Abstract
This chapter analyses the Muslim memoir as a hybrid text that both authenticates and satirises the subjectivity of the narrator. Given the social capital of the memoir form, I argue that its trustworthiness is inverted by the author Ali Eteraz to question the premise of social trust. The memoir delineates social trust through the expression of piety and Muslim modernity articulated by the narrator in his different avatars. Eteraz’s satirical representations of himself invite the reader to read against the grain of the by now familiar Muslim fundamentalist-turned-Sufi story. He reverses the contexts of Islamist violence with the performativity of humour and it is in that humour that we can see traces of a multicultural coexistence and a rebuilding of social trust.
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Notes
- 1.
On biraderi networks amongst the Pakistani community in the UK, see Alison Shaw, Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani Families in Britain. Abingdon: Routledge, 2000. Parveen Akhtar, British Muslim Politics: Examining Pakistani Biraderi Networks. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Pnina Werbner, The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings Among British Pakistanis. Berg, 1990.
- 2.
This view is also present in Linda Anderson ’s assessment of the increased reading interest in memoirs since the 1990s. She notes the shared link between reality TV and memoirs and extends our understanding of this phenomenon as merely voyeuristic, marking it instead as a ‘need to form “ad hoc communities”, to find provisional settings which can both extend and confirm the meaning of the individual and the personal’ amongst viewing publics (Anderson 2001: 114). On the Muslim memoir also see Anshuman Mondal’s ‘Bad Faith: The Construction of Muslim Extremism in Ed Husain’s The Islamist’. In Culture, Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing, ed. Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. 2012, 37–51.
- 3.
Such texts often foreground female experience, thereby underlining the association of Islam with patriarchal oppression. The trajectory of these stories features escape or (more often) rescue by the forces of Western enlightenment. Focussing on the derivative nature of their favoured style and imagery, Roksana Bahramitash has labelled such texts as instances of ‘ Orientalist Feminism’. See Roksana Bahramitash, ‘The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 14:2 (2005), 221. See also Dora Ahmad, ‘Not Yet Beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in American Popular Literature’, Social Text, 99:27:2 (2009), 109–111.
- 4.
Terry Gross interview with Ali Eteraz, NPR ‘Fresh Air’. October 29, 2009. Referenced as 2009a in text. http://www.npr.org/books/authors/138132877/ali-eteraz. Accessed June 16, 2017.
- 5.
Imam Zaid Shakir is a co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley California. His biography can be accessed on https://www.newislamicdirections.com/about/. Eteraz seems to be referring to a lecture that he gave at Aylesbury mosque, UK on ‘The changing face of secularism and the Islamic response’ in February 1999. The text is available on http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/misc/sec.htm Accessed June 20, 2017. On social media, Zaid has 67.2k followers on Instagram and 137k followers on twitter.
- 6.
According to Freud, ‘jokes act as displacement activities permitting subterranean (sexual, hostile) desires—bypass ethical and social constraints’. See Sigmund Freud. The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. Joyce Crick. London: Penguin Classics. [1905] 2002.
- 7.
Historically, this is true of anti-colonial movements as well. An engaging context of Muslim anti-colonial resistance is provided by Ayesha Jalal in her book, Partisans of Allah. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008. For a recent study that explodes the myth of the ‘war of civilisations’ between Islam and the west see Mahmood Mamdani’s, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and Roots of Terror. USA: Three Leaves Press, 2004.
- 8.
Review of Eteraz’s book by blogger ‘Teal Warrior’ aka Dixie Theriault https://dixie-afewofmyfavoritethings.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/ Accessed 01/07/2017. For a real life anthropological study of Arab Muslim American lives in Brooklyn and how they negotiate multiple identities in a time of cultural misunderstandings see Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does it Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. New York: Penguin Press. 2008.
- 9.
See all reviews listed on the author’s website. http://alieteraz.com/childrenofdust (Accessed June 19, 2017).
- 10.
My understanding of diaspora is influenced by seminal publications from Avtar Brah, Cartogrophies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. James Clifford ‘Diasporas’ in Cultural Anthropology, 1994. 9:3, pp. 302–338, and Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press 1994.
- 11.
The critic Elena Furlanetto talks about the ‘Rumi phenomenon ’ in the American literary market since 1994 with reference to the critically acclaimed Turkish novelist Elif Shafak’s 2010 novel, The Forty Rules of Love. Furlanetto argues that the cultural translation of Rumi for a Western audience flattens local nuances and carries traces of Orientalism. The Rumi phenomenon was sparked by the best-selling translation by Coleman Barks’s 1995, The Essential Rumi (Elena Furlanetto, ‘The “Rumi Phenomenon” Between Orientalism and Cosmopolitanism: the case of Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love’, 2013, 17: 2, 201–13).
- 12.
See Christopher Shackle’s reading of Bulleh Shah’s devotional Sufi poetry in his ‘Sacred Love, lyrical death’, Critical Muslim. 2013: 5, pp. 31–48.
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Yaqin, A. (2018). From Islamic Fundamentalism to a New Life in the West: Ali Eteraz and the Muslim Comedy Memoir. In: Yaqin, A., Morey, P., Soliman, A. (eds) Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71309-0_9
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