Love and Marriage: Reimagining Muslim female subjectivity in Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and saffron

Introduction

Forced marriages of women and their restricted individualistic exercise of choice and decision to love/desire are endemic to many cultures with their varied intensity. However, Muslim women in the popular Western imagination, especially in the post-9/11 gendered Islamophobia, have usually been viewed as victims of various kinds of religiously sourced gender suppression which also includes forced marriages and prohibited love/desire, and Islam as inherently restrictive of bodily or sensual pleasures and autonomy. Muslims and Islam have been imagined and painted as a monolithic and fixed religious category and socio-political problem which resists co-existence and cultural integration (Osborne, 2015; Roose, 2016; Townsend, 2016). Religio-racist xenophobia against embodied Muslimness can be witnessed in increased violent attacks on Muslims and their places of worship and legalized restrictions on Muslim women’s veils in public places in several Western countries over the last decade. Bawer (2003), in an opinion article in The New York Times, says,

While non-Muslim Europeans live in democracies, most Muslims in the same countries inhabit theocratic enclaves where they are expected to tread a narrow path or suffer the consequences. Muslim women have it worst. Not only are they subject to the often tyrannical authority of husbands, fathers and community leaders, if they seek to escape that authority, they cannot necessarily expect support […].

Bawer (2003) frames non-Muslims and Muslims in Europe in the binary of the democratic and the theocratic, the modern and the traditional, the tolerant and the intolerant, the feminist and the patriarchal, and the mindful of human rights and the unmindful of human rights. The framing is monolithic which ignores diversity and intersectional contextual, historical, temporal and spatial constituents. He further paints Muslim women’s forced and arranged marriages as instruments in the hands of the Muslim community to resist integration into and acceptance of Western communities and cultures. Their religion is considered an all-out and rigid determinant of social relations, ignoring the intersectional constitutive role of class, culture, location, caste, and mobility. The West and Islam are increasingly viewed as two binaristic monoliths and clash of civilizations (especially, in the context of the war on terror after 9/11) in which the latter is pronounced as backward and in need of learning modern/Western thoughts.

This article builds on the emerging discourse that dispels Islamophobic views that have stereotyped and homogenized Muslims regarding gender and sexuality (Ahmed et al., 2012; Chambers and Herbert, 2014; Morey and Yaqin, 2011), and argues on the agentiveness of Muslim women specifically in decisions and choices regarding love/desire and marriage. Studies on Muslim women facing racist and Islamophobic violence in Western settings are numerous. However, how they when placed back in their traditional settings are repositioning and redefining their gender and regulatory cultural norms in a distinctive subjective space without affiliating with Western universalist feminist consciousness or discarding the local values needs more scholarly attention. The Muslim female subjectivity under study here in this article demands urgency to be explored in terms of its experiencing a crucial struggle in an interstitial space between traditional values and newly learnt individualistic consciousness after having been reshaped by cultural (re)formations happening rapidly due to spatial and temporal compression ensued from hyper-mobility, globalization, cross b(order) migration. It is distinctive in its arguments that the contextually embedded Muslim gendered subjectivity that the female character under study here in this article carves out can neither be framed in Islamic or local traditional normative structures nor can it be framed in modern Western secular feminist frames. It is negotiative and inclusive without being in open and exclusive confrontation or affiliation against/with radical ideological underpinnings that categorize subjects. Unlike many studies, instead of making theoretical invocation of orientalist imaginative geographies or strange encounters with known unknowns or differentiated solidarity (Ahmed, 2000; Said, 1978) to criticize the stereotyping of Islamic mind/Muslim body in popular Western imagination which, if drawn on here also, ironically would have put more emphasis on the dominant discourses, this article therefore takes them as a backdrop to bring into limelight the subject i.e. Muslim woman by exploring their inclusivity, dynamicity, non-duality and agency in a traditional socio-cultural setting. The gendered subject that We study in this article requires a theoretical frame which focuses on the emergence of a mobile subject’s performatively created third space beyond ideological dualities and religio-nationalist narratives. The subject does not emphasize its religiosity, nationality, identity and ideological associations. Its Muslimness is known through its narration of family history and emphasis consistently remains on subjective struggles, negotiations and agency against the norms that regulate gender, sexuality, love, desire, choice and marriage in a setting of an upper class traditional Muslim family of a privileged caste in a metropolis.

Anglophone literature by Muslim women like Monica Ali, Leila Aboulela, Tahmima Anam, and Kamila Shamsie has countered the monolithic stereotypical gendered imaginary about Muslim women through their complex female characters whose subjectivity cannot be captured in simplistic linear frames. Especially, Shamsie’s novel Salt and Saffron is one such example that adroitly and deeply explores a young urban elite class mobile Muslim woman’s performative negotiation of her right to choice about love and marriage while confronted with traditional gender norms associated with class and religion in her traditional cultural setting. It articulates and is reflective of the real ongoing and increased fights on the part of Muslim women who seek agency from the interstitial space between the modern and the traditional without exclusive association with either. We, therefore, examine the agentive potential of the interstitial subject position of the young female protagonist Aliya in the novel in resisting the culturally-rooted structural concept of arranged and forced marriage and asserting her right to negotiated expression of love and choice about marriage. This article is also distinctive in reflecting on her parent’s response to her resistance and negotiation to foreground the structural shift that has made considerable inroads in social behaviors in Pakistan regarding women’s right to exercise their choice in deciding whom to marry. Drawing on the concepts of performative subjectivity (Butler, 1990: 142–149) and cultural third-space (Bhabha, 1994: 1–18), We interpret Aliya’s character by situating her in the wider social and cultural historical specificity. Performativity refers to becoming instead of being and third space to non-duality and inclusivity. Both emphasize (re)construction, enunciation, and agency of a subject. The concepts of performativity and third space become complementary to each other when it comes to shaping subjectivity in a setting in which cultures, ideologies, norms, and identities contest and collaborate in interstitial spaces as a result of cross-(b)order mobilities and interactions (McDowell, 1999). It is from the vantage point of this theoretical intersection that this article explores the performatively created third space subjectivity of Aliya. Though the interstitial subjectivity is not fully autonomous as per the imaginary of secular feminism and is vulnerable to curtailment by patriarchal whims, it has gradually been bringing about socially acceptable and workable structural changes related to Muslim women’s right to participation in the selection of their spouse and expression of desire. The case of the character of Aliya is hereby taken up to engage in the wider discourse of gendered Islamophobia and Muslim women’s subjectivity.

Subjectivity and third space

The subject is “a linguistic category, a place-holder, a structure in formation” and “a constituted social temporality” which lends intelligibility to the individuals or persons who come to occupy the site of the subject through subordination to power/discourse (Butler, 1990: 141, 1997: 10). Power is a set of conditions that precede the subject and persist through reiteration. Reiteration, however, is not mechanical; it is internally discontinuous over time and space, and so is the subjective substance produced through it. If a subject gets intelligibility through subordination to power, how does she/he become agentive to subvert or oppose, and to what extent, the same power that forms her/him into subjection? The agency is located in that unintended opposing act of the subject which is rooted in subjection and culturally intelligible. Power does not get transferred from its position of preceding the subject into the present and the future expanse in the same form. Butler observes that subjectivity materializes and enacts through an embodied performance of the conditions that produce it and that the reiteration of the performance does not remain in one fixed form and keeps incorporating changes and contradictions.

How do the changes and contradictions enter the performance of subjectivity? “The act of appropriation [in the process of reiteration] may involve an alteration of power such that the power assumed or appropriated works against the power that made that assumption possible” (Butler, 1997: 13). The appropriation enters the process of repetition, enactment (performativity) of power through unrepressed and not-foreclosed desire, temporal and spatial contingency and convergence of contradictory/contesting discourses on the site of the subject. In addition to internal disharmony between repetitions as emphasized by Butler, moving or traveling across various conditions/power/discourses (geographical, temporal, and spatial), beyond the traditional ones, the subject can be more likely to be agentive through newly gained deconstructive awareness and arguments.

Thimm (2018) has found that Muslim women in the Middle East having various kinds of mobility have performed remarkably agentive gender subjectivities and redefined gendered social expectations. Mansoor (2014), in her reading of Muslim female subjects in South Asian English literature, explores alternative sources of agency which are not embedded in the universalist discourse of human rights or feminist thought. Similarly, Chambers and Herbert (2014) and Ahmed (2021) foreground the need to read and listen to the agency of Muslim women beyond religio-racist differences. Safdar and Yasmin (2021a, 2022a, 2022b), while examining the representation of Muslim women in Pakistani Anglophone literature, emphasize agentive subjectivity which is shaped by geographical mobility. However, in the case of a postcolonial agentive subject like Aliya (which this article explores), it is not simply that she has a worldview shaped by two or more geographies that makes her interstitial or that places her in a third-space, it is the consciousness of her universalist rights and freedom as a human being gained through mobility which is fiercely contested by the norms of her class and religion.

This article highlights, through the subject of Aliya, a dramatized contestation between the consciousness of universalist individualist freedom to love and choice in marriage and that of restrictive norms of class and religion morphing into a negotiated/non-binarist space of agency. Now, a possible question that arises is to what extent or potential the agency works to change/subvert the power that preceded the formation of the subject or what space it opens up for the subject. Bhabha (1994: 1) terms the agency as “the realm of the beyondin(emphasis is original), the inbetween, interstitial, liminal, third-space of enunciation in which the old and the new collaborate and contest and are re-signified into innovative sites of subjectivity and agency. The subject becomes non-binary, dynamic, and inclusive through performativity and temporalizes subordination, power, identity, and culture. The constructed social, political, and cultural categories and imaginaries of the identity of race, class, gender, religion, and nation are displaced, de/re-constructed, and re-configured in the third-space (Bhabha, 1994: 212).

In the case of Muslim women subjects, though religion variously remains an effective condition, it is not the only or domineering one in all cases and situations. Norms of upper social class and culture are seen as the dominant conditions of the subject formation in Salt and Saffron which are resisted through performativity by mobile female subjects in the novel through carving out third space subjectivity. Interstitial or third-space does not mean any specific or fixed point for identity to stay, rather it can mean fluidity and non-fixity between the traditional norms and the newly gained individualist awareness from cross-cultural mobility – negotiating between the two ends without completely discarding either.

Aliya’s dynamic and inclusive subjectivity of being contested by her newly gained consciousness of her human rights to choice in love and marriage and traditional norms of class and religion is not a categorical battle for the sake of or against individualism or secretive love, rather her complex situation represents a fiercely contested and transforming cultural paradigm in which young and mobile women have an effective role to re-signify the traditional without yielding to the modern individualist in the postcolonial and ideological place i.e. Pakistan.

Muslim female subjectivity

Salt and Saffron can be read as a bildungsroman that revolves around the inner-conflict of its young female narrator-protagonist, Aliya, who returns home (Pakistan) after graduating from a university in the United States of America and struggles to negotiate between her class-conscious family norms and individualistic awareness and desire, ultimately coming out to performatively ground her agency in an inbetween but growingly empowering discursive space.

The novel, through her narrator Aliya, touches upon and weaves together multiple themes which include class, religious, ethnic, territorial and gender divides. Across frontiers of knowledge, it is a social and cultural inquiry. Especially and most relevant here in this article, she narrates how she came to muster her courage to negotiate her right of choice about love and marriage. She goes a step back to correspond with traditional norms but takes two forward to redefine them. Her mobility away from her home-culture into international cultural exposure reshapes her perspective to look at gendered social behavior and practices around her. However, it may need to be emphasized that Aliya’s mobility away from her culture does not mean that mobility into the Western culture was a precondition to her agency. Instead, it is mobility beyond the local gendered space, not necessarily to the West, which this article explores for its link to becoming agentive. Further, Aliya re-signifies the local when situated in the global and vice versa without cutting off from either. Hers is a character that is reflective of dynamic, inclusive, negotiating, and non-binary subjectivity.

Pakistan is a religiously and culturally conservative Muslim majority state with about 240 million people, a crumbling economy, political instability, and deep interference of the military in politics. This political, social, and financial condition has had structural effects on women. However, Pakistan is also increasingly becoming globally interconnected due to technological, communicative, and globalization developments blurring normative divides. It does not mean to underestimate the contribution of Pakistani feminists. Pakistani feminist authors, critics, and activists have had long and strong diverse voices against patriarchy.

When it comes to their subjectivity of love/desire and marriage, Muslim women in Pakistan have been faced with multiple predetermining ideological closures. Patriarchal interpretations of religion, culture, caste, ethnicity, and class are amongst the most actively contesting conditions for the regulation and surveillance of women’s body and mind. Love/desire and bodily/sexual rights of women are defined, regulated, and surveilled through religious, nationalist, and cultural discourses about norms instead of seen through the frames of secular human rights (Zia, 2020). However, during different historical specificities, these discourses have been variously influential in shaping women’s subjectivity and identity. Afzal-Khan, by mapping similarities with and differences of Pakistani women’s experiences from hers, illustrates shifts and their inconsistency in the empowerment of women regarding their exercise of love and desire in Lahore, a metropolitan in the country (2010). Pakistani secular feminists, religious feminists, and postcolonial feminists have examined the predicament of women through their different strategic underpinnings and highlighted the intersection of various factors (Jafar, 2005: 35–55; Jamal, 2005: 52; Saigol, 2019; Suleri, 1992; Zia, 2018: 18). From amongst these factors, the regulatory power of class and its elite culture is most effective and prominent in the case of Aliya. We explore how her interstitial agency gets formed through movement/travels across traditional gendered and multicultural spaces and resists the conditions that preceded her subject. How does her agency remain culturally intelligible as well as subversive? How does her subjectivity/agency dispel the stereotypical Western popular view of Muslim women regarding their love/desire and marriage? We foreground that the performatively created third space subjectivity enables Muslim women not only to negotiate against their suppression by local patriarchal discourses but also against the Western popular discourses that view Muslim women as a monolith victim entity. While my exploration of Aliya’s two-pronged agentive subjectivity, the point gets underlined that conservative religio-cultural and class norms defining and regulating gendered relationships and love in Pakistan are fast in the process of reformation and re-standardization without sticking to any categorical ideological association.

Shamsie explores the potential and limits of interstitial subjectivity through Aliya’s character who struggles against social norms to claim her right of will and choice about love and marriage. In Pakistan, the trend of love-marriages and love-turned-into arranged-marriage has been penetrating and receiving gradually growing acceptance from parents, relatives, and the society in general. Aliya’s character/subject is reflective of the trend in the country.

Before ultimately landing back in her homeland and negotiating for her choice and decision Aliya is reshaped by her travels and untraditional cultural exposure. She comes back to negotiate, not to yield. She spends 5 years in the US, graduates with her college degree from there, interacts and intermixes with the people and culture there, frequents alone between US and Pakistan, and also travels to the United Kingdom (UK). She is frequent in her corporeal/physical travels through airplanes, cars, and public transport, imaginative travels through Hollywood movies and her academic education, virtual travels through the use of the internet and communicative travels through emails. Moving/traveling across spatial, cultural, and temporal boundaries through various technological, transportational, and internet sources is a normal part of her life. The purpose of her travels is education, spending summer vacation, diversion, correspondence, and expression of desire. The means of travel help her transcend the traditional cultural and contextual boundaries which Adeel and Yeh (2018: 660) highlight as hindering and restricting many women’s mobility in Pakistan. The space or location of her travels, especially in and on the way to the US and UK is such that gives her exposure to the social and cultural practices and ideas that are universalist and secular in terms of human rights and individualistically more empowering than the ones in her home culture. Her home-culture norms are mainly formed by her upper-class culture. Consciously or unconsciously, she keeps learning instead of staying away from the new cultural practices and ideas which reshape her critical perspective of her homeland’s social norms. The purpose of her travels, too, further eases this absorption and reconstruction of her subjectivity by making her agentive. Though the fact cannot be ignored that her mobility was largely enabled by her upper class and posh metropolitan locality subject position, her familial norms to marry against the will of family and into the lower class were too fixed and traditional to be uprooted or challenged.

Snobbery against the lower class is engrained in Aliya’s family. Not to mention marrying, even having acquaintance with those in the lower class is considered as to be snubbed in her family. As a true reflection of Pakistan’s social and cultural environment, Aliya’s traditional familial and social setting, despite its urban upper class, is such that considers family reputation as “the most precious jewel in a young bride’s jahez” [dowry] (stress is original) and wherein Mariam’s elopement has ruined the family honor (Shamsie, 2000: 94). Mariam is Aliya’s aunt who had eloped with their cook. In Pakistan, there are numerous “stories of girls from ‘good’ families who go ‘bad’ and are disowned” or are even killed in the name of family honor (Alam, 2020: 76; NCHR, 2019; Shamsie, 2000: 93). The recurring thought that she would tarnish her family honor like Mariam keeps haunting Aliya. The man whom Aliya loves hails from Liaquatabad which is known for its poverty and slums. Liaquatabad with its “tiny storefronts and burst sewerage pipes and cramped flats with laundry hanging over the balconies, spattered with crow droppings” is a symbol of the lower class of the man whom she loves and wants to marry (Shamsie, 2000: 37); and the thought to live in it is taken as a nightmare.

Aliya wants to pursue her love, but she cannot help condescending to the imagined miserable life in poverty in Liaquatabad and feels embarrassed when “one of Ali Shah girls whispered, quite audibly, to her sister, ‘Her cousin married the cook” (Shamsie, 2000: 110). Her family thinks that it is the locality in which families are so desperate to improve their financial condition that they line up their “daughters as prospective brides” to be wed off with someone who possesses an American “green card and all that” (Shamsie, 2000: 22). Parents and families from the class of Aliya, in the pretext that they want to secure their children’s (especially girls’) financial future by not letting them marry into the lower class, have relieved them of their right to choice and established their parental patriarchal control. In their hold on decision-making for the marriage of their girls, they seek agency from their traditional and cultural family norms of social respect and honor, and financial security.

It is Aliya’s mobility-shaped perspective that appropriates her upper-class and metropolitan subjectivity to view things from the individualistic oppositional perspective which shapes her agency to choose to muster courage and arguments to claim her right to choice and will. “The only thing that makes [her] stand apart is [her] particular choice [to not let her be taken as a puppet in the hands of norms and her parents to decide about her marital life]” (Shamsie, 2000: 1). Being in the space of the untraditional cultural setting of Heathrow airport where there is none whom she may fear can malign or stigmatize her for not following her family and homeland conservative social norms, she does not resist the goodbye hug of the boyfriend whom she had acquainted with just a few hours ago while aboard the airplane. This (the hug) could never have happened, had she been in her familiar traditional cultural space. It never happens again because whenever they meet next it is such a social setting in which there are chances that somebody may be watching them. Immediately after the hug, internalized fear of traditional norms reminds her of her grandmother’s likely taunt, had she seen her hugging the ‘stranger’.

Being away from the traditional contextual space emboldens and empowers her to respond to and enact her desire. Even after the hug, she can feel and enjoy that her body “register[s] the feel of his arms around [her]” (Shamsie, 2000: 2). The innate desire suppressed under the ethical burden of norms begins to reemerge and lets it be felt and enjoyed when in the untraditional space beyond the religio-patriarchal fears of morality and class consciousness. How does this reemerged desire for heterosexual love reshape her subjectivity and agency, and to what extent? While in the US, she cuts her hair, and there “may be a gander or two” with whom she grows her intimacy and is well aware of “the taste of certain men’s sweat” (Shamsie, 2000: 5–7). Being away from her familial norms awakens her sexuality to which she responds positively by exercising it. The “gander” metaphorically refers to her boyfriends and that she, while taking a bath, can imagine the taste of men’s sweat signifies her having had bodily closeness/touch and sexual relationships with them. Importantly, however, this awakening of desire gets subdued and negotiated under the pressure of norms, if not eliminated, whenever she lands back in her traditional or familiar cultural space in which there are chances that her family reputation might get stigmatized by her ‘careless’ actions.

The way the characters of Mariam and Dadi (grandmother) have been projected as intermixed and interwoven with that of Aliya, they can be read as illuminating and giving insights into Aliya’s inner self. Mariam and Dadi represent two contradictory constituents of Aliya’s subjectivity; even Samia is symbolic of her inner self concerning her romantic entanglements and academic scholarly aptitude. Mariam stands for desire, determination, agency, and continuous pursuit of aspirations as a part of Aliya’s character; whereas, the grandmother represents classist norms, family reputation, and ancestral traditions as a part of her (Aliya’s) character which is conscious of regulations. To express her negotiated religiosity as well as love for fashion and bodily makeup, Mariam wears “a gold chain with a diamond-studded pendant in the shape of an Arabic Allah hung around her neck” (Shamsie, 2000: 40). For worldly knowledge, information, and entertainment, she reads newspapers, fiction, other books, and maps. She rejoices in food and loves to be in the company of her lover, Masood, the cook. She appears and disappears mysteriously, but always remains in the mind, behavior, and feelings of Aliya. The grandmother snubs and criticizes Mariam’s elopement with the lower class cook poignantly. A grapple goes on between these two aspects of Aliya’s inner self. She feels an association (as of quite-twins) between Mariam and herself but also feels satisfaction and peace after reconciling with Dadi following a conflict with her when she (Dadi) had called Mariam out for her elopement.

Mariam ‘articulates’ through silence, listens to the pauses between words/sentences, and subverts suppression through silence. Her father’s marriage against his family norms had once not been accepted and he had to leave his family. Mariam, too, through her silence and observation feels the same family reaction regarding her love for Masood. Aliya’s love for Khaleel, though has stirred her desire, cannot raise its head beyond a certain normative limit. Aliya learns from Mariam the language of silence; silence is resistive and subversive in its way and capacity. However, her way of subversion gets more effective and articulated when her mobility-shaped awareness develops in her the skill of how to give voice to what she perceives in silence. Though determined and sensitive enough even to listen to silences, Mariam is too reticent to articulate her love and desire. The language of her silence against the pressure of norms remains ineffective. She ultimately explodes into her extreme action of attempting suicide through starvation and then elopement. Again, the suicide attempt and elopement, though defiant in nature, cannot argue against the logic of the entrenched norms regulating women’s choice in love and marriage. It is Aliya’s becoming articulative against the norms by situating her choice or “error”/“passion” in her being a “fallible” human that comes out as convincing and transformative (Shamsie, 2000: 184). By admitting and presenting herself as a fallible human being who is prone to error, passion, love, and desire, she distances away from the binds of radical ideologies and norms. Her thoughts indicate that a woman’s sexuality has got to be acknowledged as her innate human characteristic and that she must not be seen as devoid of sexual emotions, feelings, love, and desire by cultural norms and narratives.

Aliya’s exposure and awareness sharpens her skill of arguments and persuasion to question and redefine norms to bring about structural cultural changes while remaining within norms. Seen through Butler’s (1990, 2009) and Bhabha’s (Bhabha, 1994) concepts, she agentively performatively creates a third space to exercise her desire and will while not openly challenging norms. While in the traditional social context, agentive performativity in the interstitial space empowers her to innovate arguments and muster courage to express them; however, this interstitial negotiated identity, due to its rootedness in the same norms that are defined by patriarchy, always remains fragile and vulnerable to curtailment and compromises. Nevertheless, her way of questioning and modifying norms brings her greater empowerment and efficacy than that of Mariam who challenged through silence and then elopement but not through arguments to establish her right.

The ups and downs and strained relationship between the two aspects of Aliya’s subjectivity continue until there comes an intriguing normalization to settle somewhere in the interstitial space. Dadi had previously called Mariam a whore and then Aliya had slapped her (Dadi) for it; they both did not speak to each other for years. However, gradually an accommodative behavior between the two develops. Dadi, though older and staunch in tradition, also becomes accommodative to the subversive and ‘salty’/“declasse” action of Mariam beyond the ‘saffron’/upper-class sensuousness and delicacies. Aliya’s attachment with Mariam is attachment with subversion and that with Dadi is attachment with tradition. She maintains an association with Mariam and also does not let Dadi slip away.

Due to her being modestly challenging, Aliya’s character is an intermediary between Shamsie’s compliant and subversive Muslim women characters in her novels. The intelligent young girl Zehra of Shamsie’s debut novel In the City by the Sea (1998) seems to have grown up in years and negotiation in the character Aliya in Salt and Saffron (Shamsie, 2000) and can be further seen as being more mobile and conscious of her agency and articulative in the character Aasmani in Broken Verses (Shamsie, 2005). Aasmani in Broken Verses has much greater global cultural exposure and agentive performance of her gender and sexuality (Safdar and Yasmin, 2021b). Through the figure of her mother and her own experiences, she narrates the story of how Pakistani women battle against the religio-patriarchal State and norms for the sake of being taken as active subjects rather than objects of exploitation and suppression. Ranasinha (2016: 129) finds Muslim female characters in Broken Verses as being agentive without submitting to Eurocentric versions of women’s autonomy. Aneeka set in the gendered Islamophobic context of Britain in the aftermath of the 9/11 and 7/7 bombings, in Home Fire (2017), in her struggle for recognition against the political erasure of Muslim women as monolithic can be termed as the latest version of Shamsie’s Muslim female protagonists.

Khurshid (2015: 98) in an ethnographic study argues that educated Muslim women in Pakistan negotiate for their empowerment against their patriarchal suppression by not challenging or subverting them publicly or defiantly. Rather, they prefer to be modestly modern by translating modernity through their religious and cultural concepts. Masood (2018: 188) finds out that women doctors in Pakistan, in their mobilization away from traditional settings, negotiate patriarchal stereotypes in public space; they negotiate the workability and embodiment of norms and reposition their social subjectivity. Having been through mobility-sourced knowledge, awareness, and global cultural exposure, Aliya’s silence, determination and abrupt reactions (as represented by Mariam) and attachment to tradition (as represented by Dadi) are re-formed into an interstitial subjectivity which knows the language of arguments and intends to articulate as well.

Aliya could have identified and felt her desire/sexuality while in a traditional social space but the courage to get it acknowledged by her family through persuasive articulation comes through knowledge and confidence from her mobilities beyond traditional gendered spaces. It does not mean that she becomes agentive through her mobility into the West; rather it means her mobility into untraditional gendered and class spaces (which include the West but not necessarily) reshapes her subjectivity and agency. Previously, “desire was an abstraction for her” (Shamsie, 2000: 72). While frequenting the world outside the traditional private gendered space, she gets attracted to Khaleel. Her desire provokes her to go on with the “celibate love affair for possibly 18 years” while her normative consciousness stubbornly replies, “Pakistan isn’t as obvious as America. Our love stories are all about pining and separation and tiny gestures assuming grand significance” (Shamsie, 2000: 72). To it, again, the mobility-shaped desire argues back “hormones are hormones” and Aliya starts calling out loud “Khaleel. Khaleel. Khaleel” (Shamsie, 2000: 72). She traces his name on her wrist and goes into reverie while thinking about him. What startles her back into the real world is a call from Aba (father) to inform her about Dadi’s arrival – a symbolic reminder of the traditional norms. Like in any patriarchal society, women in Pakistan are seen through their body and defined through their sexuality for being either pious or impious. To define, control, and suppress their sexuality and render it invisible in the public by linking it with family-honor, culture, and piety of character is one of the basic ideological principles of the religio-culturally entrenched male dominant society (Charania, 2014; Jayawardena and De Alwis, 1996; Walter, 2016; Zia, 1994, 2020). However, it was not only the unavoidable concept of piety that had suppressed Aliya’s sexuality, it was class consciousness as well.

I wanted to cup my hand against his [Khaleel’s] larynx and feel the muscles move beneath my palm as he spoke […] There was a tiny cut at the base of his index finger giving me all the excuse I needed to touch […] I touched the grass on which he’d been sitting (Shamsie, 2000: 180).

As obvious from the erotic symbol of the larynx and the desire to feel the jerks of its muscles and then the touch on the base of the index finger, sexual desire rebounds inside Aliya at the sight or thought of Khaleel. But, as conscious of norms as she is, her way of expression of it is normatively molded into being indirectly embodied in her touch of the grass on which he had been sitting. Like a modestly modern educated young Muslim woman in Pakistan she intensely feels for him, but also has to be careful of traditional cultural values that consider a woman the embodiment of piety and culture and, therefore, has to avoid public meetings and sexual intercourse until they are married to each other. The fact or possibility of the fallibility of a woman to her passion is taken as unacceptable and a crime that should be severely punished even to the extent of beating and killing. It is not Aliya who dares go to see him as the society in which she has landed back does not expect a girl to be that audacious; rather, it is Khaleel who comes to see her while she is with her family at her home. The tussle between norms and mobility-shaped consciousness which peaked at the site of her love with Khaleel opens up the third-space for her to deliberately let her family know of her feelings and keep trying to get them in her favor. She makes up her mind to argue that:

‘…This man, I don’t know what will happen between us, but I think he’s worth the risk of heartbreak. He’s worth it not because of Masood, not because of Taimur, not because of Taj or Dadi or anyone, but because. Just because. Why do you call us not-quite-twins as though we are something incomplete? More than twins, say that. Or better still, say fallible, like you; capable of error, like you; given to passion, like you.’ This was a speech that I’d prepared, rehearsed in front of the mirror. Could I ever make it when even the best of the Dard-e-Dils, even my parents, had quailed when he walked in? (Shamsie, 2000: 184).

Instead of rooting her argument in any previous example of subversion in the family or even instead of proving the shallowness of norms, she simply wants her parents and family to understand and respect her inherent natural feelings, passion, and even fallibility as a human being. The reader, however, gets disappointed when she, despite knowing the gender-biased hypocrisy of norms and their patriarchal nature, remains silent on them and instead grounds her discourse in human passion and fallibility; it is a weak and surprisingly embarrassing base of the arguments that Shamsie has invested in Aliya’s character, and which the discourse of religious, cultural and classist norms can easily repress. Interestingly, however, what is important to note is that she at least has dared to argue to let her feelings be felt and her voice be heard. The difference, that comes as a result, is that her parents and then other family members ultimately (though reluctantly) withdraw their pressure which can be taken as a remarkable step toward structural transformation related to women’s agency in the decision of their marriage.

I stood up and walked over to the window. My parents took this as some sort of signal. They told Khaleel there was no need to clear the table, Wasim would do that, then said goodbye and retreated to their room. Sameer had disappeared somewhere. Wasim took a stack of plates and vanished into the kitchen. There was such an air of familiarity about the silence in the room. I looked out at Mariam’s hibiscus branch. The glass between it and me was both a window and a mirror. I reached out to run my fingers through the air, parallel to the branch. Khaleel bent down to pick up a plate. My fingers traced the curve of his spine (Shamsie, 2000: 184).

Aliya and Khaleel are left alone in the room. She does not feel embarrassed or nervous; rather, she feels an air of familiarity and love as symbolized by Mariam’s hibiscus branch. However, though there remains the presence of norms as signified by the glass between her and the branch, they are less strong and restrictive. The glass has a window and a mirror. She can open the window and have a direct touch of the hibiscus; but, the mirror on the window reflects back the cultural normative setting and subjectivity which she accepts she should remain within. She widens her space and agency to a certain limit and does not go beyond it to open the window; rather sees and feels the touch from a distance which modifies the norms without denying their presence. In her reshaped subjectivity and negotiated articulation of desire, she does not defy Islam; instead, she reinterprets it to resist and challenge its class-specific and patriarchal interpretations because Islam does not deny a woman her right to assert her choice in love and marriage and rather prescribes norms and a procedure to ensure it. She also appropriates the empowerment and confidence gained from cross-cultural mobilities to articulate her desire when situated in her home and performs them being cautious and conscious of local norms. In that sense, she redefines not only the Western but also the local class and religious gendered practices to carve out a wider, distinctive, inclusive, and agentive space that gets growing social acceptance and causes structural changes. As Butler notes that

… gender performativity does not necessarily presuppose an always acting subject or an incessantly repeating body. It establishes a complex convergence of social norms on the somatic psyche, and a process of repetition that is structured by a complicated interplay of obligation and desire, and a desire that is and is not one’s own [but shaped by historical conditions]. (2009: xi)

A complicated interplay of obligation and desire is observed in the somatic psyche of the subject, Aliya. Though she feels and traces the curve of Khaleel’s spine as he bends to pick up a plate, no mouth-kisses or hugs happen. She succeeds in modifying the hardcore traditional patriarchal practice of forced arranged-marriage and denial of women’s sexuality and choice without inviting the rage of norms through their public violation or yielding to Western imaginaries of gender and sexual autonomy. She observes cultural norms while carving out a third-space of enunciating subjectivity in Bhabha’s (1994) terms.

It was quite possible that the inner grapple between the attempts to assert her desire and norms would not have resulted in making her mind up to argue for her right to choice, if she would not have been mobile. She, too, might have silently eloped without articulating against the suppression and denial of her desire, which would not have been that effective to win the consent and agreement of her family in her decisions. In Pakistan, elopements have long been happening; but, what has recently been remarkably notable is that mobility-shaped youth has increasingly gotten their parents with them in their decisions for love-turned-into arranged-marriage – symbolic of structural cultural changes happening regarding choice in marriage.

What, however, needs to be noted is that the mobility-shaped interstitial agency is not much empowering or autonomous. Though effective in bringing about gradual socially acceptable and workable structural changes, it has its limits. On the one hand, it justifies its ‘authenticity’ and positionality by connecting with local and indigenous discourses; on the other hand, however, it also runs the risk of fragility and curtailment by patriarchal interpretations of the same local discourses with which it attempts to connect and seek agency from. As Safdar and Yasmin (2020: 683; Yasmin and Safdar, 2022) find out that negotiated empowerment of educated professional Muslim women in Pakistan fell back to the normativity of wifehood and motherhood during the crisis of the pandemic of COVID-19. The chances of fragility and vulnerability can be minimized through a consistent backing of exposure, interaction, and awareness of the spaces beyond the traditional. The interstitial subjectivity of Aliya accommodates as well as challenges norms from the inside. She cannot completely remove the indoctrinated classist snobbery and the thoughts of ultimately getting married as society had expected of her. She is not seen as making and expressing love in public and claiming it as her individualist right. Importantly, however, she also keeps struggling against the traditional family belief of class divide, arranged marriage, and denial of women’s sexuality as is evident from her cherishing the thought of the touch and company of her boyfriend despite his lower social origin and determination to argue that she should be taken as a human being who has innate feelings, desire and is equally fallible to passion. She avoids open and public meetings with him but loves to be with him in the far distant space where nobody can watch them together. She gets lovingly anxious to receive emails from him but does not read them in the presence of her cousin lest he comes to know of her affair which can likely ruin the family’s reputation.

Conclusion

By examining the ‘case’ of Aliya’s literary expression as a representation of mobile urban young Muslim women in Pakistan, We have entered the wider postcolonial feminist discourse in Pakistan on Muslim women’s subjectivity of love/desire and marriage. We have examined the efficacy of mobility-shaped interstitial subjectivity in its take on traditional norms related to women’s love/desire and marriage as explored in Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron. The negotiated subjectivity of Aliya has challenged not only the classist and religious norms of her home culture but also the universalist and secular discourses of human and women’s rights. The local classist and religious norms expect women to abide by them and gendered Islamophobic Western discourses have viewed them as monolithic victims of suppressed desire and forced/arranged marriages. She performatively carves out a distinctive subjective position in the third space which is inclusive, dynamic, and agentive. Moving away from the traditional gendered spaces enables her to redefine the traditional norms in a way that does not disconnect her from them; rather, it enables her to carry them forward in a negotiated and re-signified sense which is empowering for her as well as resistive to Western stereotypical views about Muslim women. This subjective position has been deeply effective to empower her, widening her social space, and making her voice and desire be heard and understood. It has also been workable for her and socially acceptable as well. She succeeds in creating a favorable situation for her by convincing her parents to acknowledge it as her right to marry the person whom she loves. In her decision to argue with her parents, she redefines the norms instead of ignoring or considering them useless. She has managed to save her individual as well as familial interests. Her struggle for her rights from within norms while redefining them instead of without them through their public defiance is more effective than conservative religious and universalist secular approaches to cause structural change in patriarchal behaviors. She succeeds in avoiding the dualistic labels of being Westernized/vulgar and docile/traditional.