Rise of Global Terror and (Re)formulations of Muslim Identity Since September 11

Dr Muhammad Safeer Awan International 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.

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. Never before 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 their Diasporic 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 a substantial 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 since decolonization. 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 and addressed:
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?

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 the Muslim 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: AfroCaribbean Women Writers in Exile, Myriam Chancy has delineated the specific conditions that force 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 of hopelessness, or, finally, self-imposed exile, that is, emigration.5 The immigrant fiction writers in the Anglo-American world give overt and subtle references 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. In The 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

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 nostalgically keep 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 informed by 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 of novels, 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 mapping continents, 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 is more 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 from two old histories. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of

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, Said and 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 the Diasporas 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 the other 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 conflicting pressures to which young Pakistanis are subjected in America, particularly since September/11, and the clash between various cultures in diasporic conditions. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is 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 in Lahore, 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 reluctant fundamentalist. 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, it is a novel 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 off this 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 comes from? 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 warm sense 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

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 girl friends 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 becomes entrenched 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 cavorted Pakistani 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 into shadowy 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 a revolutionary 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.

countries, countries! Brandnames, faded and disfigured, ... (Its Your Land, Boss)16

Changez reinvents himself by adopting a counter-rhetoric. Suddenly a new identity, that of 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 war pushes him to the margin, Setptember/11 has already set new forces into motion which are redefining the immigrants relation 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 assimilation and/or cultural clash.

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), 1 6. 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. Leaving Home: 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