Renegotiating romantic genres: Textual resistance and Muslim chick lit

Abstract

The proliferation of images of “oppressed” and “downtrodden” Muslim women circulating via media discourses and popular memoirs leading up to and after 9/11 has led a number of British Muslim women to “write back” to such representations. However, these writers face a challenging politics of reception, aided by marketing tactics that attempt to reinscribe their voices within limited binaries of East and West, traditional and modern, Islamic and secular. Implicit in such binaries is the assumption of an inherent incompatibility between Islam and the “Western values” deemed necessary for fully-fledged citizenship in modern Britain, especially when it comes to gender equality. Leila Aboulela and Shelina Zahra Janmohamed are two writers who have been successful in negotiating this difficult terrain. Through their manipulation of secular romantic forms, they present readers with more nuanced articulations of Muslim womanhood that fuse feminist and religious concerns. Aboulela’s novel The Translator (1999) and Janmohamed’s memoir Love in a Headscarf (2009) appropriate the domestic novel and chick lit genres, respectively, and recast them within an Islamic signification system. In the shifting space between convention and innovation, their works enact a resistant aesthetic that draws attention to the sexism found in both traditional cultural mores and consumer-driven neoliberal gender regimes, offering personal faith and spirituality as a model for more equitable gender relations. In making a clear distinction between culture and religious belief, their works advocate for a form of Islam that coexists with other values and identities, including British, and clear discursive space for a more complex understanding of the intersection between gender and faith.

The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic: A Lacanian Reading of Ramita Navai’s City of Lies

“…Hence, many of the works stereotypically show local men's monstrous and chauvinistic treatment of women, who are accordingly "perceived as passive, complicitous, submissive, silent, voiceless, invisible, waiting to be rescued by a passing Westerner, or as rebellious and escaping to the West" (Hasan, 2015, p. 91). Newns (2018) repeats the charge by claiming that some of the Middle East women life writings "are filtered through the lens of Western publishing houses" to contribute to the conventional, not least the post-9/11, discourse of "a homogeneous world of veiled and oppressed Muslim women in need of saving" (p. 286). In nearly all these works, the subordinated women gain agency within patriarchal communities only in giving up "the visible signs of their religious belief, especially any form of veiling or hijab" (Newns, 2018, p. 286).…”

Micro-Physics of Discipline: Spaces of the Self in Middle Eastern Women Life Writings

“…He argues that the works' similarly irresponsible depictions of Islamic states as essentially misogynistic is in accordance with native Orientalist discourse that makes their writings operate as "a key propaganda tool at the disposal of" the American government and its contemporary nationalist discourse of war on terror. The claim, albeit a politically radical one, is substantiated by many other critics like Ameri (2012), Bahramitash (2005), Hasan (2015) and Newns (2017) who unanimously chastise the works' biased Western perspective as particularly filled with Islamophobic rhetoric prevalent within the dominant discursive practices in the West against the countries of the region. Narrated with such Orientalist prejudice, it is claimed that the female informers' eyewitness accounts have no truthful qualities.…”

Halal dating: Changing relationship attitudes and experiences among young British Muslims

“…This literature ranges from essays such as ‘Islamic Tinder’ by Triska Hamid (2017), to life writing including Maria Qamar’s Trust No Aunty (2017), fiction such as Ayisha Malik’s Sofia Khan is Not Obliged (2015) and Noor Al Hidayah’s (2017) self-published Muslim Dating Disasters . With their brightly coloured, cartoonish covers and emphasis on joyfully halal economic consumption, several of these texts are examples of what Lucinda Newns (2018) calls ‘Muslim chick lit’.…”