Abstract
Leila Aboulela’s novel, Minaret (2005), provides authentic and rich content to explore the Muslim Arab woman’s struggle over creating a modern yet religiously traditional identity. The conceptual framework of Victor Turner’s liminality and Homi Bhabha’s hybridity and the third space are applied in order to frame the analysis of this struggle and to show that the veil is a metaphor for the Arab woman’s positive and negative experiences. In Minare t, the protagonist, Najwa, experiences a sense of in-betweenness or liminality through crises, transitions, and resolutions of secular and religious lives. The different hybrid identities and efforts Najwa makes to come to terms with her developing Muslim identity is discussed, particularly through her and the women around her who choose to wear the veil and modest, rather than revealing, clothing. Together, these form our analysis of the Muslim Arab woman’s struggle to be Muslim through wearing the veil while living in Britain. The veil in this novel is furthermore symbolic of traditional Islamic culture and represents the struggle to be religiously faithful despite being surrounded by non-Muslims or non-practising Muslims. This then provides the means of understanding individual mobility, empowerment, and agency through which liminality is successfully negotiated in order to achieve a hybrid identity of Eastern and Western cultures. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/GEMA-2014-1403-16
Highlights
The novel, Minaret (2005), by Leila Aboulela provides a contrast to dominant Western discourses on Islam regarding Arab women‟s experiences and identities
The novel depicts a sympathetic view of immigrant Muslim communities and Islamic lifestyles through illustrations of the veil and Islam and how the female protagonist, Najwa, goes through stages and transitions characteristic of liminality in order to achieve a hybrid identity that is modern in Western terms, but firmly Muslim through the wearing of the veil
Leila Aboulela‟s Minaret provides the reader with an opportunity to explore how the veil is a metaphor or trope whose diversity can only be understood by unpacking the lived experiences of the Arab Muslim woman in the West
Summary
The novel, Minaret (2005), by Leila Aboulela provides a contrast to dominant Western discourses on Islam regarding Arab women‟s experiences and identities. The veil speaks to the positive, negative, and in-between experiences that Muslim women confront in their continuous effort to shape their identities as modern and respectable women of faith Whether she wears the veil or not, its presence or absence suggests a dense web of meanings that often change over time. Throughout the novel Minaret, Aboulela focuses on the varying aspects of the veil as a literary strategy to engage the hegemonic as well as patriarchal discourse regarding the veil, as well as the focus of Islamic treatise post-9/11 The analyses of this novel will provide examples of veiled women in the United Kingdom, namely in London, in order to stress the importance of religion as faith and its role in the experiences of transculturation and interfaith relations of Muslim women in the West. This cultural hybridity is described as a mixture of traditional Arab homeland culture and the new culture of the protagonist‟s adopted British homeland
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