Love and Marriage: Reimagining Muslim female subjectivity in Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and saffron

Abstract

Muslim women in popular Western imagination have usually been viewed as victims of forced marriages and suppressed individualistic rights to love/desire, and Islam as the primary source of it. The trend has intensified in the post-9/11 gendered Islamophobic spotlight. Anglophone literature by Muslim women writers has countered this monolithic narrative by exploring the multi-layered complexity and fluidity of Muslim womanhood. I aim to examine the subjectivity of Muslim women as explored in Kamila Shamsie’s novel Salt and Saffron regarding love/desire and marriage by drawing on the concepts of performativity and third space to intervene in the discourse of Muslim women’s gender subjectivity. I examine how the female protagonist (Aliya) transforms her consciousness of her rights and cultural norms into her battles for agency and expansive space for choice and decision in love and marriage without open confrontation against and submission to norms. This performative subjective position comes out as inclusive and agentive, re-signifying the norms and the individualist awareness into an indeterminate, third space of enunciation. I foreground the epistemology that interlaces mobility-shaped individualistic awareness and consciousness of norms to contradict the monolithic Muslim woman compliant/victim theoretical frame.