The Representations of Faith and Belonging: Locating Sri Lankan Muslim Women in Ameena Hussein’s The Moon in the Water

Abstract

The study examines Ameena Hussein’s 2009 novel, The Moon in the Water, with the objective of unveiling an alternative form of religious faith and belonging among Sri Lankan Muslim women. This investigation delves into the intricate dynamics at play, wherein religious and cultural negotiations unfold within a multi-ethnic context. The primary focus is on unravelling the temporal and spatial stratification of mourning practices adopted by Muslim women in response to the encroachment of Wahhabi influences in Sri Lanka during the early 1980s. Moreover, the research underscores the practice of idda (the widow’s four months and ten days of required mourning) within the context of marriage and gender experiences. It illuminates how these women manoeuvre across areas of subversion, resistance and cultural norms, finally questioning and redefining the peripheries of their lives.

Keywords:

• Ameena Hussein
• community belonging
• mourning
• Muslim women
• religious faith
• Sri Lanka

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A.R.M. Imtiyaz and A. Mohamed-Saleem, ‘Muslims in Post-War Sri Lanka: Understanding Sinhala-Buddhist Mobilization against Them’, Asian Ethnicity 16, no. 2 (2015): 186–202.

2. Fathi Yakan, To Be a Muslim (Indianapolis, IN: American Trust, 1990): 68–72.

3. Dennis McGilvray and Mirak Raheem, ‘Muslim Perspectives on the Sri Lankan Conflict’, Policy Studies, series 41 (Washington, DC: East-West Center, 2007).

4. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974): 274.

5. Ibid., 232.

6. Ameena Hussein, The Moon in the Water (Colombo: Perera Hussein, 2009): 134.

7. Ibid., 228.

8. Ibid., 16.

9. Ibid., 18.

10. Ibid., 206.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 207.

13. Wahhabism is a contentious term widely used nowadays. It alludes to a certain kind of Islamic practice that Shaykh Abd Al Wahaab is said to have taught in the eighteenth century.

14. ‘Sri Lanka Attacks: What We Know about the Easter Bombings’, BBC, April 28, 2019, accessed October 8, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48010697.

15. Alan Keenan, ‘Sri Lanka’s Easter Bombings: Peaceful Coexistence under Attack’, International Crisis Group, April 23, 2019, accessed October 8, 2023, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-asia/sri-lanka/sri-lankas-easter-bombings-peaceful-coexistence-under-attack.

16. Hussein, Moon in the Water, 208.

17. Ibid.

18. McGilvray and Raheem, ‘Muslim Perspectives’, 49.

19. Farzana Haniffa, ‘Piety as Politics amongst Muslim Women in Contemporary Sri Lanka’, Modern Asian Studies 42 (2008): 347–75, DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X07003137.

20. Hussein, Moon in the Water, 208.

21. Ibid., 37.

22. Ibid., 38.

23. Ibid.

24. Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

25. Mohammed Arkoun, The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought (New York: Saqi Books, 2002).

26. Mohammed Arkoun, Rethinking Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon Answers, trans. Robert D. Lee (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).

27. J.I. Smith and Y.Y. Haddad, ‘Women in the Afterlife: The Islamic View as Seen from Quran and Tradition’, Journal of the American Academic of Religion 43 (1975): 39–50.

28. D. Greenberg, ‘Gendered Expression of Grief: An Islamic Continuum’, Journal of Religion & Society 9 (2007): 1–20.

29. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots to a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992): 44.

30. The Holy Quran, trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2000). 

31. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004): 69–70.

32. Ibid., 72.

33. Isabelle Clark-Decès, No One Cries for the Dead (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

34. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965): 443.

35. Hussein, Moon in the Water, 36.

36. Butler, Precarious Life, 56.

37. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 172.

38. Hussein, Moon in the Water, 32.

39. Ibid., 38.

40. Loïc Wacquant. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).

41. See Ruvani Ranasinha, Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 149–50.

42. Hussein, Moon in the Water, 81.

43. Ranasinha, Contemporary Diasporic, 150.

44. Hussein, Moon in the Water, 26.

45. Ibid., 110.

46. Ibid., 98.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid., 160.

49. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2005).

50. Hussein, Moon in the Water, 110.

51. Ibid.

52. Miriam Cooke, ‘The Muslim Woman’, Contemporary Islam 1, no. 2 (2007): 139–54; 142, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-007-0013-z.

53. Jasmine Zine, ‘Lost in Translation: Writing Back from the Margins’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 24, no. 1 (2008): 110–16; 110.

54. Haniffa, Piety as Politics, 349.

55. Alfred Jeyaratnam Wilson, The Breakup of Sri Lanka: The Sinhalese-Tamil Conflict (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1988): 222.

56. Ibid.

57. Qadri Ismail, ‘Unmooring Identity: The Antinomies of Muslim Self Representation’, in Unmaking the Nation, ed. P. Jeganathan and Q. Ismail (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 1995): 55–105.

58. Hussein, Moon in the Water, 26.

59. Nira Yuval Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997): 27.

60. Amrita Chhachhi, ‘Forced Identities: The State, Communalism, Fundamentalism and Women in India’, in Women, Islam and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (London: Macmillan, 1991): 144–75.

61. Hussein, Moon in the Water, 26.

62. Ibid., 158.

63. Ibid., 107.

64. Ibid., 108.

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid., 109.

68. Ibid.

69. Alexandra Watkins, Problematic Identities in Women’s Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 2.

70. Hussein, Moon in the Water, 193.

71. Ibid.

72. Jonathan Spencer et al., Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque: A Collaborative Ethnography of War and Peace (London: Pluto Press, 2015): 55.

73. Ibid., 51.

74. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969): 137.