The present essay discusses Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This? by focusing on the rendition of Islam as an axis of social agency in an environment that is excessively antagonistic of any version of Islam that falls outside the contours of the “liberal model” morphed by the Western creed of equality, liberty. Amal, the protagonist, embodies the dilemmas of choice and agency within an ideological rubric which disassociates such notions from faith-based convictions. The analysis relies on the notion of Muslim agency as theorized by Saba Mahmood, for whom the conscious formation of deeply rooted religious subjectivities is sidelined within the modern secular rubrics of self-formation. The article also draws on W.E.B Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness to highlight the extent to which Muslim female bodies are caught at the intersection between religion and nation. Hence, this essay discloses the challenges facing Muslim women whose exercise of agency is tied to their religious beliefs in a backdrop characterized by multicultural and secular economies. More particularly, it explores Amal’s religious tradition of habituated practices—such as wearing the veil in a hostile environment—as embodiments of autonomous agency.
Sweetness in the Belly (2005) explores a new space which problematizes the intersections between religion, cosmopolitanism, and displacement. Camilla Gibb employs the trope of the journey to trace the ways in which the female protagonist, Lilly, transforms in a transnational context. The narrative depicts multiple journeys that Lilly undertakes between the West and the East. Such geographical displacements are pivotal to her complex spiritual self-discovery. Lilly, a white Ethiopian Muslim, embraces Sufi Islam which helps her resist forms of alienation and discrimination. Therefore, as I argue in this paper, religion can be a constitutive component in the formation of female cosmopolitan subjectivity. Understanding cosmopolitanism as a disposition that is not necessarily secular in its orientation, this article investigates the transformative role of religion in the debates surrounding “new cosmopolitanism.” I argue that through Lilly’s journey, the narrative depicts religion as a central feature of cosmopolitan identity which disrupts the orientalist bent associated with East/West dichotomies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.