Of Women’s Bonds: Female Friendship and Feminist Ethics of Care in Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane

Abstract

Set in a contemporary British Muslim context, Tabish Khair's 2016 novel Just Another Jihadi Jane grapples with the issue of religious extremism from a female perspective. The narrative arc, however, journeys from radicalisation to redemption, which is captured in powerful and enduring female bonds. The article examines how the female bonds, as portrayed in the novel, are shaped by and reshape the context and what they mean for the feminist conversation on solidarity and sisterhood. Drawing on feminist scholarship on friendship and psychoanalysis, the article explores how the novel's charting of female bonding and its vicissitudes underline an unequal personal and political setting within which female friendship is being forged. Nonetheless, the multiple sisterhoods depicted in the novel evince ethical and subversive potential. Offering a close reading of the text through the prism of care ethics, the essay argues that the text locates ethical relationality in its female bonds and sisterhoods, which in turn advances an ethic of care that both recognises and transcends differences.

Keywords:

• Islam
• feminism
• friendship
• bell hooks
• British Muslims

Notes

1 Khair, being a male writer, deploys a narrative device that underlines the ethical imperative of his text pivoting on a female protagonist. As Claire Chambers points out, ‘Khair’s interposition of a male author between him and Jamilla also works to obviate charges that he is speaking for the working-class Muslim woman, since he does not directly voice her words but implies that the writer is doing this’ (178). The presence of the male interlocutor serves to acknowledge the possible distortions that might occur in the re-presentation of the female protagonist’s narrative, owing to the inability of the male interlocutor to inhabit the psycho-social space of the female subject. This is made apparent by the protagonist’s often-expressed scepticism – and occasional exasperation – over the male interviewer’s understanding of the complexities of situations that involve women’s choices and constraints (eg male attention, wearing hijab).