A Nation of Narrations: Religion, Hegemony, & Self-Identification In
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
A Nation of Narrations: Religion, Hegemony, & Self-identification in Arab American Literature by Adam Yaghi B.A., The Islamic University of Gaza, 1999 M.A., University of Idaho, 2007 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English © Adam Yaghi, 2015 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photo- copying or other means, without the permission of the author. ii Supervisory Committee A Nation of Narrations: Religion, Hegemony, & Self-identification in Arab American Literature by Adam Yaghi B.A., The Islamic University of Gaza, 1999 M.A., University of Idaho, 2007 Supervisory Committee Dr. Christopher Douglas, Supervisor (Department of English) Dr. Lincoln Shlensky, Department Member (Department of English) Dr. Jason Colby, Outside Member (History Department) iii Abstract Supervisory Committee Dr. Christopher Douglas, Supervisor (Department of English) Dr. Lincoln Shlensky, Department Member (Department of English) Dr. Jason Colby, Outside Member (History Department) This research project investigates the intersection of religion, self-identification, and imperialism in a number of Arab American literary works. It engages a wide array of, and contributes to, scholarship from American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Islamic Studies, Global Studies, and Transnational Literary Theory. The project examines two groups of writers: the first group consists of American cultural conservatives of Arab or Muslim descent, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Bridgette Gabrielle, and Wafa Sultan, while the second includes Arab American literary writers Mohja Kahf, Leila Ahmed, Ibrahim Fawal, and Alia Yunis. The former employ the traditional autobiography genre to produce master narratives, while the latter utilize the memoir, novel, and short-story cycle genres to challenge hegemonies and master narratives. The cultural conservatives, I contend, belong to a growing transnational body of writers whose phenomenon constitutes an extension of what Matthew F. Jacobs calls an “informal network” of transnational self-identified specialists (4). In their autobiographies, Ali, Gabrielle, Darwish, and Sultan concentrate on the Middle East, Muslims, and Arabs, but they are unique in the sense that their policy-oriented personal narratives explicitly seek to influence not only American attitudes and practices aimed at Arabs and Muslims, but also those directed at American citizens of Arab or Muslim descent. Furthermore, their culturally-conservative traditional autobiographies Infidel (2007), Nomad (2010), Heretic (2015), Now They Call Me Infidel (2006), Because They Hate (2006), They Must Be Stopped (2008), and A God Who Hates iv (2009) deem American multiculturalism a serious danger to the United States and the West, a thesis not unlike Samuel P. Huntington’s in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). In this research project, I claim that Arab American literary writers have had to face, and write against, the predominance of this old-new clash of civilizations idea which has evolved into a discourse promulgated by the self-identified experts of the “informal network” and the cultural conservatives of Arab or Muslim descent. The Arab American literary novels, memoirs, and short-story cycles my study closely examines trouble the clash of civilizations discourse. Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), Ahmed’s A Border Passage (1999), Fawal’s On the Hills of God (1998), and Yunis’s The Night Counter (2009) are arguably representative of trends in, though not limited to, the contemporary Arab American memoir, novel, and short-story cycle genres and are best understood as literary writing within the context of this broader American tradition of interpreting the Middle East, Arabs, and Muslims and the specific cultural conservative fixation on Arab and Muslim Americans. v Table of Contents Supervisory Committee . .ii Abstract . iii Table of Contents . .. .. .v INTRODUCTION Through the Lens of Arab American Literature . 1 Debating Islam in the Age of Religious and Cultural Identities . 9 Research Questions and Literature Review. .33 CHAPTER ONE The American Cultural Conservatives on Islam: Narrating the Self . 44 Part One: Introducing the Cultural Conservative Autobiographers . 46 Part Two: Weaving the Fabric—Reflections on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Case . 58 CHAPTER TWO Islam in the American Midwest: Mohja Kahf . 100 CHAPTER THREE Indigeneity and Pluralism: Leila Ahmed . .148 CHAPTER FOUR Remaking Palestine, Reimagining the Palestinians: Ibrahim Fawal . .. .199 CHAPTER FIVE Scheherazade and Marginalization in Post-9/11 America: Alia Yunis . 248 CONCLUSION A Nation of Narrations: Competing Representations & Choice of Literary Genre . 285 BIBLIOGRAPHY. .308 Introduction Through the Lens of Arab American Literature: Representations and Counter Representations --They all appear by the mudbank at the bridge, and are startled and demystified at the sight of their friend and his sister, covered in mud and wailing. And Khadra wails and wails in the midst of The Clash of Civilizations. (Mohja Kahf, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, 429-30) --So long as Islam remains Islam (which it will) and the West remains the West (which is more dubious), this fundamental conflict between two great civilizations and ways of life will continue to define their relations in the future even as it has defined them for the past fourteen centuries. (Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 212) --It [Nomad] is about how Islamic ideals clash with Western ideals. It is about the clash of civilizations that I and millions of others have lived and continue to live. (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nomad, xiv) Near the end of Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), Khadra Shamy, the Arab American main character, returns to the mudbank at the bridge, the location where her Black Muslim American friend Zuhura was murdered several years previously. In Martinsville, Indiana, the town notoriously known for white racism and Ku Klux Klan’s activities, Khadra sits in the mud wailing as she remembers this violent and traumatizing past. Seconds later, still in the above mudbank scene, Khadra is comforted by her brother and both are shortly surrounded by compassionate Mormon friends, members of his musical band “The Clash of Civilizations.” Standing together in camaraderie, the religiously-diverse youth transcend the racially and geo- politically constructed boundaries of contemporary American identity. Their unity in commemorating the loss of Zuhura challenges the racist transnational Ku Klux Klan,1 its white 1 The earliest iteration of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was in the 1860s. What later became known as the KKK started in Tennessee as the Klan of Reconstruction shortly after the end of the American Civil War. It quickly came under heavy pressure from the federal government in the 1870s, but it revived its ranks a couple decades later. In 1915, William J. Simmons restructured and revived the notorious Ku Klux Klan. The KKK established presence throughout Canada in the 1920s and attempted to revive its ranks in the 1970s. Saskatchewan was the central base 2 supremacy, and later imagined civilizational clash. Members of the Klan, or “Christian terrorists on the loose” as one of Kahf’s characters dubs them, are suspected of raping and murdering Zuhura (89). This Ku Klux Klan of the second half of the twentieth century was supremacist on racial and religious grounds. It saw in colored peoples a civilizational threat. In exploring this racist white phobia of a so-called non-white civilizational takeover, Kahf participates in a well-established American literary tradition.2 The opening chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), for example, captures a semi-clannish white supremacist worldview. Talking to Nick Carraway, the character Tom Buchanan aggressively warns that “Civilization’s going to pieces. I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ . ?” This “fine book” which “everybody ought to read,” Tom proceeds, contends that “if we don’t look out the white race will be . utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved. It is up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” Tom shortly asserts: “we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do for the Klan’s activities. For further information, see James M. Pitsula’s Keeping Canada British: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Saskatchewan (2013) and Julian Sher’s White Hood: Canada’s Ku Klux Klan (1983). Currently, the Klan in the U.S. has been reinventing itself and recruiting. Many realms of the Klan have re-appeared in Germany in 2011(Obermaier and Schultz, n. p.) and KKK is said to have established presence in England around the same time (Parry and Armstrong). “The European White Knights,” Parry and Armstrong write, “claim to be represented in Britain, Germany, France, Greece, Austria, Switzerland, and Sweden” (4). 2 The KKK has been romanticized and criticized in many American literary and cultural productions. It was romanticized in Thomas Dixon’s novels The Leopard’s Spot (1902), The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), and The Traitor (1907). Dixon also adapted the second novel as a play under the title The Clansman (1905). Portraying the KKK in a positive light, D. W. Griffith adapted Dixon’s The Clansman for his 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation. In the film, Griffith turns the KKK into a heroic Southern organization that liberates the post-Civil War South from the abuses Blacks and Northerners inflict upon it. As the KKK gained more momentum during World War One and in the 1920s, it added Jews, Catholics, and immigrants of color to its list of targets. The KKK lumped Catholics, Jews, Asians, Mexicans, and others together as one hostile group because it saw them as alien and un-American.