Islamophbia and the Novel

I SLAMOPHOBIA A N D T HE

NOVE L

PE TER MOREY

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Introduction

ISLAMOPHOBIA The Word and the World

“The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.

What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—­further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-­searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or Pakistan. . . . ​Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”1 This is not a policy statement from one of those right-­wing populist politicians who seem to have multiplied in recent years. These words come from the distinguished British novelist Martin Amis, interviewed in 2006 about community relations in Britain and the “threat” from Muslims.

The unliterary lack of measured reflection in this comment is symptomatic of the heated debate about Islam and Muslims as it occurs today. Where once one might have expected a discussion informed by some degree of sophistication and historical awareness, now the Internet and social media provide an immediate platform for intemperate views to be aired and every ill-­informed opinion to be rehearsed. Worse still, violent anti-­Muslim rhetoric has become commonplace. When politicians start to articulate prejudice in much the same terms, you know society is in trouble.

In the first decades of the twenty-­first century, Islamophobia has emerged as the dominant mode of prejudice in contemporary Western societies. In North America and across the nations of Europe, concerns about “the Muslim problem” are central to political debates and policies.

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

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emergence both of the modern West and the novel form itself to those that interrogate, reject, or even parody those certainties, the range of literary responses suggests a deep critical intelligence that might usefully inform broader and often more simplistic debates.

As might be expected, literary responses to Islamophobia have been many and varied. However, if we trace the relationship of narrative to power as manifest in the content and form of texts, certain informative features appear. Add to that the enabling context in which what we might call “Muslim writing” is published, circulated, and reviewed, and we have the terrain that this book attempts to map. In some regards, what the novel can say about Islamophobia is inherently limited by its vaunted qualities as a liberal medium tied to the individualist perspective. In that respect, it becomes necessary for us to examine the cultural work that formal and generic features are doing in promoting or rejecting particular types of worldview. Thus, I propose to analyze key elements of the representative novels chosen, attending to qualities such as ambiguity; stereotyping; the effects of polyphony; response to the burden of representation that falls on “minority” writers; the fetishization of authenticity; and the presence of a certain kind of exotic idiom that blends the attractive and desirable with (in the Muslim case) the austere and repressive. These features offer ways to understand the novel in its response to Islamophobia because they are central to the novel’s meaning making as an art form. Close attention to them will help us to avoid falling back on judgments based simply on whether a book is sympathetic to Muslims or Islam or not.

When it comes to literature and politics, the relationship between narrative and power is never straightforward. Liberal claims can be made not only for the novel’s polyphony but also on behalf of (inter alia) the destabilizing effects of free indirect speech or the potential for minority voices to contest hegemonic narratives of racial, gendered, or sexual majoritarianism. All these features are again in play as we seek to understand literature’s responses to a climate of Islamophobia. However, regarding the debate about culture and difference that ignited again after 9/11, it is important to bear in mind that questions of form can be charged with entirely different political meaning. For example, instead of becoming a bridgehead for contestatory narratives, polyphony in Reading Lolita in Tehran by the Iranian émigré author Azar Nafisi is advocated as a liberal humanist clincher to shut down dissenting viewpoints and readings at the same time as it is

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promoted as a guarantee of the tolerance, “democracy,” and thereby superiority of the Western literary canon. Thus, the first major lesson that can be drawn from studying narrative and power is that there is no single model of the relationship between form and politics. Indeed, the complexity of this relationship has been understood ever since Louis Althusser’s observations on the relative autonomy of the social superstructure in relation to the economic base and its consideration by Pierre Macherey in relation to literary texts.6 Theodor Adorno also takes up these concerns in Aesthetic Theory.

Adorno claims that art is a social act, yet one produced by the tension between the formal autonomy of the work, on the one hand, and its rootedness within society, on the other. The tensions within works of art are expressive of conflicts within the larger sociohistorical processes from which they emerge. He says, “The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form.”7 For Adorno, art operates through its own internal tensions to expose hidden contradictions within society as a whole. Art thus creates its own truth through a dialectic between content and form. Following Adorno, Edward Said argues that narrative is always a social act and that it is the interplay between power and resistance that makes texts possible.8 He points out that “novels ­participate in, are part of, contribute to an extremely slow, infinitesimal politics that clarifies, reinforces, perhaps even occasionally advances perceptions.”9 For the reader, the task is to recognize that “all interpretations are what we might call situational . . . ​related to what other interpreters have said, either by confirming them, or by disputing them. . . . ​Today Islam is defined negatively as that with which the West is radically at odds, and this tension establishes a framework radically limiting knowledge of Islam.”10 The nature of this frame is something Amina Yaqin and I explore in our book Framing Muslims. There we are concerned with tracing this encircling discursive boundary as it appears in political rhetoric, journalism, and popular-­media texts.11 Yet a type of framing can be seen at work in literature, too. Literary framing takes place on three levels. First, any act of writing in and of itself is an act of framing; it is an act of bringing together and accentuating themes, issues, and characters as well as of dramatizing the consequences of the collision of different ideas. This is particularly true of what might be called multicultural fictions that focus on relationships between

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groups with different traditions and value systems. These works always already occupy a terrain contested by warring and hierarchically unequal discourses. However, that framing act then takes place within a much larger frame: the agenda-­led frame governing political, media, and journalistic discourses about the key issues defining intercultural relations. In the case of Muslims, these issues have to do with a lack of integration, gender inequality, a propensity for “radicalization,” and so on. Finally, we can see those two acts of framing—­the textual and the contextual—­as being integral to the way such texts are then placed in the frame governing their production, reception, and recognition as “literary.” This third-­level frame validates certain types of utterance in which those key “Muslim” issues become central to the way texts are understood, grouped together, marketed, and reviewed.

The most infamous instance of the clash of text, context, and paratext occurred in the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in the late 1980s.12 The dispute is now frozen and canonized as being about freedom of speech versus nascent Islamic fundamentalism. However, the tensions within the book, too, tell us something about the cultural possibilities and interpretation of the imagination. Rushdie’s description of the scene in which the angel Gibreel presents the prophet Mohammed with his revelation mimics Romantic-­era ideas of inspiration and the role of imagination in creation.13 These ideas were most famously codified in the English tradition by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817), but already decades earlier, in the mid–­eighteenth century, the writer and theologian William Law was observing that our desires and imaginations “are the greatest reality we have.” According to Law, “our own Will and desirous Imagination . . . ​resemble in some Degree the Creating Power of God, which makes things out of itself or its own working Desire.”14 Law’s intervention marks a stage in the eighteenth-­century shift in aesthetics from neoclassical reason and order to Romantic imagination and feeling.

Now, at the other end of this process, Rushdie’s perspective—­v igorously restated in his memoir Joseph Anton—­is that creative inspiration is a freedom guaranteed only by the secularization of art and society.15 As we will see, other contemporary writers such as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis also hold to this view.

The Satanic Verses was the spark that ignited a sense of injustice among Muslims that led to, among other things, the assertion of a collective

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British Muslim identity in the years that followed. And, of course, Rushdie continues to be the bête-­noir for many Muslims, who believe his supposed insults to their religion and their prophet to be unforgivable. However, we should be wary of seeing all literary and cultural perspectives that are critical of Islam as “Islamophobic.” Blanket denunciations are unhelpful because they tend to close down debate and are insufficiently attentive to the status of many of these texts as creative products of art and imagination—­something that makes them prone to the same forces of hesitation and inconsistency that always animate those activities. In particular, the novel—­with the modes of address it employs and with its unique purchase on the imagination of a reader who is required to create in his or her mind a world and thereafter to populate it—­cannot be reduced to pure “message,” whether positive or negative. This understanding of the novel, in turn, raises questions about reception and criticism.

One of the key features of the contemporary critical and receptive context is the demand that writing by Muslim cultural background authors be “representative”—­something that has implications for form. The controversy in 2006 about the depiction of the East End Bengali community in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, which spilled over into public demonstrations, is one obvious example. Reactions reflected the assumption that Ali’s much-­feted novel was offering a transparent window onto a hitherto overlooked minority group—­something that united both protestors against it and the literati who sprang to its defense.16 As discussed in chapter 2, both sympathetic and hostile responses were predicated on the successful, or otherwise, performance of authentic representativeness. This tendency to view non-­Western literatures as essentially anthropological in nature—­ affording the assumed Western reader an insight into exotically different lives—­is a long-­standing one. It amounts to what Gayatri C. Spivak has called an “information retrieval” approach in dealing with the literature of the culturally different subject.17 In this book, I argue that this approach creates what we might call a market for the Muslim. This means that texts from around the world that engage with the existing political articulation of “the Muslim problem,” contain the right elements, and offer some kind of “authentic” pseudoanthropological insight will be published, circulated, reviewed, and critiqued more or less to the extent that they reproduce existing cultural viewpoints.

(They can be hostile to or in tension with these viewpoints, but as long as

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they rehearse them, they will be recognized and accepted.) This is how framing works. So the market for the Muslim has both aesthetic and economic dimensions. Such texts are seen as offering windows onto rare and “exotic” areas of minority experience in the West that are also sites of political anxiety in the case of Muslims. This view enforces a set of criteria that then tends to privilege texts with a realist bent.18 Indeed, one of the remarkable features about many of the Muslim novels that have garnered praise and attention over the past few years is the degree to which they are deemed to offer direct, seemingly unmediated insights into hitherto hidden aspects of Muslim life and experience. To write this kind of novel in an era of Islamophobia is, at least indirectly, to accept a frame in which Muslim cultural values are contrasted with Western, more enlightened, more liberal ones, even if one’s project is to explode this myth. I would not wish to be too dogmatic about this point, but it seems indisputable that the critical success of a text such as Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2006), for example, is tied to its central aim of illustrating the “Muslim problem” of honor killing. Aslam himself made this connection in an interview when he described the imperative he felt to address honor crime in terms that echo the rationale of the war on terror.

As Madeline Clements notes, Aslam was suggesting that literature should “condemn both Bin Laden’s acts of international terror and the ‘small scale September 11s’ which occur in Muslim communities each day.”19 One can make the symbolic leap between an international terrorist atrocity and the local cultural practice of honor crime only by reproducing the existing frame that operates through an a priori equation between Islam and violence.

Writers need the leeway to address any and all matters of concern, in particular those in which they feel a personal investment. However, Aslam’s response indicates the extent to which the default expectations engendered by topicality are never neutral, least of all when the subject matter is what is commonly deemed Muslim religious or cultural behavior. In the hands of more ideological writers, the moral imperative to address injustice becomes almost inseparable from wholesale endorsement of the neoimperial civilizing mission of the United States. In these writers’ novels, the confluence of Muslim religious doctrine with political power is inevitably disastrous, compromising individual liberty at every turn. Western intervention is then a consummation devoutly to be wished.

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

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they write will always be shaped and contained by the requirements of the frame, and to that extent we will see a resulting deformation on the level of reception if not in the text itself. In the market for the Muslim, the so-­called authenticity of a text is decided by publishers and editors, who shape the text in the publication process, as well as by reviewers and critics, who deem a text “authentic” or otherwise according to how well it satisfies these predetermined criteria. As Sarah Brouillette aptly writes, “For something to be experienced as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated . . . ​and hence lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by mediating cultural codes.”21 The second, formal point has to do with realism’s utility for the anthropological reading. At the present time, it seems as if almost all attempts to render Muslim experience in a realist mode are fated to be co-­opted to explain (or refute) the framing fascination with why Muslims are recalcitrant/unmodern/not “like us.” The particular pressure on Muslim writers would seem to contradict that frequent observation—­made by Timothy Brennan, among others—­that literary sophistication is a type of bad faith, marking the “Third World” writer’s alienation from his or her own people through the valorization of established Western aesthetic criteria.22 The point here is not that experimental or modernist writing is somehow preferable to or better than realism, but rather that the anthropological frame is such that it may be necessary to devise an aesthetic that refuses and challenges that frame.

Thus, engaging with literature in the age of Islamophobia makes demands on both writer and reader. Working against the grain of existing ways of reading these texts also necessitates drawing the parameters of criticism and critique into the discussion. Recent ways of doing this include the so-­called postsecular turn, wherein the prioritization of individual moral experience and secular personal development deemed central to the novel is historicized as a culturally specific, post-­Enlightenment trend.

This awareness might then usefully be brought into engagement with cultural traditions operating through collectivist and religious orientation instead. However, this particular form of the postsecular too often merely reinforces the secular/religious binary, just positioning us differently in relation to it by relativizing our value judgments. In this context, it might be more useful to consider the degree to which narrative’s relationship to secularism and religiosity actually might not bear out the

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“divergent paths” idea commonly used to account for cultural difference.

Quite apart from the constant mutual influence of European and Muslim narrative traditions via the trade routes of southern Europe, North Africa, and Sicily, attentive reading of the English novel alone reveals that religiously derived moral preoccupations are continuous but come to be internalized in formal and metaphorical conventions and choices.23 In reiterating the implication that the West exclusively is characterized by modernity, pluralism, and enlightenment, literary readings also legitimize the conditions underpinning the false construction of Islam as inevitably at odds with Western ways of seeing. The postsecular turn in criticism might be welcome when it recognizes the historical connectedness of the secular and the sacred over time and across cultures, but in its more antisecular guise it tends merely to recapitulate the notion of a materialist-­ individualist West and a spiritual-­collectivist East in ways that ignore historical cross-­fertilization.

So, in the end, this book argues that it is in part literary criticism’s sense of itself and its own history that prevents the development of cross-­ cultural engagements with Muslim writing that could break through the frame. Inasmuch as literary culture and its critical apparatus reproduces anti-­Muslim prejudice in some of its value judgments, it does so because it unconsciously partakes of a view of itself as part of a Western culture that is sealed off, unique, and—­it is inferred—­“superior.” Certain claims are made for literature that are sometimes implicitly linked to the more capacious sympathies assumed to be a product of post-­ Enlightenment cultures where the heat has gone out of religious controversies, leaving us with the ability unproblematically to imagine our way across difference.

In his essay “Is Nothing Sacred?,” written in the early years of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him, Salman Rushdie promotes once more the familiar idea that the novel is almost by definition a bastion of freedom against the narrow exclusivism of religion: “Whereas religion seeks to privilege one language above all others, one text above all others, one set of values above all others, the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel.”24 This is a popular line of argument among writers, generally used to bolster claims about the novel form as a conduit for empathy. Ahdaf Soueif, for instance, sees the writer’s duty as being to create characters who stimulate empathy

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in readers—­“such powerful empathy that they want to reach through the print to help or comfort them. . . . ​A work of fiction lives by empathy—­the extending of myself into another’s, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes.”25 These thoughts are a handy reminder of the basic tasks of fiction, but we need also to distinguish active transcultural empathy from a lazily universalizing notion of shared human experience that can encourage us to respond only to that which is already familiar. As soon as one moves beyond bare corporeal facts to the human in society, the challenge becomes to try to find forms that will do justice to the complexity of individuals in the world in such a way as not to flatten or simplify experiences rooted in particular cultural contexts—­in short, not to universalize those experiences.26 I want to make clear that I am not saying that all novelists and book reviewers are Islamophobes or that criticism is inherently Islamophobic.

What I am arguing is that we need to be more historically aware of the provenance of the terms and values we employ to approach texts by and about Muslims (as well as by culturally different writers and about people more generally). If we see literature and criticism as systems in their longer context, we will also there find all the elements by which Muslims have been and continue to be framed within Western culture as a whole. There are enough ideologues at both extremes happy to perpetuate and exploit such binary thinking. We owe it to ourselves and to those who try accurately to depict experience using prose fiction to be aware that our conventional tools should always be employed judiciously and self-­consciously, with the awareness that times and societies change.

Secular criticism as an adjunct of cultural nationalism is not the only lens through which to view Muslim writing. This book ends with a plea for further work to understand the mutually shaping history of Western and non-­Western narrative traditions, the better to combat Islamophobic assertions of exclusionary difference. This work, in turn, could inform conventions of criticism and reviewing that at present too often value Muslim writing only for what it can tell us about supposedly alien mindsets. What we need is a critical Muslim studies to match developments such as critical race studies, and we need to keep always in view the standpoints of interlocutors who have different degrees of symbolic, cultural, and economic capital. On the terrain of literature, this seems the best way to counteract Islamophobia and to lay the groundwork for a form of literary and cultural

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

There are many ways to decode Islamophobia and understand its appeal: a psychological self-­defense reflex against an antithetical Other; the most recent instance of popular moral panic; the logic of neoimperial foreign policies; a manifestation of the unequal results of globalization; or a golden opportunity for nationalist and racist ideologues. This book acknowledges each of these possibilities as it occurs in novels and other prose fictions in English produced since the mid-­1990s, the era when an emergent multiculturalism in the West—­the product of postimperial population movements and emancipatory ethnic politics—­was challenged by the rise to prominence of politically antagonistic “radical” Islamic identities and the countermeasures employed against them.

When we consider the contested meanings of the term Islamophobia, we need to note what AbdoolKarim Vakil has called the “conceptual stretching” of the term as it travels.27 Islamophobia has meant different things in different contexts and at different times. The rapid take-­off of the term over the past twenty or so years has meant that those seeking a fixed definition have struggled to keep up.28 So perhaps a good place to begin is with the usefully circumspect definition offered by the famous Runnymede Trust Report of 1997, which defined Islamophobia as “the dread, hatred and hostility towards Islam and Muslims perpetrated by a series of closed views that imply and attribute negative and derogatory stereotypes and beliefs” to Muslims.29 The results of such prejudice, including marginalization, securitization, and sometimes violent physical attack, warrant comparison of Islamophobia with other forms of racism, such as anti-­Semitism.

Of course, there are critics who have felt that the term Islamophobia is a misnomer for a phenomenon targeted at Muslims themselves rather than at their religion. Concerns have also been raised that the loose bandying of the word could serve simply as a blanket with which to stifle legitimate criticism of aspects of Muslim society and culture.30 However, given that most people evincing anti-­Islamic prejudice identify the belief system of Islam as causing certain types of behavior in its adherents, Islamophobia seems as good a term as any. Moreover, the urgency of addressing violence and discrimination almost always justified through hostility to beliefs and

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culture means that such semantic quibbling appears now something of a luxury, particularly while Islamophobic attacks rise in tandem with anti-­ Semitism as the extreme Right is emboldened. There is more than enough evidence—­not least in the outpourings of the highly organized and networked groups in the United States that Nathan Lean refers to as constituting an “Islamophobia industry”31—­to indicate that it is often Islam itself, in a simplified and crude version, that is held up as an ideological adversary for secular Western society.

In Deepa Kumar’s view, Islamophobic myths of a perpetual struggle between Islam and the West, sometimes held in abeyance but always eventually resurfacing, seriously misrepresent history. Kumar reminds us that, in fact, attitudes to Islam and Muslims in the West have changed across history: from an early, baffled curiosity to the comparative harmony of La Convivencia in Moorish Spain, the hostility of the Crusades, the Romantic-­ era fascination with the “Gorgeous East,” and the most recent phase in which U.S. policies toward Muslim countries have been pragmatic and varied.32 Along the way, anti-­Muslim prejudice has been constructed and promoted by elites at certain times for political reasons, a process we can still trace today in the fulminations of populist politicians and journalists in search of an enemy to blame or a distraction from other problems. During the war on terror, it was necessary to create a “spectacle of fear” around Muslims and Islam to bolster support for an illegal imperialist foreign policy.33 Continuing this mission into the Obama and Trump years, a highly organized network of Islamophobic opinion formers, many with direct links to the corridors of political power, have ensured that an avalanche of suspicion and invective continues to flow.

In similar vein, Stephen Sheehi has argued that Islamophobia is the term used to describe what is actually an “ideological campaign against Muslims.” Sheehi dates modern Islamophobia very particularly to that moment in the 1990s when America became the sole world superpower, with the will and means to impose its political and economic model on the rest of the world. For him, “Islamophobia is the latest ideological construct deployed to facilitate American power.”34 Sheehi traces a line of Islamophobia from the Clinton White House through George W. Bush to Barack Obama with his ambivalent rhetoric on Muslim countries, continued unconditional support for Israel, and unease with the politically explosive Muslim part of his heritage. In its reading of Islamophobia against the

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backdrop of recent geopolitics, Sheehi’s critique carries some echoes of Salman Sayyid’s understanding of Islamophobia in Britain as tied to the moment of Muslim political self-­assertion and an anxiety about the tenuous nature of Western hegemony.35 Indeed, Islamophobia—­like all prejudices—­actually reveals more about those holding the prejudice than it does about its objects. A demonic Islamic enemy is all the better for diverting attention from intractable economic and social problems caused by late capitalism and the socially eviscerating tendencies of neoliberalism. Islamophobia makes its claim to the ground of common sense by providing simplistic explanations and scapegoats for society’s ills. It directs the attention of those who have suffered most at the hands of an inequitable system away from national political failures toward an alien wedge portrayed as intent on mayhem and carnage.36 The upsurge of Islamist terrorism, historically linked to Western economic and strategic policies, provides an easy way of unifying diverse groups in a defensive chorus of cultural suspicion, and the two phenomena—­Islamism and Islamophobia—­march off in lockstep toward a worrying future.

To be sure, there are international variations in the antecedents, development, and manifestation of Islamophobia. In Europe, the public visibility of Islam in the building of mosques and the wearing of certain modes of dress piques concerns that in turn lead to targeted legislation. In the United States, we find career Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes, whose crude polemics depend on depicting Islam as a threatening monolith and an ideological foe. In Britain, with its much longer history of contact with Muslim peoples—­including the experience derived from colonialism—­a willed historical amnesia fed by politicians and the media prevents a more nuanced understanding of Islam, its different strains and multiple histories. We see instead something much closer to what Sherene Razack, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, terms “race thinking,” where prejudice becomes naturalized in the interests of existing social relations via phrases such as “British values,” indicating kinship and common origins, to which the Muslim “outsider” is required to adhere but from whose “insider” benefits he or she is always excluded.37 So Islamophobia is manifest in words and actions. However, there is also what I would describe as a strain of latent Islamophobia, dependent on a powerful, often tacit assumption that Islam and Muslim cultures are

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inferior to an evolved, secular Western model. This distinction is stoked by the slew of decontextualized soundbites that daily present us with instances of the injustice and barbarity perpetrated in Muslim lands ­without obliging us to consider histories of imperialism. It is augmented by the underlying thrust of domestic and foreign policies designed to pursue Western strategic and economic interests, which define Muslims and Muslim lands as in need of correction. Therefore, in addition to looking at Islamophobia as a mode of prejudice that might be practiced by individuals or groups against other individuals or groups, we need also to remember the enabling context for such prejudice. This involves considering contemporary global geopolitical arrangements, their complex prehistories, and the manner in which inequalities of power can be cloaked by shrill, pseudo-­objective discourses that essentialize difference and seek to justify repressive policies against Muslims.

As many critics have noted, the hands of Samuel P. Huntington can be detected giving a shape and a somewhat spurious cover of intellectual coherence to this idea of a collision of irreconcilable opposites in his “clash of civilizations” thesis. Dividing the world up into competing “civilizations,” Huntington argued that future conflicts would play themselves out through issues of culture and religion: “The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions of humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. . . . ​The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”38 Although Huntington’s schema has drawn widespread criticism for its reductive simplifications, which, among other things, do not sufficiently acknowledge the mutual interpenetration central to the development of all cultures, the clash of civilizations thesis has gained popularity in many quarters as a means to understand extremism and to justify the aggressive advancement of Western interests, especially against Muslim peoples. Since the early years of the twenty-­first century, Islamophobia as a tacit assumption has lurked just below the surface of foreign and domestic policies in Western countries. More recently in the election campaign and then presidency of Donald Trump, Islamophobia has been mainstreamed in what at times almost seems like a direct effort to bring about a clash of civilizations in reality.

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

by Western (but putatively universal) standards. Thus, V. S. Naipaul breaks

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

The eye of the Orientalist, evident here, is able to see civilizations in toto and to rank them in relation to each other. At the same time as primping the narcissism of the Western reader, such a perspective is also busily projecting onto the Other culture all sorts of revealing anxieties of its own.

Naipaul is a Nobel Prize–­winning novelist and travel writer representative of a mindset that has internalized Western standards and mythologies and that automatically reproduces them as a shorthand way to understand other cultures. His writing thus seems to belong to an older way of seeing.

Yet the tendency to universalize one viewpoint at the same time as claiming to be able to read and reproduce a range of perspectives persists, and its effects are central to this study. The value of literature lies partly in the way it structures our feelings about the world and others in it, providing imaginative access to alternative experiences. In literature, the assumption that the novel form itself and the values it is said to carry are in some way an embodiment of the pure flowering of post-­Enlightenment Western culture ignores other models for the development of prose fiction and overlooks the ways that cultures inform each other through their historical proximity and interaction and how their creative genres take shape in part due to that contact.

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

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

The two key routes for studying culturally different texts after 9/11 are offered by the postcolonial and world-­literature paradigms. Postcolonialism developed out of those emancipation movements in Europe and America that rode the wave of post-­1968 political self-­assertion, whereas world

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literature came out of comparative literature and philology. When it comes to postcolonialism, critics have suggested that its roots in secular criticism have led to a blind spot where religion, especially Islam, is concerned.45 There is some truth in this claim, inasmuch as nationalism and antinationalism have tended to provide the umbrella beneath which issues of race, class, gender, and hybridity then shelter. However, some of these criticisms, such as that offered by Anouar Majid, begin from the false premise that postcolonialism is merely the theoretical wing of identity politics and that “the postcolonial” is the inevitably compromised brainchild of those “comprador intellectuals” first picked out by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Arif Dirlik.46 In fact, “the postcolonial” is a description of our contemporary world condition, not a set of theories or an identity. It sums up life for many who wrestle with the legacy of historical colonialism and find their place in the world still acted on by controlling impulses of the powerful nations of the West. It also encompasses the willed amnesia with which these privileged First World nations continue to blame contemporary problems on recidivism or “fundamentalism,” read as inherent in subject peoples and nations, just as it was in the days of empire. Indeed, postcolonial perspectives have become even more salient in a post-­9/11 world, where the justification and tactics of Western domination have reemerged with renewed force. Such tactics are focused primarily on Muslim citizens and nations and are composed of the classic colonial staples of surveillance: bodily disciplining; restrictions on movements; the giving, withholding, and withdrawing of citizenship and opportunity; and potential relegation to disposable infrahuman status in a global economy of rights that is skewed and partial.

World literature has reemerged since the events of 9/11 as another preferred paradigm for understanding global cultural interaction. It is taken to counter the Western parochialism that privileges European and American experiences, languages, and literary forms and that is also shared by postcolonialism. Works by critics such as Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, and others have sought to define world literature for the modern era, trace its historical antecedents, and develop appropriate methodologies.47 They build upon foundations laid in the nineteenth century by Goethe—­ responding to a changing world after the Napoleonic War—­as well as by Marx and Engels, who in The Communist Manifesto comment on the

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emergence of an international market for ideas in tandem with a market for material goods, resulting in the rise of a “world literature.”48 This idea of exchange or circulation is central to many of these approaches to world literature and is to be welcomed for reasons I elaborate in chapter 7.

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

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

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

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

It is capital alone that makes all the decisions that suit it, and then mobilizes this ideology to its service.”55 It is up to us whether literature stands in thrall to this ideology or uses its interrogative power to challenge the ideology.

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

As a critic trained in hermeneutical practices that are historically and

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culturally specific, I would be disingenuous to claim any better knowledge or more objective perspective. Nonetheless, it is possible to advocate—­ and try to practice—­a certain critical self-­consciousness in our engagement with non-­Western literatures. In the case of Muslim cultures, claims of exclusivity come from a variety of sources. Therefore, a certain critical distance can be useful. We may, perhaps, see Islamophobia more clearly as a structuring frame if we can stand back and understand it as a kind of call-­ and-­response: certain demands are made of the writers who deal with “Muslim issues,” and they either accede to or problematize those demands.

In other words, framing is always dialogic, and it takes a certain amount of cunning and guile for the writer to be able to circumvent imposed limitations on what they can say and how it will be interpreted. Critics need to be similarly supple.

If this book has a numerical bias in favor of texts about or emanating from the South Asian context, it should be remembered that it is not claiming to offer a comprehensive overview of novels by or about Muslims. As Amin Malak reminds us, no single work can be representative of the vast and varied Muslim diaspora across the world; indeed, to try to homogenize it is one of the tactics of Islamophobia.56 In the same way, no national or regional experience can be taken to stand for anything greater than itself. In this case, my particular academic specialism informs the emphasis on South Asian texts here—­without implying any lesser status to texts not covered that may come from other regions. Moreover, because those existing comparative critical texts that attempt some overview of “Muslim writing”—­those by Geoffrey Nash and John Hawley in particular—­tend to have especial strengths in Arabic background fiction, this book may be seen as an attempt to paint in another part of the vast canvas of Muslim literary expression.57 That it does so in such constrained and tense times should indicate that the need for critical explorations of the commonplaces of intercultural debate is urgent and ongoing. Equally, the English-­language bias of my selection might seem to highlight the limitations of the paradigm. However, the circulation and hence reach of literary texts about Muslims and Islam are determined by a global market that is properly one of the main subjects of our story. This market has a strong bias toward majority Western languages, indicating the broader power structures that are in play. If the current book cannot in its own terms stand outside those structures, it may at least point to the skewed results they produce.

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The chapters that follow describe the arc of literary representations in relation to Islamophobia as it is visible today. In moving between Britain and America and then out into the broader world, I wish to indicate a certain international continuity in the features of Islamophobia, along with the literary responses it calls forth.

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

The backlash against multiculturalism articulated by politicians in various parts of the world over the past few years has in its sights the supposed

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recalcitrance of Muslims. In Britain, there has been a shift from, for example, a quite virulently racist mainstream discourse in the 1970s and 1980s, based on biological racism, about Afro-­Caribbean youth as agents of crime and moral corruption to a cultural discrimination against Muslims based on their perceived “alien” practices. The recent multicultural consensus—­ inasmuch as it ever existed—­has come under attack from both left and right. The Right argue for an effectively assimilationist implementation of so-­called British values—­the distinctively British nature of which always proves somewhat tricky to identify—­and the Left emphasizes the divisive effect of identity politics, particularly in its religious form. For those on the left, the breakdown of previous antiracist solidarities has been brought about by claims to exceptionalism, resulting in special treatment conceded to minorities by governments.

In the works of Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali, we can chart the course of this disenchantment with the idea of political multiculturalism—­a course that, I argue, maps onto the rise of a post-­Thatcherite neoliberal outlook in which collective action is denigrated in favor of self-­help and entrepreneurship. Kureishi’s novels, such as The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, chart multicultural lived experience. Yet they are also quite trenchant about the potential for identity politics to lead to fragmentation, special pleading, and reactionary community politics. It may be the case that political recognition of minorities caused some groups to organize in such a way as to accentuate conservative values, with results that tended to be repressive to minorities and women. However, when commentators lament the persistence of such practices as veiling, forced marriages, honor crimes, self-­segregation, female genital mutilation, and so on, these practices are often understood as in essence “Muslim” practices. This understanding leads to an indiscriminate attack that fails to recognize the roots of practices in particular regional cultures and their social structures. (It is also, of course, the case that none of them is exclusive to Muslims.)

The novels I am concerned with in chapter 2—­The Black Album and Brick Lane—­are about the lived experience of individuals negotiating their way through the modern minefield of community relations. Both are by writers deemed to be in some way “representative” of multicultural Britain—­despite their protestations to the contrary—­and this expectation has had particular effects on these novels’ reception. That both novels also have bildungsroman elements, depicting the growth and education of their

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main characters, results in the collision of collectivist forces and individualist impulses. In The Black Album, the central protagonist is torn between secular self-­realization and the suffocating demands of an Islamic revivalist group at the college where he studies. Characteristically, Kureishi rejects the closed system of Muslim extremism he depicts, preferring to extend the protagonist’s journey of self-­discovery. In other words, he valorizes individual over collective identifications. Brick Lane, written not long after 9/11, extends this trajectory with a Bangladeshi female protagonist who rejects the shackles of domesticity and the pressure to conform.

Nazneen’s transformation from dutiful wife to adulterous lover to independent economic entity—­forming a business with like-­minded female friends—­marks the completion of a process whereby the British multicultural novel comes to embrace the neoliberal ethos of individual economic self-­assertion. This is the preferred route to emancipation for Nazneen, who at the end becomes the model multicultural liberal subject, using her design skills to produce “traditional” (and therefore exotic) garments for the wider market. Thus, taken together, these two novels register a shift of emphasis from collectivist political assertion to commodification and consumption.

By the end, the industrious but still devout Nazneen embodies an Islam “we” need not be phobic about.

The question of culture as a battleground in the war on terror also occurs in those texts addressed in the third chapter. I argue that Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner are part of a subgenre that saw an exponential growth in popularity after 9/11: the Muslim misery memoir. Such books make particular truth claims, using the supposed authenticity bestowed by cultural background and personal experience, to tell the West what it should know about the oppressive Muslim countries it stands against. These books intervened in the ongoing American culture wars, appeared at the time of the Bush interventionist foreign policy, and underpinned the moral claims of this project in stories where injustice and oppression are foregrounded and linked to religious ideology. Nafisi’s and Hosseini’s novels construct rigid binary distinctions between American freedom and the suffering of those in Muslim countries. However, it is in their mutual interest in the slippery processes of reading and writing—­Nafisi’s characters read from the canon of great Western literature, Hosseini’s protagonist is a writer—­t hat both texts expose the expedient and questionable nature of their judgments. The

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truth claims of these two exhibits in the court of world opinion are thus exposed as ideologically sealed but at the same time never watertight.

If Islamophobia can be related to questions of form, it receives its most direct treatment in novelistic themes. Chapters 4 and 5 explore how movements across space are impeded by Islamophobia, both within the metropolis and across international borders. In Amy Waldman’s The Submission and H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy, both set in New York City, Muslim characters’ ability to shape the city space is curtailed by defensive forces that seek to police it against them. Both novels reveal the negotiations and restrictions that result, including the kind of surveillance, detention, and expulsion experienced by real Muslims after 9/11. The books chronicle the closing down of alternative and hybrid identities amid the chorus of patriotism demanded after the attacks, although in the end they vary in their commitment to articulating Otherness. In the liberal thrillers examined in chapter 5, John Le Carré, Dan Fesperman, and Richard Flanagan are concerned to contest those states of exception that engulfed Muslim subjects as their citizenship was called into question and their ability to move across borders was curtailed. These writers rehearse the precarious position of the outsider, or homo sacer, who already exists on the periphery and is vulnerable to the full force of securitization and exclusion. However, they also tend to displace experiences of marginalization from Muslims to white, non-­Muslim protagonists, suggesting a discomfort with conveying culturally different experience in their novels.

Islamophobia is not simply experienced in the cities and the countries of the West. It is fostered by historical policies that have often seen Muslim lands and their populations treated as expedients, collateral damage in the pursuit of other struggles. Chapter 6 discusses how both Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows are concerned to reconnect modern readers with that longer history. They tell of the globalization of conflict in the Cold War as the United States encouraged international Islamist extremism in the fight against communism in Afghanistan and elsewhere and consider globalization’s impact on the conduct of post-­ 9/11 campaigns. In the process, these global novels by two Pakistani writers puncture Western complacency and superiority, crossing space and time to thread together characters separated by cultures and continents.

Yet in this important project they are sometimes hampered by the same commonplaces of liberal universalism that shadow those less sympathetic

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accounts we have seen. “Worlding” the contemporary novel about Muslims is one way to try to establish more equitable narrative space, but it is still fraught with dangers.

Novels that speak to the current geopolitical problematic in which Muslims stand center stage are addressing a particular audience: that market mentioned previously and reinforced by reviewers and critics. Chapter 7 returns to the question of reception and those frames through which Muslim writing is contained. I explore two ways in which the current market for the Muslim operates. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist dramatizes the experiences of a character who moves from being a foot soldier of the neoliberal economic model to one of its fiercest critics; it also destabilizes liberal readers’ expectations and confronts their prejudices.

However, despite its inscription of the pitfalls of reading and writing “the Muslim,” the novel itself—­as a marketable commodity—­is inevitably implicated in the processes it critiques. In Minaret, Leila Aboulela attempts a realist depiction of the experience of devout female religiosity in a novel that indirectly questions the normative secularity of the novel form in a way that might be called “postsecular.” Yet within the existing market for the Muslim Aboulela’s efforts are liable to be co-­opted by that anthropological tendency we have witnessed in response to other novels, in which generic expectations and the burden of representation combine to reinsert the text into prevailing discourses about “the Muslim problem.”

Artistic and cultural forms can reinforce Islamophobia. But they can also expose it, dramatize its inconsistencies, or outright oppose it. Claims for Western superiority often carry within them, even when unnoticed, the bacilli of an unstated support for the notion of individualism, co-­opted as part of the discourse of freedom that nowadays also often implies an endorsement of an inequitable globalized economic system. For every Martin Amis scurrying to rearticulate the truisms of Euro-­American cultural superiority, there is an Abdul Rahman Munif addressing the human cost of the pursuance of Western greed and exceptionalism,58 but they do not enjoy equal exposure.

Most of all, art—­at its most ambitious—­can expose Islamophobia for the thing of shreds and patches that it is. Islamophobia is often seen as a unified, monolithic discourse that is actively imposed on passive objects.

However, it is actually a discourse riven with anxieties and contradictions. This book seeks out those instances where the discourses of

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