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Who Is a Muslim?

Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.

—EDWARD SAID, ORIENTALISM

Unlike many Muslims of today, the Muslims of the Balkan-to-Bengal complex did not feel the need to articulate or legitimate their Muslim-ness / their Islam by mimesis of a pristine time of the earliest generations of the community (the salaf). Rather they felt able to be Muslim in explorative, creative, and contrary trajectories …

—SHAHAB AHMED, WHAT IS ISLAM: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ISLAMIC

This book argues that a modern Muslim identity, one that has taken on dangerously orthodox, populist dimensions in contemporary Pakistani culture, has evolved from what was essentially a moment of orientalist literary invention in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is informed by a single question—who is a Muslim?—one that is and has historically remained at the core of early modern and modern Western literariness, but that in the past century or so has taken on precarious significance in postcolonial Muslim societies and nation states as well. It shows how modern Urdu prose fiction, from the moment of its inception at Fort William College in colonial North India, becomes inextricably bound with the task of defining who is a Muslim. Over the course of some three centuries, this question and its answers, originally posed within a series of British orientalist fictions and treatises, become recurrent staples of prose texts that range from the literary or canonical to the popular, first in the colonial North India and subsequently in the postcolonial state of Pakistan.

The epigraphs that frame this introductory section are central to the methodological and ethical directions that this book takes, asking us to consider two aspects of postcolonial Muslim identity. The first, a digression of sorts by Edward Said, offers Orientalism, that sweeping history of the socio-cultural politics and intellectual disciplines that undergirded the Western imperial project of the post-Industrial era, as a personal endeavor of sorts, an attempt to read oneself, the individual subject, as indelibly marked by the centuries-long cultural transformation of colonized societies. The second, borrowed from Shahab Ahmed’s magisterial study, What is Islam? directs us further into orientalized spaces and territories and asks us to confront the problem of how and when modern Muslim subjects in societies ranging from Egypt to Indonesia came to measure themselves, albeit to different degrees, against the classical period of Islam, one that is distinguished by the life of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions and the generation that followed. By imagining this moment as original and therefore authentic, exemplifying a “model Islamic disciplinary arrangement,” modern Muslims cast off “subsequent developments as pale reflections or decadent versions” of an incontrovertible truth, thus disassociating themselves from half a millennium or so of their own continuous formation.¹

Despite the ostensible distance of the intellectual motives, disciplinary underpinnings and historical archives that inform each work, they bear witness to a singular concern. How do we understand, in our various presents, the widescale transformations of peoples, practices, and traditions forced by European imperialisms of the modern era? In this book, I attempt to grapple with this question by focusing on the extended legacies of eighteenth-century British orientalism in the Indian subcontinent—in particular, the orientalist construction of the category of “literature” in the language we have come to know today as Urdu. More specifically, I examine the orientalist reinvention of the Mahometan—a longstanding and variously purposed figure in European literature—and the historical processes by which he traverses the realm of the literary to reappear in the colony as Muslim, a religio-political subject of the modern colony.

In the past five or so years that I have spent teaching and writing in Lahore, Pakistan, a city I imagine as home, I have had to reconsider what it means to be an intellectual in our times. I had imagined, for much of my scholarly career, that the study of Western literature, world literature, or even the history of orientalism had little to do with the oppressive religio-nationalist discourse that appears to dominate every aspect of life in contemporary Pakistan. The simultaneous acts of studying eighteenth-century English fantasies of the Muslim world and teaching Pakistani undergraduates the enduring relevance of Western culture to the postcolonial humanistic project forced me to “inventory” the many traces of orientalism, to use Said’s words, upon myself as a historical subject.² I have had to understand that the “traces” of orientalism are legion, as much a part of my journey as a secular humanist educated at elite North American institutions, as they are of the powerful, orthodox narratives of religious supremacy and nationalism whose intertwined interests have forced ordinary Pakistani citizens—poets, intellectuals, leftist workers, anti-nationalists, feminists, and both ethnic and religious minorities—into positions of physical and attitudinal exile.

Thus, I attempt to understand a postcolonial present that is rife with religio-nationalist populisms, and to historicize the increasingly dangerous inseparability of the supposedly distinct realms of the literary, the political, and religious. I hope to elaborate the processes and mechanisms through which British orientalism—from its popular incarnations in eighteenth-century oriental tales to its more conclusive scholarly endeavors—sets into motion a powerful and irreversible religio-cultural transformation in the North Indian colony. This book, then, is as much a literary history of the ideas and institutions that made up “that formidable structure of cultural domination” as it is an exercise in confronting the cultural ideals that make up modern identity for a postcolonial citizen.³