Agency claims about Muslim women prop up Western women’s rejection of feminism

Evidence

Moreover, the denouement brings Nazneen and her friends closer to that mode of independent individualism noted by Christina Scharff in her study of young Western women who reject feminism as a label, preferring to identify with choice and personal autonomy as opposed to collectivist action among women. Interestingly, Scharff finds that these young women’s sense of agency—and thus their assertion that feminism is no longer relevant to them—is juxtaposed against and therefore established through the argument that Muslim women in particular do not have such agency, being victims of patriarchal cultures and therefore more in need of the feminism these women have outgrown. Seen in this light, Brick Lane describes a journey by which its protagonist moves from multiculturalism through feminism to a final economically individualist position wherein the oppressed Muslim woman shakes off the shackles of patriarchy, tradition, and communal solidarity to arrive at the Promised Land of market independence. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 198

Categorization

• XREF: Scharff’s mechanism — defining one’s own agency against imagined Muslim female victimhood — is a template for reading how Naqvi/Hamid protagonists position themselves.
• QUESTION: Does Maleeka or Changez ever define freedom against a backdrop of allegedly un-free Muslim women elsewhere, mirroring Scharff’s subjects?