Reconfiguring Faith, Redefining Agency: Post 9/11

Muslim Women’s Diasporic Dilemmas

Asha S, Department of English & Comparative Literature, Central University

of Kerala, Kasaragod drashascuk@gmail.com

Abstract

‘And then?’

‘And then the Towers fell.’

‘And you stopped being an individual and started being an entire religion.’

(Kamila Shamsie Broken Verses)

In transnational feminist scholarship like Marnia Lazreg’s and in Post-Secular feminist

anthropological/cultural enquiries like Saba Mahmood and Rosa Vasilaki’s, the agency of the

Third World woman is theorised in contradistinction to the liberal secular postulations.

Agency here is understood as the conscious and continuing reproduction of the terms of one’s

existence. The Orientalist, neo-Orientalist representations of Muslim women as silent,

passive victims of conservative, patriarchal Islam preclude enquiries into the question of the

agency of the Muslim woman and the postcolonial and post secular feminist insights are

germane to understanding and conceptualising her agency, inhabiting, as she does, spaces

outside the mainstream liberal-secular.

Enquiries about the Muslim woman’s subjectivity in the post 9/11 years make it imperative a

reconceptualization of religion (Islam) from an ideological structure repressive to women to

an enabling space of female self-determination. The Muslim woman’s engagement with faith

becomes a loaded question in the Islam-West dialectics which largely frames such enquiries,
given that religion emerges as the prime determining category in marking the Muslim

woman’s subjectivity in Western as well as counter (Islamist) discourses/representations. The

diasporic location of the Muslim woman makes her engagement with faith all the more

problematic. This paper examines how Post 9/11 Muslim women’s diasporic narratives go

beyond the limiting dichotomies of Islam-West, feminism-faith, tradition-modernity,

religion-secularism, politics-spirituality etc.

The lack of respect for the foreigner is “the most obvious form of barbarism,” observed

Fatima Mernissi, the Moroccan Islamic feminist, in her book Sheherazade Goes West (2001:

25). Mernissi’s expounding of the different significations the term harem evokes for the

Westerner and the Muslim1 is germane to the post 9/11 representations/configurations of the

Muslim woman, her dress, sexuality, faith, subjectivity and agency. These carry different

associations and evoke varied significations in the Western gaze and in the Muslim woman’s

self-perception. So do notions of truth, justice and loyalty. Mernissi was writing the book in

the closing year of the 20th century. The dawn of the new millennium witnessed further

polarisation of the Western and Muslim worlds ideologically while bringing them closer on

the lived, experiential plane, making the diasporic Muslim woman’s negotiations with faith,

her multicultural location and her subjectivity deeply fraught and vexatious, at the same time

exhilarating and self-fulfilling.

In her book Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective, which examines the

fiction of four contemporary South Asian novelists who enjoy global visibility – Salman

Rushdie, Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie – Madeline Clements writes:

“The slew of fictional narratives produced by either Western or Westernised writers, both in

North America (DeLillo 2007; Safran Foer 2005; Updike 2006) and in the UK (Amis 2008;

Faulks 2009; McEwan 2005; Rushdie 2005c) in the wake of 9/11 … have tended to reinforce

binary oppositions between Islam and the West, rather than seeking to understand why they

occur.” (2016: 6). I would argue that we also need to think whether a range of identity

positions can be imagined/re-imagined/embraced/performed within and beyond the West-

Islam dialectics by re-appropriating the Muslim diaspora’s cultural/religious/ethnic

markers/practices/rituals. This paper would look at diverse manifestations of post-9/11

diasporic Muslim women’s modes of observance of religious markers/practices as a positive,

counter-stereotypical affirmation of faith.

Faith becomes a performative act for the Muslim woman living in the West, caught as she is

between racism and Islamophobia on the one hand and Islamic radicalization and jihadism on

the other. The Muslim woman’s sartorial preferences, dietary habits and even the saying of

daily prayers cannot remain simple quotidian practices, but become politically loaded

decisions and choices. Given her politicised location, the Muslim woman’s observance of

these practices in diasporic contexts, can assume a variety of forms. I seek to illustrate this

with the hijab choices of the Muslim woman as a case in point. I choose my examples from

personal stories, fictional narratives and poems.

Hijab choices of Muslim women range from daily observance (as an affirmation of piety, as

an act of political resistance or as proclamation of cultural assertion and authenticity in a

multicultural environment), through contextual adoption to complete non-observance. Devout

Muslim women may or may not observe the hijab, or may choose to wear it only on public

platforms. Mohja Kahf, the Syrian-American novelist and poet, for instance, covers her hair

for public appearances, but lets it slip off in restaurants and chooses to do without it on hot

days. The Sudanese-born writer Leila Aboulela’s is an instance of the western metropolitan

location enabling the Muslim woman to freely engage with her faith. She believes that there

is more freedom for Muslim women to be religious in Britain, something she was not able to

do back home in Khartoum. 'I grew up in a very westernised environment and went to a

private, American school. But my personality was shy and quiet and I wanted to wear the

hijab but didn't have the courage, as I knew my friends would talk me out of it.' In London,

her anonymity helped: 'I didn't know anybody. It was 1989 and the word "Muslim" wasn't

even really used in Britain at the time; you were either black or Asian. So then I felt very free

to wear the hijab' (Sethi 2005). Here I draw upon Talal Asad’s observations on the

problematic of representing “desire” in the secular-public parlance in his essay “French

Secularism and the Islamic Veil Affair” to theorise the dilemma of Muslim women like Leila
Aboulela whose secularised environment puts constraints on their desire to wear the hijab.

Talal Asad notes a significant omission in the Stasi Commission’s2 attempt to decipher the

“genuine desires” of the girls in the French schools who wore the headscarf (with the implied

assumption of the possibility of parental and communal pressures behind the choice). Asad

says the Stasi Commission did not feel the need for a similar enquiry among girls who did not

wear the hijab. “Was it possible that some of them secretly wanted to wear a headscarf but

were ashamed to do so because of what their French peers and people in the street might

think and say? Or could it be that they were hesitant for other reasons? However, in their case

surface appearance alone was sufficient for the commission: no headscarf worn means no

desire to wear it. In this way “desire” is not discovered but semiotically constructed (2006:

98 emphasis added)”.

In an Islamophobic western metropolitan location the observance of the hijab can assume a

politically-performative role. In this context it may be worthwhile to note that the hijab-

observing Muslim women were the most vulnerable to physical and verbal assaults on

immigrants in Britain in the post-9/11 years. The hijab, popularly represented and perceived

as a synecdoche for Islam and its oppression of women, evokes feelings of strangeness and

revulsion in the liberal-secular westerner. Many of the diasporic narratives/writings have this

feeling of strangeness of the westerner and the Muslim woman’s embrace of the hijab in a

counter-stereotypical move, as their abiding thematic. Mohja Kahf’s poem “Hijab Scene 1”

tersely illustrates the feeling of strangeness-cum-disgust the hijab evokes in the westerner:

“You dress strange," said a tenth-grade boy with bright blue hair

to the new Muslim girl with the headscarf in homeroom,

his tongue-rings clicking on the "tr" in "strange".

The Australian-born Egyptian Palestinian Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel Does my Head Look

Big in this? (2005), a book generally categorised under children’s literature, humorously

relates the impact of an Australian Muslim girl Amal’s overnight decision to wear the hijab.

“Too many people look at it as though it (the hijab) has bizarre powers sewn into its

microfibers. Powers that transform Muslim girls into UCOs (Unidentified Covered Objects),

which turn Muslim girls from an 'us' to a 'them.” (2005: 38).

Mohja Kahf’s poem “Hijab Scene 7” reminds the Westerner, who brands every Muslim

immigrant as a potential terrorist, of the incendiary potential of words:

No, I'm not bald under the scarf

No, I'm not from that country

where women can't drive cars

No, I would not like to defect

I'm already American

But thank you for offering

What else do you need to know

relevant to my buying insurance,

opening a bank account,

reserving a seat on a flight?

Yes, I speak English

Yes, I carry explosives

They're called words

And if you don't get up

Off your assumptions

They're going to blow you away

The poem assumes potency and salience in the light of the observation that in the post-9/11

context, security issues and representations of Muslim immigrants as potential terrorists tend

to overshadow the everyday experience of millions of Muslims living and working in

European countries and their just claims to difference, recognition and multicultural

citizenship rights (Triandafyllidou 2006: 3-4). The adoption of the hijab in an Islamophobic

context may be perceived as the Muslim woman’s mode of contesting what Tariq Modood

calls “the secular bias of discourses and policies of multiculturalism in Western Europe”

(2006: 37).

Leila Aboulela’s women protagonists in the novels The Translator and Minaret find solace in

an alien land in adopting visible marks of Muslim faith (the hijab, being the most

conspicuous of them). Wail S Hassan is critical of this personalized commitment to faith,

which he calls “quietist” (qtd in Nash 2012: 46): “The version of Islam propagated in

Aboulela’s fiction […] involves a complete disavowal of personal liberty as incompatible

with Islam, of feminism as a secular and godless ideology, of individual agency in favour of

an all-encompassing notion of predetermination, and consequently of political agency as

well” (313).

Hassan’s conceptualisation of agency is grounded in the liberal secular Western feminist

paradigm, which the post-secular Muslim feminists have problems with. The Orientalist, neo-

Orientalist representations of Muslim women as silent, passive victims of conservative,

patriarchal Islam preclude enquiries into the question of the agency of the Muslim woman,

who inhabits spaces outside the mainstream liberal-secular. Saba Mahmood’s Politics of
Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005) was a ground-breaking work that

radically critiqued the premises of liberal western feminism, particularly its conceptualisation

of agency. Trying to address the problems and challenges of attempting a feminist

engagement with Islamist movements (earlier reviled by liberal secular feminists for their

gender conservatism and in the post millennium years for their presumed association with

jihadism), Mahmood observes that the vexing relationship between feminism and religion is

most manifest in discussions of Islam (2005: 1). She finds the liberal feminist notion of

human agency which locates it in the political and moral autonomy of the subject inadequate

to study the women involved in “patriarchal religious traditions such as Islam” (7).

Anthropological studies about non-western women such as Janice Boddy and Saba

Mahmood’s show how these women “use perhaps unconsciously, perhaps strategically”,

what the Western world considers “instruments of their oppression as means to assert their

value” both collectively and individually (Boddy 1989: 345).

Citing Marnia Larzreg, the Algerian-born US-based sociological researcher, Fauzia Ahmad

argues that the choice between gender and religion, which is integral to the liberal Western

feminist paradigm fails to resonate with the Muslim woman, for whom empowering does not

mean escape from religion. Lazreg “argues that intersubjectivity within the research process

should facilitate attributing agency to ‘other’ women and respecting their right to express

their lives through their own constructs, while recognizing that their definitions of certain

constructs both exist as their own and, at the same time, are subject to different definitions,

without needing definition or validation from the Western researcher or feminist” (Ahmad

2003: 51). For many Muslim women, empowering is something that enables them both to

offer critiques of oppressive practices and ‘patriarchal relations’ within their own

communities and also simultaneously to maintain a positive religious identity as Muslim

women (55-56). The post-secular turn to feminism “makes manifest the notion that agency,
or political subjectivity, can actually be conveyed through and supported by religious piety,

and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality” [Braidotti 2008: 2). Here I would

like to clarify that my drawing on the post-secular feminist critique of Eurocentric ideological

impositions on and assumptions about the Islamic world should not be taken to mean that I

buy all its premises. I am aware of the responses to Saba Mahmood’s position raised from

within the domain of the secular by those like Stathis Gourgouris and Rosa Vasilaki 3. The

adoption of the hijab can and does carry semiotic meanings and symbolic significance,

particularly in a largely Islamophobic diasporic environment, apart from a mere religious

obligation. Naturally, the decision not to wear the hijab can also be prompted by an act of re-

engagement with faith as it happens with the African-American Saleema Abdul-Ghafur. She

speaks of her post-divorce phase of re-assessment of her life: “I began to re-evaluate my life

and specifically the rituals I performed. I decided to stop doing things that didn’t make sense

to me, so I stopped wearing hijab – not because I felt oppressed wearing it, but rather because

I realized that I had never chosen hijab for myself. As I read the Quran and secondary texts

on Islam and meditated on hijab, I realized that my spirituality had nothing to do with

whether or not I wore hijab. My access to Islam was not located in my outer appearance”

(Abdul-Ghafur 2005: 14).

Geoffrey Nash describes the personalized faith commitment he perceives in the women

protagonists of Leila Aboulela’s diasporic fiction as “individualism of a different kind”,

different to the liberal-secular brand of individualism endorsed by the “native informant”

diasporic writer of Muslim origin – in which category he places the fiction of Hanif Kureishi

(The Black Album) Monica Alica (Brick Lane) and Nadeem Aslam (Maps for Lost Lovers)

(2012: 44). Nash goes on to argue that “without the secular western environment in which her

work is mainly set, Aboulela would not have been able so effectively to inscribe the impact

of faith” (2012: 45). This would appear a problematic proposition, or at the most, one that
would apply to particular cases like Aboulela’s in the pre-2000 years when discrimination

covered only the one practised on the basis of colour and Muslims were not even regarded as

an ethnic group (unlike the Sikhs or the Jews). However, that the spatio-temporal location of

the post 2000 Muslim diasporic writers, has been crucial in constituting their identity and in

determining their positions cannot be emphasised enough. The findings of Leila Ahmed’s

sociological enquiry into the circumstances behind the resurgence of the hijab in post- 9/11

years, which she records in her 2011 book A Quiet Revolution, would substantiate this point.

Ahmed speaks of a post-9/11 trend in the US of “outspoken criticism and challenge by

Muslim women of established Islamic teachings and practices as regards women” (271).

Novels like Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

are to be located not merely in the climate of pronounced Islamophobia in the post-9/11

West, but also in the backdrop of the plethora of writings/voices mostly emerging from

secular-western locations that illustrate the Muslim woman’s engagement with faith from

anti-patriarchal, anti-hegemonic positions. These would include Asma Barlas’ “Believing

Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Quran (2002), Amina

Wadud’s Gender Jihd (2006), Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur edited Living Islam Out Loud:

American Muslim Women Speak (2005), Asra Nomani’s Standing Alone in Mecca: An

American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam (2005), Laleh Bakhtiar’s The Sublime

Quran (2011) and many more. For these women, some of whom reject the label feminist,

“Islamic identity is typically not merely an ascribed and passively accepted identity, but

rather it is actively embraced. It is the identity they speak from and which they enact and

make visible, sometimes through the adoption of hijab” (Ahmed 2012: 279-80).

The case of Aneeka, the character in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire who fights for her right to

see her jihadist brother’s body buried in England, their home country, bears out how agency

can be conveyed through devotion to filial ties. The young generation’s – including his own
son and the two courageous sisters, Aneeka and Isma – embrace of subjectivised

commitments, whether they be to love, truth or justice, not only renders Karamat Lone, the

British Home Secretary’s public championing of these professed British values/ideals hollow,

but also pricks holes in his male British diplomatic pride and smugness, throwing him into

(never verbalised) moments of self-doubt and self-deprecation. Shamsie turns the division

between state/public/men and faith/private/women on its head when she pits Aneeka who

fiercely, fearlessly carries her defence of private, familial loyalties into the public arena,

staking her izzat (honour), (a much-valorised Muslim womanly attribute) against Karamat

Lone who lets his “personal animus” colour his strategic political decision, still managing to

keep his pride in Britishness intact. Shamsie does not fall into the essentialist trap of making

a cliched association of the woman with blind, irrational, uncritical love. As Eamonn puts it,

“they love unconditionally. Unconditionally, but not uncritically. While her brother was alive

that love was turned towards convincing him to return home, now he’s dead it’s turned to

convincing the government to return his body home” (2017: 245).

Aneeka is a ‘devout’, hijab-observing Muslim; but her faith does not stop her from pre-

marital sex. She does not pray five times a day; but never misses her morning prayer. The

transgressive (in the vocabulary of the traditional believer) sexual act becomes a variant of

her morning prayer, both acts of personal fulfilment and spiritual consummation. Other

characters in the novel also define their engagement with faith in personalised terms,

defying/sidestepping authoritative patriarchal interpretations of the Scriptures. Hira Shah,

Isma’s tutor, says, “the Quran tells us to enjoy sex as one of God’s blessings”. When Isma

clarifies, but “within marriage?”, Hira in a playful, laconic vein remarks: “We all have our

versions of selective reading when it comes to the Holy Book” (2017: 40).

I would like to conclude, drawing attention to the dilemmas, academic enquiries on Muslim

women pose to researchers, invariably belonging to urban, professional classes and located in
elite, metropolitan, western or westernised spaces, some of which I also share. Saba

Mahmood herself had problems doing research on the piety movement in the Cairo of the

1990s, which she admits to in an interview: “I went there with a set of assumptions that I am

now criticizing – that they are conservative and haven’t given much thought to what they are

doing. I was just amazed at how conscious they were and what they were struggling with. It

was an eye-opening experience to me. I also couldn’t be visible as a researcher doing this

stuff. I had to keep a very low profile; it took me two years to gain their trust” (Interview).

Questions of subjectivity which a Muslim woman academic faces while researching other

Muslim women (an earlier example of the fictional engagement with the subject can be seen

in the 1991 Pakistani-London diasporic novel The Red Box by Farhana Sheikh) form the

subject of Fauzia Ahmad’s paper “Still ‘In Progress?’ – Methodological Dilemmas, Tensions

and Contradictions in Theorizing South Asian Muslim Women”. Fauzia Ahmad’s discussion

revolves round the representations of South Asian Muslim women in the British context

within academic discourses. Ahmad writes about how at a personal level her own assertion of

a Muslim identity has elicited interesting responses from both academic colleagues and other

associates:

Since I do not wear the hijab myself, first impressions will classify me as an Asian

woman; but what follows is generally an assumption that my very presence within an

elitist institution such as a university signals secularization and an assimilation of

Western ideals. My religious sensitivities manifest themselves in other ways, such as

a rejection of alcohol or of non-halal meat. In response to my refusal, for instance, of

a ‘proper’ drink, a typical reaction would be to request further confirmation before the

issue of ‘why’ enters the conversation. Once the religious basis is established, some

academic colleagues have commented, ‘I didn’t realize you were a proper Muslim!’

The issue, of course, is not my actual abstention from a social drink; it is the cited
 reason behind it. Were I to adopt a secular identity as an ‘Asian woman’ or a ‘black

woman’, some interactions would almost certainly be more accommodating (2003:

54).

The Muslim woman’s engagement with faith may manifest features perhaps overlapping with

and/or endorsing what is (mis)construed as traditional/conservative/regressive, perhaps

ostensibly sharing aspects of Orientalist/Neo-Orientalist stereotypes, and at other times

subversive of received religious traditions and their expectations about feminine roles,

commitments, sexuality and self-fulfilment. Monochromatic representations and monolithic

paradigms fail to capture the nuances of the Muslim woman’s negotiations with faith.

Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur’s editorial remarks in her introduction to the book Living Islam Out

Loud: American Muslim Women Speak (2005) would serve as a fitting concluding note: “We

are Muslim women who have cleared our own paths and created ourselves both because and

in spite of Islam and other Muslims. Our American Muslim identity is not linear, nor can it be

shed or separated. It just is. We are women who understand that following disempowering

interpretations of sacred texts isn’t for us. We reflect the continuum of American Muslim

women – some of us are still conflicted, while others are more secure with the choices we’ve

made, but all of us are evolving as spiritual beings” (2005: 5-6).

Notes

1
Mernissi observes that for the Westerner, the tragic dimension of the Muslim harem – the

fear of women and the self-doubt of men – is missing.

2
The Stasi Commission was appointed in 2003 to report on the question of secularity in

French schools

3
In the essay “The Politics of Postsecular Feminism” Vasilaki argues that the post secular

feminist conceptualization of agency can have counter-hegemonic effects.

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