Abstract
Tabish Khair’s novel How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position grapples with the tenuous place of Muslim academics in western universities in a post-9/11. More specifically, it explores the tension between secularism as a default professional culture and condition of humanistic academia, and the imperatives of post-colonialist criticism. The novel’s narrator is a Pakistani literary scholar who in his scholarship engages with the “global south” and the experiences and voices of the “periphery.” However, he professes a narrow and un-pondered secularism that is not, as Edward Said might have it, maintaining a self-aware critical distance from all ideo-cultural formations, but a hostile, contrarian, and antagonistic version of it that is unleashed on Islam. His hostility toward Islam comes, in large part, from his anxiety about the all-engulfing shadow of “terror.” He is incapable of “reading” the Muslim characters in the novel and contemptuous for them and their belies. This comes into conflict with the imperatives of post-colonialism that Khair’s novels articulates, which include the central importance of religion to postcolonial communities, perhaps an identitarian factor that is greater than race and racial signifiers.
Presenters
Emad MirmotahariAssociate Professor, English, Duquesne University, Pennsylvania, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Secularism, Islam, Terror, Academia
