City, narratives, and nation: The representation of Karachi in H.M. Naqvi’s The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack

Abstract

ABSTRACT H.M. Naqvi’s 2019 novel The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack interweaves anthropological, historical, spatial, religious, cultural, and political narratives in comic fashion. Drawing on the tropes of the postcolonial city and “decolonization”, this article analyses Naqvi’s text in terms of political, cultural, and religious factors significant to urban centres like Karachi, and their implications for post-Independence Pakistan in its struggle to achieve a pluralistic and inclusive democratic system. Abdullah, the novel’s protagonist, seeks to present himself as a secular counterpart to the prevalent Sunni/Wahhabi orthodoxies in Pakistani culture. However, alongside his dramatization of a secular challenge to religious orthodoxy, Naqvi constructs a paradoxical representation of the enunciation of Islam at a Sufi Shrine, through the glorification of Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s tomb in Karachi. Thus, the novel’s representation of Islam contains unresolved paradoxes, in that it alternates between secularist denunciation of orthodox Sunni Wahhabism and a sympathetic representation of Brelvi/Shia sects.