Who Is a Muslim?: Orientalism and Literary Populisms

by Maryam Wasif Khan

Who Is a Muslim? argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant iterations in contemporary Pakistan―popular novels, short stories, television serials―is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question “Who is a Muslim?,” a constant concern within eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief among them, takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to the newly formed Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the idea of an Urdu canon, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate around the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship.

288 pages, Paperback

Published January 19, 2021

Reviews

[Mahnoor_96 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not just an urgent and timely study of orientalist literature's shaping of current religio-nationalism, but a remarkably accessible one too. The six sections of the book deal with literary texts from a vast temporal range---moving from eighteenth century England up till twenty first century Pakistan---and yet these sections remain wound together tightly by the book's central argument. The concept of the orientalist "chronotype of the mohametan" introduced in the first chapter acts as a guiding thread throughout the following chapters, making it possible for the reader to navigate through a dense collection of literary texts and histories without losing sight of the bigger picture. Simultaneously it brings together a vast amount of information about popular writers of Urdu literature, their equally vast corpus of literature, colonial literary institutions, and postcolonial Pakistani politics.