"This fundo stuff is really something new"
Fundamentalism and Hybridity in The Moor's Last Sigh
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15015173 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dohra Ahmad (0000-0002-3991-805X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-20 |
| Publication date | 2005-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Yale journal of criticism/ The Yale journal of criticism (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0893-5378 • E-ISSN: 1080-6636 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/yale.2005.0002 |
| OpenAlex | W2084308381 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 5 |
“This fundo stuff is really something new”:Fundamentalism and Hybridity in The Moor’s Last Sigh Dohra Ahmad (bio) What can literature teach us about fundamentalism? Since September 11, 2001, social scientists have rushed to offer their interpretations of radical Islam, the "clash of civilizations," jihad, and other purportedly relevant phenomena. Rarely do commentators turn to literary sources. There is much contemporary fiction that would in fact have proved valuable: both Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Hanif Kureishi's "My Son the Fanatic," for example, offer useful reminders that fundamentalism is a modern, metropolitan, late-capitalist invention. But the most obvious novelistic source on fundamentalism would, of course, be the work of Salman Rushdie. While The Satanic Verses anticipated many of the themes that later played out in his own history, Rushdie's best work on fundamentalism and its enemy hybridity—the two modes of belief that in his estimation define all culture—came in his 1995 novel The Moor's Last Sigh. That epic and often disorganized novel brilliantly represents fundamentalism and hybridity as not only competing modes of expression but competing forms of historiography. Through one or the other, all thinking people organize their ideas of art, love, and politics and their pictures of past, present, and future. Ultimately, Rushdie reveals the apparent opposites as distorted versions of each other. In The Moor's Last Sigh there are not one but multiple fundamentalisms, and as it turns out, all of them are contemporary, manufactured phenomena. Conversely—and less palatably to his cosmopolitan readership—Rushdie shows hybridity too to be its own brand of fundamentalism. An investigation of these two warring modes of expression may begin with Rushdie's apparent elision of Islam in The Moor's Last Sigh. With that novel's publication, many readers wondered where Khomeini and his militant followers would appear. The question was easy to answer with the earlier Haroun and the Sea of Stories: the Ayatollah became the despotic Khattam-Shud, "the Arch-Enemy of all Stories."1 In The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie employs metaphor and association rather than allegory, thus taking his study of Islam in a more interesting and useful direction and breaking the simple equivalence between Islam and fundamentalism. Therefore, we can enter the novel through its conspicuous absence of Islam. [End Page 1] I. Fundamentalisms A year after Khomeini's fatwa, Rushdie effectively if obliquely forswore Islam as a literary subject. In a 1990 review of Philip Roth's memoir The Facts, Rushdie retells the story of Roth's experience following the publication of Goodbye, Columbus. Vilified by Jewish readers, whom he had previously identified as his constituency, Roth responded, in Rushdie's summary, "I'll never write about Jews again!" On that score, Rushdie declares portentously, "he seems to speak directly, profoundly, not only to, but for, me"—the implication, of course, being that Rushdie would never write about Muslims again.2 However, Rushdie's foresight and ambition would not allow him to limit himself so categorically. Announcing that Roth "speaks for" him even as he himself speaks for Roth is a careful and unusual maneuver. As he both swears and does not swear a parallel vow to Roth's, he both obeys and does not obey it in The Moor's Last Sigh. For while the novel travels as far south as one can go in India in order to shake off the presence of Islam, and while its cast of hundreds includes almost no Muslim characters, it still addresses reductive, fundamentalist Islam through its portrayal of many other types of fundamentalism. Islam lingers in two ways: on a literal level through the protagonist's hidden ancestor, and on a symbolic level through the other faiths that separately dramatize its minority and majoritarian incarnations. As Aamir Mufti and others have pointed out, "fundamentalism" is a shifty and unreliable term, subject to abuse as an all-purpose pejorative or more perniciously as a synonym for Islam. Writing on The Satanic Verses and its fallout, Mufti sets out to "use the term . . . in a very specific sense," usefully historicizing and contextualizing a particular public discourse of Islamism.3 In The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie responds
Aesthetics · Art · Fundamentalism · Historiography · Hybridity · Literature · Political science · Politics · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,19 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2011 (2) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |