Postures of Disbelief: Secularism and Postcolonialism in Tabish Khair's How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

Abstract

:In this essay I explore the place of secularism in Tabish Khair's novel, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position. More specifically, I argue that the novel's narrator, a secular Muslim academic in Denmark, harbors a particular kind of secularism that is explicitly hostile to Islam, a hostility that is borne, in large part, from anxieties about terrorism and xenophobia. The narrator's version of secularism, however, raises the question of how secularism and postcolonialism encounter one another. The novel itself generates a critique of the narrator's secularism, suggesting that it impairs his ability to achieve the kind of Saidian secular criticism that would recognize Islam (and religion in general) as a central factor of the postcolonial intellectuals that secular academics purport to re-voice and empower.