans to relocate as a betrayal, as the text relays: Ordinarily, Parvaiz would have felt the blade of being omitted from the conversation. But just then Aneeka shrugged in response, and he experienced one of those terrifying moments in which a person you thought you knew reveals a new aspect of their character that has taken hold while you weren’t looking […] Aneeka would leave them. That’s what the shrug said. After university she had no intention of continuing to live in this house and remain a sibling rather than anything else that a law degree made possible. (Shamsie, p. 122)

Calling her a ‘traitor’ who ‘was unlinking the chains that held them together, casting him into darkness’ (Shamsie, p. 140), the sudden shifts in his family life cause Parvaiz to assess his own precarious employment as an assistant at a greengrocer’s shop where he earns an ‘insufficient’ salary as well as the stagnation of his ambitions to receive recognition for his sound engineering work (Shamsie, p. 121). Soon after his fight with Aneeka, Parvaiz encounters a wholly new career opportunity, however. Walking across a park, he comes across a group of forbiddinglooking young men dressed in ‘designer trainers, pristine white robes, ecosystem beards (Aneeka had named them: large enough to support an ecosystem, she’d said)’ who ‘hung around the neighbourhood trying to look troublesome’ (Shamsie, p. 124). Here, in the tradition of Smith’s group KEVIN in White Teeth and Kureishi’s aubergine-worshippers in The Black Album, Shamsie imagines a humorous group of young rambunctious Islamists who have ‘done themselves no favours with the name they’d chosen: Us Thugz’. According to the group, their name represents a ‘shortened form of the Arabic astaghfirullah’ yet (Shamsie, p. 124), as Isma’s questioning reveals, the group have no understanding that the phrase means to ask Allah for forgiveness and rather they stand for bullying measures like intimidating women in the area to ‘cover up more’ (Shamsie, p. 124). On this occasion it is Parvaiz who they terrorize by beating him up and trying to steal his mobile phone. As he lies there, the full extent of his misery dawns on him, lamenting ‘how he hated his life, this neighbourhood, the inevitability of everything’ (Shamsie, p. 125).

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Into this perfect storm, enters the charismatic figure of Farooq who, as Chambers observes, is described in strikingly homoerotic imagery. A ‘powerfully built man, muscles distorting the shape of his tightly fitting bomber jacket’ (Shamsie, p. 125), Farooq is ‘around thirty years old, with hair that fell in ringlets to his shoulders offsetting a beard neither hipster nor ecosystem but simply masculine’ (Shamsie, p. 125). Finding an ‘instant glamour to him that excused all accents’ (Shamsie, p. 125), Parvaiz feels a magnetic attraction as Farooq displays both tenderness and boy scout know-how when he extracts a splinter from his hand that had lodged itself during the previous night’s attack in the park. After making an indelible impression on the depressed young man, Farooq restores a sense of masculine pride to Parvaiz by apologizing for the actions of his cousin in the park last night and, upon returning his stolen telephone, admitting that his cousin ‘didn’t realise who you were’ (Shamsie, p. 125). Assuming that Farooq was referring to his sister Aneeka, Parvaiz is shocked to discover that his alluring new acquaintance is, in fact, gesturing towards his deceased father Adil Pasha. Until this moment, Parvaiz had been raised to consider his father a shameful secret, one that must be kept from the world outside or else posters would appear around Preston Road with the line DO YOU KNOW WHO YOUR NEIGHBOURS ARE? And rocks would be thrown through windows and he and his sisters wouldn’t receive invitations to the homes of their classmates and no girl would ever say yes to him. (Shamsie, p. 128)

Of all the Pasha family, only his grandmother ‘had wanted to talk about the absence in their lives’ (Shamsie, p. 128). As such, Parvaiz enjoyed a clandestine closeness with his grandmother as she ‘would call him into her room and whisper stories about the high-spirited, good-looking, laughing-eyed boy she’d raised’ (Shamsie, p. 129). Still, as Parvaiz progressed through puberty into adulthood, he could not shake off a curiosity about his father and even his grandmother told stories that ‘were always of a boy, never of the man he became’ (Shamsie, p. 129). Consequently, Parvaiz developed an intense anxiety over not knowing his father that impacted upon his sense of masculine selfhood. More specifically, Parvaiz is described as watching ‘boys and their fathers with an avidity composed primarily of hunger’ and so: Whenever any of those fathers had made a certain kind of gesture towards him – a hand placed on the back of his neck, the word ‘son,’ an invitation to a football match – he’d retreat, ashamed and afraid in a jumbled way that grew more so as the years passed and as the worlds of girls and boys grew more separate; there were times he was not a twin but rather the only male in a house that knew all the secrets women shared with one another but none that fathers taught their sons. (Shamsie, p. 129)

Parvaiz sets out an extremely normative definition of masculinity as a male identity that men supposedly learn from their fathers. By not knowing his father and, indeed

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from having to supress any knowledge of him, he evinces a deep-rooted anxiety that he is a ‘failed man’. Particularly conspicuous in the quotation is how Parvaiz portrays the family home as being dominated by women therein implying that his home lacks a male to act as ‘head of the household’ and, as such, not only has he not been ‘schooled’ in the practices of masculinity but his gendered selfhood has also been enfeebled by coming into contagious contact with too many women. Within this context, Isma’s tendency to repeat the cost of ‘the household’s monthly expenditure’ when ‘she wanted to remind Parvaiz that his earnings as a greengrocer’s assistant were insufficient, that the time he spent building up his sound reel rather than chasing after job postings was wasteful’ only compound Parvaiz’s attitude that he is failing to present a normative masculinity that depends on providing for himself and those around him (Shamsie, p. 121). Farooq refurbishes Parvaiz with a revived sense of self-worth. Rather than forcing him to repeat the line ‘I never knew my father’ to all who enquired (Shamsie, p. 172), Farooq tells Parvaiz that Adil Pasha was a paternal figure worthy of his pride. In contrast to the absent and uncaring father narrative that he had been forced to imbibe, Farooq reveals that Adil Pasha was actually known in jihadi circles as ‘Abu Parvaiz’, or ‘Father of Parvaiz’, so that ‘anytime someone said his name–his enemies, with fear; his brothers, with love; his comrades – with honour – they were saying your name too’ (Shamsie, p. 127). Even the poisonous beliefs that his father developed are varnished and repackaged as being merely anti-establishment, anti-capitalist and antiimperialist thus his father was a man who did not ‘want the world to be as it is’ and had ‘larger responsibilities than the ones his wife and mother want to chain him to’ (Shamsie, p. 131). Having resisted the ‘chains’ of committed family life, Adil Pasha is recast as a freedom fighter in Chechnya and Bosnia as opposed to an oppressive enabler of rigidly conservative forms of politicized Islam. The destructive nature of these glossed depictions and their effect upon the impressionable young man are evocatively captured when Parvaiz is shown ‘tracing the lines of his own palm with [a] grenade pin’ (Shamsie, p. 131). At every step, Farooq demonstrates a shrewd ability to manipulate Parvaiz’s anxieties all of which ‘returned to the central preoccupation of Farooq’s life, the heart of all his lessons: how to be a man’ (Shamsie, p. 132). This obsession with masculinity becomes the prism through which Farooq teaches Parvaiz about the history of the Islamicate world as he tells him that a ‘thousand years of Muslim supremacy’ were ‘eventually squandered by eunuchlike Ottomans and Mughals who had lost sight of the moral path, and then the bloodlust with which the Christians had avenged themselves for their centuries of humiliation’ (Shamsie, p. 131). Furthermore, Farooq warns Parvaiz of the ‘emasculated version of Islam, bankrolled in mosques by the British government, which wants to keep us all compliant’ (Shamsie, p. 133). Failing to behave accordingly as a man, then, is highlighted as the root cause of all societal and civilizational ills affecting Muslims in both the UK and abroad. Eventually, Farooq extends his analysis to Parvaiz’s home life and reassures his susceptible companion that his current despondency is his ‘sisters’ fault’ as: They want you in the house, doing their shopping and mowing the garden, so they’ve tried to keep you a boy, a child in need of a mother. That older one

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particularly, you know what I mean? The one who claims to be a good Muslim, and thinks she has the right to decide whether or not you can live in your own house. Tell her it is written in the Quran, ‘Men are in charge of women because Allah made one of them excel the other.’ And by Allah’s law, you, not your women, dispose of your property. (Shamsie, p. 132)

Confirming his supressed feelings of masculine inadequacy, speaking to his discomfort at having to deny his family heritage while also giving him ammunition in his frustrations towards his female siblings, Farooq inspires an uncompromising loyalty in Parvaiz. Meeting furtively in different locations every day, Parvaiz’s change in behaviour is ironically assumed by Aneeka as evidence of a clandestine love affair. In fact, Parvaiz does single out his friendship with Farooq in terms that imply something physical and more deeply rooted than a casual acquaintance. Describing how the English word for friend cannot convey the level of affection that he feels for Farooq, he uses the Urdu phrase ‘jigari dost – a friendship so deep it was lodged within you, could not be cut out without leaving a profound, perhaps fatal, wound’ (Shamsie, p. 136). In fact, their relationship does take on a physical turn as Farooq, with the aid of his friends, begin replicating the torture methods that Adil Pasha suffered in Guantanamo Bay Prison upon Parvaiz’s body, including forms of water and sonic torture and pressing a red-hot iron into his flesh. These abusive measures, which Chambers points out are appropriated from ‘the West’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques’, are supposedly inspired by Farooq’s desire that Parvaiz understands what his father experienced.27 However, such bogus justification is quickly debunked when Farooq starts to talk about the lands controlled by Daesh and suggest that Parvaiz can go there to a place where ‘schools and hospitals are free, and rich and poor have the same facilities […] men are men […] no one has to enter haram gambling shops to earn a living, but can provide for his family with dignity’. Crucially, it is also a place where you can own a ‘villa, your own car […] you can speak openly about your father, with pride, not shame’ (Shamsie, p. 147). Absurdly, it is precisely through the immoral interrogation techniques employed at Guantanamo that Farooq achieves his aim: to admit Parvaiz into the ranks of Daesh. In doing so, Shamsie’s text not only underscores the immorality of painful torture and its habit of achieving whatever aim it sets out to do by, to paraphrase Chambers, making people feel disconnected from their bodies and surroundings, but also, in a manner reminiscent of dark humour, suggests in Parvaiz’s desire to repeat the agony he received on subsequent occasions, a potentially sadomasochistic homoerotic bond between the pair. In the case of the latter, it can be argued that Shamsie is sending up the rigid heteronormative scripts of masculinity so cherished by Farooq. Nevertheless, Parvaiz’s angst accords with a range of work by scholars such as Ana Jordan on crises of masculinity. Writing that talk of ‘crises of masculinity’ is never far away in British media, politics and popular culture, Jordan notes how ‘absent’ fatherhood and the ‘breakdown’ of the family are frequently employed as supposed causes of a crisis in which young men leave school with less qualifications than women, more working-class men face unemployment than their female

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working-class counterparts, more men engage in criminal behaviour than women and rates of suicide are consistently higher for men than women.28 When it comes to men engaging in terrorist activity, sociologists such as Maleeha Aslam, have also shown how phenomena such as sons who have not known their fathers or lacked father figures are often invoked as reasons to identify why men raised in Britain and US-America may engage in terrorist attacks.29 In this respect, then, Shamsie’s depiction of Parvaiz is very much in line with contemporary popular theorists on gender. However, I would criticize this aspect of Shamsie’s fictional rendering of masculinities, as disappointingly one-dimensional. Following the path of arguments posed by Raewyn Connell, who points out that both practices of gender and constructions of the family are unstable concepts that shift according to historical, socio-political or economic context, I approach the notion of masculinity crises with sceptical caution.30 Particularly germane to Parvaiz’s fatherless family, Connell shows how supposed ‘crises of masculinity’ have been weaponized to harm men raised by single, adoptive, same-sex or transgender parents therein assuming that masculinity is an inherently male characteristic that someone develops from the ‘pater familias’ rather than a pattern of gender practices not dependent on individuals with male bodies.31 In the case of protagonist Parvaiz, the novel gives the reader little ground to interpret his decision to join Daesh other than in situations frequently invoked by conservative circles to demonize families that are deemed untraditional or unconventional. While I am not ascribing any malintent to Shamsie, and it can be argued that just as Parvaiz’s and Farooq’s views are certainly not endorsed then neither are crisis of masculinity narratives, I think that the novel’s engagement with terrorist masculinities is superficial when read alongside more sympathetic and politically attentive portrayals, such as the genuine moments of anguish felt by victims of racism in Kureishi and Smith’s more comical novels or even in the despair at socio-economic disadvantage felt by characters in Ali’s and Gunaratne’s texts. Even so, Rehana Ahmed is right to point out that ‘all of the significant encounters [in the novel] are between British Muslims, rather than between Muslims and white secular Britons’.32 As such, the novel ‘shifts the focus partly from cultural and religious difference to class difference’ and serves to ‘underline the heterogeneity of British Muslims, and so break down the dichotomy between nonMuslims and Muslims’.33 While I certainly see Ahmed’s point, especially when Parvaiz, Isma and Aneeka are contrasted with Eamonn, I am still unconvinced that the novel is so sensitive in its discussion of Parvaiz’s motives and his masculinity. Unfortunately, this is an effect compounded by the novel’s failure to satisfyingly engage with Parvaiz’s deceased mother who is rarely referred to in the text. Parvaiz’s desire to join Daesh, then, problematically seems to come down to a dubious mixture of having a Muslim background and an absent father figure instead of exploring, for example, racialized marginalization or socio-economic deprivation in greater and more nuanced detail. As such, when the reader learns that a member of MI5’s Special Branch had visited him as a child and ‘played racing cars with him’ in the hope he would inadvertently divulge information on his father or display potential signs of his father’s extremism, the reader may be left with the impression that the novel does not necessarily do enough to criticize this view (Shamsie, p. 126). Disconcertingly, the novel appears closer to

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endorsing the views of the fictional Home Secretary Karamat Lone than challenging existing stereotypes about maladjusted young Muslim men. When Eamonn tells his father Karamat Lone that his new girlfriend Aneeka is the sister of a Muslim man who has left to aid Daesh in Syria, Karamat instantly identifies her brother and his reasoning speaks to the troubling discourses of Muslim masculinities in the novel: I know all their names. Where they come from. Who they were before they went. There’s only one from Preston Road. It’s the last place in England I’d expect to find that kind of thing happening. But that one, he had exceptional circumstances. Terrorism as family trade. Illustrative of how much you need to do to root out this sort of thing. I mean, literally, grab by the roots and pull. Pull the children out of those environments before they’re old enough for the prison to seep in. (Shamsie, p. 110)

Karamat’s view, then, is that Parvaiz’s reasoning lies in his father’s choices. In other words, Karamat supports a popular but rather suspect line of thought encompassed in idiomatic phrases such as ‘like father, like son’ and ‘the apple never falls far from the tree’. My contention is that the novel could do more to confront or complicate such opinions and, later on in the chapter, I will address this criticism further. When the character of Parvaiz and his anxieties about paternal role models are read alongside the relationship of Yusuf and Irfan to their deceased father then some of the problematic aspects of Home Fire come into tighter focus. As Yusuf illustrates, his father’s position as imam at the local mosque granted both him and his brother a certain prestige among Muslims living on the housing estate and, as such, much of his early life was ‘set in orbit around the mosque’ (Gunaratne, p. 43). Even Selvon reflects on how ‘Muslims on road would treat him [Yusuf] different because of who his pops was’ (Gunaratne, p. 43). Unlike the coaching in Islam that Parvaiz receives from Farooq in Home Fire, Yusuf and Irfan’s father, referred to as Abba, was a liberal imam who was respected in the community for his scholarly approach to the religion and, in his children, both inspired ‘a sort of silent pride a son has for a serious father’ and instilled a respect for the multiple ways that people can practise Islam. For example, both Yusuf and Irfan are taught to perform tilawat (to recite the Koran) but their father insists that it is not necessary for either of them to do so in Arabic, as Yusuf reminisces how their father told them that ‘every person performs tilawat differently. You need not understand the words to feel them’ (Gunaratne, p. 90). Within this environment of acceptance and loving spirituality, Yusuf even admits that ‘we belonged’ to ‘the wall and people’ of the mosque ‘every bit as much as [the] Estate’ (Gunaratne, p. 90). Despite this, Yusuf lets evidence of a considerably less egalitarian relationship between him and his brother Irfan slip as he describes developing ‘a juvenile competitiveness’ with his brother as to ‘who could recite the Qur’an best’ and so impress their father (Gunaratne, p. 90). However, the geopolitical changes set in motion by the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have ramifications for Muslims living on the estate and, consequently, their family. Yusuf remembers:

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When 9/11 happened I was bare young. But I saw how the years that came after it affected Abba, in ways he never got to reconcile. He became muted. Disturbed by a brand of worship that became less about history and art, the Islam he loved, and more about the hate curdled up in the present. I remember once when he made a sermon he was heckled down by another in the crowd. His face afterward was angry and sad that his sons had to hear it. Mosque too became cold and unforgiving after that. The place changed hands, ennet. I began to notice raised voices between my father and those other men in kameez who would shuffle in and out East Block for prayer and tea. Those meetings became less frequent after a while, until they stopped altogether. (Gunaratne, p. 91)

The forces Yusuf alludes to are the militant Salafi jihadist network Al-Muhajiroun, or as Yusuf refers to them: ‘the Muhajiroun’ (Gunaratne, p. 97). Founded by Omar Muhammad Bakri, a Syrian who had been expelled from Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia before settling in the UK, the group, who periodically change their name to evade the law, propagate terrorist acts in order to further their ideology; principal among their beliefs is that Muslims around the world should unite and live what they argue is a literalist Islamic way of life that, for instance, punishes homosexuality, executes non-Muslims and prohibits women from working.34 Through their spokesperson Anjem Choudary, the group have made a number of offensive pronouncements, such as praising the terrorists behind 9/11 as ‘magnificent martyrs’ and have found small pockets of support in Britain, for instance taking control of the Finsbury Park Mosque in the London area of Islington between 1997 and 2003 until the mosque was closed and reopened under new, unaffiliated management. More pertinent to the novels discussed in this chapter, Al-Muhajiroun have also claimed responsibility for the murder of the British soldier Lee Rigby, whose death is the inspiration for Gunaratne’s novel, the 2017 London Bridge attack and have had some of their members travel to Syria to support the aims of Daesh. Unlike Home Fire, In Our Mad and Furious City clearly grounds the terrifying transformations happening in the estate in the socio-political present as forms of protest masculinity within the context of inner-city East London’s socio-economic deprivation. However, it is also a generational shift, as Selvon reveals: [The] Muslim lot were always safe to me tho, at least early on. There was always suttan kind and well-meaning about the older ones you met on road […] It was only when Yoos’s dad died that I noticed all the changes. Lot of them youngers around Estate started wearing them dark colours. Red-brown Muslim dress and that same skull cap. Kept carrying around books and leaflets and that. Started bopping around in twos and threes, calling themselves Muhajiroun or suttan. A few of them Arab olders even stopped turning up for footie yuno. That’s when you knew it was serious. Them Muslim olders were the ones that started footie in the Square. That’s why it was proper weird. (Gunaratne, p. 44)

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Like the football scene examined earlier in the chapter, a number of young Muslims start turning their back on the collective transcultural belonging of the estate in favour of reactive religio-political forms of identification which significantly also uses the vocabulary of brotherhood as Muhajiroun members call each other ‘brothers’. Selvon evocatively describes this loss of individuality when he witnesses a group of Muhajiroun on the estate: It was suttan about how they all looked alike, dressed the same and stood in the same manner. They all spoke like they were from Ends but as if they were repping suttan bigger than the Ends, bigger than Estate or borough even. (Gunaratne, p. 43)

Likewise, Yusuf describes how, during prayer, the group were a ‘a single tide pulled toward the dome and heaven above and then back to earth’ (Gunaratne, p. 115). The rise of the Muhajiroun has a devastating effect on Yusuf and Irfan’s family. His father’s loss of influence in the mosque leads him to retreat into his study and to behave cruelly to his wife, as Yusuf recalls hearing his father ‘shouting at Amma about some minor thing and I’d hear her crying afterward from behind the bathroom door. Abba took it out on her, but wouldn’t tell us what was happening at the mosque’ (Gunaratne, p. 113). Whereas the mosque had been a space of belonging, now ‘the drive to prayer took on a sense of dread’ and it was ‘as if my father had to absolve something to allow himself to drive through the mosque gate’ (Gunaratne, p. 113). Within this gloomy ambience, Yusuf ’s father brings home a computer and hooks the family onto the world wide web thereby signalling a change in the siblings’ relationship. Looking at back at how he had ‘idolised’ his brother ‘more than’ he did his father, Yusuf remembers how Irfan ‘had always been a ready source to listen and learn from’. (Gunaratne, p. 92). Respecting him to such a degree that he ‘imitated him, nagged him, and aped his language’ (Gunaratne, p. 92), their close connection is torn apart by the arrival of the internet within the family home. Going from living ‘in our own collective spaces’, where the pair would play and support each other, as shown metaphorically in a game of hide and seek in which their ‘father’s desk lamp became a searchlight and his heavy wooden desk became Alcatraz’ but unwaveringly Irfan would ‘never fail to search’ for his brother and ‘find’ him, Irfan slunk off into his own world and no longer resembles his brother but merely ‘the shape of him’ (Gunaratne, p. 92). Yusuf remembers how: It was as if Irfan resented having to deal with the real world, my mother, my father, and me, flesh and blood not hidden behind a computer screen. And Abba, who had always devoted the best part of his time to God and to heaven, how could his sons have hoped to claim his attention from either? (Gunaratne, p. 114)

Matters only deteriorate after the death of their father. With the passing away of the moderate imam, the path becomes clear for a complete takeover of the mosque by the Muhajiroun and hence support of the two young men falls under the jurisdiction of the new imam, Abu Farouk.

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Under Abu Farouk’s leadership, their father’s memory and his Islamic beliefs are denigrated. In particular, their father’s management of the mosque is held responsible for Irfan’s failed marriage and his destructive addiction to pornography. As Yusuf recalls, Irfan’s marriage to a Pakistani woman named Muna was arranged in the months following their father’s death and initially the excitement of his mother’s planning made Yusuf feel as if they were ‘molded’ back into being ‘a proper family again’ (Gunaratne, p. 145). However, not long later, Muna had left Irfan after finding ‘a hard drive heavy with pornographic images of teenage girls’ (Gunaratne, p. 175). Such ‘was the quantity of obscene material, amassed over so many years’, which included images of women who ‘might have been underage’, that Muna reported her husband to the police (Gunaratne, p. 175). Irfan’s affliction is something ‘he had carried within him since he was thirteen’ and now, at the age of twenty, ‘it had become so entwined within that these urges were a part of his every waking moment’ and so it was ‘a perversion, a compulsion, fattened in some Internet cavern of dark pornography’ (Gunaratne, p. 176). In particular, Muna discovers that he had been in a ‘three-year email affair with a chat-room girl in Lahore’ while he had also been making ‘homemade videos from supermarkets and parks’ that ‘he would share and distribute across forums with other anonymous, tarnished men’ (Gunaratne, p. 176). Abu Farouk’s verdict on Irfan’s pornography habits is that this is the natural consequence of too much time spent in corruptive contact with ‘nonbelievers’, he continues: This is what happens when you bathe among non-believers. The infidel does not believe what you believe, you understand? That is their abyss. Their filth. In Irfan you can see this, this heresy. That is the result of your father’s ways. You cannot see that? When he was alive he wanted us to love side by side. Abide by our way and same time, theirs. But this is bid’ah. You cannot be both. (Gunaratne, p. 148)

Referring to their father’s open-minded approach as ‘bid’ah’, or heretical innovation of religious matters, Abu Farouk actually adopts a view that is not dissimilar to Karamat Lone’s condemnation in Home Fire by telling Irfan that ‘his blood is your blood, evil breeds in a nest that has no discipline, virtue and goodness come only from Allah’ (Gunaratne, p. 149). Like Lone, then, Abu Farouk blames the father for the sins of the son. Just as Lone views Parvaiz’s family as infected with an aggressive form of Islam, then Abu Farouk reads Yusuf and Irfan as poisoned by their father’s liberal approach and desire to work with the diverse communities that live on the estate. Yusuf discloses how Abu Farouk spoke of ‘the West, Irfan’s corruption, and my own failure as a brother’. But crucially, he ‘spoke of London as a city of darkness and impurity’ while the mosque, under his leadership, had become a space ‘of sanctuary, purity and sublimity’ in which Irfan ‘could still be saved’ and ‘pulled back from the abyss’ (Gunaratne, p. 150). His plan, then, is to send both Yusuf and Irfan to their ‘Mother Country’ of Pakistan where they will be educated by the Muhajiroun in Lahore. Signifying this conversion to the Muhajiroun forces, Abu Farouk gives them a set of identical Muhaijroun clothing which he expects them now to wear at all times. In a state of despair, his brother is accepting of these new changes who is given an easy

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narrative from which to absolve himself of any accountability. Yusuf explains how ‘Abu Farouk had told us that his sickness was not of his own making. As if his heart was lent this horror by the city, by its impurity, by the West […] I looked into his [Irfan’s] eyes and I could already see the lie spreading’ (Gunaratne, p. 178). Yet in the character of Yusuf, Gunaratne’s novel challenges Abu Farouk’s simplistic logic and binary thinking while also not discounting the corrosive effects of their family life, as Yusuf is able to see that Abu Farouk ‘offered another fantasy’. Recollecting the night when he and his mother first learnt of his brother’s circumstances, Yusuf demonstrates a crucial critical awareness of the matters at hand: Out of love for him we cursed the world outside, the phantom away in the air, the pollution of a society that made such things possible. Inside I was angry. Even as I sat comforting him, reaching out to touch him in an urge to protect, I felt my hand flinch for a moment as I stroked his hair. He was the eldest, the bright-eyed mathematician. How had he fallen? Let himself fall and lose out to this scattered and self-abusing fool? A missing man who had forgotten how to reason and fight for himself. Though I loved him, I was ashamed. (Gunaratne, p. 176)

Yusuf ’s conflicting emotions notwithstanding, the protagonist shows a rejection of convenient but illusive blaming on the ills of a supposedly permissive society as captured by references to a phantom in the air. Later in the narrative, Yusuf confronts his brother with this realization and, while holding him as his ‘father would have’, he tells him ‘there is no one out here except you bro. You did it. You have to take it man. Take the responsibility, like, even though it’s hard’ (Gunaratne, p. 179). His brother tries to pull away, but Yusuf says clearly that ‘it weren’t the West bruv. We are the fuckin West, Irfan. It was you’ (Gunaratne, p. 179). Yusuf, however, is unable to convince his brother who, in the reactionary logic of Abu Farouk and the Muhajiroun, has found a suitable alibi. Nevertheless, with the protagonist Yusuf ’s approach, Gunaratne’s novel includes a valuable perspective that shirks off the moral certainties signalled by the mosque’s new management and also avoids attributing blame onto grand narratives. Yusuf is therefore an important voice of ambivalence and complexity in a series of discourses that often tend to be essentialized in sweeping scripts such as ‘crisis of masculinity’ narratives. However, while In Our Mad and Furious City looks at the present with a more reflective eye, Home Fire at times feels more literal in its dissection of the present, as shown in the protagonist Karamat Lone. Karamat owes his success, the reader learns, to careful planning of when and where to publicize his Muslim background, as the novel puts it ‘an ambitious son of migrants who married money and class and social contacts in order to transform himself into an influential party donor’ and ‘used his identity as a Muslim to win, then jettisoned it when it started to damage him’ (Shamsie, p. 260). In particular, the reader learns that Lone had suffered from the intrusive and illiberal press after a photograph of him ‘entering a mosque that had been in the news for its “hate preacher” had been publicised under the headline ‘LONE WOLF’S PACK REVEALED’ implying that the MP was in cahoots with an allegedly extremist

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branch of Islam (Shamsie, p. 35). In response, Karamat explained that the ‘picture was several years old’ and that ‘he had been there only for an uncle’s funeral prayers and would otherwise never enter a gender-segregated space’ (Shamsie, p. 36). A quick-fire programme of counter-images followed that sought to show Karamat as a man with a Muslim background who also has deep respect for Britain’s Christian heritage, as ‘pictures of him and his wife walking hand in hand into a church’ circulated in the popular press (Shamsie, p. 36). However, his Muslim-majority constituency voted him out in the elections that took place just a few weeks later, but he was quickly back in Parliament via a by-election, in a safe seat with a largely white constituency, and the tabloids that had attacked him now championed him as a LONE CRUSADER taking on the backwardness of British Muslims. (Shamsie, p. 36)

Employing imagery that recalls the sharp, essentializing divisions between the Christian-majority West and its medieval-era attempts to ‘civilise’ the Muslim-majority East, the incident causes Karamat to view his background as an obstacle. However, through careful machinations, Karamat is able to paint a picture of himself akin to that of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s much-cited phrase ‘native informant’ whose heritage gives him both a clearer insight into the thorny topic of Islamic radicalization in Britain and so is best placed to combat it.35 Likewise, it enables him to project an image of himself as a courageous advocate of liberalism who expressed ‘a completely enlightened preference for the conventions of a church over those of a mosque’ and qualifies him to speak ‘of the need of British Muslims to lift themselves out of the Dark Ages if they wanted the rest of the nation to treat them with respect’ (Shamsie, p. 61). Karamat is therefore reborn into a form of semi-loathing patriot who feels possession over ‘His London’ and is keen to erase evidence of elsewhere in his heritage (Shamsie, p. 243), as captured by a moment where Karamat reflects on how ‘the first Indian cricketer to be loved by the English, Ranjitsinhji, always wore his sleeves buttoned at the wrist to hide his dark skin – something about holding an expensive glass of wine made Karamat understand how he felt’ (Shamsie, p. 246).36 Muslimness, then, as shown by this moment is not only a religious or cultural affiliation which is popularly associated with foregoing alcohol but is also imagined as a form of racialization that he wishes to escape. Karamat’s character parallels the trajectories followed by many real-life British politicians of Muslim heritage in the years following, for example, the Satanic Verses Affair, 9/11, 7/7 and terrorist attacks planned by Daesh. As such, readers could be forgiven for imagining that his characterization is a straightforward biography of current chancellor of exchequer and former home secretary Sajid Javid, especially when it transpires that, like Javid, Karamat comes from humble and pious origins. Thus, when his son Eamonn delivers a gift to Auntie Naseem for Isma, Eamonn reflects that ‘these were the homes of the affluent relatives whose lives his father had aspired to when he sat up all night in his cramped flat in Bradford, studying for exams […] onto the surface that was kitchen counter, dining table, and workspace for his seamstress

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mother’ while ‘a large poster of the Ka’aba’ was on the wall across from him (Shamsie, p. 62). Echoing Javid’s interviews during the Conservative Party Leadership contest of 2019 where he spoke of being attacked by the National Front and attending anti-racist marches, Karamat was also politicized in his youth by anti-racist movements, such as the famous Rock Against Racism March and Concert of 1978 which was headlined by the iconic British band The Clash.37 As such, Karamat may well resemble Javid a little too literally at times and, although Javid had not yet served as home secretary at the time of Home Fire’s composition and first publication, it is worth pointing out that perhaps it is Shamsie’s intention to unambiguously highlight the hypocrisies of politicians such as Javid. To this end, Shamsie is successful in showing that being a Muslim in contemporary Britain is to be forced to navigate a series of racist, Islamophobic and gendered discourses however Karamat’s response is to become complicit with these forces of oppression rather than challenge them. Nevertheless, the certainty of Karamat is disrupted by his Irish American wife Terry and his son Eamonn who, suggestive of this less rigid mindset, has a name that calls to mind both the name of Muslim heritage Ayman and his Irish cultural background. Responding to the news that Eamonn is dating the sister and daughter of known terrorists, Eamonn and Terry try to appeal to Karamat’s better nature by pleading with him to arrange for Parvaiz’s return home and then, after Parvaiz’s death, the return of his body. Unsurprisingly, once Parvaiz finds his way to Raqqa and takes up employment as a sound engineer in Daesh’s propaganda machine, Parvaiz learns that his stories spun by his charming friend Farooq are indeed gross exaggerations. Parvaiz soon discovers that Daesh are committing gross acts of human cruelty on all who dare to express alternative opinions, particularly women. Lasting six months, Parvaiz manages to make his way back to Istanbul by hitching a ride to pick up new recruits and, once in the Turkish city, he makes his way to the British Consulate from where he hopes to acclaim asylum. Yet in an act which calls to mind a car bomb detonated by al-Qaeda militants outside the UK consulate in Istanbul in 2003, Parvaiz is killed in a drive-by shooting by members of Daesh.38 Rather than transport his body back to the UK, however, Karamat opts to strip the dual nationality Parvaiz of his British citizenship, thereby forcing Pakistan to deal with (and pay) for the young man’s burial. This decision more than anything else causes Eamonn to change his views on his father. At the beginning of the novel, Eamonn defends his father by saying that ‘he had to be more careful than any other MP, and at times that meant doing things he regretted’ yet ‘the wrong choices he made, they were necessary to get him to the right place, the place he is now’; a place from which, Eamonn believed, his father can make lives better, especially, for minorities. When Aneeka explains her family history to him, Eamonn immediately tells his father in the naïve hope that he will use his exceptional powers to help Parvaiz return safely to Britain. To begin with, Eamonn tells him that he is dating a Muslim woman and his reactions are far more accommodating than his son had feared. Strikingly, Karamat reveals that he prefers the thought of a religious Muslim daughter-in-law than ‘all the double-barrelled girls whose fathers don’t waste a minute telling me of their family’s long association with India’ (Shamsie, p. 108). These references to colonial nostalgia reveal anxieties in Karamat’s masculinity as he

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interprets their misplaced pride in ancestors who ‘helped quell the Mutiny’, referring here to the Sepoy War of 1857, as a not-so-subtle jibe at his heritage as a colonized, and therefore supposedly inferior, subject and a veiled way of informing him that his son ‘isn’t good enough for their daughter’ (Shamsie, pp. 108–9).39 Besides this, Karamat also suggests that Aneeka’s Islam is a form of ongoing teenage rebellion she can grow out of as ‘she’s only nineteen’. Like his public persona as a patriotic British man, Aneeka can similarly undergo a transformation as he himself ‘grew up a believing Muslim’ and ‘didn’t harm anyone but myself with it’ (Shamsie, p. 109). The mood changes, however, when he realizes that his son’s new girlfriend is the brother of Parvaiz Pasha and son of Adil Pasha and Eamonn finds that ‘where there’d been a father, now there was a home secretary’ (Shamsie, p. 111). Crucially, the way Karamat responds to his son is wrapped up in his own discourses of masculinity. Eamonn is therefore a ‘weak boy’ rather than a man with ‘a spine’ and he dismisses the son’s claims to loving Aneeka as being little more than lust, asking him ‘did she give you your first really great blow job, Eamonn? Is that what this is about? Because trust me, there are better ones out there’ (Shamsie, p. 230). Such crude logic reveals that Karamat is unable to read Eamonn as an adult capable of genuine loving feelings for Aneeka and, in this, he is challenged by his wife Terry who questions her husband’s fidelity and commitment to his family. In contrast, Eamonn ignores his father’s sexualized baiting, to which Karamat again questions his son’s masculinity as he ponders whether his son knows ‘about the rules between men’ (Shamsie, p. 245) that supposedly dictate that heterosexual men should not repeat sexualized boasts or comments to their female partners, and cuts off contact with him thereby leading to the novel’s extraordinary ending that will be discussed in greater detail in the final section of my chapter which explores the metaphorical meaning of Yusuf, Eamonn and Parvaiz’s deaths.

‘Everything else you can live around, but not death’ In a lecture given in 1975, Michel Foucault set out his formulation of biopower to describe how structures of power are intimately connected with the life and death of populations.40 Foucault distinguished between disciplinary power, exerted by institutions such as schools, prisons and military service, and forms of regulatory power that came with the growth of industrial capital and simultaneous advancements in technology. According to Foucault, disciplinary power separates groups of people into individuals who can be singled out for surveillance and social conditioning. In contrast, regulatory power is ‘directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species’ thereby focusing on populations and not solely on individual bodies.41 Statistical analysis is central to the development of regulatory power as states can monitor populations through data such as birth, death and disease rates. Biopower, then, refers to a form of security apparatus that works to reduce risk, optimize health and boost the productivity of a population. However, Foucault argued that the rise of biopower also ushered in a shift in the relationship between sovereignty and death. Historically, sovereign structures had ‘the

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right to take life or let live’,42 while biopower led to a new set of rights in which the state now had ‘the right to make live and let die’.43 In other words, this is the ‘right’ to choose which populations are protected through biopolitical apparatus and those who are excluded from this protection. Crucially, the advent of biopower did not lead to the cancellation of previous systems of sovereignty, however, but instead modern statistics and technologies only further cemented sovereign power over the life and death of certain populations. Foucault famously used this concept to explore how groups of people that are deemed to compromise the health and productivity of socalled ‘normative’ populations are excluded from biopolitical protection. In particular, Foucault explored how biopolitics has given rise to what he terms ‘state racism’, or ‘a racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements and its own products […] the internal racism of permanent purification, and it will become one of the basic dimensions of social normalisation’.44 Within systems of state racism, whatever race is sovereign can therefore use biopolitical technologies to ensure ‘the more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I – as species rather than individual – can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate’.45 Biopolitics can therefore be harnessed by states to engineer the health of different populations and, more insidiously, justify the right to kill off sections of society. In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe developed Foucault’s concept by focusing not on the state’s power to decide what populations can live but, on the flipside, how sovereignty is complicit in letting certain populations die.46 To this end, Mbembe added two crucial dimensions: namely ‘the relation to enmity’, which described how sovereign powers use threats from a fictionalized enemy to justify biopolitical technologies, and ‘the state of exception’, in which the rule of law is suspended to this perceived threat. In particular, Mbembe’s work centres on spaces of colonization and apartheid states that operate in states of emergency. For him, the colony is the ultimate space of exception as it ‘represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end”’.47 However, across all the necropolitical economies that he examines, Mbembe draws attention to what he terms the production of ‘death worlds’ in which the inhabitants are reduced to the status of ‘living dead’.48 As I will elaborate over subsequent pages, the ways that masculinized Muslim bodies die in each novel suggest a critical reading through the lens of Foucault’s and Mbembe’s work on biopolitics and necropolitics. I turn first to the dramatic ending of Home Fire in which Eamonn, having been unable to convince his father to allow Parvaiz’s dead body to return for burial in British soil, goes to join Aneeka and her brother’s corpse in Pakistan. Eamonn’s decision is a heavy blow to his politician father whose career is jeopardized by his son’s slick video that is released on social media. Employing his ex-girlfriend Alice’s public relations firm to direct the video announcement, Eamonn calmly delineates his reasons for going to Pakistan to support his fiancée Aneeka in her efforts to protest his father Karamat Lone’s decision to repatriate the dead body of Parvaiz Pasha. Looking directly at the camera, he states that he and Aneeka are in love and pleads her case:

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She has been abused for the crime of daring to love while covering her head, vilified for believing that she had the right to want a life with someone whose history is at odd with hers, denounced for wanting to bury her brother beside her mother, reviled for her completely legal protests against a decision by the home secretary that suggests personal animus. Is Britain really a nation that turns people into figures of hate because they love unconditionally? Unconditionally but not uncritically. While her brother was alive that love was turned toward convincing him to return home; now he’s dead it’s turned to convincing the government to return his body home. Where is the crime in this? Dad, please tell me, where is the crime? (Shamsie, p. 258)

Ironically, Karamat completely ignores the moral questioning of Eamonn’s speech and focuses on his phrase ‘personal animus’. What Karamat takes away from this terrible incident, then, is the immediate threat to his career and once Eamonn had used the phrase then ‘he gave carte blanche to every one of [his] political opponents to repeat the claim’ (Shamsie, p. 258). Believing the whole incident was ‘an Asian family drama dragged into Parliament’, he becomes only more convinced of his intransigent world view – that Parvaiz’s body should not return to Britain and that Aneeka’s passport must remain confiscated thereby ensuring her inability to travel back to the UK (Shamsie, p. 258). The final scenes of the novel involve Aneeka arranging for her brother’s corpse to be encased in a virtual coffin made of ice in a park close to the British High Commission in Karachi. Captured by the throngs of journalists who have come to document the spectacle, Aneeka makes a public plea for her brother’s body to be granted passage to the British capital in a bewildering episode that recalls Shamsie’s ancient Greek source text in its theatricality. As Chambers points out, this evocative scene, made all the more surreal as Parvaiz’s body begins to visibly decay under the melting ice, suggests Julia Kristeva’s famous work on the abject insofar as Aneeka grieving for ‘something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object’.49 Matters turn visceral as Aneeka lets out a ‘howling noise’ that not only connotes the practice of public mourning in ancient Greece but also brings to mind connotations of torture that Parvaiz’s father suffered in prison camps and Parvaiz in Farooq’s apartment thereby blurring boundaries between terrorism and state-sanctioned interrogation techniques. Within this extraordinary theatre, however, are terrorists who are hiding within the ranks of congregated journalists watching the spectacle of Aneeka wailing over the ice-coffined Parvaiz. Eventually, and here the novel describes what ‘every television channel replayed […] endlessly’ (Shamsie, p. 272), Eamonn arrives in the park and is accosted by the terrorists. Assuming them to be supportive locals, Eamonn allows himself to be embraced by two men as ‘he’s in a new place, he doesn’t want to offend, he allows himself to be embraced’ (Shamsie, p. 273). However, it transpires that the two men in ‘beige shalwar kameez’ (Shamsie, p. 273) have actually tightened a belt of explosives to his waist and, in a startling crescendo, Aneeka runs to hug him then triggering an explosion that kills him, Aneeka and destroys Parvaiz’s body.

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In Our Mad and Furious City similarly concludes with tragedy but, I argue, the novel’s final moments also pose a number of germane questions relating to the racialization of Muslim masculinities in present-day Britain. Not long after the fateful meeting with Abu Farouk in the mosque and Yusuf ’s confrontation with his brother, Irfan runs off and leaves Yusuf wondering ‘whether he would ever return at all.’ Irfan, in fact, has returned to the mosque where, while ‘shielding his eyes from familiar objects’ and ‘memories that reach out to him from childhood’ (Gunaratne, p. 218), he sets fire to the place of worship. Further degrading the mosque in an act that is saturated with masculine imagery, Irfan unzips his fly then. Pulls himself out in the hot air. He looks down and makes a second slash, his piss crossing the line of petrol. When he is finished, he tucks himself away and looks at the fire above. He exhales a deep moan in to the orange haze. Mashallah my father, I am free. And just as the wave of euphoria had swept over him, it leaves him. (Gunaratne, pp. 219–20)

By both setting fire to and then subsequently urinating on the mosque, Irfan is desecrating his father’s memory and figuratively demolishing the expectations that he should live up to his father’s image. However, this is an act of aggression that is not only intended against the former imam but also meant to aggravate the current mosque leadership who would send him and Yusuf to Pakistan. With regard to the latter, Irfan certainly achieves his aims. Universally interpreted as an arson attack perpetrated by members of a far-right group who are due to march through the estate in protest to the soldiers’ death that opens the novel, the Muhajiroun arrange a counter-protest to the racist rioters. Amidst the chaos of the scene which recalls the fires that engulf the Shaandaar Café in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Abu Farouk, who is evidently energized by the panic, launches into a vitriolic and confrontational speech in which he demonstrably lays blame at the feet of ‘Silent Muslims’ who ‘while witnessing everything around them splinter and crumble, had done nothing to prevent it’ (Gunaratne, p. 251). Emphasizing both the flaming rhetoric and the combusting mosque, Abu Farouk ‘taunted the crows, shamed and scolded us for not acting, for our passivity in practicing Islam and never protecting it’ (Gunaratne, p. 251). It is within this heated atmosphere, however, that the previously cool-minded Yusuf gets swept up in the inflamed rhetoric and loses sight of his priority to find Irfan thereby metaphorically calling to mind the phrase ‘blind anger’. Significantly, Yusuf also loses his sense of individuality and responds to Riaf ’s request that ‘we need you […] we need bodies’, thereby putting on the red-brown shalwar kameez that designates Muhajiroun membership and joining his ‘brothers’ rather than his actual brother Irfan in performed solidarity for the burning mosque (Gunaratne, p. 241). Within this febrile environment, Yusuf stood ‘invisible among them, too weak to pull away’ and, when he locks arms with the Muhajiroun in a human shield formation protecting the burned remains of the mosque, he even speculates that if his mother ‘were to look down at us, she wouldn’t see me’ as, in a description that contradicts his earlier disparagement of racial affinities with Freshie Dave, he ‘was just another among

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a sea of faces like my own’ (Gunaratne, p. 257). However, there are glimmers where the text suggests that Yusuf has not been totally won over by the violent attitudes of the Muhajiroun, such as when he describes ‘mouthing the words absently’ of verses being recited by those in the human shield (Gunaratne, p. 258). Furthermore, Gunaratne makes adept use of smoke and fog as a rhetorical device for conveying the underlying complexities that are dangerously ignored in favour of the aggressive certainties provided by the Muhajiroun and by the far-right racist groups. Thus, into ‘the sick air’, the ‘Muhajiroun were wild-eyed and pushing into the crowd, charging into the fog’ and Yusuf finds that ‘smoke filled my sight, stinging my eyes’ through which his hands ‘grasped out at the air’ as if he were ‘blinded’ thereby preventing him from seeing his previously rational and calm approach (Gunaratne, p. 265). Meaningfully, Yusuf is forced to close his eyes and, when he reopens them, he believes he sees Irfan, only for his ‘hands to go through him like an apparition’ (Gunaratne, p. 265). Yet this moment of clarity in which he is reminded of his family and, soon after, his friends Ardan, Selvon and sense of belonging to the estate, is also his last; Yusuf falls to the ground: his life and the sensitive ambivalence it represented, regained in those final moments amidst the smoke, is literally stamped out by two charging forces – the Muhajiroun and the racist thugs. Amidst this horrific violence, however, the narrative includes flashbacks from two of the novel’s older and non-Muslim protagonists through which the novel powerfully and constructively contextualizes the contemporary Islamophobia that takes Yusuf ’s life. In the first instance, Ardan sees the riot and runs home to his mother Caroline who, the novel details, underwent a traumatic experience growing up in Belfast during Northern Ireland’s period of sustained ethno-national conflict referred to as the Troubles. Caroline’s life has been shadowed by the knowledge that her family, whose sympathies were with the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) armed struggle for Northern Ireland’s independence from the UK, arranged a copycat sexual assault on a unionist family’s daughter in retaliation for a British soldier’s rape and murder of a young woman from a family with a separatist affiliation. Caroline scuppered her family’s plans to commit rape and so was sent away to London where she subsequently displayed debilitating signs of post-traumatic stress assuaged by alcohol abuse. At an earlier point in the novel, Caroline’s memories of her brother joining the IRA actually foreshadow Yusuf and Irfan’s observations of the Muhajiroun. Just as they observe the loss of individuality into a group identity, so too Caroline remembers the ‘horrifying freedom’ in her brother’s eyes as ‘a single chant’ of ‘Ay! Ay! IRA! Ay! Ay! IRA! Ay! Ay! IRA! […] rippled through the crowd’ (Gunaratne, p. 157), thereby implying commonality between the essentializing and violent rhetoric of terrorist forces in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and the compensatory violence against disempowerment propagated by the Muhajiroun. Likewise, when her son Ardan comes to her in a state of shock at the loss of his friend Yusuf, she reflects knowingly that ‘grief is a new thing for the young’ and, as such, points out how this generation of Londoners has less experience of death as those who grew up in the turbulent atmosphere of Northern Ireland during the Troubles (Gunaratne, p. 279). By connecting Caroline’s experiences with the radicalization of young Muslims at the mosque, then, Gunaratne’s novel carefully and thoughtfully invites readers to consider the radicalization and

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racialization of Muslim men and attendant moral panics about terrorism within a longer history of violent resistance against marginalization. Another deeply pertinent viewpoint is provided by the reflections of Selvon’s father Nelson – a bed-bound migrant from Monserrat who arrived in Britain during the 1950s. Throughout much of the novel, Nelson’s perspective is an internal monologue that recollects the repugnant racism many Windrush-era immigrants, like himself, suffered when they arrived on British shores to aid the colonial power’s floundering post-war economy. Becoming involved with the anti-racist struggle during the 1950s through movements like the Coloured Peoples’ Association (CPA), which had been ‘organising for the well-being of the black migrant in Britain, helping to get housing and a work and whatnot’, Nelson later suffers a crisis of faith in the organization when his comrades in the CPA advocate violent resistance during the famous Notting Hill Race Riot of 1958.50 Looking out at the destruction in Notting Hill and choosing to flee, Nelson argues that physical protest ‘was just the same as any other human collapse, the same loose and pointless frenzy’. In his article on memories of anti-racism, McLeod argues that Nelson’s experience, when juxtaposed with the present-day riots that conclude the novel, serves to provide a critical reframing of the ‘fury’ of contemporary London life, one which asks questions about the pugilistic response to persecution with which the novel climaxes and which tragically claims a young life. Gunaratne’s point, I would hazard, is not to exalt the wholesale rejection of anti-racist violence based on Nelson’s sudden pacifism. Instead, the novel suggests that these insights from yesteryear might have the capacity to assist today’s subjugated Londoners in thinking critically about their specific predicaments based upon their knowing of past yet parallel experiences.51

However, McLeod also draws attention to how the passing on of Nelson’s perspective is impeded by the protagonist’s physical condition as he is ‘confined to a wheelchair and unable to move freely or talk’.52 Pointing to a moment in the novel where Nelson tries to communicate with his son Selvon but he cannot be heard, McLeod notes that Nelson’s inability to speak ‘marks a disconnection or fracturing between generations which inhibits the elder’s wisdom from being critically considered by younger Londoners’.53 In placing Nelson and Caroline’s pasts in proximity to the incendiary conditions of contemporary life on the estate, Gunaratne’s novel probes towards a longue durée view of racialized marginalization and resistance in modern Britain. But, as McLeod identifies, Nelson’s condition, and I would add the death of Yusuf and Irfan’s father and Caroline’s retreat into alcoholism, also signifies that ‘memory of those experiences is increasingly circumscribed and silenced by age and mortality’, and in Caroline’s case, a lack of adequate mental health support or provision, ‘so that any kind of engagement with them – critical, condemnatory; empathetic, laudatory – is becoming less and less likely’.54 Broadly, I agree with McLeod’s interpretation, however his reference to age also necessitates a rethinking about the deaths of younger characters and what they symbolize. Tellingly, in the novel’s epilogue, an apparitional Yusuf reflects on how

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Abba would have told me that there was wisdom to be found in seeing cruelty so close and finding violence in the daylight. History, he said, is not a circle but a spiral of violent rhymes. We were meant to bear the foul mess, live on with our voices tied to verse, and those that could survive it would be worthy. This is the truth that our olders knew. Familiar with the echoes on the road, they sensed the fury come but stepped back to let us learn our own frailty. That’s the deep strength that survives in this place, and now it’s our wisdom too. (Gunaratne, pp. 285–6)

Yusuf therefore acknowledges the foresight of previous generations and the ways in which struggles in the present parallel those of the past, but also, depressingly, hints that it is through the death of young people that these messages will be heeded. Summoning back Foucault’s and Mbembe’s formulation of biopolitics and necropolitics with which I opened this section of my chapter, both In Our Mad and Furious City and Home Fire are novels that suggest the foreclosure of political possibilities and the sustainability of necropolitical economies in which racialized Muslim bodies and subjectivities are not afforded the same rights as non-racialized identities. In particular, Home Fire concludes with the British state’s complicity in the death of the novel’s young protagonists. With Parvaiz’s death, and retraction of his nationality, this fictionalized version of the British state also passes up the chance to understand why Parvaiz was seduced by the siren call of Daesh therein also a valuable opportunity to prevent future cases. Meanwhile, Eamonn’s and Aneeka’s deaths also mark a failure for Karamat, and by extension the British government, to treat lives of their citizens with dignity in both life and death. While Karamat’s inevitable removal from office, implied by the hectoring rhetoric of Lone’s political rivals, is also a victory for Islamophobia insofar as the prejudiced stereotypical depiction of the Muslim terrorist is substantiated by the events and Karamat is seen as having been unable to shake off associations with a harmful doctrine of Islam thereby, in the narrowminded perception of his party, casting doubt over future candidates for offices of state with his background. In the case of Karamat and his son Eamonn, socio-economic privilege is shown to be ultimately subservient to the necropolitical economy of the state in which Muslim bodies are viewed as an exceptional threat to the functioning of a ‘normative’ society. In Our Mad and Furious City, on the other hand, posits a complicated, but arguably more hopeful, conclusion. Stating that ‘the only ones that can save us in the end are the heroes’ (Gunaratne, p. 288), Yusuf ’s disembodied voice indicates that society can learn from the deaths of young people and the lives of older generations. Fundamentally, however, In Our Mad and Furious City finishes by posing a series of questions that sharply resonate with the topic of this entire book: In what ways are contemporary forms of radicalization different from earlier forms? What can be gained when we read these present-day versions of protest masculinity in parallel with previous versions? In what ways is the ‘Muslim male’ archetype a continuation of prior discourses of racialization? ***

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The title of this chapter ‘Fathers, brothers, sons’, invokes the significance of families to constructions of migrant and diasporic Muslim masculinities. Yet, over the course of this chapter, we have also considered how this focus on families refers not only to biological kinship but, in the case of the young male protagonists in Gunaratne’s novel, to the close male friendships that also govern their life – characters like Yusuf, Ardan and Selvon frequently referring to themselves as ‘breddas’, or ‘brothers’, or the illusive form of camaraderie offered by the Muhaijaroun’s brotherhood. We have also explored, in Home Fire, how these family ties are strained when male authority is challenged and how, in Shamsie’s novel, this has resulted in crises of masculinity. This is a problematic frame of understanding masculinity that Gunaratne’s novel does not incorporate within its protagonists but rather shows, in Yusuf, an ambivalent, critical yet sensitive young man. Lastly, the chapter has explored the allegorical significance of absent, dead fathers and their dead sons. It is my contention that in their preoccupation with death, these novels broach questions of political futurity: For how long, and why, will the Muslim male be read in fiction as an obtrusive figure within the British nation and, by isolating this archetype for scrutiny, do we in fact ignore more complex configurations of transcultural British identity?

Conclusion: Untranslated Men? The classic questions which every migrant faces are twofold: ‘Why are you here?’ and ‘When are you going home?’ No migrant ever knows the answer to the second question until asked. Only then does she or he know that, really, in the deep sense, she/he’s never going back. Migration is a one way trip. There’s no ‘home’ to go back to. There never was.1 Stuart Hall’s reflections on his migration from Jamaica to Britain capture the predicament of the various protagonists who have populated this study’s interrogation into literary and cinematic portrayals of British Muslim masculinities. Migration sets in motion a process of dislocation alongside encounter and exchange within new cultural landscapes. Over time, migrants’ attitudes to their places of birth, their cultural affiliations, and their previous taken-for-granted assumptions and expectations in phenomena as varied as culinary and sartorial norms to gendered behaviour and performance, change. Subsequent diaspora generations also acquire a unique perspective, as they inherit allegiances to the cultures in which they live and from which they have heritage. It is this from this vantage point that fallacious notions of national culture are challenged and new forms of transcultural belonging that draw across different cultural identities come to the fore. In the corpus of literature and film I have analysed, the focus has been on how this situation is lived out and manifested in performances and practices of masculinity. All of the novels and films in this book have, in their contrasting and comparative ways, shown that migration is a one-way trip from which masculine subjectivities are renegotiated and permanently transformed. The narrative voice in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses observes such a dilemma in the novel’s twin protagonists Gibreel and Saladin who struggle with how to adapt themselves following their ‘angelicdevilish’ fall: Should we even say that these are two fundamentally different types of self? Might we not agree that Gibreel, for all his stage-name and performances; and in spite of born-again slogans, new beginnings, metamorphoses; – has wished to remain, to a large degree, continuous – that is, joined to and arising from his past; – that he chose neither near-fatal illness nor transmuting fall; that, in point of fact, he fears above all things the altered states in which his dreams leak into, and overwhelm, his waking self, making him that angelic Gibreel he has no desire to be; – so that his is still a self which, for our present purposes, we may describe as ‘true’ … whereas

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Saladin Chamcha is a creature of selected discontinuities, a willing re-invention; his preferred revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, ‘false’? And might we then not go on to say that it is this falsity of self that makes possible in Chamcha a worse and deeper falsity – call this ‘evil’ – and that this is the truth, the door, that was opened in him by his fall? – While Gibreel, to follow the logic of our established terminology, is to be considered ‘good’ by virtue of wishing to remain, for all his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslated man. (Rushdie, p. 427)

Migration requires a form of translation in which previously understood ideas of culture, identity and gender undergo renegotiation. Ironically, however, it is Rushdie’s novel that is supposedly so sensitive to the existential dilemmas that immigrants find themselves within, that caused new ruptures in discourses of immigration and diaspora in modern Britain. This has been demonstrated by the variety of novels and films in this book that have chosen to position themselves in one way or another to Rushdie’s novel, most notably Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. However, it is a misnomer to paint these two novels as solely existing in the shadow of Rushdie’s controversial novel. In their own ways, both The Black Album and White Teeth also trace contemporary forms of transcultural Britishness through masculinized protagonists who draw on their migratory heritage as well as globalized cultural and media forms, such as gangster films and popular music. Overall, my comparison demonstrated that some of the literary and cinematic texts that I have engaged with creatively assessed the transcultural positionality of British Muslim masculinities in more successful ways than other texts. Indeed, some of the most cogent displays of transcultural masculinity were observed in Suhayl Saadi’s novel Psychoraag and Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City. In both Saadi’s and Gunaratne’s texts, protagonists use music to express their shifting and asymmetrical allegiances to the cultures that they were born within and live across. Saadi’s novel, in particular, uses music as a thematic and textual vehicle for embracing transculturality and becomes associated with various places and people who have exerted influence upon his selfhood. Furthermore, Psychoraag and In Our Mad, Furious City also use literary form to express the transcultural positionality of their protagonists by utilizing different linguistic and accented registers. Gunaratne’s text is also especially effective in presenting a multi-perspectival approach to contemporary Britain which demonstrates the ways that Muslim masculinities in the novel’s working-class London milieu are produced and constructed within the context of cultural entanglement and material inequalities. To this end, Shamsie’s novel Home Fire is also worth recalling for the ways that multiple Muslim perspectives are juxtaposed and interspliced together thereby challenging monolithic representations about the diverse communities and cultures defined within the ‘British Muslim’ demographic. This optimistic picture of transcultural British Muslim masculinities, however, is nonetheless not wholly successful. For instance, Psychoraag’s positive representation depends on abstracting music from the politics of production and commodification thereby focusing on the transcendental qualities of cultural expression and ignoring the material realities of inequality within capitalist systems. Furthermore, Zaf ’s romantic

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liaisons, in which a Pakistani Scottish woman named Zilla is played off against Babs, a white Scottish woman, render a particularly binaristic engagement with transcultural identity. Rather than a relationship predicated on mutual cultural exchange and entanglement, the allure of Babs is predicated upon her whiteness which Zaf seeks to sexually conquest and capture. Saadi’s image of a transcultural Scottish Muslim identity is hamstrung by the seductions of Scottish nationalism. Zaf ’s belief in an exceptionally tolerant Scotland passes over instances of poverty and disempowerment amongst Muslim immigrant and diaspora communities within Glasgow. Insofar as Zaf ’s radio station allows diasporic youths to express their transcultural positionality, Radio Chaandani’s imminent closure is also a powerful symbol for the precarious status of transcultural ways of being. A more depressing and devastating comparison can be found in the ways that political forces extinguish the creativity and even the lives of young people in In Our Mad and Furious City and Home Fire within necropolitical economies. I would also add that Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette and El Hosaini’s My Brother the Devil point to the warnings they pose at how easily transcultural ways of being can be absorbed within discourses of neoliberal multiculturalism. Nevertheless, for the reasons adumbrated in the previous paragraph, Saadi’s and Gunaratne’s novels present us with the most satisfying representations of a transcultural British Muslim masculine self and a literary image of what it may look like, even if these transcultural expressions of British Muslim diaspora masculinities exist precariously. As my attention to Rushdie’s novel demonstrates, historical ruptures over the thirtyfive-year period in which these novels and films were written, released and published play a determining factor in the literary and cinematic constructions of transcultural British Muslim masculinities. In terms of chronology, the first cultural text in this book, My Beautiful Laundrette, is notable for its relatively limited focus on Islam and Muslim cultural identities. Rather, the film’s migrant and diasporic protagonists identify mostly with Pakistan and use the label British Asian. ‘British Asian’ is a signifier that was prominent in the years prior to the Rushdie affair and the attacks of 9/11 and 7/7. All of these three events, then, brought Islam and Muslim identifications to the fore of scholarly and public attention. The texts in this book demonstrate that these turning points resulted in more British Muslim writers and filmmakers identifying as ‘British Muslim’ and using their work to explore Islam and British Muslim identities, often as counter narratives to negative and homogenizing representations in public discourse. Hanif Kureishi’s work, more than any other writer included in this book, traces this trajectory from My Beautiful Laundrette through to his later novel The Black Album and his screenplay My Son the Fanatic which I have not discussed in this book due to limits of space. These latter two works mark the first literary and cinematic engagements with the figure of the radical Islamist, which I have argued in this study, Kureishi imagines as forms of masculine protest. Nevertheless, the biggest shift in representation occurs after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Both Brick Lane and In the Light of What We Know include the event in their narratives and depict it as a point of irrevocable change from which the lives of Muslims in Britain come under new and arduous hardships that thwart transcultural exchange. Meanwhile, texts such as Home Fire and In Our Mad and Furious City update Kureishi and Smith’s renditions of Islamism within a more contemporary atmosphere,

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portraying young men who deal with their acute feelings of disempowerment through politicized and violent expressions of Islamic faith. Meanwhile, each of these texts emphasizes Islam as a religion that comprises of a variety of lifestyles and viewpoints. To this end, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) is an intriguing counter-text as Aslam’s novel does not deal with the events of 9/11 explicitly. Yet aspects of the novel have been described as potentially complicit with pernicious post-9/11 Islamophobic stereotypes insofar as Aslam delineates an enclosed Muslim community who are unable to speak English, harbour resentment towards their host nation and are involved in cultural practices such as honour killing.2 Saadi’s Psychoraag (2004) is an anomaly in this pattern as it does not mention the negative events that have contoured British Muslim identities in the early twentyfirst century. The novel’s engagement with Scottish Muslim identities is primarily constructed through ‘Scottish Asians’ who include those with Muslim, Hindu and Sikh cultural backgrounds and as such are more open to cultural exchange than their peers that live south of the border. However, I posit in Chapter 4, that it is a strategic representation on the part of Saadi, which encourages a Scottish exceptionalist reading of ethno-religious and racialized minority identities at a time shortly after the opening of a Scottish devolved government. The more positive experiences of Saadi’s (Muslim) diasporic youth are contrasted with the comparatively more negative experiences of post-9/11 Islamophobia faced by the English Muslim men in other novels and texts in this thesis. Even so, Psychoraag does include references to Islamism and these politicized and violent forms of Islam are addressed solely in relation to poverty. Differences between English and Scottish diasporic Muslim masculinities, however, bring me to a fruitful direction for future study which, I posit, would be examining literary and cinematic constructions of immigrant and diasporic Muslim masculinities from writers and filmmakers in other European and North American countries. Indeed, countries such as Canada, France, Germany and the United States are also home to substantial Muslim immigrant and diasporic populations with writers and filmmakers who are penning increasingly confident fictional output. Many of the topics and issues discussed by the texts in this thesis are not necessarily unique to the UK. Therefore, comparative analyses of cultural production from writers and filmmakers based in other European and North American nations could reveal different and similar practices and representations by authors and filmmakers within a period that sees greater international transmission of literature and film. The most intriguing point of future development, however, comes from a commonality between most of the texts within this study. Throughout this study, there has been a tendency for writers and filmmakers to use music to express transcultural allegiances as well as specific constructions of masculinity. A faithful reader of this book might recall Rushdie’s use of Bollywood songs in The Satanic Verses, or how the genre-defying music and gender non-conformist lyrics of African American musician Prince’s oeuvre embodied many of Shahid’s attitudes to performative identities in The Black Album. Smith’s protagonists in White Teeth also drew on the music of Public Enemy and Parliament as a way of performing their protest masculinity. In My Beautiful Laundrette, the ‘fluid’ nature of sexuality is conveyed by a particularly 1980s synthesized version of Johann Strauss’s ‘The Blue Danube’ which plays as Omar

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and Johnny have sex in the back of the laundrette. In Maps for Lost Lovers, the Sufi devotional music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was referenced as an indicator of less rigid articulations of Islam. Zia Haider Rahman’s protagonist Zafar, on the other hand, describes a passion for the music of Johan Sebastian Bach while contemporary hiphop was incorporated within My Brother the Devil and In Our Mad and Furious City. In the latter two texts, young male protagonists composed their own lyrics and rhymes to hip-hop or Grime beats through which they express their feelings and ideas. In Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City, Grime music is depicted as a paradigmatic form of transcultural expression that draws on a variety of global and migratory forms of music. Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag was the most comprehensive engagement with music where Zaf used an eclectic musical soundtrack to his radio show to destabilize and critique his own identification with Britain and Pakistan. This also extended to the novel’s formal qualities as the structure of the text is constructed around the hours of the radio show. Music, then, has allowed writers and filmmakers to voice asymmetrical cultural exchanges and entanglements on a structural, narrative and extra-textual level. However, as previously stated all texts seem to present music in somewhat depoliticized and transcendental terms. It is only in Gunaratne’s novel in which the (non-Muslim) protagonist Ardan auditions that music as a commercial industry is alluded to. Nevertheless, for all of the writers in this book, the unique quality of music as a hybrid, fluid and malleable cultural form which can be improvised, reshaped and performed serves a powerful symbol for transgressing fixed notions of national, cultural and gender identity. A further study that traces connections between music, gender and transculturality would be beneficial for unpacking and analysing this nexus more rigorously. The current climate shows that interest in issues of gender within British Muslim communities show no signs of petering out. With new vistas opening up due to the ever-developing conversations about Britain’s history as a colonial power, the country’s position on the global scene following Brexit, the racial inequalities exposed by the COVID-19 epidemic and the ramping up of anti-migrant rhetoric with the current Boris Johnson–led government, the topic of British Muslim masculinities will be a subject that will, and must, be opened to more research and thought. Accordingly, there has never been greater need for thoughtful and perceptive narratives that explore the complex transcultural formations of British Muslim masculinities. The literary and cinematic production in this book works precisely at this aim, dismantling and assessing essentialized notions of national, cultural and gendered identities. In their diverse ways, all of the texts in this book contribute to new ways of seeing Britain and creatively imagine new forms of national, cultural and gender subjectivities. My book sheds light on these contributions and aims to further conversations on how gender, cultural and national plurality can be engendered within literature and film. Although not engaged with in this monograph, the last few years have witnessed an upsurge in memoirs about British Muslim identities and experiences, including Ed Husain’s The Islamist (2007), Sarfraz Manzoor’s Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock’n’Roll (2007), Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf (2009), Yasmin Hai’s The Making of Mr. Hai’s Daughter: Becoming British (2008), Zaiba Malik’s We Are

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a Muslim, Please (2010) and Mona Siddiqui’s My Way: A Muslim Woman’s Journey (2015).3 Putting aside the differing styles, approaches and potential problematics of these texts, all of the aforementioned memoirs point to the heterogeneous Muslim lives, backgrounds and faiths that co-exist in the UK while their marketability also shows that vast swathes of the public want to read and learn about British Muslims. The most recent book in this collection is Mohsin Zaidi’s A Dutiful Boy: A Memoir of a Gay Muslim’s Journey to Acceptance which was published to very positive reviews in 2020, as I was finalizing this monograph.4 Zaidi’s book should, and hopefully will, generate critical attention in the coming years but it is worth dwelling on the fact that it is a memoir that at once conveys the diversity of British Muslim populations, as Zaidi was raised to Pakistani Shia Muslims, and the ways that Muslims in Britain are shaped by transcultural exchange and intercultural interaction. It is also a book that goes against stereotypes by showing Muslims coming to accept their gay son. The book busts stereotypes by presenting Muslims not as an aggressive, segregating and prejudiced ‘third column’ but a beleaguered population within the UK that, although suffering at the hands of Islamophobia and juggling with different interpretations of Islam, is just as complex and contradictory than any other population in the UK. So, let us finish this book with a positive image of a real-life story of acceptance, tolerance and trust.

Notes Introduction See Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: How the World Changed from the Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), p. 158. 2 Leonard Williams Levy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 562. 3 See Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, pp. 15–16. 4 Rehana Ahmed, Writing British Muslims (Manchester: Manchester University, 2015); Claire Chambers, British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Frauke Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity (London: IGRS Books, 2011); Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Geoffrey Nash, Writing Muslim Identity (London: Continuum, 2012); Esra Mirze Santesso, Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 5 Morey and Yaqin, Framing Muslims, p. 23. 6 Ibid., p. 3. 7 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durhan, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) and Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 8 Shu-mei Shih, ‘Comparative Racialization: An Introduction’, PMLA, 123.5 (2008), pp. 1347–62. 9 Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity, p. 15. 10 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, [1978] 1995). 11 Byron Porter Smith, Islam in English Literature (Beirut: American Press, 1939). 12 Claire Chambers, Britain through Muslim Eyes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 13 Nabil Matar, ‘Britons and Muslims in the Early Modern Period: From Prejudice to a (theory of) Toleration’, in Anti-Muslim Prejudice: Past and Present, ed. by Maleiha Malik (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 13. 14 Nasar Meer, ‘Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia’, in Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia, ed. by Nasar Meer (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 1–15. 15 Sadik Jalal Al-Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, in Orientalism: A Reader, ed. by A.L. Macfie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 217–38. 16 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). 17 Arif Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical Inquiry, 20:1, (1994), pp. 329–56; Neil Lazarus, ‘Disavowing 1

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Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Problematic of Representation in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse’, Research in African Literatures, 24.4 (1993), pp. 69–93; Masao Miyoshi, ‘A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation State’, Critical Inquiry, 19.1 (1993), pp. 726–51; Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004). 18 See Humayun Ansari, ‘The Infidel Within’: Muslims in Britain Since 1800 (London: Hurst and Company, 2004), pp. 145–59. 19 Sukhdev Sandhu, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (London: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 225. 20 See Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 21 See Hanif Kureishi, ‘The Rainbow Sign’, in Collected Essays, ed. by Hanif Kureishi (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), pp. 3–35. 22 Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 72. 23 Ibid., p. 74. 24 Ibid. 25 See Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy (London: Atlantic Books, 2009). 26 Ahmed, Writing British Muslims, p. 66. Ahmed’s emphasis. 27 There is a lot of debate about how to describe the beliefs and ideas of groups and organizations such as al-Qaeda and Daesh. Widely used terms like ‘Islamism’, ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ and ‘Political Islam’ are all problematic in different ways. The writer Hanif Kureishi regularly uses the term ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’, however, for many this implies that the foundational beliefs of Islam espouse some of the violent approaches of organizations such as al-Qaeda and Daesh (the same claims can also be made about ‘Christian Fundamentalism’). Although imperfect, I have opted to use the term ‘Islamism’ and ‘politicized Islam’ to distinguish between the faith of Islam and politicized forms of Islam that have no relation to the spirit and essence of Islamic belief systems. Nevertheless, as others have pointed out, this runs the risk not only of banding together all Muslims who are inspired politically by their Islamic faith with one another. For accounts of this problematic, see Youssef M. Choueri, Islamic Fundamentalism: The Story of Islamist Movements (London: Continuum, 2010), Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: Transaction, 2005), John Esposito and Azam Tamimi, eds., Islam and Secularism in the West (London: Hurst, 2000), Graham Fuller, The Future of Political Islam (New York: Palgrave, 2003) and Mansoor Moaddel, Islamic Modernism: Nationalism and Fundamentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 28 Jasbir K. Puar’s study Terrorist Assemblages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) explores how Sikh men suffered at the hands of Islamophobia despite not being Muslim thereby demonstrating the racial elements of post-9/11 Islamophobia, see pp. 106–223. 29 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 131. 30 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 197–8.

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31 See Tariq Ali, ‘“It Didn’t Need to Be Done”’, London Review of Books, 5 February 2015, p. 12; Kenan Malik, ‘Muslims Are Not a “different” Class of Briton: We’re as Messy as the Rest’, The Guardian, 15 May 2016, section Opinion [accessed 3 September 2016]; Tariq Modood, ‘Muslims In The West’, The Guardian, 30 September 2001, section US news [accessed 3 September 2016]; Mona Siddiqui, My Way: A Muslim Woman’s Journey (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015). 32 Yasmin Albhai-Brown, for example, wrote in 1997 about how liberal sections of the British media were ‘unwilling to listen to the voice of very powerless people who felt offended by the book […] I knew the way all Muslims were being treated was unfair – these supposed dangerous people were my mum, my aunts, my uncles. My liberal associates were talking about them in terms of pure hatred.’ See Chris Weedon, ‘Constructing the Muslim Other’, in Representing Culture: Essays on Identity, Visuality and Technology, ed. by Claudia Alvares (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 42–3. 33 See Khadijah Elshayyal, Muslim Identity Politics: Islam, Activism and Equality in Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), Tania Saeed, Islamophobia and Securitization: Religion, Ethnicity and the Female Voice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Alana Linten and Gavan Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (London: Zed Books, 2011), pp. 85–6. The wearing of veils is not unique to followers of Islam as many denominations of Orthodox Christianity, for example, recommend females to don headscarves. Many women who follow Islam also chose not to wear headscarves and some denominations of Islam also forbid the wearing of the veil. For debates on veiling and the diverse positions many Muslim feminist thinkers have, readers can consult Fatima Mernissi’s famous critique of veil-wearing in The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, trans. by Mary Jo Lakeland (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991), Saba Mahmood’s work on gender performativity and the veil in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011) and Amina Wadud’s perspective as a Muslim scholar who wears the veil in Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). All these accounts serve to show that it is a deeply complex and often personal issue, for a discerning discussion on the politics of veiling in contemporary Britain, see Emma Tarlo, Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith (Oxford: Berg, 2010). 34 Peter E. Hopkins, The Issue of Masculine Identities for British Muslims after 9/11: A Social Analysis (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). 35 See debates on ‘Ex-Muslim’ identities in Andrew Anthony, ‘Losing Their religion: the hidden crisis of faith among Britain’s young Muslims’ (2015), The Guardian [accessed 17 May 2015]. 36 Rana, Terrifying Muslims, p. 149. 37 Shih, ‘Comparative Racialization’, p. 1357. 38 Ibid., p. 1357. 39 Nasar Meer, ‘Semantics, Scales and Solidarities in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia’, in Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia, ed. by Nasar Meer (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 127.

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40 Tariq Modood, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 16–17. 41 Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, ‘Refutations of Racism in the “Muslim Question”’, in Anti-Muslim Prejudice: Past and Present, ed. by Maleiha Malik (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 133. 42 See Tariq Modood, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 43 See Claire Chambers, ‘Multi-Culti Nancy Mitfords and Halal Novelists: The Politics of Marketing Muslim Writers in the UK’, Textus: English Studies in Italy, 23.2 (2010), pp. 389–403. 44 For a discussion on this see the introduction to Claire Chambers, British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 45 Ahmed, Writing British Muslims, p. 8. 46 Bonnie Angelo, ‘The Pain of Being Black: An Interview with Toni Morrison’, in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. by Danielle K. Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995), p. 258. 47 See Raymond Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’, in Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture, ed. by Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 20–9. 48 Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, [1995] 2005). 49 J. Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 50 As far as I am aware, there are no literary texts that explore British Muslim female masculinities, trans or non-binary identities. Alberto Fernández Cabajal’s study Queer Muslim Diasporas in Contemporary Literature and Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019) is the most comprehensive scholarly study on queer Muslim writing and cinema in English and French. 51 Lahoucine Ouzgane, ‘Introduction’, in Islamic Masculinities, ed. by Lahoucine Ouzgane (London: Zed Books, 2006), pp. 1–9 (p. 2). For de Beauvoir’s aphorism, see Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. by Constance Bord and Sheila MalovanyChevallier (London: Vintage, [1949] 2014). 52 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Abingdon: Routledge, [1990] 2007), pp. 175–94. 53 Ibid., p. 272. 54 Ibid. 55 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Caroline Ramazanoğlu, ‘What Can You Do with a Man? Feminism and the Critical Appraisal of Masculinity’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 15.3 (1992), pp. 339–50. 56 Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity, p. 30. 57 Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, 43.6 (1991), pp. 1241–99. 58 A.-D. Christensen and S. Qvotrup Jensen, ‘Combining Hegemonic Masculinity and Intersectionality’, Norma. Nordic Journal of Masculinity Studies, 9.1 (2014), pp. 60–75 (p. 69). 59 Rusi Jaspal and Marco Cinnirella, ‘Coping with Potentially Incompatible Identities: Accounts of Religious, Ethnic, and Sexual Identities from British Pakistani Men Who Identify as Muslim and Gay’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 49.4, (2010), pp. 849–70.

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60 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 210. 61 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987), pp. 29–44. 62 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 212. 63 Connell, Masculinities, p. 79. 64 Ibid., p. 77. 65 Ibid., p. 80. 66 Ibid., p. 81. 67 Ibid., p. 111. 68 Ibid., p. 116. 69 See Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill, Men and Masculinities (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003), p. 39 70 Peter Hopkins, ‘Young Muslim Men’s Experiences of Local Landscapes after 11 September 2001’, in Geographies of Muslim Identities: Diaspora, Gender and Belonging, ed. by Cara Aitcheson, Peter Hopkins and Mei-Po Kwan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 189–201 (p. 191). 71 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 72 Katharina Rennhak and Sarah S. G. Frantz, ‘Introduction’, in Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750–2000, ed. by Katharina Rennhak and Sarah S. G. Frantz (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010), p. 2. 73 Michelle Keown, David Murphy and James Procter, eds., Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 1. 74 Ibid. 75 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 251. Emphasis in the original. 76 See Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora (London: Routledge, 1996), Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), pp. 222–37. 77 James Procter, Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 14. 78 Ibid. 79 Jodi Melamed, ‘The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism’, Social Text, 20.4 (2006), pp. 1–24, (p. 3). 80 Anusha Kedhar, Flexible Bodies: British South Asian Dancers in an Age of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 20. 81 See Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2014), pp. 3–4. 82 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico [1970] 1999), pp. 70–83. 83 Susan Bassnett, ‘Postcolonialism and/as Translation’, in Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 340–59 (p. 342). 84 Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 85 Asad, Formations of the Secular, p. 5.

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86 Ibid., p. 191. 87 See Rowena Mason, ‘Ukip MEP Says British Muslims Should Sign Charter Rejecting Violence’, The Guardian, 4 February 2014 [accessed 15 August 2016]. 88 Ariana Dagnino, ‘Transcultural Writers and Transcultural Literature in the Age of Global Modernity’, Transnational Literature 4.2 (2012), pp. 1–14, p. 13. 89 Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity, p. 35. 90 Graham Huggan, ‘Virtual Multiculturalism: The Case of Great Britain’, European Studies: A Journal of European Culture, History and Politics, 16.1 (2001), pp. 67–85. 91 Leslie A. Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Towards a New Critical Grammar of Migration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 4. 92 Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity, p. 34. 93 Graham Huggan, ‘Derailing the “Trans”? Postcolonial Studies and the Negative Effects of Speed’, in Europe and America: Cultures in Translation, ed. by Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, Markus Hünemörder and Meike Zwingenberger (Heidelberg: Universitäts-Verlag Winter, 2006), pp. 185–192. (p. 189). 94 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 7. 95 Ibid. 96 Sissy Helff, ‘Shifting Perspectives: The Transcultural Novel’, in Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. by Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 75–91. 97 David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema, ed. by Lucien Taylor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 98 John McLeod, Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 99 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 131. 100 Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 101 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) and Lisa Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’, in Materializing Democracy: Toward A Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. by Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 175–94. 102 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1996). 103 See Rehana Ahmed, ‘British Muslim Masculinities and Cultural Resistance: Kenny Glenaan and Simon Beaufoy’s Yasmin’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 45.3 (2009), pp. 285–96; Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity, pp. 123–73. 104 Ahmed, Writing British Muslims; Chambers, British Muslim Fictions; Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity; Morey and Yaqin, Framing Muslims; Geoffrey Nash, Writing Muslim Identity (London: Continuum, 2012); Esra Mirze Santesso, Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 105 Brian Baker, Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) and Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945–2000 (London: Continuum, 2006); Carole Jones, Disappearing Men: Gender Disorientation in Scottish Literature 1979–1999 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009);

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Berthold Schoene-Harwood, Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 106 Brian Baker, ‘Do We Need More Books About Men?’: Teaching Masculinities’, in Teaching Gender, ed. by Alice Ferrebe and Fiona Tolan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 64; emphasis in the text. 107 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 49. 108 Ibid.

Chapter 1 Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Or, Virtue Regained (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1740] 2019). 2 Hènry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1741] 2019). 3 Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 5. 4 See Andrew Teverson, Salman Rushdie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 5 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, [1981] 2009). 6 Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Vintage, [1983] 2009). 7 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, [1992] 2000), p. 69. 8 Teverson, Salman Rushdie, p. 8. 9 Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 145. 10 Q’td from John J. Su, Imagination and the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 93. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 251. 14 John McLeod, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 148. 15 See Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, [1994] 2004), p. 134. 16 Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1915] 2002). 17 Teverson, p. 146. 18 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa: Or, the History of a Young Lady (London: Penguin [1748] 2004). 19 DCRA Goonetilleke, Salman Rushdie (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. 84. 20 Søren Frank, Migration and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 143. 21 R.J. Yeatman and W.C. Sellar, 1066 and All That (London: Sutton Publishing, [1930] 1993). 22 Stephen Morton, Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 73. 1

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23 Ashley Dawson, Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 130. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Joy Wang, ‘Othello Revisited: Metropolitan Romance in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Rushdie’s’, The Satanic Verses, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 45.1 (2009), pp. 49–59, DOI: 10.1080/17449850802636689, p. 52. 27 See Susan Bordo, The Male Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 28 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 3. 29 Lindsay A. Balfour, ‘Sympathy for the Devil: (Re)Reading The Satanic Verses after 9/11 and Learning to Love the Monster (Within)’, Postcolonial Text, 7.4, (2012), 1–19. 30 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 84. 31 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 120–32. 32 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 126. 33 Teverson, Salman Rushdie, p. 148. 34 Paul Gilroy, Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Abingdon: Routledge, [1987] 2004), p. 43. 35 Dawson, Mongrel Nation, p. 141. 36 Teverson, p. 172. 37 Ibid. 38 Damien Rogers, ‘Our Unfinished Humanity: Contextualising Responses to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses’, in Salman Rushdie: Critical Essays Vol. 2 (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2016), p. 4. 39 Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 40 Ruth Roded, ‘Alternate Images of the Prophet Muhammad’s Virility’, in Islamic Masculinities, ed. by Lahoucine Ouzgane (London: Zed Books, 2006), p. 58. 41 John Erickson, Islam and Postcolonial Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Mondal, Islam and Controversy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 42 Ibid., p. 140. 43 Anshuman A. Mondal, ‘“Representing the Very Ethic He Battled”: Secularism, Islam(ism) and Self-transgression’, The Satanic Verses, Textual Practice, 27.3 (2013), 419–37 (p. 428). 44 Talal Asad, ‘Ethnography, Literature and Politics: Some Readings and Uses of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses’, Cultural Anthropology, 5.3 (1990), pp. 239–69. 45 Ibid., p. 254. 46 McLeod, Postcolonial London, p. 150. 47 Ibid. 48 See Alan Robinson, Narrating the Past: Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 49 James Procter, Dwelling Places: Post-War Black British Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 50 McLeod, Postcolonial London, p. 156. 51 Teverson, Salman Rushdie, p. 150. 52 Ibid.

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Chapter 2 1 Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela. 2 Referring to Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa, 3 Hanif Kureishi, ‘Touching the Untouchable’ [accessed 1 March 2019]. 4 Phillip Tew, Zadie Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 33. 5 Hanif Kureishi, ‘Touching the Untouchable’, 6 Dave Gunning, Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), p. 77. 7 Kavita Bhanot, ‘Love, Sex and Desire in British Muslim Literature’, in Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing, ed. by. Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), p. 201 and Anshuman A. Mondal, ‘Young Muslims in British South Asian Fiction’, in Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora, ed. by Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), p. 35. 8 See Frauke Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity: Representations of Islam in German and English Transcultural Literature, 1990–2006 (London: Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, 2011) and Elahe Haschemi Yekani, ‘Who’s the Fanatic Now?’: Father-and-Son Conflicts in My Son the Fanatic and East Is East’, Kritische Berichte 35.4 (2007), pp. 78–87. 9 Wendy Webster, ‘Immigration and Racism’, in Paul Addison and Harriet Jones, A Companion to Contemporary Britain, 1930–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 93. 10 See McLeod, Postcolonial London, p. 161. 11 Lewis MacLeod, ‘Eliminating the Random, Ruling the World: Monologic Hybridity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’, in Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond, ed. by Philip Tew (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 165. 12 Sarah Illott, New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 121. 13 Hanif Kureishi, ‘Sex and Secularity’, in Collected Essays, ed. by Hanif Kureishi (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 243. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., ‘The Road Exactly’, in Collected Essays, p. 237. 16 Gunning, Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature, p. 77. 17 Chris Berry, ‘Stellar Transit: Bruce Lee’s Body or Chinese Masculinity in a Transnational Frame’, in Embodied Masculinities: Corporeality, Representation and Chinese Cultures, ed. by Fran Martin and Larissa Heinrich (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), pp. 218–34. 18 Giuseppe Zevolli, ‘When Hip Hop Met Glam: The Disidentifications of Mykki Blanco’, in Global Glam and Popular Music, ed. by Ian Chapman and Henry Johnson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), p. 178. 19 Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity, p. 140; Bart Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 135–6. 20 Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity, p. 155. 21 Mark Stein, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2004), p. 125.

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22 Ibid., p. 126. 23 Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 111. 24 See Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 25 Mondal, ‘Representations of Young Muslims in Contemporary British South Asian Fiction’, in Chambers and Herbert, p. 36. 26 Claire Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 91. 27 Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: How the World Changed (London: Atlantic, 2012), p. 9. 28 Nicole Faulkenhayner, Making the British Muslim (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 42. 29 James Procter, Dwelling Places (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 170. 30 Faulkenhayner, Making the British Muslim, p. 43. 31 Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 23. 32 Falkenhayner, Making the British Muslim, p. 43. 33 Ibid., p. 114. 34 Ibid., p. 119. 35 Ibid., p. 136. 36 See Clare Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellions (London: Anthem Press, 2007) and Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019). 37 Gopal, Insurgent Empire, p. 139. 38 Philip Tew, Zadie Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 48. 39 Gunning, Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature, p. 69. 40 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, p. 148. 41 Fred Gardaphé, From Wiseguys to Wisemen: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 3–21. 42 Andrea Ciribuco, ‘Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 19.4 (2017), pp. 2–9, p. 5. 43 Ciribuco, ‘Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’, p. 6. 44 Ibid. 45 Illott, New Postcolonial British Genres, p. 36. 46 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, p. 142. 47 Christin Hoene, Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature (Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2014), p. 88. 48 Q’td., in Ibid., p. 88. 49 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, p. 117. 50 Ibid., pp. 117–18. 51 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Abingdon: Routledge, [1990] 2010), p. 145. 52 bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2004) and Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 53 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 141.

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Chapter 3 1 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, p. 87. 2 See, for example, ‘My Brother the Devil – Review | Film | The Guardian’ [accessed 3 May 2015]. 3 Carbajal, Queer Muslim Diasporas in Contemporary Literature and Film. 4 Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience’, in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. by Michael Abelove, Michele Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), pp. 227–55. 5 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 22. 6 See Susan Torrey Barber, ‘Insurmountable Difficulties and Moments of Ecstasy: Crossing Class, Ethnic and Sexual Barriers in the Films of Stephen Frears’, in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. by Lester D. Friedman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), pp. 221–36. Also note that the Thatcher regime is often referred to as ‘the New Right’. 7 Ahmed, Writing British Muslims, p. 95. 8 Ibid., pp. 94–5. 9 Peter Jenkins, Mrs. Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); q’td in Torrey-Barber, in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, p. 68. 10 Torrey-Barber, in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, p. 213. 11 Ibid., p. 236. 12 Christine Geraghty, My Beautiful Laundrette (London: I.B. Taurus, 2005), p. 11. 13 Daniela Berghahn, Far-Flung Families in Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 122. 14 Michael Warner, ‘Introduction’, in Fear of a Queer Planet, ed. by Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 21. 15 Ibid., p. 21; Referring to: Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1991). 16 Connell, Masculinities, p. 75. 17 Ibid., p. 79. 18 See Warner, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–31. 19 Momin Rahman, Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 20 Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2010) and Amanullah De Sondy, The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 21 Jaspal and Cinnirella, ‘Coping with Potentially Incompatible Identities’, pp. 849–70. 22 Rusi Jaspal and Asifa Siraj, ‘Perceptions of Coming Out among British Muslim Gay Men’, Psychology and Sexuality, 2.3 (2011), pp. 183–97. 23 ‘Sally El Hosaini: “I’m Interested in People on the Margins of Society” | Film | The Guardian [accessed 3 May 2015]. 24 Henna Night, dir. Sally El Hosaini (Yalla Film Company, 2009). 25 ‘Sally El Hosaini: “I’m Interested in People on the Margins of Society” | Film | The Guardian [accessed 3 May 2015].

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26 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, p. 14. 27 Geraghty, My Beautiful Laundrette, p. 24. 28 Q’td in Geraghty, My Beautiful Laundrette, p. 24. Referring to: Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, Black Film British Cinema, ICA Document 7, London, 1989. 29 Q’td in Ibid., p. 24. 30 Ibid., p. 25. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Lisa Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’, in Materializing Democracy: Toward A Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. by Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 175–94 and Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 34 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 41. 35 Ibid., p. 25. 36 Ibid., p. 20. 37 Ibid., p. 15. Important to note here that same-sex civil partnerships were legalized in Britain in 2004 and same-sex marriages in England and Wales in 2013 and Scotland in 2014. Same-sex marriage is still illegal in Northern Ireland, see Ben Clements and Clive D. Field, ‘Public Opinion Toward Homosexuality and Gay Rights in Britain’, Public Quarterly, 2.14 (2014), pp. 523–47. 38 Susan E. Lorsch, ‘The Ideology of Heroism in My Beautiful Laundrette: The Woman’s Alternative’, in Delights, Desires, and Dilemmas: Essays on Women and the Media, ed. by Ann C. Hall (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998), pp. 65–73 (p. 68). 39 Ibid., p. 69. 40 Ibid. 41 ‘In her first budget, Thatcher reduced top bracket taxes of 83 per cent on earned income and 98 per cent on unearned income to a uniform 60 per cent. Further her corporate tax reform dropped the rate for businesses from 52 per cent to 35 per cent. All these cuts enabled businessmen such as Nassar and Salim to increase their net profit dramatically from gross earnings,’ Susan Torrey Barber, in ‘Insurmountable Difficulties and Moments of Ecstasy: Crossing Class, Ethnic and Sexual Barriers in the Films of Stephen Frears’, in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, p. 224. 42 Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 1–2. 43 Ibid., p. 2. 44 Ibid., p. 1. 45 Ibid., p. 87. 46 Ibid., p. 3. 47 Ibid. 48 See Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), p. 213. 49 Raz Yousef, Beyond the Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 67; Referring to Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, in Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays, ed. by Leo Bersani (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 3–31. 50 Chris Ogden, Maggie: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman in Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), q’td in Torrey Barber in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, p. 224.

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51 Ogden, q’td in Torey Barber, p. 223. 52 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (London: Picador, 2004). 53 ‘Rule, Britannia!’ is a British patriotic song that originates from a poem of the same name by James Thomson and was put to music by Thomas Arne in 1704. The song is generally performed at national state occasions and the lyrics refer to historical British naval victories as well as celebrate colonial dominance. For more information, see ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia Rule the Waves’ [accessed 6 December 2016]. 54 See, for example, ‘The Reception of the Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus’, painted anonymously between c. 1513 and 1516. 55 Berghahn, Far-Flung Families in Film, pp. 122–3. 56 Ibid., p. 123. 57 Scarface, dir. Brian de Palma (Universal Pictures, 1983). 58 Barbara Mennel, ‘Bruce Lee in Kreuzberg and Scarface in Altona: Transnational Auterism and Ghettocentricism in Thomas Arslan’s Brothers and Sisters and Fatih Akın’s Short Sharp Shock’, New German Critique, 87 (2002), pp. 133–56; q’td in Berghahn, Far-Flung Families in Film, p. 213. 59 Connell, Masculinities, p. 112. 60 See Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 135–44. Virdee explains that the National Front (NF), a farright British political party organized a march on 17 August 1977 in the London district of Lewisham due to the area’s comparatively large migrant and non-white population. The event was opposed by a large number of people and led to a clash on the streets of Lewisham and New Cross in South London. 61 Stella Bruzzi, ‘Who Are Those Buggers? Aspects of Homosexuality in Mainstream British Cinema’, in The British Cinema Book, ed. by Robert Murphy (London: BFI, 2009), pp. 133–41 (p. 139). 62 Kobena Mercer, ‘Dark and Lovely Too: Gay Black Men in Independent Film’, in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. by Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar and John Greyson (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 238–57 (p. 239). 63 Bruzzi, ‘Who Are Those Buggers?’, p. 139. 64 Eva Reuschmann, ‘Introduction’, in Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities, ed. by Eva Reuschmann (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003), p. 19. 65 Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), p. 104. 66 Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 188. 67 Ibid., pp. 83–97. 68 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, p. 87. 69 Ibid., pp. 87–8; For more information, see Nicholas de Jongh, ‘From the Archive, 19 March 1982: The Romans in Britain Obscenity Trial Dropped’, The Guardian, 19 March 2015 [accessed 6 December 2016]. 70 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, p. 87. 71 Berghahn, Far-Flung Families in Film, p. 112. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Carbajal, Queer Muslim Diasporas in Contemporary Literature and Film, p. 40. 75 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, p. 73.

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76 See Susan Torrey-Barber, ‘Insurmountable Differences and Moments of Ecstasy: Crossing Class, Ethnic, and Sexual Barriers in the Films of Stephen Frears’, in British Cinema and Thatcherism, p. 222. 77 By ‘possessive individualism’, I am referring to C. B. Macpherson’s theory in which an individual is believed to be the sole proprietor of his or her skills and consequently owes nothing to the society that they live within. This conception of society was embraced by Margaret Thatcher’s administration and most conspicuously expressed in her statement that ‘there is no such thing as society’; see Iain Chambers, Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity (Abingdon: Routledge, [1990] 2014), p. 126. 78 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, p. 103. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibrahim Abraham, ‘“Everywhere You Go You Have to Jump into Another Closet”: Hegemony, Hybridity and Queer Australian Muslims’, in Islam and Homosexuality: Vol. 2, ed. by Samar Habib (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), pp. 395–419, (p. 404). 82 Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism, p. 64. 83 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, pp. 27–8. 84 Hanif Kureishi, Something to Tell You (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). 85 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 38. 86 Ibid., p. 78. 87 Morey and Yaqin, Framing Muslims, p. 116. 88 Ibid., p. 115. 89 It can be argued that El Hosaini is ironically engaging with stereotypical associations between the British Muslim male and terrorism as the audience is never encouraged to believe that Rash is involved with terrorist activity. The protagonist Mo therefore exploits his peers’ fascination with violence in order to protect his brother. Nevertheless, I argue that the film upholds homonationalist binaries as the majority of the estate’s non-white inhabitants are still represented both as uncritically supporting Rash’s supposed terrorist links and as being violently homophobic. 90 See Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ in Is the Rectum a Grave?, pp. 3–31. 91 Connell, Masculinities, p. 79. 92 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 22. 93 Ibid., p. 15. 94 Khalil Gibran, The Prophet (London: Vintage [1923] 2013). 95 For more information on Gibran’s The Prophet, see: Irfan Shahid, ‘Gibran and the American Literary Cannon: The Problem of the Prophet’, in Tradition, Modernity, and Postmodernity in Arabic Literature, ed. by Kamal Abdel-Malek, Wael B. Hallaq and Issa J. Bollata (Leiden: Brill N.V., 2000), pp. 321–34. 96 Carbajal, Queer Muslim Diasporas in Contemporary Literature and Film, p. 143. 97 Ibid. 98 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 151.

Chapter 4 1 2

Nilufar Ahmed, Family, Citizenship and Islam: The Changing Experiences of Migrant Women Ageing in London (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), p. 66. Ibid., p. 67.

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Rachael Gilmour, Bad English (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), p. 104. 4 Ibid. 5 See Carole Jones, Disappearing Men: Gender Disorientation in Scottish Fiction 1979–1999 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009). 6 See Ahmed, Writing British Muslims, p. 124. 7 Ibid., p. 125. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., pp. 125–6. 13 See Sandhu Sukhdev, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), p. 8; For information on Bangladeshi immigrants in the 2011 UK Census, see ‘2011 Census Analysis – Office for National Statistics’ [accessed 24 November 2016]. 14 Ahmed, Writing British Muslims, p. 125. 15 Melanie Desmoulins, The Snake: A Dark Fantasy of Erotic Witchcraft (London: Velvet, 1997). 16 Information obtained through my correspondence with the author. 17 Michael Perfect, ‘The Multicultural Bildungsroman: Stereotypes in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 43.3 (2008), pp. 109–20. 18 ‘Scottish Independence: Glasgow Votes “Yes”’, BBC News [accessed 6 May 2016]. 19 See Willy Maley, ‘Denizens, Citizens, Tourists and Others: Marginality and Mobility in the Writings of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh’, in City Visions, ed. by David Bell and Azzedine Haddour (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000). 20 See Willy Maley, ‘Denizens, Citizens, Tourists and Others: Marginality and Mobility in the Writings of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh’, in City Visions, p. 60. 21 Carla Rodríguez González, ‘The Rhythms of the City: The Performance of Time and Space in Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 51 (2016), pp. 92–109 (p. 93). 22 See Sadiq Mir, ‘The Other within the Same: Some Aspects of Scottish-Pakistani Identity in Suburban Glasgow’, in Geographies of Muslim Identities: Diaspora, Gender and Belonging, ed. by Cara Aitchison, Mei-Po Kwan, and Peter Hopkins (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 57–79. 23 Sara Upstone, British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First-Century Voices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 97. 24 Ibid. 25 Libby Brooks, ‘Asad Shah Killing Should Be Condemned by All Muslims, Say Ahmadi Community’, The Guardian, 2016 [accessed 9 May 2016]. 26 ‘Poverty Twice as Likely for Minority Ethnic Groups: Education Fails to Close the Gap’, JRF, 2007 [accessed 2 April 2016]. 27 See McLeod, Postcolonial London, p. 4. 3

224

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28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Emphasizing the embedded nature of Islamophobic discourses, however, 2016’s London Mayoral Elections saw the Conservative Party’s candidate Zac Goldsmith use Islamophobic tactics to besmirch Khan. Goldsmith notoriously penned an inflammatory article about Khan’s Islamic faith which included images of the 7/7 bombings. The Goldsmith campaign also sought to make connections between Khan’s faith, his background and Islamist terror. Despite this sustained Islamophobic attack by the Conservative Party, Sadiq Khan, himself born in the South London area of Tooting to a Pakistani migrant bus driver and a Pakistani migrant seamstress, was elected as mayor of London on 6 May 2016. For more information, see ‘How Zac Goldsmith Imported Donald Trump’s Politics into Britain’, Middle East Eye [accessed 2 May 2016]. 31 Sherry Simon, Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p. 7. 32 Connell, Masculinities, p. 57. 33 Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity, p. 55. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., p. 57. 36 Gunning, Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature, p. 103. 37 Ibid., p. 56. 38 See, for example, Michael Kimmel ‘Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity’, in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. by Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman, pp. 213–19 and Sedgwick’s work in Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 39 Connell, Masculinities, p. 80. 40 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2010). p. 135. 41 Ibid., p. 134. 42 See William Shakespeare, Richard II, 2.1.40–51, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus and Gordon McMullan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), p. 911. The speech in reference goes as follows: This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands— This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

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43 See, for example, Erica Sheen and Isabel Karremann, Shakespeare in Cold War Europe: Conflict, Commemoration, Celebration (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 44 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 169. 45 Gunning, Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature, p. 102. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Connell, Masculinities, p. 112. 49 Claire Alexander, ‘Making Bengali Brick Lane: Claiming and Contesting Space in East London’, The British Journal of Sociology, 62.2 (2011), pp. 201–20 (p. 213). 50 Gilmour, Bad English, p. 110. 51 McLeod, Postcolonial London, p. 8. 52 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 117. 53 McLeod, Postcolonial London, p. 9. 54 Ibid. 55 Carla Rodríguez González, ‘The Rhythms of the City: The Performance of Time and Space in Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag’, p. 10. 56 Ibid., pp. 10–11. 57 Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 66. 58 Claire Alexander, The Asian Gang: Ethnicity, Identity, Masculinity (Oxford: Berg, 2000), p. 13. 59 See thesis introduction, p. 21. 60 Connell, Masculinities, p. 45. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., p. 46. 63 Ibid., p. 61. 64 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Bodies-Cities’, in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 381–8 (p. 385). 65 Ibid., p. 388. 66 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, pp. 166–203. 67 Connell, Masculinities, p. 52. 68 Deborah Lupton, Fat (Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 63. 69 Jerry Mosher, ‘Setting Free the Bears: Refiguring Fat Men on Television’, in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, ed. by Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 166–97. 70 Thomas J. Bassett and Alex Winter-Nelson, The Atlas of World Hunger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 34. 71 González, ‘The Rhythms of the City’, p. 102. 72 Carry On Doctor, dir. Gerald Thomas (Prism Leisure Corporation, 1967). 73 Hoene, Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature, p. 71. 74 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory, ed. by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 394–403 (p. 402). 75 See Mahmud Sharbistari, The Secret Rose Garden, trans. Florence Lederer (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 2002). 76 Hoene, Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature, p. 76. 77 Ibid.

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78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., p. 67. 80 Martin Clayton, Time in Indian Music: Rhythm, Metre and Form in North Indian Rag Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), q’td in Hoene, Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature p. 67. 81 Hoene, Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature, p. 68. 82 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 93. 83 Ibid., p. 73. 84 See Rosamund Bartlett, ‘Stravinsky’s Russian Origins’, in The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. by Jonathan Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 3–18.

Chapter 5 For more background on the 1971 war, see Nayinka Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 2 Philip Tew, Zadie Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 33. 3 See Jonathan Lee, ‘Zia Haider Rahman: How Do You Know?’ [accessed 5 January 2020]. 4 See Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Fifty Poems, trans. Mahmood Jamal (Karachi: Oxford University Press Pakistan, 2013). 5 Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, p. 79. 6 Ibid. 7 See Ravi Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India (Los Angeles: University of South California Press, 2004). 8 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 9 Amina Yaqin, ‘Muslims as Multicultural Misfits in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers’, in Culture, Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing, ed. by Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 109. 10 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 11 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 413. 12 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987), p. 13. 13 Dave Gunning, Racism and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), p. 85. 14 Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’, Gender & Society, 2.3 (1988), pp. 274–90. 15 Ibid., p. 286. 16 Ibid., p. 279. 17 Maryam Mirza, Ambiguous Pakistani-Muslim Masculinities in the Diaspora: A Study of Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, South Asian Diaspora, 9:2 (2017), pp. 193–206, p. 199. 1

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18 Kandiyoti, ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’, p. 279. 19 Mirza, Ambiguous Pakistani-Muslim masculinities in the diaspora, p. 198. 20 Gargi Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on Terror (London: Zed Books, 2008), p. 88. 21 See Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam, trans. Alan Sheridan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008) 22 See Kavita Daiya, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and National Culture in Postcolonial India (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008), p. 69. 23 Mirza, Ambiguous Pakistani-Muslim Masculinities in the Diasporas, p. 198. 24 For an account of sexual violence and the formation of Bangladesh, see Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound. 25 Q’td in Helen Davies, Understanding Stuart Hall (London: SAGE Books, 2004), p. 117. 26 Roberto del Valle Alcalá, ‘Knowledge in Crisis: Cognitive Capitalism and Narrative Form in Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (May 2018), 1–13, p. 4. 27 For more information on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, see Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (London: Atlas, 2005). 28 Roberto del Valle Alcalá, ‘Knowledge in Crisis’, p. 6. 29 Ibid. 30 Fiona McCulloch, Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 31 Ibid., p. 84–5. 32 Ibid., p. 85. 33 Radhika Coomaraswamy, ‘Preface: Violence against Women and “Crimes of Honour”’, in Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossain ed. by, ‘Honour’: Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence against Women (London: Zed Books, 2005), p. 9. See McCulloch, Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction, p. 82. 34 Yaqin, ‘Muslims as Multicultural Misfits in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers’, in Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing, p. 125. 35 Ibid., p. 126. 36 Gunning, Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature, p. 86. 37 For more on qawwali, see Natalie Sarrazin, ‘Devotion or Pleasure?: Music and Meaning in the Celluloid Performances of qawwali in South Asia and Beyond’, in Music, Culture and Identity in the Muslim World: Performance, Politics and Piety, ed. by Kamal Salhi (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 178–99. 38 Farid El Asri and Anne-Marie Vuillemenot, ‘Le “ World Sufism”: quand le soufisme entre en scène’, Social Compass, 57.4 (2010), pp. 493–502; Sophia Rose Arjana, Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi: Orientalism and the Mystical Marketplace (London: Simon & Schuster, 2020); Alix Philippon, ‘A Sublime, Yet Disputed, Object of Political Ideology? Sufism in Pakistan at the Crossroads’, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 52.2 (2014), pp. 271–92. Virinder S. Kalra’s Sacred and Secular Musics: A Postcolonial Approach (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) contains a particularly helpful chapter negotiating postcolonial readings of qawwali as a commodified form of the arguably problematic label of ‘world music’. 39 Gunning, Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature, p. 87. 40 Ibid. 41 Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, ‘Writing is Really an Interruption of Reading … ’ [accessed 5 January 2020].

228

Notes

Chapter 6 1

By referring to ‘radicalisation’, I am drawing on Charlie Winter’s work as fellow at King’s College London’s International Centre for Radicalisation where he uses the term to discuss how people develop increasingly asocial beliefs and ideas, see Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, pp. 173–5. 2 Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, p. 180. 3 By Daesh, I am referring to the terrorist militant group and former unrecognized proto-state that has occupied areas of Syria and Iraq. Also known as the Islamic State or ISIS, I have decided to use the name ‘Daesh’ which is Arabic for ‘state’ to avoid suggesting that the Salafi doctrine of Sunni Islam they follow is representative of ‘Islam’ in general. 4 Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Novels, p. 177. 5 Sophocles, Antigone, trans. HDF Kitto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 6 For more information on ‘The Troubles’, see David McKrittik and David McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict (London: Penguin, 2001). 7 At the Edinburgh International Festival 2019, Gunaratne praised the novel for being an early representation of a multicultural London that he recognized. 8 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2005). 9 James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late (London: Vintage, 1998). 10 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London: Penguin, 2000). 11 See Ariela Freedman, Death, Men and Modernism: Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003). 12 John McLeod, ‘When Memories Fade’, Wasafiri, 34.4 (2019), pp. 18–23, p. 19. 13 Sara Upstone, Rethinking Race and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 4; Q’td in John McLeod, ‘When Memories Fade’, p. 19. 14 McLeod, ‘When Memories Fade’, p. 19 (his emphasis). 15 See Martin Revermann, ‘Brechtian Chorality’, in Choruses: Ancient and Modern, ed. by Joshua Billings, Felix Budelmann, Fiona Macintosh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 151–73. 16 Dave Gunning, ‘The First-Person Plural in Hanif Kureishi’s Essays’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 50.2 (2015), pp. 133–49 (p. 140). 17 Ibid., p. 140. 18 ‘Lee Rigby Murder: Map and Timeline’, BBC News, 26 February 2014 [accessed 30 January 2020]. 19 For more on La Haine and immigrant and diaspora masculinities, see Carrie Tarr, Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 20 Richard Bramwell, UK Hip-Hop, Grime and the City: The Aesthetics and Ethics of London’s Rap Scenes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 110. 21 Ibid. 22 Dan Hancox, Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime (London: HarperCollins, 2018), p. 21. 23 Ibid., pp. 1–20. 24 Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, pp. 189–90. 25 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 26 Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, p. 176. 27 Ibid., p. 188.

Notes

229

28 Ana Jordan, The New Politics of Fatherhood: Men’s Movements and Masculinities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 4; pp. 72–8 provides a history of ‘crisis of masculinity’ narratives. 29 Maleeha Aslam, Gender-Based Explosions (New York: United Nations University Press, 2012), pp. 85–9. 30 Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 84. 31 Ibid. 32 Rehana Ahmed, ‘Towards an Ethics of Reading Muslims: Encountering Difference in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, Textual Practice, (2020), pp. 1–17 (p. 13). OnlineFirst

33 Ibid., p. 13. 34 For more on Al-Muhajiroun in Britain, see Quintan Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). 35 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 9. 36 See Anthony Bateman, Cricket, Literature and Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). 37 See Ian Goodyer, Crisis Music: The Cultural Politics of Rock against Racism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). 38 ’27 dead as blasts rock Istanbul’ [accessed 30 January 2020]. 39 The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was also briefly mentioned in Chapter 2 in relation to Smith’s White Teeth; see Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019), pp. 41–83. 40 See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). 41 Ibid., p. 242. 42 Ibid., p. 240. 43 Ibid., p. 241. 44 Ibid., p. 62. 45 Ibid., p. 225. 46 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. by Steven Corcoran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 47 Ibid., p. 76. 48 Ibid., p. 103. 49 Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, p. 181. 50 For more information see Clair Willis, Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain (London: Penguin, 2017). 51 McLeod, ‘When Memories Fade’, p. 19. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid.

Conclusion 1

Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 142.

230 2 3

4

Notes Yaqin, ‘Muslims as Multicultural Misfits in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers’, pp. 101–17. Ed Husain, The Islamist (London: Penguin, 2007); Sarfraz Manzoor, Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock’n’Roll (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, Love in a Headscarf (London: Aurum, 2009); Yasmin Hai, The Making of Mr. Hai’s Daughter: Becoming British (London: Virago, 2008); Zaiba Malik, We Are a Muslim, Please (London: Windmill, 2010) and Siddiqui, My Way. Rehana Ahmed discusses many of these texts in her book Writing British Muslims. Mohsin Zaidi, A Dutiful Boy: A Memoir of a Gay Muslim’s Journey to Acceptance (London: Square Peg, 2020).

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Index affiliation 2, 18, 53–5, 100, 111, 134, 143, 199 cultural/racial/religious 74, 131, 193, 203 fraternal 88 homosocial 82, 152 male–male 82 Afghanistan 5, 112, 142, 158, 162, 164, 170 African Americans 8, 53, 67, 69, 87, 206 hood cinema 93 aggressive masculinity 62, 142, 176–7 Ahmad, Aijaz distrust on Rushdie’s work 28 In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures 4 Ahmed, Nilufar 107 Ahmed, Rehana 1, 5, 7, 74, 109, 187 Ahmed, Sara 5, 20, 116 national game 116, 131 AIDS crisis 38, 94 Al-Azm, Sadik Jalal 4 Alexander, Claire 119 Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin 5, 49, 211 n.32 alienation effect 174 Ali, Monica 133 awards/honors 109 Brick Lane (see Brick Lane (Ali)) early life 109 Altab Ali Park, London 107, 110 Anglocentrism 112 antagonism 58, 70, 89, 181 anti-establishment 53, 60, 185 anti-immigration 31, 91 anti-racism 16, 62, 194, 200. See also race/ racism anti-Satanic Verses agitation 60–1 Apter, Emily 16 Arjana, Sophia Rose 165–6 Asad, Talal 5, 42 Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity 17 on secularism 17

Aslam, Maleeha 187 Aslam, Nadeem early life 143 Maps for Lost Lovers (See Maps for Lost Lovers (Aslam)) assemblages of identity 2, 4, 7, 10–11, 23, 71, 94, 111, 120–1, 125, 134 atheism/atheists 8, 48, 51, 62, 133, 142, 147, 159 The Atlas of World Hunger (Bassett, Thomas J. and Winter-Nelson, Alex) 128 autonomy 37, 111 Bach, Johann Sebastian 155, 207 Baker, Brian 23 Bakri, Omar Muhammad 189 Balfour, Lindsay A. 37 Bangladesh 117, 153, 162 Bangladeshi British diaspora 107–9, 114, 161 Bangladeshi community 107, 109–10 migrants/immigrants 38, 223 n.13 overweight body in 128 and Pakistan 153–4 Shaheed Minar sculpture, Dhaka 107 Baudrillard, Jean 145–6 The Beatles 110 The White Album 68 ‘Within You Without You’ song 135 Beaufoy, Simon 23 Yasmin 22 Begum, Shamima 171 bell hooks 69 Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Task of the Translator’ 16 Bennett, Louise, colonisation in reverse 143 Berghahn, Daniela 95–6 Berry, Chris 53 Bersani, Leo 84, 99 Bhabha, Homi K., on migration 16–17

248

Index

Bhanot, Kavita 48 Bhat, Shakeel Ahmed 58 Bhattacharyya, Gargi 151 bigotry 39, 161 biopolitics 169, 174, 196, 201 The Black Album (Kureishi) 21–2, 47–9, 51, 56, 58, 62–3, 70–1, 79, 95, 118, 123, 169, 183, 204, 206 Chad/Trevor Buss (fictional character) 51–2, 55–6, 58–9, 61, 69 Chili (fictional character) 49, 54–5, 65–6, 71 Deedee Osgood (fictional character) 49, 62, 66–9, 71 gangster/mafia 65 gender/sexuality/racism 51–2, 54–5, 63, 66–8, 71 Hat (fictional character) 59, 69 Papa (fictional character) 51, 54 reference to Prince (see Prince (musician)) Riaz (fictional character) 49, 51–2, 54–6, 58, 61, 63, 66–7, 69–71, 73, 87 sexual relationship 66–7, 70, 95 Shahid Hasan (fictional character) 47–52, 54–6, 58–9, 61–70 white supremacist 62 Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) 169 Black British 45, 70, 173 Black literature 8. See also literature (and films) blasphemy 1, 42, 45, 58, 61, 66, 146, 159 bodies 9, 88 abject 37 and cities 125 female bodies 22, 124, 145, 149, 158, 161, 165–7 heterosexual 37 male bodies 2, 7, 9, 63, 124–5, 150–1, 187 and masculinities 20, 113, 124–5, 139, 196 Muslim-look-a-like 2, 20 queer 37–8 book-burning 58–9, 61–2. See also Bradford book-burning Booker, M. Keith 28 Borges, Jorge Luis 28 ‘On Exactitude in Science’ 145

Boyle, Danny 108 Bradford book-burning 1, 45, 47, 57–60, 63, 71 Brah, Avtar 15, 18 Bramwell, Richard 177 Brecht, Bertolt, The Threepenny Opera 174 Brenton, Howard, Romans in Britain 94 Brick Lane (Ali) 22, 38, 87, 110, 125, 141, 169, 205 Dr Azad (fictional character) 131–3 The Bengal Tigers 118–19, 125–6 Chanu (fictional character) 108–9, 115–19, 123–4, 127–8, 131–3, 135, 138 cultural difference 114 Mr Dalloway (fictional character) 116, 132 extramarital affair 108–9 gender dominance 115 going home syndrome disease 114–15 hegemonic masculinity 126–8, 131–3, 138 Mrs Islam (fictional character) 114–15 Karim (fictional character) 108–9, 118–19, 123–5, 128–9, 138 opines on British-born Muslim women 125–6 language/English literature 114–17, 131–2, 138 The Lion Hearts 118 national game 116, 131–3 Nazneen (fictional character) 108–9, 114–15, 118–19, 125, 127–8, 132–3 overweight body 128 protest against 109 sexual relations 125–6 Shahana (fictional character) 127 Tower Hamlets 109–10, 112, 114, 127 Wilkie (fictional character) 117 British Asian 45, 70, 137, 205 British Empire 56, 111, 122, 155 British Muslims 3–8, 19, 45, 57, 62, 70, 78–9, 81, 98, 109, 172, 174, 187, 193, 205, 207 masculinities 1–2, 13–14, 16, 20–3, 47, 50, 63–4, 71, 73, 78–9, 81, 101, 103, 107–8, 113, 131, 138, 169, 173, 203, 205, 207 stereotypes of 2–3, 5–6, 22–3, 45, 64, 126

Index subjects/subjectivities 4, 16, 24, 48, 81, 111, 131 British Nationality Act 1981 40, 43, 75 British National Party (BNP) 52 British Pakistani 49, 51, 67, 73–4, 78, 169–70, 182 Bromley, Roger 143 Brontë Sisters 117, 131 Butler, Judith 13–14, 69 (abject) bodies 37, 124 Bodies That Matter 37 notion on gender 9–10, 74 performativity 9, 68–9 The Byrds rock band 135, 137 capitalism 4, 7, 10, 60, 69 Carry On Doctor (Thomas, Gerald) 130 censorship 1, 54, 62, 174 Chadha, Gurinder, Bend It Like Beckham 116–17 Chambers, Claire 1, 7, 57, 143, 171, 179, 182, 184, 186, 197 Britain through Muslim Eyes 3 Chaucer, Geoffrey 116–17, 133 China/Chinese 53, 112 Choudary, Anjem 189 Christian/Christianity 1–2, 31, 33, 78, 94, 101, 120, 147, 185, 193 Christian Fundamentalism 210 n.27 Orthodox Christianity 211 n.33 Cinnirella, Marco 10, 78 Ciribuco, Andrea 64–5 cisgender 7, 9, 14. See also gender citizenship 17, 39–40, 136, 171, 194 The Clash band 194 Clayton, Martin 136 Clifford, James 15, 18 ‘The Pure Products Go Crazy’ 144 Clinton, George 69, 71 ‘P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)’ song 53 collective identity 52, 71, 76 colonialism 4, 7, 17, 19, 57, 78, 108, 136, 153. See also postcolonial/ postcolonialism colonial education systems 117 The Coloured Peoples’ Association (CPA) 200 commodity/commodification 27, 69, 113, 138, 166, 204

249

compulsory heterosexuality 29, 74 Connell, Raewyn 14, 55, 64, 78, 87, 113, 115, 187 body-reflexive practice 124–5 hegemonic masculinity 11–12, 77, 113, 127–8 marginalized masculinity 12 Masculinities 8 multiple masculinities 11 patriarchal dividend 11–12 protest masculinity 12, 55, 90, 119, 122 subordinated masculine identity 12–13 Coomaraswamy, Radhika 160 Coppola, Francis Ford, The Godfather trilogy 62, 64 Don Corleone (fictional character) 65 corporeal/corporeality 10, 71, 124–5, 127, 130 COVID-19 epidemic, racism 207 Crenshaw, Kimberle 10 King Creon 171 cultural capital 101, 154, 179 cultural diversity 6, 18, 49, 121, 136 cultural heritage 2, 14, 34, 40, 52, 73, 100, 117, 172, 175–6 cultural heterogeneity 144 cultural identity 3, 6–7, 16–18, 22, 32–4, 39, 49, 111, 203 cultural production 1–3, 7, 13, 19–20, 23, 27, 69, 73, 79, 111, 126, 138, 206 cultural translation 14, 16–17, 74, 79, 113, 134–5 Daesh (Islamic State) 6, 21, 169, 171, 189, 193, 210 n.27, 228 n.3. See also alQaeda; terrorism/terrorists Dawson, Ashley 35, 71 de Certeau, Michel, ‘Walking the City’ 121–2 Deleuze, Gilles 22 rhizomatic identity 145, 167 A Thousand Plateaus 11 del Valle Alcalá, Roberto 156–7 democracy 57, 62, 181 De Palma, Brain, Scarface 64 Pacino (fictional character) 64–5 Tony Montana (fictional character) 65, 87 Desmoulins, Melanie, The Snake 110 De Sondy, Amanullah 78

250

Index

diaspora/diasporic identity 2, 7, 9, 11, 14–16, 18, 20–3, 28, 47–8, 50–1, 54–5, 62–3, 73, 75, 79, 82, 103, 107–9, 111, 113, 115, 119, 123, 131, 133, 141, 151, 177, 202, 204–6 Dickens, Charles 116, 133 discrimination 7, 12, 18, 40, 51, 86, 107, 112, 122, 126, 153. See also race/racism disempowerment 5, 12, 53, 55, 64, 66, 70, 81, 86, 90, 118, 125, 127–8, 138, 199, 205–6 diversity 6, 8, 18, 22–3, 49, 52, 56–7, 74, 77, 97, 100, 112, 121, 136, 166, 182, 208 Duggan, Lisa 21, 81, 96–7 homonormativity 80 Dunbar, William, ‘The Dance of Seven Deadly Sins’ 41 Eagleton, Terry 21, 47 on Pamela; Or, Virtue Regained 27 Early Modern Britain 3, 56–7, 155 East India Company 60 East–West dichotomy 3–4 economy/economic(s) 37, 60, 91, 102, 109, 116, 176 Britain’s post-war 40, 200 dominance 78, 102 downturn 96, 111 free market 96–7, 111 individualism 16 necropolitical 196, 201, 205 neoliberal 16, 74, 80, 85, 97, 100 regeneration 75 socio-economic (see socio-economics) Thatcher’s regime 85, 96 education systems, colonial 117 egalitarian/egalitarianism 114–15, 157, 165, 188 El Asri, Farid 165–6 El Hosaini 81, 83, 98, 100–3, 123, 205, 222 n.89 early life 79 Henna Night 79 My Brother the Devil (see My Brother the Devil (El Hosaini)) Eliot, George 116, 166 emasculation 12, 37–8, 55, 64, 71, 76, 84–7, 90, 160, 163

embodied masculinity 145, 158 English Defence League (EDL) 169 Enlightenment 17, 62 Erickson, John 41 Eteocles 171 ethnicity 5–6, 10, 13, 23, 79, 97, 170 dominant 130 ethnic minorities 62, 87, 157 ethno-religious identity 2, 4, 7–8, 16, 20, 76–7, 80, 85, 87, 90–2, 96, 101–2, 175, 206 Euro-American 126, 137 Europe/European 136–7, 143, 157, 206 modernity 19 second-generation immigrant 87 Western Europe 7, 13, 17 Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, Dasht-e-Tanhai (the Desert of Solitude) 143–4 Falkenhayner, Nicole 57–9 far-right national group 52, 75, 179, 198–9 fatwa 1, 45, 47 feminine/femininity 12, 23, 68, 77, 86, 128, 130 Fernàndez Carbajal, Alberto 23, 95, 101 Queer Muslim Diasporas in Literature and Film 22, 73, 212 n.50 Fielding, Henry, Shamela 27, 47 ‘Fireworks Night’ tradition in England 59–60 Foucault, Michel 22, 150, 174, 201 biopolitics 196 biopower 195–6 disciplinary/regulatory power 195 normative populations 196 Frantz, Sarah S. G., Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750–2000 14 Frears, Stephen, My Beautiful Laundrette 21, 73, 75–6 Freedman, Ariela 173 fundamentalism 5, 71, 182 Christian Fundamentalism 210 n.27 Islamic Fundamentalism 182, 210 n.27 Gardaphé, Fred L. 64 Gavron, Sarah 109 gay 10, 13, 21, 73, 75, 77–8, 80–1, 94, 96–7, 100, 102–3, 208. See also

Index homosexual/homosexuality; lesbian; queer gender 1–2, 4, 6–9, 14, 23, 27, 29, 33–4, 37, 45, 47, 49, 54, 62, 66, 69, 77, 79–80, 116, 150–1. See also cisgender androgynous 160 Butler’s notion of 9–10 and cultures 114 dominance 66, 99, 115, 131, 149 equality 165 feminine/femininity 12, 23, 68, 77, 86, 128, 130 identity 7, 10–11, 53, 67–8, 74, 77, 160, 207 in literature and films 11 masculine (see specific masculinities) patriarchal 13, 82–3, 141, 160, 167 privilege 10, 116 transition/transformative 22, 27, 36–7, 40–1, 113 violence 144, 160, 166–7 Gibran, Khalil, The Prophet 100–1 Gikandi, Simon 28 Gilmour, Rachael 108, 121 Gilroy, Paul 15, 18, 40 Glenaan, Kenny 23 Yasmin 22 globalization 19–20, 136 Gödel, Kurt 152 Incompleteness Theorem 156 Goldsmith, Zac 224 n.30 Goonetilleke, DCRA 32 Gopal, Priyamvada 60 Gray, Alisdair 111 The Great British Bake Off television show 181 Greater Sylhet Development and Welfare Council 109 Grime music 177–8, 182, 207 Grosz, Elizabeth 125 Guattari, Felix 22 rhizomatic identity 145, 167 A Thousand Plateaus 11 Guerrero, Ed 93 Gunaratne, Guy, In Our Mad and Furious City. See In Our Mad and Furious City (Gunaratne) Gunning, Dave 51, 67, 114, 118, 165–6, 175

251

Halberstam, J. Jack, Female Masculinity 9 Hall, Stuart 15, 18, 79, 134, 154, 203 Hardy, Thomas 131, 133 Harvey, David, freedom of enterprise 97 Haywood, Chris 12 hedonism 48–9, 67 hegemonic masculinity 10–14, 30, 33, 53, 55, 69, 74, 77, 81–6, 90, 92, 95–7, 102–3, 113, 115–17, 126–8, 131–3, 138, 148, 157 heterogeneity 2, 79, 144, 187, 208 heteronormative/heteronormativity 14, 23, 37, 75, 77–8, 80–1, 84, 97, 103, 163, 186 heterosexual/heterosexuality 13–14, 37, 71, 74–8, 84, 88, 90, 94, 100, 102 compulsory 29, 74 Hindu/Hinduism 4, 32, 52, 120, 147–9, 206 Hip-Hop 53, 68–9, 87, 177, 207 Hoene, Christine 67, 134–6 Hollinghurst, Alan, The Line of Beauty 85 Hollywood, masculinity in 53 Home Fire (Shamsie) 22, 169, 174, 180, 201, 205 Adil Pasha (fictional character) 169, 184–6, 195 Aneeka Pasha (fictional character) 170–1, 181, 183–4, 186–8, 194–7, 201 awards/honors 169 crises of masculinity 186–7, 202 Daesh 178–9, 182, 187–8, 194, 201 Eamonn Lone (fictional character) 170–1, 181, 187–8, 193–7, 201 Farooq (fictional character) 170–1, 182, 184–8, 194, 197 friendship (jigari dost) 186, 202 Isma Pasha (fictional character) 170–1, 178–81, 183, 185, 187, 193 jihadist 169–70 Karamat Lone (fictional character) 170–1, 188, 191–3, 195–7, 201 Max (fictional character) 181–2 Parvaiz Pasha (fictional character) 169–71, 178–9, 181–8, 191, 194–7, 201 Terry (fictional character) 194 tilawat 188

252

Index

homoerotic/homoeroticism 33–4, 36, 45, 68, 93, 184, 186 homonationalism/homonationalist 80–1, 91, 97–8, 100–1, 103, 222 n.89 homonormativity 77, 80, 96–8, 100–3 homophobia/homophobic 5, 16, 33, 38, 75, 77, 82, 92–3, 99–100, 102 homosexual/homosexuality 12, 21, 33, 38, 73–5, 77–82, 91, 93–4, 96, 99–103, 124, 181, 189. See also gay; lesbian; queer homosexual panic 13–14, 29, 82–3, 94 prohibition of 78 homosocial/homosociality 21, 50, 52, 54–5, 66, 82–3, 87, 90–1, 93, 152, 158 desire 13–14, 29, 81–3 patriarchy 102 Hopkins, Peter E., work on 9/11 attacks 5–6, 13 Huggan, Graham 18 on transculturality 19 Huntington, Samuel P., Clash of Civilisations 98 hybridity/hybridization 20–1, 28, 79, 87, 131, 134 hyper-masculinity 67, 70, 76, 87–9, 98–100, 103, 108, 119, 177 Illott, Sarah 50 immigration/immigrants 15, 18–19, 21–3, 29, 36–7, 43, 65, 76, 80, 91, 99–100, 103, 109, 123, 132, 161, 171–2, 204. See also migration/migrants Asian 43, 48, 52 Bangladeshi 109, 223 n.13 Caribbean 4, 40, 172 Chinese 53 European second-generation 87 first-generation immigrants in Britain 15 illegal 36 male 63, 65 Muslim 100, 109, 205–6 Pakistani 123 Powell’s approach on 43 working-class 93 imperialism/imperialist 53, 71, 95 India 1, 27, 33, 39, 58, 60, 116–17, 120, 151–3, 161–2, 194

cultural heritage 34 division of Indian subcontinent 4 ghazal 35 Indian Muslim heritage 30, 35 Indian Mutiny (see Sepoy War of 1857) India-Pakistan partition 151, 153 music/raag (genres) 135–6 West Bengal 153 individualism 16, 45, 96, 126 possessive 222 n.77 inhabitants 75, 78, 88, 98, 101, 114–15, 121, 131, 133, 143, 146, 176 In Our Mad and Furious City (Gunaratne) 22, 56, 169, 172, 199, 201, 204–5, 207 Abba (fictional character) 188–90, 201 Abu Farouk (fictional character) 172, 190–2, 198 Ardan (fictional character) 172, 177–9, 182, 199, 202, 207 awards/honors 169 Caroline (fictional character) 172, 174, 199–200 crisis of masculinity 192 Freshie Dave (fictional character) 180–1, 198 Grime music 177–8, 182, 207 Irfan (fictional character) 172, 174, 176, 188, 190–1, 198–9 Marc (fictional character) 177 Missy (fictional character) 178 Al-Muhajiroun 182, 189–92, 198–9 Muna (fictional character) 191 Nelson (fictional character) 172, 200 pornography 191 racism 180 Selvon (fictional character) 172, 174, 177–9, 182, 188–90, 199–200, 202 Troubles (religious conflict) 172, 199 voice of young men 174–6 Yusuf (fictional character) 172–4, 176, 178–83, 188, 190–2, 198–202 interculturalism 18. See also multiculturalism intersectionality 2, 4, 7, 10–11, 78 In the Light of What We Know (Rahman) 11, 22, 38, 63, 141, 143, 145, 151, 205 deterritorialization 145

Index Emily Hampton-Wyvern (fictional character) 158, 161–6 financial system 157–8, 167 genocidal rape 152 literary translation 141–2 maps (historical) Bangladesh and Pakistan 153–4 cartography 153 Mercator Projection map 141 Peter’s Map 141 mathematics 142, 152, 156, 161–2 Oxford University 142, 152, 154–5 racism/upper-class 145, 155, 161–3, 166–7 religious faith 154 Dr Reza Mehrani (fictional character) 162 sexual relationship/sexual violence 162–3 abortion/pregnancy 163–4, 166 UK-US pairing 157–8 xenophobia 155 Zafar (fictional character) 22, 134, 141–2, 145, 152–8, 161–7, 207 Iran 1, 43, 63, 149 Iranian Revolution 5 Iraq 5–6, 112, 181, 228 n.3 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 56, 71, 181, 199 Islamic State (ISIS) 228 n.3. See also Daesh (Islamic State) Islam/Islamism 2–3, 33, 36, 41–2, 48–51, 53–8, 61, 63, 66–7, 69–70, 78, 92, 101, 124, 126, 135, 149, 151, 165, 175, 188, 198, 205 Allah 32, 42, 52–3, 61, 78, 135, 149–50, 159–60 anti-social form of 55, 58, 176 British-born Muslims 6, 125–6 essentialization of 3, 166 extremism/extremists 109, 170 fundamentalism 182, 210 n.27 and gangster 64 haram (prohibited) 78 Islamic beliefs/faith 1, 3, 5–6, 12, 32, 51, 73, 78–9, 81, 100–1, 135, 145–7, 154, 169–70, 191, 206, 210 n.27 Islamic Rage Boy image 2, 22–3 Koran 33, 41–2, 78, 101, 115, 188

253

Lut (Allah’s messenger) 78 misrepresentation of Muslims 3, 23 politicized 50–1, 185, 210 n.27 radicalization 169–70, 193, 199–200 Sunni 48–50, 53–4, 56, 103, 112, 145–6, 172, 228 n.3 talaq (divorce) 159 transcultural 56 veils/veil-wearing 211 n.33 Westernised Muslim 98 Islamophobia 3, 5–6, 8, 13, 19, 58, 75, 97, 165, 170, 179, 194, 201, 208, 210 n.28 contemporary 199 Meer on 6 isomorphic approach 125 Jack, Nasty 177 Japan/Japanese 1, 35, 53, 63 Jaspal, Rusi 10, 78 Javid, Sajid 171, 193–4 Jenkins, Peter 75 Jews/Jewish 3, 33, 39, 57 Jones, Carole 23 Jordan, Ana, crises of masculinity 186 The Joseph Rowntree Foundation 112 Kandiyoti, Deniz, ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’ 149–50 Kassovitz, Mathieu, La Haine 177 Kedhar, Anusha 16 Kelman, James 108, 111 How Late It Was, How 172 Khan-Din, Ayub, East Is East 73 Nazir (fictional character) 73 Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali 135, 165–6, 207 Khan, Sadiq 12–13, 113, 224 n.30 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah 1, 43, 45 Kirkup, James, ‘The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name’ 1 Kristeva, Julia 37, 197 Kugle, Scott Siraj al-Haqq 78 Kureishi, Hanif 4, 50, 54–7, 59, 61–3, 65, 67–9, 83, 86, 94, 97, 102–3, 110, 118, 120, 143, 175, 187, 205 award/honor 48 The Black Album (see The Black Album (Kureishi)) ‘Bradford’ 175

254 The Buddha of Suburbia 48 early life 48 ‘Eight Arms to Hold You’ 175 Islamic Fundamentalism 210 n.27 My Beautiful Laundrette (see My Beautiful Laundrette (Kureishi)) My Son the Fanatic 22, 48 ‘My Son the Fanatic’ 48, 79–80 ‘Sex and Secularism’ 50 Something to Tell You 97 Lee, Bruce 52–3, 71 Enter the Dragon 53 Fist of Fury 53 Lee Rigby, murder of 175, 189 lesbian 75, 79–80, 96–7. See also gay; homosexual/homosexuality; queer LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) 80, 100 LGBTIQ+ 73, 75, 80 liberal/liberalism 28, 50–1, 57, 62, 81, 100, 191, 193, 211 n.32 linguistic translation 16–17 literature (and films) 14, 19, 49, 93, 117, 136, 203, 206–7 academic 78 African American/Black 8 comparative 23–4 English 116, 131–2, 138 gender relations in 11 literary translation 141–2 and music 131, 138 Orientalist 41 transcultural 20 London (City of London) 112, 124 London borough of Tower Hamlets 107, 114 Muslim heritage in 112–13 7/7 London bombings 3, 21, 103, 193 2017 London Bridge attack 189 Lorsch, Susan E. 81 love drugs 59 Lupton, Deborah 127–8 Mac an Ghaill, Mairtin 12 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 30 MacDougall, David, transcultural cinema 20 Macpherson, C. B. 222 n.77

Index Mahmood, Saba 10 Maley, Willy 111 Malik, Kenan 5, 57 Maps for Lost Lovers (Aslam) 11, 22, 135, 141, 143, 206–7 Barra (fictional character) 22, 159–60 Chakor (fictional character) 147–8 Chanda (fictional character) 144, 159 Charag (fictional character) 144, 146, 148–51 The Uncut Self-Portrait 151 Chotta (fictional character) 22, 159–60 Dasht-e-Tanhai (fictional town) 144, 146–8, 150–1, 158–9, 161, 164 deterritorialization 145, 161 hegemonic masculinity 148, 150 honour killings 159 Jugnu (fictional character) 144, 159–60 Kaukab (fictional character) 144, 146–50, 159–60, 165 Mah-Jabin (fictional character) 144, 148, 150 non-Muslim/Hinduism 146–9 patriarchal bargaining 149–50 patriarchal masculinity 159–60 patriarchal violence/brutality 144, 147 racism/gender/sexual abuse 146–7 religious faith 147, 149–50 sacred salt 150 Shamas (fictional character) 144–8, 150, 158–60 Suraya (fictional character) 158–9, 166 talaq (divorce) 159 Ujala (fictional character) 144, 148, 150, 160 xenophobia 147 marginality/marginalization 5, 13, 51, 53, 57, 62, 65, 67, 75–6, 82, 84, 87, 90, 100, 108, 113, 118–19, 123, 125, 128, 136, 170, 175, 187, 200 marginalized masculinity 12, 87, 133 Marxism/Marxist 5, 49, 62, 66 Matar, Nabil 3 Matthes, Frauke 1, 7, 10, 20, 48, 54, 114 notion of transculturality 23 Writing and Muslim Identity 22 Mbembe, Achille 22, 174, 196, 201 McCulloch, Fiona 159, 161

Index McLeod, John 20, 43–4, 112, 122, 173–4, 200 Meer, Nasar 3 on Islamophobia 6 Melamed, Jodi 16, 18 metamorphosis 28, 31, 34, 36, 39–41, 45 The Middle East 3, 79, 98, 120, 149 migration/migrants 2, 9, 16–18, 21–2, 49, 63, 71, 84–5, 112, 116, 131, 145, 148, 158. See also immigration/ immigrants anti-migrant 3, 19, 118, 207 Bhabha on 16–17 Chinese to the United States 53 Cuban 64 first-generation 123, 143 hard-working 122–3 labour 4, 153 migrancy 16 Muslim (male) 27, 30, 38, 45, 79, 99, 103 Pakistani 74, 82–3, 86, 90, 110, 122–3, 224 n.30 post-migrant 15–16, 116 post-war 60 The Satanic Verses and 29–31, 33, 36–7, 40, 42, 45, 203–4 second-generation 61 South Asian 38, 120, 143 Mills, Robert, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages 41 minority group 8, 52, 57, 62, 74, 82, 85, 87, 112, 124, 157, 171, 194, 206 Mirza, Maryam 149–51 misogyny/misogynists 5, 10, 16, 29, 62, 94, 116, 127–8, 158, 163–4 modern Britain. See Early Modern Britain modern-day Bangladesh (East Pakistan) 107, 109 Modood, Tariq 5–6 on religion 7 Mondal, Anshuman A. 41, 48, 56–7 monotheism 78, 101 Moore-Gilbert, Bart 54, 63, 67–9, 94–6 morality 35, 59, 89, 94, 167, 171 Morey, Peter 1, 5, 7, 22–3, 63, 98 Framing Muslims 2, 58 Morrison, Toni 8 Morton, Stephen 35

255

Mosher, Jerry 128 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) Clarissa Dalloway (fictional character) 173 Septimus Smith (fictional character) 173 William Bradshaw (fictional character) 173 Mufti, Aamir R., Forget English! 17 multiculturalism 5, 7, 16, 18, 49–50, 65, 110, 120, 137, 174, 177. See also interculturalism My Beautiful Laundrette (Kureishi) 21, 48, 73, 76, 79–82, 205–6 Bilquis (fictional character) 83 cross-racial kiss 73, 79 Dick O’Donnell (fictional character) 86 Drugs, Money, Guns (DMG) 85 free market economics 96–7 Hussein (fictional character) 74, 83, 85–7, 102, 126 Johnny (fictional character) 75, 85, 91, 94–7, 102–3, 207 Lenny (fictional character) 88–9 Mary (fictional character) 83, 86 Nasser (fictional character) 74–5, 81–90, 95–7, 99, 102 Omar (fictional character) 21, 74–6, 80–3, 85–7, 90–1, 94–7, 100, 102–3, 206 Rachel (fictional character) 83–4, 95 racism/sexual relationship 76, 83–4, 91, 94–5 Salim (fictional character) 85–6, 90 Tania (fictional character) 81, 96 Zaki (fictional character) 86, 97 My Brother the Devil (El Hosaini) 8, 21, 73, 76, 78, 80–2, 87, 90, 101, 177, 205, 207 Aisha (fictional character) 88, 100 CCTV/surveillance cameras 98 Drugs, Money, Guns (DMG) gang 76, 81–90, 92, 98–100, 103 Izzy (fictional character) 76, 89, 92 male homosexuality 79 Mo (fictional character) 76, 87–8, 98–100, 103 Rash (fictional character) 21, 76, 81, 83, 87–94, 99–103 Repo (fictional character) 89–90, 99

256

Index

same-sex desire/sexual relationship 76, 88, 92–4, 99 Sayyid (fictional character) 76, 91–4, 98–103 Sonya (fictional character) 88 urban gangster 89 Vanessa (fictional character) 88, 94 Nash, Geoffrey 1, 23 National Front (NF) 91, 194, 221 n.60 national identity 30, 41, 49, 103, 133, 155 nationalism 74, 155, 205 nation-state 80, 136 Nazi Germany 57 Neal, Mark Anthony 69 necropolitics 22, 169, 174, 196, 201, 205 neoliberal/neoliberalism 11, 16, 21, 69, 74, 80, 85, 91, 95–8, 100, 111, 136 9/11 attacks 3, 5, 7, 21, 23–4, 103, 118, 144, 158, 188–9, 193 Hopkins work on 5–6, 13 non-British 20 non-Muslim 2, 4, 7–8, 10, 16, 21–2, 49, 113–14, 130, 146–9, 187, 189, 207 non-normative desires 21, 74, 77, 90, 96–7, 100, 102, 183 non-white 18, 75, 80, 84, 97–8, 101, 112, 116, 221 n.60, 222 n.89 North America 7, 13, 206 Northern Ireland 40, 112, 155, 172, 181, 220 n.37 Troubles (religious conflict) 199 Notting Hill Race Riot of 1958 200 Oedipus 171 Orientalism/Orientalist 4, 7, 41, 86, 144, 162, 164–6 ‘Other’ 19, 74 Muslim Other’ 2, 102 racialized 80 West’s ‘Other’ 3, 126 otherness 6–7, 16 Pakistan/Pakistanis 1, 12, 39, 51, 55, 63, 75, 82–4, 90–1, 108, 111, 122, 134, 148, 153, 181 and Bangladesh 153–4 India-Pakistan partition 151 as London Mayor 113

migrants 4, 74, 82–3, 86, 90, 110, 122–3, 224 n.30 Pakistani Scots 123–4, 129, 205 Pandey, Mangal 60. See also India Parekh Report 49 Pasha, Syed against Rushdie’s novel 1 and Thatcher 1 patriarchal bargaining 149–50 patriarchal dividend 11–12, 64 patriarchal masculinity 13–14, 21–2, 30, 77, 81–3, 85, 91, 115, 147, 159–60, 165 Perfect, Michael, multicultural bildungsroman 110 performativity 9, 53, 66, 68–70 Philippon, Alix 165–6 Polyneices 171 popular culture 66, 69, 85, 186 postcolonial/postcolonialism 4, 19, 20, 23, 28, 49, 56, 62, 66, 86, 136, 143, 153. See also colonialism post-9/11 era 2–3, 5–6, 9, 58, 63, 80, 97–8, 124, 139, 206 post-migrant 15–16, 116 postmodern/postmodernism 22, 48, 50, 108, 167 post-racial 16, 173 post-Satanic Verses Affair 3, 9, 48, 64 Powell, Enoch 40 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech 4, 43–4 Powell, Michael, A Matter of Life and Death 34–5 Pratt, Mary Louise 18–19 on transculturation 19 Pressburger, Emeric, A Matter of Life and Death 34–5 Prince (musician) 62, 67–70, 206 Around the World in a Day 68 Procter, James 15, 43, 57 Prophet Muhammad 3, 33, 41, 58, 63, 101, 135, 159 Sunnah 101, 151 protests/protestors 62. See also Bradford book-burning Bradford 5, 47, 59 against Brick Lane 109 against British in Scotland 112 protest masculinity 12, 47, 50, 53, 55, 61, 82, 87, 90, 119, 122–3, 189, 201

Index against The Satanic Verses 1, 5, 49, 58 social 6, 53 Psychoraag (Saadi) 17, 22, 107, 110, 124–5, 172, 204, 206–7 Babs (fictional character) 124, 129–30, 134, 205 cultural translation 134–5 Glasgow 22, 108, 110–11, 119–24, 129, 131, 138, 205 Harry (fictional character) 120 language 121 music (genres) 134–8 protest masculinities 122–3 Radio Chaandani (radio station) 120, 123, 205 sexuality/romantic relationships 129–30 transcultural identity 120, 123–4, 138–9, 204 Zaf (fictional character) 107–8, 110, 119–24, 128–31, 133–8, 204–5, 207 Zilla (fictional character) 124, 129–30, 134, 205 Puar, Jasbir K. 2, 8, 21, 37, 81, 98–9, 102, 126, 181 on assemblage 11 homonationalism 80, 91, 97, 100 Islamophobic attacks on Sikhs in the US 5 Terrorist Assemblages 210 n.28 Public Enemy hip-hop group 53, 62 Punk 177 al-Qaeda 5, 99, 194, 210 n.27. See also Daesh (Islamic State); terrorism/ terrorists qawwali (music) 165–6, 227 n.38 queer 23, 37–8, 73, 77, 80, 95, 99–101. See also gay; homosexual/ homosexuality; lesbian race/racism 4–8, 10–11, 13, 15–16, 31–2, 39–40, 49–54, 57, 62, 64, 66, 68–7, 74–5, 79–81, 83–4, 90–1, 119, 142, 180, 187, 196. See also discrimination burning of statues 40 COVID-19 epidemic 207

257

minoritarian 52, 85 (see also minority group) multi-racial community 87 physical and structural 4 politics 53, 68, 173 racialization 2–3, 6–7, 47, 180–1, 201 Stormzy on 178 violent 110 Raggastani group 52–3 Rahman, Momin 78 Rahman, Zia Haider awards/honors 143 early life 143 In the Light of What We Know (see In the Light of What We Know (Rahman)) Rana, Junaid 2, 6, 8 rave culture 58–9 Reagan, Ronald 97 rebellion 48, 54, 56, 60, 62, 87, 126, 195 religion 2, 7, 12, 17, 31–2, 41–3, 48, 53, 70, 84. See also specific religions Modood on 7 Rana on 6 Rennhak, Katharina, Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750–2000 14 Rich, Adrienne, compulsory heterosexuality 74 Richardson, Samuel Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady 31, 39 Pamela; Or, Virtue Regained 27, 31, 39, 47 Rock Against Racism March and Concert of 1978 194 Rodríguez González, Carla 111, 123, 129 ‘Rule, Britannia!’ nationalist anthem of Britain 85, 221 n.53 Rumi, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad 92, 166 Rushdie, Salman 48, 58, 62–3, 108 awards/honors 27–8 death 47 early life 27 early successful works 28 Midnight’s Children 27–8, 49 The Satanic Verses (see The Satanic Verses (Rushdie)) Shame 28 Russell, Bertrand 156

258 Saadi, Suhayl, Psychoraag. See Psychoraag (Saadi) Said, Edward Ahmad reproves 4 Al-Azm’s accusation against 4 Orientalism 3–4 Salique, Abdus 109 same-sex marriage 8, 13, 99, 220 n.37 Sandhu, Sukhdev 4 Santesso, Esra Mirze 1, 23 The Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 13, 21, 27–8, 47, 49–50, 54, 59, 61, 63, 169, 198, 203, 206 Alleluia Cone (fictional character) 40 Allie Cone (fictional character) 32–3, 39–41 assassination of translators 1, 47 banning and censorship 1 engagement with migration 29–31, 33, 36–7, 40, 42, 44–5, 203–4 Gibreel Farishta (fictional character) 28–36, 39–45, 59, 63, 203–4 Granny Ripper case 43–4 Jumpy Joshi (fictional character) 31, 39, 44 Mahound (fictional character) 41, 63 Otto (fictional character) 40 Pamela Lovelace (fictional character) 31, 39, 44 protests against Rushdie 1, 5, 47, 59 Saladin Chamcha (fictional character) 28–41, 43–5, 59, 63, 203–4 same-sex desires 33–4 sexual transformation (sexual organ) 36–7, 41 Spivak’s criticism on 29 use of gazal/ghazal 35 The Satanic Verses Affair 1, 3, 5, 7, 17, 21, 47–50, 57, 60–2, 70, 73, 79, 144, 193 Scorsese, Martin, Goodfellas 64 Liotta (fictional character) 65 Scotland 134, 137, 155 Glasgow 111, 113, 124 Glasgow Airport attack 111–12 Scottish Asians 206 Scottish Independence Referendum, 2014 111 Scottish music 137

Index Scottish Muslim identities 206 Scottish National Party (SNP) 111 Second World War 4, 39, 60 The Secret Rose Garden (Sharbistari, Mahmud) 135 secularism 17, 45, 115 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 13, 115 homosocial desire/homosociality 13–14, 21, 81–3, 87, 90, 93, 152 Selvon, Sam 28, 172 sensitivity 8 Sepoy War of 1857 60, 195 sexuality 2, 10, 29, 36–7, 47–9, 55, 66–70, 74, 76–7, 79–80, 83–4, 95–7, 102, 130, 158 humiliation 36, 38, 51 male–male 34, 38, 82, 91, 93–4 masculine struggle 54, 66 same-sex 21, 33–4, 73, 75–82, 90–3, 96, 98, 100, 102–3, 124, 152, 220 n.37 sexual transformation (sexual organ) 36–7, 41 Shah, Asad, murder of 112 Shakespeare, William 3, 62, 116–17 Richard II 117, 224 n.42 Shamsie, Kamila, Home Fire. See Home Fire (Shamsie) Shih, Shu-mei 8 comparative racialization 2, 7 on religion 6 Siddiqui, Mona 5 My Way: A Muslim Woman’s Journey 208 Simon, Sherry 113 Siraj, Asifa 78 slave/slave trade 3, 60, 78, 108, 111 Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations 111 Smith, Byron Porter, Islam in English Literature 3 Smith, Zadie 21, 47, 49–50, 55–7, 60–2, 65, 69, 118, 143, 173, 187 awards/honors 49 White Teeth (See White Teeth (Smith)) social constructionist approach 9 social injury 58, 65, 119, 157 socio-economics 5, 8, 10, 12, 96, 99–101, 133, 154, 178, 182, 201. See also economy/economic(s) depression 111 deprivation 50, 175, 187, 189

Index disempowerment 90 inequalities 4, 18, 71, 81, 90, 96, 103, 112 of London 112 marginalization 53 solidarity 12, 15, 79, 82, 176, 198 Sophocles, Antigone 170–1, 174 South Africa 1, 63 South Asia/South Asians 3–4, 8, 40, 56, 86, 110, 120–1, 143, 165 colonization in 60 migrants 38, 120, 143 music 136–7 Sunni Islam 145–6 spirituality 100, 135, 166, 188 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty criticism on The Satanic Verses 29 cultural perspective 136 Death of a Discipline 23–4 native informant 193 planetarity/planetary thinking 136, 139 state-of-the-art technology 88, 101, 178 Stein, Mark 55 Stormzy 176 Heavy Is the Heart 178 Strauss, Johann 95 ‘The Blue Danube’ 206–7 Stravinsky, Igor 137 ‘The Rite of Spring’ 135 Sufis/Sufism 92, 110, 135, 155, 165–6, 207 Sufyan, Muhammad 44 Sunni Islam 48–50, 53–4, 56, 103, 112, 145–6 Syria 6, 169–71, 188–9 terrorism/terrorists 38, 80, 97–9, 111, 187, 200, 222 n.89. See also specific organizations Abdulla, Bilal 111–12 Ahmed, Kafeel 111–12 9/11 attacks (See 9/11 attacks) Glasgow Airport attack 111–12 Islamist 80, 144 masculinities 187 7/7 London bombings 3, 21, 103, 193 2017 London Bridge attack 189 Teverson, Andrew 28, 31, 39, 41, 45 Thackeray, William Makepeace 116–17 Thatcher, Margaret 1, 29, 40, 42–3, 74–6, 85, 94, 96–7, 111, 222 n.77

259

economic reforms 85 New Right 40, 94, 96 Section 28 legislation 75, 94 tax reforms 85, 220 n.41 1066 and All That (R. J. Yeatman and W. C. Sellar) 34 Times Literary Supplement (TLS) 47 transcultural/transculturalism 18, 20, 53, 92, 95, 110, 129, 138, 176, 178, 190 aesthetics 110 exchange 3, 14, 18–19, 29, 81, 111, 138 identity 30, 44–5, 79, 108, 120, 134–5, 202, 204 masculinity 71, 74, 113, 160, 177, 182, 204 metropolis 112 narrative 30, 45 polyphony 110 transculturation 14, 16, 21 Pratt on 19 transnationalism 160 transnational movement 2, 45, 52, 112 Turgenev, Ivan 66 Turkey 8, 63, 136, 149 unemployment 86, 112, 186 Union of Muslims 1 United Kingdom (UK) 1, 5, 14–15, 39, 43, 157 citizenship 40 development of Islamism in 50 Pakistanis migration to 4 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) 18 The United States 5, 7, 63, 65–6, 80, 101, 152, 157, 160 Chinese migration to 53 racial politics in 53, 68 Upstone, Sara 112, 119, 173 urban environments 21, 113–14, 125, 130–1, 141 ‘Victorian-era’ morals 75, 96 violence 2, 4–5, 12, 16, 37, 54, 58, 88, 124, 166, 199 gang 123 gendered 144, 160, 166–7 IRA 56 against men 77, 166

260 patriarchal 144 sexualized 158, 162–3 Virdee, Satnam, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider 221 n.60 Vuillemenot, Anne-Marie 166 Wang, Joy 36 Warner, Michael 77 Welsch, Wolfgang 18 ‘Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’ 19 Welsh, Irvine, Trainspotting 108 Westernised masculinity/woman 115, 133 Whitehouse, Mary 94 White Teeth (Smith) 21, 47, 49, 51, 58, 62–3, 70–1, 118, 123, 142, 172, 204, 206 Alsana Iqbal (fictional character) 47, 61–2 Archie Jones (fictional character) 47, 50, 60, 71 Clara (fictional character) 47 gangster/gangsterism/mafia 62, 64–6 Hifan (fictional character) 69 Irie (fictional character) 47 Joyce Chalfen (fictional character) 49 KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation) 53–4, 56–7, 62, 64–6, 69–71, 183

Index Magid Iqbal (fictional character) 49–50, 60, 63, 71, 142 migration/race/gender 49–53, 57, 62 Millat Iqbal (fictional character) 47, 49–50, 52–5, 60–6, 69–71 Raggastani group 52–3, 69 relationship 65 Samad Iqbal (fictional character) 47, 50, 60–1, 65 sexuality 50–1, 70 William the Conqueror (William I) 34 Willis, Bruce 61–2 Winter, Charlie, radicalisation 228 n.1 Wittig, Monique 77 Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway 173 Clarissa Dalloway (fictional character) 173 working-class communities 75, 93, 96, 98–9, 101, 109–10, 114, 123, 177–8, 186–7, 204 Yaqin, Amina 1, 22–3, 63, 98, 165 Framing Muslims 2, 58 Yekani, Elahe Haschemi 48 Zaidi, Mohsin, A Dutiful Boy: A Memoir of a Gay Muslim’s Journey to Acceptance 208 Zaimoğlu, Feridun, Kanak Sprak 22 Zevolli, Giuseppe 53

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