Sacred Oppression: State-Sanctioned Islamophobia in Nadeem Aslam’s “The Golden Legend”

Abstract

Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend (2017) brings forward the contradictions of state-sponsored Islamophobia in Pakistan, where a regime that presents itself as the custodian of Islam employs religious identity as a means of repressing minorities and dissidents alike. This article argues that Nadeem Aslam critiques the way that postcolonial states racialize Muslim subjects—religious and political subjectivities—a process theorized by Sahar Aziz in The Racial Muslim (2021), by portraying blasphemy laws and vigilante violence as tools to mark “heretical” communities (Christians, secular Muslims) as dangers to national purity. By synthesizing Aziz’s theoretical model with Mahmood Mamdani’s examination of religious polarization during the Cold War and Michel Foucault’s theories of biopolitics, this research demonstrates how Pakistan’s political and legal institutions codify the very anti-Muslim racism that they officially denounce. Through close readings of characters such as Helen, a Christian charged with blasphemy, and Nargis, a Muslim shielding forbidden knowledge, this paper illustrates how the novel portrays the state’s hypocrisy and imagines resistance in gestures of remembrance and solidarity. The punctuating role of literature in this process gives rise to the concept of transnational religious racism; in the end, this narrative analysis challenges the usual Western-centric focus of the study of Islamophobia, and demonstrates how fiction offers a way to conceptualize transnational religious racism and the need to contemplate oppression outside the geopolitical framework.