ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights how Kamila Shamsie's novels Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows confront these negative international attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. By locating her characters in their homelands as well as abroad, Shamsie engages with issues related to identity and migration that began to change as a result of post-9/11 mainstream public narratives about suicide bombing, religious fanaticism, terrorism, jihad, and Islamic fundamentalism. In Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows, Shamsie foregrounds these volatile relationships between national and global politics, such as the 1947 Partition and political tensions in Pakistan in the 1970s and 1980s. Burnt Shadows recapitulates stories of Partition, migration, and ethnic violence within Pakistan and between India and Pakistan. The chapter describes Steve's conversation with Harry about recruiting people for his security firm, in which Steve dismisses Harry's sympathy for Raza and other Muslims by calling it 'nostalgia', indicates the complexities that Butler discusses; to oppose the war means sympathy with terrorism.
