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Making Sense
of Contemporary
British Muslim Novels
Claire Chambers
Making Sense of Contemporary
British Muslim Novels
Claire Chambers
Making Sense
of Contemporary
British Muslim Novels
Claire Chambers
Department of English and Related
Literature
University of York
York, UK
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Limited
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
For Reena: love and peace
Acknowledgements
vii
viii Acknowledgements
ix
x Contents
Conclusion 253
Index 289
List of Figures
xi
Introduction
A Rushdie-Shaped Hole
In Late 1988, Muslim Protestors in Bolton and Bradford, two poor
and ethnically divided cities in northern England, were encouraged
by television reporters to burn Salman Rushdie’s allegedly blasphe-
mous novel The Satanic Verses. Soon afterwards, on 14 February 1989,
the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie and his publishers had
dramatic impact in the UK as well as on global geopolitics. Following
Rushdie’s ‘un-funny Valentine’ (2012: 11), the spotlight fell on Muslims.
Previously they had appeared as a virtually invisible minority group in
Britain, subsumed under the broader category of ‘British Asians’. The
fatwa was abhorrent and indefensible, but the dominant liberal reac-
tion to the protests was also questionable. Rushdie was positioned by
commentators such as Fay Weldon (1989: 6−8) and Malise Ruthven
(1991/1990: 1) as one of their own. A pale-skinned, Cambridge-
educated exponent of free speech, Rushdie’s Voltairean upholding of
debate and democracy was juxtaposed with the supposedly barbaric,
‘alien’ values of the protestors.
It is my contention that 1989 rather than 2001 was a crucial date
for the representation of Islam and emergence of a specific form of
Islamophobia in British culture (and further afield). This monograph
engages with a series of post-fatwa fictions that deal with the question of
what it means to be British and Muslim in nuanced and sensitive ways.
My central thesis is that novels by authors from Muslim backgrounds and
xiii
xiv Introduction
There are many connections between Joseph Anton and The Satanic
Verses, and the memoir contains interesting details which illustrate how
semi-autobiographical much of Rushdie’s fictional oeuvre is. To take
just one, sensory, example, Rushdie recalls his father buying grilled
chicken from a takeaway on the Edgware Road and making the embar-
rassed young Salman smuggle it into their hotel (2012: 21) in much
the same way that Saladin Chamcha’s father does in The Satanic Verses
(1998/1988: 43). In the memoir, we find self-righteousness and self-
pity, as well as humour and keenness of vision. Rushdie plays down
accusations that he deliberately insulted and homogenized Islam in The
Satanic Verses, dismissing any criticisms out of hand as coming from ‘the
he-knew-what-he-was-doing, he-did-it-on-purpose party’ (2012: 109).
Simultaneously, he plays up his own scholarship, despite the fact that
this derives from a single course on Islamic history which he took under
the tutelage of Arthur Hibbert at the University of Cambridge (2012:
40). The memoir also exhibits what we might call a tendency towards
Islamophobia denial. For example, Rushdie writes, ‘A new word had
been created to help the blind remain blind: Islamophobia’ (2012: 343).1
Shortly afterwards, he puts the word Islamophobia in scare quotes and
describes the concept as part of ‘the vocabulary of Humpty Dumpty
Newspeak’ (2012: 346). In this quotation he calls on Orwell in a very
different way from his references to the British India-born author in the
politically engaged 1984 essay ‘Outside the Whale’ (1991: 87−101).
Rushdie argued in that early piece that art cannot be absolved of ethical
blame by virtue of its fictional status: all art, he claimed, is political – not-
withstanding his later insistence on The Satanic Verses’s fictionality and
therefore exemption from criticism.
In Joseph Anton Rushdie seeks to make a distinction between attacking
ideas and attacking people. And yet, his inference that hatred of Muslims
does not exist is disproven not only in studies by the likes of Chris
Allen (2010) and S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil (2011), but also by
Rushdie’s own memory (2012: 63) of the editor Bob Gottlieb reading
V. S. Naipaul’s withering book Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey
(1981) and from then on imagining that he would dislike anyone from
a Muslim background. Moreover, in a bathetic section, billed as being
‘the most nearly lethal moment in all those menacing years’ (2012:
474), while Rushdie and his then-wife Elizabeth West took a holiday in
the Blue Mountains in the mid-1990s their car was accidentally hit by a
xvi Introduction
The police were giving the driver a hard time, though. They too had
worked out that the man sitting dazed and wounded on the grass was
Salman Rushdie, and so they wanted to know, what was the driver’s reli-
gion? The driver was bewildered. ‘What’s my religion got to do with any-
thing?’ Well, was he a Muzlim? An Islammic? Was he Eye-ray-nian? Is that
why he had tried to kill Mr. Rushdie? Maybe one of the Ayatoller’s fellers?
Was he carrying out the whatever it was called, the fatso? (Rushdie 2012:
476−477)
Rushdie moves away from his early-career attempt to show the cate-
gories of ‘angelicdevilish’ as intertwined, towards entirely separate and
smoothed-out categories of ‘light’ and ‘dark’. This is akin to the clash
of civilizations model, which Samuel P. Huntington drew up in his 1993
article and 1996 book, and which argued that religion and culture would
prove the dominant lineaments of post-Cold War geopolitics. The irony
is that by the time Rushdie writes his memoir he is borrowing the ‘good
and bad, light and dark’ language of the supernatural realm that he criti-
cizes even as late as Step Across This Line. The man who once proclaimed
‘Only hard-line ideology is clear-cut’ (2003: 255) is now striving for
doctrinaire simplicity. Yet, as Daniel O’Gorman shows, Rushdie is ‘una-
ble to persuasively follow through on [his] rhetoric of a world simplisti-
cally torn between […] “bright” and “dark”’. O’Gorman suggests that it
is precisely in this failure that Joseph Anton proves ‘valuable’ (2017: 457).
The memoir extrudes greater ambivalence than its author intends and is
therefore unintentionally revealing about seemingly irreconcilable differ-
ences in ideology.
Minority offence at creative works can be traced in part to social and
cultural disenfranchisement (Ahmed 2015: 64–71), or the fact that some
people have more freedom and opportunities to speak than others. In
response to controversies such as the one that engulfed The Satanic
Verses, we need to challenge polarized understandings that pit secular-
ism against religion, majority against minority. As I will show in Part
III of this volume, along with the undoubted importance of freedom of
expression, what is needed is a willingness to listen.
My first monograph, Britain Through Muslim Eyes (Chambers 2015),
was a literary history that prefaces Making Sense of Contemporary British
Muslim Novels. I posited 1988–1989 as the historical moment at which
to split the two volumes. This is because the Rushdie affair was in
many ways more of a turning point for perceptions of and by Muslims
in Britain than 9/11. Nonetheless, the idea of a complete rupture for
the twenty-first century makes for impactful article, book, or chapter
titles. Muneeza Shamsie, for example, entitles her anthology of post-
9/11 Pakistani women’s writing And the World Changed (2005). Peter
Morey (via Tony Blair) writes that ‘the rules of the game have changed’
(2011) after the attacks on the United States. Meanwhile, Yassmin
Abdel-Magied identifies ‘the day it all changed’ (2016: 56−75) as 11
September 2001, from which day on Muslims were widely perceived as
personifications of evil. Through the subtitle to her book, Who Do You
xviii Introduction
In It What Is In It
As We Have Seen, Muslims have found themselves in the crosshairs of
media scrutiny and political concern since at least 1989, a phenomenon
which has gathered momentum since 9/11. This book charts the devel-
opment over three decades of a fascinating and important body of fiction
by Muslim-identified authors. The trans- or sub-field of Muslim studies
tends to be dominated by sociology and adjacent disciplines, but Making
Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels champions the inclusion
of humanities critical methodologies. It also defines new paradigms for
literature that engage with, while going beyond, both postcolonial and
sensory studies debates. The book is a selective critical exploration of the
last 30 years, exploring case-study novelistic representations of and by
Muslims in Britain. It traces the evolution of these portrayals from some-
what stereotypical depictions following the Rushdie affair to the diverse
post-9/11, post-7/7, and post-Arab Spring work of Muslim-identified
authors. My previous books, British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with
Contemporary Writers (2011) and Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary
Representations, 1780−1988 (2015), helped to galvanize discussions
about the place of Islam in contemporary British and South Asian writ-
ing. The current volume builds on that research, as well as studies of the
five senses and ‘sensuous geographies’ (Rodaway 1994) of postcolonial-
London and devolutionary migrant writing.
Taken together with Britain Through Muslim Eyes, the present mono-
graph is groundbreaking because there is no comparable study of British
Muslim writing. Rehana Ahmed’sWriting British Muslims (2015) focuses
on authors’ engagement with social class and disadvantage among South
Asian Muslims. Geoffrey Nash’sWriting Muslim Identity (2012) exam-
ines Muslim writers from Arab, African, and Persian as well as South
Asian backgrounds but only includes one chapter on Britain. Esra Mirze
Santesso’s (2013) monograph explores the ‘disorientation’ of British
Muslim female immigrant characters as described in post-9/11 novels,
mostly by womenwriters. In Islamic Postcolonialism: Islam and Muslim
Identities in Four Contemporary British Novels, Hasan Majed explores
xxiv Introduction
‘Islam and Muslim identities’ (2015: 52, 75, 96, and so on) in novels by
British Muslim authors. However, one never quite escapes the sense that
the author is awarding these writers points according to the perceived
ardour of their religious beliefs, with Aboulela as the winner, followed
by Fadia Faqir and Ali, with Kureishiand Rushdie bringing up the rear.
Sadia Abbas’s (2014) and Peter Morey’s (2018b) books, very differ-
ent in political outlook but both describing urgent new trajectories for
scholarship, take a global approach to Muslim writing rather than my
close focus on Britain. This small but growing field offers an urgent-
ly-needed discussion of a contemporary topic. The present monograph
contributes vitally to the field, offering a cohesive, critical, and histori-
cized account of a wide corpus of British Muslim writing. Making Sense
of Contemporary British Muslim Novels will demonstrate that the works
of Muslim-identified writers have been especially politicized in the years
following the Rushdieaffair and 9/11: events which have also influenced
the ways these books are absorbed or responded to by the literary canon.
As well as marking the political watershed explored in the previous
section, 1989 was a focal moment for cultural production, and espe-
cially for literary outputs. The 1988 publication of Salman Rushdie’s
novel The Satanic Verses and the fatwa a year later prompted an outpour-
ing of fictional texts by both devout and non-practising Muslim authors.
Much of this fiction centres on the lives of British-based members of
the transnational faith group of Islam. Not only did the sheer volume of
literary depictions of British Muslims increase, but there were also dis-
cernible changes in relation, first, to the genres employed and, second,
to the way Muslims were portrayed. Somewhat surprisingly in light of
the seriousness of the death threats against Rushdie and his publishers,
comedy emerged as a particularly popular literary mode through which
writers examined British Muslims and Islam. In Race Riots: Comedy
and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction (2006), Michael L. Ross situ-
ates Kureishi’sThe Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album in relation
to comedy and laughter. And in an essay on Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and
Kureishi, Helga Ramsey-Kurz highlights ‘the importance of not being
earnest’, writing of humour ‘both as a viable political stance and as a
powerful, if not as the only antidote to dogma’ (2005: 85). Although
not my primary concern in this book, my analysis in Part I (on Kureishi’s
and Ahdaf Soueif’s 1990s writing) draws out the humour manifest in
both their novels, particularly a slapstick comedy rooted in the body and
a liberal and jocose use of swear words relating to body parts.
Introduction xxv
Crude as these divisions may be, Turner is right to highlight that each
decade leaves behind a certain sense for the individuals who lives through
it. Accordingly, there are particular features of the last three decades
that I have tried to identify. If the 1990s was a decade of relative levity
(as highlighted below) in which the sense of touch rose to the fore, the
2000s were darker years of surveillance and rendition, which is why in
Part II I concentrate on the senses most closely associated with race and
gender prejudice: smell and taste. Of course we are still living through
the 2010s, so it may be too early for generalizations. Nonetheless, the
present decade has seen the normalization and advancement of techno-
logical approaches to everyday living, which is why Part III’s emphasis
on sound technologies and the posthuman condition is apt.
The monograph is bookended by close textual analysis of indi-
vidual writers, while the heart of the book contains longer chapters
with pairings (and one triptych) of authors. There is an equal balance
of men and women writers, and a good range of national heritage
in addition to the British dimension. The five male authors are: Hanif
Kureishi (Pakistan/India), Nadeem Aslam (Pakistan), Robin Yassin-
Kassab (Syria), Tabish Khair (India), and Mohsin Hamid (Pakistan),
and the five women writers comprise: Ahdaf Soueif (Egypt), Monica Ali
(Bangladesh), Leila Aboulela (Sudan/Egypt), Yasmin Crowther (Iran),
and Kamila Shamsie (Pakistan). Four of these authors have a white par-
ent (Kureishi, Yassin-Kassab, Ali, and Crowther), and this quartet also
represent the only British-born writers of the ten. Khair, alone among
my chosen authors, is not and has never been a long-term resident in
Britain. The Indian writer lives in Denmark, but has spent two short
periods in Yorkshire, as John Tilney Writer in Residence at the University
of York in summer 2016 and again as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at
the University of Leeds in 2017–2018. His fascination with Britain and
decision to set two of his well-researched novels (The Thing About Thugs
[Khair 2010] as well as Just Another Jihadi Jane, discussed in Chapter 5)
in the country justifies his inclusion. In this book, as in my previous
ones, I want to take an inclusive approach to questions of ‘Britishness’,
one that is more important than ever in these peri-Brexit days.
It was inevitable that there had to be exclusions. I especially regret
the decision to leave out Elif Shafak, for I would have liked to discuss a
Turkish author. Moreover, her novel Honour would have fit well in the
taste chapter, given that her protagonist Pembe experiences racism in a
bakery before falling in love with a chef. However, her novel was (just)
Introduction xxix
The next major academic to survey the field was Louise Vinge who,
in The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition (1975), examined rep-
resentations of the senses in Romanticism, James Joyce, and the twen-
tieth-century poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. H. Auden,
inter alia. More recently, the collection Literature and Sensation edited
by Anthony Uhlmann et al. (2009) includes a few postcolonial writ-
ers – such as J. M. Coetzee, Vikram Seth, and Lloyd Jones – alongside
more mainstream and canonical authors. Finally, in Literature’s Sensuous
Geographies (2014), Sten Pultz Moslund is to my knowledge the first
critic to have applied sensory studies methodologies to (post)colonial
literature from Joseph Conrad to David Dabydeen and cultural theory
from Deleuze and Guattari to Martha Nussbaum. This growing field
means that it is now possible to speak of a (post- or decolonial) literature
of the senses, in much the same way that Constance Classen pioneered
the anthropology of the senses and David Howes and Mark M. Smith
the history of the senses.
Although I have separated out the senses for the purposes of my six
chapters, it should be noted that all five senses braid together in inter-
esting ways in these texts and more widely. As Vinge has it (1975: 166),
‘the senses go together as all the threads of a weave’. David Howes, fol-
lowing Steven Connor and Michel Serres, similarly depicts the senses
as knotted together in what he terms a multidirectional interactivity or
‘intersensoriality’. The knot, he argues, is a helpful image, for just as in
weaving or knotwork individual elements are hard to separate, so too
are the senses ‘imbricated or twisted’ together (Howes 2005: 9). The
sense of touch particularly overspills boundaries, with the skin covering
the whole body and making it sometimes tricky to disentangle the hap-
tic from the other senses, as we will observe in Part I. And there is, I
think, an especially close relationship between smell and taste, which is
why I have put my analysis of those senses together in a single section:
Part II. Using the term ‘intersensorality’ in a similar way to literary crit-
ics’ deployment of ‘intertextuality’, sensory studies experts regularly lay
emphasis on the way the senses work ‘in concert’ (Howes 1991: 186;
Smith 2007: 1). Then there is the unusual physiological phenomenon
of synaesthesia, whereby for some people inelastic divisions between the
senses break down. Even for those of us who do not smell colours or
taste sounds, our sensual lived experiences are often mixed. Intersensorial
images like Aslam’s ‘perfumed longueurs’, quoted above to describe
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