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guns, fire, screams of death and slogans of freedom, bullets and
stones,” the Street of Storytellers is “turned into a battleground”
(255-256). Even so, as the narrator tells us, in face of the King’s forces,
“hundreds of Peshawaris planted their feet on the Street of Storytellers
and said no, they would not retreat,” for, “[i]f a man is to die
defending a land let the land be his land, the people his people” (256).
From setting up education programs and launching the civil
disobedience movement, Qayyum, the Khudai Khidmatgar, and
Ghaffar Khan in the novel all together send out a pacifist message that
is as important now in the post-9/11 era as it was before. In doing so,
the novel fights back against biased Western media representation of
Muslims as terror suspects, a labeling that has been repeated in news
coverage since 9/11, “solidifying the connection between terrorism and
Islam” (Powell, 2011: 97). Most importantly, Shamsie’s novel asserts
that, by rejecting the use of violence that extremist groups such as Haji
Sahib’s jihadists, 9/11’s terrorists, and ISIS’s militant groups have taken
up, nonviolent civil resistance can provide an alternative to the passive
acceptance of oppression. Patriots can engage in constructive tactics
such as education, mass noncooperation, and civil disobedience to
achieve local political and social change while contributing to world
peace.
In addition to the micro dimension,
A God in Every Stone
also
presents critical cosmopolitanism from a macro-societal perspective. It
could be reflected, as Delanty maintains, in “changing core-periphery
relations, with the core having to re-define itself from the perspective
of the periphery” (2006: 41-42). As pointed out earlier, a large portion
of
A God in Every Stone
is set in London, and it is also in this novel
that Shamsie first imagines an Englishwoman, Vivian, as a protagonist.
Through Vivian’s border-crossing from England to Turkey and then to
British India, Shamsie explores the dynamics of core-periphery
relations. It is a critical approach similar to, yet different from, the one
Shamsie employed in
Burnt Shadows
through Hiroko’s border crossing.
While the latter is situated in the subaltern position, the former is from
the colonial perspective. In other words, what
A God in Every Stone
is