Misery memoirs make Muslim women legible only through an American feminist lens

Evidence

Indeed, the fate of women tends to dominate the Muslim misery memoir. The form presumes its addressee to be a Western subject, possibly but not conclusively female, who will experience outrage and empathy in almost equal measure. They employ voice and perspective in particular ways so as to encourage certain types of interpretation, not just of the events narrated but also of the supposedly accurate political backdrop, and to foreclose others. Dohra Ahmad sums up the set of assumptions that motivates the technique used to describe the lot of women and the oppressed in Muslim misery memoirs: “These narratives allow women to speak, at least purportedly—but only in ways that are legible and familiar within the language and experience of American feminism.… [These women] are made over to look like us precisely so that we can take for granted what we are rescuing them to. Underneath an inconvenient and irritating layer of culture … lies a free liberal subject waiting to emerge into unproblematic selfhood.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 211

Dohra Ahmad sums up the set of assumptions that motivates the technique used to describe the lot of women and the oppressed in Muslim misery memoirs: “These narratives allow women to speak, at least purportedly—but only in ways that are legible and familiar within the language and experience of American feminism.… [These women] are made over to look like us precisely so that we can take for granted what we are rescuing them to. Underneath an inconvenient and irritating layer of culture … lies a free liberal subject waiting to emerge into unproblematic selfhood.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 211

Categorization

• DEFINE: The Ahmad quote crystallizes the operative definition of how the misery memoir auditions the Western subject and reconfigures the female subject for rescue.
• XREF: Directly parallels your work on Hamid’s and Naqvi’s protagonists—the question being whether they too perform legibility to a Western addressee or refuse it.
• SEED: Essay angle: the misery memoir’s ‘free liberal subject awaiting emergence’ as the foil against which Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy protagonists fail or refuse to be ‘made over.’
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the moral-panic framing in the immodesty article — both describe how Western observers render ‘other’ women legible through their own categories.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 211