A few years ago an odd study was published in the journal Science. It detailed the findings of a couple of researchers at the New School who had made it their business to measure the cognitive effects of reading literature. Their results confirmed what many literary critics have argued for a terribly long time, that reading expands the reader’s universe and awards the mental dexterity to navigate complex emotional situations. Readers of literary fiction are, per the study’s findings, better able to stand in the shoes of another, to see the world from another perspective, to leave, at least in the moments that they read, the prejudices and predilections of their own limited worldview. Given all of this, it makes sense to say that world literature is in dire need of more writing about Muslims. No other category of person, it could be argued, bears similar burdens of being maligned or misunderstood, cast as a matter of routine as a terrorist or would-be terrorist.

It follows from this that the task of writing Islam should fall on the shoulders of those whose origins are entwined with it and for whom the ‘Muslim’ is not the constricted creation of a post-9/11 world. It is the work of those South Asian authors who have taken on this task that is the subject of Madeline Clements’s book Writing Islam from a South Asian Perspective. Analysing the work of Salman Rushdie, Nadeem Aslam, Kamila Shamsie and Mohsin Hamid, the book presents how these authors have risen to the challenge of birthing the ‘Muslim’ as a literary creation. It is divided into five chapters; an introductory one that sets up the book’s agenda and successive ones devoted to the works of each of the writers.

The general literary climate in which these authors write, she notes at the very outset, is not one that has welcomed depictions of Muslims, and is instead one in which “Islamic peoples have come to exist as characters, never narrators; always spoken for but rarely permitted the space or the power to speak for themselves”. In keeping with this general trend, it is mostly white and male men of letters who have taken on the role of “pundits, passing judgement on Muslims and Islam even as they speak of them”. Their speaking does little to accomplish the tasks of promoting empathy; some words from author Don DeLillo quoted by Clements are illustrative in this regard: “they think the world is a disease” and “There are no goals they can hope to achieve … Kill the innocent only that.”

South Asian writers are rising to the challenge of changing the way populist media views Muslims

To present a literary alternative to the existing one-dimensional terrorist Muslim, then, is a formidable venture that seems to require going up against the largely white and largely male giants who populate it and consider it their own. It is perhaps for just this reason that all of the writers that Clements surveys in her book orient themselves to a “global” audience — that vast literary sphere where their characterisations serve as an antidote to the villainous Muslim of others. This attachment of a political agenda to the task of literary creation is not an easy one, its incipient risk of the continued ghettoisation of the postcolonial South Asian author as beset with the task of righting wrongs, denied the freedoms available to white authors who may inflect their work with political agendas but are yet never defined by them.

It is a fraught path and Clements’s analysis notes the versatility of authors who have responded to this challenge in markedly different ways. In Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows the narrator, Hiroko, functions as a means to the demystification and humanisation of peaceful, ordinary South Asian Muslims in New York. The final section of the book is set in the very city where the 9/11 attacks wreaked the most havoc and which is noted in the book as “a suddenly suspicious and defensive place” where “even the most benign invocations to Allah meet with a frosty reception”. Hiroko’s friendly interactions with South Asian taxi-drivers are the fulcrum on which Shamsie can provide sustenance for similar friendly interactions into the future.

Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil accomplishes in a very different style and subject similar acts of humanisation. In the book an English doctor, who has converted to Islam and is in Afghanistan, tends to the wounds of a young Islamist. Clements quotes the passage that follows, taking us into the thoughts of the narrator who says: “In Surah 27 of the Quran, Solomon laughs at hearing the conversation between two ants — a rare example of humour in the Quran and that there is a 12th century Buddhist version of that tale with two butterflies instead of ants. It is no point sharing with the boy the delightful essential idea that tales can travel or that two sets of people oceans apart can dream up similar sacred myths”. The passage is but one example of Aslam’s versatility, one via which the reader is gently, almost unknowingly, drawn to consider the universality of ideas that draw humans together, their small scale akin to ants and butterflies, before the larger forces of the universe. The reader may not agree, but nevertheless has been provided an invitation to consider, that last thing being Aslam’s crucial contribution.

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, in presenting a conversation between a Pakistani man and his Western interlocutor, provides the most overt literary confrontation between those who impose the burdens of suspicion and those who must bear them. Yet despite being so, Hamid’s protagonist is neither parochial nor didactic. The literary genius of the novel is that it presents the confrontation without ever veering into pedantry, as Clements notes: “it encourages them to adopt a sceptical position not only vis-à-vis the Pakistani Muslim suspect in their midst, but also with regard to the ‘suspect’ aspect of his or her Islamic identity.” It is the prescription of equal scepticisms that bears the possibility of literary absolution, the reader’s mind exploring the artifice and ambiguity in both sorts of suspicions.

In surveying the four writers that are her subjects, Clements deftly reveals the political burdens that accompany the task of being a South Asian writer in the present age. There are the challenges of writing for global audiences, and the ethical responsibilities of having a platform where art must dissipate what war has created. In doing so, Clements presents a survey that is rare and crucial, an exposition of the varying literary burdens that accompany the task of postcolonial writers who must prove their belonging and legitimacy in an international literary ecosystem that does not always welcome their expositions. Theirs is a literature of absolution, of engaging, imagining and then quietly, softly, leading the reader into feeling and finally forgiving the most maligned and the most misunderstood.

The reviewer is the author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan.

Writing Islam from a South Asian Perspective
(LITERARY DISCOURSE)
By Madeline Clements
Palgrave Macmillan, UK
ISBN: 978-1137554376
196pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 2nd, 2016