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Apparently Brick Lane’s Bengali community doesn’t think much of Monica Ali’s novel, Brick Lane. Although the makers of a film adaption of the novel have now agreed not to capture the story in those streets, some of the protestors are still threatening to burn the book in public if filming goes ahead. The disgruntled claim that the book insults their community in Shoreditch, East London. For one thing, they argue, it is written by someone not even from the area.

The thing is — and forgive me — Brick Lane is a novel, a work of fiction. I guess the culture of protest concerns me because I have been working on two novels of my own for quite some time, each of them containing characters framed in both positive and negative light and who come from different communities. In the first novel, for example, one of the main protagonists is Christian… but, look, I’m Muslim…

I guess my concerns come down to this: How do Muslim authors write for a non-Muslim audience without being accused of being propagandists? Is our audience mature enough to consider our words impartially? If my writing contains a Muslim character who is a hero or a victim, will it be received as art in the making or as propaganda? Similarly, will I receive death threats from within our community because one Muslim character happens to be portrayed in a negative light? I fear minority writing is often judged through people’s existing prejudices and not on the basis of what is actually there.

What’s a writer to do? All of my characters are multi-faceted, you see the positive and the negative… reality reflected in art, but fiction at the end of the day. Must I prepare myself for the sight of my work going up in flames too? Welcome to our enlightened age.