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Representations of September 11 in news media, film, and literature that emerged in the first few years after the event tended to restate and reaffirm the centrality of the West. Rather than negotiating the world's most significant bifurcation along East-West lines in the post-Cold War period, to date the subject of most prominent 9/11 representations have overwhelmingly-and in many ways understandably-been the traumatized western subject whose aim is to recover, as opposed to transform, the confidence of a pre-9/11 era. In the midst of what many are now characterizing as an emergent 9/11 industry, the late John Updike's penultimate novel, Terrorist, struck a new and significant note. Terrorist signals the attempt on the part of one of America's most well known and prolific writers to confront the complexities of the relations between Islam and the US in the wake of 9/11. In so doing he self-consciously explores the discourse on morality-the subterranean economy of much post-9/11 reflection-as the clash of monotheistic religions.
"Islam" has long been, as Edward Said explains in the opening chapter of Covering Islam, "news" (2-79). Well before September 11 a monolithic "Islam"-the focal point of this so-called clash-has served as a watchword for violence and terrorism in the western media. In fact, the attacks on New York and Washington, DC, have in some ways opened up a more serious and nuanced discussion of this longtime object of fascination for the western imagination; that a serious writer like Updike has claimed ground largely dominated since 9/11 by the mainstream media marks a progression from the Orientalist depictions of Islam particularly prevalent in the public spheres of the US and Britain. Just how far Updike's Terrorist actually travels from this all-too-familiar territory will be the focus of this essay.
Though, as I show, aspects of Terrorist's treatment of Islam- in particular, its exploration of the relationship between faith and violence-are problematic, the novel nonetheless in large part refuses the national triumphalism that underpins much post-9/11 reflection in the US. By attending to the ethnic as well as the religious positioning of Terrorist's central protagonist, I argue that Updike rejects the temptation to consolidate the presumption of American unity and innocence that has formed the popular horizon for understanding the 2001 attacks. Thus, contrary...