Muslim Fiction Research Articles

Capitalist modernity and gendered subalternity in contemporary Muslim fiction: Saudi Women in Raja Alem’s Fatma: A Novel of Arabia (2002)

ABSTRACT Contemporary Muslim women’s writing can help to shed light on how the ostensibly incommensurate relationship between the conditions of women’s lives and gendered forms of social reproduction in modern Muslim societies are intimately connected with the uneven development of capitalist modernity, especially in oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia. This paper traces the ways in which gendered forms of social reproduction and patriarchal oppression are mediated but also contested in the form of a text from modern Saudi Arabia: Raja Alem’s Fatma A Novel of Arabia. It considers how this novel combines elements of magic, fantasy, and realism to foreground how the oppression of Muslim women and their relegation to a position of gendered subalternity is a crucial determinant in the combined and uneven development of petro-capitalist modernity in the modern Muslim world. By drawing on Sufism in a modern narrative of so-called magical realism, the novel, I argue, contests gender roles in contemporary capitalist modernity by offering a view that stems from the Islamic tradition but does not align with patriarchy and capitalist ideology; on the other hand, it registers the coexistence of the religious and the magical within the modern world.

Britain Through Muslim Eyes: An interview with Claire Chambers

Claire Chambers is a senior lecturer in global literature at the University of York. She is the author of Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780–1989 (2015) and British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers (2011). She edited (with Caroline Herbert) Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora (2014). In this 2017 interview with Anastasia Valassopoulos, she discusses her exploration of literary representations of Muslims in Britain and South Asia, and her engagement with audiences and scholars in that field. She also discusses her current writing and reflects on sources such as the Making Britain archive that have helped to shape her current work. Finally, Claire explores crucial questions around liberalism and contemporary multicultural politics.

“Qabbani versus Qur’an”: Arabism and the Umma in Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus

Abstract In The Road from Damascus (2008), Syrian-British writer Robin Yassin-Kassab’s debut novel, the protagonist describes “the opposing camps of [his] childhood,” as narratives of “Qabbani versus Qur’an” (56). While Sami’s father idolises the pan-Arabist poet Nizar Qabbani and supports the Syrian regime despite its repressive policies, Sami’s mother, disillusioned with nationalist ideology, turns instead to faith, offering her son a “different mythology” based on “the adventures of God’s messengers” (53). Tracing Sami’s negotiations of these seemingly opposed inherited narratives, Yassin-Kassab’s novel examines the lingering impact of pan-Arabism and the alternatives offered by Islamic frameworks. While critics have previously approached this novel as part of a growing corpus of British Muslim fiction, in this essay, I focus more closely on the novel’s interrogation of Arab nationalism. As I will show, Yassin-Kassab’s novel unfolds as a series of ideological disillusionments that chart the protagonist’s confrontation with the failure of nationalist politics. Inviting the reader to follow the protagonist’s successive conversions and de-conversion from various forms of nationalism, Yassin-Kassab’s representation of the polarisation between “Qabbani versus Qur’an” poses the question of how one might find alternatives beyond such restrictive dichotomies, dramatizing the inadequacies of political vision in the Arab world today.

Qur’an and the ‘Divine Writ’: Islam in the ‘Writing Process’ of Contemporary British Muslim Fiction

Qur’an and the ‘Divine Writ’: Islam in the ‘Writing Process’ of Contemporary British Muslim Fiction

Exploring Representations of Self by Diasporic Muslim Writers

This paper highlights four completed graduate research projects conducted at the School of Language Studies and Linguistics in the area of Muslim identity in fiction. The four writers chosen are Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Randa Abdel-Fattah, Ethiopian-Yemeni Mohamad Abdul Wali, Greek-American Jamilah Kolocotronis and Afghani-American Khalid Hosseini. These writers are part of the ever growing diasporic Muslim canon that continues to explore issues of self and the politics of diaspora. The discussion investigates each writer's representation of the Muslim Self with themes which include confronting identity crisis of a minority adolescent, challenging the fractured identity of a minority migrant, defying religious identity representation of a revert, and exoticizing identity of the Muslim landscape. In conclusion, we contend that the Muslim fiction writers problematize the issue of identity of Muslims in the world today given their heterogeneous landscapes and social/cultural contestations.

British Muslim Fictions?

British Muslim Fictions?

Hijab Scenes: Muslim Women, Migration, and Hijab in Immigrant Muslim Literature

A great deal of literature by and about Muslim immigrants has been written during the last decade; these texts constitute a growing field of interest and inquiry. This is undoubtedly a result of a cultural climate that hungers for insight into Muslim communities and Islam. Because is currently still considered foreign to America, much of the literature can be considered immigrant fiction. It is no surprise, then, that Muslim fiction tends to adhere to the general narrative trends of immigrant writings: to establish a coherent identity characters must negotiate the difference between the world and the one. Generally, authors choose between depictions of assimilation, acculturation, or cultural hybridity. This negotiation is of course influenced by cultural climate. Narratives that espouse retaining difference and cultural exchange do not work well when the cultural climate requires that the audience be unified against a common enemy. In these situations, narratives that present a trajectory of assimilation are more acceptable because assimilation, in these situations, is related to allegiances. The current anti-Islam/anti-Muslim political and cultural climate in America complicates the choice between expressing Muslim otherness and assimilating. Furthermore, since is considered foreign, Muslim writers are left with very few choices in terms of content. The current trends in fiction about immigrant Muslims seem to fall into two categories: fiction that focuses on culture and assimilation, rather than religion, and fiction that focuses on the oppressive nature of religion and assimilation. (1) In either case, readers witness the opposition of the old world and the new. When the literature focuses on religion, religion is treated as a culture that needs to be left behind because it does not correlate with being American. When is considered solely a cultural affiliation, narratives of immigration become bifurcated along gender lines. Immigrant narratives that focus on religion have the potential to follow the same patterns as normative immigration novels. However, when Muslim women are placed at the center of these oppositions, the patterns are revised. The oppositions become stauncher--and the divisions between us and them are relied upon more heavily. becomes the religion of the other and the culture from which women need to be liberated. In these narratives, women are held accountable for both religious and cultural traditions of the old country. This trend correlates with many immigrant stories (fictional and real) because women are often assigned the role of bearers of cultural values, carriers of traditions, and symbols of the community (Moghadam 4), meaning that women are often compelled to assume the burden of the reproduction of the group (Moghadam, qtd. in Kopp 69). But when is conflated with cultural practices and is seen as oppressive, the female protagonists must consider compromising both religion and culture to incorporate themselves into American society. However, immigrant narratives by Muslim women who choose to veil fall in a different category because their bodies cannot escape being marked as and they, therefore, cannot reach the endpoint of being fully incorporated into American society. In these texts, women who wear hijab, by virtue of their adherence to a practice that is clearly not American, can never construct a narrative in which comfortable assimilation is the denouement. As a result, immigrant Muslim women who veil must create a new genre that defies the demands American culture places on conformity. This article focuses on the image of the veil as the most visible marker of [difference] (Ahmed 152) between veiled Muslim women and the world. As Leila Ahmed writes, Veiling--to Western eyes ... became the symbol now of both the oppression of women (or, in the language of the day, Islam's degradation of women) and the backwardness of Islam (152). …