Beyond the “‘recruitable’ narrative”? The fictive portrayal of Pakistani Christians in Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend

ABSTRACT

In seeming response to rising global interest in the condition of non-Muslims in parts of the Muslim world, recent fictions by anglophone Pakistani writers have explored how Pakistani Christians are positioned as lesser subjects. Such literature speaks to legitimate concerns about the welfare of religious minorities in Muslim-majority contexts, but also risks reproducing “‘recruitable’ narratives” which situate Christians and Muslims on either side of a religio-cultural divide. This article investigates how Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend (2017) depicts Christian experiences of religious discrimination and coexistence within the Islamic Republic. It argues that Aslam’s fiction revisits savages–victims–saviour trichotomies and demystifies religious offence, bringing to light alternative configurations of Muslim–Christian relationships and ways of understanding points of contention. Acknowledging the limitations of Aslam’s liberal humanist vision, it hopes to identify how his novel extends available representations at a time when critical perspectives on interfaith cohabitation require careful articulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Nadeem Aslam
• Christians
• Muslims
• Pakistan
• persecution
• The Golden Legend

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Omar Shahid Hamid’s (2013) The Prisoner is unusual in featuring a relatively empowered Christian police officer as its hero.

2. The relatively novel term “Christophobia” was used by British politician Jeremy Hunt (2019, n.p.) to “define” “anti-Christian discrimination and persecution” at the time of the publication of the Truro Report into Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO; now Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office) support for persecuted Christians (Mountstephen 2019). Foregrounding the “wickedness” of human rights abuses in the surveyed regions (the Middle East, Africa, and Asia), Hunt’s speech presented a dehistoricized, decontextualized Christophobia as an implicitly Muslim problem, rather than as a mutifaceted phenomenon shaped over time by a combination of social, economic, and political, in addition to religious, inequalities.

3. As Lara Feigel (2016, n.p.) observes, “this isn’t ‘magical realism’: it’s all within the bounds of earthly possibility”.

4. Article 2 (a) of the Constitution of Pakistan (1973, n.p.) states: “Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives [ … ] in accord with the teachings and the requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Quran and the Sunna”, whilst minorities should be permitted “freely to profess and practice their religions and develop their cultures”.

5. However, the lesser-known Haneef’s (2020) legal thriller Blasphemy has since directly confronted the blasphemy laws.

6. No explanation is provided for the choice of a feminine name for the male protagonist. The name, symbolizing innocence and purity in Christian iconography, may function to sanitize and sanctify this former sewage-worker character.

7. Anker would describes this also as “a sublime fascination with victimisation that inadvertently covers over rather than encourages critical scrutiny of the material disparities that generate such failures of justice” (2012, 12).

8. The clauses on “Offenses Relating to Religion, Pakistan Penal Code” read: “Whoever by words, either spoken or writer or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad [or the Holy Quran, or his wives or family] shall be punished with death, or imprisonment” (quoted in Sheemeem Burney Abbas 2013, 151).

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Madeline Clements

Madeline Clements is a senior lecturer in English studies at Teesside University, specializing in postcolonial, particularly Pakistani, literature in English. She has published Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie (2015). Her current research pertains to the literary and visual representation of Christian lives and identities in Pakistan from 1947 to the present. She was co-investigator for a QR Global Challenges Research Fund project, “Women Writing South Asia: Pakistan Perspective” (2019–20), and is leading a co-produced research initiative, “Editing Women: Co-Investigating Autonomy and Sustainability in Pakistan’s Contemporary Literary Landscape” (2022).