Reconstructing the Past, Deconstructing the Other: Redefining Cultural Identity through History and Memory in Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret

Abstract

This paper focuses on Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret (2005), a novel about the disappearance of Issa Shamsuddin, a young South African student of Eastern descent living in London, in the context of post-9/11 attitudes of suspicion and distrust towards cultural others. The paper argues that in its exploration of crosscultural relationships and transnational historical exchanges, the novel calls for an understanding of the suffering of cultural others by relating the 9/11 attacks to other events in history that have indelibly marked various groups’ sense of collective identity in order to disrupt traditional notions of cultural identity. Shifting between past and present, the narrative illustrates the relation between memory – both individual and collective – and history as distinct interpretations of the past that are both characterized by biases and omissions which, if investigated, may acknowledge a sense of indebtedness that subverts common understandings of cultural identity.