Читать книгу Who Is a Muslim? - Maryam Wasif Khan - Страница 12

The single interrogative thread “who is a Muslim,” which runs through the works I examine, originates not in the Indo-Persian cultural complex where much of this work is inevitably located but in late Enlightenment Europe, specifically, eighteenth-century England. Whether we turn to the proliferation of the literary genre known as the oriental tale in the early decades of the eighteenth century or the scholarly orientalist tracts on “Asia” in the latter half, the attempt to codify “Muslim” in or against the idea of a nation is endemic. While Urdu poetry, an older and more complex formation, also takes up the question of Muslim selfhood through stalwarts such as Hali and Allama Iqbal, the particular trajectory of prose fiction following the English oriental tale as well as the scale of its reach in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries demand a close and careful study. On a formal level, I chart the English oriental tale’s transformation over the course of almost three centuries as it journeys from the European Republic of Letters to the Indian colony. In doing so, I also trace the transformation of Urdu, a once elite aesthetic register of the Indo-Persian world to a modern vernacular for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Cementing the conjoined histories of an English literary form and an Indo-Persian linguistic register is the chrono-spatially fluid figure of the Muslim, or as his orientalist title goes, the Mahometan.

In the first chapter, “Mahometan/Muslim: The Chronotope of the Oriental Tale,” I argue that we read the vogue that surrounded the English oriental tale in the early part of the eighteenth century as one whose effects extended beyond the metropolis. An essential element of the oriental tale, whether we consider Antoine Galland and Grub Street’s Arabian Nights’ Entertainments or Francois de la Croix’s Turkish Tales (1707) and Persian Tales (1710), is the chronotope of the Mahometan. The imagined counterpart of the Ottoman or Mughal Muslim kings, the Mahometan is a figure that defies Enlightenment modalities of ancient time and geographic origin. In these works and others, including Frances Sheridan’s History of Nourjahad (1767), the chronotope, the “organizing center” of a literary genre, is defined by the absence of an originary space and time for the Mahometan.³⁵ A ubiquitous figure in the English oriental tale, the Mahometan is constructed as a homeless potentate, a traveling merchant, an itinerant dervish, a wanderer. Validated and expanded in the orientalist scholarship that flourished in the early days of the Indian colonial project, the Mahometan/Muslim functions in opposition to the “chronotope of the indigenous,” a term premised on the orientalist “notion of indigeneity as the condition of culture.”³⁶ These competing literary chronotopes complicate what Mikhail Bakhtin envisions as the “assimilating of an actual historical chronotope” into literary narrative.³⁷ The chronotope of the Mahometan/Muslim unfurls from within various English orientalist fictions and poems, traveling to scholarly documents, informing colonial laws and institutions.

The second chapter, “Hindustani/Urdu: The Oriental Tale in the Colony,” traces the oriental tale’s early nineteenth-century travels from the metropolis to the North Indian colony and the subsequent transformation it effects on premodern Urdu. I examine the scholarly writings of the celebrated philologist, William Jones, best-known for his 1784 so-called discovery of Sanskrit as the foundational language of an ancient Indic civilization. Less known is Jones’s elaboration of the chronotope of the Mahometan in which he designates Islam as a non-national movement, a false sign blotting a landscape of an otherwise ancient nation. Jones’s successor, John Gilchrist, however, changes the direction of the orientalist philological project, investing English resources to develop Indian vernaculars, the most visible of which is Hindustani. Claiming Hindustani to be one and the same with Urdu, Gilchrist patronized the production of a new vernacular literature in Hindustani whose foundational texts mirrored the English oriental tale and sought to inculcate an acquiescent morality within young officers and native subjects alike. Authored by natives working in the colonial institution of Fort William College (established 1800), these works collapse the Mahometan of the oriental tale with the North Indian Muslim, rewriting the historical presence of the latter in India as symptomatic of an itinerant, dislocated potentate. The articulation of the chronotope, therefore, becomes a moral articulation of the colonized self by the native subject. At a distance from the colonial ambit, however, examples of a courtly Urdu adab persist, exposing the contrived nature of Fort William narratives. Unattached to religious morality, existing in alternative geographies, stylized for effect and recitation, these narratives are slowly excised from the native imagination by the systematic promotion of the new prose literature.

“Nation/Qaum: The ‘Musalmans’ of India,” the following chapter, argues that in the decades following the Mutiny of 1857, the marauding potentate of the oriental tale has to be reformed in order to occupy the molds of bourgeois subjectivity in the high colony. The oriental tale is rewritten as a set of didactic and realist fictions within which the once unstable protagonist, the Mahometan, now takes the form of the bourgeois Muslim. This second stage of literary invention in the colony—patronized by the Government of India but realized by native subjects—recasts a once-aristocratic, culturally cosmopolitan individual as a compliant cog in the colonial machinery. Reinventing Muslim women as socio-religious reformers, writers such as Deputy Nazir Ahmad, Altaf Hussain Hali, and Abdul Halim Sharar offer a believing, yet rational Muslim subject, whose earlier flaws are attributed to his assimilation in India and his relations with peoples outside the fold of Islam. The reformist moment, for the most part, is lauded as having inaugurated realist and historic fiction-writing in Urdu, with Nazir Ahmad’s domestic stories frequently being cited as early prototypes of the “novel,” while Hali’s disavowal of the ghazal in favor of the single-theme, natural nazm form is also counted as literary development. Yet what often goes unquestioned in this celebration of Urdu’s attainment of the novel is its transformation of the Indian-Muslimness, a cosmopolitan condition, into a qaum or a nation whose origins lie outside of India.

In Chapter 4, “Martyr/Mujāhid: Muslim Origins and the Modern Urdu Novel,” I examine how the chronotope of the now-Muslim travels into the twentieth century through what is now a large network of Urdu literary journals and print novels. While this period is best-known for the subversive works of All-India Progressive Writer’s Movement, a Bloomsbury-inspired collective in India, the powerful, looming influence of a parallel set of Muslim nationalist writers—Rashid ul-Khairi, Nasim Hijazi, and Razia Butt—has gone unnoticed in literary histories both in the Euro-American academy and in Urdu. Written and published from around the 1920s to the 1970s, the novels of these nationalist writers resituate the once-itinerant, despotic Mahometan in terms offered by colonial modernity: nation, state, language. Within these mainstream works, which include Hijazi’s wildly successful Muhammad bin Qāsim (1945) and Butt’s enduring Bānō (1971), the Muslim qaum, or nation, is envisioned in terms of a single origin and its onward history: the caliphate, or Mecca, and the revived relevance of mujāhids, or warriors who fight in the name of Islam for the purpose of creating a separate Muslim state called Pakistan. A far cry from contemporaries such as Manto or the mutinous Angārē group, these nationalist writers cultivate the nascent ideas of nationhood propagated by earlier reformists into a powerful narrative of Muslim selfhood in the young Pakistan.

The inherent instability of the Mahometan/Muslim chronotope, however, does not permit an extended commitment to national territories. By the twenty-first century, seventy odd years into Pakistan’s existence, the cobbled ideals of nationhood and state implode into a radically reimagined Muslimness that I elaborate upon in Chapter 5, “Modern/Mecca: Populist Piety in the Contemporary Urdu Novel.” Enabled and legitimized within a number of popular novels and television serials authored by bestselling writers such as Umera Ahmad, Nimra Ahmad, and Farhat Ishtiaq, the “new” Muslim, predominantly signified by young women, is the contemporary reincarnation of a salafī, an early convert and companion of the Prophet Muhammad. In these religio-populist novels, the true Muslim protagonist actively rejects those outside the fold of Islam, including religious minorities, and renounces all that is Western, such as clothing and occupations, all the while reinventing the self in the image of the early Meccan community of converts to Islam. This exclusionary, often violent discursive formation marks the coming-of-age of a widespread religious populism in the domain of vernacular literature.