Memory, Voice, and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from across the Middle East

279 Pages·2021·4.734 MB·English

by  Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran

Memory, Voice, and Identity
Muslim women have been stereotyped by Western academia as
oppressed and voiceless. This volume problematizes such Western aca-
demic representation. Muslim women writers from the Middle East from
Out  al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah (1899–1968) and Latifa al-Zayyat
(1923–1996) from Egypt, to current diasporic writers such as Tamara
Chalabi from Iraq, Mohja Kahf from Syria, and even trendy writers such
as Alexandra Chreiteh, challenge the received notion of Middle Eastern
women as subjugated and secluded. The younger largely Muslim women
scholars collected in this book present cutting edge theoretical perspec-
tives on these Muslim women writers. This book includes essays from
confict-ridden countries such as Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and the re-
sultant diaspora. The strengths of Muslim women writers are captured
by the scholars included herein. The approach is feminist, postcolonial,
and disruptive of Western stereotypical academic tropes.
Feroza Jussawalla, PhD, University of Utah, 1980, has taught at the Uni-
versity of Texas at El Paso and is Full Professor of English and Postcolonial
Literatures at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM. She is
the author of Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in
English (1984), co-editor of Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial
World (1992), co-editor of Emerging South Asian Women Writers (2017),
and the editor of Conversations with V.S. Naipaul (1997).
Doaa Omran did her Master’s and PhD at the University of New Mexico
(2019). She wrote her ground-breaking dissertation titled Female Hero
Mega-Archetypes in the Medieval European Romance on quranic and
biblical female characters as mega-archetypes in Medieval literature. She
is currently a visiting lecturer at the University of New Mexico. She re-
ceived her BA in English language and literature at Alexandria University,
Egypt. Her essay “Anachronism and Anatopism in the French Vulgate
Cycle and the Forging of English Identity through Othering Muslims/
Saracens” is included in Albrecht Classen’s edited volume Travel, Time,
and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: Explorations of
World Perceptions and Processes of Identity Formation (2018).
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
Queering Modernist Translation
The Poetics of Race, Gender, and Queerness
Christian Bancroft
Modernist Literature and European Identity
Birgit Van Puymbroeck
Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in
Twentieth-Century Fiction
Marco Caracciolo
Life-Writing, Genre and Criticism in the Texts of Sylvia Townsend
Warner and Valentine Ackland
Women Writing for Women
Ailsa Granne
Character and Dystopia
The Last Men
Aaron S. Rosenfeld
Literary Criticism, Culture and the Subject Of ‘English’
F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot
Dandan Zhang
Clemence Dane
Forgotten Feminist Writer of the Inter-War Years
Louise McDonald
Memory, Voice, and Identity
Muslim Women’s Writing from across the Middle East
Edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.
routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Twentieth-Century-Literature/
book-series/RSTLC
Memory, Voice, and Identity
Muslim Women’s Writing from across
the Middle East
Edited by
Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran
First published 2021
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran to be identifed as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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including photocopying and recording, or in any information
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identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-56976-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-56979-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-10016-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
رٌ يدِ َقءٍ يْ شَ لِّ كُ ىٰ َلعَ ُاللَّ وَ ۗ ضِ رْ َلْاوَ تِ اوَ امَ سَّ لا كُ لْمُ ِلَِّوَ
(١ ٨٩– نارمع لآ )
“God is King of the Heavens and the Earth, and God is
Almighty over everything.”
(Quran 3:189)
“The Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth.”
(Handel’s Messiah)
This book is dedicated to peace and safety among all the
peoples written about in this book.

Contents
List of Contributors x
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
FEROZA JUSSAWALLA
SECTION 1
Memory and Matriarchy 9
1 Memory of Latifa al-Zayyat between Infuence
and Ambivalence 11
MAGDA MANSOUR HASABELNABY
2 Rebuilding Baghdad: Placing Memoir in the Archive in
Marina Benjamin’s Last Days in Babylon (2007) and
Tamara Chalabi’s Late for Tea at the Deer Palace (2010) 24
ARTHTHI SATHANANTHAR
3 Once Upon a Time in Jerusalem: Re-memory and the
Storied Geography of Subalterns’ Telling of Their S/Place 34
RIHAM DEBIAN
4 “Don’t Get in my Face Like Ashiq Peri”: The Legacy of
Azerbaijan’s Most Famous Woman Bard 46
ANNA C. OLDFIELD
5 “Exilic Consciousness”: Memoirs of Iranian Women Émigrés 57
FEROZA JUSSAWALLA
viii Contents
6 Feminist Ethnography, Revisionary Historiography, and
the Subaltern in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian
Cavalcade 69
NAILA SAHAR
SECTION2
Body and Politics 81
7 Spheres of Piety: Politicization of Muslim Women in
Turkish Novels 83
FUNDA GÜVEN
8 Muslim Face, White Mask: Out al-Kouloub
al-Dimerdashiyyah’s Ramza as a Mimic (Wo)man 94
DOAA OMRAN
9 Same-sex Relations in Modern Arabic Fiction between
Empowerment and Impossibility: A Case Study of Samar
Yazbek’s Cinnamon 106
RIMA SADEK
10 Writing Veiled Bodies Anew: A Study of Maya al-Haj’s
Burkini: Iʿtirāfāt Muḥajjaba 118
ASMAA GAMAL SALEM AWAD
SECTION3
Identity and Crossing Boundaries 129
11 “A Girl Is Like a Bottle of Coke”: Emptied and Recycled
Identities in Always Coca-Cola 131
LAVA ASAAD
12 Shaping a Female Identity: Feminism & National Identity
in Suad al-Sabah’s Poetry 139
ASMAA AHMED YOUSSEF MOAWAD
13 “An Islam of Her Own”: A Critical Reading of Leila
Aboulela’s Minaret 151
WAFAA H. SOROUR
Contents ix
14 Mobility, Survival, and the Female Body in Laila
Lalami᾿s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits 161
AMEL ABBADY
SECTION 4
Moving to Wider Spheres 171
15 An Intersectional Feminist Reading of The Dove’s
Necklace and Hend and the Soldiers 173
NAJLAA R. ALDEEB
16 Language and Identity in Postcolonial Mauritanian
Muslim Women’s Writing 184
FATIMA SIDIYA
17 Documenting Refugee Crisis and Post-migration Living
Diffculties in Ebtissam Shakoush’s In the Camps and
Social Media Representations: A Postcolonial Perspective 196
HEBA GABER ABD ELAZIZ
SECTION 5
Returning to the Scheherazade Within 209
18 Djebar and Scheherazade: On Muslim Women,
Past  and  Present 211
BRIGITTE STEPANOV
19 Cultural Trauma and Scheherazade’s Gastro-national/
Transnational Discourse in Tamara al-Refai’s Writings 223
PERVINE ELREFAEI
20 Revolutionizing Scheherazade: Deconstructing the Exotic
and Oppressed Muslim Odalisque in Mohja Kahf’s Poetry 234
AMANY EL-SAWY
Index 247