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Pakistan, often making misinformed claims” due to their lack of
knowledge of the areas (216). In the early 2000s, as one of the very
few “Pakistanis whom journalists knew and could ring,” Shamsie “at
least [knew] a little more, and [was] very interested in politics,” so
“[n]ow and then, they asked me to write something” (216). Since then,
Shamsie has been writing comment articles for a number of
newspapers and magazines, including the
Guardian
, and has joined
international institutions such as the Index on Censorship, English
PEN, Free Word, and Liberty. In particular, endeavoring to fend off the
dangers posed by misinformed claims about Muslims, Shamsie agreed
to write on “Islam and Offence” for Seagull Books.
2Offence: The
Muslim Case
is the result published in 2009.
3Offence
promotes a global understanding of Islam by fleshing out
how Muslims in Pakistan could be offended. It in a way reveals that
“[c]osmopolitanism should not be confused with the negation of
national identity
—
and vice versa,” as Victor Roudometof argues in
distinguishing cosmopolitanism from transnationalism (2005: 122).
Offence
privileges the nation state as a unit of analysis because, as
Shamsie explains, “[w]hen I look at events in Pakistan, the context of
national government and politics helps me understand what’s going on
far more than I understand anything that’s happening in Palestine,
Chechnya, or elsewhere in the so-called Muslim world” (2011: 217).
Therefore, she confines herself to Pakistan “as a case study,” but her
analysis is highly critical of “the interplay of national politics and
religious ideology” that gives rise to the ascendancy of the “hardliners”
in Pakistan (2009b: 13). Shamsie attributes some people’s biased
2
In addition to Shamsie’s book,
the “Offence” series also includes Brian Klug’s
Offence: The Jewish Case
, Irena Maryniak’s
Offence: The Christian Case
, Salil
Tripathi’s
Offence: The Hindu Case
, Casper Melville’s
Taking Offence
, and Martin
Rowson’s
Giving Offence
.
3
Offence: The Muslim Case
is also part of the “Manifestos for the Twenty-First
Century” series, which, according to Padraig Reidy, is a series of “books that
evolved out of a close collaboration between Seagull Books and
Index on
Censorship
, a home and a voice for freedom of expression since it was founded in
1972” (2007).