Unbearable Muslim Masculinity in Kamila Shamsie’s <i>Home Fire</i>

Researchers’ concern has grown over an alarming trend among young Muslim men of immigrant backgrounds born in Western countries to adopt religiously extremist tendencies. They have overlooked the Western-born young Muslim men who are disillusioned by fundamentalist Western states and social behavior and reactionary Islamist politics. It is this relatively overlooked young Western-born (especially British-born) Muslim masculine subject that I intend to explore in Shamsie’s Home Fire through Parvaiz’s character by drawing on Bradley’s concept of unbearable life with the aim to intervene in the discourse of post-9/11 Muslim jihadist masculinity and cultural integration. I examine how Parvaiz is derecognized and politically erased by the nihilopolitics of set norms of gender, religion, Islamism, and the state apparatuses of Britain; and, then how he resists and politicizes this space of non-subjectivity. I argue that this state of nullification becomes a new site of politics for him to assert his distinctive masculine self, belongingness, and voice.