Rearticulating Islam: Fatima Bhutto’s Critique of Jihadist Representation in The Runaways (2018)

Abstract

The War on Terror gave rise to prominence of various Islamist jihadist organizations in Muslim countries in the second decade of twenty-first century. Notorious for execution of war crimes, human rights violation, beheading, and slaughtering, these groups distorted the image of Islam as the West deliberately started looking at them as representative of Islam. As a result, Islam as a religion was defamed by the West in the wake of War on Terror. One such organization is ISIL, which has close similarity with Bhutto’s portrayal of the Ummah Movement in her novel, The Runaways. The present study employs Spivak’s (1988) “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as theoretical framework, to investigate Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways as an attempt to reclaim the marginalized voice of Islam against its misrepresented image. Jihad has been portrayed in the novel as reclaim of agency by the alienated, marginalized, and downtrodden as a form of their resistance to the West and colonial legacies. Bhutto is critical of terror done in the name of Islam and the militant groups in Iraq like the Ummah Movement which play a negative role to defame Islam in the name of jihad. Bhutto, therefore, tries to reclaim Islam’s voice in the novel by revealing true face of the Ummah Movement which in the name of Islamic jihadist organization is not following any law of Shariah. Bhutto has also portrayed the War on Terror and colonial legacies as reasons behind marginalized groups radicalization and easy brainwash in post-9/11 sociocultural and geopolitical scenario.

Keywords: Islam, Jihad, The Runaways (2018), The War on Terror, Textual analysis, Voice