A Personal Matter: The Memoirs of Sarfraz Manzoor, Yasmin Hai and Zaiba Malik as a response to 7/7

Miquel Pomar-Amer

doi:10.28914/Atlantis-2025-47.2.14

Authors

Miquel Pomar-Amer Universitat de les Illes Balears https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9423-2165

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2025-47.2.14

Keywords:

autobiography, affective response, British Muslim, British-Pakistani, diaspora, Islamophobia, terrorism

Abstract

The 2005 terrorist attack in London shook British multiculturalism to its foundations and meant a turning point in the relationship between British Muslims and the state. The actions of the four British-born bombers turned British Muslims, and British Pakistanis in particular, into suspects who needed to show their allegiance to British values. The memoirs by Sarfraz Manzoor, Yasmin Hai and Zaiba Malik emerge as attempts to reverse this twisted rhetoric and claim that Britishness and Islam are not incompatible. This article argues that the hostile media environment in the aftermath of 7/7 interpellated these three authors, journalists by profession, to publicly share their lives in order to become representatives of moderate British Muslims. Even though their memoirs devote few pages to discussing 7/7, their emotional response to this event acts as a catalyst for the writing process itself.

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Author Biography

Miquel Pomar-Amer, Universitat de les Illes Balears

Miquel Pomar-Amer is a senior lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands, where he teaches English Language and Literatures. He completed his PhD on British-Pakistani and Catalan-Moroccan texts at the University of Manchester. His main research interest deals with the representation of identity in literature, especially in postcolonial contexts of migration and diaspora, on which he has published several articles and book chapters. He is currently exploring a corpus of romantic novels by female writers of Pakistani descent.

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