Abstract
This chapter primarily explores the overlapping, gendered parameters of Islam, agency, piety and secularism in the feminist fictions of Kamila Shamsie, Tahmima Anam and Monica Ali, with reference to Ameena Hussein’s novel. These writers engage with distinct South Asian and diasporic locations, demographics and issues. Shamsie’s first fictions are mostly set in Pakistan. This chapter focuses on her richly woven, neglected, fourth novel, Broken Verses (2005), set in Karachi, but it also explores her more recent Burnt Shadows (2009), which traverses Japan, Pakistan, the USA and Afghanistan, A God in Every Stone (2014), which connects Pakistan, Britain, France and Turkey, alongside her collection of essays Offence: the Muslim Case (2009). As discussed in the previous chapter, Anam’s A Golden Age (2007) explores the creation of Bangladesh. Her sequel, The Good Muslim (2011), engages with the aftermath of the 1971 war of independence. Thus Shamsie and Anam interleave issues of Islam, secularism and female emancipation in Pakistan and Bangladesh respectively. They focus on the 1970s and 1980s, when both the global and local contexts of Islam were becoming increasingly central to the political conversation. They map the rise of the religious right and trace the varied challenges to the Islamisation of the region alongside the imbrication of secularism with distinct South Asian histories.
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Notes
- 1.
For a wide-ranging discussion of the multiple dimensions of Indian secularism, see Needham and Rajan (2007).
- 2.
- 3.
Huntington (1993), pp. 22–49.
- 4.
Asian American writer Samina Ali describes her experience of publishers pressuring her to conform to hegemonic perceptions of Muslim women: when editors forthrightly asked her ‘to show how Muslim women are repressed in India, denied their freedoms and how America affords them freedoms they never dreamed up’ [cited in Mustafa (2009), pp. 281–288, 287].
- 5.
Rastegar (2006), pp. 108–128, 116.
- 6.
See also Sara Ahmed’s critique of the way Islamic feminism is examined in relation to its proximity to ‘real’ Euro-American feminism (Ahmed 2000).
- 7.
Asad writes that ‘Muslim secularism is preoccupied less with theology than with separating religion from politics in national life’ (Asad 1993), p. 229. See also Christophe Jaffrelot’s exploration of the relevance of Charles Taylor’s definition of secularism outside the West. Jaffrelot argues that Jinnah’s foundational definition of Islam in the frame of his ‘two nation theory’ as an identity marker (cultural and territorial) contributed to an original form of secularisation that is not taken into account by Charles Taylor in his conceptualisation of secularism (Jaffrelot 2012).
- 8.
Iqtidar (2011).
- 9.
Shamsie (2007), p. 30.
- 10.
Shamsie (2007), p. 30.
- 11.
Shamsie (2009a), p. 16.
- 12.
Shamsie (2007), p. 30.
- 13.
Ranasinha (2002).
- 14.
Shamsie undermines the polarity set up between Bhutto and Haq in Rushdie’s novel Shame.
- 15.
Shamsie (2005), p. 91.
- 16.
The ordinances were revised as the Women’s Protection Bill in 2006 but still remain controversial. For further discussion see Shamsie (2009c), pp. 48–49.
- 17.
Suleri (1992), pp.756–769.
- 18.
Samina and the Poet are modelled on the lionised poets Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Fehmida Riaz and Habib Jalib. See Shamsie’s discussion of Riaz (Shamsie 2009c, pp. 51–52).
- 19.
See the Pakistani feminist poet and activist Fehmida Riaz’s powerful repudiation of the directive in her poem (Riaz 1990, pp. 52–55). In Riaz’s poem the veil becomes the site of controlled and skilfully crafted polemic; it is stripped of its religious mythos and exposed as a tool for sustaining patriarchy and sexual control over the female body. Purdah is explored in a ground-breaking anthology of poetry by feminist activists and writers during the Zia-ul-Haq period, including Riaz. See also Ahmad (1991).
- 20.
The Women’s Action Forum was founded by upper-middle-class women like Riaz, and their counterhegemonic activities consisted mainly of producing powerful oppositional cultural forms such as poetry and hosting subversive theatre performances. The other prominent organization, All Pakistani Women’s Association, formed a distinct group and concentrated its efforts on direct action. Shamsie characterises Samina’s activism as an amalgam of both groups.
- 21.
In India, a similar post-emergency feminist movement emerged around the framing of rape as a state and caste issue in response to the mass rape of dalits and outcastes.
- 22.
Bapsi Sidhwa explored the infamous trial of Safia Bibi, whose experience represents an unnerving microcosm of how rape figured in the new nationalist politics: ‘The blind sixteen-year-old servant girl, pregnant out of wedlock as a result of rape, was charged with adultery. She was sentenced to three years rigorous imprisonment, fifteen lashes and a fine of a thousand rupees’ (Sidhwa 1993, p. 247).
- 23.
Boehmer (2005), p. 5.
- 24.
See Humeira Iqtidar’s (2011) discussion of Islamic secularism.
- 25.
Bhasin et al. (1996). See Gita Sahgal on reconciling feminism and faith through antimonial feminism with a Sufist devotional edge, Gita Sahgal, ‘Feminism and secularism’, London Feminist conference, 7 November 2013. For an analysis of a thriving grassroots women’s piety movement in mosques in Egypt, see Mahmood (2005).
- 26.
For further discussion see Shamsie (2009c), pp. 56–57.
- 27.
Shamsie (2009b), p. 147.
- 28.
Modood (1992), p. 87.
- 29.
For a fuller discussion of these new perspectives see Needham and Rajan (2007).
- 30.
As discussed in what follows, like Ziauddin Sardar and Akbar S. Ahmed, Shamsie tends to conceive of Muslim identity in terms of inherited cultural tradition.
- 31.
However, in contrast to Nadeem Aslam in his novel Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), Shamsie does not emphasise that gender equality is as much a part of the Islamic Sufi tradition as modern Western discourse.
- 32.
For a fuller discussion of this see Awn (1983).
- 33.
See Needham and Rajan (2007), p. 3.
- 34.
Shi’a Muslims believe in intercession between God and humanity through the Family of the Prophet and Imams; orthodox Sunnis do not accept spiritual mediation or hierarchy, although many amongst the Sunni masses do.
- 35.
- 36.
Khan’s depiction of the entangled lives of survivors of the partition and World War II in the second novel Five Queen’s Road (2009) prefigures Shamsie’s shift towards tracing shared histories.
- 37.
See (2009), CO9.
- 38.
Nivedita Menon argues that to live with secularism is to question the fixity of national borders within South Asia (Menon 2007, pp. 117–140, 140).
- 39.
Shamsie (2014), p. 79.
- 40.
Mohanty (2003), p. 51.
- 41.
This focus serves as an important reminder of the multiplicity of Sri Lankan identity. Although Sri Lankan Muslims comprise the island’s second largest ethnic minority, they tend to be erased in nationalist, essentialised binaries of Sinhalese versus Tamils in the context of Sri Lanka’s civil war between 1983 and 2009.
- 42.
Hussein (2009), p. 18.
- 43.
See Ahmed (1992b), p. 42.
- 44.
Shamsie’s point is that following 9/11 Muslim identification is not simply a matter of individual choice, as Kureishi delineates in his novel The Black Album, published in 1995, before 9/11. Ali makes a similar argument in Brick Lane, discussed subsequently.
- 45.
Shamsie (2009a), p. 16.
- 46.
See Shamsie (2009c). Like Shamsie, Ameena Hussein privileges a nation-centred conception of Sri Lankan Muslim identity rather than Global Ummah and sees identification of Sri Lankan Muslims with Arabs as misplaced and misguided. In A Moon in the Water Shahul observes: ‘We are not Arabs. So why do we want to dress like Arabs? We must not lose the sense of who we are. We belong to this country that has a proud and rich history. We must not forget our contribution to this country of ours. We have no need to look elsewhere for our heritage’. He ‘took pains to teach his community that the duties of a good citizen were as important as being a good devotee…take pride in being a Sri Lankan as well’ (Hussein 2009, p. 208). See also Hussein’s short story ‘Muslim on the Periphery’, where the protagonist leaves Sri Lanka for the Middle East expecting to be embraced by fellow Muslims. Instead ‘the scorn and contempt poured on my Sri Lankan head, the country of housemaids in their words, showed me the true colours of the Muslim Ummah’ (Hussein 2003, p. 20). At the same time, Hussein also presciently acknowledges the Sinhala ethno-nationalism that discourages some Sri Lankan Muslims from such an identification: ‘“Look, Imam”, a few would retort [to Shahul] lightly, “this country seems to have no need for us, and we, we are descended from Arabs”’ (Hussein 2009, p. 208). This reflects an ethno-nationalism that has increased in Sri Lanka at a horrifying rate since this novel was first published in 2009.
- 47.
Jinnah’s case for a separate Pakistani state was bolstered by the claim that, despite being a minority within India, as Muslims they were part of a global ummah.
- 48.
In Broken Verses the Poet observes: ‘If we could only view the motion of currents as metaphors for the gyres of history…we’d know the absurdity of declaring the world is divided into East and West’ (Shamsie 2005, p. 24). In Burnt Shadows, Weiss is an idealistic German artist and scholar whose work attempts to discover how Eastern and Western civilisations might learn to live in harmony.
- 49.
Needham and Rajan (2007), pp. 4–5.
- 50.
Shamsie (2007), p. 30.
- 51.
This is one of the ways in which Anam’s novel resonates with Kumari Jayewardena’s pioneering study of feminism and nationalism, decolonisation struggles and communalism (Jayewardena 1986).
- 52.
Anam (2007), p. 175.
- 53.
See also ‘And the Holy Book…has helped her through so many difficult times, times she could not imagining surviving’ (Anam 2011b, pp. 92–93).
- 54.
This aspect of The Good Muslim merits comparison with Taslima Nasrin’s powerful feminist critique of nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism in her novel on Bangladesh Lajja (1993).
- 55.
Anam (2011a), pp. 38–43, 43. See also Partha Chatterjee’s argument that the privately funded madrassas in Bengal might be seen in terms of a ‘different modality’ of secular politics, one which straddles both government and community. Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Contradictions of Secularism’ in Needham and Rajan (2007), pp. 141–156, 154–155.
- 56.
This final section of Hussein’s novel highlights the greater divide between the wealthier Muslim traders and business people in the South, and the North Eastern Muslim agriculturalists and fishermen who mainly live below poverty line. It explores the already impoverished East coast Muslim community, already affected and displaced by the civil war when they faced further devastated from the December 2004 Tsunami.
- 57.
Shamsie (2013).
- 58.
Ahmed (1992a), p. 98.
- 59.
Ahmed (1992a), pp. 257–258.
- 60.
Ahmed (1992a), p. 145.
- 61.
Sardar (1997), pp. 38–43.
- 62.
Sardar distinguishes between an ossified approach to tradition that is evident in Islamic fundamentalism and traditionalism, which he argues is dynamic and open to change (Sardar 1997, pp. 272–291).
- 63.
Thus for Sardar, globalisation is ‘the most pathological of all creeds of domination, the final solution of the cultural logic of secularism—the acquired inhuman domination syndrome (AIDS) of our time’ (Sardar 2003, p. 175).
- 64.
- 65.
Roy (2004), p. 21.
- 66.
Roy (2004), p. 49.
- 67.
Ranasinha (2002, CitationRef CitationID="CR32">2007</CitationRef>).
- 68.
Ali (2003), p. 215.
- 69.
See Hiddlestone ‘Ali’s presentation of the radical Islamist cause as an amalgamation of frustrations contradicts existing judgments that condemn those apparently inimical to democracy as a principle,’ Hiddlestone (2005), pp. 57–72, 66.
- 70.
Roy (2004), p. 197.
- 71.
I refer to Rehana’s sexual awakening in her affair with the Major, the injured soldier she hides in her house and nurses to recovery. Their relationship encourages Rehana to consider her own needs, up till now sublimated in her role as mother and friend. She notes in astonishment that the Major is the first person to ever ask her ‘what do you like? It stunned her that a person could go through life without anybody ever asking that question’ (Anam 2007, p. 144).
- 72.
For a fuller discussion of this point see Tarlo (2010).
- 73.
See Lutz (1991), pp. 121–137, 121–122.
- 74.
See Uzma Aslam Khan’s critique of the implications of this conclusion in her review of Brick Lane (Khan 2007).
- 75.
See also Cormack (2006), pp. 695–721.
- 76.
Mohanty (1991), pp. 1–51.
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Ranasinha, R. (2016). Resistance and Religion: Gender, Islam and Agency in Kamila Shamsie, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali and Ameena Hussein. In: Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40305-6_4
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