Muslim Women Speaking Persistently

Muslim women have been speaking out for eons. Long before the conception of Scheherazade, Muslim women have spoken their minds. Khalid Muhammad Khalid’s Women Around the Prophet tells the stories of pious, eloquent women in the early days of the Islamic tradition. Similarly, Halime Demiresik’s The Mothers of the Believers: Wives of Prophet Muhammad; Muhammad ‘Ali Qutb’s Women Around the Messenger show that Khadija, the Prophet’s wife, was instrumental in helping Mohammad understand that he was receiving the revelation, as she was a successful businesswoman––fifteen years older than the Prophet. It is well-known and accepted that many women from the Prophet’s family provided direction toward the development and support of the religion. From then on, we see that communities of women have supported each other. The Islamic tradition is replete with examples such as al-Sayyidah Nafisah (762–824), a descendant of the Prophet, who was a scholar and teacher of Islam and gave lessons on jurisprudence in the early medieval Arab world. Even before her was al-Khansaa – a seventh-century tribeswoman who was an eloquent elegist during the time of the prophet. The Book of Songs by Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahīnī mentions dozens of female poets across a vast stretch of time, from the time of the Prophet, through the Ummayd and Abbasid Caliphates, right up through early medieval female poets from al-Andalus. Among the notable Andalusian poets is Wallāda bint-al-Mustakfi – whom Doaa Omran focuses on in her paper – who not only spoke persistently through her poetry but also ran a literary salon in eleventh century al-Andalus.

Muslim women writers in the Middle Ages were poets, because poetry was the salient literary genre at the time. Later, they experimented with new genres such as the novel and the short-story, and then expanded to other sub-genres, such as memoir, autobiography, the graphic novel, chick literature, and drama. Even though most of the papers in this cluster read more modern and contemporary works, we have included a medieval paper and book review to showcase the chronological expanse of Muslim women’s writing. The geographic range is equally vast. This issue examines works from across the globe by Muslim women, including works from the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and diasporic Muslim Writers.

This collection contests some enduring stereotypes, such as the contemporary notion that Muslim women behind the veil are subservient and lack liberation, by illuminating some of the various ways Muslim women express themselves and shape their world.

These essays show that Muslim women have spoken out to fulfill their own needs, advocate for inclusion, and resist marginalization even since medieval times. Our collection represents the younger Muslim generation, both as characters and as authors, as represented in the fiction of Zadie Smith and the chick lit written about by Lopamudra Basu and Jariah Mohd Jan and Diana Abu Ujum. As a Black British writer familiar with the context, Smith, though not a Muslim herself, is relevant to the portrayal of young Muslims in London’s marginalized areas, such as Chalk Farm, Brick Lane, and Southall. Although Britain is a particularly contested environment for Muslims and Muslim cultural practices, it has produced an extraordinary body of literature that can illuminate the conditions of Muslim women and Muslims in general. Muslim female characters are widely represented today by both Muslim and non-Muslim writers across literary genres. Muslim women or writings about Muslim women have won the Orange Prize, and Muslim women writers like the Bangladeshi writers Monica Ali and Tahmima Anam have won prizes and received international recognition for their work. In his brilliant essay on liminality in Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age, Om Prakash Dwivedi applies postcolonial theory to develop a hermeneutics of nationalism and feminism, showing how Anam speaks up for the rights of single mothers and their children. Her character, the grandmother Rehana, helps strengthen the notion of the need for community.

The essays and book reviews in our collection survey Muslim women’s writing from the earliest periods, both in the Middle East and in the subcontinent of India. Islam came to India through several Sufi women poets and missionaries. Thereafter, the Moghul Empire brought art, architecture, poetry and various literary forms to the subcontinent, which was already rich with its own Sanskritist and Hindu culture, its indigenous epics. “Mother India” has always absorbed the palimpsest of colonizing cultures, Indianizing them in her all-absorbing bosom. With the advent of British colonialism and British education in India, along with the emergence of several Bengali women writers like Aru and Toru Dutt, several Muslim women writers also gained prominence. Muslim women developed both in education and in notions about their own liberation. Since then, Muslim women’s writing has flourished. Vighnesh Hampapura reviewed Ismat Chughtai’s stories, which have recently been republished together with the great Urdu writer, Manto. Rokeya Hossain dreamt a feminist Utopia in her work Sultana’s Dream, in which she thought up a society called Lady Land, where women kept the men behind purdah. There exists a very vast canon of Indian Muslim women’s writing that includes such greats as Anees Jung, Annie Zaidi, Iqbalunnissa Hussein, Khadija Mastur, Attia Hossain and Qurrattulain Haider. Muniza and Kamila Shamsie have been great exponents of new Pakistani literature. Several of these women writers have borne testimony to the aggressions of men in wars and during the large historical events like Partition and the Bangladeshi wars.

The essay from Yuniyanti Chufaiza of Indonesia most directly challenges the notion that women practicing the faith are necessarily subservient. This essay shows that believing Muslim women are speaking out against certain practices they see as unhealthy or traumatizing for women. Yet they retain their faith and organize through grass-roots movements and NGOs, through communities of women, to bring about changes in their society. Yuniyanti’s article exemplifies grass roots activism to “better” Islam. In her recent talk as part of the 2021 Holberg Debate on Identity Politics, Judith Butler talked about the force of nonviolence as persistence. She felt that defining victimization is a form of persistence (1:01:00–1:02:00). In this essay we find how persistently speaking out against Muslim conventions is meant to better the lives of women victimized by religious practices.

This is followed by Muslim young women authors and scholars who show that it is possible to keep their faith and be recognized as Muslims, while modernizing cultural practices, writing chick lit, reading romance novels, and more generally participating in the modern world. The two essays on chick lit, by Lopamudra Basu and by Jariah Mohd Jan and Diana abu Ujum, demonstrate how, in order to retain their faith, modern Muslim women in Southeast Asia are both creating a literature and learning to speak out against their marginalizations, in the light of new political developments. This helps perpetuate the religion for the future. Basu explains how Ayisha Malik’s young female characters counter the pervasive climate of Islamophobia, but also espouse Islamic practices, like the headscarf. This novel draws very much intertextually from Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic, where the parents are more Westernized and assimilate quietly into British society, but the young people aggressively assert their Muslim identities in the face of marginalizations, bullying etc. We see this also in Zadie Smith’s novel where she describes the formation of the group KEVIN: Keepers of the Eternal Vigilant Islamic Nation.

Though Mala Yousufzahi is often seen as the symbol of women’s liberation in Afghanistan, Hashmi’s The Pearl that Broke Its Shell demonstrates a completely different side of women’s liberation in Afghanistan, turning a critical eye toward the traditional practice of Bacha Posh. Hashimi attempts to validate a transgender identity in a very problematic part of the subcontinent. A transnational anti-racist feminism pervades the work. Butler’s comments regarding the intersectionality of race and gender are relevant here as well.

Heba Abdel-Aziz’s book review of Rafia Zakareya’s Against White Feminism works in tandem with Amel Abbady’s view that the Bacha Posh tradition should be read as a liberating possibility for Muslim women in an oppressive society. Rafia Zakareya’s Against White Feminism contests applying Western feminist theories verbatim to their Islamic counterparts as the application would be faulty in most cases. Amany El-Sawy’s paper on Rohayna Malik’s play Unveiled not only introduces theatrical works as a genre that Muslim women are recently introducing to their audiences but also contests Western stereotypes of Muslim women after the 9/11 attacks.

Nashwa Elshamy’s review of Sherine Hafez’s Women of the Midan introduces the reader to how Egyptian women contributed to the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square, Egypt. They wanted to have a say in making political decisions for their country. Similarly, Magda Hasabelnaby and Rania Reda Nasr explore how Palestinian women revisit the history of the Nakba (the 1948 Palestinian Catastrophe) and defend their country against Israeli occupation. Muddasir Ramzan interviews the prominent Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh, a revolutionary writer who challenges traditional roles for women in her novels.

In addition to experimenting with new literary genres, Muslim women are also becoming theorists. This is evident in Abdel-Aziz’s review of Against White Feminism and Sadek’s review of Eman el-Meligi’s Deconstructing Hegemony: Contemporary Middle East Literature, Theory and Historiography—a theory book that contextualizes theory about the Middle East while focusing, specifically on Palestine. As evident in both titles, Muslim women persistently speak “against” and “deconstruct hegemonic” discourses that locate them in passive and inferior positions propagated both by mainstream academia and Muslim rules of conduct.

The capacity of Muslim women to speak out, to chart their own course independent of male domination and colonialist discourses, and to engage the world on their own terms depends now, as always, on the formation of strong communities and support structures, created by women, for women.

In conclusion, the idea of Muslim women’s writing is not exhausted yet, and our scholarship opens the door for further academic inquiry. In this special issue, we are collaborating in knowledge production in a field of knowledge that has always been written from skewed perspectives. Most of the contributors in this volume are emerging (Muslim) female scholars whose voices were not given the chance to be heard in academia. Inviting mostly Muslim women scholars talk about Muslim women writers gives this volume fresh views as it replaces the dominant trend of having colonial Western male scholars talk about Muslim women. This in itself is a persistent act of speaking out.

Disclosure statement

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