Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms

Abstract

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is one of the most influential books of literary studies, and it has, arguably more than any other academic book, contributed to the advancement of post-colonial studies in the Western academy. A large, impressive body of scholarly contributions have taken up Said’s project of interrogating Western representations of non-Western people and understanding how these representations are consolidated and distributed by and, in turn, consolidate and distribute imperial power. While this work is necessary, its narrow focus on Western literary representations, often in English or French, misses one of Said’s most profound concerns in Orientalism: how orientalist representations circulate and gain currency in the so-called orient itself. In the ‘Introduction’ to Orientalism, Said directly addresses readers in the post-colonial world, alerting them to the power and influence of orientalist discourse: ‘My hope is to illustrate the formidable structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or upon others’. Said analyses a specific pattern of cultural domination whereby orientalist representations are absorbed by intellectual and popular discourses in postcolonial sites due to global hierarchies of political power and knowledge production: ‘the pages of books and journals in Arabic (and doubtless in Japanese, various Indian dialects, and other Oriental languages) are filled with second-order analyses by Arabs of “the Arab mind”, “Islam”, and other myths’. Based on these observations, Said declares: ‘The modern Orient, in short, participates in its own Orientalizing’. How can we critically study such self-orientalising representations in post-colonial literature? Maryam Wasif Khan’s book, Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms, addresses this question. Building on Aamir Mufti’s suggestion that ‘the critique of Orientalism must ultimately lead us to the Orientalized spaces themselves’, Khan’s book tracks ‘the longer journey of the oriental tale into the orient, and subsequently into the postcolonial nation-state’ (185). Khan develops the argument that Muslims in South Asia were separated from Hindus by orientalist literary representations, especially the oriental tale and its post-colonial adaptations, marking Muslims as foreigners while representing Hindus as the true and only natives of India. She joins scholars such as Vinay Dharwadker, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Aamir Mufti, Mrityunjay Tripathi and Walter Hakala in studying the impact of British orientalism on the development of modern literary traditions in South Asia, especially focusing on the identitarian split between Muslims and Hindus that continues to have disastrous consequences for the people of South Asia. Khan provides a unique and compelling angle into the discussion by focusing on the