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A Comparative Approach to Pakistani Fiction in English[1] CLAIRE CHAMBERS* , Leeds Metropolitan University *[email protected] This survey paper adumbrates an opening up of Pakistani fiction in order to draw comparisons with other writing by novelists of Muslim heritage. While Pakistani writers tend to be analyzed as part of broader South-Asian trends, Pakistan also faces west West and has concerns in the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe and beyond, that derive from its Muslim identity. Without overstating the idea of a universalizing umma (which can lead to neglect of the differences and tensions between different Muslim groups), the approach has the advantage of bringing together writers from Muslim countries to shed light on each other. South Asians, Arabs, and Africans are discussed together, because of their shared religious heritage, but never overlooking their vast contextual variations. Insights and themes unique to the research include the fact that writers often tap into a canon of largely Muslim literature and art from the Middle East, South Asia and beyond, which responds to key moments in the construction of Muslim identity, so intertextuality is a significant concern. Key words: Pakistani literature; diaspora; Muslim; intertextuality; Yusuf; war on terror. My paper focuses on Pakistani writers who write fiction in English, examining them alongside their peers with Muslim heritage from the Middle East, North Africa, and their diasporas. Pakistan’s pre-Islamic civilizations 1 1

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Page 1: A Comparative Approach to Pakistani Fiction in Englisheprints.whiterose.ac.uk/88425/1/JPW_Chambers_Edit_for... · Web viewadumbrates an opening up of Pakistani fiction in order to

A Comparative Approach to Pakistani Fiction in English[1]

CLAIRE CHAMBERS* ,

Leeds Metropolitan University

*[email protected]

 This survey paper adumbrates an opening up of Pakistani fiction in order to draw comparisons with other writing by novelists of Muslim heritage. While Pakistani writers tend to be analyzed as part of broader South-Asian trends, Pakistan also faces west West and has concerns in the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe and beyond, that derive from its Muslim identity. Without overstating the idea of a universalizing umma (which can lead to neglect of the differences and tensions between different Muslim groups), the approach has the advantage of bringing together writers from Muslim countries to shed light on each other. South Asians, Arabs, and Africans are discussed together, because of their shared religious heritage, but never overlooking their vast contextual variations. Insights and themes unique to the research include the fact that writers often tap into a canon of largely Muslim literature and art from the Middle East, South Asia and beyond, which responds to key moments in the construction of Muslim identity, so intertextuality is a significant concern.

Key words: Pakistani literature; diaspora; Muslim; intertextuality; Yusuf; war on terror.

My paper focuses on Pakistani writers who write fiction in English, examining them

alongside their peers with Muslim heritage from the Middle East, North Africa, and

their diasporas. Pakistan’s pre-Islamic civilizations (evident in the archeological sites

of Taxila, Moenjodaro, and Harappa), and its shared borders and overlapping culture

with India, Afghanistan, Iran, Central Asia, and China, “has given Pakistani writers a

particularly rich cultural heritage to draw on” (Shamsie Dragonfly xxii). Pakistanis

also speak a variety of languages, including Urdu, Baluchi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Siraiki,

Pashto, Kashmiri, and Potohari. In the decades immediately after Partition, some

rejected the use of English for creative purposes as an elitist, colonial language. Yet,

far from making a political choice to write in English, many writers educated in the

“English-medium” system in Pakistan or Anglo-American countries have English as

their strongest language. As a character in Aamer Hussein’s Another Gulmohar

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Tree[2] remarks, “You don’t choose the language you write in, it chooses you” (53).

Given that my broader research project is in literary representations of and by

Muslim-heritage subjects in the UK, there is likely to be some bias towards British-

resident writers, but I hope not to the exclusion of authors based in Pakistan or in the

Pakistani diaspora elsewhere, notably North America. My interviews with several of

the authors discussed (conducted for my book, British Muslim Fictions) inform the

paper.

The recent flowering of Pakistani fiction in English has received much news

media coverage,[3] and great critical attention when compared to the scant material

on the subject before the 1990s.[4] Pakistani writers, most of them living or educated

in the West, currently feature prominently in the international literary scene as award

winners or nominees, bestselling authors, festival speakers and, increasingly, topics

for research students and critics. The success, borne out by multiple prize awards or

nominations, of such novels as Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, Mohsin

Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohammad Hanif’s A Case of Exploding

Mangoes, and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, has led to bidding wars and high

advances for AmericanUS-educated writers Ali Sethi and Daniyal Mueenuddin.

Freeman’s recent Granta 112: Pakistan adds to a sense of publishers and academics

moving away from the fashionable Indo-chic of the 1980s and 90s (see Huggan 69-

77) towards grittier, post-9/11 “renditions” of Pakistan as the eye of the storm in the

war on terror (Bennett-Jones). Some of these writers, despite different backgrounds,

exhibit the ability to “live between East and West, literally or intellectually” (Shamsie

Dragonfly xxiv), which percolates through their writing.

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This attention paid to the (undeniably excellent) “big five” of Hamid, Hanif,

K. Shamsie, Mueenuddin, and Aslam problematically leads to neglect of other less

well-known, but equally great writers from Pakistan, such as Moni Mohsin, Sara

Suleri-Goodyear and Sorayya Khan. It could also give the mistaken impression that

Pakistani writing is dominated by male writers (a misapprehension that has already

been countered by such anthologies as Hussein Kahani and M. Shamsie World). What

also gets forgotten in the celebration of this “case of exploding talent” (Ilkley,

Literature Festival n.p.) is that the achievements did not explode out of a vacuum.

Important Muslim writers, such as Ahmed Ali and Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, began their

careers in pre-partition Partition India and prefigure this younger generation. In the

1970s and 80s, leading luminaries of Pakistani writing in English included Bapsi

Sidhwa, Zulfikar Ghose, and Hanif Kureishi, all diasporic writers, and Ghose and

Kureishi having only wavy connections to Pakistan. Salman Rushdie, although a self-

proclaimed Indian writer, wrote extensively about Pakistan in Midnight’s Children.

Despite resisting his family’s move to Karachi, Rushdie also published a novel on

Pakistan, Shame, which, in its satirical portrayal of Zia ul-Haq and the Bhutto family,

anticipates the wicked humour of Hanif’s recent A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

Whereas such critics as Tariq Rahman take an encyclopaedic view of

Anglophone Pakistani writing, I take a comparative approach to recent Pakistani

English-language fictional works, situating them alongside writing by authors of

Muslim heritage in other parts of the world. Complete coverage of Pakistani or other

“Muslim writing” is not attempted here, but the authors discussed illustrate recent

trends. My research draws attention to the absence of univocality in writers of Muslim

heritage, indicating that—notwithstanding attempts by sections of mainstream fiction

and the media to portray Muslims as a monolithic group[5]—these creative writers are

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highly heterogeneous, even conflicting thinkers. I argue that, despite lively

differences of opinion, Pakistani and other writers of Muslim background draw upon,

return to, and build on, a canon of largely Muslim writing and art from the

subcontinent and Middle East. Through intertextuality, the writers challenge stock

images of, while highlighting divisions and disagreements among, Muslim groups.

Founder of the nation, Mohammad Ali Jinnah’sThe declared aim of founder of

the nation, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, to safeguard the rights of Muslims as India’s

largest minority, generated support for the Muslim League’s calls for Pakistan but,

notwithstanding his deep-rooted secularism, Jinnah inadvertently opened the door to

religion being privileged over all other components of identity (see Shamsie, Offence

29-35). The word “Islamic” rather than “Muslim” gained currency, amid much

debate, as a means of defining the new state after it was created, and a hegemonic

version of the religion was officially prioritized in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s

Constitution of 1956 and subsequent amendments. Furthermore, as Pakistan’s crises

of 1971 and ongoing provincial fissures demonstrate, “Islam” conspicuously failed to

unify the nation. The loss of Pakistan’s east wing in the 1971 war and Bangladesh’s

resulting independence was slow to inform English-language writing (although there

was an outpouring of representations of the war in Bengali literature), perhaps

because of psychological trauma. However, 1971 is now being discussed by a new

generation of Pakistani writers including Kamila Shamsie (Kartography), Moni

Mohsin and Sorayya Khan.[ 6 ]

As Sri Lankan critic, Neluka Silva, and Kamila Shamsie demonstrate, hardline

Islamic political parties have been resoundingly defeated in almost every election

since Independence (Silva 175; K. Shamsie, Offence 39; 58; 69; 71-2). Silva focuses

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on the growing subgenre of texts lambasting Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamizing regime (1977-

88) and his fiercely misogynistic Hudood Ordinance, examining two texts of the

1980s, Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Rukhsana Ahmad’s pathbreaking We Sinful

Women anthology of English translations from Urdu poetry. This era is examined

further in Nadeem Aslam’s Season of the Rainbirds, Kamila Shamsie’s Broken

Verses, Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Ali Sethi’s The Wish

Maker, and Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geometry of God, among other texts. So writers

are acutely aware of the threat posed by the rise of a politicized Islam, particularly to

women, and to other minority groups, including the stigmatized Ahmadi community.

In this context, it might seem strange to make a case for exploring Muslim

identity rather than national origins as a way of understanding literature. But Muslim

identity is proving an increasingly useful valence for understanding Pakistani texts

since a series of pivotal events between 1989- and 2005, including the Rushdie Affair,

the two Gulf Wars, 9/11, 7/7, and the “war on terror”. Identity is a protean thing,

constantly being re/fashioned (see Hall, “Cultural”), and one’s religious affiliations as

a Muslim intersect with other identity signifiers. My paper will not stray far into

discussions of the multifariousness of Islam; it is the reified figure, and cultural

category, of the Muslim that is under analysis. With Amin Malak, I draw a distinction

between the Muslim, “who espouses the religion of Islam or is shaped by its cultural

impact”, and “the faith of Islam” (5).

Many significant Pakistani and Arab writers are secular, agnostic, atheists, or

(like Pakistani-American US novelist Bapsi Sidhwa, Pakistani-British poets Moniza

Alvi, John Siddique, and the late Middle-Eastern thinkers Edward W. Said and Mai

Ghoussoub) were not brought up as Muslims or come from other religious

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communities. They all have in common, though, a Muslim civilizational heritage. In

relation to my own positionality and interest in this field, as a non-Muslim who has

nevertheless been shaped by South-Asian Muslim culture in Britain and Pakistan, I

often think of a statement by Amin Malak: “Islam constitues not only a cardinal

component of Muslims’ identity but also becomes a prominent feature in the identity

of the non-Muslims (be they Hindus, Zoroastrians, Jews, or Christians) who happen to

live in Muslim communities” (4). Therefore, I take a broad view of the category

“Muslim”, rather than examining texts for their religiosity or piety.

As Muneeza Shamsie convincingly argues, it is also untenable to impose a (or

any?) distinction between diasporic and Pakistani-resident authors writing in English

(World: xvii). Many Pakistani writers in English (including Nadeem Aslam, Aamer

Hussein, Kamila Shamsie, and Uzma Aslam Khan) neither have hyphenated

identities, nor can be considered Pakistani exiles, but write in liminal positions

between West and East. I follow Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur in recognizing

the roots of the term “diaspora” in unwilling displacement, oppression and exile, but,

like them, I think that “[d]iaspora, in the rapidly changing world we now inhabit,

speaks to diverse groups of displaced persons and communities moving across the

globe” (2). Yet perhaps most central to my understanding of diasporic identities is

Avtar Brah’s suggestion that religion “underpin[s] a complex intersection” between

more commonly-discussed aspects of diasporic identity, including gender, class, caste

and ethnicity (18).

In the current political climate, an increasingly complex debate is emerging

about the reified figure and cultural category of the “Muslim”. Yet criticism of

postcolonial and migrant writing still tends to subsume religious identity under such

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categories as ethnicity, nationality, hybridity and race. Proposing an alternative

critical vocabulary, the paper explores the diversity of Muslims, the civilization of

the Islamic world and, to a lesser extent, the representation of religion, as depicted in

a rich and often contestatory body of writing. Pakistani and Pakistani-diasporic

authors tend to be analyzed as part of broader South-Asian trends alongside their

peers from India, Bangladesh, and their diasporas. This is logical, given their long

history as one nation. However, the “South-Asian” construct’s relevance may be

decreasing as Partition becomes more firmly a part of past history (notwithstanding its

continuing residues); and as Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh develop and self-fashion

increasingly distinct identities. Pakistan differs from India because it has concerns in,

and links to, the Middle East, Central Asia, East Africa, and beyond, that derive from

its Muslim identity. However, it is important to bear in mind Kamila Shamsie’s[7]

witty query: “Has anyone else noticed how we seem to have geographically shifted

from being a side-thought of the subcontinent to a major player in the Greater Middle

East? Is this progress?” (“How” np). The comparative “Af-Pak” rather than “Indo-

Pak” approach (K. Shamsie “How” np), while now common in political and social

sciences, is as yet under-explored in literary studies, but it will only represent an

advancement if we use “Muslim writing” as a launch-pad towards a constellation of

new texts and connections, rather than a label with which to brand and constrain

writers.

I begin my comparative survey by taking one example of shared influences

from the Qur’an on these writers. The Qur’anic story of Yusuf, narrating

Yusuf/Joseph’s betrayal by, and eventual return to, his family; his exile into slavery;

and attempted seduction by Potiphar’s wife Zuleikha (the name popularly given to

Potiphar’s wife in Muslim tradition), is explored in Aamer Hussein’s “The Lost

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Cantos of the Silken Tiger”, Tanzanian-British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah’s

Paradise, Suhayl Saadi’s Joseph’s Box, and Nadeem Aslam’s “Leila in the

Wilderness”. In Hussein’s folkloric story-within-a-story, Yusuf is figured as a poet,

challenged to a recital contest by the fiery, but ageing Zuleikha, during which they fall

in love. This story gives way to discussion amongst Pakistani émigrés in London

about the Pakistani woman writer, Aarzou, said to have written the tale about her

lover, the poet Yusuf Reza, in order to “stage [ . . . ] herself as Potiphar’s wife—an

early feminist struggle to present a woman mad, bad and dangerous” (“Cantos” 89).

Gurnah’s Booker-shortlisted fourth novel, Paradise, represents both a

rewriting of Surah Yusuf, and a pessimistic account of the colonization of east Africa

in the late-19th century. In the richly resonant chapter, “A Clot of Blood” (in the

Qur’an, this is one of the ingredients out of which Allah made man), Yusuf, the good-

looking rehani (slave-boy), faces attempted seduction by the vampiric older woman,

Zulekha.[8] As in Surah Yusuf, Yusuf’s innocence is proven by the fact that Zulekha

tore Yusuf’s shirt at the back as he ran from her, yet in this corrupt, hierarchical

society, the evidence counts for little (238-39). In contrast with Surah Yusuf’s

concluding optimism, when the young man’s steadfast faith is rewarded in his return

to his family, Gurnah’s Yusuf makes the cowardly, if understandable decision to

abandon the woman he loves, Amina, and despairingly joins the ruthless German

colonizers he had despised (247).

Suhayl Saadi’s voluminous and somewhat impenetrable Joseph’s Box also

features a character called Zuleikha who discovers a box in a Scottish river, inside

which she finds six further boxes containing clues which inspire a journey to

Scotland, England, Pakistan, ending in the Himalayas. Saadi’s self-declared aim is to

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use the Yusuf myth in order to explore the Sufi conditions of “sacrifice, truth, power,

obedience, life, memory and beauty” (Box blurb), through a transcultural frame.

Finally, Nadeem Aslam’s lush novella about antipathy towards the birth of

girl-children in Pakistan, “Leila in the Wilderness”, which opens Freeman’s Granta

112: Pakistan (9-53), is inspired by the ancient Arab legend of Leila and Majnun (the

hero Qes is known as Majnun, meaning the Mad One due to his grief at the loss of his

lover, Leila). The ancient love story is one of the central metaphorical, romantic, and

mystic texts of Muslim civilization. Other English-language writers of Muslim

heritage, including Kamila Shamsie (Broken 49-51; 118) and Afghan-American

Khaled Hosseini (Suns 240), make reference to the legend. “Leila in the Wilderness”

also evokes verses from Surah Yusuf, which describe Joseph’s father going blind

because of his sorrow over his missing son, and his sight being restored when he is

shown a shirt that proves Joseph is alive. In the novella, Leila is made to wear a

talismanic shirt “meant to represent the garment worn by Joseph”, in order to protect

the unborn son her relatives long for (in Freeman 26). Yet the shirt, apparently so

enabling for sons and fathers, makes Leila feels as though she is “almost blind” (37).

This discussion of three Pakistani writers based in Britain, Hussein, Saadi, and Aslam,

and of one writer of Muslim heritage from Zanzibar, Gurnah, indicates that Surah

Yusuf lends itself well to transcultural debate about migration, exile, slavery, and

gender. Certainly this is the view of Dutch literary critic Mieke Bal, whose book,

Loving Yusuf, centres on (re-)tellings of the Joseph story, from the Bible and Qur’an

through to Rembrandt’s etchings and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers.

In other texts, prayer and Ramadan are shown to structure the Muslim day and

year, intimating a strong imagined community. Hajj promises even greater “spiritual

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pleasure” (188) than the quotidian activities of prayer and fasting for Najwa,

protagonist of Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela’s Minaret. At the novel’s end, she

chooses to be funded to go to Makkah by the family she has worked for as a servant

for, rather than pursue a prohibited relationship with Tamer, her employer’s youthful

brother. The novel resembles romance fiction, with a friendship growing between

Najwa and Tamer, despite their different ages and social positions, but the conclusion

tilts it towards a different interpretation. Over romantic love, Najwa chooses religious

pilgrimage, which she imagines as being made up of “genuine joy and adventures

[ . . . ], [t]he crowds, the hardship of sleeping in tents, long bus rides, the [sense of

being] squeezed and wrung” (209). Ali Sethi represents Hajj more irreverently

through the portrayal of another servant woman, Naseem, who has saved up her

wages to make the pilgrimage to Makkah, commenting approvingly that in Saudi

Arabia “[e]verything they have: KFC, McDonald’s, anything at all” (Wish 5). Yet, for

Naseem, the pilgrimage proves epiphanic, showing her

the people of the world brought together in one mission: they wore the same

cloth and prayed to the same God and went round and round the same

monument. It had alerted her to the presence of a single underlying system.

(Sethi 12)

This idea of an “underlying system”, however tongue-in-cheek, indicates a notion of a

Muslim global community, or umma.

A key feature of what may be controversially termed “Muslim writing”,

therefore, is that writers are often less concerned with (neo-)colonialism and “the

West” than with establishing connections and affiliations which transcend this. Peter

G. Mandaville observes that “[t]he ‘debate’ between Islam and the West is certainly

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important, but we have allowed it to so overdetermine our perceptions of Islam that

crucial contestations and negotiations within Islam go unnoticed” (2-3). An example

of such negotiations is found in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s exploration of pre-colonial

trading connections between the Indian subcontinent, East Africa, and the Arabian

Peninsula. Similarly, in his Islam Quintet, Tariq Ali describes the hybrid societies of

medieval Spain and Sicily, and the more monocultural but still vibrant societies of

19th-century Turkey and contemporary Pakistan. Writing on Urdu short stories, in a

comment also applicable to English-language fiction, Aamer Hussein writes,

“[c]ontemporary Pakistani literature [ . . . ] reveals fascinating parallels with the

literature of other nascent post-colonial societies” (Hussein Kahani 16), to which I

would add, particularly Muslim postcolonial societies.

British-resident Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif provides diagrams in her

collection of essays, Mezzaterra (5; 8), which illustrate that alliances such as the Non-

Aligned Movement, Socialism, and Pan-Arabism aimed to forge new links between

countries that circumvented the legacies of colonialism, but that these “hospitable”

connections were attacked “from all sides” (8) and are now critically weakened.

Bangladeshi Tahmima Anam similarly describes a prevalent “cultural magpie-

picking” that she argues existed in the 1960s among Leftist activists, who:

felt like they were part of a global movement. Every time some other dictator was

overthrown in a far-flung country, student activists in Bangladesh felt an affinity, not

least to the Vietnamese when they were fighting the Americans. We think of

globalization as being post-internet, but in fact 1968 was the real moment of

globalization and political ideas (in Chambers, Fictions n.p.).

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Tariq Ali, in his account of the 1960s, Street-Fighting Years, similarly describes the

internationalism of the 1960s and the iconic status that figures such as Che Guevara

and Fidel Castro had amongst activists in South Asia and Europe alike.

Yet during and after the 1980s’ collapse of Communism, Islamism became an

increasingly potent force in world politics. Fiction by Soueif (Map), Aslam (Vigil),

Anam (Muslim) and Ali (Butterfly) documents the rise of various Islamist groups to

fill the void left by Marxist politics. Islamist connections between nations tend to be

less concerned with dialogue than a desire to persuade, convert or overthrow. To

describe one little-known but significant export from Pakistan to the Arab world, for

example, the Jamaat-e-Tablighi or Society for the Propagation of Religion played an

important role in North African nationalist struggles, and in the strikes of 1960s-70s

France (see Kepel 207-09). More notoriously, Arab, particularly Saudi, money is

given to Pakistan and its diaspora, often with the aim of consolidating Wahhabi

influences (Lewis, Young 139-40).

Another hierarchical and exploitative, though secular, connection was at its

peak in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, when many Persian Gulf states encouraged

Pakistan, alongside many other poor Asian countries, to send labourers to work in

their oil industry, as South Asians were seen as “cheaper and more pliable” than

indigenous or other Arab workers (Findlay 107). Yet their expectations of the good

life were frequently dashed by poor treatment and conditions, segregation, and

xenophobic abuse, all common features of migrant existence in the Gulf. This is

recognized by the significantly-named Noman in Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geometry

of God, who travels to unnamed Gulf nations with his father, a Pakistani Islamist

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minister, and observes “sleek hotels in cities with only conditioned air, where all the

workers look like me” (113).

To hold to the belief, then, that Pakistani authors are always concerned with

interrogating Western western Orientalism, a view that may be encouraged by a

partial reading of postcolonial theory, represents a misinterpretation of the texts.

Amin Malak suggests that “Muslim narrative writers [ . . . ] project the culture and

civilization of Islam from within” (2), and the texts dramatize this notion of an

insider’s view of Islam. By removing Muslims from the position of “other”, these

novelists create various possibilities for Muslims’ depictions. In this century’s climate

of Islamophobia, wars of questionable legality, and oppressive counter-terror

legislation, more writers are representing Muslim identity than ever before. Whereas

non-Muslim authors such as Martin Amis, Sebastian Faulks, and John Updike have

zeroed in on the figure of the terrorist, drawing upon a tradition in literature stretching

back to Conrad, Muslim writers have often looked at Islam in complex, multifaceted

ways.

Fictional counter-narratives disturbing the monolithic image of the “Muslim”

in public discourse have increased since the 2001 race riots in the north of England,

the attacks on America later that year, and the onset of the so-called war on terror. I

emphasize the British riots and the war on terror as much as the dramatic event of

9/11. While the attacks on America were evidently horrific and tragic, I’d suggest that

the unrest preceding them and the foreign policy that ensued in their wake were not

inevitable, and that the war on terror has had even more cataclysmic reverberations

than the terrorist strikes. In addition, the terrorist acts against the US in 2001 and their

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aftermath mark a flashpoint for a specific generation, as the Iranian revolution and

hostage crisis for the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Rushdie Affair of 1989 onwards,

and the First Gulf War of 1990-1 all manufactured concerns about the figure of the

Muslim. I will examine fictional representations of three of these turning points: 9/11,

the war on terror, and the Iraq War.

Daniyal Mueenuddin and Kamila Shamsie almost casually mention

Islamophobia experienced in post-9/11 AmericaUSA. Mueenuddin’s elite Pakistani

émigrés to the West in his acclaimed short story collection In Other Rooms, Other

Wonders, are described as being weakly hybrid, “not American and not with any

place in Pakistan”, daily apologizing for the crime of 9/11, despite their great distance

from Al Qaeda’s politics (149). In Shamsie’s Broken Verses, the sophisticated New

York-resident, Mir Adnan Akbar Khan (nicknamed Ed by his friends), is sacked from

his job and questioned by the FBI in the suspicious atmosphere following the 2001

attacks. Returning to Pakistan, Ed cites a depressingly familiar list of post-war on

terror outrages: “the INS. Guantanamo Bay. The unrandom random security checks”

(46). Mohsin Hamid explores this theme at greater length in The Reluctant

Fundamentalist through the character Changez (another pronunciation of the first

name of Mongol leader, Genghis Khan), who feels compelled to return to Pakistan

after changes in attitude to him, and Pakistanis as a group, in post-9/11 New York.

Changez is aware of other Pakistanis being beaten and arrested, himself experiences

verbal abuse from strangers, and ‘become[s] overnight a subject of whispers and

stares’ (130) for assuming the potent visual symbol of a beard, but he goes further

than Ed by getting involved in incendiary Lahori campus politics (179). Less well-

known is H.M. Naqvi’s fine new novel, Home Boy, which recounts the story of well-

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integrated Pakistani-American, Shehzad (“Chuck”) and his two friends, who are

arrested on terrorism charges in the toxic post-9/11 climate.

21st-century British Islamophobia is perhaps most extensively scrutinized in

Hanif Kureishi’s latest novel, Something to Tell You. Although somewhat solipsistic,

the novel interestingly shows religion becoming a central marker of identity in

contemporary Britain. Following 7/7, the failed bombings two weeks later, and the

shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes (see Vaughan-Williams),

Kureishi’s previously secular character, Ajita, tries to reorient herself in London by

reading the Qur’an and wearing the burqa. Kureishi traces changing attitudes towards

Muslims in Britain by discussing the shifting monikers used in describing them, from

“blacks” to “Asians” and now “Muslims” (36-37; see also Modood 3-7). Perhaps

most memorable, however, is Kureishi’s depiction of London as “one of the great

Muslim cities”, evident in a description of Shepherd’s Bush Market, in which

Morocco, the Middle East, and Europe coalesce in the pursuit of commerce (10).

Elsewhere, Kureishi explores increasing Islamophobia in a Britain where Muslims’

“fortunes and fears rose and fell according to the daily news” (14), and “Mussie”,

“ham-head” and “allahAllah-bomb” (320) are new insults.

Important though 9/11 and subsequent events such as the Madrid and London

bombings have been for non-Muslim perceptions of Islam, the war on terror has had

far greater impact on the lives of Muslims. For writers of Pakistani descent, at least,

the war in Afghanistan represents a particular watershed which has had a devastating

impact on Pakistan, and which is discussed in Feryal Ali Gauhar’s No Space for

Further Burials, Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil, Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt

Shadows, among other texts. To examine just one of these novels, The Wasted Vigil

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deals with intertextuality in an unusual way through the characters of two doctors,

Marcus (now an English perfume factory owner, who has his hand cut off by the

Taliban) and Qatrina (his wife of twenty 20 years, nonetheless considered his mistress

because a female cleric performed their wedding rites). Their eclectic reading is

nurtured by desperation, emblematically figured in the variety of books nailed to the

ceiling of their house “[a] spike driven through the pages of history, a spike through

the pages of love, a spike through the sacred” (5).

Aslam’s novel of Afghanistan is alternately lyrical and overwritten, but

contains some penetrating insights about thirty 30 war-torn years of the country’s

history. The style is intense and uncompromising, and yet there is a terrible, Yeatsian

beauty in many of the images. For example, Marcus’s mutilation is described

elegiacally and horrifically as follows: “the skin cup he could make with the palms of

his hands is broken in half” (6). Adam Mars-Jones questions the appropriateness of

Aslam’s aestheticism to the subject matter of the Afghan War, but concludes that it is

successful, comparing the techniques in The Wasted Vigil to those found in Sri

Lankan Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. I would further argue that Aslam’s

exploration of the ruination and recuperation of Buddha statues is not merely a

representation of the destruction the Taliban wreaked in the Bamiyan valley in March

2001, but a conscious intertextual reference to Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, which

concludes with the image of an artist painting in Buddha’s eyes (299-307). Aslam’s

borrowings are extremely eclectic, ranging from John Berger to Aamer Hussein and

Yevgeny Vinokurov. On the debit side, however, its only central Afghan character,

Casa, sometimes lapses into acting as a one-dimensional mouthpiece for a violent,

joyless Islamism, and the slipperiness of the narrative voice means that misleading

statements such as Lara’s, “[t]he religion of Islam at its core does not believe in the

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study of science” (112), can all too easily be mistaken for authorial diktats (see

Yassin-Kassab Kassab, “Two” and Buchan).

The Gulf Wars have received less attention from Pakistani writers, probably

because they took place in Iraq, a country geographically and culturally distant from

Pakistan. However, Aamer Hussein had a story about the First Gulf War, “Your

Children”, and another which tangentially discusses the Second Gulf War, “The

Book of Maryam”, collected in Insomnia (73-79). Both touch on the issues of Saddam

as a dictatorial Great Leader (Insomnia 77), and the ethical and political concerns

raised for Muslims by the US-led invasion. Uzma Aslam Khan’s politically-astute

Trespassing is another exception. One of its four narrators, Daanish, studies

journalism in Amherst, Massachussetts, only to discover that the American

“freedoms” of expression and the press he hopes to be taught about are deemed less

important than the promotion of consumer confidence. During the 1991 Gulf War,

Daanish writes a journal about his increasing suspicions that the Iraqi invasion of

Kuwait was actively encouraged by the US, to justify an attack on its oil-rich former

ally. Yet his coldly informal tutor dismisses his research as Daanish’s “tak[ing] pride

in [his] own” (148), in one phrase eliding the myriad differences between Arabs and

Pakistanis, and reducing the journal to mere opinion (while hysterical American

headlines about Saddam Hussein are interpreted as factual [149]).

Even in the Arab world, there have been surprisingly few sustained

fictionalizations of the Gulf Wars, but Iraqi refugee Hassan Blasim’s translated short

story collection, The Madman of Freedom Square, harrowingly depicts the perils,

trauma, and abuse suffered by those who leave Iraq, as well as those who stay. In the

post-“war on terror” world, more even than when critics Suhrke and Kabbani were

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arguing this, the vast majority of refugees and asylum seekers are Muslims, or

refugees in Muslim states. Many other writers of Muslim heritage including, but not

limited to, Abdulrazak Gurnah (Sea), Bangladeshis Manzu Islam and Tahmima Anam

(Golden), British-Syrian Robin Yassin-Kassab, Nadeem Aslam (Maps), and Kamila

Shamsie in Burnt Shadows, dramatize issues relating to asylum, migration, and

discourses of otherness in their fiction.

To take just one of these texts: as Maps for Lost Lovers’ title suggests, this is a

novel that is concerned with migrants’ “cognitive mapping” of a new landscape (see

Jameson 89-90). Aslam’s mythical Dasht-e-Tanhaii bears close surface resemblance

to the Yorkshire cities of Huddersfield (where the author spent his late teens) and

Bradford, with their large populations of South Asian migrants, particularly from rural

areas in Azad Jammu & Kashmir and the Pakistani Punjab. He describes the migrants

of the 1950s and 1960s in terms that echo Paul Carter’s descriptions of earlier

European explorers and colonialists, depicting them as involved in a process of

renaming the British landmarks, streets, and towns that they encounter. In so doing,

Aslam uncovers a complex history of interchange between Europe and the

subcontinent, as many of the familiar appellations they choose to replace the

supposedly “unpronouncable” English names in fact hark back to colonialism: “a Park

Street here as in Calcutta, a Malabar Hill as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla Hill as in

Dhaka” (28). Aslam also charts the increasing polarization between different

communities from the subcontinent, particularly after the Bangladesh War of 1971.

Ultimately, the only name accepted by all communities is the Urdu term “Dasht-e-

Tanhaii” for the town’s name, an allusion to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who is one of three

individuals eulogized on the novel’s prefatory page. The phrase derives from Faiz’s

poem, “Yad (Memory)”, immortalized in Iqbal Bano’s song “Dasht-e-Tanhai”, which

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deals with the theme of lovers’ separation, despite their physical proximity (see Mufti

“Lyric” 255-59). More allusively, the poem may be interpreted as touching upon a

migrant’s yearning for home.

Aslam’s representation of the ways in which contemporary British-Pakistani

communities have been shaped by, and are reacting to, post-war waves of chain

migration is neatly complemented by his portrayal of a painter’s attempts to

“incorporate into [his] art the lives of the people I grew up amongst examine and

explore them” (318). When the news emerges that a photography studio in Dasht-e-

Tanhaii, renowned for its vast collection of portraits of migrants from the 1950s,

1960s, and 1970s, is about to close, Shamas’s British-born son buys a cache of

photographs to rescue this “important document” of South Asian migration (319) and

inform his own art. The artist Charag intertwines the documentary realism of

photographs with the opulent “butterflies, fruit- and flower-heavy boughs, birds,

hoopoes and parakeets” of his usual painting style (320). This strand of the novel

refers to Tony Walker’s Belle Vue studio in Bradford, which from 1926 until its

closure in 1975, was well-known for taking archaically formal photographs of the

city’s immigrant workers and their families. Photographs from this studio, as in the

example of the starchy picture of Shamas and his family in Aslam’s text (318), were

sent back to Pakistan “to show [the immigrants’] new found wealth and success”,

often with Western western material goods in prominent positions (Bradford np).

Although many negatives were destroyed in 1985, a valuable collection of the

remaining photographs is available on the Bradford Museums, Galleries and Heritage

website. This archive, which illustrates the continuing significance to the migrants of

sending photos “back”, parallels Aslam’s interest in the idealized backward gaze of

uprooted peoples, also movingly described in Amitav Ghosh’s essay “The Greatest

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Sorrow” (303-13). There is also traffic here between the sending of photographs to the

subcontinent and the importing of imagery from Pakistan to enrich Aslam’s writing.

Like Charag, Aslam uses specifically Muslim South-Asian myths, art forms,

and religious stories in order to translate the England in which his characters live. For

instance, the novel is peppered with rich images drawn from Urdu poetry, particularly

ghazals: tropes include the moth and the flame; stars and diamonds; wine and

peacocks. The novel’s evocation of the 19th-century ghazal poet Ghalib (see Maps

163; 332) is suggestive in relation to Aslam’s literary project. Ghalib creatively

reinterpreted the stock images of Urdu poetry in order to make veiled but sharp points

about the turbulent times in which he lived, the era of the Indian Rebellion of 1857

and the demise of the Mughal Empire (Chew 41). In a similar way, the artists Abdur

Rahman Chughtai (whose intricate drawing of a deer and cypress is on Aslam’s

frontispiece, and who himself illustrated Ghalib’s poetry [Dadi 52]) and, more

recently, a younger generation of artists including the “Singh Twins”, Amrit and

Rabindra Singh, adapted the Mughal miniature tradition “to depict the complex urban

and domestic landscapes” of contemporary South Asians’ lives (Dadi; Mathur 6).

Aslam embarks on an analogous enterprise, showing that themes from South-

Asian poetry and art (relating to such issues as politics, tradition, love, and religion)

are relevant to contemporary British migrants, and that they generate various

connotations when transplanted to this new context. By this, he refutes attempts to

constrict Islam into an exclusive, singular identity as distortions of the religion’s

pluralist history. In evoking the opulence associated with Urdu poetry, he reminds

us/readers? that Islam is a heterogeneous religion and culture, and that in the ghazal

tradition, for instance, secular elements such as wine and the Beloved featured as

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spiritual metaphors. It may be argued, then, that Aslam builds upon a canon of work

negotiating changing positions of Muslims in pre- and post-colonial societies.

This paper has illustrated the many ways in which writers of Pakistani and

other Muslim heritage explore their syncretic, progressive past and more recent

history. Drawing on artistic works by Muslims (and non-Muslims), the authors reflect

the many influences that bear upon contemporary Muslim identity. At stake in the

return to figures of Muslim art, such as Faiz, Chughtai, and Ghalib, is a desire to think

through moments of crisis in Muslim subjectivity formation, which include the 1857

Indian Rebellion, Gulf Wars, and the war on terror. The writers also seek to highlight

the centrality of Muslim art to global canons, and to situate their own fictions within a

long history of Muslim artistic identity. The texts certainly write back to earlier

stereotypical depictions of Muslims, but something more is also put forward. The

novels celebrate Muslim civilizations as forming a rich cultural repository from which

their writing has much to gain. The intertextual referencing of a long history of

Muslim artistic work refigures the category “Muslim” as a springboard rather than a

constricting box. It is to be hoped that, through a comparative perspective, the paper

has illustrated the connections as well as disjunctures between Muslim writers, who

are producing some of the most nuanced and politically-engaged writing in world

literature today.

Notes[1] I would like to thank James Dodge for all his insights, and Muneeza Shamsie for her encyclopaedic guidance and editorial skills. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.[2] Unless otherwise stated, all writers (including Aamer Hussein) have Pakistani heritage.[3] See, for example, K. Shamsie “Another”; Dalrymple, “Post Colonial”; Chaudhuri.[4] M. Shamsie Dragonfly and World; Rahman; Hashmi; Cilano “Extreme” and National.

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[5] For examples of stereotypical literary representations of Muslims, see Amis; McEwan; Updike; Faulks. On media representations, see Said; Poole; and Ahmed.[6] For further analysis of literary representations of 1971 and its fallout, see Cilano’s recent monograph, in which she scrutinizes the critical juncture for Pakistani self-identity of the 1971 war, as refracted through both Urdu- and English-language literature.[7] Authorship of the four sections of “How to Write About Pakistan” was never attributed but I have received independent confirmation that II is by Kamila Shamsie.[8] Probably because phonetic representations of Arabic words vary according to the writer’s mother tongue, subcontinental writers tend to spell the name ‘Zuleikha’, whereas Gurnah consistently writes ‘Zulekha’. Similarly, there are disparities in spellings of the name Leila/Laila/Layla in the Laila and Majnun myth.

Notes on contributor

Claire Chambers is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Leeds Metropolitan University, where she specializes in South Asian writing in English and in literary representations of British Muslims. Claire is currently writing two books, the first entitled British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, and the second a monograph about artistic representations of Muslims in Britain, 1966–present.

Address: School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, Civic Quarter,Leeds, LS2 3HE, UK.  Tel: 0113 2732 632Mob: 07816 683 316Fax: 0113 295 9116

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