Archiving Islam in Nadeem Aslam’s Libraries

Abstract

This article explores the representation of libraries and Islam in Nadeem Aslam's three most recent novels: The Wasted Vigil (2009), The Blind Man's Garden (2013), and The Golden Legend (2017). In these novels, the Golden Age of Islam – for which Baghdad's legendary House of Wisdom has come to serve as metonym – is repeatedly referenced as a time of learning, cultural production, and cultural syncretism. Meanwhile in contemporary south-east Afghanistan and north-west Pakistan, a region of the world that has been scarred by violence, books and libraries proliferate as vehicles and spaces of translation, enlightenment, and sanctuary. The article scrutinises the place of Islam within the historically deep and geographically broad world mapped in Aslam's novels, tracing its presence in the rich archives that they uncover and explore. It investigates how in Aslam's work, books and libraries disrupt both categories of difference, by bringing the Islamicate world and the secular West into dialogue with one another, and linear notions of time through its archival recovery. Yet, the article argues, its archival excavation of the Golden Age of Islam is implicitly contrasted with the poverty of the faith in the present, which risks reinstating the temporality that the novels are, in some way, intent on disrupting. The article questions how far Aslam's libraries, and Aslam's novels, uncover the past for the present, and to what extent they allow the anglospheric reader to travel across the divide that separates contemporary Islam from secular liberal thought. It argues that the libraries' admission is limited to those who can fit a model of a secular liberal cosmopolitanism, and that the novels' archival recovery falls short of a decolonial praxis that deconstructs hierarchies of knowledge in the present.