Speculative Fiction, the Aesthetics of Discomfort, and Muslim Futurity in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

For Muslims, the future is complicated by the persistence of the past. The Islamophobia of a post-9/11 world constitutes a continuation of the historical colonial suppression of Muslim identities and epistemologies. Islamophobia reproduces old Orientalist narratives that reduce complex Muslim identities into a violent and fanatical “Other” that needs to be contained and silenced. In order to resist such suppression, Muslims must re-possess their identities outside of binary Western ontological frames in which these Islamophobic constructions are rooted. I argue that speculative fiction (sf) provides a means of re-imagining Muslim experiences and identities outside of oppressive binaries. The “absent paradigm” of the SF world has no direct relationship with the empirical world, and this central absence allows writers to introduce difference into familiar narratives, thereby carving out possibilities for alternative identities and futures. Through a reading of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), I demonstrate how the absent paradigm of SF can establish aesthetics of discomfort that can unsettle old narratives and stereotypes. I argue that this enables Hamid to redefine Muslim identity in relation to in-betweenness and difference, thus breaking down the opposition between “self” and “other.” In this way, Muslim identity is reframed, paving a way for a hopeful Muslim future.