Islamophobia and the Novel

Peter Morey

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231541336
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire religieuse

In an era of rampant Islamophobia, what do literary representations of Muslims and anti-Muslim bigotry tell us about changing concepts of cultural difference? In Islamophobia and the Novel, Peter Morey analyzes how recent works of fiction have framed and responded to the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice, showing how their portrayals of Muslims both reflect and refute the ideological preoccupations of media and politicians in the post-9/11 West.

Islamophobia and the Novel discusses novels embodying a range of positions—from the avowedly secular to the religious, and from texts that appear to underwrite Western assumptions of cultural superiority to those that recognize and critique neoimperial impulses. Morey offers nuanced readings of works by John Updike, Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, John le Carré, Khaled Hosseini, Azar Nafisi, and other writers, emphasizing the demands of the literary marketplace for representations of Muslims. He explores how depictions of Muslim experience have challenged liberal assumptions regarding the novel's potential for empathy and its ability to encompass a variety of voices. Morey argues for a greater degree of critical self-consciousness in our understanding of writing by and about Muslims, in contrast to both exclusionary nationalism and the fetishization of difference. Contemporary literature's capacity to unveil the conflicted nature of anti-Muslim bigotry expands our range of resources to combat Islamophobia. This, in turn, might contribute to Islamophobia's eventual dismantling.

Chapter One

ISLAM, CULTURE, AND ANARCHY

Faith, Doubt, and Liberalism in Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and John Updike

In a world where Muslims can be routinely vilified en masse, Geoffrey Nash’s idea that they are subject to a Kulturkampf, a cultural struggle, fairly encapsulates the situation.1 Our task as students of the relationship between Islamophobia and the novel then becomes to identify the constituent elements of this struggle: the values through which it is waged and what literature’s part in it might be. If literature is not merely reflective but active in the process of constructing realities through which our contemporary world can be imagined and understood, we need to consider the tacit assumptions by which it makes its claims on our assent. This, in turn, requires us to attend to those values considered foundational or definitive that are drawn from the deepest recesses of the Western sense of self and that then become the raw material for fictional writing as much as for political or public discourse. It means, for one thing, tracing and contesting the binary distinction by which the West comes to be equated with liberalism, secularity, and modernity and Islam is rendered authoritarian (sometimes totalitarian), superstitious, and backward.

The tone of reductive, moralistic separatism characteristic of modern discourse about Muslims and the West and its attendant fetishization of “our culture” becomes the main way to instrumentalize this sense of difference and exceptionality. In thinking of culture, we can take Edward Said’s cue when he suggests that a culture is “not something to which one belongs but something that one possesses and, along with that proprietary process, culture also designates a boundary by which the concept of what is extrinsic or intrinsic to the culture come into forceful play.”2 Historically, this sense of culture has often been tied to the state in projects of national renewal or at times when hegemonic authority has felt under threat. Said remarks on the proximity of culture and the nation-state, an assimilation that is accompanied by “assurance, confidence, the majority sense, the entire matrix of meanings we associate with ‘home,’ belonging and community.” Yet this also means “that culture is a system of discriminations and evaluations[,] … a system of exclusions legislated from above but enacted through its polity, by which such things as anarchy, disorder, irrationality, inferiority, bad taste and immorality are identified, then deposited outside the culture and kept there by the power of the State and its institutions.”3

When it comes to drawing a distinction between Muslims and the West, claims are made on a supposedly deeply felt sense of identity and tradition—quite in the face of the negotiated, fitful, and often violent history by which identification with state projects has been enforced. The recent fissiparous tendencies highlighted by the British vote to leave the European Union, along with the rise of reactionary populist parties across Europe, are illustrative both of the atavistic nature of these identifications and of the fact that nationalism tends to trump the rather more airy claims of civilization, and a great deal of work has to be done to render the two synonymous. Mahmood Mamdani has usefully explained how the post-9/11 phenomenon of an assumed unbridgeable cultural gulf has emerged in the table talk of policy makers and opinion formers. Locating “culture talk,” as he calls it, as part of the latest phase in a much longer story of U.S. post-Vietnam global political engagements, Mamdani suggests that the era since the Cold War has seen the “ascendancy and rapid politicizing of a single term: culture.”

Culture talk assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and then explains politics as a consequence of that essence. Culture talk after 9/11 … explained the practice of “terrorism” as “Islamic.” “Islamic terrorism” is thus offered as both description and explanation of the events of 9/11. It is no longer the market (capitalism), nor the state (democracy), but culture (modernity) that is said to be the dividing line between those in favour of a peaceful civic existence and those inclined to terror. It is said that our world is divided between those who are modern and those who are premodern. The moderns make culture and are its masters, the premoderns are said to be but conduits.4

Culture and cultural difference are then constructed as the cause and legitimation of violence, whether the fury of the terrorist or the calculated precision attacks of “smart” warfare such as unmanned drones.

In the erection and codification of “our” values—that which separates “us” from “them”—the categories are not neutral. Indeed, these categories are produced by and in turn are productive of Western normativity. They tend to view culture as essential and formative as opposed to constructed and negotiable. Culture talk tends to reify cultures as objects that have attributes driving individual behavior. This has led to attacks on Islam for its supposedly inevitable and predictable impact on its adherents, usually traced back to the myth that the Quran supposedly forces a literal interpretation and thus determines behavior, whereas the Bible and in turn Christianity have a tradition of critical interpretation. In assuming that culture causes people to do certain things, this view also exoticizes the Other—although, as we will see later in the book, this exoticization is less about cozy commodification and more about the frisson of vicariously experienced threat. More-liberal positions tend toward a minimization of difference on the basis of notions of a “shared humanity.” Such familiar modes of categorization fail to recognize their own cultural privilege and support for a universal system. Tolerance is mistaken for good citizenship in a move that eventually tends to yield to demands for assimilation when its notions of acceptable difference are challenged.

Thus far I have been referring to culture as the logic of practices by which a notion of unity is created. These practices depend on a performative sense of ourselves and of Others that has to be created and constantly reiterated. For example, the othering of Muslims as terrorists and irrational people requires certain mechanisms to allow it to spread and be internalized. Talal Asad writes of modernity as a project aimed at institutionalizing certain principles—“constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, … consumerism, freedom of the market—and secularism. It employs proliferating technologies (of production, warfare, travel entertainment, medicine) that generate new experiences of space and time, of cruelty and health, of consumption and knowledge.”5 Against each of these principles, “the Muslim” is positioned as aberration or threat. Such an undertaking involves the aesthetic realm, too—that other, narrower kind of “culture” usually taken to mean the arts, media, and sometimes science and often having class connotations. Literature, for all the claims made for its independence, is one of these technologies.

In this chapter, I examine two novels that participate in the process of sanctifying Western modernity through literary art in particular ways: Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006). I come at them by way of Martin Amis’s essay collection The Second Plane (2008), which crystallizes many of the key issues.6 In particular, I want to focus on aspects of Amis’s essay “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,” which can be seen to articulate several key tenets of the liberal novel as it sought an initial response to 9/11 and the changes it wrought. Taken together, Amis and McEwan can be seen as advancing what Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate have called “the new atheist novel” as a “front in the ideological war against religion.… Quite simply, the novel apparently stands for everything—free speech, individuality, rationality and even a secular experience of the transcendental—that religion seeks to overthrow.”7

Central among the tenets of this breed of liberal novelist is the value of the kind of artistic and literary endeavors that Islam, since the Rushdie affair, is said to be suspicious of. In particular, what gets rearticulated is a notion of a tradition of core cultural values that literature should be in the business of preserving, primary among them being pluralism and reason. I want to contrast this very British approach with the more hesitant prognosis of the American writer John Updike. Whereas Amis and McEwan elevate literature to an article of humanist faith to set against the censorious repression of political religion, Updike, as we will see, has a more ambivalent relationship with this redemptive project. Whereas McEwan in particular invests in the power of literary art as a going concern and as a means to confront the immediate threats to his protagonist’s world in the early years of the war on terror, in Updike art as a mode of self-expression is treated ambiguously, almost as a mode of passing the time, on a par with shopping or sex. In McEwan, art and canonical poetry in particular can reach and subjugate the savage and the culturally “heathen.” This view is part of a post-9/11 fetishization of the great Western literary text as the herald of free expression and its elevation to stand for a culture that, in fact, is exhausted and in crisis. However, to achieve this elevation, McEwan, like Amis, must reach back to the cultural and literary authorities of yesteryear: for McEwan, Matthew Arnold, and for Amis (albeit ambivalently), F. R. Leavis. Updike, however, is drawn more to the exhaustion and crisis end of the spectrum. Terrorist is much more interrogative in its approach to the value of art. On the one hand, it is itself a novel. On the other, the book’s representative artist figure and her work are treated with a degree of distanced skepticism in a broader study of societal and familial breakdown.

Both McEwan and Updike do oppose the “irrational” with the “rational,” perceived as essential markers of difference. But, again, whereas in Saturday reason emerges battered but triumphant, in Terrorist the representative rationalist protagonist is pinned down in a culture that is frayed and irrational, built now on consumption and the gratification of desires. In the end, the eponymous terrorist’s mission is defeated not by the redemptive power of art as such, but by a more hesitant, almost pantheistic embodied humanism working through fellow feeling with other living creatures.

The fact that, as critics have frequently remarked, both novels have to resort to quite contrived and implausible denouements is indicative of a certain strain in the task of standing up for liberal humanist values. In fact, both McEwan and Updike—like Amis—manifest a marked postimperial melancholia of the kind identified by Paul Gilroy.8 In Britain the loss of empire and in the United States the loss of a particular white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant consensus have led to compensatory fantasies about the reassertion of white male power in the face of competing claims by others. In keeping with the two novels’ domestication of cultural struggles, the decline of white male power is figured as a failure of parental (and especially paternal) protection.9 This failure then calls for a reassertion of masculinities of a particularly assertive kind, corresponding to ideals of a national “best self” that has been lost and must be retrieved.10

Even then, both novels manage to concoct endings characterized by a sort of default-setting liberal wish fulfillment in which the forces of death and disorder are vanquished and the threat from the irrational negated. In both texts, acts of reading (and misreading)—of critical interpretation—are central to the resolution of the plot. For the satisfactory triumph of their endorsed value systems, both depend on the “conversion” of the threatening Other,11 and yet, at the same time, the faith displayed by characters is always haunted by its flipside, doubt.

In Britain, the attempt to erect the literary as a main bastion of Western freedom is only the latest instance of a tendency that has appeared sporadically but especially at times of crisis over the past two hundred or so years. This tendency frequently occurs as a response to forms of social change felt to be threatening to bourgeois hegemony. As a predominantly middle-class form, the novel has been uniquely placed to chart such anxieties as well as to give them expression. Yet it has also been co-opted in a discussion of secularism that universalizes a particular idea of “human nature” corresponding to Western experience and social development. Talal Asad’s assertion that “religious toleration was a political means to a strong state power” after the seventeenth-century European wars of religion might confuse cause and effect;12 state power was the price to be paid for ensuring toleration and the advance of secularism rather than something already lurking in the shadows waiting for an appropriate vehicle. Yet Asad is correct to suggest that after Kant the insistence that religion should submit to criticism and reason became an Enlightenment commonplace. Rational criticism becomes an alternative to religious authority—something that resurfaces again, two hundred years later, in the Satanic Verses affair, where freedom to criticize Islam is exalted and where “the sacred role performed by literature in modern culture” accounts for the outrage caused when protestors in Bradford burned a copy of the book.13

Of course, it has been many years since literature has occupied an exalted space in the West; it has long since been desacralized and reduced to a commodity among other commodities. However, the peculiar reanimation of this much older way of thinking about literature after the Rushdie affair and again after 9/11 indicates that literature continues to hold what we might term talismanic potential, ready to be wheeled out whenever a decisive rebuke needs to be issued to those from other cultures who simply don’t understand how important it is. The talismanic potential of literature is dependent on its openness to being interpreted. As it has been deployed in current debates, it is taken to stand in contrast to the “closed” sacred text of Islam. Asad revisits his comparative history of these ideas in his book Formations of the Secular to suggest that although interpretation of the Quran has always been open and shifting, there has been no equivalent of that nineteenth-century European tradition of “higher” criticism that drew so strongly on Enlightenment and German idealism to treat the Bible as a literary text open to being read in mythological and symbolic as well as literalist ways.14

The legacy of German idealism feeds directly into English Romanticism, particularly in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who drew on Kant and Schelling to suggest that objects of perception are really composed only of ideas in the perceiving mind. In literature, idealism came to mean the representation of things in an ideal form or as they might be: the imaginative treatment of a subject through poetry or fiction. If true reality is located in our consciousness, then this bestows a central importance on the imagination. Coleridge’s poetic practice famously begins from an appreciation of the importance of imagination, a vital force with the power to transform objects and transfigure the mundane. Even in its simpler form, the imagination is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”15 The result of this quasi-divine elevation of ego and imagination is that the Romantic artist becomes a prophetic genius, a seer for his community. Artists become—as Percy Bysshe Shelley later put it—“heirophants of an unapprehended inspiration”16 working in the service of art as a substitute for religion. Coleridge himself elaborated on this line of thought in his treatise On the Constitution of Church and State (1830), with its explicit call for a “clerisy” of the learned, composing a “third estate” to propagate the liberal arts and sciences and to keep alive the knowledge of the past.17

This idea influenced successive generations of English thinkers, foremost among them Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s criticism responded to the cultural crises and perceived spiritual poverty of his mid-Victorian age and helped to shape the emerging field of literary criticism. In particular, he can in some ways be seen as initiating what Chris Baldick calls “the social mission of English critici...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series List
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction—Islamophobia: The Word and the World
• 1. Islam, Culture, and Anarchy: Faith, Doubt, and Liberalism in Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and John Updike
• 2. From Multiculturalism to Islamophobia: Identity Politics and Individualism in Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali
• 3. Muslim Misery Memoirs: The Truth Claims of Exotic Suffering in Azar Nafisi and Khaled Hosseini
• 4. Migrant Cartographies: Islamophobia and the Politics of the City Space in Amy Waldman and H. M. Naqvi
• 5. States of Statelessness: Islamophobia and Border Spaces in the Post-9/11 Thrillers of John Le Carré, Dan Fesperman, and Richard Flanagan
• 6. Islamophobia and the Global Novel: “Worlding” History in Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie
• 7. Marketing the Muslim: Globalization and the Postsecular in Mohsin Hamid and Leila Aboulela
• Conclusion—Toward a Critical Muslim Literary Studies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index