Emad Mirmotahari - Islam in the Eastern African Novel (Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World)

Islam in the Eastern African Novel

Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World

Edited by Hamid Dabashi

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Hamid chaired the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures from 2000 to 2005 and was a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. His most recent books include Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire; Makhmalbaf at Large: The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker; Iran: A People Interrupted; and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan:

New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East: The Chaotic Imagination
Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of Aisha Taymur
Mervat F. Hatem

Islam in the Eastern African Novel
Emad Mirmotahari

Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature: Portraits of Cairo
Mara Naaman

Emad Mirmotahari

ISLAM IN THE EASTERN AFRICAN NOVEL
Copyright Emad Mirmotahari, 2011.
All rights reserved.

First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United Statesa division of St. Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978-0-230-10843-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mirmotahari, Emad.

Islam in the Eastern African Novel / by Emad Mirmotahari.

p. cm.(Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World)

ISBN 978-0-230-10843-1 (hardback)

1. East African literatureHistory and criticism. 2. Islam in literature. 3. Farah, Nuruddin, 1945 Criticism and interpretation. 4. Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 1948 Criticism and interpretation. 5. Vassanji, M. G.Criticism and interpretation. 6. African literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. 7. Africa, EastIntellectual life. I. Title.

PR9340.5.M57 2011
823.9140938297dc22 2010045305

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First edition: June 2011

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Printed in the United States of America.

For Azadeh and Fazlolah, who give and never take...

I am a lucky man. I carry the world within me.

V. S. Naipaul

Art always says And yet to life.

Georg Lukcs

Sadegh Hedayat

The Islamic world is home to a vast body of literary production in multiple languages over the last 1,400 years. To be sure, long before the advent of Islam, multiple sites of significant literary and cultural productions existed from India to Iran to the Fertile Crescent to North Africa. After the advent of Islam in mid-seventh century CE, the Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish cultures in particular have produced some of the most glorious manifestations of world literature. From prose to poetry, modern to medieval, elitist to popular, oral to literary, these literatures are in great need of a wide range of renewed scholarly investigation and lucid presentation.

The purpose of this series is to take advantage of the most recent advances in literary studies, textual hermeneutics, critical theory, feminism, postcoloniality, and comparative literature to bring a wider reception and appreciation to the spectrum of literatures and cultures of the Islamic world. Usually the study of these literatures and cultures is divided between classical and modern periods. A central objective of this series is to cross over this artificial and inapplicable bifurcation and abandon the anxiety of periodization altogether. Much of what we understand today from this rich body of literary and cultural production is still under the influence of old-fashioned Orientalism or postWorld War II area studies perspectives. Our hope is to bring together a body of scholarship that connects the vast arena of literary and cultural production in the Islamic world without the prejudices and drawbacks of outmoded perspectives. Toward this goal, we are committed to pathbreaking strategies of reading that collectively renew our awareness of the literary cosmopolitanism and cultural criticism in which these works of creative imagination were conceived in the first place.

Hamid Dabashi

This world is not always clear. It is seldom clear. If it were clear, Albert Camus asserts, there would be no need for art. The absence of clarity or certitude is the fulcrum of fiction. Because facts have parted company with truths, because they fail to satisfy, to explain, to reconcile, to inspire, or to guide, we are left with fictions. To write fiction, which is to create a work of art, is not a luxury, as the sometimes-deafening clamor of conventional unwisdom insists. It is a survival mechanism. Even more: it is an evolutionary mechanism. Through the work of art we come to know ourselves best. It is in the act of creation that we glimpse the means and conditions of our own. The creative act is the most rudimentary. That is why Primo Levi, while interned at Auschwitz and in a predicament that pierces the very notion of the human, found himself not just in need of food, freedom, comfort, and relief from physical agony but also remembering precisely an important part of Dantes Divine Comedy. If the body is broken, the mind probably becomes secondary. But for Levi, when the body was broken, the mind was the only thing that was left and it had to be gardened, it had to be honed. He said that he would give up his daily ration of soup if he could only remember certain lines from the canto of Ulysses. Privilege is the enemy of imagination, as Chinua Achebe writes. Indeed, conflict and irresoluteness is in the genetic code of art.

It is no accident, coincidence, or irony that some of the most magnetizing works of fiction in the last half-century, as Pascale Casanova has observed, have been produced in minor places, on the perimeter, those troubled places that form the overwhelming majority of humanity but are referred to as the third world, whatever that means. African authors were traditionally seen as being part of this perimeter. This is changing, but not fast enough. Their writings are too important, too voluminous, too unsettling, and despite their increasingly visibility, it is still fairly common to be able to complete a university literature degree without encountering fiction from the continent that has produced at least five Nobel Laureates. African literatures cannot be treated as addenda to the western canon, nor can they be read as if they were in perpetual orbit around it. They exist on their own terms, which is not to say that they exist in hermetic isolation.

Books do mean. They do conjure. They arouse the most passionate ire. They are the reason why so many authors worthy of the name live and die in exile. Books are social and political documents, and this is not a demerit. However, some time in the recent life of modern literary studies, some intellectual quarters decided that characterizing a work of art as political was an accusation, that it was a charge, that it was invective. Moreover, to read a novel as having political and social reverberations was to necessarily impoverish it as a work of art. As well, the critic that read it as such was, almost by default, branded incapable and academically undernourished. Thankfully, this approach to literature is on its back foot.