Within the Hybrid Imagination: Muslim Women's Agency after 9/11 in Laila Halaby’s once in a Promised Land

Abstract

In literary imaginations, Muslim women are frequently portrayed as disempowered, oppressed, and devalued by Muslim men, submissive to their husbands with no equal rights, utterly neglected by their parents and mistreated as daughters-in-law, and, most notably, always kept at home and under the veil of ignorance. Some Muslim authors, however, strayed from these Orientalist, neo-Orientalist, and postcolonial depictions of Muslim women. Islamophobia escalated after the September 11 attacks, resulting in Muslims being exposed to othering, profiling, discrimination, and physical and verbal abuse. The post-9/11 public power discourse and Islamophobic social rhetoric that accompanied the War on Terrorism produced a narrative of destroying terrorism, instituting democracy, and freeing burqa-clad Muslim women from patriarchal and religious restrictions. After 9/11, the fictional works of Western authors propagated negative preconceptions of Islam and Muslims. This portrayal intentionally eliminated any prospective Muslim female characters, so developing and endorsing the non-entity persona of Muslim women who have little place, position, and role in the public arena, and are therefore not worth depicting. In contrast, Muslim authors presented the flip side of the coin to contradict this widespread misunderstanding and stereotyping of Muslims and Islam. This research paper investigates the portrayal of Muslim women in post-9/11 literature, giving special reference to the novel Once in a Promised Land by Laila Halaby.