| Summary: | This paper interrogates and complicates the definition of Muslims post-9/11 in terms of prescriptive recognition patterns, by examining two Muslim diasporic novels: South African author Ishtiyak Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (2005) and British-Pakistani novelist, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). The “schemes of recognition” of Orientalism and multiculturalism are scrambled in both novels in order to challenge scripts which make Muslims “knowable”. Resistance to the injury of misrecognition after 9/11, framed by the device of the dramatic monologue in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is formulated in terms of a classic writing-back strategy. However, Shukri departs from this defensive posture and binary structure by revisiting post-9/11 Muslim experiences via South African colonial and apartheid narratives of resistance. The inclusion of Muslim experiences emanating from the South and from Africa intrude upon the dominant imaginary of the Muslim diaspora. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the exceptionalism of Muslim experiences is unhinged by tying it to familiar Third-world nationalist struggles, enabling reflection on an ethics of responsibility. The Silent Minaret proposes a rethinking of diaspora in terms of an “ethics of dispersion” which informs the very structure of the novel, and explores multiple and more lateral promises of “relationality”.
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