Islamophobia and Pakistan

Dr Tariq Rahman
Literati
March 1, 2020
The first coherent account of the response to 9/11 portraying Pakistan, its literature and its art
forms

T he book under review is a collection of ten chapters excluding the introduction, the conclusion and the
foreword by one of Pakistan’s foremost liberal-humanist intellectuals and peace activists, Professor
Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy. The editor, Dr Nukbah Taj Langah, made her mark in the academic world
through her doctoral dissertation, later a published book, entitled Poetry as Resistance: Islam and Ethnicity
in Postcolonial Pakistan (2011). The contributors are also distinguished writers in their own right which
makes the book a milestone in the literary responses to a world-shaking event like 9/11.
Pervez Hoodbhoy gets to the gist of the matter when he says that ‘there’s the wider issue of Islam’s
attitude towards modernity, important because cultural resistance widens differences and thus feeds into
terrorism’ (p. xix). He rightly points out that, literal readings of texts notwithstanding, there may be other
ways of thinking and moving on permitting diversity and tolerance. It is in this spirit of moving on that
Nukbah has collected these articles in her timely book. The aim of the contributors, as she points out, is ‘to
present a multilayered analysis of responses towards 9/ 11’ (p. 1). This involves filling existing gaps in
what has been produced earlier on this subject – and a lot has; not only in the West but also in the rest of
the world – but also questioning definitions (terrorism, Muslim identity, Pakistani identity etc). This is a
very complex exercise from all points of view and no answer will satisfy everybody.
The debate on cultural relativism and ethnocentrism (Kamal-ud-Din) and orientalism (Charles Ramsay) is
not new but it is argued with a new-found passion and sometimes with new arguments. The former
points out that cultures are dynamic while clash theories essentialise them as monolithic and unchanging
entities. The latter moves beyond the Saidian implications of Orientalist and goes on to suggest that the
tradition of studying Islam or the Middle East, as an academic discipline, is also a dynamic discipline and
maybe anti-colonial in opposition to what it was in the nineteenth century.
After these critical debates, we come to 9/ 11 itself and its relationship with literature, art and other
aspects of life. Mobeena Shafqat, for instance, examines the critiques of policies which were adopted by
the United States in the wake of 9/11 as reflected in English literature. In this HM Naqvi’s Homeboy has
pride of place because it is a case of the US authorities condemning an innocent man. In the same way, in
Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist the protagonist, Changez, is made to conform to the
stereotype of a terrorist. The same issues are taken up by Debamitra Kar in her examination of John
Updike’s novel Terrorist (2007).
The point she makes is that Islamophobia, akin to anti-semitism and other forms of racism, now attracts a
wide audience because of ‘immense technological progress and global connections between nation-states’
(p. 76). One notable point is that Bin Laden’s edict against Christians, the Americans specifically, is also an
example of the xenophobia and racism in question. However, the author then makes a point which will be
contentious i.e ‘the conflict we see is, therefore, a fake one; it is a mere hegemonic device to consolidate
the control of the centre over the periphery’ (p. 76). The author means as the next few lines make clear,
that such conflicts are for power. This, of course, is true but they are in so sense ‘fake’. Nor, is it meant to
consolidate the power of the centre over the periphery. For this to be true, the centre would be controlling
such apparent challenges to itself. It is a very real challenge to the centre but through unconventional,
guerrilla tactics and the centre is not controlling it.
The chapter on Hunza, ostensibly on developments there, is actually about statelessness. The people of
Hunza feel disconnected from Pakistanis because, for legal and other reasons, that is how they have been
made to feel.

In this context, Nukbah’s own chapter: Islamization and Post-9/11 Islamophobia, takes the argument
further and focuses on Pakistani literature in English in detail. She traces out the roots of Islamisation in
Pakistan from the time of General Zia ul Haq (1977-88). Her argument helps us understand how
‘Islamization policies not only imposed the label of religious fervour on their Pakistani-Muslim identity
but also made their lives hell when they tried to survive in the West as a diasporic community’ (p. 91).
This is in a sense, an important part of the Pakistani identity as it is expressed nowadays. It is confused,
torn between liberal-humanist values and traditional cultural moorings. Moreover, it is also responsive to
the anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistani prejudice which is prevalent in Western societies nowadays. So, a
liberal Pakistani young person ends up attacking the very values which he or she may be passionately
defending within the country.
One positive aspect of this book is that it has chapters on art forms: Waqar Azeem’s on drones and truck
art and Halimah Mohamed Ali’s on cinematic responses. These are important responses and ones which
reach a wide range of viewers. Two chapters which do not apparently connect with the dominant themes
mentioned so far are Madeline Clement’s Christian community and the development of Hunza.
The first is important to remind Pakistanis that, while they complain of being discriminated against in the
West, their treatment of Christians has terrorised the community. The misuse of the blasphemy law is
such that Christians, Hindus, Ahmadis and other religious minorities can never feel safe. The author has
used literary and other sources to present the plight of the Christian community which, without explicitly
saying so, is an indictment of the Muslim community for its lack of empathy and understanding towards
minorities.
The chapter on Hunza, ostensibly on developments there, is actually about statelessness. The people of
Hunza feel disconnected from Pakistanis because, for legal and other reasons, that is how they have been
made to feel. In a sense then, the perceived alienation of the Muslim diaspora in the wake of 9/11 from
their host communities in the West, has resonance here.
Mashal Saif’s article on Pakistan’s traditional Islamic scholars and the West touches upon a debate which
has been raging in Pakistan for a long time. The point is whether the state can arrogate to itself the right to
change the curricula of the religious seminaries on the assumption that those who study it will be prone
to Islamist radicalism. In principle, the state should have no such right. After all religious seminaries of
Christians, Jews, Hindus and Sikhs function as seminaries without teaching other subjects in any detail. It
is also true that people who become Islamists and indulge in militancy are not necessarily from
seminaries. Indeed, most of them tend to be students of technical and science subjects, especially
engineering. However, it is also true that the very nature of the curricula in seminaries does predispose
the learner to look at the world through religious spectacles. This may lead to piety and self-restraint but
it may also result in exclusivism, lack of sympathy for the ‘other’ and a tendency to sit on judgement of
other ways of living.
This is a very useful book but there is a glaring fact about it – and other writings from the non-Western
world – which I must point out. It is that, while placing due and needed emphasis on the faults of the
‘West’, there is a tendency to gloss over the reality of anti-Western sentiment among Muslim and non-
Western societies. Moreover, radical Islamists have a worldview based on their own interpretations of the
texts of Islam. These have not been touched upon though they have been written about at length by
academics since even before 9/11.
This book was the ideal place to refer to them since they provide rationales for violence which, as we have
seen, are used by the challengers of the West like Bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri etc. Barring these minor points,
and they are more omissions than mistakes, this is an excellent book. Indeed, it is the first coherent
account of the responses to 9/11 which takes into account Pakistan, its literature and its art forms. I
recommend the book to all those who are interested in world politics, Pakistani and world literature and
the general reader.
Literary and Non-Literary Responses towards 9/ 11
South Asia and Beyond
Author: Nukbah Taj Langah (ed.)
Publisher: Oxford: Routledge. South Asian Edition India, 2019
Pages: 194
Price: N/M

Column: ‘Islamophobia’: Orwellian newspeak or racially-inflected

hatred?
Claire ChambersUpdated 21 Jul 2013

Claire Chambers teaches Global Literature at the University of York and is the author of British Muslim Fictions: Interviews
with Contemporary Writers

Casting around for subjects to write on for this Books&Authors column, a Pakistani writer friend based in London suggested
that I discuss an issue he often hears me ranting about: the institutionalisation of Islamophobia, and how this is explored and
challenged in literary texts.

As my friend knows, Islamophobia has become an urgent topic for me, especially since reading Salman Rushdie’s Joseph
Anton. This memoir is perhaps best summarised by Matthew Hart: “much like his career to date, the book is great until about
halfway through.” However much one might wish to contest some of Rushdie’s assertions, there is no denying the literary and
emotional power of the early sections describing the fatwa years. Yet, as Joseph Anton progresses it becomes increasingly
pompous, celebrity-obsessed, and misogynist.

More interesting from my perspective, though, is the way in which Rushdie denies the existence of anti-Muslim hatred. He
writes, “A new word had been created to help the blind remain blind: Islamophobia,” and shortly afterwards he co-opts George
Orwell’s 1984 to relegate the term to “the vocabulary of Humpty Dumpty Newspeak.” (It’s revealing that Rushdie should cite
newspeak’s creators’ name for their torture chamber, The Ministry of Love, in support of his argument, but not Muslims’
experiences of the doublespeak of ‘extraordinary rendition,’ ‘shock and awe,’ and ‘detention’.)
But what is Islamophobia? Is it a species of loathing akin to homophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism? Or is religion,
as Rushdie argues, just an “idea” which should be robust enough to “withstand criticism”?

“Islamophobia” is a new, imperfect idiom still finding its place in mainstream discourse. First coined as the French
“Islamophobe” in the early 20th century, it didn’t make its way into English until 1985 when Rushdie’s friend, the distinguished
Palestinian Christian writer Edward Said, presciently pointed out “the connection between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.”

Chris Allen describes the “first decade of Islamophobia” as truly beginning in the ’90s. In 1997 Britain’s Runnymede Trust
published its foundational report, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, which led to the term entering public policy for the
first time, and which sought to explain the word’s meaning by tabulating eight “closed” and “open” views of Islam.

For my money, though, the best definition comes from Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, who describe Islamophobia as “anti-
Muslim sentiment which simultaneously draws upon signs of race, culture and belonging in a way that is by no means reducible
to hostility towards a religion alone.” Whereas Rushdie seeks to make a distinction between attacking ideas and attacking
people, Meer and Modood dismantle this common argument that religion, unlike skin colour, gender, and sexuality, consists of
private beliefs that one chooses and can equally abandon, suggesting that both religious and secularist beliefs actually tend to be
rather fixed, context-specific, and inherited. It is not just ‘ideas’ that anti-Islam zealots are attacking, but people — and in the
West these people often belong to vulnerable and impoverished minorities.

Having defined Islamophobia, it next behoves us to ask: does this racially- and culturally-constructed anti-Muslim feeling
actually exist?

Two internet storms from the last month indicate that Islamophobia is real and aggressive. Writing in The New York
Times about Mohamed Morsi’s fall, David Brooks suggested that undifferentiated Islamists are embroiled in a “culture of
death,” concluding, in high Orientalist style, “It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to
lack even the basic mental ingredients.” On Twitter, American author Joyce Carol Oates mused “Where 99.3% of women report
having been sexually harassed & rape is epidemic — Egypt — natural to inquire: what’s the predominant religion?.” Oates later
half-apologised for the comment, but first the Moroccan-American novelist Laila Lalami riposted, “Sexual assaults and rape are
epidemic in the US military. What is the predominant religion there?.” No wonder researchers Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley
describe Islamophobia and related subjects as a “toxic gift that keeps on giving.”

In the UK there has been a spike in the number of hate attacks against Muslims since the horrific murder of Lee Rigby in
Woolwich this May. Yet, when a small group of EDL supporters recently protested in Rigby’s name outside a York Mosque, in
my picturesque (and quite monocultural) city of work, the mosque members welcomed the bigots with tea and biscuits,
provisions with quintessentially British (and Pakistani) cultural resonances.

This incident, which The Guardian called an attempt to “open a dialogue,” demonstrates that many Muslims, far from
cultivating a ‘victim mentality’ — a charge often levelled at them by the anti-Islamophobia brigade — in fact deploy reason,
humour, and toleration to combat hatred.

How does anti-Muslim sentiment make its way into writing by authors from Muslim Pakistani backgrounds? One of the earliest
and most consistent writers to explore the issue is Aamer Hussein, whose short story about the First Gulf War, “Your Children,”
was published soon after the 1990 invasion. Along with another story, “The Book of Maryam,” which recalls the tense London
atmosphere just before the Second Gulf War, it evokes the ethical and political concerns raised for Muslims by US-led raids. As
a character in “Your Children” remarks, the Gulf War “isn’t a Muslim war.”

Daniyal Mueenuddin and Kamila Shamsie almost casually mention Islamophobia experienced in post-9/11 America.
Mueenuddin’s elite Pakistani émigrés in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders are described as daily apologising for the crime of
9/11, despite their great distance from Al Qaeda’s politics. In Shamsie’s Broken Verses, a character accounts for his return from
New York to Karachi with a familiar litany: “the INS. Guantanamo Bay. The unrandom random security checks.” In Burnt
Shadows, another character says:

“Everyone just wants to tell you what they know about Islam, how they know so much more than you do, what do you know,
you’ve just been a Muslim your whole life?.”

In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid explores Islamophobia through the Pakistani character Changez, who is aware
of countrymen being beaten and arrested in post-9/11 New York, and is himself ostracised for adopting the potent visual symbol
of a beard, eventually compelling him too to return to Pakistan. H.M. Naqvi’s novel Home Boy similarly recounts the story of
well-integrated Pakistani-Americans, Shehzad (“Chuck”) and his two friends, who are arrested on terrorism charges in the
fearful and frightful post-9/11 climate. Twenty-first-century Islamophobia in Britain is scrutinised in Hanif
Kureishi’s Something to Tell You. The novel shows religion moving to centre-stage in London just after 7/7 when Ajita, a
previously secular character, tries to reorient herself by sporting a burqa. More convincing are Kureishi’s depiction of London
as “one of the great Muslim cities” and his exploration of a Britain where Muslims’ “fortunes and fears rose and fell according
to the daily news,” and “Mussie” and “ham-head” are new insults.

This fascinating body of writing suggests that the pen is among the best weapons minority Muslims have with which to fight
racially-inflected religious hatred. Like Scheherazade telling stories to stave off violence, these Pakistani writers dispute
common stereotypes of Muslims and distract from the dominant narrative with wit, passion, and empathy. Their voices add
gradation to the ‘not-for-prophet’ New Atheist movement’s hollering. Rushdie might do well to study some of these novels, so
that he can learn what Islamophobia is from those qualified to define it from experience as well as theory.

Pakistani English novel's ceaseless quest for identity

Sauleha Kamal

Updated 25 Apr, 2018 02:59pm

Illustration by Soonhal Khan

T here is a scene early in Bapsi Sidhwa’s harrowing Partition novel, Ice-Candy Man (recently renamed Cracking India),

where a character narrates the story of the arrival of his Zoroastrian ancestors in India after they were “kicked out of Persia”.

They were, according to the narrator, initially turned away by an Indian prince who told them there was no room for outsiders

in India. He sent them a glass full of milk to illustrate his point. In response, Zoroastrians mixed a teaspoon of sugar into the

milk, successfully demonstrating that “the refugees would get absorbed into his country ... and with their decency and

industry sweeten the lives of his subjects”. This “smart and civilised” move impressed the Indian prince and he gave

Zoroastrians permission to live in India.

It is interesting that this story of a minority community’s experience with immigration and assimilation is recounted in one of

the first truly Pakistani novels. Pakistan, indeed, emerged as an independent state primarily as a safe haven for the Muslim

minority of India. Since the country’s inception in 1947, however, it has not only been faced with the task of defining its distinct

postcolonial identity that is different from a postcolonial Indian identity, it also has had to separate its new identity from its

Indian past. Sugar has to be taken out of milk in order for it to become distinctly visible.

Pakistan’s emergence as a new state, thus, severed Pakistani English fiction from its Indian antecedents. Born at a moment of

intense trauma, caused by Partition, and amid a heightened sense of nationalism subsequently, Pakistani English fiction began

its life with no lineage — or so it seems. It is, therefore, important to note that the anglophone Pakistani novel – defined here as

any novel written by writers who self-identified as Pakistani at the time of writing – is not simply an extension of the Indian

novel, even though the two are closely related.

Scholars such as Claire Chambers (writing in her 2015 book, Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism,

Religion, Representations, and her 2017 book, Rivers of Ink), Muneeza Shamsie (in her 2017 book, Hybrid Tapestries: The

Development of Pakistani Literature in English, and her 1997 collection, A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani

Writing in English) and Tariq Rahman (in his 1991 book, A History of Pakistani Literature in English 1947-1988) have traced

Pakistani novels back to Indian novels written by Muslim authors, most notably Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi.
Attendees at the ninth annual Karachi Literature Festival browse through books | Tahir Jamal, White Star

Ali was born in Delhi in 1910 and his work first featured in Angarey, a 1932 avant-garde Urdu volume that carried short stories

by leading progressive writers of the time. He later migrated to Pakistan and became a diplomat. Published in 1940, his novel

offers a nostalgic portrait of Indian Muslims in Old Delhi and their decline following their encounter with British colonisers. It,

however, can hardly be termed as the progenitor of Pakistani fiction writing in English.

Where Ali wrote Twilight in Delhi as an Indian Muslim, the first generation of Pakistani writers wrote with the awareness that

they were no longer Indian and sought to emphasise their new national identity. For a time, therefore, the anglophone Pakistani
novel continued to focus on how the identity of the new country and its citizens was taking shape. Zulfikar Ghose’s 1967

work, The Murder of Aziz Khan, attempts to map this cultural transition as Pakistan grew into its adolescence. To do so, the

writer employs a dark tale of the unscrupulous Shah brothers plotting to exploit the older, eponymous Aziz Khan — a stand in

for traditional values.

Attempts to attach a history to the Pakistani novel based solely on a tenuous religious link, and the temptation to define the

Pakistani novel as an Indian-Muslim novel, therefore, must be resisted. It is more rewarding, instead, to examine the unique

historical forces that led to the creation of Pakistan and, thus, shaped the concerns of its English literature.

T hemes of cultural hybridity and assimilation are expected in postcolonial novels but what is specifically worth examining

with reference to Pakistani fiction in English is the anxiety around the identity of the Pakistani state. Should this identity be

predicated on a history of Islam and Muslims in the Subcontinent simply because religion predominantly figured in the

movement to create Pakistan?

Ayesha Jalal (writing in a chapter titled ‘The Past as Present’ in Pakistan: Beyond the ‘Crisis State’, published in 2011)

identifies the struggle for Pakistan as the one to “define an identity that is both national and Islamic”. This particular problem of

negotiating between the national and the religious was inevitable for a nation state whose creation was justified on the basis of

religious differences. The Two-Nation Theory that formed the basis of the All-India Muslim League’s movement for Pakistan

defined nation on the basis of religion but, initially, only used this definition as a bargaining chip. That Partition’s violence was

carried out along religious lines no doubt cemented the connection between Pakistani and Muslim nationalism.

Post-Partition, this meant a conflation of Muslim and Pakistani identities. The muhajir (Muslim migrants to Pakistan from

India), thus, based their sense of belonging to the new country on religion and embarked upon a quest to dissolve themselves

into the national framework like the sugar in milk in Sidhwa’s story. Cara Cilano of Michigan State University (in her 2013

book, Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English: Idea, Nation, State) refers to this process as “representations of unity through

a shared Muslim identity carried over from Muslim to Pakistani nationalism”. The question remains, however, whether equating

the Pakistani nation with the Muslim nation fully encompasses the Pakistani identity. If so, why does the Pakistani novel

continue to fixate on identity?

Interestingly, the originators of Muslim nationalism in India belonged to the class of English-educated ‘mimic men’ whom the

colonial state once imagined as its gatekeepers. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, a British loyalist who called the First War of

Independence in 1857 a mutiny, encouraged Muslims to study English, seeing it as a tool necessary for their advancement
within British-ruled India. He also spoke in the late 19th century about Hindus and Muslims being “two nations” after the

Indian National Congress failed to address Muslim concerns. Later, another highly educated man, the poet Allama Iqbal, would

take up the cause of Muslim nationalism and crystallise the idea of a separate nation for Indian Muslims in a 1930 speech.

The consequent movement for Pakistan was one that simultaneously opposed British rule and emerged out of colonialism. Such

a history would inevitably raise questions about identity. The same applies to the anglophone novel written in South Asia.

Priyamvada Gopal of the University of Cambridge notes that the emergence of the Subcontinent’s anglophone novel out of

colonialism has meant that it has “returned repeatedly to a self-reflexive question: What is India(n)?” The anglophone Pakistani

novel, in turn, has fixated on the question: ‘What is Pakistan(i)?’. This latter question, however, is more complicated than its

predecessor for it bears not only the burden of a foreign language but also a confusion over religious nationalism and an anxiety

about a severed past that involves “‘othering’ the national self from the rival neighbor India” — as Amina Yaqin of SOAS,

University of London has described it in the book Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South

Asia.
Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Ice-Candy Man | Azhar Jafri, White Star

M uneeza Shamsie has written about what she calls “Duality and Diversity in Pakistani English Literature” in the Journal

of Postcolonial Writing in 2011. “Pakistani English literature shares with other South Asian English literatures a regional

dynamic as well as a long colonial history, but the Pakistani imagination is also linked to the wider Islamic world.” The Islamic

connection, thus, only partially encompasses the idea of Pakistan.

To understand this, it is important to examine the minority rights discourse that preceded the creation of Pakistan. Leaders of the

All-India Muslim League did not take an exclusivist approach to the protection of minorities. This explains why, after Pakistan

was created, Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared, “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your

mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has

nothing to do with the business of the State.”

A little less than a decade from the moment Jinnah made this famous declaration, the 1956 constitution renamed Pakistan as an

“Islamic Republic”, bringing religion right back into the business of the state. This confusion over the separation of religion and

the state certainly complicates the possibility of equating Muslim nationalism with Pakistani nationalism as has been argued by

some theorists.

Pakistani novelists, therefore, had to negotiate what Jalal terms the “twilight [zone] between myth and history”. It was

inevitable that the literature that emerged from such a history would be focused on identity.

T he anglophone novel in South Asia emerged out of the colonial encounter. Postcolonial criticism, therefore, has

dedicated a lot of time and ink to the question of whether anglophone postcolonial writing is truly postcolonial, written as it is

in the language of the colonisers. Feroza Jussawalla, professor of literature at the University of New Mexico, claims in her

1985 book, Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English: “Indians write in English to impress the British …

they write at the inspiration of Western writers.”

Other critics, too, have documented this discomfort with English language in the postcolonial context. Tariq Rahman, in his

excellent history of anglophone Pakistani literature, recounts these debates but offers no resolution to this particular issue.

Looming in the background of all this, of course, is the spectre of Thomas Macaulay’s oft-quoted 1835 Minute on Indian

Education that became the basis for the English Education Act in India. He sought to create “a class of persons Indian in blood

and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. While it is tempting to see the very existence of

English writing in the postcolonial state as evidence of the success of Macaulay’s mission, such a move would be something of

an oversimplification.

Indeed, an examination of postcolonial anglophone South Asian literature reveals that it is not simply a product of the kind of

Indians Macaulay sought to create. Many postcolonial anglophone writers are not engaged in mimicking their colonial masters.
The rich South Indian tapestry in Arundhati Roy’s 1996 novel, The God of Small Things, and Vikram Seth’s charming desi

matchmaking saga, A Suitable Boy (published in 1993), are just two of the many books that prove this contention.

It is apparent that these writers understand the fact that “to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English”, as postcolonial

theorist Homi K Bhabha observes in his book, The Location of Culture, which came out in 1994.

Anglophone writers do act as interpreters, albeit in the other direction. They are not the “vehicles for conveying [Western]

knowledge to the great mass of the population”, as Macaulay had imagined but they are certainly vehicles for communicating

South Asia to the West and the rest of the English-speaking world.

This is why it is common to see words and phrases from indigenous Indian languages in anglophone South Asian literature,

always accompanied by their translations. Here is one example. Sidhwa writes, “She calls him Jan: life.” Implicit in her

translation of “Jan” is the fact that the writer is not writing for an audience of Urdu-Hindi speakers alone.

The first generation of Pakistani writers wrote with the awareness that they were no longer Indian and
sought to emphasise their new national identity.

Nearly a decade after Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man, Mohsin Hamid frames The Reluctant Fundamentalist literally as the speech of

a Pakistani man addressed to a Westerner (an American, to be exact). That this dialogue with, and for, the West that has become

an integral part of the postcolonial anglophone novel is evidence that postcolonial writers continue to act as interpreters for

outsiders and, thus, participate in the Macaulay project, though in a very different way from what he had originally intended.

It is, therefore, not surprising then that Ice-Candy Man remembers Partition from an insider-outsider perspective: children

within a minority community. Many anglophone Pakistani novels that precede and follow this novel offer a similar perspective

through the eyes of migrants to and from Pakistan.

The diasporic concepts of “‘home’, ‘nationality’ and ‘exile’” that Paromita Deb identifies in her 2011 paper, Religion, partition,

identity and diaspora: a study of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man, have recurred as major themes in many anglophone Pakistani

novels. Their framing, however, has changed according to a changing sociopolitical landscape.

Hanif Kureishi (in his 1990 book, The Buddha of Suburbia, and 1998 book, Intimacy), for instance, explores the familiar form

of cultural disconnect felt by those straddling two cultures as the first wave of Pakistani diaspora lived out their lives in the

United Kingdom. Bina Shah’s 2001 novel, Where They Dream in Blue, chronicles an attempt to know a possibly unknowable

Pakistan as her young Pakistani-American protagonist, Karim Asfar, follows his identity crisis to Karachi. Plagued with

concerns about having a hybrid identity, he wonders about his fellow hyphenated Americans: “Were they Americans, or
Pakistanis? Where did they belong? Who owned their loyalties? When the Gulf War erupted, should they have supported the

Iraqis, because they were Muslim, or Americans, because they were born in America?”

The same themes continue in contemporary Pakistani English fiction but here, questions of identity and assimilation have been

complicated by changes in global politics in the years immediately following 9/11.

H M Naqvi, author of Home Boy | Tahir Jamal, White Star

Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing (published in 2003) offers a window into the consequences of the Gulf War through a family

drama, but it contains a moment where its young Pakistani protagonist Daanish returns home after years at an American

university (and is consequently othered by his countrymen). He envies his love interest and co-protagonist, Dia, who, by virtue

of having lived in Pakistan her entire life, remains “fully Pakistani”.

Mohammed Hanif’s darkly humorous A Case of Exploding Mangoes (which came out in 2008), a satire on militarism and

American influence in the Cold War era told through General Ziaul Haq’s assassination, is also aware of the contemporary ‘Af-

Pak’ facet of Pakistan’s identity. It features episodes where American diplomats rub shoulders with Pakistani officials and

Afghan freedom fighters in Islamabad.

After 9/11, there has also been a shift from questions around immigration and assimilation to ones around migrants returning

‘home’. This is evident in Hamid’s 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and H M Naqvi’s 2009 novel, Home Boy. Both

these books ask whether assimilation is even desirable.

For The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s Changez, the question comes to a head when he experiences a loss of self during a visit

home from New York, where he has been living for years. He finds himself mistaking, at first, the “enduring grandeur” of his

family home for shabbiness — just as an American would. For him, to think about his home in this way is shameful for it

suggests that he is becoming a foreigner in his own land. As he dreams “not of Erica”– his girlfriend and a stand in for America

in the novel – “but of home”, it becomes apparent that sooner or later he will have to choose between the two.

For Naqvi’s Chuck, a similar choice appears in a darker manner after a night of casual misadventures lands him in hot water

with the authorities in the post-9/11 panic. He is transformed into an object of suspicion, is dehumanised and told he has no

rights because, “You aren’t American!” When he chooses to return home at the novel’s close, he is in a state of psychological

anguish, crippled by “fear and terror”.

Attendees at the ninth annual Karachi Literature Festival | Tahir Jamal, White Star

T he early English novels of India and Pakistan shared many similarities — take the shared thematic concerns over Partition

in Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man, Khushwant Singh’s 1956 novel, Train to Pakistan, and Attia Hosain’s 1961 novel, Sunlight on a

Broken Column. The trauma of 9/11 brought a major shift for Pakistan – and its literature – away from its South Asian links as
its Islamic identity and strategic location have embroiled it in what has become a prolonged campaign against Islamic militants

in Afghanistan as well as in its own Pakhtun regions.

The country’s public perception in the wake of this fight has very much shaped its literary and cultural discourse. Cultural

theorist Claire Chambers notes this change while talking about Granta magazine’s 2010 Pakistan issue. “[It] adds to a sense of

publishers and academics moving away from the fashionable Indo-chic of the 1980s and 1990s towards grittier, post-9/11

‘renditions’ of Pakistan as the eye of the storm in the war on terror,” she writes. That this grittier post-9/11 rendition should

come from writers who, as Chambers says, citing Muneeza Shamsie, “neither have hyphenated identities nor can be considered

Pakistani exiles, but write in liminal positions between West and East”, is not simply coincidental.

The anglophone Pakistani novel has always been on a quest for identity, belonging and immigration. It follows, then, that these

concerns are adapted to the contemporary moment by the contemporary Pakistani novel in English to the extent that Cara

Cilano reads an end of nationalism in Kamila Shamsie’s ambitious novel Burnt Shadows that travels from Japan to India to

Pakistan to Afghanistan and to the United States.

It appears, however, that the Pakistani English novel advocates something beyond nationalism, not because it is opposed to

nationalism but because it finds itself outside of nationalism. It amplifies the notions of othering so that sugar no longer

dissolves in milk. The question is no longer about “getting absorbed into [a new] country”. Attempts to dissolve outside of

Pakistan, too, have ended in failure, as is clear in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy. It is debatable whether attempts

to re-enter Pakistan and get reabsorbed into its fabric can be successful but these ‘return home’ novels certainly attempt it. This

moment of returning home with an insider-outsider perspective, however, may be short-lived — as is clear from some recent

works of fiction.

True to its form, the Pakistani novel in English continues to pursue selfhood and home.

The contemporary wave of anglophone Pakistani fiction, bolstered by a thriving publishing industry in India, is marked by what

Bilal Tanweer calls a local reference point. Take, for instance, the crime thrillers written by Omar Shahid Hamid, a Karachi-

based cop who started writing novels during a sabbatical. He has drawn on his personal and professional experiences to paint,

among other things, an up-close picture of the war against terrorism played out on the streets of Karachi.

With The Diary of A Social Butterfly (published in 2008) and its sequel (published in 2014), Moni Mohsin has deftly penned

irreverent satires of high society life in Lahore. Tanweer’s own tumultuous love affair with Karachi in The Scatter Here is Too

Great (that came out in 2013) attempts a Calvino-esque immortalisation of a city. Legal academic Osama Siddique’s foray into
fiction, Snuffing Out the Moon, is an ambitious tour through the history of the land we call Pakistan — starting from 2084 BCE

Mohenjodaro, moving through present-day Lahore and ending in an era about 70 years from now.

These novels – fragments of various identities in the country, snapshots of different moments in time – signal an era in which

Pakistani writing is happy to investigate the country itself, and its competing narratives, on its own turf rather than from the

outside in. With Partition over 70 years in the past and the pull westward dulled in the polarised, anti-immigrant climate of a

Trump-led United States and an increasingly xenophobic United Kingdom, interest in questions of immigration and assimilation

has diminished in the Pakistani novel in English.

As the space for hybrid identities shrinks, so does the proclivity among writers towards being citizens of nowhere and

everywhere — water lilies, rooted but able to float, as Hamid puts it in his 2014 collection of essays, Discontent and its

Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London.

Literary theorist and philosopher György Lukács noted in his 1920 book, The Theory of the Novel, that selfhood is home for the

soul. He described the novel as an attempt to regain home in order to recover selfhood. True to its form, the Pakistani novel in

English continues to pursue selfhood and home. This pursuit, however, is moving away from an exploration of identity in terms

of immigration and assimilation and towards an exploration of identity – in all its multitudes – in the indigenous context.

The writer is an alumna of the University of Cambridge and Barnard College, Columbia University.