Islam and the west in anglophone Muslim Fiction after 9/11

<p dir="ltr">The minority Muslim population in the Anglophone West includes a number of novelists whose work in English is of great formal interest and political significance. In this thesis, working with a category of primary materials I will be calling ‘Anglophone Muslim fiction’ produced in the wake of 9/11, I will discuss how these writers have engaged with crucial issues of Islam’s position in and relationship with the West.</p><p dir="ltr">Following an introduction in which I seek to contextualise this fiction and to set out the conceptual framework and methodology supporting my research, the body of the thesis is divided into three, multi-sectioned chapters. Each chapter puts into dialogue – around a particularly contentious social, cultural and political question – two novels written in English during the past fifteen years by Muslims currently living in or principally associated with the West, especially the United States and the United Kingdom. Chapter One is concerned with the multiple challenges of living an Islamic life in diasporic or migrant conditions, and takes as its case studies Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005) and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006). Chapter Two reverses this geographical move to the West by exploring, through close readings of Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009), the catastrophic effects upon Muslim (and other) communities in the developing world of the post-9/11, US-led ‘War on Terror’. Finally, centred on Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) and H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy (2009), Chapter Three explores the forms and consequences of the Islamophobia which has intensified in the West, particularly in the US, since September 11th (one of these consequences being to stall and even reverse the westward migration that is the focus of Chapter One). My hope, across the thesis, is to demonstrate the vitally important contribution that contemporary Muslim novelists have to make to the work of communication and understanding across cultures which at present is so urgently required.</p>