The saint of Karachi
Media often report on the grim plight of Pakistan’s Christians, who make up just 1.5 percent of the country’s 200 million people. Long subject to mob attacks and discriminatory prosecutions, their situation has deteriorated in recent years with the rise of extreme Islamist factions.
Anyone looking for a serious or morally improving analysis of this story should absolutely not turn to Mohammed Hanif’s 2012 novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. But if you want a stunning exploration of very poor minority Christians living in a tumultuous and endemically violent setting, you could choose no better.
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti follows in the Swiftian satirical tradition. The world it depicts is raucous, anarchic, and (often) sexually explicit, marked by stratospheric levels of violence of all kinds, especially against women. Hanif’s maniacally comic tone barely conceals his seething rage at the sexual oppression he witnesses around him.
