Anti-Islamophobic novels can still reproduce the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman

Evidence

As a Bangladeshi woman, Asma’s ability to traverse even the immigrant spaces of New York is severely circumscribed. She rarely ventures out from her home in Little Dhaka, as their part of Brooklyn is known, considering Manhattan “like another country” (71). Moreover, in a move that perhaps indicates that The Submission, despite its concern for stereotyping in the media, does not always escape stereotypes of its own, the restraints on Asma are depicted as cultural as well as Islamophobic. She begins as the archetypal oppressed Muslim woman, cowed by the patriarchal conventions of her community. Her tentative attempts to break free of tradition are crushed under the weight of convention and respectability—as when she attempts to rescue a neighbor from domestic abuse but finds her efforts rejected even by the victim, whose concern is primarily for reputation. Arin Keeble suggests that “the characterization of Asma that emerges,” despite this surface image, “is of a strong compassionate woman who won’t accept her husband being written out of history.” That may be so, but her ultimate fate reveals the combined weight of a paranoid host nation and an imposed collective responsibility to community. Her decision to speak up for Mo’s design at the public hearing brings plaudits from many Americans, who see her as acting against silencing oppression by Muslim males. Yet it also brings renewed scrutiny to her own residency status and that of fellow members of the Bangladeshi community in New York, many of whom are also irregular, and leads to an order for her expedited removal from the country. Her murder at the hands of an unknown knifeman—Is he a right-wing extremist or an outraged Bangladeshi community member?—takes place in the full glare of the nation’s media, for whom she has become a cause célèbre. In Waldman’s novel, there is no question but that those most directly at risk from hatred and Islamophobia will always pay the highest price. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 292

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes a novel that contests anti-Muslim stereotyping yet still deploys the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ trope internally.
• XREF: The ‘contest vs. quietly reinforce’ question — this is exactly the taxonomy the reader wants to apply to Hamid and Naqvi. Also relevant to Home Boy’s representation of Muslim women. — connects to: Muslim characters can break stereotype when faith is incidental to personality — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 537; The invented rape-of-the-Virgin-Mary fantasy persists in modern anti-Muslim discourse; Many similar articles to Booth’s story have been written by women such as Theresa Corbin, a white convert living in New Orleans, Louisiana. Corbin wrote an article in 2014 for CNN titled “I’m a Feminist and I Converted to Islam.” Even the title of Corbin’s article addresses the Western misperception that feminism and Islam must be mutually exclusive. Like Booth, Corbin also admits to false notions about “oppressed” Muslim women. However, she came to realize that “Islam turned out to be the religion that appealed to [her] feminist ideals.” On the whole, Western audiences struggle to grasp the appeal of Islam for young white women such as Booth and Corbin. Even more shock is expressed at young American girls joining ISIS. According to a report from New America, one in seven American ISIS converts are women. 30% of these female converts are teenagers (Paquette 2015). Marie Saltman, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noted that female ISIS converts “are denying being sexual objects of the West…they refuse to be objectified. They use the veil so they cannot be sexualized” (Paquette 2015). Female Muslim converts refuse to be sexualized by Western society and thus don the veil as an emancipatory act of protection against the male gaze and mass consumption of female bodies in the public sphere. (+15 more)
• QUESTION: Which of Hamid’s or Naqvi’s female characters does Morey’s framework mark as still stereotyped, or as genuinely escaping it?
• SEED: Essay angle: when novels criticizing Islamophobia replicate its gender conventions, does the critique self-deconstruct?
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 292

Broader Connections

• A novel can expose stereotypes yet trap its own character within them #exemplifies (0.80)
• Gendered Islamophobia assigns opposite tropes to Muslim women and men #qualifies (0.35) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1244