Re-envisioning the Question of Postcolonial Muslim Identity: Challenges and Opportunities

In our contemporary era of transnationalism, the issue of identity has assume unprecedented significance and scope. In this paper, I intend to discuss the complexities and nuances of the Muslim identity in the postcolonial literary discourses. One of the basic contentions of the paper is to find some pattern in the transnational and transcultural diversity presently characterizing the Muslim identity discourses. Hence, this paper is a plea to discover some kind of literary and discursive sharedness in the contemporary postcolonial Muslim writings. It has been observed that at this point in time the Muslim identity in not only subject to myriad influences, it is also a topic of heated and passionate debates. In fiction, memoirs, travel writing, media and cultural narratives, the issue of Muslim identity is invested with all kinds of representations ranging from uncouth explosive-bearing terrorists to friendly and sociable people. It has also been shown that the Orientalist legacy, far from being dead, is being given new lease on life by the highly ‘constructed’ and ‘worked over’ images of Muslims in the Western media. The large Muslim diasporic populations settled in the European countries are specifically bearing the brunt of such stereotypical depictions built by media persons, political commentators, analysts and ‘cultural experts’. Faced with this mighty discursive onslaught, the Muslim writers, novelists, poets, intellectuals have been responding variedly and with considerably mixed motives: acceptance, rejection, rectification, resistance, etc.