Negotiating Twentieth Century Crises Through Chronotopic and Heterotopic Spaces in Current Muslim Fiction

Abstract

Fiction by two contemporary Muslim writers is here critiqued for the ways in which crises and challenges to Muslim communities over the long twentieth-century are represented. Steve Suleyman Noyes’ novel Marmaduke and Yusuf: the Conversations (2023-2025) fictionalises the lives and relationship of two early translators of the Qurʾān into English, Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall and Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Conducted at intervals on location in and on journeys between Britain, India and Egypt in the last decades of empire their “plausible” conversations disclose shared concerns and anxieties concerning Muslim futures. Gauging the impact of genocidal events in 1990s Bosnia and the fall out to the 9/11 attacks on America, Rashid Shaz’s Kodra: A Sunni-Shia Odyssey (2018; 2024) sets up an imagined colloquium that attempts to account for the incapacity of a fractured ummah to stage effective responses to a series of setbacks of modern times. In juxtaposition to these crises time-spaces of sanctuary (chronotopes) and alternative worlds (heterotopias) are created in the cause of Muslim survival and renewal.

Keywords: crisis – chronotope – heterotopia – empire – India – Bosnia