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Rise of Global Terror and (Re)formulations of Muslim Identity Since

September 11

Dr Muhammad Safeer AwanInternational Islamic University Islamabad

I once went to sleep and dreamt that I was a butterfly.

And then I woke up.

What am I, now?

Am I the man who went to sleep and dreamt that he was a

butterfly;

Or am I the butterfly the man dreamt about?

(Loa Tse, The Way)

ABSTRACT

Geographical dislocations and cross-pollination of cultures often entail traumatic experiences for

the immigrants. The paradox of our times is that, on the one hand, we live in an increasingly

borderless world where cultural, economic and political frontiers are constantly eroding due to

supersonic aeroplanes, global communication systems, and post-industrial technologies; on the

other hand, since September-11, we witness a new wave of xenophobia in public, and

megalomania among the politicians, resulting into the closing of borders and an irrational fear of

the other or the new barbarians. Until September-11 happened, American cultural production

seemed to achieve what Ralph Waldo Emerson prophesied about in 1845: In this continent

asylum of all nations we will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature

which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the Dark Ages. September-11

caused an abortion of history history moving in a linear, progressive fashion was disrupted

with a jolt of epic proportions, bringing hiatus to the Emersonian dream. In order to negotiate

this disruption in the experience of the diasporic Muslim communities in the West, and to

investigate the issues of identity, exile, Home, and cross-culturality, my study focuses upon the

work of Pakistani expatriate writers like Zulfikar Ghose, Mohsin Hamid, and Nadeem Aslam.

Ghose, with his rich experience of multiple exiles, is the prototype of exilic perspective in the

classical sense. Mohsin Hamid, on the other hand, is a leading voice in the backdrop of

September-11 scenario. In his recent novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Hamid

encapsulates the dilemma of American Muslims. By discussing the work of two writers who,despite being contemporaries, represent two different perspectives on home and family I hope

to negotiate such binaries as cultural collision/cultural assimilation, Home/Exile, etc. Thus my

paper aims to study the emerging perceptions of and about the Muslim Diasporas in the West

before and after September 11, 2001.

Key Words: Diaspora, exile, home, cultural clash, identity, Zulfikar Ghose, Mohsin Hamid.

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1. Writing Home in Exile

Iocasta: What means exile from ones country? Is it a great evil?

Polyneices: The greatest; harder to bear than tell.

(Euripidess The Phoenician Women)1

With the onset of the 20th century, the great imperial structures started to melt, resulting

into large-scale immigrations from the former colonies to the erstwhile imperial centres. Neverbefore in human history had so many crossings geographical, cultural, racial happened at

such scale. On the heels of those crossings, the problem of identity impinged as the biggest issue

among all such post-imperial concerns. Identity politics is mainly a twentieth century syndrome,afflicting most post-colonial people. Closely related are the volatile and fiercely contested

concepts of Home, exile, and the debate surrounding cultural purity and cultural assimilation.

Since September 11, 2001, the identity politics and the clash-of-cultures thesis have acquired

special resonance in the public and political spheres of the Western societies vis--vis theirDiasporic populations, particularly Muslim Diasporas.

Generally speaking, the idea of Diaspora refers to a group of people who have left or

have been forced out of their original habitat and culture. Robin Cohen (1997) provides a list of

criteria by which one could identify diasporas.2 For Cohen, diasporas are formed when asubstantial number of people move to a foreign place from a homeland, either because of some

harrowing experience (e.g. ethnic cleansing) or, more mundanely, in search of economic

opportunities.

The Pakistani Diasporic writers in the West have also taken up themes which are

universal to most immigrants, that is, debates surrounding the problems of deracination,alienation, and assimilation. At the same time, they differ when they bring in the memories and

narratives of colonialism, partition of India in1947 and the problems of nationalism, as in the

case of Pakistani expatriate writer Zulfikar Ghose who left India after the Partition because

everything is so dimmed and distant, the whole world has become foreign and strange3

Alongside such motifs, some of which they share with other South Asian writers,

transnationalism, with its problems of cultural and geographical separation between people, is

the most human and touching aspect of this literature4 that has been emerging sincedecolonization.

In the context of Pakistani Diasporic writings, a number of writers like Bapsi Sidwa,

Mohsin Hamid, Abdullah Hussain, Zulfikar Ghose, Hanif Kureishi, and more recently Nadeem

Aslam have been documenting their exilic perspectives on home in and away from Diaspora.Keeping in view the issues which inform such debates, following questions can be formed andaddressed:

1. In the face of global migrancy and the formation of multi-lingual, multi-racial and multi-

cultural societies in the west, to what extent can the harmonizing of different cultures be

realistically achieved without compromise or surrender on the part of the host or migrant

communities?

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2. Given the above question, what is the place and role of the creative writer, whose roots

are located in one culture and whose mind is nurtured in another?3. In what ways is the Pakistani diasporic experience different/similar in different

generations of immigrants?

4. How the events of September/11 have become almost a cut-off point to distinguish

between the old/classical exile and the reformulations in the exilic perspectives of theMuslim migrants?

Contemporary critics are redefining exile and migration in terms of how these conditions

are experienced by the immigrants in western diasporas. In Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-

Caribbean Women Writers in Exile, Myriam Chancy has delineated the specific conditions thatforce people to leave home and go in search of home:

The threat of governmental/political persecution or state

terrorism; poverty enmeshed through exploitative labor

practices that over-work and underpay; social persecution

resulting from one's dehumanization because of color,gender, sexuality, class standing; ... Such indignities lead

to suicide, violence, more poverty, a vicious cycle ofhopelessness, or, finally, self-imposed exile, that is,

emigration.5

The immigrant fiction writers in the Anglo-American world give overt and subtlereferences to the differences in life styles and culture they encounter in their host countries.

Facing entirely new situations, the immigrants in such literature are mostly depicted as facing a

series of re-evaluation of their beliefs and values, at times, discarding their original values for

those of the host cultures. As Iqbal Mahmood writes in his Strategies of Negation:

The immigrant fiction brings together people of diverse

backgrounds, cultures, religions, nationalities and creeds. In

addition to these concerns are the issues of migration,

nationalities, displacement, diversity, and multiculturalism,which are addressed in a non-Western context6

In this way, the immigrants previously whole, identifiable selves are shaken and split. InThe Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha describes the state of displacement as a disorienting

condition thus:

it captures something of the estranging sense of the

relocation of the home and the world the unhomeliness that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural

initiation In that displacement, the borders between

home and world become confused [emphasis added]; and,uncannily, the private and the public become part of each

other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is

disorienting.7

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The role that memory plays in the formation of immigrants history is significant as it

evokes nostalgic appeal among a displaced people in an alien setting. Thus, they nostalgicallykeep on recalling the language(s), customs, cuisines, values, beliefs and even climate of their

home vis--vis their host culture. As Ghose writes in one of his poems:

My temporary peasant fervor

plays out its fantasy on the Texas hillside.

Im not sure what this earth means to me.

I dont take the peasants pride

in the quality

of the soil. I dont need to. But feel poorer

because of this loss,

this irrelevance. (Its Your Land, Boss)8

The immigrants relationship with the culture of their host country is ambivalent as it is a

complex mix of simultaneous attraction towards and repulsion from the foreign culture. Among

writers of Pakistani origin, Zulfikar Ghose is perhaps the only expatriate whose work is informedby the issues of cultural ambivalence and the dilemma of living multiple identities, in the

classical sense of these terms.

Ghoses Triple Exile

Born in Sialkot, Pakistan, Ghose first migrated to Bombay in 1942 and then to England in

1952. He made his third migration in 1969, this time to the United States of America where,

since then, he has been teaching at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published an

autobiography, appropriately named The Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965), and a number ofnovels, including Triple Mirror of the Self (1992), a complex tale of multiple migrations and

exiles9

His personal journey as a rootless man qualifies him almost as a modern day Odysseus.

Married to a Brazilian artist, Ghose has multiplied his exilic experience to a very complex state.In his third novel, Triple Mirror of the Self, he traces his own steps back to his Subcontinental

roots. Like his own protagonist, who is known as Urim in the Amazon, Shimmers in London,

and Roshan in India-Pakistan, Ghose has lived like an archetype cosmopolitan figure mappingcontinents, and living cultures. Unlike Jasmine, Bharati Mukharjees character, who is a typical

liminal figure, living on the threshold of two cultures, the Ghose persona has a more splintered

personality, absorbing and imbibing influences and getting transformed in the process. He ismore like Hanif Kureishis young anti-hero, Karim, who proclaims at the outset in The Buddha

of Suburbia:

My name is Karim Amir and I am an Englishman born and

bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of

Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged fromtwo old histories. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of

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continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not,

that makes me restless and easily bored.10

Of the various selves in his novel, the name of the first self is Urimba, or the scattered

one11. The oscillation between his past and present continues throughout Ghoses Confessions.He is a archetype intellectual exile and economic migrant in the classical sense of these terms

and, therefore, his situation bears comparison with such intellectual exiles as Eliot, Joyce, Saidand others of this clan. However, in the wake of September 11 attacks, the conflict between the

Diasporic communities and their host countries gave rise to new conflicts and debates. Romantic

exilic perspectives gave way to new fears and trepidations. Mohsin Hamids The Reluctant

Fundamentalist is the prototype work of fiction that is based on those new trends in theDiasporas and the attitudes of the native populations towards the reformulation of immigrants

identities, particularly that of the Muslims living in the West.

2. Hamids Reluctant Fundamentalist

Muslim immigrants from South Asia, particularly Pakistan, live through a double bind:

on the one hand they are bracketed with the Asian/South Asian diasporic identity, and on theother they have to respond to international political crises such as the Rushdie affair, the Gulf

War or, more recently, September 11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the confrontation

between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. While a Pakistani transnational identity is mostly

submerged beneath these other identities, it is in fact critical in understanding the conflictingpressures to which young Pakistanis are subjected in America, particularly since September/11,

and the clash between various cultures in diasporic conditions. The Reluctant Fundamentalistis

the narrative of that conflict epitomized in the personal dilemma of its protagonist to come to

terms with the post-September 11 America and the new identity imposed upon him. Narrated inLahore, the novel is set in New York. Throughout the novel, the protagonist Changez explains

the causes of his transformation from a normal assimilated immigrant to a reluctantfundamentalist.

However, Hamid's portrayal of America in the first part of the novel does not rely on the

trope of the Manichean allegory and the demonization of the American system. Therefore, itis anovel that resists closure and suggests a strategy of continual transformation as a narrative of

survival. Both Erica, Changezs girlfriend, and his boss Jim, notice a foreigness in his

mannerism and his bearing that gives him advantage over others. Erica remarks, You give offthis strong sense of home, you know that... This I-am-from-a-big-family vibe. Its nice. It makes

you feel solid.12

Later Jim tells him, You are a watchful guy. You know where that comesfrom? I shook my head. It comes from feeling out of place, he said. Believe me. I know.13

Prior to the September 11 xenophobia that gripped the US, Changez has, at least

apparently, assimilated into the host culture. As he informs the readers: I felt bathed in a warmsense of accomplishment. Nothing troubled me; I was a young New Yorker with the city at my

feet. The American corporate system exerts a powerful influence on Chengez as long as he does

not resist and is ready to become a cog in the machine. I was the only non-American in our

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group, but I suspected my Pakistaniness was invisible, cloaked by my suit, by my expense

account, and most of all by my companions.14 The corporate success gives him such

confidence that he takes advantage of the ethnic exception clause while visiting his girlfriends family. He wore a starched white kurta of delicately worked cotton over a pair of jeans.

It was a testament to the open mindedness and that overused word cosmopolitan nature of

New York in those days that I felt completely comfortable on the subway in this attire.20

However, in the wake of attacks, his Pakistaniness becomes visible as a source of alienation and

is taken as a threat to his host society.

Until September/11 happens, there is no visible threat to the identity that Changez has

adopted. However, soon he is stripped of his illusions and enforced identity. This is the moment

when regression starts and any hidden/subconscious desire to see America harmed becomesentrenched in the conscious self. The transformation begins.

As Changez informs:

America was gripped by a growing and self-righteous rage in

those weeks of September and October as I cavortedPakistani cabdrivers were being beaten to within an inch of

their lives; the FBI was raiding mosques, shops, and even

peoples houses; Muslim men were disappearing, perhaps intoshadowy detention centers for questioning or worse.15

That is the moment in American history when the syncretic America fails to become the

first Universal Nation the world has ever seen. Zulfikar Ghose, writing much earlier, is

strangely prophetic about the loss of such utopian America for the immigrant who now faces arevolutionary rhetoric and an official discourse which:

... breeds

a counter-rhetorics pretentious

slogans:America Love It or Leave It, and so on.

Earth-kissing Zionists aside (and each country is an Israel for someone),

people dont really

care nowadays for sentimental gestures,

for sacredness is suspect,

the earth more a problem for conservation than

a banner across a jingoist breast, and the land

merely a real estate speculation.

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countries, countries! Brand-

names, faded and disfigured, ... (Its Your Land, Boss)16

Changez reinvents himself by adopting a counter-rhetoric. Suddenly a new identity, thatof a terrorist or at least a terrorist-look-alike is imposed on the successful Princeton graduate and

a brilliant business analyst for Underwood Samsons. The new discourse of terror and warpushes him to the margin,

Setptember/11 has already set new forces into motion which are redefining the immigrantsrelation to nation, Diaspora, and homeland. There is a strong, yet unattractive, possibility that

the new transnational and transcultural changes will bring about an unpleasant twist to the

already charged debate about the problems and possibilities of immigrants cultural assimilationand/or cultural clash.

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Endnotes

1. Euripides. The Phoenician Women. Translated by E.P. Coleridge (1891). From

eBooks@Adelaide, 2004.

2.

R. Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: UCL Press, 1997), p 14.

3. Textual references from Ghoses autobiography are taken from, Zulfikar Ghose.

Confessions of a Native-Alien. (London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).

4. Alpana Sharma Knippling.New Immigrant Literatures in the United States. (New York:

Greenwood Press, 1996), 150

5. Myriam Chancy. Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile.

(Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1997), 16. Iqbal Mahmood. Strategies of Negation: Postcolonial Themes and Conflicts in the English

Language Literature of the East Indian Diaspora. (Indiana: Author House, 2006), 24.

7. Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2003), 9

8. Zulfikar Ghose. Selected Poems. (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 37.

9. Muneeza Shamsie.LeavingHome: A Collection of English Prose by Pakistani Writers

(Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 32.

10. Hanif Kureishi. The Buddha of Suburbia.(London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 3.

11. Textual references are from Zulfikar Ghose. Triple Mirror of the Self(London:

Bloomsbury, 1992), 342

12. Mohsin Hamid. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. (OUP, Karachi, 2007), p. 12

13. Ibid. p. 25

14. Ibid. p. 42

15. Ibid. p. 29

16. Zulfikar Ghose 1991, 38