105

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 Conrads Heart of Dark-
ness, Chinua Achebe tells of receiving a letter from a high school student
in Yonkers who upon reading Achebes 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 ction as a
transparent, practically invisible conveyance for ethnography. Beyond
the students 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 Achebes novel is merely one
manifestation of a wider set of erroneous interpretive practices based
on authenticity and representativeness. Therefore the particular case of
Achebes magisterial novel or, more specically, 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 rst-person oppressed
Muslim women narratives. Multiple examples across the cultural land-
scape, whether serious nonction, childrens book, or pulp memoir,
Not Yet Beyond the Veil
Muslim Women in American Popular Literature
Dohra Ahmad
106 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 specicity, their packag-
ing denies such specicity 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 difcult 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
Aparts 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 rst 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 Achebes magnicent 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 specically,
pedagogy. Adichies roommates encountered Things Fall Apart within a
classroom setting that not only failed to situate the novels 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 Achebes novel, and despite the novelists
care in discouraging generalizing interpretations, Adichies roommates
contact with the novel generated an alternative set of assumptions and
preconceptions.
Achebes 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 specic place and time: the ctional Igbo vil-
107 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
lage of Umuoa, midway through the nineteenth century. Further, Achebe
reminds us that even within Umuoa 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
prot. 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 ction, and thus converting it into a denitive 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 supercial 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 exibility 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 nd an extraordinary overlap among highbrow and popu-
lar narratives, adults and childrens literature, ction and nonction
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 denitive comments
108 Ahmad Muslim Women in American Popular Literature
not on those places but on Islam at large. Similarly, these narratives, taken
together, convey a wide variety of religious practices (Sala, Deobandi,
and Su) 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 Achebes carefully grounded
historical ction is taken with disturbing frequency as a denitive 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 identied as gendered Orientalism. In
Minoo Moallems summary, the trope of the Muslim woman as the ulti-
mate victim of a timeless patriarchy dened 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
Kahfs 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 condent 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 inltrate fully into the realms of its regime.
This ideology of utter scrutability emerges from a false universal-
109 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 afrm and harmonize cultural difference.
14
Similarly,
the narratives I focus on for the remainder of the essay at once magnify
and atten 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 ts 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 eld, but hope not to reproduce a misleading
equivalence. In the crudest summary, then, the eld 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 womens 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 identied 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 Mahmoods 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 narrators 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 (dened 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
Achebes references to literariness); the ctive 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 atten out the geographic and economic specicity
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
111 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
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 specically, 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 Moghissis 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 specic 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 signicant 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
Bhabhas 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 Huntingtons 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 Sassons Princess Trilogy. Opening with Princess: A True Story of
Life behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia, the trilogy presents the rst-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 connement of her own privileged circle of
sisters, cousins, and friends, but also the torture inicted 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-
tanas Daughters, Princess Sultanas Circle, Daughters of Arabia, and others
112 Ahmad Muslim Women in American Popular Literature
all of which share content as well as cover art (see gure 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.
Sassons authorial framing encourages readers to view Princess in a
uncomplicated documentary light. There are numerous references to per-
vasive silencing, which Princess Sultanas apparent testimony is intended
to counteract. Despite those references to the difculty 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 Dengs 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 Mara Snchez-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
grandfathers 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 fathers 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 Sultanas clichd
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.
113 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
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 authors note, Sultanas passion
for life and her amazing mental capacity altered my Westerners incorrect
perceptions of the women in black, whom at that time I viewed as an
incomprehensible species of the human race.
28
Both Sassons foreword
and Sultanas own narrative contain constant reminders unfortunately
Figure 1. Cover of Jean Sasson, Princess (Van Nuys, CA:
Windsor-Brooke, 2001).
114 Ahmad Muslim Women in American Popular Literature
belied by general perceptions of the book that Sultanas situation rests
upon particular economic and political circumstances. Sasson, responsi-
bly, makes it eminently clear throughout the book that the blame for the
horric 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 Achebes Umuoa, 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. Sultanas 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, Sassons publisher
makes the claim that it is not the intention of the author or of the Princess
to demean the Islamic religion.
30
Sultanas 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 books appendixes, which include Koranic excerpts, translations
of Arabic words, and a chronology of Muslim history. Even though Sas-
son at least partially historicizes her subjects extraordinarily class-bound
experience by writing that Sultanas 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.
115 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
More perniciously, Princesss 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-ung as Mahmood Mamdani in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,
Robert Dreyfuss in Devils 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, lled with simple, unassuming, honest, good people.
Kindly and friendly Americans punctuate the text, appearing every
fty or one hundred pages to pull the reader back into her own sphere of
moral robustness. The rst Americans we encounter are the pilots of Sul-
tanas 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 artice 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 attering 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 identied by both Lila Abu-Lughod and Mah-
mood Mamdani, in which essentialist discourse tends to take precedence
116 Ahmad Muslim Women in American Popular Literature
over analysis of power relations.
33
Speaking specically 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
Sassons career of using pulp nonction 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 books harmful reception. Sassons cautions against
generalization go entirely unheeded; one reader advises, If youve never
been exposed to Arab history, start here. Manichean logic is in abundant
display: After this book all I can say is Im proud to be an American where
at least I know Im 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
womens oppression at home.
35
Whatever potential Sassons 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 books
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
Womans 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 specicity. Latifa makes many references to Afghanistans progressive
past, countering Orientalist myths of eternal and static Muslim societies by
117 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
telling us that her own mother studied at Zarguna High School, where she
didnt 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 nurses 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 Latifas 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 Talibans terms, terms that conveniently intersect with
an American wish to view Afghanistan as inaccessible and alien (see gure
2). Meanwhile, whereas Latifa cites a rich variety of non-Afghani cultural
inuences Indian movies, Persian poetry, and a new Iranian novel as
well as American pop music it is only the latter that the books 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 Hosseinis 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 unspecied or else identied 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
118 Ahmad Muslim Women in American Popular Literature
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, Latifas careful separation
of Koranic doctrine and Taliban practice has gone entirely unnoticed.
In terms of class positioning, Azar Nasis 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 Timess Michiko Kakutani; widely praised for its lyrical and
Figure 2. Cover of Latifa and Shkba Hachemi, My Forbidden
Face: Growing up under the Taliban: A Young Womans Story
(New York: Hyperion, 2001).
119 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
evocative style; ingeniously marketed to American middle-class women
eager to identify a redeeming social benet in joining a book group.
41
How-
ever, style and credentials notwithstanding, the outlines of Reading Lolita
t 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, Nasi 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 signicantly, 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 declassied in 2000, three
years before the publication of Reading Lolita. Robert Dreyfuss provides
a detailed account in Devils 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 Irans 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 Nasi 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 Nasi 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 Dabashis critique
centers on Nasis exclusive choice of Western classics as a worthy object of
study for her underground book group. To be fair, Nasi frequently men-
tions Persian poetry as a subversive force banned by a government loathe
to admit any non-Muslim cultural inuence. 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, Nasi belonged to a study group for classical Persian
120 Ahmad Muslim Women in American Popular Literature
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, Saadi, 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 ne mist, touching all ve 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 dees the stark dichotomy
presented by the books title and packaging; but such an indigenous literary
tradition plays nearly no role compared with the English and American
classics that structure Nasis memoir. The rst item on her alternative
curriculum is A Thousand and One Nights, used as a case study in subversive
storytelling. Yet Scheherazades protofeminist legend merits no chapter in
Nasis 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, rmly rebut.
46

Finally, there is once again the matter of covers, by which books are
inevitably judged. As Dabashis 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 gure 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) inuences how the text is consumed.
In the realm of American popular culture, we nd the most nuance
and the clearest response to Orientalist fantasies of the oppressed Muslim
woman, not in any adult titles, but in childrens literature: namely, Suzanne
Fisher Stapless young-adult novel Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind. Once
again, however, that nuance is entirely undone by the books presentation
and its pedagogical use. Named as a Newbery Honor Book and American
Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, among other honors and
121 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
Figure 3. Cover of Azar Nasi,
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
122 Ahmad Muslim Women in American Popular Literature
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 childrens literature even
within this critique of representativeness.
The novels opening pages have far more to say about location, cul-
ture, and class than about religion. In fact, the rst two chapters contain not
a single mention of Islam; Staples expends far more energy in establishing
the setting, Pakistans Cholistan desert. Here, local conditions are far more
signicant determinants of behavior than religion. As Shabanus 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 Latifas Afghanistan. We see little depiction of religious
practice, and what there is Staples identies 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 Susm 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 cant 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 Su form of Islam practiced here would in fact be
illegal in Princess Sultanas Saudi Arabia. Yet Shabanu appears in many
misguided multicultural curricula as a simple and denitive 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 INGs explanation, Since the targeted audience seventh
graders are generally not equipped to make the distinction between
religion and culture, specic 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
123 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
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 ctional texts misread as anthropological
ones a subject for another essay. Here, let it sufce to remember Achebes
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-
banus cover (see gure 4), which atly contradicts the novels 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 outt 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 Sassons personal Web site. Teenage readers of Shabanu graduate
to Mahmoodys 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 specicity. 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 Sultanas childhood (shuttling between a luxurious villa in Jedda,
mansion in Riyadh, and apartment in London) and Shabanus (learning
to manage camels on her own). However, marketing images diminish the
specicity 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
125 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
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 specicity; 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 Habibians 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, ction,
essays, and drama. To name a few valuable examples across the genres:
Heather Raffos 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 Hammads 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 Sikanders
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 gure 5).
126 Ahmad Muslim Women in American Popular Literature
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 Raffos Nine Parts who, in her honesty about
her own complicity with repressive structures of power, mirrors the per-
formers complicity with her audiences demands and expectations. Raffos
character is neither an oppressed victim nor a plucky protofeminist, but
rather the product of a far more complex negotiation. Similarly, Sajjil,
the Nibras collectives 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.
127 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
ing moments of acknowledging its own performative quality, which none
of the memoirs discussed above exhibit. Both through such reections
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 benet 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 Moors Last Sigh, these texts insist
through self-contradiction that denitive 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 beneted enormously from the comments of Lila Abu-Lughod, Tanya
Agathocleous, Hamid Dabashi, Orin Herskowitz, Marisa Parham, Bruce Robbins,
Ella Shohat, Social Texts anonymous readers, and the Junior Faculty Research Group
at St. Johns University. Many thanks as well to Livia Tenzer and Erin Fiero.
1. Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads 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 Fathers 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 Mara Snchez-Arce, Authenticism, or the Authority of Authenticity, Mosaic
40 (2007): 139 55.
128 Ahmad Muslim Women in American Popular Literature
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 rst 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 Islams 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.
129 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
20. See, for example, Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzalda, 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 authors note.
25. Dave Eggers, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak
Deng: A Novel (New York: McSweeneys, 2006).
26. Snchez-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, Dreyfusss is
by far the most complete, lucid, and measured exposition of the dybbuk or Franken-
stein monster produced by the United States. Ungers book provides the most detail
about Saudi Arabia in particular ltered, unfortunately, through an anti-Muslim
tone that translated into overt xenophobia when it appeared in a cruder visual
medium as one storyline of Michael Moores Fahrenheit 9/11. Though contributing
to Islamophobia in its willingness to substitute Saudi Arabias Sala strain for Islam
in general, House of Bush, House of Saud does important work of showing the deep
and wide connections over the past fty 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 Oils 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, Devils 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 Worlds 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 Reections 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
130 Ahmad Muslim Women in American Popular Literature
(2002): 85; Volpp, Feminism versus Multiculturalism, 1214; and Shohat, Area
Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowledge, 69.
36. Latifa and Shkba Hachemi, My Forbidden Face: Growing up under the
Taliban: A Young Womans 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, Devils Game, 270 302.
40. Ams, customer review of Latifa and Shkba Hachemi, My Forbidden
Face: Growing up under the Taliban: A Young Womans 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 Nasi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New
York: Random House, 2003), back cover.
42. Ibid., 108, 109.
43. Dreyfuss, Devils 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. Nasi, 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 eld. 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 Teachers
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 Books 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/nalsubpage.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, rst performed in New York City, 2002);
Suheir Hammad, First Writing Since, In Motion Magazine, 7 November 2001;
131 Social Text 99 Summer 2009
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 Moors Last Sigh (New York: Random House, 2005).
For a reading of this work as Rushdies attempt to foreclose interpretive possibilities,
see my essay This Fundo Stuff Is Really Something New: Fundamentalism and
Hybridity in The Moors Last Sigh, Yale Journal of Criticism 18 (2005): 1 20.