Writing the South Asian Muslim Terrorist: Religion, Politics and “Terror” From a Postcolonial Lens

Terrorism, especially Islamic terrorism, is presented in popular media as a constant global threat. Viewing terrorism through a media narrative that both reports on and shapes a changing political reality, in the name of counterterrorism, can be obscuring. This thesis engages with a wide range of Muslim writing—drawing on novels, memoirs, and a diary recorded via Facebook posts—which uncover this oft-misunderstood phenomenon and write back to damaging Orientalist ideas. Stereotypes about young Muslim males who are sex-starved and morally opposed to the materialism of the West give way to the connection of this contemporary terrorism, within literature, to colonialism. "Writing the South Asian Muslim Terrorist" investigates “Islamic” terrorism through the dialectical intersection of the personal and the political, whether this relates to fundamentalism, Islamism, jihadism, counterterrorism, or state terrorism. By juxtaposing non-state and state violence, a more nuanced understanding of terrorism emerges. The focus on Kashmir and Afghanistan, locations which have received little critical attention, provoke the notion of terrorism as being perpetrated by the state and masquerading as counterterrorism. Consideration of state terrorism thus complicates definitions of terrorism commonly disseminated via mainstream media in the West. Using an interdisciplinary approach encompassing postcolonial and critical theory, politics, sociology, history, and critical terrorism studies, this thesis contextualises Islamic terrorism within the currents of colonialism, postcolonialism and neocolonialism, and global geopolitics. In critically writing the South Asian Muslim terrorist through a postcolonial lens, this thesis fosters a more precise, humane, and radical mode of understanding “Islamic” terrorism.