1st Edition
Community, Faith, and Resistance Writing Religious Resurgence in Select British Muslim Fiction
This book looks at texts produced before and after 9/11 by novelists with Muslim backgrounds in Britain. It delves into the ways in which the politics of representation have changed in the wake of 9/11 and highlights the conflicts that arise in these coming-of-age narratives between the demands of a liberal individualist lifestyle and those of community, family, and faith. Drawing on the works of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Qaisra Shahraz, Leila Aboulela, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Zia Haider Rahman, and Ahdaf Soueif, it discusses how they distinguish between Islam as a religion and Islam as a culture and negotiate complex themes of religion, representation, recognition, and secularism in their works.
The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers, particularly those focused on literature, politics, cultural studies, South Asian studies, Islamic studies, and decolonial studies, providing valuable insights and fostering deeper understanding within these disciplines.
Introduction: The Location of Islam 1. Community, Religion, and Secularism: A Re-Reading of The Enchantress of Florence and The Road From Damascus 2. Remapping Fundamentalism, History, And Terrorism in The Black Album and The Wasted Vigil 3. Gender, Religion, and Religious Faith in Qaisra Shahraz and Leila Aboulela’s Select Novels 4. History, Economics, and the Transnational Imaginings in The Map of Love and in the Light of What We Know. Conclusion.
Biography
Sk Sagir Ali is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Midnapore College, India. His published works include the edited books Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance Margins and Extremism, Literature and Theory: Contemporary Signposts and Critical Surveys, War on Terror: Nation, Democracy, and Liberalisation, Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture, and Marginal Narratives and the Question of Human Rights in Asian Pacific Literature. His articles appear in journals of repute like South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies from the University of Florida Press, etc. Ali holds a position as series editor of the book series “Peripheral Lives in Asia: Reimagining Nationalisms, Citizenship, and Precarity in the 21st Century” with Routledge.
“In a time when Islam and its diverse adherents are the focus of both public and political hostility in Britain and elsewhere, considerations of the meanings of Muslim cultural and religious identity can provide substance to often facile discussions. Sk Sagir Ali’s book examines an exemplary range of literary texts that are part of the wider corpus of British Muslim fiction in light of contemporary concerns and theories around Islam, culture, identity, secularism, representation, and alterity. An engaged and wide-ranging account of an important body of fiction that speaks to contemporary theoretical concerns.”
Priyamvada Gopal, University of Cambridge
