Representations of Islam, Terrorism, and Religious Extremism: Cosmopolitan Identity in Muslim Anglophone Novel

Abstract

In Orientalism, Edward Said argues amply that the West has popularised a rather distorted image about Islam through a pseudoscientific study of the East, subjecting it in the process to a discourse of power, which colours most of the perceptions that the West has had about Islam. Recently, the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York have, in their wake, revived and reinforced many extant, Orientalist myths in a new, perhaps more overwhelming, wave of misrepresentation targeting Islam. In the realm of literature, canonical writers like John Updike and Don DeLillo published works that do but reiterate the media Neo-orientalist discourse, which paints Islam as a religion mired in outmoded practices and incapable of cross-cultural dialogue in the age of Globalisation. In this thesis, however, it is argued that out of the post-9/11 frenzy emerges a counter discourse, which tries to correct these misconceptions and myths. In order to analyse this counter discourse, the three novels analysed here are therefore read through the lens of Anthony Appiah’s philosophy of Rooted Cosmopolitanism. The three novels promote narratives of crosscultural dialogue in that the main Muslim characters, to evoke Appiah’s cosmopolitanism, fulfil fully their “moral oughts,” the moral obligations that bind them to their fellow human-beings who do not belong to their local culture.