Muslims Writing Britain and Beyond: Faith, Class and Multicultural Politics

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The proposed research will explore and interrogate contemporary literary representations of Muslim culture and identities. It will focus in particular on British writers of South Asian Muslim heritage, engaging substantially with debates and controversies concerning the place of Muslims in contemporary multicultural Britain, as well as with the historical presence and practices of Muslims in Britain from the early years of the twentieth century.Since the controversy sparked by Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, British Muslims have been placed increasingly at the centre of tensions and urgent debate concerning multiculturalism by a series of events. These include the 1991 Gulf war; the July 2001 'race riots' in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham; the 9/11 attacks and 'war on terror' waged by Britain in Afghanistan and Iraq; and the 2005 bombings on London transport by British Muslim men. The research will demonstrate the dominance in political debate and national broadcast and broadsheet media of liberal constructions of this minority which represent 'culture' (encompassing religion) as the main factor in identity formation and the primary source of the perceived ills of the 'community', erasing or at best marginalising the social and cultural exclusion experienced by a significant proportion of British Muslims. In such constructions, Britain's male Muslim youth becomes hyper-masculinized through a discourse that identifies it with disaffection, criminality, violence and terror, and leaves little space for alternative subjectivities. In debate about forced marriage, 'honour killings' and the wearing of the hijab, Muslim women are frequently represented either as submissive to patriarchal religious culture or, conversely, as 'liberated' from it. Islam and Muslims have come to figure increasingly as secular modernity's fundamentalist 'other'.South Asian Muslim Britons have engaged with these events, controversies and discourses - not just in the media and the political sphere but also in the arts and fiction. The project will offer close readings of a selection of novels, short stories and autobiographical accounts by a number of authors including Tariq Mehmood, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Sarfraz Manzoor, Ed Hussain, Yasmin Hai and Shelina Zahra Janmohamed. It will explore the ways in which the texts reproduce, debate or destabilize normative ideological constructions of British Muslim culture, and how they might inform current debates about contemporary multicultural Britain. These concern, for example, the place of religious faith within a largely secular public sphere; the intersection of class, gender and generation with religion in the formation of identities, affiliations and practices; and protests by Muslims against creative work and the questions they raise about the politics of representation. By focusing on the silences and contradictions of the primary texts, the study will shed light on social contradictions that are normatively obscured by ideology and demonstrate the centrality of the role of class in shaping Muslim minority identities and practices. It will thereby challenge liberal binaries of secularism, modernity and individual freedom versus religiosity, tradition and communal constraint, and advocate an understanding of multiculturalism and anti-racism which valorises subaltern formations and minority rights.While its primary focus is on the last 25 years, the project will also incorporate an exploration of the South Asian Muslim presence in Britain for the past 100 years in order to historicise their contemporary presence, practices and reception. Further, while its key concern is with Britain, the research will necessarily take in a wider, global context, incorporating discussion of how the writers have responded to events and debates relating to 'terror' and the 'war on terror' which have impacted profoundly on British Muslims.