Muslim Women's Identity in a Changing World: the Fiction of Leila Aboulela

Abstract

Leila Aboulela’s fiction is distinctive because of its unique representation of Muslim experiences. Along with several other Muslim writers, Aboulela writes about Islam and Muslim women’s complex identities in the contemporary world, as a countering intervention to the Western literary tradition. This thesis examines the fictional works of Leila Aboulela, (excluding her most recent novel, River Spirit), in order to show how she engages with the broad theme of how Muslim women grapple with cross-cultural experience and how this resonates with their identity as Muslim women. The works that are analysed in this thesis are The Translator, Minaret, Lyrics Alley, The Kindness of Enemies and Bird Summons; in addition, I refer to the two collections of short stories, Coloured Lights and Elsewhere, Home. I argue that Aboulela depicts Muslim women as active agents who practise their faith from personal conviction as a deliberate strategy to counter dominant Western misconceptions of their supposed oppression under a patriarchal religion. I investigate Aboulela’s fiction to explore the complexities of Muslim women’s identity through cross-cultural encounter, whether at home in Sudan or after their migration to the West. This investigation explores Aboulela’s conceptualisation of Islamic feminism, analyses how her Muslim female characters relate to others, and examines her representation of gender roles in the light of her perception of Islamic feminism. My critique of Aboulela’s fiction recognises her positive representation of Islam as a faith and her normalisation of Islamic practices. More importantly, it demonstrates her female characters’ strong sense of home and identity and how this affects their engagement with Western surroundings.