Tariq Ali And Recent Negotiations Of Fundamentalism

  • Klaus Stierstorfer
Chapter

Abstract

This chapter attempts to present a fast-forward version of recent developments in literary negotiations with fundamentalism highlighted by what can hopefully be conceived as writers and texts representative of the points to be made in my literary and literary historical argument. This argument situates the engagement with fundamentalism in literature in English at the threshold between modernist and postmodernist discourses, as well as in the context of explorations beyond the postmodernist paradigm that both revaluate and transcend modernist essentialisms. Before the fast forwarding can begin, however, a kind of origin can be established, if only in etymological terms in English. It points to the Southern United States in the early twentieth century.

Keywords

Islamic World Islamic Culture Islamic Tradition Female Protagonist Fast Forwarding 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 177.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Quoted in Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1960), 84.Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Jon Lance Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), quoted in Ralph C. Wood, “Flannery O’Connor’s Strange Alliance with Southern Fundamentalists,” in Flannery O’Connor and the Christian Mystery, ed. John J. Murphy, Linda Hunter Adams, Richard H. Cracroft, and Susan Howe (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 1997), 76.Google Scholar
  4. 5.
    Robert H. Brinkmeyer, “A Closer Walk with Thee: Flannery O’Connor and Southern Fundamentalists,” Southern Literary Journal 18, no. 2 (1986), 3–13, 4.Google Scholar
  5. 8.
    See critics’ voices quoted by Gloria L. Cronin, “Fundamentalist Views and Feminist Dilemmas: Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn’s Many Things Have Happened Since He Died and Break the Heart of Me,” in Traditions, Voices, and Dreams: The American Novel since the 1960s, ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Ben Siegel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 255–256.Google Scholar
  6. 11.
    See Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), esp. 70–81.Google Scholar
  7. 12.
    See the statistical survey at http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_viol.htm (accessed on January 20, 2006).Google Scholar
  8. 17.
    Quoted in Bobby S. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism (London, New York: Zed Books, 1997), 96.Google Scholar
  9. 20.
    Salman Rushdie, Shame: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 1983), 266. Subsequently cited parenthetically in the text.Google Scholar
  10. 21.
    Cf. Mark Wormald, “The Uses of Impurity: Fiction and Fundamentalism in Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson,” in An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970, ed. Rod Mengham (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1999), 182–202, 188 and Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity (1996; London: Penguin, 2000).Google Scholar
  11. 22.
    Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 104. Bombay mix is a tasty, spicy mixture of nuts and other stuff.Google Scholar
  12. 24.
    The novel’s title is taken from the legend that verses 53:19–23 of the Qur’an originally referred to three pre-Islamic deities. For further explanation see Hartmut Bobzin, Der Koran: Eine Einführung (München: C.H. Beck, 1999), 60–61, 77.Google Scholar
  13. 25.
    Salman Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1991; repr. 1992), 394.Google Scholar
  14. 26.
    David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; repr. 1997).Google Scholar
  15. 28.
    Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms (London: Verso, 2002). Subsequently cited parenthetically in the text.Google Scholar
  16. 29.
    “The [ultrasecular; 246] J[ammu] & K[ashmir] Liberation Front meanwhile has published a map showing its favoured boundaries for an independent Kashmir, made up of territory currently occupied by India, Pakistan and China. Hashim Qureshi, one of the leaders of the organisation, told me that they did not want all the paraphernalia of a modern state. They weren’t interested in having an army. They would be happy for their frontiers to be guaranteed by China, India and Pakistan, so that Kashmir, the cause of three wars, could become a secular, multicultural paradise, open to citizens of both India and Pakistan. At the moment, it is a noble but utopian hope.” Ali, Clash of Fundamentalisms, 251.Google Scholar
  17. 30.
    Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (London: Verso, 1991); The Book of Saladin (London: Verso, 1998); The Stone Woman (London: Verso, 2000); A Sultan in Palermo (London: Verso, 2005). Subsequently cited parenthetically in the text.Google Scholar
  18. 31.
    Cf. Mario Apostolov, The Christian Muslim Frontier: A Zone of Contact, Conflict, or Cooperation, Routledge Curzon Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003).Google Scholar
  19. 34.
    See Klaus Stierstorfer, “Wobbly Grounds: Postmodernism’s Precarious Footholds in Novels by Malcolm Bradbury, David Parker, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift,” in Beyond Postmodernism, ed. Klaus Stierstorfer (Berlin, NY: W. de Gruyter, 2003), 213–234.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Catherine Pesso-Miquel and Klaus Stierstorfer 2007

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  • Klaus Stierstorfer

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