Majed, Hasan (2012) Islam and Muslim Identities in Four Contemporary British Novels

Majed, Hasan (2012) Islam and Muslim Identities in Four Contemporary British Novels. Doctoral thesis, University of Sunderland. Downloaded from: http://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/id/eprint/3739/ Usage guidelines Please refer to the usage guidelines at http://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact [email protected]. Islam and Muslim Identities in Four Contemporary British Novels A thesis submitted to the University of Sunderland for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Education and Society Hasan Majed June 2012 CONTENTS Abstract 1 Introduction: Islam and Postcolonialism 3 Chapter One: Islam and Muslim Identities in Kureishi’s The Black Album 74 Chapter Two: Islam and Muslim Identities in Ali’s Brick Lane 110 Chapter Three: Islam and Muslim Identities in Faqir’s My Name is Salma 142 Chapter Four: Islam and Muslim Identities in Aboulela’s Minaret 196 Conclusion 226 Bibliography 237 Abstract Islam and Muslim Identities in Four Contemporary British Novels The aim of the dissertation is to explore how Islam is depicted and Muslim identities are constructed in four representative works of contemporary British fiction: Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma, and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is also discussed in terms of its crucial role in fostering what some Muslims might consider polemical and stereotypical positions in writing about Islam. The term ‘Islamic postcolonialism’ provides the theoretical underpinning to the thesis. Islamic postcolonialism is a theoretical perspective that combines two components which have up until now existed in a state of tension. As a secular theory, postcolonialism has notably failed to account for Muslim priorities; it has, for instance, had severe problems critiquing the anti-Islam polemics of The Satanic Verses, as is evidenced by Edward Said’s support for Rushdie, in spite of his criticism of the stereotypical representation of Islam and Muslims in the West. Islamic postcolonialism applies the anti-colonial resistant methodology of postcolonialism from a Muslim perspective, exploring the continuance of colonial discourse in part of the contemporary western writing about Islam and Muslims. Applying Islamic postcolonialism to the novels in question, the thesis tests the following questions: 1. How are Islam and Muslims depicted in the novels discussed? 2. Is the depiction of Islam similar to, and if so in what ways, its depiction in the literature of the colonial period? 3. Is there a connection between the writer’s personal 1 religious commitment and the image of Islam and Muslims he/she inscribes in the novel? The four novels are then classified according to three categories: Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane depict Islam and Muslims stereotypically, from a partially colonial perspective. Secondly, Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma adopts a mixed colonial and postcolonial depiction of Islam and Muslims. While it depicts the centrality of Islam in a Muslim society (Hima, Jordan) stereotypically, the novel appears more sympathetic in imaging Islam in England under the conditions of the personal and the marginal. Thirdly, Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret is the one text that complies with an Islamic postcolonial perspective. The failure of secularism and re-emergence of Islam in the Arab world is, Waïl Hassan contends, the background to the achievement of Aboulela’s fiction. Her image of Islam and Muslims is unique in British fiction as it provides a new depiction of these categories from the standpoint of a more authentic Muslim voice. Minaret, it is argued, is an Islamic postcolonial novel both because it celebrates Islam, and because Najwa adopts Islam as her first identity in metropolitan London, which once represented the colonial centre from which her native Sudan was colonised. 2 Introduction: Islam and Postcolonialism It could be argued that Islam is among the first to benefit from postcolonial theory. The writings of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, which provide the solid foundation of postcolonialism, contain many of the themes and ideas that Islam calls for. Fanon’s work is highly critical of racism and colonialism and calls for equality and freedom; he writes against colonialism, paying more attention to its psychological aspects. Edward Said, on the other hand, writes about Islam with specific focus on the cultural facets of colonialism. Fanon’s psychologically and Said’s culturally oriented writings aim at freeing the colonised people from the inside so as to enable them to feel and think independently. This “inside independence” is fully supported by Islam: the religion that has refused to be colonised by western Christianity in the past and by western secularism today. In the colonial period, Fanon writes: “the struggle for national liberty [in the Arab World] has been accompanied by a cultural phenomenon known by the name of awakening Islam” (Fanon, 1997, pp. 95-96). Hand in hand, Islam and the national struggle were fighting against colonialism.1 1 Islam plays an important role in the anti-colonial national struggle in many Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979. In some Muslim countries, the Islamists still struggle against colonial domination. In Algeria, for example, “the Islamists say that it is to free Algeria from the legacy of colonial domination, which they view as ongoing through the influence of [a] political and military elite that even now remains bound to French business and political interests” (Huband, 1999, p. 47). In the present day, the well-known Islamic organizations Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon are clear examples of Islam’s influence on anti-colonial national movements. Fred Halliday, however, thought that historically Islam did not play a crucial role in the anti-colonial movements in the Muslim world. He reveals: “throughout the long history of colonial wars that the British fought, from the eighteenth century onwards the enemies were nearly always not Muslims ... rarely in this history of empire did the British face an insurrection from within an area under their control that was wholly or mainly composed of Muslims” (Halliday, 2010, p. xv). 3 However, this relationship between Islam and postcolonialism2 was challenged after the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. It seems that the Rushdie affair sparked the debate over this relationship for different reasons. The Satanic Verses, first of all, which is for many Muslims an unacceptable attack on Islam, is the work of an identified postcolonial writer.3 Secondly, Edward Said, along with other postcolonial critics, supported Rushdie’s novel and criticised Muslims’ reaction against it. Writers like Said and Rushdie, before the publication of The Satanic Verses, were, in a sense, Islam and Muslims’ defenders in the West; afterwards, they defended a discourse that attacked Islam. Disappointed by the new position of the postcolonial writers, certain Muslim writers, like Anouar Majid, attempted to delimit the scope of postcolonial theory and the reasons behind its support for Rushdie’s book. Amin Malak, Anouar Majid and Waïl Hassan have written about the complicated contemporary relationship between Islam and postcolonialism. Malak refers to the “oddness” of the relationship. And while Majid seems to prefer the Islamic alternatives to the postcolonial ones, Hassan calls for the theorising of the 2 Islam is the main or a major component of the Muslim world’s native cultures that postcolonialism intends to secure. Therefore, challenging the misrepresentation of Islam in colonial discourse is a national and postcolonial action. When the Iranians, for example, struggle against the western and colonial cultural, political or economic domination in their country, they practise postcolonialism to save their Islam-coloured native culture. Postcolonialism in such countries is expected to stand with Islam due to its crucial position in native society. Like Muslims in the Muslim world, many Muslims in the West consider Islam as their first identity and/or an important part of their native cultures and postcolonialism, for them, is expected to challenge the colonial discourse that might still exist in the West currently. 3 Edward Said, for example, describes Rushdie’s writings as postcolonial when writing: “to read Rushdie is really to read something completely new [and] post-colonial” (Said, 2001c, p. 416). Feroza Jussawalla, however, posits a broader meaning to Rushdie’s postcoloniality. She thinks that linking Rushdie’s postcolonial identity with the post-British colonialism is “eurocentric and does not provide complete answers to Rushdie’s complex works or the complicated response to his work. For the very hybridity that Rushdie manifests results from his being not only a ‘post-British’ colonial but also a ‘post-Mughal’ colonial” (Jussawalla, 1996, p. 51). 4 postcolonial limitations and horizons. Amin Malak, in his book Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English, writes, “it is odd that ‘postcolonial theory’ cannot offer insights about the activism of Islam, despite the fact that one of its seminal texts, Edward Said’s Orientalism … is prompted and permeated by a challenge to the colonial representations of Islam as biased constructions whose corrosive corollaries are discernible today in multiple insidious fashions across diverse domains of power” (Malak, 2005, p. 17). In fact, Malak thinks that postcolonialism fails to take religion into account due to its secular stance. He believes that postcolonialism involves a “marginalization of religion as a force or factor with its own complex dynamics [which] reflects privileging a secular, Europe-American stance that seems to shape the parameters of postcolonial discourses” (p. 17). The limitations of postcolonialism in relation to Islam are discussed by Anouar Majid in his article “Can the Postcolonial Critic Speak? Orientalism and the Rushdie Affair”. From the beginning, it seems that the postcolonial support given to Rushdie’s novel is the motivation behind his article.

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