Related Papers
Freedom and unfreedom in the literature of the Iranian and Arab diaspora
2019 •
Roxanne Bibizadeh
This thesis seeks to interrogate the concept of freedom, a vital issue in contemporary feminist scholarship surrounding women’s equality. The main contribution of this thesis is to identify the ways in which diasporic Iranian and Arab writers are challenging the binary construct of “Western” secular freedom versus the unfreedom of Islam, in order to offer alternative ways of pursuing and obtaining freedom. There is a pressing need to reconfigure the dynamic relationship between Islam, feminism and secularism, terms that are conventionally considered incompatible. I argue that the texts in this thesis explore the convergences and divergences between these terms through the writer’s or their protagonist’s quest for freedom. Each chapter will focus on how the writers resist or attempt to mobilise their identification with Islam, including whether they are successful at reimagining what it means to assert freedom, to redefine choice, and avoid their agency becoming a commodity. This the...
African women writers and the politics of gender
2014 •
sadia Zulfiqar
This thesis examines the work of a group of African women writers who have emerged over the last forty years. While figures such as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka are likely to be the chief focus of discussions of African writing, female authors have been at the forefront of fictional interrogations of identity formation and history. In the work of authors such as Mariama Bâ (Senegal), Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), and Leila Aboulela (Sudan), there is a clear attempt to subvert the tradition of male writing where the female characters are often relegated to the margins of the culture, and confined to the domestic, private sphere. This body of work has already generated a significant number of critical responses, including readings that draw on gender politics and colonialism; but it is still very much a minor literature, and most mainstream western feminism has not sufficiently processed it. The purpose of this...
Leila Aboulela’nın Minare ve Nadeem Aslam’ın kaybolan sevgililere yollar romanlarında İngiliz Müslüman kimliklerinin temsili
2014 •
nesrin koç
Representation of British Muslim identities in Contemporary British fiction is a thriving field of research. With the aim of contributing to this field, this study brings together two contemporary novels, Minaret (2005) by Leila Aboulela, where the novel presents a very monolithic and closed understanding of religion, and Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam, which is critical of religious fundementalism. Reading them aganist the background of significant events such as The Rushdie Affair, and “halal fiction”, the thesis emphazises the diversity British Muslim fiction writers are promising. Even though liberal, secular authors seem to be dominating the literary scene and thus determing the representation of British Muslim identities, reading Minaret and Maps in dialogue with each other, shows how British Muslim identities are in fact nuanced, complex and fluid.M.S. - Master of Scienc
Empowering Muslims in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf
2021 •
Mahmoud Alshetawi
Diasporic Arab writers substantially differ in how they represent aspects of contemporary Arabic culture(s) in their literary works and diasporic Arab women writers have represented Islam even more differently in their works. The study investigates how Islam is portrayed in the fiction of two diasporic Arab women writers, Leila Aboulela (b. 1964) and Mohja Kahf. (1967). General literary research has been conducted on these two writers and how they represent Islam in their writing; however, firstly, most of the conducted literature is about the veil and what it adds to Muslim women living in the West. Secondly, most of the previous research tackles each writer alone. Nevertheless, the current study is predominantly different as it shows how Islam is represented in both Aboulela’s Minaret (2004) and Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) as a religion that provides an ethical pathway and empowers its adherents socially, politically and psychologically, thus lending purpose to o...
Seeking Freedom in the “Third Space” of Diaspora: Muslim Women's Identity in Aboulela's Minaret and Janmohamed's Love in a Headscarf
Md. Mahmudul Hasan
Muslim societies, and especially Muslim women, have often received fetishized attention in (neo-)Orientalist literature. However, opening up spaces for the voices of Muslim women especially those wearing the hijab is long overdue. Therefore, the representation of diasporic Muslim women and their multiple identities in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Shelina Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf is of paramount importance. These two texts show how, face to face with possibilities and pitfalls of diaspora, Muslim women negotiate and prioritize Islamic identity in the metropolis. While immigrant Muslim men are racked with somewhat unacknowledged exilic anxieties, the challenge and possibility of Muslim women largely concern gender and religion. For a group of Muslim women, the West facilitates a critical interrogation of their feeling of identity vacillation and creates a useful framework for thinking about their religious observances, which eventually helps them conceptualize and articulate their sense of belonging. For many others, it provides a third space in which they can confidently engage in a reinterpretation of the Islamic texts and thus reclaim an identity which liberates them from culturally enacted practices of their countries of origin.
Aboulela for CW
Eva Hunter
BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES
Muslim women’s diasporic identity: a critical discourse analysis of Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005)
2024 •
Morve Roshan K.
Due to different unpropitious circ*mstances, immigration is glob-ally on the rise. A Muslim Sudanese woman’s diasporic experience can be best perceived through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret (2005). In a study of Minaret’s textual analysis, this article applies three central CDA postulations: 1. Teun A. van Dijk’s (1993a, & 2006b) three layers of study through ‘Discourse, Cognitive, and Society’, 2. Ruth Wodak’s ‘Language, and Ideology’ in the study of discourse analysis, and 3. Norman Fairclough’s (1996a, 2001b & 2013c) ‘3D model of CDA’. This research explores the social, diasporic, and historical challenges through a textual analysis of Minaret, which is faced by Sudanese women in Britain. Najwa, the protagonist struggles to find her identity while encountering innumerable challenges in the diaspo-ric route. Her dis/placement of identity, and religion can be seen to construct an identity in a multicultural world (like Britain). In a nutshell, Minaret presents Najwa’s identity, representation, and language relation in social practice. Class conflict, power inequality, and a struggle for identity quest are contemporary issues that have been demonstrated around Najwa’s life.
Third World Quarterly
Veiling the Obvious: African feminist theory and the hijab in the African novel
2008 •
Shirin E Edwin
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
“Halal fiction” and the limits of postsecularism: Criticism, critique, and the Muslim in Leila Aboulela’sMinaret
2017 •
Peter Morey
This article examines Leila Aboulela’s 2005 novel Minaret, considering the extent to which it can be seen as an example of a postsecular text. The work has been praised by some as one of the most cogent attempts to communicate a life of Islamic faith in the English language novel form. Others have expressed concern about what they perceive as its apparent endorsem*nt of submissiveness and a secondary status for women, along with its silence on some of the more thorny political issues facing Islam in the modern world. I argue that both these readings are shaped by the current “market” for Muslim novels, which places on such texts the onus of being “authentically representative”. Moreover, while apparently underwriting claims to authenticity, Aboulela’s technique of unvarnished realism requires of the reader the kind of suspension of disbelief in the metaphysical that appears to run contrary to the secular trajectory of the English literary novel in the last 300 years. I take issue wi...
Third World Quarterly Veiling the Obvious: African feminist theory and the hijab in the African novel
Shirin E Edwin
