Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing

Literary fiction by writers of Muslim background forms one of the most diverse and vibrant corpora of work being produced today, often dealing with the interaction of Muslim and non-Muslim cultures and exploring liberal orthodoxies such as secularism and multiculturalism. From the work of Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi, whose trail-blazing but controversial writing challenged political and racial orthodoxies in the 1980s, to the new generation of writers, such as Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie, novelists have crafted their complex fictions of multiple belongings and affiliations. The volume aims to reflect the variety of this writing, in essays by acknowledged experts in English, South Asian, and postcolonial literatures in English. Essays address the nature of Muslim identities and affiliations and how they have responded to political realignments since the 1980s, and the conflict between piety/tradition and secular and modern models of citizenship, including how these often play out as generational conflicts in the fiction. Contributors consider the role of migration and immigration in shaping perceptions and shifting affinities, issues of class and gender, literary controversies, national identity, and the impact of 9/11. As well as interrogating such matters, the volume pushes beyond the habitual populist #xE2;#xAC;#xDC;framing#xE2;#xAC;" of Muslims as strangers or interlopers whose ways and beliefs are at odds with those of modernity, exposing the hide-bound, conservative assumptions that underpin such perspectives. Writing by authors of Muslim origin grapples with questions of how one reconciles the impulses of the individual with the requirements of community, how one #xE2;#xAC;#xDC;belongs#xE2;#xAC;" in the modern world, and the role of art in making sense of chaotic contemporary experience, serving to exercise all writers and intellectuals at the present time.