Routes, Roots, and Rihla: Cartography of Feminine Islam in Contemporary Anglophone Travel Narratives by Muslim Women from India

Abstract

Drawing on Anees Jung’s Night of the New Moon: Encounters with Muslim Women in India (1993) and Nighat Gandhi’s Alternative Realities: Love in the Lives of Muslim Women (2013), two contemporary anglophone travel narratives documenting the lives of Muslim women, the article explores the cartography of feminine Islam in the Indian subcontinent and argues that both authors, in mapping the geography of Muslim women, take inspiration from Rihla narratives, the medieval Islamic genre of travel literature. It explores how the generic esthetics of Adab-al-Rihla (travel literature) resonate with the esthetics employed by the authors in their “eye-witness” accounts of Muslim societies: how journeys in search of Muslim women bring the traveler close to Talib-e-’ilm (knowledge-seeker) of Rihla, how, through their discoveries, the authors reclaim the domain of knowledge production, how the narratives, by incorporating everyday and commonplace, along with ‘aa’jaib and nawadir (strange and rare), remediate sublimity of the genre, and how do the authors map secular and sacred in Muslim geographies raising questions about the spaces that women inhabit. Furthermore, it investigates how, by revealing the feminine, both texts contest the inherent masculinity of Rihla tradition and challenge the hegemonic narratives about women and lived Islam in the subcontinent.