Negotiating the Veil and Identity in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret

Abstract

Leila Aboulela"s novel, Minaret (2005), provides authentic and rich content to explore the Muslim Arab woman"s struggle over creating a modern yet religiously traditional identity. The conceptual framework of Victor Turner"s liminality and Homi Bhabha"s hybridity and the third space are applied in order to frame the analysis of this struggle and to show that the veil is a metaphor for the Arab woman"s positive and negative experiences. In Minaret, the protagonist, Najwa, experiences a sense of in-betweenness or liminality through crises, transitions, and resolutions of secular and religious lives. The different hybrid identities and efforts Najwa makes to come to terms with her developing Muslim identity is discussed, particularly through her and the women around her who choose to wear the veil and modest, rather than revealing, clothing. Together, these form our analysis of the Muslim Arab woman"s struggle to be Muslim through wearing the veil while living in Britain. The veil in this novel is furthermore symbolic of traditional Islamic culture and represents the struggle to be religiously faithful despite being surrounded by non-Muslims or non-practising Muslims. This then provides the means of understanding individual mobility, empowerment, and agency through which liminality is successfully negotiated in order to achieve a hybrid identity of Eastern and Western cultures.

Toward postmigrant realities in Leila Aboulela’s Elsewhere, Home

“…Peter Morey (2018: 302) argues that “the imperatives of belief are at the centre of her work”, Hassan (2008: 299) states that much of her fiction addresses “the status of women in male-dominated societies”, and Lucinda Newns (2018: 289–290) connects Aboulela’s writing with the term “domestic fiction”. A final comment by Susan Taha Al-Karawi and Ida Baizura Bahar (2014: 256) emphasizes these perspectives: “Aboulela’s work […]fills a gap in Western representations of Muslim women”. The risk here is to perpetuate othering in Aboulela’s portrayal of Muslims and particularly women in the UK or elsewhere through such categorization, but her writing also highlights the postmigrant condition in unique ways, especially through these three interlinked themes.…”

“…There is thus an urgency to re-examine Aboulela’s writing from a perspective no longer only tied to being “a response to the needs of the second generation of Muslims who are not only trying to remain faithful to the principles of their religion, but are also very much rooted in the Western societies to which they belong” (Al-Karawi and Bahar, 2014: 257). Such a description of her writing, along with that of other writers who have negotiated the lives and realities of Muslims in the West in fiction, rests on notions of what Regina Römhild (2017: 70) has termed “migrantology”, which essentially is “research about migrants” instead of taking “migration as its perspective rather than its subject” (2017: 73).…”