Imagining Islamism

In many ways, the story of contemporary fiction’s representation of Islamic fundamentalism seems so familiar that it does not need retelling. ² It was hardly surprising, of course, that the period after 9/11 witnessed an explosion of Anglophone literary texts that sought to imagine Islamists and Islamism. As James Wood safely predicted in 2006, “in the next few years, one of the central novelistic subjects will be religious fundamentalism and its relation to Western secular society.” ³ To start with, the “9/11 novel” itself became something of a popular sub-genre of contemporary fiction: Martin Amis, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan, Joseph O’Neill, and John Updike were just some of the most famous figures to reflect upon the origins, events, and aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center. ⁴ Yet the turbulent geopolitics of the last decade or so—from the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorist attacks in Madrid and London, the Israeli invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Syria, up to the rise of neo-fundamentalist groups such as ISIS—have inevitably meant that Islamic fundamentalism continues to fascinate the British and American literary imaginary. If the 9/11 novel itself has often been criticized for a certain aesthetic and political myopia—which led it to prioritize the personal trauma inflicted upon American culture over a larger reflection upon the geopolitical context for the attacks—a new wave of fiction by writers such as Salim Bachi (Algeria), Mohsin Hamid (Pakistan), Yasmina Khadra (Algeria), and Hisham Matar (Libya) has offered a corrective to such institutional Americanism by focusing upon the complex social, political, and religious origins of Islamism in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. ⁵ Perhaps the most visible symptom of the ubiquity of Islamic fundamentalism in fiction today, though, is that it is seemingly now impossible to write a British or American “state of the nation” novel that does not feature an Islamist among its dramatis personae. In recent works such as Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December (2009) and John Lanchester’s Capital (2012), for instance, the figure of the Islamist terrorist takes his obligatory place among the cast of rogue traders, politicians, footballers, builders, and nannies who collectively emblematize life in contemporary London. ⁶