Jewish Muslims in The Handsome Jew and Don’t Leave Me Here Alone: Conversion, Identity, and Liminality

Abstract

The present article addresses the complex interplay of boundaries, belonging, and modes of identity and investigates the space between the distinct boundaries of religious identities. It focuses on the Jewish Muslim identity as it defies categorization and plays out in the liminal space of the Jewish Muslims, a space of fluid and blurred contours, haunted by ancestral religion and inherited culture, and obsessed by a crucial need to reconstruct a new sense of self. The article explores these concepts by referring to two narrative works: Ali Al-Muqri’s The Handsome Jew and Ihsan Abdel Quddous’s Don’t Leave Me Here Alone, which extensively elaborate on the relationship between conversion, identity, and liminality. It argues that Jewish Muslims stay within a liminal space due to their inability to forget their past and assimilate into the present, and that a non-binary Jewish Muslim subject lives in a place that borders the Jewish and Muslim spaces but never crosses into either position completely. The study aims to investigate discourses, as presented in the two texts under discussion, that construct boundaries between individuals of different religious affiliations and the motives for such constructions, and it tries to demonstrate the extent to which liminality can be used as an apt metaphor to define the life of Jewish converts to Islam.