Reading Power: Muslims in the War on Terror Discourse (original) (raw)
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2020
This essay explores the dominant rhetoric of American society in the wake of 9/11 as seen through fictional narratives by Muslim-American writers, it also delves into how that rhetoric was shaped by politicians and the media. The novels employed in this essay are The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Home Boy by H. M. Naqvi and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. The essay examines the temporality of the novel, in particular when it comes to historical fiction, and to what extent time is under the author's control. It looks into migration and the myth of return in immigrant writing and the power of nostalgia both in writing and politics, such as with Donald Trump's infamous slogan "Make America Great Again". Additionally, it analyses the attacks on September 11 as a national trauma that destroyed Americans' illusion of invulnerability and looks at how trauma can be translated in writing. It scrutinises the cultivation of fear both on a domestic and nationwide scale, in particular it focuses on the fear of the imagined 'other' cultivated by the American administration and media following 9/11. This leads into the legitimisation of war, principally the War on Terror; a war that has cost upwards of $6 trillion as of 2019. It discusses Americans' fear of Muslims and, the oft-forgotten other side of the coin, Muslim-Americans fear of American society at large. Throughout, it looks at how the novels at hand both translate and shape experience, arguing that fictional narratives have the potential power to bridge the gap between Muslim-American immigrants and the rest of American society and increase empathy for an ethnic minority that has, in past years, been painted as the 'radical enemy.'
International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 2022
Terrorist (2006) by John Updike has been classified within the post-9/11 novel genre where many American authors depict their counter-narratives to the horrific event of 9/11. The novel revolves around the life of a young teenager named Ahmad and his religious mentor, Shaikh Rashid, who are accused as terrorists. This study problematises the issue of the identity of Muslim characters in facing oppression using the concept of cultural imperialism by Iris Marion Young (1990), focussing on the social treatment of Muslim minority characters in America perceived as inferior to the entire American cultural mainstream. The objective of this study then is to examine the author’s depictions of the American society as the cultural imperialism persecuting Muslim characters. The findings highlight the Muslim characters’ inability to emulate the prevailing American cultural imperialism which oppresses them. As such, the study’s originality lies in the interpretation of the aversive affinity betw...
Res. J. Lang. Lit. Humanities Representation of Islam in Post 9/11 English Novels
Present research aims to study the representation of Islam in post 9/11 English novels. To this aim 31 post 9/11 English novels were divided into eight categories based on the angles from which they had looked at 9/11 event, and one novel of each category, a better received one, was chosen through cluster sampling to be studied. As the study went on two categories were deleted for not being related to the subject. Thus six novels by Updike, DeLillo, Ferrigno, see, Halaby, and Kalfus were studied. Using representation theory and Foucault's discursive formation approach, the effort was taken to identify the latent and manifest discourses shaping and shaped by these texts as well as the characteristics attributed to Islam and Muslims. The results showed that the discourse shaping the texts (war against terrorism) and discourses shaped by the texts (Muslims are all the same, Muslims are violent and promote violence, and Zionists are innocent) are in line with the power discourse in four of the six novels; whereas, in the remaining two novels, the approach taken toward power discourse is quite subversive. This of course signifies the presence of a multiple voice in the American society although the weaker voice is not heard as well as the loud voice.
2020
This paper deals with some aspects of neo-orientalism in the modern American novel highlighted in much conventional political and literary studies and conceptualized both as a composite of cultural studies and a western ideology. When applied to the post 9/11 American novel analysis, neo-orientalism uses terrorism as a significant aspect of a much broader reaction to Islamists' threats living in the United States and Europe. It is common in neo-orientalist discourse about extremism to refer to Islamism as a threat to nations and therefore, it is important to find how the American novel represents the Muslims and how vigorously acts with the state in its fight against terror. This paper focuses on contemporary issues on Arabs represented in Robert Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin (2006), such as extremism, women's rights, hostility, and identity, common themes in post 9/11 novel on the Muslims. Moreover, this study attempts to answer two questions: Has there been a cha...
The Backlash of 9/11 on Muslims in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Social Science Research Network, 2015
This paper examines how Muslims are harshly treated after the backlash of 9/11 in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist and how they become victims and legitimate targets of hate crimes, negative media stereotypes, physical beatings, disappearance, racial profiling, interrogations at American airports, and detentions in secret places. It addresses how such treatment sheds light on the questions of Muslim integration in the American society, citizenship, multiculturalism, identity, and alienation, belonging, and national affiliation. It also disrupts the dominant American official discourse, which links Islam with terror and portrays Muslims as potential terrorists and a threat to America and values of Western civilization. I also argue that Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers a counter literary response not only to the American public rhetoric but also to the dominant literary discourses that prevailed after 9/11, inflamed the American sentiments, and consolidate...
Representation of Islam and Muslims in post 9/11 Orientalist Narrative
ABSTRACT Since the attacks of September 11, hundreds of novels have been written on and about Islam. Such novels attempt to explain Islam or portray Muslims. Some of these novels have tried to explain the true Islam as opposed to fundamentalism, as a religion of peace, tolerance and charity while others have depicted Islam as an evil religion, a religion of Jihad, death and terrorism. One of these novels which belong to the latter category is John Elray’s Khalifah: A Novel of Conquest and Personal Triumph. The novel attempts to portray Islam as a religion which purportedly harbors hostility towards other religions and races. It tries to convey the idea that Islam, a harsh and intolerant creed, spread by the sword. The present article attempts to analyze the portrayal of Islam and Muslims in Khalifah. It examines the ways in which Elray has represented Islam and Muslims in his novel. The aim of the article is to explore how Islam is depicted and Muslim identities are constructed in the novel. The article argues that Khalifah nudges the reader toward viewing Islam as a danger to Western interests. The main purpose of the novelist is to demonize Islam and dehumanize Muslims particularly the first generation of Muslims.
Academy of Education and Social Sciences Review, 4(2), 223–235., 2024
This article studies the Negotiation of Muslim Identity in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced (2012) that Muslim characters practice after the 9/11 attacks in the USA. The paper, moreover, evaluates the Muslim characters encountering the backlash, discrimination, harassment, othering, religious profiling, media propaganda, and alienation despite their complete integration and assimilation into the hostland identity. To explore how the Muslim Immigrant characters, as members of the minority out-group(MO), adopt the strategies of identity negotiation and construct the reactive Muslim identity in the selected play in the post-9/11 American context, The Social Identity Theory by Tajfel and Turner (2004) is used as the theoretical model through the textual analysis and Close Reading Method. The paper, furthermore, aims to study the Muslim characters struggling with the identity crisis and the derogatory treatment from the majority in-group Americans (MI). It also adds to research on the selected play the comprehensive understanding to the readers about the identity negotiations and Muslim identity construct after the 9/11 attacks in America.
Post 9/11 Rhetoric and the Split of Safety in Amy Waldman's 'The Submission'
RSA Journal, 2019
This article sets out to investigate the theme of citizenship in relation to individual and collective civil rights in post-9/11 U.S. I will do so by focusing on Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011), a novel that speculates on a fictional controversy, ignited by the accidental selection of a Muslim American architect in the competition for the design of the 9/11 Memorial. Within this framework, the narrative represents the discrimination of Muslim and Arab Americans as a minority group singled out by assumptions of collective responsibility for the attacks on the World Trade Center and it reflects on the notion of safety and its implications: why an American citizen of Muslim religion who proposes to design a memorial is defined as “a security threat”? Why is the 9/11 aftermath “no time for multicultural pandering”? Is a state that places national safety on a higher plane than civil liberties (cf. Patriot Act, 2001) really safe? And if so, for whom? I argue that Waldman addresses these questions by adopting a multi-perspective narrative that allows for the depiction of differing understandings of safety; perspectives that the author seems to place on a continuum. On one end lies a slice of the American population (the governor of the state of New York, the association “Stop Islamization of America,” some representatives of the 9/11 victims’ families) that resorts to national security rhetoric in order to prevent a Muslim architect from memorializing 9/11, because his religious background is reputed as a threat in itself. On the opposite end lies a Pakistani immigrant without documents who lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks (himself an illegal worker at the WTC), a woman for whom this climate of mounting racial friction results in the total negation of her safety when she is killed in an anti-Muslim riot. I believe that this tragic event can be interpreted as the apex of a trajectory, developed over the whole novel, that interrogates the dynamics of a comprehension of safety and of national identity that opposes “Americans” to “immigrants,” and eventually leads to a split in the notion of “safe” into its two antithetic meanings of “not likely to be harmed” and “not likely to cause or lead to harm.”
For any process of literary defamiliarization of discourse to take place, it has to take into account the economy of power relations which are complicit in history. It is argued that 9/11, as a " historical " moment, has emphasized a cofounding period of " transition " in the contemporary globalized world. However, the problematic question that has not yet received much critical consideration is the extent to which literature, more specifically prose fiction, involves not merely the process of historicizing the event and its ongoing aftermath but also the process of dehistoricizing and defamiliarizing it to the reader. This is basically the framework within which the argument of the present article operates. Its premise lies at the origins of investigating closely the politics of trauma and terror in Mohsin Hamid " s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) as a post-9/11 postcolonial fictional narrative. Drawing upon postcolonial approach, the present study argues that Hamid has provided an alternative fictional perspective which has defamiliarized and problematized the hegemonic and orientalist discourses of " war on terror " and " clash of civilizations " by which the post-9/11 western colonial project is legitimatized. In so doing, this diasporic American novelist highlights in his aforementioned postcolonial trauma literary work the power relations behind " terrorism " and " war on terror " through which Hamid questions the post-9/11 " regime of truth " which has been constructing " orientals " as " terrorist others. "