The Silent Minaret by Ishtiyaq Shukri
THEMES:
• In an interview, Ishtyiaq Shukri explains that his novel The Silent
Minaret (2005)... is about the ‘alienation, disillusionment, anger and
loss caused by the ‘war on terror’ in Britain” – but it achieves more
than this.
• Against the often powerful inscriptions of identity of such a
restrictive and reductive discourse, particularly upheld by
institutions of state and the media, the authors set the personal –
the lived experience of their characters which in its complexity
questions simple categorisations of identity in terms of culture and
religion.
• Setting characters with lives, feelings, struggles, loves, and fears
(fiction) in a context of actual historical events and showing the
many ways in which these events impact all sorts of people is the
kind of writing which does what Steiner indicates only fiction is
capable of. Shukri uses Issa and his struggles with power, visibility,
and nations to get across some very strong points about
perception.
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Structure and Motifs
Religion & ritual
“Otherness”
Walls and Barriers
Amalgamation of peoples and religions
Censorship/ Silence
Forgetting/Remembering History/History Repeating
Memory, Remembering vs. Forgetting
Power/lack of access to history
Invisible/Visibility and Disappearance
Rebellion and subverting authority
War/politics and destruction
Disappearances & secrecy
The intellectual in ‘exile’
Style
• All of Issa’s dialogue are italicized not in quotes
– Making him seem like a phantom or apparition
• The epilogues in the beginning of each section
– The Bookshelf (73)
• What stands on Issa’s abandoned bookshelves?
• What is the purpose of this excerpt?
• The epilogues at the start of some chapters
– A road map into our past (91)
• Significance? Parallels?
• Each chapter has a title (not simply a number:
chapter 5)
• We get to read selections of Issa’s manuscript/thesis
• Poem at the beginning of novel
• Flashbacks and Free Indirect Narrative style
Structure
• Begins with poem “When Cities Crack” echoes throughout
narrative
– Rhetorical questioning
• “When cities crack, do stories too”
– Do memories too
– Do people too
• Imagery of decimation
– “like china heirlooms/smashing?” & “disintegrating”
– “lifting/calling/tapping”
• Reminiscent of bombed cities (Baghdad/Israel)
– “brushing carefully dusting/ only ever finding/skeletons of
silence”
• Paleontology – searching for remains/ruins
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Metaphor of South Africa
– “mosaic pictures hobbled together from fragments”
– “Then I trawl the fragments lying disarranged”
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Religious imagery
– Sacramental language
• “upturned palms” and “ashen palms”
VOC History
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1602 the prime companies of Holland
merged to form a large company called
"Vereinigte Ostindische Compagnie (VOC)
The new company received a state charter
which granted it sovereign rights
the VOC was lord of over 150 trading
vessels, 40 warships, 20,000 seamen,
10,000 soldiers and had nearly 50,000
civilians in its service
VOC was unscrupulous: it created
monopolies, destroyed local competitors
and forced up prices for the most
important spices by 180%.
The East Indian quarters of the VOC were
set up in Batavia on the island of Java, the
Portuguese was driven out of Ceylon and
Malacca and the first white colony was
established in South Africa
– Hobhouse, Henry: "Finally, the VOC
ruled over eight foreign governments in
Amboyna, Banda, Ternate, Macassar,
Malacca, Ceylon, Java and on the
Cape of Good Hope.”
The later popular Dutch nickname for the
once most influential company of the world
was V(ergann) O(nder) C(orruptie) which
means "Ruined By Corruption".
Later the company fell due to serious
• An ethnic community in
SA made up of people who
were brought by the VOC
as slaves, political
prisoners, and exiles
• During apartheid they
were moved from “District
6” to the Cape Flats (a
coloured township)
• Cape Malay was a subcateorgory of “Coloured”
during apartheid
• Typically Muslims – their
language formed the root
of Afrikaans
Issa’s Disappearance
• Issa perceives that those not in power are “disappeared”
by those in power.
• His “disappearance” makes a more poignant statement
than any academic exploration/writing. He controls the
conditions of his disappearance.
• BUT: his thesis is left on the table.
• His action draws in his family and those close to him from
their “geographical and emotional distance”
(Jayawardane 7).
• Maybe even more importantly, it brings people (who
were kept at a distance) into his perspective – it forces
them to consider the poignant statement Issa has made
by his silent disappearance.
• As they attempt to solve the mystery, they consider every
possible cause and effect, looking at history for clues
History/Violent Night
• History is a major backdrop to the story, providing some
insight into Issa’s view of the world.
• In 1667, the VOC brought the first prisoners to the Cape.
All of them were Muslims, and all of them opposed the VOC
business ventures in the East.
• Sheikh Abdurahman Matahe Sha and Sheikh Mahmood were
the first political exiles, rulers of Sumatra.
• In 1694, Sheik Yusuf of Macassar (a.k.a. Abadin Tadia
Tjoessoep) arrived in the Cape. He would be the most
influential of these new political exiles. He is credited with
being the grandfather of Islam in South Africa.
Dreamer Schemer, History’s Cleaner
• Past events are repeated
• Resistance is met with intolerance and segregation via fear and the
threat of disappearance
• This happened in the beginnings of the Slave Trade and repeated
with the way Muslims have been treated
• “It was as much about forgetting as remembering. Not a single
thought spared for how the exhibits came to be here in the first
place. Chronic amnesia” (143).
• History favors the winner, but:
– Issa’s protest is revisionist; his whole thesis talks about how
our knowledge of the VOC and the slave trade is portrayed in
a way that favors the Europeans and he writes in a way that
helps South Africans
– He perceives the connection between the VOC and the US in
their actions representative of a modern empire
Religion & Ritual:
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Cathemosdraquel
Christian & Muslim
– Amalgamation/fusion of the two
• Frances contemplates this and imagines a more “whole”
religion
– Prays in both Arabic and English – meshing the two
religions
– “That it stands so close to the Catholic cathedral that from certain angles
the two buildings almost seem as one. I rather like the sound of that”
Yes Frances, imagine that, a sky that echoes simultaneously with azaan and
the Angelus (77-8)
– This appears to be a hopeful cry – why can mankind not
simply accept both and live harmoniously, peacefully?
• Issa Minaret
– Issa tells Frances of its history and she wishes to
see a tangible connection between the two
religious traditions
• The church-like mosque used to be the Roman temple of Jupiter, then the
Basilica of St. John. It’s where John the Baptist is buried, a holy place for
both Muslims and Christians.
“I’ve thought about that one often since. I’d never heard of it. I wouldn’t
have minded seeing it. Such a link.” A real cathemosdraquel, she
thinks. (79)
Religion & Ritual
• The Issa (Jesus)
Minaret is so called
because it was believed that
Jesus Christ, who is
considered a prophet in
Islam, will reappear at this
place shortly before the day
of judgment. The upper part
of the Minaret that can be
seen today was built in the
Ottoman period after the
earthquake of 1759, and
the lower part is from the
Memluk period.
Source: E. Claire Grimes, A guide to Damascus,
Avicenne Bookshop, 1997
Right: Issa Minaret
Lower: Umayyad mosque
Visibility and Power
• History seems, to Issa, to be very “Euro-centric” (or
centred around power/conquest).
• Issa’s writing could be seen as Afro-centric or Muslimcentric. But in a way, it is “people-centric”
• Issa contends that this sort of “forced invisibility”
means that people will inevitably protest.
• He’s interested in providing the stories of the
conquered/those whose history was
subsumed/disappeared by power.
• He makes visible what was invisible, thusly shifting the
power structures. He also challenges the manner in
which power makes itself “invisible.”
Censorship/Disappearance
• The TRC Reports are read by Kagiso
• Huge chunks of information are omitted/blacked-out
– “…it strikes him that, more than a decade later, he has still not
managed to fill in all the gaps inflicted upon him by a censorious
dictatorial regime. The books not read, music not heard, histories not
known… a part of his truthfully reconciled and liberated life.” (98)
– He feels that he is “a collection of blank spaces, defined more by what
I don’t know, than by what I do” (99)
• This seems to be a recent revelation to Kagiso – yet this
is what has been driving Issa all along (i.e.: his
rebellion, and desire to know history as it actually
happened)
– Issa seems to be a more intellectualized version of this
• Forget about maps. They don’t show things as they are. Asmara is
in Eritrea. …That’s because it’s still a dream. Maps don’t show
dreams either. Only nightmares. (59)
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Kagiso recollects his friend saying this of the TRC
– “A stage-managed whitewash… and Tutu wants us to ‘close the
chapter on our past’, with this? When it castrates our leaders
and diminishes our suffering…” (94)
• Truth and Reconciliation Committee
Abandonment/ Disappearance
• SA citizens often turned up missing → TRC
• SA citizens often abandoned their families to
attempt to move up (racially/socially) during
Apartheid or due to political agendas
• Issa abandons his family for his politics
– “Issa lifted a rucksack onto his back and made for the
front door, determined to defy Ma Vasinthe… Issa swung
around and started running toward the back door… [was]
carried away in an expensive motorcade of defiant
resistance.” (102-3)
• Issa abandons his manuscript/thesis
– “By the time the waiter turns around… his eyes settling on
the empty seat in the corner behind the mashrabeya
screen, the wound-up pipe, the serviette, folded neatly
next to the empty glass the abandoned manuscript, Issa
has already slipped through the door”(71-2)
We can control people by controlling
their access to information
• “I did not want anybody to know that I could
read. I half consciously realized even then that
this was the dangerous moment. I was safe so
long as I could not read,” – Graham Greene
(Shukri, 73)
• People disappear and no one knows what
happened to them – total lack of information
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Rebellion/ Subversion of
Authority
Allusions to (often
Issa’s) Pink Floyd’s The Wall
album
– Seems as though this would be a banned album, part of
the “music not heard”
– Heavy subversion of authority theme
“Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone”
“all in all you’re just another brick in the wall”
School? I’m sorry, Ma, but if you mean that bigoted white
liberal bourgeois nest you send us to every day, you can
forget it (102)
But I like deserts Teacher. …They’re deserts of water. And
‘the desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped’. (57)
• Influence of multiple rock songs/albums including
Purple Rain Prince and the Revolution
– the song Purple Rain is a symbol for heaven/the afterlife
• Issa’s political activism (righteousness) and
subsequent unexplained disappearance alluded to
via these references
– “… he recognized Issa, stained purple, staring at him from
among his purple comrades.” (82)
Barriers/Walls
• Barriers have long been used as a means to
keep people powerless, by limiting where they
can go, what they can do, and with whom
they can interact.
• There seem to be many barriers in the novel,
both real, physical barriers and metaphorical
barriers.
• What are some of the barriers you noticed?
Were they overcome? How?
Contradictions and Perspectives
• This book operates on analyses and comparisons of many
contradictions inherent in history
– “A thesis that started out as history now reads like current affairs,” –
Issa (Shukri, 67) – he feels this is also a moment of encounter in which
a group will be depicted as violent, brutal, or barbaric because there is
a resource this invading company wants (Jayawardane).
– The “silent minaret” – “At home, minarets declare God’s greatness five
times a day, but here they stand silent like blacked-out lighthouses,” –
Issa (Shukri, 76) … and the concept of the mosque in Durban that is so
close to the cathedral that they almost seem like one building
(cathemosdraquel) - he’s constantly emphasizing that the three main
religions build on each other’s history, and it is a holy land for all of
them.
– “What sort of society makes sentences out of such disparate words?” –
Issa talking about words like “riot gear, metal battering ram, mosque;
children, refuge, deportation…) (Shukri, 88)