The Postcolonial Crescent Islam's Impact on Contemporary Literature by John C. Hawley, editor, New York, Peter Lang Publishing, 1998.

Abstract

Identity politics has become the catch phrase of the postmodern age. With
concepts such as "exile," "migrancy," and "hybridity" acquiring unprecedented
cultural significance in the late twentieth century, the postcolonial age gives
way to new identities, fractured modes of living, and new conditions of humanity.
Literature is a powerful tool to explore such issues in an era where a great
deal of the world is displaced, and the idea of a homeland becomes a disrupted,
remote possibility. The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact on
Contemporary Literature, is an attempt to discuss how Muslims negotiate
identity at a time of rapid and spiritually challenging transculturation. The book
uses fiction written by Muslims to critique the effects of colonialism, counteract
modernity, and question the status of Islamic identity in the contemporary
world. It also can be considered as the primary introduction of contemporary
Islamic literature into the postcolonial genre. Muslim writers have yet to submit a unique and powerful commentary on postcolonial and cultural studies;
this work at least softens that absence.
The Postcolonial Crescent was conceived as a response to The Satanic
Verses controversy. Therefore, it is “intimately involved in the interchange
between religion and the state, and demonstrates that the roles Islam is playing
in postcolonial nation-building is especially contested in the absence of broadly
acceptable models” (p. 4). Conflicting issues of identity are approached by
interrogating the authority to define a “correct” Islamic identity, the role of
individual rights, and the “variegation of Islamic expression within specific
cultural settings, suggesting through the national self-definitions the many concerns
that the Islamic world shares with global postcoloniality” (p. 7) ...