The Uses of Caricature in the Western Muslim Novel 

Clichés and stereotypes about Muslims circulate widely among Western publics.1 Pundits and politicians commonly imply and assert that Muslims are irrational, fanatical, and closed-minded. This bigotry is a staple of political commentary and social media, so much so that the demonization of Muslims has become all too routine, even expected.2 Broadly speaking, the left understands such clichés as harmful instantiations of the Islamophobic ideologies that have exploded across the Western world in the first decades of the twenty-first century.3

But when Islamophobic clichés appear in the realm of literature, they are jarring: we expect sensationalism from entertainment media but tend to expect more restraint from the literary world. For example, when the novelist Martin Amis said in 2006 that the Muslim community should "suffer until it gets its house in order" by being subject to "deportation" and "strip-searching" on the basis of racial profiling, he caused a scandal. The critic Peter Morey described Amis's views as "violent," "ill-informed," and "intemperate," but also "unliterary" in their lack of measured reflection.4 Morey was suggesting that there was something not just bigoted but contradictory about Amis's remarks: such clichés, in their crassness, seem beneath or contrary to literature.5 To be sure, it's not uncommon to encounter novels written by non-Muslim Westerners that, in depicting Muslims as backward bogeymen at odds with Euro-American cultures, reflect the hegemonic self-congratulatory perspective of liberalism.6 Nor is it uncommon for such novels to rehearse more overtly Islamophobic plot points.7 But we might reasonably expect that literary works that primarily seek to examine Western Muslim individuals and communities, and especially those works authored by writers of Muslim backgrounds themselves, would challenge the Islamophobic images that dominate so much of contemporary Muslim representation.

So, it is puzzling to encounter novels about Western Muslims, especially novels by writers with Muslim backgrounds themselves, that rehearse negative clichés about Muslims. Yet in novels by Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem Aslam, Monica Ali, and others, we repeatedly find stereotypical elements: honor killings, patriarchal men controlling submissive women, men young and old inclining toward Islamist extremism, charismatic leaders indoctrinating others, and guilt-wracked hypocrites failing to uphold their faith's stringent prohibitions. Far from depicting Muslims in a reparative light, novels by writers of Muslim backgrounds are riddled with seemingly Islamophobic clichéd plot points and character archetypes. This raises difficulties for readers participating in contemporary debates about the political status of Muslims in Western societies, which has often been framed according to a dichotomy whereby most Muslims, coded as dangerous others, are seen as incompatible with a liberal body politic.8 Why do novels — especially those by authors with Muslim backgrounds — depict Western Muslims in terms that recapitulate the clichés and stereotypes that seem to demonize them? What is achieved by doing so?

I offer two interrelated responses to this puzzle. First, I argue that caricature — closely related to but distinct from cliché and stereotype — functions in these novels as a way of depicting the depth, processual development, and dignity of Western Muslim identity. Though caricature has been described as a tool of essentialism that reduces its subjects to a one-dimensional and grotesque image, I argue that it can work counterintuitively as a disruptive and humanizing force. How? The caricature turns out to be a way of acknowledging, in exaggerated form, certain potentially discomfiting aspects of Western Muslim identity, especially those aspects most overdetermined by Islamophobic framings. By then displaying the dynamism and legitimacy of those aspects of identity, these novels depict cultural hybridity in process, and, at their best, unsettle the economy of value on which caricature relies. Moreover, even as many individual caricatures that appear in these novels repeat Islamophobic tropes, their cumulative effect is to undercut the force of Islamophobic tropes by depicting the process of self-fashioning in which Western Muslims engage. Surprisingly, then, caricatures function in these novels to depict the complex identities of Western Muslims as hard-won and dynamic achievements; they illuminate how these identities are shaped and reshaped through ongoing and intergenerational processes of negotiation with conflicting cultural expectations and transnational power structures.

I make this argument through close readings of three works that instantiate what I call the "Western Muslim novel": The Satanic Verses (1988) by Salman Rushdie, White Teeth (2000) by Zadie Smith, and Martyr! (2024) by Kaveh Akbar. I've chosen these novels because, though they obviously can't represent the whole category, they are fairly illustrative of it: they span a period of nearly four decades; their authors represent a number of national and cultural backgrounds; and their characters include Muslims of Persian, Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani origins living across the US and UK. They are also quite well-known, which relieves me of the burden of introducing and analyzing their general features, and allows me to instead rapidly narrow my focus to the role caricature plays in them. While the two earlier novels reflect periods of Western Muslim life dominated by nascent globalization and racialized anxieties of extremism, the more recent novel reflects the development of Western Muslim identity in a new generational period. The set also includes a novel by an author not of Muslim background that nonetheless warrants inclusion on account of the centrality of Muslim characters in it, as well as its prominent employment of caricature. Though the selection of novels is admittedly (and necessarily) imperfect, it illuminates the development of the Western Muslim novel and its distinctive use of caricature for counterintuitively humanizing ends.

My second response to the puzzle is to elaborate on the Western Muslim novel's status as a literary genre (or subgenre). Closely related to, but distinct from, other categories of world literature like the postcolonial, migrant, and diasporic novel, the Western Muslim novel has a distinguishing concern with the ethical, spiritual, and political dilemmas faced by Muslims in Western societies where they constitute an often unwelcome minority. I identify this genre with a cluster of Anglophone novels that are often (but not always) written by authors of Muslim backgrounds, and I discuss its genealogy, from its emergence within the problem-space of late twentieth-century Islamophobia and its representational binds, to its development and canon-formation during the Global War on Terror and its wake. The genre includes the novels mentioned above, as well as Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album (1995), Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love (1999), Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea (2001), Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003), Nadeem Aslam's Maps For Lost Lovers (2004), Leila Aboulela's Minaret (2005), Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) and The Other Americans (2019), Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Exit West (2017), H.M. Naqvi's Home Boy (2009), Ayad Akhtar's American Dervish (2012), and Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire (2017).9 Though there is not space to examine these novels in depth, I discuss their thematic preoccupations with a postcolonial social field in which Muslim subjectivity is still perceived and disseminated by colonial devices of repetition such as cliché, stereotype, and caricature. They examine, for instance, how Islamophobic discrimination shapes the possibilities for Muslim life; how atmospheres of suspicion generate ethical and spiritual quandaries for Muslims, especially regarding their attitudes toward faith; and how Muslims navigate a field of conflicting social scripts about relationships, work, dress, diet, and other aspects of life. The genre rehearses and deploys Islamophobic clichés and stereotypes, but not simply to appeal to Western audiences by satisfying appetites for Islamophobia. Instead, I identify how the genre performs important aesthetic and cultural work in shaping how readers understand Western Muslims. Specifically, the devices of repetition that characterize the genre are employed in ways that partially subvert the Islamophobic ideas they evoke. These devices of repetition often implicate readers in the power dynamics subtending their meaning, and thereby demand that readers examine their role in co-producing negative images. Moreover, they depict Muslims not as passive objects of repetitious representation, but as self-aware subjects knowingly navigating a social field structured by representation loaded with power. Thus, they produce images of Muslims as savvy participants in discourses about the relationship between Muslims and the West.

Caricature as a Device of Humanization

What is caricature? Though humans have been depicting one another in comedic ways for thousands of years, historians trace the modern concept to the late sixteenth century in Italy, when artists first began creating deliberately exaggerated portraits and eventually began doing so for satirical purposes. In his study A History of Caricature, the artist and writer Bohun Lynch writes that the term is "derived from the Italian caricare, to load," and that it can be concisely understood as "overloaded representation."10 This aligns with today's popular understanding, that caricatures are images that exaggerate and distort the truth. Other early definitions also tended to evaluate caricature negatively, emphasizing its sometimes ludicrous or grotesque manner of exaggerating the subject's most striking or flawed features. Francis Grose, for instance, distinguishes character from caricature, writing that while the former involves the "slight deviation" from ideals necessary for establishing specific identities, the latter involves an "aggravated" deviation from them.11 Yet Lynch also approvingly remarks that the best portrayals have a measure of caricature in them, and that the caricaturist, prizing the "intuitive faculties" and "sense of truthful misrepresentation," is preferable to the cataloguer of facts. He argues that caricature reveals a higher form of truth than plain realism does, because it displays the "spiritual tendencies" that lie latent within their subjects, rendering visible what would otherwise remain imperceptible.12 Art historian Ernst Kris adds that "the successful caricature distorts appearances but only for the sake of a deeper truth" by which "the artist penetrates to the essence of a person's character."13 The caricature, these analysts argue, certainly exaggerates reality, but does so to represent a deeper truth that could not be expressed through straightforwardly realist means.

In literature, caricatures are characters who are often comedically exaggerated in some way, and, because they often conform to recognizable types, caricatures are closely related to literary devices of repetition like the cliché and stereotype. Though often associated with derogatory intent, these devices aren't always malicious. Lynch describes how, despite its crude associations, caricature is a pleasurable, deeply observant, and even beautiful artform.14 Moreover, the employment of character "types" has been associated with a politically emancipatory and edificatory aesthetic, as in Georg Lukács's critical realism, for which the construction of "typical" characters is central. For Lukács, "genuine literature reflects life in a vital and contradictory unity" by depicting characters who grapple with "the objective general problems of the age" and embody "all the most important social, moral and spiritual contradictions of a time."15 The realistic depiction of social "types" can, he argues, be a vehicle of critical knowledge and social transformation.

Still, it's mostly as signifiers of domination through the ascription of sameness and immutability that these devices have preoccupied scholars of postcoloniality and race. Theorists have long identified how circulating devices of repetition entrenches the antinomies of colonial rule. Frantz Fanon, for instance, describes how colonization imposes a sense of non-originality on the subaltern: "The white man explained to me that, genetically, I represented a stage of development ... I had the feeling that I was repeating a cycle. My originality had been torn out of me. I wept a long time, and ... I was haunted by a galaxy of erosive stereotypes."16 Here, the violence of racialization exceeds relations of domination: it also denies human beings their originality and reduces them to repetitive instances of a type. In this way, racial systems turn the unique human spirit into "an object in the midst of other objects," thereby "sealing" individuals off into "crushing objecthood."17 Homi Bhabha picks up on Fanon's argument and emphasizes the ascription of fixity, or unchanging rigidity, to colonized peoples: it's a problem, he says, not just because it's false, but because it's "an arrested, fixated form of representation that ... den[ies] the play of difference."18 The problem with clichés and stereotypes in the postcolonial cultural matrix is not that they wrongly depict others, but that they create the discursive conditions whereby those others become locked into place as figures of opposition. And such problems apply strikingly to the case of Muslims and Islam. John L. Esposito writes of a "persistent tendency to reduce Islam and Islamic activism to religious extremism and terrorism" and pointedly compares Western secularists to "conservative clerics the world over" for their essentializing, ahistorical view of Islam.19 Anouar Majid writes that Western political and scholarly discourse about Islam "freeze[s] live histories into immutable and misleading stereotypes," and memorably sums up the predicament of Western Muslims facing a cultural minefield of stereotypes: "Muslims are exotically colorful and charming in their immutability; but, as Muslims, they do not — cannot — change from within."20

But scholars have observed that devices of repetition don't just impose dehumanizing qualities of immutability. Their repetition actually reveals just how insecure their claims are. Bhabha writes, "the stereotype is a complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation, as anxious as it is assertive," and identifies how it "vacillates between what is ... already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated." For him, stereotypes bind together "knowledge and fantasy, power and pleasure," revealing more about colonizers' fantasies of mastery than about the colonized themselves.21 And as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue, the analysis of clichés, stereotypes, and caricatures must account for the perspectives and social positioning of creators and audiences. Subaltern groups, they argue, engage in "insider satire" to affectionately caricature themselves "from below," opening up polyphonic "narrative space to play out the contradictions of a heterogeneous community."22 Caricatures aren't one-dimensional tools of fixity: analyzing them closely, we find that they signify in multiple, cross-cutting ways, and are sometimes more disruptive and critically humanizing than they appear.

Beyond Good and Bad Muslims

The Satanic Verses strikes the reader with the weight of history; not only with its notorious publication and reception history, but its concern with the intertwined histories of Indo-Persian Islamic cultures and British imperialism, and the scattered lives of those living in their wakes. Besides its notorious references to the life of Muhammad, the novel has been widely discussed for its depiction of diasporic subjectivity and Islamic heritage, its intertextuality, and its gender politics.23 Here, though, I focus on the way it mobilizes caricature while simultaneously throwing Islamophobic images into question. The novel follows two Indian Muslim men, film star Gibreel Farishta and voice actor Saladin Chamcha, who miraculously survive the hijacking of a passenger plane but, upon landing in England, find themselves transforming into an angel and a devil, respectively — horns, hooves, halo, wings, and all. Chamcha, an Anglophile and disgruntled son of an Indian nationalist who effaces his heritage, is ironically detained as an illegal alien before escaping to hide in London's Asian neighborhoods; Farishta, meanwhile, has a tumultuous love affair with an Englishwoman, Alleluia Cone, while steadily going mad and experiencing feverish dreams of himself as the Angel Gabriel. Chamcha eventually reconciles with his Indian lover Zeeny Vakil and his father, while Farishta succumbs to paranoid fantasies of Cone's infidelity and commits murder-suicide.

The section of Verses in which Farishta and Chamcha gradually transform into angel and devil, respectively, is the novel's most obviously normatively laden example of caricature, so it is a fitting place to begin. The angel-devil episode seems like a familiar physical binary attached to a simple moral binary of good-evil. Its physicality appears structured around what the artist Mike Kelley refers to as a set of "intertwined dichotomies," as horns and halo, or hooves and wings, form interconnected pairs of opposition.24 The normative dichotomy of good and evil, too, is intertwined with and emerges from the opposing physical pairs. As literary theorist Mrinalini Chakravorty argues, caricatures and stereotypes "participate in multiple perceptual fields" and emerge from a nexus of visual and textual codes.25 Though the angel-devil caricature is rooted in visual description, it involves multiple senses and evokes textual, conceptual, and normative resonances. Thinking about caricature in this broad multi-sensory and normative way allows us to discern a chain of further associations, linking Farishta's apparent goodness with his bodily gusto, bombastic sociability, and lighthearted embrace of fate, and Chamcha's apparent evil with his dourness, recessive demeanor, and morbid self-loathing.26 The angel-devil caricature begins with intertwined physical and visual dichotomies, but also evokes conceptual, normative, and even characterological resonances beyond them. Unpacking this physical caricature, we see how it is entwined with the social identities of Farishta and Chamcha as Muslims facing the pressures of perception by Westerners. Interestingly, too, the caricatured physical features begin to appear only after the men land in England. The novel thus stages how certain judgments about "good" and "bad" Muslims, which have real effects on the lives of Muslims, emerge from discourses about Islam circulating within the West.

But if the angel-devil caricature mobilizes interconnected sensory and conceptual codes to construct an aesthetic and normative binary opposition, what work does Satanic Verses then do with that opposition? According to one interpretation, Satanic Verses actually rebukes essentializing perspectives that exaggerate binary oppositions. In this vein, A.G. Mojtabai writes that the novel erects a moral dichotomy between Farishta and Chamcha only to then blur the normative lines between them. For Mojtabai, this is done simply to remind readers "that good and evil are deeply, subtly intermixed in humankind."27 But while Verses often does scramble the dichotomies it mobilizes, to say that it does so in order to remind us that humans are morally complex is to miss the novel's specific treatment of Western Muslim identities. It employs caricatures of Western Muslims in ways that don't just impart a moral lesson about good and evil, but that reveal and disrupt stereotypes associated with Islam and Muslims.

Caricature also factors into the novel's ethos of hybridity and its associated rejection of standards of purity, authenticity, or goodness. Interpretations of Verses commonly remark on its treatment of hybridity, encapsulated in a line attributed to Cone's father: "Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor."28 Though Verses certainly celebrates what it calls "an ethic of historically validated eclecticism" against "the confining myth of authenticity," it also depicts the specific ethical and spiritual dilemmas and mixed identities of Western Muslims, often in caricatured form.29 Consider how the novel scrambles binaries of good-evil or pure-corrupt, not merely in order to remind readers of human complexity, but in order to advance a complex picture of Muslims navigating contesting normative codes in new geographies and among diverse audiences with varying expectations. For instance, Farishta has a crisis of faith after nearly dying from illness: he rejects belief in Allah and, in a symbolic act of protest, goes to a buffet to stuff himself with bacon and pork sausages. It is while he has "pigs falling out of his face" that he finds "a woman watching him" whose "skin possessed the color and translucency of mountain ice."30 The subsequent scene in which Farishta meets Cone includes — in its depiction of pork consumption, extramarital relations, and the idealization of whiteness — stereotypical outward components of narratives of slipping Muslims. Later descriptions of Cone and of Chamcha's lover Pamela Lovelace repeat similar clichés. Moreover, in its swirling depictions of immigrant London, the novel is populated by all sorts of "haramzada" men, "haramzadi" women, and "Playboy Pakistanis," stereotypical figures of Islamic shortcoming and transgression.31 The novel thus caricatures one kind of "bad Muslim" — the sort who fails to live up to Islamic ethical laws around diet, sex, and dress. But as it rehearses those caricatures, it also unsettles them.

One way that Verses does so is through sheer quantity. By employing so many caricatures of Muslims, the novel actually undercuts the force of any of them in particular. The freewheeling central portions of the novel contain a wide-ranging cast: Hind and Sufyan, the couple in a desexualized, repressive marriage; Mishal, the rebellious teenager; Billy Battuta, the rapacious conman; Jamshed Joshi, the political radical; and countless others. Faced with such a glut of exaggerated caricatures, the reader is initially entertained and encouraged to passively affirm them. But in their cartoonish quantity, the caricatures undermine their realism, counterintuitively making evident their own fantastical nature. Here we see the insecurity that Bhabha locates at the heart of the stereotype, which, in being "anxiously repeated," showcases its own distance from reality. Similarly, while acknowledging that it reiterates existing biases, Chakravorty also notes that "as the stereotype proliferates, it leads to new interrogations about the bases of its assumptions."32 In Verses, the comical caricatures are so thickly drawn that they invite the reader to consciously perceive their formulaic, unreal nature.

This alone wouldn't necessarily push the reader to critically reexamine or deconstruct the caricatured associations they make about Muslims. Yet Verses further unsettles its caricatures by depicting hybridity as a process rather than an outcome. Early on, the novel asks: "How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?"33 This question reflects the way postcolonial life produces new identities in spaces of transcultural interface. But it also might also alert us to the ways identities are dynamically negotiated, revised, and achieved by people living between boundaries. The caricature/character of Saladin Chamcha, originally Salahuddin Chamchawala, a man who aches to possess the trappings of British culture and to be accepted into English society, offers a powerful example of hybridity as a dynamic process. A voice actor, he is initially accepted by English society only for his ability to imitate what he is not. Chamcha's evil, then, resides in his avoidance of himself: his racialized shame at his inauthentic Englishness is a kind of self-debasement expressed in the caricatured form of the goatlike devil he becomes. It is only as he releases his own self-hatred, reconciles with his father, and gains an appreciation of his complex cultural inheritance that his symbolically loaded devilish appearance fades. Slowly, Chamcha ceases to be a man whose identity is foisted upon him by the perceptions of others, and becomes someone whose identity is an achievement, a thing he has struggled for and articulated himself. As he regains human form, he learns to reject the self-image he had internalized, the "portrait of himself and Gibreel as monstrous."34 The bitterness the two had felt for each other since their crash-landing and split transformation gradually tapers as they emerge together as survivors of an arson attack at the Shaandaar Café, an immigrant community space, in what the narrator describes as a "small redeeming victory for love."35 This line is especially significant since, for much of the novel, it is Chamcha's love for London and English culture that crowds out his love for his own private dreams.36

By the novel's end, though, Chamcha has adopted an ethic of embracing his hybridity. The lesson is delivered by his lover, Zeeny, in Bombay:

"If you're serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We're all here. We're right in front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time... Draw it close. The actually existing place. Make its faults your own. Become its creature; belong."37

With their first-person plural and "chutney-fied" vernacular, these lines interpellate Saladin as a member of a community inhabiting mixed cultural space.38 Moreover, they map that interpellation onto the achievement of an adult identity through the embrace of history, geography, and hybridity, imperfections and all. Chamcha's arc encapsulates how Verse uses caricatures as vehicles for subverting stereotypes and depicting Western Muslim identity as a dynamic, hard-won achievement.

From Caricature to Intergenerational Pluralization

Zadie Smith's debut novel White Teeth (2000) is in some ways an unconventional novel to include here: its author isn't of Islamic background, and though it depicts a Bengali Muslim family, the Iqbals, they're just one of three London families whose paths weave throughout the novel. Yet White Teeth warrants inclusion because it prominently caricatures its Western Muslim characters in ways that strikingly evoke stereotypical and Islamophobic clichés. The aesthetic and readerly effect of these caricatures is surprising. Taken individually, they may seem harmful and one-dimensional, but taken together, they depict the intergenerational quality of diasporic and Western Muslim life in ways that complicate the derogatory, "freezing" force of caricature.

Caricature pervades the novel, from minor to major characters. One brief passage describes an Islamic fundamentalist living ascetically for years in a garage, locked away with a copy of the Quran and receiving food from family members through a cat-flap. The critic James Wood notably calls the scene "cartoonish," writing, "we are not led toward the consciousness of a truly devoted religionist. It is all shiny externality, all caricature." Wood associates caricatures with stock characters reducible to ideas or archetypes. For him a caricature is "a simple, univocal essence" or "casing" of a character who stands in for an idea (like fundamentalism). Conversely, he describes characters as complex and deep: they draw out readerly feeling and empathic relation, inviting readers to "enter into" them. This way of defining caricature resembles the postcolonial perspective. Interestingly, the caricature Wood protests most is that of Samad Iqbal, the Bengali-British patriarch of an immigrant family who comes to take center stage in the novel. Of Samad, Wood writes, "he is, precisely, a caricature more than a character...who has, really, only the one dimension, his angry defense of Islam."39 For Wood, caricature flattens Samad into a stand-in for Islamic fanaticism. But does the caricature of Samad do more than repeat the stereotype of the fanatical and easily wounded Muslim?

Samad is not only a caricature of a fervent Muslim; he is also, like Gibreel Farishta, a caricature of a bad Muslim. His religious fanaticism sits uneasily alongside his many vices. He's described when we first meet him as having a withered right hand, an injury suffered in WWII: it is "a broken thing, grey-skinned and unmoving, dead in every way bar the blood that ran through it."40 Since the right hand is ennobled in Islam — Muslims are instructed to use it for eating, drinking, greeting, and other activities — his injury is symbolic of his body's rebellion against his wish to devote himself to Islam. Torn between his conflicting desires, he is not one-dimensional but bifurcated, simultaneously both a fanatical Muslim and a fallen one. Violating Islamic prohibitions, he drinks, gambles, and has an affair with his sons' teacher, a white Englishwoman, which especially fills him with shame. Morally anguished, he confides to his coworker Shiva at the restaurant where he holds down a dead-end job:

It is more than stray thoughts, Shiva. My whole body is mutinous, nothing will do what I tell it...I have been corrupted by England, I see that now — my children, my wife, they too have been corrupted...I should never have come here — that's where every problem has come from. Never should have brought my sons here, so far from God.41

Wood writes that Samad's subsequent confession to masturbating in a failed attempt to quell his bodily mutiny flattens him into a caricature, which may be true; but his words also depict a man torn between a moral vision anchored in a distant Islamic world, and a set of desires borne of his actual surroundings. Indeed, the two caricatured sides he contains are inextricable from each other: his passionate avowals of faith are fueled by his shame at his vices, which in turn tug at him more powerfully because of his fanatical devotion to faith. Far from a one-dimensional "angry Muslim," then, Samad appears as a figure of internal complexity.

However, it may well be that such a depiction of postcolonial migrancy — torn between "Western" desires and a (however fabricated) nostalgia for a lost moral purity attributed to the Islamic world — is precisely the sort of caricature that critics of Islamophobia argue depicts Muslims as unfit for liberal citizenship. If so, we might find it especially flattening and confirming of Islamophobic clichés, when, ashamed of his shortcomings as father and man of faith, Samad decides to save his sons by sending them back to Bangladesh for a proper Islamic education. But if we look more closely at the caricature, we find something else at work, as well. Samad's plan backfires: his first son, the studious Magid, eventually returns from Bangladesh a science-enthused atheist, determined to become more English than the English. Meanwhile, Millat, the younger son who remained in London, joins a comical gang of Quran-thumpers that loosely resembles the Nation of Islam. The anti-Western migrant father thus gives way to his sons, an earnest Anglophile and a nutty fundamentalist. We might draw from this the simple conclusion that parents' plans are fallible and their children uncontrollable. But more importantly, the intergenerational aspect of the story transforms what might initially appear as an objectifying caricature of stubborn Muslims refusing to integrate and become Westerners into a more complex picture of Muslims as agents, negotiating and contesting their hybrid identities.

Instead of reading the back-to-Bangladesh plotline as a renewal of clichés about Muslim intransigence, we might read it as a mobilization of caricature that surprisingly reveals a deeper, process-oriented perspective on hybridity as an identity developed over time. The caricatured, fixed identities of Samad and his wife Alsana give way generationally to an incipient plurality. The novel mobilizes what Paul Gilroy calls the "tension between roots and routes" as it illustrates how the fixed, foundational identities to which characters like Samad and Alsana cling can be traded for fluid ones, continually remade amid the contingencies of migrant life.42 Like her husband, Alsana, a garment worker, resents her mistreatment by the British, is frustrated at her lack of economic opportunity, and is ashamed at her family's lack of religious piety and cohesion. And just as her husband externalizes his shame onto Shiva, Alsana, too, externalizes her own struggles with bifurcated identity onto her happily Westernized lesbian niece Neena, whom she repeatedly calls "Niece-of-Shame."43 Neena, Magid, Millat, and other second-generation characters in the novel are arguably also stand-ins for clashing ideas: if Neena is something of a cheerful progressive, Magid stands for secular liberalism's universal promise, while Millat represents a militant Islamic Third-Worldism. Still, the multivocal contestations amongst them demonstrate how the hardened identities of caricatured Western Muslims (represented by Samad and Alsana) contain and unfold into more complex, pluralistic identities. If Samad and Alsana are "anti-Western Muslims," the generation that succeeds them is more internally heterogeneous.

This reveals the complexity at the heart of caricature itself. As the political theorist William Connolly argues, identities aren't stably univocal, but are formed in relation to a series of differences that constitute them. Once formed, though, identities tend to forget their reliance on these constitutive differences, and to instead treat them as other. The externalization of constitutive difference can lead to demonization of the other; this maneuver entices subjects to consolidate identity as a pure, untarnished whole. "Entrenched in this indispensable relation" between identity and difference, Connolly writes, is a tendency "to congeal established identities into fixed forms" and to convert "difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty."44 With this understanding, we can see how someone with a "deep identity" like a stereotypical Western Muslim may "translate differences" into "moral failings or abnormalities," perhaps out of a conviction that a "deep identity must make contact with the essence of the soul or a transcendental principle."45 Hence for Samad and Alsana, the West is morally deficient, and Islamic faith is the necessary basis of goodness. Yet as I have argued, the Western desires and the eastern nostalgia that they feel are each constituted by the other; the two sides of their bifurcated identity need each other. Against the cycles of "existential resentment" to which this inevitably gives rise, Connolly advises an appreciation of the "historically contingent character" of identity.46 Instead of acting from a place of entrenched identity, as if self-knowledge could be a fixed guide to ethical action, this means problematizing identities, acknowledging their imbrications, and recognizing the historical contingencies of boundaries.

In White Teeth, caricature is a means for depicting the struggles of Western Muslims — for dignity, respect, and meaning — in terms that are empathetic but that also reveal the constitutive differences that Western Muslims themselves may attempt to efface or suppress. The binary oppositions of Samad and Alsana's "deep identity," such as the contrast of Islamic purity with Western sin, offer a set of too-easy clichés that lend themselves to caricature. Yet these oppositions arise, as the narrative emphasizes, from their working-class immigrant struggles with poverty, disability, and marginalization. Furthermore, the narrative's intergenerational unfolding shows that there is more to caricature than the one-dimensional flattening of character. If Samad and Alsana are caricatures of fanatical but fallen Western Muslims, they are also formed through constitutive differences that they cannot fully suppress. Their efforts to impose intergenerational fixity fail, and the subsequent generation manifests vividly their inchoate plurality. The deep identity of the older generation splinters into the multiplicity and difference that characterizes the younger generation. Alsana and Samad blame this division on the West. For instance, Alsana accuses her neighbor Joyce, an avatar of English middle-class liberalism, of causing her family strife: "You have made a war between my sons. You are splitting them apart!"47 Yet it's clear that the religious and political conflicts between the younger generation reflect and emerge from the internal divisions within Samad and Alsana, as much as from the influences of their well-meaning white neighbors. Literary caricatures of fervent but deeply flawed Muslims like Samad aren't simple, one-dimensional Islamophobic images; they also reveal the struggles and grievances of Western Muslims and show how even apparently flat caricatures contain inchoate multitudes.

The Self-Conscious Negotiation of Caricature

If novels like The Satanic Verses and White Teeth helped pioneer the literary caricaturing of Western Muslims for surprisingly complex and even humanizing ends, Kaveh Akbar's 2024 novel Martyr! centrally examines caricature's role in the making of modern Western Muslim identity. In Martyr!, there is no self-realization without grappling with caricature, and Muslims are explicitly reflective about its power in their lives. The novel depicts how young Western Muslims navigate the social pressures and representational binds associated with caricature along a twisting pathway toward the eventual achievement, rather than passive imposition, of identity.

A loose bildungsroman, Martyr! follows Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian-American living in the wake of neo-imperial traumas: his mother was killed in a US missile strike shortly after his birth, and his father, a reeling and poor single parent, brought Cyrus to the US and worked himself to an early death. Orphaned by his college years and turning to drugs and alcohol, Cyrus lingers well into his twenties in a midwestern college town, working at a café while occasionally writing poetry and canvassing Islamic traditions in a vain search for meaning. As the novel quickly announces, Cyrus's fascination with Islamic traditions is sincere but tinged with ironically deprecatory self-awareness. His poems make reference to stereotypical Islamic images, such as pomegranates, the legendary sword Zulfiqar, and the Battle of Karbala; he reads "ancient mystics," questing after a "Persian higher power" or "something in Islam" that could soothe what he darkly calls the "doom organ" in his throat that "pulses dread, every day, obstinately."48 We first meet him in a drugged-out haze in his bedroom, wishing for a sign from God: "Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? ... Turn the lights on and off lord and I'll buy a donkey, I promise I'll buy a camel and ride him to Medina..."49 Where Verses depicts Muslims who come of age in the postcolony before migrating, and White Teeth encompasses them and the subsequent generation, Martyr! focuses primarily on that next generation. Less a fallen Muslim than only vaguely a Muslim, Cyrus inherits Islamic tradition in a patchwork way that is shot through with millennial American pop culture. Neither he nor his parents are particularly religious, and he describes himself as someone who "grew up eating Hot Pockets and watching Michael Jordan, not thinking about Hussain or Ashura."50

Still, we are frequently reminded of his enmeshment, however haphazard and ironic, in global Islamic history. For instance, Cyrus's dreams — in which various real, historical, and fictional characters meet — are interspersed throughout the narrative, and these fantastical sequences feature a motley cast including Scheherazade, Rumi, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In one memorable dream, Cyrus's deceased father Ali meets a wine-drinking and marijuana-smoking Rumi outside of a nightclub, and the two discuss whether an eternity in heaven would be desirable or even tolerable. The mixture — American and Persian, high and low, modern and medieval — creates an eclectic synthesis of Islamic traditions and American pop culture, counteracting the long history of assertions of an insurmountable gap between Islamic and Western civilizations. Many Western Muslim novels have been in the business of challenging this gap, but Martyr! is especially concerned with drawing bizarre and playful interconnections between American pop culture and esoteric Islamic cultural objects. Extending the textual strategy of Verses — in which modern London and Bombay, mythical Jahilia and Titlipur, and allegorical dreamscapes all collide — Martyr! employs a formal strategy of postmodern and anachronistic pastiche in a way that isn't just surreally comic, but that also undermines ascriptions of fixity and alterity.

What's especially interesting about Martyr!, though, is how this synthesis or pastiche is part of the interior life of a young man troubled by his fear of becoming a caricature. One of Cyrus's defining traits is his cringing horror at his own genericity: he understands that his Muslim and Persian background generates stereotypical images in the minds of white Americans, and he is embarrassed by the moments when he fears he conforms to those images. Most salient is his obsession with martyrdom, which fuels his writing project, "Book of Martyrs," a mix of historical profiles and personal reflection formally integrated into the novel in brief, spliced sections. This obsession draws heavily on his Islamic and Iranian background, but he continually recoils from the suggestion that his obsession is "an Islam thing" or that he might just be "another death-obsessed Iranian man."51 Having experienced a lifetime of post-9/11 Islamophobic racism, he's embarrassed to be seen as an extremist in the making and lashes out at white Americans. "If we met outside these rooms, you'd probably try to deport me," he exclaims to the members of his AA support group.52 Meeting afterward with his AA sponsor, Gabe, Cyrus confesses his desire to die, and Gabe is dubious: "You want to be a martyr? ... You think you're going to be able to strap a bomb to your chest and walk into a café?"53 Cyrus grows enraged and accuses Gabe of racism, but it's clear that his anger is tinged with embarrassment over the fact that his desires are so stereotypical. Even when he confides to his friends about his project, he calls it "corny," complaining: "What could I possibly say about the martyrdom of Hussain or Joan of Arc or whoever that hasn't already been said?"54 Saying something new is a perennial problem for writers, but this also points to a specific problem for Muslims. The caricaturing of Muslims is so ubiquitous that Muslims with interests in their own histories and traditions must wrestle with the fear that they could become caricatures, or that others will see them as such.

Like many coming-of-age stories, Martyr! includes a character arc about overcoming internal and external obstacles to more fully realize yourself. In its second half, Cyrus learns surprising truths about his mother's fate, gains a renewed willingness to live, and even finds a deeper love with his friend and roommate, Zee. So it's no surprise that early reviews praised its celebration of the indefatigable human spirit: they announced that Martyr! is a "paean of life, of hope," that teaches us that "the only way to make meaning out of meaninglessness is to become the author of our own story."55 But the way the narrative of self-fashioning is structured by the pressures and binds of caricature has been less discussed. Cyrus tries to find himself in Islamic and Persian culture — hence the pomegranate poems, Rumi dreams, and offhand references to Quranic prophets and Sufi prayers — but only ends up ashamed of his secondhand, exaggerated pretensions. This shame, alongside his devastating losses and privation, lead him toward thoughts of death; but again, these thoughts leave him cringing because they align him with caricatures of death-obsessed Muslims. No matter where he turns, he's met again by his fear of becoming a caricature.

Only when he abandons his quest for a primordial source or root and instead embraces the here and now — making peace with his "routes" — is he able to shed his death wish, open up to life, and deepen his relationship with Zee. This reconciliation is reminiscent of Verses' conclusion, where Zeeny advises Chamcha to "make an adult acquaintance with this place," and of White Teeth's conclusion, where Magid and Millat's friend Irie imagines a time "when roots won't matter anymore because they mustn't because they're too long and they're too tortuous and they're just buried too damn deep."56 In Martyr!, reconciliation with routes is linked to a reconciliation with religion. Cyrus remarks to Zee that our ideas of heaven and hell provide us with the needed comfort and reassurance of justice's eventuality, soothing the angst of so often seeing evil go unpunished and goodness go unrewarded. But Zee replies, "Nah, fuck hell ... Hell is a prison. All we do is build those on earth ... And fuck heaven too! ... Like goodness is a place you can arrive at, a destination. Where you're either standing in it or you're not. It fucks you up."57 Zee rebukes expectations of otherworldly judgment, focusing instead on the spiritual significance of mortal life as it's lived. This reorientation lands. The scene closes with the two bathed in golden light and holding hands, as "the feeling of prayer — not prayer itself, but the stillness it leaves — lifted from the earth."58 Washed in light and earthly prayer, Cyrus embraces his hybridity. His attempted retreat, in his poetry and martyrdom obsession, to a "deep identity" that could make "contact with the essence of the soul," leads to cringing horror at becoming caricature. Though painful, it's a necessary step in the development of an original Western Muslim identity. To think with Martyr!, then, is to see that the force of caricature doesn't dominate Muslims. Instead, caricature turns to meta-reflection on caricature as Muslims grasp its place in their lives and navigate its pressures toward an eclectic synthesis.

The Work of Genre: Markets, Culture, and Perception

I've argued that Western Muslim novels employ caricature with unexpected, sometimes humanizing effects. But what is at stake in calling the Western Muslim novel a genre, or subgenre, of its own? We should begin by explicating why the use of caricature in this genre might be concerning. We might reasonably worry that caricatured depictions of Western Muslims confirm what Islamophobes suspect: that if novels, especially those written by Muslim authors, reproduce Islamophobic clichés, then those clichés must reflect the truth about Muslims. We might also fear that those clichés, in addition to being rhetorical expressions, have material impacts, too. In recent decades a range of fears have been incited across the West, as Muslims have emerged "as the focal point of anxieties about citizenship, loyalty, and liberal values."59 Acts of state violence and discrimination committed and abetted by Western powers against global Muslim populations in recent decades have been undergirded and given preemptive justification by what Stephen Sheehi describes as a deliberate "ideological campaign against Muslims" launched by prominent politicians, scholars, and commentators, especially in the US foreign policy orbit.60 Far from an organic form of prejudice, Islamophobia is born of a concerted effort by elites and cultural producers to disseminate the view that Muslims resist secular values, are incapable of liberal citizenship, and can only be dealt with by force. Moreover, Islamophobia is deeply rooted in a fabricated but widely disseminated historical narrative of an unbridgeable difference between an Islam constructed as monolithically extreme and a West constructed as liberal and open.61 So caricatures, or depictions of Muslims that draw on and exaggerate Islamophobic clichés, are more than mere instances of bigotry: at worst, they reinforce static stories about Western civilization versus Islamic barbarity, and provide ideological justification for militarized policing of Muslims globally.62 Such clichéd stories certainly include but also exceed diagnoses of an ahistorical "clash of civilizations" that ascribe a primordial inclination to violence to Islamic cultures and that erase complex histories of interreligious coexistence throughout the Mediterranean world.

It is in this context that the Western Muslim novel as a distinct genre emerges and performs important aesthetic and cultural work in shaping readerly expectations and perceptions. We can examine the genealogy of the genre's emergence and development by first establishing the global atmosphere of Islamophobia into which the genre intervened. This atmosphere developed in the late twentieth century due to fears of Islamic fundamentalism that erupted among Westerners in the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the subsequent Rushdie Affair. Anouar Majid writes that these events offered "compelling reasons for defenders of the West to insist on the incompatibility of civilizations," and led to perceptions that Muslims were not only a recognizable group but a monolith.63 Western understandings of Muslims, he argues, have also been poorly served by a dominant representational binary that opposes "Islamist clerics" and similar strands coded as hardline to "secular reformers" who are understood to have renounced any substantive role for Muslim identity and to have assimilated into a homogenous Western public.64 What dominant representation, whether monolithic or dichotomous, thus obscures is a more accurate conception of the Muslim world's complexity and internal polycentricity. Mahmood Mamdani elaborates that in the post-9/11 era, distinctions between "good" and "bad" Muslims drawn by politicians and the media do not only equate Muslims with terrorism and demand irreligiosity from them. They also reflect an ahistorical understanding of culture and subject-formation by seeing individuals as "shaped entirely by the supposedly unchanging culture into which they are born."65 Moreover, they deny the role that historical conflicts, such as Cold War operations in southern Africa and Afghanistan, played in shaping geopolitical constructions of terrorism, barbarism, and Islam. Since Islamophobic clichés enjoy ubiquity and hegemonic narrative power, they result in pervasive cultural distortion, with which any representation of Western Muslims must contend.

Though the binary of good and bad that Mamdani identifies is part of an ahistorical framing that speciously obscures Muslim plurality, it is nonetheless true that Western Muslims have much in common with one another. After all, despite their considerable linguistic, national, and sectarian diversity, they have been collectively shaped by historical experiences and share a sense not only of linked fate, but also of responsibility to their communities within the West. Tariq Ramadan writes that this involves not just dispelling Islamophobic ideas, but Muslims "free[ing] themselves of their double inferiority complex — in relation to the West on the one hand and in relation to the Muslim world on the other."66 This complex reflects the fact that many Muslims in the West experience a spiritual and cultural orphaning: demonized by Western media and politicians, they are told that Islam's "proper" geographical place is "over there" in the Middle East. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Western Muslims face the task of "developing a rich, positive, and participatory presence in the West."67 This involves contributing to debates about, for instance, the putative universality of liberalism; economic injustice and globalization; and the status of religion in a Western world that, as Edward Said has pointed out, conveniently sees itself as bigger than religion, as opposed to the "degraded" Islamic world.68 So if Islamophobia has produced false stereotypes of Muslims, it is nonetheless true that many Muslims share experiences and social responsibilities which help compose the cultural basis for their representation.

But the Western Muslim novel doesn't take up those responsibilities in a straightforward way. Islamophobia, after all, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin write, "intolerant images and pronouncements breed a kind of self-fashioning," as "certain Muslims position themselves, often in direct answer to these images, as the pure antithesis of a corrupt, materialist modernity." In understanding themselves and crafting their beliefs, practices, and identities in contrast to the West, they "stereotype the West on its own terms — take it too much at face value, shall we say — and stereotype themselves too." Yet as Morey and Yaqin also recognize, the many historical phases of cultural exchange between the geopolitical formations now gathered under the headings of the "West" and the "Islamic world" cannot "be collapsed into matters of mere (mis)representation, as if all that were needed to set the world to rights were more accurate images of other people."69 Geopolitical imbalances of power are too entrenched to be adequately addressed by better representation. Besides, to think that caricatures are just distortions that could be combatted by dispelling misconceptions is to misunderstand the work that such devices do. As Rey Chow argues, stereotypical forms of cultural representation contain not just "conventionality and formulaicness" but also a "capacity for creativity and originality."70 As a result, they generate multiple trajectories of uptake and response, including tendencies in which people are driven to emulate the stereotypical images that circulate about them, rather than to overturn them. It would be a mistake, then, to think that the cultural projects of Western Muslims would simply refute misrepresentations: to the contrary, we should expect a range of responses, from the imitative to the disruptive.

We find this range in the Western Muslim novel, which emerges from and partially overlaps with other genres representing related social phenomena like postcoloniality, migrancy, and diaspora. Such genres are always slippery and interconnected things, since they are about how people make lives in an increasingly interconnected but unequal world spawned by colonial violence and marked by uneven capitalist development and variant life chances. The postcolonial novel, as May Hawas writes, "was never written in a single language," nor has it "ever covered a single geography," since it has always "been connected to, and concerned with, the specific geographies and languages of the former European empires," and has therefore been marked by mobility, multiplicity, and the lack of any "single, recognizable formal aesthetic."71 The closely related migration novel — which, as Peter Hitchcock writes, in its use of motion and flight often "embeds the general aims of decoloniality by other means" — is similarly disruptive. Though it may be marked by the "specificity of the experience of migration," this experience often functions in these novels as "a polemical scene of aesthetic decentering where the terms of genre, subgenre, and critique are themselves questioned."72 Diasporic novels, too, are a site of contestation rather a stable aesthetic form, as their genealogy tracks geopolitical histories of development and modernization: as Ulka Anjaria writes, even novels with explicitly diasporic narratives have seen a "defetishization of diaspora and emigration" as "new economic conditions in places such as India" enable the third world to "become the site of possible futures for those who might earlier have left."73 The Western Muslim novel is similarly marked by multiplicity, mobility, connection with various colonial geographies, and histories of uneven capitalist development. But it differs from these other genres in that it responds particularly to the lived experiences of Muslims within Western societies, and does so by examining how faith, identity, and practice adapt as they come into contact with Western cultures, racialization and power, and the politics of belonging. The Western Muslim novel is not reducible to an examination of migration or diaspora, nor is it merely a postcolonial critique of empire. In mobilizing a range of responses to the representational binds of Islamophobia and its stereotypes, it stages the tensions between diverse Muslim subjectivities and Western political and cultural impositions.

Conclusion

I've argued that Western Muslim novels characteristically employ caricature in strategic ways that enable them to subvert caricature's expected effect. Instead of degrading or freezing Muslims in one-dimensional and grotesque images, caricature can appear in these novels as a humanizing force. It's been argued, notably by Peter Morey, that such devices are marketing tactics, because a work recognized by critics and publishers as a "Muslim novel" must rehearse certain familiar tropes about Muslims in order to be published and circulated. Even authors who expressly wish to unsettle derogatory stereotypes must still rehearse them in order for their work to satisfy the demanding "market for the Muslim." Only those novels that "engage with the existing political articulation of 'the Muslim problem,' contain the right elements, and offer some kind of 'authentic' pseudoanthropological insight will be published, circulated, reviewed, and critiqued more or less to the extent that they reproduce existing cultural viewpoints."74 This dynamic requires Muslim writers to present themselves as informants whose narratives reveal private aspects of Muslim experience. For example, Morey argues that Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), with its "central aim of illustrating the 'Muslim problem' of honor killing," does so in ways that tacitly accept the Islamophobic frame according to which there is always an "a priori equation between Islam and violence."75 Whether they explore sensationalized practices like honor killing, or, like Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003), purport to offer Western audiences an insider's glimpse into a poorly understood minority community, Morey argues, Muslim novels must situate themselves in the literary marketplace by reiterating familiar tropes of Muslimness as a problem to be solved.

Morey's account persuasively explains how the market for Muslim narratives compels authors to reproduce dominant clichés about Muslims, even if they also hope to undermine them. But it doesn't illuminate the aesthetic and cultural work that such clichés perform, or how their repetition shapes how we read and understand Muslim identities in the contemporary Western world. I've argued here that the use of caricature in novels like The Satanic Verses, White Teeth, and Martyr! have the unexpected effect of depicting the dynamic process whereby Western Muslims, as individuals and across generations, negotiate the pressures and binds of Islamophobia, navigate conflicting cultural pressures and normative regimes, and refuse imposed perceptions in favor of complex identities of their own achievement and self-creation. Caricatures appear in these novels only to be subverted through sheer quantity, character arcs of self-realization, and moments of reconciliation with hybridity.

In closing, two additional aspects of this aesthetic-cultural work should be emphasized. First, caricatures demand that readers examine how they are implicated in the Islamophobic atmosphere in which the genre intervenes. Caricatures are, by their nature, attention-grabbing and striking. As such, they arrest the reader with their exaggerated features and raise questions for the reader about their relation to reality. The proliferation of zany caricatures that populate London in Verses and White Teeth are good illustrations of this: the reader can hardly contemplate such a cast of exaggerated Muslim fundamentalists and playboys without recognizing its absurdity. But once that absurdity becomes an object of conscious attention, it poses to the reader the question of why those caricatures are so recognizable. Because caricatures only function by exaggerating some aspect of a character in a recognizable and often stereotypical way, they provoke the reader to confront their own role in the atmosphere of Islamophobia, which is the background condition of intelligibility for those caricatures. By explicitly reflecting on caricature as a condition of Western Muslim life, Martyr! goes even further, training the reader's attention on the way Muslims self-consciously navigate a field of expectations and clichés in their everyday lives.

Second, Western Muslim novels employ caricature to reveal the agency and processual self-realization of the characters they depict. The characters that these novels follow are rarely frozen, one-dimensional images. Though they may sometimes appear that way, they are often wrestling with their own clichéd desires and identities, searching for ways to make their lives more livable, and sometimes articulating, eventually, more ambivalent or eclectic identities. Samad, Alsana, Farishta, and Chamcha are all occasionally caricatured, but they also are, for the most part, depicted as characters who struggle with their attachments to their "deep identities." In some cases, this struggle leads them to eventually relinquish deep identities founded in bifurcated oppositions. And Cyrus, too, self-consciously wrestles with the caricatured aspects of his personality and eventually relinquishes his need for a deep identity at all, whether rooted in Persian or Islamic culture or in the artistic quest for a meaningful death. In Western Muslim novels, caricature isn't merely imposed on Western Muslims as a derogatory image they cannot escape. It is, instead, employed to depict Western Muslims as self-aware, hybrid, and dynamic agents, negotiating spiritual and cultural dilemmas alongside representational binds.

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Banner Image from "Laila and Majnun in School", Folio 129 from a Khamsa (Quintet) of Nizami of Ganja, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Siraj Ahmed Sindhu is a political theorist and organizer. He is a PhD candidate at Brown University, where he studies how spiritual habits of mind shape the fates of struggles for democracy and justice in a transnational frame. He is also Executive Director of Reclaim RI, a statewide nonprofit, where he leads left political and legislative campaigns for housing justice. His writing has appeared in Political Theory. 

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References

1. There is always the risk when using terms like "the West" and the "Islamic world" of reinforcing notions of homogeneity and antagonistic difference. Though I use these terms, I do so in a critical way, seeking to unsettle these notions and to analyze the way geopolitical entities and cultural/religious groupings are constructed as at odds, rather than to reify their assumed contradistinction.[⤒]
2. The 2017 signing of Executive Order 13769; the hijab bans in France and Austria; the rise of explicitly Islamophobic parties in the UK, Germany, and elsewhere; and the conflation of protest against apartheid and genocide in Palestine with terrorist sympathy are among the recent examples.[⤒]
3. Chris Allen gives the following definition of Islamophobia: "an ideology, similar in theory, function and purpose to racism and other similar phenomena, that sustains and perpetuates negatively evaluated meaning about Muslims and Islam." He elaborates that it is not restricted to "direct relationships of power and domination" but is bound up "in the less explicit and everyday relationships of power." And crucially, he argues that Islamophobia is embedded in "the shared languages and conceptual maps that inform and construct thinking about Muslims and Islam as Other," highlighting that it can't be disarticulated from the shared cultural circuitry of mental shortcuts, attitudes, and perceptions consolidated through repetition. Chris Allen, Islamophobia (Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 190.[⤒]
4. Martin Amis, in Ginny Dougary, "The Voice of Experience: Martin Amis," Times Magazine, September 9, 2006; Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel (Columbia University Press, 2018), 1.[⤒]
5. While Erich Auerbach identified the novel form's distinctive imitation or representation of reality, theorists have often distinguished this mimesis from the use of cliché or stereotype, which are often understood as frozen and one-dimensional signs indicating the cessation or even death of language, imagination, and thought itself. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 2003). See also Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975), 38-44.[⤒]
6. Morey, for instance, argues that Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005) and John Updike's Terrorist (2006) are in the business of "sanctifying Western modernity" by depicting triumphant avatars of literature, art, and rationality who take on "irrational" forces seeking to tear them down. Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 31-64.[⤒]
7. Among works of literary fiction, Michel Houellebecq's Submission (2015) is the most well-known recent example, but Islamic terrorism, honor killings, and radicalization appear in numerous works of mass-market genre fiction.[⤒]
8. While classic assimilationist models call on Muslims to shed cultural distinctiveness and adopt Western norms and values, multiculturalists call for group-differentiated rights and institutional accommodation of minority practices such as religious dress and holiday observances. But as scholars of empire and race have argued, debates between assimilationists and multiculturalists obscure that both mobilize deep wells of anti-Muslim racism to position Muslims as perpetual others. See Tariq Modood, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2005).[⤒]
9. The necessity of choosing a small number of novels for close reading required difficult exclusions. The novels listed here, though not examined in the present work, offer promising directions for future research; several are less well-known than the novels selected for close reading, and they balance out the overrepresentation of male and South Asian writers and characters.[⤒]
10. Bohun Lynch, A History of Caricature (Faber and Gwyer, 1926), 1.[⤒]
11. Francis Grose, Rules for Drawing Caricaturas: With an Essay on Comic Painting (S. Hooper, 1791), 6.[⤒]
12. Lynch, A History of Caricature, 2, 5.[⤒]
13. Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (International Universities Press, 1952), 198.[⤒]
14. Lynch, A History of Caricature, 97-108.[⤒]
15. Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic: And Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn (Merlin Press, 1970), 78, 154.[⤒]
16. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Pluto Press, 1986), 129.[⤒]
17. Fanon, Black Skin, 109.[⤒]
18. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994), 66, 75.[⤒]
19. John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (Oxford University Press, 1993), 198, 200.[⤒]
20. Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Duke University Press, 2000) 138, 5-6.[⤒]
21. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 70.[⤒]
22. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 2014), 205.[⤒]
23. A short list of critics of these aspects of The Satanic Verses includes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Gregory J. Rubinson, and Feroza Jussawalla.[⤒]
24. Mike Kelley, "Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature," Artforum 27, no. 5 (1989): 93.[⤒]
25. Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2014), 33-34.[⤒]
26. For Bhabha, the Manichean "splitting" of colonial discourse always involves a "chain of stereotypical signification," such that each stereotype discursively evokes others. The Location of Culture, 82.[⤒]
27. A.G. Mojtabai, "Magical Mystery Pilgrimage," The New York Times, 29 January 1989.[⤒]
28. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Picador, 1988), 305.[⤒]
29. Rushdie, Verses, 52.[⤒]
30. Rushdie, Verses, 31.[⤒]
31. Rushdie, Verses, 27, 258, 269.[⤒]
32. Chakravorty, In Stereotype, 148.[⤒]
33. Rushdie, Verses, 8.[⤒]
34. Rushdie, Verses, 422.[⤒]
35. Rushdie, Verses, 483.[⤒]
36. Rushdie, Verses, 411-415.[⤒]
37. Rushdie, Verses, 555.[⤒]
38. On the "chutney-fied" English of Rushdie's novels, see Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Harvard University Press, 2016), 163-167.[⤒]
39. James Wood, "Human, All Too Inhuman," The New Republic, 24 July 2000.[⤒]
40. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (Vintage International, 2000), 10.[⤒]
41. Smith, White Teeth, 120-121.[⤒]
42. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Verso Books, 1993), 133.[⤒]
43. Smith, White Teeth, 53, 63-68.[⤒]
44. William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 64.[⤒]
45. Connolly, Identity/Difference, xiv-xvi.[⤒]
46. Connolly, Identity/Difference, 116.[⤒]
47. Smith, White Teeth, 365.[⤒]
48. Kaveh Akbar, Martyr! (Vintage Books, 2024), 25, 16.[⤒]
49. Akbar, Martyr!, 3-4.[⤒]
50. Akbar, Martyr!, 101.[⤒]
51. Akbar, Martyr!, 102, 101.[⤒]
52. Akbar, Martyr!, 23.[⤒]
53. Akbar, Martyr!, 28.[⤒]
54. Akbar, Martyr!, 74.[⤒]
55. Junot Diaz, "A Death-Haunted First Novel Incandescent with Life," The New York Times, 19 January 2024; Nicolás Medina Mora, "There's No Such Thing as a Meaningful Death," The Atlantic, 29 January 2024.[⤒]
56. Smith, White Teeth, 437.[⤒]
57. Akbar, Martyr!, 321-322.[⤒]
58. Akbar, Martyr!, 324.[⤒]
59. Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 2.[⤒]
60. Stephen Sheehi, Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (Clarity Press, 2011).[⤒]
61. Majid, Unveiling Traditions, 50-72.[⤒]
62. Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years After 9/11 (Verso Books, 2021).[⤒]
63. Majid, Unveiling Traditions, 6,[⤒]
64. Majid, Unveiling Traditions, 2.[⤒]
65. Mahmood Mamdani, "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism," American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September 2002): 767.[⤒]
66. Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2004), 225.[⤒]
67. Ramadan, Western Muslims, 225.[⤒]
68. Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1979), 260.[⤒]
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74. Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 6.[⤒]
75. Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 7.[⤒]