“Velvet Jihad”: South Asian Muslim Women Writers Waging a Narrative War

Abstract

Faegheh Shirazi uses the term “Velvet Jihad,” borrowed from the 1989 anti-communist Velvet Revolution of the Czechs and Slovaks, to describe the connection between non-violent resistance and Muslim women activists living in the Muslim world. The Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin and the Pakistani writer Tehmina Durrani are also participating in this jihad. This essay analyzes Nasrin's autobiography My Girlhood and Durrani's novel Blasphemy in relation to the complex web of Islamic revivalism on three levels (textual interpretation, political ideology, and personal experience), the roles of the interpreters of Islam in perpetuating sexualized violence, and the position of women in patriarchal South Asia.