Researching the Muslim Diaspora: Towards Developing New Approaches of Reading

Abstract

This paper discusses the current postgraduate level research into the corpus of Muslim Diaspora at the School of Language Studies and Linguistics which reflects the increasing interests into the corpus by students from within and outside the country. The first research focuses on minority Muslim women writers who reside in different host countries: Standing Alone by Indian American, Asra Q. Nomani, We are a Muslim, Please by Pakistani British, Zaiba Malik and The Land of Invisible Strangers by Pakistani British, Qanta A. Ahmed. In these narratives, the Muslim women's selves often face competing binary discourses of Islam and the West/Orientalism. The second research is on three Iranian diasporic memoirs – Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Marina Nemat's Prisoner of Tehran. The study explores how these memoirists play the role of a native informer for imperialism by presenting Iranian Muslims as the Other while presenting discourses that justify the ‘war on terror’ under the guise of women's rights. The final study explores how resistance and nature appear to coexist throughout the twenty-six years of the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish's diasporic writing life. The study synthesizes Darwish's modes of colonialist resistance and in doing so, forge an eco-resistance conceptual framework as a lens for reading resistance in Muslim diasporic writers’ works. The range of researches showcased here illustrates the diversity of issues vis-a-vis the representations of Muslims in diasporic fiction in the West. Each conceptual framework developed towards examining the individual research corpus, as shown in these theses-in-progress, establishes new approaches of reading, elicited from the contexts of the situations that give rise to the production of the texts under scrutiny.