Connected History: Essays and Arguments

Abstract

journeys of religious conversion, abandonment of material and national allegiances, and a return to Mecca and Ka’abah as the pure and original location of Muslims. In doing so, they excoriate religious and ethnic minorities, reinforce patriarchal values, and solidify a militaristic view of religio-national supremacy. Khan’s worldly methodology—premised on the ‘inseparability of the supposedly distinct realms of the literary, the political, and religious’ (3)—enables a literary analysis of the novels without losing sight of their political relevance in contemporary South Asia, where religio-nationalist identities continue to separate and hierarchise people. A short epilogue, which serves as a counterpoint to the popular tradition of Urdu fiction, focuses on the experimental novels of Fahmida Riaz, which present an exilic transnationalism in Urdu that contests narrow definitions of Muslim identity. Throughout his writings, Said contested textual, essentialising models of literary study with historical readings that intervened in socio-political issues. Khan’s work builds on this legacy by forcefully reminding us of the dangers of creating a single, static narrative for Muslim nationalism in South Asia. At the same time, Khan points towards new possibilities for post-colonial studies opened up by Orientalism by reading the European oriental tale alongside its distant descendants, the contemporary Urdu television blockbuster, reinforcing the importance of Saidian methodologies to contemporary post-colonial studies of vernacular literary traditions.