Muslim Identity Fluidities and Ambiguities: A Focus on Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Elif Shafak's The Forty Rules of Love

Abstract

Identity as the definitive factor of one’s individuality has been extensively explored from the sociological, psychological, and political perspectives. Of particular importance is the prevailing realization of the pervasiveness of the concept of identity and its fluidity, especially concerning the transcendence of cultural binaries and spaces. According to T.S. Elliot, the discourse of aesthetics is defined by constitutive dialects and is doubly-encoded in the specific and concrete. Thus, aesthetics in literature provides a theory of senses in which production, presentation, and reception of identities, cultures, and other social phenomena can be understood and defined. Within Islamic contexts, therefore, the pursuance of a true identity definition becomes an intricate issue that necessitates the incorporation of both historical and contextual perspectives, as well as the pursuance of aesthetic expressions and experiences at the individual level. With these insights in mind, the current analysis utilized a comprehensive analytical framework that applies Eliot’s assumptions within the interactionist framework with the aim of mapping identity fluidities and ambiguities in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Elif Shafak's The Forty Rules of Love. The findings indicate that Muslim cultural contexts bear apparent aesthetic experiences and ideological multiplicities at the individual level that cut across a variety of spiritual, political, social, and geographic domains. The fluidity and multiplicity of the resulting identities, thus, necessitates the application of suitable identity signifiers to ensure the rational and practical reportage of Muslim identities.