Capitalist modernity and gendered subalternity in contemporary Muslim fiction: Saudi Women in Raja Alem’s Fatma: A Novel of Arabia (2002)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Contemporary Muslim women’s writing can help to shed light on how the ostensibly incommensurate relationship between the conditions of women’s lives and gendered forms of social reproduction in modern Muslim societies are intimately connected with the uneven development of capitalist modernity, especially in oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia. This paper traces the ways in which gendered forms of social reproduction and patriarchal oppression are mediated but also contested in the form of a text from modern Saudi Arabia: Raja Alem’s Fatma A Novel of Arabia. It considers how this novel combines elements of magic, fantasy, and realism to foreground how the oppression of Muslim women and their relegation to a position of gendered subalternity is a crucial determinant in the combined and uneven development of petro-capitalist modernity in the modern Muslim world. By drawing on Sufism in a modern narrative of so-called magical realism, the novel, I argue, contests gender roles in contemporary capitalist modernity by offering a view that stems from the Islamic tradition but does not align with patriarchy and capitalist ideology; on the other hand, it registers the coexistence of the religious and the magical within the modern world.