Pluralism, Religion, and Democratic Culture

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.