269 / 138
Engaging Politically from the Margin 269
association of Islam with extremism to hardliners, “whose
interpretations of Islam give fuel to the Violently Offended Muslim by
stressing violent punishment over opportunities for repentance, and by
their sidelining of courts of law in decisions about innocence and guilt”
(13). Her historical analysis in
Offence
begins with the Indian Mutiny
or Revolt against the British in the decade of 1857-67, the
establishment of “a true Islamic State” in the post-Partition era (29),
the civil war between East Pakistan and West Pakistan in the early
1970s, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s militant secularism, Zia-ul-Haq’s
Islamization, and then ends with the United States becoming Pakistan’s
“great Other” after the Cold War (63). Despite being confined to
Pakistan’s national politics and religious ideology, such an analysis is
crucial in the post-9/11 era, as it offers insights into global issues of
international terrorism.
Through
Offence
, Shamsie renders herself a rooted cosmopolitan
of the type for whom Appiah and other critics have argued. Although
Appiah has been credited by scholars like Jessica Berman with the
phrase “rooted cosmopolitanism” (2001: 27), the phrase was used
earlier, and perchance first coined, by Mitchell Cohen in the article
“Rooted Cosmopolitanism.” In that article, Cohen argues “against
conceiving nationalism as an either/or proposition: either all its forms
to be condemned or all its expressions to be sanctioned” (1992: 481).
As Cohen explains, “it is not true that all nationalists have had
chauvinist views of the world and that all expressions of national
sentiment represent particularist evil” (480). Viewing “the legitimacy
of plural loyalties,” best evidenced in “trans-nationality,” as “an
important democratic principle” (482), Cohen proposes rooted
cosmopolitanism as the middle ground and an alternative to abstract
universalism, which is illusionary and untenable, and to particularism,
which is one-sided and unidevotional. Published almost 13 years after
Cohen’s piece, the final chapter of Appiah’s
The Ethics of Identity
(2005) is also entitled “Rooted Cosmopolitanism,” although the
chapter appears to repeat some ideas that Appiah has argued in an
earlier article called “Cosmopolitan Patriots” (Appiah, 1997).