The Conflicts between the Secular and the Religious in Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim

Abstract

This paper discusses the relationship between the ideologies of the secular and the religious in the process of nation-building as presented in Tahmima Anam's The Good Muslim (2011). It centres around the conflicts between the Haque siblings, Maya and Sohail as they navigate their ways in life after the Bangladeshi Liberation War of 1971. The novel portrays how Sohail's submission to extreme dogmatism which has led him to neglecting his son, Zaid, and Maya's inability to tolerate her brother's transformation, result in their estranged relationship, eventually leading to a devastating family tragedy. Using Talal Asad's (2003) definition of the secular as an ideology that brings together different concepts and practices, and which is neither a break from religion nor a continuity of it, this paper suggests that the skirmish between the siblings is a metaphorical representation of a conflict between the secular and the religious in the efforts towards nation-building. This formulation foregrounds the importance of establishing an intricate balance between the secular and the religious, which also has the social implication of destabilizing the binary that is often drawn to differentiate between a 'good' and a 'bad' Muslim.

Silence and the ethics of partial empathy in Tahmima Anam’sThe Good Muslim

“…Additionally, Anam’s work is regularly cited as a significant contribution to the “new genre of [Anglophone] cultural production” about the 1971 War that “seeks to illuminate internal and external tensions surrounding the representation of war, gender, memory and justice for a global audience” (Chowdhury, 2016: 43) — although A Golden Age , the first book in the trilogy that features The Good Muslim as its second installment, appears more frequently in this thread of critical scholarship on Anam. 3 Further, critics such as Claire Chambers (2015) and Amrah Abdul Majid and Dinnur Qayyimah Ahmad Jalaluddin (2018) have meditated on the ideological chasm between Maya and Sohail that ultimately raises questions about the possibility of empathy between them. However, none of the commentaries on the novel have examined its engagement with the entanglement of silence and empathy, which, as the reading in this article shows, crucially informs the text’s ethical and political implications.…”

“…Before delving into my analysis of the novel, let me discuss briefly the relevant political and cultural conversations about post-war Bangladesh that Anam’s novel joins through its examination of empathy and silence. As Majid and Jalaluddin (2018) suggest, Maya and Sohail’s empathic crisis over ideological differences about religion allegorizes the tension between the Bengali and Islamic aspects of national identity in Bangladesh that has troubled the country since independence. 4 Historians have observed that the political and cultural dominance of West Pakistan before the war had led to a strong assertion of Bengali identity (as a linguistic–ethnic, and largely secular, formation) in Bangladesh, which ultimately proved instrumental in propelling the war.…”