Beyond the Veil: Exploring Muslim Women’s Multidimensional Identities in Laila Aboulela’s The Translator and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Nawel Meriem Ouhiba

doi:10.47631/ijecls.v2i5.340

Abstract

The article presents a critical analysis of two novels by contemporary Arab Muslim women writers, Leila Aboulela and Mohja Kahf. The article examines how these authors critique, resist, and disrupt the hegemonic discourse that presents Muslim women as a monolithic and homogeneous category. In The Translator and The Girl in Tangerine Scarf respectively, the female protagonists’ religious experiences and identities are studied with reference to resistance narratives and disruptive postcolonial strategies. The unsettling of the monolithic image of veiled Muslim women is hereby pursued through providing an analysis of the cultural imagery of Muslim women, to deconstruct the image of the veil in today’s world.

Highlights

After the 9/11terrorist attacks, Islam, as a religion in general, and Muslim women, in particular, were subjected to various form of abuse, stereotypes, and prejudices in the West
For many Muslim women, the veil is a synonym of identity; to others, it is a symbol of oppression, and to history, it is a reference to status
An important part of what can be called a self-conscious counter-representation is the paratexti of the novel, which, we argue, disrupts the familiar stereotypes of Muslim women

Summary

Introduction

After the 9/11terrorist attacks, Islam, as a religion in general, and Muslim women, in particular, were subjected to various form of abuse, stereotypes, and prejudices in the West. Attempting to explain how these fictional texts resist the often monolithic representations of Islam and Muslim women that pervade Western texts, the central argument in the paper is that Muslim women’s religious identities and experiences are complex and cannot be reduced to certain fixed stereotypes. Because these novels focused on the lives of Muslim women in the west the main concern of this research article is to depict and explore the contradictions and tensions that shape the Muslim women’s identities in the West. International Journal of English and Comparative Literary Studies, vol., no.5 (2021)

Muslim Women and Identity Construction

Islamic Feminism

The Veil as an Identity

Conclusion

Works Cited