Cosmopolitanism, religion and ethics: Rereading Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Abstract

Western liberal ideals, with their emphasis on autonomy and instrumental reason, are usually treated as incompatible with the more communitarian values of non-western forms of society. Rather than reading Brick Lane as an enactment of the conflict between autonomy and religious faith – and the moral superiority of the former over the latter – this article discusses the novel in the context of renewed debates about the place of religion in the public sphere, seeing Brick Lane as offering a nuanced contemplation of the distinction between faith as a politics and faith as an ethics, and the challenges of living across that distinction. Stuart Hall’s concept of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” is used as a way of entry into Brick Lane, and Selma Sevenhuijsen’s work on the ethics of care is also brought to bear on the text. It is argued that the novel invites a nuanced appreciation of the duality of “care” as a value, namely its significance as connotative of attentive engagement, and its importance as a synonym for self-reflexive caution that should attend moral deliberation and judgment in multicultural contexts.