From Hidayet novels to pious women's literature: Changing agency in negotiation with feminism

Abstract

Hidayet literature was a genre that emerged for the first time in the 1970s in Turkey with Islamism becoming visible in the public sphere. This genre not only provided a life/body guideline for urbanizing Islamism, but also offered popular literal products to allow others defined as western/modern to have contact with the Muslim world. Although Hidayet novels have lost their old influence nowadays, they continue to have a similar popular effect with new writers reviving ‘Islamist romanticism’. Pious female literature, on the other hand, describes the oppression of religious women wearing hijab who wanted to get their right to education at the end of the 1980s. These political pressures on hijab have produced female writers who have been aggregating autobiographical stories the theme of which is the exile from the secular and Islamist public sphere and even from their “Muslim homes”. In Hidayet novels, pious agency is established as an essence of a holistic representation of good in a world divided into good and evil with sharp boundaries. In pious female literature, however, the permeability of these two worlds can be seen but the expectation from the pious agency is to be preserve holistic good authentic existence. In this study, how feminism is represented in the literal negotiation that establishes pious agency will be discussed descriptively, considering the perspective of these different genres on feminism.