Download or read book In Between Identities Signs of Islam in Contemporary American Writing written by John Waldmeir and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the writers and artists in In-Between Identities: Signs of Islam in Contemporary American Writing, contemporary Muslim American identity is neither singular nor fixed. Rather than dismiss the tradition in favor of more secular approaches, however, all of the figures here discover in Muhammad’s revelation resources for affirming such uncertainty. For them, the Qur’anic notion of a divine “sign” validates creation, even that creativity born of contrasting if not competing assumptions about identity. To develop this claim, individual chapters in the book discuss Muslim faith in the work of poets Naomi Shihab Nye, Kazim Ali, Tyson Amir and Amir Sulaiman; novelists Mohja Kahf, Rabih Alameddine, and Willow Wilson; illustrator Sandow Birk; playwright Ayad Akhtar; and the online record of the 30 Mosques in 30 Days project.

Download or read book Neighbors written by Deanna Ferree Womack and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the Top 10 Books of the Year in 2020 by the Academy of Parish Clergy For a long time, American Christians have been hearing a story about Islam. It's a story about conflict and hostility, about foreigners and strangers. At the heart of this story is a fundamental incompatibility between the two religions going all the way back to their original encounters. According to that story, the only valid Christian response to Islam is resistance. But it's time to tell a different—and truer—story. Christians and Muslims have not always fought or lived in fear of each other. Christian communities in majority-Muslim countries have coexisted with their Muslim neighbors for centuries. More importantly, Muslims have been part of the American story from its beginning. And like their Christian neighbors, Muslims want to make the community in which they live a better place for all citizens. In Neighbors, Deanna Ferree Womack lays the groundwork for members of the two religions to understand, converse, and cooperate with each another. With models for cultivating empathy and interfaith awareness, Christians can move from neighborly intention to real dialogue and common action with Muslims in the United States. Ideal for individual or group study, the book includes discussion guide for group study with links to video clips, a timeline of the first Muslim communities, and a glossary of Arabic terms related to Islam.

Download or read book Developing Muslim Self identity Through Contemporary American Literature written by Mohd. Nazri Latiff Azmi and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Writing Muslim Identity written by Geoffrey Nash and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between Islam and the West is one of the most urgent and hotly debated issues of our time. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive overview of the way in which Muslims are represented within modern English writing, ranging from the novel, through memoir and travel writing to journalism. Covering a wide range of texts and authors, it scrutinises the identity 'Muslim' by looking at its inscription in recent and contemporary literary writing within the context of significant events like the Rushdie Affair and 9/11. Examining the wide range of writing internationally that takes Islam or Islamic cultures as its focus, the author discusses the representation of Muslim identity in writing by non-Muslim writers, former Muslim 'native informants', and practising Muslims.

Download or read book Umma Expressions written by Leila Tarakji and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Umma Expressions: Community, Origins, and Representations in Contemporary Muslim American Literature explores how Muslim Americans articulate their "Muslimness" while situating themselves within the Umma or Muslim community. I explore how Muslim writers (re)imagine their plural identities through narrative, grappling with what it means to be Muslim and American simultaneously; how they participate in, react to, challenge, reify, and shape existing rhetoric on Islam and Muslims; and how they participate in the production of American literature and the U.S. cultural imaginary. As it intersects two literary traditions, both national and religious, Muslim American literature weaves in dialogues that have taken place across a myriad of geographical and historical borders for centuries, effectively broadening the scope of American literary studies as well as our conception of America's narrative. As Umma Expressions examines various iterations of Umma that are expressed in contemporary post-9/11 Muslim American literature, each chapter focuses on a primary text that represents a different genre and time period. Beginning with a historical Umma-identification in an American context, Chapter One: "History, Storytelling, and a Muslim American Origins Narrative in Lalami's The Moor's Account" analyzes Laila Lalami's The Moor's Account (2014), which elaborates on the story of a marginalized historical figure named Estebanico. A work of historiographic metafiction, this novel blurs the lines between fiction and history, demonstrating the (inter)textuality of the latter, questioning the process of historiography, and subverting Western narratives of the past. By integrating elements of early African Muslim slave narratives, Lalami contextualizes Estebanico's narrative within Black and Muslim American literary traditions. Chapter Two: "Muslim American Journeys in the Global" examines Willow Wilson's memoir The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam (2010) as an autobiographical conversion narrative that documents her journey to and within Islam. Her journey to a publicly visible and communal expression of her Muslimness illustrates a reciprocal relationship between faith, self, and community. Wilson's perspective as an American convert to Islam contributes to a deeper understanding of American Muslimness that grapples with the narrative of Islam vs. West, private vs. public religion, and American individualism vs. community belonging. Chapter Three: "Breathing Through the Dust in Samira Ahmed's Internment" examines how the Muslim American community has struggled with the suffocating pressures of Islamophobia in the United States. I argue that the physical internment of Muslim Americans in Ahmed's Internment (2019), a work of speculative fiction, symbolizes the marginalization of Muslims in American society. The protagonist Layla bears the burdens of Islamophobia as she fights against a system that seeks to silence and eliminate her Muslim American identity.Lalami, Wilson, and Ahmed offer three very different representations of Muslim American identity, each of which articulates belonging to the Muslim Umma while resisting narratives of an Anglo-American nationalist history; a manufactured clash of civilizations; and American Islamophobia via War on Terror culture.

Download or read book Contemporary Arab American Literature written by Carol Fadda-Conrey and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of Arab-American literature across multiple genres. Yet, increased interest in this literature is ironically paralleled by a prevalent bias against Arabs and Muslims that portrays their long presence in the US as a recent and unwelcome phenomenon. Spanning the 1990s to the present, Carol Fadda-Conrey takes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging. By asserting themselves within a US framework while maintaining connections to their homelands, Arab-Americans contest the blanket representations of themselves as dictated by the US nation-state. Deploying a multidisciplinary framework at the intersection of Middle-Eastern studies, US ethnic studies, and diaspora studies, Fadda-Conrey argues for a transnational discourse that overturns the often rigid affiliations embedded in ethnic labels. Tracing the shifts in transnational perspectives, from the founders of Arab-American literature, like Gibran Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, to modern writers such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Joseph Geha, Randa Jarrar, and Suheir Hammad, Fadda-Conrey finds that contemporary Arab-American writers depict strong yet complex attachments to the US landscape. She explores how the idea of home is negotiated between immigrant parents and subsequent generations, alongside analyses of texts that work toward fostering more nuanced understandings of Arab and Muslim identities in the wake of post-9/11 anti-Arab sentiments.

Download or read book Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction written by A. Kanwal and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-03-09 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the way that notions of home and identity have changed for Muslims as a result of international 'war on terror' rhetoric. It uniquely links the post-9/11 stereotyping of Muslims and Islam in the West to the roots of current jihadism and the resurgence of ethnocentrism within the subcontinent and beyond.

Download or read book The Promise of Patriarchy written by Ula Yvette Taylor and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The patriarchal structure of the Nation of Islam (NOI) promised black women the prospect of finding a provider and a protector among the organization's men, who were fiercely committed to these masculine roles. Black women's experience in the NOI, however, has largely remained on the periphery of scholarship. Here, Ula Taylor documents their struggle to escape the devaluation of black womanhood while also clinging to the empowering promises of patriarchy. Taylor shows how, despite being relegated to a lifestyle that did not encourage working outside of the home, NOI women found freedom in being able to bypass the degrading experiences connected to labor performed largely by working-class black women and in raising and educating their children in racially affirming environments. Telling the stories of women like Clara Poole (wife of Elijah Muhammad) and Burnsteen Sharrieff (secretary to W. D. Fard, founder of the Allah Temple of Islam), Taylor offers a compelling narrative that explains how their decision to join a homegrown, male-controlled Islamic movement was a complicated act of self-preservation and self-love in Jim Crow America.

Download or read book Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets Poetry and Pedagogy written by Daniel Morris and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In sixteen chapters devoted to avant-garde contemporary American poets, including Kenneth Goldsmith, Adeena Karasick, Tyrone Williams, Hannah Weiner, and Barrett Watten, prolific scholar and Purdue University professor Daniel Morris engages in a form of cultural repurposing by “learning twice” about how to attend to writers whose aesthetic contributions were not part of his education as a student in Boston and Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s when new formalism and post-confessional modes reigned supreme. Morris’s study demonstrates his interest in moving beyond formalism to offer what Stephen Fredman calls “a wider cultural interpretation of literature that emphasizes the ‘new historicist’ concerns with hybridity, ethnicity, power relations, material culture, politics, and religion.” Essays address from multiple perspectives—prophetic, diasporic, ethical—the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics—the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the singular, private human voice across time and space—to an individual reader, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as both opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.

Download or read book How Muslims Shaped the Americas written by Omar Mouallem and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Winner of the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction* *Selected as a Most Anticipated Book of Fall by The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star* An insightful and perspective-shifting new book, from a celebrated journalist, about reclaiming identity and revealing the surprising history of the Muslim diaspora in the west—from the establishment of Canada’s first mosque through to the long-lasting effects of 9/11 and the devastating Quebec City mosque shooting. “Until recently, Muslim identity was imposed on me. But I feel different about my religious heritage in the era of ISIS and Trumpism, Rohingya and Uyghur genocides, ethnonationalism and misinformation. I’m compelled to reclaim the thing that makes me a target. I’ve begun to examine Islam closely with an eye for how it has shaped my values, politics, and connection to my roots. No doubt, Islam has a place within me. But do I have a place within it?” Omar Mouallem grew up in a Muslim household, but always questioned the role of Islam in his life. As an adult, he used his voice to criticize what he saw as the harms of organized religion. But none of that changed the way others saw him. Now, as a father, he fears the challenges his children will no doubt face as Western nations become increasingly nativist and hostile toward their heritage. In Praying to the West, Mouallem explores the unknown history of Islam across the Americas, traveling to thirteen unique mosques in search of an answer to how this religion has survived and thrived so far from the place of its origin. From California to Quebec, and from Brazil to Canada’s icy north, he meets the members of fascinating communities, all of whom provide different perspectives on what it means to be Muslim. Along this journey he comes to understand that Islam has played a fascinating role in how the Americas were shaped—from industrialization to the changing winds of politics. And he also discovers that there may be a place for Islam in his own life, particularly as a father, even if he will never be a true believer. Original, insightful, and beautifully told, Praying to the West reveals a secret history of home and the struggle for belonging taking place in towns and cities across the Americas, and points to a better, more inclusive future for everyone.

Download or read book Memory Voice and Identity written by Feroza Jussawalla and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muslim women have been stereotyped by Western academia as oppressed and voiceless. This volume problematizes this Western academic representation. Muslim Women Writers from the Middle East from Out al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah (1899–1968) and Latifa al-Zayat (1923–1996) from Egypt, to current diasporic writers such as Tamara Chalabi from Iraq, Mohja Kahf from Syria, and even trendy writers such as Alexandra Chreiteh, challenge the received notion of Middle Eastern women as subjugated and secluded. The younger largely Muslim women scholars collected in this book present cutting edge theoretical perspectives on these Muslim women writers. This book includes essays from the conflict-ridden countries such as Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and the resultant diaspora. The strengths of Muslim women writers are captured by the scholars included herein. The approach is feminist, post-colonial, and disruptive of Western stereotypical academic tropes.

Download or read book Native Believer written by Ali Eteraz and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] wickedly funny Philadelphia picaresque about a secular Muslim’s identity crisis in a country waging a never-ending war on terror.” —O, The Oprah Magazine Ali Eteraz’s much-anticipated debut novel is the story of M., a supportive husband, adventureless dandy, lapsed believer, and second-generation immigrant who wants nothing more than to host parties and bring children into the world as full-fledged Americans. As M.’s life gradually fragments around him—a wife with a chronic illness, a best friend stricken with grief, a boss jeopardizing a respectable career—M. spins out into the pulsating underbelly of Philadelphia, where he encounters others grappling with fallout from the war on terror. Among the pornographers and converts to Islam, punks and wrestlers, M. confronts his existential degradation and the life of a second-class citizen. Darkly comic, provocative, and insightful, Native Believer is a startling vision of the contemporary American experience and the human capacity to shape identity and belonging at all costs. “Native Believer stands as an important contribution to American literary culture: a book quite unlike any I’ve read in recent memory, which uses its characters to explore questions vital to our continuing national discourse around Islam.” —The New York Times Book Review “A page-turning contemporary fiction that addresses burning issues about the very essence of identity, and without question Ali Eteraz is a writer’s writer, one whose ear for the English language is just as acute as fellow naturalized Americans Vladimir Nabokov (born in Russia) or Viet Thanh Nguyen (Vietnam).” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Download or read book Gender Place and Identity of South Asian Women written by Pourya Asl, Moussa and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2022-04-08 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past century, South Asia underwent fundamental cultural, social, and political changes as many countries progressed from colonial dominations through nationalist movements to independence. These transformations have been intricately bound up with the spatiality of social life in the region, drawing further attention to the significance of social spaces within transformative politics and identity formations. Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women studies contemporary literature of South Asian women with a focus on gender, place, and identity. It contributes to the debate on gender identity and equality, spatial and social justice, women empowerment, marginalization, and anti-discrimination measures. Covering topics such as partition memory narrative, spatial mobility, and diasporic women’s lives, this book is an essential resource for students and educators of higher education, researchers, activists, government officials, business leaders, academicians, feminist organizations, sociologists, and researchers.

Download or read book Writing New Identities written by Gisela Brinker-Gabler and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Muslim Women in America written by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-02 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muslim women living in America continue to be marginalized and misunderstood since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, yet their contributions are changing the face of Islam as it is seen both within Muslim communities in the West and by non-Muslims.

Download or read book Negotiating Past and Present for a New Identity Contemporary Canadian Muslim Writers and Their Manifold Approaches written by Matthias Dickert and published by . This book was released on 2020-11 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific Essay from the year 2020 in the subject Literature - Canada, Comenius University in Bratislava (Philosophische Fakultät), language: English, abstract: This paper compares various contemporary Muslim writers from Canada and their negotiation with their identity. The choice of works tries to focus on the last decade and wants to show the multiple and flexible way these writers treat the key topic identity. All novels offer a comprehensive and detailed investigation into the concept of identity in contemporary literature from writers with a migrational background whose basis lies in the Muslim world and who know Canada since they have lived there or still do so. The generic and thematic diversity which is reflected in these books show the importance of these writers and throws light on their pluralistic concepts of identity which has and still enriches Canlit. To better present the development of this part of Canlit the first and the last novel are discussed in more detail. The aim of this is to show the development this group of writers has made in such a short time. Contemporary English literature investigates a wide range of issues such as theoretical and conceptual debates over modernity and contemporary, the history and practice of reviewing and / or writing in relation to nationhood, gender, religion or postcoloniality. 'Muslim Writing', as one branch of contemporary English literature is part of 'Postcolonial Writing' which includes sub-genres such as the 'Postcolonial', 'Black British Writing', 'British Jewish' or 'British Asian'. The novelists which form 'Muslim Writing' dispose of a Muslim background which is first of all geographical and cultural and not necessarily religious. It is necessary to point this out that it is not Islam nor the religious as such which shape this term since some important writers like Salman Rushdie or (for the Canadian background Rawi Hage) are not religious in the sense that they are Muslims although India and the

Download or read book American Dervish written by Ayad Akhtar and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-01-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Homeland Elegies and Pulitzer Prize winner Disgraced, a stirring and explosive novel about an American Muslim family in Wisconsin struggling with faith and belonging in the pre-9/11 world. Hayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes. American Dervish is a brilliantly written, nuanced, and emotionally forceful look inside the interplay of religion and modern life.