Word: kureishi
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Back in the early 1990s, when Kureishi first started going to extremist London mosques for research for The Black Album, scribbling down notes at Friday sermons was weirdo stuff indeed. Today, with London still scarred from the 2005 bombings by British-born terrorists and the far-right British National Party winning seats in recent European parliamentary elections, the novel seems spookily prescient. Though its themes of radical faith and alienation endure, Kureishi's mosque visits didn't. One Friday, he recalls, the mullah at a mosque in London's East End warned that "there are spies and journalists...
...Kureishi has been attracting controversy since his Oscar-nominated screenplay for 1985's My Beautiful Laundrette, about a young, gay British-Pakistani making it - and making out - in Thatcherite London. The discovery that he could shake things up was wonderfully liberating, particularly for the son of a Bombay intellectual stuck commuting from a dreary London suburb to work as a civil servant in the Pakistani embassy. "My parents' generation were immigrants, who nobody noticed, and who didn't want to be noticed," he says. "Then came my generation." The boy who was called "Pakistani Pete" by a teacher for whom...
Where Rushdie, by now a friend, used baroque language to spin fantastical tales spanning continents and centuries, Kureishi stayed street. His father figures were faded and refined - dusty relics from a more gracious time who looked to literature or socialism to block out the cold realities of being foreign-born in 1970s Britain. Their sons weren't Pakistanis but "Pakis," who snorted coke, fornicated and embraced the Thatcherite dream of making money fast. "When I was in school, the long-standing stereotype of the South Asian male was of the studious nerd, who was going straight to an enviable university...
...Kureishi is a tidy man, his shirt buttoned, his gray curls - and his sentences - clipped. He was "very pleased and flattered" by his CBE and extols a recent stint teaching at Yale as "very comfy." But his spot in the cultural establishment is proof that his revolution succeeded. He's about to start on the screenplay of The White Tiger, the Booker Prize winning novel by Indian author (and occasional TIME contributor) Aravind Adiga. That a story about a poor Indian hustling his way in Bangalore sold millions of copies all over the world, notes Kureishi, shows that post-colonial...
Bart Moore-Gilbert, professor of post-colonial literature at London's Goldsmiths College and author of a book on Kureishi, places the writer in the tradition of Dickens and H.G. Wells, with their "old-fashioned concern with the condition of England." Especially when that condition changes. Kureishi says the Muslims his sons go to school with aren't attracted by extremism. Islam is "what it was for people when I was a kid - a quarter of their lives," he says. "You're a soccer fan, you go shopping, watch TV and you're a Muslim." The England Kureishi chronicles - indeed...