#NotAllTheSame: American Muslims from Hybridity to Difference in the Wake of 9/11
Mohammad, with its spelling variants, Mohammed and Muhammad, is one of the most common names in the world, not only in predominantly Muslim areas, but also in West . This preference for giving a boy the prophet’s name has become, in recent years, a matter of concern for Islamophobic commenters, who warn against the rise of the crescent moon in Western skies. Tabloids, in particular, are ready to impart inaccurate information in regard to this name’s precedence. In 2016, the British tabloid Daily Mail featured a headline which read: ‘Mohammed tops the list of most popular baby boy names in England and Wales’, after having previously published a similar article in 2014, while The Independent settled for implying the same thing, only as a possibility, this time: ‘why Mohammed may be the most common baby boys’ name in England and Wales’. The Sun followed a day later, with a similar claim. In America , CityLab, the digital division of The Atlantic, cited an empirical survey bearing stereotypical overtones, which claimed that ‘if you ever want to meet a guy called Mohammed in the Big Apple, try hailing a taxi. The first name is incredibly common among the city’s medallion-bearers, serving as a salutation for about 15 out of every 100 cabbies’ (Metcalfe 2015). The same survey lists the surnames Singh, Rahman, Islam , Ahmed and Khan as the most frequently encountered on the streets of New York. In an article that attempts to debunk this popular myth, which plays, as they put it, ‘on fears of both immigration and cultural change’, The Guardian cited Imran Awan (Birmingham University) as saying that the rather insignificant matter of the Muslim name is sensationalised because ‘Islamophobia is perpetuated by fear and a sense that Muslims are taking over and polarising society. Little issues such as the name of Muhammad are turned by the far right into vitriolic hate against Muslims’ (The Guardian 2014).
It should not come as a surprise, then, that Amy Waldman , on a quest to demonstrate the Islamophobic atmosphere in America in the aftermath of September 2001, chooses to give the name Mohammad to her conflict-triggering character . As Nadine Naber remarks, ‘after September 11, no one would have thought about naming their son Mohammed in this country [the U.S.A.] if they wanted him to be treated like a normal person’ (2008, 290). Naber points to the fact that this name has become a resounding signifier of Muslim identity . Other authors who focus on the Muslim Other as a literary character have avoided this Orientalist pitfall of name stereotyping—except for Amis , but, in his case, the situation is different, due to his borrowing his character directly from reality . Waldman goes further by also giving her character the common Muslim surname ‘Khan’, which may be indicative either of the fact that it was intended to suggest a stereotypical Muslim identity—which will later be subverted as the character is developed—or that Waldman wanted to make her antihero an Everyman. The latter assumption is supported by textual evidence: ‘she […] googled his name, and got 134,000 hits. ‘Mohammad Khan’: the ‘John Smith’ of the Muslim world’ (2012, 119). Possibly resting on the postmodern American tradition of focusing on flawed characters , far from the idealised romantic character , Waldman constructs an image that could not be farther from the archetypal hero. At the same time, a closer look into the characters that populate 9/11 fiction shows the same preference for the banal, the ordinary, when it comes to the central figures of the novels in this category. This may be a result of the fact that the attack affected everybody, which gave the alternative worlds of literature the possibility to dwell upon it from various degrees of distance from the event. Or this may also be a neorealist feature, alongside scaffolding on the structures of the immediate, palpable reality and of its media representations.
It is, nonetheless, obvious that the representation of Muslims in Waldman’s novel reveals more than just a construction of average characters , affected as much as everybody by the development of the events at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Neither are Waldman’s Muslims embodiments of the barbarians who embarked on the four planes to bring death upon Manhattan , Washington and Pennsylvania, their portrayal being far from that of an antagonist. Waldman’s Muslims are nothing like the psychopath villain Atta from Amis’s short story , or even like the insecure, sexually repressed Hammad from DeLillo’s novel, who still ends up boarding the plane that crashes into the WTC . Keeble (2014) points out that previous narratives of 9/11 are problematic in their representation of Islam , asserting that Waldman comes to fill a void with her creation of ‘multidimensional Muslim characters’ , which would be ‘clearly an imperative in representing the complexities and conflicts of America’s national response to 9/11’. Waldman’s construction of Muslim identity is less interested in counteracting the Orientalism of established Western novelists like Amis , DeLillo or Updike , and much more in producing a piece of social realism along the lines imposed by liberal media—and I have to agree at this point with Lorentzen’s review: ‘Reading The Submission , I often had the feeling that the novel was written by the New York Times itself; that Waldman has so thoroughly internalised the paper’s worldview that she can’t see things any other way’ (2011, 28).
In fact, the novel unfolds as an expansion of what was to become a powerful statement of anti-Islamophobia just a few years after its publication: the famous #NotAllTheSame, posted all around the new media every time a terrorist attack strikes Western civilisation. It is, of course, common sense, that Muslims are not all the same and, most definitely, that they are not all terrorists , but emphasising this aspect over and over again has become, in recent years, a matter of importance to the politically correct media . Perhaps fed up with the Americans’ negative stereotyping of Muslims in the decade after 9/11, which is indeed a fact, Amy Waldman advances this declaration as early as 2011, with a novel featuring an array of Muslim characters that… are not all the same, but are nevertheless regarded by the media and public as dangerous and best avoided. Two characters stand out: Mohammad Khan, the architect who won the anonymous contest for the memorial of the unnamed tragedy , and the Bangladeshi woman Asma Anwar, widow to one of the illegal workers in one of the towers, who has to endure even more hardship, due to her legal status, but also to her gender, in the context of her religion.
‘The Submission begins its examination of post-9/11 cultural division and racial prejudice by evoking the Clash of Civilizations or “Islam versus the West ” discourse , re-calibrated to also evoke one of the other popular War on Terror conceits—the enemy within’ writes Keeble (2014). But not only does it begin it, but it also leaves it open to the interpretation of history, as the novel provides no resolution for the great divide that affects the American melting pot. It has indeed an ending, set 20 years after the events in the book, which is, presumably, around 2023, in which an elderly Mohammad Khan has long withdrawn from the memorial competition in New York and relocated to the Orient , gaining recognition for his works commissioned by ‘rich patrons, undemocratic governments; Gatsby nations in a hurry to buy identities with their newfound wealth’ (Waldman 2012, 369). Although ‘American Muslims were now, if not embraced, accepted. Trusted. Their rights unquestioned’ (370), Khan’s auto-imposed exile back to his native territories may suggest the regaining of his ethnic identity, far from America , which denied him the right to a home and a hybrid/multicultural identity. In this respect, but not this only, the trajectory of the main character mirrors that of yet another fictional representation of the Muslim who cannot find his place in post-9/11 America , namely Changez, Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist. Had it not been for this ending, as ambivalent in intention as the entire characterisation of Mohammad Khan along the novel, Waldman could have indeed passed for that exception of a Western writer who has not let herself seduced by the mirage of Orientalism and who, consequently, has not given up to the simplicity of stereotyping Muslims.
Amir Khadem has a point when he remarks that ‘Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) is among the first politically engaging post-9/11 American novels that not only
avoid the faulty head-on approach in the depiction of the Muslim terrorists , but also counter the general reduction of public life to private affairs by creating a narrative of the American moral panic in the encounter with its Muslim minority’ (2015, 68). While not missing any of the most common Islamophobic stereotypes in circulation after 9/11 , The Submission renders them as phonies, malicious statements and misinterpretations, simply because Muslims are not all the same. However, it would be a mistake to read this novel as a Vindication for the Rights of American Muslims of sorts, no matter how seductive this idea might seem to liberals, because, regardless of what the novelist might want, the novel hardly achieves this aim. It can indeed be read as a social commentary addressed to the Americans’ reactions to virtually any Muslim in the wake of 9/11, as Khadem suggests, but it can also be read as a crafted exercise in othering . This is because Waldman constructs a gradual otherness , endowing Mohammad Khan with a moral ambivalence which his fellows Americans find impossible to understand, despite the repeated claims that the architect, son of a couple of Indian migrants who raised him with little to no regard to the teaching of Islam , is a born and raised secular American citizen. As a side note, reading too much into Khan’s secularism, and regarding it as a conscientiously employed counter-stereotype in the construction of a Muslim character , as Keeble does, following in the footsteps of the omniscient narrator , who insists on this aspect, results in effectively acknowledging the stereotype of the Muslim as necessarily religious and having inclinations towards radicalism. As it is common knowledge that Islam is the second-largest religion in the world, after Christianity, with more than 1.8 billion followers, it is only natural that the degree of Islamic religiousness, piety and/or fundamentalism should vary, according to both internal and external control mechanisms (conscience, upbringing, education, living under an autocratic or a democratic regime, and geography, to name but a few).
Leaving sociological considerations aside, if only to the extent allowed by a realist novel that entices its readers to look beyond the fictionality of its worlds and search, in the New Historicist manner, for correspondences in the non-fictional world, what remains worthy of mention is that Waldman’s ‘Other’, Mohammad Khan, is doubly alienated. Firstly, he is different from the other Muslims in the novel, who meet the stereotype-imposed requirement of being religious and displaying the migrants’ propensity for sticking together and for preserving their ethnic, religious and cultural identity. Secondly, he is ‘almost the same, but not quite’ as the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) Americans , who cannot break with a centennial tradition of white superiority and distrust of the Other, especially after a tragedy provoked by said Other. Mohammad Khan is characterised by in-betweenness, by hybridity , by his being neither fully American , nor a stereotypical Muslim . This draws the character near to mimicry, as famously outlined by Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), close to an ambivalence which produces difference. Khan is portrayed as ambivalent, as a ‘sign of the inappropriate, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power , intensifies surveillance and poses an immanent threat to both “normalized” knowledge and disciplinary powers’ (Bhabha 1994, 85).
In The Submission , New York City is only at the surface level a space of cultural diversity, viewed as ‘recognition of pre-given cultural contents and customs, held in a time frame of relativism; [which] gives rise to anodyne liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange, or the culture of humanity’ (Bhabha 2006, 155). In fact, the city is a space of cultural difference, which the different ones can freely inhabit, either mingling among the representatives of the dominant culture , as is the case of Khan, who is a respected architect working for an important firm and who feels—declaratively, at least—as entitled as any other American citizen to pay his respects to the dead in the attacks by submitting a project for a memorial , or hiding in its slums, together with other migrants, as is Asma’s case. While Asma and the entire ‘little Dhaka’ in the Brooklyn-Queens area do not even attempt to assimilate, to acquire the customs and traits of the host culture —many do not speak English, and their relocation is only spatial, geographical, and not in the least cultural—Mohammad Khan, who, until the attacks considers himself a Westerner who happened to be Muslim , but did not trouble himself too much with this, is suddenly thrown into a third space which he does not fully acknowledge until later in the novel . Relevant in this respect is the first episode which features Mohammad Khan, two years before the development that was to bring him to public notice, just a week after the attacks. ‘His name was what got him pulled from a security line at LAX as he prepared to fly home to New York’ (Waldman 2012, 29). Subject to a rather discretionary singling out, he realises that, as Muslims were responsible for the attacks, he became cautious, ‘careful to give no cause for alarm’ (p. 30), and yet he cannot refrain from answering sarcastically to the questioning of the agents. He insists that he is an American citizen, that he loves the country as much as the next man and that he has never given any thoughts to jihad or jihadists. The agents ask him rather ridiculous questions—if he has ever visited Afghanistan , what his opinion is on going to heaven for martyrdom or if he knows any Islamic terrorists . Although he was a man who ‘ate pork, […] dated Jews, not to mention Catholics and atheists [… who] was, if not an atheist himself, certainly agnostic, which perhaps made him not a Muslim at all’ (34), Mohammad Khan is surprised to realise that his mind has filled with the words of the first Kalima, kalimat tayyibah (Word of Purity), the Islamic declaration of faith: ‘There is no God but Allah , and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah ’ (translated by Ruthven and Nanji, 2014, 14). The omniscient narrator comments that ‘at the moment he planned to disavow his Muslim identity , his subconscious had unearthed its kernel’ (Waldman 2012, 34). This episode can be seen as stereotyping, as turning the character into a terrorist or into a ‘reluctant fundamentalist’, since a scene of control and questioning on the airport is also present in Hamid’s novel. Amina Yaqin and Peter Morey provide an explanation for such attitudinal changes, in their book, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation After 9/11 (2011), claiming that constant vilification leads to the emergence of a group identity that can turn violent. Citing the two authors, Keeble (2014) notes the other instances in which Khan becomes aware of his Muslim heritage: the moment in which, for the first time in his life, he starts observing the Ramadan fast, and when he grows a beard ‘to play with perceptions and misconceptions, to argue against the attempts to define him’ (Waldman 2012, 272). These transformations may, therefore, account for Khan’s becoming increasingly aware of his otherness or, perhaps, for a form of back-acculturation induced by his newfound unhomeliness, by his being denied the Westerner status that he had taken for granted on account of his American citizenship. Born and raised an Occidental, his subconscious leads him back to his culture and religion , to which he has not previously paid much attention. If before the attacks he was a positive image of hybridity , a successfully integrated member of a minority, after the tragedy , he becomes the Other, the enemy within who aids and abets terrorists with his subversive design of an Islamic garden (which he probably created subconsciously, inspired by the heritage of his interiorised culture).
If one resorts to postcolonial terminology, one can regard Mohammad Khan’s character development as taking two discursive avenues, not radically distinct, but different nevertheless, namely, hybridity and otherness . On the one hand, he is represented based on notions inspired from Homi K. Bhabha’s hybridity . He is the mimic man who borrows traits, customs and, above all, discourse, from the host culture , and who is eventually faced with his difference, regardless his degree of acculturation. At times, his identity is conflicting, as is the case when he watches a televised debate on ‘Should Muslims be singled out for searches at airports?’ (Waldman 2012, 50) and agrees with radio host Lou Sarge, who is in favour of this discriminatory measure. Mohammad Khan states that one can
not pretend that ‘Islam isn’t a threat’ (52), and asks his indignant liberal girlfriend: ‘if Muslims are the reason they’re doing searches in the first place, why shouldn’t Muslims be searched?’ (51). In the year after the attacks and his own singling-out at the airport, Khan’s American identity had been re-established: ‘news about Muslims arrested or suspected, the constant parsing of Islam’s “true” nature had become background noise for Mo’ (47), but the denial of his expected promotion at the architect firm makes him wonder whether this may be a consequence of his being a Muslim.
British and American Representations of 9-11 Page 29
