Reconfiguring Faith, Redefining Agency: Post 9/11

Muslim Women’s Diasporic Dilemmas

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

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

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 Vasilaki3. 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

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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