Dora Ahmad.not Beyond the Veil

10 5 Social Text 99 • Vol. 27, No. 2 • Summer 2009

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2008-024 © 2009 Duke University Press

In his 1977 essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Dark-ness,” Chinua Achebe tells of receiving a letter from a high school student in Yonkers who upon reading Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart “was par-ticularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an Afri-can tribe.”1 Among other problems of preconception and ethnocentrism, Achebe here points to the damaging habit of approaching fiction as a transparent, practically invisible conveyance for ethnography. Beyond the student’s failure to consider the engrained behaviors of “his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York,” as Achebe puts it, there lies an even more basic fallacy: the idea that a novel can serve as a reliable container for “customs and superstitions.” Since 1977, if anything, this reductive ethnographic reading practice has become more prevalent, to the point where college syllabi, Amazon bulletin boards, and professional book reviews alike exhibit a hermeneutic division of labor that allows Western representations to be ironic and complex and reads “third-world” and “minority” writing as exclusively mimetic.2

The dominant (mis)understanding of Achebe’s novel is merely one manifestation of a wider set of erroneous interpretive practices based on authenticity and representativeness. Therefore the particular case of Achebe’s magisterial novel — or, more specifically, its prevalent misread-ings — can help us understand a related piece of the same general phenom-enon. After a brief discussion of Things Fall Apart, this essay will investigate the imagery of Muslim women presented in American popular literature, particularly the wildly proliferating subgenre of first-person “oppressed Muslim women” narratives. Multiple examples across the cultural land-scape, whether “serious” nonfiction, children’s book, or pulp memoir,

Not Yet Beyond the VeilMuslim Women in American Popular Literature

Dohra Ahmad

10 6 Ahmad • Muslim Women in American Popular Literature

impart variations on the same image. The Muslim woman — always singu-lar and representative — is veiled, subjugated, indomitable in spirit, but still in need of rescue from an enlightened West. To the extent that these narra-tives convey any regional, doctrinal, or economic specificity, their packag-ing denies such specificity by wrapping them in an iconic image, emptied of political content. The combination of narrative and packaging has a single effect: to allow their American audiences simultaneously to sympathize with, and also to distance themselves from, the political processes that bring anti female regimes into being. I will end with some alternative representa-tions that prove more difficult to render into ethnographic generalization — though, as the case of Things Fall Apart demonstrates, even the most com-plex and nuanced portrayal can result in a rigid and reductive type if its audience is determined to generate that type.

As Salah Hassan points out, one of the central ironies of Things Fall Apart’s reception is that a novel intended to counteract discursive repre-sentations of Africa should generate a dominant discourse of its own.3 The younger Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells how Things Fall Apart mediated her own arrival in the United States:

When I first came to the U.S. to go to university almost 10 years ago, my roommates were startled by everything about me: that I wore what they called “American” clothes, that I spoke English, that I knew who Mariah Carey was. They also seemed disappointed, as if they had been expecting a real African and then had me turn up. Later, I began to suspect that this was because, apart from the movie Tarzan, all they knew of Africa was Chi-nua Achebe’s magnificent novel Things Fall Apart, which they read in high school. But their teacher had forgotten to tell them that Things Fall Apart was set in the Nigeria of a hundred years ago.4

The problem here is not content but reception, or more specifically, pedagogy. Adichie’s roommates encountered Things Fall Apart within a classroom setting that not only failed to situate the novel’s setting chron-ologically, but also bestowed it with what Hassan terms “a singular repre-sentative function.”5 Despite the deliberate absence of the anachronistic terms Nigeria or even Africa in Achebe’s novel, and despite the novelist’s care in discouraging generalizing interpretations, Adichie’s roommates’ contact with the novel generated an alternative set of assumptions and preconceptions.

Achebe’s novel, on the other hand, works hard to undermine just that sort of representative function. While focusing in on one group of villages, the story resists generalization, inserting periodic reminders that customs differ according to locality.6 Though Things Fall Apart is very much an African novel, it is by no means a novel about Africa. Rather, it is a novel that artistically creates a very specific place and time: the fictional Igbo vil-

107 Social Text 99 • Summer 2009

lage of Umuofia, midway through the nineteenth century. Further, Achebe reminds us that even within Umuofia one cannot generalize about cultural practices.7 Rather than a monolithic model of culture, we have a wide and constantly evolving range of opinions and practices. And lest even such a nuanced portrayal be interpreted ethnographically, Achebe also codes the novel with references to its own literary quality. Attentive audiences will understand that Things Fall Apart responds, not to a desire for ethnographic information, but to a need for poetry and narrative. Finally, Achebe signals the unreliability of translations through the example of the corrupt court messengers who use the opportunity of bilingualism to extract their own profit. Responsibly reading Things Fall Apart, therefore, is not only a matter of historicizing, subdividing, and specifying the purported cultural unit under study; it also entails abandoning the very premise of ethnographic reading. Yet American audiences tend to miss all of those points, instead placing the novel within a framework that privileges authenticity over either truth or fiction, and thus converting it into a definitive statement on a knowable cultural body.

Though by no means limited to the United States — Chris Abani tells of visiting Saudi Arabia and being asked “You are from Nigeria? Did you know Okonkwo?” — this reductive, literalist reading practice has been per-fected here.8 While its roots lie in the colonial “native informant” tradition and the concomitant links among knowledge, surveillance, and power, the new American version uses literary tourism to justify global rule, as seen, for instance, in contemporary secondary-school curricula that promote a superficial and facile understanding of “Other Cultures,” while invari-ably presenting them as static, stagnant, and provincial.9 The danger of the ethnographic reading technique to which Things Fall Apart has fallen victim is that it bestows a false sense of “awareness” that supplants both a deep historical literacy and also an understanding of the flexibility and imaginative quality of literary works.

The remainder of this essay is no more about “real” Muslim women than Things Fall Apart is about “real” Igbo villagers. Rather, this essay is about how images of Muslim women are deployed in the American popular imagination. We find an extraordinary overlap among highbrow and popu-lar narratives, adult’s and children’s literature, fiction and nonfiction — especially in terms of publishing apparatuses, marketing, and reception. That overlap also transcends the geographical range of the narrative. The most widely consumed examples of the “oppressed Muslim woman” genre take place in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. (One can note a singular lack of interest on the part of the American reading public regarding Islam outside the Middle East and Central Asia, or the hot spots of American interest: Muslim women in Gambia or Bangladesh do not seem to register.) But invariably they are packaged as definitive comments


not on those places but on Islam at large. Similarly, these narratives, taken together, convey a wide variety of religious practices (Salafi, Deobandi, and Sufi) and class positions (urban professional, rural nomadic, and high-bourgeois nomadic masquerading as aristocracy). Yet in their pre-sentation and reception, no matter what the content, such variety becomes subsumed under the sign of “Islam,” just as Achebe’s carefully grounded historical fiction is taken with disturbing frequency as a definitive picture of an eternal Africa. Once again the problem is not with the documents themselves but with the reading practices I have already described: the memoirs, which contain different degrees of emphasis on Islam, themselves fall victim to what Inger Marie Okkenhaug and Ingvild Flaskerud identify as the “Western tendency to view every issue of the Middle East through the lens of religion, Islam in particular.”10

A familiar semiotic tradition is at work here, one that many literary critics and media scholars have identified as “gendered Orientalism.” In Minoo Moallem’s summary, “the trope of the Muslim woman as the ulti-mate victim of a timeless patriarchy defined by the barbarism of Islamic religion and in need of civilizing has become a very important component of Western regimes of knowledge.”11 The general contours of that trope have been effectively documented by Edward Said, Lisa Lowe, and Leila Ahmed, among others.12 Yet the trope also bears deconstruction along historical lines: it is not an “essential or timeless” phenomenon, as Mohja Kahf’s work makes abundantly clear. Her Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagent to Odalisque historicizes, de-aggregates, and “dis-Orients” nine centuries of European images of Muslim women, unraveling a thread of representation that runs from the medieval to Roman-tic periods. Despite the wide variety of literary models Kahf uncovers — giantesses, princesses, harlots, and soldiers — she concludes that “all that Western culture retains today of its own ebullient parade of Muslim women is a supine odalisque, a shrinking-violet virgin, and a veiled victim- woman.”13 The late-twentieth-century strain of gendered Orientalism produced a series of plucky individualists: introspective, outspoken, strong willed. Far from exotic, in this iteration they are pleasingly familiar, a kind of shadowy sister-self to the American female, if not feminist, reader. Com-pared with the instances of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these neo-Orientalist narratives exhibit a far greater degree of legibility: the objects of study are no longer inscrutable or beyond reach. The colonial gaze remains, but penetrates further and is more confident in its ability to know. There could even be said to be a sort of compensatory function in these narratives: by revealing the previously obscured “world behind the veil,” American pop narratives make up for the failure of English colonial-ism to infiltrate fully into the realms of its regime.

This ideology of utter scrutability emerges from a false universal-

10 9 Social Text 99 • Summer 2009

ism that constructs its objects in its own image. Unlike colonial harem accounts, these narratives allow women to speak, at least purportedly — but only in ways that are legible and familiar within the language and experi-ence of American feminism. They cannily appropriate central tenets of twentieth-century feminism and civil rights: the personal as political; the importance of speaking for oneself. These heroines are made over to look like us precisely so that we can take for granted what we are rescuing them into. Underneath an inconvenient and irritating layer of culture — a culture separated from the messy imbrications that characterize contem-porary world politics — lies a free liberal subject waiting to emerge into unproblematic selfhood. Hassan speaks of Things Fall Apart, at least in its contemporary, hypercanonized incarnation, as one of a group of “texts that simultaneously affirm and harmonize cultural difference.”14 Similarly, the narratives I focus on for the remainder of the essay at once magnify and flatten difference: their protagonists must suffer through an alien and oppressive culture, but inside they are just like us.

I should specify here how this essay fits in with the burgeoning academic literature on women and Islam. Within that literature, the veil often takes on a synecdochical role as a stand-in for an imposed religious identity.15 I will follow that convention only in order to summarize the general schism within the field, but hope not to reproduce a misleading equivalence. In the crudest summary, then, the field divides between femi-nist readings that view the various forms of hijab as providing a space for female expression and empowerment and those that see them as a mark of male domination. Contesting the colonial understanding of the veil as a symbol “of both the oppression of women . . . and the backwardness of Islam,” Leila Ahmed offers a functionalist analysis of the veil as “a practical coping strategy” that legitimizes women’s presence in the public sphere.16 Haideh Moghissi counters, contending that Ahmed and others inadvertently romanticize veiling and other perceived trappings of fun-damentalism as activities that resist a sterile, universalizing modernity. As Moghissi explains, “if, in the Orientalist version, Islam is condemned for its unreformed and unreformable gender-oppressive character, in this neo-Orientalist version, it is applauded for its woman-friendly adaptability, its liberatory potential.”17 More recently, a third position has emerged that opposes both Orientalism and the cultural relativism that can be seen to excuse local patriarchal structures. Lila Abu-Lughod, Saba Mahmood, Zillah Eisenstein, and others have recast the debate by identifying the prov-enance of both narratives in an automatic presumption of liberal-secular humanism as an utmost goal.18

It should be noted as well that all this discussion inevitably takes place within the fraught terrain of what Leti Volpp calls the “discourse of feminism versus multiculturalism.”19 As such, a reconciliatory position

110 Ahmad • Muslim Women in American Popular Literature

here (on the topic of the veil or women in Islam more generally) meshes into the counterdiscursive work done by Volpp, Ella Shohat, Anne McClintock, and many others. Indeed a host of scholars have participated in the ongo-ing process of disassembling the manufactured opposition identified by Volpp.20 Part of that process involves analyzing precisely how the opposi-tion functions, as I will attempt to do through the examples that follow. Anticipating Saba Mahmood’s critique of secularism, Volpp writes that “the discourse of feminism versus multiculturalism assumes that women in minority communities require liberation into the ‘progressive’ social customs of the West.” This is indeed precisely what we will see in the texts I discuss below, particularly Princess: a liberated and even utopian West provides the only conceptual escape for the narrator’s viscerally rendered captivity.

There is therefore a need for dual critique: both of the locations where these memoirs are purported to originate and of those where they are consumed. We can observe the effect of the fraught terrain of “feminism versus multiculturalism” less in the texts themselves and more in readers’ comments, in which responses conform exactly to the closed economy by which a female subject can experience either freedom (defined in Western-universalist terms) or culture (coded as non-Western) but not both. It will thus be necessary to attend to multiple aspects of texts. On the one hand there are the already contradictory internal elements: their claims toward authenticity; the moments in which they undermine those claims (as in Achebe’s references to literariness); the fictive ethnographies they gener-ate; and even the historical validity of some of their claims. At the same time, it is also important to examine their conditions of reception: which of these internal elements appear to gain traction in the American popu-lar imagination and which appear to vanish within a prevailing structure of ethnographic reading and what Mahmood Mamdani calls “culture talk.”21 Mediating those internal and external elements are the publishing apparatuses of the texts — authors’ notes, glossaries, chronologies, back cover quotes, and front cover art — which help to encourage reductive readings. Despite the updated image of the oppressed Muslim woman as plucky individualist, the books’ covers, in particular, work strenuously to invoke and revive the old nineteenth-century harem imagery. Whatever the content, even that limited complexity is belied by the covers, from art to blurbs, which flatten out the geographic and economic specificity developed within the texts themselves.

My interpretive method, therefore, will be two-pronged. We should begin by reading these narratives as literary constructions. Despite the ongoing appeals toward authenticity, there are invariably moments when we can see the text asking us not to read it ethnographically or geopo-litically, as in the too-often-unheeded references in Things Fall Apart to


minute cultural distinctions, individual reinterpretations, and wholesale literary inventions. On the other hand, given that the narratives are indeed consumed ethnographically, we must also observe precisely what histories and ethnographies they create — and, more specifically, which enabling networks of power escape those apparently mimetic representations. I recognize that to point to the historical realities left out of each text is to take the texts on the same distorting terms that I critique, and perhaps to reinforce their manufactured and misleading “reality factor.” But it is important to do so precisely because that is how they have been consumed. Such a methodology should satisfy Moghissi’s concerns, which I do take quite seriously. If, as Volpp and Shohat suggest, we should be able to dis-pense with the ever-looming nonissue of “feminism versus multicultural-ism,” it is also possible in this more specific case to read these narratives critically and to expose their imperializing motives and effects without being seen in any way to suggest that the regimes they pillory might con-stitute legitimate or viable opponents of the new empire.

As a group, these “oppressed Muslim woman” narratives are marked by significant sins of omission: most notably, a reverberating silence on the connections between U.S. foreign policy and the existence of the misogynistic authoritarian regimes they document. Taken together, they create an understanding of the world as divided into separate spheres of barbarism and civilization, darkness and enlightenment, female oppression and female emancipation. Rather than the productive potential of Homi Bhabha’s mimicry, this version of “almost the same, but not quite” allows an easy separation between action and consequence.22 A key feature of these narratives is that they never question the cultural supremacy of the West, thus reinforcing Samuel Huntington’s dangerous Clash of Civiliza-tions thesis.23 If we recognize ourselves in our unfortunate heroines, we are moved only to gratitude and relief for what we are made to view as a separate realm of freedom and emancipation. Their narratives evoke at once sympathy and also distance: the sense that all this has nothing to do with us.

In surveying the landscape of popular “oppressed Muslim women” narratives, the most obvious place to begin is with the publishing phenome-non of Jean Sasson’s Princess Trilogy. Opening with Princess: A True Story of Life behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia, the trilogy presents the first-person nar-rative of the spunky and contemplative Princess Sultana, a pseudonymous member of the Saudi royal family. Through Sasson as ghostwriter, Sultana narrates, not only the virtual confinement of her own privileged circle of sisters, cousins, and friends, but also the torture inflicted upon the disen-franchised population of non-Saudi women in Saudi Arabia. Princess is the most widely read installment in a formidable roster of titles — Princess Sul-tana’s Daughters, Princess Sultana’s Circle, Daughters of Arabia, and others —


all of which share content as well as cover art (see figure 1). It has sold approximately 12 million copies in thirty languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Hebrew. Named in a Penguin readers’ guide as one of “500 Great Books by Women,” Princess is frequently used as part of the assigned curriculum in American high schools and middle schools.

Sasson’s authorial framing encourages readers to view Princess in a uncomplicated documentary light. There are numerous references to per-vasive silencing, which Princess Sultana’s apparent testimony is intended to counteract. Despite those references to the difficulty of speaking, we have no overt sense that such structural silencing has affected the shape or vocabulary of the story: Sultana has simply come into language, midwifed by Sasson, and can now speak the perfect truth that has been suppressed. Sasson writes at the outset: “While the words are those of the author, the story is that of the Princess.”24 The inference is of an utterly transparent mechanism of transcription that purports to have no impact on the con-tent. For contrast we may think, not only of Things Fall Apart, with its sly reminders of the problems and rewards of translation, but more recently of Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng’s collaborative work What Is the What, in which the entire narrative is framed as an unreliable memorial device conjured under extreme pressure.25 Here, on the other hand, the narrative relies upon the faulty logic of “authenticism,” the term coined by Ana María Sánchez-Arce to denote “the discourse or grand narrative that legitimizes knowledge on the grounds of it originating from essential identity characteristics or subjectivities.”26 In this case, the implication is that since Sultana has spoken — through Sasson — we are in possession of the clear and unvarnished truth.

Yet Princess also contains interesting moments that serve to under-mine its own claims toward absolute truth. Sultana tells us: “Since my grandfather’s day, we owned a family of Sudanese slaves. . . . In 1962, when our government freed the slaves, our Sudanese family actually cried and begged my father to keep them. They live in my father’s home to this day.” This complex anecdote succinctly brings up the problems of agency, historiography, and unreliable narration; it handily undermines the easy opposition of slavery and freedom, set out earlier in Sultana’s clichéd contention that “I was born free, yet today I am in chains.”27 From this apparently offhand comment, we can glean that individuals have a more complicated relationship to the idea of choice, a relationship dictated by convention, habit, and economic opportunity. The seemingly absolute categories of “born free” and “in chains” are rendered unstable. Despite the prevailing theme of silence and speech, we must now understand that we are not receiving the ungilded truth.


Of course, this is not the conclusion with which most readers leave Princess. It is also important to read the work with the grain, on its own authenticist terms, in order to analyze precisely what kind of ethnographic picture Princess presents. In fact, fanciful metaphor and sensationalist prose notwithstanding, Princess nonetheless offers some surprisingly important observations that have failed to register within the general American under-standing of Islam and the Middle East. Sasson recognizes the previous stereotype of exotic and passive Muslim women and self-professedly sets out to combat it. As Sasson writes in an author’s note, “Sultana’s passion for life and her amazing mental capacity altered my Westerner’s incorrect perceptions of the ‘women in black,’ whom at that time I viewed as an incomprehensible species of the human race.”28 Both Sasson’s foreword and Sultana’s own narrative contain constant reminders — unfortunately

Figure 1. Cover of Jean Sasson, Princess (Van Nuys, CA:

Windsor-Brooke, 2001).


belied by general perceptions of the book — that Sultana’s situation rests upon particular economic and political circumstances. Sasson, responsi-bly, makes it eminently clear throughout the book that the blame for the horrific practices it exposes lies not in Islam but in the unfettered power brought by oil wealth. Rather than a critique of a religion, Princess provides a strong indictment of a stultifyingly parasitic class. Indeed, it presents a thoroughly class-bound picture. As Sultana tells it, “with the coming of the great oil wealth, which relieved nearly all Saudi women, other than the Bedouin tribespeople and rural villagers, from any type of work, inac-tivity and boredom became a national problem.”29 This is a milieu more familiar from, say, studies of late-Victorian England or neurasthenic New England than from accounts of life for a working Muslim woman anywhere from Senegal to Bangladesh. Sasson and Sultana — like Achebe — insert reminders that culture is not static or eternal, but historically contingent. Princess presents Saudi haute-bourgeois culture as very much a product of the unprecedented oil boom that, much like the coming of the English in Things Fall Apart, unmoored long-standing relationships and generated inorganic communities. In this case things did not fall apart, as they do in Achebe’s Umuofia, but consolidate perniciously around a scaffolding of easy money and seemingly limitless global power.

Similarly, Princess differentiates throughout between religion and local custom. The Saudi ban on women driving, for example, is a “silly custom that had no basis whatsoever in Islam.” A trip to Cairo and a con-versation with a Lebanese immigrant provide Sultana with the opportunity to represent a rich diversity of Muslim practices and behavior. Sasson and Sultana fragment a monolithic picture of political Islam through continu-ous observations that the royalty and the religious establishment, far from working hand-in-hand, are often directly opposed. Sultana’s brother Ali, caught with alcohol and pornography, exclaims, “I am a prince. Those religious fanatics are nothing more than pesky mosquitoes at my ankles.” However, the various apparatuses attached to the narrative itself — from cover to index — tell a different story. In a prefatory note, Sasson’s publisher makes the claim that “it is not the intention of the author or of the Princess to demean the Islamic religion.”30 Sultana’s narrative itself upholds that claim, differentiating as mentioned between Islam proper and the perverse distortion of it practiced in Saudi Arabia. But the claim is then contradicted by the book’s appendixes, which include Koranic excerpts, translations of Arabic words, and a chronology of Muslim history. Even though Sas-son at least partially historicizes her subject’s extraordinarily class-bound experience by writing that “Sultana’s destiny was formed in January, 1902, when her grandfather Abdul Aziz fought and regained the lands of Saudi Arabia,” the chronology begins not with the colonial anointing of an oil-hungry clan but with the birth of the Prophet Mohammed in AD 570.


More perniciously, Princess’s omissions speak still more loudly than its equivocal content. Thoroughly absent from the narrative is the inkling of any structural connection between the tyranny and misogyny of the Saudi Arabian state and the political interests of the United States: a causal relation that Princess strategically omits. Writers as methodologically and politically far-flung as Mahmood Mamdani in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Robert Dreyfuss in Devil’s Game, Craig Unger in House of Bush, House of Saud, and Tariq Ali in The Clash of Fundamentalisms have shown convinc-ingly how Muslim fundamentalism emerged as a result of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War.31 Princess, on the other hand, for all its sur-prising nuance regarding Islam, presents a Manichean world in which the uninvolved Americans are the only possible saviors. Throughout the book, America appears as the opposite of Saudi Arabia in every way. America is quite simply a utopia, filled with simple, unassuming, honest, good people. “Kindly” and “friendly” Americans punctuate the text, appearing every fifty or one hundred pages to pull the reader back into her own sphere of moral robustness. The first Americans we encounter are the pilots of Sul-tana’s family plane. “I was immediately attracted to their open, friendly manner,” Sultana tells us. After one pilot “gave me a reassuring smile . . . to my surprise, I found myself leaning over his shoulder, completely at ease.” Against the artifice and social repression of the Saudi milieu, the Americans come to represent natural human warmth. On her honeymoon in the United States, Sultana announces to her husband, Kareem — and by extension to her readers — “that I liked these strange, loud people, the Americans.” When Kareem asks why, she replies with the implausibly stilted but conveniently flattering explanation that “I believe this marvelous mixture of cultures has brought civilization closer to reality than in any other culture in history.” The accumulating heap of positive associations culminates in the last chapter, in which American troops occupy Riyadh, a chapter that Sasson without a hint of irony titles “The Great White Hope.” As Sultana tells it, “with the arrival of the American troops, Saudi femi-nists’ most ambitious dreams felt the spark of life.” As a result, “suddenly, middle-class Saudi women threw down their shackles.”32

In fact, however, as Unger, Dreyfuss, and others meticulously docu-ment, the United States has never been the opposite or the escape hatch of an authoritarian Saudi Arabia, but rather its enabler — and vice versa, as shown by the United States’ farming out its illegal detainees to Saudi Arabia. Surprisingly, Princess makes many genuinely useful points, whether or not its readers are willing to internalize them. But not surprisingly, in catering to those same ethnocentric readers, the book leaves out the key geopolitical connections that make possible the atrocities it documents. This is the phenomenon identified by both Lila Abu-Lughod and Mah-mood Mamdani, in which “essentialist discourse tends to take precedence


over analysis of power relations.”33 Speaking specifically of Afghanistan, Abu-Lughod wonders “why knowing about the ‘culture’ of the region, and particularly its religious beliefs and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the U.S. role in this history.”34 Indeed, Princess sits easily within Sasson’s career of using pulp nonfiction to justify U.S. foreign policy, a career that began with The Rape of Kuwait in 1991 and continues with Mayada: Daughter of Iraq in 2003, equally well timed to support military action in Iraq.

In surveying readers’ responses to Princess, it is not the class critique but the Manichean worldview that immediately surfaces. Amazon reviews chillingly testify to the book’s harmful reception. Sasson’s cautions against generalization go entirely unheeded; one reader advises, “If you’ve never been exposed to Arab history, start here.” Manichean logic is in abundant display: “After this book all I can say is ‘I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free.’ ” We can see that like other works in this genre, Princess in its reception works to excuse local patriarchy. Taking the book as evidence that “women of the Arab culture have no rights,” a reader goes on to conclude that “if you think we have it bad in America, then after you read this book you will never call anyone sexist again.” This is precisely the process observed by Lila Abu-Lughod, Zillah Eisenstein, Leti Volpp, and others, in which a focus on the supposedly culturally induced oppression of non-Western women serves to derail any consideration of women’s oppression at home.35 Whatever potential Sasson’s book may have had in differentiating between Islam proper and its Saudi distortion, leveling an economic critique at an untouchable U.S. ally, and demonstrat-ing the personal consequences of American oil consumption, the book’s omissions and its presentation undercut that potential, leaving it open to the most reductive, ethnocentric readings. Like Things Fall Apart, indeed like all “minority” literature, Princess speaks within dominant discursive structures that uphold the vision of a world in which some people have “customs and traditions,” while others behave rationally. This is precisely how Princess is read: as anthropological evidence, where the relevant cat-egory is Islam. Princess plays into that reading both by appealing openly to authenticism and by leaving out the historical circumstances that enable what is perceived as culture.

On a less-sensationalist point in the oppressed-Muslim-woman spec-trum, we have My Forbidden Face: Growing up under the Taliban: A Young Woman’s Story. The story of the also-pseudonymous Latifa, who grew up in Kabul under the Taliban, it follows Princess in providing a good deal of his-toric specificity. Latifa makes many references to Afghanistan’s progressive past, countering Orientalist myths of eternal and static Muslim societies by


telling us that her own mother “studied at Zarguna High School, where she didn’t wear the veil; her father had bought her a bicycle, like mine, to ride to school. She knew a time when girls wore their skirts hemmed at the knee, like mine; she received her nurse’s diploma, worked in a hospital, earned a degree in gynecology.” Latifa, like Sasson, eschews a blanket condemnation of Islam and instead points to differences in religious practice across class, region, and family. She emphasizes throughout her book how far Taliban doctrine was from “the Koran, which they distort as they please without any respect for the holy book.” Further still, she uses the Koran to argue against Taliban injunctions: “the Koran says that a woman may be veiled, but should remain recognizable.”36 Within Latifa’s memoir, the Taliban emerges as a force that is hypocritical, opportunistic, and anti-Islam.

But despite the care taken within the narrative itself, the book is packaged in a way that encourages essentializing misreadings. Invoking the most recognizable image within the United States of an Afghani female, the cover material for the AudioFile version of the book declares that “She could be the girl on the National Geographic cover.” In fact, she precisely could not be: one of the points Latifa herself emphasizes is the vast dif-ference between urban and rural Afghan life pre-Taliban. Secondly, not the memoir itself but its packaging presents the same Manichean world familiar from Princess. The cover portrays Latifa — who wrote the memoir from Paris — on the Taliban’s terms, terms that conveniently intersect with an American wish to view Afghanistan as inaccessible and alien (see figure 2). Meanwhile, whereas Latifa cites a rich variety of non-Afghani cultural influences — Indian movies, Persian poetry, and a new Iranian novel as well as American pop music — it is only the latter that the book’s market-ing apparatus, and accordingly its reviews, seize onto. Like Princess, My Forbidden Face follows the American slave narrative tradition in containing an authenticating note; here it is a preface by Karenna Gore Schiff, which humanizes Latifa by invoking her “posters of Brooke Shields and Elvis.”37 Once again we are given a story of American culture providing the only possible alternative to an endemic fundamentalism.

The obscured reality, of course, is the United States’ sponsorship of what was to become the Taliban. As in Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling The Kite Runner,38 there is no mention of U.S. support for the anti-Soviet mujahideen; instead, both Latifa and Hosseini tell a story in which Soviet occupation simply drove its victims into fundamentalist excess. Neither is there any mention in the chronology that closes the book of a U.S. role in Afghanistan. Latifa frequently mentions “foreign support” for the Tali-ban, but such support is either unspecified or else identified as stemming exclusively from Pakistan, a country that looms as an equally sinister entity to the Taliban itself. As is now well known, the “foreign support” came


not only from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia but also from the United States under Ronald Reagan.39 Again, readers’ responses demonstrate the damag-ing effects of those omissions. We can see the same tendency to generalize about Islam and the same romanticization of the status quo — often pack-aged in the same comment, as in “I recommend it to all American women so they can understand how precious our freedoms and liberties are. Also, any person who is interested in learning more about the Islam religion [sic] would greatly appreciate this book.”40 Clearly, Latifa’s careful separation of Koranic doctrine and Taliban practice has gone entirely unnoticed.

In terms of class positioning, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is an entirely different affair from Princess: written by a professor of literature; festooned with testimonials from Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, and the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani; widely praised for its lyrical and

Figure 2. Cover of Latifa and Shékéba Hachemi, My Forbidden Face: Growing up under the Taliban: A Young Woman’s Story

(New York: Hyperion, 2001).


evocative style; ingeniously marketed to American middle-class women eager to identify a redeeming social benefit in joining a book group.41 How-ever, style and credentials notwithstanding, the outlines of Reading Lolita fit in with the same Manichean picture perfected in Princess. Once again a free soul chafes at the constraints of a fundamentalist regime; once again her imaginative escape is, largely, America. Binary oppositions abound. “The values shaping [The Great Gatsby] were the exact opposite of those of the revolution,” Nafisi tells us. One region is forward thinking, the other mired in the past: “We in ancient countries have our past — we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgic about the promise of the future.”42

Reading Lolita, much like the other books I study here, is notable for the story not told: most significantly, Iranian history before the Islamic revolution of 1979. Looming in modern Iranian history, but absent here, is the CIA-engineered overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. The episode was long known anecdotally and declassified in 2000, three years before the publication of Reading Lolita. Robert Dreyfuss provides a detailed account in Devil’s Game. “The story of the coup, run jointly by the CIA and M16, has been told many times,” writes Dreyfuss. “Almost never reported, however, is the fact that the two intelligence agencies worked closely with Iran’s clergy, the ulema, to weaken and ultimately over-throw Mossadegh. . . . Khomeini himself, then no more than an obscure, middle-aged mullah . . . took part in the CIA-organized, pro-shah dem-onstrations against Mossadesh.”43 So, as in Princess, the appearance of an “exact opposite” is an illusory one, manufactured at the cost of historical truth. Given how recently the full contours of that truth have emerged, it makes sense that Nafisi would not record the CIA role in empowering fundamentalists. But to overlook the causality of the Mossadegh-Pahlavi-Khomeini sequence is a glaring omission that changes the political land-scape of her tale of redemption by Western literature. Nowhere, indeed, does Nafisi complicate the image of an enlightened, tolerant West that powers the story.

In a scathing attack that made the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Boston Globe, Hamid Dabashi characterized Reading Lolita as “partially responsible for cultivating the U.S. (and by extension the global) public opinion against Iran.”44 A large part of Dabashi’s critique centers on Nafisi’s exclusive choice of Western classics as a worthy object of study for her underground book group. To be fair, Nafisi frequently men-tions Persian poetry as a subversive force banned by a government loathe to admit any non-Muslim cultural influence. For her, banned Persian poets provide just as valuable a window into freedom and human expres-sion as James and Austen. Before beginning the reading group on which her memoir centers, Nafisi belonged to a study group for classical Persian


literature. Every Sunday night, “like a group of conspirators, we would gather around the dining room table and read poetry and prose from Rumi, Hafez, Sa’adi, Khayyam, Nezami, Ferdowsi, Attar, Beyhaghi. We would take turns reading passages aloud, and words literally rose up in the air and descended upon us like a fine mist, touching all five senses. There was such a teasing, playful quality to their words, such joy in the power of language to delight and astonish.”45 The characterization defies the stark dichotomy presented by the book’s title and packaging; but such an indigenous literary tradition plays nearly no role compared with the English and American classics that structure Nafisi’s memoir. The first item on her alternative curriculum is A Thousand and One Nights, used as a case study in subversive storytelling. Yet Scheherazade’s protofeminist legend merits no chapter in Nafisi’s book, unlike Jane Austen, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov. Here was a potential opportunity to let the U.S. read-ing public understand that literature of value exists outside the United States and England, a message that runs as an undertone within the book but lacks any emphasis within its structure, title, or marketing. And most certainly, within Reading Lolita, feminism and female empowerment are only exogenous to Iran, a characterization that Roksana Bahramitash and Afsaneh Najmabadi, among others, firmly rebut.46

Finally, there is once again the matter of covers, by which books are inevitably judged. As Dabashi’s research reveals, the artful photograph featured on the cover of Reading Lolita had originally portrayed two girls as agents — or at least overt consumers — of local electoral politics. However, the cover uses a cropped version of the photo, one that transforms the girls into surreptitious consumers of “forbidden” Western culture (see figure 3). Without an object, their downward gaze becomes demure, elusive, stealthy; when in fact it had been raptly absorbed in recent electoral developments. As Dabashi writes, cropping the photo “strips them of their moral intel-ligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their home-land, ushering them into a colonial harem,” which as we have seen is still heavily populated by doe-eyed cover models.47 Indeed, the issue of framing informs all of these texts. Something is always foregrounded; something else is always left out; and such framing (both within the text itself and in its publishing apparatus) influences how the text is consumed.

In the realm of American popular culture, we find the most nuance and the clearest response to Orientalist fantasies of the oppressed Muslim woman, not in any adult titles, but in children’s literature: namely, Suzanne Fisher Staples’s young-adult novel Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind. Once again, however, that nuance is entirely undone by the book’s presentation and its pedagogical use. Named as a Newbery Honor Book and American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, among other honors and


Figure 3. Cover of Azar Nafisi,

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York:

Random House, 2003); “Two

Iranian students read the

reformist newspaper Mosharekat, at the Khajet Naseer Technical

University in Tehran, Iran,

Tuesday, April 25, 2000, as

hundreds of students cut classes

to rally for support of reformist

president Mohammad Khatami.”

Photo by Vahid Salemi.

Courtesy of AP


awards, Shabanu frequently appears in units on Islam on the elementary- and middle-school levels.48 It is these marks of institutional approval that allow me to present the novel as representative children’s literature even within this critique of representativeness.

The novel’s opening pages have far more to say about location, cul-ture, and class than about religion. In fact, the first two chapters contain not a single mention of Islam; Staples expends far more energy in establishing the setting, Pakistan’s Cholistan desert. Here, local conditions are far more significant determinants of behavior than religion. As Shabanu’s mother declares proudly, “We are desert people!” Staples gives her readers a strong sense of regional variation as Cholistani Shabanu encounters Baluchis, Arabs, and “people of all kinds.” Set in the 1980s, the novel is marked in world-historical time by the presence of the same mujahideen who would go on to “liberate” Latifa’s Afghanistan. We see little depiction of religious practice, and what there is Staples identifies as a local, and syncretic, ver-sion of Islam. Responsibly, Staples makes absolutely no claims toward representing Islam; rather, she overtly depicts a local nomadic culture that has far more in common — even in terms of religious practice — with its Hindu counterpart across the invisible border than with any of the many non-Cholistani, nonnomadic forms of Islam, whether urban or agrarian, Arab or African. Just as she depicts the blurred line between the linked mystical practices of Sufism and Bhakti Hinduism, Staples also notes the illusory nature of national borders: “Sometimes our animals wander across the border, and when I go to fetch them I look hard to see how it differs from our Pakistan. But the same dunes roll onto India, and I can’t tell for certain exactly where Pakistan ends and India begins.”49

If there is any message to be gleaned about Islam, it ought to be that the faith is nothing if not heterogeneous. But even while the story itself resolutely moors itself on practically every page in Cholistan, its cover announces the story as originating “from the heart of the world of Islam.” What is that world, one wonders, and who has designated Cholistan as its heart? The syncretic Sufi form of Islam practiced here would in fact be illegal in Princess Sultana’s Saudi Arabia. Yet Shabanu appears in many misguided multicultural curricula as a simple and definitive representative of Islam. The Islamic Networks Group (ING), an educational advisory group, recommends against its adaptation for teaching, on the basis of its reception. In ING’s explanation, “Since the targeted audience — seventh graders — are generally not equipped to make the distinction between religion and culture, specific situations and broad generalizations, it is common for them to ask such telling questions after reading the novel as: ‘Do you drive?’ ‘How old were you when you were married?’ and ‘Were you forced to marry your husband?’ There have even been instances of


Muslim girls being teasingly called Shabanu.”50 Of course, this fault lies not with the text itself, but with the way in which it is being presented within an educational curriculum that aims to bestow students with the illusion of global cultural literacy through fictional texts misread as anthropological ones — a subject for another essay. Here, let it suffice to remember Achebe’s receipt of a letter from an American high-school student “happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe.”

I must close this section by noting the heightened absurdity of Sha-banu’s cover (see figure 4), which flatly contradicts the novel’s content: Shabanu, head covered despite her self-description as being too young for any sort of veil; incongruously bejeweled even though she has told us that

Figure 4. Cover of Suzanne Fisher Staples, Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind (New York: Laurel Leaf, 2003).

124

she has worn the same faded outfit for the past three years.51 One fears that it could hardly be any other way. Each of these individual texts, after all, ultimately weaves into a seamless blanket of discourse. Readers of Prin-cess give online recommendations for My Forbidden Face as an alternative treatment of the same topic. Betty Mahmoody, author of the notoriously Islamophobic Not without My Daughter, provides a testimonial for Princess on Jean Sasson’s personal Web site. Teenage readers of Shabanu graduate to Mahmoody’s memoir. Whatever their individual content, their read-ers form these books into linked narratives that add up to a consolidated indictment of Islam. The visuals — one after another set of kohl-rimmed eyes peering out of implausibly glittering veils — simply reinforce that consolidation. None of these texts claim fully to represent Muslim women at large; even Princess, and far more so Shabanu, invokes the importance of geographical and economic specificity. Reading them, as opposed to gazing at their practically identical covers, reveals a wide range of Muslim female experience, determined most particularly by class and region. Even within a Bedouin or nomadic category, we witness an immense difference between Sultana’s childhood (shuttling between a luxurious villa in Jedda, mansion in Riyadh, and apartment in London) and Shabanu’s (learning to manage camels on her own). However, marketing images diminish the specificity that the texts themselves work to achieve, returning readers to a singular vision of a veiled woman, dripping with jewels but unable to own her own self.

As a whole, we should commend these books for departing from a received image of Muslim women as passive victims in need of rescue. But their omissions are more damaging still. They effectively conspire to present a divided Huntingtonian universe, by obscuring the web of complicity and mutual support that has brought these undeniably guilty regimes into being. Relatedly, as reader responses demonstrate, they pro-vide a smokescreen for a lack of female empowerment within the United States. Minoo Moallem writes, “it is under the sign of a veiled woman that we increasingly come to recognize ourselves not only as gendered and heteronormative subjects but also as located in the free West, where women are not imprisoned”; this is precisely the mechanism at work in the reception of these varied but cohesive narratives.52 Reading them, we can feel better about our own condition, with reproductive rights under attack, health care and childcare frequently unavailable, and a Supreme Court that has an eighteenth-century vision of the Constitution. We need not consider the ironies of the inconvenient detail that Saudi Arabia, but not the United States, has signed an international convention guaranteeing equal pay for male and female workers.53 The regimes depicted by Sultana and Latifa in particular are genuinely horrendous, illegitimate, and worth


opposing; but opposition to them is not in fact the outcome of consum-ing these texts. What the texts produce instead is horror, estrangement, disconnection, cultural nationalism, and ultimately passivity.

What, then, are the alternatives to such representations of Mus-lim women? I hope to have demonstrated here some of the antidotes to an apparently totalizing discourse. First, it is critical to interrogate and contextualize the representations themselves, along with their conditions of production and reception; second, to emphasize economic, regional, and doctrinal specificity; and third, to separate religion from culture. As teachers, for example, we can encourage students to read publishing apparatuses as important, if contradictory, elements of texts. There are further measures that we can take. By delving into literary and historical archives, we can resurrect bygone voices of resistance: resistance, that is, both to patriarchal implementation of religious doctrine and also to Western stereotyping. Maryam Habibian’s recent performances, which incorporate the work of the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, do just this. Fatima Mernissi and Leila Ahmed, in the books cited here, both credit a long history of Muslim feminisms. We can also turn to the many alterna-tive literary representations that such distinguished writers as Mariama Ba, Assia Djebar, Nawal el-Saadawi, Hanan Al-Shaykh, and Ahdaf Soueif have made available.

Even within the United States, to return to the terrain on which this essay has generally stood, we have a new wealth of poetry, fiction, essays, and drama. To name a few valuable examples across the genres: Heather Raffo’s one-woman play Nine Parts of Desire presents several Iraqi women — children and adults, natives and expatriates, collaborators and dissidents — giving full expression to the complexity of their experiences; Suheir Hammad’s elegiac poem “First Writing Since” beautifully explores the “double trouble” of living through 9/11 as a Palestinian-American New Yorker; the groundbreaking theater collective Nibras makes extraordinarily productive use of the documentary theater technique pioneered by Anna Deavere Smith; and the multigenre collection Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out introduces readers to “the wide array of thought and behavior embodied in the concept ‘Muslim Woman’ — so that its monolithic quality can be shattered.”54 Even the cover art of Shattering the Stereotypes works to challenge a monolithic conception. In place of the pseudo-authentic photographs seen thus far, the collection uses an image that is subtle, nuanced, and self-consciously artistic: Shahzia Sikander’s Fleshy Weapons, a painting whose nonmimetic quality disallows its audi-ence from literalist interpretations and forces us to recognize the process of representation as one that is complex, negotiated, ambiguous, and sometimes uncomfortable (see figure 5).


What all of these cultural texts have in common is a heavy reliance on the antiuniversalizing technique of heteroglossia: each presents not one narrator or protagonist, but a multiplicity of voices and positions. There is complexity within those voices as well: for example, the Iraqi state-sponsored artist in Raffo’s Nine Parts who, in her honesty about her own complicity with repressive structures of power, mirrors the per-former’s complicity with her audiences’ demands and expectations. Raffo’s character is neither an oppressed victim nor a plucky protofeminist, but rather the product of a far more complex negotiation. Similarly, Sajjil, the Nibras collective’s remarkable documentary play, contains fascinat-

Figure 5. Shahzia Sikander, Fleshy Weapons, 1997. Acrylic, dry pigment,

watercolor, and tea on linen. 96 x 70 inches. Courtesy of Sikkema

Jenkins and Co.


ing moments of acknowledging its own performative quality, which none of the memoirs discussed above exhibit. Both through such reflections and characterizations, and even in their formal contours, these texts each prevent their audiences from generating a singular and representative “Muslim woman,” something that American popular literature has not yet been willing to do.

This is not to say that postmodern, multiple-perspective narratives are the only “acceptable” type, or even are necessarily preferable; for a critic to dictate artistic choices is a dangerous business. I have intended my emphasis to be far more squarely on our own reading practices, which must remain attuned to the moments when texts inevitably indicate their own provisionality. With that said, there is a clear benefit of these more heteroglossic texts in that they resist reductive readings at the very level of structure. By disavowing their own historicity, and instead emphasizing their literariness, they paradoxically become more historically honest even while making it impossible for us to make the grave error of reading them ethnographically. Clearly, this sense of self-consciousness and play is a reactive quality, generated precisely by the reductive readings they intend to combat. Like Salman Rushdie in The Moor’s Last Sigh, these texts insist through self-contradiction that definitive decoding is a futile and mis-guided effort.55 Bad reading practices, it seems, can produce a whole new set of texts, ones that contain a built-in resistance to exactly that type of misreading. Of course, Things Fall Apart too contained such an engrained resistance, yet its warnings against reductive readings are seldom heard. No author can control the ideological uses to which her or his text will be put; therefore it is incumbent upon readers, teachers, and critics to curtail the damaging work of ethnographic misinterpretations.

Notes

This essay benefited enormously from the comments of Lila Abu-Lughod, Tanya Agathocleous, Hamid Dabashi, Orin Herskowitz, Marisa Parham, Bruce Robbins, Ella Shohat, Social Text’s anonymous readers, and the Junior Faculty Research Group at St. John’s University. Many thanks as well to Livia Tenzer and Erin Fiero.

1. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Dark-ness,” Massachusetts Review 18 (1977). Reprinted in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Dark-ness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (London: Norton, 1988), 251.

2. For a series of helpful discussions of the phenomenon whereby audiences exclusively perceive what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “the ethnographic dimen-sion,” see Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 68; Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Post-colonial Poetry in English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 141 – 42; and Ana María Sánchez-Arce, “ ‘Authenticism,’ or the Authority of Authenticity,” Mosaic 40 (2007): 139 – 55.


3. Salah D. Hassan, “Canons after Postcolonial Studies,” Pedagogy 1 (2001): 297 – 304.

4. Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, “You Must Read This: An African Education in ‘No Sweetness Here,’ ” www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18142470 (accessed 12 June 2008).

5. Hassan, “Canons after Postcolonial Studies,” 298.6. See Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Anchor, 1994), 31, 73.7. There was, for instance, no consensus within the village over the question of

whether Okonkwo should have participated in the killing of his foster son Ikemefuna. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 61, 67.

8. Chris Abani (lecture given at “Tribute to Chinua Achebe on the 50th Anni-versary of his novel, Things Fall Apart,” Town Hall, New York, 26 February 2008).

9. Such curricula represent a decisive shift from the high school reading lists of the 1950s – 1980s, which served to endow students with a sense of nationalism, anticommunism, and comfortable global ignorance (in the first group Twain, Haw-thorne, Melville, and James; in the second Orwell and Huxley). For an excellent study of the political uses to which high school curricula have placed Huckleberry Finn, see Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criti-cism in Our Time (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). On the other hand, studies of the politics behind contemporary “multicultural” curricula are sorely lacking; an informal survey indicates that works by Amy Tan, Alice Walker, and Achebe (all inevitably interpreted on ethnographic lines) have begun to supple-ment the older nationalistic model that Arac describes. Later in this essay I will discuss the way in which Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind functions within such “multicultural” curricula.

10. Inger Marie Okkenhaug and Ingvild Flaskerud, Gender, Religion and Change in the Middle East: Two Hundred Years of History (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 2.

11. Minoo Moallem, “Am I a Muslim Woman? Nationalist Reactions and Postcolonial Transgressions,” in Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch, 2005), 52.

12. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); Lisa Lowe, Criti-cal Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

13. Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagent to Odalisque (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 2, 179.

14. Hassan, “Canons after Postcolonial Studies,” 302.15. For an excellent succinct discussion of the Western academic obsession

with the veil, see Myra Macdonald, “Muslim Women and the Veil: Problems of Image and Voice in Media Representations,” Feminist Media Studies 6 (2006): 7 – 23.

16. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 152, 223 – 24.17. Haideh Moghissi, Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of

Postmodern Analysis (London: Zed, 1999), 7.18. Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Is Liberalism Islam’s Only Answer?” in Islam

and the Challenge of Democracy, ed. Joshua Cohen and Deborah Chasman (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 2004). See also Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Female Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

19. Leti Volpp, “Feminism versus Multiculturalism,” Columbia Law Review 101 (2001): 1181 – 1218.


20. See, for example, Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1984); Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press, 1994); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Ella Shohat, “Area Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowledge,” Social Text, no. 72 (2002): 67 – 78.

21. Mahmood Mamdani, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism,” American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 766.

22. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1984), 86.

23. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

24. Jean Sasson, Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia (1992; rpt. Van Nuys, CA: Windsor-Brooke, 2001), unpaginated author’s note.

25. Dave Eggers, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel (New York: McSweeney’s, 2006).

26. Sánchez-Arce, “ ‘Authenticism,’ or the Authority of Authenticity,” 143.27. Sasson, Princess, 29, 17.28. Ibid., 248.29. Ibid., 35.30. Ibid., 194, 67, 8.31. While Mamdani and Ali offer more theoretical sophistication, Dreyfuss’s is

by far the most complete, lucid, and measured exposition of the dybbuk or Franken-stein monster produced by the United States. Unger’s book provides the most detail about Saudi Arabia in particular — filtered, unfortunately, through an anti-Muslim tone that translated into overt xenophobia when it appeared in a cruder visual medium as one storyline of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Though contributing to Islamophobia in its willingness to substitute Saudi Arabia’s Salafi strain for Islam in general, House of Bush, House of Saud does important work of showing the deep and wide connections over the past fifty years between Saudi Arabia and the United States. Unger tracks decades of collusion beginning in 1945 and escalating with the cooperative venture of funding and training the anti-Soviet mujahideen in the 1980s, providing a lens that demonstrates how U.S. foreign policy essentially enabled the bloodcurdling episodes portrayed in Princess. Ali dates the origins of U.S.-Saudi col-lusion further back, to Standard Oil’s concession to Ibn Saud in 1933. See Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004); Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Holt, 2005); Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship between the World’s Two Most Power-ful Dynasties (New York: Scribner, 2004); Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity (London: Verso, 2003), especially 85.

32. Sasson, Princess, 55, 147, 237, 238.33. Shohat, “Area Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowl-

edge,” 73.34. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropo-

logical Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 784.

35. See Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” 784; Zil-lah Eisenstein, “Feminisms in the Aftermath of September 11,” Social Text, no. 72


(2002): 85; Volpp, “Feminism versus Multiculturalism,” 1214; and Shohat, “Area Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowledge,” 69.

36. Latifa and Shékéba Hachemi, My Forbidden Face: Growing up under the Taliban: A Young Woman’s Story, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 14, 40, 48.

37. Ibid., x.38. Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (New York: Riverhead, 2004).39. Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 270 – 302.40. Ams, customer review of Latifa and Shékéba Hachemi, My Forbidden

Face: Growing up under the Taliban: A Young Woman’s Story, Amazon.com, 23 Octo-ber 2003, www.amazon.ca/My-Forbidden-Face-Growing-Taliban/dp/customer -reviews/1401359256.

41. Geraldine Brooks writes, “Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book.” Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2003), back cover.

42. Ibid., 108, 109.43. Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 109 – 10.44. Hamid Dabashi, “Native Informers and the Making of the American

Empire,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 1 – 7 June 2006, weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special .htm.

45. Nafisi, Reading Lolita, 172.46. Roksana Bahramitash, “The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and

Orientalist Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14 (2005): 232 – 33. Najmabadi writes: “Not only have women not disappeared from public life, they have an unmistakably active and growing presence in practically every field.” Afsaneh Najmabadi, “(Un)Veiling Feminism,” Social Text, no. 64 (2000): 30.

47. Dabashi, “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire.”48. See, for example, the lesson plan in Ellen Dybola, Ann Andino, Harriet

Arnold, Maria Asvos, and Ivette Robles, “Using the Novel Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind as a Window into Islamic Religion and Culture in Pakistan,” in Teacher’s Workshop, 1999: Islam in South Asia and the United States (Chicago: South Asia Edu-cational Outreach Project, 1999).

49. Suzanne Fisher Staples, Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind (New York: Knopf, 1989), 145, 48, 10.

50. Ameena Jandali, “Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind: Book Review as It Relates to the Book’s Use in Humanities for Complementing Studies about Islam and the Muslim World in the Context of World History and Social Studies,” ING: Islamic Networks Group, www.ing.org/speakers/finalsubpage.asp?num=41&pagenum=3 (accessed 12 June 2008).

51. Staples, Shabanu, 5.52. Moallem, “Am I a Muslim Woman?” 52.53. Namely, ILO Convention 100 (Equal Remuneration for Men and Women

Workers for Work of Equal Value), adopted by the International Labor Organization in 1951. In January 2009 the U.S. Congress passed, and President Obama signed, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, which at least brings U.S. law into gen-eral compliance with ILO Convention 100.

54. Heather Raffo, Nine Parts of Desire (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2006); Nibras, Sajjil (unpublished play, first performed in New York City, 2002); Suheir Hammad, “First Writing Since,” In Motion Magazine, 7 November 2001;


Fawzia Afzal-Khan, “Introduction: Playing with Images, or Will the RE(A)EL Muslim Woman Please Stand Up, Please Stand Up?” in Afzal-Khan, Shattering the Stereotypes, 4.

55. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (New York: Random House, 2005). For a reading of this work as Rushdie’s attempt to foreclose interpretive possibilities, see my essay “ ‘This Fundo Stuff Is Really Something New’: Fundamentalism and Hybridity in The Moor’s Last Sigh,” Yale Journal of Criticism 18 (2005): 1 – 20.

Documents

Dora Ahmad.not Beyond the Veil