Questioning ‘Muslim Fictions’

Abstract

This article evaluates the concept of Muslim fictions and Muslim writing that has emerged recently in literary and cultural criticism and is already being widely used to identify and analyze the (mainly literary) texts written by authors from a Muslim/Islamic background. This concept has been developed in response to the need of differentiating authentic, „insider‟ representations of Muslim life from the ones produced by „outsiders‟. Though this need had been felt since Edward Said‟s Orientalism (1978) and Covering Islam (1981), works in which Said had identified and criticized the biased nature of western (and, therefore, „outsider‟) representations of Islam and the Muslims, scholars in the disciplines of humanities and the social sciences have become more acutely aware of this need since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent „War on Terror‟. In particular, the discipline of postcolonial studies has taken up this task of defining and appreciating representations of Islam and the Muslims produced by writers from an Islamic background, in order to challenge and decentre western representations which have been seen as supportive of the „clash of civilization‟ framework deployed in the discourse of the „War on Terror‟. This paper will discuss the post-9/11 context of the emergence of the concept of Muslim fictions/writing, discuss the definitions of the concept as given by Amin Malak (Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English), Claire Chambers (British Muslim Fictions), and collectively by Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin in their introduction to Culture, Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing, and, through the case of Pakistani Anglophone writers, will identify some areas in the conceptualization of Muslim fictions/writing which need reconsideration and suggest ways of revising the concept and its applications in order to be a more appropriate reflection of Muslim identity.