Mohja Kahf Research Articles

Indigeneity Buried, Then Unearthed, in Mohja Kahf’s “Fayetteville as in Fate” and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Indigeneity Buried, Then Unearthed, in Mohja Kahf’s “Fayetteville as in Fate” and <i>The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf</i>

Postcolonial Ecologies and Postcolonial Ecofeminism in the Poetry of Mohja Kahf

Postcolonial Ecologies and Postcolonial Ecofeminism in the Poetry of Mohja Kahf

A Response to Mohja Kahf

A Response to Mohja Kahf

Deconstructing Borders: Arab American Immigrants and Body Politics in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Deconstructing Borders: Arab American Immigrants and Body Politics in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Muslim Women and the Politics of Representation (2002)*

This paper examines the politics of knowledge production as it relates to Muslim women in western literary traditions and contemporary feminist writing, with a view to understanding the political, ideological, and economic mediations that have historically framed these representations. The meta-narrative of the Muslim woman has shifted from the bold queens of medieval literature to colonial images of the seraglio’s veiled, secluded, and oppressed women. Contemporary feminist writing and popular culture have reproduced the colonial motifs of Muslim women, and these have regained currency in the aftermath of 9/11.Drawing upon the work of Mohja Kahf, this paper begins by mapping the evolution of the Muslim woman archetype in western literary traditions. The paper then examines how some contemporary feminist literature has reproduced in new ways the discursive tropes that have had historical currency in Muslim women’s textual representation. The analysis is attentive to the ways in which the cultural production of knowledge about Muslim women has been implicated historically by the relations of power between the Muslim world and the West. *This article was first published in the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 19, no. 4 (2002): 1-22

Constructions of Masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa: Literature, Film, and National Discourse, edited by Mohja Kahf and Nadine Sinno

Constructions of Masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa: Literature, Film, and National Discourse, edited by Mohja Kahf and Nadine Sinno

The Portrayal of Islamophobia in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to investigate the Islamophobia discourse, and to examine the cause and effect to the characters in the in the novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. The study used qualitative approach and the results of this study are presented using a descriptive model. The case study approach was used in this study, and the theoretical framework which is used to analyzed the data was discourse anlaysis. The primary source of this study is Mohja Kahf’s novel entitled The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, which was pulblished in. The study finds several portrayal of Islamophobia through the narative of the novel and the characters dialog and act. This study discovered that Islamophobia may put victims in very stressful situations and can cause them to undergo identity crisis.Keywords: Anti-Islam, Discourse, Islamphobia, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Relocating a Torn Identity and Asserting the Right of the Oppressed to be Heard and Liberated in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Recently, there has been a rapid increase in the production of literary works written in English by female Arab writers who have brought more appreciation for the Arab women who are often perceived by the Western reader as exotic, eccentric and complex. The article deals with the 2006 novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf, a Syrian-American poet and novelist, which presents the reader with a new borderland area occupied by young Arab-American Muslim women. The novel condemns distorted images of Muslims in America by local media and US foreign policy. The article aims to show the way the protagonist Khadra attempts to relocate an identity which has been lost between home and abroad and between a radical Islam and discerning secularism. Kahf offers the Western reader a unique portrayal of Muslim women, having developed a subjectivity of their own. The article also aims to show that by disclosing the journey—searching for the identity—of Khadra, Kahf enables her to come to terms with both her Arab and American identities where she creates a new identity for herself in order to be accepted and established in America. The new attitude of Muslim-American women resonates with the author’s assertion of the right of the oppressed to be heard and liberated.

Diasporic Syrian women writers: stories of resilience and survival

ABSTRACT In 2020, Ghada Alatrash and Najat Abed Alsamad noted that, ‘Historically Syrians have written and spoken about exile in their literature, long before the Syrian war began in March of 2011 (p. 4). This paper brings together two Syrian women writers who straddle this epochal moment in Syrian history: Mohja Kahf and Ibtisam Tracy. It seeks to bridge the gap between these writers and to chart new trends in diasporic writing by Syrian women. It argues that bringing Kahf and Tracy into the same frame captures the complex diasporic positioning of contemporary Syrian women writers. This in turn offers new perspectives on transnational and postcolonial criticism, in particular by focusing on gendered resilience in the diaspora through the act of storytelling in solidarity. By bringing into discussion current socio-political issues presented by Syrian women, this paper seeks to challenge the dominant representations of Muslim/Arab women in general and Syrian women in particular.

Counter- Representational Discourse of Islam in Islamophobic States: The Case of Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in Tangerine Scarf (2006)

Anglophone Arab literature in general and women in specific witnessed unprecedented change in content and quantity after the Twin Tower collapse. The September attacks of the 2011 brought about great political, social, cultural changes to the situation of Arabs in the West and America in particular since it destabilized their sense of belonging and created an agony and hostility against them. The experiences of social, political, and cultural marginality shape Arab Women’s diaspora fiction which, in turn, attempts to produce a rhetoric of resistance to counter-balance discourses of hierarchies and cultural binaries (self/other, black/white man woman and so forth). In this respect, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), written by Arab American, Mohja Kahf, functions as a mirror which reflects on the image of Islam, the veil and Arab-Muslim identities in Islamophobic states. This paper, therefore, offers an investigation of how, in border zone, Mohja Kahf attempts to correct the fallacies vis-à-vis Islam and Muslim and negotiates journeys of displacement and dislocation that Arab immigrants may experience.

Aspects of multiculturalism in Mohja Kahf's E-mails from Scheherazade.

Aspects of multiculturalism in Mohja Kahf's E-mails from Scheherazade.

Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal

Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal

Constructions of Masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa , by Mohja Kahf and Nadine Sinno (eds.)

Constructions of Masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa , by Mohja Kahf and Nadine Sinno (eds.)

HERSTORY FEMALE IDENTITY: POSTMODERN FEMINIST REVISION OF FEMALE CHARACTERS IN ISLAMIC NARRATIVE IN MOHJA KAHF S HAGAR POEMS Aya ELBABLY

Contending with the re-reading and re-writing of history that has always excluded women from its grand narratives, postmodern feminist writers have always sought to revise canonical texts from a gynocentric perspective. Through their revisionary fiction, they aimed at challenging the subordinate, marginal and invisible position of the women characters in these texts. In place of the alleged objectivity of these accounts, postmodern feminist revisionist writers transform these ancient tales while employing female insight to re-narrate the story of humanity, yet through women’s perspective. Thus, they create new texts to challenge the fundamental gender stereotypes, namely the binary images generated by the ‘collective male fantasy’ of women as divine/demonic. This reclamation additionally shatters the imposed silence upon women, while granting these female characters the voice and agency they were denied. This paper demonstrates Mohja Kahf’s re-writing of the female characters, Hajar, Balqis and Zuleikha in her poetry collection Hagar Poems (2016). Kahf re-envisions the Islamic narrative by recollecting these women’s stories from a postmodern feminist revisionist perspective. Such re-appropriation of these female figures unsettles the traditional linear Islamic history that conventionally focuses on male characters and recreates these eminent women in new archetypal forms. In effect, this paper draws upon the critical theories of postmodernist revisionism, using Adrienne Rich’s seminal concept of ‘Re-vision’ and Alicia Ostriker’s feminist revisionist mythmaking theory, along with postmodern feminist historiography and in particular Linda Hutcheon’s theory of historiographic metafiction, in addition to Islamic feminism. Hence, the paper displays how Kahf recasts these notable women to create a dialogue between the past and the present. Her revisionary feminist re-narration renders a possible divergence to the patriarchal symbolic and problematizes the androcentric basis of history. Finally, the paper demonstrates how Kahf’s poetry reinforces modern Muslim women’s agency and enriches their subjectivity.

Thawrah Des Odalisques at the Matisse Retrospective

Odalisques feature prominently in western paintings of the secluded harem especially at the height of such paintings' popularity in the colonial nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Lewis, 2004). When a painter draws an Oriental odalisque, he is sure to draw an artistically scopophilic object. While indulging himself in his sensual art, this same painter exercises his masculine power to exploit the body of the woman whom the odalisque now represents. Noticeably, the presence of a harem odalisque, be it a presence in writing or in visual art, recalls the seminal The Arabian Nights, the mecca of odalisques' lovers; and its enchanting harems and harem women, on top of them is the arch-odalisque Scheherazad. It is drawing on the heritage of The Arabian Nights and its plethora of Orientalist images that the Arab American poet Mohja Kahf (b. 1967) is inspired to entitle both her poetry collection E-mails from Scheherazad (2003) and the poem under scrutiny in this paper “Thawrah des Odalisques at the Matisse Retrospective” (Kahf, 2003, pp. 64-69). In drawing on that heritage, Kahf, a writer who belongs to a racial minority and is a feminist herself, uses the renowned odalisques painted by the French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) as a mouthpiece that exposes the enduring Orientalist stereotypes and counterattacks them. Through Matisse's odalisques, Kahf narrates a story of how a past replete with misconceptions about the Orient and Oriental women continues to feed mainstream Western thought sabotaging the image of Arabs and Arab Americans (and the women among them in particular). It is in the heart of New York, one of the world's most modern cities, that those women-slaves of art inaugurate their revolution against the enduring stereotypes and liberate themselves.

Indiana as Islamistan: Mohja Kahf's The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Indiana as Islamistan: Mohja Kahf's The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Hagar’s Textual Agency: Diversifying Christian Womanist Sources of Interpretation

ABSTRACT In this article, I converse with two women – Muslim religious scholar, Aysha Hidayatullah and Arabic poet, Mohja Kahf – to constructively explore the story of Hajar/Hagar through an interreligious Christian womanist theological lens. In her classic work Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, womanist figurehead Delores Williams rightly highlights Middle-Eastern socio-religious culture in her exploration of Hagar’s story as a critical resource for Black women’s Christian religious thought. I continue in this interpretive vein by centreing contemporary scholastic reflection and poetic interpretation concerning Arabic women’s visibility and voice through the themes of water, abandonment, and wandering, ultimately illumining Hagar’s permanence; hers is a narrative always in accompaniment to Abraham’s.

Arab American Identity in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Dans cet article nous nous demandons comment l’identité se forme, comment elle se négocie et comment elle se transforme dans un contexte de diaspora et de migration. Ce questionnement prend place dans la fiction arabo-américaine de l’Amérique post-11 Septembre. Prenant pour objet d’analyse le roman The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf de Mohja Kahf, nous cherchons à souligner le rôle essentiel que joue le récit et la mise en récit pour comprendre comment l’identité est influencée et altérée dans un monde où le racisme et les discriminations contre les Arabes et les Musulmans se sont intensifiés.

Annotating The history of the Syrian uprising: poems by Mohja Kahf, introduced by the author

Annotating The history of the Syrian uprising: poems by Mohja Kahf, introduced by the author

Beyond the Veil: Exploring Muslim Women’s Multidimensional Identities in Laila Aboulela’s The Translator and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

The article presents a critical analysis of two novels by contemporary Arab Muslim women writers, Leila Aboulela and Mohja Kahf. The article examines how these authors critique, resist, and disrupt the hegemonic discourse that presents Muslim women as a monolithic and homogeneous category. In The Translator and The Girl in Tangerine Scarf respectively, the female protagonists’ religious experiences and identities are studied with reference to resistance narratives and disruptive postcolonial strategies. The unsettling of the monolithic image of veiled Muslim women is hereby pursued through providing an analysis of the cultural imagery of Muslim women, to deconstruct the image of the veil in today’s world.