Cosmopolitan Ethics and the Politics of Religious Identity in Leila Aboulela's Novels: an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

Leila Aboulela is a prolific Anglophone Muslim writer whose narratives inscribe in the postmodernist tradition of literary production. She engages with Muslim religious identity renegotiations in a transnational imaginary space. Literary critics consider her writings as an arduous write back to the underpinning discourses of Islamophobia, which gained momentum in the metropolitan cities of the West in the aftermath of 9/11. In doing so, Leila Aboulela overstresses the religious identity at the expense of other forms of affiliation and identity. In my thesis, I will invite philosophers of cosmopolitanism across disciplines to account for the inverse relationship between constructing religious identity and cosmopolitan ethics.