Towards an Ethics of Reading Muslims: Encountering Difference in Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire

This article explores the ethics of reading across difference in a secular literary marketplace that is increasingly invested in representations by and of Muslims. Focusing on Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), it considers how this high-profile novel anticipates and negotiates the pressures of anthropological reading practices, especially in its representation of the ‘veiled’ Muslim woman who can easily become a canvas for the projection of a liberal secular reader’s ‘enlightened’ self. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on ‘strange encounters’ to read the characters’ encounters within the novel, the article highlights the novel’s concern with the sensory everyday – especially the aural – as a possible means of bypassing the violence of surveillance and the visual more broadly in connecting with others. By examining these encounters, the article considers how the novel negotiates its implied reader’s encounter with the text. It argues that while the success of Home Fire lies partly in its use of spectacular, even stereotypical images of Muslims, its overt theatricality in fact opens up a space beyond the frame within which Muslims are normatively seen or read, and enables a reading encounter that resists a transparent translation or easy consumption of difference. Through its analysis of Shamsie’s novel, the article explores the possibility of building through reading what Iris Marion Young calls a ‘differentiated solidarity’ – a means of forging connections across lines of difference (class and religiosity in particular) without compromising the ‘distinction’ of that difference – thereby intervening in debates about the ethics of writing and reading others