Fundamentalisms in Conflict: Religion, Secularism and Identity in Contemporary Pakistani and Bangladeshi Fiction
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Abstract
This paper examines how three South Asian novels in English represent the relationship between religion, secularism, national identity, and violence in Pakistan and Bangladesh. It analyses Uzma Aslam Khan's The Geometry of God (2008), Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Tahmima Anam's The Good Muslim (2011). The Pakistani novels are read as critiques of state-sponsored Islamisation and of the post-9/11 global order, while Anam's novel is read as an interrogation of Bangladesh's oscillation between imposed secularism and political Islam after the 1971 Liberation War. Using a postcolonial framework, together with the concepts of reactive identity formation and re-orientalism, the study employs qualitative close reading and comparative analysis. It argues that all three novels define fundamentalism broadly, as any worldview that recognises only one source of truth, whether that source is a state-approved Islam, market capitalism, or an intolerant secularism. In each text, rigid ideology fractures families, silences dissent, and falls most heavily on women, children, and minorities. Formally, the novels resist singular authority through polyphonic narration, dramatic monologue, and shifting timelines. The paper concludes that these works advocate a dialogic model of identity in which faith and reason, the religious and the secular, can coexist without domination.
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