

Engaging Politically from the Margin 271
“unified by faith and transcending national state boundaries” (Sayyid,
2000: 36). In
Offence
, Shamsie examines the dialogical relationship
between these different local fields and their dialectical relationships
with the cosmopolitan. Her aim is to acknowledge the nuances of
Muslims and to promote civil liberties and the right to freedom of
expression against the growing global “culture of complaint and
oversensitivity” (Rajagopalan, 2009). First and foremost,
Offence
notes
that Pakistan and Islam are interrelated fields that shape Muslims’
social life and identities, but they are not equivalent. As quoted earlier,
when Shamsie claims that she understands more about Pakistan than
other places in the so-called Muslim world, she articulates not only her
attachment to Pakistan but also the diversity of Muslims living in
different nations and areas. The task of cosmopolitanism that Shamsie
contemplates in
Offence
is the “debate and conversation across
nations” (Appiah, 2005: 246) and other local areas in the world, which,
in the post-9/11 era, has been arbitrarily divided into Muslim and
non-Muslim. Examining the local situation in Pakistan,
Offence
aims at
dispelling the notion of the “Offended Muslim,” now almost
universally regarded as “an anti-Western construct” (Shamsie, 2009b:
3). It points out that the combination of Islam with violence is
“primarily an intra-Muslim affair and only secondarily concerned with
the non-Muslim world” (3), for, even without reference to the West or
Christianity, Muslims living in one nation could be offended for
various reasons. As important as the idea of Muslim diversity within
and across national borders in forming part of Shamsie’s
cosmopolitanism and complicating the unified notion of
ummah
are
the extra-textual ties that
Offence
forges with other books in the
“Offence” series, each of which is “a long-form essay discussing
offence from the perspective of the offender, the ‘victim,’ and the
religious context of Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Christians”
(Rajagopalan, 2009). In a nutshell, although
Offence
is partially rooted
in the Muslim case in Pakistan, it fundamentally concerns politics and
civil liberties across nations and religions in the post-9/11 era.
Published in the same year as
Offence
,
Shamsie’s
Burnt Shadows
,