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Making Sense of Contemporary British

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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

ISBN 978-1-137-52088-3 ISBN 978-1-137-52089-0 (eBook)


https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52089-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934711

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019


The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: ‘In It What Is In It’ by Fatima Zahra Hassan. Photograph by


Simon Allen

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

This monograph draws on research funded by the Leverhulme Trust;


grateful acknowledgements to this body for granting me a year’s
sabbatical.
All books are collaborative, but this one has been more of a team
effort than most. For their invaluable research, linguistic, and stylis-
tic help, I want to thank the following people: Rehana Ahmed, Manal
Almehaidly, Pürnur Altay, Nadia Atia, Derek Attridge, Katie Beswick,
Roxanne Bibizadeh, Clare Bielby, S. J. Callender, Frances Carruthers,
Ashim Dutta, Mary Eagleton, Andrew Evans, Rachael Gilmour, Sam
Hellmuth, Caroline Herbert, Jim Hicks, Ben Holgate, Aroosa Kanwal,
Indrani Karmakar, Tabish Khair, Hannah Kershaw, Madhu Krishnan,
Maryam Mirza, Anshuman Mondal, Lindsey Moore, Peter Morey,
Stephen Morton, Delphine Munos, Liliana Naydan, Lucinda Newns,
Libby Peake, Noemì Pereira-Ares, Michael Perfect, Christer Petley,
Richard Phillips, Angelia Poon, Eve Popperwell, Shital Pravinchandra,
Emelia Quinn, Sana Riaz, Hannah Roche, Ana María Sánchez-Arce,
Esra Mirze Santesso, Bina Shah, Helen Smith, Susie Thomas, Anastasia
Valassopoulos, Susan Watkins, Mandala White, and Amina Yaqin. I owe
these coruscating critical thinkers and fragrant friends an enormous debt
of thanks. Without them, my writing experience would not have smelled
as sweet.
For help with my chicken shop collage, I am grateful for the intrepid
gastrogeographic exertions of friends near and far, old and new: Navneet

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

Bhamra, Rachel Farebrother, Heidi Frances, Jane Jardine, James Meek,


Katy Mullin, Jayne Rodgers, Stephanie Smith, and Paul Veyret.
Visually, this book would not have been the same without Fatima
Zahra Hassan’s marvellous cover art ‘In It What Is In It’; Mobeen Butt’s
talents as a curator and cultural connector; Thierry Cohen’s and Simon
Allen’s spectacular photography; and the design and editorial skills
of Jane Jardine, Linda Mellor, Joash Webster, Vicky Bates, Hemapriya
Eswanth, Tom René, and Ben Doyle.
In an interview on her writing process, Ahdaf Soueif once shared that
she feels most free when she is writing on her own in a room but can
hear her loved ones busy with happy activities not far away. The same
is true for me. To my family: thanks for (mostly) keeping your noise in
other rooms so I could finish this book. Specifically, warmest thanks and
love goes to ‘my boys’: Robert, Joash, and Derry Webster. I shall try to
be a better listener now the book is completed.
This book is dedicated to Reena, my dear friend for 30 years, who
touches my heart.
Contents

Part I The 1990s: ‘It Was Only Through Touch


That We Really Knew Things’

1 ‘Touch Me, Baby’: Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun 3

2 ‘I Wanted a Human Touch’: Hanif Kureishi’s The Black


Album 41

Part II Smelling and Tasting the 2000s

3 Fiction of Olfaction: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers


and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane 71

4 Taste the Difference: Leila Aboulela, Yasmin Crowther,


and Robin Yassin-Kassab 121

Part III Taking Soundings in the Technologized 2010s

5 Sound and Fury: Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane


and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire 169

ix
x    Contents

6 The Doors of Posthuman Sensory Perception


in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West 213

Conclusion 253

Works Cited 257

Index 289
List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 An A to Z of (mostly) British Fried Chicken Restaurants,


June 2018 (Source and copyright Claire Chambers) 148
Fig. 6.1 ‘London 51° 30′ 17″ N’ from the Darkened Cities series
© Thierry Cohen (www.thierrycohen.com) (Courtesy
Danziger Gallery, New York and the Artist [2015]) 224
Fig. 6.2 ‘London 51° 30′ 44″ N’ from the Darkened Cities series
© Thierry Cohen (www.thierrycohen.com) (Courtesy
Danziger Gallery, New York and the Artist [2015]) 225
Fig. 6.3 View of St Mary Aldermary (Source and copyright Claire
Chambers) 226
Fig. 6.4 Another view of St Mary Aldermary (Source and copyright
Claire Chambers) 227

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

with varying degrees of religiosity are richly sensual. In relation to a tide


of rising Islamophobia and simplification whose history I will chart in
this section of the introduction, these novelists demonstrate shared com-
mitment to questions of experience, specifically as mediated through the
senses, which will be the focus of this volume. My title is not intended to
imply that these novels did not make sense before I came along to inter-
pret them, but to signal that I am looking at these novels through the
lens of sensory studies. The Ummah, or global community of believing
Muslims, is often imagined as one body, even if this is equally often chal-
lenged. In one hadith, Mohammed described the indivisible nature of the
Ummah as being like that of ‘one body; when any limb of it aches, the
whole body aches’ (Sunnah.com, n.d.: n.p.). I emphasize the importance
of the five senses in Muslim-heritage cultures and, particularly, in the
confluence or collision of Muslim and British values and cultural habits.
Writing 13 years later, in his memoir Joseph Anton, Rushdie describes
the fatwa against him as being ‘like an intense light shining down on
everyone’s choices and deeds, creating a world without shadows, a stark
unequivocal place of right and wrong action, good and bad choices, yes
and no, strength and weakness’ (2012: 150−151). In the context of the
dramatic story Rushdie tells – of marriages, relationships, and his own
safety being damaged or destroyed by the deplorable fatwa’s fallout – his
monochrome analysis is understandable. It would take a hard-hearted
reader not to be moved by a passage from Joseph Anton in which Rushdie
describes his fears for the safety of his son, Zafar, during a harrowing
few hours when the young boy was not at home at a time Rushdie had
arranged to ring him (2012: 158−160). Yet the despair the author felt
during the nine-year fatwa period appears to have led to a permanent
hardening of attitude. Whereas his unbending character Swatilekha is
deeply ironized in The Satanic Verses for saying ‘Battle lines are being
drawn up […]. Secular vs. religious, the light versus the dark. Better you
choose which side you are on’ (1998/1988: 537), in Joseph Anton her
remark is quoted approvingly and without qualification (2012: 126).
Given the violence that has ensued from George W. Bush’s similarly
uncompromising rhetoric, ‘You’re either with us or you’re with the ter-
rorists’, it is surely desirable to find a more gradated approach to what
Tariq Ali describes in his 2002 book of the same name as the contem-
porary ‘clash of fundamentalisms’ between extremism in the name of
Islam, on the one hand, and Western neoliberalism – what Nisha Kapoor
(2018: 16) calls ‘state extremism’ – on the other.
Introduction    xv

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

lorry. Arriving at the scene, Australian policemen turn on the bemused


truck driver in a way that is surely Islamophobic:

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 fails to recognize that untrammelled criticism of a religion can


lead to this kind of vituperation against its (assumed) followers. Indeed,
The Satanic Verses affair led to a ramping up of prejudice against Muslims
to which Rushdie himself contributed. When he makes the supercili-
ous comment that ‘to the smug and angry men and boys in Bradford,
Heinrich Heine meant nothing’ (2012: 129), instead of speaking truth
to power, this elite writer appears to be talking down to the power-
less. At one point, Rushdie uses the adjectives ‘unqualified, unyielding’
approvingly (2012: 22), but more qualifications and a less inflexible
stance would have made for a better memoir.
I will intimate in this book that the sacralization of freedom of expres-
sion since the Rushdie affair, and its post-9/11 resurgence led by New
Atheists such as Martin Amis and the late Christopher Hitchens (to
whom Rushdie dedicated his essay collection Step Across This Line), has
entrenched both liberal and conservative perceptions of religions, par-
ticularly Islam, as repressive, dogmatic, and violent. It is less commonly
recognized that the hardline secular position also has ‘fundamentalist’
tendencies, including its near deification of art (especially literature and
its avatar, The Writer) and of science and Enlightenment values, all of
which are often partially understood or taken on ‘faith value’. As early
as 1959, Eric Stokes, in The English Utilitarians and India, identified
this kind of approach as ‘secular evangelicism’, which he defines as ‘the
translation of secular objectives to a religious level’ (1959: 308).2 Both
secular and religious evangelism rest on a conversion impetus, and this is
one from which Rushdie’s memoir is not immune.
For all its faults, The Satanic Verses inverted stereotypes with postmod-
ern glee, playing with received depictions and defying clear categoriza-
tions, including that between deities and mortals. Yet in Joseph Anton
Introduction    xvii

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

Think I Am?, Abdel-Magied also constructs this transformation as affect-


ing how her story, as a millennial Sudanese Australian and a believing
Muslim who wears hijab, has been told without her permission, and her
voice ventriloquized according to others’ assumptions and desires.
Of course, 9/11 marked great change in global geopolitics. In the
1990s and very early 2000s many clung complacently to a notion that
racism (as well as sexism and homophobia) had been defeated and the
end of history had arrived. In the foundational year of 1989, Francis
Fukuyama had messianically announced that history would end its evo-
lution as the result of what he saw as a happy convergence of liberal
democracy and free market capitalism. Yet if Fukuyama won the battle
of ideas, with an equally flawed thesis Samuel Huntington won the war.
9/11 saw a move in public discourse from talking about race to obsess-
ing over faith, accompanied by racism’s resurgence – typically with overt
colour prejudice decanted into religion and culture.
The present book will be published in 2019, the year of the first
intake of university students born after 9/11. This cohort will not
remember that race and interfaith relations were dire enough before
2001. The First Iraq War of 1990–1991, with its attendant Allied prop-
aganda, was followed in 1993 by an attempted bombing of New York’s
World Trade Center by terrorists from Muslim backgrounds, some of
whom were al-Qaida-affiliated. Working as a journalist on Newsnight
when the Oklahoma bombing took place two years later in 1995, the
British Muslim author Yasmin Hai was ordered by a senior colleague
to ‘[g]et a mad mullah!’ (2008: 242) to be interviewed on the show.
This pre-9/11 instance of Islamophobia occurred before the news came
through to Hai’s producer that the attack had been perpetrated by a
white far-right extremist, Timothy McVeigh, and not a Muslim. Such
utterances have become more widespread in many sections of the media
since 9/11, as exemplified in initial assumptions by a high proportion
of live-broadcasting journalists that the 2011 Norway mass murders
were orchestrated by a Muslim, when they were in fact acts of terror
committed by another white violent extremist, Anders Behring Breivik.
Amplified and made more ubiquitous since the late 1990s by the advent
of 24-hour rolling news in Britain and around the globe,3 the stigmatiza-
tion of Muslims has become increasingly prevalent and toxic over the last
18 years.
Introduction    xix

In Feiwel Kupferberg’s ‘Theorizing Turning Points and Decoding


Narratives’, he cautions that the notion of a turning point is ‘deeply sub-
jective’ and that such watersheds are ‘narrated’ rather than ‘historical
reality’ (2012: 240−241). Perhaps 9/11 marks a subjective flashpoint
for the millennial generation, just as the Rushdie affair manufactured
concerns about the reified figure of the Muslim for Generation X; the
Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s
did for Baby Boomers; and as the Arab Uprisings and its consequences
may be the defining moments for a younger group sometimes referred to
as Generation Z or the smartphone-wielding iGen. Kupferberg identifies
three main types of turning points: ‘“milestone”, “meeting a challenge”
and “the last straw”’ (2012: 232). The Rushdie affair was a milestone
in that a head of one state (Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini) was using the
discretionary legal opinion of a fatwa to order the targeted killing of a
citizen from another country. Rushdie would later write of the threats
against him as a personal challenge, handing him ‘the flag under which
he was ready to fight, […] which stood for intellect, argument, analy-
sis and progress, for the freedom of philosophy and learning from the
shackles of theology, for human reason and against blind faith, sub-
mission, acceptance and stagnation’ (2012: 23). Note the dog whistle
– some might say the airhorn – with which Rushdie signals a link from
Islam, which translates as ‘submission’, to unthinking belief and civiliza-
tional atrophy. The Satanic Verses controversy was also the last straw for
many members of the impoverished British Muslim community, who by
the end of the 1980s were reeling from the Honeyford affair of 1984–
1985 (see Chambers 2015: 218–220), the racist policy in Bradford of
‘bussing out’ Asian children to prevent too many of them going to their
local schools (Macey 2009: 10), and the struggle to have halal dietary
requirements catered for in schools across the UK.
The timeframe of my two books therefore allows me to examine a
series of turning points often forgotten amidst emphasis on the World
Trade Center attacks and their aftermath. With Debjani Ganguly, I
argue that 1989, the year of the collapse of communism as well as the
Rushdie affair, signalled a more pronounced shift in perceptions of and
by Muslims in Britain. In her monograph This Thing Called the World,
Ganguly pays welcome attention to ‘the historically significant threshold
of 1989’ in shaping our current Manichean political climate (2016: 1).
xx    Introduction

I agree with Ganguly’s assessment that 1989 – a year significant for,


but not reducible to, the fall of communism – ushered in the most pro-
found shift in geopolitics and literary aesthetics since the revolutionary
movements of 1968. Ganguly argues that post-Cold War world litera-
ture is notable for its engagement with modern kinds of unending war
and insurgency, the digital environment, and human rights discourse.
She paints a grisly picture of what she terms, with a nod to Achille
Mbembe, ‘deathworlds’ around the globe (2016: 9−10), as well as
resistance movements that flare up in response. Ganguly makes an urgent
intervention in the emerging field of global digital humanities. She per-
tinently observes that Tim Berners-Lee made early steps toward creat-
ing the World Wide Web in 1989. The ramifications of technological
developments for global communications and access to information are
compared to the earlier impact of industrial revolutions. When Ganguly
describes ‘the surveilling power of information technology’ (2016: 96)
and the unmanned drones that play an ever-increasing role in society, it
is as though she casts a night-vision optic on the found-footage horror
film that is twenty-first century warfare. I take from This Thing Called the
World the interest in new technologies (which I especially explore in Part
III) and the emphasis on 1989 as a turning point.
Strangely, though, the 2003 Iraq War is first encountered in
Ganguly’s book via Ian McEwan’s Saturday. In this novel, a rather
objectionable middle-class man, Henry Perowne, expresses views of
the war and Muslim migrants in Britain that are scarcely offset even by
the whisper of his daughter’s contestatory voice because no Muslims’
perspectives are explored. Similarly, Martin Amis’s ‘The Last Days of
Muhammad Atta’ provides Ganguly’s readers with their first window on
9/11. Ganguly praises ‘Amis’s deft strokes’ (2016: 49) in the short story
and absorbs his phrase ‘the thing which is called the World’ into her title
(Amis, qtd. in Ganguly 2016: 43). It is a missed opportunity that she
does not challenge Amis’s preoccupation with the figure of the terrorist,
his simplistic view of Atta as a man with a death wish, and the hateful
nature of some of his public pronouncements on Muslims and Islam.
Rushdie himself uses cataclysmic language in Joseph Anton, describing
1989 as ‘the year the world changed’ and the fatwa against him as the
‘first blackbird on the climbing frame’ (2012: 126, 4). In this last image,
he alludes to the crows (not blackbirds) which congregate menacingly
in the playground in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds (2005/1963).
Introduction    xxi

Rushdie’s idea, put forward in Joseph Anton, but anticipated by commen-


tators including Hanif Kureishi (2005) and Kenan Malik (2009), that
the fatwa against The Satanic Verses heralded absolute rupture in rela-
tion to freedom of expression versus Muslim sensitivities is an exagger-
ation to say the least. The protests in India against Angaraay (Shingavi
2014), a collection of socialist short stories published in 1933 by the
Progressive Writers Association and soon banned by the Indian govern-
ment in response to the public disorder; the H. G. Wells affair of 1938
when Muslims marched in London against Wells’s book A Short History
of the World (Ahmed 2012: 42–44); and some small-scale demonstrations
against Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette being screened in New York
in 1986 (see Chambers 2011: 22) together repudiate this claim of new-
ness entering the world.
While we might dispute the scale and the axis on which the
Rushdie affair as a turning point pivots, 1989 was the moment when
Islamophobia became crystallized in Britain, and after which many
Muslims increasingly saw themselves as constituting a separate commu-
nity. Whereas national origins and race had previously been interpreted
as the dominant attributes of particular migrant groups, it was after the
Rushdie affair and then accelerated by 9/11 that religion came to the
forefront in British debates about multiculturalism. This is evidenced by
the fact that it was in 1997, four years before the World Trade Center
attacks, that the Runnymede Trust published its influential report
Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. The report identifies the Rushdie
affair as ‘one of the formative, defining events in the stories not only of
nations and communities but also of countless individuals’ (Runnymede
1997: 7). I would concur that this fin de la décennie affair, along with the
First Iraq War, marked a turning point for Islam’s positioning as Britain’s
new other. As for the US, clearly the word ‘Muslim’ has become more
contentious since 9/11, but it would be erroneous to assume that in the
1990s it carried no negative connotations. Huntington published his
clash of civilizations article early in the decade, in 1993, suggesting that
a certain demonization was already under way. That same year, Time ran
a cover headline ‘Hitting Back at Terrorists’ and included a cluster of five
articles insinuating, in a similar manner to Huntington’s, that Islam was
the new enemy.
Rather than a straightforward literary history, the present mono-
graph has ended up becoming a work of literary criticism. Evaluation
xxii    Introduction

is important in my discussion, but the book is not trying to establish a


ranking of the novels I discuss according to religiosity, political stance,
or aesthetic value. The post-Rushdie material has posed a conundrum
of balancing critical versus literary–historical material, since I have much
more critical commentary to negotiate in the contemporary era.
Britain Through Muslim Eyes, as its title suggests, emphasized the
Muslim author’s gaze on the United Kingdom. Drawing on the work
of theorists from Jacques Lacan (1978/1973) to Jeremy Hawthorn
(2006), I argued that images of eyes, optics, and the gaze dominated the
texts produced by Muslim writers who spent time in Britain during the
period 1780–1988. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors
such as Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin and Mirza Abu Taleb Khan sought
to reverse the Orientalist gaze, adapting the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey
scene’ for themselves as Muslim subjects to star in (Pratt 1992: 201–
227). Examining contemporary Muslim fictions, I increasingly noticed a
preoccupation with the other senses: touch, smell, taste, and hearing. I
came to realize that visualism or ocularcentrism – the privileging of look-
ing over other sensory perceptions – has led to relative neglect of the
four remaining senses. In this book I therefore want to provide a more
‘full-bodied’ approach to Muslim writing (Howes 2005: 1). The chap-
ters that follow, therefore, provide fine-grained exploration of this liter-
ature’s representations of the non-visual senses. Because of the book’s
strong critical dimension, literary−historical materials support my read-
ings but are not intended to be exhaustive.
In Britain Through Muslim Eyes I stated that this sequel would
begin with The Satanic Verses. However, my burgeoning interest in the
post-Rushdie writers has led to the decision to leave a ‘Rushdie-shaped
hole’ in this book.4 I find that the novel and subsequent affair is ‘ein zu
weites Feld’: too big a subject (or field), as Theodor Fontane’s adulter-
ous heroine Effi Briest puts it (Fontane 2009: 35). I have therefore pro-
vided only this brief account of Rushdie’s influence.5 Just as The Satanic
Verses controversy casts a long shadow across a range of novels from the
decades that follow, so too Rushdie himself is, to adapt his own words,
a ‘visible but unseen’ presence in this monograph (1988: 241–256).
Much of his fiction would also fit my theme of the senses, as has already
been discussed by several fine scholars (Mukherjee 2006; Parashkevova
2009: 415–418; Ray 2018). But it is important to take sensory stud-
ies as a framework for analysing other Muslim writers so as to counter
Introduction    xxiii

widespread assumptions that only secular authors evince this concentra-


tion on the sensuous. Let us now turn to more detailed discussion of my
research contribution and its particular approach, remit, and scope.

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

Sexuality and the haptic sensibility were heightened preoccupations


and often treated with levity among authors of Muslim heritage in the
decade following the Rushdie affair, perhaps as a way of distancing them-
selves from the perceived sexual austerity of the protestors. This is also
important in terms of representation, as a counter-discourse against
hegemonic portrayals of Muslims. Just such a counter-discourse has
been explicitly highlighted in a number of recent anthologies of short
fiction, most notably The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women
Write, in which the editor, Sabrina Mahfouz, states: ‘one of the aims of
this anthology is to dispel the narrow image of what a Muslim woman –
particularly a British Muslim woman – looks and lives like’ (2017: 8).
More importantly, perhaps, apart from the two authors I discuss in Part
I, there are several other 1990s texts I could draw on to support my
argument that touch is a means by which these authors explore ques-
tions surrounding knowledge, desire, and violence, including Farhana
Sheikh’s The Red Box (1991), Zulfikar Ghose’s The Triple Mirror of
the Self (1994/1992), Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih’s Gardens of the Night
(1995), and Rukhsana Ahmad’s The Hope Chest (1996). For these resist-
ant writers, ‘Muslim’ moved from being an identity marker that was
worn relatively lightly in literary texts (with class, gender, and ethnicity
being more important to most pre-1989 authors), to a post-Rushdiean
fascination with Islam, especially what was then termed its ‘fundamen-
talist’ tendencies. To construct my argument in Part I, I investigate two
multisensory 1990s novels, Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and Kureishi’s
The Black Album, concentrating on the authors’ explorations of touch.
In these novels, Soueif and Kureishi keep circling back to discussion of
various forms of touch, from agamic hugging to sadistic torture, which is
why I take the haptic as my focus in this Part.
In the wake of the northern English riots of 2001, the attacks on
the United States later that year, and the onset of the ‘War on Terror’,
there was a further surge in British fiction’s preoccupation with Islam.
Other non-Muslim British authors such as Nigel Williams (1993), for-
mer-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson (2005), Martyn Waites (2008),
and Sebastian Faulks (2009) fictionalized sensationalist topics such as
Muslim faith schools, terrorism, and the figure of the violent extremist.
This kind of pigeonholing of the Muslim experience is damaging, with
literary depictions reinforcing stereotypes from mainstream British media
and vice versa. I want to leave behind the well-worn recourse to white,
non-Muslim men’s take on the War on Terror and its repercussions,
xxvi    Introduction

attending instead to the voices of Muslim-identified writers. These writ-


ers have more to say, both celebratory and critical, about Islam and
Muslims than their non-Muslim counterparts who trade in a limited set
of ideas. From M. Y. Alam’s (1998, 2002, 2012) thrillers and Ayisha
Malik’s chick lit (2016, 2017), to literary fiction such as Abdulrazak
Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996) and Gravel Heart (2017), the
increase in attention paid to Islam and to characters of Muslim heritage
in British Muslim fiction is due to a turning point which is not solely – as
is commonly assumed – 9/11 and its aftermath, but owes much to the
Rushdie affair of late 1988 onwards.
My hope is that this monograph will make an important contribution
to debates about literature and multiculturalism in Britain. I use the differ-
ent senses to structure the book, looking at – and listening to, touching,
tasting, and smelling – ten novels. I explore Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the
Sunand Kureishi’s The Black Album under the rubric of touch; Nadeem
Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and Ali’s Brick Lane via ‘postcolognial’
attention to smell; Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus,
Yasmin Crowther’s The Saffron Kitchen, and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret
according to gustatory experience; Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and
Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane in relation to sound; and Mohsin
Hamid’s Exit West with regard to sound, but also posthuman sensory per-
ception. There is a great deal to say about the five senses in these texts and
the approach also allows me to offer supple critiques of my key authors’
textual politics. This book balances some frequently-discussed nov-
els (Kureishi’s The Black Album and Ali’s Brick Lane in particular) with
some that are much less written on (for example, Crowther’s The Saffron
Kitchen and Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane). Approaching these texts
through the senses opens up a very different set of readings and analyses,
even in those texts which have amassed a significant critical hinterland.
There is also, however, a certain arbitrariness about this. Of course,
all the novels I discuss in the book evoke several, if not all, of the senses,
but I am selective in pursuing particular arguments. And I do not hes-
itate to cross-reference already-analysed novels in later chapters if it
is useful to do so. Although I am constructing Soueif and Kureishi as
tactile writers, for instance, they are both also interested in how people
listen to and respond to music, and I do ‘touch on’ the sense of hear-
ing in their texts. For Soueif, music is an important vehicle of resistance,
as in the satirical songs of Sheikh Imam criticizing the Egyptian regime.
Introduction    xxvii

Kureishi, meanwhile, is seduced by pop’s sensual and sexual energies,


an aspect of his work which has already been accorded sustained critical
scrutiny (Smyth 2008: 182–184, 219–220; Pereira-Ares 2018: 59–104).
Similarly, Nadeem Aslam, whose novel Maps for Lost Lovers I explore for
its ‘olfactory factor’ could equally have been mined for its auditory mate-
rial. Given this sonic sensitivity, Aslam’s depictions of the great Qawwali
singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s ‘perfumed longueurs’ (Aslam 2004: 187)
form an important strand of Chapter 3’s argument. Read for his interest
in taste in this book, I have discussed elsewhere Robin Yassin-Kassab’s
love of hip hop and dub poetry in The Road from Damascus (Chambers
2012: 126–127). Music is omnipresent in other novels of the 2000s that
I assess; for example, Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (like Yassin-Kassab’s novel
approached via the sense of taste) in its early sections throbs to the disco
beats of Boney M, Michael Jackson, and the Bee Gees, but later loses
itself in the evocatively unadorned sound of the azan or call to prayer.
By the 2010s there is nostalgia for the materiality of records and CDs
alongside a turn to digitized sounds, some of them sinister (like the crack
of a sword through the neck that Kamila Shamsie’s male protagonist
Parvaiz has the job of recording for a Daesh propaganda video). More
than any of the other authors, Mohsin Hamid, in his novel Exit West,
borrows from digital technologies to innovate with literary form and
stretch the boundaries of human sensory perceptions. All of this high-
lights the arbitrariness of divisions when it comes to the single sense of
hearing. I could do the same for taste, touch, and smell, but will leave
this until the individual chapters. Additionally, as we will see in the next
section, my chapters show that the senses themselves intertwine. We do
not just taste our food, but also look at, touch, and smell it, for exam-
ple; just as we regard, hear, taste, and sniff our lovers as well as touching
them. The concepts of synaesthesia, intersensoriality, and the multidirec-
tional nature of the senses thus recur across these pages.
The book is not just organized around the senses but is cross-hatched
by the decades. Again, there is some caprice to that decision since, as
Alwyn W. Turner writes:

the division of history by dates is a necessarily arbitrary affair. Decades and


centuries are artificial, crude concepts that seldom fit the objective facts.
They do, however, have an impact on the subjective experience of time,
the turning of the years affecting how people see the evolution of their
societies. (2014: 1)
xxviii    Introduction

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

published in the 2010s (Shafak 2015/2011), so for my exploration of


Honour, I direct you to one of this book’s online paratexts (Chambers
2016).
In postcolonial studies, Shital Pravinchandra and I argue, ‘the novel,
poetry, and to some extent drama remain the literary modes of choice,
while genre fiction, nonfiction, and short fiction receive relatively little
attention’ (Chambers and Pravinchandra 2018: 342). While acknowledg-
ing the marginalization of other forms, I confine myself to the literary
fiction novel in this volume, as I am scrutinizing more popular genre,
short, and nonfiction forms in detail as part of the Arts and Humanities
Research Council-funded project Storying Relationships (see https://
www.sheffield.ac.uk/storyingrelationships and Chambers et al. 2018).
There is more than enough material for a study of the literary fiction
novel since, as I argue in Chapter 5, this form is a uniquely flexible and
border-crossing one, bringing together history, politics, and sociology,
while retaining a close focus on people. That said, Muhammad Khan’s
I Am Thunder (2018) would have tessellated with Chapter 5’s readings
of representations of the radicalized Muslim subject in Tabish Khair’s
Just Another Jihadi Jane and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. Because
Khan’s work is categorized within the genre of Young Adult or YA fic-
tion, I hope to explore his promising debut elsewhere (Phillips et al.,
forthcoming).
In Britain Through Muslim Eyes, I found that in the period 1780–
1980, English was firmly a minority language for authors of Muslim her-
itage, who more commonly turned to their mother tongues of Persian,
Arabic, or Urdu for literary production. Translation was thus an impor-
tant theme for that monograph, and most of my key texts were works
in translation. While, as I demonstrated (Chambers 2015), most of the
pre-1980s authors were elite, ‘England-returned’ sojourners, in the
post-Second World War period a more permanent ‘myth of return’ class
of writers emerges. Many, though not all, of these authors choose – or
have no choice but to use – English as their language for literary expres-
sion. As such, this volume has ended up being a purely Anglophone
affair, albeit scrutinizing an English richly seasoned and remoulded by its
encounters with the diction and grammar of the three above-mentioned
languages.
The front cover image is taken from ‘In It What Is In It: 09’ (it is
ninth in a series on the Afghan-born poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–
1273) by British Pakistani Muslim artist Fatima Zahra Hassan). Her title
xxx    Introduction

‘In It What Is In It’ references Rumi’s collection of discourses Fihi ma


Fihi, which translates as It Is What It Is or In It What Is In It (Marman
2000: xvii). The medium used is paper collage from leftover wrapping
paper and graphite on a found takeaway package. There is an Arabic
imprimatur at the bottom right, which reads, ‘Amal by Fatima Zahra
Hassan’ (‘Amal’ means the execution of the artwork).6 Hassan happened
to find some Costa coffee takeaway packaging in the woods on a rainy
day as she returned from a school run with her daughter. This packaging
fascinated her, as she thought it looked like a person’s brown face, and
she decided to take it home. In due course she turned to the packag-
ing to make something for her daughter, as she too loved it. Hassan is a
painter who rarely works in other media, but the found object inspired
her to create a paper collage. She cut small circles out of one of the pat-
terns from the Pepin Press book of giftwrap paper, Islamic Designs (van
Roojen 2013). Next, she stuck two small circles on the two coffee cup
holes in the takeaway carrier and drew a diagonal grid with a pencil.
To me, Hassan’s artwork looks like a mobile phone case, while incor-
porating the main features of Muslim art (calligraphy, Arabesques, and
geometrical designs). I appreciate the way it combines the contemporary
with the classic, and constructions of East with West. This cover aims to
convey this book’s information communication technology component;
the hybridity of many of the key authors’ work; the sense of taste (in the
takeaway packaging); the emphasis on people (the ‘brown face’) and reli-
gion (the Rumi allusion); and the long timespan embraced by this vol-
ume and its prequel.

Coming to Our Senses


This study breaks new ground not only in its contribution to our
understanding of Muslim-inspired writing, but also as regards liter-
ary criticism focusing on the senses, which until recently has been
scarce. Writing on prose by Walter Pater, Gustave Flaubert, and Guy de
Maupassant, Derek Stanford was an early critic to seek answers to two
questions: ‘what are the senses for, and which are their legitimate uses’?
(1968: 37). However, few scholars have gone on to pursue Stanford’s
enquiries, and certainly the question of morality which he quietly raises
through the word ‘legitimate’ has withered on the vine, to be revitalized,
I will argue, by some of these Muslim authors.
Introduction    xxxi

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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DIRECTORS.

Henry George Ward, Esq., M.P., Chairman.


John Aylwin, Esq., Dulwich.
Robert Bastow, Esq., 20, Surrey-place, Old Kent-road.
William Bastow, Esq., 20, Surrey-place, Old Kent-road.
Henry Cornfoot, Esq., Old Palace, Richmond.
Adam Duff, Esq., Morden-hill, Blackheath.
Henry Hind Edwards, Esq., Park Village East, Regent’s-park.
Edward Evans, Esq., 2, Stones’-end, Borough.
Robert Meggay, Esq., 38, Great Tower-street.
Richard Pope, Esq., 11, North Terrace, Camberwell.
John Richards, Esq., 17, New Bridge-street, Blackfriars, and
Reading.
Thomas Bush Saunders, Esq., 19, Lincoln’s-inn-fields.

Rates of premium calculated on as low a rate as is consistent with


the safety of the assured and the stability of the Company.
A septennial division of the profits, either in the way of bonuses, or
in the reduction of premiums; two-thirds to the assured, and one-
third to the proprietors.
A system of loan upon personal or other securities, provided the
party borrowing assures his life for double the amount he receives.
Policies which shall have been assigned six months as a bona fide
security not void by death from suicide, duelling, or the hands of
justice.
No entrance fee or other charge beyond the policy stamp.
All matters in dispute, where no fraud is suspected, to be referred
to arbitration.
Claims payable three months after death, or earlier on receiving a
discount.
A liberal commission to all parties bringing business.
Premiums payable yearly, half-yearly, or quarterly.
Medical referees paid by the Office in every case referred to them
for their professional opinions.
Interest at the rate of 5l. per cent. allowed on the paid-up capital.
Applications for the remaining shares, agencies, and
prospectuses, to be made to the Secretary, 112, Cheapside.
Board days, Mondays and Thursdays, at half-past One o’clock.
FREDERICK LAWRANCE, Secretary.

TO THE CLERGY.
CITY EQUITABLE CLOTHING ESTABLISHMENT, FLEET-STREET
(Three Doors from Temple-bar).
G. EVANS respectfully yet fearlessly submits the following SCALE
of CONTRACTS to the careful perusal of gentlemen who have been
accustomed to pay exorbitant prices, and to assure them that the
articles will be of the best materials and workmanship, as he intends
to continue that honest and just principle of doing business which he
has hitherto pursued, and which he is happy to find has given such
general satisfaction. His long experience in cutting has qualified him
to give a good fit, and his matured judgment enables him to select
none but the best materials.
Naval and Military Uniforms strictly to regulation, with a careful
regard to economy. Liveries unusually low, considering the superior
articles invariably supplied. Ladies’ Riding Habits, not to be
surpassed in style, quality, or price. Young Gentlemen’s Clothing at
extremely moderate prices.
A List of Prices forwarded to gentlemen who do not wish to
contract.
TABLE OF CONTRACT.

No. of Suits. Colours. Super. Best that


per suit. can be made
in every
particular.
£ s. d. £ s. d.
Two Suits Coloured 4 4 0 4 18 0
Ditto Black or Blue 4 18 0 5 10 0
Three Suits Coloured 4 2 0 4 16 0
Ditto Black or Blue 4 16 0 5 8 0
Four Suits Coloured 4 0 0 4 10 0
Ditto Black or Blue 4 12 0 5 5 0
Five Suits Coloured 4 0 0 4 8 0
Ditto Black or Blue 4 12 0 5 2 0
Six Suits Coloured 3 18 0 4 6 0
Ditto Black or Blue 4 10 0 5 0 0

OLD SUITS TO BE RETURNED.


Silk Waistcoats, 4s. extra; Frock Coats, 10s.; Velvet Waistcoats,
10s.; Velvet Collar, 4s.
A newly-invented Measuring Card (with a Drawing), and Tape
attached, giving instructions to enable any person to use it correctly,
will be forwarded where required.

OIL and LAMP PHENOMENA, and NO PUFF.—CLARK and CO., oil


refiners by chemical process, 261, Strand, and 16, Picket-street, sell
their UNEQUALLED CLARIFIED OIL, at 4s. 10d. per gallon, suitable
for every description of lamp in present use. Four gallons go as far
as five gallons of solar or other common oils, and therefore their
Clarified Oil is cheapest. Lamps burning it require no cleaning, on
account of its purity. It produces a splendid light, without smoke, if
their fire-proof smoke consuming glasses are used; but burns quite
equal to sperm with the common glasses. Oil lamps, best
workmanship and newest style, at manufacturer’s prices: for
instance, excellent table lamps, 21s., usually 38s.; Cambridge
reading or writing lamps, superior, 11s. 9d., usually 21s.; hall lamps
from 2s. 9d.; very superb drawing and dining room lamps, 45s. 9d.,
usually 84s.; beautiful brass and real bronze reading lamps, 15s. 9d.,
usually 30s. These are only specimens of prices. Chandelier designs
to be seen in great variety. Clarified oil, 4s. 10d. imperial gallon; fire-
proof chimneys, 1s. only.—CLARK and CO., 16, Pickett-street, or
261, Strand, three doors from the stone pillars, opposite St.
Clement’s Church, and not a corner shop. To prevent impositions,
observe, strictly, Clark and Co. stamped on the glasses, and sealed
on the oil corks. Books of designs of lamps (for every use) forwarded
free to any part of the kingdom.

PAINT AND PAPER CLEANED ON A NEW PRINCIPLE.—HENRY


BURRIDGE, 15, Grenville-street, Brunswick-square, original Inventor
of the new and approved method of washing Paper-hangings on the
walls of rooms by a Chemical Preparation, to look equal to new,
begs to return his most grateful thanks to the Nobility and Gentry for
the liberal patronage he has received, and trusts by strict attention to
merit a continuance of their favours.
Specimens of paper cleaning may be seen at 15, Grenville-street,
or shewn on the walls that are required to be cleaned. Gilt
Mouldings, Painted Ceilings, Stucco Walls, Wainscots, &c., cleaned
nearly equal to new, Marble Monuments, Busts, and Chimney-pieces
bleached and cleaned without incurring the expense of taking down
and refixing.
Manufacturer of Marble Papers for staircase walls, &c., in a new
and superior style.
Distempering, Whitewashing, and Colouring executed with
despatch.
Established 20 years.
House and Estate Agent.
N.B. No charge for registering.
AUSTIN & SEELEY,
NEW ROAD, LONDON,
(Corner of Cleveland Street.)

AUSTIN and SEELEY respectfully invite the attention of Builders,


Masons, and others to their extensive Collection of Ornaments,
manufactured in Artificial Stone, of their own peculiar Composition,
without either the use of Roman Cement or the application of Heat.
They are also ready to execute New Models on the lowest
remunerating terms. Their present Stock consists of—
Capitals and Fluted Columns; Trusses, Brackets, and Modillions;
the Royal Arms and Prince of Wales’s Feathers; Centre Ornaments
for Entablatures and Bas-Relievos; Balustrading and Coping, for
which, as their work is waterproof, it is well suited; Rustic and Rough
Stone Facing, and Pier Ornaments, such as Pine-Apples, &c.; Gothic
Work in great variety, including Fonts, Communion Tables, and
Screens; Tazzas and Vases, to the extent of nearly One Hundred
Models; Flower-Boxes, and Garden-Border Edging; Fountains, from
£6 and upwards; Monumental Urns; Figures—Statues from the
antique, as well as some chaste subjects of modern design, Animals,
Birds, &c.; Chimneys and Chimney-Pots, from 1 foot 10 inches to 10
feet high. (As these are so bulky, a portion of Roman Cement is
introduced for economy’s sake.)
N.B. A complete Specimen-Sheet of their Chimneys may be had by
application to A. and S.
MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION.
THE PATENT STUCCO PAINT CEMENT.—This truly valuable
preparation, the satisfactory result of a long series of experiments,
after having been subjected to the most rigid tests, is now offered
with confidence to the public, as possessing the following
extraordinary qualities, which must at once insure for it a preference
over any Cement yet manufactured.
Architects, Engineers, Contractors, Builders, Masons, Plasterers,
and the Trade are referred to the undermentioned properties of this
valuable discovery, which is secured by Patent to its Inventors and
Proprietors.
1. Its strong adhesive properties, fixing most tenaciously to the
smoothest surfaces, even to glass.
2. Its being highly repellent of water, and thoroughly impervious to
wet or damp.
3. The chemical peculiarity of its composition does not admit of the
possibility of its vegetating, and thereby becoming discoloured.
4. The safe and gradual rapidity with which it dries; hardening the
more by the greater exposure to the atmosphere.
5. Its perfect freedom from any of the caustic qualities of Lime
Stuccoes; and consequently,
6. It may be painted upon as soon as dry, a property possessed by
no other Cement whatever.
7. It is not in the slightest degree affected by frost.
8. It may be kept in the cask as delivered from the Manufactory for
any length of time without deterioration, not requiring to be used (as
other Cements are) immediately after being manufactured. To
Merchants, therefore, and Exporters, even to the remotest parts of
the globe, this Cement will form a most important item of commerce.
9. To Engineers and Conductors of Public Works, the use of this
Cement is strongly recommended in lieu of mortar, particularly in the
construction of Railway Arches and Tunnelling; its peculiarly
tenacious property forming one hardened mass with the brick or
masonry, or with whatever material it may be used; and it will be
found particularly valuable in laying and pointing roofs, whether of
slate or tile, in the most exposed situations, rendering the whole roof
fixed and immoveable.
This Cement is sold in a fluid state, fit for its mixture with the sand,
at 14s. per cwt.: the proportions being one fourth-part of the fluid to
three-fourths of sand, thereby reducing the price of this Cement
considerably below that of any other yet offered to the public.
One coat of the Cement, so prepared, is sufficient to cover at once
a Brick Front, without any preparatory coat of lime, seven pounds of
the fluid Cement being consumed in covering the square yard; but
when laid on Lime Plaster, four pounds’ weight to the square yard
will be found enough.
Messrs. Johns and Co., of Plymouth (the Patentees), are now
prepared to execute orders to any extent; and beg to intimate that
they have appointed Messrs. Mann and Co., of No. 5, Maiden-lane,
Queen-street, London, as their Sole Agents, at whose Warehouse
any quantity may be procured, specimens may be seen, and every
information obtained, and to whom all communications are to be
addressed.
London, 5, Maiden-lane, Queen-street, Cheapside, May, 1842.

JAMES GRANT, GAS FITTER, No. 1, Vine-street, Tufton-Street,


Westminster, respectfully offers his services to his friends and the
public, to lay gas apparatus, of iron or metal, with every requisite for
lighting houses or apartments, &c., upon sound principles, which
insure safety and prevent smell or other inconvenience, upon
economical terms. Drawings and estimates furnished.
TO MASONS, SCULPTORS, BUILDERS, &c.—WYATT, PARKER,
and Co. beg to inform their friends and the public, that they have just
received from Italy some fine Blocks of Statuary, Veined, Dove,
Sienna, and other Marbles. Also a large quantity of Italian sawn
slabs or tables. To be seen at Albion Wharf, Holland-street, foot of
Blackfriars-bridge, Surrey.

TO ARTISTS, &c.—Wanted, a Gentleman with a taste for


Architectural Drawing, and of competent skill as a Draughtsman and
Colourist, who, in return for the facilities given him to acquire a
knowledge of Architecture, &c., would give his services, or at a
moderate remuneration in instruction. Address H., “Builder” Office.

TO ARCHITECTS, BUILDERS, &c.—J. EVANS, Stove Grate


Manufacturer, 33, King William-street, London-bridge, respectfully
submits the following reduced prices for wholesale orders:—Best
elliptic stoves, 4½d. per inch; register stoves, 10d. per inch; Evans’s
improved patent self-acting kitchen ranges, with ovens and back
boilers, three feet, 4l. 14s. 6d.; three feet four inches, 5l. 15s. 6d.;
three feet eight inches, 6l. 6s.; four feet, 6l. 16s. 6d. Larger sizes,
with steam apparatus complete, from 20l. to 100l. and upwards. The
largest stock of ornamental drawing-room stoves, fenders, &c., in the
kingdom.

TO ARCHITECTS, BUILDERS, AND OTHERS.


The advantages of JAMES FINDON’S Patent improvement to Water-
Closets are the great facility of acting, cleanliness, a durability, a
readiness of being connected to a pipe from a head of water, which
pipe may be used for any other purpose; the whole of the apparatus
being under the seat. Testimonials to be seen at the manufactory,
190½, High Holborn.
N.B. Iron Hopper Closet Basin glazed and trap complete, 1l. 5s.;
Long Iron Hopper Closet Basin glazed and trap complete, 1l. 7s.
TO ARCHITECTS, BUILDERS, DECORATORS, &c.—A Gentleman
who has had considerable experience as a draughtsman and
designer in the Elizabethan style, as applicable to building,
decoration, and furniture, would be glad to meet with an engagement
where he would also make himself generally useful. Apply by letter,
prepaid, to A.B., “Builder” Office.
MUSIC.
EIGHT-KEYED COCOA FLUTES, with MOSAIC GOLD or GERMAN
SILVER double spring-actioned keys, made on the principle of the
two most eminent Professors, NICHOLSON and RUDAL, price 2l.
15s. with Case, &c., complete.

FLOWERS OF MELODY; or the BEAUTIES of the OPERA and


CONCERT ROOM. Under this title are published, Songs, Airs,
Quadrilles, Waltzes, &c., arranged for the Flute or Violin; the
following are now ready, and may be had by order of any Book or
Music-seller, price Sixpence each:—Songs and Airs from the works
of Albert, Prince of Saxe Coburg Gotha—Beauties of Strauss, Book
I.—Lanner’s Waltzes, Book I.—Airs in the Tempest and Macbeth—
Songs and Airs in the Beggar’s Opera—Songs and Airs in Shiel’s
Opera of The Woodman.—John Limbird’s Music Warehouse, 143,
Strand.

MAINZER’S MUSICAL TIMES, and SINGING CIRCULAR, a


Fortnightly Journal, published the 1st and 15th of every month.
Price 2d.—Stamped Edition for the Country, 3d.

Annual Subscription 4s. 6d.


Six Months’ ditto 2 3
Stamped Edition 6s. 6d.
Ditto ditto 3 3

The “Musical Times” contains original Articles on the Art, in all its
branches, with Criticisms of important Works bearing upon it;
together with notices of the chief Musical Performances in London
and the Provinces. It especially advocates Popular Musical
Education. The rapidly increasing circulation of this Paper, in all parts
of the Kingdom, renders it an important advertising medium. A
composition of one of the celebrated old or modern masters is
presented Monthly to Subscribers (in advance) of Six Months. These
Compositions will consist of Organ Pieces, Madrigals, Glees, Songs,
&c.
Guaranteed Circulation 5,000 Copies.
Scale of Charges for Advertisements:—

Eight Lines and under 5s. 0d.


Every additional Line 0s. 6d.

For a series of insertions, a considerable reduction is made.


Office, 340, Strand; and may be ordered through all News Agents
and Booksellers.
The following Musical Compositions have already been presented to
the Subscribers.
With No. 2.—A Selection of Psalms and Hymns, arranged for one or
two treble voices and additional bass voice. By the Chevalier
Sigismund Neukomm. Part I.
With No. 4.—The Evening Song, for two voices; written for the family
circle. By C. H. Rinck.
With No. 6.—Psalms and Hymns. By the Chevalier Sigismund
Neukomm. Part II.
With No. 8.—Duet. By Alesandro Stradella; with Accompaniment by
G. Hogarth.
With No. 10.—Madrigal. “Turn Amarillis.” By Brewer, 1667.
With the Number for Jan. 1, 1813, will be presented a perfect Fac
Simile of the Original Manuscript of a celebrated Composition of
Mozart.
COMPOSITION AND MUSICAL WORKS,
BY JOSEPH MAINZER.
SINGING FOR THE MILLION, Eighth Edition: A Practical Course of
Musical Instruction, adapted, from its pleasing simplicity and rapid
effect, to render Musical Reading and Singing familiar to all ages,
capacities, and conditions. Stitched, 1s. 6d.; in cloth, 2s.
SINGING FOR THE MILLION, Second Part; containing numerous
Exercises in Imitations, Figures, and Canons of Jaunaconi, Fuchs,
Albrechtsberger, Hiller, Kittel; Gebhardi, Rinck, and Mainzer,
stitched, 2s. 6d.
MAINZER’S CHORUSES.—2d. each.
PART I.

1 Praise.
2 Psalm CVII.
3 The Cuckoo.
4 The Village Chimes.
5 Independence.
6 The Traveller.
7 God is everywhere.
8 Temperance.

PART II.

9 Invitation to a Redbreast.
10 Call to Prayer.
11 Stanzas to my Child.
12 Infant’s Prayer.
13 Blowing Bubbles.
14 Super Flumina Babylonis.
15 Prayer.
16 Shepherd Boy.

PART III.

17 The Sea.
18 Contentment.
19 Fraternity.
20 Night Song.
21 Consolation.
22 Hymn.
23 The World we have not seen.
24 Psalm XV.

Part IV. now issuing.

Britain’s Hymn, 2 editions, 3d. and 1s. 6d.


Departure, 3d.
Song of Night, 3d.

GUIDE FOR BEGINNERS IN PIANOFORTE PLAYING, with


English and French words. 5s.
This work is entirely different from those of a similar kind, which
have chiefly in view the great agility of fingers, the elegance of
performance, and the difficulty of execution; while, on the contrary,
the greatest pains have been taken in this work to make it as simple
as possible for the understanding even of children, or all those who
are unacquainted with the Pianoforte.
The following Compositions are to be published successively:—
MUSICAL GRAMMAR. Theory of Chords, of Counterpoint, of
Imitation, Fugue, and Canons. In sheets, 3d. each.
THE ART OF SINGING, or Guide for the higher practical part of
Execution.
A COLLECTION OF AIRS, DUETS, and CHORUSES of the
Opera “La Jacquerie” (Poor Conrad), with English, French, and
German words.
THE ASCENSION OF CHRIST, an Oratorio.
London: Published at the Repository for Mainzer’s Publications, 340,
Strand.
PUBLICATIONS.
On Saturday, the 7th of January, 1843, will be published, the First Number of a
New Weekly Periodical, price 4d. or stamped, 5d. to be entitled the
ILLUSTRATED POLYTECHNIC REVIEW. This Journal will be devoted to
Science, the Fine Arts, and Literature. Each Number will contain an Essay or
Essays on some branch of Science or the Fine Arts, together with other highly-
interesting matter. The Review will be printed on a fine Paper, with a new Type,
and will comprise 48 closely-printed columns, 4to. The whole to be illustrated
with numerous fine Engravings, by the first Artists.
Letters, Essays, Works for Review &c. to be addressed to the Editor, 143,
Strand, London, where Advertisements will be received.

Will be published on 1st January, 1843,


LAXTON’S BUILDERS’ PRICE-BOOK for 1843, containing upwards of Ten
Thousand Prices and Memoranda connected with Building. The whole has been
carefully revised and corrected agreeably to the recent alteration of the price of
materials in consequence of the New Tariff. A great variety of additional prices
have been given not before published, together with some useful Tables.
Seventeenth Edition. Published in a convenient size suitable for the Pocket.
Price 4s. bound in cloth, or in the form of a pocket-book, price 5s.
To be had of the Author at his Office, 10, Fludyer-street, Whitehall; John
Weale, Architectural Library, 59, High Holborn; Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., and
R. Groombridge, Paternoster-row; Hebert, 88, Cheapside; and Miller & Field, 6,
Westminster-bridge-road.

NEW WORKS
NOW PUBLISHING BY
H. G. CLARKE & CO. 66, OLD BAILEY, LONDON,
Agent for Ireland, S. J. Machen, 8, D’Olier-street, Dublin,
AND SOLD BY ALL BOOKSELLERS.
THE ENGLISH WIFE; A Manual of Home Duties, designed as a Sequel to the
English Maiden. 12mo. cloth, lettered. Price 4s. 6d. Silk, 6s. Morocco, 8s.
Contents.—Bridal Hopes and Joys. Family Arrangements. Domestic and
Social Duties. State of Mind necessary to the due Discharge of Domestic

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