Introduction: Secularism and the literary marketplace

The last few years have witnessed a rising awareness across the media of the whiteness of Britain’s fiction publishing industry and an amplification of calls for racial diversity both within the workforce and within author lists. In 2015, shortly after the release of the all-white authored list of books to be freely distributed across the UK for World Book Night 2016, The Guardian published a piece featuring a roster of British writers of colour critiquing the industry’s shameful record of race as well as class inclusivity (Shukla et al. 2015, n.p.; see also Flood 2015). Here, the words of trailblazing campaigner for Black, Asian, and People of Colour authors and Britain’s first female Black publisher, Margaret Busby, sit alongside those of relative newcomer Nikesh Shukla, whose own success as an anthologist and author has been accompanied by a tireless advocacy for a racially diverse literary marketplace (Shukla et al. 2015, n.p). In his contribution, Shukla alludes to his then forthcoming essay collection The Good Immigrant (Shukla 2016) whose publication in 2016 and commercial and critical success marked the beginning of a new shift – even a watershed moment – in the UK book industry. Together with Reni Eddo-Lodge’s (2017) chart-topping non-fiction book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Bernardine Evaristo’s (2019) history-making Booker Prize win Girl, Woman, Other, and Candice Carty-Williams’s (2019) novel Queenie, which won the British Book of the Year award in 2020, among others, Shukla’s high-profile collection helped to pave the way for a boom in books by Black and Brown writers. This was underpinned by new initiatives such as Penguin’s Black Britain: Writing Back list, curated by Evaristo and launched in 2021, and its WriteNow mentoring scheme for writers from under-represented backgrounds, established in 2016, as well as the inauguration of the Jhalak Prize for “British/British resident BAME [Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic] writers” in 2017.¹ This shift took place against the backdrop of the worldwide rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, following the racist murder of George Floyd in 2020. By then, book publishers evidently felt an imperative to speak out against racial violence: that race was their business, or, more cynically, that they could no longer afford to remain silent on matters of race. Penguin Random House, Hachette UK, Pan Macmillan, and HarperCollins all issued statements affirming their solidarity or allyship with racialized people and their commitment to inclusivity in the wake of Floyd’s murder (Saha and van Lente 2022, 1804–1805).

Yet, while race has become a literary “hot topic”, with publishers keen to seize this marketable moment, writers of colour remain marginalized and their literary production circumscribed by market expectations. Anamik Saha and Sandra van Lente’s (2020) Rethinking “Diversity” in Publishing is the most recent in a series of commissioned reports that document little positive change since the beginning of this century in the industry’s lack of diversity and its racialization of “BAME” authors. In 2004, Danuta Kean (2004) wrote in her Bookseller report that Black and Asian writers felt pressure from publishers “to write about multicultural issues, which effectively ghettoises them” (3), while the interviews that she conducted with “BAME” writers for her 2015 report, commissioned by Spread the Word, revealed that they felt “pressurized into using cultural stereotypes” (Kean 2015, 8) and that “authenticity” was a constraining expectation that, in the words of an anonymous writer of Black African descent, “turns Black and Asian writers into totems for their communities, which emphasises the sense that they are outsiders to a White literary culture” (quoted in Kean 2015, 14). Similarly, five years later, Saha and van Lente (2020) documented writers’ frustration at white middle-class editors’ expectations about the focus of their fiction – citing demands for an “immigrant narrative”, “war”, or “knife crime” as examples – and at the practice of comparing new writers of colour to other writers of colour which again ties them to certain themes (14, 18). Publishers’ perception of their core readership as white and middle class – and assumptions about that readership’s taste – plays a key role in sidelining Black and Brown writers at the point of acquisition, while suggestions that a lack of “quality” is at the root of these writers’ peripheralization continue to haunt some industry personnel’s thinking (12, 16–17, 20). In an article based on their findings, Saha and van Lente outline the ways in which the publishing industry alienates writers from racialized backgrounds, in spite of – and indeed through – its purported commitment to diversity. As they put it, “the publishing of authors of color makes race in a way that paradoxically continues the marginalisation of those authors, which in turn is precisely how the dominant culture sustains its position of privilege” (Saha and van Lente 2022, 1810). Even while major publishing companies are adding authors of colour to their lists in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and significant media coverage of the whiteness of authors and of the industry’s employees, at the same time they are continuing to encourage writers to reproduce certain “racialized expectations” which confine them to themes and genres that are considered suitably “authentic” (1818, 1816). The positive changes that have taken place over the last few years should certainly not be dismissed, especially those that have been generated from the ground up – for example, by small independent presses or initiatives spearheaded by writers and collectives of colour – but the depth and longevity of this change remain to be seen. As Malachi McIntosh (2020, n.p.) recounts in relation to Black British writers, Britain has a track record of waves of “social change followed by publishing frenzy”, and it is not yet clear whether or not the current wave will eventually ebb away.

These evolving debates in the media and publishing industry have turned the spotlight onto questions of production, reception, cultural value, and gatekeeping in the literary market and beyond. But they also reveal a blind spot in their exploration of racial and cultural diversity: religion. In an age of Islamophobia, when racism often operates culturally – including religiously – the position of Muslim authors and the fictional worlds they create within a marketplace that is clearly shaped by hierarchies and exclusions is ripe for exploration. The attacks of 9/11 and 7/7, along with numerous other worldwide events and controversies with Muslims at their centre, have piqued the reading public’s interest in Muslim-authored fiction as well as non-fiction. The rising profile in the 2000s of a limited number of highly acclaimed novelists on both sides of the Atlantic, including Khaled Hosseini, Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Monica Ali, and Nadeem Aslam – alongside that of mass-market “misery memoirs” at the other end of the spectrum of “literary” value – has been followed, in the second and third decades of the 21st century, by a welcome diversification in Muslim writing. This has been helped by publishers such as Lisa Milton at HarperCollins’ HQ imprint (whose list includes authors Kia Abdullah, Khurrum Rahman, and Nadiya Hussain), small presses such as newcomer Fox & Windmill (which specializes in genre, young adult [YA], and literary fiction by South Asian writers), and initiatives like the Diverse Book Awards (won by Ayisha Malik in 2020 and Kia Abdullah in 2022 when Elif Shafak was also shortlisted). Today, in 2023, Muslim-authored writing encompasses more popular genres, including romance (Malik’s Sofia Khan series [2015, 2017, 2022]) and crime (Saima Mir’s [2021] The Khan), and a wider range of forms, such as graphic memoir (Sabba Khan’s [2021] The Roles We Play) and the essay anthology (Mariam Khan’s [2019] It’s Not About the Burqa, and Sabeena Akhtar’s [2021] Cut from the Same Cloth?). Beyond British authors, too, “Muslim” writing has flourished, including YA fiction (e.g. by Samira Ahmed and Sara Sharaf Beg), the “rom-com” novel (e.g. by Syed M. Masood), and detective fiction (e.g. by Ausma Zehanat Khan), as well as more literary fiction (by Laila Lalami, Ayad Akhtar, and Fatima Bhutto, to name just a few). This is a welcome shift: a strand of the industry’s broader reckoning with “race”, perhaps. Yet Muslim writing continues to carry familiar burdens. The mainstream reading public’s desire to “know” the Muslim “other”, the better to understand its supposedly alien or “exotic” mindset and practices, remains. In this context, to paraphrase the words of Saha and van Lente (2022, 1810) quoted above, it seems important to consider whether and how the publishing of Muslim authors makes “Muslimness” in a way that results in their continuing marginalization, and how writers might anticipate, register, or resist expectations or pressures to reproduce certain themes or tropes in their work.

This Special Issue is animated by these considerations, as well as by a number of related questions, which the articles and interviews together explore. How do Muslim or Muslim heritage writers negotiate their role – one that is imposed on them – as mediators of religious culture or faith? How do they negotiate the tension that might arise from communicating faith to a predominantly secular readership, and can unease or anxieties about this tension be traced within their writing? How do publishers, or other cultural gatekeepers, help shape and package “Muslim” writing as products which will sell, or accrue prestige, in a marketplace that is shaped by biases – for example, through editorial interventions, paratextual materials, or marketing strategies? To what extent do the conventions and established discursive coordinates of reception (reviewing, criticism, and so on) contain inherent bias in the valuing of texts that engage with religious issues? Is the literary marketplace shaped by a secular bias? Or does religion in fact play a role in shaping aspects of literary culture in certain contexts, and, if so, how? To what extent does the publishing industry’s current interest in race extend to religion? By focusing on these questions, this Special Issue adds to and brings into dialogue two areas of scholarship in particular. First, it builds on critical work on representations of Muslims and Islam in contemporary writing (e.g. Nash 2012; Santesso 2013; Ahmed 2015; Morey 2018; Chambers 2019); and second, it engages with studies of production and reception in contemporary publishing contexts, especially those that focus on race or on postcolonial or global literatures more broadly (e.g. Brouillette 2007, 2014; Low 2010; Ponzanesi 2014; Dane 2023).

To extend our knowledge and understanding of contemporary publishing contexts, including in relation to religion, we interviewed representatives from Bloomsbury, Oneworld, Faber & Faber, and Random House Penguin in the summer of 2021.² These conversations, together with the interviews with author Leila Aboulela, editor Hermione Thompson, and agent Rukhsana Yasmin, which follow in this Special Issue, yield further insights into the current climate.³ The speed and urgency with which publishers have diversified their practices vary according to their size, reach, priorities, and economic model: for example, whether a publisher specializes in literary or more commercial fiction, and whether they are publicly owned or part of a media conglomerate. Different publishers are at different stages of diversification. Bloomsbury, for example, has implemented a Global Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Plan, appointed a diversity and inclusion manager, and recruited the actor, author, and cross-bench peer Baroness Lola Young as a non-executive director. Its efforts were rewarded with a London Book Fair Inclusivity in Publishing Award and an Independent Publishers Diversity and Inclusivity Award.⁴ In her interview for this volume, “A Publisher’s Perspective on Diversity: A Conversation with Hermione Thompson”, Hermione Thompson from Random House Penguin describes how their Hamish Hamilton imprint recently relaunched its in-house literary magazine, Five Dials (https://fivedials.com/), with a specific focus on emerging voices and commissioning writers from under-represented backgrounds. For the much smaller Oneworld Publications, founded in 1986, diversity has always been at the heart of its mission. Its list has an almost 50/50 split between white authors and authors of colour, while a “Fiction World Map” proudly displayed on its website reveals that Oneworld’s writers come from all parts of the globe, with recent acquisitions from Botswana, Korea, Mexico, and Vietnam.⁵ Consistently punching above its weight in terms of prize success, Oneworld has been instrumental in launching the careers of writers such as Marlon James, Ahmed Saadawi, and Paul Beatty.

The publishers we interviewed were generally unaware of instances of the kind mentioned by Rukhsana Yasmin in her interview with Peter Morey, “An Agent’s View on Diversity, Secularism and Religion: A Conversation with Rukhsana Yasmin”, where writers had been advised to mediate or dilute aspects of their work that might present a challenge to mainstream readers. Indeed, all agreed that, when commissioning, they were looking for stories that had not been told before and valued new, more diverse perspectives. There was, however, a sense that the lens through which diversity is viewed and measured can inadvertently reproduce types of exclusion. For example, one interviewee warned that the national categories into which writers and books are sometimes bundled may risk eliding crucial differences – between, say, Igbo and Yoruba cultures in Nigeria – such that one cultural vocabulary may be elevated above another. They have been aware of instances where authors have been encouraged to change the cultural vocabulary in which they work in order to be more successful. This question of accommodation to a perceived readership is also raised by Leila Aboulela in her interview with Rehana Ahmed, “A Conversation with Leila Aboulela”. There it takes a religious colouring as Aboulela records how she will work through her draft before it reaches the publisher to remove any words, such as “pious” or “obedient”, that may produce a negative reaction in the reader towards her practising Muslim protagonists. This preliminary vetting offers a fascinating glimpse of the degree to which what Saba Mahmood (2006), in another context, has called an assumed “secular normativity” may exist under the surface, so to speak, colouring views on what constitutes the limit of secular tolerance. Aboulela’s practice certainly lessens the likelihood of an intervention by the editor, and it would be interesting to know whether other writers take similar precautions.

Less easy to control are the interpolations of other gatekeepers later in the publication process. Thompson notes that while she and her colleagues will never fetishize an author’s identity by making it the main consideration when promoting a book, established practice among reviewers is sometimes less scrupulous. While a greater diversity of reviewers is certainly desirable, there is often a certain tokenism at work in the allocation of books to reviewers. Yasmin observes how a book by a Muslim or about Islam will often be sent to a Muslim journalist to review, “as if it can’t be reviewed by anyone who isn’t a Muslim”. Writers she has represented are, likewise, often invited for interview on topics to do with Islam or Muslims as if they are representatives of their faith. This pervasive by-product of minoritization limits writers and the reception of their work, chaining them to aspects of their identity or heritage regardless of how they might wish to be viewed. Unconscious bias appears particularly prevalent in cover design where in some cases, although writers are consulted, marketing imperatives and the perception of “what sells” can outweigh the author’s preferences. The well-worn path of familiar images, coupled with political sensitivities, often leads to the replication of clichés. Literature festivals too – with some important exceptions such as the Bradford Literature Festival – remain predominantly white spaces, to the discomfort of the comparatively few emerging Black or Brown writers who make it onto speaker lists increasingly populated by big-name draws and celebrity authors as organizers look to recoup their costs.

It is important not to paint too monochromatic a picture of publishers’ attitudes to religious content in literature. Oneworld, for example, was founded by Novin Doostdar and Juliet Mabey, both members of the Bahá’í faith, and has a reputation for openness to religious subjects – particularly in its non-fiction list which includes books on homosexuality in Islam and the religion’s long-neglected role in the Enlightenment. Nonetheless, religious difference in a broadly homogeneous publishing landscape, where decision-makers share similar cultural reference points with secularism as a default position, may not always receive a hearing. Thompson remarks that the very fact that religion rarely features in editorial discussions may itself indicate an unspoken secular norm. From a different experiential angle, Yasmin baulked at the “representative” position she was expected to adopt early in her publishing career as an assistant editor when any and all submissions to do with Islam were sent her way. Describing herself as culturally a Muslim, she recognizes the dilemma of those authors who may not wish to be pigeonholed on the basis of faith or background.⁶

Thus, that secular normativity mentioned above is less to do with conscious bias than a consequence of the frame around Islam which, at least for the last 25 years, has centred on its “(potentially dangerous) divergence from the perceived norms of secular-liberal polity” (Mahmood 2005, 189). It is certainly the case that academic abstractions often stand clear of the economic processes shaping the production of culture in activities such as publishing, raising the risk of generalization. Even so, if what Talal Asad (2003) has called the “proliferating technologies (of production, warfare, travel, entertainment, medicine)” that constitute modernity can be said to include the culture industries, then the challenge to its unspoken hegemony offered by religious perspectives is worthy of critical consideration (13).

As Wendy Brown (2013) describes, secularism “has come to stand in commonsense fashion for post-Reformation practices and institutions in the West that frequently separate private belief (or non-belief) from public life” (4). According to what has become known as the secularization thesis, the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries witnessed an intellectual evolution away from metaphysical, supernatural thinking seen as synonymous with religion. Individualism and rationalism lit the way to freedom. As John McClure (1997) notes, both those intellectual heralds of this idea of progress, such as Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx, and thinkers like Max Weber, who lamented the “disenchantment” of the world resulting from the loss of the older outlook, were united in understanding reason as the driving force of history. Yet, as critics have noted, secularism is more of an epistemic category linked to political doctrine than a mode of life as such. As Tracy Fessenden (2014) puts it, “the secular is conceived as a historical formation, not a default position, a modus operandi, or a reliable account of the way things simply are” (155). Literature as a rendering of human practice is therefore replete with religion, even in those cases where its canonical authors have sometimes been associated with Comtean progressivism, as in the case of George Eliot. For Eliot and others, narrative, indeed language, is imbued with and shaped by religious perspectives that find their way into characters, plot lines, metaphors, and allusions. This is true of the major western writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, even where – as with James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence – their instinct was to critique the pernicious repressions engendered by religious mindsets, to say nothing of the long and continuing tradition of avowedly Catholic writers – from G.K. Chesterton to Evelyn Waugh, and from Graham Greene to Muriel Spark – and the plethora of writers that has emerged recently to draw inspiration from alternative spiritualities. If anything, the pervasive influence of the spiritual is even more marked in writers coming from those colonized parts of the world where religious outlooks remain central to the organization and understanding of lived experience: one thinks of the way that Hinduism structures the life cycle of characters in R.K. Narayan’s work; the presence of the ancestors in Chinua Achebe’s and Wole Soyinka’s texts; or the living influence of Obeah and Myal spiritual systems in works by Jean Rhys and Erna Brodber. They form part of the strategic arsenal through which postcolonial authors contest dominant narratives of colonization and progress. In short, literary practice inscribes the religious even where its finished products are co-opted as weapons in a perceived battle between imaginative freedom and religious fundamentalism, as in the case of the Satanic Verses affair.

Such alternative traditions draw our attention to the degree to which the secularization thesis emerges through a Protestant Christian trajectory and depends upon that trajectory’s privileging of private individual belief in place of the social practices foregrounded in other faiths. Thus, to apply a secularist lens to modern multicultural societies is to risk homogenizing faith practices and outlooks in ways that are blind to the differences in experiences of religious diaspora, exile, or migration from outside the Christian framework (Fessenden 2014, 163). If we move away from this perspective and view religion and the secular as “co-constitutive, indelibly intertwined, each stretching and suffusing the sphere of the other” (Brown, Butler, and Mahmood 2013, x), then we can recognize the notion of a return of religion, which has accompanied political realignments since September 11, 2001, as problematically presentist. Instead of understanding that current theoretical buzzword “postsecular” as describing a moment, we might more profitably view it as a critical way of seeing. Michael Kaufmann (2009) writes that “postsecular thought stems from a desire to resist any master narrative – whether it be a supersessionary narrative of secularization, or a triumphal narrative of the return of religion” (68–69), by moving beyond binaries to an awareness of their mutual dependence.

It is important to note that we are outlining here the subject matter of literary texts and a theoretical orientation towards them, rather than foregrounding those very different aesthetic and material considerations that are paramount in the publishing industry. At the same time, postsecularism as a means of classifying textual or critical practices that include religion is by definition validated by reference to a social practice understood as human and not transcendental. The fact that the postsecular is taken to stand in opposition to the religious/secular binary sometimes results in its employment to describe interpretative practices privileging results such as indeterminacy or undecidability: qualities that align the postsecular with postmodernism or post-structuralism in ways which might baffle devout subjects (Huggan 2010, 763; McClure 1997, 334–340). In this school of thought, postsecularism is taken to be resistant to dogma but, we might ask, does this preoccupation with the deconstruction of absolutes preclude its adherents from a full engagement with those more orthodox accounts of belief we find in, for example, Aboulela’s work, where faith offers an escape from disturbing indeterminacy in the form of an ultimate Truth?

For our purposes here, we can agree with Kaufmann’s description of the postsecular as a “trend in literature, and the development of a repertoire of critical practices” (2009, 70). What it is not – as we will see in the articles in this Special Issue – is a conscious consideration in the publishing industry, where exigencies of the market always take precedence. It is, however, worth bringing these two seemingly oblique discursive worlds into dialogue since the publication process is the space where the author and the authorizing power of agents, editors, booksellers, and so on collide. Asad notes the slippery nature of the authority associated with authoring: “[t]he sense of author is ambiguous as between the person who produces a narrative and the person who authorizes particular powers, including the right to produce certain kinds of narrative” (1993, 4). It is this kind of authority – spread across the production and reception processes of literature – that the articles in this Special Issue seek to interrogate. Our focus is on Islam as it has perhaps the most fractious recent relationship with what are taken to be the liberal values governing secular society, and literature has more than once proven the battleground wherein struggles over such values have taken place. Moreover, the place of Islam in debates around secularism and postsecularism is still under-theorized, especially given the upsurge in writing by Muslims and the popular interest it has garnered. With their concern for questions of genre, identity, and aesthetic choices, as well as for the mechanisms by which literature finds its way into the world and how it is judged when it appears, it is hoped that the articles in this Special Issue will help stimulate further scholarship on the relationship between secularism and the literary marketplace.

In their article “Rethinking Muslim Narratives: Stereotypes Reinforced or Contested in Recent Genre Fiction?”, Claire Chambers and Sairish Hussain look at the publishing expectations placed on Muslim writers, but find, in the thriving genre fiction scene, a space where Muslim writers may be more readily able to challenge and subvert some of the assumptions that delimit them and their work. They identify a publishing industry that, despite numerous equality initiatives, remains predominantly white, particularly at managerial levels, and which continues often to see minority writers as native informants, shedding light on their cultures, or as purveyors of exoticism. Drawing on Riz Ahmed’s suggested “test” by which the media can measure its representation of Muslims against a checklist of clichés and stereotypes, Chambers and Hussain consider the extent to which recent examples from the thriller genre show Muslim writers striving to break free of framing demands. Khurrum Rahman’s (2017) comedic thriller East of Hounslow attempts a realistic, three-dimensional portrayal of Jay, a young Asian Londoner who seeks to escape from his mundane life to a more glamorous existence financed by drug dealing. Despite Rahman’s efforts to humanize his character, the presence of pervasive tropes including suicide bombing and terrorist training camps indicates the grip of received ideas in the novel’s depiction of Muslim youth. By contrast, Kia Abdullah’s (2019) Take It Back features as its conflicted central protagonist a Muslim female lawyer whose contradictory behaviour forces her to scrutinize her own motivations as well as contending with the Islamophobic media who swarm over the high-profile case of grooming and abuse she takes on. In the more ambitious instances of genre fiction, it is suggested, an opportunity exists to “bend imposed, hegemonic expectations”.

In “Exclusion, Empathy and Islam: The Runaways in the Literary Marketplace”, Sauleha Kamal sees, in Fatima Bhutto’s 2018 novel, a praiseworthy attempt to move away from the homogenizing view of Muslims often required by a global literary marketplace with its readerly centre of gravity firmly in the west. The three main protagonists in The Runaways all experience alienation from their respective communities in Karachi and Portsmouth, but where this leads towards what could conventionally be termed “radicalization”, emphasis is placed not primarily on religion, but on class, gendered, racial, and sexual exclusion. Kamal suggests that the text’s author-avowed investment in universalist empathy is tempered by a desire to place the western reader in the active position of witness to injustice, thereby avoiding an exploitative and temporary sympathy for the suffering “other”. Such laudable aims are, however, compromised by inaccurate cultural details that have slipped through the editorial process and which reveal a continued privileging of a normative western readership.

Rehana Ahmed’s article “ ‘We Tick: Other’ – Race, Religion, and Literary Solidarities in Three Essay Anthologies and the Neo-Liberal Marketplace” reveals how multicultural anthologies have, in recent years, been transforming the ground of minority representation. The success of collections such as Shukla’s (2016) The Good Immigrant challenge predominant celebratory models of metropolitan multiculturalism and posit alternative egalitarian modes of solidarity. Such broadly inclusive compendia have given a new form to collective literary activism, while at the same time achieving success within an existing neo-liberal literary marketplace characterized by exoticism and anthropological expectations where a balance must be struck between individual self-expression and perceived cultural authenticity. A more radical challenge to literary gatekeeping may be posed by those Muslim anthologies, such as Khan’s (2019) It’s Not About the Burqa and Akhtar’s (2021) Cut from the Same Cloth?, where a deliberate undercutting of secular stereotypes of Islamic threat is deployed in the description of quotidian experiences in which the meaning of faith can be simultaneously interrogated and lived out, thereby preserving a crucial distance from externally imposed definitions and situating individuality within a strongly felt sense of community.

If the main focus in these articles is on the literary marketplace for fiction, other forms, such as theatre, are also shaped by the prerequisites of a marketized economic model with little room for representations that depart from cathartic, secular individualistic paradigms. In the post-9/11 context, where there has been an upsurge of interest in plays about Muslim experience, especially as it is linked to radicalization, a tendency to double down on certain required characteristics has been compounded by loose governmental definitions of “extremism” and a consequent curtailment of acceptable speech.

Peter Morey’s article on Omar El-Khairy’s and Nadia Latif’s ill-fated 2015 play Homegrown, “Tormented Visibility: Extremism, Stigma, and Staging Resistance in Omar El-Khairy and Nadia Latif’s Homegrown”, traces the effects of these pressures on an innovative, site-specific production with a young cast set in a school, which was abruptly cancelled by the National Youth Theatre (NYT) shortly before it was due to open. The terms of the play’s commissioning by the NYT assumed a certain “inside knowledge” about the radicalization of young Muslims on the part of the production’s creators, and an emphasis on cultural authenticity marked the pre-publicity drive. Yet topical anxieties triggered by the very subject matter of youth radicalization collided with an increasing legal pressure on public bodies to police so-called “extreme” opinions of the kind woven into Homegrown’s tapestry of contemporary youth discourse, to create a perfect storm of censorship. Morey argues that the origins of such censorship can be found in the way commissioning processes shape (and reward) certain self-exoticizing representations. In an era where faith identifications seem to be replacing more encompassing ethnic solidarities, the process of producing “representative” minority theatre requires an endorsement of the existing stigmatization of Muslims as prone to terrorism. Because El-Khairy and Latif rejected the terms of this debate and refused to bear the stigma in their play – instead embracing a deliberately obtuse, heterogeneous, unfiltered, and non-didactic approach which set it at odds with other more conventionally liberal verbatim theatre fare at the time – their play was destined to fall foul of those forces attempting to govern the representation of difference on the stage and in society at large.

If secularism exists more as an unconscious bias than as an active requirement in the literary marketplace, it is worth considering how the aesthetic strategies employed by authors can challenge it. Defamiliarization becomes a potentially disruptive intervention, particularly when – as in the work of Mohsin Hamid – stereotypes are simultaneously deployed and subverted in order to challenge cultural binaries. In his article on two of Hamid’s novels, “Marketing Secular Anxieties: Mohsin Hamid’s Planetary Turn”, Paul Veyret sees a bipartite awareness at work: conscious participation in the commodification of Pakistani (and Islamic) culture, coupled with destabilizing resistant textual practices. This “double logic of ambivalence” is present in The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s (Hamid 2007) slippery, ambiguous “you” addressee – simultaneously the American interlocutor and the assumed western reader – and in the way tensions between religious and secular world views, characteristic of the War on Terror years, are deferred or transposed to the level of allegory. For Veyret, this bespeaks Hamid’s ambivalent position as a purveyor of “the east” to “the west”; despite his cosmopolitanism, he is aware that he cannot wholly escape the exigencies of the literary marketplace nor evacuate a touristic perspective from his writing. In this context, the protagonist Changez comes to embody the “Orient-as-text [ … ] enticing and threatening, a palimpsest of textual resistance and political agency”, which thereby meets the requirement of liberal post-9/11 interpretation. Veyret’s combination of materialist and textualist reading sees Exit West’s (Hamid 2017) somewhat gnomic “un-labelling” – the decision not to name the two protagonists’ home country, for example – as humanizing migrant subjects and allowing for a more planetary perspective. Along with its destabilizing referential qualities and knowing use of intertexts and second-hand aphorisms, Hamid’s novel amounts to an ironic refusal to brand the “other” in stereotypical ways demanded by the market.

When considering faith, secularism, and literature, it is important to recognize the way in which fiction can dramatize encounters with spirituality which then invite a response from the reader that goes beyond acceptance or dismissal. Attending to these nuanced demands within texts themselves reveals that the relationship between secularism and the literary marketplace may be less clear-cut, or more fragmented, we might say, than in models which homogenize products and audiences, centrality and marginality. This is the approach taken in Rachel Gregory Fox’s article, “Marketing Stories: Writing with Faith and Reading in Search of Spirituality in Elif Shafak’s Fiction”, which considers two novels by the cosmopolitan writer. Gregory Fox argues that reading is depicted in both texts as a convivial act in which religion and the secular can coexist – against the inflexibility of conservative nationalism and fundamentalism. In The Forty Rules of Love (Shafak 2010), Sufism stands for affiliation and communication, building a bridge between cultures and between the contemporary and 13th-century protagonists in the novel’s dual time frame. Gregory Fox is aware of the marketability of Sufism in the post-9/11 context and with charges that Shafak’s fiction panders to such tastes, succumbing in the process to a self-orientalization. Yet she argues that Shafak dramatizes, in the modern protagonist’s reading within the text, the necessary self-abandonment and openness to otherness that becomes an ethical act, one constitutive of the novel form itself and which can be replicated in real-world readings. This emphasis on openness is continued in Three Daughters of Eve (Shafak 2016), where entrenched binaries are presented but rejected in favour of complexity and uncertainty. Against the din of competing ideologies, Shafak “puts faith in her reader” and in the act of engaging with the micro-stories of others.

Together, these articles and the three interviews connect debates about the contemporary publishing industry that take in the production, positioning, marketing, and reception of writing by and about Muslims, with explorations of the treatment of Islam within a range of literary texts (a play, essay anthologies, and genre fiction, as well as novels), including their negotiation of hegemonic expectations of and secular paradigms for the representation of this religion. As such, the Special Issue as a whole combines a materialist interest in literary production with attention to textual practices in order to explore the place of secularism in the literary marketplace today.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rehana Ahmed

Rehana Ahmed is senior lecturer in postcolonial and contemporary literature at Queen Mary University of London, co-editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, an associate editor of Wasafiri, and co-investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project “Remaking Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1830s to the Present”. Her publications include Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism (2015), articles in books and journals including Race & Class, Textual Practice, and Modern Drama, and a range of edited books and journal issues, including, most recently, “A House of Wisdom: Libraries and Literatures of Islam”, for Wasafiri.

Peter Morey

Peter Morey is Professor of 20th-century Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (2000); Rohinton Mistry (2004); Islamophobia and the Novel (2018); and, with Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11 (2011). He has co-edited the volumes Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism (2006); Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing (2012); Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism (2018), and Contesting Islamophobia (2019).

Notes

1. See: https://www.penguin.co.uk/series/bbwb/black-britain-writing-back, https://www.penguin.co.uk/company/social-impact/writenow, and https://www.jhalakprize.com.

2. The publishers interviewed did so on the understanding that their contributions would remain anonymous. Hence their names are not included here.

3. The help of those who made time to speak to us is gratefully acknowledged. The contextualized interpretation of their reflections is entirely our own.

4. See: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/connect/work-with-us/diversity-equity-and-inclusion/.

5. See: https://oneworld-publications.com/fiction-world-map/.

6. In her conversation with Peter Morey, Yasmin noted that she had never encountered the category of “Muslim writing” outside academic circles: an important reminder of the performative nature of categorization, bringing into being that which it frames.