MAPPING GLOBAL SPHERES OF AFFILIATION AND AFFINITY IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ...

277 Pages·2014·1.61 MB·English

ORIENTING MUSLIMS: MAPPING GLOBAL SPHERES
OF AFFILIATION AND AFFINITY
IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION

M. A. CLEMENTS

Ph.D.

2013
ORIENTING MUSLIMS: MAPPING GLOBAL SPHERES
OF AFFILIATION AND AFFINITY
IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION

MADELINE AMELIA CLEMENTS

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the
University of East London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

December 2013
i
Abstract
This thesis asks how four South Asian Muslim novelists have responded to the
challenge of writing about Islamic faith ties in the aftermath of the 11 September
2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the ensuing “war on
terror”. This is a period when Muslim writers and commentators have come
under increasing pressure to “explain” Islamic affiliations and affinities, and – as
Pnina Werbner (2002: 1) has put it – to ‘disclose where ... the centres of their
subjective universe lie’.
Focussing on the international novels of Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid,
Salman Rushdie, and Kamila Shamsie, this thesis explores the hypothesis that
they can be read as part of a post-9/11 attempt to revise modern “knowledge” of
the Islamic world, using globally-disseminated literature to reframe Muslims’
potential to connect with others, whether Muslims who subscribe to other
versions of Islam, or non-Muslims. It considers how the “world literature” these
authors create and shape maps spheres of Islamic affiliation and affinity,
questioning where their subjects turn in seeking a sense of connection or
identification, and why. It provides a detailed examination of the inter-cultural
and intra-cultural affiliations and affinities the characters pursue in these texts,
asking what aesthetic, historical, political and spiritual identifications or
commitments could influence such connective attempts. It also analyses
popular discourses and critical discussions surrounding the novels, offering a
critical examination of the explanations offered by their authors in their non-
fiction writing and commentary for privileging, problematising or prohibiting one
(Islamic) affiliation or affinity instead of another, and scrutinising how the writers
are appropriated as authentic and hence authoritative spokespeople by
dominant political and cultural forces. Finally, it explores how, as authors of
ii
Indian and Pakistani origin, Aslam, Hamid, Rushdie and Shamsie negotiate
their identities and the tensions of being seen to act as Muslim spokespeople in
(conscious) relation to the complex international and geopolitical context in
which they write.
iii
Contents
Chapter 1. Writing, Islam and Faith in Anglophone South Asian Fiction
after 9/11 1
Introduction 1
After 9/11: Muslims in the Frame 4
Global Orientations in South Asian Muslim Fiction 13
Points of Reference 27
Emerging Visions 36
Authors, Texts and Terminology 40
Globally-Oriented Texts as Discrete Textual Entities 54
Chapter 2. Enchanted Realms, Sceptical Perspectives – Salman Rushdie’s
Post-9/11 Fiction 62
Introduction 62
Rushdie Today: Writer and Pundit 63
The Post-9/11 Fictions: 69
Shalimar the Clown 69
The Enchantress of Florence 89
Areas Left Unmapped 101
Chapter 3. ‘A Devilishly Difficult Ball to Play’ – Mohsin Hamid’s The
Reluctant Fundamentalist 103
Introduction 103
Hamid’s Ambiguous Personal Affiliations 104
Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Contemporary Readings 114
Changez as Psychological Case Study 129
Dead Ends? Hamid’s Recent Short Fiction 134
Conclusion 139
Chapter 4. Re-culturing Islam in Nadeem Aslam’s Mausoleum Fiction –
Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil 141
Introduction 141
‘All the Colours?’ Aslam’s Islamic Spectrum and Commitment to Realism 145
Aslam’s Post-9/11 Fiction: 156
Maps: Prescribed Affiliations, Elective Affinities and the Solace of “Sufism” 156
The Wasted Vigil: Re-culturing Islam – Salvaging Art 169
Conclusions: Archived Hopes 191
Chapter 5. Stranger Intimacies: Global Un-knowing and the Suspension of
Judgement in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, Broken Verses and Burnt
Shadows 194
Prologue: ‘Do Not Feel Safe. The Poet Remembers’ 194
Introduction 196
The Author, Kamila Shamsie 196
iv
Knowing: Shamsie’s Take on the Exotic and its Expectations 200
Questioning: Shamsie’s Complex Affiliations 211
Un-knowing: Shamsie’s Global, Decentring Perspectives 223
Conclusion: Rendering Forgiveness Redundant 239
Chapter 6. Conclusion: Orientations toward a Coherent Narrative? 241
Bibliography 248
List of Illustrations 268
Acknowledgements 269
Dedication 271

v
Chapter 1. Writing, Islam and Faith in Anglophone South
Asian Fiction after 9/11
Introduction
In the introduction to the revised edition
of Covering Islam: How the Media and
the Experts Determine How We See
the Rest of the World, first published in
1981, Edward Said (1997: xii)
expressed increased concern that
‘malicious generalisations about Islam
have become the last acceptable form
of denigration of foreign culture in the
West’. He went on to describe his

Untitled
disturbance on being asked,
Sajid Khan (2012)
[Figure 1]
presumably because of Middle Eastern
– and mistaken Muslim – identity, to provide the media with an insider’s insight
into the bomb attack in Oklahoma City in April 1995:
I must have received twenty-five phonecalls ... The entirely facetious
connection between Arabs, Muslims, and terrorism was never more forcefully
made evident to me; the sense of guilty involvement which, despite myself, I
was made to feel struck me (xiv).1

1 The perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombings was in fact Timothy McVeigh,
an American Gulf War veteran and agnostic, whose protest was anti-
government.
1
These late twentieth-century observations point to a totalising trend in Anglo-
American discussions of Islam, and highlight its potentially unsettling impact on
those actual and assumed Muslim writers who might be called upon to
comment in the western public sphere. They provide a means of entry into this
study, which asks how four South Asian Muslim authors have responded to the
challenge of writing about Islamic faith ties in the aftermath of the attacks on
New York of 11 September 2001, which replaced the Oklahoma City bombings
as the most destructive on US soil to date.
This thesis explores the hypothesis that the international novels of Nadeem
Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Salman Rushdie and Kamila Shamsie can be read as
part of a post-9/11 attempt to revise modern “knowledge” of the Islamic world,
using globally-disseminated literature to reframe Muslims’ potential to connect
with others, whether Muslims who subscribe to other versions of Islam, or non-
Muslims. It considers how the “world literature” they create and shape maps
spheres of Islamic affiliation and affinity, questioning where their subjects turn in
seeking a sense of connection or identification, and why. It provides a detailed
examination of the inter-cultural and intra-cultural affiliations and affinities the
characters pursue in these texts, asking what aesthetic, historical, political and
spiritual identifications or commitments could influence such connective
attempts. It also analyses popular discourses and critical discussions
surrounding these texts, offering a critical examination of the explanations
offered by the authors in their non-fiction writing and commentary for privileging,
problematising or prohibiting one (Islamic) affiliation or affinity instead of
another, and scrutinising how the writers are appropriated as authentic and
hence authoritative spokespeople by dominant political and cultural forces.
Finally, it explores how, as authors of Indian and Pakistani origin, Aslam,
2
Hamid, Rushdie and Shamsie negotiate their identities and the tensions of
being seen to act as Muslim spokespeople in (conscious) relation to the
complex international and geopolitical context in which they write.
For the purposes of this study, I use ‘affiliation’ to describe more active and
selective of the modes of Islamic connection which may be traced in the novels.
According to the OED Online (2013a, ‘affiliate, v.’) the would-be ‘affiliate’, an
adoptive son, seeks to attach himself to an institution, organisation, political
group, or society, expressing in his choice a desire to belong. In Edward Said’s
(1983: 18-19) conception, this may constitute what he describes as a ‘turn’
from a lost or outmoded natural familial ‘filiation’ to a critically created and
‘compensatory’ cultural and societal system of ‘affiliation’. Further, it may
demonstrate an individual’s desire to become an ‘agent’ or ‘bearer’ of a
particular notion of ‘civilisation’ or ‘culture’ (Gilroy 2004: 65).
The term ‘affinity’, in contrast, variously defined in the OED (2013b, ‘affinity’,
n.’) ‘by position’ as a ‘relationship of kinship generally between individuals or
races’, and ‘by inclination’ as a ‘voluntary social ... companionship [or] alliance’
and ‘psychical or spiritual attraction’, may point to a more natural, unplanned or
even involuntary sense of being drawn to a particular community grouping,
geographical area or imaginative realm. Nederveen Pieterse (2007: 186-8) uses
the term to describe the ‘multiple circuits of [cultural] identification and
integration’ within which migrant communities participate in a global multicultural
context. However, the term need not be confined solely to this usage. ‘Affinitive’
may also refer, for example, to the kind of feelings ignited between Muslims of
radically different social, educational and doctrinal backgrounds when engaging
in Islamic rituals or contemplating a common heritage or culture in their South
and Central Asian homelands.
3
In drawing attention to different ways in which contemporary Muslim
connections are established and experienced, the South Asian literature I
examine begins to take leave of the colourful, hybrid, and darkly comic
multicultural visions offered in the popular postcolonial writing of the 1980s and
1990s. This was a period bookended in the UK by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children (1981) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), which perhaps did more
to juxtapose the religious and secular than to explore their interrelationship. Yet
the twenty-first century fictions I consider remain in dialogue with these novels,
with works of world literature like Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient
(1992), and such colonial antecedents as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
(1902), E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi
(1940), and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955).
After 9/11: Muslims in the Frame
The “terror” attacks of 9/11 and, later, 7/7, brought a militant “jihadist” Islam
sharply into world view. Racing to decode the ‘message’ of 11 September 2001,
commentators and critics in the British press such as Martin Amis (2008: 3)
interpreted the launching in Afghanistan of this ‘Intercontinental Ballistic Missile’
as an alien culture’s wake-up call to the innocent, unassuming West.2 As Amis
put it, ‘America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated’ (3). Social
anthropologist Pnina Werbner (2002: 1) would later observe that it seemed to
parties on both sides of the proposed ideological divide ‘that the clash of

2 This quotation is taken from ‘The Second Plane’, an article first published in
The Guardian on 18 September 2001 and subsequently collected in The
Second Plane (2008).
4