does my head look big in this by randa abdel fattah

The idea of “saving” penetrated the cultural landscape as much as it did foreign policy which underscores the intersection of feminist thought with imperial aspirations (Thobani 2018, 164).

In the face of a systematic representational enterprise pigeonholing Muslim female subjectivities into docile victims in need of “saving,” it has become incumbent upon Muslim women authors to invigorate novel ways of self-fashioning in order to construct a hermeneutic space devoid of orientalist images. Alternative visions which provide everyday life and struggles of Muslim men and women are deemed “unmarketable” because they do not aspire to promote the westernization of Muslim identities. Intrinsic to the latter idea is the premise that there is an essential incommensurability between Islam and “Western Values.” The rendition of Muslim women as anything other than victims or escapees has become a challenge to the publishing industry, particularly as it falls outside the contours of conventional representations of Muslim women (Abdel-Fattah 2017, 97). In their strife to provide alternative narratives, Muslim women authors including Ayisha Malik, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, Leila Aboulela, and Randa Abdel-Fattah have been stricken by other challenges such as the issue of reception and marketability limiting their voices to binary prisms of East and West. In the aftermath of 9/11, the ubiquity of orientalist metanarratives that render Muslim women as “oppressed” and “downtrodden” has affected emerging Muslim voices by imprisoning their works within binary contours. More particularly, it explores Amal’s religious tradition of habituated practices-such as wearing the veil in a hostile environment-as embodiments of autonomous agency. Hence, this essay discloses the challenges facing Muslim women whose exercise of agency is tied to their religious beliefs in a backdrop characterized by multicultural and secular economies. The article also draws on W.E.B Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness to highlight the extent to which Muslim female bodies are caught at the intersection between religion and nation. The analysis relies on the notion of Muslim agency as theorized by Saba Mahmood, for whom the conscious formation of deeply rooted religious subjectivities is sidelined within the modern secular rubrics of self-formation.

Amal, the protagonist, embodies the dilemmas of choice and agency within an ideological rubric which disassociates such notions from faith-based convictions. The present essay discusses Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This? by focusing on the rendition of Islam as an axis of social agency in an environment that is excessively antagonistic of any version of Islam that falls outside the contours of the “liberal model” morphed by the Western creed of equality, liberty.

Does my head look big in this by randa abdel fattah