Faith, Identity and Belonging in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Abstract

This paper analyses Syrian- American writer Mohja Kahf’s novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) as a key text  to understand how an emergent group of  immigrant Muslim women writers negotiate their hyphenated identities and write insightful and poignant accounts of being Muslim in America, by embracing all the complexities and contradictions of their hybrid Muslim American identity. This paper studies Kahf’s novel to probe the ways in which the author critically explores the construction of Muslim women’s identity in the context of displacement, belonging, race and religion in the diasporic space of North America in a post 9/11 world. The analysis looks for the ways in which the writer critiques certain compelling representations of the Muslim woman in popular culture that have contributed to the political alienation and growing marginalization of Muslims in contemporary mainstream society. At a time when Islamophobia is rampant and is used as a political strategy to otherise and alienate, narratives like these, I argue, are stories that people tell about themselves to reclaim their voice and redefine restrictive representations. Furthermore, cultural productions like Kahf’s  can be seen as sites of contestation, as oppositional spaces, where  Muslim minorities challenge stereotypes, and problematize homogenization to construct a distinct American Muslim counter-public. Functioning simultaneously as counter narrative against gendered racialization and critique of intra-community tensions, Kahf’s novel is a timely case study of narrative control, questioning totalizing discourses of community, religion and politics to negotiate meanings from a multiplicity of subject positions. The identity crisis and eventual self-discovery articulated by the protagonist Khadra are viewed through the lens of diasporic consciousness as theorized by Robin Cohen (1997) within the fluid spatial imaginary of a transnational Muslim public sphere as elucidated by  Eickelman and Piscatori (1990).