Writing Muslim Identity

Examining a wide range of genres, including novels, memoirs, travel writing and journalism, this book explores representations of Muslims and Islam in modern English literature. The relationship between Islam and the West is one of the most urgent and hotly debated issues of our time. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive overview of the way in which Muslims are represented within modern English writing, ranging from the novel, through memoir and travel writing to journalism.

Covering a wide range of texts and authors, it scrutinises the identity 'Muslim' by looking at its inscription in recent and contemporary literary writing within the context of significant events like the Rushdie Affair, the Gulf War and 9/11. Examining the wide range of writing internationally that takes Islam or Islamic cultures as its focus, the authors discuss the representation of Muslim identity in writing by non-Muslim writers, former Muslim 'native informants', and practising Muslims.

Review: Nash'sdiscourse is layered and nuanced, at times forcefully polemical, but alwayslucid and intellectually stimulating. In this book he raises some sharp andastute points that would enrich current, complex debates concerning literature, religion, and identity. --, There are currently few more controversial topics than Muslim identity, and the ways in which it is formed, lived, and understood.

In his wide-ranging study, Geoff Nash bravely tackles a variety of contemporary representations and interventions - fictional and non-fictional, Muslim and non-Muslim - of this thorny subject. --Sanford Lakoff Nash's discourse is layered and nuanced, at times forcefully polemical, but always lucid and intellectually stimulating.

In this book he raises some sharp and astute points that would enrich current, complex debates concerning literature, religion, and identity. --Sanford Lakoff