Resistance and Religion: Gender, Islam and Agency in Kamila Shamsie, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali and Ameena Hussein

Abstract

This chapter primarily explores the overlapping, gendered parameters of Islam, agency, piety and secularism in the feminist fictions of Kamila Shamsie, Tahmima Anam and Monica Ali, with reference to Ameena Hussein’s novel. These writers engage with distinct South Asian and diasporic locations, demographics and issues. Shamsie’s first fictions are mostly set in Pakistan. This chapter focuses on her richly woven, neglected, fourth novel, Broken Verses (2005), set in Karachi, but it also explores her more recent Burnt Shadows (2009), which traverses Japan, Pakistan, the USA and Afghanistan, A God in Every Stone (2014), which connects Pakistan, Britain, France and Turkey, alongside her collection of essays Offence: the Muslim Case (2009). As discussed in the previous chapter, Anam’s A Golden Age (2007) explores the creation of Bangladesh. Her sequel, The Good Muslim (2011), engages with the aftermath of the 1971 war of independence. Thus Shamsie and Anam interleave issues of Islam, secularism and female emancipation in Pakistan and Bangladesh respectively. They focus on the 1970s and 1980s, when both the global and local contexts of Islam were becoming increasingly central to the political conversation. They map the rise of the religious right and trace the varied challenges to the Islamisation of the region alongside the imbrication of secularism with distinct South Asian histories.