Local, National or/and Global? Rethinking Identity through The Silent Minaret

This paper looks at Ishtiyaq Shukri’s novel, The Silent Minaret (2005), a work
which explores South Africa’s transnational and transoceanic connections in
the past and the present, and the way these relations with other places and
people bring about a change in the existing conceptions of self, community
and nation. Set in the post 9/11 world, which witnesses the rise of ethnic and
religious nationalisms, the novel offers “rooted” cosmopolitanism as an alternative
to reimagine our collective lives. Interestingly, it looks at these questions
from the perspective of characters who are South African, and thus, seemingly
remote from the event itself – the 9/11 attack and the “War on Terror”
that follows. This choice of characters serves to underline one of the major
thematic preoccupations of the work: the “simultaneous existence of local,
national and global identities” (Kurusawa 2004, 239). Moreover, at a moment
when the world is struggling to formulate a just and humane response to the
migration crisis, the novel offers a nuanced and sensitive representation of
how the meaning and experience of migration differs depending on one’s position
in terms of race, class and in a post 9/11 world, increasingly, religion.