Religion and Feminism in the Short Story of Alifa Rifaat—The Voice of the “Voiceless”

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to bring to the foreground a better understanding and appreciation of the work and impact of an Arab Muslim woman writer whose work, characters, thoughts, settings, and words sink very sensitively into the depth of being of her oriental women characters. They are very local and they reflect a typical oriental and distinct religious sentiment, along with an underlying predicament or suffering because of some lack in their love life, both emotional and sexual. This paper will attempt to analyze how the short story written by Alifa Rifaat (1987) deal with the thorny issues of religiosity and sexuality that might appear as two opposing poles, yet they mix and blend within same characters exposing different aspects of the human being living within dilemmas of personal needs and social dictates of tradition, taboo, and culture. For a non Arab reader, this should be an interesting and informative cross-cultural issue.