Leila Aboulela, Religion, and the Challenge of the Novel

Abstract

Leila Aboulela, Religion, and the Challenge of the Novel Sadia Abbas (bio) In current discussions, it sometimes seems as if conversations about religion can take place only as fights about literature. One need look no further for the reason than the Salman Rushdie affair, which was central in the consolidation of the Muslim political presence in Europe and served as a vehicle for the expression of many of the disappointments of the (mostly South Asian) immigrant experience in Britain. The kind of protest that started with the burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford, West Yorkshire, has become a template for expressions of militant Muslim anger elsewhere in Europe, in such controversies as the case of the Danish cartoons. The polemics, controversies, and apologetics that have followed these events have helped produce a notion of a transnational Muslim polity constituted by offense.1 Rushdie's positions subsequent to the fatwa have not helped matters at all. If the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988 was a catalyst in the political consolidation of Muslim militancy in Europe, it was also crucial to the renascence of academic discourse on religion. In his hugely influential Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993), Talal Asad devoted not one but two chapters, in the section entitled "Polemics," to the Rushdie affair. Of the critiques of Rushdie, and of [End Page 430] secularism, generated at the time, it is Asad's that has proven most conceptually influential, possibly because of the theoretical register of his work.2 He has emerged as one of the most important critics of secularism. According to the religious turn initiated by Asad, literature has taken over the functions once performed by religion and, at the same time, has targeted religion for criticism, indeed, for insult and parody. Even as literature continues to perform this category-confusing, attack-and-mirror maneuver, it is misunderstood as stably secular. For Asad, The Satanic Verses provides a particularly stark example, for this slippery move is precisely what the novel executes: it claims an unassailable status, as a work of art, that is itself a version of sanctity and at the same time attacks the very notion of the sacred (Asad, Genealogies 285-91). As if that were not enough, the novel's British reception demonstrates the way this doubleness fuels an intense social and political hypocrisy; in the leap to defend Rushdie from Muslim outrage, critics, writers, and even politicians demanded a respectful secularism from politically weak immigrants even as they asserted the sanctity of literature (Asad, Genealogies 269-306). Immigrants were, and are, required to assent to this sacred status in what is nothing so much as a tacit pledge of allegiance, a social contract imposed by national aesthetic fiat (Asad, Genealogies 239-306). Asad's recognition of the hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness in the British reception of The Satanic Verses is useful enough, but it is subordinate to his greater conceptual commitments: to the identity of something called modernity with liberalism, to the idea that the sanctity of literature is one of the joints of the modern and the liberal, and to the project of recuperating political religion. In Asad's argument, modernity, the West, anything secular, liberalism, literary culture, and even antinomianism are made synonymous through a series of displacements. He presents those who are outraged by the book's blasphemy as non-Western and repeatedly designates the Muslims (secular and otherwise) who object to the protests and the threats of murder [End Page 431] as Westernized (Genealogies 278-88). And for that designation one might, without too much trouble, substitute "collaborator." Britain's more conservative Muslims stand in as symbols of a host of non-Western lifeworlds, and literature emerges as the lifeworld-flattening juggernaut of a catastrophic colonial modernity. The anthropologist Saba Mahmood does not distinguish between literature and criticism, tracing them both to "the poetic resources of the Judaeo-Christian tradition," which are in turn just a disguise for a colonial secularism ("Secularism" 346).3 In her argument, anyone committed to any kind of secularism, or to reform, is in bed with the Bush administration's imperialism; the rhetoric has become so inflated...

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