Khan and Qureshi contend that, while Hosseini shows some Pashtun men to be “constructive-minded” and “matchlessly helpful to the needy,” he “exaggerates in misrepresenting” the Taliban as in the character of Rasheed so that, because the novel is narrated “from female perspective,” it is “biased” and “discriminatory” (392, 395, 396, 397). In such a reading, Hosseini’s work does not reveal representative conditions; the critics might be more pleased with a novel that shows the Taliban and their male adherents opposing any form of violence or discrimination against women. Further attacks of this kind on Hosseini’s work can easily be found (see also our chapter 1.1.2.). Yet Sarah O’Brien from a very different reading sees in Hosseini’s fiction “a sometimes problematic subversion of post-9/11 New Orientalist stereotypes” (4).
21 Tahira Khan places “the prescribed socio-cultural norms” first: a lower-class and economically dispossessed man retains honor as long as “the women in his family remain in his control”; honor-related violence occurs, too, in upper classes, with “more ‘sophisticated’ and modern” weapons (66).
22 Writing for “Dutch, Belgian, European readers” (Braun), Abdolah sums up his intentions by stating that he is specifically addressing “my Dutch, Belgian, German and American readers, since it would not even have been necessary for an Iranian audience. I take my readers by the hand and let them peek behind the curtain” (Braun).
23 Tahar Ben Jelloun, too, has been the target of scathing attacks, as we will discuss further below (see chapter 1.1.3.).
24 There are further aspects to the debate about Mo Yan: Xue Wei discusses the writer in the context of Western promotion of authors who “criticize the Chinese government,” quoting the Nobel chairman’s award ceremony speech (109). From another perspective, Duran and Huang highlight the “sustained crosscultural gazes” on Mo Yan, which result in enabling the “instantiation of a brave, significant, critical, communally constructed connection of East and West” (15–16).
25 Elif Shafak explains in an interview with Le magazine littéraire, “Fiction for me does not mean telling my own story to other people. Just the opposite. It means putting myself in the shoes of others, making endless journeys to other people’s realities and dreams. In fiction it is essential to transcend the limits of Self. […] Sometimes I think I am full of multiple voices.” As for Shafak’s work, we can read it as exposing a fallacy within the “real”: she partly adapts to but also counters “the dominant discourses in Turkey as well as in the western world, and offers changeable perspectives to confront on the one side the hedonist and consumer reality in which many Western European readers are living today, and on the other side the polarised, patriarchal and nationalist reality in Turkey” (Heynders 164). In this way Shafak’s fiction, its “[n];arrative articulation and representation help to imagine and understand social ‘events’,” to prompt “intercultural consciousness” (Heynders 179). It is also useful to be aware of Shafak’s social and academic orientation: “To me, it is very important, both the theory and practise of feminism” (“Ten”). This is not too different from Orhan Pamuk, who has said he “wouldn’t refuse” the designation feminist: “I strongly believe that I’m representing the truth about the repression of the woman in Turkey – and in an honest way” (Bednarz and Pieper).
26 As Longo argues from the perspective of sociology, agreeing with Jerome Bruner, literary narrative exemplifies singular happenings which assume “the features of a more general type,” with events and actors “in their emblematic dimension” so that the description is “useful to explain other contexts and actions” (50).
27 From Magona’s following statement it becomes clear that she is mainly writing for a White audience: “I am a black woman and I am writing from a black woman’s perspective. The gatekeepers to publication are white people. Yet if a white person writes about black people, who will pick up the errors?” (Salo).
28 See also Steppat and Krause. As for teleopoiesis with its evoking of both completion and distance, as re-imagined by Spivak, it would require working through the Other, aiming toward a future with and through that distant Other, while retaining a certain doubt whether the gap can actually be bridged. If that should involve a perceived spreading of Western value notions, the prospect might possibly be feared to convert the addressee “en refoulé” (Derrida, Politiques 198).
29 Attridge reminds us that “the mere fact of a text’s changing the subject who reads it does not signal an inventive work and a creative reading,” as the advertising industry’s products also rely on texts to change recipients’ behavior (Singularity 85). It is “creative reading” of inventive works that is able to “introduce into the culture the hitherto unthinkable” (85).
30 Khalid reports the advice of Mufti Naeem Ashraf from Karachi: “Religious scholars can tell their congregation that Islam forbids killing a human being. […] NGOs should move forward and work with ulema.”
31 See Baker et al. on an “inherently individualistic component of family honor” and a shift of the enforcement role “from natal family members to individual men” (174); also: the individual Western man is “both judge and executioner” (179). Négar Djavadi in Désorientale presents the West as “bereft of a closer, vital sense of unmediated community”; Western democracies do not “provide the humanity that binds one individual life to another, that sustains an individual and a community through private or shared trauma” (Provata-Carlone).
32 For such a context, see also for instance the sketchy surveys by Goldstein in 2002 (29) or Muhammad in 2010 (16–18) or Kiener in 2011. As the secondary sources, including scholarly analyses, show not only considerable divergence but sometimes also dubious statements, we believe it is necessary to take pains to be as meticulous (or even fussy) as possible in identifying authentic records for such a highly sensitive subject. Fiske and Rai in 2015, for instance, assert that the Trojan War in The Iliad “should conclude in an honor killing” in light of “the prescribed violence by Menelaus against Helen” (88), yet this lacks evidence unless one consults later sources in various genres. In another instance, according to Taylor in 2008 the theme of wife killing in Spanish drama “first came to prominence” in 1631 (2), yet there are notable earlier dramas. Other such cases can be easily found. We need to test the evidence for James Bowman’s hypothesis that “even in classical times, I believe, the Western honor culture showed signs of its later instability and collapse” (45). We should also note the assessment that “considering the history of Roman rape laws helps put into context the rape laws of other modern legal systems which might still be primarily based in the honor/shame system and its relation to sexual gender roles” (Nguyen 112). What is more, Churchill (264–71) suggests promoting an alternative model of masculinity based on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book 4 and Marcus Aurelius’s stoic Meditations. Yet we do not wish to forget that “[t];he kind of critique that a politically alert cultural analysis can usefully bring to bear on traditions cannot cleanly disentangle itself from the cultural fabric in which the critique is embedded” (Bal, “Zwarte” 140–41; Travelling 246).
