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As the first study of its kind, this book offers a new understanding of progressive women’s poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu’s linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form. It argues that canonical texts for sharif women from Mirat-ul Arus to Umrao Jaan Ada need to be looked at alongside women’s diaries and autobiographies so that we have an overall picture of gendered lives from imaginative fiction, memoirs and biographies. Despite the disintegration of the Progressive Writers Movement and the official closure of the Left in Pakistan, the author argues that an exceptional legacy can be found in the voices of distinctive women poets including Ada Jafri, Zehra Nigah, Sara Shagufta, Parvin Shakir, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Their poems offer new metaphors and symbols borrowing from feminist thought and a hybrid Islamicate culture.

This book explores the representation of queer migrant Muslims in international literature and film from the 1980s to the present day. Bringing together a variety of contemporary writers and filmmakers of Muslim heritage engaged in vindicating same-sex desire, the book approaches queer Muslims in the diaspora as figures forced to negotiate their identities according to the expectations of the West and of their migrant Muslim communities. The book examines 3 main themes: the depiction of queer desire across racial and national borders, the negotiation of Islamic femininities and masculinities, and the positioning of the queer Muslim self in time and place. This study will be of interest to scholars, as well as to advanced general readers and postgraduate students, interested in Muslims, queerness, diaspora and postcolonialism. It brings nuance and complexity to an often simplified and controversial topic.

Fiction by writers of Muslim background forms one of the most diverse, vibrant and high-profile corpora of work being produced today - from the trail-blazing writing of Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi, which challenged political and racial orthodoxies in the 1980s, to that of a new generation including Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie. This collection reflects the variety of those fictions. Experts in English, South Asian, and postcolonial literatures address the nature of Muslim identity: its response to political realignments since the 1980s, its tensions between religious and secular models of citizenship, and its manifestation of these tensions as conflict between generations. In considering the perceptions of Muslims, contributors also explore the roles of immigration, class, gender, and national identity, as well as the impact of 9/11. This volume includes essays on contemporary fiction by writers of Muslim origin and non-Muslims writing about Muslims. It aims to push beyond the habitual populist 'framing' 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. While returning to themes that are of particular significance to diasporic Muslim cultures, such as secularism, modernity, multiculturalism and citizenship, the essays reveal that 'Muslim writing' grapples with the same big questions as serve to exercise all writers and intellectuals at the present time: How does one reconcile the impulses of the individual with the requirements of community? How can one 'belong' in the modern world? What is the role of art in making sense of chaotic contemporary experience? Rehana Ahmed is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Teesside, UK. Peter Morey is Reader in English Literature, School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London, UK. Amina Yaqin is Lecturer in Urdu and Postcolonial Studies, Department of South Asia, SOAS, UK. Selected Contents: Introduction Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin 1. Writing Muslims and the Global State of Exception Stephen Morton Part 1: Writing the Self 2. Bad Faith: The Construction of Muslim Extremism in Ed Husain’s The Islamist Anshuman A. Mondal 3. Reason to Believe? Two ‘British Muslim’ Memoirs Rehana Ahmed 4. Voyages Out and In: Two (British) Arab Muslim Women’s Bildungsromane Lindsey Moore Part 2. Migrant Islam 5. Infinite Hijra: Migrant Islam, Muslim American Literature, and the Anti-Mimesis of The Taqwacores Salah D. Hassan 6. Muslims as Multicultural Misfits in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers Amina Yaqin 7. ‘Sexy Identity-Assertion’: Choosing between Sacred and Secular Identities in Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus Claire Chambers Part 3: (Mis)reading Muslims 8. Writing Islam in Post-9/11 America: John Updike’s Terrorist Anna Hartnell 9. Invading Ideologies and the Politics of Terror: Framing Afghanistan in The Kite Runner Kristy Butler 10. Representation and Realism: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane Sara Upstone Part 4: Culture, Politics and Religion 11. From ‘the Politics of Recognition’ to ‘the Policing of Recognition’: Writing Islam in Hanif Kureishi and Mohsin Hamid Bart Moore-Gilbert 12. Resistance and Religion in the Work of Kamila Shamsie Ruvani Ranasinha 13. Mourning Becomes Kashmira: Islam, Melancholia, and the Evacuation of Politics in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown Peter Morey

Can Muslims ever fully be citizens of the West? Can the values of Islam ever be brought into accord with the individual freedoms central to the civic identity of Western nations? Not if you believe what you see on TV. Whether the bearded fanatic, the veiled, oppressed female, or the shadowy terrorist plotting our destruction, crude stereotypes permeate public representations of Muslims in the United States and western Europe. But these \"Muslims\" are caricatures - distorted abstractions, wrought in the most garish colors, that serve to reduce the diversity and complexity of the Muslim world to a set of fixed objects suitable for sound bites and not much else. In Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin dissect the ways in which stereotypes depicting Muslims as an inherently problematic presence in the West are constructed, deployed, and circulated in the public imagination, producing an immense gulf between representation and a considerably more complex reality. Crucially, they show that these stereotypes are not solely the province of crude-minded demagogues and their tabloid megaphones, but multiply as well from the lips of supposedly progressive elites, even those who presume to speak \"from within,\" on Muslims' behalf. Based on nuanced analyses of cultural representations in both the United States and the UK, the authors draw our attention to a circulation of stereotypes about Muslims that sometimes globalizes local biases and, at other times, brings national differences into sharper relief. Summary reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press

In Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin dissect how stereotypes that depict Muslims as an inherently problematic presence in the West are constructed, deployed, and circulated in the public imagination, producing an immense gulf between representation and a considerably more complex reality.

A partir de los escritos en urdu de intelectuales musulmanes, examinaré en este artículo los temas de lengua, acción y género al tiempo que investigo el poder que ejercen el arbitrio literario y la afiliación linguistica sobre el funcionamiento de la nación poscolonial.

The recent Arts and Humanities Research Council U.K.-funded international research network on \"Women's Autobiography in Islamic Societies\" has highlighted women's autobiographical writings in other cultural and temporal sites, focusing on social periods from the sixteenth century to the present, on intimacy and sexuality, on the variance of regions, and the underlying question of women's subjectivities, providing one recent challenge to the idea of autobiography as a purely western construct.8 One of the key questions that the project seeks to answer is: \"Can women's life writing be distinguished from that of male authors?\" This is a question of identification that has preoccupied much feminist writing on the topic and has led to an interrogation of the term \"autobiography\" in books by well-known critics in the field that have explored mainly European contexts. Feminist critics have questioned the identification that gives iconic status to male autobiography; critics such as Nancy K. Miller have noted that the lives of these men reaffirm notions of a grand narrative of history and hence confirm their status as universal subjects worthy of attention.9 Extending the range of autobiographical identifications to non-European twentieth-century South Asian autobiographies, it is worth noting that most work has also prioritized men who are public intellectuals and charismatic political leaders, underlining the lives of a new urban elite in India.