Tangerine Scarf Research Articles

Towards a Feminist Debate of Religion-Related Violence in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

This article aims at exploring Kahf’s feminist and intellectual critical position of masculine Islam, fundamentalist Islam, and their agencies that operate within Arab and Arab American societies to engender physical and structural violence against women, and hinder a harmonious relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim people, as reflected in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf . My arguments regarding Kahf’s communication of these forms of Islam will be developed in light of Arab (Muslim) feminists such as Leila Ahmad, Fatima Mernessi, Mai Ghoussoub, among others. Said’s views, in Covering Islam , about Islam in Western consciousness, together with liberal Muslim scholars, such as John Eposito and Amber Hague, will be also consulted in my analysis.

Identity Malaise of Exiled Characters in Ethnic Fiction Case Study: Mohja Kahf’s the Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006)

This paper presents a critical study of how a contemporary ethnic writer presents exile cases and counter-hegemonic discourses throughout it as regards to notions of belonging and identity. The process of identity-making is discussed through an examination of the protagonist’s development in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006). This study focuses on how the protagonist constructs a new meaning of exile that challenges previous conventions and seeks to recuperate the sense of pride in cultural difference. It also attempts to highlight how this literary work is a counter-narrative regarding the cultural practices that hitherto have been regarded as archaic; backward; and yet fit to adapt the new changes of the Western World.

Conjunctures of the “New” World Literature and Migration Studies

Abstract The essay explores the overlapping discourses in the fields of the “new” world literature and the “new” migration studies, with a focus on their related discourses of circulation and cosmopolitanism. It examines the transnational circulation of writers in addition to texts in twenty-first century world literature with specific discussions of the cosmopolitan treatment of religion in the work of selected diasporic Muslim women writers, featuring Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul and Mohja Kahf’s E-Mails from Scheherazad and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. The essay considers the importance for diasporic Muslim women writers of Scheherazade as a learned woman and clever storyteller who saves the realm through words, not violence. Confronting Islamophobia and Orientalist fantasies of Muslim women, these authors locate traditions of cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance within their own heritage, not as an exclusive property of the West.

Encounter, Clash, and Confluence: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

In her novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), Syrian-American Mohja Kahf engages in the representation of an experience similar to hers, the coming-of-age narrative of a young girl in a Muslim community in the heart of Indiana. A coming of age that is strongly marked by recurring cycles of encounter, clash and confluence on various levels. By making use of such a recurring pattern, Kahf questions the view which holds identity to be fixed and ossified, and problematizes the prevalent stereotypes of gender and nationality.

Negotiating Muslim Women’s Rights and Identity in American Diaspora Space: An Islamic Feminist Study of Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

This paper addresses the narrative of a Muslim woman who struggles to negotiate her rights, identity and sense of belonging in an American diaspora space. Despite the difficulties and obstacles of being regarded as an “other” in her adopted homeland, Khadra Shamy, the protagonist in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, chooses to maintain her Islamic identity with a new interpretation of her faith while attempting to build a hybrid identity as an American Muslim. The narrative implies that not all Muslims interpret their religion in the same way and that Muslims identify themselves with Islam to differing degrees. Hence, the media and critics of Islam clearly distort social reality when they depict all Muslims as extremists and all Muslim women as abject individuals. In addition, the employment of Islamic feminism in the analysis of the novel is an approach that can help enhance our knowledge concerning problems connected to the patriarchy that are pertinent in many Muslim communities, including ones in the West. The diaspora space in America has become a platform for Muslim women to gain more freedom, particularly the freedom to negotiate their rights and identities and to reinterpret religious teachings in a new light, a freedom that they may not be able to achieve in some Muslim-majority countries.

Negotiating Meanings of Borderlands in relation to Arabness, Americanness and Muslimness: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Anglophone Arab writings have come of age after years of ethnic, religious and gender-based invisibility. This literature has carved out a niche for itself as a literature of minority, of womanhood and of borderlands. Recent theorizations on borderland zone(s) have endeavored to understand journeys of displacement and dislocation that immigrants may experience. The present paper offers an investigation of how the border zone, be it geographical or psychological, is fictionalized in Arab Anglophone women narratives. The novel of the Arab American Mohja Kahf, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), highlights the borderland zone occupied by Arabs in the diaspora and represented by Khadra, the novel’s protagonist. Kahf’s novel serves here as a case study that shows how women characters have to negotiate their Arabness, Americanness and Islamness. The question is how.

The Many Ways of Being Muslim: The Practice of Immanent Critique in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

There is a stereotypical understanding of Islam as a religion that is inherently hostile to critique and changes, making it no longer relevant in modern age. To dispel this, Irfan Ahmad proposes the theory of immanent critique in the Islamic tradition where doctrines within the Islamic tradition itself are used to develop different interpretations of religious understanding. This article discusses how this theory is applied in the novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf (2006). It narrates the coming of age story of a young American Syrian Muslim woman, Khadra Shamy, who lives within a pious small Muslim community in Indiana, United States of America. As she lives under the watchful eyes of her parents and the community, she grapples with her understanding and acceptance of various Muslim communities around America who have different ways of practicing the religion. The article uses Ahmad’s theorization to discuss how the practice of critique allows the protagonist to free herself from being governed by specific individuals in her understanding of Islam. The concept allows the protagonist to actively engage with Islamic teachings in order to develop their personal position within the doctrines of the religion. Furthermore, the article also suggests that the practice of critique helps to develop an independent selfhood that is strongly committed to Islam while at the same time, tolerant of differences that may exist in the society that she is living in.

Critical literacy: The encounter between Western secularism and Islamic spirituality in selected young adult novels – An approach

This article aims to show how selected young adult novels may be potentially powerful locations for creating an awareness and better understanding of Muslims, Islam, and veiling practices in particular. Critical literacy as a methodology will be employed to demonstrate how learners may be guided towards critically engaging with texts. This is essential as mere surface knowledge is not enough when learners are confronted with complex issues, such as race, spirituality and culture. Western TV, newspapers, and magazines are responsible for painting a very monolithic image of Muslims as a seamless homogeneous group. Many young adults are actively engaging in conversations on digital media, such as Twitter and Facebook, where issues of culture and diversity are commented on regularly. Westerners may form very negative perceptions of Islam and Muslims when inundated with a deluge of images of atrocities performed by extremist groups such as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The consequence is that all Muslims are stereotyped as being fundamentalists, terrorists and oppressing their women. Thus knowledge construction is manipulated by Western media. An understanding of the reasons for donning a piece of cloth – the headscarf – may serve as a starting point in changing perceptions about Muslims and their diverse practices. Educators should be wary of only advocating tolerance among different cultural groups, as tolerance implies a mere managing of one’s feelings of aversion for that which is to be tolerated. Critical literacy questions on texts, such as The breadwinner trilogy by Deborah Ellis and The girl in the tangerine scarf by Mohja Kahf, are discussed as examples for use in classrooms. These texts are very different in their portrayals of Muslim girls/women and may be read comparatively. The complexity of the encounter between Western secularism and Islamic spirituality emerges either subtly or explicitly in the novels discussed.

The Quest for Self-Discovery: A Study of the Journey Motif in Kahf’s

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the journey motif plays a pivotal role in the works of Arab women writers in diaspora. Through a close reading of Arab American novelist Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) and Arab British novelist Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999), the paper highlights how the journeys taken by Khadra and Sammar, respectively, govern each of these two novels structurally and thematically. As they make journeys to their home towns in Syria and Sudan, respectively, they edge closer toward self-discovery. Therefore, the journeys the characters embark on are linked to their inner search for their own identities. Khadra and Sammar gain knowledge, better understand life, and consequently, better understand themselves. Overall, the paper shows how investigating the importance of journeys and travels in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and The Translator helps shed light on how Khadra and Sammar negotiate their cultural circumstances and cope with pressing social demands. In this sense, the two women personify resilience, courage and self-respect since they resist social pressures and decide to challenge them..

The Postsecular Turn and Muslim American Literature

This essay argues that contemporary discourses around postsecularism in literature do not adequately express the concerns of Muslim American writers who are reimaging how they can practice their religion within the specificity of the US secular context. It examines the ways Mohja Kahf’s bildungsroman, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, challenges the contemporary notion of postsecular literature, which takes a weakened, hybridized, liberal spirituality as its starting point. Although the bildungsroman conventionally plots an individual’s modernization in line with the nation’s, Kahf uses the formal strategies of the bildungsroman to contest the moral superiority of secular feminism and to assert an Islamic feminism that works in tandem with American identity. She situates her protagonist’s ultimate independence from the family fold, patriarchal Islam, and mainstream US society in explicitly gendered and religious acts of claiming control over her body. While Kahf illuminates the limits of secularism, she also sees its potential, and the novel ultimately envisions the secular context as a place in which to foster the umma—the global, transnational community to which every Muslim belongs.

‘Praise to the Emptiness’ Locating Home in the Arab Diaspora

This paper explores the continuing negotiations which occur among the diasporic communities to arrive at definitions of home within the new geographical spaces occupied by them. Using the liminal and hybrid theories of Avtar Brah, Stuart Hall and their literary manifestations in Salman Rushdie and Meena Alexander, it explores the notion of home among the Arab diaspora in The United States, particularly as expressed by women writers. Using the specific example of Mohja Kahf’s the girl in the tangerine scarf, this study examines the way in which Muslim women in the diaspora struggle to find multiple possibilities of ‘home’. It presents the possibility that the inability to establish a final home could be a literary tool for the creative artist to examine multiple identities and inhabit marginal spaces in ways which are imaginative and hopeful rather than being zones of loss and longing.

Negotiating Liminal Identities in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

This paper challenges the thought that the term ‘Muslim woman’ connotes submissive or backward and is in need of rescue by the West through a literary analysis of the work by Mohja Kahf (b.1967), a leading contemporary Arab-American Muslim woman writer. In her novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), Kahf focuses on the oppressive and discriminatory practices Muslim women encounter when wearing the hijab or veil where the main character and narrator experiences a type of identity split, or fragmentation, when assimilating into mainstream American culture. As a tool for analysis, the notion of liminality by Victor Turner (1920-1983), a British cultural anthropologist, is used to analyze the narrator’s choice of being ‘betwixt and between’ the state of things, or being ‘neither here nor there’. The resolution of social and personal conflicts portrayed is mapped to the stages of liminality.

Scheherazad's Daughters: Views From A Muslim Diasporic Woman Writer

In this paper, we discuss the works of Mohja Kahf, specifically her anthology of poetry Emails from Scheherazad and her novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, to show the challenges facing a Muslim practising Islam within the context of post 9/11. Mohja Kahf, of Syrian origin and now a creative writer and educator of literature residing in America, describes the experiences of the diasporic Muslim community as it adapts to its new home and foreign American customs, behaviour, and people. We will show the ways in which she comprehends her situation of being a hyphenated identity and what stereotypes of Muslims she debunks, rejects, or affirms. How she resolves the conflict of being a minority in a community where Islam is perceived with suspicion and sometimes derision will also be explored in our analysis of her works. There will undoubtedly be clashes, misunderstandings, and conflicts of opinions, but the learning curve of the diasporic resident will gradually become less precipitous, the slopes more gentle as she begins to negotiate the terrain. Kahf's works show a resolution of East-West conflicts as she comes to terms with the realities of being a hyphenated identity in America, and how she negotiates old ways with practices of the new host land.