Writing Muslim Identity.

• Author: Seddon, Mohammad Siddique
• Position: Book review

Writing Muslim Identity

By Geoffrey Nash

London: Continuum, 2012, 142 pages, ISBN 97814411366664.

The continued and growing presence of Islam and Muslims in the West has produced a plethora of conflicting literature and debates around interpretations on and representation of minority Muslim identity constructions. Incorporated into the configurations of the ever-shifting debates on Muslim identities is the impact of the 9/11 terror attacks and the subsequent re-framing of Islam/Muslims in modern, liberal and increasingly secular western societies. Geoffrey Nash's new book sets about unpacking what has been produced, by whom and why on evolving fictional narratives on Muslims over the last two decades. His survey covers a series of interrelated styles of English writing: ranging from the novel, through memoir and travel writing to journalism, including a wide range of authors and texts. Nash is more than qualified to grapple with this difficult and complex subject matter, as Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sunderland, UK, whose previous literary works include: From Empire to Orient (2005) and The Anglo-Arab Encounter (2007). The publication under review is a textual discourse analysis, which presents itself in a thematic schema covering five main chapters engaging with, cultural studies literature written as a critique against Islam (p.7); fictional Muslim migration narratives in the British context (p.26); Muslim gender and sexuality (p.50); modernity and eschatological Muslim discourses (p.70); and, finally, the misnomer of 'Islamic terrorism' (p.93). In doing so, the book brings together diametrically contesting representations and binary-oppositional interpretations from across the spectrum of issues and themes explored in the book, pitting them against each other through deconstructing their variant ideas and posits, employing a theoretical prism of post-colonialism, post-structuralism, and cultural hegemony. Nash's central argument asserts that while the specific contemporary socio-political contexts in which Islam and Muslims are framed--postcolonial, western migration, minority status, their established positioning as the paradigmatic 'other,' particularly shaped through a perpetuated Orientalist imaginary, neatly and conveniently circumscribes the overwhelming representations within modern, popular western fiction. This battle to break free from homogenous hegemonic depictions is described by Nash as a Kulturkampf...