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This article locates Nadeem Aslam’s 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers within a European politico-legal argument about religious free expression under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, demonstrating the novel’s engagement with the norms and lived experience of democratic pluralism under pressure. Maps for Lost Lovers is an intervention into the public argument about pluralism and assimilation in the United Kingdom, a narrative that illuminates the prescriptive regimes and structuring epiphenomena of law in post-9/11 Britain. Maps is an agenda-setting narrativization of a legal regime, and specifically a richly textured and individuated account the failures of democratic pluralism and social relations within an incompletely secularized polity. Like Aslam’s other fiction, Maps for Lost Lovers seeks to cultivate those habits of thought that can lead to collective engagement and political change.

This chapter examines how novelists and poets explore the sacrificial reckonings of the ‘war on terror’ in terms of relations between faith (social and religious), sympathy, and bearing witness. It discusses Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and two books of poetry: Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs (2005). Both poems balance matters of aesthetics and ethics by comparing modes of bearing witness: watching spectacles of war through television, and testifying to responsibility for others’ lives. The chapter relates those to the contrasting kinds of sacrifice attributed to armed services personnel and jihadi ‘martyrs’. It then discusses how these modes of sacrifice and witnessing are examined in recent novels: Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man’s Garden (2013); Lorraine Adams’s The Room and the Chair (2010); and James Meek’s We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008).

Chapter 9 focuses on female imprisonment and on women’s confinement in patriarchy. The chapter starts with a consideration of real-life female imprisonment and its reflection in one literary example (Alice Walker’s The Color Purple). This is followed by a discussion of the panopticon metaphor in Angela Carter and Sarah Waters, analysing these authors’ feminist and lesbian takes on Foucault. A third section concentrates on domesticity and the body in so far as they are perceived as metaphorically confining, contrasting Susan Glaspell’s Trifles with Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers. A final section returns to Emily Dickinson and Glaspell, focusing on the predicament of the woman writer; it notes how the female artist can escape from the straitjacket of feminine decorum only by ending up in the role of another gynophobic stereotype: that of the hysteric or the madwoman.