Jane Austen and Her Diverse Daughters: Muslim Women Re-reading and Re-writing Pride and Prejudice from South Africa and Beyond

Abstract

Jane Austen and her depiction of courtship during the Regency Period is particularly relevant to South African Indian Muslim women due to the similarities between contemporary Muslim engagement rituals and Austen’s representation of courtship. This can be seen in Riding the Samoosa Express (eds Jeena and Asvat 2014), a non-fiction collection of essays by South African Muslim women, relating to courtship and marriage. In examining some of the essays in that anthology, as well as the novel Ayesha at Last (Jalaluddin 2018), we explore the continued desire of Muslim women not only to re-read Austen, but to read culturally adapted versions of her classics as well. Revisiting Pride and Prejudice and its adaptations provides a window into some of the issues surrounding re-writing the canon for diversity and the representation of specific cultural contexts. These adaptations expand Austen’s universe to allow for inclusion of varying types of complex identities, inviting different types of readers to engage in the original and its adaptations in a meaningful way.

Keywords:

• postcolonial
• Jane Austen
• Indian Muslim women
• South Africa
• Canada
• adaptation

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We recognise that ‘the West’ is not a homogenous or monolithic entity, but the term is used as a descriptor to denote Euro-American ‘perceptions of shared identity’ (Shaikh 2003: 159 fn4). When we refer to Western Muslims, we are referring to practising Muslims who live in countries where Muslims are a minority of the population, and in which the tenets of Western culture, broadly, have merged to varying degrees with Muslim culture.

2 A version of Austen’s chaperoned courtship still exists and plays out in countless contemporary Muslim families, evidenced by novels such as: Ayesha at Last which deals with a Canadian-Muslim woman (Jalaluddin 2018); Courting Samira which portrays a Palestinian-Australian woman going through the process of Samoosa Runs in what she calls ‘Doorknock Appeals’ (Awad 2021: 4); and The Story of Maha, which details the courting experiences of a coloured-Indian woman from Durban (Lee 2007); the non-fiction collection of essays, Riding the Samoosa Express (Jeena and Asvat 2014), relates numerous personal accounts of South African Muslim women and the traditional courtship experience as well.

3 Some have argued that Islam and feminism are mutually exclusive, for example Zara Faris (2018), who states, for example, that ‘theology is the study of the Will of God’ and not the study of the will of man or woman. Others such as Fatima Seedat (2013) and Paria Gashtili (2013) also support the separation of Islam and feminism. However, others argue that the two can be integrated, for example Sa’diyya Shaikh (2003), Margot Badran (2005), Amina Wadud (2008), Ziba Mir-Hosseini (2006) and Aysha Hidayatullah (2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aneesa Bodiat

Aneesa Bodiat is an English literature scholar, currently pursuing a PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand. She practised corporate law for some years before leaving to work on a project dedicated to constitutional literacy. She then left the legal field to pursue further academic study. She focuses on literature in relation to Muslim culture, feminism and auto-ethnography.

Antoinette Pretorius

Antoinette Pretorius is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of South Africa. Her areas of interest are food studies, popular culture in South African literature, masculinity studies, the pornographic and the erotic, female embodiment, and African speculative fiction.