SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter analyses the Muslim memoir as a hybrid text that both authenticates and satirises the subjectivity of the narrator. Given the social capital of the memoir form, I argue that its trustworthiness is inverted by the author Ali Eteraz to question the premise of social trust. The memoir delineates social trust through the expression of piety and Muslim modernity articulated by the narrator in his different avatars. Eteraz’s satirical representations of himself invite the reader to read against the grain of the by now familiar Muslim fundamentalist-turned-Sufi story. He reverses the contexts of Islamist violence with the performativity of humour and it is in that humour that we can see traces of a multicultural coexistence and a rebuilding of social trust.