Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels [1st ed.] 978-1-137-52088-3;978-1-137-52089-0

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxxviii
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
‘Touch Me, Baby’: Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun (Claire Chambers)....Pages 3-39
‘I Wanted a Human Touch’: Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (Claire Chambers)....Pages 41-68
Front Matter ....Pages 69-69
Fiction of Olfaction: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (Claire Chambers)....Pages 71-120
Taste the Difference: Leila Aboulela, Yasmin Crowther, and Robin Yassin-Kassab (Claire Chambers)....Pages 121-166
Front Matter ....Pages 167-167
Sound and Fury: Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Claire Chambers)....Pages 169-211
The Doors of Posthuman Sensory Perception in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (Claire Chambers)....Pages 213-252
Back Matter ....Pages 253-302

Citation preview

Making Sense

of Contemporary British Muslim Novels

Claire Chambers

Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels

Claire Chambers

Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels

Claire Chambers Department of English and Related Literature University of York York, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-52088-3 ISBN 978-1-137-52089-0  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52089-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934711 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: ‘In It What Is In It’ by Fatima Zahra Hassan. Photograph by Simon Allen This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

For Reena: love and peace

Acknowledgements

This monograph draws on research funded by the Leverhulme Trust; grateful acknowledgements to this body for granting me a year’s sabbatical. All books are collaborative, but this one has been more of a team effort than most. For their invaluable research, linguistic, and stylistic help, I want to thank the following people: Rehana Ahmed, Manal Almehaidly, Pürnur Altay, Nadia Atia, Derek Attridge, Katie Beswick, Roxanne Bibizadeh, Clare Bielby, S. J. Callender, Frances Carruthers, Ashim Dutta, Mary Eagleton, Andrew Evans, Rachael Gilmour, Sam Hellmuth, Caroline Herbert, Jim Hicks, Ben Holgate, Aroosa Kanwal, Indrani Karmakar, Tabish Khair, Hannah Kershaw, Madhu Krishnan, Maryam Mirza, Anshuman Mondal, Lindsey Moore, Peter Morey, Stephen Morton, Delphine Munos, Liliana Naydan, Lucinda Newns, Libby Peake, Noemì Pereira-Ares, Michael Perfect, Christer Petley, Richard Phillips, Angelia Poon, Eve Popperwell, Shital Pravinchandra, Emelia Quinn, Sana Riaz, Hannah Roche, Ana María Sánchez-Arce, Esra Mirze Santesso, Bina Shah, Helen Smith, Susie Thomas, Anastasia Valassopoulos, Susan Watkins, Mandala White, and Amina Yaqin. I owe these coruscating critical thinkers and fragrant friends an enormous debt of thanks. Without them, my writing experience would not have smelled as sweet. For help with my chicken shop collage, I am grateful for the intrepid gastrogeographic exertions of friends near and far, old and new: Navneet vii

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Bhamra, Rachel Farebrother, Heidi Frances, Jane Jardine, James Meek, Katy Mullin, Jayne Rodgers, Stephanie Smith, and Paul Veyret. Visually, this book would not have been the same without Fatima Zahra Hassan’s marvellous cover art ‘In It What Is In It’; Mobeen Butt’s talents as a curator and cultural connector; Thierry Cohen’s and Simon Allen’s spectacular photography; and the design and editorial skills of Jane Jardine, Linda Mellor, Joash Webster, Vicky Bates, Hemapriya Eswanth, Tom René, and Ben Doyle. In an interview on her writing process, Ahdaf Soueif once shared that she feels most free when she is writing on her own in a room but can hear her loved ones busy with happy activities not far away. The same is true for me. To my family: thanks for (mostly) keeping your noise in other rooms so I could finish this book. Specifically, warmest thanks and love goes to ‘my boys’: Robert, Joash, and Derry Webster. I shall try to be a better listener now the book is completed. This book is dedicated to Reena, my dear friend for 30 years, who touches my heart.

Contents

Part I The 1990s: ‘It Was Only Through Touch That We Really Knew Things’ 1 ‘Touch Me, Baby’: Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun 3 2 ‘I Wanted a Human Touch’: Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album 41 Part II  Smelling and Tasting the 2000s 3 Fiction of Olfaction: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane 71 4 Taste the Difference: Leila Aboulela, Yasmin Crowther, and Robin Yassin-Kassab 121 Part III  Taking Soundings in the Technologized 2010s 5 Sound and Fury: Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire 169

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6 The Doors of Posthuman Sensory Perception in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West 213 Conclusion 253 Works Cited 257 Index 289

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4

An A to Z of (mostly) British Fried Chicken Restaurants, June 2018 (Source and copyright Claire Chambers) 148 ‘London 51° 30′ 17″ N’ from the Darkened Cities series © Thierry Cohen (www.thierrycohen.com) (Courtesy Danziger Gallery, New York and the Artist [2015]) 224 ‘London 51° 30′ 44″ N’ from the Darkened Cities series © Thierry Cohen (www.thierrycohen.com) (Courtesy Danziger Gallery, New York and the Artist [2015]) 225 View of St Mary Aldermary (Source and copyright Claire Chambers) 226 Another view of St Mary Aldermary (Source and copyright Claire Chambers) 227

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A Rushdie-Shaped Hole In Late 1988, Muslim Protestors in Bolton and Bradford, two poor and ethnically divided cities in northern England, were encouraged by television reporters to burn Salman Rushdie’s allegedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses. Soon afterwards, on 14 February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie and his publishers had dramatic impact in the UK as well as on global geopolitics. Following Rushdie’s ‘un-funny Valentine’ (2012: 11), the spotlight fell on Muslims. Previously they had appeared as a virtually invisible minority group in Britain, subsumed under the broader category of ‘British Asians’. The fatwa was abhorrent and indefensible, but the dominant liberal reaction to the protests was also questionable. Rushdie was positioned by commentators such as Fay Weldon (1989: 6−8) and Malise Ruthven (1991/1990: 1) as one of their own. A pale-skinned, Cambridgeeducated exponent of free speech, Rushdie’s Voltairean upholding of debate and democracy was juxtaposed with the supposedly barbaric, ‘alien’ values of the protestors. It is my contention that 1989 rather than 2001 was a crucial date for the representation of Islam and emergence of a specific form of Islamophobia in British culture (and further afield). This monograph engages with a series of post-fatwa fictions that deal with the question of what it means to be British and Muslim in nuanced and sensitive ways. My central thesis is that novels by authors from Muslim backgrounds and xiii

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with varying degrees of religiosity are richly sensual. In relation to a tide of rising Islamophobia and simplification whose history I will chart in this section of the introduction, these novelists demonstrate shared commitment to questions of experience, specifically as mediated through the senses, which will be the focus of this volume. My title is not intended to imply that these novels did not make sense before I came along to interpret them, but to signal that I am looking at these novels through the lens of sensory studies. The Ummah, or global community of believing Muslims, is often imagined as one body, even if this is equally often challenged. In one hadith, Mohammed described the indivisible nature of the Ummah as being like that of ‘one body; when any limb of it aches, the whole body aches’ (Sunnah.com, n.d.: n.p.). I emphasize the importance of the five senses in Muslim-heritage cultures and, particularly, in the confluence or collision of Muslim and British values and cultural habits. Writing 13 years later, in his memoir Joseph Anton, Rushdie describes the fatwa against him as being ‘like an intense light shining down on everyone’s choices and deeds, creating a world without shadows, a stark unequivocal place of right and wrong action, good and bad choices, yes and no, strength and weakness’ (2012: 150−151). In the context of the dramatic story Rushdie tells – of marriages, relationships, and his own safety being damaged or destroyed by the deplorable fatwa’s fallout – his monochrome analysis is understandable. It would take a hard-hearted reader not to be moved by a passage from Joseph Anton in which Rushdie describes his fears for the safety of his son, Zafar, during a harrowing few hours when the young boy was not at home at a time Rushdie had arranged to ring him (2012: 158−160). Yet the despair the author felt during the nine-year fatwa period appears to have led to a permanent hardening of attitude. Whereas his unbending character Swatilekha is deeply ironized in The Satanic Verses for saying ‘Battle lines are being drawn up […]. Secular vs. religious, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on’ (1998/1988: 537), in Joseph Anton her remark is quoted approvingly and without qualification (2012: 126). Given the violence that has ensued from George W. Bush’s similarly uncompromising rhetoric, ‘You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists’, it is surely desirable to find a more gradated approach to what Tariq Ali describes in his 2002 book of the same name as the contemporary ‘clash of fundamentalisms’ between extremism in the name of Islam, on the one hand, and Western neoliberalism – what Nisha Kapoor (2018: 16) calls ‘state extremism’ – on the other.

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There are many connections between Joseph Anton and The Satanic Verses, and the memoir contains interesting details which illustrate how semi-autobiographical much of Rushdie’s fictional oeuvre is. To take just one, sensory, example, Rushdie recalls his father buying grilled chicken from a takeaway on the Edgware Road and making the embarrassed young Salman smuggle it into their hotel (2012: 21) in much the same way that Saladin Chamcha’s father does in The Satanic Verses (1998/1988: 43). In the memoir, we find self-righteousness and selfpity, as well as humour and keenness of vision. Rushdie plays down accusations that he deliberately insulted and homogenized Islam in The Satanic Verses, dismissing any criticisms out of hand as coming from ‘the he-knew-what-he-was-doing, he-did-it-on-purpose party’ (2012: 109). Simultaneously, he plays up his own scholarship, despite the fact that this derives from a single course on Islamic history which he took under the tutelage of Arthur Hibbert at the University of Cambridge (2012: 40). The memoir also exhibits what we might call a tendency towards Islamophobia denial. For example, Rushdie writes, ‘A new word had been created to help the blind remain blind: Islamophobia’ (2012: 343).1 Shortly afterwards, he puts the word Islamophobia in scare quotes and describes the concept as part of ‘the vocabulary of Humpty Dumpty Newspeak’ (2012: 346). In this quotation he calls on Orwell in a very different way from his references to the British India-born author in the politically engaged 1984 essay ‘Outside the Whale’ (1991: 87−101). Rushdie argued in that early piece that art cannot be absolved of ethical blame by virtue of its fictional status: all art, he claimed, is political – notwithstanding his later insistence on The Satanic Verses’s fictionality and therefore exemption from criticism. In Joseph Anton Rushdie seeks to make a distinction between attacking ideas and attacking people. And yet, his inference that hatred of Muslims does not exist is disproven not only in studies by the likes of Chris Allen (2010) and S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil (2011), but also by Rushdie’s own memory (2012: 63) of the editor Bob Gottlieb reading V. S. Naipaul’s withering book Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and from then on imagining that he would dislike anyone from a Muslim background. Moreover, in a bathetic section, billed as being ‘the most nearly lethal moment in all those menacing years’ (2012: 474), while Rushdie and his then-wife Elizabeth West took a holiday in the Blue Mountains in the mid-1990s their car was accidentally hit by a

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lorry. Arriving at the scene, Australian policemen turn on the bemused truck driver in a way that is surely Islamophobic: The police were giving the driver a hard time, though. They too had worked out that the man sitting dazed and wounded on the grass was Salman Rushdie, and so they wanted to know, what was the driver’s religion? The driver was bewildered. ‘What’s my religion got to do with anything?’ Well, was he a Muzlim? An Islammic? Was he Eye-ray-nian? Is that why he had tried to kill Mr. Rushdie? Maybe one of the Ayatoller’s fellers? Was he carrying out the whatever it was called, the fatso? (Rushdie 2012: 476−477)

Rushdie fails to recognize that untrammelled criticism of a religion can lead to this kind of vituperation against its (assumed) followers. Indeed, The Satanic Verses affair led to a ramping up of prejudice against Muslims to which Rushdie himself contributed. When he makes the supercilious comment that ‘to the smug and angry men and boys in Bradford, Heinrich Heine meant nothing’ (2012: 129), instead of speaking truth to power, this elite writer appears to be talking down to the powerless. At one point, Rushdie uses the adjectives ‘unqualified, unyielding’ approvingly (2012: 22), but more qualifications and a less inflexible stance would have made for a better memoir. I will intimate in this book that the sacralization of freedom of expression since the Rushdie affair, and its post-9/11 resurgence led by New Atheists such as Martin Amis and the late Christopher Hitchens (to whom Rushdie dedicated his essay collection Step Across This Line), has entrenched both liberal and conservative perceptions of religions, particularly Islam, as repressive, dogmatic, and violent. It is less commonly recognized that the hardline secular position also has ‘fundamentalist’ tendencies, including its near deification of art (especially literature and its avatar, The Writer) and of science and Enlightenment values, all of which are often partially understood or taken on ‘faith value’. As early as 1959, Eric Stokes, in The English Utilitarians and India, identified this kind of approach as ‘secular evangelicism’, which he defines as ‘the translation of secular objectives to a religious level’ (1959: 308).2 Both secular and religious evangelism rest on a conversion impetus, and this is one from which Rushdie’s memoir is not immune. For all its faults, The Satanic Verses inverted stereotypes with postmodern glee, playing with received depictions and defying clear categorizations, including that between deities and mortals. Yet in Joseph Anton

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Rushdie moves away from his early-career attempt to show the categories of ‘angelicdevilish’ as intertwined, towards entirely separate and smoothed-out categories of ‘light’ and ‘dark’. This is akin to the clash of civilizations model, which Samuel P. Huntington drew up in his 1993 article and 1996 book, and which argued that religion and culture would prove the dominant lineaments of post-Cold War geopolitics. The irony is that by the time Rushdie writes his memoir he is borrowing the ‘good and bad, light and dark’ language of the supernatural realm that he criticizes even as late as Step Across This Line. The man who once proclaimed ‘Only hard-line ideology is clear-cut’ (2003: 255) is now striving for doctrinaire simplicity. Yet, as Daniel O’Gorman shows, Rushdie is ‘unable to persuasively follow through on [his] rhetoric of a world simplistically torn between […] “bright” and “dark”’. O’Gorman suggests that it is precisely in this failure that Joseph Anton proves ‘valuable’ (2017: 457). The memoir extrudes greater ambivalence than its author intends and is therefore unintentionally revealing about seemingly irreconcilable differences in ideology. Minority offence at creative works can be traced in part to social and cultural disenfranchisement (Ahmed 2015: 64–71), or the fact that some people have more freedom and opportunities to speak than others. In response to controversies such as the one that engulfed The Satanic Verses, we need to challenge polarized understandings that pit secularism against religion, majority against minority. As I will show in Part III of this volume, along with the undoubted importance of freedom of expression, what is needed is a willingness to listen. My first monograph, Britain Through Muslim Eyes (Chambers 2015), was a literary history that prefaces Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels. I posited 1988–1989 as the historical moment at which to split the two volumes. This is because the Rushdie affair was in many ways more of a turning point for perceptions of and by Muslims in Britain than 9/11. Nonetheless, the idea of a complete rupture for the twenty-first century makes for impactful article, book, or chapter titles. Muneeza Shamsie, for example, entitles her anthology of post9/11 Pakistani women’s writing And the World Changed (2005). Peter Morey (via Tony Blair) writes that ‘the rules of the game have changed’ (2011) after the attacks on the United States. Meanwhile, Yassmin Abdel-Magied identifies ‘the day it all changed’ (2016: 56−75) as 11 September 2001, from which day on Muslims were widely perceived as personifications of evil. Through the subtitle to her book, Who Do You

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Think I Am?, Abdel-Magied also constructs this transformation as affecting how her story, as a millennial Sudanese Australian and a believing Muslim who wears hijab, has been told without her permission, and her voice ventriloquized according to others’ assumptions and desires. Of course, 9/11 marked great change in global geopolitics. In the 1990s and very early 2000s many clung complacently to a notion that racism (as well as sexism and homophobia) had been defeated and the end of history had arrived. In the foundational year of 1989, Francis Fukuyama had messianically announced that history would end its evolution as the result of what he saw as a happy convergence of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. Yet if Fukuyama won the battle of ideas, with an equally flawed thesis Samuel Huntington won the war. 9/11 saw a move in public discourse from talking about race to obsessing over faith, accompanied by racism’s resurgence – typically with overt colour prejudice decanted into religion and culture. The present book will be published in 2019, the year of the first intake of university students born after 9/11. This cohort will not remember that race and interfaith relations were dire enough before 2001. The First Iraq War of 1990–1991, with its attendant Allied propaganda, was followed in 1993 by an attempted bombing of New York’s World Trade Center by terrorists from Muslim backgrounds, some of whom were al-Qaida-affiliated. Working as a journalist on Newsnight when the Oklahoma bombing took place two years later in 1995, the British Muslim author Yasmin Hai was ordered by a senior colleague to ‘[g]et a mad mullah!’ (2008: 242) to be interviewed on the show. This pre-9/11 instance of Islamophobia occurred before the news came through to Hai’s producer that the attack had been perpetrated by a white far-right extremist, Timothy McVeigh, and not a Muslim. Such utterances have become more widespread in many sections of the media since 9/11, as exemplified in initial assumptions by a high proportion of live-broadcasting journalists that the 2011 Norway mass murders were orchestrated by a Muslim, when they were in fact acts of terror committed by another white violent extremist, Anders Behring Breivik. Amplified and made more ubiquitous since the late 1990s by the advent of 24-hour rolling news in Britain and around the globe,3 the stigmatization of Muslims has become increasingly prevalent and toxic over the last 18 years.

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In Feiwel Kupferberg’s ‘Theorizing Turning Points and Decoding Narratives’, he cautions that the notion of a turning point is ‘deeply subjective’ and that such watersheds are ‘narrated’ rather than ‘historical reality’ (2012: 240−241). Perhaps 9/11 marks a subjective flashpoint for the millennial generation, just as the Rushdie affair manufactured concerns about the reified figure of the Muslim for Generation X; the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s did for Baby Boomers; and as the Arab Uprisings and its consequences may be the defining moments for a younger group sometimes referred to as Generation Z or the smartphone-wielding iGen. Kupferberg identifies three main types of turning points: ‘“milestone”, “meeting a challenge” and “the last straw”’ (2012: 232). The Rushdie affair was a milestone in that a head of one state (Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini) was using the discretionary legal opinion of a fatwa to order the targeted killing of a citizen from another country. Rushdie would later write of the threats against him as a personal challenge, handing him ‘the flag under which he was ready to fight, […] which stood for intellect, argument, analysis and progress, for the freedom of philosophy and learning from the shackles of theology, for human reason and against blind faith, submission, acceptance and stagnation’ (2012: 23). Note the dog whistle – some might say the airhorn – with which Rushdie signals a link from Islam, which translates as ‘submission’, to unthinking belief and civilizational atrophy. The Satanic Verses controversy was also the last straw for many members of the impoverished British Muslim community, who by the end of the 1980s were reeling from the Honeyford affair of 1984– 1985 (see Chambers 2015: 218–220), the racist policy in Bradford of ‘bussing out’ Asian children to prevent too many of them going to their local schools (Macey 2009: 10), and the struggle to have halal dietary requirements catered for in schools across the UK. The timeframe of my two books therefore allows me to examine a series of turning points often forgotten amidst emphasis on the World Trade Center attacks and their aftermath. With Debjani Ganguly, I argue that 1989, the year of the collapse of communism as well as the Rushdie affair, signalled a more pronounced shift in perceptions of and by Muslims in Britain. In her monograph This Thing Called the World, Ganguly pays welcome attention to ‘the historically significant threshold of 1989’ in shaping our current Manichean political climate (2016: 1).

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I agree with Ganguly’s assessment that 1989 – a year significant for, but not reducible to, the fall of communism – ushered in the most profound shift in geopolitics and literary aesthetics since the revolutionary movements of 1968. Ganguly argues that post-Cold War world literature is notable for its engagement with modern kinds of unending war and insurgency, the digital environment, and human rights discourse. She paints a grisly picture of what she terms, with a nod to Achille Mbembe, ‘deathworlds’ around the globe (2016: 9−10), as well as resistance movements that flare up in response. Ganguly makes an urgent intervention in the emerging field of global digital humanities. She pertinently observes that Tim Berners-Lee made early steps toward creating the World Wide Web in 1989. The ramifications of technological developments for global communications and access to information are compared to the earlier impact of industrial revolutions. When Ganguly describes ‘the surveilling power of information technology’ (2016: 96) and the unmanned drones that play an ever-increasing role in society, it is as though she casts a night-vision optic on the found-footage horror film that is twenty-first century warfare. I take from This Thing Called the World the interest in new technologies (which I especially explore in Part III) and the emphasis on 1989 as a turning point. Strangely, though, the 2003 Iraq War is first encountered in Ganguly’s book via Ian McEwan’s Saturday. In this novel, a rather objectionable middle-class man, Henry Perowne, expresses views of the war and Muslim migrants in Britain that are scarcely offset even by the whisper of his daughter’s contestatory voice because no Muslims’ perspectives are explored. Similarly, Martin Amis’s ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ provides Ganguly’s readers with their first window on 9/11. Ganguly praises ‘Amis’s deft strokes’ (2016: 49) in the short story and absorbs his phrase ‘the thing which is called the World’ into her title (Amis, qtd. in Ganguly 2016: 43). It is a missed opportunity that she does not challenge Amis’s preoccupation with the figure of the terrorist, his simplistic view of Atta as a man with a death wish, and the hateful nature of some of his public pronouncements on Muslims and Islam. Rushdie himself uses cataclysmic language in Joseph Anton, describing 1989 as ‘the year the world changed’ and the fatwa against him as the ‘first blackbird on the climbing frame’ (2012: 126, 4). In this last image, he alludes to the crows (not blackbirds) which congregate menacingly in the playground in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds (2005/1963).

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Rushdie’s idea, put forward in Joseph Anton, but anticipated by commentators including Hanif Kureishi (2005) and Kenan Malik (2009), that the fatwa against The Satanic Verses heralded absolute rupture in relation to freedom of expression versus Muslim sensitivities is an exaggeration to say the least. The protests in India against Angaraay (Shingavi 2014), a collection of socialist short stories published in 1933 by the Progressive Writers Association and soon banned by the Indian government in response to the public disorder; the H. G. Wells affair of 1938 when Muslims marched in London against Wells’s book A Short History of the World (Ahmed 2012: 42–44); and some small-scale demonstrations against Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette being screened in New York in 1986 (see Chambers 2011: 22) together repudiate this claim of newness entering the world. While we might dispute the scale and the axis on which the Rushdie affair as a turning point pivots, 1989 was the moment when Islamophobia became crystallized in Britain, and after which many Muslims increasingly saw themselves as constituting a separate community. Whereas national origins and race had previously been interpreted as the dominant attributes of particular migrant groups, it was after the Rushdie affair and then accelerated by 9/11 that religion came to the forefront in British debates about multiculturalism. This is evidenced by the fact that it was in 1997, four years before the World Trade Center attacks, that the Runnymede Trust published its influential report Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. The report identifies the Rushdie affair as ‘one of the formative, defining events in the stories not only of nations and communities but also of countless individuals’ (Runnymede 1997: 7). I would concur that this fin de la décennie affair, along with the First Iraq War, marked a turning point for Islam’s positioning as Britain’s new other. As for the US, clearly the word ‘Muslim’ has become more contentious since 9/11, but it would be erroneous to assume that in the 1990s it carried no negative connotations. Huntington published his clash of civilizations article early in the decade, in 1993, suggesting that a certain demonization was already under way. That same year, Time ran a cover headline ‘Hitting Back at Terrorists’ and included a cluster of five articles insinuating, in a similar manner to Huntington’s, that Islam was the new enemy. Rather than a straightforward literary history, the present monograph has ended up becoming a work of literary criticism. Evaluation

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is important in my discussion, but the book is not trying to establish a ranking of the novels I discuss according to religiosity, political stance, or aesthetic value. The post-Rushdie material has posed a conundrum of balancing critical versus literary–historical material, since I have much more critical commentary to negotiate in the contemporary era. Britain Through Muslim Eyes, as its title suggests, emphasized the Muslim author’s gaze on the United Kingdom. Drawing on the work of theorists from Jacques Lacan (1978/1973) to Jeremy Hawthorn (2006), I argued that images of eyes, optics, and the gaze dominated the texts produced by Muslim writers who spent time in Britain during the period 1780–1988. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors such as Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin and Mirza Abu Taleb Khan sought to reverse the Orientalist gaze, adapting the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey scene’ for themselves as Muslim subjects to star in (Pratt 1992: 201– 227). Examining contemporary Muslim fictions, I increasingly noticed a preoccupation with the other senses: touch, smell, taste, and hearing. I came to realize that visualism or ocularcentrism – the privileging of looking over other sensory perceptions – has led to relative neglect of the four remaining senses. In this book I therefore want to provide a more ‘full-bodied’ approach to Muslim writing (Howes 2005: 1). The chapters that follow, therefore, provide fine-grained exploration of this literature’s representations of the non-visual senses. Because of the book’s strong critical dimension, literary−historical materials support my readings but are not intended to be exhaustive. In Britain Through Muslim Eyes I stated that this sequel would begin with The Satanic Verses. However, my burgeoning interest in the post-Rushdie writers has led to the decision to leave a ‘Rushdie-shaped hole’ in this book.4 I find that the novel and subsequent affair is ‘ein zu weites Feld’: too big a subject (or field), as Theodor Fontane’s adulterous heroine Effi Briest puts it (Fontane 2009: 35). I have therefore provided only this brief account of Rushdie’s influence.5 Just as The Satanic Verses controversy casts a long shadow across a range of novels from the decades that follow, so too Rushdie himself is, to adapt his own words, a ‘visible but unseen’ presence in this monograph (1988: 241–256). Much of his fiction would also fit my theme of the senses, as has already been discussed by several fine scholars (Mukherjee 2006; Parashkevova 2009: 415–418; Ray 2018). But it is important to take sensory studies as a framework for analysing other Muslim writers so as to counter

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widespread assumptions that only secular authors evince this concentration on the sensuous. Let us now turn to more detailed discussion of my research contribution and its particular approach, remit, and scope.

In It What Is In It As We Have Seen, Muslims have found themselves in the crosshairs of media scrutiny and political concern since at least 1989, a phenomenon which has gathered momentum since 9/11. This book charts the development over three decades of a fascinating and important body of fiction by Muslim-identified authors. The trans- or sub-field of Muslim studies tends to be dominated by sociology and adjacent disciplines, but Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels champions the inclusion of humanities critical methodologies. It also defines new paradigms for literature that engage with, while going beyond, both postcolonial and sensory studies debates. The book is a selective critical exploration of the last 30 years, exploring case-study novelistic representations of and by Muslims in Britain. It traces the evolution of these portrayals from somewhat stereotypical depictions following the Rushdie affair to the diverse post-9/11, post-7/7, and post-Arab Spring work of Muslim-identified authors. My previous books, British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers (2011) and Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780−1988 (2015), helped to galvanize discussions about the place of Islam in contemporary British and South Asian writing. The current volume builds on that research, as well as studies of the five senses and ‘sensuous geographies’ (Rodaway 1994) of postcolonialLondon and devolutionary migrant writing. Taken together with Britain Through Muslim Eyes, the present monograph is groundbreaking because there is no comparable study of British Muslim writing. Rehana Ahmed’sWriting British Muslims (2015) focuses on authors’ engagement with social class and disadvantage among South Asian Muslims. Geoffrey Nash’sWriting Muslim Identity (2012) examines Muslim writers from Arab, African, and Persian as well as South Asian backgrounds but only includes one chapter on Britain. Esra Mirze Santesso’s (2013) monograph explores the ‘disorientation’ of British Muslim female immigrant characters as described in post-9/11 novels, mostly by womenwriters. In Islamic Postcolonialism: Islam and Muslim Identities in Four Contemporary British Novels, Hasan Majed explores

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‘Islam and Muslim identities’ (2015: 52, 75, 96, and so on) in novels by British Muslim authors. However, one never quite escapes the sense that the author is awarding these writers points according to the perceived ardour of their religious beliefs, with Aboulela as the winner, followed by Fadia Faqir and Ali, with Kureishiand Rushdie bringing up the rear. Sadia Abbas’s (2014) and Peter Morey’s (2018b) books, very different in political outlook but both describing urgent new trajectories for scholarship, take a global approach to Muslim writing rather than my close focus on Britain. This small but growing field offers an urgently-needed discussion of a contemporary topic. The present monograph contributes vitally to the field, offering a cohesive, critical, and historicized account of a wide corpus of British Muslim writing. Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels will demonstrate that the works of Muslim-identified writers have been especially politicized in the years following the Rushdieaffair and 9/11: events which have also influenced the ways these books are absorbed or responded to by the literary canon. As well as marking the political watershed explored in the previous section, 1989 was a focal moment for cultural production, and especially for literary outputs. The 1988 publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the fatwa a year later prompted an outpouring of fictional texts by both devout and non-practising Muslim authors. Much of this fiction centres on the lives of British-based members of the transnational faith group of Islam. Not only did the sheer volume of literary depictions of British Muslims increase, but there were also discernible changes in relation, first, to the genres employed and, second, to the way Muslims were portrayed. Somewhat surprisingly in light of the seriousness of the death threats against Rushdie and his publishers, comedy emerged as a particularly popular literary mode through which writers examined British Muslims and Islam. In Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction (2006), Michael L. Ross situates Kureishi’sThe Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album in relation to comedy and laughter. And in an essay on Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Kureishi, Helga Ramsey-Kurz highlights ‘the importance of not being earnest’, writing of humour ‘both as a viable political stance and as a powerful, if not as the only antidote to dogma’ (2005: 85). Although not my primary concern in this book, my analysis in Part I (on Kureishi’s and Ahdaf Soueif’s 1990s writing) draws out the humour manifest in both their novels, particularly a slapstick comedy rooted in the body and a liberal and jocose use of swear words relating to body parts.

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Sexuality and the haptic sensibility were heightened preoccupations and often treated with levity among authors of Muslim heritage in the decade following the Rushdie affair, perhaps as a way of distancing themselves from the perceived sexual austerity of the protestors. This is also important in terms of representation, as a counter-discourse against hegemonic portrayals of Muslims. Just such a counter-discourse has been explicitly highlighted in a number of recent anthologies of short fiction, most notably The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write, in which the editor, Sabrina Mahfouz, states: ‘one of the aims of this anthology is to dispel the narrow image of what a Muslim woman – particularly a British Muslim woman – looks and lives like’ (2017: 8). More importantly, perhaps, apart from the two authors I discuss in Part I, there are several other 1990s texts I could draw on to support my argument that touch is a means by which these authors explore questions surrounding knowledge, desire, and violence, including Farhana Sheikh’s The Red Box (1991), Zulfikar Ghose’s The Triple Mirror of the Self (1994/1992), Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih’s Gardens of the Night (1995), and Rukhsana Ahmad’s The Hope Chest (1996). For these resistant writers, ‘Muslim’ moved from being an identity marker that was worn relatively lightly in literary texts (with class, gender, and ethnicity being more important to most pre-1989 authors), to a post-Rushdiean fascination with Islam, especially what was then termed its ‘fundamentalist’ tendencies. To construct my argument in Part I, I investigate two multisensory 1990s novels, Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and Kureishi’s The Black Album, concentrating on the authors’ explorations of touch. In these novels, Soueif and Kureishi keep circling back to discussion of various forms of touch, from agamic hugging to sadistic torture, which is why I take the haptic as my focus in this Part. In the wake of the northern English riots of 2001, the attacks on the United States later that year, and the onset of the ‘War on Terror’, there was a further surge in British fiction’s preoccupation with Islam. Other non-Muslim British authors such as Nigel Williams (1993), former-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson (2005), Martyn Waites (2008), and Sebastian Faulks (2009) fictionalized sensationalist topics such as Muslim faith schools, terrorism, and the figure of the violent extremist. This kind of pigeonholing of the Muslim experience is damaging, with literary depictions reinforcing stereotypes from mainstream British media and vice versa. I want to leave behind the well-worn recourse to white, non-Muslim men’s take on the War on Terror and its repercussions,

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attending instead to the voices of Muslim-identified writers. These writers have more to say, both celebratory and critical, about Islam and Muslims than their non-Muslim counterparts who trade in a limited set of ideas. From M. Y. Alam’s (1998, 2002, 2012) thrillers and Ayisha Malik’s chick lit (2016, 2017), to literary fiction such as Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996) and Gravel Heart (2017), the increase in attention paid to Islam and to characters of Muslim heritage in British Muslim fiction is due to a turning point which is not solely – as is commonly assumed – 9/11 and its aftermath, but owes much to the Rushdie affair of late 1988 onwards. My hope is that this monograph will make an important contribution to debates about literature and multiculturalism in Britain. I use the different senses to structure the book, looking at – and listening to, touching, tasting, and smelling – ten novels. I explore Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sunand Kureishi’s The Black Album under the rubric of touch; Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and Ali’s Brick Lane via ‘postcolognial’ attention to smell; Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus, Yasmin Crowther’s The Saffron Kitchen, and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret according to gustatory experience; Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane in relation to sound; and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West with regard to sound, but also posthuman sensory perception. There is a great deal to say about the five senses in these texts and the approach also allows me to offer supple critiques of my key authors’ textual politics. This book balances some frequently-discussed novels (Kureishi’s The Black Album and Ali’s Brick Lane in particular) with some that are much less written on (for example, Crowther’s The Saffron Kitchen and Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane). Approaching these texts through the senses opens up a very different set of readings and analyses, even in those texts which have amassed a significant critical hinterland. There is also, however, a certain arbitrariness about this. Of course, all the novels I discuss in the book evoke several, if not all, of the senses, but I am selective in pursuing particular arguments. And I do not hesitate to cross-reference already-analysed novels in later chapters if it is useful to do so. Although I am constructing Soueif and Kureishi as tactile writers, for instance, they are both also interested in how people listen to and respond to music, and I do ‘touch on’ the sense of hearing in their texts. For Soueif, music is an important vehicle of resistance, as in the satirical songs of Sheikh Imam criticizing the Egyptian regime.

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Kureishi, meanwhile, is seduced by pop’s sensual and sexual energies, an aspect of his work which has already been accorded sustained critical scrutiny (Smyth 2008: 182–184, 219–220; Pereira-Ares 2018: 59–104). Similarly, Nadeem Aslam, whose novel Maps for Lost Lovers I explore for its ‘olfactory factor’ could equally have been mined for its auditory material. Given this sonic sensitivity, Aslam’s depictions of the great Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s ‘perfumed longueurs’ (Aslam 2004: 187) form an important strand of Chapter 3’s argument. Read for his interest in taste in this book, I have discussed elsewhere Robin Yassin-Kassab’s love of hip hop and dub poetry in The Road from Damascus (Chambers 2012: 126–127). Music is omnipresent in other novels of the 2000s that I assess; for example, Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (like Yassin-Kassab’s novel approached via the sense of taste) in its early sections throbs to the disco beats of Boney M, Michael Jackson, and the Bee Gees, but later loses itself in the evocatively unadorned sound of the azan or call to prayer. By the 2010s there is nostalgia for the materiality of records and CDs alongside a turn to digitized sounds, some of them sinister (like the crack of a sword through the neck that Kamila Shamsie’s male protagonist Parvaiz has the job of recording for a Daesh propaganda video). More than any of the other authors, Mohsin Hamid, in his novel Exit West, borrows from digital technologies to innovate with literary form and stretch the boundaries of human sensory perceptions. All of this highlights the arbitrariness of divisions when it comes to the single sense of hearing. I could do the same for taste, touch, and smell, but will leave this until the individual chapters. Additionally, as we will see in the next section, my chapters show that the senses themselves intertwine. We do not just taste our food, but also look at, touch, and smell it, for example; just as we regard, hear, taste, and sniff our lovers as well as touching them. The concepts of synaesthesia, intersensoriality, and the multidirectional nature of the senses thus recur across these pages. The book is not just organized around the senses but is cross-hatched by the decades. Again, there is some caprice to that decision since, as Alwyn W. Turner writes: the division of history by dates is a necessarily arbitrary affair. Decades and centuries are artificial, crude concepts that seldom fit the objective facts. They do, however, have an impact on the subjective experience of time, the turning of the years affecting how people see the evolution of their societies. (2014: 1)

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Crude as these divisions may be, Turner is right to highlight that each decade leaves behind a certain sense for the individuals who lives through it. Accordingly, there are particular features of the last three decades that I have tried to identify. If the 1990s was a decade of relative levity (as highlighted below) in which the sense of touch rose to the fore, the 2000s were darker years of surveillance and rendition, which is why in Part II I concentrate on the senses most closely associated with race and gender prejudice: smell and taste. Of course we are still living through the 2010s, so it may be too early for generalizations. Nonetheless, the present decade has seen the normalization and advancement of technological approaches to everyday living, which is why Part III’s emphasis on sound technologies and the posthuman condition is apt. The monograph is bookended by close textual analysis of individual writers, while the heart of the book contains longer chapters with pairings (and one triptych) of authors. There is an equal balance of men and women writers, and a good range of national heritage in addition to the British dimension. The five male authors are: Hanif Kureishi (Pakistan/India), Nadeem Aslam (Pakistan), Robin YassinKassab (Syria), Tabish Khair (India), and Mohsin Hamid (Pakistan), and the five women writers comprise: Ahdaf Soueif (Egypt), Monica Ali (Bangladesh), Leila Aboulela (Sudan/Egypt), Yasmin Crowther (Iran), and Kamila Shamsie (Pakistan). Four of these authors have a white parent (Kureishi, Yassin-Kassab, Ali, and Crowther), and this quartet also represent the only British-born writers of the ten. Khair, alone among my chosen authors, is not and has never been a long-term resident in Britain. The Indian writer lives in Denmark, but has spent two short periods in Yorkshire, as John Tilney Writer in Residence at the University of York in summer 2016 and again as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds in 2017–2018. His fascination with Britain and decision to set two of his well-researched novels (The Thing About Thugs [Khair 2010] as well as Just Another Jihadi Jane, discussed in Chapter 5) in the country justifies his inclusion. In this book, as in my previous ones, I want to take an inclusive approach to questions of ‘Britishness’, one that is more important than ever in these peri-Brexit days. It was inevitable that there had to be exclusions. I especially regret the decision to leave out Elif Shafak, for I would have liked to discuss a Turkish author. Moreover, her novel Honour would have fit well in the taste chapter, given that her protagonist Pembe experiences racism in a bakery before falling in love with a chef. However, her novel was (just)

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published in the 2010s (Shafak 2015/2011), so for my exploration of Honour, I direct you to one of this book’s online paratexts (Chambers 2016). In postcolonial studies, Shital Pravinchandra and I argue, ‘the novel, poetry, and to some extent drama remain the literary modes of choice, while genre fiction, nonfiction, and short fiction receive relatively little attention’ (Chambers and Pravinchandra 2018: 342). While acknowledging the marginalization of other forms, I confine myself to the literary fiction novel in this volume, as I am scrutinizing more popular genre, short, and nonfiction forms in detail as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Storying Relationships (see https:// www.sheffield.ac.uk/storyingrelationships and Chambers et al. 2018). There is more than enough material for a study of the literary fiction novel since, as I argue in Chapter 5, this form is a uniquely flexible and border-crossing one, bringing together history, politics, and sociology, while retaining a close focus on people. That said, Muhammad Khan’s I Am Thunder (2018) would have tessellated with Chapter 5’s readings of representations of the radicalized Muslim subject in Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. Because Khan’s work is categorized within the genre of Young Adult or YA fiction, I hope to explore his promising debut elsewhere (Phillips et al., forthcoming). In Britain Through Muslim Eyes, I found that in the period 1780– 1980, English was firmly a minority language for authors of Muslim heritage, who more commonly turned to their mother tongues of Persian, Arabic, or Urdu for literary production. Translation was thus an important theme for that monograph, and most of my key texts were works in translation. While, as I demonstrated (Chambers 2015), most of the pre-1980s authors were elite, ‘England-returned’ sojourners, in the post-Second World War period a more permanent ‘myth of return’ class of writers emerges. Many, though not all, of these authors choose – or have no choice but to use – English as their language for literary expression. As such, this volume has ended up being a purely Anglophone affair, albeit scrutinizing an English richly seasoned and remoulded by its encounters with the diction and grammar of the three above-mentioned languages. The front cover image is taken from ‘In It What Is In It: 09’ (it is ninth in a series on the Afghan-born poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207– 1273) by British Pakistani Muslim artist Fatima Zahra Hassan). Her title

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‘In It What Is In It’ references Rumi’s collection of discourses Fihi ma Fihi, which translates as It Is What It Is or In It What Is In It (Marman 2000: xvii). The medium used is paper collage from leftover wrapping paper and graphite on a found takeaway package. There is an Arabic imprimatur at the bottom right, which reads, ‘Amal by Fatima Zahra Hassan’ (‘Amal’ means the execution of the artwork).6 Hassan happened to find some Costa coffee takeaway packaging in the woods on a rainy day as she returned from a school run with her daughter. This packaging fascinated her, as she thought it looked like a person’s brown face, and she decided to take it home. In due course she turned to the packaging to make something for her daughter, as she too loved it. Hassan is a painter who rarely works in other media, but the found object inspired her to create a paper collage. She cut small circles out of one of the patterns from the Pepin Press book of giftwrap paper, Islamic Designs (van Roojen 2013). Next, she stuck two small circles on the two coffee cup holes in the takeaway carrier and drew a diagonal grid with a pencil. To me, Hassan’s artwork looks like a mobile phone case, while incorporating the main features of Muslim art (calligraphy, Arabesques, and geometrical designs). I appreciate the way it combines the contemporary with the classic, and constructions of East with West. This cover aims to convey this book’s information communication technology component; the hybridity of many of the key authors’ work; the sense of taste (in the takeaway packaging); the emphasis on people (the ‘brown face’) and religion (the Rumi allusion); and the long timespan embraced by this volume and its prequel.

Coming to Our Senses This study breaks new ground not only in its contribution to our understanding of Muslim-inspired writing, but also as regards literary criticism focusing on the senses, which until recently has been scarce. Writing on prose by Walter Pater, Gustave Flaubert, and Guy de Maupassant, Derek Stanford was an early critic to seek answers to two questions: ‘what are the senses for, and which are their legitimate uses’? (1968: 37). However, few scholars have gone on to pursue Stanford’s enquiries, and certainly the question of morality which he quietly raises through the word ‘legitimate’ has withered on the vine, to be revitalized, I will argue, by some of these Muslim authors.

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The next major academic to survey the field was Louise Vinge who, in The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition (1975), examined representations of the senses in Romanticism, James Joyce, and the twentieth-century poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. H. Auden, inter alia. More recently, the collection Literature and Sensation edited by Anthony Uhlmann et al. (2009) includes a few postcolonial writers – such as J. M. Coetzee, Vikram Seth, and Lloyd Jones – alongside more mainstream and canonical authors. Finally, in Literature’s Sensuous Geographies (2014), Sten Pultz Moslund is to my knowledge the first critic to have applied sensory studies methodologies to (post)colonial literature from Joseph Conrad to David Dabydeen and cultural theory from Deleuze and Guattari to Martha Nussbaum. This growing field means that it is now possible to speak of a (post- or decolonial) literature of the senses, in much the same way that Constance Classen pioneered the anthropology of the senses and David Howes and Mark M. Smith the history of the senses. Although I have separated out the senses for the purposes of my six chapters, it should be noted that all five senses braid together in interesting ways in these texts and more widely. As Vinge has it (1975: 166), ‘the senses go together as all the threads of a weave’. David Howes, following Steven Connor and Michel Serres, similarly depicts the senses as knotted together in what he terms a multidirectional interactivity or ‘intersensoriality’. The knot, he argues, is a helpful image, for just as in weaving or knotwork individual elements are hard to separate, so too are the senses ‘imbricated or twisted’ together (Howes 2005: 9). The sense of touch particularly overspills boundaries, with the skin covering the whole body and making it sometimes tricky to disentangle the haptic from the other senses, as we will observe in Part I. And there is, I think, an especially close relationship between smell and taste, which is why I have put my analysis of those senses together in a single section: Part II. Using the term ‘intersensorality’ in a similar way to literary critics’ deployment of ‘intertextuality’, sensory studies experts regularly lay emphasis on the way the senses work ‘in concert’ (Howes 1991: 186; Smith 2007: 1). Then there is the unusual physiological phenomenon of synaesthesia, whereby for some people inelastic divisions between the senses break down. Even for those of us who do not smell colours or taste sounds, our sensual lived experiences are often mixed. Intersensorial images like Aslam’s ‘perfumed longueurs’, quoted above to describe

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Nusrat’s singing, thus limn our impressions more vividly than a discrete five-sense model. Finally, Howes writes briefly on the subject of ‘displacement from the sensory and social environment’ (2005: 8). In Chapter 3, I adapt the work of Derek Gregory (2004), Jahan Ramazani (2009), and Daniel O’Gorman (2015) to explore just such a displacement in the form of a ‘connective dissonance’ depicted in Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and Ali’s Brick Lane. Writing the senses, and the body more broadly, is often, for authors of Muslim heritage in Britain, an act of protest. This resistance is double-edged, pointing at the marginalization or cover-up of non-­ heteronormative sexualities and women’s rights that sometimes occurs in Muslim communities, but also, and more pervasively, at successive British governments’ attempts to surveil, control, and suppress Muslim bodies. In her searing analysis in Deport, Deprive, Extradite (2018), Nisha Kapoor explores the increasing securitization of the British state. In doing so, she exposes the use of racial profiling to deprive certain (brown) bodies of passports, whereupon citizenship is changed from a right to a privilege, statelessness turned into a punishment, and paperwork weaponized to keep Muslims out of, or under subjugation in, the security state that we all inhabit (2018: 6–14). The interest in touch, smell, taste, and hearing in these texts may be read as a challenge to the state’s gaze of surveillance. Dominant depictions of Muslims are often scopic and spectacular, so many of the chosen writers turn to ‘everyday’ sensations rather than to the sensational (see Procter 2006). For Aboulela’s Najwa, Yassin-Kassab’s Sami, Khair’s Jamilla, and Shamsie’s Parvaiz, among others, these characters’ estrangement from their bodies reflects a wider alienation from the national body. Whereas turning scrutiny back onto the colonial gazer seemed to an earlier, returnee generation an appropriate literary strategy, this later myth of return group is living in a different, securitized age. They are no longer content simply to reverse the gaze, and instead lay stress on the other senses. I would not want to be misconstrued as creating a new ‘great divide’ theory (Smith 2007: 8–11) and suggesting that after the turning point of Rushdie’s most Enlightenment-influenced novel The Satanic Verses there was no interest in sight. Certainly, things changed, and they changed even more after 9/11. But this was not a complete rupture; the old can overlie the new, and these authors do concern themselves with vision, if not so much as the other senses.

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There is, it appears, a need for what Walter D. Mignolo calls a ‘body-politics of knowledge’ (2011: xxi−xxii) if we want to create a truly decolonial way of thinking. Mignolo writes: Empirical knowledge comes to us through our senses. Sensing would be, then, a parallel activity to reasoning. […] For decolonial thinkers, the senses (aiesthesis, affects) are also foundational, and Frantz Fanon taught us much about it. […] [K]nowledge starts in and from the heart, and […] the mind categorically processes what the heart dictates. […] [T]he heart senses not just the universality of human beings but also […] the body feels according to its location in the colonial matrix of power, and according to patriarchal and racial hierarchies. […] [K]nowledge begins with the senses. (Mignolo 2011: 203)

My monograph takes as its point of departure the rallying cry that knowledge begins and ends with sensory perception; indeed, Part I has in its title Soueif’s idea that ‘it was only through touch that we really knew things’ (1999/1992: 428). At stake in the excerpt from Mignolo’s work is the idea of a coming ‘sensual revolution’ (Howes 2005: 1), after which the senses will be granted their rightful epistemological status. The revolution of which Mignolo speaks would be predicated on the work of such radical theorists as Fanon, who argued for the reconstruction of psyches damaged by racism and for the need for the world’s ‘wretched’ to restore meaning and merit to their own ideas and ways of living. Indeed, Fanon is a crucial theorist whose work surfaces at intervals in this book. His work, and that of Mignolo, prompts us to revalue the senses as sources of wisdom. It is worth pointing out, though, that as David Howes shows in Empire of the Senses, ‘[t]he human sensorium […] never exists in a natural state’ (2005: 3). Rather than viewing them as natural, we need to regard the senses as cultural constructs. As poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists have demonstrated that knowledge is not universal but deeply entwined with power structures, so too have sensory studies scholars revealed that our understanding of the senses has been shaped by what Mignolo calls the ‘colonial matrix of power’. And the two clusters of scholarship are not always separate. For instance, Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish reminds us that the body is ‘directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they

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invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Foucault 1979: 25). The senses may be read as ‘subjugated knowledges’, thinking back to Foucault’s theorization of worldviews that have been dismissed as naive and relegated to a low place on the hierarchy, ‘beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity’ (1980: 82). Yet, despite the reach of colonial power and knowledge, how people interpret sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch still varies across cultures. When Mignolo writes about the heart as the seat of aiesthesis or affect, he seems unaware that for many South Asians the equivalent organ would be the liver (see Chambers 2015: 157–158). And, as we will see later (pp. 96–98; p. 112, en. 20), for this same group the nose has resonances of dignity and its violation. Sensory experience is therefore, as we shall see, saturated with context-specific knowledge and values. In this Introduction, I have explained the reasons for Rushdie’s exclusion from this book, notwithstanding the impact of the Satanic Verses affair on literary output and Muslim self-identification. I laid out the line of enquiry for this book and its prequel, drawing together the threads of an argument that 1989 was the moment after which Islamophobia calcified in its present form. I moved on to outline my attention to the senses, presenting a case for the value and urgency of taking a sensory studies approach to writing by Muslim-identified authors in Britain. This is important because for these authors writing the senses is often a bidirectional act of protest. Some of the key authors denounce a misogyny and sexual repression they identify with particular Muslim communities. Yet their protest is especially directed at secular culture’s ocularcentrism and at the British establishment’s surveillance, domination, and violence towards Muslim bodies. In this monograph I will explore these writers’ political ideas, arguing that literary fiction has more to say than sociological accounts, not least because of its multisensory quality.

Notes 1. Because my writers tend to use a lot of italicization, for pages on end when it comes to Hasina’s letters in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, unless otherwise stated it should be assumed that all quotations in italics from here until the end of the book had the emphasis in the original. 2. Homi K. Bhabha describes Stokes’ book as an ‘exemplary history’ (1992: 89), while in The Promise of Happiness Sara Ahmed positions it as one of ‘several key historical works’ on utilitarianism and empire that have ‘influenced postcolonial critics’ (2010: 256, n. 6).

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3. Although CNN International was launched in 1985, it was not until the tumultuous year of 1989 that Europe was to have its first 24-hour news channel in the form of Britain’s Sky News. Fox News and CNBC Europe were inaugurated in 1996, BBC News 24 in 1997, and Al Jazeera began broadcasting 24 hours a day in 1999. 4. This is a twist on Rushdie’s ‘God-shaped hole’ (2006/1981: 6−7); see also p. 154. 5. Later I will draw on my research in his archive at the Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Library, some already conducted and some still to be done, in order to fill the Rushdie-shaped hole fully in a separate long article or short volume. 6. Interestingly, ‘Amal’ is also the name of one of my key authors’ protagonists, in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999).

Works Cited Abdel-Magied, Yassmin (2016) Who Do You Think I Am? Sydney: Vintage. Ahmad, Rukhsana (1996) The Hope Chest. London: Virago. Ahmed, Rehana (2015) Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Alam, M. Y. (1998) Annie Potts Is Dead. Castleford: Springboard. ——— (2002) Kilo. Glasshoughton: Route. ——— (2012) Red Laal. Pontefract: Route. al-Faqih, Ahmad Ibrahim (1995) Gardens of the Night. London: Quartet. Allen, Chris (2010) Islamophobia. Farnham: Ashgate. Aslam, Nadeem (2004) Maps for Lost Lovers. London: Faber and Faber. Chambers, Claire (2011) British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ——— (2012) ‘“Sexy Identity-Assertion”: Choosing Between Sacred and Secular Identities in Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus’. In Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin (eds.), Culture, Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing. New York: Routledge. 117–131. ——— (2015) Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780– 1988. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ——— (2016) ‘“Home Had Come Here”: Connective Dissonance and Split Selves in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and Elif Shafak’s Honour’. 3 Quarks Daily. 23 May. https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/05/homehad-come-here-connective-dissonance-and-split-selves-in-leila-aboulelas-thetranslator-and-elif.html. Accessed 22 September 2018. Chambers, Claire, and Shital Pravinchandra (2018) ‘Guest Editorial: Postcolonial Past, World Present, Global Futures?’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 53.3: 339–344.

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——— (2019) ‘“Sexual Misery” or “Happy British Muslims”? Contemporary Depictions of Muslim Sexuality’. Ethnicities 19.1: 66–94. Faulks, Sebastian (2009) A Week in December. London: Hutchinson. Fontane, Theodor (2009) Effi Briest. Husum: Hamburger Lesehefte Verlag. Foucault, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Alan Sheridan (trans.). London: Penguin. Ganguly, Debjani (2016) This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ghose, Zulfikar (1994/1992) The Triple Mirror of the Self. London: Bloomsbury. Gregory, Derek (2004) The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Gurnah, Abdulrazak (1996) Admiring Silence. London: Hamish Hamilton. ——— (2017) Gravel Heart. London: Bloomsbury. Hawthorn, Jeremy (2006) ‘Theories of the Gaze’. In Patricia Waugh (ed.), Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 508–518. Hitchcock, Alfred (dir.) (2005/1963) The Birds. Actors: Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, and Jessica Tandy. London: Universal. Howes, David (1991) ‘Sensorial Anthropology’. In David Howes (ed.), The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 167–191. ——— (2005) Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Johnson, Boris (2005) Seventy-Two Virgins. London: HarperCollins. Kapoor, Nisha (2018) Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century Extremism. London: Verso. Khair, Tabish (2010) The Thing About Thugs. Noida, India: HarperCollins. Kupferberg, Feiwel (2012) ‘Conclusion: Theorizing Turning Points and Decoding Narratives’. In Karla B. Hackstaff and Feiwel Kupferberg (eds.), Biography and Turning Points in Europe and America. Bristol: Policy. 227–259. Lacan, Jacques (1978/1973) ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a’. In Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.) and Alan Sheridan (trans.), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: W. W. Norton. 65–119. Macey, Marie (2009) Multiculturalism, Religion and Women: Doing Harm by Doing Good? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mahfouz, Sabrina (ed.) (2017) The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write. London: Saqi. Majed, Hasan Saeed (2015) Islamic Postcolonialism: Islam and Muslim Identities in Four Contemporary British Novels. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Malik, Ayisha (2016) Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged. London: Twenty7. Kindle. ——— (2017) The Other Half of Happiness. London: Zaffre.

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Marman, Doug (2000) ‘Introduction’. In Discourses of Rumi: Based on the Original Translation by A. J. Arberry. Ames, IA: Omphaloskepsis. vi–xix. McDonald, Donna (2009) ‘The Silence of Sounds’. In Anthony Uhlmann et al. (eds.), Literature and Sensation. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. 173–183. Mignolo, Walter D. (2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morey, Peter (2018b) Islamophobia and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. Moslund, Sten Pultz (2014) Literature’s Sensuous Geographies: Postcolonial Matters of Place. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mukherjee, Ankhi (2006) ‘Fissured Skin, Inner Ear Radio, and a Telepathic Nose: The Senses as Media in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’. Paragraph 29.3: 55–76. Nash, Geoffrey (2007) The Anglo-Arab Encounter: Fiction and Autobiography by Arab Writers in English. Bern: Peter Lang. O’Gorman, Daniel (2015) Fictions of the War on Terror: Difference and the Transnational 9/11 Novel. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ——— (2017) ‘“Dark Newnesses”: The Failures of Joseph Anton’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52.3: 455–466. Parashkevova, Vassilena (2009) ‘New Cities Out of Old Ones: Catoptric Echoes and Reversals in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45.4: 414–425. Pereira-Ares, Noemí (2018) Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives: From the Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Phillips, Richard, Claire Chambers, et al. (forthcoming) ‘Pakistani Heritage and Sexual Relationship Stories’. Ethnic and Racial Studies. Pratt, Mary Louise (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Procter, James (2006) ‘The Postcolonial Everyday’. New Formations 58: 62–80. Ramazani, Jahan (2009) A Transnational Poetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ray, Shakuntala (2018) ‘Profane Cooks and Minor Condiments: Chutnification and “Cooking the World” in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Online First. https://doi. org/10.1177/0021989418808838. Accessed 31 December 2018. Rodaway, Paul (1994) Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place. London: Routledge. Ross, Michael L. (2006) Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Runnymede Trust (1997) Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. London: Runnymede.

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Rushdie, Salman (1988) The Satanic Verses. London: Viking. ——— (1998) ‘Make Your Freezer Look Like Dennis Nilsen’s: Salman Rushdie Reviews How to Eat by Nigella Lawson’. Observer. 27 September. 14. ——— (2003) Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002. New York: Random House. ——— (2012) Joseph Anton. London: Jonathan Cape. Ruthven, Malise (1991/1990) A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam. London: Hogarth. Santesso, Esra Mirze (2013) Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shafak, Elif (2015/2011) Honour. London: Penguin. Shamsie, Muneeza (2005) And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women. New Delhi: Women Unlimited. Sheikh, Farhana (1991) The Red Box. London: Women’s Press. Shingavi, Snehal (2014) Angaaray. New Delhi: Penguin. Kindle. Smith, Mark M. (2007) Sensory History: An Introduction. Oxford: Berg. Smyth, Gerry (2008) Music in Contemporary British Fiction: Listening to the Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stokes, Eric (1959) The English Utilitarians and India. London: Oxford University Press. Sunnah.com (n.d.) ‘Martyr and Musk’. https://sunnah.com/search/?q=martyr+and+musk. Accessed 17 May 2018. van Roojen, Pepin (2013) Islamic Designs: Gift and Creative Paper Book: Vol. 32. Amsterdam: Pepin Press. Vinge, Louise (1975) The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition. Lund: LiberLäromedel. Waites, Martyn (2008) White Riot. London: Simon & Schuster. Weldon, Fay (1989) Sacred Cows. London: Chatto & Windus. Williams, Nigel (1993) East of Wimbledon. London: Faber and Faber.

PART I

The 1990s: ‘It Was Only Through Touch That We Really Knew Things’

CHAPTER 1

‘Touch Me, Baby’: Ahdaf Soueif ’s In the Eye of the Sun

Introduction to Part I More than halfway through Ahdaf Soueif’s lengthy masterpiece In the Eye of the Sun, the protagonist Asya al-Ulama is suffering from unslaked lust for Mario, the best friend of her absent husband, Saif Madi. Trying to quell her desire by curling up with a hot-water bottle and – significantly – a copy of Anna Karenina, Asya recalls an aunt’s grief when her husband had died of cancer some seven years earlier. Asya’s father, the aunt’s elder brother, had instructed his daughter to sit with her aunt and ensure she was in unceasing physical contact with the frenzied woman. Suppressing the temptation to steal away for a tryst with Saif, then merely her boyfriend, Asya did as she was told, rubbing, stroking, and patting her aunt’s body as the latter sobbed and keened. Her father later explained that this human touch had been important, since ‘it was only through touch that we really knew things, […] it was only by other people’s touching us that we knew we were here at all’ (1999/1992: 428).1 If this idea of knowing things through the sense of touch seems oxymoronic, that is probably due to the longstanding and widespread belief that ‘touch was radically inferior to sight and […] tactility was bereft of intellectual context’ (Smith 2007: 93). Yet the patriarch’s remark confirms an idea gaining traction through the development of sensory studies in the 1990s that there is a ‘tacit wisdom of the body’ (Pallasmaa 2005/1996: 26). One leading scholar of literature and sensation, Sander L. Gilman, shows that rather than being inferior to sight, touch is in fact © The Author(s) 2019 C. Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52089-0_1

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‘the most complex and the most undifferentiated of the senses’ (1993: 199). Another prominent academic from sensory studies, Constance Classen (2012), calls touch ‘the deepest sense’. There are different kinds of touch, which include sensual, sexual, kinship, and violent, and I deal with all of these registers of touch in the next two chapters. Also discussed is the broader field of the ‘haptic’, by which I mean not only touch but also feelings of the body in motion, its sensitivity to temperature, and how it arranges itself within space. Both the chapters in this Part, this one on Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun (1999/1992) and the next on Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995a), invest heavily in the notion that the haptic is connected to knowledge, and that others’ touch facilitates a better understanding of ontology. As Diane Ackerman declaims in her masterpiece A Natural History of the Senses: [A]bove all, touch teaches us that life has depth and contour; it makes our sense of the world and ourself three-dimensional. Without that intricate feel for life there would be no artists, whose cunning is to make sensory and emotional maps, and no surgeons, who dive through the body with their fingers. (1990: 96)

The body is also central to my chosen authors’ discussion (for instance, Kureishi would go on to write a novella entitled ‘The Body’ [2002]). As we will see, through the issue of touch both Kureishi and Soueif engage with a multiplicity of bodily representations: the gendered body, the disabled body, the pregnant body, the brutalized body, the racial body, and the dressed body. What is more, the haptic is closely linked to the body as a whole. Of course, all senses are located in the physical body, but, as Gilman points out elsewhere, ‘touch seems to be [a] […] quality of the entire body’ (Gilman 1991: 31; emphasis added). This idea has a long tradition within Western philosophical thought (Connor 2015). The alleged ‘inferiority’ of touch vis-à-vis the other senses is likely to be linked to an intellectual denial of the body due to the wide influence of Cartesian mind–body dualism. Rejecting this denial to reinstate the importance of the body makes plain the connections between corporeal touch and sexuality, which are key to my analysis in the next two chapters. It is no coincidence that these 1990s texts are so interested in touch, the body, and sexuality. Both were written in the interregnum between the fall of communism in 1989 and 2001’s inception of the War on

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Terror. Although wars raged in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere, this was a decade when erotically-charged as well as violent touch took centre stage in global politics. As Laura Kipnis argues, ‘If the ’90s was an adulterous decade, it follows that it was a particularly scandalous one too (or how would we know about the adultery?)’ (2003: 164). In 1998, Bill Clinton caused a scandal by becoming only the second US president to be impeached. Like Andrew Johnson in 1868, he was ultimately acquitted. Clinton’s impeachment was partly for perjury on the grounds of his notorious lie, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky’, when questioned under oath about his extramarital affair with a White House intern. In the UK, John Major’s family values policy of ‘Back to Basics’ proved hypocritical as a series of scandals relating to infidelity, sexual deviance, and corruption rocked the Conservative government and led to the resignations of such ministers as David Mellor and Tim Yeo. This Anglo-American ‘sleaze’ showed that touching the wrong person in the wrong place could jeopardize or entirely derail a political career. Outside of high politics, ‘scandalous fictions’ proliferated (Morrison and Watkins 2007) – within the postcolonial field at least. Both the authors discussed in this Part, Ahdaf Soueif and Hanif Kureishi, courted controversy with their novels under discussion here; indeed, there were calls for Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun to be banned in her home country of Egypt because of its sexual content.2 It is crucial to take a long view of the 1990s in this regard, so as to think back to the watershed year of 1989 and Rushdie’s combustible novel The Satanic Verses, as discussed in the Introduction. That was also the year of the Second Summer of Love, and rave culture fuelled by drugs would colour the entire decade that followed, leaving an indelible imprint on Kureishi’s The Black Album into the bargain. Ecstasy is often seen as the quintessentially 1990s drug that epitomized the turn towards sensual, pleasurable touch. In 1990s Britain, sexual harassment both in the workplace and outside was commonplace, and women tended not to lodge complaints for fear of ­victim-blaming. The mainstream’s blind eye to rape was not lost on some producers of alternative popular culture (for instance, Courtney Love’s Riot Grrrl band Hole released a song in 1994 entitled ‘Asking for It’). The danger of sexual assault made the broadly safer spaces of raves attractive to women. In her essay ‘Sampling Sexuality’ (1993), Barbara Bradby argues that dance music venues were customarily more secure for women than traditional nightclubs revolving around pop, rock, and copious alcohol.

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In this regard, and very different from the polymorphously perverse love and peace of the repetitive beats scene was the rise of lad and ladette culture a few years later. It was in the mid-1990s that monthly ‘lads’ mags’ emerged as a significant force in publishing. These were lifestyle magazines aimed at men such as FHM, Maxim, and Loaded that featured women in various states of undress on their covers and across their pages. As for ladettes, Carolyn Jackson gives a helpful definition: ‘The term “ladette” is a mid-1990s creation of the UK media. […] In general, “ladettes” are presented as crude, loud, bold, (hetero)sexually assertive, hedonistic and into alcohol and smoking’ (2006: 11). Imelda Whelehan explains further that the ladette’s ostensibly assertive behaviour masks the fact she only pays lip service to gender equality and has done little to combat the objectification of the male gaze (2000: 9). Reminiscing about her ladette activities in the 1990s, Guardian journalist Zoe Williams writes with light irony that in those apparently postfeminist times she, like many women, thought it was taking a stand against the patriarchy to be ‘as drunk and negligent and promiscuous as any man’ (2015: n.p.). Meanwhile, Angela McRobbie sceptically defines postfeminism or feminism’s third wave, in which movement the ladettes squarely belong, as an ‘individualistic discourse’ that relies on ‘a vocabulary that includes words like “empowerment” and “choice”’ (2009: 1). The nascent British Muslim perspective proffered in Soueif’s and Kureishi’s novels speaks to this wider context. Ladette culture, for example, was primarily – although not exclusively – a white phenomenon. Figures like Sara Cox, Zoe Ball, Denise Van Outen, and the Spice Girls3 gained high profiles (Turner 2014: 72, 77) at the expense of entertainers of colour such as Magenta Devine, Josie D’arby, Konnie Huq, and girl band the Honeyz. Rave had vaguely idealistic underpinnings,4 and Bradby quotes one dance music producer who opined: ‘big raves are the only places on this earth where you can honestly be friends for one day – everyone: black/white, Indian/Chinese, male and female – you can all be equal for one day’ (1993: 165–166). With their ‘ironic’ sexism and racism, lads and ladettes were part of a backlash against the alleged beatific peace of the dance music scene. Not unlike rave, lad and ladette culture cohered around ideas of the sensual. Lads’ preferred modality of touch was sexual, while ladettes too flirted with ideas of being boldly sexual but their patina of irony often disguised a certain ambivalence around whether they wanted to be touched. Having discussed sex and sexuality in relation to the postcommunism void and political scandals such as the Lewinsky affair, and

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having intimated that the 1990s was ostensibly a freer sexual environment than the decades preceding it, it is now pertinent to bring in the issue of pop and postwar youth subcultures. These cultural phenomena seem to have had a great impact on the proliferation of discourses on, and attitudes towards, sex and sexuality. They tie in with the Second Summer of Love, rave culture, and ladettes, while providing a broader background. Kureishi himself has discussed pop, subcultures, and sexuality in various essays, interviews, and short stories, as, to a lesser extent, has Soueif.5 Not only that, but the decade marked a point of inflection in terms of the proliferation of academic studies on sex and sexuality, such as Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work on gender performativity (1990, 2011/1993). Finally, the 1990s were important as regards queer theory, LGBTQI+ activism, and the emergence of different attitudes towards HIV/AIDS. Matt Cook’s survey of ‘Sexual Revolution(s) in Britain’ from the 1950s onwards concludes with a short section on the 1990s and 2000s (2014: 134–136). In it, he chronicles the gradual mainstreaming of same-sex desire (notwithstanding the homophobia that was still open and widespread for much if not all of the 1990s). Cook also explores the concomitant erosion of feminists’ and queer communities’ radical politics in those recent decades, warning against any complacent assumption that there was no ‘battle to be waged anymore’ (2014: 136). By the late 2010s such incipient complacency has receded but, while the present decade has so far been bleak in many ways – whether we look to the crushing of Arab revolutions, the rise of racist nationalisms across Europe and the US, or the renewed nuclear threat – it has also held out hope, much of which has been driven by women’s activism.6 Mostly in reaction to foreign policy, but also partly in response to the political vacuum left by communism, the political scandals, and an increasingly permissive environment – especially to the heavy drinking and casual sex of lads and ladettes – the 1990s saw a rise in extremist activism by groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al Muhajiroun in British university campuses. To evidence this, British Bangladeshis Ed Husain (2007) and Russell Razzaque (2008) both describe their growing involvement with Hizb ut-Tahrir while at college or university in London in the long 1990s. In The Islamist Ed Husain details his restless search for spiritual and political meaning while at school, college, and university in London, gravitating from Sufism to Jamate-Islami-affliliated groups to Hizb ut-Tahir and back again to Sufism. He describes one pressing topic of debate among the members of his London branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir: ‘in [the talk] “Sex, Drugs &

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Rock’n’Roll” we spoke about clubbing in Leicester Square, getting high and one-night stands, and then realizing that there is more to life than pleasure. How could it be that we lived for pleasure while Bosnia burned?’ (2007: 107). In Human Being to Human Bomb, Razzaque similarly depicts his alienation during his university’s Freshers’ Week, and the affiliation he felt with other Muslims ‘who did not drink alcohol […] [and had no] experience of pubs, bars or clubs or even girlfriends’ (2008: 2). Such religious revivalism was part of a global upsurge in political Islam. Considering just Egypt and Pakistan, the two home nations referenced in my chosen novels, in 1995 President Hosni Mubarak came close to being assassinated, like Anwar Sadat before him, by a member of an Islamist group. Despite Mubarak’s West-friendly secularism, during his long dictatorial presidency organizations such as the northern Muslim Brotherhood and southern Islamic Group gained power and influence. According to Mamoun Fandy (1994: 614), one of the Egyptian Islamists’ main pillars was ‘maintaining the sexual honor of women’. This was also a concern, albeit in a reworked fashion, among Hizb ut-Tahrir (male) members in Britain – hence another seminar Husain mentions that had the inadvertently comic title ‘Hijab: Put up or Shut up’ (2007: 60, 67; see also Tarlo 2010: 128, n. 14). Known for her trademark white dupatta lightly covering her hair, in Pakistan Benazir Bhutto made feminist history in 1990 when she became the first elected head of state to become pregnant and give birth while in office. Despite this milestone, the decade was mostly bleak for women’s human rights in the Islamic Republic. Saadia Toor (2011: 159) writes germanely of the ‘long shadow’ cast by the Islamizing policies of President Ziaul-Haq (1977–1988), which contributed significantly to ‘increasing levels of sexual(ized) violence against women’ in 1990s Pakistan. Kureishi also discusses Zia’s Islamization in Part II of his autobiographical essay ‘The Rainbow Sign’ (1986), which focuses on Pakistan. He argues that General Zia’s cultural and religious cringe towards the Arab nations led to prohibition of alcohol, dancing, gambling, and horse-racing, as well as to gender segregation, television censorship, and – contrariwise – a roaring trade in drugs. Given this background and the preoccupation with sexual and sensual registers of touch, I will suggest that the embodied approach breathes life into what can be stale and bitter debates about Islamism versus liberalism.

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Extreme versions of political Islam were also impelled by the many instances of violent touch against Muslim bodies in the 1990s. From the Iraq War and subsequent Western sanctions on the Iraqi people, to Bosnia and Kosovo a few years later, to the damaging Oslo Accords of 1993–1995 and the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999, this was a decade when the Ummah – if such a global Muslim community can be said to exist – had many justifiable grievances. As Soueif judges in the introduction to her collection of nonfiction writing of the same name, the Mezzaterra (the middle ground of cultural exchange) was ceded in the 1990s: ‘as the Eighties rolled into the Nineties the political direction the world was taking seemed to undermine every aspect of this [hybrid] identity. Our open and hospitable Mezzaterra was under attack from all sides’ (2004: 8). Her novel In the Eye of the Sun looks back on this Mezzaterra’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, proceeding to chart events such as 1967s Six-Day War and the Palestinian plane hijackings of the 1970s that contributed to the erosion of the middle ground. The 1990s was the decade when, as Kureishi observes in ‘The Carnival of Culture’, ‘[t]he British-born children of immigrants [became] […] more religious and politically radical than their parents’ (2011: 130). It is this religious direction of travel that Kureishi maps out in The Black Album.7 Not only should we ground the various registers of touch on some of the socio-political changes taking place in the world during the 1990s, but the intellectual context also demands consideration. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the social sciences and humanities experienced a ‘spatial turn’ (Teverson and Upstone 2011: ix), in which theorists pondered space’s implication in social, cultural, and political power. The English translation of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991/1974), and the publication of Doreen Massey’s Space, Place and Gender (1994) and Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin (2005/1996), indicate how questions of the haptic emerged when ideas of space became central to political analysis. Pallasmaa’s book, with its similar title to that of Soueif’s novel and its synaesthetic approach to the sense of touch, to space in a capacious sense, and to Pallasmaa’s field of architecture, make it especially useful for adding texture as I map out the 1990s cultural landscape. Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion was not published until 2004, but the affect theory field she helped to spearhead is also highly relevant to the haptic approach I am taking in this Part. In Ahmed’s opening chapter ‘Feel Your Way’, she unpicks

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the commonplace that Britain is a soft touch country, ripe for the exploitation of grasping migrants and fraudulent asylum seekers: the metaphor of ‘soft touch’ suggests that the nation’s borders and defences are like skin; they are soft, weak, porous and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others. […] The implicit demand is for a nation that is less emotional, less easily moved, one that is ‘hard’ or ‘tough’. The use of metaphors of ‘softness’ and ‘hardness’ shows us how emotions become attributes of collectives, which get constructed as ‘being’ through ‘feeling’. Such attributes are of course gendered: the soft national body is a feminised body, which is ‘penetrated’ or ‘invaded’ by others. […] Feminist philosophers have shown us how the subordination of emotions also works to subordinate the feminine and the body. (2004: 2–3)

Let me now turn to the way in which touch is portrayed in the work of Egyptian-British woman writer Ahdaf Soueif.

* * * In the Eye of the Sun (1992/1994) is crammed with references to sound, sight, taste, and smell, in addition to touch. The text’s soundscape takes in, for example, Qur’an recitations, a cassette tape recording of a comedian’s satirical Arabic, and the music of Simon and Garfunkel, Mozart, Fairuz, and Ummu Kulthoum.8 Listening brims over into sight, as when Asya attends a performance of Don Giovanni. In Midan el-Opera, she surveys the chandeliers and paintings of great composers while narcissistically fantasizing about Saif watching her in her evening finery and, by extension, projecting a scopophilic male gaze onto her own body. The pleasures of taste are also revelled in from the novel’s earliest pages onwards, when a Mediterranean meal, rounded off with ‘[m]int tea […] brewing in the teapot’ (9), shows that Asya and her fellow Egyptian migrants are creating a home from home in London. The aromas of coffee, sunburnt skin, and grilled sweetcorn are materialized in a passage that verges on sensory overload while describing the ­seaside city of Alexandria. This segment culminates with Asya imagining herself telling Saif: ‘[T]he nights I’ve tasted the sea and waited for life to begin are now part of loving you; […] I love the spring in your step and your moustache and the way you call me “Princess”, and how we touch each other all the time and we don’t really seem to need to talk’ (124–125).

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This paean to her new love begins with the smell and taste of salt water, before moving from the sights of Saif’s bouncy gait and bristly moustache to the sound of his terms of endearment. However, the excerpt’s ending indicates that touch, both in its presence and absence, has the power to move this romantic ingenue more than any other sense. Asya’s playing down of the ‘need to talk’ bespeaks the inward-looking and suffocating relationship that thrives on a lack of open conversation. The quote thus shows that Asya prioritizes haptic over oral communication, and the novel’s fascination with sex and sexuality is signalled. Yet her sensory hierarchy also contributes towards rendering Asya childlike. Touch is a primary need for babies but, once they enter the symbolic realm, the scale of sensory value tilts towards sight and sound. If we confine our study to the single category of the haptic, there are several different kinds of touch. Soueif helps readers to understand this through a list that an older and disenchanted Asya draws up after the novel’s halfway point in an attempt to improve the quality of her life. Her primary two headings are ‘Work’ (a brief section focused on finishing the thesis she is struggling to write) and ‘Love’. In relation to the latter, she thinks of various subdivisions: ‘Family’, ‘Friends’, ‘Children’, and ‘Married Love’ (she crosses this out on the grounds that it is too ‘coy’), ‘Sex’ (again she rejects this as ‘that’s […] not only it’, eventually settling on ‘Romance’ (454–455, strikethrough added). This last category of married love, sex, or romance is the most obvious arena where touching is expected. The fact that Asya has been ‘repulsed, turned away so many times’ by Saif (393) is at the root of their marital problems. As indicated in her operatic raptures and the couple’s romantic trip to Alexandria, there was passion at the start of their relationship, in 1967 when Asya was 17. Her young age makes her parents hold out for a long engagement while she completes her education to master’s level. This drawnout betrothal impinges heavily on ‘Romance’, intensifying the role of the imagination over straightforward sexual touch between Asya and Saif. Circumventing her elders’ curfews and close eye on her chastity, Asya manages to spend largely blissful Sunday afternoons with her fiancé at his family home. They listen to Bob Dylan together in Saif’s room, and Asya experiences orgasms as ‘starbursts’ (161, 420). This moment of synaesthesia, where touch is experienced optically as radiating light, is an example of what Mark Smith criticizes in his agenda-setting book Sensory History as a ‘visualist idiom’ that dominates much thinking about the senses (2007: 94). Notwithstanding her euphoric, somewhat hackneyed

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language, Asya feels flat afterwards because they are not having penetrative sex. Later, the couple pull off an elaborate deception to spend four days together away from their families in Beirut. In this city ‘where you can do anything’ (130), Saif and Asya do not progress beyond erotic touch. Moreover, apart from one or two painful episodes of fumbling, even after their wedding the marriage is barely consummated. Then, as Waïl Hassan succinctly describes, ‘[f]ollowing Asya’s miscarriage, Saif refrains from lovemaking with her’ (2011: 162). After a while, even his gentlest, most fraternal touch has such a strong psychosomatic effect on her that she sneezes repeatedly and no longer yearns for his Rothmans-scented fingers to touch her. Asya’s response is significant for, as Ackerman reminds us, sneezing is a pleasure verging on the sexual, as ‘[t]he whole body ripples in orgasmic delight’ (1990: 31). Asya’s sneezes at once make her appear allergic to her husband and hint at the gratification she can find without his help. Telling her he loves her enough to live with her ‘like a sister’ (302), Saif too easily reconciles himself to a sexless marriage with the woman he at once idealizes and infantilizes – as epitomized in his nickname for her, ‘Princess’. What results from this in the context of touch and the body is that Asya is unable for a long time to move beyond the binary of ‘virgin’ or ‘whore’, the only categories into which patriarchal structures in general and Saif in particular see fit to slot her. The Westernized Saif seems to subscribe to a post-Enlightenment, imperial order of the senses in which sight is at the top and touch, a ‘proximity sense’ (Classen 1990: 727), is low down, if not at the nadir. His rationalism pervades the couple’s daily life together, typified by Saif’s refusal to dance or go waterskiing with Asya. His preference is to act as a detached and ironical observer. Pallasmaa argues that such disinterest is commonplace for people among whom ocularcentrism holds sway: ‘The dominance of the eye and the suppression of the other senses tends to push us into detachment, isolation and exteriority’ (2005/1996: 19). Saif tries to mould Asya into exercising similar restraint in her speech and gestures, internalizing her emotions rather than expressing them too intemperately. She does her best to live up to Saif’s feminine ideal, dressing in the beige tones that he likes and attempting to curb her storytelling instincts by summing things up ‘in a nutshell’ (436, 509). As I wrote in my last monograph about Asia’s previous incarnation, the eponymous Aisha from Aisha (Soueif 1995/1983), when they are together ‘[h]is uncompromising logic makes her retreat to hotel bathrooms around the world to cry or vomit’ (Chambers 2015: 202). She is a poor

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little rich girl because on the one hand Saif’s affluence and her family’s cosmopolitanism grant access to global travel, the finest lodgings, and a plethora of consumer goods, but on the other hand she is encased in a passionless marriage. Asya’s/Aisha’s crying and vomiting reflects a larger pattern, too, for in her relationship with Saif she goes through cycles of reticent self-control followed by excessive emotional emissions. These cycles are possessed of an energy that permits and enables their repetition, in a manner akin to an addiction. Small wonder that, as with the heroines of the nineteenth-century Russian novels Asya admires, the novel culminates in Asya’s adultery. When – as is often the case – she is apart from Saif, the young woman realizes that she cannot suspend her bodily needs indefinitely. On a language summer school in Italy, she finds herself inundated with admirers. Although she gives most of them short shrift, it is hard to resist the advances of handsome, laidback Umberto. Somewhat guiltily, she enjoys kissing and touching him, but they make a pact not to go any further because of her fiancé Saif back home. The Italian’s sole condition is for secrecy regarding their abstention, as public knowledge that they are not having sex would damage his manly reputation. This thrills Asya as it upends Egyptian mores: ‘So much the opposite of everything she’s ever known: people sleeping with each other but pretending not to. […] Here it’s all the other way round. She loves it’ (173). If this apparently harmless, even joyful interlude foreshadows Asya’s full-blown and destructive love affair in England, it also contains the germ of something dark and violent, showing that European sexuality is no more liberatory than its Egyptian counterpart. Her pretend Italian lover escorts her to a party where she takes cocaine for the first and only time in her life as the gathering morphs into an orgy. Soueif provides a discomforting snapshot of semi-conscious Asya being assaulted by a thickset man. She weakly refuses him while consumed by desire, even as ‘lighter, less substantial’ (171) Umberto pulls the stranger off her. Recalling Aisha’s violation by a burly butcher at a zar dance9 in Soueif’s story ‘The Nativity’ (1995/1983: 137–184) and presaging the sexual violence that is to come later in In the Eye of the Sun, this event raises fraught questions about Soueif’s internalization of ideas which we caught a glimpse of earlier as being dominant in the 1990s around victim-blaming (the notion that ‘she wanted it’) and the normalization of rape culture. The episode also highlights that social class impacts on touch, with working-class people designated as ‘rough’ and the upper classes’ tactile explorations supposed to be more refined and rational.

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With Saif working away in Syria and his best friend too loyal to make a move, Asya embarks on an affair with a man named Gerald Stone. From the moment she encounters him wearing a garish shirt at an Anglo-Arab friendship event in her northern English university, she is alert to his unprepossessing character. More determinedly even than Asya with her list-making, Gerald is a devotee of the self-help genre, and Asya has to suppress a smile as she thinks of how contemptuous Saif would be of Gerald’s references to such solipsistic titles as ‘I Touch the Earth – The Earth Touches Me’ (713). The Englishman also dabbles in half-digested New Age spiritualism including astrology, the I Ching, and meditation. His long hair and repeated use of the moniker ‘man’ (see, for example, 655, 680) indicate his ‘1970s hippie’ beliefs (Hassan 2011: 162). Gerald’s disdainful epithet of ‘phoney’ to describe Asya’s PhD in linguistics and her love of classical music (556, 599) is reminiscent of Holden Caulfield’s adolescent rebelliousness in The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger 1951). Despite these countercultural allusions, Gerald is doing a vocational master’s in marketing. He is possessed of no particular skills, but nonetheless has a strong sense of entitlement as a white, middle-class man. Using his salesman patter on Asya, he speaks in clichés and tortuous metaphors about their love. Before long he has practically moved into the northern English cottage, paid for by Saif, where she is living while she tries to finish her doctoral thesis. It should, however, be recognized that there is, as Samia Serageldin notes (2003: 200), a heightened sense of class superiority in how Asya views Gerald, especially in what she regards as his miserly approach to money. Asya seems to drift along, often despising Gerald but not knowing how to defenestrate him. However, she is not entirely passive in the affair, and her agency revolves around the sensual. (After Saif discovers her infidelity, one of their most tempestuous arguments is sparked when she challenges his sexist assumption that Gerald had ‘tak[en] advantage of a woman on her own: a defenceless woman’ [665]. In fact, discountenanced by her lack of sexual experience despite being married, it was she who first asked him to stay the night.) Asya is attracted to Gerald’s blondness, his rangy body and unashamed sensuality. If his surname suggests the unbending nature of rock, by contrast ‘Gerald’ has the aggressively phallic meaning of ‘[m]ighty spear ruler’ (Spence 2001: 269).10 Although sex hurts her at first, she soon discerns ‘intimations of pleasure’ (542) as he begs her ‘Touch me, baby, touch me’ (542). Later, during their relationship’s slow-motion nosedive, Gerald tells her she feels as though she is ‘a million miles away’ and demands that she make love to

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him so she ‘come[s] back’ (601). This irredentist demand for her physical proximity and mental attentiveness is of a piece with Gerald’s sometimes frightening desire to possess Asya. Gerald’s excessive emphasis on tactility leads to his traits of material acquisitiveness and sexual covetousness. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that she comes to accuse him of ‘sexual imperialis[m]’. All Gerald’s previous partners have been women of colour and, according to Asya, this is so that he can feel like ‘the big white boss’ (722). Here the role of touch seems to function as a sort of conquering. But, until the final showdown that terminates their relationship, Asya finds it hard to resist Gerald’s quasi-colonial drive for sole ownership of her. That much said, one of his main positive contributions is to ‘ma[k]e her a gift of her own body’ (602). The morning after Gerald’s and Asya’s first night together, instead of awakening as she had expected after a broken night’s sleep and racked with guilt, she feels well rested, and is surprised by her ‘bright-eyed and rosy and soft – younger’ appearance in the mirror (540). Gerald has not only inadvertently improved her looks, but has also expanded her mind. She has been inducted into the pantheon of literary heroines she appreciates, such as Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. As Bill Overton has outlined, these are two of the most well-known protagonists in the ‘novel centred on wifely adultery [that] flourished in Continental Europe’ of the late nineteenth century (2002: 3). Gerald has therefore opened her up to a new and dangerous kind of adulterous knowledge that simultaneously contrasts with and complements11 her earnest book-learning as a child and a young woman. While this point is important, it should not be overstated. The limitations of the sensual worldview of Gerald and his circle are clearly delineated, as when Asya is dismayed by the aimlessly somatic life of Marie, the wife of Gerald’s close friend Leroy in New York. Since becoming pregnant, Marie has given up her job, and Asya compares her robotic existence to that of the women in The Stepford Wives (708; Levin 1972). Rather than exploring her great city, Marie spends each day desultorily cooking and cleaning before ‘prepar[ing] […] psychologically’ for her husband’s return from work (709). Conversely, the rationalist, largely visual practice of reading is often celebrated, as we will see in the discussion of form and modernist intertextuality shortly. Rather than subscribing to the idea of a sensory hierarchy, Soueif shows that the senses are all linked and osmotically leak into each other. Adultery, especially female adultery, has long been a staple of the novel, particularly the realist novel. Perhaps, as Laura Kipnis suggests in

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her lively and panoramic book Against Love: A Polemic, this is because of its high-octane potential for risk and transformation: Adultery is to love-by-the-rules what the test tube is to science: a container for experiments. It’s a way to have a hypothesis, to be improvisational: ‘What if … ?’ Or to take a conceptual risk. Like any experiment, it might be a really bad idea or it might be a miracle cure – transubstantiation or a potential explosion. Or both. Something new might be invented or understood: this could be the next big paradigm shift waiting to happen. Or it could just fizzle. (2003: 9)

Not only is the extramarital relationship a linchpin of mainstream literature but also, as Hsin-Ju Kuo shows in ‘Revisiting Adultery in South Asian Immigrant Narratives’ (2014), it is a key feature of many postcolonial texts. Kuo’s is an innovative study of how the unfaithful woman regularly surfaces as a trope in texts by diasporic South Asian women writers. Drawing on a wide range of critical sources, including Tony Tanner’s magisterial Adultery in the Novel (1979) and Ketu H. Katrak’s more recent postcolonial study Politics of the Female Body (2006), Kuo makes the persuasive observation that such South Asian writers of diaspora as Meena Alexander, Monica Ali, and Jhumpa Lahiri ‘us[e] adultery to […] challeng[e] the hierarchical rubric of gender relations in South Asian societies, as well as the dominant cultures of the host countries’ (2014: 173). Of course, Soueif is not South Asian, and she started her career earlier than all three of Kuo’s chosen writers (Ali and Lahiri in particular are associated with publishing in the 2000s). Despite these spatial and temporal differences, she shares certain things in common with them as a diasporic writer, coming as she does from the much smaller community of Egyptian Muslims living in Britain. Like her South Asian fellow authors, she casts a bifocal gaze at the sexist status quo in both East and West. For Westernized Easterner Saif, Asya is a delicate and wilful child to be alternately indulged and disciplined, while the Orientalist Westerner Gerald constructs her as exotic passion. In this respect, Hassan pertinently remarks that both Saif and Gerald have ‘apparently never imagined her [Asya] as capable of independent thought’ (2011: 162). The initiation of her sexual affair for Asya, as for the South Asian diasporic heroines Kuo explores, marks her ‘acquisition of agency and […] ability to act to improve [her] condition’ (2014: 177). Not only functioning as a turning point in the individual life,12 adultery is also a successful conceit for In the Eye of the Sun more broadly because it allows

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Soueif to engage with touch in all its aspects – ‘the submission to tactile impulse, the grasp, the clumsy lunge, the heavy-handedness of handling’ (Smith 2007: 108) – as well as tender stroking and carnal embrace. In accordance with Kipnis’s analysis, Asya uses adultery to escape the ‘domestic gulag’ of her chaste marriage with Saif (2003: 51). This proves to be ‘a really bad idea’ rather than the ‘miracle cure’ adumbrated in the above block quote. Apropos of this notion, a scene in which Asya is rather apathetically attempting to escape Gerald’s clutches warrants careful reading: Asya tries to twist away but his mouth lands on hers and pins her head to the pillow. She lies still, willing herself not to move. His tongue moves slowly in the corners of her mouth. His hand leaves her breast and wanders down to her knee. He strokes her stockinged thighs, up and up to where the stockings end, and then he strokes and scratches at her flesh. He slips his hand inside her panties and his fingers find all those secret paths they’d found before. He groans into her mouth. He lifts his face from hers and looks into her eyes as his fingers play with her, separate her, enter her – ‘Tell me you don’t want me to do this,’ he says. ‘I don’t want you to do this,’ she says. ‘The shit you don’t,’ he says. ‘You’re hot for me –’ ‘It won’t change anything,’ Asya says. ‘Can you bear it, babe? Never to feel this again? Ever?’ ‘I am staying with him,’ Asya says, and bites her lip as he pushes his fingers into her. ‘Babe, you’re going to force me to do something bad.’ Asya turns her face away. (656–657)

At this uncomfortable moment in the text, the first two sentences describe Asya’s ineffectual attempt to escape Gerald’s petting, and then her appearing to play dead. The next few sentences switch to Gerald, depicting in multisensory detail the actions of his tongue and hand, as though Asya has excluded herself from this narrative just as she had wished. Gerald’s once erotic touch on Asya’s body now stirs fear, mild disgust, and a sense of the absurd. Only the faintest tinge of her earlier passion remains – Asya recalls ‘those secret paths [he]’d found before’ and ‘bites her lip’ in a gesture that is pained but might contain a hint of her earlier desirous response to Gerald’s roaming hands. Yet she lies unmoving, like the ‘prim, repressed bourgeois’ Gerald earlier accused her of being (601), and monitors in deadpan detail her paramour’s e­ xertions. Choosing between having foreplay against her will and breaching her

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‘bourgeois’ etiquette by refusing him, Asya opts for a non-consensual fingering. Her decision is also sculpted by the threat of violence: just before the quoted excerpt Gerald had told Asya that he would rather strangle her than lose her as a partner. Caught in the quandary of how to uncouple from this obdurate pursuant, Asya tells him their lovemaking ‘won’t change anything’. By this point in the novel she realizes that their illicit relationship, rather than delivering the promised ‘transubstantiation’, should be recognized for its banality and allowed to ‘fizzle’. Gerald refuses to accept this, ending the passage with the coercively controlling phrase: ‘Babe, you’re going to force me to do something bad’. When he goes on to confess that he has read a diary entry she had written about her conflicting emotions for Saif, she becomes angry and tries to push him away. He is unrepentant, representing the violation of her privacy as a sign of his desperate and intense love for him. ‘I can’t stand you –’ Asya spits at him, ‘I want you to take your lousy fingers out of me’ (157). Little wonder, given its candour about sexuality and the sense of touch, that this book caused controversy in Soueif’s home country of Egypt, as discussed at some length by Hassan (2011: 160–167). But Anastasia Valassopolous points out that it is problematic to dwell, as do Hassan and Amin Malak (2005: 130–135), on the ‘taboo’ nature of Soueif’s writing in an Egyptian context. Valassopolous rightly suggests that such a reading ‘offers little more than a reactive reaction (isn’t it great that Arab women are writing about sex?). Instead, is it not what is learnt, revealed, accepted and repudiated in this frank elaboration on sexuality that should be our focus?’ (2007: 126). I certainly think so, which is why I take up Valassopolous’s challenge to mull over what the novel reveals about touch, in all its variants. A few words are in order on the interplay between voice or language and touch, which is also integral to this novel. Asya’s bodily needs are repressed just as her voice is silenced. In Italy, where she meets Umberto and is able to enjoy, for the first time in a while, the pleasures of touching, it is as a result of an Italian Institute scholarship to attend language classes at an unnamed university there. When it comes to the relationship with Gerald, I argued that she tries to refuse him but soon submits quietly to his roaming hands. The words she utters in the dialogue I quoted at length also oscillate between consenting to and dissenting from the act (obviously, fear plays a role). But she ultimately rejects being touched (‘take your lousy fingers out of me’) in a passage where her voice seems more emancipated. Soueif shows that the senses are linked, and that

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increased empowerment in one sensory perception has an impact in other areas. This fits with Louise Vinge’s argument in The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition. In this classic study, Vinge maintains that touch and listening or speaking are the senses that have the closest relationship to each other, which, she says, ‘is evident from the words with which sounds are described: harsh, crude, soft, etc.’ (1975: 166). In the Eye of the Sun’s form is usually interpreted as realist,13 broadly conceived, with most critics commenting on its autobiographical elements, Mrinalini Chakravorty describing it as ‘formally realistic’ (2007: 122), Malak (2005: 130), and Lindsey Moore (2012: 68) calling it a Bildungsroman, and Rasheed el-Enany (2006: 201) a Künstlerroman, or artist’s novel. This emphasis on realism14 is understandable, given the novel’s layering up of details, well-rounded characterization, and precise charting of time and space. However, form in this text is more complicated than that and I want to challenge those critics like Rohan Maitzen (2009) who – misled by the epigraph and Soueif’s many other references to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, as well as to the realist novels of female adultery I have already discussed – interpret it almost exclusively within the bounds of realism. The novel’s opening in extreme medias res and the dramaturgical titles for chapter subsections as ‘Scenes’ immediately communicate Soueif’s unobtrusive interest in quasi-modernist experimentation rather than solely deploying realist plain style. At the level of the sentence, her iterative use of em-dashes and literary impressionistic intertwining of actions with memories and thoughts shows that Soueif engages in neo-modernist provocation and transcends her everyday subject matter. Writes Jesse Matz of literary impressionism: ‘It does not choose surfaces and fragments over depths and wholes but makes surfaces show depths, make [sic] fragments suggest wholes, and devotes itself to the undoing of such distinctions’ (2003/2001: 1). This is certainly true of Soueif’s fiction, which might seem preoccupied with the surfaces of clothes, the seductive scent of Monsieur de Givenchy, and fragments of poetry, but also exposes the unknowability and contradictions of human consciousness, while undoing often gendered distinctions between superficial and deep topics. Soueif’s comment about Colette could equally be applied to her own high-feminine writing: ‘she is […] unashamedly interested in clothes and in makeup and living the good life and all the fripperies that make up so much of our lives. Yet, her novels end up being about something bigger than that’ (qtd. in Massad, 1999: 88). It is noteworthy that Soueif refers to Colette (1873–1954),

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a woman writer who challenged some of the ways adultery is represented by men in conventional realist novels. Even by the second decade of the twenty-first century, when the Guardian published a round-up of the ‘Top Ten Novels About Unfaithful Wives’, it managed entirely to exclude women writers (Read 2015). Yet in novels from more than a century earlier such as Claudine Married (2001/1903) and The Innocent Libertine (1980/1905), Colette discusses lesbian desire, attraction to underage girls, and the ennui of the married woman with wit and a great lightness of touch. The detail in Soueif’s quotation about Colette is also interesting, as it conveys the feel of fabric and the sensation of applying cosmetics in evocative and memorable ways. Literary impressionism is the stylistic mode closest to this often stream-of-consciousness novel, not least because Joseph Conrad makes it clear that the mode is intimately connected to sensory perception: Fiction – if it at all aspires to be art – appeals to temperament. […] Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses […], because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. […] [I]t is only through complete unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words. (Conrad 1925/1897: ix)

Here Conrad argues that all five senses, more than appeals to reason through ‘persuasion’, are involved in revivifying what he goes on to call ‘the old, old words’ (1925/1897: ix). Touch and sight have pride of place, with ‘form’, ‘shape’, and ‘plasticity’ being foregrounded by Conrad alongside ‘colour’ and ‘light’. Relatedly, Sara Ahmed lays emphasis on the part played by sensations in the impressions that we experience from moment to moment, writing that an impression ‘can be a mark on the surface (“to leave an impression”). We need to remember the “press” in an impression’ (2004: 6). The impressions that life leaves on the eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and skin accordingly form the elemental core of Soueif’s highly digressive,15 connotative novel.

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In addition to literary impressionism, the British Egyptian author’s formal choices also include the modernist ‘collage aesthetic’ particularly popular with ‘necessarily subversive’ Harlem Renaissance authors, subjugated as these writers were due to their racial status (Farebrother 2016/2009: 3). As part of her compendious collage structure, Soueif includes anecdotes, fairy tales, swaths of dialogue, newspaper articles, translations from Arabic, medical reports, diary entries, a glossary,16 and so on. Yet, Soueif’s allusions to modernism venture outside of form and into content. One of the things that is ‘modern’ about In the Eye of the Sun is the novel’s treatment of ethical behaviour (or often its lack) relating to sexual touch. In the essay ‘Old Bloomsbury’ (1985/1922), Virginia Woolf writes of a likely apocryphal but nonetheless crucial moment in the Bloomsbury Group’s evolution from intense conversations about the meaning of beauty or art onto a cruder and more mischievous frankness about sex. Virginia Woolf, then Stephen, is sitting with her sister Vanessa, who has taken up with the artist Clive Bell whom she will soon marry. At that moment, their friend the outspoken gay biographer Lytton Strachey enters the room: He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress. ‘Semen?’ he said. Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. […] Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips. […] It is strange to think how reticent, how reserved we had been and for how long. […] When all intellectual questions had been debated so freely, sex was ignored. Now a flood of light poured in upon that department too. We had known everything but we had never talked. Now we talked of nothing else. (Woolf 1985/1922: 195–196)

Strachey’s impish articulation of the unsayable holds within it an enlightenment aspect. According to Woolf, ‘light pours in’ on sex, which was known about before but never discussed.17 From this moment on the friends dramatically widen the sphere of their ‘intellectual’ pursuits to incorporate the voluptuary, in another example of the haptic’s ties with knowledge. Soueif implicitly references this humorous episode at three moments in her novel. Early on, a vignette is presented of a bold and glamorous girl Asya had been delighted to befriend as a child in Egypt.

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This girl’s ‘free and uninhibited nature’ contributes to her marriage at the young age of 17. Her mother continues to do her laundry, but increasingly remonstrates with the youthful bride over the state of her sheets. Eventually the daughter exclaims for all to hear: ‘All right. Since you don’t understand I’ll make you understand. You know what these stains are, Mama? They’re my husband’s semen. Semen. SEMEN. MY HUSBAND’S SEMEN’ (77). Later on, convulsed with anxiety about her returning husband discovering evidence of Gerald’s presence in her cottage, Asya pictures Saif discovering a stain on her sheets and ‘like her friend so many years ago she’ll dance and jubilate, “Semen, semen, Gerald’s SEMEN”’. She then imagines Saif emasculated, ‘in a flowered house dress’ (618), running away in embarrassment like the longago friend’s mother. This vivid daydream about her cuckolded husband leaves her so appalled, trembling, and breathless that she has to stop the car she is driving to regain her composure. Finally, back in Cairo in the novel’s closing pages, Asya meets a fair girl who bears an uncanny resemblance to the friend, and realizes she must be her daughter, ‘a product of one of the drops of “semen, semen, my husband’s SEMEN” that had not stained the sheets’ (769). Now separated from Saif but longing for a child of her own, this encounter makes Asya realize bitterly: ‘Time passes, oh, time passes – she had better take note, she had better do something about it’ (769). ‘Time Passes’ is a section of To the Lighthouse that deals with seasonal change, ageing, and mortality (Woolf 1955/1927: 125–144), so the parallels between Soueif’s novel and Woolf’s work are reinforced here. Additionally, the threefold repetition of the ‘semen’ passage and its further orthographic underscoring make this appear a deliberate nod to Woolf on Strachey. Allowing speculation to swirl, the italicization of ‘out’ when Asya orders Gerald to take his fingers ‘out of me’, as well as the repeated use of capital letters for ‘semen’, seem to go beyond the limits of mere emphasis. Bearing in mind my earlier discussion of the novel’s deployment of a collage aesthetic, the use of italics and capitals together (‘Semen. SEMEN’) could be interpreted as a way of adding ‘texture’ to the text. Through playful intertextuality, Soueif transplants the Bloomsbury Group and the Harlem Renaissance into Egypt, muddying distinctions between West and East, past and present, reasoning and the sensory. If erotic touch brings pleasure, heightened awareness, and sometimes offspring (like the daughter born of the husband’s SEMEN), it can also engender discomfort and pain. Before the liaison with Gerald, and

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lonely in her northern English university town while Saif is working in Damascus, Asya submits to being poked and prodded by a doctor. This physician fits her for a prosthetic penis for her to practise with, in order to make sex with her husband possible when he comes to stay. Several funny set pieces ensue when her sister, visiting from Egypt, discovers the object in the bathroom and Asya tries to pass it off as some unknown appliance from a previous resident of her cottage. Abandoning the sex toy in a drawer, later she stumbles across it while on the phone to Gerald before the commencement of their sexual relationship. She then wraps it in the suggestively sensual folds of a piece of ‘uncut’ fuchsia silk gifted by her mother-in-law (494), and stows it more securely in her wardrobe. Finally returning home to Cairo, the pink material reminds her of the dildo even though she has left it far behind in Kensington. Asya’s ignominious encounter with her doctor recalls her unfortunate uncle Hamid Mursi’s repeated visits to hospitals, first after a terrible car accident in Cairo, and later the major surgery he undergoes to treat secondary lung cancer. Hospitals, as Pallasmaa reminds us, are ‘technologically […] advanced settings’ that summon forth sensations of ‘estrangement and detachment’ in patients and their visitors (2005/1996: 19). As is often the case in In the Eye of the Sun, this scene is mirrored by another occurrence in the novel. Hamid’s genuine treatment is paralleled when Saif pretends to have cancer after the breakdown of his marriage. The latter goes to the mendacious lengths of taking Asya with him to doctors’ surgeries and putting car brochures in an envelope to stand in for medical notes. In similar refracted instances of the ‘medicalization of touch’ (Gilman 1993: 198), as part of her military training during the 1967 War young Asya is invited to give an old man an injection. She backs out at the sight of him abjectly offering up his buttock to her syringe. Her aunt Nadia, a doctor, has no such scruples at the novel’s close, conducting a rectal examination in public despite Asya’s protests. When she sees the patient’s involuntary erection at the medic’s touch, Asya feels vindicated in her belief that a screen would have protected his dignity. These paired incidents suggest that medical professionals, while sincere in their desire to help and more effective than squeamish Asya, nonetheless may sometimes place greater emphasis on scientific considerations than on patient needs. Here we see the condescending attitude of the educated class towards those who need help. Equally, those on the receiving end of their healing touch may, as it were, be grateful in unexpected ways.

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As intimated earlier, not long after the wedding Asya has another brush with the medical profession when she suffers a miscarriage. At first the pregnancy was unwanted, since Asya, still viewing herself as little more than a virgin because of the dearth of sexual pleasure to be had with Saif, had wanted to ‘catch up with [her] own life’ (268) before starting a family. Yet partly as a result of the warmth and companionship of a cat, which is also pregnant, Asya has come to terms with her condition. She has even started to love the unborn baby and picture it as a solemn-eyed boy by the time she miscarries early in her second trimester. Her contractions are compared to rough handling from ‘the powerful hands of a washerwoman’ (279), making her buckle with the pain. As she is rushed to hospital Saif has a kind and concerned mien. Her aunt Soraya is stony-faced, thinking that Asya has aborted the child since she was so vocal about her maternal ambivalence. Amidst their marital strife years later, Saif too will throw the accusation at her that she chose to have a termination. Asya’s body is no longer her own, but a warzone on which others play out their claims of possession. Waking up nauseous from the general anaesthetic, Asya finds herself in a bleak new world akin to the battlefield on which Egypt lost to Israel in just six days. Sandbags are wedged between her legs, to ‘barricade […] the baby’, she thinks (281). Her body is brutalized like those of the fallen soldiers, and here the link Santanu Das draws between war and the sense of touch should be remembered: ‘The writings of the First World War are obsessed with tactile experiences: from the horrors of the “sucking mud” […] to the ordeal of bandaging wounds’ (2005: 5). Not only is her female body ravaged, but Asya’s foetus has been disposed of, she knows not how or where: She feels so lonely. And empty. And all cold inside. And she is starting to shiver and to feel a horrid pain down there where she is all wadded up […] She is sorry. Oh, so sorry for the poor little baby lying now in some plastic bag. The little baby whom she hadn’t welcomed. Hadn’t wanted. Had he known as he lay curled up inside her that she didn’t want him? She, his mother? But she did. She did. She had started to want him. (282)

This passage, with its many short sentences and repeated words, is redolent of Asya’s agitated state of mind and traumatic situation. The miscarriage is described with unflinching honesty as well as pathos. At several moments in the text (449, 459), Asya regrets the lost touch of her

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baby and the denial of what Margaret Homans has called ‘the pleasures of plump baby-flesh’ (2002: 266). Nada Ayad (2018) deftly shows that Asya is not blameless for rejecting procreativity in pursuit of an upperclass, consumerist feminism, where her sense of self-worth is attached to what is bought for her. However, Ayad’s politically committed reading, while welcome, also erases the trauma of Asya’s miscarriage and her later longing for a baby. Just as individuals submit to uncomfortable, invasive, and sometimes agonizing forms of touch in the hope of long-term benefit, the same is true in the shorter term of several of the beauty treatments to which many women regularly subject themselves. Some feminists have condemned this as oppressive to women, most notably Naomi Wolf in her popular work The Beauty Myth (1990). Meanwhile Emma Tarlo cites a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet entitled The Western Beauty Myth, which assumes that a yawning chasm exists between Western and Muslim women, and blames atheist consumerism for Western women’s anorexia, use of plastic surgery, and susceptibility to depression (Tarlo 2010: 117–119). More alert to beauty’s creative and empowering aspects, Elizabeth Wilson nonetheless also discusses the ‘complex’ relationship between women and fashion in Adorned in Dreams (2003/1985: 245). In Soueif’s novel, there are two scenes that deal with halawa, or the Arab hair-removal technique of sugaring (see Tannir and Leshin 2001). First, Asya cautiously depilates her legs while her family’s trusted servant Dada Zeina stuffs a chicken and questions her about her timid foreplay with then-fiancé Saif. After she has finished with the bird, Dada Zeina impatiently takes over from Asya in applying the hot sugary paste, saying: ‘So we’re going to sit here all day while you pat gingerly at your legs? Come on, let’s get it done.’ This no-nonsense approach has a beneficial effect both on the chicken, which after her manhandling is left ‘pink and glowing’ (136), and on Asya, whose legs are soon smooth and who is given practical advice about her sex life to boot. Second, shortly before her wedding night, a Mashta (translated in the glossary as ‘a woman who attends to the grooming of women’s bodies’; 789) comes to do sugaring on Asya’s whole body, as is traditional for brides. In a foreshadowing of her low pain threshold for sex, Asya cannot tolerate having her pubic hair ripped off by the halawa, and she jumps up telling her beautician that she will not continue. The Mashta is incredulous: ‘You’ll go to your bridegroom with one half clean and the other half as it is? You’re going to make him laugh at you? Come on darling, let’s get it done’ (250).

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And if the smarting pain leaves Asya shaken, in the long run she is pleased to have ‘g[o]t it done’, as both these working-class women had nonchalantly ordered her to do. On their wedding night, she will beg Saif to ‘get it done’ (258) and break her hymen, but he is too cautious and asexual with Asya, his ‘pussycat’. That said, and as the first part of his pet name for her indicates,18 Saif is careful with Asya because part of him wants to wreak sexual violence on her (189; see Valassopoulos 2007: 128) – a presentiment of what is to come. The issue of working-class identity, raised through the beauty work and at numerous other moments in the text, indicates that touch is experienced differently according to social class. Soueif portrays the working classes as taking a matter-of-fact approach to touch that is less dysfunctional than the shilly-shallying of their upper-class counterparts. When Asya has her miscarriage, we saw earlier that she imagines being kneaded by what Pallasmaa calls the ‘working hand’ (2009: 46–69) of a washerwoman. Working hands are depicted by Soueif as skilled and effective, far more capable of getting jobs done than the soft, uncalloused hands of the leisured classes. Returning to the halawa passages, in addition to drawing out the working-class women’s relaxed sexual knowledge as compared to Asya’s ‘confusion’ (Valassopoulos 2007: 128), they also showcase the labour involved in maintaining procrustean standards of feminine beauty – both for the beautician and her client. As Ursula Sharma and Paula Black demonstrate in their article ‘Look Good, Feel Better’, this is emotional as well as physical labour. Reporting on their findings from research into the British beauty industry, the sociologists write: ‘We decided to look at beauty therapy and its associated practices as a form of work rather than as an aspect of patriarchal culture (though undoubtedly it is this as well […])’ (2001: 914). Even when her beauty routines are not as painful as the sugaring, readers see the intense graft required to keep Asya looking and feeling as good as she wants. Prone to frizzy hair, it is a running joke with her loved ones that she has to spend several hours twice a week under her hairdryer after washing her thick tresses. The stigmatization of black hair and (especially) frizzy, curly hair has been denounced by various scholars – Kobena Mercer (1987), bell hooks (1988, 2015: 63–65), and Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps (2003), among others. Asya’s hard work on her hair might relate to beauty ideals, but beauty ideals also involve certain ‘ethnic ideals’. Despite this, non-white women’s ‘agency in terms of beauty practices’ (Tate 2009: 11) and their resistance to and hybridization of normative (white) beauty standards

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should not be stricken from the record. Asya recognizes the effort involved in maintaining her look, too, quantifying the ‘backbreaking two hours’ devoted to sugaring, the time spent applying face masks, ‘her elbows planted in two halves of a lemon to make them silky soft’ (406), and feeling duped that all this preparation does not lead to the payoff of sex with Saif. The solicited sadism of some of her beauty treatments is shadowed in the novel by other, less predictable forms of violence. Asya’s best friend Chrissie narrowly avoids being hit by a heavy crystal ashtray, hurled at her by her father merely for walking in Cairo with a platonic male friend. Saif throws a similar projectile, this time an incense-burner, at Asya after he has found out about her infidelity. The incense-burner, a leftover possession of Gerald’s, had previously displaced her novels and reading-light on the bedside table, symbolizing her temporary retreat from the world of books into a sensual realm of touch. (At one point she even writes next to ‘Romance’ in her notebook: ‘attain ideal (Botticelli Venus?)’ [463].) Now, as the burner shatters the cottage window and Asya finds herself caught up in domestic violence in England, her aspiration to become sexually confident like ‘Colette or Piaf or Cleopatra or even Kushuk Hanim’ also lies in shards (538). (Here Soueif returns to one of her literary idols, Colette, as a model for her heroine’s seduction techniques.) Her assertiveness troubled, Asya realizes that her youthful attempt to play down Chrissie’s abuse as something ‘you […] get used to’ (144) was misplaced and wrongheaded. Given free rein by Asya’s adultery to indulge his urge to enact touch as violence, Saif pulls her hair, punches her face, and breaks her rib. About her spectacular black eye he is temporarily remorseful, uttering the classic abuser line ‘What have you made me do?’ (663). But in London he hits her twice more and by his own confession (in one of the rare passages written in the first-person from his perspective) viciously rapes her: She covered her face with her hands. I knelt beside her. I pushed her and she lay back. I did not wait to undress her but just pulled her pants down and over her feet. Then I rubbed them in her face and forced the gusset into her mouth. I held her hands above her head and fucked her, truly fucked her, for the first time in our marriage. She fell asleep afterwards, right there on the floor, and I kept my arms around her all night, but in her sleep she turned away from me. I thought then that I would do anything to hang on to her. (653)

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It is troubling that critics of In the Eye of the Sun, while condemning Saif’s patriarchal tendencies, have mostly stayed quiet about his domestic violence and rape.19 This is perhaps partly because Asya herself absolves Saif on the grounds of her own transgressive behaviour. Moreover, when locked in the cold war of their marriage towards the novel’s midway point, she had been unable to ‘imagine him caring enough about her to hit her’ (301), thus problematically framing ferocity as passion. But when Asya puts these kinds of argument to her mother, the English professor Dr Lateefa, the latter responds with scepticism: ‘So he hits you? What are we? Brought up in the streets?’ (668). I submit that Soueif shares Dr Lateefa’s repugnance for Saif’s violence, no matter how sorely he was provoked. The author goes further than the mother’s rhetorical questions, which are laced with snobbery, to demonstrate that men’s sexual, physical, and emotional violence towards women cuts across social class, national identity, and religion.20 As we have seen, despite her explicit statement ‘I don’t want you to do this’, Gerald sexually assaults Asya. Readers also witness the Englishman punching walls and throwing objects around, as well as stalking her movements, in a clear sign that given enough time he would be just as physically aggressive towards Asya as her Egyptian husband. This is why I vehemently disagree with Serageldin when, amid her otherwise compelling argument in ‘Reflections and Refractions’, she accuses Soueif of shock tactics and deems it ‘inexplicabl[e]’ that Westernized Saif ‘reverts to Arab machismo when faced with her betrayal, and becomes violently abusive’ (2003: 201). Nowhere in the novel is the violence linked with Saif’s Arab culture,21 his Egyptian nationality, or the religion of Islam. Instead, violence from men towards women is shown to be sadly insidious, regardless of ethnicity or creed. Nor are working-class men exempted from culpability in domestic violence. Asya grew up knowing the slightly older daughter of a washerwoman who was married off to a widower at just 16. At Asya’s halawa ceremony before her own wedding, she sees the young woman, now ‘missing two front teeth and [with] a wide scar down her neck and her left arm where he [her husband] had thrown a saucepan full of boiling water at her’ (249). This recalls a scene during the Six-Day War when Chrissie and Asya had visited the burns unit of a Cairene hospital, and as well as military patients there were also many women and children present, of indeterminate social class, who had been harmed by domestic atrocities such as scalding and kerosene burning. Even women

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themselves have some culpability in this kind of abuse, as was evident in Asya’s failure to appreciate Chrissie’s home-life predicament and is also apparent when Chrissie’s mother only weakly defends her daughter from her father’s wrath and privately chides the girl for walking in public with a man. Here Deniz Kandiyoti’s notion of the patriarchal bargain is useful. In ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’, Kandiyoti argues that what she calls classic patriarchy relies, in theory at least, on an agreement of ‘protection in exchange for submissiveness and propriety’ (1988: 283). In practice, patriarchy doesn’t always function: male providers may become infirm or die, or the system itself can come into crisis. Rather than resisting patriarchy, many women espouse ‘conservatism’ and try to shore up a way of living that seems on the surface to be against their interests, since ‘they have paid the heavy price of an earlier patriarchal bargain, but are not able to cash in on its promised benefits’ (Kandiyoti 1988: 282). Read in this light, Asya’s belittling of Chrissie’s abuse and her mother’s victim-blaming are part of the accommodations that many women make in order to survive in a patriarchal milieu. Violent touch is not confined to the home, but is out there in the world too. Whereas women and children are the primary victims of domestic violence, physical violence as a result of politics is more often (though not exclusively) enacted on men’s bodies by other men. Early on, in London, Asya eats a sandwich, admires her freshly painted toenails, and opens a letter from her sister Deena. The letter drops from her hand as Asya reads Deena’s reflections on the use of torture on her husband and his communist associates. These men have been suspended upside-down, beaten, electrocuted, and raped in a Cairo prison. The disjuncture – what Moore calls a ‘snapshot of dislocation’ (2012: 70) – between Asya’s comfortable British-based life and this horror is echoed two dozen pages later in the description of a concert given by Ummu Kulthoum in 1967. Asya attends the opulent concert in Cairo, at which President Gamal Abdel Nasser is chief guest. As the great Egyptian singer’s voice takes flight with words of passion and occasionally veiled political satire, Asya thinks of Nasser’s university purges, concentration camps, and torture of both leftists and Islamists. This is one of the many moments in the novel where the gritty coexists with the glittery. Asya goes on to imagine torture at various dissonant moments in the text, wondering impotently what she and her circle can do to combat such brutality. She also speculates about the motivations of the torturer, whom she assumes to be male:

30  C. CHAMBERS How could you be someone who actually does it? […] You would be a perfectly normal person, eat your breakfast in the morning and drink your tea with two spoonfuls of sugar, see your kids off to school, choose what you were going to wear […], shave and get dressed – maybe even say your morning prayers – and set off for work. And when you got there you would take off your jacket, roll up your thin-striped sleeves and go into a bare windowless room where you started stripping a guy and blindfolding him, cursing and abusing him of course as you went along – (235)

With her inventorization of the torturer’s morning routine, Soueif reflects on what the German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt calls ‘the banality of evil’. In Eichmann in Jerusalem (2006/1963), Arendt posits that there is nothing in evil that is radical or lucid; rather, even the most extreme evil is senseless and banal. To be able to touch someone else in order to torture them, one has to disregard that person’s humanity. If one recognizes a spark of consciousness in the other, it is harder to inflict pain on them, since one can imagine, and therefore empathize with another’s perspective, understanding, and emotions on being touched in such a cruel way. Arendt relates that the Nazis were able to starve and murder their concentration camp victims by inverting the direction in which the pain was believed to flow. Rather than focusing on the suffering they made others undergo, instead they convinced themselves: ‘What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!’ (Arendt 2006/1963: 106). This inversion of pain and power is utterly banal, commonplace as such selfpity also is in everyday cases of domestic violence. If Soueif had taken the discussion no further than her protagonist’s recoil from the ordinary quotidian habits of the torturer, she would have been guilty of glossing over the complicity of Asya and most members of her social class when it comes to the intelligence agencies and policing. But, as Amin Malak shrewdly notes, Saif’s lucrative computer technician work in Damascus is for the Syrian secret service (442; see Malak 2005: 131). So when Asya listens to Ummu Kulthoum sing and silently criticizes Nasser’s turning of the Mukhabarat ‘against the people’ (63), she seems little aware that the wealth that will later keep her in pedicures, French bread, and a Kensington apartment derives from Hafez al-Assad’s notoriously ruthless intelligence apparatus in Syria. In a sense, Asya’s largely pleasurable experiences of touch – her gentler beauty treatments, foreplay, the early sex with Gerald – have been paid for by money earned off the back of others’ confrontation with excruciating forms of touch.

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Although Soueif’s historical novel reflects on Egyptian torture during the period 1967–1980, if anything this worsened in the 1990s when Soueif was writing. In 1993, a year after In the Eye of the Sun’s publication, American academic Virginia N. Sherry scraped off the veneer of respectability Hosni Mubarak’s regime wished to show the world, arguing that the Egyptian government had an abysmal human rights record and furtively carried out ‘systematic torture of detainees’ (1993: 2). This brief flavour of the socio-political context which the novel speaks to is important, as Arendt is obviously referring to a very specific historical event. Then, a dozen years after In the Eye of the Sun’s publication, Soueif would write again about torture, this time a nonfiction piece about the atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. With an implicit nod to Arendt, she compares one humiliating photograph from Abu Ghraib of Iraqis piled on top of each other to pictures taken at Nazi concentration camps in the Second World War. Whereas the prisoners had not been incarcerated for as long as the starving Jewish victims, the former’s torture was primarily sexual. The Iraqis were naked except for their hoods, which, Soueif argues (2004: 163), ‘ensur[ed] that each man was isolated from his companions, that he suffered alone although the flesh of others was an instrument in his suffering’. Although she does not mention Lynndie England by name, Soueif is alert to the fact that ‘American women’ were at the centre of this ‘pornography of occupation’ (2004: 165, 164), in contrast to the assumed male torturer whose breakfasting rituals she had imagined in her 1992 novel. In both her novel and her journalistic writing, then, Soueif is alert to the most brutal registers of touch, as well as the gratifying haptic modes pertaining to sexuality that made In the Eye of the Sun a controversial text in the Egypt of the 1990s. In this chapter I have challenged the long-dominant proposal that touch is anti-intellectual and therefore inferior to sight. The novel under consideration, Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun, is deeply committed to the notion that touch leads to knowledge. Through an extramarital affair in northern England, Soueif’s protagonist Asya gains entry to a new realm of somatic wisdom. The affair has violent repercussions, though, and the novel’s exploration of violent touch is further developed through depictions of torture, agonizing beauty treatments, and the medicalized body. Instead of putting the senses into a discrete hierarchy, Soueif demonstrates that the senses are inextricably intertwined, as are the understandings to which they grant access.

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Notes











1. Subsequent references are to this (1999/1992) edition of Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. 2. More broadly, in Australia Helen Darville’s The Hand that Signed the Paper (1994) was considered a literary hoax. Darville had assumed the false surname ‘Demidenko’ to push for the success of this novel about Ukraine, when her heritage is British rather than Slavic. And J. M. Coetzee’s Booker prize-winning novel Disgrace (1999) was at once a ‘scandal’ and a ‘success’ (Easton, in Morrison and Watkins 2007: 187), dealing with the contentious issues of race and rape in post-apartheid South Africa. 3. True, the Spice Girls were not an all-white band. However, Mel B, the only black woman in the 1990s group, was tellingly saddled with the epithet of ‘Scary’ Spice. Afua Hirsch writes in Brit(ish) of having been known as the ‘scariest’ girl in the school she attended approximately a decade before the Spice Girls formed, despite the fact that her personality is laidback and friendly. ‘There is only one explanation for this perception’, she rightly concludes, ‘I looked “scary”, because I am black’ (2018: n.p.). 4.  As we will see in relation to Hanif Kureishi’s depictions of raves in The Black Album, dance music’s nonviolence, egalitarianism, and – especially – antiracism could be overstated. Kureishi portrays raves as segregatory white spaces, in which black and brown bodies really stand out. 5.  See, for instance, Kureishi (1995b, 2015) and Soueif (1995/1983: 23–39; 2012). 6. The year 2017, for instance, began with a worldwide women’s march, progressed through the #MeToo movement, and ended with paedophile Roy Moore losing to Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama, thanks in large part to the campaigning of black women. 7. Indeed, one of the ways the Islamist leader Riaz in The Black Album explains his religio-political fervour is through a homily on the need for Muslims to avenge the Ummah’s wounds: ‘We’re not blasted Christians […] We don’t turn the other cheek. We will fight for our people who are being tortured in Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir! War has been declared against us. But we are armed’ (Kureishi 1995a: 82). 8.  Here and elsewhere I deploy Soueif’s unusual spelling, rather than the more commonly used transliteration ‘Umm Kulthum’. It should be observed that Soueif is an author with a deep interest in popular culture, and in this regard one thinks of Walter Armbrust’s introduction to his monograph Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996). Armbrust has a nationalist bent to his argument, but he also stages an important argument

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about the everyday aspect of the production of culture in Egypt, writing, for example: ‘Popular culture features in the lives of most Egyptians and, to some extent, in all of the Arabic-speaking Middle East’ (1996: 3). 9. A zar is an exorcism in which djinns or afreets are expelled by means of a vigorous group dance dominated by women. Howaida el Guindy and Claire Schmais (1994) show that this subjugated religious ritual is a highly sensate experience, as drums are beaten, incense is burnt, and women go into a trance-like state. 10. Interestingly, Amin Malak reveals that Asya’s husband’s name has a similar meaning: ‘An ironic signifier of [his] phallic failure, the name Saif Madi in Arabic means a “piercing sword”’ (2005: 133). 11. I say that the adultery contrasts with Asya’s academic work, because on the surface its passionate touch could not be more different from her meticulous collection and cataloguing of thousands of poetic metaphors. However, reading about adultery is a central part of reading the canon, so at another level there is a synergy between the two. 12. As Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland point out, the female Bildungsroman regularly features the extramarital relationship: ‘Because it frequently portrays a break not from parental but from marital authority, the novel of awakening is often a novel of adultery’ (1983: 12). 13. Only Molly Youngkin (2016: 163) accords sustained attention to Soueif’s non-realist literary strategies, but she links the novel with postmodernism, whereas I will argue that In the Eye of the Sun owes a greater debt to such practitioners of the modernist mode of literary impressionism as Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad than to the playful pastiche of postmodernists such as Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter. 14.  It might be objected that the Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman are not uniquely realist genres (Castle 2006; Malmgren 1987). One thinks especially of James Joyce’s quintessential modernist Künstlerroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1993/1916). However, because none of these critics lay stress on In the Eye of the Sun’s formal experimentation, it seems logical to conclude that they are thinking of the more conventional, realist versions of the Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman. 15. Ross Chambers (no relation) argues that digression is fundamental to much creative writing, so much so that he gives us the delightful term ‘loiterature’ (1999). In a later piece on digression in literature, he inadvertently trespasses on my body politics approach to Soueif and Kureishi, writing: ‘Where there is a law, digression is on the side of desire; where power reigns, it represents the strength of the weak’ (2011: ix). Appearing antithetical to focus and logical progression, digressive texts (like Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun) reflect the mind’s easy distraction by the body. In this way they indirectly challenge various modes of authority, particularly those which place a high value on ratiocination.

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16. There are many words in the text that Soueif leaves untranslated; instead, as with her next novel The Map of Love (1999), she adds a glossary. She thus avoids translation, which she shows to be problematic through Asya’s attempt to translate a comedic song by Sheikh Imam. She also remains closer to the original language of Arabic. However, using a glossary has its own set of concerns. As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin suggest, ‘glossing gives the translated word, and thus the “receptor” culture, the highest status’ (2002/1989: 65). 17. In Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism, Jodie Medd positions this as a significant queer moment. Medd argues that it is the word ‘bugger’ more than ‘semen’ that marks the start of the revolution in talking about sex. However, she does acknowledge that it is by ‘announc[ing] the knowledge of sexual residue’ (2012: 154) that Strachey unleashes the volley of ‘buggers’ from the Bloomsbury set’s lips. 18. ‘Pussy’ is of course crude slang for the vulva as well as being an informal word for cat. It is notable that cats have long been associated with female sexuality, as in the sex kitten, Catwoman, and the catsuit. A related thing to consider is Kristen Roupenian’s long short story Cat Person (Roupenian 2018) which, with its unsparing gaze on bad sex and miscommunication, chimes with many of Soueif’s concerns in In the Eye of the Sun. 19. Of the critics that examine the marriage in any detail, Waïl Hassan calls Saif ‘in many ways “ideal”’ as a partner, and, even if the shudder quotes show that Hassan recognizes his sexism and emotional limitations, he nonetheless completely passes over the character’s violence towards his wife (2011: 162). Amin Malak only remarks on Saif’s ‘sexual paralysis’ (2005: 133), not noticing that this paralysis is overcome when the husband is enraged by the belief that Asya has cuckolded him. Nada Ayad is extremely perceptive about Saif’s and Asya’s ‘upper-class consumerism’ and ‘sexual incompatibility’ (2018: 5, 6), but is wrong to say that ‘[t] hroughout the novel, Saif remains emotionally stoic and impenetrable’ (2018: 7). I have already indicated that Anastasia Valassopoulos rightly exposes Saif’s suppressed desire to commit acts of sexual violence on Asya early in their relationship (2007: 128). Given this, it is surprising that she only alludes to the rape in one euphemistic and slightly inaccurate endnote: ‘The marriage is […] consummated […] in a violent manner’ (171, n. 49). The marriage must have been consummated before then, albeit unsatisfactorily, since Asya has had a miscarriage. Moreover, to call this a violent consummation is too neutral: it is non-consensual and therefore rape. Saif subjects Asya to underwear-sniffing so as to humiliate her further. The two critics who tersely acknowledge Asya’s violation (without making mention of the broader domestic violence) are Rasheed el-Enany:

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‘Sayf [sic] […] rapes his wife in an angry violent scene’ (2006: 202) and Lindsey Moore: ‘Saïf [sic] hits and rapes her in a fit of sexual jealousy’ (2012: 74). 20. Soueif reinforces this viewpoint with her nonfiction writing. In an essay first written in 1992 and entitled ‘Women: The Battles That Have Not Been Won’ (Soueif 2004: 224–229), she opens with some statistics that show the vast amount of labour women around the globe do, and how little they are recompensed for that work. She does not leave the richest countries out of this gloomy picture, reviewing for instance the United States’ attack on abortion rights and poor record on domestic violence. 21.  There are points at which Saif might aspire to an anecdotal Arab machismo, but he oddly fails at this (not least when he takes Asya to Beirut, supposedly for a ‘dirty weekend’ before marriage, and on their wedding night a few years later).

Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (1983) ‘Introduction’. In Elizabeth Langland, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Abel (eds.), The Voyage in: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. 3–19. Ackerman, Diane (1990) A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage. Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Arendt, Hannah (2006/1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Amos Elon (intro.). New York: Penguin Classics. Armbrust, Walter (1996) Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (2002/1989) The Empire Writes Back: The Theory and Practice of Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Ayad, Nada (2018) ‘Reproducing, Mothering and Caretaking: Forms of Resistance in Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 1–12. Bradby, Barbara (1993) ‘Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology and the Body in Dance Music’. Popular Music 12.2: 155–176. Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. ——— (2011/1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Abingdon: Routledge. Byrd, Ayana D., and Lori L. Tharps (2003) Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

36  C. CHAMBERS Castle, Gregory (2006) Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Chakravorty, Mrinalini (2007) ‘To Undo What the North Has Done: Fragments of a Nation and Arab Collectivism in the Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif’. In Nawar Al-Hassan Golley (ed.), Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. 129–154. Chambers, Claire (2015) Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780–1988. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chambers, Ross (1999) Loiterature. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Classen, Constance (1990) ‘Sweet Colors, Fragrant Songs: Sensory Models of the Andes and the Amazon’. American Ethnologist 17.4: 722–735. ——— (2012) The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Coetzee, J. M. (1999) Disgrace. London: Vintage. Colette (1980/1905) The Innocent Libertine. Antonia White (trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——— (2001/1903) Claudine Married. Antonia White (trans.). London: Vintage. Connor, Steven (2015) ‘Literature, Technology and the Senses’. In David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 177–196. Conrad, Joseph (1925/1897) ‘Preface’. In Joseph Conrad (ed.), ‘The Nigger of the “Narcissus”’ and “Typhoon”. Mineola, Edinburgh: John Grant. vii–x. Cook, Matt (2014) ‘Sexual Revolution(s) in Britain’. In Gert Hekma and Alain Giami (eds.), Sexual Revolutions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 121–140. Darville, Helen (pseudonym: Helen Demidenko) (1994) The Hand That Signed the Paper. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Das, Santanu (2005) Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. El Guindy, Howaida, and Claire Schmais (1994) ‘The Zar: An Ancient Dance of Healing’. American Journal of Dance Therapy 16.2 (Fall/Winter): 107–120. El-Enany, Rasheed (2006) Arab Representations of the Occident: East–West Encounters in Arabic Fiction. London: Routledge. Fandy, Mamoun (1994) ‘Egypt’s Islamic Group: Regional Revenge?’ Middle East Journal 48.4: 607–625. Farebrother, Rachel (2016/2009) The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance. Abingdon: Routledge. Gilman, Sander L. (1991) Inscribing the Other. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ——— (1993) ‘Touch, Sexuality and Disease’. In W. F. Bynam and Roy Porter (eds.), Medicine and the Five Senses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 198–224.

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Hassan, Waïl (2011) Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsch, Afua (2018) Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. London: Jonathan Cape. Kindle. Homans, Margaret (2002) ‘Adoption and Essentialism’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21.2: 257–274. hooks, bell (1988) ‘Straightening Our Hair’. Avant-Garde Z Magazine. September. https://zcomm.org/zmagazine/straightening-our-hair-by-bellhooks/. Accessed 26 April 2018. ——— (2015) ‘Dreaming Ourselves Dark and Deep: Black Beauty’. In bell hooks (ed.), Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. New York: Routledge. 59–74. Husain, Ed (2007) The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left. London: Penguin. Jackson, Carolyn (2006) Lads and Ladettes in School: Gender and a Fear of Failure. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Joyce, James (1993/1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Vintage. Kandiyoti, Deniz (1988) ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’. Gender and Society 2.3: 274–290. Katrak, Ketu H. (2006) Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kipnis, Laura (2003) Against Love: A Polemic. New York: Random House. Kuo, Hsin-Ju (2014) ‘Revisiting Adultery in South Asian Immigrant Narratives’. Contemporary Women’s Writing. 8:2: 171–188. Kureishi, Hanif (1986) My Beautiful Laundrette and the Rainbow Sign. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (1995a) The Black Album. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (1995b) ‘That’s How Good It Was’. In Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage (eds.), The Faber Book of Pop. London: Faber and Faber. xvii–xx. ——— (2002) The Body and Seven Stories. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (2011) Collected Essays. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (2015) ‘On David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel”’. Wall Street Journal. 17 March. https://www.wsj.com/articles/novelist-hanif-kureishi-on-david-bowies-rebel-rebel-1426600595. Accessed 26 April 2018. Lefebvre, Henri (1991/1974) The Production of Space. Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Levin, Ira (1972) The Stepford Wives. New York: Random House. Maitzen, Rohan (2009) ‘But Why Always George Eliot? Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and Middlemarch’. Novel Readings. 26 May. https://

38  C. CHAMBERS rohanmaitzen.com/2009/05/26/but-why-always-george-eliot-ahdaf-soueifs-in-the-eye-of-the-sun-and-middlemarch/. Accessed 29 December 2018. Malak, Amin (2005) Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English. Albany: State University of New York Press. Malmgren, Carl D. (1987) ‘“From Work to Text”: The Modernist and Postmodernist Künstlerroman’. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 21.1: 5–28. Massad, Joseph (1999) ‘The Politics of Desire in the Writings of Ahdaf Soueif’. Journal of Palestine Studies 28.4: 74–90. Massey, Doreen (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Matz, Jesse (2003/2001) Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McRobbie, Angela (2009) The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: SAGE. Medd, Jodie (2012) Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mercer, Kobena (1987) ‘Black Hair/Style Politics’. New Formations 3: 33–54. Moore, Lindsey (2012) ‘Voyages Out and In: Two (British) Arab Muslim Women’s Bildungsromane’. In Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin (eds.), Culture, Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing. New York: Routledge. 68–84. Morrison, Jago, and Susan Watkins (2007) Scandalous Fictions: The TwentiethCentury Novel in the Public Sphere. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Overton, Bill (2002) Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684–1890: Theories and Circumtexts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2005/1996) The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Steven Holl (pref.). Chichester: Wiley. ——— (2009) The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. Chichester: Wiley. Razzaque, Russell (2008) Human Being to Human Bomb: Inside the Mind of a Terrorist. Cambridge: Icon. Read, Piers Paul (2015) ‘Top Ten Novels About Unfaithful Wives’. Guardian. 2 December. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/02/top-10novels-about-unfaithful-wives-chatterley-tolstoy-karenina. Accessed 1 June 2018. Roupenian, Kristen (2018) Cat Person. London: Jonathan Cape. Salinger, J. D. (1951) The Catcher in the Rye. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Serageldin, Samia (2003) ‘Reflections and Refractions: Arab American Women Writing and Written’. Hawwa 12: 189–205. Sharma, Ursula, and Paula Black (2001) ‘Look Good, Feel Better: Beauty Therapy as Emotional Labour’. Sociology 35.4: 913–931. Sherry, Virginia N. (1993) ‘Security Forces Practices in Egypt’. Criminal Justice Ethics 12.2: 2, 42–44. Smith, Mark M. (2007) Sensory History: An Introduction. Oxford: Berg.

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Soueif, Ahdaf (1995/1983) Aisha. London: Bloomsbury. ——— (1999/1992) In the Eye of the Sun. London: Bloomsbury. ——— (1999) The Map of Love. London: Bloomsbury. ——— (2004) Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground. London: Bloomsbury. ——— (2012) Desert Island Discs. BBC Radio 4. 22 June. https://www.bbc. co.uk/programmes/b01jwfpz. Accessed 26 April 2018. Spence, Hilary (2001) The Complete Book of Baby Names. Cippenham: Foulsham. Tanner, Tony (1979) Adultery in the Novel. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tannir, Dania, and Barry Leshin (2001) ‘Sugaring: An Ancient Method of Hair Removal’. Dermatologic Surgery 27.3: 309–311. Tarlo, Emma (2010) Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. Oxford: Berg. Tate, Shirley Anne (2009) Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics. Farnham: Ashgate. Teverson, Andrew, and Sara Upstone (eds.) (2011) Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Toor, Saadia (2011) The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan. London: Pluto. Turner, Alwyn W. (2014) A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s. London: Aurum. Valassopoulos, Anastasia (2007) Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression in Context. Abingdon: Routledge. Vinge, Louise (1975) The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition. Lund: LiberLäromedel. Whelehan, Imelda (2000) Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism. London: Women’s Press. Williams, Zoe (2015) ‘What the 90s Meant: In with Hedonism, Out with Believing in Something’. Guardian G2. 8 September. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/sep/08/nineties-90s-in-hedonism-out-with-believingsomething. Accessed 11 April 2018. Wilson, Elizabeth (2003/1985) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: I.B. Tauris. Wolf, Naomi (1990) The Beauty Myth. London: Vintage. Woolf, Virginia (1955/1927) To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ——— (1985/1922) ‘Old Bloomsbury’. In Jeanne Schulkind (ed. and intro.), Moments of Being. London: Hogarth. 179–201. Youngkin, Molly (2016) British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 2

‘I Wanted a Human Touch’: Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album

Three years after Soueif, in 1995, Hanif Kureishi published his second novel, The Black Album. As Susie Thomas shows, the novel’s temporal setting in 1989, ‘the year of the fatwa and the end of the Berlin Wall’, is significant, demonstrating that ‘with the collapse of socialism, Islam became the main form of resistance’ (2009a: 379). Kureishi’s text centres on the rise of extremism in Britain but, perhaps surprisingly for a book about Islamist abstemiousness, it is also preoccupied by music, British Asian cuisine, and both sensual and sexual touch. The 1990s, Alwyn W. Turner argues, was a uniquely secular decade. In A Classless Society, he reminds readers of Labour Party spokesman Alistair Campbell’s famous public relations dictum that politicians should not discuss God with the media. ‘[W]ithout political expression’, Turner concludes, ‘the voice of religion faded still further into the background noise of society’ (2014: 17). Yet, as his swift segue into discussion of television comedies The Vicar of Dibley and Father Ted makes plain, Turner’s assumptions about religion are limited to Christianity. In his book of almost a thousand pages, Turner only mentions Islam once and in the most glancing of ways, as he references Terry Waite’s release from his hostage situation at the hands of Islamists in Lebanon. And if Turner makes much of the decade beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s ousting from power by her own Conservative Party and replacement with the ‘grey man’ John Major (Turner 2014: 24), the fact that the long 1990s is bookended by the Rushdie affair and 9/11 passes him by. This makes Kureishi’s freewheeling intervention into Islamism at the decade’s © The Author(s) 2019 C. Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52089-0_2

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halfway point all the more impressive and prescient, even if, as we will see, the intervention itself is uneven. In a way, all the senses, touch included, are entangled with each other, unspooling their knotty skein across Kureishi’s work. Even in his memoir My Ear at His Heart, we learn about his early experiences of tactility in a highly Freudian manner, as he writes about helping his father with his ablutions in the family’s tiny bathroom: ‘I would wash his back, caress his head with oil, walk on his back, massage his legs and feet.’ This was, Kureishi reflects, ‘an intimacy I adored’ (2004: 75), and it is an intimacy largely performed through the sense of touch. Similarly, in Kureishi’s first novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), touch is omnipresent – mostly, of course, in relation to eroticism, sensuousness, and sexual pleasure. For example, in a suggestive quotation, when protagonist Karim sees the elaborate toilette of Eva (his father’s girlfriend), he says: ‘it represented a world of sensuality, of smell and touch, of indulgence and feeling, which aroused me like an unexpected caress as I undressed’ (1990: 92). And in Kureishi’s latest novella, The Nothing, smell, taste, and touch (and, more often, memories of long-ago experiences of smell, taste, and touch) pervade the text. Confined to a wheelchair, Waldo, the main character, recreates (that is, sees without seeing) what is going on in his house by paying attention to smell and sound clues. As so often in Kureishi’s fiction, The Nothing revolves around adultery, with Waldo suspecting his much younger wife of having an affair. Old and impotent, his sexuality is reduced to memories of sensory activities from the past and listening into the liaisons of the present day. Waldo seems to find a positive side to this, saying: ‘I am impatient, giddy almost with this descent into voluptuous masochism. Pain is such pleasure, and pleasure such pain’ (2017: n.p.). This returns us, ouroboros-style, to My Ear at His Heart, in which Kureishi writes: ‘Where does sex begin and end? Sex is often the memory of sex, as well as the fantasy and the anticipation’ (2004: 74). As with The Nothing and Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun (discussed in the previous chapter), The Black Album pivots on an adulterous relationship. In this case the relationship is precisely educational, since the lovers are protagonist Shahid Hasan and his lecturer Deedee Osgood. Early on in the novel, Shahid goes to a rave nightclub in Brighton. One of the club’s most attractive aspects is that under the influence of drugs and euphoric music, revellers lose all inhibitions around touch, so that ‘[t] hey hugged and kissed and stroked one another with an Elysian innocence’ (1995a: 25).1 Here it is salient briefly to delve into the sexual

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dimension – and even a component of sexual fetishism – inherent to pop music, given the music’s centrality to the text. This dimension is evoked in Kureishi’s words in the introduction to The Faber Book of Pop: ‘pop is a form crying out not to be written about. It is physical, sensual, of the body rather than the mind’ (1995b: xix). Similarly, in her essay on sexual politics in The Black Album (1999), Maria Degabriele holds that Shahid and Deedee view pornography as part of pop’s repertoire, which they believe is an aspect to be celebrated. By contrast, Riaz and his Islamist group censoriously agree that pornography is integral to pop culture and therefore endorse pop’s renunciation. It is at the rave that Shahid learns of Deedee as an inspirational teacher from a black student of hers. Once back in London he goes to her under-resourced multicultural college. This institution is probably based on Kilburn Polytechnic, a rundown university in northwest London that finally closed its doors in 1991, soon after the close of the narrative arc and four years before the novel’s publication.2 At the college, Shahid secures admission to the eclectic course on which Deedee lectures by dazzling with his knowledge of Prince, an artist he describes as ‘half black and half white, half man, half woman, half size, feminine but macho too’ (25). Deedee accords pop cultural icons such as Madonna and the leather jacket equal status to literary classics. In an interview with me, Kureishi expressed his agreement with Deedee’s intermixing of high and low culture: ‘It would be silly to say people should be reading Shakespeare and not studying Coca-Cola: it just depends on how good the teaching is’ (qtd. in Chambers 2011: 238). Deedee’s teaching is accordingly full of sensual enjoyment as well as erudition, and this mixing of business with pleasure brims over into her extracurricular interactions with students. Soon Deedee takes Shahid to another rave, where he ‘had never heard music so fast; the electronic beats went like a jackhammer’ (25). Kureishi captures this moment of optimism in the late 1980s when, as Sarah Champion puts it, ‘at an acid house party or at an urban warehouse party, we all believed that things might change’ (1997: xv). The novel’s main drug-dealing character Strapper expresses a similar utopianism, praising a space containing three thousand virtually naked, high people, dancing as one without violence, the new acid dream, not over, not yet. The soulfulness and generosity of people he’d met on that scene who, mocked and

44  C. CHAMBERS outlawed by the straight world, would welcome him into their homes on this very day if he turned up, no questions asked, sharing whatever they had, for they understood one another, as if they’d been in combat together; it had been collective love and spiritual oneness. (197)

As is implied by the words ‘spiritual oneness’, as well as the ‘Elysian innocence’ mentioned earlier, one of the utopian aspects of the late 1980s and early 1990s dance music scene is its paradisiacal simplicity. Even if the ravers are ‘virtually naked’, like Adam and Eve before their expulsion from Eden, touch between them is supposed to be pure, based on ‘collective love’ rather than sexual impetus. Indeed, as Deedee and Shahid gaze at the ravers, who do not seem ‘to have any great interest’ in each other beyond a detached appreciation of beauty, the teacher touches her student’s arm and quotes lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (2004/1816) about the paradise of Xanadu: ‘A savage place! […] holy and enchanted’ (61–62). Little wonder that this otherworldly ‘dream’ is viewed askance by religious figures, with Riaz giving one of his fire and brimstone Islamist talks the Ed Husainesque title of ‘Rave to the Grave?’ (80). As well as being castigated by some clerics, acid house was also ‘mocked and outlawed’ by the establishment, as recognized by Andrew Hill (2002: 90–93) and Tim Lawrence (2006: 128) in their analyses of the moral panics around dance music that would culminate in John Major’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. Yet, the peaceful collectivism of dance all-nighters extolled here is to some extent exposed as a myth. A hint of this is given in the dark analogy that is drawn between the ravers’ camaraderie and the fellow feeling of war veterans. Kureishi’s reservations are made more explicit when Strapper quickly goes on to talk of his experience of going to rehab ‘and how many times he’d fled or been kicked out for drug-taking or fucking’ (197). So much for the character’s claims that house music fosters nonviolence and agamic love. Additionally, there is always the slight possibility of literally raving to the grave. This possibility is raised in Kureishi’s dark aside from My Ear at His Heart that Ecstasy is ‘a drug I like too much’ (2004: 177) and caricatured in Strapper’s description of people dying of dehydration from too much dancing: ‘people had combusted, […] ravers reduced to slime’ (196). In 1995, the same year that Kureishi published The Black Album, Britain’s most notorious Ecstasy death took place. Contrary to widespread belief that she took a bad pill or overheated,

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18-year-old Leah Betts actually died because of her fear of the kind of dehydration Strapper hyperbolizes here. The teenager suffered catastrophic water poisoning after taking an E for the first time ‘and then drinking 7 litres of water’ (Ranscombe 2016: 33). It is no wonder, then, that one reason Shahid bonds with Riaz is that he believes the older man saved his life when he collapsed, vomiting, after the excesses of his night of hedonistic raving with Deedee. Furthermore, despite its ‘Second Summer of Love’ tag, the acid house scene that broke into the mainstream from 1989 onwards is depicted here as far from inclusive. The novel’s warehouse space is known as the White Room, and Deedee is remorseful for bringing Shahid to such a monocultural club where he seems out of place because of his Pakistani ethnicity. In his chapter about race and dance culture, ‘Whose Club Is it Anyway?’, which includes brief analysis of The Black Album, Stan Beeler (2007: 74–93) shows that the rave scene was predominantly white and that whenever non-white people got involved the movement tended to splinter along ethnic lines. Nor does literature escape this monocultural bias. All of the authors Champion includes in Disco Biscuits, her anthology of ‘fiction from the chemical generation’, are white men.3 This extraordinary lack of diversity comes in spite of the fact that Champion makes a passing reference in her introduction (1997: xv) to readings Kureishi gave at London’s ‘Arthrob’ parties – events which mashed up cultural talks with DJ sets. Feeling visibly different at white dance parties but enjoying the euphoric music and touching, Shahid feels torn between on the one hand music and ‘sex and secularity’ (Kureishi 2011: 243), and on the other the discipline and anti-racist solidarity he finds with Riaz, Chad, Hat, and other members of an Islamist group based at his halls of residence. At the White Room, just as in Brighton, the young people lie almost motionlessly, apart from some aimless fondling, ‘as if they’d been massacred’. High on Ecstasy, Shahid dives into the pile of bodies and is soon ‘fuse[d]’ to a random girl (63). Deedee is unhappily married, to fellow academic and Marxist Andrew Brownlow, and she reacts with jealousy, ‘pushing away the other girl and falling into his mouth’ (64). Fresh from the White Room, she takes him to an end-of-decade party, despite the New Year’s Eve of 1990 still being some way off. It is held in a white mansion, and the house’s lack of pigmentation speaks tellingly to the novel’s discussion of exclusionary racial politics. The venue is also described as a seat of social privilege: ‘the sort of place an English Gatsby

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would have chosen’ (61). However, Gatsby is the ultimate nouveau riche individual whose acquisition of the symbols of old money forms part of a desperate attempt to erase his parvenu status, so there is also a hinted insecurity here. In Kureishi’s text a group of ravers are nihilistically intent on irrupting the quintessential English country estate. Deedee expresses this in class terms, exclaiming that most of the young people present ‘had probably never been inside such a house before, unless they were delivering the groceries’. The boy who sells them drugs concurs, asseverating: ‘E for the people! Up the working class’ (62). As with Soueif’s novel, therefore, The Black Album emphasizes social class, showing both that some spaces are usually closed to the working classes and that the appeal of rave’s egalitarian tactility cuts across borders of class – if not race. After this unforgettable night, Deedee and her much younger student escalate their passionate relationship, which is based on shared tastes in literature, music, and fashion. Deedee, like Asya’s lover Gerald, introduces her partner to new forms of sexual knowledge that teach Shahid even more than the unorthodox pedagogy of his college course. Since she is in the position of power there are issues of exploitation here too. As Kureishi writes in an essay about adultery: ‘what the adulterer usually wants are better relationships, conversation, support, attention, pleasure’ (2013: n.p.). Interestingly in light of this Part’s haptic knowledge line of enquiry, all of the listed gratifications are advantages not only of affairs but also higher education, as Shahid recognizes when he reflects on the ‘intrigu[ing] […] discuss[ions]’ that lured him to embark on his course in the first place (20). Even knowing that Shahid is seeing Deedee, his married yuppie brother Chili openly makes a pass at her. Brushing off Shahid’s protest, Chili justifies himself in terms that are often used to rationalize extramarital relationships: ‘I wanted a human touch. To feel the warm skin. Is that too much to ask?’ (259). Chili projects his spouse Zulma as the stereotypical Pakistani Muslim woman – sexually unavailable, repressed, devoid of sexual desire and experience – and consequently depicts himself as asking little of the white woman but to make her warm skin available to his touch. Although Kureishi is consistently more positive about extramarital affairs than Soueif with her exploration of domestic violence and rape, he nonetheless expresses reservations. These are indicated, for example, through his use of the indiscriminately violent verb ‘massacred’ to describe the ravers lying on top of one other. And although as we will see

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the novel is heavily weighted against Islamism, there is shown to be some truth in Chad’s puritanical assertion: ‘[P]leasure and self-absorption isn’t everything!’ (128). A jarring illustration of this comes at the novel’s end when Shahid and Deedee pledge a tongue-in-cheek vow to stay with each other ‘[u]ntil it stops being fun’ (276). The built-in obsolescence of their relationship suggests a depressingly consumerist and disposable view of sexual partners. In ‘The Postcolonial Subject Divided Between East and West’, Frederick Holmes also explores Kureishi’s ambivalent treatment of the value of pleasure, propounding: ‘what is sacrificed in such a fluid world is stability and enduring purpose’ (2001: 308). Even Brownlow, who is on paper a wronged husband, appears in the depthless world of the novel as being unperturbed by Deedee’s affair with Shahid, so long as they keep it on the ‘down-low’. On one of his and Deedee’s first assignations, Shahid is horrified when Brownlow comes into the family home he shares with his wife. The leftist has suffered from a stammer ever since the Soviet Union’s collapse so he cannot speak to Shahid, but ‘he stuck out his adhesive hand and Shahid shook it as genially as he could, trying to ignore the fact he almost had the man’s wife on his knee’ (49). The ‘adhesive’ nature of Brownlow’s handshake denotes his oleaginous personality, and later, when he has incontrovertible proof of Shahid’s physical relationship with his wife, his response is ‘glum’ (213) rather than angry. Brownlow quickly moves the conversation along so as to praise the censorship of the Islamist group, his cultural relativism accounting for Kureishi’s negative portrayal of this character. In contrast to the superficiality of ‘fun’ sexuality, reading, and writing are consistently delineated as ‘hard’ (30) but bringing durable rewards. As we saw in the previous chapter, Asya tries to use Anna Karenina as a cautionary tale about adultery when she is suppressing her desire for Mario. Similarly, Shahid ardently believes that literature – including Tolstoy’s magnum opus – has the power to educate about ‘the profoundest dilemmas of living’ (20). Deedee’s scholastic interest in the leather jacket indicates that this is a novel that is deeply curious about matters of dress, which subtends her interest – as well as Kureishi’s – in popular culture. In the early development of fashion studies, thinkers understandably enough tended to concentrate on the visual aspects of clothes, but this led to ocularcentric bias. Arguments such as Thorstein Veblen’s about conspicuous consumption (2007/1899) and Alison Lurie’s in The Language of Clothes (1981) primarily focused on the visually communicative aspects

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of dress and thus passed over garments’ tactile qualities (see Wilson 2003/1985: 50–57). This neglect connects to the fact that, at least at first, fashion studies equally did not pay enough attention to the body. Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson explain this problem in their introduction to the volume Body Dressing, noting that ‘[f]or the most part, fashion theorists have failed to give due recognition to the way in which dress is a fleshy practice involving the body. In other words, they disembody fashion.’ The hegemony of linguistic or textual interpretations of fashion, they explain, has ‘led to rather narrow accounts, which neglect the place and significance of the body’ (2001: 4) – and, one might add, garments’ tactile properties. What is more, one could add a long list of early works, most of them with a semiotic focus (Barnard 1996; Barthes 1985; Eco 1979), or fashion histories such as James Laver’s (1937), which explain the evolution of clothing in relation to sight: primarily, in relation to the male gaze. This is to some extent understandable, and it is easily apparent that garments are often used by authors as an additional form of communication within literary texts.4 A character’s development in a narrative may be echoed through their vestiary transformation, or their poverty marked by the absence of choice afforded to them when deciding what to wear. Just such a fall from sartorial grace is tracked in the novel when Shahid loses Riaz’s clothes to opportunistic thieves as he dutifully washes them at a rundown laundrette. (This is a sly intertextual reference to Kureishi’s 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette.) Riaz’s devoted follower Chad compels Shahid to give up many of the clothes in his wardrobe, including a flamboyant red Paul Smith shirt belonging to Chili, to make up for the spiritual leader’s loss. In his book Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller, Kenneth C. Kaleta (1998: 141) tracks the ‘passage’ of this shirt as it is loaned to Shahid, then to Riaz, and finally returns to Chili. Following Kaleta, Noemí Pereira-Ares reads the Paul Smith shirt as ‘a symbol of Western consumerism and capitalism’ (Pereira-Ares 2018: 111). There is truth in this, but it should also be mentioned that Kureishi – no straightforward enemy of capitalism – is a personal friend of Smith’s, and that the novelist ‘once modelled’ for the designer ‘at a Paris catwalk show’ (Sharkey 1999: n.p.). Although PereiraAres largely concentrates on The Buddha of Suburbia, she provides a sprightly two-page analysis of the depictions of dress in The Black Album in her 2018 monograph Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian

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Diaspora Narratives. She concentrates on the different ‘looks’ of, on the one hand, Riaz and his followers, who for the most part dress severely, and on the other, Shahid, Deedee, and Chilli, who are constantly experimenting with their fashion and wear a lot of branded clothing. Especially illuminating is Pereira-Ares’s analysis of two moments in the text, one when Shahid briefly assumes the ‘national dress’ (131) of shalwar kameez and skullcap during his Islamist phase, and the other as Hat chides him: ‘our religion isn’t […] like trying on a suit to see if it fit! You gotta buy the whole outfit’ (235; see Pereira-Ares 2018: 112). Hat’s demurral notwithstanding, as we will see later, casually trying Islamism on is exactly what Shahid seems to do in this novel. However, as Mark Smith shows, the transformative effect of dress has to do with touch as well as look: ‘Clothes can, and should, be read from the inside out as well as from outside in so that the quality and feel of the clothing on the inside, how it was understood to either caress or rub the skin of the wearer by spectators, is appreciated fully’ (2007: 107). In a similar vein, Elizabeth Wilson writes: ‘Fashion is more than a language. […] It is also tactile […], it is about touching’ (1992: 14). We see a reverse marginalization of fashion’s legibility to the outside eye when Deedee encourages Shahid to cross-dress as a precursor to sex. At first he is self-conscious and ‘felt he were losing himself’. Yet Deedee’s assertiveness is soothing, as is the decentring of the ophthalmic at this moment in the text. Denied a mirror by Deedee until she has finished daubing him with lipstick and blusher, he starts to enjoy ‘the feel of his new female face’. As 1990s hit song ‘Vogue’ plays through the sound system,5 with its refrain ‘What are you looking at?’, it is noticeable that Madonna’s question remains unanswered. Shahid wonders of Deedee: ‘What was she seeing?’ (117). Readers only learn of how he feels in his makeup,6 and then attest to how he playfully embodies a female or gender-fluid identity. The cosmetics provoke him to strut like a model on a catwalk: ‘he swung his hips and arms, throwing his head back, pouting, kicking his legs out, showing her his arse and cock’ (118). Now ‘[b] eyond embarrassment’ (118), he revels in temporarily embodying a ‘half man, half woman’ ipseity like his favourite pop star Prince. Here gender is a performance, which, as Judith Butler puts it, entails ‘free play […] [and] theatrical self-presentation’. Performance, then, stands in contrast to the performativity of gender in quotidian life, which involves ‘a regularized and constrained repetition of norms’ (2011/1993: 59–60).

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Shahid’s gender identity is productively destabilized by his performance of femininity, and a space is opened up for him to rethink his identity as bashful, petulant, sultry, and so forth. Although marginal to my discussion, there has been some adept criticism about looking relations in the novel. Critics such as Kenneth C. Kaleta (1998), Bradley Buchanan (2007, following Kaleta), and Elahe Haschemi Yekani (2011) contend that the novel features a reversal and subversion of the hegemonic male gaze. To argue this, the critics focus on the same passage I analyse in which Deedee applies makeup to Shahid’s face, and they marshal quotations such as: [S]he liked him naked while she was dressed. But when he glanced at her, he saw she had drifted away. […] She hummed and fussed over him, reddening his lips […]. She back-combed his hair. It troubled him; he felt he were losing himself. What was she seeing? […] [S]he refused him a mirror […] To examine him she moved about, telling him to turn his head this way and that, to place his arms here and there, to do more of this or the other. (117)

It is evident from this passage that Shahid becomes an object of the female gaze, thus subverting the hegemonic paradigm whereby ‘men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger 1972: 47). However, there are many ambiguities at work here, as each of the critics points out in their own way (Kaleta 1998: 123–133; Buchanan 2007: 62–63; Yekani 2011: 179). Shahid, one can argue, becomes a sort of fetish, and this seems particularly problematic when read alongside other discourses such as the imperialist one outlined in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1995/1978). Additionally, as Maria Degabriele shows while discussing pornography in the novel (admittedly in a sketchy way), one could also argue that Deedee allows her body to become the object of the pornographic male gaze: ‘With splayed fingers she showed him her cunt. He picked up the candle and, holding it close, peered in. He was so pleased, and the drug, making her smiling face waxy, rendered her in magazine soft-focus; without losing her soul she was turning herself into pornography’ (119). This complex section, therefore, is an example of how touch is twisted up in the novel with the other senses, most notably sight. Returning to the hyper-tactile section of the novel, Deedee then puts on stockings and a straw hat with a silk band, garments which are

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seemingly chosen for their textures since we are told nothing of how she looks in them. She describes the contours of Story of O to Shahid, particularly the ‘suede shoes […], and fur and silk’ worn by Pauline Réage’s protagonist O (118; Réage 1976/1954). In her pioneering interdisciplinary book Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Elizabeth Wilson refers to Story of O as ‘a “classic” pornographic celebration of bondage, flogging and mutilation’ (Wilson 2003/1985: 101), all three activities of course being practices from the pleasure–pain repertoire of sadomasochism. Wilson quotes Réage on O’s view of the face of one of her lovers, Jacqueline, which is framed by a fur coat: ‘her soft but hard cheek grazing silver fox’.7 This is a peculiarly tangible vision, for O can discern the oxymoronic soft–hardness of the visage as well as the pelt’s almost wounding fuzziness. Elsewhere in her book, Wilson writes that clothing offers up many items that are ripe for fetishization because of their closeness to the body and simultaneous capacity to conceal and reveal. While recognizing that those fabrics that are considered erotic vary across temporal and spatial contexts, she notes the particular appeal of three articles of clothing with distinct touch: silk, spike-heeled shoes, and the ‘unrepentant, brash display’ of furs (2003/1985: 97, 141).8 The word ‘unrepentant’ indicates fur’s cruelty, which was underscored in the influential campaign in the 1990s by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), featuring semi-nude supermodels and the slogan ‘I’d rather go naked than wear fur’ (Dejmanee 2013; see also Classen 2005: 1). The imaginary around fur holds sexy associations with pubic hair, to which PETA responded by flaunting the brazen attractions of naked flesh. However, as Tisha Dejmanee argues, in doing so the group caused ‘women’s issues to be cast aside or exploited in the name of animal welfare’ (2013: 312). This allusion to animal rights necessitates a short foray into touch’s relationship with taste and, specifically, the curry industry. In Chapter 4, ‘Taste the Difference’, I will delve more deeply into British multicultural cuisine in relation to Arab and Mediterranean food. Curry is often hailed today as Britain’s national dish. In his ‘Chicken Tikka Masala Speech’, Robin Cook (the UK’s Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001) remarked on the dish’s ‘national’ importance and assimilatory tendencies. The British, he said, absorbed and redefined South Asian cuisine, adding that the masala sauce was added to hybridize traditional chicken tikka because of the British penchant for meat in gravy. In Britain Through Muslim Eyes, I argued that (usually Bangladeshi-run) curry houses were

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a common setting in much of the early writing by authors of Muslim heritage in the UK. This continues into the later period explored in this book, as is underlined in one of the most darkly comic jokes from The Black Album. Against a backdrop of the racial and religious tension surrounding the Rushdie affair, about which more later, Brownlow pronounces: ‘I could murder an Indian’ (180). But little carnivorous killing is committed in the world of the novel, even though, as Constance Classen observes, the majority of Westerners handle animals ‘most frequently […] when their body parts are served up as a meal’ (2005: 111). By contrast, all the fare described in the novel is vegetarian, with the exception of one reference to ‘keema’ or mince (4). Dishes the novel alights on include the badly-labelled ‘korjet’ or ‘oberjean’ (4), and the ‘bindi’ and ‘apple chutney’ (168) served in Hat’s father’s café, as well as the high-quality matar paneer and chickpeas on offer at an Indian restaurant in Westbourne Grove to which Deedee takes Shahid (77). And that is to pass over in forgiving silence what Bart Moore-Gilbert astutely calls the ‘unfortunate passages relating to the […] aubergine’ (2001: 147–148) said to be inscribed with ‘holy words’ (171), and based on a real event in Leicester five years before the novel was published (Hoyland 1990; Moore-Gilbert 2001: 238, n. 56). Another aspect of this is that touching one’s meal via eating with the hands is very common in the Indian food culture that is celebrated in the novel. Indeed, the Hindi−Urdu word ‘chamcha’, meaning ‘spoon’, may have developed its connotations of ‘sycophant’ or ‘toadie’9 when Indians started trying to ape British cutlery traditions, in order to curry favour (so to speak) with their colonizers. But eating is a multisensory experience, as Mark Smith recognizes in his customarily succinct discussion of ‘[t]actile table manners’ (2007: 102) and Kureishi highlights in his depiction of Riaz and Shahid tearing ‘with scorching fingers into […] hot chapattis, soaking them in dhal’ (5).10 In The Black Album, a full gamut of gustatory gratification is explored across the different senses including touch, but it is noteworthy that the pleasures of animal flesh are almost entirely shunned. (It should perhaps be kept in mind that Kureishi is a pescatarian and has not eaten meat since the 1980s.) Chef Vinita Chopra Jacinto reinforces the idea that South Asian food culture invests in the various sensations associated with food: ‘Eating should be sensual and mindful, employing all the senses: sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. Using your hands gives you a tactile connection with your food’ (Jacinto, qtd. in Mindess 2012: n.p.). And yet, Western and

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imperial discourse represses the sense of touch in this area, condemning the etiquette of eating with the fingers as uncivilized. Anna Mindess (2012) cites one extreme example from 2011 when Norwegian authorities took Indian children into foster care in part because they objected to a migrant family’s cultural practices of eating with their hands and sleeping together in one bed. It is clear that there exists a sort of imperial discourse on touch. As Mark Smith writes, ‘[t]he general indifference toward hapticity plays up the idea that touch was variously more carnal, lewd, primitive, emotional and less intellectual than sight’ (2007: 93). Yet, far from being anti-intellectual, touching one’s meal teaches more than can ever be imparted by sterile utensils about the dish’s texture, individual ingredients, the spices used, and the aromas that may linger on the hands long afterwards. The black humour in Brownlow’s pronouncement stems, of course, from the menace that adheres to the common English phrase ‘murder an Indian’ in the light of pervasive racism. In his monograph The Book of Skin, Steven Connor connects touch and race in the chapter ‘Off-Colour’: Though the words ‘tinge’, ‘tint’ and ‘tincture’ all derive from tingere, to dye, and thus have no direct relation to the family of touchy words like ‘tangent’, ‘intangible’ and ‘contingent’, which all derive from the Latin tangere, to touch, the idea of touch seems nevertheless to have exercised an attraction on the words for colour. To be ‘tinged’ with a colour is to have the merest touch of it applied. (2004: 152)

This bleeding of the vocabulary of touch into diction surrounding ­colour helps to illuminate the novel’s discussions of racism. For instance, when remembering his traumatic experience of racism as a younger man, which led to a ‘distorted’ hatred of himself and other non-white people (11), Shahid declares: ‘I wouldn’t touch brown flesh, except with a branding iron’ (10). As he remembers his distaste for brown skin, Shahid adds cutaneous exaggeration through an allusion to the hideous practice in the Transatlantic slave trade of branding humans like livestock (KatzHyman 2011). This image of burning recalls the opening page of ‘The Rainbow Sign’, in which Kureishi describes his younger self understanding the racist compulsion that drove a young black man to jump into boiling water in the hope of turning his skin white (1986: 9). In The Black Album, at a confused juncture in his life Shahid found the prospect

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of sex with British Asian women nauseating. His self-hating racism became so extreme that he almost joined the British National Party, and he confesses to having harboured fantasies of murdering black people. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon evokes what happens to non-white individuals when they are subjected to what he calls the ‘racial epidermal schema’ (2008/1952: 84) dominant in Western societies: For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white. […] [I]t is apparent to me that the effective disalienation of the black man entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities. If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process: – primarily, economic; – subsequently, the internalization – or, better, the epidermalization – of this inferiority. (Fanon 2008/1952: 4)

Writing in 1952, Fanon excoriates the fact that if the ‘black man [sic]’ wants to succeed, he has to make himself as white as possible. By 1989 when The Black Album is set, little seems to have changed for the black (or brown) subject. Shahid, like Fanon before him, is alienated by racialized deprivation (his ethnically diverse college11 is laughingly said to hold its reunions in Wandsworth Prison). His ‘epidermalization’ by the threatening ‘Paki-busters’ who patrol the streets (141), at one time led to an inferiority complex so severe that Shahid felt freakish, developed paranoia, and ‘thought [he] was going mad’ (10). This might be partly autobiographical, since in ‘The Rainbow Sign’ Kureishi writes of the intense racial abuse he experienced on a daily basis during the late 1960s and 1970s: ‘The word “Pakistani” had been made into an insult. It was a word I didn’t want used about myself. I couldn’t tolerate being myself’ (1986: 12). It should also not escape our notice that Brownlow claims Deedee ‘sometimes takes a certain interest’ in Fanon (214). Through this seemingly throwaway comment, Kureishi infers Deedee’s white privilege in that she can intermittently dabble in radical black politics without having to endure racism’s daily reality as Shahid does. While Kureishi, like Fanon, is razor-sharp about colour racism and its pernicious psychological effects, he finds himself on less secure ground when it comes to cultural racism and Islamophobia. He shows acuity about those features of Islam that are initially attractive to the relative outsider. Islam betokened one form of resistance to racism (albeit one not given authorial endorsement) in Kureishi’s work as early as The Buddha of Suburbia. In that debut novel, Karim’s Uncle Anwar

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starts ‘behaving like a Muslim’ (1990: 64) after a pig’s head comes flying through the windows of his shop Paradise Stores, and around the same time that he feels he is losing his daughter, Jamila, who opposes the marriage he is trying to arrange for her. In The Black Album Shahid has just lost his father, the source of authority in his life, and is disoriented because of this bereavement. His experience of racism has been debilitating and cannot be spoken about at home: his mother censors his story ‘Paki Wog Fuck Off Home’, tearing it up as she declares: ‘Goodbye to Filth’ (72–73). Shahid, a teenager, is desperate to feel a sense of belonging and to fight for a cause. He is therefore energized when Riaz’s group band together to defend a Bengali family living on a rundown estate who are being physically abused and tormented by Islamophobic words, such as one graffito which proclaims ‘Eat the Pig’ (89). Islamism allows him to express his rage and confusion at racism and at the same time to rebel against his family who, as his snobby Pakistani sister-in-law Zulma puts it, think Islam is ‘for the peasants’ (186). And even Deedee, opposed as she is to the Islamists’ worldview, admits that Trevor/Chad ‘would probably be dead’ if he hadn’t found Riaz (110). All this is a heady (nonalcoholic) cocktail for the young man. Having established Islamism’s attractions, Kureishi appears to lose interest and provides few clues as to what sustains Shahid’s attention and keeps him regularly returning to the group. Maria Degabriele (1999: n.p.) puts her finger on the mismatch between him and Riaz’s disciples, writing: ‘[t]he Islamic Brothers in The Black Album are antiintellectual, and Shahid is an aspiring intellectual’ – even when his intellectualism encroaches on haptic forms of knowledge. Kureishi’s ­portrayal of Islamist self-denial is often framed in relation to touch and the body. For instance, on readers’ first encounter with Riaz he uses the word ‘dissipator’ (8) and criticizes British women’s baring of flesh on foreign beaches. In South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain, Ruvani Ranasinha claims that in The Black Album, Shahid ‘chooses liberal sensualism over not only Islamic “fundamentalism” but also anti-racist activism’ (2007: 246). This is part of a bigger discussion about what Ranasinha constructs as the novel’s final message. She makes the related point that indulging individual sensory pleasure is preferred to political mobilization even in Kureishi’s more searching and artistically successful novel The Buddha of Suburbia. Later in The Black Album, one of Riaz’s incendiary talks has a predictable title: ‘Adam and Eve Not Adam and Steve’ (80). The novel therefore falls back on habits of thought that taint

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all Muslims as homophobic. Moreover, Kureishi fails to recognize that there is no culture without prohibitions against and expectations around sexual touch. As Smith puts it: ‘Injunctions against not touching were as important as touching itself’ (2007: 111). To set this generalization in the present context, there is a strong taboo in mainstream British culture against cousin marriage as incestuous. The distaste for cousin marriage exists despite the fact that the risk it holds for babies’ genetic defects has likely been exaggerated and is no more severe than that for children born to mothers over the age of 40 (Connor 2008). Unlike in white British society, for biradari (kinship) reasons, among British Pakistani Muslims the practice of cousin marriage is often encouraged (Shaw 2006). Furthermore, and contrary to Kureishi’s portrayal of Pakistan as a ‘country which couldn’t accommodate […] initiative’ (54), as mentioned earlier Benazir Bhutto became the first prime minister to have a baby during her tenure in 1990 (she was also the first democratically elected female head of state for a Muslim-majority country). In the early 2000s, President Pervez Musharraf presided over an efflorescence of cable television programmes and channels, led by a strikingly female-dominated workforce, which brought ‘youth culture, progressive thought, multiple perspectives, in-depth reporting’ (Shamsie 2005: 4) to a Pakistani public previously accustomed to monochrome government propaganda. More recently, in 2018 Marvia Malik became the Islamic Republic’s first transgender newscaster.12 Later the same year, the Pakistani parliament passed the genuinely radical Transgender Persons Act which underwrote transgender citizens’ human rights, allowed them to identify their gender however they wished, and made discrimination against them illegal. Pakistan is not so easily pigeonholed as a sexually-repressed, misogynistic theocracy as Kureishi would like. Although The Black Album is in many ways a novel of ideas, these ideas are not explored with equal attention. Kureishi levels only a few criticisms at the liberal left. For instance, Deedee can be unpleasantly dictatorial in her condemnation of Riaz and her demand that Shahid take sides. She is also too quick to call the cops over the group’s attempt to censor the controversial book that clearly stands in for The Satanic Verses, which hints that liberals become authoritarian at the first hint of illiberalism. One recalls the last line of Kureishi’s ‘My Son the Fanatic’, in which a son, beaten up by his father, cries: ‘[W]ho’s the fanatic now?’ (1997a: 131). (I will return to this story and its film adaptation shortly.) However, Deedee’s mostly positive portrayal and the fact that Shahid

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ends up with her – even if readers are left uncertain how long that relationship will last – shows that her liberal lifestyle is ultimately preferred to what is presented as Islam’s strictures. That The Black Album is limited as a novel of ideas probably stems from its context: not just Kureishi’s personal loyalty to Rushdie, more of which later, but also because it was written before the tsunami of Islamophobia unleashed by 9/11. At one moment in the text, intimations are given of an alternative, more positive view of religion, but these are quickly undercut. Shahid goes to the mosque, where he finds: Men of so many types and nationalities – Tunisians, Indians, Algerians, Scots, French – gathered there, chatting in the entrance, where they removed their shoes and then retired to wash, that it would have been difficult, without prior knowledge, to tell which country the mosque was in. […] Forty Ethiopians sat to the side of one room, addressed by one of their number in robes. (131–132)

The mosque briefly emerges as a cosmopolitan, transnational space, which has an ‘uncompetitive, peaceful, meditative’ atmosphere (132). There is some truth in the potential objection that the mosque is only diverse among its male congregation but, if women are not explicitly described, there are many people present whose gender is not specified, and ‘girls in white dresses’ run about in the huge, carpeted space (132). A page later, seemingly forgetting the Muslim congregation’s multiplicity just recounted, the narrator states that Shahid ‘found it difficult to reconcile what went on in the mosque with the bustling diversity of the city’ (133). As Anshuman A. Mondal puts it in a reading of the commingling of different classes and professions in Kureishi’s mosque, ‘an alternative to the structural oppositions set up by the text is revealed, only to be left unexplored through a failure of imagination as much as through ignorance’ (2015: 36). In The Black Album, there is an empathetic blockage propelling the narrator into a narrower reading of the mosque than this intriguing moment in the text warrants. Like Shahid trying Islamism on for size, Kureishi dabbles with Islam and Islamism in this novel, but seems ultimately perplexed and beats a retreat into his comfortable space of ‘sex and secularity’. Similarly, towards the end of his memoir My Ear at His Heart, Kureishi describes conducting research for The Black Album in a

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makeshift mosque in the basement of a West London house. He reproduces his own suggestively mundane field notes, which detail the construction work being undertaken on the masjid, minor disputes over the contracting of builders, and efforts to raise funds both for the mosque and other charitable appeals. The Imam he met there ‘was a young friendly man, gentle, with a black beard’ (2004: 204) and, as reflected in The Black Album, Kureishi discovered ‘so many different races and types, together in the same place’ (2004: 204). Yet what could have inspired gradated writing about petty rivalries among a diverse religious congregation and about charity (zakat) as one of Islam’s five pillars quickly turns into Kureishi’s finding what he wants to find: It wasn’t belief I was looking for: I already believed in culture and love as the only possible salvation, and Islam after the fatwah didn’t seem compatible with any kind of combative imagination. I think I was looking for solidarity, to see whether there was a Muslim part of me that existed apart from my father, to see whether being part of this group could be significant, or therapeutic in any way. I didn’t find music, stories or community, as I had in church as a child. I found ideology and fundamentalism, and young people holding extreme, irrational and violent views, along with an inability to engage with or use the most basic forms of reasoning. It was puzzling: there was no attention to the inner life; it had been politicised. (2004: 205; emphasis added)

Since Kureishi is blunt from the outset about his lack of interest in religion, it is not surprising that the novel that arises from this research is about competing ideologies, rather than being necessarily concerned with the spiritual. To compare The Black Album with Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (discussed in Chapter 4), it is revealing to scrutinize what both writers leave out. Aboulela omits 9/11; Kureishi omits faith. All this is fair enough; after all, as James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus remark with some irony about Shakespeare: ‘A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery’ (2010/1922: 170). In other words, to define a writer’s flaws is also to define their genius. What is troubling, however, is the sweeping generalizations in the excerpt from My Ear at His Heart about Islam’s incompatibility with the imagination and young Muslims’ irrationalism, as well as the glib comparison between Christianity and Islam which is freighted in the former’s favour. ‘[Islam] was a hall of mirrors’, he concludes majestically, ‘and a cult of hate’ (2004: 205). Here Kureishi goes against the creative writing

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adage of ‘show, don’t tell’, since what he has shown us in his notes is vastly different from what he tells his readers so didactically. Throughout his oeuvre, Kureishi’s negative treatment of Muslims and their religion particularly coheres around touch from among the five senses. As he articulates this in relation to ‘fundamentalists’ in his 2002 essay ‘Sex and Secularity’, the Muslim extremist others the West in sexual terms as ‘a godless orgiastic stew of immoral copulation’ and allegedly ‘constrains desire, […] strangl[ing] this source of human life too’ (2011: 246). Kureishi would portray the integration of Islam and the metropolis somewhat more successfully in his 2008 novel, Something to Tell You, in which he affectionately sketches London as ‘one of the great Muslim cities’ and depicts North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe coalescing in the vigorous but good-natured trading at Shepherd’s Bush Market (2008: 10). The 7/7 bombings of 2005 and their racist aftermath would have made this defence of Muslim London a more pressing imperative than in the mid-1990s during the years of Rushdie’s hiding. Something to Tell You’s Ajita searches for solace in Islam even if, as Rehana Ahmed (2015: 118) argues, her search is limited by its public, performative, and almost certainly perfunctory aspects. It is surely no accident that Kureishi ascribes this quest to a female character. This makes all the more conspicuous one of The Black Album’s biggest weaknesses: the way Kureishi can barely be bothered with the women in Riaz’s posse, who are unmemorable and scarcely individuated. Islam as a topic for sustained study was something new for Kureishi. From a present-day vantage point, one of the striking things about My Beautiful Laundrette, the 1985 film that made Kureishi’s name, is that it contains no explicit references to Islam or Muslims. Pakistan and Pakistanis are often referred to, Urdu is spoken, and the main character Omar makes dal for his alcoholic father. However, religion is only alluded to on three occasions, and in a highly tangential way each time. The first instance comes when a middle-aged ‘maulvi’ removes his long white beard to reveal its use as a container for smuggling drugs, intimating a sly dig at religion as a mask for hypocrisy. The second indirect allusion to Islam comes in Omar’s Uncle Nasser’s ironic claim that Pakistan ‘has been sodomized by religion’ to the extent that ‘it is beginning to interfere with the making of money’. Nasser’s homophobic diction collocates incongruously with Omar and his friend Johnny’s same-sex desire. Finally, when she learns about her husband’s affair, Nasser’s wife Bilquis uses black magic against his mistress Rachel. This kala jaddu is connected

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to culture rather than religion, and Islam is never once evoked. As such, in My Beautiful Laundrette Kureishi, like many other Muslim-identified authors writing in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s, largely took Muslimness for granted as an identity component, placing much greater emphasis on national origins, ethnicity, and sexual orientation than on religion. All this would change after Khomeini issued his fatwa against Rushdie, a close friend whom Kureishi had thanked in his introduction to the film’s screenplay (Kureishi 1986: 44). The unprecedented threat against Rushdie from the government of Iran and from some British Muslims left an indelible mark on Kureishi, who would speak out publicly on his mentor’s behalf (see, for example, Rushdie 2012: 218), and at least mention the fatwa in most of the essays he wrote after 1989 (see Kureishi 2011). Kureishi also became the first British writer with Muslim heritage to accord serious attention in his creative writing to the issue of violent extremism in the name of Islam – using the vehicle of comedy. Soon after The Black Album, Kureishi would publish a short story, ‘My Son the Fanatic’ (1997a), which was adapted into a film the same year (Kureishi 1997b). The film was part of Kureishi’s shift from portraying cultural Muslims to observant Muslims, even if his sympathies, as in The Black Album, mostly lay with the devout characters’ secular antagonists. This was also Kureishi’s first movie set outside London, in the north of England. The setting was intended to be Bradford, site of the most notorious burning of The Satanic Verses in January 1989. In fact, the film was inspired by campaigning to get prostitutes off the streets of Bradford’s Muslim-majority district of Manningham during the 1990s. However, protests in Bradford prevented My Son the Fanatic from being filmed in the city, so the production company relocated to nearby (and predominantly white) Halifax. As Thomas notes (2009a: 365), in an early scene a northern working-men’s club comedian singles out the visibly different protagonist Parvez as the target for his brand of racist, Islamophobic ‘humour’. Kureishi’s script indicates that ‘the Comedian is telling Paki, Rushdie and Muslim jokes’ (Kureishi 1997b: 46). In the film the comedian spells this out in multisensory terms: Hey! Somebody farted. I can smell shit somewhere. Hey, it’s Salman Rushdie himself. What you’re smelling here, folks, is a satanic arsehole. If there’s any of Rafsanjohnny’s mates in here, slip me a tenner and I’ll shoot

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the bastard for you. […] You know why the fuckers smell so bad, don’t you? […] Give the blind a chance to avoid them.

Here the name ‘Rushdie’ is used as a talisman under which to bait the only ethnic minority audience member in the comedy club. The comedian aligns himself with ‘Rafsanjohnny’ (an Anglicization of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was President of Iran for eight years from August 1989) and flippantly offers to carry out the fatwa that was in place for the whole of Rafsanjani’s 1990s premiership. I will return to this scene’s mephitic implications in the next chapter on smell. As the film unfolds, taxi-driver Parvez’s Anglophilia and belief in cultural mixing is undermined by his stereotypically repressed South Asian wife Minoo, who tells him: ‘I hate this dirty place [England]! The men brought us here and then left us alone!’ Minoo’s rage is unsurprising, given that she suffers from never being touched and has now discovered Parvez’s close relationship with a prostitute named Bettina. Indeed, the film connects with my earlier discussion of adultery, as in one scene in which an old friend confronts Parvez about his relations with Bettina and he says in self-justification: ‘What else is there for me, yaar, but sitting behind that wheel without tenderness? That’s it for me, is it, until I drop dead. Not another human touch?’ In the story, a similar moment arises when Bettina unthinkingly lays her hand on Parvez’s shoulder, triggering his son’s fury: ‘[W]hy is he letting a woman like you touch him like that?’ (Kureishi 1997a: 130). For the Islamists in these texts, the prostitute’s touch is constructed as a pollutant to be abjured. In both story and film, the son makes a resounding challenge to his father’s value system by breaking off his engagement to his wealthy white fiancée, giving away his possessions, extolling purity, and renouncing bacon and booze in favour of mullahs and the mosque. Whereas My Beautiful Laundrette merely contained hints of the Islamic faith, in My Son the Fanatic the presence of a maulvi is writ large when Farid invites his religious teacher to stay in the family home. Although Parvez longs to see beneath his beard, unlike in the 1980s film this is no drug-smuggling prosthetic. The maulvi wreaks havoc in their domestic sphere, borrowing a heater to replicate South Asia’s warm climate, commandeering the television to watch cartoons, and supporting the intimidation of local prostitutes, including Bettina. The film builds to a climax after Parvez’s taxi gets caught up in a violent demonstration against the sex-workers. This galvanizes Parvez to return home, evict the maulvi, beat up his

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son (who storms off with his zealot friends), and despondently watch Minoo’s departure for the subcontinent. The Black Album takes the controversy around Rushdie as its point of departure, although he is known as ‘the writer’,13 and The Satanic Verses is similarly never explicitly referred to by name, being referred to darkly as ‘the book’. As we have seen, Kureishi sheds light on how racism causes young second-generation migrant Muslims to become more religious than their parents. However, The Black Album’s simplistic depiction provides few clues as to how this dogmatic, puritanical group of Muslim extremists keeps the intelligent protagonist in its thrall for as long as it does. This is particularly true when it comes to Riaz’s and the other Islamists’ attitude to sexual touch and to literature, two aspects of life Shahid is very keen on. The group surround themselves with prohibitions around touch, from the hijab Tahira swathes herself into keep men at bay, to Chad’s repudiation of pop music as a gateway to sexual impropriety. Their attitude to literature is not much more tolerant. Although Riaz tries his hand at writing poetry, Shahid, working as his amanuensis, finds the resulting work unimaginative and hackneyed. In part this is because Riaz’s verse is received so reverently by his followers that he is not challenged to work on his craft, and partly it is because his scepticism of contemporary littérateurs means that his style is pompous and out-ofdate. Although by his own admission Shahid ‘wanted to cheer’ (9) at the novelistic Rushdie’s antiracist activism, he goes along with the group’s inflammatory upbraiding of the author of Midnight’s Children. A hint at an explanation is given for this contradictory behaviour when readers are informed that Shahid ‘believed everything; he believed nothing’ (147). Yet ultimately Kureishi fails to imagine what it is about a religious worldview, beyond the Islamists’ social activism, that could have touched Shahid and held him for so long.

Conclusion In this Part I hope to have given a vivid sense of both novels and how they simultaneously use and question the sensual register. I advanced an argument about how the 1990s saw a sensory turn: a global movement towards touch in one way or another. In the context of British Muslim writing this plays out, first, as pleasurable sense: in the shape of sex, dance, recreational drug use, dressing up, and beauty work. Second, it also manifests more problematically in terms of violence, sexual taboos,

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and transgressions. This is to say that what on the one hand appears to be a move towards a radical kind of sensory culture has a dark underside. Freer boundaries mean that consent to touch (and the forms that touch takes) can be exploited. In the meantime, a residual morality continues to frame touch in the context of sex (and drugs too, as with the case of Leah Betts). Touch, as we have seen in this Part, is the most amorphous and intricate of the five senses. Whereas the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth are found in specific places, the skin covers the whole body. This makes touch hard to differentiate from other sensory perceptions, as does the fact that you cannot test touch against a control group of those who do not feel as you can against the blind, deaf, anosmic, or ageusic (see Ackerman 1990: 77). Perhaps these reasons contribute towards the sense of touch often being overlooked in literary studies. Yet taction impacts on every aspect of life – not least the experience of touching a book and turning its pages. Soueif and Kureishi show that all five sense modalities are interlinked and contingent, messily overspilling any boundaries that are constructed to separate them.

Notes





1. Subsequent references are to this (1995a) edition of Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. 2. I deduced this from a passage in which the college is described as being located in ‘a cramped Victorian building, an old secondary school, twenty minutes’ walk away [from an unspecified hall of residence and Chinese restaurant in Kilburn]. It was 60% black and Asian, with an ineffective library and no sports facilities’ (24). Kilburn Polytechnic was similarly accommodated and ethnically diverse, with no sports facilities worth speaking of. 3. There is one possible exception to this: the mysterious Two Fingers writes about the black dance scene in London in his novels Junglist (1995), Bass Instinct (1996), and Evil Eye (1997), and may himself be from an ethnic minority background. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find out any more about him than his gender and ‘young’ age, which are mentioned in the author biographies to Disco Biscuits (Champion 1997: 295). 4.  For more on the many different functions of dress in literature, see Hughes (2006), Kuhn and Carlson (2007), McNeil et al. (2009), and Thomas (2007).

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5.  Laurie Pike’s essay ‘Throwing Shade: Voguing’ (1997/1989) reminds that Madonna, ever the pop cultural magpie, appropriated the Harlem dance craze of voguing when she brought out her 1990 hit song and video. The dance involved drag queens and other LGBTQI+ subjects ‘striking poses’ inspired by models from the fashion magazine Vogue. 6. Of makeup, Steven Connor writes in The Book of Skin that it ‘reveals the skin as a screen which lets out colour from within, especially, of course, the colour and the coursings of the blood. […] [T]he colour [of makeup] is correctly recognized as a superficial filter, which interrupts and masks off external light; in the other, it seems to be transmitting an inner light, that “glow” beloved of art historians and fashion writers alike. This is why, as Jacqueline Lichtenstein has observed, makeup should ideally be transparent’ (2004: 155). The sensuality of his description and makeup’s exaggeration of blood flow and ‘glow’ bespeaks why Shahid feels so good wearing Deedee’s beauty products. 7. R éage, qtd. in Wilson (2003/1985: 101), see also Réage (1976/ 1954: 86). 8. In Fashion and Fetishism, David Kunzle similarly connects the haptic to fetishism: ‘rubber and leather, like velvet and fur, are basically fetishes of material or texture, which induce or enhance certain tactile or cutaneous sensations’ (2004: 6). In The Fashioned Body, Joanne Entwistle extrapolates rubber and leather, noting that their smell can be erotic for fetishists, and that ‘[t]hey are also favoured for their tactile qualities of hardness and smoothness, which enable them to outline the contours of the body as well as constrain the body’ (2000: 199). 9. Non-Urdu speakers only need to think of Rushdie’s character Saladin Chamcha in The Satanic Verses, whose nickname is Spoono. 10. Although not an example of ‘British Muslim fiction’, Cauvery Madhavan’s novel about a young doctor named Padhman moving from Madras/ Chennai to Dublin, entitled Paddy Indian, makes a similar point: ‘Man was always meant to eat with his fingers, Padhman decided. Anyone who had switched to cutlery had lost the feel for food. […] Food on a plate needed to be felt. Fingers were essential … the ability to touch enhanced the taste, he concluded’ (2001: 170). 11. As mentioned in note 2 to this chapter, above, this college is probably based on the now defunct Kilburn Polytechnic, an institution similar in its ethnic makeup to today’s London Metropolitan University. In 2007, the Runnymede Trust disseminated the shocking discovery that there were more students of Caribbean origin at London Met (which was formed by a merger of the former Polytechnics of North London and City of London), than in the whole of the Russell Group put together. It is clear that, more than a decade since The Black Album’s publication,

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little had changed for the prospects of Black and Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) students. A substantially higher proportion of these BAME undergraduates continue to attend less prestigious, financially hardpressed post-1992 universities than the white population. 12.  Malik made her debut just three years after India (née Jonathan) Willoughby in the UK, but it should be noted that Malik presents for a national television channel while Willoughby worked on local TV until her recent appearances on Loose Women and Celebrity Big Brother. 13.  Instead, he is twice alluded to as the author of Midnight’s Children (9, 169).

Works Cited Ackerman, Diane (1990) A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage. Ahmed, Rehana (2015) Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barnard, Malcolm (1996) Fashion as Communication. London: Routledge. Barthes, Roland (1985) The Fashion System. London: Jonathan Cape. Beeler, Stan (2007) Dance, Drugs and Escape: The Club Scene in Literature, Film and Television Since the Late 1980s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Buchanan, Bradley (2007) Hanif Kureishi. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, Judith (2011/1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Abingdon: Routledge. Champion, Sarah (ed.) (1997) Disco Biscuits: New Fiction from the Chemical Generation. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Classen, Constance (ed.) (2005) The Book of Touch. Oxford: Berg. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (2004/1816) Kubla Khan. Reading: Two Rivers. Connor, Steve A. (2008) ‘There’s Nothing Wrong with Cousins Getting Married, Scientists Say’. Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/ theres-nothing-wrong-with-cousins-getting-married-scientists-say-1210072. html. Accessed 9 June 2018. Connor, Steven (2004) The Book of Skin. London: Reaktion. Degabriele, Maria (1999) ‘Prince of Darkness Meets Priestess of Porn: Sexual and Political Identities in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album’. Intersections. 2. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue2/Kureishi.html. Accessed 19 April 2018. Dejmanee, Tisha (2013) ‘The Burdens of Caring: A Postfeminist Perspective on PETA’s Animal Protection Campaigns’. Australian Feminist Studies 28.77: 311–322. Eco, Umberto (1979) A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

66  C. CHAMBERS Entwistle, Joanne (2000) The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Entwistle, Joanne, and Elizabeth Wilson (2001) ‘Introduction’. In Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth B. Wilson (eds.), Body Dressing: Dress, Body, Culture. Oxford: Berg. 1–9. Fanon, Frantz (2008/1952) Black Skin, White Masks. Charles Lam Markmann (trans.), Homi Bhabha and Ziauddin Sardar (forewords). London: Pluto. Haschemi Yekani, Elahe (2011) The Privilege of Crisis: Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography and Film. Frankfurt: Campus. Hill, Andrew (2002) ‘Acid House and Thatcherism: Noise, the Mob and the English Countryside’. British Journal of Sociology 53.1: 89–105. Holmes, Frederick M. (2001) ‘The Postcolonial Subject Divided Between East and West: Kureishi’s The Black Album as an Intertext of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses’. Papers on Language and Literature 37.3: 296–313. Hoyland, Paul (1990) ‘Allah Sows the Seeds of Faith’. Guardian. 28 March. 24. Hughes, Clair (2006) Dressed in Fiction. Oxford: Berg. Joyce, James (2010/1922) Ulysses. Cedric Watts (intro.). London: Wordsworth. Kaleta, Kenneth C. (1998) Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller. Austin: University of Texas Press. Katz-Hyman, Martha B. (2011) ‘Brands’. In Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice (eds.), World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood. 77–79. Kuhn, Cynthia, and Cindy Carlson (2007) Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature. Amherst, NY: Cambria. Kunzle, David (2004) Fashion and Fetishism: Corsets, Tight-Lacing and Other Forms of Body-Sculpture. Stroud: History Press. Kureishi, Hanif (1986) My Beautiful Laundrette and The Rainbow Sign. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (1990) The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (1995a) The Black Album. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (1995b) ‘That’s How Good It Was’. In Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage (eds.), The Faber Book of Pop. London: Faber and Faber. xvii–xx. ——— (1997a) ‘My Son the Fanatic’. In Hanif Kureishi (ed.), Love in a Blue Time. London: Faber and Faber. 119–131. ——— (1997b) My Son the Fanatic. Udayan Prasad (dir.). Actors: Om Puri, Rachel Griffiths, Akbar Kurtha, Stellan Skarsgård, and Gopi Desai. London: BBC. ——— (2004) My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (2008) Something to Tell You. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (2011) Collected Essays. London: Faber and Faber.

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——— (2013) ‘Weekends and Forevers’. In Hanif Kureishi (ed.), Le Week-End (Kindle). London: Faber and Faber. ——— (2015) ‘On David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel”’. Wall Street Journal. 17 March. https://www.wsj.com/articles/novelist-hanif-kureishi-on-david-bowies-rebel-rebel-1426600595. Accessed 26 April 2018. ——— (2017) The Nothing (Kindle). London: Faber and Faber. Laver, James (1937) Taste and Fashion: From the French Revolution until Today. London: Harrap. Lawrence, Tim (2006) ‘In Defence of Disco (Again)’. New Formations 58.1: 128–146. Lurie, Alison (1981) The Language of Clothes. New York: Random House. Madhavan, Cauvery (2001) Paddy Indian. London: BlackAmber. McNeil, Peter, Vicki Karaminas, and Catherine Cole (2009) Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television. Oxford: Berg. Mindess, Anna (2012) ‘Eat with Your Hands for a Sensuous, Intimate, Mindful Meal’. KQED Food. 22 February. https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/39132/eat-with-your-hands-for-a-sensuous-intimate-mindful-meal. Accessed 19 April 2018. Moore-Gilbert, Bart (2001) Hanif Kureishi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pereira-Ares, Noemí (2018) Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives: From the Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pike, Laurie (1997/1989) ‘Throwing Shade: Voguing’. In Richard Benson (ed.), Night Fever: Club Writing in the Face 1980–1997. Basingstoke: Boxtree. 105. Ranasinha, Ruvani (2007) South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ranscombe, Peter (2016) ‘Neuro-Scientific Enlightenment in Scotland?’ Lancet 15.1: 33. Réage, Pauline (1976/1954) Story of O. London: Corgi. Rushdie, Salman (2012) Joseph Anton. London: Jonathan Cape. Said, Edward W. (1995/1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Shamsie, Kamila (2005) Broken Verses. London: Bloomsbury. Sharkey, Alix (1999) ‘The Very Height of Fashion: Profile: Paul Smith’. Independent. 17 September. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-very-height-of-fashion-profile-paul-smith-1119906.html. Accessed 27 March 2018. Shaw, Alison (2006) ‘The Arranged Transnational Cousin Marriages of British Pakistanis: Critique, Dissent and Cultural Continuity’. Contemporary South Asia 15.2: 209–220. Smith, Mark M. (2007) Sensory History: An Introduction. Oxford: Berg.

68  C. CHAMBERS Thomas, Diana Mary Eva (2007) Texts and Textiles: Affect, Synaesthesia and Metaphor in Fiction. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Thomas, Susie (2009a) ‘After the Fatwa’. Changing English 16.4: 365–383. Turner, Alwyn W. (2014) A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s. London: Aurum. Veblen, Thorstein (2007/1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class. Martha Banta (ed. and intro.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Elizabeth (1992) ‘Fashion and the Postmodern Body’. In Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (eds.), Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader. Berkeley: University of California Press. 3–16. ——— (2003/1985) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: I.B. Tauris.

PART II

Smelling and Tasting the 2000s

CHAPTER 3

Fiction of Olfaction: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Introduction This millennium opened with the publication of Bhikhu Parekh’s The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000). Parekh’s report called for an extension of policies encouraging multiculturalism, arguing that this would lead to cultural exchange and dialogue between communities. Before his hypothesis could be tested, riots in Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford broke out in the summer of 2001. Four summers later, the 7/7 bombings of 2005 killed 52 people in London. Internationally, the audacious and bloody attacks of 9/11 and the vicious war without end in West, Central, and South Asia also necessitate my analysis in this chapter of the responses of two Muslim-inspired writers to race, religion, culture, and terror. One key topic which preoccupies Nadeem Aslam, Monica Ali, and other Muslim-heritage authors is multiculturalism, which after 7/7 was deemed to have failed in Britain (Malik 2009; Goodhart 2013; Phillips 2016). Yet multiculturalism is not just a public policy, but also involves everyday lived experience and how we imagine our relationships with others. Several scholars have demonstrated that both the policy and everyday encounters are being reshaped by those who are most affected by it: ethnic minority women (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999; Bhimji 2012). Nonetheless, a key charge that is frequently levelled against multiculturalism is that it is inimical to women, particularly women from the very minority groups it is supposed to help (Okin 1999; Macey 2009). Ethnic minority and especially Muslim women are portrayed as being © The Author(s) 2019 C. Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52089-0_3

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affected by this policy in a different and more harmful way than men. That is because multiculturalism allegedly leads to them being spoken for by self-appointed community leaders and their rights eroded by a valorization of cultural traditions. This accusation of multiculturalism’s male bias is often fortified by points about minority women’s restricted employment and clothing choices, and, most sensitively, their marriage options. However, critics of multiculturalism can themselves be accused of propagating saviour discourse (Abu-Lughod 2002; Cilano 2015: 157–159), as they position women as victims with no agency who are easily controlled by their menfolk. The twenty-first century Muslim-identified writers I have chosen to explore in this chapter, Aslam and Ali, reflect on these arguments about multiculturalism’s political and quotidian aspects, and on its repercussions for women. Like Soueif’s and Kureishi’s novels which I explored in my previous chapters covering the 1990s, Aslam’s and Ali’s novels revolve around extramarital affairs, and they are set at least partially in the relatively recent past (the 1960s to the 1990s for Aslam, and 1985– 2001 for Ali). As we saw in my previous two chapters on touch, the preponderance of transgressive sex in the novels under study in this book is no coincidence, for Muslim-heritage authors are sensuists who are alert to all the five sensory dimensions. However, since Hsin-Ju Kuo (2014) and Hannah Kershaw (2017) respectively deal with the topic of adultery in South Asian diasporic women’s writing and how Muslim authors deploy historical fiction, my concerns in this chapter take a different focus. I argue that one of the ways Aslam and Ali explore multiculturalism is through depictions of the sense of smell. The air that we breathe is axiomatic for something that is taken for granted. But smells are potent and important, affecting us more than we realize. Scholars such as Constance Classen, Roy Porter, and Jim Drobnick illuminate the often overlooked power of smell. In their pathbreaking work, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, Classen et al. write: ‘Smell is powerful. Odours affect us on a physical, psychological and social level. For the most part, however, we breathe in the aromas which surround us without being consciously aware of their importance to us’ (1994: 1). Other scholars such as Jonathan Reinarz (2014: 1) and Jim Drobnick concur about smell’s often overlooked might. Drobnick (2006: 1–12) coins the term ‘olfactocentrism’ to help smell overcome its subjugated status in relation to the other senses and allow the olfactory factor to be understood more fully.

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Roy Porter similarly suggests that history has long been ‘deodorized’ (1986/1982: v), with aromas having been fumigated from our view of past cultures. What I am arguing in this book, though, is that unlike historical accounts, fiction has scant problem with representing all of the five senses. In this chapter, we will look closely at how Aslam and Ali, two writers who are critical of Islam, pour odours into their novels of the 2000s. What this angle adds is an enrichment of readers’ understanding of these richly sensual novels across all five sensory dimensions. After an initial detour via German novelist Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, which helps to reveal smell’s intricacy, I argue that an olfactory approach makes sense for British Muslim writing in particular. Of all the ideas I mix together in this chapter, the central ingredient of connective dissonance brings out the way that smells function in both these texts, because smell has the capacity to bond together various disparate elements with ease. Since women’s rights are a key concern, my discussion of the olfactory is firmly anchored in the gender debate. Smell, given its associations with transience, the body, perfume, and unguents, has long been assumed to be a female sense, and has therefore been devalued. Not only are women viewed as having skills in the base sense of smelling but, as Jonathan Reinarz reveals, they are also ‘subjected to a “male nose”’ akin to the better known male gaze, whereby ‘aroma was readily used to elevate or demean women’ (2014: 114). Moreover, its border-crossing ability means that smell is able to bypass or even expose as a false dichotomy the gendered binary of private and public or the home and the world (Tagore 2005/1916; Chatterjee 1993: 119–121). If smell seems to reinforce the gendered binary (and even, as we will see, the ethnic divide), its frontier-traversing potential simultaneously serves to expose the cultural construction of gender (and ethnicity). The vaporous, atomized forms of knowledge to which thinking about smell gives access are profound, and they allow for various interpretations of the novels to blend together harmoniously. Before examining this chapter’s dyad of British Muslim novels, as mentioned it is worth thinking about the most well-known mainstream odoriferous fiction. In Perfume (1985) Süskind recreates the stinky eighteenth century in France. His novel evokes smell’s subjugated status, the role it plays in spatial and social separation, and its relationship with both memory and the other four senses, in ways that open up the complexity of the two texts scrutinized in this chapter.

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Through this ‘story of a murderer’, Süskind creates olfactory portrayals of several French locations, most notably over-populated, reeking Paris and the fragrant southern town of perfumers, Grasse. This was the era of the Enlightenment, of ‘Diderots and d’Alemberts and Voltaires and Rousseaus’ (2010/1985: 59), when reason and sight were privileged. Three years before Süskind, in 1982, Alain Corbin published his history of smell, The Foul and the Fragrant. Although Corbin’s book for the most part creates an aromatic picture of nineteenth-century France, it also touches on Enlightenment attempts a century earlier to quarantine foetid enterprises like tanneries, cemeteries, and dyers away from more salubrious and well-ventilated parts of town (1986/1982: 99–100). This filters into Perfume, whose lowly protagonist, Grenouille,1 usually lives in foul-smelling spaces such as a tanner’s workshop or a ‘putrid spot’ near a graveyard (2010/1985: 4). It also has relevance, as we shall see, to the olfactorily segregated Muslim communities of Aslam’s imaginary English town Dasht-e-Tanhaii and Ali’s East London. Like Corbin, Süskind suggests that writers have been too preoccupied by sight, so Perfume broadens this out to other ‘sensate impressions’ (2010/1985: 5), particularly relating to the sense of smell. One of the interesting points the text puts forward is that when a gorgeous young woman – like the many Grenouille ends up murdering – comes to efflorescence in her puberty, others reach for eye-centred reasons to explain her appeal. Often they fail to notice that the woman’s pheromones are her crowning glory, and that the chemical reactions involved in sexual allure are not so easily ascribable to looks alone. The Age of Reason’s visual bias leads to most people overlooking smell, as they consider it an ignoble sense. Not so Grenouille, who even as a foundling infant has acute skills in olfaction, sniffing out others’ stench even though he preternaturally has no body odour of his own. In one of the novel’s many moments of synaesthesia he can almost see with his nose, the aromas around him sometimes appearing as solid and three-dimensional as architecture. At other moments in the text, smells liquefy and he yearns to taste them by drinking them down until he is brimful with their perfume. Alternatively, odours form a persuasive language to be parsed, as Grenouille strains to ‘decipher even the most complicated odours by composition and proportion’ (2010/1985: 77). Continuing the theme of sound, Süskind regularly compares smells to music: a melodious symphony or a squawking violin. Sure enough, perfumers use the musical term ‘accords’ to speak of olfactory essences that go well together. If smell can be harmonious,

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it can also, as we will see in my discussion of connective dissonance, yoke together clashing notes like Süskind’s violins. To sum up, the effect of Süskind’s synaesthesia is threefold: it evokes the memories and emotions that attach to smells, suggests the inadequacy of language to express sensory experience, and shows how pervasive olfactory perception is. Süskind’s omniscient narrator contends that smells are invasive, inexorably entering the body: For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they could not escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath. Together with breath it entered human beings, who could not defend themselves against it, not if they wanted to live. (2010/1985: 161)

He exercises some sleight of hand in the passage, for loud noises, like scent, are hard to escape, and the requirement to eat is nearly as pressing as the need to breathe. But it is broadly true that one can easily avert one’s eyes or refuse to touch, to taste, or to listen to particular arguments, whereas smelling is unavoidable for all humans except the anosmic. The idea that ‘scent was a brother of breath’ is suggestive, as a sweet smell uplifts like fraternal love, but noxious effluvium oppresses just as Cain (or Qabil in the Qur’an) oppressed Abel (Habil). As we saw in the previous chapter, there is a scene in Kureishi’s 1997 film My Son the Fanatic in which a comedian mocks the minoritized protagonist Parvez as part of his routine. He talks about smelling anuses and excrement, blaming this on British Pakistanis’ gustatory choices. Here that well-worn racist topos of malodorous people and their food is used to bait the only ethnic minority audience member in the comedy club. Daljit Nagra similarly speaks of ‘the smell of curry in the air’ as having been ‘a racist taunt in the 70s from my experience’ (qtd. in Chambers 2010: 93), while Diane Ackerman observes that ‘the word “stinking” […] often appears as an adjective in streams of racial abuse’ (1990: 22). Similarly, Avtar Brah inventorizes the abusive sensory perecptions in Cartographies of Diaspora: ‘According to the stereotype, the Asian was an undesirable who “smelled of curry”, was “dirty”, wore “funny clothes”, lived “packed like sardines in a room”, practised “strange religions”, and so forth’ (1996: 22). Such ‘racial olfactory conceits’ (Smith 2007: 72) as the curry-smelling British Asian are widespread and extremely damaging. So much so that Smith thinks

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that smell may be the sense that most otherizes and works as a barrier against integration (2007: 59). In her seminal 1999 essay ‘The Scent of Memory’, Brah discusses smell in relation to the way inhabitants of a particular space divide other people between those who belong to us (‘apni’), those who might one day belong to us (‘ajnabi’), and strangers (‘ghair’). In interviews Brah conducted with white working-class women in Southall, an area of London with a sizeable population that has strong connections in Pakistan and north India (mostly Punjabi-speakers), she often came across racism which defined olfactory strangers as irredeemably other (what these self-same strangers would call ‘ghair’). She characterizes this white racism as ‘[a] feminized commonsense with its fantasy of tranquil and tidy rural domesticity which is “mucked up”, disrupted by “foreigners” with their alien foods and unfamiliar smells’ (1999: 10). The olfactory other, she suggests, threatens to dominate the self’s apparently fragrant or at least neutral smell, polluting the very atmosphere. What smell yields in this chapter, therefore, is insight into how people are demonized for their difference and how olfaction is the form of human receptivity most closely associated with memory and desire.

‘Perfume Was the Key’: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers Our first olfactory fiction for consideration is Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), which revolves around the ‘honour’ killing of 64-year-old protagonist Shamas’s younger brother Jugnu and his girlfriend Chanda. This unmarried couple lived together in a conservative Muslim area in northern England, much to their neighbours’ outrage. As its title suggests, this is a novel that is concerned with migrants’ sensory mapping of a new landscape. Lila Abu-Lughod notes that Aslam’s ‘[e]xquisite lyrical prose […] dances off the page and creates colors, moods, and sights’ (2011: 35). If Abu-Lughod is too focused on the novel’s visual beauty, other critics (Majors 2012: 70–73; Highmore 2013) have teased out representations of the sense of taste via Maps for Lost Lovers’ thick descriptions of South Asian food culture. Yet no scholar to date has paid attention to the often neglected sense of smell. In this section I argue that aromas (which in any case usually accompany the culinary) provide a valuable supplementary valence for understanding Aslam’s novel.

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That smell is crucial to this resplendently sensual text set in northern England is established early on. As a boy, the younger son of married protagonists Shamas and Kaukab tried to attract carp to his fishing line by using cherry blossom or dandelion flowers as bait. This youth, Ujala, found that only lilac would do, for ‘perfume was the key’ to attracting the finny prey (Aslam 2004: 4).2 And in a way perfume and flowers are the key to this poetic novel, saturated as it is with heady fragrances. Recalling tales from the Thousand and One Nights, for instance, Shamas thinks of Harun al-Rashid’s ‘perfumed Baghdad’ as almost a paradise on earth (5). Another early example is Shamas’s memory of Jugnu having pinned one of Chanda’s scarves to the window as insect netting during their all too brief time living together, which caused Shamas to enter a ‘space saturated with a scent he had understood to be the scent of Chanda’s body and hair’ (79). If it is to be expected that magnificent cities like Baghdad and handsome women like Chanda smell good, beautiful scents also waft over even the most difficult subjects. For example, 20 years earlier Shamas’s young family used to lay down flowers so that a warning scent would be released if racist trespassers entered their house. In this fantastical way, Aslam describes the racism of 1970s Britain with a ‘terrible beauty’ (Yeats 2000/1916: 121), wherein the enchanting and the annihilating co-exist: There were violent physical attacks. At night the scented geraniums were dragged to the centres of the downstairs rooms in the hope that the breeze dense with rosehips and ripening limes would get to the sleepers upstairs ahead of the white intruders who had generated it by brushing past the foliage in the dark after breaking in. (11)

The geraniums unite the syrupy, ‘oriental’ scent of roseships with sharp notes of citrus, just as this lovely image of flowers is undercut by the odious reality of racism. The description teeters on the brink of what Sadia Abbas astutely describes as Aslam’s tendency to write ‘aesthetically laden, even overwrought […] hyper-aesthetic’ prose (2014: 185),3 or Sharae Deckard in a different context tellingly calls ‘fragrant lyricism’ (2016: 252). In one reading, Aslam might be accused of ‘deodorizing’ ugly prejudice through the belletristic leitmotif of geraniums. The smells more commonly associated with 1970s racism are foetid or faecal: of the

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spit gobbed in migrants’ faces or the shit lobbed through their letterboxes. Yet at another level, Aslam evokes the profundity of a Sufi saying attributed to Hazrat Ali, in which the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law described forgiveness as the fragrance that flowers release when they are crushed. Later in the novel, in another moment of analepsis to the 1970s, the geraniums release their ‘lime-and-rosehip perfume’ (142) when Shamas and Kaukab tread on the flowers while locked together in a fight. Although the geraniums had been spread out to guard the safety of the home from danger outside, ultimately the olfactory alert is set off due to trouble within the domestic sphere. As feminists often point out, the ‘safe space’ of the home has the potential to be extremely exploitative and perilous for women (Barrett 1988/1980: 187–226; Barrett and McIntosh 1990/1982), as well as for ‘children, queers’ (Ahmed et al. 2003: 6). In the house Shamas, ostensibly the novel’s most positive character, raised a hand to his wife for the first and only time in their marriage. Despite this, readers’ sympathies are encouraged to remain with Shamas. This free-thinking antiracist activist is depicted as having been driven to domestic violence by Kaukab’s decision to impose the Ramadan fast on her ‘holy’ baby Ujala, depriving the newborn of her breast milk during the hours of daylight. As with a moment in Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun, domestic violence is here justified as resulting from the woman’s malfeasance. This is especially ­disappointing because, as Lindsey Moore reflects, ‘honour killing is confronted in [Aslam’s] […] male-authored novel’, which is genuinely invested in women’s experiences and human rights (2009: 16). As Kaukab and Shamas angrily struggle, the cooking with which Kaukab is strongly associated throughout the novel4 is left forgotten on the hob and begins to burn, releasing caustic fumes that drown out any trace of the flowers. This is a suggestive incident as the life-sustaining food, which these first generation women migrants spend so much of their time preparing, turns acrid. It foreshadows Kaukab’s and other first-generation Pakistani women migrants’ asphyxiation of natural instincts around the body, which they particularly inflict on their daughters (one only has to think of the Muslim girl who is killed by a cleric brought in by her mother to ‘perform an exorcism’ (155) after she is caught with her Hindu lover). As Ruvani Ranasinha perceptively notices with reference to a quote from the novel describing Pakistani mothers as ‘dangerous lunatics’ (118), ‘they are at times (unlike the fathers) pathologized as monstrous’

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(Ranasinha 2009: 305). That said, there is some mitigation against this negative view of the patriarchal bargain (see p. 29) struck by Kaukab and other older Pakistani women. One example of this softening of the narratorial stance against Kaukab comes in the final reference to the scent of geraniums towards the end of the novel. Kaukab wistfully tells her grandson that the Sleeping Beauty of his fairy tales would have woken up when interlopers came in if only she had thought of placing geraniums around her palace. In this way, the family’s DIY enfleurage functions as a fantastical image that swirls through the narrative, carrying with it hints of smell’s links with race relations, gender, sexuality, and violence. The cartographic aspect of Aslam’s sensory mapping is that his mythical Dasht-e-Tanhaii bears close surface resemblance to Huddersfield and Bradford. These West Yorkshire urban spaces are home to large populations of South Asian migrants, particularly from rural areas in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and the Pakistani Punjab. The British Pakistani author describes postwar South Asian migrants in terms that resonate with Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay (1987) about earlier European explorers and colonialists, depicting them as involved in a process of renaming the British landmarks, streets, and towns that they encounter. In doing so, Aslam shows that ‘this process of re-nomination is a symbol of a first generation stubbornly defining itself in ethnic terms’ (Bromley 2017: 40). He also uncovers a complex history of interchange between Europe and the subcontinent, as many of the familiar appellations they choose to replace the supposedly unpronounceable English names in fact hark back to colonialism: ‘As in Lahore, a road in this town is named after Goethe. There is a Park Street here as in Calcutta, a Malabar Hill as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla Hill as in Dhaka’ (28). This is not, then, merely an example of what Jamaican poet Louise Bennett humorously called ‘colonisation in reverse’ (1966: 179–180), whereby migrants allegedly laid claim to the colonial metropole once decolonization got under way after the Second World War. Rather, there is a bidirectional movement, in that European monikers and misapplications of Malayalam and Bengali5 words are now re-exported to the former imperial centre of Britain. As well as giving Yorkshire places South Asian names, these migrants transform their area olfactorily. One recurring image, of musky tendrils of incense drifting above the snowy land or across centrally heated ­interiors (3, 191–192, 360), is particularly evocative of the creation of

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hybrid new smellscapes. This is significant, for in his most recent novel Night of Happiness, Tabish Khair (whose Just Another Jihadi Jane will be discussed in Chapter 5) has his first-person Hindu Indian narrator remark: Strange, isn’t it, incense and kebab – those are the good memories that I associate with my cursory incursions into Muslim colonies [localities]. Smells, memories that travel in the wind, as if they carry, encapsulated in themselves, the history of a people who have moved, and moved, and moved. (2018: 73)

Khair’s narrator’s association of joss sticks, beef, memories, and travel with Muslims is revealing, and Aslam’s novel makes similar links. Muslims’ consumption of (halal) meat and treatment of animals form a central strand of Islamophobic discourse (Quinn 2018: 112–114). Thus it is no coincidence that Maps for Lost Lovers’ villains, Chanda’s brothers and also her murderers, work in an abattoir and that the van they drive is ‘full of the stink of meat’ (349). After killing Chanda and her lover, their whole house is described as being pervaded by the ‘smell […] of death’ (357), with Aslam suggesting a clear relationship between butchery of animals and of people. This is interesting because of the ambivalence surrounding this association. Indeed, it is risky of Aslam to refer to meat in a way that strays into Islamophobic discourse about bloodthirsty Muslims. Monica Ali does something similar, since her protagonist’s best friend Razia is married to a man who, like Chotta and Barra, drives halal meat around and as a consequence has a ripe odour. Razia’s husband’s job has significance later in Brick Lane, for he is killed by 17 frozen cows falling from his van. The irascible man has met a curiously apposite end, as his widow recognizes: ‘no slaughter man to slaughter me now’ (139). Like Aslam, Ali is aware of the links between meat and toxic masculinity (see Adams 2010/1990: 71–73). I will examine Robin Yassin-Kassab’s and (to a lesser extent) Yasmin Crowther’s more nuanced depictions of meat and Muslim men in greater depth in the next chapter on the sense of taste. Secondary to ‘kebab’ is ‘incense’ which, in traditions from Paganism to Hinduism to the monotheistic faiths (including Islam), has long played an important role in religious and social practice.6 Incense was used in pre-Islamic Mesopotamia as an offering to the gods, and it went alongside meat from the outset as it hid the smell of burning animal

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flesh in sacrifices (Ackerman 1990: 56). Muslims do not burn agarbattis in mosques as Hindus do at their temples. However, at graves and the shrines of Muslim saints it is a different matter. Rosabelle Boswell discusses rumours that abound in Muslim communities relating to the deaths of saintly individuals, stating that ‘the sweet smell of holiness is said to rise from their bodies indicating their purity and closeness to the gardens of paradise’ (2008: 297). Frederick R. Dannaway delineates the continuities between such olfactory notions and the pre-Islamic Arab use of incense ‘in a quasi-magical manner that is also subtly psychoactive’ (2011: 491). I will have more to say about the musky scent of the martyr in this chapter’s second half on Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. This discussion of incense is important, since it reminds us that as well as being bodily and material, smell can be otherworldly and a conduit to visions. Despite incense’s sweet warmth and pleasantly heavy sillage, many Pakistanis living in Britain have internalized dominant ideas about their bad odour to the extent that they feel ashamed. For instance, every time Kaukab sees her elder son Charag’s white (ex-)girlfriend, Stella, she worries that her breath is ‘stale’ or her teeth poorly brushed (317). Aware of stereotypes around South Asians’ pungent smell of spices, Kaukab feels paranoid about her own bodily hygiene. She ensures no coats are near her cooking, having been influenced by some white people’s hateful assumption that Asians are ‘“smelly” and “stinky”’. Through Kaukab’s focalization we are told that these racists ‘do have a point’, because coats left in kitchens can soak up the smell of cooking spices, and butter used to oil women’s long hair sometimes goes bad (297). She has imbibed hurtful depictions of British Asian women as ‘“ugly”, “smelly”, “oilyhaired” etc.’ (Brah 1996: 78). Perhaps more than any other sense except the visual, smell acts as a sign of otherness and as justification for discriminatory or cruel treatment. This sort of smell-related prejudice – like Fanon’s ‘racial epidermal schema’ (see p. 54) – can be turned inwards by its victims. As is common for Kaukab, she projects insecurity about her current hostile environment into nostalgic raptures about Pakistan, recalling such traditional cleaning methods as ‘the sarsaparilla root that is thrown into the brass or earthenware containers which hold a household’s drinking water in the home village, to sweeten the water so that its scent will freshen the mouth when the water is drunk’ (315). Her village’s name is Sohni Dharti (literally ‘beautiful land’, but also a national song of Pakistan written in the 1970s), further underscoring Kaukab’s idealization of the home country she has left behind.

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Notwithstanding this imagined figuration of a unitary country and Ummah, Aslam charts the increasing polarization over time between different communities from the subcontinent, especially after the 1971 War that resulted in Bangladesh’s independence. Ultimately, the only name accepted by all communities is the Urdu term for the town itself: ‘Dasht-e-Tanhaii’, meaning ‘The Wilderness of Solitude. | The Desert of Loneliness’ (29). This is a reference to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who is one of three individuals eulogized on the novel’s prefatory page. The phrase derives from Faiz’s poem, ‘Yad’ or Memory (2006/1952). This poem was immortalized in the song ‘Dasht-e-Tanhai’, which was sung by Iqbal Bano in the 1970s.7 Faiz’s ‘Yad’ deals with the theme of lovers’ separation despite their hinted physical proximity (Mufti 2004: 255–257). More allusively, the poem may be interpreted as representing the Sufi devotee’s desire for God and both ‘other-worldly and thisworldly significations’ (Mufti 2004: 259) or, as in the readings of Aslam and Amina Yaqin (2013: 10–13), as touching upon a migrant’s yearning for home. In both Faiz’s poem and Aslam’s novel, memories of lovers and of home are ‘[d]renched in […] aroma’ (Faiz 2006/1952: 206). In ‘Yad’, the lover’s presence is redolent with the scents of jasmine and rose (‫‘ سمن اور گالب‬saman aur gulab’; see Mufti 2004: 256–257). These are two particular flowers whose bouquet hangs over Aslam’s novel as well as Faiz’s poem. Readers are informed that Kaukab ‘always wears’ a jasmine cologne (120). This might seem inconsistent with her puritanical version of Islam but, as Shelina Zahra Janmohamed reminds us: The Prophet Muhammad talked of perfume as something that was never extravagant, something you could never get enough of. Muslims are advised always to smell good, especially at prayer time and definitely during Friday prayers. From a religious and a cultural perspective, perfume is equally important for men and women. (2016: 165)

Janmohamed further remarks that the only Islamic prohibition around fragrance is the alcohol used in many Western perfumes to disperse and preserve their odour. By choosing jasmine as her signature smell, Kaukab opts for a scent that can be applied via a ‘roll-on vial’ of attar oil (215) rather than suspended in a haram liquor. The novel shows that jasmine also has floriographic significance in South Asian culture, with women tying the buds into their coiffures (135) and using them to scent

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clothes (360). Along with the rose, jasmine’s petals sweeten the water that washes dead bodies (185), and both plants are a favourite with gardeners, including Kaukab herself (233). Shifting the angle, Holly Dugan demonstrates in her history of perfume in the Renaissance that jasmine has also long been valued and associated with gardens, sexuality, and the exotic in England: ‘Jasmine, imagined as a sweet breath exhaled from nature, […] is bucolic and natural. [T]he scent of jasmine was a key trope for defining eroticised space […] for those experiencing it in English gardens, it was connected to odoriferous pleasure imagined to occur in such spaces [as the East or West Indies]’ (2011: 156–157). Roses are everywhere in this novel, from the green and white pattern in the family’s kitchen floor linoleum (7) to a ‘rose essence’ (81), which is sold by Shamas’s mother in Pakistan until people start returning the product as a bigoted protest on hearing the news that her husband and Shamas’s father was born a Hindu. In many cultures, the rose is a symbol of love, desire, and mortality. And the fact that Kaukab tends a rose garden is important because in Sufi verse this stands for the cultivation of one’s soul in preparation for meeting God. While Kaukab spends much of her time thinking of and making ready for the afterlife, the Turkish poet and Sufi mystic Yunus Emre (1238–1320) claimed that the rose is similarly spiritual and that it sighs ‘“Allah, Allah” each time one smells it’ (Ackerman 1990: 36). Most famously, rose imagery is also prevalent in the work of the thirteenth-century Persian-language poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (1997/1367). The Persian poet drew a comparison between the pious and the worldly person through his image of the rose, since this flower incorporates both the sharp thorn and the delicately scented flower. In the Masnavi Rumi occasionally refers to those who are unaware of the spiritual path and indulge themselves solely in the terrestrial world as unspiritual thorns. Furthermore, Rumi writes at several moments in his Masnavi about the rose garden of God (see, for example, Rumi 2010/1367: 43–45). There is an irony at play, though, for Kaukab’s spirituality has been rent by the thorns of convention. Using luminous images which include the perfumed and the floral, Aslam details the relocation process undergone by Dasht-e-Tanhaii’s predominantly Muslim community in the mid- to late twentieth century. Like Shamas and Kaukab, the first, pioneer generation of migrants thought that they would not stay in the UK long, but would leave once they had earned enough money. However, becoming parents to Britishborn children changed their assumptions and ambitions. Kaukab more

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than once berates her husband that she is stuck in ‘[t]his accursed country’ (146) because it is the only nation her progeny know well and they would not leave it for Pakistan. Instead of departing, she and many of her British Pakistani friends surround themselves with the familiar sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of the home country. Aslam painstakingly outlines the ways in which racism, white flight, social exclusion, and alleged forms of self-segregation have contributed towards Dasht-eTanhaii’s Muslim population existing within a ghetto, to the extent that white people are seen as the other by many members of the community. This is particularly true of the older generation, few of whom speak fluent English, who rarely have contact with indigenous northerners, and who discipline recalcitrant children with the threat of giving them away to a white family (220). Aslam’s construction of the migrants’ contributions to their own ghettoization encapsulates one strand of criticism often levelled at the multiculturalism model of immigration. For example, soon after the 7/7 bombings, Trevor Phillips, then the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, famously argued that multiculturalism was leading to the UK ‘sleepwalking into segregation’ (2005: n.p.). Two years later, in a report commissioned by the right-leaning think tank Policy Exchange entitled Living Apart Together, Munira Mirza et al. similarly contend that Muslims increasingly ‘feel that they have less in common with non-Muslims […] and […] show a strong […] preference for Islamic schools and sharia law’ (2007: 5). From an academic perspective, Mikhail Epstein puts forward the claim that, ‘contrary to its original noble intentions’, multiculturalism has ‘erect[ed] new walls among cultures rather than ruin[ing] the old ones’ (2009: 336). Epstein and Mirza et al. agree that multiculturalism has led to the creation of separate cultural islands within the nation state, with each culture seeing the other as alien, and their mutual acceptance being conditional on the premise ‘living together but apart’. Meanwhile another theorist Wolfgang Welsch rejects as ‘politically dangerous’ the way in which, he claims, multiculturalism encourages groups to exist as ‘closed spheres or autonomous islands’ within the nation state (1999: 195). By contrast, I observe that the charge of self-segregation is often a form of victim-blaming and a distraction from the issue of white flight. Although Aslam’s is therefore a recognizable and fairly conservative account of migration, he is stylistically innovative, deliberately defamiliarizing the industrial landscape inhabited by his characters. He transmutes this townscape into a pastoral scene, in which the prevalence of exotic

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plants and animals – tamarind trees, fireflies, parakeets, and sugar-cane – make Aslam’s world seem far removed from the more usual ‘[b]asements and bedsits, streets and cafes, […] suburbs and the city’ (Procter 2003: 1) that have featured as the cardinal locations of postwar British diasporic writing. In one sense, Aslam is simply documenting the ways in which Pakistani migrants are transforming their localities by establishing South Asian shops, cultural events, ways of dressing, and smellscapes. Yet what is also immediately notable about his writing is the shoring up of similes and metaphors, many of them breathtakingly beautiful, which derive predominantly from the natural world and domestic sphere of Pakistan. Shamas’s comment about his younger self could equally apply to Aslam: both find ‘the rough material for metaphors all around’ (16). Aslam argues that his extravagant use of metaphor is an appropriate technique for representing his characters’ worldview, because, he argues, they ‘constantly compare[e] their England with Pakistan’. He has stated ‘I wanted the reader to feel […] frustration [that the migrants don’t accord importance to their own lives in England]. I wanted England to shout, as it were, “Look at me!”’ (Brace 2004: n.p.). In my reading, England might also yell ‘Smell me!’, for the scents in this novel are of tadka dal, marigolds, naphthalene balls, and coconut hair oil, rather than fish and chips, rising damp, or stale ale. To theorize the ‘translocal connections’ (Attridge 2017) that make the UK veer off into Pakistan, Bangladesh, or elsewhere for diasporic writers, I reach for Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics (2009) and for Derek Gregory’s analysis of ‘imaginative geographies’ as ‘doubled spaces of articulation’ in The Colonial Present (Gregory 2004: 256, drawing on Said 1995/1973: 49–72). As a geographer, Gregory is alert to both the linkages and the severances that are caused by globalization. He offers the term ‘connective dissonance’ (2004: 248–256), which is helpful in allowing insight into the frequent moments in these novels at which characters experience the world swinging around and Britain becoming Pakistan or vice versa. The neologism plays on the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance (Vaidis 2014), concerning the stress and discomfort often felt by a person who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time. Migrants, and Muslim migrants in particular (see Santesso 2013), are especially vulnerable to cognitive dissonance, since they have strong ‘home’ values connected to religion and culture but are expected to learn the ‘host’ ones as well. Gregory adds a spatial dimension to psychology’s concept of cognitive

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dissonance. His adjective ‘connective’ gestures to globalization’s population flows and the idea that the world is a disparate web of far-flung nodes, separated by time and space, but linked by the Internet, growing anxiety about climate change and extremism, the ravages of capitalism, and so forth. In Fictions of the War on Terror, Daniel O’Gorman includes a whole chapter on connective dissonance in representations of the Iraq War of 2003 onwards by US-based writers (2015: 76–111). O’Gorman writes that Gregory’s connective dissonance ‘indicates an ambiguous space between identities in much the same way as a dissonant musical chord occupies an ambiguous space between notes’ (2015: 78). Dissonance can also be applied more widely across the sensorium. As this chapter shows, smell is in some ways the most dissonant of the senses since it is the one most associated with memories and therefore with other times and places. From a literary perspective, Ramazani writes in A Transnational Poetics that early twentieth-century modernists such as W. B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot ‘translated their frequent geographic displacement and transcultural alienation into a poetics of dissonance and defamiliarization’ (2009: 25). Keep in mind that Ramazani uses the diction of translation and defamiliarization (as well as unwittingly echoing Gregory’s noun ‘dissonance’), for these are also key ideas explored by Aslam and Ali (Perfect 2008: 111–112). Some pages on, speaking of the later poet Seamus Heaney, Ramazani makes a similar point that in the Irish poet’s work ‘the here becomes inseparable from the not here’ (2009: 40). Finally, he writes extensively about the ‘translocal’ (2009: xiii, 13–16, 101–102, and so on). This is a term which he takes from anthropologist James Clifford, and which Ramazani suggests is useful in allowing us to keep in mind transnational writers’ simultaneously local and cosmopolitan, deep-rooted and freewheeling perspectives. Aslam’s portrayal of the ways in which contemporary British Pakistani communities have been shaped by, and are reacting to, the not-here’s superimposition over the here is neatly encapsulated in his own artistic endeavour. Aslam uses specifically Muslim South Asian myths, art forms, and religious stories in order to translate and transculturate the England in which his characters live. Such translation and transculturation allow him to forge ‘plural, sometimes contradictory, identities, and new ways of knowing’ (West-Durán 2005: 697). For instance, the novel is peppered with sensuous images drawn from Urdu poetry, particularly ghazals: tropes include the moth and the flame, stars and diamonds,

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wine and peacocks. Maps for Lost Lovers’ evocations of the nineteenthcentury ghazal poet Mirza Ghalib (see 163, 332) are suggestive in relation to Aslam’s literary project. Ghalib creatively reinterpreted the stock images of Urdu poetry to make veiled but acerbic points about the turbulent times in which he lived, the era of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the demise of the Mughal Empire (Hyder 2006: 471). As in Faiz’s later work there is an important dialogue between love and loss in Ghalib’s writing, especially in his threnodies for the decline of a culturally syncretic Mughal history and his descriptions of a historical moment when Muslims were made other. The Rebellion was the turning point to which Ghalib responded, after which colonial powers increasingly represented Indo-Muslims as strangers and aggressive figures of terror in ways that are strangely familiar because of current geopolitics. When the Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (who has great imaginative purchase on the text) dies towards the end of the novel, three of its main characters react to the information in very different ways: The news is genuinely devastating. ‘Who will sing about the poor, now?’ [Shamas] whispers in shock. ‘And about the women’, says Suraya – his whispers are audible to her. ‘And in praise of Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him?’ adds Kaukab. (238)

The renowned singer from the mystical Sufi tradition released several albums on Peter Gabriel’s record label, Real World, before his untimely death in 1997 (presumably the same year the novel is set). He is interpreted according to the perspective of each listener as a champion of Marxist, feminist, and spiritual values. Even from within the allegedly unitary religious perspective, Nusrat provokes a range of responses in Aslam’s fictional world. For example, Muslims from one sect, probably a Deobandi-related movement, cannot be seen attending his performance because their version of Islam forbids music, even devotional singing such as Nusrat’s (192). These varied constructions of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan accord with Rehan Hyder’s research (2004: 66–69), which shows that Nusrat reinterpreted the Qawwali tradition (itself a blend of Hindu and Muslim influences) and argues that his music was in turn repackaged and emptied of spiritual meaning for Western ‘world music’ consumers. Significantly, the portrayal of Nusrat’s concert is studded

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with descriptions of plants. These include orchids and the ubiquitous ‘roses and […] jasmine blossoms’ (185), as well as aspidistras, which are odourless but attract ‘snails and slugs’ (184). Not only that, but the maestro’s singing is interpreted through an olfactory lens as ‘perfumed longueurs’ (187). This synaesthesia projects music into smell, working to limn the song as desultorily attracting the audience’s attention, just as the buddleia’s ‘rich fragrance’ (183) is impossible to ignore for those moths that make their presence felt in almost every chapter of this lepidopterist’s dream8 of a novel. As is suggested by the intervention from Shamas’s lover Suraya in the above block quotation, Aslam is concerned to probe the ethics of Muslim religious tradition, levelling particularly pointed criticisms in relation to gender. Yet, he has rightly been criticized9 for overloading his discussion of religious abuses, even pathologizing some of his Pakistani characters. Although the novel’s honour killing strand has understandably attracted the most scholarly attention (Yaqin 2012: 101–108; Mirza 2017: 194–195; Butt 2008), subsidiary cruelties include child molestation by a religious cleric, the violent exorcism of djinns, women’s supposed lack of rights under Islamic divorce,10 rape within marriage and the extended family, female foeticide, and the pernicious effects of gender segregation. To explore in detail just the first topic, of child sexual abuse, this is primarily unpicked in the chapter entitled ‘Leopold Bloom and the Koh-i-Noor’. From his controversial opening line on the subject – ‘Semen was found on the mosque floor late last evening’ (234) – onwards,11 Aslam provides details of the sexual abuse of a child by a Muslim cleric. As is usual for him, the author intertwines this shockingly cruel event with dreamily pastoral sights and smells, such as: ‘The scent of hawthorns in bloom in May is as thick inside the house as out, the air drowsily astir in summer with the weightless seeds of the poodletail dandelion clocks’ (234). In the next chapter, ‘You’ll Forget Love, Like Other Disasters’, Shamas discovers that the religious elder has been employed in the Dasht-e-Tanhaii mosque despite his known history of assaults on children. The novel goes on to trace the British Muslim community’s cover-up of this abuse on a national level. Just before this, though, readers are presented with a fascinating reflection on smell, and I want to suggest the juxtaposition is no coincidence. Shamas remembers coming across a Japanese knotweed tree:

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[Its] pale cream flowers – looking as though dusted with custard powder – he had tried to discover the smell of a few years ago, and found himself taking in a lungful of decay, suppuration, the shock throwing him back on his heels where he had reached up with his neck stretched like that of a hanged man’s. Perfumes come from plants; it’s animals who produce disagreeable odours, humans included. Musk, honey, milk – these are as much an exception in the animal world as those tropical plants said to produce blossoms smelling of festering flesh or this Japanese knotweed around whose shimmering flowers he had cupped both hands that day, the way a young man kisses his first girl. (244)

At this pivotal moment in the novel Aslam puts flora and fauna, perfume and miasma, love and violence adjacent to each other. The knotweed provoked a visceral reaction in Shamas as he recoiled from the unexpected stench emanating from its pretty blossom. Why does he think of this now, preoccupied as he is by the child’s plight – as well as by his own predicament, having just found out his mistress, Suraya, is pregnant with his baby? The sweetness of childhood and of love has turned acrid, and the putrescence of his memory parallels this souring effectively. The cream colour of the knotweed’s flowers, along with the ‘[m] usk, honey, milk’ of the animal realm, conjure up the creamy fluid of the cleric’s semen,12 just as foul-smelling plants and sweet-smelling animals – freaks of nature, both – underscore the monstrous nature of this elder’s exploitation of a minor. The sexual connotations are spelt out at the end of the excerpt, as Shamas compares his cradling of the flowers with the tenderness of a first kiss. Making them plainer still, he goes on to lament, through free indirect discourse, that ‘[h]e’ll never now kiss her [Suraya’s] mouth again while his penis is engorged and sticky at the tip like a bull’s muzzle’ (244). The despoliation of both innocence and intimacy is linked to religion, for Suraya has only entered into the sexual relationship with Shamas because she needs to get married and divorced again if she wants to return to her son and her husband (the latter pronounced triple talaq13 in anger when drunk). It is important to examine this discussion of child abuse while simultaneously holding in view both Aslam’s manifest aesthetic qualities, and his tendency to sensationalize religious maltreatment in the novel. His tendency to emphasize abuses within Muslim societies is more worryingly pronounced in Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil. This 2008 novel of Afghanistan

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is alternately lyrical and overwritten, but it imparts some penetrating insights about 30 war-torn years of the country’s history. However, its only central Afghan character is a one-dimensional mouthpiece for a violent, joyless Islamism, and misleading authorial statements such as ‘The religion of Islam at its core does not believe in the study of science’ (112) are all too common. Perhaps due to its lengthy gestation period (see Chambers 2011: 135), the earlier Maps for Lost Lovers is more finely drawn. For instance, Kaukab, who in many ways functions as the text’s archetypically intolerant proponent of a narrow Islamism, is nonetheless imbued with some sympathetic traits. She sees the maintenance of tradition and refusal of assimilation as connecting her to her ancestors: ‘her mothers and grandmothers […] those now dead and absent but still living in her mind, unsung elsewhere and otherwise’ (116). Thus, although the narrative ultimately rejects her hidebound clinging to conventions and the judgemental odour of sanctity that hangs over her, we are given a hint of the sense of continuity she gets from following prescribed practices. In addition, while her outrageous act of holding a knife to her daughter’s throat is accorded clear narratorial condemnation, she is still portrayed as a hard-working, loving mother facing a hostile environment. One example is provided when she first sees her son, Ujala, after a long estrangement, and tells herself he looks ‘[l]ike a dream walking’ but is too anxious about her poor spoken English to reveal her emotions (293). Similarly, what Brah terms the scent of memory and Trygg Engen calls ‘the associative power of odor’ (1982: 97) is released when Kaukab nervously adorns herself with perfume and cosmetics as, alone and ‘dissatisf[ied] with England’ (31), she waits for guests to arrive. Her longneglected face powder compact proves particularly evocative: ‘the smell the cracked pieces of powder gave off took her back to her younger days’ (35). Remembering our discussion earlier of Faiz’s ‘Yad’ and the multilayered smell of jasmine and roses, Kaukab is revealed here as a complex figure, hard and unyielding on the surface but sentimental and girlish underneath. As in the long quotation above, in which three different interpretations of the musical tradition are simultaneously held in view, Kaukab, and literalist interpretations of Islam more broadly, are examined in Maps for Lost Lovers from more than one interpretative standpoint. This is my overarching argument about smell, too: that it allows Aslam to portray multiple standpoints through the intermingling of various odours, as well as the copresence of multiple localities through connective dissonance. Thus, thinking back to the Japanese knotweed

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example, the plant at once stimulates the senses with the delicate and the delicious – the powdering similar to custard and the ‘shimmering flowers’ – and makes the gorge rise with the ‘decay, suppuration […] [and] festering’ that is linked with the maulvi’s child abuse. Always in this novel (and Aslam’s larger oeuvre), horror and aestheticism, stench and perfume are closely linked, expressing the multisensory, Yeatsian aching beauty that Aslam finds in British Muslim contexts.

‘The Ice Smelled of Limes’: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane In the 1940s, around the time that the British Raj was disintegrating, an abundance of Bengali people began migrating to Britain. (Looking further back, ever since the seventeenth century, smaller numbers of Bengali migrants had travelled to the country.) Many of them hailed from Sylhet, in what is now northeast Bangladesh. Some of these new residents had previously been lascars, working as crew members or cooks onboard ships. Settling in areas such as East London’s Spitalfields, Sylhetis pioneered Britain’s emerging curry restaurant trade, laboured for long hours and with few rights in the garment industry, and worked as mechanics. Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, and Michael Young demonstrate the bifurcation between this precarious part of London and the development of the City: The East End of London is the backside of the City. As the City of London evolved over six centuries into the centre of global capitalism, the areas on its eastern fringe evolved too in symbiotic differentiation. At first they supplied food for the emerging urban community, then as the City concentrated increasingly on the pursuit of profit it gradually exported its less valuable and more polluting trades to just outside the City walls – where the benefits accrued without offending the dignity of the City itself. Leather trades, clothing, furniture, shipping and distribution were expelled in turn, and established to the east. As the City became wealthier and more important, the contrast between it and the East End grew sharper. (2006: 1)

This description unwittingly harks back to Corbin’s and Süskind’s exploration of eighteenth-century olfactory segregation that we examined at the beginning of this chapter, whereby such ‘polluting trades’ as the leather industry were relegated to poor urban districts. The fact that the East End first distributed food and later clothes to the nearby City

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demonstrates the former area’s somatic function. Cooking and the textile industry are two standout themes that pervade fiction from this particular part of London, and these topics have been especially well researched in relation to Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.14 The countervailing images of the deprivation of the East End and the wealth of the City is so stark that Dench et al. use the bodily and potentially smelly image of a ‘backside’ to describe the East End. Accordingly, poverty, social class, and globalized capitalist exploitation are other significant critical preoccupations (Ahmed 2015: 124–153; Morton 2018). In this section I build on the existing body of criticism on Ali’s best-known novel by introducing the issue of smell in relation to Brick Lane’s portrayals of material culture, social class, race, and religion. Sylhetis from Bangladesh have made an inestimable contribution to the fabric of British life over more than three centuries. This is most frequently recognized in their association with Brick Lane, the fragrant road of curry houses in East London. Their contribution is suggested and sometimes belittled in Ali’s 2003 debut about the famous street and its denizens. And too often the contribution to Anglophone literature of Sylhetis and Bangladeshis is reduced to this single novel. In a chapter I have published elsewhere (Chambers 2017: 232–255), I sought to broaden the focus out to English-language literature from authors with heritage on both sides of the India–Bangladesh border. However, given this book’s focus on Muslim-identified novelists writing about Britain, as well as Brick Lane’s seismic impact on the literary–critical scene, with some noted reservations I explore Ali’s text as the sole Bangladeshi representative. In the novel Ali mostly evokes life in Britain, with only a few, largely analeptic descriptions of Bangladesh. The main plot is conveyed through a third-person narrative interspersed with occasional letters.15 Temporally, it spans the years 1985–2002 (with a prologue covering the novel’s protagonist Nazneen’s birth in 1967). The period from 1988 to January 2001 is covered relatively quickly by Ali with a cluster of letters from Hasina, Nazneen’s sister in Bangladesh, collected in a single chapter (Chapter 7: 146–177). This long letter section is also emblematic of Nazneen’s grief after losing her baby son Raqib, since she is entirely silent in this chapter. A narratively constructed period of mourning is therefore built into the novel’s structure. We only hear of Nazneen’s letters from Hasina, who comments they are ‘short’ but that she can discern that her London-based sister is ‘cast down’ (151). Despite their

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important functions in the novel, Hasina’s letters have been widely criticized for being written in broken English.16 In Brick Lane, Ali engages with the sexual, sensuist, and sartorial choices of a number of different characters, suggesting that upon these choices hinges their understanding of identity, religion, and culture. Nazneen moves from rural Bangladesh to become first a housewife and then a seamstress in London. There she has an arranged marriage to Chanu, a largely amiable immigrant whose physical repellence is signposted through the recurring motif of Nazneen razoring the corns off his feet.17 Yet Nazneen does not stay put in what Ali constructs as the automatically passionless and gently oppressive space of her arranged marriage, as the author moves the character out of her religio-cultural space to have an affair with a younger British-born Muslim named Karim. Like the two 1990s novels explored in Chapters 1 and 2, as well as Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers discussed earlier, adultery therefore plays a major role in Nazneen’s self-realization (see Kuo 2014: 177–180). Brick Lane was met with commercial success and critical plaudits, including a shortlist nomination for the Booker Prize of 2003. The novel also faced criticism that Ali did not have the right to represent the British Bangladeshi community. Germaine Greer, for example, took Ali for task for her choice of language and ventriloquism of the voice of Nazneen’s Bangladeshi sister, Hasina: ‘She writes in English and her point of view is, whether she allows herself to impersonate a village Bangladeshi woman or not, British’ (2006: n.p.). Some academics argued that Ali borrowed too heavily from Naila Kabeer’s (2000) n ­ onfiction account of the East London garment industry The Power to Choose (Perfect 2008: 116–119; Brouillette 2009: 439). When Ali decided to write about a topic not associated with ‘her’ Bangladeshi community, in the follow-up novel Alentejo Blue which centred on Portugal, her efforts were badly received.18 There was also something of a backlash against her ‘girly’ novel about Princess Diana, Untold Story (Ali 2011). This may partly be due to the uneven quality of the writing, but also because the later novels did not operate ‘in an expected way’, as Ana María Sánchez-Arce argues is demanded by our notions of ethnic minority ‘authenticity’ (2007: 139).19 In this regard, the ‘burden of representation’ (Mercer 1994: 235) is something that has rightly been discussed from various angles in the critical oeuvre on Ali’s work (Ahmed 2015: 124–129; Benwell et al. 2011; Hiddleston 2005: 70; Perfect 2008: 110; Roupakia 2016: 649). There seems to be a curious double bind, whereby

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a mixed-heritage woman writer like Ali is damned if she does write about Muslims in Britain and damned if she does not. One of the reasons for Brick Lane’s supposed authenticity is that, like Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, it immerses readers in the experiences of a new migrant from a Muslim background as she finds it hard to adjust to her new life in Britain and lives as though she were still in the home country. (Another reason is that a specific place – Brick Lane – is named, which encourages readers to see the novel as an ‘authentic’ representation of that particular community in that particular place. In this sense Brick Lane is unlike Maps for Lost Lovers, given the latter’s mythologizing and magical realist tendencies.) Especially early on in the novel, Nazneen sometimes observes a British object or phenomenon and is transported back imaginatively to the sights, sounds, and smells of Bangladesh – just as Kaukab constantly interprets the UK from a Pakistani standpoint. Perhaps the most illustrative example of Ali’s representations of connective dissonance comes early in the novel when Nazneen ventures for the first time onto the celebrated street of Brick Lane. There she is assailed by odours both enticing and unpleasant, as ‘the restaurants smelled of fresh boiled rice and old fried fat’ (55), and rotting garbage is stacked up. Unlike Aslam’s idealistic pastoral aromatic landscape, Ali presents the very urban British odours of frying fat, dog excrement, petrol fumes, and rubbish as omnipresent in the novel’s East London sections (see, for example, 18). In one sense, this suggests how non-white people, particularly women migrants, often have to live in unsanitary conditions and are treated as disposable, almost as human waste (Wisker 2007; Rathje and Murphy 2001/1992: 146–150). A less sympathetic reader might say that Ali wrinkles her nose at the social housing of Tower Hamlets. Yet she does not stay within the British olfactory map, as connective dissonance is further hinted at through a description of children chattering as loudly as peacocks and Nazneen stepping into the road alongside another woman, like a cow with its mother. For Nazneen, experience ‘spills across national and psychic borders’, and Brick Lane inhabits more than one place, as do the texts Ramazani (2009: 38) explores. The grey surroundings of Britain veer off into the colourful animals and birds of Bengal, and Nazneen translates and transculturates her new surroundings into familiar terms just as her fictional counterpart Kaukab does. Brick Lane, as with Aslam’s novel, explores Islam in various manifestations. As a girl and then a young woman, and influenced by her alleged ‘saint’ of a mother (46, 80), Nazneen has left everything to her fate.

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She unquestioningly accepts Allah’s will and uses religion as an emotional crutch, as when she recites Surahs in Arabic without any understanding. At other times she uses prayer to give her life structure. On arrival in Britain, watching ice skating almost becomes an alternative, secular religion for Nazneen. Once the sport stops being aired on the television, out of boredom she begins to pray five times daily and finds herself ‘pleased with the order it gave to her day’ (41). Later in the narrative, when her affair with an attractive Muslim extremist results in anxiety and eventually a severe bout of depression, she seeks guidance from the Qur’an, but ‘the words on the page kept her out, hid their meaning and pushed her away’ (332). Finding cold comfort from Islam, portrayed as it is as exclusionary, she decides that her sin has preordained for her ‘a place in hell for all eternity’ (341). Superficially devout, Nazneen therefore has little knowledge of Islam. She uses religion in an instrumentalist way to calm her fears, fill her day, and provide fatalistic justification not to break off her extramarital relationship. In the book’s second half, as Nazneen’s faith is beginning to wane, Ali outlines the emergence of a group of extremist Londoners called the Bengal Tigers, who are mobilized by post-9/11 Islamophobia and a feeling that the Muslim world is under attack. Jane Hiddleston suggests that Ali depicts the radical Islamist group as fragmentary and ambivalent, instead of portraying them as adhering to a ‘focused set of beliefs’ (2005: 66). The group is outlined as riven with dissent and fissures, rather than being the usual stereotypically rigid and authoritarian cell. Certainly, from their inauguration onwards the Bengal Tigers are plagued by internecine strife. This is indicated in the clash between Nazneen’s lover Karim, who thinks locally, wanting to ‘get our own neighbourhood straight’ (283), and his antagonist, known as the Questioner, who advocates national and global jihad. The Questioner wants to charter a coach to Oldham to join the town’s Muslim-dominated riots in summer 2001 (286–287), as well as to to fund Chechen rebels and Iraqi aid efforts. It is noteworthy that the Chechen campaign is aerated in Ali’s novel with the diction of smell. Chanu is troubled when he comes across a propaganda leaflet from the Bengal Tigers that starts with praise to Allah ‘for our brothers who gave up their lives shaheed to defend the brothers’. With his belief in higher education, Chanu is unimpressed by their poor sentence structure and misuse of the word ‘shaheed’ (martyr). More disturbing is the eulogy for one particularly devout fighter who was shot dead in spring 2000

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during the Second Chechen War. According to eyewitness testimony quoted in the document, when Russians returned his body three months after his death, it ‘was smelling of musk and it was the most beautiful of all the shaheed bodies […] in Chechnya’ (274). The idea that a martyr’s corpse does not rot like those of ordinary mortals is raised in two ahadith (narrations about the ways and deeds of Mohammed) reported by Imam Ahmad an-Nasa’i. These ahadith state that the martyr’s reward for dying in the cause of Islam will be that the blood from his body will be saffron-coloured ‘and its fragrance will be like musk’ (Sunnah.com, n.d.: n.p.). Despite this apparent religious underpinning, the pamphlet’s quotations from the Qur’an on the value of jihad are highly selective, and Chanu scoffs at its message: ‘Smelling of musk. After three months! What is all this mumbo-jumbos?’ (275). The author and disseminator of this propaganda document, the Questioner, is a stock Muslim character, and much of the pernicious stereotyping around him centres on his smelling instrument, his large and hooked nose. Notwithstanding the Questioner’s Bengali background, Ali caricatures him as the archetypical wily Arab Muslim with a Roman nose and Disney-esque features. In Disney cartoons and films such as Aladdin (Clements and Musker 1992), the Arab is likewise illustrated with an aquiline proboscis and a demeanour that is bloodthirsty and barbaric. The Questioner is scrawny, rebarbative, and dominated by his ‘extravagan[t]’ snout, a nose that is laden with sexual overtones and a sort of compensatory hyper-masculinity. It is ‘hard and bony’ (241) and when the Questioner calls for jihad it ‘swell[s] with enthusiasm’ (281). Once the Bengal Tigers have disbanded and Karim has departed England, probably for Bangladesh, he is replaced by another cartoonish jihadist. Like the Questioner, this new recruit is depicted as a ‘thin young man’ with a menacingly pronounced ‘pestle-shaped nose’. Despite his espousal of gender segregation, when this young man looks at Nazneen with ‘devouring interest’ it is his bulbous nose that becomes ‘inquisitorial’ (485). Perhaps one of the most disturbing features of these characterizations is the way in which Brick Lane’s physical distortion of extremist Muslims creates a ‘Weimar feeling’, to adapt Hari Kunzru (2016: n.p.). In her article ‘Smelly Encounters: An Olfactory Reading of Indian English Fiction by Women’, Asha Choubey writes that Indians elevate the nose, connecting it with honour and shame as well as more prosaically with smell: ‘“Cutting off somebody’s nose” means dishonouring the person; “saving one’s nose” means saving one’s honour; “a fat nose”

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means bloated ego and “a matter of nose” means the matter of one’s self-respect’ (2014: 53). This comment applies mostly to Hindi, and to some extent its sister language Urdu, although by not specifying the language Choubey makes it sound universally Indian. But the point also has some relevance to Nazneen’s mother tongue, since the first example – nose cutting or disgracing – applies to Bengali in the same way (नाक काटना or naak katana in Hindi becomes নাক কাটা যাওয়া or naak kataa jawa in Bengali). There is another Bangla idiom about cutting one’s own nose to spoil someone else’s journey, নিজের নাক কেটে পরের যাত্রা ভঙ্গ, which means to harm oneself in order to ruin another person’s plan or endeavour – much like the English phrase ‘to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face’. In any case, it is clear that when the Questioner and his ‘inquisitorial’ young replacement are described with pronounced ­muzzles, this not only signals their poking their noses (নাক গলান�ো or naak golano in Bengali) into other people’s business, but also their unhealthy preoccupation with protecting women’s ‘honour’. Why noses are associated with honour and shame in South Asian culture is not entirely clear, though likely explanations have to do with the nose’s prominence on the face, the fact that a bride often wears an elaborate nose ring on her wedding day, and that ‘stealing the nose pin’ is a euphemism for rape in several South Asian languages.20 Upon publication, critics heralded Brick Lane as displaying compassion and generosity, and it is true that most of her characters outside of the Islamist cell are likeable or at least well-rounded. One notable exception, however, is Mrs Islam, who functions as a grotesque embodiment of the insatiably greedy moneylender (another hackneyed idea of the Semitic peoples) rather than a three-dimensional character. Even if ‘Islam’ is a relatively common surname,21 Ali cannot have been unaware of the connotations that attach to this name. In addition to being unsympathetic, Mrs Islam borders on the godlike. Like Allah, she is omnipotent and omiscient, so that whatever happens in Tower Hamlets ‘she would be the one called to preside over it’ (66). The debt her borrowers owe her for her financial aid, like the debt humans owe Allah for life, can never be repaid (314). Also like Allah, she is eternal and will ‘outlive us all’ (481). Ali’s deliberate choice of the name ‘Islam’ for the novel’s most unsympathetic character therefore provides more than a hint of the author’s standpoint on the religion. Like the devil with his customary whiff of sulphur, Mrs Islam has a characteristic smell, which is mentioned each time she makes an

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appearance. Her bag smells strongly of mints, as does she, and this glacial scent stiflingly intermingles with the syrupy cough mixture (Benylin Chesty Coughs) and the locker-room odour emanating from the bottle of muscle painkiller (Ralgex Heat Spray) she takes everywhere with her. This distinctive fragrance lends Mrs Islam ‘an aura of the sickbed’ (196; see also 307), bespeaking the money lender’s assiduous self-care and enthusiastic hypochondria. During Nazneen’s pregnancy Mrs Islam chaperones her on a routine doctor’s appointment. The surgery’s air is ‘foetid, as if to sweat the illness out of the patients’ (63), further cementing the association the older woman has with malodorous disease. In truth, when Dr Azad predicts ‘things will go smoothly, you will have a healthy child and he will look after you in your old age’ (67), the malevolent atmosphere created by Mrs Islam chokes his cheery words like exhaust fumes, auguring ill for the unborn child. Later, when Nazneen discovers the power the woman wields over her household through an extortionate loan Chanu had unwisely taken out to pay for his computer and Nazneen’s sewing machine, she feels ‘overpower[ed]’ by the stench of the handbag Mrs Islam has ordered her to put money into. This odour is ‘an essence of ill health’ (199), a ‘prescription of perfume’ (199), playing on the doxa of Islam and Muslims as dangerous, their ‘sick’ worldview threatening the ‘healthy’ European body politic (Daoud 2016). These pernicious ideas about Muslim sickness stem from seventeenth-century European enmity for the Ottoman Turks (Halliday 2010: n.p.). By the early twentieth century, the image of Turkey as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ was cemented in the popular imagination due to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire (Said 1995/1978: 223). Because of her handkerchief obsession, Mrs Islam is known as ‘She of the thousand hankies’ (97). Several rumours surround her use of these squares of material, including that they aim at hiding an unsightly and witch-like wart on her nose. However, the most plausible is that they send out signals to her husband about their shady business dealings and her imposition of riba or unjustly high interest on borrowers, while still allowing her to maintain the facade of religiosity from behind the most cursory semblance of purdah. In this way, Ali criticizes the hypocrisy of those who pass as religious people but are unconcerned by committing unreligious acts such as charging riba on loans. This brings to mind the stereotype of the furtive and duplicitous Muslim, concealing something beneath their niqab, beard, or handkerchief. As Mrs Islam tightens her hold on Chanu and his family, her smell is depicted as ‘layered’ and ‘complex’ (305, 307). Her perfume masks

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the animal scent of her sweat and her doctor’s bag of medicinal odours, and the overall hybrid odour is an assault on the senses. With her portrayal of ‘smells hiding smells’ (307), Ali plays on received ideas about the secretive, dissembling Muslim (Mondal 2018). In one of their last encounters, the aromatic becomes overpowering, as Mrs Islam confronts Nazneen about her debt in a butcher’s shop where ‘[t]he smell of meat was intense […] [,] so thick that when Nazneen opened her mouth it felt like she had licked a raw and fatty chop’ (419). Despite her usual vitriol, the once succubus-like figure seems diminished, and at first Nazneen cannot put her finger on what has changed. Then it dawns on her that the difference is due to the usurer (like Süskind’s Grenouille) now having no body odour: ‘beneath the blood-heavy air she could not smell Mrs Islam’s sickroom smell. This was what she had lost’ (420). In parallel with Mrs Islam’s medicinal fragrance of mint and menthol and the brutal odour of dead animal flesh that laces her penultimate showdown with Nazneen are other, more pleasant scents. When Nazneen has her first child, Raqib, a great deal changes for her, including that she is no longer so regular about her prayers (93). Instead she takes huge draughts of his intoxicating new baby scent, noting through free indirect discourse that ‘[h]is head smelled like a sacred flower’ (81). Whereas Chanu scrutinizes the child through a ‘question[ing]’, visualist lens (for the patriarch, his son ‘provided a telescope and a looking glass’), Nazneen only senses his clearly defined bodily needs (83). Mrs Islam, of course, medicalizes the perfectly healthy baby by recommending strong-smelling home remedies, ordering Nazneen: ‘Make a little pillow of feathers and bay leaves and cloves to help him sleep. […] Add some ghee to his bath water to keep his skin soft. Paste turmeric and aniseed to his chest to cure a cough. Rub his feet with coconut oil to draw out a cold’ (85). Later, when Raqib succumbs to what eventually proves a fatal illness, the world seems to revolve around his institutional cot. After a four-day vigil at the hospital, with its frightening sounds and ‘smothering smells’, Chanu goes home to cook. He returns with supplies of curry and rice that fill the antiseptic air with its ‘warm heady smell of spices’ (118). By stimulating the sense of smell, he thus attempts to redesign the institutional space, making it more homely. The whiff of disinfectant is intermittently displaced by the ‘complicated smell of a high feast’, but this cannot entirely erase the hospital’s underlying odour of ‘neutered grief’ (126, 139). After their baby dies, it is not until her little daughters come along with their fresh smell of ‘toothpaste and soap powder and the unvarnished scent of small, clean bodies’

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(191) that the scent of loss lifts somewhat for Nazneen. What is striking about the smells that I discuss in this paragraph is how they manage to unite ‘domesticity’ and ‘public space’ as well as bridging ‘immigrant’ and ‘British’ spaces. This is an argument that flecks this chapter and it is noteworthy, especially given the prevalence of the public versus private dichotomy in debates about multiculturalism and gender. Another aroma that revives Nazneen is the cool but contrastingly refreshing smell of citrus fruit. Nazneen first encounters this ‘smell […] of limes’ in a daydream she has of dancing on ice in a ‘spangled’ costume (93), at first with a man and then on her own. The reverie is inspired by ice skating Nazneen watched on television when she first arrived in Britain. That was in 1985, just a year after Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won gold at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics for their performance to Ravel’s Bolero, and the British skating power couple is fleetingly referenced in the novel (141). At the time Nazneen had only a few words in English, and consequently she struggled to enunciate the sport’s name, calling it ‘ice e-skating’ (36–38, 41). This solution to the difficulties of sibilance by inserting a vowel between the consonant clusters recalls the mispronunciation of ‘Mrs Moore’ by Indians protesting outside the court room against the trial of Dr Aziz for sexual assault in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Although it transpires that Mrs Moore died on her sea voyage home to England, she still holds influence beyond her watery grave, as the crowd chant ‘Esmiss Esmoor | Esmiss Esmoor’. The old woman transmutes into a ‘Hindu goddess’ (Forster 2005/1924: 212), much as Nazneen almost deifies the skating legends she admires.22 It has not been lost on critics (Ahmed 2015: 138–139; Pereira-Ares 2013: 160, 182) that Nazneen’s fantasy of becoming an ice skater is an unsubtle celebration of the freedom that Ali believes exists for the woman migrant in Britain. This freedom apparently encompasses independence, mobility, and the wearing of short skirts. Although ice skating is almost a religious conviction for Nazneen, she briefly flirts with apostasy towards the novel’s end. The freedom the skaters represent momentarily seems a ‘demented illusion’ and suddenly she can see through the couple’s ‘false smiles, the made-up faces’ (364). Despite this wobble in her secular faith, the book’s final conclusion is unequivocal in its pro-British piety. Nazneen’s best friend Razia blindfolds her and takes her and the girls on a surprise trip. Deprived of her sight, Nazneen has to rely on her other senses to give clues as to where they are:

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Nazneen rested her arms on the table. She could smell fried food, old leather, the warm, used smell of air that has been in countless nostrils, a hint of talcum powder, furniture polish and the sharp skin of limes. She breathed deeply. It was the furniture polish that smelled of limes. (491)

Barely using her sense of touch, it is smell, especially the lime scent, that helps Nazneen orient herself. She is finally at the ice skating rink, a place she has only ever entered before through her imagination. As Nazneen prepares to set foot on the rink, clad in sari and the longed-for ice skates, Razia voices the novel’s tritely hopeful last line: ‘This is England […] You can do whatever you like’ (492). The lime fragrance floats into Nazneen’s mind in a different context after she has begun working as a pieceworker in the garment industry and has met the young middleman, Karim, with whom she will soon embark on an affair. This is at a time when her once clear sense that Bangladesh is home has become blurred, just as the synaesthesia in the following quote makes the fault line between sight and smell wavy and indistinct: ‘The village was leaving her. Sometimes a picture would come. Vivid; so strong she could smell it. More often, she tried to see and could not’ (217). Nazneen tries on one of the sequinned vests she is charged with sewing, and, even as it recalls the showgirl outfits worn by skaters, ‘she closed her eyes and the ice smelled of limes and she moved without weight and there was someone at her side’ (220). Swiftly becoming emotionally intimate with Karim, even allowing him to use her prayer mat, she ‘smelled the crisp smell of his shirt’ (244) and realizes it is the same lime odour as in her daydreams. What is significant here is that Karim, who has never been to Bangladesh and apparently speaks confidently in English but stutters over his Bengali words, holds out the icy cool promise of Britain and neoliberal self-realization.23 This contrasts with what Ali positions as the warm passivity and fatalistic capacity for endurance of Bangladeshis. Towards the end of the novel, just before she breaks things off with Karim, Nazneen thinks, ‘He still smelled of limes. It made saliva come into her mouth. It made her feel that before she had been sleepy, and now she was awake’ (449). Their relationship (and, by extension, Nazneen’s experience of life in Britain) has energized her, rousing the Bengali woman from what the novel constructs as the torpor of her culture. However, she can see that in time Karim will become ‘like her husband’ (450) and she will find herself back in the same sexual and

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intellectual slumber. Natasha Walter was one of the few critics to ­foreground the lime smell, in a review for the Guardian under the tantalizing title ‘Citrus Scent of Inexorable Desire’. However, apart from a brief reference to ‘the citrus scent of his shirts’ as part of Karim’s general attractiveness (2003: n.p.), Walter does not follow through on the connection made by her byline writer between odour and desire. Limes are a longstanding symbol in (post)colonial writing, because the British used them to combat scurvy and to hide the smell of decay. Of course, ‘limeys’ is a slang American word for Britons, which refers to the association of British sailors with consumption of this fruit. Elleke Boehmer (1995: 26) remarks that in Dombey and Son Dickens identifies limes (along with ginger and turtles) as some of Barbados’s most highly regarded commodities. Similarly to Barbados, Montserrat in the Lesser Antilles depended on limes and cotton as its ‘economic duumvirate’ (Fergus 1982: 10), replacing sugarcane as prime export commodities after the sugar trade was halted by slave emancipation. Interestingly, though, compared with Mediterranean lemons, Caribbean limes were ‘almost useless’ as a Vitamin C source for preventing scurvy (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 177, 301). This did little to dent the fruit’s popularity. According to Howard Fergus (1982: 11–13), bruised and overripe Montserrat limes had their juice extracted, which was then used in perfumes, soaps, food, drink, and household cleaning products manufactured by companies still active today such as Schweppes and Crosse & Blackwell. Cementing the link between this crop and the colonial enterprise, Derek Walcott sets his poem ‘Ruins of a Great House’ in a former lime plantation. Linking limes to the British, Walcott describes the scent of this ‘dead’ fruit as ‘[t]he leprosy of empire’ (1992/1964: 19). Yet limes are not only associated with the Caribbean. In Bangladesh, Ali’s country of birth, a variant of the fruit known as shatkora in Bengali, or citrus macroptera in English, is used widely in cooking and perfumery because of its rind’s distinctive taste and smell. There are thus complex implications when links are established between the ice rink’s lime smell and that of Karim’s shirts, as well as the connotations of ‘freedom’ that both carry. Despite his Bangladeshi background and assertive Islamism, Karim is altogether the acquisitive Briton when it comes to his work as a middleman. Given all the connotations of the limes that I draw out, Karim is no Bengali shatkora but a British limey, almost imperialist in his desire to possess Nazneen and his certainty that his brand of Islam is the only correct path.

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A related point to consider is that no text exemplifies more clearly than Brick Lane the contrast between the generally pre-Second World War, upper-class England-returned Muslim sojourner to Britain and the postwar, working-class myth of return migrant (see Chambers 2015: 143). In a resonant passage near the beginning of Brick Lane we are confronted with an arresting example of the myth of return, which Chanu’s friend Dr Azad terms ‘Going Home Syndrome’. This ‘disease’ is caused by the desire to return to the homeland, and Dr Azad claims that it afflicts many Bangladeshi migrants. According to the doctor, not only is their physical return a myth but also, mentally, ‘[t]hey don’t ever really leave home. Their bodies are here but their hearts are back there. […] [L]ook how they live: just recreating the villages here’ (32). This concatenates to another strand in the novel about the migrant’s sense of being out of place, which can lead to mental illness, such as Nazneen’s collapse due to what Chanu terms ‘nervous exhaustion’ (325; see also Santesso 2013: 61–82). Nazneen’s illness at this point in the novel also has much to do with the moral conflict she experiences as a result of her extramarital affair with Karim. The ‘ghostly’ appearance of her mother is suggestive in this respect. Moreover, the ‘rest cure’ Dr Azad prescribes for her (326) is significant from a historical, feminist-informed perspective, given its ‘sadistic, controlling, and intrusive’ as well as caring impetus (Bassuk 1985: 245). Probably the most important means by which migrants either try to assimilate in the host country or turn away from it towards the homeland is through education. Mrs Azad interestingly describes her rejection of this education through an olfactory metaphor, declaring of Dr Azad: ‘Oh yes, my husband is a very refined man. He puts his nose inside a book because the smell of real life offends him’ (112–113). Indeed, we are told that Dr Azad’s nose turns up – and, at least at first, the snobbish doctor also turns up his nose at Chanu, despite the latter’s education. Moreover, Mrs Azad is right that ‘real life’ smells, for in this novel we are regularly exposed to its emissions, as ‘[a] fresh dog turd steamed gently on black tarmac’ and ‘the tarmac smelled of rubber and essence of car fume’ (143). At first Nazneen’s husband Chanu imagines himself to be immune to Going Home Syndrome, and he tries instead to make a life for himself in Britain. When he arrives in England, the sum total of his possessions is the usual few pounds in his pocket, along with the significant additional item of his degree certificate. In England Chanu zealously takes classes in everything from nineteenth-century economics to cycling proficiency,

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and acquires further certificates. These he frames and displays on the wall of the poky Tower Hamlets home he shares with Nazneen, as a talisman of his hopes of promotion at work and the consequent acquisition of a comfortable life in London. His dreams remain unrealized, whether due to institutional racism at his workplace or his own incompetence is never made clear. Chanu’s boss, with his Woolfian name of Mr Dalloway, passes him over for promotion, possibly because the Bangladeshi man does not ingratiate himself by socializing after work in the pub like his British co-worker and rival Wilkie (37). Chanu’s fortunes then take an embittered turn when he aspires to become an England-returned success story. He clings ever more desperately to the fantasy of returning to Dhaka in financial and social triumph. However, for migrants this hope of return migration often proves to be a myth, particularly because men put down roots in their new country when they get married and start having children. Nazneen and especially their young daughters, Shahana and Bibi, fear the realization of their father’s longed-for homecoming. The rationale for going back to Dhaka is tenuously based on Chanu’s saviour complex – to rescue Nazneen’s sister, the vulnerable ingenue Hasina, whose unwittingly alarming letters to Nazneen about sexual grooming and exploitation stipple the narrative. However, despite Hasina’s increasingly worrying communication, the three women – Nazneed, Shahana, and Bibi – are now deeply embedded in Britain. They decide to stay on. Trailing clouds of defeat more than glory, the patriarch Chanu returns home on his own. Chanu will try to freshen Bangladesh’s air with a business venture selling soaps – ‘Lux, Fairy, Dove, Palmolive, Imperial Leather, Pears, Neutrogena, Zest, Cuticura and Camay Classic’ (464) – to subcontinental shoppers. In her monograph Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock makes the link between soap and colonialism, discussing an 1899 Pears’ soap advertisement as a prime example of what she calls ‘commodity racism’ (1995: 32). It should not be complacently assumed that the disgusting racism of the Pears’ magazine advert, with its talk of the white man’s burden, is a relic of the past. In both 2011 and 2017 the cosmetics firm Dove had to apologize for adverts that were widely perceived as racist. Nivea also came under fire in 2017 for aiming a skin-whitening product at black women under the slogan ‘Visibly Lightens’. Out of decades of experience in racist Britain, Chanu seeks through his new

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enterprise to purify his compatriots with a range of cleaning commodities, in the process ‘soft-soaping empire’ (McClintock 1995: 207). He, too, has become a ‘limey’, eager to cleanse his home country with Western products despite his wistfulness while in Britain for Bangladesh’s lush paddy, fertile language, and unparalleled poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore. His South Asian consumers would be unaware that their salesman Chanu at best smells prosaically of ‘hair oil and deodorant’ (372) and at worst sends out the pong of halitosis. Ali establishes from the outset that Chanu’s breath stinks (39) and that he emits a ‘stale breeze’ with every exhalation (115). In bed, Nazneen has to learn to adjust her nighttime breathing to his rhythm, in a poignant metaphor for the compromises and consolation prizes of marriage. One could argue that Ali combines the olfactory, the visual, and the haptic to create an opposition between repulsion (Chanu’s plump body and gnarled feet) and attraction (Karim’s muscular physique and confident touch). It is perhaps the sense of smell that dominates; for example, each time Karim leaves the house after they have made love, Nazneen ‘lay for hours on the soiled sheets, smelling him’ (363). Additionally, and given that Nazneen is the main focalizer, it might also be argued that the novel reverses the paradigm of the ‘male nose’, for in Brick Lane it is the woman protagonist who scrutinizes male bodies through lenses of the visual, the olfactory, and the haptic. Early on in their union and finding her new husband repellent, Nazneen thinks that she catches a whiff of ‘the jasmine that grew close to the well’ in her home village (76). Trapped in her marriage to this affable but unattractive and pompous man, she feels a great nostalgia for home, where Hasina is always six and their mother smells sweetly of milk. Yet a few pages later this Kaukab-like veneration of the home village is undercut by the memory of a man named Makku Pagla who, like Chanu, reads books insatiably and is regarded by the other villagers as mad (pagla). Makku Pagla dies, perhaps by suicide, in that same well recalled in Nazneen’s homesickness, and his body produces a rotten ‘stench’, dispelling the jasmine scent of memory (78). The villager who volunteers to descend into the well and bring up the body has to be bribed not only with money but soap and perfume, presumably to eradicate the smell of the corpse and the pungent mustard oil he slathered his body in before

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going down the shaft. Starkly contrasting with the delicate white flowers of the jasmine plant, young Nazneen notices ‘holes where the flesh had dropped off’ Makku Pagla’s body (79). The novel suggests that you cannot step into the same river (or well) twice. Nazneen, unlike her husband, realizes that her postcolonial nostalgia (Walder 2011) is misplaced and, smelling a rat when it comes to Chanu’s idealization of the past, she refuses to return to Bangladesh with him. Another example of the text’s depictions of Bangladesh’s stark reality underneath its pretty smells comes when a colleague called Abdul from Hasina’s factory is clearly attracted to her. He wears a new shirt to work each day and takes pains always to smell of cologne, causing some co-workers to view him as conceited. Hasina counters with a point similar to Janmohamed’s (quoted on p. 82), declaring ‘the Prophet (peace be upon him) instruct [sic] us to keep clean and care the bodies we have’ (156). Despite Hasina’s genuinely highminded sentiments, she is sacked from her job merely for going on a walk with this colleague. In one of her letters, Hasina also draws a distinction between city and village smells which is suggestive: ‘I wake up time to time and think I back home. But is only smell of goat come bleating outside door. City smell different smell of men and cars. I like to smell the village again’ (135). Like Nazneen, Hasina is also a migrant woman in an urban context. The prime difference is that Nazneen undertakes a process of international migration, whereas Hasina undertakes a process of intra-national migration. Later, Hasina makes a friend in Dhaka who almost dies in an acid attack. As a household servant, Hasina needs permission from her employer, Lovely (who is associated with expensive perfume), to visit the victim. Hasina writes to Nazneen in England: ‘When I walk close is bad odour emitting from thing lie on mattress. I must put hand over nose and mouth and stomach make threat on me. […] Cheek and mouth is melt and ear have gone like dog chew off’ (269). Lovely is initially disgusted to hear about these injuries. When the woman dies, and Lovely learns that she had a son who was also maimed, she opportunistically profits from the information, making her name as the head of a new charity emotively titled ‘Acid Innocents’ (408). Lovely’s saviour fixation is propelled by her hope that rescuing children will allow her to climb the ranks of Dhaka’s fashionistas and philanthropists. Like Aslam with Pakistan, Ali is relentless in her inventorizing of Bangladeshi’s miseries, especially for working-class women.

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Conclusion The contemporary Muslim-identified novelists I have analysed in this chapter, Nadeem Aslam and Monica Ali, explore how multiculturalism as a policy and an everyday practice impacts on women. One of the ways Aslam and Ali open up multiculturalism is through evocations of the sense of smell. Smell is often ignored, but it is a formidable sense nonetheless. Because Aslam and Ali are preoccupied by gender and by women’s (mis)treatment in Muslim communities, it is appropriate for them to sniff out aromas. I showed that smells are associated with women and therefore disparaged, but that they also cross borders as connective dissonance does. My discussion of the eighteenth-century world portrayed by Süskind illustrated smell’s segregative and othering potential. This is picked up in Aslam’s discussion of Kaukab’s self-doubt around her body odour and Ali’s diabolization of Mrs Islam through menthol smells. Fragrance can also ventilate excremental subjects, as we saw with Aslam’s geraniums which warn of racist attacks and in Ali’s depiction of Nazneen’s daughters’ sweet girlish scent that lightens Nazneen’s grief at the loss of her baby son. This chapter has charted Muslim migrants’ olfactory remapping of Britain, which is associated with the smells of meat and incense in Maps for Lost Lovers and with curry smells overlaying the disinfectant base notes of Brick Lane’s hospital. Incense is also discussed in Ali’s exploration of an odour of sanctity coupled with Islamism. Chechnyan martyrs are said to smell of musk, so aromas can work to mask the whiff of jihadism’s blood lust. Knowledge of intertexts and artistic attention to the senses enriches our understanding of Maps for Lost Lovers in particular, so I attended to Aslam’s allusions to Faiz’s, Ghalib’s, and Sufi poetry. Britain’s odours are often overpowered by South Asian ones in both texts. This is where Gregory’s notion of connective dissonance comes in, as a way of conceptualizing how contrasting accords from northern Europe and the Indian subcontinent blend together in the imaginations of homesick South Asian Muslim migrants. One technique that Aslam deploys to humanize his ostensibly unlikeable character Kaukab, is to reveal the connective dissonance set free when she smells old, cracked pieces of face powder in a compact. No such alleviation is granted by Ali to her depictions of Mrs Islam or the Questioner in Brick Lane. Their ugly noses bear witness to their unyielding characters. On the

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other hand, Karim’s and ice skating’s ‘limey’ smell is a sign of hope for Nazneen that she, unlike other migrants including her husband, can cast off nostalgia for the homeland to reach an apotheosis in her transcultural practice and ‘do whatever [she] like[s]’ in ‘[t]his […] England’ (492). Like many other critics, I am unpersuaded by Ali’s closing panegyric to the sweet smell of success for the Muslim woman migrant, particularly in light of Nazneen’s earlier travails in Britain, many of which cohered around the sense of smell. Not only do I focus on smell because it is a prominent aspect of both these texts that has not been scrutinized before, but also because this is a valuable approach that allows me to advance some large claims about smell in relation to the politics of these texts. Both novels are critical of Islam and, at times, propagate two-dimensional stereotypes and misconceptions. For all the praise that has been directed towards these texts’ politics, both display some complicity with racist and Islamophobic perceptions of Muslims in Britain. As I have shown in this chapter, unpleasant smells play a large part in that. On the other hand, there is a panoply of wonderfully exotic smells in these novels, too – emanating from plants, fruits, spices, incense, and so on – the vast majority of which are associated with the subcontinent in some way. (I look at pleasant smells in Maps for Lost Lovers more than I do in Brick Lane, for they are more prominent in the former. However, it should not be forgotten that there are sumptuous smells in the latter too: not just the limes, but the aroma of spices from Chanu’s cooking and the new baby smell.) Per Graham Huggan (2001), the delectable smells seem to function as a kind of exoticism in these texts. More importantly, in allowing wonderful aromas from ‘the East’ to drift through the pages of their novels, Ali and Aslam attempt to offer something of a counterweight to all the nasty smells in their novels – and, by extension, to the criticisms of Islam and Muslims with which those disgusting smells are associated. This has a scintilla of Orientalism about it – the ‘positives’ in these novels are almost as problematic as the negatives. It seems that these texts use foul smells as a kind of shorthand for their often very reductive criticisms of Islam, and that they are using agreeable smells (again, quite stereotypically) as if to offset this and show readers just how balanced their ‘insider’s’ view of Muslims in Britain is. Ultimately, these authors fail to transcend the pernicious dichotomies of good Muslim and bad Muslim or Islamophilia and Islamophobia (Mamdani 2002, 2004: 25; Shryock 2010), when it would

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be desirable instead to find a middle ground between polarized positions, a ‘common scents’ approach to Muslims in Britain, so to speak. In addition to why, despite often being overlooked, smells in texts are extremely important and worthy of exploration, there is more to say in terms of how smells in texts are uniquely placed to create the illusion that we as readers can occupy the position of a textual other. For example, Aslam uses the sense of smell to momentarily humanize Kaukab and encourage us to empathize with her, and Ali reveals Chanu’s aromatic culinary skills at a tragic moment in Brick Lane when medicinal aromas predominate. Ali and Aslam liberally spread odours around so as to put readers in their protagonists’ position. There is something particularly experiential about smell – more so, somehow, than evocations of sights and sounds – and it is as if the evocation of odours in texts can make us feel as though we are occupying the position of those characters smelling them. As such, these texts attempt to allow a mostly white, Western readership to see through the eyes of (‘smell from the nose of’?) Muslims in Britain. If smell seems an ephemeral thing to which it is easy to turn a blind eye (or an anosmic nose), it is nonetheless crucial. This chapter has discussed how Aslam and Ali take a leaf out of Süskind’s Perfume to create novels that are unusually engrossed in the realm of odours. Both novelists are alert to the key role that smell plays in sexual attraction, racist discourse, migrant encapsulation, and religious practice. Particular smells, such as jasmine, roses, cologne, fried food, medicines, and garbage have very precise connotations in these osmatic texts. In this chapter, I hope to have ‘made scents’ of these two Muslim-identified British novels from the early 2000s. The sense of smell is not to be sniffed at; as Ali and Aslam intimate, the nose knows.

Notes

1.  Grenouille’s name means frog (he is also repeatedly described using another bestial image, that of a tick). 2. Subsequent references are to this (2004) edition of Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. 3. This fits with the ‘Cold War Baroque’ style Sadia Abbas (2014: 149–182) discerns in Nadeem Aslam’s fiction and that of his fellow Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif. 4. See Highmore (2013: 103–104, 112) and Majors (2012: 70–73).



110  C. CHAMBERS 5. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie (1995: 11–12) shows that his own and his protagonist Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby’s home locality of Malabar Hill in Bombay/Mumbai takes its name from the Malabar Coast in southwest India (itself a distorted Anglicization of the original Malayalam vernacular). As for Naag Tolla Hill, despite the attention paid by several critics to this particular passage by Aslam (Bajraktarević 2011: 81; Ilott 2015: 76; Töngür 2016: 128), they miss the fact that no such place exists in Dhaka. Perhaps Aslam is thinking of the far from hilly district of Naktala (literally, the place where the snake lives) in South Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, but he is way off the mark positioning this locality in Bangladesh’s capital. 6. In Chapter 1 we saw that in Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun, Gerald Stone, despite his supposedly pacifistic New Age beliefs, hurls an incense burner at Asya. 7. Sadia Abbas calls Iqbal Bano a ‘very fine Pakistani singer’ (2014: 183) and rightly draws attention to her most agenda-setting recital, in 1985, of a Faiz song known as ‘Hum Dekhein Ge’ as a defiant act against Zia-ulHaq’s regime. 8. Absent from the novel’s pages except in memory (yad) is the lepidopterist character, Jugnu, Shamas’s brother who is killed in the central honour killing. Jugnu’s name means ‘firefly’, carrying connotations of one who brings light to the darkness. Accordingly, as Amina Yaqin observes (2013: 8), this character is a personification of Enlightenment reason. He is fascinated by lepidoptera and, with heightened poetic resonance, attracts them as moths to a flame. Not only are moths drawn to bright lights, but they are also extremely sensitive to smell. Twice in A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman memorably describes sphinx moths flocking to the Selenicereus cactus, whose flowers produce an intense vanilla scent for just one night per year (1990: 5, 55). 9.  See, for example, Moore (2009: 9), Ahmed (2015: 154), and AbuLughod (2011: 35). 10.  Robin Yassin-Kassab dismisses as inaccurate the novelistic contrivance whereby Suraya has to marry and divorce another man before she can return to her husband. This obscure rule would only apply had the original husband gone through with three divorces to the same woman, so as to admonish him for his fickleness. As such, Yassin-Kassab criticizes Aslam for his dereliction of ‘writerly responsibility […] in an Islamophobic climate’ (2008: n.p.) in presenting the sharia in this distorted way to his mostly Western readership. 11.  Rehana Ahmed argues that this sentence is reminiscent of ‘the Islamophobic headlines which periodically adorn the pages of the

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Daily Mail or the Sun’ (2015: 154). Beyond tabloid fodder, though, Aslam also recalls an inflammatory story from the controversial collection Angaaray (see p. xxi), by Sajjad Zaheer. This story, ‘A Vision of Paradise’, concerned a Muslim cleric who falls asleep while he is praying and has a wet dream while still on the prayer mat. Aslam would be aware of this story, which sparked riots in India, because his father was a communist poet exiled from Pakistan due to his political beliefs. 12. Earlier in the novel, at the end of the chapter ‘Women with Tails’, a surly teenage Ujala is disturbed in an act of masturbation by his parents. He stages a dirty protest by releasing his semen into their faces, ‘smelling of bleach, runny like the whites of a quarter-boiled egg’ (73). This reminds of the similarly adolescent defiance of Ahdaf Soueif’s bold girl from In the Eye of the Sun who taunts her mother about her ‘husband’s semen. Semen. SEMEN’ (see p. 21–22). 13. Under Islamic law, a threefold pronouncement of the word ‘talaq’ by a man to his wife can result in divorce. However, as Nehaluddin Ahmad observes, these utterances ‘have to be spaced over a period of 3 months to give husband and wife time for reconciliation’ (2009: 53). Similarly to Yassin-Kassab’s criticism of Aslam’s sensational exaggeration of Islamic misogyny (see Note 10), it would thus be impossible for a man to get drunk and ‘accidentally’ divorce his wife, as Suraya’s husband is said to have done. 14. See, for example, Pereira-Ares (2013, 2018: 149–194), Frost (2011: 231, 236), and Maxey (2012: 199–200). 15. For more on the novel’s deployment of the epistolary mode, see Perfect (2008: 111–116) and Bower (2014, 2017: 167–199). 16. For example, Michael Perfect remarks on critics’ ‘confusion’ (2008: 111) over why Hasina is presented as writing in broken English. He concludes that the italicized epistolary sections must be a translated rendition of her Bengali idiom, ‘a formal representation of the vulnerability and helplessness that characterize Hasina’s life’ (2008: 112). This is perfectly correct – pun intended – but the text exposes a further layer of meaning. Hasina writes carelessly but her letters ‘burst […] with life’ (94), whereas Nazneen is hamstrung by the quest for accurate grammar and spelling and as a result writes very guardedly. If, like Perfect, we take this as a ‘formal representation’, it symbolizes Hasina’s sometimes misguided spontaneity and Nazneen’s need to renounce her quasi-religious conditioning that ‘all errors [should be] expunged along with any vital signs’ (94). 17. See Ali (2004/2003: 24, 39, 45, 135). Subsequent references are to this (2004/2003) edition of Ali’s Brick Lane and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text.



112  C. CHAMBERS 18. Ali (2006). For an exemplary poor review, see Walter (2006). 19. For my discussion of her more enthusiastically received third novel In the Kitchen (2009), see Chambers and Watkins (2015: 250). 20. In Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps, there is much play with two characters’ nose pins. In this dystopian novel, Shah portrays a world in which women are forced to marry many husbands and have the maximum possible number of children. The first nose pin-wearing character, Rupa, is part of a secret group of women who rebel, refusing to marry. Instead, they make money by furnishing government officials with nonsexual intimacy, furtively spending whole nights simply holding them, even though the authorities forbid this in order to maximize procreation. Rupa’s mother also wears a nose pin, and Shah uses this jewellery item as a symbol of the loss of virginity and entry into adulthood. When Rupa’s mother pierces her daughter’s nose and gives her the nose pin, this action functions as an attempt to repair the fractured mother–daughter bond between them – the relationship has been damaged because the husband molests Rupa. 21.  Islam is estimated as the 1,649th commonest of all the surnames in Britain, compared to 713rd for Mohammed and 1,238th for Hussein. 22. There is a key parallel between the realization of ‘ice-skating’ and of ‘Mrs Moore, Mrs Moore’ in these examples. Although the structures involved are not strictly identical, the sounds involved are (namely sibilants). There are two potential issues for the second language speaker in ‘ice-skating’: first, that they encounter two instances of [s], one at the end of ‘ice’ and one at the beginning of ‘skating’; and, second, there is an [sk] consonant cluster at the start of the word ‘skating’. Phonologists would argue that the second problem is thornier for the second language speaker than the first. This is because the pronunciation of ‘s+C clusters’ (where ‘C’ stands for any consonant) is known to vary across Indo-European languages. English allows s+C: ‘school’ [sku:l], ‘student’, and so on, but other Indo-European languages do not (for example, the cognate words in Spanish are ‘escuela’ and ‘estudante’). The [sk] problem is dealt with by inserting a vowel before the [s], just as Nazneen does in ‘ice e-skating’. Nazneen would almost certainly be a Sylheti speaker, and for the actualization of English words in Sylheti, see Goswami (2013) and Singha and Ahmed (2016). As for Mrs Moore, the issue here is not a strict match to either of the structural difficulties in ‘ice-skating’ (no [s+s] sequence, and no s+C sequence). Instead, it appears that the crowd have somehow re-analysed [ˈmɪsɪz mɔːɹ] as [ɪzˈmɪs ɪzˈmɔːɹ]. If we assume that the crowd are Hindi–Urdu speakers, then Hindi–Urdu is more permissive than Sylheti in relation to what consonant or CC clusters are allowed, and also has some s+C clusters in loan words from Sanskrit and English. It therefore appears unlikely that this is a pronunciation difficulty due to



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linguistic differences. Perhaps what is going on here is a rhythmic reanalysis: three beats (= three syllables) in [ˈmɪsɪz mɔːɹ] sets up an uneven rhythm (1 2 3 -), so in the process of chanting an extra beat has been added to the beginning of the first word, giving 1–2 1–2 with the stress on ‘2’ each time which keeps the stress on the ‘right’ syllable for English. All this is to say that the generally parallel effect of the sibilant sound world is worth noting here, but it is also important to understand that structurally the two cases (skating versus Mrs Moore) are not the same. 23. For a detailed exploration of Brick Lane as a Bildungsroman, see Michael Perfect’s excellent (2008) article.

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116  C. CHAMBERS Frost, Nicola (2011) ‘Green Curry: Politics and Place-Making on Brick Lane’. Food, Culture, and Society 14.2: 225–242. Goodhart, David (2013) The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration. London: Atlantic. Goswami, Arpita (2013) ‘Simplification of CC Sequence of Loan Words in Sylheti Bangla’. Language in India 13.6: 182–191. Greer, Germaine (2006) ‘Reality Bites’. Guardian. 24 July. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/jul/24/culture.books. Accessed 1 August 2018. Gregory, Derek (2004) The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Halliday, David (2010) The Bloody History of the Croissant. Neil Perry (foreword). Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Kindle. Hiddleston, Jane (2005) ‘Shapes and Shadows: (Un)veiling the Immigrant in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40.1: 57–72. Highmore, Ben (2013) ‘Migrant Cuisine, Critical Regionalism and Gastropoetics’. Cultural Studies Review 19.1: 99–116. Huggan, Graham (2001) The Postcolonial Exotic. Abingdon: Routledge. Hyder, Rehan (2004) Brimful of Asia: Negotiating Ethnicity on the UK Music Scene. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hyder, Syed Akbar (2006) ‘Ghalib and His Interlocutors’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26.3: 462–475. Ilott, Sarah (2015) New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Janmohamed, Shelina Zahra (2016) Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World. London: I.B. Tauris. Kabeer, Naila (2000) The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso. Kershaw, Hannah (2017) History, Memory, and Multiculturalism: Representations of Muslims in Contemporary British Fiction (PhD thesis). York: University of York. Khair, Tabish (2018) Night of Happiness. New Delhi: Picador. Kunzru, Hari (2016) ‘I Run Home with Trump on My Heels and Farage Has Moved in’. Guardian. 26 June. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/26/hari-kunzru-eu-referendum-nigel-farage. Accessed 10 January 2017. Kuo, Hsin-Ju (2014) ‘Revisiting Adultery in South Asian Immigrant Narratives’. Contemporary Women’s Writing 8.2: 171–188. Lloyd, Christopher, and Jack L. S. Coulter (1961) Medicine and the Navy, 1200– 1900. Volume III: 1714–1815. Edinburgh: Livingstone. Macey, Marie (2009) Multiculturalism, Religion and Women: Doing Harm by Doing Good? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Majors, Kerri (2012) ‘Out of the Frying Pan: Food in Fiction’. Midwest Quarterly 54.1: 67–81.

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Malik, Kenan (2009) From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy. London: Atlantic. Mamdani, Mahmood (2002) ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism’. American Anthropologist 104.3: 766–775. ——— (2004) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon. Maxey, Ruth (2012) ‘Mangoes and Coconuts and Grandmothers’: Food in Transatlantic South Asian Writing’. In Ruth Maxey (ed.), South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970–2010. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 163–208. McClintock, Anne (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge. Mercer, Kobena (1994) Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Mirza, Maryam (2017) ‘Ambiguous Pakistani-Muslim Masculinities in the Diaspora: A Study of Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers’. South Asian Diaspora 9.2: 193–206. Mirza, Munira, et al. (2007) Living Apart Together: British Muslims and the Paradox of Multiculturalism. London: Policy Exchange. Mondal, Anshuman A (2018) ‘The Trace of the Cryptic in Islamophobia, Antisemitism, and Anticommunism: A Genealogy of the Rhetoric on Hidden Enemies and Unseen Threats’. In Amina Yaqin, Peter Morey, and Asmaa Soliman (eds.), Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 27–50. Moore, Lindsey (2009) ‘British Muslim Identities and Spectres of Terror in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers’. Postcolonial Text 5.2: 1–19. Morton, Stephen (2018) ‘Multicultural Neoliberalism, Global Textiles, and the Making of the Indebted Female Entrepreneur in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’. In Amina Yaqin, Peter Morey, and Asmaa Soliman (eds.), Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 171–192. Mufti, Aamir R. (2004) ‘Towards a Lyric History of India’. Boundary 2 31.2: 245–274. O’Gorman, Daniel (2015) Fictions of the War on Terror: Difference and the Transnational 9/11 Novel. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Okin, Susan Moller (1999) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Parekh, Bhikhu C. (2000) The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. London: Profile. Pereira-Ares, Noemí (2013) ‘The Politics of Hijab in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 48.2: 201–220. ——— (2018) Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives: From the Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

118  C. CHAMBERS Perfect, Michael (2008) ‘The Multicultural Bildungsroman: Stereotypes in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43.3: 109–120. Phillips, Trevor (2005) ‘After 7/7: Sleepwalking into Segregation: Full Text of Trevor Phillips’ Speech’. https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A3 =ind0509&L=CRONEM&E=quoted-printable&P=60513&B=%EF% BF%BD%E2%80%94_%3D_NextPart_001_01C5C28A.09501783&T= text%2Fhtml;%20charset=iso-8859%E2%80%931&pending=. Accessed 20 July 2018. ——— (2016) Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence. London: Civitas. Porter, Roy (1986/1982) ‘Foreword’. In Alain Corbin. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Miriam L. Kochan (trans.). Leamington Spa: Berg. v–vii. Procter, James (2003) Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Quinn, Emelia (2018) ‘Deer Crossing. Moose Crossing. Old People Crossing. Children Crossing: Reading Islamophobia Through a Vegan Lens in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 53.1: 109–123. Ramazani, Jahan (2009) A Transnational Poetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ranasinha, Ruvani (2009) ‘Racialized Masculinities and Postcolonial Critique in Contemporary British Asian Male-Authored Texts’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45.3: 297–307. Rathje, William L., and Cullen Murphy (2001/1992) Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Reinarz, Jonathan (2014) Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Roupakia, Lydia Efthymia (2016) ‘Cosmopolitanism, Religion and Ethics: Rereading Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52: 645–658. Rumi, Jalal al-Din (1997/1367) A Rose Garden: Selections from the Divan-I Kebir, Meter 1. Nevit Oguz Ergin (trans.). Lake Isabella, CA: Echo Publications. ——— (2010/1367) The Masnavi: The Spiritual Couplets of Mauláná Jalálu’ddin Muhammad Rúmí. E. H. Whinfield (trans.). New York: Cosimo Classics. Rushdie, Salman (1995) The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Jonathan Cape. Said, Edward W. (1995/1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sánchez-Arce, Ana Maria (2007) ‘“Authenticism”, or the Authority of Authenticity’. Mosaic 40.3: 139–155.

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Santesso, Esra Mirze (2013) Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shryock, Andrew (2010) Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Singha, Kh. Dhiren, and Md. Isthaque Ahmed (2016) ‘Phonological Adaptations of Some English Loanwords in Sylheti’. Language in India 16.7: 269–286. Smith, Mark M. (2007) Sensory History: An Introduction. Oxford: Berg. Süskind, Patrick (2010/1985) Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. John E. Woods (trans.). London: Penguin. Tagore, Rabindranath (2005/1916) The Home and the World. Sreejata Guha (trans.) and Swagato Ganguly (intro.). New Delhi: Penguin. Töngür, A. Nejat (2016) ‘City Within a City: The Pakistani Ghetto in Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam’. In Banu Akçeşme, Hasan Baktır, and Eugene Steele (eds.), Interdisciplinarity, Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in Humanities. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. 122–135. Vaidis, David (2014) Cognitive Dissonance Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Walcott, Derek (1992/1964) ‘Ruins of a Great House’. In Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. 19–21. Walder, Dennis (2011) Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory. Abingdon: Routledge. Walter, Natasha (2003) ‘Citrus Scent of Inexorable Desire’. Guardian Review (20 May). 16. ——— (2006) ‘Continental Drift’. Guardian Review (20 May). 16. Welsch, Wolfgang (1999) ‘Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’. In Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (eds.), Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. London: SAGE. 194–213. Werbner, Pnina, and Nira Yuval-Davis (eds.) (1999) Women, Citizenship and Difference. London: Zed. West-Durán, Alain (2005) ‘Nancy Morejon: Transculturation, Translation and the Poetics of the Caribbean’. Callaloo 28.4: 967–976. Wisker, Gina (2007) ‘Moving Beyond Waste to Celebration: The Postcolonial/ Postfeminist Gothic of Nalo Hopkinson’s “A Habit of Waste”’. In Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz (eds.), Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 114–125. Yaqin, Amina (2012) ‘Muslims as Multicultural Misfits in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers’. In Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin (eds.), Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing. Abingdon: Routledge. 101–116.

120  C. CHAMBERS ——— (2013) ‘Cosmopolitan Ventures During Times of Crisis: A Postcolonial Reading of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Dasht-e Tanhai” and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers’. Pakistaniaat 4.1: 1–17. Yassin-Kassab (2008) ‘Maps for Lost Lovers and Writerly Responsibility’. Qunfuz Blog. 6 February. http://qunfuz.com/2008/02/06/%E2%80%9Cmaps-for-lost-lovers%E2%80%9D-and-writerly-responsibility/#more-63. Accessed 30 December 2018. Yeats, W. B. (2000/1916) ‘Easter 1916’. In Timothy Webb (intro.), Selected Poems. London: Penguin. 119–121.

CHAPTER 4

Taste the Difference: Leila Aboulela, Yasmin Crowther, and Robin Yassin-Kassab

Introduction Smell, which I explored in the previous chapter, is hard to enucleate from the next sense under discussion, that of taste. When a person has a blocked nose from a cold, their enjoyment of food diminishes. For the unafflicted, tantalizing aromas from a meal being cooked often add to anticipation and pleasure in its eating. As Ackerman puts it: Smell contributes grandly to taste. Without smell, wine would still dizzy and lull us, but much of its captivation would be gone. We often smell something before we taste it, and that’s enough to make us salivate. Smell and taste share a common airshaft, like residents in a high rise who know which is curry, lasagna, or Cajun night for their neighbors. When something lingers in the mouth, we can smell it, and when we inhale a bitter substance – a nasal decongestant, for example – we often taste it as a brassiness at the back of the throat. (1990: 142)

This is a choice comparison in its medley of racial, cultural, and class politics, a medley that also plays out in this chapter’s key texts. Although very different from each other, these texts, Leila Aboulela’s Minaret, Yasmin Crowther’s The Saffron Kitchen, and Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus, share a neighbourly relationship whose common airshaft is their depictions of food and religion. Two of the novels, Minaret and The Road from Damascus are unusual in portraying a movement towards faith. As the most overt creator of ‘devout fiction’ © The Author(s) 2019 C. Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52089-0_4

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(Morey 2018a: 303) from among my chosen authors, Aboulela structures Minaret around Islam’s five pillars. I will pay close attention to three of the pillars in particular (fasting, charity, and pilgrimage) as loci at which food and self-denial plays a prominent part. In The Road to Damascus Robin Yassin-Kassab depicts Sami’s insatiable hunger for various sensations and his longstanding lack of restraint. By the novel’s end, Sami has renounced his earlier sensual flânerie and found succour in vegetarianism, environmental activism, and a nascent Muslim purity. Finally, Crowther’s text depicts a journey towards Iranianness (if not towards Islam) but, rather conventionally, exoticizes Persian food as a ‘palatable version […] of cultural otherness’ (Huggan 2001: 23). The author’s tendency towards melodrama and food fetishization leaves an Orientalist taste in the mouth. Nonetheless, The Saffron Kitchen is a bittersweet novel about travel and return migration that educates readers about the hybrid histories of both Iran and Britain. In this chapter, I will argue that the protagonists in all three novels gradually embrace their religious and/or cultural differences from the British mainstream, and that this is signalled through the sense of taste and their changing relationship with food. Hence this chapter’s title: ‘Taste the difference’ is a successful advertising campaign by British supermarket Sainsbury’s to promote its high-end food line. In my chapter, though, the phrase stands for a commodification of alterity that is sometimes critiqued and sometimes conciliated by the authors under scrutiny. While smell has been neglected in academic scholarship, the same cannot be said of taste, which has spawned a vast body of research that is often bracketed within the broader remit of food studies. This work overlaps productively with postcolonial and multicultural work from the discipline of literature, as is confirmed by the publication of such books as John Thieme and Ira Raja’s anthology The Table Is Laid (2007), and the monographs Culinary Fictions (2010) by Anita Mannur and Alimentary Tracts (2010) by Parama Roy. Outside of academia come narrative nonfiction works and novels such as Ziauddin Sardar’s Balti Britain (2008), Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook (2008), Almas Khan’s Poppadom Preach (2011),1 and Bisma Tirmizi’s Feast: With a Taste of Amir Khusro (2017). Both Alibhai-Brown’s memoir and Tirmizi’s novel include embedded recipes that are suggestive of a sharing of culinary skills as well as of stories. All of these books deal with food writing from South Asia and its diaspora, and I have made a modest contribution to the field myself with my discussion of the curry industry

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that emerged from 1810 onwards in Britain (Chambers 2015) as well as a brief section applying that analysis to the sense of touch in the c­ hapter on Kureishi earlier in this volume (pp. 51–53). In addition to South Asian literary studies of food, plenty of high quality research is being produced on food writing in the Caribbean (see, for example, Loichot 2013; Lawson-Welsh 2018) and Africa (Highfield 2010; Ramone 2018), among other postcolonial regions. Although it would take us too far from this chapter’s concern with taste, it is worth mentioning that food sustainability has also become an important part of postcolonial, migrant, and diasporic writing (in relation to issues of access to food, lack of food, migrant work on farms, discussion of supermarkets, urban dwelling in First World cities, and so forth). One area whose diasporic cuisine has been neglected is the Perso-Arab world. The few scholarly works that I have been able to find only attend to artistic representations of food in ancient Arabia or Persia (van Gelder 2000; Ziglar 2003). A literary study addressing the contemporary period is not easy to discover. Nor do historical or cultural studies fare (pun intended) much better when it comes to representing Arab or Persian food. For example, in Food in the Migrant Experience (Kershen 2002), the influential first edited collection about British food ways, authors make only the most fleeting references to Arab or Iranian cooking. These cuisines are subsumed under the umbrella term of Mediterranean food, where Italian dishes predictably dominate and Greco-Turkish cuisines are, as it were, next in the pecking order. In his ‘multicultural history of British food’, Panikos Panayi, a scholar with Greek Cypriot heritage, goes some way towards filling the intellectual gap regarding the history of Perso-Arab cuisine in Britain. He writes that Jewish and Mediterranean restaurants are widely regarded as selling ‘overtly British products’ (2008: 10). Similarly, Greco-Turkish, Arab, and Persian foods do not stand out in the British foodscape as much as more recognizably ‘exotic’ food outlets such as South or (South)East Asian restaurants. Panayi draws readers’ attention to one beautifully written postwar cookery book, Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food (2002/1950), which did much to integrate Middle Eastern and Mediterranean dishes into the British culinary landscape. As Panayi puts it: ‘David acts like a philosopher, popularizing food which went on to be adopted by a mass media’ (2008: 36). Having lived in Egypt and Greece, David (1913–1992) intended to ‘stir the memories’ of those who like her had partaken in this then-unfamiliar cuisine. She wrote eloquently

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about bringing ‘those blessed lands of sun and sea and olive trees into their English kitchens’ (David 2002/1950: xvi). The no-nonsense recipes she collated in this book alongside some lyrical depictions of the region were an early example of the culinary mark Middle Eastern food has left on postwar British cuisine. Although there are hardly any histories of Perso-Arab food in the UK on which the researcher may depend, I have found that a rich seam to tap is the ‘food microhistory’ genre (Brien 2011). As its name indicates, this comprises in-depth studies of single ingredients, dishes, drinks, or eating places that have an everyday valence, temporal longevity, and global reach. Especially in the section on Crowther, but also in the one on Yassin-Kassab, I draw on microhistories of the beverages tea and coffee, the foods saffron and croissants, and restaurants selling Parsi food and fried chicken. The difficulty of separating typical ‘English’ or ‘French’ foods from ‘Eastern’ foods because of imperialism, highlighted in my reading of these novels, shows the entangled histories of what is often simplistically viewed as an Islam–West divide or clash. The use of microhistories of particular foods proves an effective methodology to illuminate postcolonial texts that are richly seasoned with references to specific groceries and their histories, sociological import, or religious and cultural significance. Food, as Anirudh Raghavan, Syeda Asia, and Vanshika Singh argue, ‘is an important marker of identity for any culture’ (2015: n.p.). What people consume (or refuse to consume) becomes an exceptionally detectable or, indeed, delectable identity marker in the context of migration. And it is around Muslim migrants in the global north that deliberation over what it is permissible or desirable to eat and drink has been especially vociferous over the past 30 years. Further, one of the ways in which British Muslims came of age as a community was through food. To take a single example, in 1982 Muslim parents and pupils campaigned for school children in Bradford to be given halal meals at lunchtime (Chambers 2015: 218). Food is a crucial part of group as well as individual identity, as David Bell and Gill Valentine recognize: ‘communities are about exclusion as well as inclusion; and food is one way in which boundaries get drawn, and insiders and outsiders distinguished’ (1997: 91). The early protests over halal food in West Yorkshire schools accordingly helped to forge a sense of distinctive group identity as Muslims in Britain. It is important therefore to frame a taste for particular sorts of food as part of minority rights.

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Taste is an important topic to consider in a book about British Muslim fiction because food is bound up with identity – ‘we are what we eat’ – and the faultlines between people with tastes for different kinds of food can become rigid and fraught or erupt into violence.2 Halal seems to be a particularly pertinent case. Here it is knowledge about food or an idea about its origins that takes precedence over taste. The halal certification is something that ends up exerting a psychic, rather than sensorial power. It leads to a definition of taste in relation to moral sensibility. There are also interesting points to be made in relation to halal’s relationship with disgust (Miller 1997; Nussbaum 2004) and the abject (Kristeva 1982), whereby accidentally eating non-halal might have the power to disgust regardless of taste or sensory pleasure. Taste, then, often has more to do with social construction than visceral experience. All this intimates that we need a framing and unpacking of ‘taste’ as distinct from food studies. Examining the manifold representations of food and certain eating practices across my three case studies, I found little focus among the authors on the affective sensation of taste – whether taste as a sumptuous pleasure or its corollary of disgust. This chapter functions as an exploration of the ways in which taste is in fact seemingly excised from the narratives I explore. To be sure, Aboulela, Crowther, and Yassin-Kassab make surprisingly few attempts to describe the taste of anything.3 There is much discussion of abjection, restriction, and repression, but the meaning of food takes precedence over its actual taste in these texts. Even Crowther relies on the talismanic value of quintessentially Mediterranean foodstuffs such as pistachios, pomegranates, and figs without going into what it feels like to savour them. This is markedly different from the kind of cacophonies of sensuous taste experiences in books like American Jordanian author Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel – practically an orgasm of food porn – Crescent (2004/2003) and her 2005 memoir The Language of Baklava. As such and as mentioned, I look at microhistories, and these cultural histories of specific food products and their multivalent significations of course do not constitute a study of the sensation of taste. Both might be grouped under food studies, but the focus of my chapter is the former rather than the latter. For the purposes of the present argument, therefore, by taste I mean practices and politics of consumption or appetite rather than the sense per se. For these authors, as we will see, food generates a great deal of meaning, but this often comes at the expense of a primary, sensorial experience.

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Forbidden Fruit: Leila Aboulela’s Minaret Whereas Nadeem Aslam and Monica Ali focus almost entirely on claustrophobic South Asian communities, Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005) gives a broader sense of a transnational faith group, the Islamic Ummah, even if her main characters are Arab. Aboulela herself is an acclaimed writer of joint Sudanese-Egyptian heritage, who has resided in Abu Dhabi and Doha but now lives in Aberdeen. She has set her six books to date in a variety of locations, including Scotland, London, Chechnya, and Sudan. It could be argued that her espousal of a transcendental Ummah is naive and downplays the very real tensions between different Muslim groups within an in any case divided Britain, let alone the wider world.4 However, what marks out both Minaret and one of the other texts I discuss in this chapter, Robin YassinKassab’s The Road from Damascus, as novels of Muslim experience is that they centre on a character’s propulsion towards religion, rather than away. We saw in previous chapters that most Muslim-identified novels published in the 1990s and early 2000s are about young Muslims (like Soueif ’s Asya, Kureishi’s Shahid, and Ali’s Nazneen) discovering ‘freedom’ in the shape of a secular life and independence from familial or kinship ties. This may also be said of Maps for Lost Lovers, inasmuch as the novel’s couples, Chanda and Jugnu and Shamas and Suraya, out of various motivations and circumstances defy cultural constraints to pursue love matches, even if both relationships end in loss. Novels by authors with Muslim heritage therefore too frequently hinge on a protagonist’s journey away from their ‘repressive’ families and communities towards assimilation in the apparently liberatory, secular West. Writing from within the context of ‘Third-World’ fiction, Timothy Brennan pithily depicts such a process as ‘overcoming that to join this’ (1997: 38). Aboulela departs from this stale narrative to describe her Arab Sudanese protagonist Najwa’s metaphorical ‘fall’ from grace. This fall comes after her father’s arrest and hanging in Sudan for corruption, and is due in part to her longstanding encounter with the vertiginous liberties of the West. The novelist follows Najwa’s downwardly-mobile journey from her privileged position as a Sudanese minister’s daughter, to exile in London when a coup dislodges her father from power, and eventually her life as a domestic servant cooking food for and cleaning up after a wealthy Arab family in the former imperial capital.

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Minaret is a lucid second novel about love, religion, and freedom that is unobtrusively interested in feasting, fasting, and a space of moderation to be found in between these two poles. People who binge-read it as a piece of romance fiction may not digest its message about the perils of over-indulgence and the importance of restraint, an importance that is reflected in the novel’s muted tone and ‘flat, direct style’ (Morey 2018a: 308). Thus, while Seda Canpolat and Emily Churilla are right respectively to emphasize Najwa’s ‘scopic dilemmas’ (2016: 216) and the ‘asymmetrical gaze’ (2011: 41) she is subjected to by male and racist eyes, the character is also at the mercy of destructive appetites. Unlike in Aslam’s novel, where racism is largely depicted as colour prejudice, Aboulela portrays overt anti-Islamic sentiment in post-9/11 London (though revealingly the events of September 2001 are never mentioned). A bigot assaults Najwa as ‘Muslim scum’, throwing a bottle of liquid over her veiled head on a London bus in 2003. She is relieved only to taste Tizer, a very British carbonated soft drink, and not a haram alcoholic beverage: ‘It could have been beer but I’ve been lucky’ (2005: 81).5 The fact that Najwa counts herself fortunate for avoiding the sin of accidentally imbibing alcohol when she is still the victim of an unprovoked attack speaks volumes about the dire state of Islamophobia in twenty-first century Britain. And the fact that Aboulela figures forth a drink as a weapon of hatred shows that gustation represents a space where the other is encountered and ideas around identity, purity, and contamination are never far away. As we saw in the previous chapter, Aslam and Ali are highly critical of rigid religious beliefs, practices, and infrastructure. This is perhaps most apparent in Aslam’s negative portrayal of Dasht-e-Tanhaii’s mosque’s cover-up of child abuse, and in Ali’s demonization of the character given the telling name of Mrs Islam. Taking a very different approach, Aboulela portrays the mosque – in her case, the Central Mosque at Regent’s Park, which has been described as ‘the most prestigious’ mosque in Britain (Lewis 1994: 13) – as a nurturing microcosmic community. The mosque provides shelter (Najwa and her love interest Tamer each sleep there at different times); it is where Najwa finds her job as a nanny-cum-cook; and it bestows education, both in the form of religious classes and one-off lectures that stimulate much debate. (Najwa does not, however, appear to participate in these debates. At one point she admits that she is much more comfortable reciting the Qur’an [tajweed] than interpreting it (ijtihad), because in ‘Tajweed class’ [79] she never

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knows whose argument to support.) Even seen from a distance as a fragmented minaret, the hallowed building provides a sense of security, wellbeing, and locatedness. The mosque is also a source of friendship and female communion, and there a levelling out of class and other differences takes place. Feelings of equality are established among the congregation, as is reinforced by the fact that the Senegalese ambassador’s wife prays with and gives lifts to the lowly Najwa during the month of fasting. This does not establish the two women as friends, though, so class differences fail fully to evaporate at the masjid. Above all, the mosque furnishes devotees with sustenance, both physical and spiritual. For example, before a stimulating evening class in ‘Qur’an Tajweed’, Najwa takes her dinner at a halal restaurant close to the mosque and finds comfort in its simple international fare: ‘Their dal tastes good and the pitta bread is warm’ (74). She is also delighted to be given a box of chocolates for winning a quiz about ‘Islamic knowledge’ at the mosque (98). Because both these victuals attach to spiritual striving in the class and the quiz, they are portrayed as wholesome rather than indulgent. Relatedly, several times Najwa compares her new-found religious faith with the sense of wellbeing she felt as a sick child being cared for in her parents’ bed with its crisp, clean sheets. There is a taste component to this mostly haptic fantasy of pampering, as Najwa longs for the simultaneously ‘delicious’ and ‘burn[ing]’ taste of the medicine of her childhood (132, 276). Religion is limned as a purificatory substitute for parental care, this elixir’s palatability coexisting with a searing that is inflicted on oneself in pursuit of spiritual improvement. Surprisingly, Aboulela to some extent conforms here to the notion of religion’s infantilizing and ‘tranquiliz[ing]’ tendencies (Abbas 2014: 91) put forward by some atheists. Following Esra Mirze Santesso’s (2013: 83–106) deft reading of the novel, Najwa uses Islam in a way that evokes a child eating comfort food, something to receive without question and consume without too much thought. Prayer and Ramadan are depicted as structuring the Muslim day and year, giving a strong sense of an imagined community of believers. The most alimentative provisions found in the mosque are those shared during Ramadan, when Najwa ‘would break my fast, wedged in the crowd, sometimes there was hardly a place to sit and then we would all stand up to pray, and suddenly there was more space and the imam would start to recite’ (188). The exhilaration that can be inferred from Najwa’s use of the adverb ‘suddenly’ appears to stem from her transcendence of

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bodily needs (the meal has barely begun when the congregation jump to their feet for prayer) and from the almost miraculous creation of space within the surging crowd as the imam begins to intone from the scripture. Similarly, in her debut novel The Translator, Aboulela had her protagonist Sammar feel blissful ‘because of Ramadan, because of eating and drinking after fasting all day’ (1999: 180). In the novel, Sammar’s home country of Sudan is at its most sociable and picturesque when the evening azan sounds and Muslims break their fasts, like the Prophet before them, with plain but nutritious refreshments of dates and water. As a girl and young woman, Najwa is brought up in a broadly Western tradition within Sudan. She comes from an elite family that only pays lip service to Islam. Her lower-class boyfriend Anwar, although not Westernized, is a radical leftist who cannot ‘see the point’ of fasting (36). Yet Ramadan is an inescapable part of life even for the most stridently irreligious in Sudan. In her youth Najwa is vaguely agnostic, but she always tries to pray and fast during this holy month – though she seldom, if ever, completes the full 30 days. At the very least she views Ramadan a good opportunity to diet and make a token gesture towards renouncing food during daylight hours. Despite this lackadaisical approach to her faith, she feels panic and depression when, living as an exile in London, she realizes Ramadan has almost passed her by.6 In contrast to the months-long fanfare around Christmas, non-Muslim Britain is oblivious to the fact that sawm is taking place. As such, she only learns that Ramadan is at its height when a flatmate of Anwar jokingly calls them both ‘heathens’ (230) as he goes out to share a communal iftar meal with coreligionists. Food is a spine running through another of Islam’s five pillars, that of zakat or charity. Feeding the sick or poor is a crucial aspect of such good works. Early on in the novel Najwa reluctantly accompanies her mother to a special school in Khartoum to distribute lollipops, sweets, and other alms to its disabled pupils. Although her mother is upbeat and practical during the visit, the experience distresses Najwa. The children’s thin, deformed bodies ‘disturb’ her (18), and the aggressive behaviour of a boy from south Sudan and the inconsolable crying of a pre-pubescent girl make her more upset. As she and her mother take their leave, she watches the disabled girl start to eat her candy, still weeping: ‘Hunched over, she squinted, mucus dribbling from her nose over her mouth. It was a struggle for her to unwrap the lollipop, aim it at her mouth’ (22). The overall impression conveyed by this passage is that, while it makes

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the mother feel good about herself, these rich women’s largesse proves a poisoned chalice for the deprived children. All it achieves is to agitate the young people, reminding them of their physical imperfections and gloomy life prospects, and to fill them with the empty calories of junk food. Later, in Britain, Najwa involves herself in a different form of charity work. Supported by regular prayer and recitations of the Qur’an and based on the distribution of healthy meals rather than sweet, sticky snacks, this is a more sustainable and sincere zakat than her half-hearted efforts in Sudan. Secondary to enjoyment of food is self-denial, and this relates to the final pillar of Hajj. Let me make a brief but important detour away from taste and food. I want to examine the novel’s crucial representation of pilgrimage for the challenge it sends out to Western secularist definitions of freedom (versus supposedly ‘unfree’ Islamic models), even if this seems like something of a digression for a short while. ​Hajj promises greater ‘spiritual pleasure’ (188) than Ramadan or zakat, and at the end of the novel Najwa chooses to be funded or even bribed to go to Mecca by the family she has worked for, rather than pursue a prohibited relationship with Tamer. The novel, which until its conclusion seems roughly to fit into the genre of romance fiction, with the friendship growing between Najwa and Tamer despite their age gap and the ­inequality of their social positions, now makes its not unexpected move in a new direction. As Waïl Hassan summarizes, ‘the novel violates the rules of romance by not uniting the lovers at the end while still depicting them in a state of contentment akin to a happy ending – [… through] spiritual growth’ (2008: 309). One way of looking at this is religious selfindulgence: Najwa gives up romance voluntarily (and in a calculating way) in order to afford a pilgrimage to Mecca (Abbas 2014: 84). A more charitable approach is to see this as steadfast spiritual choice. Over romantic love with an immature but sincere man, Najwa chooses religious ­pilgrimage, which she imagines as being made up of ‘genuine joy and adventures […], [t]he crowds, the hardship of sleeping in tents, long bus rides, the [sense of being] squeezed and wrung’ (209). Minaret opens as a ­typical novel of migration and sensual pleasures, but ends up leading into another journey, one that is bound up with Bildung (Morey 2018a: 312) and self-denial as well as notions of belonging and coherence. During her social declension, an unfurling religious identity nourishes Najwa through her losses and also, as Geoffrey Nash observes, ‘shapes an emerging awareness of [her] difference’ (2007: 136). The supportive

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ties that Najwa discovers in her mosque are starkly contrasted with the supposed ‘freedoms’ of the non-religious world, which Aboulela portrays as being constrictive rather than liberatory. The notion of liberty in Western thought, since the time of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1991/1651), has meant a freedom from external constraints and the right of individual ­ self-determination. In Arab and South Asian thought, by contrast, f­reedom – hurriyya in Arabic or azadi in Urdu – typically possesses political, communitarian, and organismic connotations. It would be ­ wrong to assume that Muslims have not hotly debated the concept of freedom over the centuries. In Sufi traditions, individual freedom has been compared to ‘perfect slavery’ (Bostom 2012: 54). This indicates not only that slavery in the Arab world was, in Amitav Ghosh’s words, a relatively ‘flexible set of hierarchies’ (1992: 260), but also that the institution was often used as a metaphor for understanding the relationship between Allah the omnipotent and his human devotees or ‘slaves’. Allison Weir maintains that ‘relational conceptions of freedom are ­diametrically opposed to a conception of freedom as noninterference: freedom is found not in escape from but in engagement in relationships’ (2018: n.p.). She concludes that there is a need to decolonize freedom. Weir’s argument, while pertinent, is here slightly underdeveloped. Of course, ‘engagement in relationships’ can be an expression of freedom. But what are the rules of engagement necessary to guarantee freedom (remember that the master–slave relationship might also be seen as an engagement)? Tacitly providing her answer to this question, Aboulela challenges Western perceptions of what freedom entails when she has Najwa express a desire to become her employer’s family slave or concubine ‘like something out of The Arabian Nights’. As with the fantasy of being a helpless child cared for in her parents’ bed, Najwa longs to renounce any agency in her relationship with Tamer. Remaining chaste, she would help arrange his marriage from behind the scenes, and would then look after the young couple’s babies from the position of a trusted retainer ‘with life-long security and a sense of belonging’. Through her first-person narrative voice saturated with flat affect, Najwa rues that instead she ‘must settle for freedom in this modern time’ (215). The issue of clashing cultural understandings of liberty highlighted by this jarring passage is particularly pertinent in the light of Lila AbuLughod’s analysis of the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ used to justify the War on Terror. In her book Do Muslim Women Need Saving (2013), AbuLughod tackles ideas about freedom in relation to the realms of race,

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class, and gender. A feminist anthropologist with heritage partly in the global south, she suggests that many Western feminists see themselves as bringing the gift of liberty to their benighted Muslim sisters. AbuLughod also scrutinizes repercussions arising from one notion of freedom being extolled above all other values. She postulates that a binary opposition of free and unfree lies at the heart of twenty-first century versions of Orientalism. Moreover, people often fail to recognize the unequal power structures which underpin the premise that Western freedom contrasts with imprisonment by Islam. By contrast, Abu-Lughod deftly communicates that believing Muslims have their own ideas about, and goals for, liberation. Similarly, with her evocation of The Arabian Nights, Najwa communicates that feminism has typically overlooked nonEuro-American traditions when defining ‘women’s lib’. Yet Najwa’s wish is itself problematic, especially since later she chooses to perform Hajj, rather than love and serve Tamer in marriage. Her internal monologue smacks of lugubrious martyrdom and right-wing propensities (Hassan 2008: 313; Abbas 2014: 83–90). Without straying too far from our primary focus, it should also be observed that romance fiction in general and Aboulela’s work in particular often underwrite traditional gender binaries. Minaret is hardly a feminist text (Western or Muslim) and, while Aboulela pays some lip service to Najwa’s self-assurance when she strikes out on her own to perform the pilgrimage, this novel may also be responsible for feeding patriarchal discourses and body negativity. Returning to taste, we have already started to see that Najwa’s early life, while affluent and sheltered, is nonetheless depicted as lacking some essential component. Within conventional limits, she has considerable freedom in her dress, education, sexual relations, and eating habits. And it is after a particularly gluttonous meal of buttery cannelloni and creamy profiteroles in a London restaurant that she has an epiphany about her lack of restrictions, freed as she is in the diaspora from concerns about gossip: ‘I can do what I like, no one can see me. […] I could order a glass of wine. Who would stop me or even look surprised?’ (128). Instead of trying wine for the first time, though, Najwa experiences self-disgust at the tightness of her skirt’s waistband after the heavy meal. On her way home she experiments not with alcohol but with food refusal – a bodily ‘purge’ (242) – buying ‘a copy of Slimming and a packet of Fox’s Glacier Mints’ and all the while despising herself for her ‘too full’ stomach and garlicky burps (129). Although overlaid by spiritual emptiness, it is important to note that these purchases are not directly based

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on religious need. Rather, she is conscious of her body image and worries about losing her shape. Despite her rounded stomach and endless failed diets, young unspiritual Najwa is viewed as holding a ‘hollow place’ (a God-shaped hole?) inside her that cannot be filled by food or sex (31, 135). She feels uneasy when men she is unfamiliar with openly appraise her body, whistling at her curvaceous figure and long hair. Although dimly believing their wolf whistles to be ‘a compliment’, she blushes with embarrassment at ‘all the weight I had gained [which] had settled on my hips’ (130). Her only sexual relationship – with Anwar, a Marxist exile in London – is sordid and guilt-ridden. Najwa’s discomfort with her own body is revealed through her repeated invocations of ill-fitting clothes (‘too tight skirts and too tight blouses’ [14]), an inability to stop eating even when her hunger is satisfied, and one glancing but self-deprecating reference to her ‘fat bum’ (30). One of the reasons she hankers to be like the pious women in tobes from her home university in Khartoum is that she envies their ‘slimness’ while admiring the elegance of their modest fashion (14). Perhaps the nadir for Najwa’s self-esteem comes during her first visit to the Regent’s Park mosque. She is wearing her most concealing outfit, but as she prostrates herself in prayer her lower legs are nonetheless exposed. An old lady throws a coat over her back and she feels ‘shame’ and a miserable sense that she ‘wasn’t good’ (238). Most authors would indicate their support for the rebuked woman and encourage readers to withhold sympathy from the judgemental coat-hurler. By contrast, Aboulela leaves this scene of dress policing in the mosque and, indeed, all her narrative events open-ended for readers to interpret.7 After the leftist coup in Sudan leads to her father’s imprisonment and eventual execution, her family is described as falling through space. This image of descent evokes the horror Aboulela suggests is inherent in too much liberty. Of course, it also suggests the ‘Fall’ common to both Judeo-Christian and Qur’anic doctrine, whereby Adam and Eve/ Hawwa were banished from the Garden of Paradise to live on earth. Just as the Abrahamic Eve/Hawwa and Adam are tempted by forbidden fruit from a tree in their paradisiacal garden, so too Najwa’s downfall is prefigured by food, including fruit. Aboulela provides a precise inventory of food enjoyed during a day of Sudanese gastronomic excess: ‘Everything started to fall that night, late after the picnic, after the barbecue […]. After grilled kebab and peanut salad, boiled eggs, watermelon and guava’ (53). Mieke Bal discusses the metaphor of ‘falling in

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love’, arguing that the phrase ‘occurs in many Western languages, yet it is by no means universal. […] [It represents] something sudden, an event beyond the control of the lover’ (2008: 23–24). Rather than the untrammelled, romantic connotations that attach to the notion of the ‘fall’ in much Western tradition, Aboulela focuses on the uncontrollable and negative aspects of such a plunge. Najwa’s fall is complete once her twin brother Omar, having become involved in London’s drugs scene, is imprisoned for stabbing a policeman, and her mother dies following a protracted illness. After being released from her nursing duties by her mother’s death, and with her brother behind bars and unable to comment on her lifestyle, Najwa supposes that she should feel a sense of emancipation, but instead comments that ‘[t]his empty space was called freedom’ (175). Paradoxically, Najwa finds an alternative to the unfulfilling Hobbesian brand of freedom in Islam’s rules and precepts, its fasting and moderation. Eschewing her earlier bingeing and dieting, Najwa’s eventual arrival at a moderate approach to eating is significant because of Islam’s rejection of excess and emphasis on balance. The relevant Qur’anic verse (2:143) is perhaps best translated by Muhammad Asad, who writes: ‘And thus have We willed you to be a community of the middle way, so that [with your lives] you might bear witness to the truth before all mankind, and that the Apostle might bear witness to it before you’ (2004: n.p.). In other words, the Qur’an exhorts Muslims to avoid both excess and asceticism. Sure enough, it is only after her conversion to become a practising Muslim that Najwa comes to terms with her body, hidden as it now is from prying eyes, and learns to regulate her previously disordered eating. She also finds the confidence to extricate herself from the borderline abusive relationship with Anwar and enter into a friendship with Tamer based on light flirtation, stirring conversations, and (for the most part) virtuous self-control. Let me conclude this section with a note that Aboulela has been approvingly described as a ‘halal novelist’ (in other words, a writer who is religiously permissible) by the Muslim News, a catchphrase that is repeated on the dustjacket for Minaret. We can locate the ‘halal novel’ oeuvre’s propriety in the figure of its author, who wears the veil and whose book designs prominently display this headgarb; in protagonists’ quests and dilemmas; and in the texts’ resolutions, which tend to feature Muslim solutions to contemporary dilemmas. The approbatory term halal for works by such believing Muslims as Aboulela censoriously

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implies other writers whose fiction is haram or impermissible and should be avoided. By labelling certain texts as halal (and other texts implicitly as haram), some people apply to literature terms that have more commonly been associated with food and eating (Hussaini 1993; Eliasi and Dwyer 2002).8 Febe Armanios and Boğaç Ergene in Halal Food: A History (2018: 3) observe that Islam’s longstanding sumptuary laws have helped to define the communal identity of members of the Ummah. As she is born again into the Muslim faith, Najwa discovers food consumption as a means of control and symbol of identity. Accordingly, as we have seen, Aboulela’s appetitive novel is a groundbreaking halal example of identity assertion and of ‘biting back’ (Loichot 2013) against assumptions about Western freedom and Muslim oppression. Yet sometimes Minaret’s dominant flavour is fault-finding about personal behaviour, particularly that of women. Aboulela’s welcome emphasis on restraint shades into strictures about what is haram, her heroine’s ‘withdrawal’ or ‘escapis[m]’ (Santesso 2013: 86, 96), and a troubling lack of spirit in Najwa’s journey through life, love, and the sensorium.

Sumptuous, Exotic Foods: Yasmin Crowther’s The Saffron Kitchen Yasmin Crowther’s 2006 novel, as its title suggests, centres on the kitchen. This is a room in the house which Crowther portrays as a largely female or family-oriented site, a space of gossip and intrigue, ritual and stories. Indeed, the kitchen is the sociable heart of the home and kitchen tables have, since at least the early 1980s, been used as launchpads for the activism and creativity of women, especially women of colour (Smith 1989; Harjo 1994; Blodgett 2004: 263; Ahmed 2006: 61–62). Readers of Crowther’s novel are presented with various kitchens: in Hammersmith and Richmond Hill in London, and the village of Mazareh and second city of Mashhad in Iran. One central character is Maryam Mazar, an ageing Iranian woman who has lived in Britain for five decades and is married to Edward. The other protagonist is her daughter Sara, who is in her mid-thirties and has been married for five years to Julian (both of the white English husbands exist in the shadows of this female-centred novel). The two women clash over the upbringing of Sara’s 12-year-old cousin. The boy, Saeed, is on an extended stay with Maryam and Edward in their London home due to his father remarrying after the death of his mother (Maryam’s younger sister Mara). Saeed is

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being bullied at the English school he is temporarily attending, perhaps due to his evident foreignness. Yet the words ‘race’ and ‘racism’ are surprisingly never mentioned in this novel published during the last days of Tony Blair’s premiership. This despite the fact that its present-day setting is in 2003, the year the Second Iraq War began, when the news is full of bombs raining down on ‘Fallujah, Tikrit, Baghdad’ (116). If the novel does explicitly tackle racism in its narrative or thematic content, Crowther is attuned to the issue of Muslims’ ‘framing’ (Morey and Yaqin 2011), directing sharp criticisms at the ‘cartoon of Iran’ (128) regularly peddled in the media. She is also alert to migrants’ feelings of alienation in the face of British polite coldness and unfamiliar table manners. After Saeed is caught playing truant, Maryam slaps the youngster with a view to toughening him up, as her own father had similarly ‘humiliated’ her to ‘ma[k]e [her] strong’ when she was a teenager back home (Crowther 2006: 13).9 This causes Saeed to bolt from the pub where the women are drinking filter coffee, and Sara has to stop him throwing himself off a bridge into the Thames. In the struggle Saeed inadvertently kicks Sara’s pregnant belly so that, although she saves her cousin from drowning, she loses her own unborn son. Maryam’s guilt over her role in the miscarriage leads to her taking a trip home to confront memories of her own emergence into early adulthood 50 years earlier, against the backdrop of the US- and UK-orchestrated coup of 1953 that ousted the secular nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq. In post-revolutionary Iran, Maryam reconnects with Ali, an old flame whom her father forbade her to see as he was from the servant class. The novel culminates with Maryam deciding to stay on in Iran and to leave Edward for this man who has never stopped loving her. Karim Mattar writes persuasively about the novel’s welcome destabilization of received ideas about a dichotomy consisting of secular freedom versus Islamic unfreedom: ‘In a paradigmatic reversal of the narrative of cosmopolitan arrival, the experience of migration […] enables Maryam to weigh her youthful ideals against their “price”, belonging, and choose the latter as she returns to Iran, to Ali, and reconstructs her life’ (2012: 565). And in an ecstatic review, Frederick Luis Aldama praises the way Crowther is simultaneously loath to paint the West as ‘the place of gender liberation’ or the Middle East as automatically oppressive for women (2009: 87). While Mattar and Aldama’s readings are valid, I intend to complicate their interpretations. As my short summary indicates, there is an exoticizing strain of melodrama and

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sensationalism in the novel, a strain which, I will argue, is reinforced by The Saffron Kitchen’s dense evocations of food and drink. Sara has grown up with Maryam’s stories of samovars and black tea served in glasses accompanied by dried figs, cardamom sweets, and other snacks in Iran. Due to political turmoil and her mother’s ambivalence, she has never visited the ancestral country or taken its tea. The novel rightly portrays Iran as being steeped in tea culture. Iranians drink tea for pleasure, companionship, and for its alleged medicinal benefits.10 From the early twentieth century onwards, Parsis originally from Iran imported their ‘Irani cafes’ to India, particularly the southern metropolis of Bombay/Mumbai (Raghavan et al. 2015). Known for their seafood, dhansaks, spicy scrambled egg, and masala chai, these establishments may be declining in number but they are still quintessential spaces of conviviality associated with Iran. Tea is not just a social drink, but also has psychic connotations. Half parodying their family’s cook’s superstitious practices, and half deadly serious, her elder sister Mairy reads Maryam’s tea leaves. This occurs soon after the teenager’s boyfriend Ali has been beaten up by their father’s goons and Maryam feels her life is at a crossroads. From the dregs in her sister’s tea cup, Mairy discerns a horse leaping, and from the stallion’s airborne pose she concludes that Maryam will surmount her current difficulties. Yet her mother quickly grabs the tea glass and tells Maryam her sister is being fanciful: ‘There is no horse. I see you faced by a person holding a heavy stick, and you have no protection but a speck of dirt’ (95). Sure enough, the next time the fortune telling is mentioned is around the same time that her father banishes Maryam to Tehran. Disproving Mairy’s optimistic tea leaf interpretation, once there Maryam undergoes a test ‘to establish if [she is] still a virgin’ (96) as punishment for her intimacy with Ali. Rather than overcoming adversity, the girl suffers a brutal sexual assault which she needs no clairvoyant techniques to anticipate: ‘I closed my eyes and somehow knew that something in me was about to die’ (99). Tea is therefore associated with women and the sanctity of domestic space, which are easily violated by predatory men benefitting from patriarchal codes of honour. At these moments in the text, the linking of food and drink to a certain exoticism but also to violence is apparent. In Islamophobia and the Novel – perhaps coincidentally when dealing with Iran in the guise of Azar Nafisi’s (2015/2003) Reading Lolita in Tehran – Peter Morey makes a case for the existence of what we might call a distinctive ‘Muslim exotic’ (2018b: 95–125). In doing so, he captures that distinctive amalgam of the soft

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exotic of foodstuffs with the surrounding (Islamic) context of extreme repression and violence so prevalent in post-9/11 novels about both Iran and Afghanistan. Contra Mattar, here the novel fails to destabilize the dichotomy of secular freedom versus Islamic unfreedom, since the tea leaves references underscore notions of Islamic gendered unfreedom and Iran as ‘a land of superstition’ (1). A contrast to the tea served in the domestic kitchen is set early on in the novel with the coffee drunk in the public sphere, such as the cafetiere shared by Maryam and Sara in the pub. If it is easy for them as women to drink coffee outside the home in Britain, Maryam and Sara’s outsider status is nonetheless signalled through their act of drinking coffee in a pub,11 that archetypal locus of Englishness, masculinity, and alcohol consumption.12 Crowther portrays Iranian coffee houses as exclusively masculine spaces which allow debate and sometimes violence to percolate in the lead-up to the 1953 coup. In a section of Maryam’s first-person narrative set in the urban location of Mashhad, she observes: ‘Groups of men loitered in the bazaar, and the coffee shops were swollen and loud with argument’ (69). The languages of Persian/Farsi and Arabic both use variants of the word qahwa (‘brew’) for coffee. This word has been borne across into Afghanistan’s, Pakistan’s, and Kashmir’s brew of kahwa, a green tea often served with lemon and/or spices in the largely tea-loving and coffee-shunning region of Central and South Asia.13 A similar caffeinated porosity is evoked in Tea: A Global History, where Helen Saberi expatiates that Iran’s preferred drink for many centuries was coffee, but that ‘[i]n the 1920s the former Shah’s father became suspicious that coffee houses were fostering political dissent and decided to persuade people to switch to tea-drinking’.14 It is implied here that the switch to tea would draw men home, as tea is consumed primarily in the domestic realm; making men return to the domestic realm was a way of quelling political dissent. The novel indicates that Reza Shah (1878–1944) was right to take this decision, since first Mossadeq and later, in the 1970s, the Shah’s son Mohammad Reza Shah (1919–1980) were overthrown in large part due to discord ‘brewing’ over coffee (69). In The Saffron Kitchen, coffee is always associated with men. The novel’s only instance of women drinking the liquid prefigures the bitter experience of Sara’s miscarriage. We have seen that this tragedy is triggered by Maryam’s attempt, inspired by her father’s strictness, to ‘make a man’ of Saeed, so the women’s coffee drinking has an overlay of masculine impersonation. Back in 1950s Iran, this father is depicted as

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meeting his male friends over coffee and cigarettes. Maryam and Mairy are dismissed as childish when they bring him a feminine gift of a parcel of jasmine tea they have bought from coffee-swilling traders in the town bazaar. Coffee thus encourages conversation and even revolution, and functions as ‘social glue’ (Abbas 2018: 123). But in mid-twentieth century Iran this is a stimulant that is not available to all, with its consumption by women seemingly frowned upon.15 The tastes of England are for the most part predictable in The Saffron Kitchen, and include toast, hot chocolate, and various alcoholic drinks including brandy drunk at Christmas. At her first meeting with her future mother-in-law, when she and Edward are still courting, Maryam eats fish and chips with them at a Whitby café. Fish and chips is not really a British dish at all, even if it has been enthusiastically taken up throughout the UK. In another book by Panikos Panayi, Fish and Chips: A History (2014), he explains that fried fish had Jewish origins, while the chips came from France (‘French fries’). Then there is the milky tea drunk by Britons in the novel at moments of shock, crisis, celebration, or boredom. In Fruits of Empire (1997: 9–31), James Walvin shows how the experience of empire lies at the epicentre of British history and life by focusing on this ostensibly most British of beverages: a cup of tea. Cups of tea are not really British at all, in the sense that their most important elements are, and were, produced elsewhere. The cup itself is made of china, a product from the East. Initially all of the best porcelain came from the Orient, especially from China – hence the name. The tea itself is another product that began as a luxury item. It was initially brought from China, and later from India and Ceylon. The sugar stirred into tea became widely available in Britain after the seventeenth century with the development of British sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The British national drink thus consists of leaves from a shrub grown in China, then India, by Asian workers, sweetened by a product that was first made widely available as the result of African slave labour on British plantations in the Americas. It is a central part of British daily life and culture that would have been impossible without the Empire. In the novel, supposedly British food and drink items in this way reveal themselves to undermine concepts of national identity. Also highlighted is a continental import: the croissant, a patisserie which has an unusual backstory. In his lively study The Bloody History of the Croissant (2010), David Halliday shows that, contrary to popular assumptions, the croissant is no French delicacy. Halliday traces its

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prehistory to the fascination with the crescent symbol that dates back to the Sumerians of Mesopotamia (incorporating Iraq as well as parts of Iran and other modern nation states). Crescent iconography was borrowed by the ancient Greeks and Romans, who like the Sumerians maintained a strong strand of moon worship in their religious practice. It was eventually adopted by the Eastern Christians of Byzantium and, once the Ottomans conquered the Byzantine Empire in what is today’s Turkey and beyond, they too also took up the crescent. Just as it is wrong to see the croissant as a quintessential emblem of Frenchness, it is also therefore mistaken to think that the crescent has a long and unshakeable association with Islam. Halliday goes on to show that the croissant’s creation came out of the Great Turkish War between the Ottomans and the Holy Roman Empire (the Germans, Austrians, and others) allied with Poland in 1683. Turkish invaders laid siege to Vienna, and Halliday conjectures that the city’s bakers heard the sound of the Ottomans tunnelling under the city when they were up early preparing Viennese daily bread. Legend has it that their warning helped to prevent Vienna from falling to the Muslim ‘hordes’. Subsequently ‘[t]he bakers of Vienna commemorated the victory by baking a special bread that emulated the Islamic crescent moon symbol on the Turkish flags’ (2010: n.p.). The viennoiserie did not in fact spread to France for almost two centuries, as 1853 is the first recorded instance of the croissant being mentioned in a French book. Such food microhistories are important in our interpretation of the chosen texts, this lens allowing us to see nuances that might otherwise be passed over, and to create an alternative, taste-bound account of imperialism. Given this historical background, as flaky and layered as the croissant itself, it is significant that Sara’s father Edward feeds her pieces of crescent-shaped pastry soon after her miscarriage. He comes to the hospital to visit her, bringing ‘proper coffee and a croissant’, that traditional breakfast combination. In her sickness she baulks at these edible luxuries, having already turned down the institutional toast and orange juice as unappealing. But her father wheedles her into consumption, feeding her tiny pieces of pastry mouthful by mouthful over the course of half an hour. In this curious scene, Edward immediately emphasizes his patriarchal position by referring to himself as Sara’s ‘old man’. He then behaves almost like adult seagulls regurgitating half-digested food to feed their young, an impression that is underlined by allusions to ‘spit’, ‘swallowing’, and ‘a sick bird’. At one level this is a beneficent act of care from

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parent to child, with food and drink functioning as expressions of love. Both characters ‘smile’ (17) and there is tenderness and an understanding between the two which bespeaks a healing agenda. Yet at another level there is an infantilization of the tricenarian woman. This is reinforced at the scene’s end when Edward presents his daughter with Ted, a much-loved soft toy from her childhood. Given the imperialist connotations accreting to the croissant that are highlighted by Halliday, the patisserie gift takes on faintly sinister connotations. As Halliday writes: ‘the story of this innocent looking pastry is fundamentally one of warfare’ (2010: n.p.). The fact that Sara is almost completely silent in this scene, opening and shutting her mouth like a baby bird and without uttering words, also casts a coercive shadow over the picture of the English saviour feeding (and simultaneously silencing) an injured, AngloIranian woman.16 The titular saffron kitchen refers to Sara’s decision to paint her cooking area in the colour to please Saeed during a visit to her home (with Justin) in Hammersmith, west London. The young boy likes to draw using that colour, as its ochre tones remind of the sunset and the reddish earth of his family estate near Mashhad (162). These are warm natural colours and, for Crowther, Iran’s landscape is tinted in saffron tones – just as the colours she always associates with Britain are the green of its grass and the grey, overcast skies. On the kitchen’s saffron backdrop, Saeed uses spray paint and stencils to create a golden mural full of images including gazelles, roses, and outlines of his and others’ hands. Here the theme of the idealized homeland plays into the exoticization of food and drink. Saffron recurs often throughout the novel’s pages as well as in the title.17 This is a spice which is more valuable by its weight than is gold and which is produced from the stamens of a rare crocus. Its Farsi name is zaferan (24, 257). In the epigraph to his poem ‘The Last Saffron’, Agha Shahid Ali writes in tourist guide style that the most ‘interest[ing]’ feature of his putative nation state of Kashmir is the high-quality saffron produced in the valley (1998/1997: 27). An even more prominent contender for the accolade of finest saffron-producer is Iran, which cultivates approximately 90 per cent of the world’s saffron. In her ‘biography’ of the condiment, Secrets of Saffron: The Vagabond Life of the World’s Most Seductive Spice, Pat Willard proclaims that Persian saffron ‘smells and tastes like the mother lode’ (2002: 201). Saffron also functions as a symbol of modern-day Iran, given its exquisite qualities despite its cultivation through slow violence (the

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intensive and poorly-paid labour demanded for its production, as well as environmental problems caused by the crop’s high use of energy and chemical fertilizers). This is not lost on Crowther, who draws an implicit connection between the purple crocus’s ‘stamens the color of blood’ (39) and the slaughter in the conflicts of 1953 and 1979. Demonstrating taste’s close relationship with smell, the unique taste of saffron – ‘earthy, sharp, sweet and delicate’ (24) – also evokes the ‘scent of memory’ discussed in the previous chapter (p. 000). Sara inhales the aroma of her mother’s jar labelled Zaferan, and ‘breathe[s] in an essence of [her] childhood’ (24). In the previous chapter we also caught a glimpse of how highly saffron is prized when martyrs are described in a hadith as having blood that is saffron-coloured as well as their bodies smelling of musk. Saffron has multiple uses in perfumery, dyeing (including the amber shades in Persian carpets), cooking, and medicine. In case her references to saffron seem idealized, Crowther belatedly introduces bathos into discussions of the spice. On Maryam’s return to Iran, a farmer’s first wife reminds her that although the saffron seems miraculous – the crocuses sprouting ‘from the dirt, green shoots from nothing’ – ultimately the flowers die, ‘and the ground is dirt again where chickens shit. That’s the way of things: saffron, shit; saffron, shit’ (175). This scatological statement makes a serious point that resonates across both the novel’s Iranian and British sections: out of dirt and trying circumstances something useful and beautiful may flourish, and ‘[g]ood comes from bad’ (251). Conversely, bad also comes from good. Recalling Aboulela, Maryam comes to realize that ‘there are many types of freedom and each has its price: freedom to love, to travel, to belong. For each freedom we choose, we must give up another’ (129). For me, this is a more convincing interpretation than Najwa’s intellectual acrobatics to try and make concubinage an appealing option. The idea of a range of liberties, each of which offers advantages and entails sacrifices, is among the most interesting notions advanced in this novel. Other important tastes of Iran include the quotidian meal of flat bread and cheese (this prosaic combination is often mentioned, and sometimes it is made more appetizing through the addition of fresh mint). For special occasions, lamb on the bone or mutton stew is usually accompanied by saffron rice, and kofta (meatballs) and lamb kebabs are also popular. Meats from sheep but hardly any other animal are mentioned, and Crowther neither conceals nor condemns the violence their consumption entails:

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Reza had slit open the fleece along its belly and in the pits of its legs, showing creamy-white skin beneath the coarse, dirty wool, which he hacked and scraped back with a knife. Slowly the fleece peeled away, and a smell of raw scalped meat filled the air. ‘We will eat well tonight.’ Hassan looked up at Maryam from where he squatted on the ground, his hands smeared with fat, wool, and blood. ‘Yes.’ Maryam breathed in the fresh mountain coldness and the strawdirt smell of animals. (124)

When farmer Hassan declares that they will eat well that night, it reminds of the way in which Iranians often look to the price of meat as an indicator of upcoming difficulties. Moreover, as with coffee, meat is depicted as having strong associations with masculinity – meat in many cultures being symbolic of a man providing for the family (Adams 2010/1990: 47–63). The reference to the ‘straw-dirt masculinity smell of animals’ at the excerpt’s end suggests that although Maryam finds butchery difficult to stomach, it is being presented as natural and cyclical. Fruits devoured in this novel include dried figs, clementines, watermelons, apples, and the ubiquitous pomegranate, which Damien Stone says has long been viewed as symbolizing ‘beauty, mystery and the female’ (2017: 7). If fruits embody the female and are eaten greedily in the text ‘with [the] bare hands’ (28), the implication is that women are prey for men to gorge on. Various sweets are made from cardamom, while nougat with nuts is a treat strongly associated with Maryam’s Westernized aunt Soraya, who venerates Paris and denigrates Maryam’s mother for looking ‘like a Russian peasant’ (38). (Later Aunt Soraya is the one who betrays Maryam by telling her father about the night she spent with Ali during the crisis of 1953, leading to the girl’s virginity test rape.)​There is an exoticizing dimension to much of the culinary writing, and at times the book reads like a sumptuous cookery book like fellow Anglo-Iranians Yasmin Khan’s The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen (2016) or Kamin Mohammadi’s (2018) memoir replete with recipes, Bella Figura. In this regard, Gillian Whitlock’s observation about Iranian women’s memoirs has resonance: ‘[t]his is writing by and about women; it revolves around the cosmopolitan elite privileged under the regime of the Shah and disinherited by the revolution; it is dense with exotic aromatics: memories of walled gardens, pomegranates and pistachios, and saffron skies’ (2008: 10–11). This chimes with my main objection to the novel. For all that it conjures up the menacing side of taste, with Crowther lingering on the tang of blood and the

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strong taste of oil of cloves used to medicate Maryam’s mouth wound after being hit by her father, even this darker aspect of ingestion is prettified and made other. The female protagonists are exoticized like food and drink; they have ‘almond-eye[s]’ (7, 177), ‘gypsy’ curls (10, 203), and full lips. Although subtler than the diasporic Iranian memoirs that Whitlock discusses, and of course belonging to a different genre, I worry that Crowther’s novel could function as a ‘soft weapon’, in the sense that it could be ‘easily co-opted’ into right-wing discourse about Iran as a rogue state (Whitlock 2007: 3; see also Mattar 2012: 552–554). There is a fetishization of Iran’s food culture signalled in the novel’s very title that takes away from Crowther’s many flashes of insight about both preand post-revolutionary Iran as well as Blairite Britain.

Junk Food and Saying No: Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus The Road from Damascus (2008), an acclaimed debut by the British Syrian novelist Robin Yassin-Kassab, is a novel of ideas whose Muslim characters enunciate diverse and often clashing views of Islam. In this section, I will argue that these ideas often cohere around the consumption of food, drink, and drugs: the bread and hashish of what was the novel’s original title, ‘Bread, Hashish and Moon’, after a poem of the same name by the great Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani (Thomas 2009: n.p.; Qabbani 1972/1954). The novel’s plot follows the romantic and intellectual travails of a British protagonist of Syrian Muslim heritage, Sami Traifi, which for the most part unfold in the summer of 2001. I suggest that Sami is confronted with a choice between sacred and secular identities, one that often manifests itself through his and other characters’ sense of taste and relationship with food. In a previous essay (Chambers 2012), I discussed Yassin-Kassab’s references to astronomy (the moon part of ‘Bread, Hashish and Moon’), to Arabic poetry,18 and to the issue of identity, in detail that I will not rehearse here. For this chapter I am more interested in Yassin-Kassab’s intertextual titbits relating to other well-known British Muslim writers and texts, imaginative and critical as they are. In addition to his rewriting of Kureishi’s The Black Album noted by Thomas (2009: n.p.) and Mondal (2015: 39), Yassin-Kassab’s novel contains an implied challenge to the overall optimism about ‘British values’ found in Ali’s Brick Lane. Furthermore, Yassin-Kassab occupies territory in between Aslam’s pessimism and Aboulela’s idealism

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about Muslim communities in Britain. And the novel’s self-consciousness about its place in the dynamic, emergent canon of fiction by writers of Muslim heritage is often expressed through the sense of taste. As an undergraduate in the 1990s Sami hungers that others will taste the difference he embodies, and that white women will yearn to kiss his ‘full, tasting, mobile lips’ (Yassin-Kassab 2008: 14),19 a facial feature which as will be made evident is supposedly common among Arabs. In bars, he uses his full, tasting lips for speech, declaiming in Arabic verses from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Identity Card’: ‘Beware … | Of my hunger | And my anger!’ (14).20 The undertow of irony is unmissable here, since Sami can have little bodily hunger (spiritual famishment is a different matter), comfortably ensconced as he is in a pub. What’s more, his identity crisis is the pose struck by an idle student as compared to the Palestinians’ daily confrontations over their identity papers at checkpoints. A decade later, Sami is overcome by ennui as he finds Arab culture and politics to be decaying: ‘Poets died and were not replaced. Religion grew in response’ (35). He finds renewal in the start of the Second Intifiada (April 2000) when, paraphrasing William Wordsworth, he thinks: ‘[T]o be young in that morning of the rejuvenated Arabs was very heaven’ (38). Yet this feeling is shortlived, and the novel revolves around the identity crisis that ensues when Sami’s pick‘n’-mix blend of secular Arabism and Western popular culture no longer sustains him and indeed starts to do significant damage. From the novel’s outset, it is clear that Sami’s sybaritic lifestyle has taken its toll on him, with his body ‘ageing quickly, increasingly swell-bellied’ (1). Unlike his wife Muntaha, who as we will see exercises self-restraint without sacrificing sensory pleasure, at this stage of his life Sami does not know how to say no, and his health and looks are paying the price. He is ‘hungry for […] [s]ensations’ (12), his appetite for instant thrills especially stressed when he plunges back into voluptuary pleasures in London after a sabbatical in Syria which was spent listlessly trying to find inspiration for his PhD Downing a triple whiskey at the airport, he immediately heads for a Trinidadian barber where he knows he can buy cannabis. At the barber’s he has another drink, rolls a joint, and only then can he start to feel relaxed. The old Caribbean clients are jealous of his recent trip, their ‘postcolonial nostalgia’ (Walder 2011) cohering around food: ‘“Nothing like a Trinidad mango.” And this brought forth a chorus […] from the men nearest. | “Guava!” | “Pineapple!” | “Papaya!” | “Plantain!” As a second-generation migrant,

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Sami is uncertain what Syrian delicacy to extol: ‘Lemon? Olive? Fig?’ (28). Such a panegyric to the food of home and memory would in any case be entirely hypocritical, since he has rejected the expected homecoming to Muntaha’s Arab cooking in favour of his current dalliance with alcohol and cannabis. His smoking causes urgent food cravings, and Sami knows where to sate them: Along the Harrow Road […] and through the open entrance of the Tennessee Bird Bar. (Or the Louisiana Chicken Shack, or the Mississippi Fry House, perhaps the Memphis Wing Palace. They’re all there.) Behind the counter a nocturnal, paper-faced creature blinked into perpetual neon day. Sami placed and at once received his order: battery chicken in batter, a potato and grease ensemble, a syrup and caffeine mix. […] As he chomped he was conscious of his butter-churn stomach, the enzymes working. He rolled another spliff, licking the paper with stunned tongue. (29)

Yassin-Kassab pokes fun at the widespread attempt by local fast food businesses to emulate Kentucky Fried Chicken’s global success while avoiding their litigation. The artificiality of such restaurants is emphasized via the description of the server, whose translucent skin and dazed eyes have more in common with a battery chicken than the mass in batter (note the play on two senses of the word) that he hands to Sami. The speed with which he is given his meal is not matched by nutritional value, and Sami regards his chips and soft drink with a bilious eye. The implication at the end of the quotation is that his mindless consumption of fast food has deadened his sense of taste, since his tongue is described as ‘stunned’. This craving is also more about satisfying a physiological need after smoking weed than enjoyment of food. It is worth pausing on the question of the unbranded fried chicken shop, since such eateries reveal much about dietary choices among minority groups in the UK. In his article ‘Fried Chicken Shops’, Hussein Kesvani points out a link between such establishments and British Muslim communities. Because most of these chicken restaurants sell halal meat at low cost in the warmth until late at night, they are popular with working-class Muslims seeking a change from home cooking or with no comfortable home to go to. Kesvani avers: ‘People may look down on halal fried chicken shops but they engender intense loyalty from their clients’ (2018: 133). Sami is right to worry about his ‘butter-churn

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stomach’, though, since the health problems associated with this repast include Type 2 diabetes and obesity, as Claire Thompson et al. (2018: 7) have shown through their qualitative public health research. Sami describes, later in the novel, ‘[m]eat which defiles the intestines for forty-eight hours after ingestion’. Not only are fat, salt, and sugar content a worry, but Yassin-Kassab gestures towards hidden dangers in processed meat’s production, ‘machine-hacked’ as it is from animals which are ‘pilled-up steroid-sick’ (254). Thompson et al. and Kesvani highlight the deep roots that chicken restaurants have in London, with the former calling them ‘community spaces’ (Thompson et al. 2018: 8) and the latter declaring that they are ‘the taste of London itself’ (Kesvani 2018: 233).21 However, this is a somewhat Londoncentric view, for fried chicken places are now found throughout Britain’s urban areas and some more rural settings too. If many women are attracted to real-world chicken shops, and in the novel Sami’s mother Nur works for a halal butcher, this does not negate Crowther’s (p. 142–143) and Aslam and Ali’s (p. 80) linking of meat with masculinity. For women often purchase their products as a cheap, convenient way of feeding their families, therefore maintaining dominant gendered divisions of labour, while the novel shows that Nur’s presence at the butcher’s is anomalous in this ‘man’s world’ (8). Whereas Yassin-Kassab parodies the early 2000s tendency for the chicken eateries to be named after cities and states in America’s deep south, nowadays, as Fig. 4.1 shows, the fashion is for acronyms. I have collected photographs of fried chicken joints beginning with every letter of the alphabet (apart from VFC and ZFC, which had to be sourced from India). Notice how most of them repurpose Kentucky Fried Chicken’s red and white colour scheme and bold, slanted use of capital letters. Given the chicken shops’ ubiquity and symbolic value, it is fitting that the dust jacket to the hardback first edition of The Road from Damascus features a stylized illustration that extends across the front and back covers. The picture by Olivier Kugler22 depicts a street scene with Trellick Tower in the distance, and in the foreground the iconic Arab London space of the Harrow Road, complete with a pair of chicken shops (‘Carolina Chicken’ and one simply called ‘Chicken’) alongside two beauty salons, a multicultural supermarket, and a fish bar. The chicken restaurants may well be halal, although there is fierce debate about whether all such outlets merit the religious branding to state that they are Islamically permissible (Kesvani 2018: 135–136). The

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Fig. 4.1  An A to Z of (mostly) British Fried Chicken Restaurants, June 2018 (Source and copyright Claire Chambers)

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Road from Damascus’s description of how suppliers achieve this halal label is particularly scathing: ‘It’s called halal because there’s a voice on a cassette player coughing “In the Name of God” between pulls on a fag’ (254). Setting such debate aside, a related point is that in addition to the binary of halal and haram there exists a less well-known Islamic concept: that of tayyab, meaning ‘wholesome, clean, nutritious, and safe’ (Shah 2018: 91) – which the poultry shacks are anything but. In Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World (2016), a work of narrative nonfiction, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed develops a number of themes related to taste and eating while representing young practising Muslims – ‘Generation M’ – as a digitally connected, creative, and enterprising faith group. About the issue of tayyab food, she writes: Whilst the traditional focus has been on halal, Generation M believe this is not enough: food must also be wholesome. In a modern mechanised world, animal treatment has radically altered, and what was once taken for granted in terms of animal welfare has […] been sacrificed in the pursuit of mass production. ‘Tayyab’ would once have been implicitly bundled into the observance of ‘halal’ but now there is a move to reintroduce it explicitly. (2016: 61)

Although Janmohamed does not discuss the issue in any detail, preferring instead to explore the free-range and organic movements, some members of Generation M are turning to vegetarian or vegan ethics. Shanon Shah, a Malaysian Muslim who has tried repeatedly to be vegetarian or at least flexitarian, writes of a typical question – ‘why are you rendering harm what is halal’ (2018: 88) – which many Muslims pose when faced with a fellow Muslim who refuses to eat meat. Shah unearths Islamic exegesis that condemns vegetarianism as unIslamic, before turning to the reasoning of groups of Muslims whose members, from the tenth century onwards, have chosen a plant-based diet in the interests of animal rights. Returning to the novel, there follows a tumultuous period for Sami, as his indolence causes him to be expelled from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where he has long been struggling to write a PhD thesis on Arabic literature. Now his supervisor advises Sami not to vex himself with ‘big ideas’ (154). He reacts to this humiliating dismissal by taking his customary drink and drugs consumption to new heights,

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leading to a one-night stand and crisis in his marriage. Enter Gabor, a British-born man with complex Hungarian–Russian–Jewish heritage (his grandfather bore the Tolstoyan name of Vronsky). Gabor shows signs of being in love with Muntaha after her split from Sami when the latter has his debauched lost weekend, sleeps with a ‘bikini girl’ whose name he does not even find out (163), and misses the ta’ziya, or condolence ceremony, after the death of Muntaha’s father. Following a summer of getting closer as friends, Gabor plans to seduce Muntaha by impressing her with his paintings which blend Muslim concepts, such as tawheed (divine unity), with art. He fantasizes over Muntaha’s appearance, which he considers at once ‘erotic’, ‘terrible’, and ‘freakish’ (291). As with Homi Bhabha’s depiction of the colonizer being discombobulated by colonized people’s mimicry – they are ‘almost the same but not quite […] [a]lmost the same but not white’ (1994: 89) – Gabor is unsettled by the idea that Arabs are ‘so like us sometimes they’re almost interchangeable’. While lusting over Muntaha, Gabor notes that Arab faces are always in some way disproportionate, as exemplified by the Iraqi woman’s pronounced features: ‘her nose, mouth, […] her eyes, big like baby eyes’ (291). This chimes with Joseph Massad’s argument in Desiring Arabs that ‘sex [acts] as one of the main axes by which civilization and barbarism can be classified’ (2007: 6), and that Arabs tend to be portrayed in Western discourses as deviant, desirous, desirable, and representing a radical alterity. Perhaps there is some truth in Maya Jaggi’s assertion that Gabor acts as ‘a straw man set up to embody a predatory orientalism’ (2008: 11). In Arab culture, food and sex have long been known as ‘two good things’ or ‘fleshly delights’ (van Gelder 2000: 109). This ‘intersensorality’ (Howes 2005: 9–10) or leakage and cross-fertilization between the senses of taste and touch is recognized in Western culture too. For example, Nigella Lawson’s cookery book How to Eat came out in 1998,23 and was hailed by Salman Rushdie as the debut of a ‘divine gastronome’ likely to attract many ‘new worshippers’ (1998: 14). However, it was not until How to Be a Domestic Goddess was published in 2000 that Lawson’s deification was assured. She hovered over the twenty-first century British culinary scene as a loftily sexualized household name. As Charlotte Brunsdon writes of the television series Nigella Bites, Lawson’s presentation style ‘was distinguished by her sensual enjoyment of her cooking and her semi-ironic, sometimes wittily flirtatious mode of address’ (2005: 113). The early 2000s was therefore a time when the interest of the 1990s in the priapic/yonic (discussed in Part I) moved together with

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the prandial. Given also food’s relationship with imperialism and warfare, outlined in the discussion of the croissant in the previous section, it is unsurprising that gastronomy plays a large role in this novel of politics and sex set in the game-changing year of 2001. When Sami has left the marriage after his lost weekend, Gabor feels everything is coming together for him: ‘He had an exhibition planned in a fashionable gallery, and at the same time, Muntaha became available’ (235). In a scene in which Yassin-Kassab’s interest in food is underscored, Gabor invites Muntaha to dine with him but she demurs on the grounds that she would feel more at ease in her own house. After a threshold altercation with Muntaha’s hotheaded and anti-Semitic brother Ammar, Gabor smells the enticing aroma of onions and meat cooking, and settles into pre-gustatory conversation with Muntaha. She brings in a wholesome vegetarian starter of flat bread with matabal, an aubergine dip made with yoghurt and tahini. Less innocently, Gabor notes with disappointment that the copy of Anna Karenina he had bought her soon after Sami departed the marital home remains ‘pristine’ (240), its spine unopened, in an augury that she will refuse his advances. The main culinary event is ‘a leg of lamb which had been marinated overnight in sour yoghurt and garlic’. This meal is quickly sexualized from Gabor’s focalization, as ‘succulent’ meat to be ‘carved and then forked’, before ‘disintegrat[ing] dreamily in his mouth’ (240). He finds himself aroused by the leg of flesh in front of him and on his tongue, by an extending metonymy of legs, of shanks and thighs, and of the area where they meet. He understood why cartoon Victorians, fearing for a gentleman’s moral equilibrium, covered female-suggestive piano and table legs. Except that covering draws your attention to what is covered. (241)

Here the leg of lamb stands in for Muntaha’s modestly covered limbs and other body parts, about which Gabor drifts off into increasingly explicit fantasy. His internal monologue about the more prudish among the Victorians allegedly24 concealing the bare legs of pianos and tables leads him to conclude that covering is more suggestive than baring all, since the imagination then comes into play. As Emelia Quinn, drawing on Carol Adams (2010/1990), sagaciously observes, Gabor’s enjoyment of Muntaha’s roast dinner ‘becomes analogous to his heterosexual male desires, as Yassin-Kassab plays with

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tropes of women as animals and men as hunters’ (2015: n.p.). Oblivious to Gabor’s fetishization of her, Muntaha discusses the sharia, alighting with inadvertent irony on the punishment for zina or adultery. Setting the punitive law in its context of social stability and the elaborate conditions which need to be met before it can be carried out, she nonetheless asserts that adultery is a ‘sin, a serious sin’. Thus, when she temporarily suspends talking ‘to chew some leg’ (242), this strays far from the sexy connotations Gabor desires. Her undesirable meat-eating seems to suggest something of the way in which Muntaha is desired as herbivorous prey, as identified by Quinn. In this scene Gabor gets to enjoy the sensual pleasure of eating Muntaha’s food and to fantasize about her sexual proclivities, but sees nothing of the hard labour that must have gone into creating the meal,25 nor of the animal’s ritual slaughter.26 Undeterred by the clear signals Muntaha is sending out that she views Gabor solely as a friend, he hopes that his exhibition’s opening night and his incorporation of Islamic principles into his art will impress her into bed. After the show, he again invites her to his home, rhapsodizing about the part of the East End in which he lives in terms of its cuisine: ‘You’ll love the area. The restaurants we have round here. There’s Bengali, loads of Bengali. There’s Vietnamese, Mexican. […] Greek, Brazilian, and fusion of course …’ (292). Hoping to ignite in her his passionate association of food with sex, all Gabor’s babbling achieves is to highlight his shallow ‘boutique multiculturalism’. Stanley Fish, who coined this term, places an emphasis on food when he disparages the late twentieth-century popularity of a wafer-thin multiculturalism incorporating ‘ethnic restaurants, weekend festivals, and high profile flirtations with the other’ (1997: 378). Following Joanna Blythmann, Panayi similarly writes of the ‘culinary voyeurism’, which from the 1960s onwards increasingly motivated Britons to buy cookery books and venture outside their neighbourhoods in search of ‘exotic’ tastes (2008: 36). Gabor’s seductive offer to introduce Muntaha to such voyeurism proves fruitless. The Iraqi woman reminds him that although she and Sami are currently separated, she still considers herself married. Gabor makes his crestfallen way to his home in Spitalfields, while the narrator comments: ‘She said no, and so prevented the story from moving into the universal territory we can all relate to’ (293). This scene in which Muntaha refuses Gabor’s implied offer of the pleasures of both food and sex plays out close to Brick Lane. Yassin-Kassab therefore encourages us to read it as a swipe at that other novel of London’s East End by Monica Ali. Brick Lane was greeted with

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critical adulation in part because its protagonist Nazneen chooses not to stay in her ‘religio-cultural space’ (Yassin-Kassab 2008: 293) and has an affair with the younger British Muslim Karim. Yet, my last chapter indicated that Nazneen’s ‘saying yes’ to Britain has something in common with boutique multiculturalism, in relation to Brick Lane’s feel-good account of self-actualization through work and consumption (see also Morey 2018b: 85–94). Although on the surface it seems negative, therefore, Muntaha’s saying no has manifold positive aspects. C. E. Rashid helpfully points out that even her name ‘means the “end” or the “farthest limit” in Arabic’ (2012: 98). Limitations can be beneficial or even the ultimate goal for the restless ego spoilt by too much choice. In his essay ‘On Refusal’, Benjamin Westwood argues that ‘to refuse is not simply to invite the discretely experienced effects of restriction and denial, a withering away enacted only by the one who refuses. It is relational, with implications for how we think about our ethical lives more broadly; a communicative act that elicits reactions and responses’ (2018: 177). Westwood is discussing vegans’ refusal to eat meat and any products that cause animals harm. However, the way that he argues vegan refusal is widely construed as self-denial of ‘natural’ bodily instincts tessellates with the way Muslim women are often stereotyped as sexually repressed. Spurning the dominant pop culture of the 2000s linking food to sex, Muntaha turns Gabor down. Gabor’s preparation of his bedroom as part of his attempt to seduce Muntaha is described as ‘an elaborate trap’ (285). Here Yassin-Kassab draws out the alignment of food (or more specifically meat) and sex to the dominant thrust of seduction narratives in which sex becomes equivalent to domination: the capture and dismemberment of vulnerable animal prey. In this sense, Muntaha is turning her back on a distinct gendered narrative that stretches much further back than the 2000s. A link has long been made between taste and women similar to that which we saw in relation to touch and smell in the previous chapters (pp. 12, 73). Women were thought to be irrational, close to the baser proximate senses rather than the allegedly nobler ones of hearing and (especially) sight, and they were often depicted as being in thrall to their appetites, in both senses of the word (see Ahmed 2004: 3). Thus, the fact that Yassin-Kassab positions his female protagonist as steadfast of disposition and discernment and his male protagonist as ruled by his appetites is significant. Read in such a light, Muntaha’s no is an affirmative and relational declaration against patriarchal assumptions, self-indulgence, and the commodification of both food and sex.

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Sami comes to realize that his secularist emphasis on bread and hashish has led to a neglect of moon, or the numinous. To fill his spiritual emptiness – that ‘god-shaped hole’27 cultivated by his father but after the latter’s death ringing increasingly hollow – Sami eventually eradicates meat from his diet and embarks on Islamicate fasts and ablutions. He also gets involved in ecocritical politics through his friendship with Global Resister (GR), her fellow Reclaim the Streets environmental activists, and Tom Field, a countercultural academic. The Gilgamesh flood myth so often evoked in the novel, with its story of the obliteration of humanity by a weather catastrophe, thus links in with early twenty-first century concerns about climate change. The Road from Damascus suggests that if we are to survive global warming, then the solutions are not just technological but spiritual. Sami becomes increasingly repelled by the zombie consumerism of millennial Britain, and eschews chemicals such as deodorant, becoming a ‘Muslim veggie’ (Shah 2018) in part because of concerns about food sustainability and the environment. Yassin-Kassab is not the only writer to draw a parallel between The Epic of Gilgamesh and human hubris leading to climate change. In Hell and High Water, Alastair McIntosh also makes the connection (McIntosh 2008: 15, 139, 144, 158–159), arguing further that the Enlightenment arose concurrently with fullscale imperialism and unbridled capitalism. Like Yassin-Kassab he suggests that this created a spiritual gap, because it deadens the spirit to view the world and its peoples through the lens of logical positivism as objects to be used. In addition to green politics and alternative millenarianisms, Sami has to negotiate a whole series of further apparent dichotomies: between sacred and secular texts and modes of living; father and mother; drugs and prayer; and storytelling and religion. This last opposition is outlined by the novel’s Rushdie figure Rashid Iqbal and it is suggested by the novel to be shaky at best. When Rashid comes to Sami’s university to make a speech in which he begins with the image of a book burner and a suicide bomber, and goes on to praise storytelling, literature, songs, and films at religion’s expense (300), it clearly parodies Rushdie’s more sophisticated lecture, ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’, which was first presented in absentia by Harold Pinter in 1990, when Rushdie was in hiding after the fatwa (Rushdie 1991: 415–429). The fictional Rashid controversially asserts that Islam is ‘not a civilization of narratives’ (299–300). He does this through an image of food: ‘Literature

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[…] isn’t clean. Literature is impure, as blended and mixed and polluted, as transgressively tainted, as a curry, a spiced Bombay curry, into which all the influences of a continent have been poured’ (300). Here the spiced Bombay curry stands in for Rushdie’s ‘melting-pot slogan of chutnification’ (Rashid 2012: 93). Chutnification is one of the most suggestive images in his second novel Midnight’s Children (Rushdie 2006/1981: 642), wherein pickling elicits the writing process, the preservation of history, and above all an impure hybridity in wider culture. In much postcolonial thought, hybridity, pluralism, fragmentation, and uncertainty have been invested with an oxymoronic authority that leads to Linda Hutcheon’s wry and quasi-religious observation: ‘Ye shall know that truth is not what it seems and that truth shall set you free’ (1988: 13). For those who do not have the cultural or material capital to take for themselves ‘a bit of this and a bit of that’ (Rushdie 1991: 394), just as for those brought up to take religious purity seriously, hybridity may be seen as the preserve of the frequent flyer set, a transnational elite more familiar with caviar and champagne than the bottling of humble chutneys. In Yassin-Kassab’s novel, we then see the Muslim convert academic who has been chosen by the university to respond to Rashid’s lecture furiously ‘[s]cribbling about the spicy mix that was Islamic Spain. About the Greco-Judaic-Indo-Persian masala of medieval Baghdad’ (300). Contrary to Rashid’s stereotype of Islam as narrowly illiberal and unimaginative, this quotation brings to light an immense penumbra of pluralism, tolerance, sophistication, and hybridity. It also summons up memories of Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), as one of that novel’s chapters is entitled ‘Malabar Masala’, and Rushdie’s entire work alludes to Moorish Granada as well as interchange between Hinduism and the three religions of the book in twentieth-century India. This indicates that Yassin-Kassab does intend some distinction to be made between his ‘caricature’ (Rashid 2012: 93) and Rushdie the multifaceted though often doctrinaire thinker. Ultimately, the novel indicates that Islam, far from being opposed to chutnified narratives as Rashid Iqbal claims, is in fact bursting with them, whether stories that derive from the Qur’an, or the Sunna (life of the Prophet) and ahadith. As the quotation demonstrates, and as we have seen throughout this book, Rashid Iqbal’s suggestion that Islam is a consistent single entity is also erroneous. In his representations of Muslims and Islam, Yassin-Kassab treads a careful middle

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ground between Nadeem Aslam’s lyrical but condemnatory depictions of a claustrophobic, gossipy, and sometimes vicious Muslim community in Maps for Lost Lovers, and celebrations of a supportive, egalitarian mosque in such novels as Leila Aboulela’s Minaret. The novel ends soon after 9/11 with newly abstemious Sami taking a reconciliatory holiday with Muntaha in Scotland. There they pray together for the first time and Sami realizes that he has ‘developed a trembling, contingent faith’ (348). Yassin-Kassab tilts away from all dogma, and yet the narrative’s tranquil ending of healthy eating, prayer, and marital harmony suggests the attractions of ‘tasting the difference’ and cultivating a flexible belief system.

Conclusion Having established that Perso-Arab diasporic cuisine is a significant lacuna in migration food studies, this chapter explored the sense of taste in novels by one Anglo-Iranian and two British Arab writers. In relation to Minaret I argued that Aboulela presents the mosque as a space of healthful sustenance contrasting with the dangers of non-Muslim London – dangers which can spill over into the sense of taste (through the Tizer attack) in this novel. Next I got my teeth into a contextualized reading of the movements (and meanings) of commodities such as tea, coffee, and croissants in The Saffron Kitchen. Finally, in The Road from Damascus, Sami’s sensory flânerie becomes increasingly chaotic and troubled. Once marital crisis ensues, his rival Gabor tries to use taste, which Ackerman calls ‘the social sense’ (1990: 127–130), as a way to Muntaha’s heart. We have seen in this chapter that food and the sense of taste are striking aspects of these three 2000s novels. The role of taste in Perso-Arab Muslim-heritage novels of this period stands in contrast to the novels of the 1990s and especially to pre-The Satanic Verses (1988). To greater and lesser extents, these novelists use food to challenge dominant sedimented British notions of Muslim encagement and Western freedom. Whether their writing style is ostensibly halal (Aboulela), haram (Yassin-Kassab), or something in between (Crowther), these Perso-Arab novelists ‘bite back’ against stereotypical ideas about British freedom and Muslim oppression. In different ways, all their protagonists ultimately strive for what they consider a tayyab or wholesome mode of living, loving, and eating with others.

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Notes





1. Despite its witty title, Almas Khan’s Poppadom Preach has less to do with food than the other three books. I include the text in this list because it shows that, as well as evoking nostalgia among migrants, food can be a barrier to integration. Khan’s protagonist Dilly feels suffocated by an endless repetition of similar types of South Asian food at mealtimes: ‘My mother was a hopeless cook. Her food tasted watery and weak, as though she has deliberately rinsed out all the flavour […]. It was Mummy’s slops that we had to endure on a daily basis’ (2011: 16). This biting attack on her mother’s cooking reflects Dilly’s broader dream to escape her stereotypically repressive and conformist Muslim diasporic family (see Santesso 2013: 159–174). She also resents that she is not allowed to take mainstream cupcakes or Angel Delight to their school, but is instead lumbered with what she disparages as ‘sweaty samosas’ (2011: 47). Food assumes a metaphorical significance here, underlining Dilly’s monotonous childhood and adolescence, as the word ‘sweaty’ evokes fatigue, stench, and a claustrophobic existence inside a plastic container. The bitter relationship between a mother and her daughter also accounts for the relative absence of food descriptions in this novel, since food and the kitchen are often the mother’s domain. 2. Racism around migrants’ supposedly inedible food and the bad smells emanating from its cooking were discussed in Chapter 3. 3. In The Road from Damascus, for instance, taste seems to find itself slipping away from its more literal meaning as a sensorial sensation with such statements as: ‘The air outside was anyway gusty and cold, and tasted of beer and traffic’ (75) and ‘Poor Sami felt sick. Such guilt couldn’t be swallowed immediately’ (177). Here, taste functions as a metaphor for the ways in which British cultural values and urban living are imbibed by Sami – he seems almost to be man-handled by the sensations of Western living – and this plays into my broader argument about a specifically Muslim experience of the senses. 4. For a critique of the ‘illusion’ of the Ummah, see Shamsie (2009: 15, 41). 5.  Subsequent references are to this (2005) edition of Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. 6. In Maps for Lost Lovers, too, Mah-Jabin is momentarily ‘aghast’ to think that she has forgotten to mark Ramadan while away from home (Aslam 2004: 98). 7.  Indeed, Waïl Hassan and Peter Morey identify in Aboulela’s literary approach a glaring lack of irony, Hassan linking this with a naïve religious sincerity (2008: 311) and Morey positioning it as a stylistic technique carefully crafted for Aboulela’s subject matter (2018a: 309).

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8. Researchers have acknowledged the application of these terms to a wider set of practices including other forms of consumption (Mukhtar and Mohsin Butt 2012), clothes (Tarlo 2010), branding (Alserhan 2010; Wilson and Lui 2010), and finance (Mohsin Butt and Aftab 2013). 9. Subsequent references are to this (2006) edition of Yasmin Crowther’s The Saffron Kitchen and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. 10. For example, on her return to Iran in the twenty-first century, Maryam helps a woman of Sara’s age who has fallen ill with a stomach complaint. She tells the woman’s young son, ‘let’s make your mother some tea to help her get well’ (170). Despite this tonic, the woman dies, which suggests that the drink’s healing potential is quite limited. 11. It is not that they are teetotallers, for Maryam drinks ‘bad wine’ (78) with Ali when they spend the night together (though without having sex) during the turmoil of 1953, and later has brandy with Edward. Sara meanwhile imbibes red wine and also brandy at various moments in the novel. 12. Bell and Valentine point out that ‘the social cohesion offered by pub life is exclusive and can work to maintain social barriers’ (1997: 97). The most obvious of these barriers are around race/nationality and gender, and between the alcohol consumer versus the teetotaller (genuine or perceived). Thus, a non British-born Muslim woman is up against intersecting forms of exclusion when she enters the gastro-communitarian space of the pub. 13. This point is certainly true for swaths of northern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. However, one has to be careful not to overemphasize the region’s status as exclusive tea-drinkers, as Tahir Abbas does when he generalizes that ‘[p]eople do not really drink coffee in South Asia or Southeast Asia due to the role that tea plays there’ (2018: 128). In fact, south Indians prefer coffee to tea, as Saberi recognizes when she writes of the subservient role tea long played to coffee in southern states such as Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh (2010: 136). 14. Rudi Matthee (1996: 201–202) and Tahir Abbas (2018: 125–126) confirm Saberi’s point about the coffee house as a space ripe for the fomenting of dissent. Abbas also observes that coffee grounds may be scrutinized for what they reveal about people’s futures, just as the tea leaves are read in The Saffron Kitchen. 15. The reason for women’s prohibition from drinking coffee in Iran appears to have more to do with the beverage’s traditional intake in public than its status as a stimulant. However, more research is needed in this area. The leading scholar of Iran’s material culture Rudi Matthee does not even mention Iranian women in his otherwise comprehensive study ‘From Coffee to Tea: Shifting Patterns of Consumption in Qajar Iran’ (1996).

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16. This translates into a comment on the relationship between a father and daughter more broadly, and readers may draw connections to Maryam’s more openly fraught bond with her father. 17. One of the authors analysed in Chapter 5 of this book, Kamila Shamsie, has also written a novel with saffron in the title. Salt and Saffron (2001/2000) is Shamsie’s second book and it sets up a contrast between the daily essential of salt and the luxury of saffron, which parallels the cross-class love affairs of aristocratic sisters Mariam and Aliya with working-class men. 18. Tasnim Qutait recently published an insightful essay (2018) that significantly extends my brief sketch of Yassin-Kassab’s intertextual allusions to Arabic poetry. Qutait’s original and multilingual contribution to knowledge lies in his exploration of the important but under-researched area of Syrian and Arab(ic) influences on The Road from Damascus. 19. Subsequent references are to this (2008) edition of Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. 20. For Darwish’s original poem, translators Ian Wedde and Fawwaz Tuqan render these lines slightly differently, as follows: ‘Beware beware of my hunger | & of my anger!’ (Darwish 1973/1964: 25). The lines stand as the final couplet of a poem that has set up a contrast between the fertility of the Palestinian land and people on the one hand, and on the other the hardness of the rocks which the dispossessed are forced to quarry to support themselves. Although the poetic persona ‘do[es] not hate people’ (1973/1964: 25), the palms of his hands have become rough from breaking stones and his patience is wearing thin. As such, while to him ‘the most delicious food | is olive oil & thyme’, his anger now drives him to consider other means of sustenance: ‘if I am hungry | I will eat the flesh of my usurper’ (1973/1964: 24, 25). Like Yassin-Kassab, therefore, in ‘Identity Card’ Darwish depicts the foodstuffs of olives and meat (‘flesh’) as having nationalist and imperialist resonances. 21. So much so that from 2015 to 2017 the Chicken Connoisseur, AKA Elijah Quashie, garnered more than 632,000 subscribers and a cult following for his YouTube reviews over a grimy soundtrack in which he rated London’s eating places for the ‘peng’ value of their breaded poultry. He now presents his own show for Channel 4, entitled The Peng Life. 22.  Ten years after creating his cover art for The Road from Damascus, Olivier Kugler continued his interest in the Syrian diaspora with a work of comics journalism entitled Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees (2018). Similarly, his penchant for gustatory subjects is not a one-off. As well as his drawings of chicken restaurants for YassinKassab’s novel, Kugler creates monthly recipe sketches for GQ magazine in Germany and is also a regular food illustrator for Real Simple.

160  C. CHAMBERS 23. This was the same year Delia Smith’s television series How to Cook first aired on the BBC, alongside what would eventually be three volumes under the same name (Smith 2001). Lawson parodies Smith, that practical and unfussy doyenne of British TV chefs, but her title How to Eat shifts the focus to (sexual) appetite. This play between food and sexuality is made even more blatant in Lawson’s (2001) title Nigella Bites. 24.  Matthew Sweet debunks the leg-covering story in Inventing the Victorians, calling it an ‘old chestnut’ (2001: xii) and tracing the myth’s invention and its exaggeration over time (2001: xii–xv). 25. Speaking on the BBC World Service programme The Food Chain, Emily Thomas (2018: n.p.) makes the important point that time is the ‘invisible ingredient’ in most meals. 26. This short-sightedness is also a trait of the male author, as identified by Harriet Blodgett: ‘men are more inclined to link food with sexuality than women, who attach it rather to female roles and status in their writing’ (2004: 262). I do not implicate Yassin-Kassab within this sweeping critique of the male author, because he actively exposes and critiques this stock dyad through the lecherous presentation of Gabor. 27. Sami’s father Mustafa discusses this god-shaped hole (see Introduction, n. 3, above), in the novel’s only direct reference to Rushdie (51–52), arguing that it is the task of any mature critical thinker to suture this laceration.

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Aldama, Frederick Luis (2009) ‘The Saffron Kitchen, Yasmin Crowther’ (Review). Wasafiri 24.1: 75−93. Ali, Agha Shahid (1998/1997) The Country Without a Post Office: Poems 1991– 1995. New York: W. W. Norton. Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin (2008) The Settler’s Cookbook: Tales of Love, Migration and Food. London: Portobello. Alserhan, Baker Ahmad (2010) ‘On Islamic Branding: Brands as Good Deeds’. Journal of Islamic Marketing 1.2: 101–106. Armanios, Febe, and Boğaç Ergene (2018) Halal Food: A History. New York: Oxford University Press. Asad, Muhammad (2004) The Message of the Qur’an, Watsonville, CA: Book Foundation. Kindle. Aslam, Nadeem (2004) Maps for Lost Lovers. London: Faber and Faber. Bal, Mieke (2008) Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Bell, David, and Gill Valentine (1997) Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat. London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. (2004/1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Blodgett, Harriet (2004) ‘Mimesis and Metaphor: Food Imagery in International Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing’. Papers on Language and Literature 40.3: 260–295. Bostom, Andrew G. (2012) Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Brennan, Timothy (1997) At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brien, Donna Lee (2011) ‘Five Food Microhistories: Stories of What, How and Why We Eat’. Australian Humanities Review 51. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2011/11/01/five-food-microhistories-stories-of-what-howand-why-we-eat/. Accessed 3 August 2018. Brunsdon, Charlotte (2005) ‘In Focus: Feminism, Postfeminism, Martha, Martha, and Nigella’. Cinema Journal 44.2: 110–116. Canpolat, Seda (2016) ‘Scopic Dilemmas: Gazing the Muslim Woman in Fadia Faqir’s My Name Is Salma and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret’. Contemporary Women’s Writing 10.2: 216–235. Chambers, Claire (2012) ‘“Sexy Identity-Assertion”: Choosing Between Sacred and Secular Identities in Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus’. In Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin (eds.), Culture, Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing. New York: Routledge. 117–131. ——— (2015) Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780– 1988. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

162  C. CHAMBERS Churilla, Emily (2011) ‘Coming Home: Communities Beyond Borders in Caryl Phillips’ The Atlantic Sound and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret’. Obsidian 12.2: 25−46. Crowther, Yasmin (2006) The Saffron Kitchen. New York: Viking. Darwish, Mahmoud (1973/1964) Selected Poems. Ian Wedde and Fawwaz Tuqan (intro. and trans.). Cheadle: Carcanet. David, Elizabeth (2002/1950) A Book of Mediterranean Food. Clarissa Dickson Wright (foreword). New York: New York Review of Books. Eliasi, Jennifer R., and Johanna T. Dwyer (2002) ‘Kosher and Halal: Religious Observances Affecting Dietary Intakes’. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics 102.7: 911–913. Fish, Stanley (1997) ‘Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking About Hate Speech’. Critical Inquiry 23.2: 378–395. Ghosh, Amitav (1992) In an Antique Land. London: Granta. Halliday, David (2010) The Bloody History of the Croissant. Neil Perry (foreword). Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Kindle. Harjo, Joy (1994) ‘Perhaps the World Ends Here’. In Joy Harjo (ed.), The Woman Who Fell from the Sky. New York: W. W. Norton. 68. Hassan, Waïl (2008) ‘Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction’. Novel 41.2/3: 298–306. Highfield, Jonathan (2010) ‘“Relations with Food”: Agriculture, Colonialism, and Foodways in the Writing of Bessie Head’. In Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt (eds.), Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 102–117. Hobbes, Thomas (1991/1651) The Leviathan. Richard Tuck (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howes, David (2005) Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Huggan, Graham (2001) The Postcolonial Exotic. Abingdon: Routledge. Hussaini, Mohammad Mazhar (1993) Islamic Dietary Concepts and Practices. Park Ridge, IL: Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America. Hutcheon, Linda (1988) A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Jaggi, Maya (2008) ‘Beyond Belief: Review of The Road from Damascus by Robin Yassin-Kassab’. Guardian Review. 14 June. 11. Janmohamed, Shelina Zahra (2016) Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World. London: I.B. Tauris. Kershen, Anne J. (ed.) (2002) Food in the Migrant Experience. Farnham: Ashgate. Kesvani, Hussein (2018) ‘Fried Chicken Shops’. In Ziauddin Sardar (ed.), Critical Muslim 26: Gastronomy. London: Hurst. 131–138. Khan, Almas (2011) Poppadom Preach. London: Simon & Schuster.

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Khan, Yasmin (2016) The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen. Shahrzad Darafsheh and Matta Russell (photography). London: Bloomsbury. Kristeva, Julia (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Leon S. Roudiez (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Kugler, Olivier (2018) Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees. Oxford: Myriad. Lawson, Nigella (1998) How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food. London: Chatto & Windus. ——— (2001) Nigella Bites. London: Chatto & Windus. Lawson-Welsh, Sarah (2018) ‘Caribbean Cravings: Food and Literature in the Anglophone Caribbean’. In Donna Brien and Lorna Fiatti-Parnell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Food and Literature. London: Routledge. 194–208. Lewis, Philip (1994) Islamic Britain: Religion, Politics and Identity Among British Muslims. London: I.B. Tauris. Loichot, Valerie (2013) The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mannur, Anita (2010) Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Massad, Joseph (2007) Desiring Arabs. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Matthee, Rudi (1996) ‘From Coffee to Tea: Shifting Patterns of Consumption in Qajar Iran’. Journal of World History 7.2: 199–230. Mattar, Karim (2012) ‘Rereading the “Rogue State”: The Politics of Gender in Anglophone Iranian Literature’. Interventions 14.4: 551–568. McIntosh, Alastair (2008) Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Miller, William (1997) The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mohammadi, Kamin (2018) Bella Figura: How to Live, Love and Eat the Italian Way. London: Bloomsbury. Mohsin Butt, Muhammad and Muhammad Aftab (2013) ‘Incorporating Attitude Towards Halal Banking in an Integrated Service Quality, Satisfaction, Trust and Loyalty Model in Online Islamic Banking Context’. International Journal of Bank Marketing 31.1: 6–23. Mondal, Anshuman A. (2015) ‘Representations of Young Muslims in Contemporary British South Asian Fiction’. In Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert (eds.), Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations. Abingdon: Routledge. 30–41. Morey, Peter (2018a) ‘“Halal Fiction” and the Limits of Postsecularism: Criticism, Critique, and the Muslim in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 53.2: 301–315. ——— (2018b) Islamophobia and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press.

164  C. CHAMBERS Morey, Peter, and Amina Yaqin (2011) Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation After 9/11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mukhtar, Arshia, and Muhammad Mohsin Butt (2012) ‘Intention to Choose Halal Products: The Role of Religiosity’. Journal of Islamic Marketing 3.2: 108–120. Nafisi, Azar (2015/2003) Reading Lolita in Tehran. London: Penguin. Nash, Geoffrey (2007) The Anglo-Arab Encounter: Fiction and Autobiography by Arab Writers in English. Bern: Peter Lang. Nussbaum, Martha (2004) Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Panayi, Panikos (2008) Spicing Up Britain: The Multicultural History of British Food. London: Reaktion. ——— (2014) Fish and Chips: A History. London: Reaktion. Qabbani, Nizar (1972/1954) ‘Bread, Hashish, and Moon’. Zvi Gabay (trans.). Journal of Arabic Literature 3: 123–125. Quinn, Emelia (2015) Unpublished MA Essay on Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus’. York: University of York. Qutait, Tasnim (2018) ‘Qabbani Versus Qur’an: Between Arab Nationalism and Nation as Ummah in Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus’. Open Cultural Studies 2: 73–83. Raghavan, Anirudh, Syeda Asia, and Vanshika Singh (2015) ‘Circuits of Authenticity: Parsi Food, Identity, and Globalisation in 21st Century Mumbai’. Economic and Political Weekly 50.31. 1 August. https://www. epw.in/journal/2015/31/notes/circuits-authenticity.html. Accessed 30 July 2018. Ramone, Jenni (2018) ‘Transforming Hunger into Power: Food and Resistance in Nigerian Literature’. In Donna Brien and Lorna FiattiParnell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Food and Literature. London: Routledge. 184–193. Rashid, C. E. (2012) ‘British Islam and the Novel of Transformation: Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48.1: 92–103. Roy, Parama (2010) Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rushdie, Salman (1988) The Satanic Verses. London: Viking. ——— (1991) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. London: Granta. ——— (1995) The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Jonathan Cape. ——— (2006/1981) Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage. Saberi, Helen (2010) Tea: A Global History. London: Reaktion.

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Santesso, Esra Mirze (2013) Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sardar, Ziauddin (2008) Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience. London: Granta. Shah, Shanon (2018) ‘Muslim Veggies’. In Ziauddin Sardar (ed.), Critical Muslim 26: Gastronomy. London: Hurst. 86–102. Shamsie, Kamila (2001/2000) Salt and Saffron. London: Bloomsbury. ——— (2009) Offence: The Muslim Case. Kolkata: Seagull. Smith, Barbara (1989) ‘A Press of Our Own Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press’. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 10.3: 11–13. Smith, Delia (2001) Delia’s How to Cook: Books One, Two and Three. London: BBC Worldwide. Stone, Damien (2017) Pomegranate: A Global History. London: Reaktion. Sweet, Matthew (2001) Inventing the Victorians. London: Faber and Faber. Tarlo, Emma (2010) Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. Oxford: Berg. Thieme, John, and Ira Raja (eds.) (2007) The Table is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Emily (2018) ‘The Invisible Ingredient’. The Food Chain. BBC World Service. 26 August, 08:32. Thomas, Susie (2009) ‘Review of Robin Yassin-Kassab, The Road from Damascus’. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 7.1. http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2009/ thomas.html. Accessed 21 July 2018. Thompson, Claire, et al. (2018) ‘Fast-Food, Everyday Life and Health: A Qualitative Study of “Chicken Shops” in East London’. Appetite 128: 7–13. Tirmizi, Bisma (2017) Feast: With a Taste of Amir Khusro. New Delhi: Rupa. van Gelder, Geert Jan (2000) Of Dishes and Discourse: Classical Arabic Literary Representations of Food. Richmond: Curzon. Walder, Dennis (2011) Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory. Abingdon: Routledge. Walvin, James (1997) Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660– 1800. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Weir, Allison (2018) ‘Islamic and Secular Philosophies of Freedom’. In Anshuman A. Mondal and Tanja Dreher (eds.), Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics of Difference. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 75–92. Westwood, Benjamin (2018) ‘On Refusal’. In Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood (eds.), Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 175–198. Whitlock, Gillian (2007) Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

166  C. CHAMBERS ——— (2008) ‘From Tehran to Tehrangeles: The Generic Fix of Iranian Diasporic Memoirs’. Ariel 39.1–2: 7–28. Willard, Pat (2002) Secrets of Saffron: The Vagabond Life of the World’s Most Seductive Spice. London: Souvenir. Wilson, Jonathan A. J., and Jonathan T. L. Liu (2010) ‘Shaping the Halal into a Brand?’ Journal of Islamic Marketing 1.2: 107–123. Yassin-Kassab, Robin (2008) The Road from Damascus. London: Hamish Hamilton. Ziglar, Katie (2003) ‘A Persian Banquet’. Gastronomica 3.4: 8–12.

PART III

Taking Soundings in the Technologized 2010s

CHAPTER 5

Sound and Fury: Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Within a year of each other, Kamila Shamsie and Tabish Khair published novels that deal with radicalization from the standpoint of this complex and violent second decade of the twenty-first century. As my title suggests, this chapter explores the novels’ leitmotifs of sound and fury.1 It also considers whether we need to ‘listen to’ – while simultaneously refusing to condone – jihadists. Tropes of noise and violence pierce the two novels, Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane (2016) and Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017a), at regular intervals. Both novelists listen to others, to individuals who are usually unattended to: most notably, radicalized subjects. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is my main influence in adopting this auditory line of enquiry. She famously enquired whether the subaltern could speak (1988), but less well known than this work on speech is her examination of listening. For example, in one interview she tells her interlocutor, Sneja Gunew: ‘For me, the question “Who should speak?” is less crucial than “Who will listen?”’ (Spivak 1990/1986: 59). Almost two decades later, in the essay ‘Terror: A Speech After 9-11’ (2004), Spivak again frames her argument in acoustic terms, writing about the importance of listening to others even when they have committed acts of terror. In part building on Spivak’s research, a substantial ‘politics of listening’ oeuvre is developing (see, for example, Bickford 1996; Lacey 2013; Bassel 2017). Such research positions listening as a type of responsiveness or an ethical openness rather than listening per se. Yet in the current political climate, some people are listened to more than others. © The Author(s) 2019 C. Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52089-0_5

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In her book The Politics of Listening, for instance, Leah Bassel puts those who are typically inaudible within earshot. She quotes a Somali Muslim woman based in Canada as saying: ‘I wish white liberal women would stop saving us. They only listen to you if you bash your culture’ (2017: 17). Bassel argues that if people listen hard for harmonious notes among the dissonance separating them from others, it will result in greater political equality. I aim to show that applying sound studies research to literature relates productively to sociological and political matters. I weave the warp of aural theories through the weft of subaltern studies and the politics of listening. Shamsie’s and Khair’s novels implicitly focus on the relationship between the textual and the sonic, asking the urgent question: can the oppressor listen? It seems as though these writers have not merely heard the mood music of the 2010s, but listened closely to the sounds of our times. They therefore attend to a plurality of oppressors and victims and, by extension, to the shifting identities and roles of ‘listeners’ and ‘speakers’ which are context-specific. This chapter argues that the authors also set up a pairing of sound and text, for example by deploying (inter-)textuality in furtherance of an exploration of its relationship with sound. This relationship between the textual and sonic is foundational. It helps to think about both constituents in relation to listening, communication, speaking, access to representation, and reception – upon which much of my discussion pivots. Both Home Fire and Just Another Jihadi Jane are deeply concerned with texts: sacred texts and secular texts, texting, online texts, and the various typographies of texts. It should not surprise us that text and sound are twin currents running throughout the two novels, for as Orhan Pamuk puts it, ‘[t]he most advanced sounds [are], of course, words; words [are] the magic building blocks of the exalted thing we call […] speech’ (2006/1990: 297). My argument about sound and its different forms therefore links this theme to literature, as well as to various kinds of torture, violence, and radicalization. Melissa Dearey argues that ‘radicalization’ is a word that has become central to policy decisions, but which is insufficiently theorized or understood: In place of a definition, […] the assumption appears to be that everyone knows [radicalization] when they see it, and so we are able to proceed with the tasks in hand while awaiting further conceptual clarification. Despite our admitted lack of understanding of radicalization, it has emerged

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as a concept that has displayed substantial ‘epistemological creep’ into contemporary discourses about freedom, security, identity, crime and deviance. (2010: 1)

She and several other scholars including Tarik Fraihi (2011: 207) argue that radicalization – if such a term is useful – is best characterized as a process through which an individual becomes increasingly convinced that society can only be improved by dramatic and sweeping change. The terms radicalism and radicalization are not inherently negative, and many different forms of radicalization exist, few of which are violent. Furthermore, radicalization is of course not a uniquely Muslim problem, as was demonstrated in the UK by the far-right murder of politician Jo Cox shortly before the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and by the Finsbury Park mosque attack in June 2017. Dearey’s original contribution to the contested category of radicalization research is to examine what she describes as an ‘“alternative” and underestimated data set’ (2010: 2): the life writing, often produced in prison, by people viewed as radicalized agents. While Dearey provides lucid sociological and criminological data analysis of this life writing, her literary and cultural analysis is limited by inattention to form. I will therefore supplement her work with my textual analysis of Shamsie’s Home Fire and Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane. Close attention to texts qua texts is necessary if we are to understand radicalization more fully, and I argue that literature is uniquely placed to tune into the radical subject’s wavelength and bandwidth. The novel has a power and a truth that nonfiction does not possess to the same degree; it is a capacious form that exceeds borders and rules. The novel is able to transcend fiction and nonfiction, and to bring together different historical periods, geographical locations, and political contexts, while all the time keeping the emphasis firmly on people. Ultimately, as Pheng Cheah argues, literary writing is a ‘world-making activity that enables us to imagine a world’ (2008: 26). As this chapter will demonstrate, the two authors under study enable us to imagine a richly sensate world, particularly focusing on the realm of sound. Prior to Dearey’s intervention, attempts to explain radicalization tended to rest on three approaches: a sociological methodology, which searches for a common social background among jihadists (see, for example, Gambetta and Hertog 2009); the psychological attempt to look for a radical personality type (Davar 2004; Razzaque 2008); and a communitarian approach examining group dynamics (Sageman 2004;

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McCauley and Moskalenko 2010). The first, sociological explanation was discredited as it emerged that the stereotype of young, brainwashed men from deprived backgrounds in the poorest parts of the ‘Third World’ did not tally with the extensive range of terrorists that exists. While some jihadists are impoverished, others have been drawn into a criminal milieu, and still others again are relatively wealthy and have higher than average levels of educational attainment. Few terrorists based in Euro-America attended madrassas or had unusually religious upbringings, and many jihadists are married, often with children, rather than being the loners typically identified in sociological explanations. The psychological approach also has pitfalls; for example because there is little evidence to suggest that jihadists who work in groups (as compared with lone actors) have higher instances of mental illness than the wider population (Corner and Gill 2015: 24). Fanaticism usually denotes not mental disorder, but fervently held belief. Even suicide bombing – the facet of terrorism with the clearest link to mental illness – forms part of this belief system. Nor is there evidence to suggest that a higher than average proportion of jihadists have experienced childhood trauma that, according to a psychoanalytic approach, might have sent them down the route of violence. Some creative writers, including Martin Amis, have tried to link jihadists with personality disorders such as narcissism, which allegedly allow their sufferers to kill because the world is divided into ‘me’ and ‘not-me’. In Amis’s story ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’, the eponymous 9/11 ringleader believes himself to be ‘not like the others’ (2008: 94). An erotic rationalization is exploited by other Islamophobic writers, such as Boris Johnson (MP and former British Foreign Secretary) in his novel, Seventy-Two Virgins, in which the narrator speculates in cod-psychological style: ‘There is one really […] satisfying explanation for the suicidal behaviour of young men, and it is something to do with sex, or at least with self-esteem’ (Johnson 2005: 131). In his incisive slim volume On Suicide Bombing, Talal Asad (2007: 3, 41) identifies any such explanation of motives as a ‘fiction’, since it is impossible to know what is in the suicide bomber’s head at the moment of detonation. While Asad uses the term disparagingly against sociologists and politicians who claim to understand the terrorist’s reasoning, this chapter will argue that the Muslim-identified fiction of Khair and Shamsie (unlike that of Amis and Johnson) paradoxically sheds light on the facticity of the violent extremist’s experience, as well as the suffering he or she causes.

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Instead of looking for a common social background or pathology, ‘a consensus soon emerged that group dynamics were key to understanding terrorist motivation’ (Corner and Gill 2015: 23). In this regard, a contrasting theorist, Marc Sageman, is useful. Sageman’s influential book Understanding Terror Networks stages the argument that friendship, kinship, and discipleship bonds play a more central role in radicalization than sociological or psychological factors. He draws on his own experience as a CIA operations officer, but also has expertise as a forensic psychiatrist. Trying to identify a personality type that might be ripe for radicalization is problematic, and Sageman instead lifts a term coined by Canadian federal authorities, who were shadowing a group plotting the unsuccessful 2000 bombing of Los Angeles International Airport. These operatives, Sageman reports, referred to the Algerian-Canadian group as BOG, or ‘bunch of guys’, seeing them as ‘more pathetic than dangerous – unemployed, no girlfriends, living on welfare or thievery, and crammed into an apartment reeking of cigarette smoke’ (2004: 101). He turns the BOG nickname into a theory, arguing that one cannot align terrorists with particular personality types. Rather, what leads people to seek out jihad are the circumstances and social bonds individuals find themselves embroiled in – especially an intense male bonding based on a shared view of religion and politics, and a desire for adventure. Sageman concludes: ‘It may be more accurate to blame global Salafi terrorist activity on in-group love than out-group hate’ (2004: 135). He writes cogently about the group dynamics involved in radicalization, and I will show that such interpersonal interactions exert a strong influence on the radicalization of the jihadist characters in the two novels. Sageman’s research into al-Qaida-affiliated cells has, however, been superseded by the rise of Islamic State or Daesh.2 He is also hamstrung by his positivism, tendency to play down religious and political beliefs, gender blindness (he never considers the possibility of a bunch of girls), and inability to explain why some people choose to ‘self-recruit’ outside of groups (he only briefly discusses homesickness and cultural alienation as factors). In a recent interview with the Observer, Kamila Shamsie talks of being influenced by the research of Charlie Winter, a fellow at King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalization (Thorpe 2017: n.p.). Winter brings radicalization research into the age of Daesh, arguing that in the 2010s jihadists recruit through a three-pronged strategy. The first tactic, to create a ‘positive narrative’ for Daesh (Winter 2017: 15), revolves around offering recruits a sense of group belonging

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and solidarity. Daesh accordingly projects an image of a thriving, beneficent state grounded on sharia law and Islamic values. The second line of attack is ‘counterspeech’ (Winter 2017: 16). Through a close reading of their publication Media Operative, You Are a Mujahid, Too (Daesh 2016), Winter argues that Daesh’s leaders ‘construct an existential crisis […] that can only be resolved through the hard work of Islamic State media operatives’ (2017: 16). This ‘existential crisis’ is portrayed as the consequence of a relentless and demeaning war against the Ummah, or global population of Muslims, by Western ‘Crusaders’ (2017: 17). To further their aims of encouraging conscription and boosting existing recruits’ morale, the document’s authors hail or ‘interpellate’ (Althusser 2014/1971: 190–197) brave, hard-working Daesh media operatives as the people best placed to thwart the Crusaders’ planned overthrow of the righteous. Louis Althusser argues that ideologies – here I think of Daesh’s poisonous screed – function in a way that is analogous to speaking and listening. (I am also reminded of Spivak’s assertion, with reference to subaltern attempts to express themselves, that ‘speaking and hearing complete the speech act’ [1996/1993: 292]. Spivak’s assertion does not map precisely onto the present context because of the nature of hate speech. However, the notion of a ‘speech act’ illustrates Daesh’s frighteningly perceptive and performative understanding of its audience’s potential receptiveness to the group’s virulent dogma.) For Althusser, ideology interpellates or summons individuals, making them view themselves as free subjects: ‘the hail rings out, “Hey, you there!” […] [and] the subject answers, “Yes, it really is me!”’ (2014/1971: 191, 195). Interpellation is thus an acoustic version of the controlling gaze that prevails in ocularcentric discussions of biopolitics. According to Winter, Daesh’s third strategy is to ‘deliberately weaponise […] media coverage’ (2017: 6). By this he means that the jihadists view the media as one of the most powerful missiles in their arsenal, so they use various channels to inform the public about their graphic violence against enemies and their warped version of Islam. In another article (2016), Winter identifies that conventional media weapons are at least as useful to Daesh as emerging, online media, especially when – as now – the Islamic State is under concerted attack and in retreat. Notwithstanding the claims of such thinkers as Ali H. Soufan that Daesh is primarily engaged in ‘cyber combat’ on an ‘electronic battlefield’ (2017: vii), Winter contends that offline technologies such as radio are proving more durable than vulnerable online social

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media and streaming channels. ‘Night and day’, observes Winter, ‘the al-Bayan Radio station broadcasts its programs on FM frequencies from central Libya to eastern Iraq, with programs ranging from news bulletins and “history lessons” to on-air fatwas and call-in medical clinics’ (2016: n.p.). One is reminded of Frantz Fanon’s essay ‘This is the Voice of Algeria’, in which the Martinican psychiatrist described the colonizers’ radio station as ‘Frenchmen Speaking to Frenchmen’ (1965/1959: 74), while characterizing Algerian freedom fighters’ radio as a ‘voice of the combatants’ (1965/1959: 88, 90). Along with al-Bayan and Algerian freedom fighters’ radio, the génocidaires advocating the killing of Tutsis by Hutus on Radio Rwanda and Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines come to mind. Let this brief discussion of radio propaganda serve as a promissory note for this article’s close attention to sound and voice, as we now turn to the literature. Kamila Shamsie and Tabish Khair were both born in South Asia (Shamsie in Pakistan and Khair in India) to Muslim parents. Khair moved to Denmark as a young adult to start his academic career and is currently an associate professor at Aarhus University. Shamsie lived between Pakistan, the United States, and Britain during the 1990s and 2000s, but has now chosen London as her place of residence. Both have also worked as journalists, Shamsie for the Guardian, and Khair for the Times of India. As well as sharing some biographical similarities, their novels also have certain features in common. Each is a literary thriller that partly unfolds in England: London in Shamsie’s Home Fire, and an unnamed West Yorkshire city in Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane. Although neither author was born in Britain, they also have sharp ears for local argots, with Khair’s characters ambling through ginnels and into back-to-backs and Shamsie attempting the rhythms and cadences of the ‘class-obscuring London accent’ (2017a: 16).3 Yet it is impossible to contain such multilingual, well-read, and politically astute fiction within solely British locales. Both writers are concerned with Muslims who leave their homes in Britain to join Daesh, and in an interesting gender reversal the female author writes about a male jihadist, and the male author a female. Shamsie’s Women’s Prize for Fiction-winning novel Home Fire is set in five locations: London, Amherst in Massachusetts, Istanbul, Raqqa in Syria, and Karachi. Similarly, the text’s structure echoes the five acts over which much Western drama unfolds (and also, perhaps, the five pillars of Islam and the five senses). Accordingly, each substantial chapter is told

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through free indirect discourse from the perspective of one of the five major characters: a devoted sibling in her late twenties called Isma Pasha; the man she has a crush on, Pakistani-Irish-American Londoner Eamonn or Ayman; Isma’s wayward younger brother Parvaiz; her sister and Parvaiz’s twin Aneeka; and Eamonn’s politician father Karamat. Despite its global sweep, this is easily Shamsie’s most British novel to date, with much of its action taking place on and around Preston Road in Alperton, near Wembley. Here Parvaiz experiences a crisis of masculinity precipitated in part by a fellow British Pakistani Farooq’s charming machinations that recruit him to Daesh, combined with his sisters’ decision to sell the family house against his will. The final trigger to depart for the Islamic State comes when his twin Aneeka does not comply with his text message begging ‘Please come home’ (139), after he has been physically tortured in Farooq’s tawdry flat. Readers hear a susurrus of homoeroticism between the two men and later, after Parvaiz’s death, Isma says that she and Aneeka had thought his radicalization ‘was some kind of secret affair, his first time in love. And in a way, it was. What else explains a person being turned inside out in the space of just a few weeks?’ (238). First in Britain and then in Syria, Farooq repeatedly bestows the affectionate nickname ‘warrior’ on Parvaiz (140, 144, 158). But readers witness love’s illusions falling away in Raqqa, as Parvaiz observes Farooq posturing with his chest out, in a manner that he used to find ‘impressive’ and now thinks ‘ridiculous’ (178). When Parvaiz escapes from Daesh’s media wing and before he tries to gain entry to the British High Commission in Islamabad, Farooq sends him a text message imbuing his term of endearment with new menace: ‘You’re a dead man, my little warrior’ (166). Months earlier, in Farooq’s hypermasculine apartment above a London fried chicken shop (see pp. 146–149), Parvaiz had encountered both pain and redemption amid the video-game violence and simplistic Islamist slogans blaring out. His transformation from a bookish, family-oriented young man into a jihadist is a narrative structure wherein the topoi of sound and fury need to be highlighted. In this plot line, Parvaiz finds an attentive ‘listener’ in the fold of Farooq’s friendship instead of among his sisters. The rest of the novel pursues Aneeka’s increasingly desperate, even crazed, attempts to get her brother to come back to ‘London. Home’ (179). She is blocked at every turn by Britain’s first Muslim Home Secretary Karamat Lone, who believes that those who ‘set [them]selves apart’ from British society deserve to be ‘treated differently’ (87, 88) and denied a homeland. This policy has strong echoes of the hostile

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environment for migrants championed by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, as well as foreshadowing the work of her successor in the Home Office Amber Rudd (July 2016–April 2018). Indeed, Shamsie has written passionately about how naturalized Britons and citizens with dual nationality can be ‘made unBritish’ under the discriminatory British Nationality (General) Regulations of 2003 (2018b: n.p.). However, Karamat’s ethnicity and working-class background are closer to those of the London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and Dewsbury MP and former Minister of State for Faith and Communities Sayeeda Warsi. Most of all, one thinks of Sajid Javid, the man who eight months after Home Fire’s publication would become the first Muslim Home Secretary in April 2018. This example of life imitating art caused the author to be dubbed ‘Nostrashamsie’ for her prescience by publisher Faiza Sultan Khan.4 Even more prophetic was Shamsie’s depiction of Karamat’s denial of Parvaiz’s citizenship. This predicted the similar fate of the radicalized teenager Shamima Begum, whom Javid similarly prevented from coming home to Britain in February 2019. Khair likewise gets behind the headlines, in his case to chart the experiences of two ‘Jihadi Janes’ who end up in Syria working at an orphanage run by Daesh. He draws on the story of the three teenage schoolgirls, Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana, and Amira Abase, who left their homes in Bethnal Green in London to go to Syria and marry Daesh fighters. One of these real-world girl brides, Amira, is explicitly referenced in the novel, when the narrator, Jamilla, remarks on her name’s similarity with that of Ameena, Jamilla’s schoolfriend and now her travel companion to the so-called Islamic State. Khair’s two Yorkshire-born female characters are a few years older than their Bethnal Green counterparts, but likewise turn a healthy scepticism about news reporting into a naive view that ‘the Western media had exaggerated the villainy of Daesh’ (Khair 2016: 102).5 To relate how Jamilla and Ameena managed to get Daesh so wrong, Khair employs a similar technique to Mohsin Hamid in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) whereby Jamilla narrates her first-person narrative to a muted male interlocutor. For example, after describing her happiness on arriving at the Daesh orphanage she tells this man, whom we can deduce to be a writer: ‘You look startled’ (108). Similarly, following a confession about pretending to be his girlfriend Erica’s dead exboyfriend in order to make love to her, The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s Changez-as-narrator remarks: ‘[Y]ou are looking at me with a degree of revulsion’ (Hamid 2007: 107). Yet Khair’s frame narrative is less obtrusive and ominous than Hamid’s. It is closer to the frame narrative and

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occasional second-person mode of address of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors, such as Joseph Conrad, than to Hamid’s more recent influences of Albert Camus and the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The primary significance of Khair’s frame narrative is that it centres on a conversation: an instance of ‘communicative interaction – speaking and listening together’ (Bickford 1996: 2). This interaction operates as a metaphor for the quiet contemplation of the other’s point of view undertaken by the reader of Just Another Jihadi Jane. The novel unusually pivots on a female Muslim who talks and a male atheist who listens. Jamilla’s male companion is a foil rather than a character in his own right. He functions as a contrast in relation both to his gender and to his worldview, which Jamilla assumes to be secular and which is therefore very different from her religious mindset.6 Khair’s interposition of a male author between him and Jamilla also works to obviate charges that he is speaking for the working-class Muslim woman, since he does not directly voice her words but implies that the writer is doing this. He nonetheless invites readers to reflect on the requisition of stories by writers. In Just Another Jihadi Jane we are presented with a man possibly appropriating a female story, and with an oral narrative being validated by writing. The role of the male writer is intriguing, as Jamilla does not know what will happen to her story once her words become script. The book we are reading could be the writer’s words and they could be false. The written word and its authenticity, which are given primacy by many jihadist groups – the only word that matters is the sacred text and everything else is irrelevant – are similar for every fundamentalism: including secular fundamentalism, which valorizes Literature above all else. If the oppressor listens, therefore, it is the written and the male narrative that counts in the construction of knowledge. That much said, amanuenses are not mere ciphers helping others but have agency to help themselves, as we will see later. In one outburst, Jamilla informs her conversation partner: [T]rust me, no man, no Muslim man, no matter how believing, how faithful, how orthodox, has to face a third of the difficulties that orthodox Muslim women encounter in the West. A man has to be careful about what he eats and his observances, true. But what about a woman? Think of it. The way an orthodox woman wants to dress – and I was a very orthodox woman – the way you want to dress, interact, meet, or not meet other people, live, all of it is under constant assault by ordinary life in the West. (77)

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It is certainly true that women like Jamilla feel that their values are threatened by Western popular culture’s emphasis on ‘sex-as-love’ (115) and by anti-hijab prejudice. But, as the quotation intimates, the oppression of these women is double-sided. For instance, some British Muslim women are prevented by their own Wahhabi-influenced menfolk from attending burials and visiting graveyards. This causes Jamilla and her mother unhappiness when her father dies, but ultimately they accept her brother’s argument that women’s ululations at graveyards are anti-Islamic. Just as Khair’s novel presents Muslim women as being subjected to both dominant media stereotypes and domineering male relatives, so too Home Fire is alert to this ‘double colonization’ (Petersen and Rutherford 1986), or, more pertinently, to oppression’s intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, 1991). If Karamat’s influential speech about the importance of integration emboldens a racist to spit at Aneeka in her visibly Muslim clothes, Shamsie also depicts an unknown woman from London being brutally punished in the Islamic State for allowing her face veil to slip off. These are writers, then, who say a plague on both your houses to white British extremism and Daesh. The novels present unusual jihadists, set aslant from the flimsy portrayals of writers like Johnson (2005), Amis (2008) and, in the United States, John Updike (2006). As we have seen, such authors recycle clichéd portraits of terrorists as young, death-obsessed men with temperaments suited for engineering. In contrast, Khair’s protagonist Jamilla turns to extremism not only because of her passionate friendship with Ameena and to fill a vacuum in her life after failing to win a university scholarship,7 but also out of a sense of being perceived as ‘an oddity or monster’ in Britain ‘because of her faith’ (115). Shamsie’s Parvaiz is another Muslim who becomes radicalized due to a combination of personal and political circumstances. He has been stopped and searched twice for purely Islamophobic reasons by British police officers, and is regularly treated with suspicion as a young Muslim man in Britain. However, the extremist ideology Parvaiz encounters is shown to be deeply misguided and wrong. He proves susceptible to it due to feelings of camaraderie with his new friend Farooq – despite, or in part because of, the latter’s violence – and a concomitant sense of emasculation around his sisters. I should also briefly mention Parvaiz’s search for a connection with the father that he never knew. This is something that Farooq is aware of and plays upon, telling the son about his father’s bravery under torture at Bagram air base. In these novels and elsewhere

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in their writing, Shamsie and Khair make it clear that racism and the ‘Islamophobia industry’ (Lean 2012) contribute significantly to such characters’ actions. Khair writes of the many people ‘who stared or muttered or shouted’ (141) about Jamilla’s covered head. Worth noting here is the way the strangers’ curious gaze transmogrifies into increasingly bellicose noise, which loudening is reflected, as we shall see later, in the form of Khair’s novel. Shamsie opens Home Fire with Isma missing a flight because of extensive and Islamophobic questioning at the airport. If later in the novel Isma speaks wryly about the stigma of GWM or ‘Googling While Muslim’ (65), the airport altercation clearly highlights the difficulties of flying while Muslim. The text progresses from ostensibly light-hearted Islamophobic microaggressions among Eamonn’s smart friendship group to one of the siblings’ cousins explaining how restricted and anxious people with Pakistani passports are when it comes to overseas travel. Yet both novels also include white Britons who make a genuine effort to understand Muslim characters’ religious worldview. These include Just Another Jihadi Jane’s thoughtful schoolboy James, or Eamonn’s mother and Karamat’s wife in Home Fire, Terry, with her Irish-American heritage, radical politics, and artistic temperament. Both authors refuse to make sweeping statements, as Daesh does, about the West in general and the UK in particular. Shamsie condemns Britain’s rising xenophobia and ideas about British purity, but also trumpets London’s convivial diversity, replete as her fictionalization of the city is with Iranian neighbours, Scottish political assistants, and Latin American bodyguards. Despite their focus on acts of terror, these are quiet, reflective novels, preoccupied by sound but out of it creating lyricism rather than fury. Shamsie’s novel Home Fire also operates as a post-9/11 Antigone. The adaptation element is immediately signalled by the novel’s epigraph from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’ play: ‘The ones we love … are enemies of the state’.8 This refers to the dramaturgical plotline in which Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, defies King Creon’s laws and breaks with her sister Ismene (Isma in the novel) by refusing to leave the dead body of her brother, Polyneices (Shamsie’s Parvaiz), who has been exiled from the king’s city of Thebes for treason. In Heaney’s poetic rendition, the tyrannical Creon (Karamat) goes on to declare that such enemies are ‘[t]o be considered traitors’ and that ‘[w]hoever isn’t for us | Is against us’ (Heaney 2004: 1, 3). Heaney was writing in 2004,

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when Sophocles’ lines took on new meanings, given George W. Bush’s asseveration that others are either with ‘us’ or with the terrorists. A decade later, Canadian poet Anne Carson similarly recognizes Creon’s binary thinking when she writes that he constantly ‘makes clear his preference for pure categories: friend, enemy; patriot, traitor; winner, loser; good, bad; me, them’ (2015: 7). A year after Carson, in 2016, Shamsie adds fresh layers to the classic by reconsidering the issues Sophocles raised against the backdrop of racist immigration laws, a ‘two-tiered system of justice’ (Shamsie 2018b: n.p.), and one young man’s radicalization. Perhaps taking a cue from Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim, Shamsie transmogrifies Antigone into Aneeka as ‘a feminine figure who defies the state through a powerful set of physical and linguistic acts’ (Butler 2000: 2). It is via a speech that Antigone defies Creon in the play, and similarly in Home Fire Aneeka uses both language (in an appeal for the Muslim-associated value of justice; 224–225) and extralinguistic noise in her attempts to persuade Karamat to allow her to bury her brother’s body: For a few moments there was only a howling noise, the wind raging through the park, and then a hand plucked away the white cloth and the howl was the girl, a dust mask on her face, her dark hair a cascade of mud, her fingers interlaced over the face of her brother. A howl deeper than a girl, a howl that came out of the earth and through her and into the office of the Home Secretary, who took a step back. As if that were the only thing the entire spectacle had been designed to achieve, the wind dropped […], and the girl stopped her noise, unlaced her fingers. The cameras panned, then zoomed. In the whole apocalyptic mess of the park the only thing that remained unburied was the face of the dead boy. ‘Impressive,’ said the Home Secretary. (224)

Aneeka’s refusal to be parted from Parvaiz’s body is abject, given Julia Kristeva’s definition of abjection as a struggle with ‘something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object’ (1982/1980: 4). In a South Asian context, the symbol of the unburied dead body cannot but recall the dissident Punjabi Sufi poet Bulleh Shah, whose corpse vengeful religious authorities would not allow to be interred. This moment, mediated as it is by the optics of a Pakistani news channel’s cameras and coldly interpreted by Karamat as an ‘[i]mpressive’ visual spectacle, is nonetheless highly

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auricular. Not only does it bring to mind Allen Ginsberg’s beat poem ‘Howl’ (1956) and the horrible scene of the magistrate’s torture in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for Barbarians (1980/1978) but also, from Urdu poetry, Kishwar Naheed’s feminist collection The Scream of an Illegitimate Voice (1991). In Shamsie’s arrangement, Aneeka becomes her anguished utterance: a howl that seems to emanate from the earth, aeolian remnants of which soil her face. In pathetic fallacy, the wind howls with her, only abating when her voice drops. Karamat is literally taken aback by Aneeka’s deep-throated, almost bestial wail. The Foreign Secretary hears ‘mere voice’ divested of words, an expression of pain that all mammals and not just Homo sapiens are capable of uttering (Dolar 2006: 105). It takes him a moment to recover his suave cynicism. In his review of Home Fire, Tabish Khair writes of Oedipus (the father of Sophocles’ sibling characters Antigone, Ismene, and Polyneices) that he represents ‘an extreme intermingling of the public and the private, for his story combines regicide and kingship with incest. A similar intermingling, it can be argued (though Shamsie wisely leaves it implicit), characterizes Islamic radicalism’ (2017b: 28). Through this statement, Khair gestures towards the way Islamism takes very public aspects of religion and politics and melds them with the most private of matters, such as how to eat, what to wear (not just for women), and even matters of personal hygiene. And subtly, implicitly, Shamsie portrays her Islamist characters’ absurdly trivial prohibitions against slogan t-shirts or women sitting down in mixed-gender company (167). Over and above the private stories of young European Muslims going to Syria to join Daesh and being denied citizenship when they try to return, she removes some of the noise surrounding such public matters as belonging, assimilation, difference, and justice. Despite exposing the flaws of her male characters, Karamat and his son Eamonn/Ayman (Haemon in the play), Shamsie does not idealize Aneeka. As Hanif Kureishi points out about Sophocles’ classic: ‘What is terrible about Antigone is not so much her belief, but the way she assumes it. She is entirely certain. […] Her intransigence mimics that of Creon. Indeed, the two of them have similar characters, neither having any self-doubt, sceptism or ability to compromise. Both are afflicted by excessive certainty’ (2016: ix). Although in Shamsie’s rendition neither Aneeka nor Karamat are jihadists, in their excessive certainty and refusal to hear others’ arguments they surprisingly articulate worldviews closer

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to those espoused by the violent extremist than does the novel’s conflicted and self-doubting radical Parvaiz. Intertextuality is less sustained in Just Another Jihadi Jane than Shamsie’s wholesale rewriting of Antigone, but Khair nonetheless creates humour and additional narrative strata with his literary references. A gifted poet himself,9 Khair names his opening chapter ‘Reading Scheme’, after a comic villanelle about an adulterous relationship between a mother and the milkman, written in faux-naive ‘Peter and Jane’ primer style10 by Wendy Cope (1986). Missing the poem’s irony altogether, Jamilla responds to it angrily, writing a polemical 500-word essay, ‘full of quotations from the Quran, the hadith, and even one from the Bible’, about its ‘obscene’ content (16, 15). When the headteacher challenges Jamilla over her expressed antipathy towards ‘the depravity of the West’ (16), she brings her older brother Mohammad into school for support. Mohammad goes even further than Jamilla, scoffing at instruction in any verse other than the Qur’an’s ‘divine poetry’ (18). He calls for the school to ban secular poetry, in a controversy clearly intended as a smallscale version of the Rushdie affair. In the UK context about which Khair writes, this additionally rings bells with debates about the national curriculum, faith schools, and Birmingham’s 2014–2015 ‘Trojan horse’ scandal. Small wonder that around the same time he published this novel, Khair wrote a column for the Hindu in which he argued that a literary education can work as a corrective to fundamentalisms of all kinds. In the essay, he argues that it is the process of reading that is salutary, rather than any particular import yielded by literature. Fundamentalists, he suggests, will not engage with texts’ nuances, reducing literature to a ‘singular message’ (2017a: n.p.). And, as I have indicated, both authors explore the complexity and subtlety of signification: how signs are multiply read and misread with anything from droll to disastrous consequences. Pinning some of the blame for simplistic readings on our current ‘technocratic’ societies, Khair concludes his essay by emphasizing the crucial need to teach ‘literary exegesis’ (2017a: n.p.) so as to avoid the bitonal thinking that can lead to extremism. Given this background, it is clear that Cope’s poem is included to provoke readers to reject the young Jamilla’s dogmatic ‘reading scheme’, whereby ‘pure’ Muslims shut their ears to sacrilegious subject matter. A comparable moment is found in Home Fire when readers learn of Parvaiz’s long-term involvement with a campaign to save his local library

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from closure. Caught up as he is in Farooq’s and the other Islamists’ propaganda offensive about global injustice, Parvaiz feels embarrassed at the prospect of being seen fund-raising for a library.11 Yet the Observer’s interviewer tells Shamsie that she interprets the public library in Home Fire as functioning as ‘a signifier of moral good’ (Thorpe 2017: n.p.).12 This interpretation is perceptive, as Farooq reassures Parvaiz that libraries and all other public services matter and are safeguarded in the Islamic State. His lip service to the importance of literature soon rings hollow when Farooq misses Parvaiz’s intertextual joke about Daesh’s fabled glory: ‘Let’s follow the Yellow Brick Road, or is it the White Rabbit that takes us there?’. Through Farooq’s blank look and his rebuke that Parvaiz should think of more ‘serious’ topics (145), Shamsie suggests that Islamists’ view of literature as inconsequential and their failure to understand irony contribute to their ruthlessly simplified cosmology. I have shown that both Just Another Jihadi Jane and Home Fire share a deep-rooted interest in various sorts of text, from the sacred book of the Qur’an and ancient Greek classics, to contemporary poetry and public libraries. In addition, as I will explore later on, both novels probe those stentorious texts that are increasingly being disseminated online. When I chaired Shamsie and others on a panel at the Bradford Literature Festival in July 2017, the author shared that, after the EU referendum in June 2016, she started using the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ about the British for the first time in her life.13 Opposed to the Leave vote as she is, the historic mistake of Brexit ironically made her feel at home, since it chimed with the political disarray and violence of Pakistan, the nation she grew up in. Unquestionably, the feeling of being at home is one of the book’s major themes. This is indicated by the title, which alludes to the First World War song ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. Lena Guilbert Ford’s lyrics, set to a melody by Ivor Novello, exhort the women left behind to keep up their houses and their spirits despite justifiable fears for the men away fighting for ‘honour’, ‘freedom’, and ‘friend[ship]’. Shamsie transposes ideas from the First World War (a conflict she explored in relation to Indian soldiers in her 2014 novel A God in Every Stone), as well as the classical battles in Thebes evoked by Heaney, onto contemporary themes of jihad and securitization. And, equally, ‘home fire’ suggests the possibility of terrorism and conflagration here at home. Home for Isma Pasha is lower middle-class suburbia near Preston Road station. By contrast, privileged Eamonn was raised in affluent Kensington and Chelsea, by Holland Park – where his father Karamat

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still lives, having put an impoverished upbringing in Bradford far behind him. Drifting between jobs, Eamonn can still afford to live in a flat in on-trend Notting Hill, paid for by his powerful parent. Like Karamat before her, Isma tries to escape the poverty of her surroundings. Her life was long ago made difficult by the abandonment of the family by her terrorist father Adil Pasha. Her mother’s later death from cancer left only the 19-year-old Isma to look after her prepubescent twin siblings. Now that the twins are adults, Isma goes to Amherst to write a doctoral thesis in sociology, ironically missing her planned flight after an aggressive search at Heathrow airport because of her hijab and the father’s reputation. Eventually reaching America, Isma welcomes her sense that the studio apartment she rents there is ‘a home that made almost no demands’. Much of the attraction for Isma of her Amherst room lies in its lack of association with home, so she is surprised when Eamonn sees it as ‘uncluttered’ (46), which she reads as a euphemism for spartan and unhomelike. Just Another Jihadi Jane’s settings are West Yorkshire, Turkey, Bali (where Jamilla has settled and where she conducts her conversation with the unnamed writer), and a village north of Raqqa. Interestingly, Jamilla is coy about the details of both her northern English home and the very different one she finds in Syria. About her Yorkshire flat she shruggingly asks the writer ‘Do I need to describe the building?’ (2), before sketching a rundown, condom- and syringe-strewn apartment block. As for the Syrian location, she paints it as a generic underdeveloped conurbation: full of people, counterfeit goods, and a motley collection of architecture: ‘Let me call Hejjiye’s town just the Town. That should suffice. Let it stand in for all such towns in those parts’ (87). If Jamilla is dismissive towards her new home, she is also suspicious of people who feel easily at home. For instance, she sees Hejjiye as: a person who would be at home, in control and totally satisfied with herself, anywhere. She could have been a politician in Europe, justifying racist immigration laws in the most humane terms; she could have been a corporate head in New York, or a banker in Tokyo. Whatever set of rules she found around herself, she would use them to empower herself, unable even to see the monstrous shadows thrown by her goodness. (205)

Those who can make the most ‘monstrous’ ideologies homely or heimlich – in Freud’s or Bhabha’s senses of the word14 – are, Jamilla suggests, dangerous and self-serving. The novel aligns with those

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who feel out of place (Said 1999) rather than at home in the world (Bhabha 1992). Despite growing up in Yorkshire, Jamilla knows ‘it was not home. I did not belong here, I felt; I never would’ (68). She experiences a strange sense of homecoming when she arrives in Turkey and sees a spectrum of women’s outfits, from niqabs to miniskirts, similar to those on display in her northern English city. This familiarity is a false flag, as she swiftly passes into Syria where she comes to regard Daesh’s values as utterly alien and to long for ‘news from home’ (96). She realizes, though, that she can never return to her heimlich Yorkshire space, since the return of this ‘Jihadi Jane’ would create intense media interest and intractable difficulties for her mother. It is telling that she makes a new life for herself in Indonesia, a ‘space of moderate Islam’ (Botta et al. 2017/2016: 230). This spatial relocation is symbolic of the shift Jamilla herself has made away from dogmatic religio-politics towards a subtler faith of ‘endless doubts’ (218). Pakistan is the other, little-known, shadowy home of secondgeneration British Muslims such as those portrayed in the two novels. The country is hardly mentioned in Just Another Jihadi Jane, which concentrates on Pakistanis in Britain. These include a glitzy group of Londoners, originally from Karachi, of whom Jamilla’s father disapproves for their supposedly irreligious and deracinated ways. Ameena is Indian Muslim, like the author Tabish Khair himself, while Jamilla’s family are muhajirs but she has only been to Pakistan ‘a couple of times as a kid’ (86). Similarly, the ‘Most Dangerous Country in the World’15 is barely mentioned in Home Fire’s first half, although it figures as a stylized, postapocalyptic landscape in the novel’s final section. In a similar experience to one described by Kureishi in his autobiographical essay ‘The Rainbow Sign’ (1986: 17), a cousin tells Parvaiz: ‘I’m a Pakistani and you’re a Paki’ (150). His not feeling at home anywhere is one factor that contributes to Parvaiz’s radicalization. The more assimilated character Eamonn usually tells people ‘I’ve never even been to Pakistan’ (98) when they wrongly assume he has insider knowledge about his father’s birth nation. Apart from this mention, there are only a few indirect references to Pakistan early in the novel through telling Urdu phrases, such as baytakalufi, or feeling at home with a friend by dropping formalities. Isma’s brother Parvaiz finds just such an easy intimacy with his fellow British Pakistani Farooq, which we will see shortly as I turn to analysis of the importance of sound in each text.

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We saw at the beginning of this chapter that in ‘Terror: A Speech After 9/11’ Spivak argues that we must ‘listen to the other as if it were a self, neither to punish nor to acquit’ (2004: 83) – even when that other is a terrorist. Writing in a similar key, Shamsie traces Parvaiz’s passionate friendship with Farooq, descent into violent extremism, and subsequent remorse. Listening to varied points of view is exactly what she does in Home Fire. What is more, both Shamsie’s characters (particularly the siblings) and her readers listen to, or at least hear, the other’s arguments. Although not necessarily punishing or acquitting, the situation asks them to make judgements. At the same time, the novelist disrupts the centrality of ‘the cardcarrying listeners, the hegemonic people, the dominant people’ (Spivak 1990/1986: 60), giving a platform for others to speak too. Shamsie records Parvaiz’s screams of pain at Farooq’s second round of torture, an ordeal that Parvaiz himself instigated so as to share the pain his father went through at Bagram airbase. Readers are made privy to Aneeka’s complaint that British Muslims experience ‘rendition, detention without trial, airport interrogations, spies in your mosques, teachers reporting your children to the authorities’ (90–91). As Nisha Kapoor shows in Deport, Deprive, Extradite, these sorts of injustices are increasingly prevalent in British criminal justice policy, which she dubs ‘policing to produce culprits’ (2018: 164). Shamsie also puts the sadomasochistic relationship between Parvaiz and Farooq almost within readers’ earshot. Put simply, Farooq purports to teach Parvaiz ‘how to be a man’ (129). One of his methods is to have accomplices inflict pain on the younger man, not only by chaining him in a stress posture, but also by subjecting him to an unendurable hubbub (stress positions and prolonged exposure to loud noise are both, of course, torture techniques used by the US): He [Farooq] heard his voice begging, but the two men didn’t even look in his direction. The video-game sound designer hadn’t accounted for cheap speakers, and the crackling and distortion were more intolerable than gunfire and death screams. He tried prayer but it did nothing. […] Every crackle from the speakers was magnified until it became a physical force attacking his ears. He was screaming in pain, had been screaming in pain, for a very long time. One of the cousins pressed pause. The sounds of the everyday rushed to embrace him – rattling windows, traffic, his breath. The two men walked over, unshackled him. (137)

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The unpleasant din assails Parvaiz’s ears, causing physical pain as well as mental and spiritual dissociation. Once it is turned off, the hush feels like a caress as it lets in the ordinary sounds of the city. Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fear of Barbarians was written in 2007, but in its English edition, published in 2010, the French-Bulgarian critic reflected on the release by Barack Obama in 2009 of secret torture memos written during George W. Bush’s administration. These memos revealed the way the US sought to change the definition of torture after 9/11 to recategorize waterboarding, humiliation, sleep deprivation, and – most relevant for our purposes – being subjected to deafeningly loud music. Such examples of ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ (Todorov 2010/2008: 114–115), would now be termed ‘increased pressure’ rather than torture. The Bush regime’s weasel words notwithstanding, Clive Stafford Smith (2008) and Ian E. J. Hill (2012) write about the damaging impact on the psyches and the hearing of detainees being played various kinds of music at top volume in American internment camps. Just as 2010s jihadists from Daesh have put their prisoners in orange jumpsuits ‘as a nod and a wink to the Guantanamo situation’,16 so too does Farooq appropriate the West’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques as part of his carrot-and-stick recruitment tactics.17 The inhuman treatment Parvaiz receives has the effect of making him feel disconnected from his own body, as he hears himself screaming in agony and imploring the men to stop. If they are not specifically auditory, similar aspects of torture and violence are described in Khair’s novel, especially when it comes to the domestic violence that Ameena undergoes at the hands of her husband Hassan. This begins with a hard slap Hassan gives her for protecting a Yazidi boy, which was ‘the first time anyone had hit Ameena’ (167). The violence culminates when Hassan deals out a sadistic punishment of ten lashes that leave Ameena’s back ‘scarred in strips’ (149). In addition to this domestic terror, it is also unclear whether the two young protagonists Ameena and Jamilla are worldly enough to be fully aware of the sexual violence the Daesh fighters visit on the Kurdish women, Sera and Dilnaz, whom they hold in detention at the orphanage (144). The absence of their awareness could be a wilful closing of the eyes and ears to the women’s sexual torture at the hands of Daesh men. Alternatively, it might simply mean that Jamilla and Ameena are in denial, being unwilling to listen to the Kurdish others’ words until it is too late.18

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Returning to Home Fire, in a self-flagellating mood, Parvaiz later tries to inflict the same kind of sonic torture on himself that Farooq had inflicted on him by blasting heavy metal through his headphones; but he gives up after 20 minutes. It is not easy to torture oneself; a partner is needed. Their torrid friendship contributes to Parvaiz’s swift acceptance of Farooq’s misinformation about the impressive welfare state Daesh has set up in Raqqa. Farooq claims gender divisions are defined more clearly and well under the Islamic State, and that everyone is looked after amid sanitary, efficient public services. This chimes with Sageman’s exploration of ‘in-group love’ as a prime motivation for jihadism (2004: 135), and with Winter’s analysis of the sophisticated ‘media jihad’ or ‘narrative-led terrorism’ propagated by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s caliphate (2017: 6, 18). Yet, cutting through the persuasive words of Daesh propagandists, Parvaiz will discover that the reality in this north Syrian city is ‘inequality between the locals and those who ruled over them’ (172). Common to both novels is jihadist characters’ sweeping assumption that all sections of the Western media peddle in propaganda and that the Islamic State is paradisiacal rather than the awful place it is usually portrayed as being. Similarly to Parvaiz, Just Another Jihadi Jane’s Jamilla and Ameena become disillusioned while in Syria, as they see the cruel treatment of people assumed to belong to the Yazidi sect, watch young girls from the orphanage being sent away to act as suicide bombers, and realize that leaders such as the female propagandist Hejjiye and the military man Hassan are protected from the ravages of war, while other, less senior people find themselves exposed to danger and not listened to as they defend the frontline. Since early childhood, Parvaiz has had sharp hearing and, compared to others, he finds ‘[t]he sound of the world turned up just that little bit’ (121). As a consequence, he is ‘obsess[ed]’ by sound, ‘uncaring of anything except capturing something previously unheard’ (25, 12). His ‘sound projects’ (25) include making aural diaries of the noises he hears across London during an average day, and over nearly four years creating a 24-hour track ‘that his ideal listener would play between midnight of one day and the next’ (131). When he departs for the Islamic State, his cover story is a job opportunity sourced by his guitarist cousin in Karachi to work as a sound engineer for a television programme that bears striking similarities to the show Coke Studio. Pakistan’s legendary music television programme began broadcasting in 2008 using a format

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and sponsorship from the Coca-Cola Company, and continues to enjoy great popularity today. While Isma does not view Parvaiz’s sound work as a lucrative career, in Raqqa he can put his skills to use, working as a sound man for the kind of propaganda videos that had interpellated him so powerfully in Farooq’s company back home. In the late 2000s and 2010s, creative artists evinced great interest in the jihadist video, particularly its horrifying visual qualities. In ‘The Reality and the Record’ (2009), Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim tells the story of a man who is kidnapped and forced to act in a range of parts for propaganda videos. As I have shown elsewhere (Chambers 2012), Chris Morris’s film Four Lions (2010) is preoccupied with jihadist videos, phone footage, and hand-held camera techniques. Hanif Kureishi’s short story ‘Weddings and Beheadings’ is written from the perspective of a jobbing filmmaker in an unnamed country (probably Iraq), who is coerced into filming and posting on the Internet recordings of executions. At the end of the story, the narrator expresses his desire to make an artistic film, ‘maybe beginning with a beheading, telling the story that leads up to it’ (2010: 613). Mohsin Hamid’s story ‘A Beheading’ takes just such a point of departure. Hamid focalizes the victim’s point of view and moves the setting to Pakistan, with references to cricket and the Pashto language. Written in the present tense, the narrative arc follows a writer who is taken from his house by jihadists, driven to a dilapidated house, and murdered. The deeply pessimistic ending describes the man witnessing his own filmed beheading, both aurally and visually: ‘Then I hear it. I hear the sound of my blood rushing out and I open my eyes to see it on the floor like ink and I watch as I end before I am empty’ (2010: 195). In a powerful essay, ‘Unheard-of Things’ (2016) Ethiopian-American author Maaza Mengiste shares her fellow creative artists’ interest in the jihadist video and like Hamid balances her discussion of the gaze and listening so that the emphasis on these two senses is equally weighted: I am talking about our responsibility, our duty, in the face of those unspeakable and unheard-of things. How do we begin to construct a vocabulary if all we can do is stand in numb and silent grief? What is there to really see of those who once stood and then were forced to kneel, if all we do is look away? What I have begun to think: that before the word comes the image, that before we describe, we must first be willing to look. We must stare,

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then verbalize, then reclaim. We learn to comprehend what is in front of us by writing, by re-creating in such a way that we urge others not to turn aside. (90)

Accordingly, Shamsie takes up where Hamid and Mengiste leave off, but rather than the visual she concentrates on auditory media’s capacity to affect sensibilities. For Parvaiz, absorbed in his labour, ‘nothing but getting the sound right mattered’. He becomes obsessed with ‘[t]he fascination of discovering the different pitch and timbre of a nail through flesh, a blade through flesh’ (170). There is a chilling conjunction here of the creativity of sound alongside its witness to torture. As Irish novelist Colum McCann’s blurb indicates – ‘Shamsie […] seems as if she has heard, and listened to, the music of what surrounds us’ (in Shamsie 2017a: n.p.) – this book is saturated with noise. Although deliberately left unnamed, the background music includes Indian maestro A. R. Rahman’s ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ from the Bollywood film Dil Se (Ratnam 1998). Revealingly, this is a film about violent insurgency in Kashmir with a similarly explosive ending to Home Fire.19 Also evoked is Pakistani pop group Vital Signs’ 1989 song ‘Gori’,20 whose lyrics extolling the beauty and success of a fair-skinned girl cast into sharp relief Eamonn’s privilege as a secular man with light skin, a white mother, and a Westernized version of his name which is useful in an Islamophobic world (29). Home Fire is an ‘aural map’ of a novel (172) that envelops its audience in rich soundscapes. From an eerie music uncannily created by icicles in the chill of a Hampshire county winter to the playlists enjoyed by the young British Muslims while cooking dinner,21 Shamsie painstakingly minutes her characters’ sonic agenda items. Not only is the novel about hearing, but it also puts great emphasis on being heard. A few words are in order here on the distinction McCann hints at when he says Shamsie has ‘heard, and listened to, the music of what surrounds us’ (in Shamsie 2017a: n.p.; emphasis added). Anshuman A. Mondal explicitly draws out this nicety when he writes of the concentrated attentiveness that differentiates listening from hearing. On the words’ subtle differences, Mondal further elaborates that listening ‘speaks of a particular kind of attitude towards, and therefore relationship with, the speaking “other”; it involves a “tuning in” or “focussing” that “hearing” does not’ (2018: n.p.). This is significant for Home Fire, in which Eamonn notices that Aneeka sometimes ‘switch[es] out of the frequency of their relationship’ (83). Although still

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physically present and hearing Eamonn’s words, she grows distant and refuses to listen. This is represented in an ambient simile: it is ‘as if an elbow had accidentally pressed against a radio button and, mid-note, jazz became static’ (84). Unaccustomed to being othered, the usually self-possessed Eamonn rightly worries that these occasional jarring moments akin to audio feedback will cause lasting interference in their relationship. I also wish to explore the relationship between sound and text, bringing together the discussion of (inter-)textuality with the sonic. In relation to non-linguistic, embodied sonic communication, a two-way flow of sound is present from the twins’ pre-speech babyhood onwards, when ‘there was no sound except their breath in unison, the universe still around them’ (27). Their pre-linguistic communication continues into adulthood too, each of the twins secure in the knowledge that next to their own heart is another beating organ ‘experiencing every moment of fear, every second of wonder alongside it’ (139). After the rupture from his twin caused by going to the Islamic State, Parvaiz finds himself unable to phone Aneeka and can only communicate through text messages, since ‘[c]onversation had become unimaginable’ (170). His experiences in Syria are unspeakable and would be unintelligible to civilians back home, even to his sister. Regarding linguistic textual communication, individuals who lack the somatic twin bond need to shout to get heard. I use the term ‘heard’ here in a metaphorical sense, given that communication is transformed into textual rather than oral communication at one particular moment in the novel. In an undergraduate class in sociology, quiet, turban-wearing Isma bursts into a tirade about how the British media manipulatively portray the 2005 London bombers as ‘unBritish’. Only then does her lecturer notice her, exclaiming: ‘You have quite a voice when you decide to use it’ (38). This lecturer decides to champion that hitherto silent voice, encouraging Isma to start an academic career by writing about the post-9/11 securitization of Muslims. In this way, textuality offers something that oral communication does not. Writing, as Jacques Rancière oxymoronically argues in Mute Speech, is a ‘mute-loquacious’ enterprise, whereby the ceaseless ‘chatter’ of literary prose vies for airtime with the ‘profound silence’ this fiction paradoxically creates (2011/1998: 21, 125). Furthermore, words are literature’s simultaneously ‘sonorous and imagistic’ building blocks, producing similar effects on the senses as sights and sounds (Rancière 2011/1998: 43).

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Representations of sound by Khair may well be shaped by the fact that the author has been partially deaf since early childhood. In Seeing Voices Oliver Sacks writes about the profusion of art that arose from sign language (1990: 149), and so it may be that his hearing loss has contributed to Khair’s unique mastery of voice in this novel. An early draft of Just Another Jihadi Jane contained a fuller frame narrative, in which Jamilla’s writer friend expressed his perspective in the firstperson, a perspective that was rather intrusive and was rightly expunged from later drafts. This author character is half-deaf and, as is the case with Khair, the condition was probably caused by aggressive treatment of a virus in early childhood at the instigation of his family of doctors. Yet, like the deaf critic Donna McDonald, who asserts ‘I have never experienced the sensation of my other-hearingness as a grief or a loss’ (2009: 173), Khair’s fictional writer does not mind his condition. This narrator explains that on occasion ‘I needed to take off my hearing aids and return to the quieter world I had grown up in before my “hearing impairment” was discovered and unfortunately remedied’ (Khair 2015: 3). The absence of one of the senses, while it changes one’s experiences and can prove very difficult in an ableist world, opens people up to the sharpening of other senses and of creativity. Yet as McDonald argues (2009: 174), following Susan DeGaia, such a sharpened outlook is rarely attended to in mainstream society. In its final, published version Just Another Jihadi Jane opens sotto voce, but the novel’s volume is turned up in the Syria sections, reflecting Jamilla’s increasingly clamorous movement away from politicized religion as she encounters Daesh’s atrocities. Music ‘had merely been in the backdrop’ during her childhood (116), for her family was even suspicious of melismatic religious music such as qawwali. In Syria, Jamilla’s soundscape is broadened, as her Turkish companion Halide is incongruously a fan of both Bollywood movies and rousing jihadist songs known as anasheed. Jamilla and Halide watch snatches of such art but can only do so furtively: ‘there were no earphones available in the room – I guess on purpose – and we could not play the sound out aloud’ (116–117). This causes the girls to choose old silent films instead, especially those of Charlie Chaplin, as they are entertaining even without headphones. The austerely silent world of Daesh leads Halide to impose muteness on herself, ‘stuff[ing] her scarf into her mouth in order to prevent herself from screaming with laughter’ at the silent comedies (117). Later we learn that the orphanage workers reprimand children who laugh noisily,

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and this makes Jamilla-as-narrator conclude that Islamists ‘find it […] difficult to smile’ (179).22 In Rabelais and His World (1984/1965: 59–144), Mikhail Bakhtin writes of prohibitions against comedy and the levelling, dissident potential of laughter. Relatedly, in Empire of the Senses David Howes recognizes the threat laughter poses to language and discourse, calling it ‘a spontaneous, corporeal eruption into and disruption of the linguistic realm’ (2005: 2). Not for nothing does Jacques Attali remind us that totalitarian regimes ban particular noises because of their ‘subversive’ attributes, preferring insipidly melodic and conventional sounds (1996/1977: 7). Women’s laughter has a particularly radical power, and it often does not go unpunished. As Margaret Atwood writes, ‘men feel threatened by women [because] […] [t]hey’re afraid women will laugh at them, [… and] [u]ndercut their world view. […] [W]omen feel threatened by men [because] […] they’re afraid of being killed’ (2011/1982: 413). Given all this, the scene in which the girls surreptitiously watch silent movies, and try to suppress their laughter because they fear violent punishment, is an illustrative example where the oppressor’s (in this case Daesh’s) failure to listen and privileging of some sounds over others is captured. It is important to distinguish the imposition of sound or silence (such as Farooq’s sonic torture or Daesh’s suppression of music, films, ululations of grief, and peals of laughter) from the sounds that the characters are naturally drawn to (as in Parvaiz’s sound projects and Halide’s attraction to Bollywood and anasheed). Sound as a weapon is very different from sound as expression, and Daesh uses the former to stifle the latter. This is especially relevant considering how much these jihadists ‘despise […] popular music’ (Harkin 2015: 5), target concert halls such as Paris’s Bataclan or the Manchester Arena, make bonfires out of CDs, and so on. Pushing against Daesh’s humourless hush, Just Another Jihadi Jane builds to a crescendo, and the novel’s final two chapters ‘The Sounds of War’ and ‘Suicide Bomber’ merit an especially close listen. These chapters emphasize the painful realities of war by mobilizing sound in a material rather than metaphorical way. In the introduction to this chapter, I considered sound as a form of communication, discussing the vital importance that voices from below are heard in public discourse. Early on in Chapter 5, then, the inference was therefore that sound is a positive thing, as Spivak hypothesizes through her repeated contention that listening and conversing are ethical moves. However, here, as with the

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torture scenes in Shamsie’s text, we encounter sound as a form of violence, and silence as a relief. In the build-up to this concluding segment of Khair’s novel, the noises of planes and bombs have been heard from a distance. Now the multinational war against Daesh finally reaches this village north of Raqqa, and the noise is like the hammering in of nails (189, 191). Fears of American surveillance mean that the villagers bolster their silence even more, and communication with their jihadist loved ones fighting on the frontline is forbidden. Jamilla experiences one particularly devastating explosion as an aural assault: ‘It was like the world had come to an end. Waves of sound passed through us’ (214). There are moments of calm amidst the violence, but even these seem portentous to apprehensive Jamilla: The silence grew with the sunshine. For the first time in two or three days, I heard the cry of birds – […] even a crow’s croaking sounded wonderful. There still was life. […] You have no idea how beautiful the world looks and sounds in the hours after a battle stops! How does that poem go, the one we read in school? … [A]t my back, I could hear death’s winged chariot hurrying near. That was all the sound I could hear. Believe me. It drowned out the murmur of Hejjiye’s words. (203, 205)

This pastoral passage reminds one of Walter Benjamin’s discussion in ‘The Storyteller’ of the uncommunicable nature of the First World War’s horrors, a war in which, like now, young people stood ‘under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and [found that] beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body’ (2007/1968: 84). The tranquil, bucolic silence after the bombing in the novel is soon disrupted by Jamilla’s half-recollection of lines from Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘at my back I always hear | Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near’ (51). A heavy irony is attendant here, given that what the reluctant jihadist remembers is a poem about seduction. Under Daesh’s rule, death is a vociferous force, overpowering more subdued quotidian sounds such as the crowing of birds or women talking. ‘The Sounds of War’ opens with Ameena recovering from the lashes inflicted by her bigoted husband. She has been punished because she tried to protect the ‘Devil-worship[ping]’ Yazidi boy from a planned

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execution to be filmed and distributed on YouTube, just like the video to which Parvaiz contributed in Home Fire (166). The trauma Ameena has undergone marks her tongue: she is newly ‘guarded’ in what she says, her speech succinct and cautious. Her Yorkshire burr is also toned down: ‘She spoke more like a book now, like Mrs. Chatterji, slipping only slightly into the accents of her childhood English. “Yer see, Jamilla,” she replied […], “Allah always has a purpose; he is kind to us even in our errors”’ (174). The formerly ebullient girl is now almost inaudible, and she censors her own speech to ensure that her words are blandly inoffensive and her regional accent neutralized. Yet Khair’s text represents her effaced, truncated speech as mimicry, in Bhabha’s dual sense of ‘resemblance and menace’ (2004/1994: 86). As the novel’s dramatic ending makes clear, she is guarding her tongue and mimicking her oppressors as part of a plot to rebel against them. The use (or not) of dialect is clever here because readers think she has been brainwashed. However, her speech is a way of falsely convincing her enemies and protecting Jamilla by not making her privy to Ameena’s plans, and instead leaving her to assume they are no longer friends. In this context, silence is not just a self-defence mechanism, but may also be used to shield others from harm. This is not made explicit until the novel’s climax because we hear about events from Jamilla’s point of view. But Ameena’s motives can be read between the lines if readers are attentive to the text’s gaps and elisions. When it comes to most of the reviews Just Another Jihadi Jane received, their focus was primarily on what impetus would drive British Asian women to join the conflict. But in the novel Khair is also trying to imagine what form a critique from within the jihadist struggle would take. To expand narrow discussions of what goes wrong in order to trigger a Briton to be radicalized and join an extremist group, Khair (and Shamsie) asks what, if any, ideals remain once a person goes beyond the smokescreen of ‘jihadi chic’ (see Picart 2017). The DanishIndian novelist provides an appraisal of the poverty of Daesh’s thought, which probes into the movement more deeply than the usual stereotype of the Islamist offered in Western letters. Nor is the novel especially preoccupied with the UK, but encompasses a vastly more global purview. The fact that the reviews miss these issues shows that the novel and the type of Muslim characters it portrays have not been listened to carefully enough. My auditory focus is more salient than the reviews’ emphasis on radicalization, because (mis)information, the controlled use of

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propaganda, and Daesh’s internal communication are some of the novel’s key concerns. Not only is Khair’s text posing a question about who listens in Western countries but also whether anyone listens anywhere. Daesh reveals itself to be extremely unresponsive, despite its claims that Muslims’ anguish does not fall on deaf ears with them as it does with the Western mainstream. The post-Brexit referendum, Trumpian world of Internet feedback loops, Facebook echo chambers, and fake news is symptomatic, as Les Back puts it, of a culture that ‘speaks rather than listens’ (2007: 7). Shamsie trains a sharp ear to this social media cacophony, representing it in part through a version of what Margaretta Jolly calls ‘e-epistolarity’ (2011: 158–162). The letter’s longstanding function in fiction is replaced in contemporary e-epistolary novels by emails and – admittedly something of an afterthought for Jolly – ‘social networking’ (2011: 158). In challenging popular nostalgia around the letter, Jolly nonetheless refuses to idealize e-epistolary forms, depicting them as ‘troublingly unreliable’ and ‘crude’ (2011: 156, 158). Demonstrating that by the 2010s emailing has fallen out of favour when it comes to informal personal communication, this technology is actually only mentioned once in Home Fire (81) and readers never see any emails directly. More prevalent are SMS and WhatsApp messages, Twitter commentary, and newspaper articles. Fragments of text from these are provided in the novel, their difference from the main narrative signalled by various fonts, and occasionally by deviations such as columns in the page layout. Shamsie details the bubbling Skype ringtone, online news articles shared, FaceTime rendezvous, and messaging app chatter. Like Jolly, she recognizes the unreliability of electronic communication, showing, for example, that line identification makes it easy for recipients to ignore calls, as Isma does when she notices Parvaiz on Skype after he has betrayed her by joining the Islamic State. And Shamsie knows better than Jolly the ‘crudeness’ of cyberspace, in the form of racism, Islamophobia, and sexism. This crudeness is even signified through the typography, given that a traditional serif font is used for the main body text (Garamond) and for newspaper reports (Times Regular), while a sparse, contemporary sans serif typeface usually denotes electronic communication in the novel (for instance, Trade Gothic for SMS messages). In terms of content, after Karamat gives a trenchant statement that Parvaiz’s body will be sent to Pakistan rather than brought home, a hashtag that starts trending on Twitter is unequivocally racist: ‘#GOBACKWHEREYOUCAMEFROM’ (190). And the siblings’

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ageing neighbour Gladys is trolled for speaking out in Parvaiz’s defence on television, with a false account-holder Tweeting coarsely in her name: ‘I can do things those 72 virgins don’t know about’ (192). Despite her skill at ‘[l]istening online’ (Crawford 2009: 525) and her alertness to the worst of the new media’s excrescences, Shamsie’s is no nostalgic elegy for the days of letter-writing. In her evocation of the digital environment, there is chutzpah and celebration as well as the notes of caution explored above. The novel’s fourth section, ‘Aneeka’, is particularly experimental and decentred, including in its pages text messages, a transcript of a television interview, a list of trending hashtags, Tweets, broadsheet and tabloid journalism, and even a poem that appears to have been penned by grieving Aneeka. In her third novel Kartography (2002), Shamsie addressed the legacy of the 1971 War in Pakistan but also imagined an interactive Internet map of Karachi where people could upload their writing, pictures, and sound-files, anticipating the creation of Google Earth in 2005. In effect, her attitude to what we might call the ‘modem era’ and its possibilities for storytelling constructs, as Caroline Herbert argues, ‘a dialogue between narrative and nonnarrative modes that opens a space for difference and non-identification’ (2011: 171). While Shamsie’s third novel was authored, published, and read in the conventional way, her creation of this online interactive map suggests connections between new narrative forms, new technologies, and a new understanding of ‘home’ and ‘away’. Despite giving a platform for recidivist political aggression, online writing, as Shamsie shows in both Kartography and Home Fire, can also positively disrupt supposedly static boundaries between nations. Khair cuts through the bad reception of certain YouTube preachers and Facebook demagogues, showing how their alluring sound is an aural disguise. Ameena and Jamilla’s radicalization begins with their bonding through searching together for ‘Islamic preaching’ online (29). They find videos which open with reasonable objections to the ‘double standards’ of Western foreign policy, but end in anti-Semitic calumny against ‘that ex-Jew, Marx’ (30). After a while, the girls attend a lecture by a cleric from Birmingham whose YouTube channel they admire. Maulana Abdulaziz bears almost the same name as another maulana, Abdul Aziz, the controversial leader of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid, who notoriously tried to flee the government’s siege of the Red Mosque in 2007 dressed in a woman’s burqa. Yet it is impossible for critics to determine whether the character and the Pakistani preacher are one and the same.

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They see nothing of the man and only ‘hear’ disembodied snippets of his fulminations against usury, Muslims who do not pray, uncovered women, and bloodshed in Palestine (38). In 2006, Charles Hirschkind published a monograph, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. The book already seems quaintly low-tech as it is based on fieldwork conducted in the Cairo of the mid-1990s, before the Internet was widely used. However, Hirschkind’s insights about the popularity of taped sermons transfer onto today’s Muslim e-evangelists: both are ‘part of the acoustic architecture of a distinct moral vision, animating and sustaining the ethical sensibilities that enable ordinary Muslims to live in accord with what they consider to be God’s will’ (2006: 8). It is sound or audition, Hirschkind argues, that has contributed to the Islamic Revival more than any other sensory perception. If listening to YouTube is a conduit to the girls’ formulation of radical politics, Facebook is instrumental in their grooming to join the Islamic State. On this social media platform, plain, unloved Ameena proves susceptible to Hassan’s jihadi chic and his proposal of marriage. Beautiful Jamilla is no stranger to such seductive language, and asks her friend sceptically: ‘How do you know that he is what he claims to be?’ (70). Ameena tells her that Hejjiye introduced them and Jamilla finds this reassuring since, although the girls have not yet met the older woman, her omnipresent social media presence made her seem ‘like a family member’ (71). When they do encounter Hejjiye, she is far from what she had claimed to be. One of the things that had attracted Jamilla, an animal-lover, to Hejjiye’s online persona was the fact that she depicted herself fighting the jihad accompanied by a cat named Batala (meaning heroine). In Syria there is no sign of this cat, and Hejjiye waves aside Jamilla’s enquiries with a dismissive question of her own: ‘[W]ho has time for pets now?’ (92). Islamic culture, if such a monolith exists, has long preferred the auditory to the imagistic. Many Muslims believe that representations of people and animals amount to idolatry, and that only the word can lead to God. The muezzin’s evocative call for Muslims to come to prayer five times a day is a defining sound in Islamic countries around the world. In early Christianity people used to pray using song, prostration, and genuflection (Fulton 2006), but over time Christian prayer experienced a diminuendo to become something more meditative and silent, whereas Muslims retained the physicality and sound. In mainland Europe, raucous arguments are sparked by the competing noises of the church bell

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and the muezzin’s call to prayer. And rows over the azan regularly surface in British politics. More than 1,500 complaints were lodged against Channel 4 for their decision to broadcast the dawn call to prayer during Ramadan in 2013. In 2016, the obnoxious Jayda Fransen, made famous a year later by retweets from Donald Trump, uploaded a video to Britain First’s YouTube channel denigrating a Muslim petition to allow the call to prayer to be broadcast through loudspeakers three times a day at British mosques (unlike the president, I refuse to dignify her hate speech with a reference). On this subject Neil MacGregor argues that ‘the public call to private prayer is still a matter of bitter political debate’ in Britain (2017: n.p.). Returning to the connections I am making between sound and text, communication and representation, and interpellation and radicalization, in both novels reception fails on multiple levels. At the level of kinship, Parvaiz is not listened to by his own sisters, and instead discovers in Farooq a sympathetic listener outside the family. On the religio-political plane, conservative male Muslims disapprove of women keening at graveyards, and Daesh are not ready to listen to music or to girls’ laughter in the orphanage depicted by Khair. More broadly, those seeking to return home from the Islamic State are not given a second chance and nor are their families granted an empathetic hearing. The misalignment between who should speak and who should listen more carefully leads to a fury that fans the flames of hatred and violence that we witness in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Careful attention to the sonic landscapes of these texts allows readers to correct Islamophobic mishearing, to redefine harmony and dissonance, and ‘hear […] moments of subversion and clarification’ (Titlestad 2004: 578). Sound appears both as a metaphorical conceit and as a material or embodied experience in the novels. That is, there are textual moments where voice and sound are positioned as a way of ‘being heard’ that is literal, but also metaphoric of access to representation and a recognition (or, more accurately, reception) that might be political, social, or literary. At other points, the authors are thinking about sound as a material and embodied experience (a phenomenological issue) – in, for example, the torture scenes in Shamsie’s Home Fire. Where sound (or indeed silence) is metaphorical, it seems for the most part productive and to have ethical value, as when we are urged by Spivak to listen to the other. In Khair’s war scenes and Shamsie’s portrayal of torture, sound is a violent weapon. Through their delineations of both positive and negative sound, the

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two novelists seem to heed calls to ‘decipher a sound form of knowledge’ (Attali 1996/1977: 4). Visualism, or the privileging of looking, has led to a long neglect of the aural in academia. Yet Roland Barthes accurately describes the novel’s satisfying aural effects: the text […] produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else. I am not necessarily captivated by the text of pleasure; it can be an act that is slight, complex, tenuous, almost scatterbrained: a sudden movement of the head like a bird who understands nothing of what we hear, who hears what we do not understand. (1975/1973: 24–25)

Let us end by revisiting some of this chapter’s starting points. I opened the discussion by suggesting that literary texts can supplement sociological, psychological, and criminological analyses of radicalization. What literary fiction brings to the table are its qualities of multisensory texture, and in this chapter I enucleated the aural dimension. I would argue that these writers’ accounts of contemporary society not only deserve a hearing; they should be played on repeat in Britain’s Houses of Parliament. Earlier Muslim novels – including others by the two authors – rightly challenged stereotypes of Muslims and fictionalized everyday realities. But terror, both state-sponsored and the work of violent extremists, exists and has to be confronted. Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane and Shamsie’s Home Fire are two of the most plangent and multitonal novels that have yet been written about such violence. We need to be careful about wishful thinking around literature’s prospect of saving the world. Yet literary fiction is contributing to global debate differently from social science-based interventions. Novels add to that body of work, holding the potential to transform our understanding of radicalization by ‘giv[ing] evidence of the profound perplexity’ of both jihadists and those who oppose them (Benjamin 2007/1968: 87). As Rancière suggests, literature has the power to stimulate readers to imagine ‘the general ideas man does not yet have the ability to form by abstraction’ (2011/1998: 58). The woman quoted by Bassel was right to point out that the mainstream Western media only listen to Muslims if they demean their own culture. But literary fiction offers something that journalism cannot. Fiction delves beneath words to shadow forth why individuals have spoken them, and what symbolic bearing they have on our age.

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Notes





1. ‘Sound and fury’ of course refers to Shakespeare’s Macbeth (V.v.25–27) via William Faulkner’s masterpiece (1995/1929), wherein the sound and the fury ultimately denotes idiocy and nonsense. I play with Faulkner’s title so as to bring out the two main strands of my argument around sound and violence. I do not wish to appear as though I am saying that these writers are producing empty noise. Far from it and, as my analysis will show, these are two of the most accomplished texts yet published about the phenomenon of jihadism. 2.  Daesh is just one among a bewildering array of names used by and imposed upon the group also known as Islamic State, IS, ISIS, ISIL, ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī ‘l-‘Irāq wa-sh-Shām, and ad-Dawlah alIslāmiyah. For reasons of consistency, I largely follow the usage of Tabish Khair’s character Jamilla. She prefers to call the jihadists Daesh because they loathe the term (2016: 55), presumably because of its pejorative double meaning of ‘bigot’. However, it is important to remain mindful that terminology, while important, will not win the war against the jihadists and nor will it win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, Syrians, or alienated British Muslims. As Charlie Winter argues, ‘[c]ounter-strategic communications must rest upon implicitly positive foundations and avoid targeting the Islamic State alone’ (2017: 2). Thus, when I refer to the geographical area occupied by Daesh – at least, the area that was occupied by the group at the time when the two authors were writing – I use the term ‘Islamic State’ or ‘State’. In switching terms for context-specific reasons, I am influenced by Kamila Shamsie, who usually refrains from referring to the organization by name in Home Fire, except in a passing allusion made by Karamat Lone to ‘Islamic State’ (2017a: 109) and by two sensationalist and inaccurate media reports to ‘ISIS’ (2017a: 188, 197–198). 3.  Subsequent references are to this (2017a) edition of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. I write that Shamsie ‘attempts’ the London accent, because the Pasha siblings in particular seem too well-spoken for working-class Britons, sounding more like Karachi Grammar School alumni. Similarly, one of the notable features of Khair’s novel is the way he ventriloquizes the speech patterns and dialect words of West Yorkshire. In the American edition of the novel that I reference, characters speak using ‘A’ to denote the first-person pronoun ‘I’, which was what Khair had wanted after consulting some theatre specialists based in Yorkshire. To his dismay the UK edition, published by Reading’s Periscope Books (Khair 2016), stuck to a literary ‘Ah’. There are a few other missteps that cut across both volumes of Khair’s novel, such as ‘kitlin’ for cat and ‘kwacken’ for cure (73, 103) – archaic

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or inaccurate dialect terms that contemporary Yorkshire youths living in ­cities would be unlikely to use. As noted on p. xxviii, Khair is not a resident in Britain, and given his short time in Britain, it is impressive that there are not more lapses. 4. The non-Muslim politicians May and Rudd are evoked in terms of their draconian policies, but the British Pakistani politicians Warsi and Javid (and to a lesser extent Khan) share similarities in their ethnic and social backgrounds as well as their policy decisions. (For evidence that Faiza Khan dreamt up ‘Nostrashamsie’, see Shamsie 2018a: n.p.) 5. Subsequent references are to this (2017/2016) edition of Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. 6. Such sets of binary oppositions are laid out in the epigraph from Leeds poet Tony Harrison’s V., which I suggested my friend Tabish Khair use, since like Khair’s novel this poem is about ‘all the versuses of life’ (Harrison 1989/1985: 11). Khair not only used Harrison’s lines for Just Another Jihadi Jane’s epigraph, but also borrowed at least one expression – ‘poofy words’, used to disparage poetry – from V. (14; see also Harrison 1989/1985: 22).  7. Jamilla’s failure to win a funded place at university galvanizes her mother to start arranging her marriage. Khair represents this as another factor behind the 19-year-old’s departure to the Islamic State. 8. Shamsie (2017a: n.p.). See also Heaney (2004: 1). 9. See, for example, Khair’s volumes of poetry, Where Parallel Lines Meet (2000) and Man of Glass (2010). 10. Peter and Jane were the two child protagonists of Ladybird Books’ Key Words Reading Scheme, which taught children to read from 1958 to 1973 and beyond. While these books are remembered fondly by at least two generations of British readers, they are also often criticized for a lack of diversity and for perpetuating gender stereotypes. 11. At the same time that Shamsie was writing Home Fire, she published an academic article about women’s position in tenth- to twelfth-century al-Andalus. One of the two remarkable women on whom she focuses, Lubna, laboured for Cordoba’s impressive library, built by the Umayyad Caliph Al-Hakam II. Shamsie reads Lubna’s existence with cautious optimism as ‘suggest[ing] a world in which women’s education was not an anomaly’ and showing that ‘women were to be found working outside the domestic sphere’ (2016: 182). In both her fiction and nonfiction, then, Shamsie positions libraries as important spaces of learning and social equality. 12. In her short story collection, Public Library: And Other Stories, Ali Smith – to whose retelling of the Antigone story (2015) Shamsie ‘grateful[ly]’

204  C. CHAMBERS refers in Home Fire (263) – positions the local library as ‘a free space, a democratic space […] whose underlying truth is that it isn’t a shop […] something communal’ that is under threat from government cuts (Smith 2016/2015: 58–59). In the collection, Smith quotes Shamsie discussing her teenage autodidacticism in the British Council library on the evocatively named Bleak House Road in Karachi (2016/2015: 133–134). This is an early experience of libraries that the author also describes in her Observer interview (Thorpe 2017: n.p.). Incidentally, the narrator of Smith’s story ‘Good Voice’ from this collection states, in terms that chime with this chapter’s concerns, that she wants to write a piece focusing on ‘voice, not image, because everything’s image these days and I have a feeling we’re getting further and further away from human voices’ (2016/2015: 25). 13. Shamsie said something similar to Vanessa Thorpe: ‘Being a citizen makes me feel more able to take part in the conversation. I noticed the first time I used “we”, as in “we British”, was after the Brexit vote, as in “What have we done?”’ (Thorpe 2017: n.p.). 14. Freud (2003/1919: 124–125) and Bhabha (1994: 136, 165, 195). Both thinkers play on the German word heimlich’s literal association with home and homeliness, its additional connotations of secrecy and furtiveness, and Freud’s reconstruction of its meaning to denote the opposite of unheimlich or uncanny. 15. In 2007 and again in 2010, the American magazine Newsweek named Pakistan as the world’s most dangerous nation. Other news outlets repeat this charge with depressing regularity. In 2010, an anonymous online piece was probably published by Mohsin Hamid, though Mohammed Hanif, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Kamila Shamsie are other contenders for its authorship. The piece accompanied issue 112 of Granta magazine on Pakistani writing, and satirized this slogan as a marketing exercise: ‘people from all over the world have come to know and love brand Pakistan for its ability to scare the shit out of them. Whatever you write, please respect this legacy. […] Yes, love etcetera is permissible. But bear in mind that Pakistan is a market-leader. The Most Dangerous Place in the World’ (n.a. 2010: n.p.). 16. Mohammed Akunjee, qtd. in Slovo (2016: n.p.); see also Shamsie( 2017a: 149). Shamsie dedicates Home Fire to Gillian Slovo, as well as warmly referencing the latter’s verbatim play Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State (n.p., 264). Some of Charlie Winter’s words are given to an actor in Slovo’s play, and it may have been through this dramaturgical source that Shamsie discovered Winter’s research into Daesh’s methods for radicalization.

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17. In Slovo’s Another World (see previous note), Chair of the South Wales Radicalization Working Group, Rev. Dr Paul Fitzpatrick says: ‘You know how grooming works? “I love you I love you I love you come to me.” And at a given point (sound of a slap) either violence or control, power, money, something – but there’s a slap. At the end there is violence’ (2016: n.p.). This impression of loving words giving way to violence evokes Farooq’s treatment of Parvaiz and is also relevant for Hassan’s treatment of Ameena in Just Another Jihadi Jane (discussed on pp. 195–196). 18. Sera and Dilnaz go silent, as they mysteriously and sinisterly disappear from the pages of Just Another Jihadi Jane. 19. Shamsie describes Eamonn watching ‘a man dancing on the top of a train, declaring – in Urdu, with subtitles – that if your head is in the shade of love then surely your feet are in Paradise’ (87). This is an almost precise description of the scene from Dil Se in which ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ is sung, although Shamsie gives the female lead, Manisha Koirala’s, words to her co-star Shahrukh Khan. At the song’s opening and from atop a train, Koirala’s playback singer intones ‘Jinke sar ho ishq ki chhaaon | Paaon ke neeche jannat hogi’, which translates as ‘The one whose head is in shadow of love | There will be heaven beneath his feet’. 20. In her 2010 essay ‘Pop Idols’, Shamsie explores the rise of Pakistani pop music in the 1980s and 1990s. She was a particular fan of the pioneering Rawalpindi group Vital Signs, seeing them as ‘clean-cut, good-looking and, most shockingly, […] nearby’ (2010: 204). Shamsie’s panegyric for the youthful energy of the Pakistani pop scene, from sibling disco act Nazia and Zoheb in 1981 to Coke Studio in the present day, is intercut with analysis of Pakistan’s political travails. 21. The music has been sent them by a guitar-playing cousin in Pakistan and features ‘chimta and bass guitar, dholak and drums’ (117). The non-linear form of the playlist allows consumers to customize and share music to suit their frame of mind or situation, in what Michael Bull calls ‘a dream of auditory control’ (2007: 129). Finally, straying from our primary focus, it may be observed that during their dinner preparations Parvaiz wears swimming goggles to stop his eyes streaming while cutting onions – a terrific life hack. 22. Similarly, in Gillian Slovo’s verbatim play (discussed in Notes 16 and 17 to this chapter), a Belgian mother explains that when she spoke to her daughter, who had been radicalized and had gone to Syria, she found her coldly taciturn: ‘She wasn’t crying, nothing, because actually, they’re not allowed to cry’ (2016: n.p.). Whether happy or sad, it seems that all kinds of voluble expression of emotion are discouraged by Daesh.

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Lean, Nathan (2012) The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims. John L. Esposito (foreword). London: Pluto. MacGregor, Neil (2017) Living with the Gods. BBC Radio 4. Smita Patel (prod.) and Bridget Harney (ed.). 23 (2 November):30. McCauley, Clark, and Sophia Moskalenko (2010) ‘Recent U.S. Thinking About Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Baby Steps Towards a Dynamic View of Asymmetric Conflict’. Terrorism and Political Violence 22:4: 641–657. McDonald, Donna (2009) ‘The Silence of Sounds’. In Anthony Uhlmann et al. (eds.), Literature and Sensation. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. 173–183. Mengiste, Maaza (2016) ‘Unheard-of Things’. Massachusetts Review 57.1: 88–90. Mondal, Anshuman A. (2018) ‘On Liberty on Listening: John Stuart Mill and the Limits of Liberal Responsiveness’. In Anshuman A. Mondal and Tanja Dreher (eds.), Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics of Difference. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 41–56. Morris, Chris (dir.) (2010) Four Lions. Actors: Riz Ahmed, Kayvan Novak, and Adeel Akhtar. Sheffield: Warp. n.a. (2010) ‘How to Write About Pakistan’. Granta. https://granta.com/howto-write-about-pakistan/. Accessed 6 February 2018. Naheed, Kishwar (1991) The Scream of an Illegitimate Voice: Selection of Poems of Kishwar Naheed. Baidar Bakht et al. (trans.). Lahore: Sang-e-Meel. Pamuk, Orhan (2006/1990) The Black Book. Maureen Freely (trans.). London: Faber and Faber. Petersen, Kirsten Holst, and Anna Rutherford (1986) A Double Colonization: Colonial and Post-colonial Women’s Writing. Sydney: Dangaroo. Picart, Caroline Joan ‘Kay’ S. (2017) American Self-Radicalizing Terrorists and the Allure of ‘Jihadi Cool/Chic’. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Rancière, Jacques (2011/1998) Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics. James Swenson (trans.) and Gabriel Rockhill (intro.). New York: Columbia University Press. Ratnam, Mani (1998) Dil Se. Actors: Shah Rukh Khan, Manisha Koirala, Preity Zinta, and Raghuvir Yadav. Chennai: Madras Talkies. Razzaque, Russell (2008) Human Being to Human Bomb: Inside the Mind of a Terrorist. Cambridge: Icon. Sacks, Oliver (1990) Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf. New York: Harper Perennial. Sageman, Marc (2004) Understanding Terror Networks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Said, Edward W. (1999) Out of Place: A Memoir. London: Granta. Shamsie, Kamila (2002) Kartography. London: Bloomsbury.

210  C. CHAMBERS ——— (2010) ‘Pop Idols’. In John Freeman (ed.), Granta 112. London: Granta. 197–214. ——— (2016) ‘Librarians, Rebels, Property Owners, Slaves: Women in al-Andalus’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52.2: 178–188. ——— (2017a) Home Fire. London: Bloomsbury. ——— (2017b) ‘I, Migrant’. Dawn. 2 April. https://www.dawn.com/ news/1324367. Accessed 12 January 2018. ——— (2018a) (@kamilashamsie) ‘A Few Words About That Whole “Life Imitating Art” Business #homefire #sajidjavid. It Was @BhopalHouse Who Coined “Nostrashamsie”’. 3 May, 06:47. Tweet. ——— (2018b) ‘Exiled: The Disturbing Story of a Citizen Made UnBritish’. Guardian. 17 November. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/ nov/17/unbecoming-british-kamila-shamsie-citizens-exile. Accessed 2 January 2019. Slovo, Gillian (2016) Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State. London: Oberon Modern Plays. Kindle. Smith, Ali (2016/2015) Public Library and Other Stories. London: Penguin. Smith, Clive Stafford (2008) ‘Welcome to “the Disco”’. Guardian. 4 July. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo. Accessed 27 February 2018. Soufan, Ali H. (2017) ‘Foreword’. In Malcolm Nance and Chris Sampson (eds.), Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad. New York: Skyhorse. vii. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. 271–313. ——— (1990/1986) ‘Questions of Multi-Culturalism’. In Sarah Harasym (ed.), The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York: Routledge. 59–66. ——— (1996/1993) ‘Subaltern Talk: Interview with the Editors’. In Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (eds.), The Spivak Reader. London: Routledge. 287–308. ——— (2004) ‘Terror: A Speech After 9-11’. Boundary 2 31.2 (Summer): 81–111. Thorpe, Vanessa (2017) ‘Kamila Shamsie: “Being a UK Citizen Makes Me Feel More Able to Take Part in the Conversation”’. Observer. 27 August. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/27/kamila-shamsie-home-fireman-booker-longlisted-author-interview. Accessed 2 January 2017. Titlestad, Michael (2004) ‘Listening to Bloke Modisane: Considering Acoustic Regimes in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing’. Social Identities 10.5: 575–588. Todorov, Tzvetan (2010/2008) The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations. Andrew Brown (trans.). London: Polity Press.

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Updike, John (2006) Terrorist. London: Hamish Hamilton. Winter, Charlie (2016) ‘ISIS’ Offline Propaganda Strategy’. Brookings Institution. 31 March. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2016/ 03/31/isis-offline-propaganda-strategy/. Accessed 27 February 2018. ——— (2017) Media Jihad: The Islamic State’s Doctrine for Information Warfare. London: ICSR. http://icsr.info/2017/02/icsr-report-media-jihadislamic-states-doctrine-information-warfare/. Accessed 1 January 2018.

CHAPTER 6

The Doors of Posthuman Sensory Perception in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Humans are limited in what they can experience and know by their ability to perceive through the five (some say six or more) senses. Steven Connor reminds us that ‘[t]he number of the senses was not automatically or universally fixed as five’ (2015: 180). Even for those societies that agree on recognizing five modalities of sense, these senses are blunt instruments at best when it comes to understanding an infinitely complex world. In a fine insight, Diane Ackerman states: ‘For convenience, and perhaps in a kind of mental pout about how thickly demanding just being alive is, we say there are five senses’ (1990: 302). Yet there are several other ways of sensing out there that require research; Ackerman lists electromagnetic, vibrational, muscular, and gravitational senses. Having examined all of the senses other than sight (which I explored in Britain Through Muslim Eyes), I want to close this book by thinking through what happens to sensory studies in a digital age, via a reading of Mohsin Hamid’s tech-savvy novel Exit West (2017). New technologies facilitating computer-mediated communication, human–computer interaction, augmented or artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, are having effects which Paul Rodaway presciently termed ‘the hyper-realisation of the senses’ (1994: 173). In the current rapidly technologizing age, our senses are evolving. As Steven Connor suggests (2015: 186), if new technologies are subjecting us to new forms of control over our bodies, they are also allowing us to enhance and extend the range of our senses. Even those of us who have not (yet) been © The Author(s) 2019 C. Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52089-0_6

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modified through pacemakers, prosthetics, or plastic surgery enhancements are connected to our phones – almost a new appendage that comes as standard from the toddler years onwards. As people drift through the streets staring at and touching their screens, no wonder popular culture has seen a revival in the zombie genre. Moreover, research suggests that human bodies are adapting to fit the new technologies. Fingers are becoming stronger, more dexterous, or suffering damage (‘smartphone thumb’) through phone use, while reactions are quicker and hand–eye coordination is allegedly better among those who regularly play videogames. In his second novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hamid’s protagonist Changez reimagines the film Terminator ‘with the roles reversed so that the machines were cast as heroes’ (2007: 113). Yet the present chapter, which represents a culmination of my larger argument about the five senses, will show that nothing nearly as dramatic as robot–human warfare needs to be contemplated. Instead, the historically located figure of the human is ceding ground to the cyborg or the posthuman, with unfathomable implications for our understanding of the sensory world. In the mid-1980s the feminist and biologist Donna Haraway argued in ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ that women should recognize their ‘kinship’ with machines, famously asserting: ‘We are all […] cyborgs’ (Haraway 1991/1985: 154, 150). The cyborg of her manifesto’s title is a hybrid, post-gender being, whose first component is our organic selves and whose second constituent is the machine. Cyborgs have held particular appeal for feminists, since women have failed to thrive under the historical primacy of the universalizing category of man. But who is this ‘we’ of which Haraway speaks, and is she right to declare that cyborg writing has ‘a special significance for all colonized groups’ (Haraway 1991/1985: 174)? Susan Watkins and I have argued elsewhere (Chambers and Watkins 2015: 257), that notwithstanding this problematic ‘speaking for’ the subaltern, Haraway’s embodied cyborg figure still offers affirmative routes for thinking through our relationship with others – whether these others’ difference is constructed through gender, race, species, (in-)organic matter, sexuality, or disability. In How We Became Posthuman, the feminist and literary critic Katherine Hayles brings Haraway’s discussion of human–machine hybrids down to quotidian concerns and into the second person (often also Hamid’s preferred mode of address), observing: ‘As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, […] you have already become posthuman’ and ‘You are the cyborg, and the cyborg is you’ (1999: xiv, xii). In relation to the transformations of real life (RL)

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by virtual reality (VR), Hayles gives the example of pixellated computer Ping-Pong. To bring this up-to-date, it is worth noting that the recently popular phone game Pokémon Go is the first instance of real-world and virtual splicing, suggesting that as with AI, reality is tending to be augmented rather than altogether supplemented. Also worth probing is the very boundary assumed to separate the virtual and the real, the organic and the robot. As Kim Toffoletti remarks in Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, ‘the distinctions between real and virtual worlds are no longer clear […] the two are no longer separable’ (2007: 17, 29). Finally, another feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti asks in The Posthuman what is happening to Hayles’ ‘you’ and Haraway’s ‘us’ with the impact of the posthuman; what subjects of knowledge and sensory beings we find ourselves ‘in the process of becoming’ (2013: 12). As an antihumanist, Braidotti is relatively upbeat about our new, digitized horizons of perception. She views the death of Man as an unparalleled opportunity for women and racially othered people to redefine themselves, participate in political action, draw up new ways of thinking, and transform their ‘sensorial and perceptual co-ordinates’ (2013: 193). This has profound implications for our understanding of the sensory world. As long ago as 1961, in his essay ‘Inside the Five Sense Sensorium’ Marshall McLuhan claimed that electronic media and communication would lead to new kinds of spaces and ways of inhabiting these spaces. McLuhan predicts that in a posthuman environment where global electronic information flows, ‘the interchangeability of out-ofdoors and indoors is inevitable. […] With electric media any place is a center. No place is a margin’ (1961/2005: 8, 49). However, twenty-first century migrants are showing that the opposite is also true: any place is a margin, and no place is a centre. Extrasensory perception is an idea in widespread circulation, but what happens to ideas of spatiality and sensory experience in a posthuman world? In exploring this question, let us now turn to this chapter’s key text.

* * * Mohsin Hamid’s sonorous novel Exit West was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017, and represents an attempt to understand the global refugee crisis through the lens of posthuman sensory perception. In it, he presents snapshots of the lives of anonymous people in different locations around the globe, including San Diego, Tijuana, and Dubai.

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These fragments are juxtaposed with the detailed narrative trajectory of the novel’s only named characters, protagonists Nadia and Saeed, as they fall in love, begin to cohabit, flee the city of their birth, and experience the migrant or refugee’s precarious existence.1 Hamid engages in onomastic play, because the initials of ‘N’ and ‘S’ in his characters’ names supplement the missing compass points implied in the novel’s title, Exit [East] West. To some extent Nadia aligns with generalizations about the global north and Saeed the global south, since the male protagonist is more community- and family-oriented than his independent girlfriend. The title also indicates that migrants exit into the West, given that many refugees see it as the destination of their choice and desire. More importantly, the title also implies an exiting of the West. That might then be taken as a bigger indictment of Western countries and their immigration policies, which try to shut out the problem of refugees. Having ignited their relationship in a municipality, which as I will show is loosely based on Lahore, Saeed and Nadia grow frightened at the militants’ takeover of their country and a concomitant increase in summary executions. This propels the couple to escape through a portal to the island of Mykonos. From the Greek migrant hub they take another door to Kensington and Chelsea, after which they work on a labour camp in the ‘London Halo’ (2017a: 167),2 which now rings Britain’s capital. Nadia and Saeed eventually break up in the new, impoverished metropolis of Marin in California. They have one last meeting over a nostalgic coffee in the city of their birth many years later, described in a short, epilogue-like chapter. The ‘sensuous geographies’ (Rodaway 1994) that Hamid constructs in this, his fourth novel, are at once otherworldly and posthuman, with something important to say about the tensions generated when the ideal of a globalized world is confronted by the figure of the refugee. In his essay ‘Between Roots and Routes’, Simon Gikandi writes about how this figure troubles easy, even complacent, assumptions about the sophisticated transnationalism of the postcolonial flâneur in a globalized world: [R]efugees threaten my identity as a cosmopolitan, a connoisseur of modern cultural goods […] because they are signs of a dislocated locality, a mote in the eye of cosmopolitanism, of that postcolonial identity which derives its legitimacy from the mastery of the culture of modern Europe. […] [W]hat does it mean to think of the refugee, rather than

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the intellectual, as the quintessential figure of life across or outside boundaries? (2010: 23)

At the heart of this chapter, on a novel that represents Hamid’s first significant foray into writing about Britain, lies an attempt to answer Gikandi’s provocative question. I suggest that thinking of the refugee as the ultimate boundary-transgressor enables Hamid to give readers a glimpse through the doors of posthuman sensory perception.3 Hamid’s book is a window on a technologically assisted future in which the senses are enhanced by digital advances. His refugees seem powerless, but they make use of technology in unexpected ways which appear to protect them, or at least hold at bay hostile larger forces. The real issue of migration is the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Hamid emphasizes that a lack of material goods and basic amenities is the lot of global outsiders. This contrasts with the affluence of ‘natives’ in the West. However, when even the powerless have powerful technologies in their hands, things start to change. For seven years Hamid resided in London but wrote about elsewhere. He has subsequently relocated to his birth city of Lahore.4 The novelist divides his postapocalyptic version of London – like the unnamed Pakistani municipality with which the narrative opens, this is ‘a city swollen by refugees’ (1) – into two halves. These binary areas are occupied by angry, scared white ‘nativists’ on the one hand, and on the other a burgeoning number of migrants. As the following passage demonstrates, the halves can also be identified by those who have access to light and electricity and those who do not: From dark London, Saeed and Nadia wondered what life must be like in light London, where they imagined people dined in elegant restaurants and rode in shiny black cabs, or at least went to work in offices and shops and were free to journey about as they pleased. In dark London, rubbish accrued, uncollected, and underground stations were sealed. The trains kept running, skipping stops near Saeed and Nadia but felt as a rumble beneath their feet and heard at a low, powerful frequency, almost subsonic, like thunder or the detonation of a massive, distant bomb. At night, in the darkness, as drones and helicopters and surveillance balloons prowled intermittently overhead, fights would sometimes break out, and there were murders and rapes and assaults as well. Some in dark London blamed these incidents on nativist provocateurs. Others blamed other migrants […]. (142)

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The excerpt’s chiaroscuro effect figure forth various binaries which are set up in Hamid’s other novels – between the classes who possess air conditioning and those who do not in Moth Smoke (2000: 101–110), those who own cars and those who do not in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007: 32), and those with access to bottled water and those without in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013: 109–110).5 In each case, ownership, comfort, and health and safety are almost unvaryingly weighted towards the rich.6 A spatial or geographical divide is also glaringly evident here, as is the issue of technology accompanying power – both of which themes regularly resurface in Hamid’s novels, including, as we shall see, Exit West. Again one is reminded of Fanon, this time in relation to his diagnosis of the colonial city as ‘cut in two’, so that the dominant half is ‘brightly lit’ and possesses ‘asphalt […] and […] garbage-cans’, while the other half is ‘starved […] of light’ (2001/1961: 29, 30) and lacks the most basic amenities. Not only is Saeed and Nadia’s district in dark London disconnected from the electricity grid, but it also does without such basic social infrastructure as refuse collection and both private and public transport. This last dearth is experienced ‘almost subsonic[ally]’ in the ominous growl of Tube trains speeding through stations in no-go areas. Machines such as trains and helicopters are portrayed as being beyond the migrants’ reach. As in Hamid’s previous novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, this textual moment encourages reflection on the interconnected nature of the city and the intertwined lives of its inhabitants. Despite the division between the inhabitants of dark and light London, it is still clear that the rich and poor exist in a symbiotic relationship. The quotation’s auditory allusion to securitization again recalls How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, in which Hamid occasionally employs the perspective of a drone pilot, a ‘reconnaissance satellite’, or something even higher up (God?), and writes in a style influenced by the dizzying extrapolation techniques of Google Earth, zooming out from the city, revealing the systems above the systems, and showing that the self is just a tiny node within a vast constellation of networks. Phones and drones similarly loom large in this novel. In keeping with Hamid’s global magical realism (to be discussed later), smartphone7 antennas ‘sniff […] out an invisible world, as if by magic’ (35). Now not just a listening and speaking device, the phone is a precious possession. For the migrant it is valued as a source of information, space of intimacy, link to home, and ‘a crucial resource akin to food’ (Wall, Otis Campbell,

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and Janbek 2015: 241). Patrick Kingsley shows that both people smugglers and migrant support networks operate on Facebook and WhatsApp, making refugees dependent on information from their phones (2016: 238). Despite their dramatic and involuntary displacement(s), migrants are digital natives (Prensky 2001). The novel figures phones as providing escapism as well as information. People hold up their screens in public as a portable mode of privacy. On Saeed and Nadia’s initial date, they display their interest in each other by temporarily abandoning these public shields, placing their phones screen down, ‘like the weapons of desperadoes at a parley’ (16). Arriving into destitute conditions on Mykonos, one of the first things Nadia and Saeed buy is local SIM cards. They sit together, discretely absorbed in catching up with ‘the news, the tumult in the world, the state of their country, the various routes and destinations migrants were taking’ (103). This moment is an early harbinger of the beginning of the end for their relationship, given the juxtaposition between the absorption in the digital world and their initial focus on each other at their phones’ expense. Once entrenched in Kensington and Chelsea, the couple experience what Melissa Wall, Madeline Otis Campbell, and Dana Janbek (2015: 240–247) call refugees’ ‘information precarity’. This is a ‘precarity’ (see also Butler 2004) that pertains to migrants’ uncertain access to crucial and fast-moving facts, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and violence. ‘Dark London’ features a thriving black market in ill-gotten electricity, which intermittently gives migrants the opportunity to charge their phones. Saeed and Nadia can only find strong signal ‘at the edges of their locality’ (154), making their access to information precarious. It is on one of her sporadic hikes to catch up with world news that Nadia experiences a weird connective dissonance akin to mise en abyme. On her phone’s Internet browser, she thinks that she spots a photograph of herself ‘sitting on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the street from a detachment of troops and a tank’. She is surprised, wondering ‘how she could both read this news and be this news’ (154), and catches time bending in Möbius strip-fashion, before realizing that the photograph’s subject is not her but another covered woman in a war zone. This moment is significant, as it indicates a universalizing streak in Hamid’s work to which I will return. The disconcerting experience is also an instance of ‘translocal connection’ (Attridge 2017), theorized earlier as connective dissonance in relation to Maps for Lost Lovers and Brick Lane (see pp. 85–86). In Exit West, digital technologies

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function as a door to a world in which the human is decentred and stable selfhood is unmoored. Later, as distance starts to grow between the couple while working on a labour camp in London’s outskirts, they take comfort from staring at their screens: ‘wandering far and wide but not together’ (185). However, there is a flip side to the compelling ‘pull of [the] phone’ (35), and this device opens up an ‘invisible network of surveillance’ (188) that can be used against migrants by agents, smugglers, and border forces. The Syrian government, for instance, tracks opponents’ phones, turning them from a weapon of resistance into ‘an instrument to aid in oppression’ (Wall, Otis Campbell, and Janbek 2015: 241). Phones are subversive and have helped to organize revolutions, so authorities frequently view them askance and confiscate them from refugees. There is something to be said, too, about the relationship between, on the one hand, phones and distance, and on the other physicality and intimacy. I have already suggested that Nadia and Saeed’s use of their phones reflects the symbiosis between distance and lack of intimacy in their relationship. Before coming to London, when the phone signal ‘simply vanishe[s]’ due to the escalating conflict in their Lahore-like city, the couple find themselves confined to a world within their immediate physical proximity. Feeling ‘marooned and alone and […] afraid’ (55), unreliable landline connectivity causes them to seek each other out in person. And yet, being in constant physical contact with one another is problematic for them and ultimately plays a role in the dissolution of their relationship. Nadia is uncomfortable with intimacy, which may partly be due to trauma after she was sexually assaulted while waiting in line for a bank to open as her country’s economic order collapsed. However, she is additionally unsure of her feelings for Saeed and, it becomes clear, of her sexual orientation. The latter is more certain of his love for Nadia, but his religious beliefs and respect for his parents make taboo a full sexual relationship with her outside of marriage. It is as though someone has pressed fast forward on their relationship in any case, because the crisis in their country ‘accelerates and intensifies their relationship’ (Hamid, qtd. in Leyshon 2016: n.p.). Their phones help them keep their distance while at the same time connecting them. Hamid’s interest in technology and how it changes our experience of time and space, speaking and listening, and hence our sense of self and alterity, is also apparent in his evocation of drones. In A Theory of the

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Drone, Grégoire Chamayou writes that the unmanned aerial vehicles of war place a distance between the perpetrator and the victim of violence: This could be seen as the fulfillment of the ancient desire that inspires the whole history of ballistic weapons: to increase one’s reach so as to hit the enemy from a distance before the opponent can launch its own attack. But with drones, the weapon’s range […] has been increased by the range of the remote control. […] Warfare, from being possibly asymmetrical, becomes absolutely unilateral. What could still claim to be combat is converted into a campaign of what is, quite simply, slaughter. (2015/2013: 12–13)

The perpetrators of this slaughter are, Chamayou observes, ­overwhelmingly American,8 and its victims are Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis, and, ‘above all’, Pakistanis. On average there was a CIA drone strike in Pakistan every four days between 2004 and 2012, and the deaths from such attacks were estimated at up to 3,474 (2015/2013: 13). It should be noted that the pace slowed in 2016 and 2017, bringing the upper estimate of reported deaths in drone attacks on Pakistan to 500 for the five years from 2013 to 2017 (Bureau of Investigative Journalism 2018: n.p.). Chamayou’s philosophical work emphasizes a lack of ethical responsibility in contemporary warfare, which exists in parallel with the reluctance of current Western governments to accept even some liability for the migration crisis. Drone technology also facilitates an indefatigable, panoptic surveillance which watches and eavesdrops online and from on high. If the drone is like the all-seeing ‘eye of God’ (Chamayou 2015/2013: 37), the suffering it inflicts is more aural than visual. Chamayou quotes one Pakistani from a heavily surveilled area as saying: ‘It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them, you know they are there’ (Chamayou 2015/2013: 45). Another young man who lost a cousin in a drone attack on Waziristan told report ­ writers: ‘because of the noise, we’re psychologically disturbed’ (International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic 2012: 86). Some people in heavily ‘dronized’ areas (Chamayou 2015/2013: 11) run about in ­aimless panic each time they hear these remote-controlled aircrafts. There have been many cases of hearing loss caused by missiles detonated from drones. In this way, the sensorial and the affective are profoundly affected by posthuman technologies.

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Sometimes audibly ‘prowl[ing]’, at other moments ‘too quiet to be heard’ (142, 87), drones are as ubiquitous a presence on the London pages as those set in the novel’s alternative Pakistan. As well as ‘flying robots’ (83), there are also terrestrial drones, and both subsets inspire great unease ‘because they suggested an unstoppable efficiency, an inhuman power’ (151). Yet when a miniature surveillance drone crash-lands through the entryway of their hovel in Marin, Nadia and Saeed anthropomorphize the hummingbird-sized machine. Even though its job was presumably to spy on migrants, they give it a burial and joke about ‘offering a prayer for the departed automaton’ (205). Drones contribute to ‘the necro-political governmentality of bio-genetic capitalism’ (Braidotti 2013: 142).9 The technology confronts these oppressed people with the materiality of their own dehumanization, and the omnipresence of authorities listening into their lives. However, the miniature drone’s breakage, or ‘mortality’, renders it harmless. This is a malfunction its programmer ‘may not have anticipated’, suggesting that the birdlike drones are living creatures of a sort ‘because they have the form of life, that is, an informational code’ (Hayles 1999: 11). Through a simulacrum of death rites, Saeed and Nadia try to bring its posthuman form into the fold of the human. At one level, Hamid’s references to ‘dark’ and ‘light’ London indicate that access to, or the lack of, access to electricity establishes a social hierarchy. Indeed, 1.3 billion people, or approximately one-quarter of the households on earth, are not linked to the power grid. In her essay ‘Power Failure’ for Granta’s online Pakistan issue, Bina Shah writes of Karachi’s painfully fitful bijli or electricity service, describing how regular bouts of ‘load-shedding’ decrease productivity, health, and morale in Pakistan’s sweltering summers. In words that cannot but reverberate for the reader of Exit West, Shah concludes her essay as follows: I’m convinced that if you were to look at Karachi from a great height, say a plane thirty thousand feet in the air, or even a satellite, you would see miles and miles of darkness, and then suddenly a well-lit city, black in some places but brilliant in others, powered by a hundred thousand generators, rumbling late at night and into the early hours of the morning. (2010: n.p.)

Extending this idea of pockets of darkness existing alongside dazzling brightness, Hamid delineates a socially and electrically striated British

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capital, where the rumbling of generators in Karachi is replaced with London’s throbbing of helicopters and a ‘held note of silence’ (Kahn 1999: 59) produced by the sinister surveillance balloon. Although Hamid chooses not to name him, he also draws on the work of a ‘French photographer’ (54), Thierry Cohen. Through his ongoing series of pictures, entitled Darkened Cities, Cohen has given present-day citizens a foretaste of how First World cities will appear if they are deprived of electricity, as in the dystopian near future that Hamid describes. Cohen includes four London photographs in the series: the first is of the Palace of Westminster expunged of all artificial light. Another depicts the Serpentine in Hyde Park, made bucolic by the extinguishing of all luminosity except for stars. A third is reproduced here as Fig. 6.1, and is a view from the Thames’s South Bank featuring the iconic buildings of the Walkie-Talkie, the Cheesegrater, and the Gherkin. Figure 6.2 is captioned ‘London 51° 30′ 44" N’. From those coordinates and some local knowledge, one can deduce that the pictured church and curved building sprouting cranes into the gloom is at the junction of Cannon Street and Queen Victoria Street. (See Figs. 6.3 and 6.4 for two summer’s day snaps of this area, which has changed a great deal in the last three years.) The historic chapel captured in the image is St Mary Aldermary, while the curved 1970s building is the office space of 30 Cannon Street, but without its usual nighttime radiance. Saeed explains to Nadia how the photographer digitally scrubbed the urban skies of all their neon lights, before Photoshopping in the stars from rural areas on the same latitude line but a different longitude, where light pollution did not obscure the heavens. This textual moment demonstrates that Hamid portrays technology as disrupting ideas about space and time as well as about human and non- or posthuman identity. In his essay for the book accompanying the series, astrophysicist and author Jean-Pierre Luminet writes: ‘De quoi l’obscurité est-elle remplie? Sans doute est ce là l’origine lointaine de ma vocation et du travail que j’ai pu accomplir sur ces mystères de la cosmologie d’aujourd’hui que sont les trous noirs, la matière noire et l’énergie sombre …’ [‘What is darkness filled with? Little doubt this question was the point of departure years ago for my vocation and the work that I have been able to accomplish on the mysteries of today’s cosmology: black holes, dark matter, and dark energy …’] (qtd. in Cohen et al. 2012: n.p.). Noticing the pictures’ simultaneous beauty and their eerie, ‘ghostly’ qualities, Nadia reflects: ‘Whether they looked like the past, or the present, or the future, she

Fig. 6.1  ‘London 51° 30′ 17″ N’ from the Darkened Cities series © Thierry Cohen (www.thierrycohen.com) (Courtesy Danziger Gallery, New York and the Artist [2015])

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Fig. 6.2  ‘London 51° 30′ 44″ N’ from the Darkened Cities series © Thierry Cohen (www.thierrycohen.com) (Courtesy Danziger Gallery, New York and the Artist [2015])

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Fig. 6.3  View of St Mary Aldermary (Source and copyright Claire Chambers)

couldn’t decide’ (54–55). The seductive Enlightenment temptation to characterize improvements to the human condition as cumulative and permanent is exposed as misleading. To Hamid’s imagination the future seems dark, dystopian, and regressive, containing only occasional apertures onto a brighter optimism. It is not lost on me that Hamid’s version of London is futuristic, or at least unrealistic (his depiction of the city reminds me of Adrian Barnes’s depiction of a sleep-deprived Vancouver in Nod [2012], or Lauren Beukes’ post-apartheid Cape Town in her 2008 novel Moxyland). To over-emphasize the realist elements of Exit West would be to evacuate issues of realism and representability. Readers experience a state of ontological uncertainty at many of the aspects they encounter in the city designated as London. This links to my earlier comments about Hamid formulating a critique of Enlightenment-derived notions of History as teleological progress. Some of the elements of Hamid’s portrayal apply to real-life London, such as the locales and street names I will examine

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Fig. 6.4  Another view of St Mary Aldermary (Source and copyright Claire Chambers)

shortly. Others relate to a London which is perhaps not so much futuristic as it is a London-as-Lahore (manifested, for instance, in the drones, power shortages, spatial divisions, and curfews). This resonates with Jean and John L. Comoroff’s Theory from the South, in which they advance the idea that the global south is the future of the world. Comoroff and Comoroff write that in future decades London or New York might look like Johannesburg or Mumbai today: ‘in the dialectics of contemporary world history, the north appears to be “evolving” southward’ (2016/2012: 13). Similarly, Hamid’s US is both the nation state as we know it today and a futuristic (or is it a viciously atavistic?) America. Indeed, this is one of the novel’s main points; that is, that audiences can never be sure what era they are reading about. The beauty of Exit West is that it plunges readers into a form of temporal hesitation since, like Nadia as she contemplates Cohen’s photographs, they are unclear whether Hamid’s London, and his broader fictional world, look like the past, present, or future.

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Not only is the timescale indeterminate, but readers come across many other textual doublings. Using techniques first deployed in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid refuses to name his secondary characters, as well as to disambiguate his reference to real-world artists such as Cohen and a Pakistani band (which as we will see may or may not be Vital Signs). This decision is another part of his creation of ontological undecidability. The novel’s characteristically overlong sentences (illustrations will follow) also partake in a sense of uncertainty. The critic needs endlessly to read and re-read them, since there is often ambiguity about pronouns, hierarchy of clauses, emphasis, meanings, and so on. It seems that Hamid is deliberately denaturalizing English syntax almost to breaking point – his long, melodious sentences sound almost like a parallel ‘Urdu’ to these ears. Returning to my close reading, the ‘dark’ and ‘light’ London dichotomy metaphorically illuminates the issue of race and social exclusion. En route to their apparent refuge overseas, the impoverished migrants on Mykonos and elsewhere largely belong ‘within a band of brown that ranged from dark chocolate to milky tea’ (100). And from the moment Nadia and Saeed arrive in London, they are struck by signs that point to the formula that affluence equals whiteness. Their new abode’s opulence initially leads them to assume that they have emerged in a hotel, rather than a house taken over by squatters. Its wood is ‘pale’, the rugs ‘cream’, and water spurting from the taps is ‘white with bubbles’.10 This bleached vision spills out onto the street, where the ‘white buildings opposite’ and the unpigmented cherry tree blossom (118–119) provide dichromatic contrast with the ‘dark people’ like themselves who are regularly expelled out of a portal and into the house (120). Some migrants compare the white blossom to cotton ‘waiting to be picked, waiting for labour, for the efforts of dark bodies’ (136). The United States was of course the original site of such infamous plantations, and this country is Saeed and Nadia’s final destination as a couple. In the States they notice that although white people are not indigenous to the nation, just as in Britain it is the white section of the population that maintains a stranglehold on resources, ‘claiming the rights of nativeness most forcefully’ (196). The real Native Americans are reduced to trading in handicrafts, jewellery, and fabrics, while another reminder is given of white colonial ferocity in discussion of the ‘unspeakable violence’ (197) suffered by enslaved African Americans. Hamid’s portrayal of the divided municipality of London is prescient given that his novel was first published in March 2017, three months

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before the Grenfell Tower fire. In the early morning of 14 June 2017, this high-rise block of flats in North Kensington succumbed to flames which spread quickly due to the inflammable insulation materials in the hollow between the building and its recently-installed cladding. Over half of the 72 victims at Grenfell Tower had Muslim names, and only approximately three of them were white (see Rawlinson 2017: n.p.). In his 60,000-word essay ‘The Tower’ (2018), Andrew O’Hagan calls attention to the fact that in the building’s early days in the mid-1970s it gained the nickname ‘Moroccan Tower’ as so many immigrants were housed there. He also shows that the fire took place during Ramadan and thus many of the tower’s Muslim residents were still awake, praying or relaxing after a day of fasting followed by iftar. One of the most tragic vignettes O’Hagan presents (before his essay comes badly unstuck trying to exonerate council workers of any blame) is that of two Syrian refugee brothers, Omar and Mohammad Alhajali. Although Omar survived, Mohammad jumped to his death from the burning building, having previously viewed London as his ‘haven’ after the horrors of the Syrian War (O’Hagan 2018: n.p.). There’s more: some of the fire’s victims may have been undocumented migrants, so there were reports of surviving residents being reluctant about full disclosure. This means that although there is no need to inflate the already shocking death toll, it is possible that the number of dead might be higher still (Bulman 2017: n.p.). Outrage and protests erupted over the fact that Kensington and Chelsea, one of the world’s wealthiest residential areas, could accommodate working-class and ethnic minority people in such parlous conditions. Skylar Baker-Jordan pointed the finger of blame for Grenfell Tower at ‘racism and classism […] and structural inequality’ (2017: n.p.). Keith Hart (2017: 3) incorporated the fire into a broader argument about the West’s moral and political crisis, speculating that the disaster could become a turning point akin to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 – which atrocity contributed to sweeping electoral changes in the Great Reform Act. Moreover, in an extraordinary piece of public poetry, Ben Okri wrote: [W]hat you saw could only be seen in nightmare. Like a war-zone come to the depths of a fashionable borough. Like a war-zone planted here in the city. To see with the eyes that which one only sees In nightmares turns the day to night, turns the world upside down.

230  C. CHAMBERS Those who were living now are dead Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled. If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower. See the tower, and let a world-changing deed flower. (Okri 2017: n.p.)

Exit West’s London chapters may well be described, in Okri’s terms, as ‘a war-zone come to the depths of a fashionable borough’. Battles for London take place in and around a cinema in Marble Arch, while rumours abound of massacres at iconic locations: ‘in Hyde Park, or in Earls Court, or near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, migrants dying in their scores’ (161). One particular passage about a siege of migrants holed up in the Marble Arch cinema is chilling. When loudspeaker orders and a leaflet drop fail to persuade the migrants to leave, the cinema is burnt down, allegedly killing more than 200 men, women, and children – ‘especially children, so many children’ (160). This is a plausible situation if UK race relations continue to deteriorate further, and the fictional incineration has taken on even more horrific overtones after June 2017’s fire. With his reference to a large-scale government-led act of violence, Hamid sounds a grim warning knell about where current British race relations could be heading. It should not escape our notice that Okri’s passionate poem contains a germ of optimism within the anger. Three times he ends stanzas with variants of ‘See the tower, and let a world-changing deed flower’. There is a similar move from dystopia to a relative utopia in Hamid’s text. After the fire, the narrator reports that weeks pass by peacefully and ‘the natives and their forces stepped back from the brink’ (164). The reason for this is only speculated at: the nativists might have decided against further slaughter out of pragmatism, a feeling of being overwhelmed, or compassion for others. Whatever the case, the decision to pull back from expulsion and slaughter is a rare instant of hope in the novel. Another glimpse of calm comes at the novel’s end when Saeed and Nadia meet for coffee and closure after a lifetime apart. The recently returned Nadia finds that the place of their birth has recovered from its earlier civil war, ‘the lives of cities being far more persistent and more gently cyclical than those of people’ (227). In an essay on the regressive and repressive nostalgia of ‘Take back control […] Make America great again […] Restore the caliphate’, Hamid puts forward storytelling as its ‘antidote’. The imagination, he argues, maps out future trajectories that individuals and communities may follow, and ‘stories have the power to liberate us

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from the tyranny of what was and is’ (2017c: n.p.). Given this belief in fiction’s transformative potential, it is unsurprising to find seeds of a happier future amid Exit West’s largely bleak narrative topsoil. Especially in the context of the divided city exposed by the Grenfell Tower fire, it is significant that Nadia and Saeed live in Kensington and Chelsea. Their squatters’ dwelling is precisely charted to Palace Gardens Terrace. As this house becomes dominated by Nigerians, Saeed seeks the company of his ‘own kind’ (149) at a shared house in a neighbouring street, Vicarage Gate, on the way to Notting Hill. Even a cursory Internet search reveals these to be leafy roads of white stucco townhouses in W8 where the average property price is over two million pounds. Not incidentally, then, after the horrors of war in Nadia and Saeed’s own country the couple find the delicate blossom on the trees lining their road ‘unreal’ (118). This unreality is expressed in the many long sentences, drenched with comma splices, which lend the text an epic quality and a breathless syncopation, reflecting the relentlessly desperate condition of the migrant. Hamid’s use of the excessively long sentence also reproduces the overwhelming rush of emotions and the inability to think caused by catastrophic events. Here is one example in which the careening syntax echoes migrants’ uncontrollable predicament: It seemed the more empty a space in the city the more it attracted squatters, with unoccupied mansions in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea particularly hard-hit, their absentee owners often discovering the bad news too late to intervene, and similarly the great expanses of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, filling up with tents and rough shelters, such that it was now said that between Westminster and Hammersmith legal residents were in a minority, and native-born ones vanishingly few, with local newspapers referring to the area as the worst of the black holes in the fabric of the nation. (126)

Hamid writes in contrastingly terse style for a Guardian round-up of the Booker shortlist that Exit West’s sentences became ‘incantatory, like a magic spell. Like a prayer. Which seemed fitting to me’ (2017b: n.p.). If the abundant clauses begin with hope for the migrants in the form of ‘unoccupied mansions’, any sense of anticipation is dashed by the negative diction of ‘hard-hit’, ‘bad news’, and ‘rough shelters’. The supra-real grammatical structure ends with tabloidese metaphors

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ripping a hole in homespun nationalism (‘fabric of the nation’) to introduce fears of the astronomical phenomena of black holes – la matière noire, about which Luminet wrote. This dark matter, in turn, is inexorably tied to the black rectangles (the doorways) from which the migrants emerge into different locations. In interview, Hamid reveals that these black rectangles also represent the multitude of screens we use these days, which allow virtual travel to other, faraway worlds (Leyshon 2016: n.p.). And the quotation’s reference to ‘absentee owners’ gestures towards a pan-London problem. It is a blight that particularly affects Kensington, a district in which many homes are owned by the super-rich or offshore businesses who can afford to let them stand empty. Hamid’s journalistic eye on such zeitgeist issues as absentee landlords is palpable in this incisive, timely novel. Hamid’s Manichean portrayal continues in writing that cannot but resonate for our divided Trumpian world, with the author describing a paranoid old man in San Diego asking ‘whether it was Mexicans that had been coming through [the doors], or was it Muslims, because he couldn’t be sure’ (47). Tellingly, this is the only use of the word ‘Muslim’ in the entire book, and not a single mention is made of Islam or Pakistan.11 Hamid’s restraint recalls the claims to universalism of his previous novel How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, which also focused on one Everyman and his girlfriend in a spectral facsimile of Lahore (Poon 2017: 143). In Exit West, the repudiation of specifics around religion and location means that Saeed and Nadia could in one reading represent almost any migrants from Turkey to Indonesia (their names are Arabic and not unique to Muslims).12 However, in another sense there is no doubting the characters’ religion, so that they stand in for Muslim refugees in particular. If Hamid’s near-total refusal to single out Islam comes in stark contrast to his accurate mapping of London, there is nonetheless much discussion of Islam-adjacent practices such as prayer, charitable giving, and modest dress. For example, throughout the novel Nadia wears a figure-hiding black cloak (note: not an abaya or a niqab). Rather than for religious reasons, she dresses this way to ward off unwanted attention from men because she lives on her own. Nadia has little interest in religion and uses her robe as a kind of disguise, cover for a nonconformist lifestyle. The sexual assault she suffers (mentioned earlier) gives readers a first-hand peek at the violent behaviour she had vainly hoped that the concealing garment would protect her from. Like Home Fire this novel counters sedimented ways of thinking

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by depicting the wearing of modest dress as a defiant and rational choice, often going against male relatives’ wishes. For instance, Saeed finds it increasingly ‘grate[s]’ on him (187) that Nadia wears religious garb while shunning orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and the company of her compatriots. He more than once questions her decision to wear it, but she remains steadfast in her agency to seek cover. In the novel, Hamid mounts an implicit critique of anti-Muslim hostility13 in direct connection with the ‘problem’ of migrants. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, despite its title and readers’ usual assumptions, the bearded protagonist Changez is carefully delineated as being indifferent to religious thought. The same is also true of Exit West’s Nadia, who baldly tells Saeed: ‘I don’t pray’ (3). Inverting readers’ likely expectations on being first introduced to the on-point designer stubble that Saeed sports, and the conservative black robe worn by Nadia, Saeed is the character to evince the most religious curiosity of Hamid’s creations to date. He wishes he could share with Nadia ‘this mystery that prayer linked him to’ (202). Never agreeing to penetrative sex before marriage (though he and Nadia find pleasure in other sexual activities14 and in light recreational drug use), as time goes on Saeed prays more regularly and seeks out his coreligionists. There is even a passage in the novel’s London section when Saeed seems drawn to jihad. He responds emotionally to an elder speaking of martyrdom as a lastresort option in a world where ‘the religion of the righteous must defend those who sought passage’ (152). Ultimately, he remembers his mother’s death at the militants’ hands and dismisses this momentary temptation as ‘something rancid in himself’ (153). After parting from Nadia in Marin, he forms a relationship with a ‘curly[-]hair[ed]’ woman (198), the daughter of an African American cleric and his deceased wife who came from Saeed’s country. Around the same time, Nadia becomes close to a muscular, blue-eyed female cook at the Californian food cooperative where she works. Although readers are not privy to the development of these relationships – in the epilogue they tell each other about their lives ‘with vital details highlighted and excluded’ (228) – Saeed’s increased religiosity and Nadia’s recognition of her same-sex desire indicate that their lives have moved in different directions. In spite of the topographic indeterminacy in the novel’s early chapters, we can pin down the couple’s home nation as a Muslim one, because of the rise of the militants and characters practising their religion in an Islamic way (the beards and covered hair, and so forth).

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And although Saeed and Nadia use the year’s ‘first dense smogs’ (57) as a temporal gauge of the start of winter, this detail could mark the city spatially as belonging to Pakistan, most probably Lahore. The smog has worsened in Lahore over the last few years, even coming to be seen as a fifth season between autumn and winter. Some rushed to blame the convenient scapegoat of India, because East Punjabi farmers’ stubble burning plays a part in explaining why the problem is more severe in Lahore despite the pollution that chokes Pakistan’s megacity of Karachi.15 It is therefore understandable that grassroots movements such as the ‘Lahore Can’t Breathe’ campaign have emerged to challenge this real-world dystopian situation.

* * * Hamid muses on the new technologies’ significance for our understanding of the sensory world through his customary play with genre. Hamid continues the striking experimentation with form that has been a hallmark of his novels so far, and in Exit West he pushes into dystopian, postapocalyptic, speculative fiction, and magical realism. Confines of space unfortunately prevent me from discussing any but the last of these narrative modes. However, the matter will be ripe for investigation by other scholars, since questions of form are always pressing when it comes to Hamid’s work. At first, it would seem that Exit West is magical realist. Most events are related in detail and with verisimilitude, but there are occasional fantastic moments. In accordance with definitions of the genre by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (1995: 3) and Christopher Warnes (2009: 2–3), inter alia, readers are supposed to view these unusual occurrences as natural and unproblematic. Hamid pays heed to such children’s cultural products as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll 1949/1865), The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis 1950), and Monsters, Inc (Docter 2001). He acknowledges this influence in a nonfiction account of how important books were to him as a child in Lahore without access to many other forms of entertainment: ‘I turned to fantasy. I read The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. The idea of children passing through a wardrobe into a strange and magical land seemed entirely plausible to […] this until recently California boy [sic] now finding his way in Pakistan’ (2017c: n.p.). In the novel, Hamid slyly hints at his children’s literature homage as one anonymous

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character finds that the doors ‘reminded him of something, of a feeling, of a feeling he associated with children’s books, with books he had read as a child, or books that had been read to him rather, by his mother’ (127; emphasis added). These elegant interlaced repetitions are close to the rhetorical contrivance of the diacope, a structure whereby a phrase is cut into pieces and repeated amidst intervening words. The reiteration has the effect of simultaneously emphasizing the character’s nostalgia and the sinister augury accreting to the doors. Hamid’s magical conceit is of closet doors and other thresholds that open onto other places, often, but not invariably, in the First World.16 In the novel, news of these ‘special door[s]’ (70) is initially greeted with incredulity but soon becomes a concrete matter of fact. In portraying the way migrants move as their being disgorged through doors, Hamid seeks to limn the surreal and disorienting nature of their emotional and psychological journey. What is missing, of course, is the physically perilous and temporally drawn-out nature of the journey itself. In the children’s literature, space–time wormholes have traditionally given access to the realm of fantasy, as in the case of C. S. Lewis’s wardrobe that opens out into Narnia. Yet Hamid’s doors unfasten only the grinding everyday realities experienced by the refugee who struggles to find housing and work in a ‘developed’ country while staying safe. This dystopian, adult reworking of the portal narrative is similar to an American novel published a year earlier than Hamid’s book. Like Exit West, Colson Whitehead’s generically hybrid novel The Underground Railroad was recommended by Barack Obama (more precisely, Whitehead’s text was included in Obama’s book list 18 months earlier than Hamid’s, in summer 2016). Whitehead uses a similar trope to Hamid’s doors, positioning nineteenth-century slaves from the Deep South as escaping into the titular underground railroad and resurfacing in a Manichean realm in the north, where enemies try to recapture them and friends such as the abolitionists try to secure their freedom. The teleportation through the doors – and, by extension, migration – is described in Hamid’s novel as being a violent experience akin to a birth (see also Leyshon 2016: n.p.) and paradoxically also ‘like dying’: Nadia experienced a kind of extinguishing as she entered the blackness and a gasping struggle as she fought to exit it, and she felt cold and bruised and damp as she lay on the floor of the room at the other side, trembling and too spent at first to stand, and she thought, while she strained to fill her lungs, that this dampness must be her own sweat. (98)

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Small wonder, then, that portal narratives, with their close connection to a baby’s exhausting passage through the birth canal, have most often found a home in children’s fiction, giving generations of children the opportunity to reflect on their own relatively recent entrance into the world. The doors’ relationship with birth betokens the kind of non-technological physical existence brought about by the loss of phone connection in Exit West: a mode of primal, body-bound selfhood. (At times, while the novel is rightly suspicious of ‘neo-liberal euphoria’, its ambivalence towards technology and tilting towards literature seems a form of problematic ‘conservative nostalgia’ [Braidotti 2013: 11].) In this passage, Nadia’s body is buffeted and wettened, intimating that she has been tossed about on a boat, like current refugees braving a voyage across the Mediterranean. Finally, just as we saw earlier that light is associated in the novel with whiteness, technology, and privilege, so too there is a close connection between the darkness of the doorways and the dimness of refugee spaces such as those found in ‘dark London’. In her essay ‘Framing Travel and Terrorism Allegory in The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ Mandala White perceptively highlights the crucial meaning-making inherent in Hamid’s frame narrative17 of a Pakistani man recounting his life story to a silenced American interlocutor – a framing which is often neglected in discussions of this, Hamid’s second novel. As with that earlier novel, Hamid shows himself to be highly attuned to formal innovation in Exit West, and similarly its ‘textual project is intimately bound up with […] narrative structure’ (White 2017: 2). Rather than another frame narrative, in his fourth novel Hamid creates what I want to call cut-piece scenes (see Hoek 2013). Cut-piece films are common in Pashto and Bangladeshi cinema, whereby male audiences flock to see particular movies because they know they will be intercut occasionally with brief scenes of pornographic content followed by a swift return to the mainstream content. This is not to suggest that Hamid’s interspersed scenes are obscene (though some of them feature seminudity or sexual encounters), but the sudden shift to a different location and new characters before a jump-cut back to the main narrative is similar. The cut-piece scenes are sometimes demarcated by a line break and at other moments continue straight on from the main body text. The first of them conveys a timbre of oddity and menace, as it takes place in the dark while an Australian woman sleeps and a migrant comes through her wardrobe door, into her bedroom, and out of the window. Another

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chapter features a Tamil family – watched attentively by a security camera, a drone, and tourists’ selfie-taking phones – as they make their bewildered and fearful arrival in Dubai after appearing through one of the doors. In Vienna, a young white woman feels threatened on public transport because she is wearing pro-migrant badges and is on her way to protest against a far-right anti-migration mob. A depressed accountant in Kentish Town, London, contemplates suicide, but instead steps through one of the doors into Namibia. A young mother emerges through an access point into an orphanage in the Mexican border town of Tijuana to reclaim her lost daughter. A lonely old man in Amsterdam forms a relationship with another elderly man from Brazil, and eventually follows him through a portal to Rio de Janeiro.18 Such scenes evoke a planetary snarl-up of lives and furnish a tempered optimism in this mostly bleak novel about interactions between white, brown, and black people beyond twenty-first century imperialism.19 They also give an indication of the space–time compression effected by the doors, symbolizing our ubiquitous screens in an exponentially technologizing world. And the best of the cut-piece scenes have a hammer-blow impact since, as Maggie O’Neill writes in the context of UK asylum-seekers’ storytelling, ‘a fragment of a story of a life can tell us so much more than 100 pages of information about a life’ (2008: n.p., drawing on Walter Benjamin). The short interwoven scenes seem part of Hamid’s attempt to show a common humanity and how the desire for a different existence or a new chapter in one’s life makes us all, in some sense, migrants (209). We find this articulated through the free indirect discourse of the old woman in a cut-piece scene set in California who inhabits a new place without moving anywhere at all: [N]ow all these doors from who knows where were opening, and all sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home than she was, even the homeless ones who spoke no English, more at home maybe because they were younger, and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time. (209)

From the Western perspective of an elderly woman based in rapidly changing Palo Alto,20 migration comes whether she likes it or not; the

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world is on the move and people move with it. Even though readers are repeatedly told that she has ‘lived in the same house her entire life’ (206), the woman’s city is altered to such an extent that she feels foreign and less at home than the new arrivals. (This idea at once links with, and is undermined by, Shamsie’s and Khair’s portrayals, discussed in the previous chapter, of British Muslims who do not feel at home either in Britain, their parents’ South Asian homelands, or among the jihadists in Syria.) In the aggressively Eurocentric world of #JeSuisCharlie, it is powerful that Hamid makes an inverse point: ‘We are all migrants’. His use of the first-person plural pronoun indicates that all of humanity owes a debt to defend and help displaced people; as Imogen Tyler puts it, they are ‘subjects who matter, “like us”’. Tyler further writes about high-profile humanitarians who are able to ‘use their agency to “speak” on behalf of asylum-seekers, and […] use the frame of their own visibility to make asylum-seekers visible’ (2006: 194). This solidarity is important, but the idea that everyone is a migrant may conceal more than it reveals, and it is unclear from the text to what extent Hamid goes along with his character’s thought process. In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously argues that academics must not ‘speak for’ subalterns (1988: 303), but instead listen to them without co-opting their diverse stories. Despite the passage’s lyricism, it raises uncomfortable questions about Hamid, as an affluent, cosmopolitan author, speaking for refugees and downplaying the specificity of their trauma in his well-intentioned phrase ‘We are all migrants through time.’ Texts such as Susan’s Regarding the Pain of Others should give further pause by encouraging an interrogation of the ethics of aesthetics: the problem of enjoying someone else’s pain through the consumption of art. As Sontag puts it: ‘Who are the “we” at whom […] shock-pictures are aimed?’ (2004/2003: 7). In this context, Hamid’s use of the first-person plural pronoun cannot but seem somewhat suspect, just as Haraway’s declaration ‘We are all […] cyborgs’ received criticism more than 30 years ago. Continuing to think about this question of audience, let us now examine an excerpt in which Saeed and Nadia discuss the reception of migrants in their country, as compared with the frosty welcome accorded in the global north: ‘I can understand it,’ she said. ‘Imagine if you lived here [in England]. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived.’

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‘Millions arrived in our country.’ Saeed replied. ‘When there were wars nearby.’ ‘That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.’ (162)

Nadia’s sensitive attempt to see through the nativists’ (blinkered) eyes is easily apparent. Her empathetic understanding of locals’ fears brings to mind Gikandi’s definition of cosmopolitanism which, he asserts, ‘is structured by the desire, if not the need, to understand the Other’ (2010: 24).21 Yet her logic is questionable to say the least; a less generous person might dispute that her compatriots did not have as much to spare as the rich Western hosts. Indeed, Kingsley argues that the refugee population can be ‘feasibly absorb[ed]’ by Europe if the continent acts compassionately and in unison. He goes on to demonstrate that rather than finding asylum in the West, the vast majority of Syrian refugees are in fact sheltered in other developing countries – such as Lebanon,22 whose infrastructure is at ‘breaking point’ (2016: 7). Moreover, Syria itself in better times gave refuge to a large number of Palestinian asylum-seekers. Similarly, since the Afghan War over 1.5 million Afghans have fled across the porous border with Pakistan, some of them trying to escape danger a second time by joining the exodus to Europe. Despite the brunt of the migrant crisis falling on nations in the Middle East and South Asia, the last few years have witnessed a resurgence of the far right in such nations as Hungary, Slovakia, France, Germany, and Sweden, as well as most famously in AngloAmerica with Brexit and the election of Trump. Though it is fuelled by jealousy of imagined benefits, populist nationalism’s scapegoating of the minorities of Muslims and refugees bears little relation to these groups’ actual poverty, persecuted status, and powerlessness. All the migrants in Hamid’s London are offered is 40 square metres and a pipe – the latter signalling ‘a connection to all the utilities of modernity’ (168) – which is a pointed parallel to the 40 acres and a mule promised to African Americans in 1865, soon after emancipation. The refugees are therefore depicted as being even worse off than former slaves. This point is important, especially in light of the reference to blossom in London resembling cotton waiting to be picked by brown bodies which I discussed earlier. The refugees’ hazardous journey across the Mediterranean may be seen as a new Middle Passage and these displaced people often end up incarcerated in modern forms of slavery.23

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National borders and ideas of self versus other have been damaging to the region obliquely figured in this novel, the Indian subcontinent, as well as to Israel/Palestine, Ireland, Sudan, and other countries that have experienced partitions. Frontiers in these geopolitical hotspots have been implicated in the construction of religious and ethnic minorities as ambivalent citizens on the one hand, or as enemies within or beyond the nation on the other. As the ‘unprecedented flow of migrants’ affects Exit West’s wealthy nations, their leaders ‘construct walls and fences and strengthen […] their borders’, though without much success in stemming the flow (71). This of course has echoes of the isolationist theory behind Donald Trump’s foreign policy: the ideas of ‘America first’ and a return to an imagined time when the world was regulated by firm borders. Given the hatred and violence they engender, it is important to abjure the limits of national frontiers. As Hamid achieves in his last two novels, critics also need to reach beyond the nation state, instead using approaches more suitable to a globalized world. Thinking across the border, and rethinking the fixity of the border, is crucial to understanding the fraught position of stateless people. Hamid’s magical doors allow individuals to bypass borders altogether. They simply go from one world to the next, emerging as if from a plane door onto the other side of the world. Doors have risk too, as Hamid shows, for the wrong one leads to death. Wars in Muslim-majority countries, the othering of people of Muslim heritage, and their humiliations at passport control have become increasingly acute in recent years, especially since Donald Trump’s appalling Muslim travel ban came into effect. We must not forget the materiality of borders, and their very real consequences for those without the right passport, visa, name, or skin colour. Sometimes the doors appear in people’s homes, as with the accountant in London who discovers a dark vortex where the entryway to his second bedroom had once stood. In her monograph Home Truths, Susheila Nasta posits home as a point of departure, a space of contestation, and an ‘illusory haven’ (2002: 1). Through her research, Nasta disrupts bipolar assumptions about home and abroad, making the familiar unfamiliar while ‘homing in’ (2002: 9) on seemingly distant cultures. Writing their complex theoretical text A Thousand Plateaus in the late 1980s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari point out that home is not a given: ‘it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile centre, to organise a limited space. Many, very diverse components have a part in this, landmarks and marks of all kinds’ (1988: 311). Home

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is especially uncertain and fragile in the case of the refugee, for whom, as Hannah Arendt notes, ‘[w]hat is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one’ (1976/1966: 293; qtd. in Gikandi 2010: 27). One of the markers that takes on new connotations as people try protectively to encircle the centre of their homes during war in Saeed and Nadia’s country is the window. Since windows are liable to shatter, they are either blocked off or taped up. The domestic space that is supposed to protect has become dangerous, and the casement has the potential to transform into shrapnel.24 Furthermore, the frontier between light and dark here becomes blurred, given that the black doors have the potential for a new lease on life, while supposedly light-revealing windows in this dystopian world represent ‘the border through which death was possibly most likely to come’ (68). An early detail we notice about the brown man who emerges through a wardrobe door into the room of a sleeping Australian woman in Sydney is his anguished quietness: ‘the silence of a man struggling in an alley, on the ground, late at night, to free himself of hands clenched around his throat. But there were no hands around this man’s throat. He wished only not to be heard’ (7). This desire to be inaudible notwithstanding, the author lends a sympathetic ear to the migrant’s plight. Just as Hamid wrong-foots readers about who America’s natives are, so too he plays with our prejudices derived from, for example, the reading of Raj fiction (Rubin 1986) about what a fraught brown man might do to a sleeping white woman: ‘His eyes rolled terribly. Yes: terribly. Or perhaps not so terribly’ (7). Hamid goes on to portray the man as the victim of structural inequality, while the white woman is oblivious to his suffering and remains unharmed. If at this moment the subaltern cannot speak for fear of exposure, elsewhere the text resounds with noise from below. Nadia loses her virginity to a musician, and even though they soon split up she continues to value her record player. On this machine she plays a soul record which becomes a ‘third presence’ (25) in the room when she is on an early date with Saeed. Later, as the militants tighten their grip on the city, playing music is deemed irreligious and so she has to abandon her prized possession and listen to tracks on her phone instead. There is an interesting use of music in the novel to create intimate spaces, homes even. I think of that moment when Nadia plays for Saeed some songs ‘by a local band popular in their city when they were in their teens’ (133) – the band is quite possibly Vital Signs, discussed in relation to Shamsie

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in the previous chapter. These are ditties of which Nadia is not particularly fond but, even distorted through her phone’s tinny speakers, she knows that they evoke happier times for Saeed. In postapocalyptic Marin, she is a bystander at a musical efflorescence, ‘a new jazz age’ (216), at which instrument-playing humans mingle with the posthuman sounds produced by computers and other electronic devices. It is significant that Hamid chooses jazz as the musical style to associate with the ‘great creative flowering’ occurring in postapocalyptic Marin, for jazz has long been linked with racial politics and involves improvisation within a loose form. Yet more than jazz or any other sound in the novel’s sensory landscape, it is the ‘screaming’ of ‘fighter aircraft’ (150) and the thunderclap of helicopters that reverberate: [T]he whirr of their rotors echoed through windows and down alleys, seemingly compressing the air beneath them, as though each were mounted atop an invisible column, an invisible breathable cylinder, these odd, hawkish, mobile sculptures, some thin, with tandem canopies, pilot and gunner at different heights, and some fat, full of personnel, chopping, chopping through the heavens. (32)

* * * In this chapter, I have explored some of Exit West’s key features in light of the current refugee crisis. I have been pursuing three main ideas, in an attempt to give cultural and historical context to Hamid’s novel. First, I have discussed the Pakistani author’s representation of a divided world. This manifests itself in exploration of the vastly different cities of London and Lahore, and in this regard I discussed Hamid’s representations of Thierry Cohen’s photographs and of the smog that characterizes the northeastern capital of Pakistan’s Punjab. Even within a single locale such as London, the metropolis is divided into light and dark sections. Possession or otherwise of a charged phone symbolizes those who are connected to, or disconnected from, both their loved ones and the wider world. Meanwhile, drones ‘unilaterally’ divide the world into aggressors and victims, watchers and listeners as opposed to the watched or listened to. The ability to make uninhibited noise and the compulsion to keep quiet for fear of exposure indicates another

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area of inequality. There is no ignoring the racialization of these divisions: advantage is always with the whites, to black and brown people’s detriment. Second, I have linked Hamid’s starkly bifurcated world to both historical and contemporary forces that have experienced similar divisions. Historical examples of such divisions include but are not limited to the Enlightenment project, the Atlantic slave trade, and imperialism, while contemporary exemplars include Trump and Grenfell Tower. Finally, I explored how Hamid bolsters his content with formal innovation, paying particular attention to magical realism, children’s portal fiction, sentence structure, and cut-piece scenes. I showed that Hamid’s novel, which purposely begins in no specific place and in many ways operates as a work of magical realism, has real historical and cultural relevance – and concrete connections to specific places and events. Hamid creates a form of global magical realism appropriate for this dark phase of the late 2010s. His suprareal doors untether new, posthuman modes of perception in spaces that are starkly reticulated by the divide between nativists and migrants. The novel’s aesthetic form and register, sombre and spare as it is at some moments and breathlessly anxious or utopian at others, have a lasting political import, which I have traced. I want to conclude this chapter by underscoring the paradox that Hamid seems to bring to the forefront by virtue of not labelling the nation from which Nadia and Saeed migrate. In interview he declares: I used Lahore, the city where I live, as a starting point for the city. And yes, readers are free to put names to this nameless place, if they wish. I often leave gaps in my writing, spaces for readers to fill in, areas left open to be co-imagined. I used namelessness here in part because I couldn’t bear to do to Lahore and Pakistan what happens to the city and country in this story, and in part because this could be a story of many other cities, and in part because we live in a world of extreme censorship and so namelessness is a way of drawing attention to the existence of what cannot be said, is not being said. (Hamid, qtd. in Leyshon 2016: n.p.)

Here the author confirms my hunch that Lahore was the initial lodestar for the city portrayed in Exit West. He also points towards issues around censorship and the silencing of marginalized voices in a similar manner to Shamsie and Khair, as discussed in the previous chapter. In

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this latest text Hamid has moved away from the second-person mode of address he used in his second and third novels. However, as with the Choose Your Own Adventure books which Hamid admits to having devoured as a child, he continues to make demands of his readers, ‘leav[ing] space for [their] thoughts to echo’, as Erica puts it in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007: 51). Namelessness enables readers to involve themselves in the co-production Hamid espouses in his art as in his politics,25 as well as drawing attention to language’s limitations. I have already noted that this is a variation on what Hamid does in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, but he chooses not to estrange himself from all labels in his fourth novel as he does in his third. He is willing to badge London and Mykonos, as well as undertaking a peculiarly precise branding of the Bay Area in California as Marin. The difference between what he does with labels and the identity features that those labels conjure up in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and in Exit West is that in this most recent text he wants to call out Western nations by name for their inhospitable treatment of refugees, while lending all migrants a common humanity and a sympathetic ear. Along these lines, Hamid suggests that the migration crisis is partly caused by the cruel rigidity of borders, which he seeks to dissolve. He also upends demands on refugees to give a full account of their origins if they wish to be granted asylum. Hamid understands that the migration crisis has a good deal to do with religion – or at least perceived religion, because national borders shape perceptions. The novel also speaks to his interest in words as a medium for reductive labelling, as well as a medium for art such as his own economical but iridescent prose. As an utterance and as a work of art, Exit West can do much that global politics and twenty-first century border-making fails to do. Rightly or wrongly, Hamid’s words function as an anguished cry on behalf of the silenced migrant. In our digital age, the senses overspill the fivefold divisions used to categorize them. Hamid’s Exit West shows that for refugees, posthuman sensory perception has become a matter of life and death. Far from a luxury, the phone is an indispensible tool – even if this tool can be turned against its owner like that other, more sinister technology: the surveillance drone. Migrants have perhaps been more empowered than disempowered by their devices. Technologies thus do not just serve to enhance the senses. They also reduce the disparity, the divide, between rich natives and poor migrants in small but crucial ways.

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Notes







1. Hamid uses the word ‘migrant’ throughout his novel, and only very occasionally is the term ‘refugee’ deployed. However, some people and organizations believe that people escaping from war should be described only as ‘refugees’ (UNHCR 2016: n.p.). This position too could be criticized for drawing too neat a distinction between ‘good’ refugees and ‘bad’ migrants, when catastrophic economics and environmental disaster are often factors for those stigmatized as economic migrants. Perhaps this lies behind Hamid’s trenchant attempt to reclaim ‘migrant’ as a neutral term. As for this chapter, I follow Hamid in using ‘migrant’ more often than ‘refugee’, but to facilitate variety of language and to break down unhelpful barriers I use an admixture of the two terms. For further analysis of terminology, see Kingsley (2016: 260–262). I return to the notion of the migrant’s precarious existence later on in the chapter. 2. Subsequent references are to this (2017a) edition of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. 3. With this titular reference, I of course refer not only to Hamid’s magical doors but also to Aldous Huxley’s (2004/1954) book about his experiments with mescalin, The Doors of Perception. 4. In this initially exilic aesthetic, Hamid is like Kamila Shamsie, whose first British-based novel Home Fire I explored in the previous chapter. Shamsie too for almost a decade lived in London and wrote fiction mostly set overseas. However, whereas Hamid moved back to Pakistan, Shamsie eventually and onerously acquired British citizenship (Shamsie 2017). 5. To this list, we could now add the new information inequality whereby the rich in Pakistan buy access to a virtual private network (VPN), leaving only the poor vulnerable to the government’s regular clampdowns on particular websites, especially YouTube. 6. For one exception, in Hamid’s depiction of the envehicled person being at a disadvantage in Lahore’s labyrinthine Old City (2007: 32), see Chambers (2017: 83). 7.  Here a note on terminology is required. Hamid exclusively uses the term ‘phone’ in his novel, except when he refers to house-based devices, which like many people today he calls the ‘landline’ (55, 58). This use of ‘phone’ allows him to sidestep the transatlantic divide whereby Britons say ‘mobile phone’ and North Americans ‘cell phone’. Both groups are increasingly calling what is now more correctly termed a ‘smartphone’ simply a ‘phone’ – something of an oddity since it is being used less and less for conventional telephonic communication. Echoing Hamid, I follow this conversational terminology for the rest of the chapter. Simon Gikandi identifies the device as part of the ‘insignia of globalization’

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(2010: 32), while my last word goes to the observation that the British coinage ‘mobile phone’ points to the mobility of the world that has been unleashed onto our screens. 8. Although Chamayou is correct to point the finger at the United States, they are not the only country investing in drones. At least ten other countries own unmanned aerial vehicles, and after America, India and Israel have lavish stocks, with the size of Turkey’s, China’s, and Russia’s drone fleets currently unknown. 9. It should be noted, however, that Braidotti’s analysis about drones is finely balanced. She advances an argument in favour of the technology that it rules out the likelihood of rape or murder being committed in the heat of human anger during the chaos of war (2013: 126). 10. Here Delphine Munos has influenced my thinking with her important reading of The Reluctant Fundamentalist through the lens of whiteness studies (2012: 402–404). 11. This is similar to The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which suggests from its title that it will be a novel about terrorism, but only contains one representation of a terrorist act – and this occurs on a television set (a representation of a representation). 12. Saeed is an Arabic name (meaning ‘happy one’), which is not exclusively Muslim. In the days of the Prophet, some of his companions were known by the name Saeed, but they had held this name since before the arrival of Islam. Today it continues to be a name common among Arab Christians as well as Muslims (the most famous example being Edward W. Said). Nadia is common in various parts of the Islamic world as well as outside it (for example, in Greece, Russia, and France). As with Saeed, the name is popular in the Arabic language but does not have specific Islamic tonality. It is pronounced differently in Arabic (Nadiyah) than in European languages, and is an adjective which comes from the noun nada (meaning dewdrops formed after rain or, in a figurative sense, generosity). 13. This critique is enunciated not only through the American man’s paranoia about ‘Mexicans […] or […] Muslims’ cited earlier, but also through the allusion to a ‘night of shattered glass’ (132) against migrants perpetrated by the far right in London. This of course references Kristallnacht in the Germany of the 1930s, thereby hinting at religious as well as racial hatred. 14. Our posthuman condition will, Braidotti predicts, lead to ‘a vitalist return to the polymorphous and, according to Freud, “perverse” (in the sense of playful and non-reproductive) structure of human sexuality’ (2013: 98). 15. Others agreed with Pakistan’s former climate change negotiator Shafqat Kakakhel that the smog might bring the two hostile neighbours together. In both Delhi and Lahore, simply inhaling the noxious air is said to do the same damage as smoking 50 cigarettes a day. And Pakistanis need to look

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at their own practices, such as the wholesale destruction of trees, before castigating their foes next door. Sociologist Anita Weiss currently resides in Lahore, and observes that ‘the deterioration of public transit networks and the proliferation of automobiles and private minibuses cause unprecedented traffic congestion, bottlenecks, and pollution’ (2014: 194). 16. See endnote 18 to this chapter, below, for more details. There are no magical realist elements apart from that. Yet, as already intimated, other non-realist components in the novel include a speculative fiction element that adheres to the extension of existing surveillance and artificial intelligence technology, as well as the dystopian and utopian angles that I have adumbrated but hope other critics will consider in full detail. 17.  This framing, as I noted in the previous chapter, is similar to that employed by Tabish Khair in Just Another Jihadi Jane. 18. These cut-pieces can be found in Chapters 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, respectively. Additionally, the second chapter introduces a Japanese gangster who starts following two girls in their late teens; these young women are Filipino, a race he dislikes and has a history of violence against. Chapter 3’s scene is about an old war veteran in San Diego who tries to speak to a young soldier about the ‘enemy’ coming through the doors, but is snubbed. In a rare misstep, Chapter 4 rather confusingly describes a brave man (probably a jihadist) helping a second man teleport through a door into Nadia and Saeed’s city. In Chapter 10, the ­opinions are recounted of an old woman in Palo Alto, California, who has lived there all her life but is shocked by the sweeping population changes (see p. 237–238). Chapter 11’s cut-piece scene pivots on a mute maid living alone in the outskirts of Marrakesh, most of the other servants and her husband and daughter having passed through the doors to Europe. There is no cut-piece scene in the short epilogue-like final chapter. 19. All but the first cut-piece scene set in Sydney’s Surry Hills district were excluded from the BBC Book at Bedtime adaptation of Hamid’s novel (Radio 4 2017). This is understandable given the need to abridge the novel to fit five 15-minute episodes, but it did lead to the programme’s omission of all the juxtaposed stories of anonymous people in different cities around the world, which cast new light on the allegorical tale of Nadia and Saeed. (As a side note, the Surry Hills area near Sydney’s Central Station is quite rundown and frequented by drug addicts and other down-and-outs, so Hamid’s portrayal of it as a bastion of white privilege is discrepant.) 20. It is interesting that the author chooses Palo Alto, which is a place that has changed almost entirely over the last 30 years. The city is unrecognizable compared to how it was before the tech-boom and the rise of Silicon Valley. Parts of the metropolis which used to be extremely deprived are now a playground for Google, Twitter, and their like. The transformation

248  C. CHAMBERS in Palo Alto and other parts of California is remarkable, but not all inhabitants benefit equally and public services are often lamentable. Hanna Rosin reports on Silicon Valley’s sinister side that has led to unusual high rates of ‘suicide clusters’ among young people in Palo Alto, in part because these clusters ‘feed on viral news’ (2015: n.p.). 21. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that Gikandi writes (2010: 24) that even if some refugees seem to cling to hidebound traditions and ideas of purity, they are cosmopolitanism’s last, best hope – though our notions of cosmopolitanism will have to be radically reworked. 22. While the mainstream media in Euro-America has been preoccupied with a European refugee crisis, this is in fact a global refugee crisis with greatest impact on Syria’s neighbours. Leila al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab divulge the staggering statistic that the over one million Syrian refugees seeking asylum in Lebanon comprises well over a quarter of the country’s population – the equivalent of more than 16 million people entering the UK (2016: 157). 23. For discussion of refugees, asylum seekers, and modern forms of slavery in contemporary women’s fiction, see Chambers and Watkins (2015: 250). 24. This image is similar to one deployed by Agha Shahid Ali in his poem ‘Farewell’ about the violence in Kashmir that has caused children to run out of bombed houses with ‘windows in their arms’ (1998/1997: 22). 25. In Discontent and Its Civilizations, Hamid writes: ‘Co-creation is central to my politics […]. I believe that we co-create the overlapping societies we belong to, large and small, and that we should be free to try to invent new ways of being and interacting’ (2015: 11).

Works Cited Ackerman, Diane (1990) A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage. Ali, Agha Shahid (1998/1997) The Country Without a Post Office: Poems 1991– 1995. New York: W. W. Norton. al-Shami, Leila, and Robin Yassin-Kassab (2016) Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. London: Pluto. Arendt, Hannah (1976/1966) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Attridge, Derek (2017) ‘No Escape from Home’: History, Affect and Art in Zoë Wicomb’s Translocal Coincidences’. In Derek Attridge and Kai Easton (eds.), Zoë Wicomb and the Translocal. Abingdon: Routledge. 49–63. Baker-Jordan, Skylar (2017) ‘Racism and Classism Killed the Residents of Grenfell Tower’. Huffington Post. 15 June. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/skylar-bakerjordan/grenfell-fire_b_17104044.html. Accessed 7 December 2017. Barnes, Adrian (2012) Nod. Hebden Bridge: Bluemoose.

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Braidotti, Rosi (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bulman, May (2017) ‘Grenfell Tower Fire: Undocumented Migrants Could Still Be Missing’. Independent. 19 June. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ home-news/grenfell-tower-fire-disaster-latest-residents-families-victims-homeless-immigration-status-migrants-a7798051.html. Accessed 12 January 2018. Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2018) ‘Drone Wars: The Full Data’. Accessed 11 January 2018. Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Carroll, Lewis (1949/1865) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: A. and R. Lane. Chamayou, Grégoire (2015/2013) A Theory of the Drone. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: New Press. Chambers, Claire (2017) Rivers of Ink: Selected Essays. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Chambers, Claire, and Susan Watkins (2015) ‘Writing Now’. In Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker (eds.), The History of British Women’s Writing, Volume 10: 1970–Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 245–265. Cohen, Thierry, Maylis de Kerangal, and Jean-Pierre Luminet (2012) Villes éteintes. Paris: Marval. Comoroff, Jean, and John L. Comoroff (2016/2012) Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa. Abingdon: Routledge. Connor, Steven (2015) ‘Literature, Technology and the Senses’. In David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 177–196. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus. Brian Massumi (trans. and foreword). London: Athlone. Docter, Pete (dir.) (2001) Monsters, Inc. Actors: John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Mary Gibbs, and Steve Buscemi. Emeryville, CA: Disney Pixar. Fanon, Frantz (2001/1961) The Wretched of the Earth. Constance Farrington (trans.) and Jean-Paul Sartre (pref.). London: Penguin. Gikandi, Simon (2010) ‘Between Roots and Routes: Cosmopolitanism and the Claims of Locality’. In Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh (eds.), Re-routing the Postcolonial. Abingdon: Routledge. 22–35. Hamid, Mohsin (2000) Moth Smoke. London: Granta. ——— (2007) The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Hamish Hamilton. ——— (2013) How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. London: Hamish Hamilton. ——— (2015) Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York and London. New York: Penguin. ——— (2017a) Exit West. London: Hamish Hamilton.

250  C. CHAMBERS ——— (2017b) ‘Mohsin Hamid on Exit West. What Makes a Man Booker Novel? Six Shortlisted Authors Share Their Secrets’. Guardian. 14 October. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/14/what-makes-a-man-bookernovel-six-shortlisted-authors-share-their-secrets. Accessed 7 December 2017. ——— (2017c) ‘Mohsin Hamid on the Dangers of Nostalgia: We Need to Imagine a Brighter Future’. Guardian. 25 February. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/25/mohsin-hamid-danger-nostalgia-brighter-future. Accessed 14 January 2018. Haraway, Donna J. (1991/1985) ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. 149–181. Hart, Keith (2017) ‘The West’s Moral and Political Crisis’. Anthropology Today. 33.4: 1–3. Hayles, Katherine (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Hoek, Lotte (2013) Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh. New York: Columbia University Press. Huxley, Aldous (2004/1954) The Doors of Perception: And Heaven and Hell. London: Vintage. International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law) (2012) Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan. September. http://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/ Living-Under-Drones.pdf. Accessed 10 December 2017. Kahn, Douglas (1999) Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kingsley, Patrick (2016) The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis. London: Guardian and Faber and Faber. Lewis, C. S. (1950) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. London: Geoffrey Bles. Leyshon, Cressida (2016) ‘Mohsin Hamid on the Migrants in All of Us’. New Yorker. 7 November. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/thisweek-in-fiction-mohsin-hamid-2016-11-14. Accessed 13 January 2018. McLuhan, Marshall (2005/1961) ‘Inside the Five Sense Sensorium’. In David Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. 43–52. Munos, Delphine (2012) ‘Possessed by Whiteness: Interracial Affiliations and Racial Melancholia in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48.4: 396–405. Nasta, Susheila (2002) Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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Conclusion

There are several avenues for future research and writers who are not discussed in this book but whose work is worthy of examination from a sensory studies perspective. Apart from the 1990s novels which I list on p. xxv and the ones whose absence I lament in the Introduction, several other important texts from the 2000s and 2010s should be recognized. Since I discussed Abdullah Hussein’s Urdu novella ‘The Journey Back’ (1987/1981) in Britain Through Muslim Eyes, I decided not to include his first Anglophone novel Émigré Journeys (2000), because it deals with similar themes of the first generation of male Pakistani migrants to the UK. More notable an absence is British Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh. Her humorous Arabic-language novel Only in London (2001/2000) is highly multisensory, featuring a gay character, Samir, who longs for the touch of blond British men; a divorcee named Lamis, whose English elocution teacher advises her not to eat Arab dishes because she will say their names in her head and this will distract her from developing ‘unaccented’ speech; a prostitute called Amira who frequents the Edgware Road’s restaurants and London’s glitziest tea rooms in the hope that Gulf Arabs will reward her handsomely for her sexual touch; and finally Nicholas, the handsome museum curator with whom Lamis falls in love and for whom she stops her enthusiastic masturbation against various pieces of furniture. Then came Pakistani Scottish author Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag (2005/2004), which unfolds over the course of one nighttime radio show and includes a track listing and discography by the protagonist, © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 C. Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52089-0

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Zaf, a Glasgow DJ. The novel therefore has a great deal to say about listening, but Gerry Smyth has already discussed this in relation to music (2008: 123–128) and Rachael Gilmour (2018: 82) with regard to ‘uncanny language effects’. South African-born Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (2005) imparts wisdom on silence as well as sound. Although its protagonist Issa is a taciturn person, he listens to highbrow talk radio, works on his PhD thesis with the same piece of music constantly playing, and tolerates the incessant chatter of his elderly English neighbour Frances. Set in London during the hot summer of 2003, the novel poses an ethical question about silence over injustices. For example, Issa is shocked at the lack of outcry when a mosque is raided by British police intent on deporting an Afghan refugee family who had found sanctuary there. He also considers whether South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commttee’s approach of giving an airing to apartheid’s atrocities goes far enough. Shukri, like Issa, seems to believe in the importance of speaking out against social injustice, and finds several Qur’anic and literary passages to support this view. Aamer Hussein’s wistful and carefully-crafted texts Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and The Cloud Messenger (2011) are replete with oral folktales, flute-playing women, male singers, the mellifluous languages of Persian, Italian, and Urdu, and many stimulating reflections on sound and listening. Finally, in 2014, Bangladeshi-born writer Zia Haider Rahman published his captivating debut novel In the Light of What We Know, which is partly set in London and Oxford. In a perceptive review (2014), James Wood maintains that Rahman’s novel is all about knowledge and its limitations. However, the text’s title offers up a hint that it is equally about ‘light’ – or religious knowledge, vision, and optics. Saadi’s, Shukri’s, and Rahman’s novels destabilize my thesis: the first two are about hearing but were published in this millennium’s first decade, when I discuss this sense as a preoccupation for the 2010s, while Rahman’s is one of the rare post-Rushdie Muslim texts to evince greater concern with sight than the other senses. This illustrates some inevitable overlap between categories – features from one decade may bleed into another – and the fact is that most taxonomies find exceptions to prove the rule. In the Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing, editors Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam reflect on the interplay of the mental with the physical in Muslim spirituality via a reading of Uzma Aslam Khan’s lyrical novel The Geometry of God (2009/2008). ‘The best way

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to know God’, they aver, ‘is through khayal, “the seat of intelligence”, but zauq (taste), a more sensual way of knowing God, is even lovelier than khayal because “It’s physical. Not abstract”’ (2019: 384). Taste, and the senses more broadly, can thus be a source of mystical enlightenment as well as material pleasure. Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels has made a physical, concrete, and multisensory intervention into debates about literature and multiculturalism in the UK, but without losing sight of the religious dimension of British Muslim fiction. Throughout its pages, I have emphasized that the senses provide access to an alternative form of knowledge from that of reason-based thought. As we have seen, this knowledge can be empowering for postcolonial subjects in general and Muslims in particular. British Muslims have long had their everyday lives scrubbed from existence in the media and the arts by lack of representation and endless circulation of the same stereotypes. As we have seen, some of these Muslim-identified writers contribute to such a doxa more than others. However, much of the fiction highlighted, especially in my last three chapters, provides readers with a full-bodied account of Muslims’ quotidian experiences and complex sensory lives.

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Index

0-9 1971 War, 82, 198 7/7 London attacks of 2005, xxiii, 59, 71, 84 9/11 attacks on the United States, xvi–xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxvi, xxxii, 41, 57, 58, 71, 95, 127, 138, 156, 172, 180, 187, 188, 192 A Abbas, Sadia, xxiv, 77, 109, 110, 128, 130, 132 Abbas, Tahir, 139, 158 Abdel-Magied, Yassmin, xvii Aberdeen, 126 Aboulela, Leila, xxiv, xxvi–xxviii, xxxii, 58, 121, 122, 125–129, 131– 135, 142, 144, 156, 157 Abu Dhabi, 126 Abu Ghraib, 31 Abu-Jaber, Diana, 125 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 72, 76, 110, 131, 132 Abu Taleb Khan, Mirza, xxii

Ackerman, Diane, 4, 12, 63, 75, 81, 83, 110, 121, 156, 213 Adams, Carol J., 80, 143, 151 adultery in the novel, 16 Afghanistan, 32, 89, 138 Afghan War (2001 onwards), 239 Africa, 59, 123 African Americans, 228, 233, 239 Ahmad, Rukhsana, xxv Ahmed, Rehana, vii, xvii, xxi, xxiii, 59, 92, 93, 100, 110, 112 Ahmed, Sara, xxxiv, 9, 20, 78, 135, 153 Alam, M.Y., xxvi al-Andalus, 203 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr, 189 alcohol, 5, 6, 8, 82, 127, 132, 138, 146. See also pubs Aldama, Frederick Luis, 136 Algeria/Algerians, 57, 173, 175 Ali, Agha Shahid, 141, 248 Ali, Monica, xxviii, 16, 71, 80, 81, 92, 107, 109, 126, 152 Ali, Tariq, xiv Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin, 122

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 C. Chambers, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52089-0

289

290  Index Ali Khan, Nusrat Fateh, xxvii, 87 allegory, 236 Allen, Chris, xv Al Muhajiroun, 7 al-Qaida, xviii, 173 Al-Shaykh, Hanan, 253 Althusser, Louis, 174 Amis, Martin, xvi, xx, 172, 179 anasheed (music), 193, 194 Anglo-Iranians, 141, 143, 156 Antigone, 180–183, 203 anti-Semitism, 151, 198 Arabian Nights, The, 131, 132 Arabic, language, xxix, xxx, 10, 21, 33, 34, 95, 131, 138, 145, 153, 159, 232, 246, 253 literature, 149 Arabism (Arab nationalism), 145 Arabs, xxvi. See also Bedouin, Middle East colonialism, 150 culture, 28, 145, 150 identity, xxv, 145 migration, 84, 104, 106, 122 women, 18 world, 123, 131 writers, xxii–xxiv, xxvi, 71, 145, 156 Arab Spring, xxiii Arendt, Hannah, 30, 31, 241 artificial intelligence (AI), 213, 215, 247 Asad, Talal, 172 Aslam, Nadeem, xxvi–xxviii, xxxi, xxxii, 71–74, 76–80, 82–91, 93, 94, 106, 107, 109, 127, 144, 156 Aslam, Saiyma, 254 Attali, Jacques, 194 Attridge, Derek, vii Atwood, Margaret, 194 Auden, W.H., xxxi autobiographical fiction, xv autobiography biography/biographers, 21, 141

life writing, 171 memoir, xv awards Man Booker Prize, 93, 215 Women’s Prize for Fiction, 175 B Back, Les, 138, 197 Baghdad, 77, 136, 155 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich, 194 Bal, Mieke, 133 Bangladesh (earlier East Bengal, East Pakistan), 85, 91, 101, 102, 104 Bangladeshis, British/in Britain, 7, 92, 101 Barnard, Malcolm, 48 Barnes, Adrian, 226 Barrett, Michèle, 78 Barthes, Roland, 48, 201 Bassel, Leah, 169, 170, 201 belief, xix, xxiii, xxiv, 3, 14, 34, 44, 58, 61, 85, 95, 110, 111, 127, 156, 172, 173, 182, 220, 231 Bengal, 94, 95 Bengali (language), 79, 102, 152 Benjamin, Walter, 195, 201, 237 Bennett, Louise, 79 Berger, John, 50 Berners-Lee, Tim, xx Beukes, Lauren, 226 Bhabha, Homi K., xxxiv, 150, 185, 196, 204 Bhutto, Benazir, 8, 56 Bible, 183 Bildungsroman, 19, 33, 113 binary opposition, 132, 203 binary thinking, 181 biradari (kinship), 56 Blair, Tony, xvii, 136 Blasim, Hassan, 190 blasphemy, xiii

Index

Bloomsbury Group, 21, 22 body, vii, xxxiii, 3, 4, 10, 12, 14, 14, 15, 17, 23, 24, 25, 31–33, 43, 48, 50, 51, 55, 63, 64, 74, 77, 78, 96, 98, 99, 105, 107, 122, 132–134, 145, 151, 180, 181, 188, 197, 201, 236 Boehmer, Elleke, 102 Bollywood, 191, 193, 194 Bolton, xiii Bombay (Mumbai), 79, 110, 137, 155 bombings, 59, 71, 84 borders, 10, 46, 94, 97, 107, 171, 240, 244 Bosnia, 8, 9 Bradford, xiii, xvi, xix, 60, 71, 79, 124, 184, 185 Brah, Avtar, 75, 76, 81, 90 Braidotti, Rosi, 215, 222, 236, 246 Breivik, Anders Behring, xviii Brexit, xxviii, 171, 184, 197, 204, 239 Britain/British class, xxiii, xxix, 103, 127 history, xiv, xvii, 8, 79, 123 immigration, 84, 216 religion, xxi, 41, 60, 71, 95 British Asians, xiii, 41, 54, 75, 81, 196 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), xxxv, 160, 247 British Muslims, viii. See also identity, media, migration contested, mutating category of, 171 education, 124 representations of, xxii, xxiii, xxix, 155, 199 writing by, xxii–xxiv, xxxiv, 52, 60, 73 British National Party (BNP), 54 Burnley, 71

  291

Bush, George W., xiv, 181, 188 Butler, Judith, 7, 49, 181, 219 Byzantine Empire, Byzantium, 140 C Cairo, 22, 23, 27, 29, 199 Camus, Albert, 178 capitalism, xviii, 48, 86, 91, 154, 222 Carroll, Lewis, 234 Carson, Anne, 181 Carter, Paul, 79 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 173, 221 Chamayou, Grégoire, 221, 246 Chechnya, 9, 95, 96, 126. See also Second Chechen War chicken shops, vii, 146, 147, 176 China, 139, 246 Christians/Christianity, 32, 41, 58, 140, 199, 246 city/urban, 10, 12, 15, 43, 60, 79, 85, 91, 94, 106, 123, 135, 138, 140, 147, 175, 180, 186, 188, 189, 216, 223 poor, 91 postcolonial, 123 ‘clash of civilizations’, xvii, xxi. See also Huntington, Samuel P. class middle, xx, 14, 184 upper, 13, 25, 26, 34, 103 working, 13, 26, 28, 46, 76, 103, 106, 146, 159, 177, 178, 202, 229 Classen, Constance, xxxi, 4, 52, 72 climate change, 86, 154, 246 Clinton, Bill, 5 clothes, 19, 47–49, 75, 83, 91, 133, 158, 179

292  Index Coetzee, J.M., 31, 32, 182 coffee, xxx, 10, 124, 136, 138–140, 143, 156, 158, 216, 230 Cohen, Thierry, viii, 223, 227, 228, 242 Coke Studio, 189, 205 Cold War, xvii, xx, 28, 109 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 44 Colette, 19, 20, 27 colonialism, 79, 104 communism/communists, xix, 4, 7, 29, 111 Comoroff, Jean, 227 connective dissonance, xxxii, 73, 75, 85, 86, 90, 94, 107, 219 Connor, Steven, xxxi, 4, 53, 56, 64, 213 Conrad, Joseph, xxxi, 20, 33, 178 Corbin, Alain, 74, 91 cosmetics, 20, 49, 90, 104 cosmopolitan(ism), 13, 57, 86, 136, 143, 216, 238, 239, 248 croissant, 124, 139–141, 151, 156 cross-dressing, 49 Crowther, Yasmin, xxvi, xxviii, 80, 121, 122, 124, 125, 135, 136, 138, 141–144, 147, 156 Crusades, 174 cyborg, 214, 215, 238 D Dabydeen, David, xxxi Daesh, xxvii, 173–177, 179, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 189, 193–197, 200, 202, 204, 205 Darwish, Mahmoud, 145, 159 Das, Santanu, 24 David, Elizabeth, 123 Dearey, Melissa, 170, 171 decolonization, 79 de Maupassant, Guy, xxx

Denmark, Danish, xxviii, 175 Deobandi, 87 diaspora/diasporic, vii. See also AngloIranians, Bangladeshis, British Arabs, British Asians, British Muslims, Pakistanis writing, 72, 85, 122, 123, 143 discrimination, 56 dissonance, 85, 86, 170, 200 diversity, 45, 57, 180, 203 Doha, 126 Dolar, Mladen, 182 doubt, 186, 223, 232 dress. See clothing, cosmetics Drobnick, Jim, 72 drones, xx, 217, 218, 220–222, 227, 242, 246 E ears, 20, 75, 175, 183, 187, 188, 197, 228 Eco, Umberto, 13, 18, 48 ecstasy (drug), 5, 44, 45 education, 11, 103, 127, 132, 183, 203 higher education/university, 46, 95, 183 schools, 13, 30, 32, 63, 84, 112, 124, 136, 157, 183, 195 Egypt, xxviii, 5, 8, 18, 21–24, 31–33, 123 El-Enany, Rasheed, 19, 34 Engen, Trygg, 90 England, Lynndie, 31 English language, xxix, 92 English-language fiction, xxv, 96 Enlightenment, the, xvi, 12, 21, 74, 110, 154, 226, 243, 255 Entwistle, Joanne, 48, 64 equality, 84, 128, 170, 203

Index

ethnicity, xxv, 28, 45, 60, 73, 177 Europe, xxxv, 7, 15, 59, 79, 98, 107, 185, 199, 216, 239, 247 exile, 111, 126, 129, 133, 180 exotic(ism), 16, 83, 84, 108, 123, 136, 137, 143, 152 extremist(s), xviii, xxv, 7, 59, 62, 95, 96, 172, 183, 196, 201 ideology, 179 eyes, xxii, 17, 20, 63, 75, 101, 109, 127, 134, 137, 146, 150, 188, 190, 205, 229, 239, 241 F Facebook, 197–199, 219 faith, xvi, xviii, xix, xxiv, xxv, 58, 80, 95, 100, 121, 126, 128, 129, 135, 149, 156, 179, 183, 186 Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, 82, 87, 90, 107, 110 Fallujah, 136 fanaticism/fanatics, 56, 172 Fanon, Frantz, xxxiii, 54, 81, 175, 218 fatwa, xiii, xiv, xix, xxi, xxiv, 41, 60, 61, 154, 175 Faulkner, William, 202 Faulks, Sebastian, xxv feminism, 6, 25, 132 First Iraq War, 1990–1991, xviii, xxi First World War, 24, 184, 195 Fish, Stanley, 152 five pillars. See Islam Flaubert, Gustave, xxx Fontane, Theodor, xxii food Arab, 51, 123, 124, 126, 146, 150, 156 British, 51, 75, 122–125, 139, 144, 156 Iranian/Persian, 122, 123, 135, 137, 138, 144

  293

microhistory genre, 124 South Asian, 51, 52, 76, 123, 157 Sudanese, 126, 129, 130, 133 Forster, E.M., 100 Foucault, Michel, xxxiii, xxxiv France, French people, 73, 74, 139, 140, 239, 246 freedom/unfreedom and women, 131, 132, 136, 138, 184 as (assumed) Western value, 130–132, 135, 156 azadi, 131 communitarian, 131 fighters, 175 hurriyya, 131 liberation, 132, 136 religious, xvi, 100, 131, 133 French colonialism, 79, 104 Freud, Sigmund, 185, 204, 246 Fukuyama, Francis, xviii fundamentalism/fundamentalists Hindu, 183 Muslim, 58, 59, 178 secular, xiv, 59, 178, 183 G Ganguly, Debjani, xix, xx gay sexuality, 21, 253. See also queer identities gaze, the, xxii, xxxii, 6, 10, 16, 34, 48, 50, 73, 127, 174, 180, 190, 214 gender, 10. See also feminism and (in)equality, 6 and Islam, xxv, 57, 73, 132 and nation, 10 gender performativity, 7, 49 Ghalib, Mirza, 87, 107 ghazal(s), 86 ghettoization, 84 Ghose, Zulfikar, xxv

294  Index Ghosh, Amitav, 131 Gikandi, Simon, 216, 217, 239, 241, 245, 248 Gilgamesh flood myth, 154 Gilman, Sander L., 3, 4, 23 Gilmour, Rachael, vii, 254 Ginsberg, Allen, 182 globalization, 85, 86, 245 global refugee crisis, 215, 248 global warming, 154 Great Turkish War, 140 Greece, 123, 246 Greer, Germaine, 93 Gregory, Derek, xxxii, 85, 86, 107 Grenfell Tower, fire, 229, 231 Guantanamo, 188 Guardian, the, 6, 20, 102, 175, 231 Gurnah, Abdulrazak, xxvi H hadith/ahadith, xiv, 96, 142, 155, 183 Hai, Yasmin, xviii Hajj, 130, 132 halal, xix, 124, 125, 128, 134, 135, 147, 149, 156 fiction, 125, 135 meat, 80, 146, 147, 149 halawa (sugaring), 25–28 Halliday, David, 98, 139–141 Hamid, Mohsin, xxvi–xxviii, 177, 190, 191, 204, 213, 214, 216–220, 222, 223, 226–228, 230–245 haram, 82, 127, 135, 149, 156 Haraway, Donna J., 214, 215, 238 Hassan, Waïl, 12, 14, 16, 18, 34, 130, 143, 157, 188, 189, 205 Hawthorn, Jeremy, xxii, 88 Hayles, Katherine, 214, 215, 222 Heaney, Seamus, 86, 180, 184, 203 Herbert, Caroline, vii, 198 hijab, xviii, 8, 62, 179, 185

Hindus/Hinduism, 80, 81, 155 Hirschkind, Charles, 199 Hitchens, Christopher, xvi Hizb ut-Tahrir, 7, 8, 25 Hobbes, Thomas, 131 Holy Roman Empire, 140 homophobia/homophobic, xviii, 7, 56, 59 Honeyford affair, xix honour/dishonour, 96, 97, 137, 184 honour killing, 78, 88, 110 hooks, bell, 26 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, xxxi Howes, David, xxii, xxxi–xxxiii, 150, 194 Huddersfield, 79 Huggan, Graham, 108, 122 human rights, xx, 8, 31, 56, 78 abuses, 27, 29, 54 report, 56, 221 Huntington, Samuel P., xvii, xviii, xxi Husain, Ed, 7, 8, 44 Hussein, Aamer, 254 Hussein, Abdullah, 253 Huxley, Aldous, 245 hybridity, xxx, 155 I identity, 9, 25, 26, 28, 49, 50, 60, 93, 124, 125, 127, 130, 135, 139, 144, 145, 171, 216, 223, 244 Imam, Sheikh, xxvi, 34, 58 immigration. See migration imperialism, 124, 140, 151, 154, 237, 243 incense, 27, 33, 79–81, 107, 108, 110 India, xxi, xxviii, 65, 76, 92, 110, 111, 137, 139, 147, 155, 158, 175, 234, 246 Indian subcontinent, 107, 240 individualism, 6

Index

infidelity, 5, 14, 27 interpellation, 174, 200 intersectionality, 179 intersensoriality, xxvii, xxxi intertextuality, xxxi, 15, 22, 183 Iran, xix, xxviii, 60, 61, 122, 135–138, 140–142, 144, 158 Iraq, xx, 5, 9, 31, 140, 152, 175, 190 Iraq War, Second, 2003, 136 Ireland, 240 ISIS. See Daesh Islam and dissent, 95 and European encounter, 79, 99, 112, 126, 127, 178, 195 and identity, xxv, 28, 60, 124, 127, 135 as faith, xvi, xix, xxiv, 58, 61, 80, 122, 135, 156 distinction between religion and culture, 155 five pillars. See Hajj, Ramadan, prayer oppressive currents/accretions in, 25, 93, 136 representations of, xxii, xxiii, xxix, xxxi, 76, 123, 155 Islamabad, 176, 198 Islamic Right, xxxii, 8, 56 Islamism, 8, 41, 47, 49, 55, 57, 90, 102, 107, 182 Islamophobia, xiii–xv, xviii, xxi, xxxiv, 54, 57, 95, 108, 127, 180, 197 Israel/Israeli, 24, 240, 246 J Janmohamed, Shelina Zahra, 82, 106, 149 jasmine, 82, 83, 88, 90, 105, 106, 109, 139

  295

Javid, Sajid, 177, 203 Jews, 31, 123, 150 Jewish identity, 139 jihad/jihadism/jihadists, 95, 96, 107, 169, 171–176, 178, 179, 182, 184, 188–190, 193–196, 199, 201, 202, 233, 238, 247 John L. Comoroff, 227 Johnson, Boris, xxv, 172, 179 Jones, Lloyd, xxxi journalism, 159, 198, 201, 221 Joyce, James, xxxi, 33, 58 K Kandiyoti, Deniz, 29 Kanwal, Aroosa, vii, 254 Kapoor, Nisha, xiv, xxxii, 187 Karachi, 175, 186, 189, 198, 202, 204, 222, 223, 234 Kashmir, 32, 79, 138, 141, 191, 248 Kershaw, Hannah, vii, 72 Kershen, Anne J., 123 Khair, Tabish, vii, xxvi, xxviii, xxix, xxxii, 80, 169–172, 175, 177– 180, 182, 183, 186, 188, 193, 195–198, 200–203, 238, 243, 247 Khan, Almas, 122, 157 Khan, Muhammad, xxix Khan, Sadiq, 177 Khan, Uzma Aslam, 254 Khartoum, 129, 133 Khomeini, Ayatollah, xiii, xix, 60 Kingsley, Patrick, 219, 239, 245 Kipnis, Laura, 5, 15, 17 knowledge colonial, xxxi, xxxiii, 255 sensory, xxxiv, 4, 55, 215, 255 spiritual, 128, 254 western, 4 Kosovo, 9

296  Index Kristeva, Julia, 125, 181 Kureishi, Hanif, xxi, xxiv–xxviii, 4–9, 32, 33, 41–48, 52–60, 62, 63, 72, 75, 123, 126, 144, 182, 186, 190 L Lacan, Jacques, xxii Lacey, Kate, 169 ladettes, 6, 7 Lahore, 79, 216, 217, 220, 227, 232, 234, 242, 243, 245–247 language, xx, xxix, 12, 13, 18, 34, 49, 74, 75, 93, 97, 105, 112, 134, 138, 181, 190, 193, 194, 199, 244–246, 253, 254. See also individual languages, translation Lawson, Nigella, 150, 160 Leeds, xxviii, 203 Lefebvre, Henri, 9 lesbian sexuality, 34 Levin, Ira, 15 Lewis, C.S., 127, 234, 235 limes, 77, 91, 100–102, 108 listening, xxvi, 10, 19, 42, 169, 170, 174, 178, 187, 190, 191, 194, 218, 220, 222, 254 politics of, 169, 170 logical positivism, 154 London, xxi, xxiii, 7, 10, 27, 29, 43, 45, 58–60, 63, 64, 76, 91–94, 104, 126, 127, 129, 132–135, 141, 145, 147, 152, 156, 159, 173, 175–177, 179, 180, 189, 192, 202, 217, 218, 220, 222– 224, 226–230, 232, 233, 236, 237, 239, 240, 242, 244–246, 253, 254 East End, 91, 92, 152

M Madonna, 43, 49, 64 magical realism, 218, 234, 243 Major, John, 5, 41, 44 Malak, Amin, 18, 19, 30, 33, 34 Malik, Ayisha, xxvi, 65 Malik, Kenan, xxi, 71 Mamdani, Mahmood, 108 Mannur, Anita, 122 martyrs, 107, 142 mashta (beautician), 25 Massad, Joseph, 19, 150 Massey, Doreen, 9 Mattar, Karim, 136, 144 maulvi (religious teacher), 59, 61, 91 May, Theresa, 88, 177, 203 Mbembe, Achille, xx McClintock, Anne, 104, 105 McDonald, Donna, 193 McEwan, Ian, xx McIntosh, Alastair, 154 McLuhan, Marshall, 215 McVeigh, Timothy, xviii media, xviii, xxiii, xxv, xxx, 6, 41, 123, 136, 174, 176, 177, 179, 186, 189, 191, 192, 197, 198, 201, 202, 215, 248, 255 Mengiste, Maaza, 190, 191 Middle East, 33, 59, 123, 136, 239 Mignolo, Walter D., xxxiii, xxxiv migrants, xx, xxi, xxiii, 10, 53, 62, 76, 78, 79, 82–85, 91, 94, 100, 103, 104, 106–109, 123, 124, 136, 145, 157, 215–220, 222, 228–233, 235–241, 243–246, 253 migration, 84, 104, 106, 122, 124, 130, 136, 156, 217, 221, 235, 237, 244 Mirza, Maryam, vii, 88

Index

Mirza, Munira, 84 modernism, 21 Mondal, Anshuman, vii, 57, 99, 144, 191 Moore, Lindsey, vii, 19, 29, 35, 78, 100, 112, 113 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 52 Morey, Peter, vii, xvii, xxiv, 121, 127, 130, 136, 137, 153, 157 Morris, Chris, 190 Morton, Stephen, vii, 92 Moslund, Sten Pultz, xxxi mosques, 57, 58, 61, 81, 88, 127, 128, 131, 133, 156, 171, 187, 198, 200, 254 mouth, 17, 45, 63, 81, 89, 99, 101, 121, 122, 129, 141, 144, 150, 151, 193 Mubarak, Hosni, 8, 31 Muezzin, 199, 200 Mufti, Aamir R., 82 Mughals, 87 Muhammed, Prophet, 78, 82, 129, 155, 246 multiculturalism, xxi, xxvi, 71, 72, 84, 107, 152, 153, 255 Munos, Delphine, vii, 246 Musharraf, Pervez, 56 music, xxvi, xxvii, 5, 6, 10, 14, 32, 41–46, 58, 62, 74, 87, 170, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194, 200, 205, 241, 254 Muslim Brotherhood, 8 ‘Muslimness’, 60 Muslims. See British Muslims, diaspora ‘Muslim world’, 95 N Nafisi, Azar, 137 Naheed, Kishwar, 182 Naipaul, V.S., xv

  297

Nash, Geoffrey, xxiii, 130 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 29, 30, 59 Nasta, Susheila, 240 nation/nation-state, 10, 84, 140, 141, 184, 186, 204, 227, 228, 231–233, 240, 243 nationalism, 7, 232, 239 neoliberal(ism), xiv, 101 New York, xviii, xxi, 15, 185, 225, 227 nose, xxxiv, 20, 63, 73, 74, 94, 96–98, 103, 105, 107, 109, 121, 129, 150 nose pin, 97, 112 nostalgia, xxvii, 105, 106, 108, 145, 157, 197, 230, 235, 236 Nussbaum, Martha, xxxi, 125 O Obama, Barack, 188, 235 ocularcentr(ism), xxii, xxxiv, 12, 47, 174 offence, xvii O’Gorman, Daniel, xvii, xxxii, 86 Oklahoma (bombing), xviii Okri, Ben, 229, 230 Oldham riots, 71, 95 olfaction, 74, 76, 109 olfactocentrism, 72 Orientalism/Orientalist, xxii, 16, 50, 108, 122, 132, 150 Oslo Accords, 9 Ottoman Empire, 98 Ottomans, 140 P Pakistan, xxviii, 8, 56, 59, 76, 81, 83–85, 106, 111, 138, 158, 175, 184, 186, 189, 190, 197, 198, 204, 205, 221, 222, 232, 234, 239, 242, 243, 245, 246

298  Index Pakistanis, 59, 221, 246 British, 75 in Britain, 81, 186 Palestine/Palestinian, 32, 145, 159, 199, 239, 240 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 3, 9, 12, 23, 26 Panayi, Panikos, 123, 139, 152 Parekh, Bhikhu, 71 Partition (of the Indian subcontinent), 240 pastoral, 84, 88, 94, 195 Pater, Walter, xxx patriarchy, 6, 29 Pereira-Ares, Noemí, vii, xxvii, 48, 49, 100, 111 Perfect, Michael, vii, 86, 93, 111, 113 perfume, 73, 74, 77, 78, 82, 83, 89–91, 98, 102, 105, 106, 109 Persia, xxiii, 83, 122, 123, 138, 141, 142, 155 Persian language, xxix, 83, 254 Peterloo Massacre (1819), 229 Phillips, Trevor, 84 phones, xxx, 23, 190, 192, 214, 215, 218–220, 236, 237, 241, 242, 244, 245 Pinter, Harold, 154 pluralism, 155 poetry, xxvii, xxix, xxxi, 19, 62, 86, 87, 107, 144, 159, 182–184, 203, 229 Poon, Angelia, vii, 232 Porter, Roy, 72, 73 postcolonial, xxiii, xxix, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxiv, 5, 16, 47, 106, 122–124, 145, 155, 216, 255 nation-states, xxxiii postcolonialism, xxiii posthuman, xxviii, 214–217, 221–223, 242, 243, 246 sensory perception, xxvi, 213, 215, 217, 245

technologies, xxviii, 214, 217, 221 Pravinchandra, Shital, vii, xxix prayer, xxvii, 30, 82, 95, 99, 101, 111, 128, 130, 133, 154, 156, 187, 199, 200, 222, 231–233 prejudice, xvi, xviii, xxviii, 77, 81, 127, 179, 241 Progressive Writers’ Association, xxi protest, xiii, xxi, xxxii, xxxiv, 23, 46, 60, 83, 111, 124, 229, 237 pubs, xiii, 8. See also alcohol purdah, 98 Q Qabbani, Nizar, 144 Qawwali (music), xxvii, 87, 193 queer identities, 7, 78 Quinn, Emelia, vii, 80, 151, 152 Qur’an, 10, 75, 95, 96, 127, 128, 130, 134, 155, 183, 184, 254 R race, xviii, xxi, xxviii, 32, 45, 46, 53, 71, 79, 92, 131, 136, 158, 214, 228, 230, 247 racism, xviii, xxviii, xxxiii, 6, 53–55, 62, 76, 77, 84, 104, 127, 136, 157, 180, 197, 229 cultural, 54 radicalization, 169–171, 173, 176, 181, 186, 196, 198, 200, 201, 204, 205 radio, 174, 175, 192, 247, 253, 254 Rafsanjani, Akbar Hashemi (President), 61 Rahman, Zia Haider, 254 Raja, Ira, 122 Ramadan, 78, 128–130, 157, 200, 229 Ramazani, Jahan, xxxii, 85, 86, 94

Index

Ranasinha, Ruvani, 55, 78 Rancière, Jacques, 192, 201 rape, 5, 13, 28, 32, 34, 46, 88, 97, 143, 246 Raqqa, 175, 176, 185, 189, 190, 195 rave, 6, 42, 43, 45, 46 rave culture, 5, 7 Rawalpindi, 205 Razzaque, Russell, 7, 8, 171 Réage, Pauline (Story of O), 51, 64 refugees, 159, 216, 217, 219, 220, 232, 236, 238, 239, 244, 245, 248. See also global refugee crisis Reinarz, Jonathan, 72, 73 religion, xvi–xviii, xxx, 28, 41, 49, 57–60, 75, 85, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 97, 121, 126–128, 145, 154, 155, 173, 182, 193, 232, 233, 244 resistance, xx, xxvi, xxxii, 26, 41, 54, 220 riba (loan interest), 98 Rodaway, Paul, xxiii, 213, 216 Romanticism, xxxi Roses, xxviii, 82, 83, 88, 90, 109, 141 Roy, Parama, 122 Rudd, Amber, 177, 203 Rumi, Jalal al-Din, xxix, xxx, 83 Runnymede Trust, xxi, 64 Rushdie, Salman, xiii–xvii, xix–xxvi, xxxii–xxxv, 5, 33, 41, 52, 57, 59–62, 64, 110, 150, 154, 155, 160, 183, 254 Russia, 13, 96, 143, 150, 246 Ruthven, Malise, xiii Rwanda, 5, 175 S Saadi, Suhayl, 253, 254 Sacks, Oliver, 193 Sadat, Anwar, 8, 54, 129, 133, 134

  299

saffron, 96, 124, 141–143, 159 Sageman, Marc, 171, 173, 189 Said, Edward W., 50, 85, 98, 186, 246 Sánchez-Arce, Ana María, vii, 93 Santesso, Esra Mirze, vii, xxiii, 85, 103, 128, 135, 157 Sardar, Ziauddin, 122 Satanic Verses, The, xiv–xvii, xix, xxi, xxii, 56, 60, 62, 64 affair, xvi, xxii, xxxiv novel, xiii, xxiv, xxxii, 5 Saudi Arabia, 123 saving Muslim women, 71, 131 Sayyid, S., xv science, xvi, 9, 16, 90, 201 Scotland/Scottish, 126, 156, 180, 253 Second Chechen War, 9, 96 Second World War, xxix, 31, 79, 103 secularism, xvii, 8 segregation, 8, 84, 88, 91, 96 semen, 21, 22, 34, 88, 89, 111 semiotics, 48 sensory studies, xiv, xxii, xxiii, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxiv, 3, 4, 213, 253 Serres, Michel, xxxi Seth, Vikram, xxxi sex, 6, 7, 11–14, 18, 21, 23, 25, 27, 30, 34, 42, 45, 49, 54, 57, 59, 61–63, 72, 133, 150–153, 158, 172, 233 sexuality, xxv, 4–7, 11, 13, 18, 31, 34, 42, 47, 79, 83, 160, 214, 246 Shafak, Elif, xxviii Shah, Bina, vii, 112, 222 Shah, Bulleh, 181 shaheed. See martyrs Shah, Reza (of Iran), 138, 143 Shah, Shanon, 149 Shakespeare, William, 43, 58, 202 Shamsie, Kamila, xxvi–xxix, xxxii, 56, 159, 169–173, 175–177,

300  Index 179–184, 187, 191, 195–198, 200–205, 238, 241, 243, 245 Shamsie, Muneeza, xvii sharia, 84, 110, 152, 174 Sheikh, Farhana, xxv Sheikh I’tesamuddin, Mirza, xxii short story, xx, xxi, 7, 34, 60, 190, 203 Shukri, Ishtiyaq, 254 Six-Day War (1967), 9, 28 Skin, xxxi, 10, 20, 46, 49, 53, 63, 64, 99, 101, 104, 143, 146, 191, 240 slavery/slaves, 53, 102, 131, 139, 239, 243, 248 Slovo, Gillian, 204, 205 smell, xxii, xxvi–xxviii, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiv, 10, 11, 42, 52, 60, 61, 64, 72–77, 79–82, 86, 88–90, 92, 95–103, 105–110, 121, 122, 142, 143, 153 Smith, Mark M., xxxi, xxxii, 3, 11, 17, 49, 52, 53, 56, 75 Smith, Zadie, xxiv Smyth, Gerry, xxvii, 254 socialism, 41 social media, 174, 197, 199 Sontag, Susan, 238 Soueif, Ahdaf, xxviii, xxxv, 4–7, 9–13, 15, 16, 18–22, 24–28, 30–35, 46, 63, 72, 78, 110, 111, 126 South Africa, 32, 254 Soviet(s), 47 Spain, 155 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 169, 174, 187, 194, 200, 238 stereotypes/stereotyping, xvi, xxv, 75, 81, 96, 98, 108, 153, 155, 172, 179, 196, 201, 203, 255 Stokes, Eric, xvi, xxxiv Strachey, Lytton, 21, 22, 34 Sudan/Sudanese, xviii, xxviii, 126, 129, 130, 133, 240

Sufi/Sufism, 7, 78, 82, 83, 87, 107, 131, 181 Sunni, 155 Süskind, Patrick, 73–75, 91, 99, 107, 109 Sylhet/Sylhetis, 91, 92, 112 synaesthesia, xxvii, xxxi, 11, 74, 75, 88, 101 Syria, xxviii, 14, 30, 145, 159, 175–177, 182, 185, 186, 189, 192, 193, 199, 202, 205, 238, 239, 248 Syrian War, 229 T Tagore, Rabindranath, 73, 105 taste, xxii, xxvii, xxviii, xxx–xxxii, xxxiv, 10, 11, 42, 46, 51, 52, 64, 74, 76, 80, 84, 102, 121–125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 139–147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 156, 157, 255 tayyab (wholesome), 149, 156 tea, 10, 30, 124, 137–139, 156, 158, 228, 253 television, xiii, 8, 56, 61, 65, 95, 100, 150, 160, 189, 198, 246 terrorism/terrorists, xiv, xviii, xx, xxi, xxv, 172, 173, 179, 181, 184, 185, 187, 189, 236, 246 Thatcher, Margaret, 41 theatre, 49, 202 ‘Third World’, 172 Thomas, Susie, vii, 41, 60, 144 Thorpe, Vanessa, 21, 173, 184, 204 thriller, xxvi, 175 Tikrit, 136 Tirmizi, Bisma, 122 tolerance, 155 torture, xxv, xxxiv, 29–32, 170, 179, 182, 187–189, 191, 194, 195, 200

Index

touch, xxxiii, xxxiv, 3–6, 8–13, 15, 17–33, 41, 42, 44, 46, 49–53, 56, 59, 61–64, 72, 75, 101, 105, 123, 150, 153, 253 translation, xvi, xxix, 21, 34, 86, 180 Trump, Donald, 200, 239, 240, 243 Turkey/Turkish, xxviii, 83, 98, 123, 140, 185, 186, 193, 232, 246 Twitter, 197, 247 U Ummah, the, xiv, 9, 32, 82, 126, 135, 157, 174 United States, xvii, xxv, 35, 175, 179, 228, 246 Updike, John, 179 Urdu, xxix, 52, 59, 64, 82, 86, 87, 112, 131, 182, 186, 205, 228, 253, 254 language, xxix, 97, 254 literature, 255 V Vakil, AbdoolKarim, xv Valassopoulos, Anastasia, vii, 18, 26, 34 vegans, 149, 153 vegetarianism, 122, 149 veil/veiling, xx, 29, 87, 127, 134, 179. See also hijab violence, domestic, 27, 28, 30, 34, 35, 46, 78, 188 physical, 29, 77 vision, xv, xx, xxxii, 51, 111, 199, 254 Vital Signs (band), 111, 191, 205, 228, 241 voice/voiceless, xviii, xx, xxvi, 18, 29, 41, 93, 101, 131, 149, 175, 178, 182, 187, 192–194, 200, 204, 243

  301

W Wahhabis, 179 Waites, Martyn, xxv Walcott, Derek, 102 ‘War on Terror’, xxv, xxvi, 4, 86, 131 Warsi, Sayeeda, 177, 203 Watkins, Susan, vii, 5, 32, 112, 214, 248 Weldon, Fay, xiii West, Elizabeth, xv White, Mandala, vii, 236 Whitlock, Gillian, 143, 144 Williams, Nigel, xxv Wilson, Elizabeth, 25, 48, 49, 51 Winter, Charlie, 173, 174, 189, 202, 204 Wolf, Naomi, 25 women, xv–xvii, xxiii, 5–8, 15, 16, 20, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31–33, 35, 50, 51, 54, 55, 57, 59, 71–73, 76– 79, 81, 82, 87, 88, 94, 96, 97, 104, 106, 107, 112, 130, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 143, 145, 147, 152, 153, 158, 160, 175, 178, 179, 182, 188, 194–196, 199, 200, 203, 214, 215, 230, 247, 248, 254 Wood, James, 254 Woolf, Virginia, 21, 22, 33 World Trade Center, New York, xviii, xix, xxi X Xanadu, 44 xenophobia, 180 Y Yaqin, Amina, vii, 82, 88, 110, 136 Yassin-Kassab, Robin, xxvi–xxviii, xxxii, 80, 110, 111, 121, 122,

302  Index 124–126, 144–147, 151, 153–157, 159, 160, 248 Yeats, W.B., 77, 86 Yorkshire, xxviii, 79, 124, 175, 177, 185, 186, 196, 202, 203 YouTube, 159, 196, 198–200, 245 Yugoslavia, 5

Z zakat (charity), 58, 106, 122, 129, 130 Zia-ul-Haq, Muhammad, 8, 110