Muslim Women’s Memoirs: Disclosing Violence or Reproducing Islamophobia?

Esmaeil Zeiny Jelodar,Noraini Md Yusof,Ruzy Suliza Hashim

doi:10.5539/ass.v10n14p215

Abstract

As an upshot of 9/11, the literary market in the West saw a proliferation in writings by and about Muslim women. Many of these works are memoirs which focus on Islam, a patriarchal society, and the state’s oppression on women. These Muslim women memoirists take the western readers into a journey of unseen and unheard events of their private lives which is apparently of great interest for the westerners. Some of these memoirs, which reveal the atrocities and hardships of living in a Muslim society under oppressive Islamic regimes, are fraught with stereotypes and generalizations. Utilizing Gillian Whitlock’s theory of ‘soft weapons’ and studying the concept of Islam in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003), we argue that some of these Muslim life narratives are manipulated to meet political demands of the West through creating Islamophobia.

Highlights

After the tragic event of 9/11, the American media became fraught with different kinds of discourses portraying atrocities and hardships of the Middle Easterners in Islamic societies
Utilizing Gillian Whitlock’s theory of ‘soft weapons’ and studying the concept of Islam in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003), we argue that some of these Muslim life narratives are manipulated to meet political demands of the West through creating Islamophobia
In some memoirs, these depictions are rarely truthful and realistic; they are, oftentimes, replete with stereotypes and generalizations. This unprecedented rise of memoir is a response to the western readers’ curiosity about the Middle East. The rise of this genre could be partly attributed to its promise to take the western readers into a journey of the writer’s private life of unheard and unseen events which is of a great interest for western readers to explore

Summary

Introduction

After the tragic event of 9/11, the American media became fraught with different kinds of discourses portraying atrocities and hardships of the Middle Easterners in Islamic societies. The authors of these memoirs, who promise to dismantle the outdated orientalism, reiterate the stereotypes of women suffering behind the veil imposed by the oppressive Islamic regime Their life stories are an amalgamation of twisted truths and fabricated events; at times, a memoir could be wholly concocted for political purposes of the West like the ‘honor-killing’ memoir of Norma Khouri’s Forbidden Love (2003). This recent flourishing of memoirs by Iranian women occurred concurrently with the United States fixation on Iran as part of the Bush administration’s project of ‘Axis of Evil’ and the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq which took place under the justification of humanitarian act of saving people, especially women residing under the oppressive Islamic regime (Rastegar, 2006) This new wave of Iranian women memoirs includes Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003), Persepolis: The Story of a Return (2004), and Embroideries (2005), Roya Hakakian’s Journey from the Land of No (2004), Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran (2005) and Marina Nemat’s Prisoner of Tehran (2007) just to name a few. Satrpi (2003) claims that she has written the memoir to dispel the stereotypes of the Orient and dismantle the outdated Orientalist myths

Persepolis and Its Reception in the West

Persepolis

Conclusion