Community, Faith, and Resistance

Sk Sagir Ali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Midnapore College, India. His published works include the edited books Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance Margins and Extremism; Literature and Theory: Contemporary Signposts and Critical Surveys; War on Terror: Nation, Democracy, and Liberalisation; Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture; and Marginal Narratives and the Question of Human Rights in Asian Pacific Literature. His articles have appeared in journals of repute such as South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies. Ali is series editor of the Routledge book series, “Peripheral Lives in Asia: Reimagining Nationalisms, Citizenship, and Precarity in the 21st Century”.

• Introduction: The Location of Islam 1. Community, Religion, and Secularism: A Re-Reading of The Enchantress of Florence and The Road From Damascus 2. Remapping Fundamentalism, History, and Terrorism in The Black Album and The Wasted Vigil 3. Gender, Religion, and Religious Faith in Qaisra Shahraz’s and Leila Aboulela’s Select Novels 4. History, Economics, and the Transnational Imaginings in The Map of Love and In the Light of What We Know. Conclusion.

“In a time when Islam and its diverse adherents are the focus of both public and political hostility in Britain and elsewhere, considerations of the meanings of Muslim cultural and religious identity can provide substance to often facile discussions. Sk Sagir Ali’s book examines an exemplary range of literary texts that are part of the wider corpus of British Muslim fiction in light of contemporary concerns and theories around Islam, culture, identity, secularism, representation, and alterity. An engaged and wide-ranging account of an important body of fiction that speaks to contemporary theoretical concerns.”Priyamvada Gopal, University of Cambridge