Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora

Abstract

Islam has been wrongly interpreted by representing it synonymous with terrorand “the Muslim,” as Hamid Dabashi maintains in Norway: Muslims andMetaphors (2011), “is a metaphor of menace, banality and terror everywhere”(p. 2). Consequently, Muslims in and beyond South Asia are being stigmatizedby the newly constituted environment known in the western scheme of thingsas “Islamophobia.” The state of disgrace and misery of Muslims continues toincrease and is being facilitated by the biased ideas and thoughts propoundedby some journalists and writers to construct often misleading and one-dimensional images. This had led to Muslims being harassed, dishonored,and rebuked. The present book evinces their increasingly stereotyped and demonizedportrayal.Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora is a critical evaluationand analysis of representations of these Muslims in literature, the media, culture,and cinema. The essays highlight their diverse representations and therange of approaches to questions concerning their religious and cultural identityas well as secular discourse. In addition they contextualize the depictionsagainst the burgeoning post-9/11 artistic interest in Islam and against culturalresponses to earlier crises in the Subcontinent, including the 1947 partition,the 1971 war and subsequent secession of Bangladesh, the 1992 Ayodhyariots, the 2002 Gujarat genocide, and the ongoing tension in Indian-occupiedKashmir ...