Islam is the Eternal Irony of the Community: Reading Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire

Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire restates the central question at the heart of Sophocles’ Antigone: what is the relationship between family and state? Differently figured, what is the relationship between the law of the gods and the law of state? Shamsie’s novel is boldfaced in its indebtedness to the Greek tragedy. The novel transplants the play to the context of a securitized, post-9/11 world. It maps the play’s central characters onto a transnational British South Asian family as they encounter the myriad manifestations of the security state. What makes the novel interesting is not just its restaging of the plot in a new context. It is the dynamic that Shamsie creates between the philosophical reception of the play and her novel: by using Antigone as intertext, Shamsie places Islam in the role that philosophy has traditionally put Antigone and, by extension, women: the disavowal of Islam from the “western” tradition is what “ironically” constitutes it. 

This paper demonstrates how Home Fire comments on western philosophy and literature’s ironic, constitutive, and ultimately impossible erasure of Islam. This reading of Home Fire addresses recurrent problems in two bodies of literature: first, it addresses the problem that appears in scholarship from a wide range of ideological commitments on the relationship between Islam and the West. Thinkers as diverse as Bernard Lewis and Joseph Massad have created hard and fast borders between these two large blocks. This paper offers a reason for this by diagnosing in Home Fire the constitutive erasure of Islam from Euro-American humanistic tradition. The second body of work that this paper addresses is an emergent strain of scholarship that theorizes religion from literature, typified most recently by the edited volume, The Abyss or Life Is Simple. Like this volume, this paper demonstrates the fruitful pathways opened by examining religion through literature. It adds to this work by demonstrating how such scholarship move beyond the longer standing problem of associating the novel with Europe. 

Paper Plan

This paper rehearses the philosophical reception of Antigone. Next, it demonstrates how Home Fire stages the relationship between Islam, as practiced by the central family in the book, and the state, as represented by the British Home Secretary. Then, this paper assesses the way that Home Fire shows gender and sexuality to have been entirely reconfigured in its political context. It demonstrates not only that Home Fire adds an element of racialized religiosity that is absent in Antigone but also that the novel uses this change to diagnose an alternation in the political. Yet, as with Antigone, the poles that at first seem opposed between (Muslim) kinship and (British) state begin to collapse into one another. I demonstrate how the Home Secretary attempts to hold them separate but ultimately fails. This movement demonstrates the relationality of world history, implicating not just Europe but also the colonies in the transformation of the political. 

Antigone and Its Philosophical Reception

Philosophical discourse has long been tantalized by the interaction between the various forms of law and commitment in Antigone. As Judith Butler shows in her Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, philosophers since Hegel have read Antigone as both outside of and necessary to the constitution of the political community. Hegel speaks of this constitutive outside as an “irony,” which Butler describes as such, “She is outside the terms of the polis, but she is, as it were, an outside without which the polis could not be.” Irony, thus, refers to an element that is necessary but despised in its necessity. This sense of the ironic continues to accompany discussions of Antigone in the wake of Hegel. European and American feminists and queer theorists have reread the play to successfully push back on Hegel’s sexist understanding. Yet, they have maintained a hermetic seal around “western” philosophy, excluding the importance of Islam and Muslims to modern understandings of the Greeks. In this way, they have replicated Hegel’s basic move, but replaced “women” with “Islam.” 

Sex, Gender, and Islam

Islam in Home Fire is often discussed in sexed and gendered terms. While the book replaces Antigone (as she has been discussed in philosophy) with Islam, it does not attempt to transcend the questions posed by gender and sexuality in relation to politics. Instead, it shows them to be bound up with questions of racialized religiosity. The book shows how questions of sexual and gender norms have become primary foci of discussions of the acceptability of Islam to “western” traditions, with women doing primary symbolic work in representing Islam in these instances. 

This paper reads out of Home Fire the emergence of what Lauren Berlant called the “intimate public sphere.” This marks a reversal from Antigone, which attempts to hold a firm line between intimacy and the public. In contrast, the way characters are intimate with one another in Home Fire actually signals their degree of participation in public life. For example, when the British Home Secretary Karamat Lone first learns of his son Eamonn’s new Muslim girlfriend he asks “exactly” how Muslim she is. The question signals his hope that one could go on being Muslim without actually practicing Islam or standing out from the assumed white, non-working class norms. Eamonn replies by telling his father how often she prays. But Karamat is interested in a different gauge of Aneeka’s religiosity, “He brought the palms of his hands together and then separated them… ‘sex’” (109).

This paper uses scenes like this one to demonstrate how, despite deep changes to the nature of (sexual) politics, Islam continues to operate as a constitutive outside to the so-called western humanities. Yet, philosophers note that the separation that Antigone marks is never complete. The irony comes from both sides: the state cannot free itself of kinship any more than Antigone can be a prepolitical opponent of politics. This paper argues that Home Fire demonstrates that the same is also true of the attempt to separate Islam and the west.

This paper may be most appropriate for the panel, “Religion, Art, and Political Reimagination.”