"'Speaking for Ourselves': American Muslim Women's Confessional Writings and the Problem of...

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“Speaking for Ourselves”: American Muslim Women’s Confessional

Writings and the Problem of Alterity

Aysha A. Hidayatullah and Taymiya R. ZamanUniversity of San Francisco

AbstractThis article examines the phenomenon of American Muslim women’s self-representation through the medium of autobiography post-9/11, focusing on Sumbul Ali-Karamali’s The Muslim Next Door, Asma Gull Hasan’s Red, White, and Muslim and the edited collections I Speak for Myself and Love, InshAllah. Highlighting the operation of “Muslim media chic”, the authors challenge the assumption that Muslim women speak solely for themselves through emancipatory “truth-telling” narratives, arguing that self-narration tailored to the demands of explaining oneself to a non-Muslim audience results in gendered forms of ambassadorship that require critical examination. In addition to the problems of confessional representation, the authors also observe the writings’ invocation of American cultural supremacy and depoliticised individualism, the latter propelled by post-1990s mass-media modes of feminine visibility, including chick-lit.

Journal for Islamic Studies, Vol. 33, 2013, 48-76

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The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us.

Michel Foucault1

But if she should choose [...] to respond to the hailing “Hey, you!” that is issued from various directions in the outside world — she would still be considered a turncoat.

Rey Chow2

IntroductionAs much as Americans disagree on the place of Islam in the US, most seem to agree that Muslim women’s voices have been stifl ed and that it is high time they speak for themselves. The call for Muslim women to “speak” in the US has been answered by several popular books, of which four are the subject of our attention. Two are single-authored works, each penned in the fi rst person by an American Muslim woman: Asma Gull Hasan’s Red, White, and Muslim: My Story of Belief, published in 2009 (originally published as Why I Am a Muslim: An American Odyssey, in 2004) and Sumbul Ali-Karamali’s The Muslim Next Door: The Qur’an, the Media, and That Veil Thing, published in 2008.3 In both, the authors are determined to dispel American stereotypes about Islam by explaining their religion through their own personal experiences and refl ections. The two later works which we discuss are compilations of autobiographical writings by multiple authors: I Speak for Myself: American Women on Being Muslim (2011), which presents the self-narrated profi les of forty American Muslim women under the age of forty, and Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women (2012), which features twenty-fi ve

1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 60.

2 Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 117.

3 Asma Gull Hasan, Red, White, and Muslim: My Story of Belief (New York: HarperOne, 2009); Asma Gull Hasan, Why I Am a Muslim: An American Odyssey (London: Element Books, 2004); and Sumbul Ali-Karamali, The Muslim Next Door: The Qur’an, the Media, and That Veil Thing (Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud Press, 2008).

“Speaking for Ourselves”: American Muslim Women’s Confessional Writings

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American Muslim women’s fi rst-hand accounts of their experiences of love and sex.4

Together, all four books belong to the genre identifi ed by Juliane Hammer as Muslim women’s “‘speaking out’ literature”,5 and set out to dispel stereotypes about Islam and Muslim women by offering an intimate, “truth-telling” alternative to mainstream discourses that speak for Muslim women and present them as voiceless and uniquely oppressed. Unlike the best-selling books of Irshad Manji, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Nomani (which have received much critical attention), these autobiographical works by Muslim women tend to be less controversial and more positively received by Muslims (and their non-Muslim liberal allies), presumably because they demonstrate Muslims to be a diverse population within the US for whom Islam offers empowering choices. Likely due in part to their Islam-positive sentiments, they have yet to receive any comprehensive or comparative critical attention.6

In this article, we challenge the authors’ unquestioned assumption that they are truly “speaking for themselves” by way of some purely self-willed act unhindered by larger social, political and market forces. We argue that the market for Muslim women’s voices is crucial to their publication and cannot be separated from how these voices emerge, the stories they tell and the selves they present. We propose that these writings are produced through the employment of a marketing

4 Maria M. Ebrahimji and Zahra T. Suratwala (eds.), I Speak for Myself: American Women on Being Muslim (Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud Press, 2011); and Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi (eds.), Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2012).

5 Juliane Hammer, American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 171.

6 The one work we are aware of that substantially treats the books of Sumbul Ali-Karamali and Asma Gull Hasan is Juliane Hammer’s American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism. Hammer makes important observations about the motivations for Muslim women’s personal writings, including their portrayal of Islam, political contexts and the dangers of legitimising stereotypes about non-Western Muslim women. Hammer also points to how these works can reinforce monolithic representations of Muslim women while seeking to challenge them and the limitations on authorial control placed by publishers who force writers to conform to the modes of marketable writing. Hammer, American Muslim Women, 171-192.


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savvy which we term Muslim media chic. Muslim media chic refers to marketing practices resulting from American Muslim anxieties around self-representation after 9/11 and functions as a navigational strategy to make Islam more palatable to American audiences through personal accounts. In the texts we discuss, American Muslim women deploy a gendered form of ambassadorship that results in compromised selves whose agency we doubt and an unthreatening form of visibility whose potential we question. Beyond being shaped by the politics of American Muslim self-representation after 9/11, the media chic employed by the authors of these texts is notably infl uenced by the decade prior in which, following the end of the Cold War, Western feminist critiques of economic and social power structures moved towards a post-feminist focus on individual agency. Consequently, these texts reduce activism and critique to the exercise of individual free choice, even as their respective authors, by virtue of being Muslim and telling their life stories, see themselves as contributing to social change.

We fi nd that the confl uence of 1990s individualism and post-9/11 anxiety has left these texts poised uncomfortably on two unresolved contradictions. First, several of the authors we focus on wish to represent the truth about Islam and Muslim women while simultaneously claiming to represent only themselves and not Islam and Muslim women as a whole, holding that both are complex subjects marked by diversity. Second, a number of these authors claim that Muslim women are no different from other Americans, while selling their stories for a market hungry for those stories precisely because their authors are different from other Americans. We argue that these double tasks set the authors up to fail, that it is impossible to represent all Muslims while representing only oneself and to prove one’s sameness while selling one’s difference. Furthermore, in their quest to make Islam palatable to American audiences, a number of these works market American Islam as free of the trappings of culture, where “culture” is located outside the US and pollutes an otherwise pure religion with patriarchy and ignorance; in this, a number of the authors we examine see American Islam as superior to the Islam of Muslims abroad and themselves as uniquely poised to convey this truth to the world.


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A discussion of our own relation to these texts would be germane. We are professors at an elite liberal-arts college in San Francisco and we are both Muslim women ourselves. We are part of a generation of scholars whose very jobs are contingent upon the market for academic experts on Islam created in the US after 9/11. In writing this article, we acknowledge our own complicity — from which we believe there is no escape — in the project of representing Islam and Muslims. We are regularly inundated with invitations to give talks about Muslims in the US; our inviters are most often prompted by the goal of dispelling stereotypes about Muslims rather than in engaging in a serious study of Muslim history or practice. We experience discomfort when asked to support student initiatives that represent Islam on campus because, through discussions about the “veil thing” (to quote from Ali-Karamali’s title) and the spiritual meanings of jihād, these events inadvertently reduce Islam to the very stereotypes through which it is represented. Finally, we are troubled by being asked to support book projects such as those we critique in this article in the interest of goals thought to be ones that we — by virtue of being Muslim women ourselves — must somehow share with all American Muslim women.7

We have asked ourselves: what does it mean to support other Muslim women? Does questioning their writings constitute betrayal, or a different form of support? (We suspect both.) We are wary of replicating the behaviour, observed by Mohja Kahf and Juliane Hammer, of “‘merciless Muslim readers’ who criticize any hint of […] representational politics without acknowledging the powerful forces at work and the dire lack of other choices if a woman wants to get published at all”.8 The object of our critique is those very forces that constrain the possibilities for American

7 A similar bind is expressed by Fatemeh Keshavarz in Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran. A professor of Persian and Comparative Literature and Roshan Chair of Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, Keshavarz writes of being troubled by having to introduce Azar Nafi si, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, at an event on campus because of Nafi si’s New Orientalist representations of Iran. See Fatemeh Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 18-30.

8 Hammer, American Muslim Women, 191.


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Muslim women’s self-expression. We acknowledge that we have access to scholarly resources and theoretical vocabularies that only a graduate school education can provide. Using such privileged vocabularies to launch a critique on Muslim women writing about their lives carries with it the threat of the very violence of misrepresentation that we seek to address. We also do not wish to suggest that American Muslim women’s autobiographical writings incorporate discursive analysis, critical consciousness, challenges to American foreign policy and a background in feminist or race theory. Doing so would be to impose upon their authors the same fatigue of representation that is often imposed on us.

However, while we do not insist that all Muslim women take into account the forms of analysis that we privilege, we point to how the frequent absence of critical consciousness leads these writings into the territory of American cultural supremacy, depoliticised individualism and self-narration tailored to the demands of explaining oneself to a non-Muslim audience. Our interventions are poised both sympathetically and critically between imagining the possibilities of these works and observing the restraints within which they operate. The spirit of the critique we engage in is best captured by Joan W. Scott:

[t]he point of critique is not to tear down or destroy but, by bringing to light the limits and inconsistencies that have been studiously avoided, to open up new possibilities, new ways of thinking about what might be done to make things better.9

The Alterity Industry and the Market for ExperienceWe contend that the personal narratives of Muslim women’s “experience” do not supply an answer to the question of “who are Muslim women?” or a solution to the problem of their marginalisation. Instead, such narratives are what need to be questioned, especially if one’s goal is greater agency

9 Joan Wallach Scott, “Introduction: Feminism’s Critical Edge,” in Joan Wallach Scott (ed.), Women’s Studies on the Edge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 7.


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for Muslim women.10 We fi nd that these writings often facilitate a more sophisticated adaptation (as opposed to silence) to the marginalisation they seek to remedy. Though the appeal of these books relies on the enticement of accessing the unmediated truth of the authors’ fi rst-hand experiences, we fi nd that the production of “experience”, rather than its straightforward narration, is central to these autobiographical accounts. Drawing on Joan W. Scott’s work on autobiography, we argue that the authors’ self-narrations of experience do not constitute transparent “evidence” of truth or unmediated refl ections of reality, since the gaze of the reading audience crucially frames how the authors see themselves.11

The covers of all four books refl ect the operations of that gaze within the texts. Ali-Karamali appears on the cover of The Muslim Next Door, arms crossed, smiling, her hair cut in a bob; she is the approachable “girl next door”, ready to explain Islam through her own unthreatening but confi dent femininity. The back cover matter invites the book’s reader into the “home” of an everyday American mother: “[w]hat if you could sit down at a kitchen table with an American Muslim mom and ask anything you wanted about her faith and religious practice?” On the cover of the fi rst edition of her book (titled Why I Am a Muslim), Asma Gull Hasan takes on a similar appearance to Ali-Karamali, except with one hand at the hip, suggestive of a “girl power” attitude.12 In the later edition, titled Red, White, and Muslim (the name itself now emphasising assimilationist aspirations), the author disappears from the cover and is replaced by an apple pie decorated with a crescent and star and an American fl ag. The colourful front and back covers of I Speak for Myself feature the smiling faces of Muslim women of varied ethnicities and degrees of head covering (or none at all), celebrating the rainbow of their multicultural diversity. Love, InshAllah’s cover offers up a red slip on tousled white sheets in

10 On this point, see Sara Suleri, “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition,” Critical Inquiry 18, 2, 1992, 768; and Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, 4, 1991, 797.

11 Scott, “The Evidence,” 776, 795, 797.12 See Hammer’s comments on American Muslim women writers who “represent

themselves as modern, liberated, fashionably dressed, confi dent, and only mildly exotic” on their book covers. Hammer, American Muslim Women, 196.


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bright light, invoking “the morning after”. The women within its pages entice the reader by being absent on the cover and present later in their confessional tellings about their “secret” love lives. Already, even as each book is picked off a shelf by its readers, the selves within these books are produced through markets for a version of difference that is unthreateningly familiar, but different enough to warrant its own pages.

As Judith Butler has observed, “[n]o account takes place outside the structure of address, even if the addressee remains implicit and unnamed, anonymous and unspecifi ed”.13 The addressee of these autobiographies is more often than not the non-Muslim American to whom Muslim women must explain themselves, a directive predicated on their presumed essential difference from the reader. Thus, the self that is narrated in the accounts cannot be regarded simply as an “instrument of personal freedom”; it must be confronted critically as a “tool of power”.14 The lack of critical consciousness demonstrated in most of the accounts inadvertently supports the powerful discourses of difference that have prompted the authors to self-representation. In Scott’s words, the “evidence” of experience “becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world”.15 The framing of these works as insider testimonies only further obscures how the demand for Muslim women to speak shapes the very selves they reveal.

The reading public’s appetite for novelty (something new and “different”), combined with the assumption that any person with an authentic identity is capable of writing something that others should read in order to know more about their “kind”, produces a powerful demand for “authentic” insider voices within the “alterity industry” — the business of marketing difference and “insider” voices as commodities for consumption.16 An interesting effect of this demand is that “belonging

13 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 36.

14 José Guilherme Merquior, Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 108.

15 Scott, “The Evidence,” 777.16 Ana María Sánchez-Arce, “‘Authenticism’, or the Authority of Authenticity,”

Mosaic, 40, 3, 2007, 154.


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to an identity group is taken as authority enough for one’s speech; the direct experience of a group or culture — that is, membership in it — becomes the only test of true knowledge.”17 For example, in Love, InshAllah Mattu and Maznavi appear to have only two criteria for accepting contributors: that they self-identify as “Muslim” and that they self-identify as “American.”18 The authors’ credentials as writers become reducible to their being Muslim women.

It is true that such open criteria allow for the inclusion of diverse and divergent voices. But if the point is to showcase the diversity of American Muslim women, then what is it that unites them all under the category of American Muslim women? The degree to which our writers represent themselves or Muslims in general remains unresolved, given their need to simultaneously argue both points. For instance, one of the editors of I Speak for Myself, Maria M. Ebrahimji, writes that Muslim women in general must speak up and speak out and have their voices heard, presumably given the many stereotypes there exist about Muslim women.19 In contrast, her co-editor, Zahra T. Suratwala, writes that she speaks only for herself and not in response to anyone’s views about Muslim American women, because like all women, Muslim women cannot be labelled, and labels are reductive.20 Both Suratwala and Ebrahimji explicitly note in their book’s introduction that American Muslim women are “a rainbow of sects, practices, beliefs, and values. Under the umbrella of our general commonality, we differ widely”.21Although the editors of I Speak for Myself note that its contributors did not set out to respond to stereotypes or to show how “normal,” educated, or similar to non-Muslim Americans they are, they reassure the reader of her/his commonality with them: “although our lives perhaps differ from yours, you will relate to us in the moments

17 Joan W. Scott, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity,” in John Rajchman (ed.), The Identity in Question (New York: Routledge, 1995), 10.

18 Mattu and Maznavi, Love, InshAllah, x.19 Maria M. Ebrahimji, 2011, “Editors,” I Speak for Myself. Retrieved October 22,

2013, from http://www.ispeakformyself.com/muslimwomen/editors. 20 Zahra T. Suratwala, 2011, “Editors,” I Speak for Myself. Retrieved October 22,

2013, from http://www.ispeakformyself.com/muslimwomen/editors. 21 Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, xvi.


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that we are most [...] human”.22 Meanwhile, a number of contributors within the volume unquestioningly accept their roles as ambassadors for Islam without raising the question of what larger forces necessitate the view of their “general commonality”.23 Were it not for 9/11 and media representations of Muslim women as oppressed and in need of rescue, it is likely that none of these works, which function to normalise Muslim women (even when they intend to resist that function), would have been published. The authors’ recourse to an explicit or implicit second person form of address (as in, “you will relate to us”)24 signifi cantly constrains their ability to speak purely for themselves.25 They are then caught in the representational contradiction of a post-9/11 world: they must be self-possessed American individuals who speak only for themselves, but they must also represent their kind with each utterance.

The problem we observe is not only how the audience’s gaze and notions of essential difference shape the selves and self-narrations of these writings; our concern is also for the forcible demand to reveal oneself in the fi rst place and its internalisation as liberating by many of the writers. As Rey Chow has observed in writings by other minority groups, American Muslim women writers often assume that an inward turn to the self is emancipatory — that it facilitates an unproblematic representation of reality which can free one from the condition of others speaking for her, from the un-freedom of not being in charge of speaking for herself.26

22 Ibid.23 For example: Jameelah Xochitl Medina, “The University of Life,” in Ebrahimji

and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 54; and Dewnya Bakri-Bazzi, “Sporting Faith,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 61.

24 Ebrahimji and Suratwala, “Introduction,” xvi.25 However, as an exception to most media interviews about these works, Zahra

Noorbakhsh (a contributor to Love, InshAllah) does hint at such an awareness of the pressures of autobiographical writing in a NYT interview about Love, InshAllah: “It is doubly hard for Muslim women,” because of the problem of “everyone turning around to say, ‘See, I knew they were all crazy terrorists’ ... You leave yourself vulnerable to people using your voice to attack your community, so we kind of censor our own voices”. Neil MacFarquhar, “Lifting Veil on Love and Islam,” The New York Times, February 23, 2012. Retrieved October 22, 2013, from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/books/in-love-InshAllah-american-muslim-women-reveal-lives.html?_r=0.

26 Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 113.


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The editors of I Speak for Myself, for instance, note: “[o]ther books about Muslim women were written from someone else’s perspective...Or they weren’t completely personal narratives”.27 For them, the book is “unique — a refreshing opening into our lives, our minds, our hearts”.28

The writers presume they are correcting the problem of other people speaking for them, failing to notice their own forcible interpellation to speak.29 As such, they unwittingly respond to the summons that Chow has referred to as the ever-present “Hey, you!” (the demand to explain oneself) that echoes throughout discussions of difference, including purported celebrations of cultural and religious diversity. As evidenced by American Muslim women’s turn to autobiographical writing, those who submit to the call of “Hey, you!” are likely to respond through some form of self-confession:

Resorting to the self-referential gesture as an ethnic and/or sexual minority is often tantamount to performing a confession in the criminal as well as noncriminal sense: it is to say, “Yes, that’s me,” to a call and a vocation [...] as if it were a crime with which one has been charged; it is to admit and submit to the allegations (of otherness) that society at large has made against one.30

According to Chow, confessional representation results from internalising and conceding to the demand placed on minorities to answer the question “who (or what) are you?” continually asked of them by members of dominant groups.31 Their response to the demand entails displaying or performing an “exhibition” of the self.32 The question of why someone should expose oneself at all remains unasked.

Furthermore, Chow notes the tendency within confessional representation to perform what she calls self-mimicry, or the act of

27 Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, xv.28 Ibid.29 Scott, “The Evidence,” 778.30 Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 115.31 Ibid., 110.32 Ibid., 111.


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representing oneself in a manner that resembles (or “mimics”) the self that others desire to see.33 To give credit where it is due, we observe that these collections aim (and at moments succeed) at subverting the audience’s expectations about Muslim women in ways other than simply responding to stereotypes. However, the remarkable extent to which these autobiographical accounts are written (or perhaps edited to be read) as stories of women who are triumphant in realising and representing who they are, raises questions. Suddenly the image of the oppressed and abused Muslim woman is replaced by the “plucky individualist”34 who is certain of who she is and ready to take on the world; she embraces her hyphenated identity and accepts herself as a Muslim American.35 Of course, the confi dent Muslim woman is a welcome alternative to stereotypical representations of Muslim women’s misery. Still, it may not be entirely coincidental that this image is pleasing for readers who beam with pride for spirited Muslim women to whom they can gleefully reply, “You go, girl!”

Cultural Backwardness and the Other WomanThe discourse of unthreatening difference also demands in many instances of these writings the truncation of “culture”, which involves the construction of an artifi cial boundary between religion and culture and the implicit dominance of American triumphalist narratives. Wendy Brown writes that the “culturalization of politics” has meant “the reduction of political motivations and causes to essentialized culture (where culture refers to an amorphous polyglot of ethnically marked religious and nonreligious beliefs and practices)”.36 In references to places abroad, culture is “mobilized to explain everything from Palestinian suicide bombers to Osama bin Laden’s world designs ... and the failure of

33 Ibid., 112.34 Dohra Ahmed, “Not Yet Behind the Veil: Muslim Women in American Popular

Literature,” Social Text, 27, 2, 2009, 110.35 Among many examples, see Naheed Hamid, “Hyphenated Identity,” in

Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 130.36 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 20-21.


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democracy to take root in the immediate aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq”.37 These appeals to culture elide the relations of power that constitute political confl ict. Contemporary neo-liberalism, in Brown’s argument, is “relentlessly depoliticizing” because it wishes to reduce culture at best to an individual attribute or privately held attachment on the part of the otherwise secular subject.38 Depoliticisation construes inequality and marginalisation as either “personal and individual, on the one hand, or as natural, religious, or cultural on the other”.39

Muslim media chic is relentlessly depoliticised; culture is a product of other Muslims somewhere else and almost always viewed as suspect, because it pollutes how Muslims outside of the US practice Islam.40 Pure Islam, freed from culture, is the domain of American Muslims, and unlike Islam in other places, is based on rationality, democracy, egalitarianism and a concern with women’s welfare. I Speak for Myself features examples of women who have resolved the tension between the cultural practices of their immigrant parents in exchange for an American Islam that offers them freedom. Hebah Ahmed writes: “I fi nally saw the difference between the cultural Islam I was raised in and the true Islam based on original texts”.41 In a similar vein, Zahra Jamal writes that the values found in the Qurʾān are also found in the US constitution.42 This wedding of the Qurʾān to the constitution and textual Islam to America allows a beleaguered minority to stake claims to being as American as anyone else. Asma Gull Hasan in Red, White, and Muslim writes that “the Qurʾan and the core values of American society are strikingly similar”.43 In the concluding chapter of the book, titled “Being Muslim Makes Me a Better American (and Being American

37 Brown, Regulating Aversion, 20.38 Ibid., 18.39 Ibid., 15.40 See also Juliane Hammer’s discussion of “culture-free” American Islam.

Hammer, American Muslim Women, 62.41 Heba Ahmed, “The Muslim Feminist,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for

Myself, 35.42 Zahra Nasiruddin Jamal, “A Sister in Humanity,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala,

I Speak for Myself, 170.43 Hasan, Red, White, and Muslim, xiii.


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Makes Me a Better Muslim)”, Hasan writes that American Muslims can “practice a more Qurʾan-based Islam than many world Muslims”. She continues by saying that Islam in America is freed from “pre-Islamic Arab culture”.44 Similarly, Ali-Karamali’s text concludes with a celebration of America and American Muslims and the freedoms that American Muslims enjoy when compared to Muslims elsewhere: “We American Muslims love our country and favor secularism and see that as reconcilable with Islam”.45

For writers such as Hasan and Ali-Karamali, Islam constitutes an original reality that has been polluted by non-American cultures and each appoints herself the guardian and representative of that reality. Both Ali-Karamali and Hasan view non-American Muslims with concerned paternalism. According to Ali-Karamali, half of Pakistan’s population is too illiterate and given to drug-addiction to know what their religion really says; consequently, it is easy for Bin Laden to recruit them.46 Muslims and non-Muslims must separate Islam, the religion, from the “culture of the various countries in which it is prevalent”, writes Ali-Karamali.47 It is for American Muslims to show other Muslims how to practice their religion, freed from “culture”, which is always timeless and irrational.48 Like George Bush, who addressed the nation on September 11, 2001 to say that the terrorists practiced a fringe form of extremism that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam, Ali-Karamali writes that the Taliban “think they are Muslim” but are in fact unable to accept any form of Islam other than their own; they have effectively hijacked the faith and it is now up to Muslims like her to set the record straight.49 While a history of the Cold War and the political and economic forces that created the Taliban would provide a far better context for the Taliban’s version of Islam, this is entirely absent in her

44 Ibid., 144-147.45 Ali-Karamali, The Muslim Next Door, 215.46 Ibid., 215-6.47 Ibid., 229.48 For a history of how “moderate” Muslims became the post 9/11 face of a

desirable Islam, see Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture, 18, 2, 2006, 323.

49 Ali-Karamali, The Muslim Next Door, 97-98.


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narrative, perhaps because of the degree to which such a history would implicate the US.

In both Hasan and Ali-Karamali’s narratives, Islam was pure before it left the Arabian peninsula, after which it became tainted by other cultures that hijacked Islam’s feminist, democratic and egalitarian spirit.50 These purist assumptions closely mirror those of post-colonial Muslim revivalists (including the Afghan Taliban), who similarly aim to re-create the early community of Muslim believers in their search for Islam at its purest; the values that the Taliban would attach to their idealised golden age would be different from those of Hasan and Ali-Karamali, but their need for a golden age untainted by what they see as impure would be eerily similar. As the Muslim world came under colonial rule in the nineteenth century, Orientalists promoted the idea of Muslims as a fallen race whose golden age was long past and required European intervention to restore to Muslims their lost splendour. This dovetailed nicely with anti-colonial movements by Muslim revivalists, who similarly internalised the notion that theirs was a history of defeat and shame, and chose to romanticise the earliest age of Muslim triumph in response.51 These dynamics are complicated further by the anxieties of Muslims in post-9/11 America, who similarly envision a pure golden age that must extricate itself from the impurity of culture abroad and fi nd its fi nal destination in America.

While Ali-Karamali blames culture for anything Muslims do that creates negative media attention, she also claims that Islam moves across diverse cultural contexts when she is challenging stereotypes of Islam as monolithic. Diversity is then invoked when convenient for defending Islam and blamed when Islam (or Ali-Karamali’s understanding of Islam) proves to be too inconvenient. For instance, Ali-Karamali notes that

50 Ibid., 106-7, 110, 120-1, 126-7, 128, 134, 138-9. Juliane Hammer points out that such works construct “a true, normative Islam ... different from the history, practices, and interpretations of Muslims.” Hammer, American Muslim Women, 173.

51 See Marshall G. S. Hodgson, “The Role of Islam in World History,” in Edmund Burke III (ed.), Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 97-125. Ali-Karamali, to her credit, does mention the link between anti-colonialist sentiment and Muslim revivalism, but her knowledge of this does not inform her broader narrative framework. Ali-Karamali, The Muslim Next Door, 179-180.


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Islam has always been tolerant by referring to how European travellers commented on the multi-ethnic courts of Mughal and Ottoman kings.52 At the same time, when a friend tells her that Muslim men take dowries from their wives and then proceed to kill them in order to marry more wives whose dowries they can steal, Ali-Karamali responds by saying that the dowry custom in India has to do with Hinduism and not Islam.53 While adding that she is not implying that “Hindu culture” sanctions murder, this neat sectioning of Hindu from Muslim in order to defend Islam contradicts the pluralism she praises within the context of Mughal India, which was a very product of cultural intermingling between Hindus and Muslims.54 Interestingly, but unsurprisingly, Hindu revivalists, like their Muslim counterparts in post-colonial India, seek to purify Hinduism (which they believe was characterised by a pre-Muslim golden age) from all strains of Islam using similar tools of cultural amputation.55

Compared to Ali-Karamali, Hasan demonstrates a more sophisticated understanding of Islamic history. She points out how the absence of an equivalent to the centralising power of the Catholic Church makes it diffi cult for Muslims to point to a core authority fi gure who can speak for them.56 In a rare moment when she speaks unprompted by the demand to explain Islam to Americans, she mentions her deeply personal relationship with God, which is inspired by the writings of Muslim mystics. The moral discipline that adherence to Islam offers her, which includes detachment from material things and a genuine love for the divine in all its forms, comes through in her text not merely as a response to negative images of Islam, but as a well-articulated personal practice of faith that she has inherited from her parents.57 Her analysis of the diversity that is found within Islam is sound in its historicity compared to Ali-Karamali’s.58 Nonetheless, even while recognising the complexity of Islamic history,

52 Ibid., 193.53 Ibid., 139.54 Ibid.55 On this topic, see Gyanendra Pandey, “Can a Muslim be an Indian?” Comparative

Studies of Society and History, 41, 4, 1999, 608-629.56 Hasan, Red, White, and Muslim, 31.57 Ibid., 54-56, 66.58 Ibid., 87-111.


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her book follows a trajectory in which — despite the ability of Islam to adapt to various cultures and to take on new forms — America comes to be the promised land in which Islam achieves the fulfi lment of its mission.

According to Hasan, the Prophet Muḥammad “gave Islam its own Pledge of Allegiance, hours before his death: liberty and justice for all, under God and under Islam”; his life story “reads like the American Dream”.59 The author emphasises her twinned commitment to Islam and America, over and above commitments to what she perceives as her Pakistani cultural heritage. Hasan writes that she appreciates Pakistani culture, but is herself a product of American culture and mentions that after her mother took the Pledge of Allegiance, the judge smiled and said that when he went out to dinner, he could eat Chinese, Mexican and Italian food because of immigrants such as Hasan’s mother.60 And so, “the diversity heralded in Islam is achieved in America”.61 While other cultures, despite adding diversity to Islam, often confl ict with it, American culture fundamentally does not because, it would seem from this observation, American ideals of diversity are better, as exemplifi ed by images of ethnic food brought to the country by hard-working immigrants.

Like Ali-Karamali, Hasan too falls into the trap of extricating Islam from non-American cultures when defending its true core and does so especially when addressing assumptions about Islam’s repression of women.62 She writes that, in response to patriarchal formulations by men, “it is a rare woman who has enough education, confi dence, and support to say no, this is not what Islam says; this practice is a cultural one”.63And after discussing the Prophet Muḥammad’s respect for women, Hasan writes, “Every place where Islam has been practiced, the culture has affected how Islam is interpreted. Many of these cultures are patriarchal and violate the spirit of Islam”.64 Hasan mentions how often she was asked

59 Ibid., 111, 156.60 Ibid., 149.61 Ibid., 110.62 Hammer notes the danger in such writings to “reformulate and legitimize

stereotypes of Muslim women outside North America” and thus to participate in imperial feminism. Hammer, American Muslim Women, 186, 189.

63 Hasan, Red, White, and Muslim, xxiii (emphasis in original).64 Ibid., 115. See also 135-137.


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while growing up in America, what it was like to be a Muslim woman and whether she had to struggle for freedom. Her response is to say that in fact she never had to struggle since both her country and her religion gave her freedom. “The stories we hear in the news, things we read on the Internet, do come from somewhere, but not from Islam. Just because a Muslim does or says something doesn’t mean it is automatically Islamic, especially when it comes to Muslim women”, she writes.65 While Hasan is right theoretically — in distinguishing between Islam and the speech, acts, and behaviour of Muslims — she inhabits a contradictory position because it is being a Muslim that allows her to speak for Islam in America. So, when Muslims behave badly, as they are wont to do in other cultures, they do not represent Islam; rather they represent a culturally polluted version of Islam. But when Hasan writes about being a Muslim, she does in fact represent Islam, or a face of Islam that is more pleasing by virtue of her and her Islam being grounded in America.

That one woman should be in the position of defending an entire religion, in all its complexity, is a circumstance that neither Ali-Karamali nor Hasan engage, even as the impossible demands of this task inevitably set them up to fail. It would also not be seemly for either author to criticise American imperialist involvement with Pakistan (or other Muslim countries) or the diffi cult choices faced by immigrants with whom a judge’s comment about the availability of an array of ethnic food might not register as positively. An immigrant might not, perhaps, wish to be one of many choices available on a menu.66

65 Ibid., 132. See also 153.66 The menu on which Muslim women’s stories are available for sampling is

extensive. It does not, in fact, even matter whether or not Muslim women in America narrate their stories themselves; their stories can be collected by another party who can then, reassuringly tell her reader that these Muslim women are worthy of being represented because of their individual triumphs and tragedies. For instance, The Face Behind the Veil (2006) is an edited collection of Muslim women’s stories by the journalist Donna Gehrke-White, who decided that she would take it upon herself to reveal the lives and stories of the Muslim women who inhabit America. Donna Gehrke-White (ed.), The Face Behind the Veil: The Extraordinary Lives of Muslim Women in America (New York: Citadel Press, 2006).


66

Investing in Women: Chick-Lit and Luminous SubjectsBy giving Islam an American texture and offering up their stories for consumption, our authors attempt to challenge the idea that there are irreconcilable differences between America and the Muslim world. But why should young Muslim women be the new face of Muslim media chic? What is alluring about their ambassadorship? While 9/11 has shaped the need for Muslim media chic in general, the emergence of the young woman as a subject worthy of media investment is a phenomenon that dates further back, as do expressions of female individualism through mass media. In the decade preceding 9/11, television shows such as Sex and the City (1998-2004) and works of fi ction such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary (1996) ushered in a historical moment marked by spectacular, dramatic and glossy forms of female visibility. Chick-lit, which depicts young, predominantly white and predominantly heterosexual women navigating romance and careers in large cities, emerged as a genre that purported to speak to the experiences of real women in ways that feminism had not.67 Like Helen Fielding, the author of Bridget Jones’ Diary, who famously wanted her plot to echo a modern-day Pride and Prejudice, Nura Maznavi, one of the two editors of Love, InshAllah, writes that she sees her book as something that could be placed on bookshelves between Pride and Prejudice and Sex and the City.68

Claire Snyder has analysed how in the 1990s a number of texts (many of which were loosely edited collections of fi rst-person narratives) declared the coming of a third wave of feminism in which women could be anything they wanted. Snyder points out that in defi ning the new feminism as fun, feminine and sex-positive, women in the 1990s played into the idea that the

67 Caroline J. Smith, Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1-7.

68 Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi, “Nura and Ayesha Get Published, or From ‘He’s just not that into you’ to ‘As good as it gets’ in under one minute,” The Book Doctors, February 7, 2012. Retrieved October 23, 2013, from http://www.thebookdoctors.com/nura-ayesha-get-published-or-from-hes-just-not-that-into-you-to-as-good-as-it-gets-in-under-one-minute. While Love, InshAllah was initially rejected by publishers because it fi t neither the category of chick-lit nor religion, its eventual success reveals it to draw on the appeal of both categories.


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second wave — which was characterised by mass movements for social and economic change — was dour, frumpy and frigid. Snyder goes on to write that “third-wavers do not feel the need to spend a lot of time construct-ing ambitious theoretical analyses or justifying on what grounds they are acting; they just do it. Others can join them or do their own thing”.69 Simi-larly, Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill have argued that neo-liberalism provides women with autonomous choices that they can make as informed consumer-citizens who are perpetually engaged in the production of self. Women’s magazines, internet spaces for women, chick-lit and television series all championed the pursuit of freedom by positioning women as con-sumers of material and sexual pleasure. In the 1990s and after, individual choices, such as the choice to self-represent through forms of mass-media, replaced broader feminist agendas for social change.70

While I Speak for Myself contains accounts in which some personal refl ections are interspersed with political critique, Love, InshAllah emphasises a liberating space in which American Muslim women can share stories about their secret love lives in order to shatter the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman.71 In the introduction to Love, InshAllah, co-editors Nura Maznavi and Ayesha Mattu write that despite accusations of playing into an “Orientalist fantasy about Muslim women”, they are showing that “like most women — we’re independent and opinionated. And the only things hiding under our clothes are hearts yearning for love”.72 Each story, write the editors, “is as unique as the woman behind it”.73 Love, InshAllah locates Muslim women’s agency in the very act of choosing to write confessional stories about their romantic

69 Claire R. Snyder, “What is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay,” Signs 34, 1, 2008, 188.

70 See Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change (London: SAGE Publications, 2009), 3. See also Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), 13-15, 226-229; and Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 91.

71 For two accounts that do intersperse personal refl ection with political critique especially well, see Arshia Khan, “Itchy Feet,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 89-95; and Zainab Alwan, “Shock and Awe,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 184-189.

72 Mattu and Maznavi, Love, InshAllah, ix.73 Ibid., ix, xi.


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experiences. In doing so, the anthology frames its authors through the paradox of uniqueness and conformity that pervades American Muslim women’s confessional writing in the wake of 9/11: Muslim women are unique, but they are also just like other women. This means they too experience desire (usually for men, but sometimes for women), struggle with heartbreak and make informed decisions to refrain from sex or alternatively choose to have a lot of sex. In keeping with the Orientalist fantasies that Maznavi and Mattu do not wish to perpetuate, love and sex function as the all-pervasive lens through which both Muslim women’s confi nes and their freedom are understood.

The acquiescence of Muslim women to the demands that they reveal their relationship to sex to a voracious audience, coupled with the stance that such acquiescence constitutes empowerment, adds to the successful marketing of the book. Many reviews of Love, InshAllah refer to the book as fi nally lifting the veil, so to speak, on Muslim women’s lives.74

Maznavi herself reports that when she pitched the book at a literary festival, enthusiastic men approached her afterwards to say that they did not know they were allowed to touch Muslim women.75 In Foucauldian terms, the discourse of sex offers the writer the pleasure of confession, of telling for the fi rst time what has not been told, what is forbidden, what lies beneath a real or metaphorical veil; the telling is a striptease that binds the performer and her audience in mutual expectation.76 The stated goal of Love, InshAllah is to break stereotypes about Muslim women while also creating a dialogue among Muslims;77 yet, the all-pervasive power of the alterity industry leaves little room for Muslim women to have such a dialogue among themselves without simultaneously having to tailor their presentation of themselves to a hungry and voyeuristic audience. Love, InshAllah then becomes another instance of interlocked performativity; Muslim women produce confessional narratives in

74 For example, the title of this review: Neil MacFarquhar, “Lifting Veil on Love and Islam,” The New York Times, Online, 23 February 2012.

75 MacFarquhar, “Lifting Veil on Love and Islam.” 76 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 70-71. For the emergence of the confessional

subject, see Foucault, 1-35. 77 Mattu and Maznavi, Love, InshAllah, ix, x.


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response to stereotypes and believe the act of confession to be freeing. These confessions are rapidly consumed by an audience whose own role in producing the market for such confessions remains invisible.

To their credit, unlike the two autobiographies penned by a single author who appoints herself an ambassador for Islam in the US, Love, InshAllah and I Speak for Myself feature diverse voices. Love, InshAllah contains accounts that encapsulate the complexities of being Muslim in the US alongside accounts in which those are submerged into breathy narratives of love, sex and romance. For example, Tolu Adiba writes of her same-sex relationship coming to an end because of the confl ict between religious commitments and sexuality, and Leila N. Khan of a relationship ending because her boyfriend eventually could not accommodate her commitments to Islam.78 Other authors follow fairly formulaic, chick-lit approaches to love and longing that come with a Muslim twist. Aisha Saeed enters an arranged marriage with trepidation, only to fi nd that her prospective suitor is the one for her after all, and Deonna Kelli Sayed musters up the courage to initiate a relationship with her future husband instead of waiting for him to make the fi rst move.79

I Speak for Myself too contains accounts that thoughtfully address racism and discrimination toward and among Muslims in the US and accounts that emphasise the cultural diversity present within the Islamic world as a source of enrichment.80 At the same time, the text contains accounts

78 See Tolu Adiba, “A Prayer Answered,” in Mattu and Maznavi, Love, InshAllah, 8-27; and Leila N. Khan, “Rerouting,” in Mattu and Maznavi, Love, InshAllah, 162-178.

79 Aisha C. Saeed, “Leap of Faith,” in Mattu and Maznavi, Love, InshAllah, 1-9; and Donna Kelli Sayed, “Even Muslim Girls Get the Blues,” in Mattu and Maznavi, Love, InshAllah, 152-161.

80 On the latter, see Asma T. Uddin, “Conquering Veils: Gender and Islams,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 36-41; Rabea Chaudhry, “Truth Is Not Always Self-Evident,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 178-183. For some stories that speak of racism and discrimination, and/or challenge U.S. imperialism, see Fatemah Fakhraie, “Roots,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 13-17; Maryyam Abdl-Haleem, “There and Back Again: A Spiritual Journey,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 108-113; Jameelah Xochitl Medina, “The University of Life,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 48-54; Dewnya Bakri-Bazzi, “Sporting Faith,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 60-64; and Mariam Sobh, “A Headscarf Away from Television,” in Ebrahimji and Suratwala, I Speak for Myself, 77-82.


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whose authors’ need to extricate Islam from stereotypes results in an emphasis on the supremacy of American Islam in a manner similar to Ali-Karamali’s and Hasan’s.81

Consequently, both these anthologies contain the potential to subvert Muslim media chic while being constrained by it because the collection of stories allows for the showcasing of difference without the pressures of sustained debate. Subversion is thus reduced to the effect of an isolated preference, accident or individual quirk; perhaps it must be so, since anything more might dangerously approach a shared political demand.82

Even when women in Love, InshAllah write about practices that might make Western feminists uncomfortable, such as polygamy or commitments to virginity, they frame them simply as a product of individual choice, since the politics of post-1990s femininity insist upon the uncritical adoption of the ideology of individualism.83 Within anthologies such as Love, InshAllah and I Speak for Myself, Muslim women are allowed to be different from one another (because each woman must be celebrated for being unique), but these differences are not starting points for critical analysis, nor do they resolve the tension between representing oneself and representing one’s community or proving both one’s essential difference and sameness to an American audience. Even when the personal is acknowledged as political, gendered expectations require difference to be unthreatening while leaving the burden of representation unquestioned.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, McRobbie distinguishes between two ways of gazing upon subjects: visibility and luminosity. Whereas visibility comes from light shining on the form of an object to reveal it, luminosity is a form created by light itself, which exists only as a fl ash, sparkle or shimmer.84 In the new sexual contract between young women and the state, public femininity is a display in which women operate as luminous subjects engaged in producing selves

81 See previous footnotes 41 and 42.82 Michaele L. Ferguson, “Taming the Shrew? Choice Feminism and the Fear

of Politics,” Conference Paper, Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop, University of Chicago (May, 2011), 14-15.

83 Scott, “Introduction: Feminism’s Critical Edge,” 4.84 McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 60-61.


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that are “constitutive of the spectacularly feminine”.85 According to McRobbie, young women who have taken feminism into consideration and moved on are intensely engaged in the production of selves that must — as a condition of their freedom — withhold feminist critique.86 If authors like Hasan and Ali-Karamali must withhold political critique in order to speak for themselves, then writers whose love stories appear in Love, InshAllah must similarly withhold feminist critique or adopt a coy nonchalance towards politics, taking the stance that no matter how their work is read, their intent was never to perpetuate Orientalist fantasies. Such a performance of femininity glances at and then away from a reader whose gaze is ubiquitous and for whom the subject will nonetheless perform a version of herself, thus offering an escape from the dangers and perceived tedium of overt political resistance.

An interesting entry point into the discussion of the new contract between feminine self-expression and public space is the parallel collection of writings by American Muslim men published through the same I Speak for Myself series that published Ebrahimji and Suratwala’s collection of Muslim women’s voices.87 Muslim men, it appears, are not luminous subjects and are able to claim opaque positions that are protective rather than revelatory. Unlike women, who have less autonomy over their bodies and frequently talk about wearing the headscarf or facing comments about Islam’s oppression of women, the Muslim men in this collection barely mention their clothing practices or whether or not they have beards. Their bodies do not feature in their tellings and they remain unmarked by the materiality and gloss that shapes women’s writings. In this collection, a number of black Muslims point to tensions between their community and immigrant communities, a Muslim writer makes fun of the defensiveness of the mantra of “Islam is peace” and another writes that “the idea that any of us speak for ourselves is in some ways naïve. The truth is that I inevitably speak for my fellow Muslim

85 Ibid., 60.86 Ibid., 18-21.87 Wajahat M. Ali and Zahra T. Suratwala (eds.), All-American: 45 American Men on

Being Muslim (Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud Press, 2012).


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Americans, regardless of my intentions. In that sense, my speech is not free, but rather bears the weight of that responsibility”.88

Like some of their female contemporaries, a number of the Muslim men in this collection also point to the cultural diversity within the Muslim community through stories with a global focus and show a diversity within their commitments to America; some are fi erce patriots while others are more ambivalent.89 Some of the similarities between Muslim men and women in these linked collections are promising, because they reveal Muslim men and women to have much in common with one another. In the same vein, the editors of Love, InshAllah are now soliciting stories written by men about their love lives. In this we see a subversive potential; by asking men to avail of technologies of pleasure and confession that have previously been attached only to spectacular femininity, the editors may perhaps be able to offset the overwhelming alterity attached to Muslim women in America.90 At the moment, however, American Muslim women writing autobiographically face challenges that men simply do not, because the market for Muslim women’s writing discourages political subversion, rewards feminine luminosity and weighs down women’s self-expression with the requirement that they respond to stereotypes about their religion and its policing of their desires. Contrary to the notion that the voices of the Muslim women writers in the four works discussed here are purely their own, the bright lights on the theatre in which they are performing and the audiences they attract lead us to suggest that perhaps there could be other spaces that Muslim

88 For an account of tensions between Muslim communities, see Adisa Banjoko, “The Day I Left Islam,” in Ali and Suratwala, All American, 52-57; and Dawud Walid, “Wading through the Seas of Contention,” in Ali and Suratwala, All American, 106-109. For an account of Muslim defensiveness, see Shahed Amanullah, “Creating a New Normal,” in Ali and Suratwala, All American, 72- 73. For a problematisation of free speech, see Azi H. Poonawalla, “Integration, Not Assimilation,” in Ali and Suratwala, All American, 91-92.

89 See for instance, Kamran Pasha, “The War of Art in the Muslim Community,” in Ali and Suratwala, All American, 101-105.

90 The call for submissions is posted on the Love, InshAllah blog. See Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi, “Supplemental Call for Stories for New Anthology,” Love, InshAllah Blog, Online, 2 April, 2013. Retrieved October 22, 2013, from www.loveInshAllah.com.


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women could claim — away from the lights and the applause and the praise and condemnation that are all anchored in the same essentialist assumptions about them.

Concluding Thoughts: Pleasure beyond Confession The discursive constraints in which Muslim women’s autobiographical writing operate are the product of both post-feminist American visibilities and the additional burdens that Muslim women face in response to the vilifi cation of Islam, particularly to perceptions of them as oppressed. We suspect that the consequences of resisting Muslim media chic would likely have been lethal for all four of these books; had they succeeded in doing so, they may never have sold or even been published. Two far lesser-known collections of Muslim women’s writings serve as powerful illustrations of such consequences: Muslim Women Activists in North America: Speaking for Ourselves and Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality.91 Both works have failed to garner any mass attention and their sales likely pale in comparison to the works studied here. Their subjects are more serious, it appears, than they are luminous.

In examining the complicated forces navigated by female Muslim activists in North America, Bullock’s collection simultaneously offers up both an internal challenge to Muslim communities (seeking purposefully to transform defi nitions of female authority among Muslims) and an external challenge to broader North American society (by highlighting efforts to enable Muslim communities to fl ourish in the midst of Islamophobic climates). Bullock deliberately avoids soliciting narratives

91 Katherine Bullock (ed.), Muslim Women Activists in North America: Speaking for Ourselves (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); and Sarah Husain (ed.), Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality (Emeryville, California: Seal Press, 2006). See also Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak, which aims to provide a platform for women to speak courageously and in self-determining ways through an interesting mixture of personal writings and poetry; a few contributions contain confessions about love and secrets reminiscent of Love, InshAllah or seek to explain the veil to mainstream American audiences, while other pieces aim at internal and external political critique, even while being concerned with distinguishing between the Islam of the US and the Islam of foreign cultures. Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur (ed.), Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).


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of a “general life story” and instead calls for ones that zero in on women’s lives as activists.92 While this book, too, is at times concerned with the stereotype of oppressed Muslim women,93 demonstrating the diversity of Muslim voices94 and drawing on models from an early Islam perceived to be more supportive of women’s leadership,95 it is, however, unabashed in its political aims and manages to speak to fellow Muslims in a manner that skirts neither around internal critique nor the critique of broader structures of North American power.

Husain’s collection, consisting of personal writings, poetry and visual art, consciously sees itself as a “departure” from other anthologies about American Muslim women.96 When asked, Husain refused to put a veiled Muslim woman on the cover of Voices of Resistance; her anthology rages against the confi nes of “constantly being defi ned and framed by the state, its military, and its policies” and aims at “creating a community whose priori frame of reference is neither the US war machine nor the stereotypically termed ‘Islamic’ patriarchy”.97 Husain understands the differences between her contributors as part of “a radical poetics in which difference becomes an actual force” of political engagement.98 Husain writes unapologetically in her stirring introduction: “Stripping America’s own veil of convenience and comfort by laying naked the ‘terror’ circulating through every corner of its culture, we come together to bear witness, to refuse silence, and to imagine and work toward constructing other futures”.99 Published by an independent press and an academic press, the saleability of both works appears to have suffered from their being politically engaged and consciously defi ant against the politics of representation.

92 Bullock, Muslim Women Activists in North America, x.93 Ibid., xvi.94 Ibid., xviii.95 Ibid., xvii.96 Husain, Voices of Resistance, 2.97 Ibid., 2, 4. Husain’s refusal to put a veiled woman on the cover of her anthology

is discussed in an online book review, see Shahnaz Habib, 2006, “Inside, Outside and Everywhere in Between,” Samar Magazine. Retrieved October 22, 2013, from http://samarmagazine.org/archive/articles/225.

98 Husain, Voices of Resistance, 2.99 Ibid., 5.


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In assessing the future possibilities of American Muslim women’s autobiographical writings, we draw on the insights of Linda Martín Alcoff, who has pointed out that it is not necessary to view identity and experience as simply imposed or infl icted on the self.100 Beyond being conferred upon one, public identities, such as the identity of Muslim-American, are also key to how one experiences the world; thus the knowledge drawn from one’s identity and experience might also transform the self, particularly when one refl ects on and reinterprets the historical events and social structures that confer public identities.101 In other words, we need not read Muslim American women’s experiences as doomed to be mere “reports of unrefl ective consciousness”.102 When undertaken vigilantly and critically, we posit that their personal narratives may become sites for dynamic and constitutive interplay between the self and history, discourse and community — allowing for the transformation of the self through writing and creating a different locus of pleasure. Through critical refl ection, the Muslim American woman writer might become one who “adjusts, redeploys, resists, [and] transforms discourses of autobiographical identity”.103

There is no denying that there is pleasure in coming forth, in telling one’s story to popular acclaim, in the freeing and often heady sense of confession whose gendered confi nements are not always evident. There is pleasure in creating and reading works in which Muslim girls and women may see refl ections of themselves presented in popular media that otherwise erase them. And there is a pleasure in breaking through the barriers of speech considered improper or treacherous by one’s own community and even in shrugging off politics to talk about love. We

100 Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 92-94.

101 Alcoff, Visible Identities, 114; and Linda Martín Alcoff, “Whose Afraid of Identity Politics?” in Paul M. L. Moya, and Micael Hames-García (eds.), Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 314.

102 Shari Stone-Mediatore, “Chandra Mohanty and the Revaluing of ‘Experience’,” Hypatia, 13, 2, 1998, 117.

103 Sidonie Smith, “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance,” in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds.), Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 111.


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nonetheless imagine pleasures insuffi ciently explored; the pleasure of pushing back at the discourses that constitute Muslim women, of forging new forms of expression that not only actively resist the confi nes of those discourses by creating an “oppositional consciousness”104 but that allow Muslim women to write beyond them altogether. There could be pleasure in fi nding a creative freedom whereby a writer could afford to momentarily “forget” her confi nes without being complicit in the project of forcing Muslims into politically complacent or subservient positions. In the end, we posit that the locus of American Muslim women’s pleasure may exist in a place to be imagined — a place between being silenced and being brought out into spectacular luminosity, a place between invisibility and coercive visibility.

104 Stone-Mediatore, “Performativity,” 123-124.


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