Muslim Women Speaking Persistently

Preface

Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran

Introduction: Muslim Women Speaking Persistently

Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran

1. Wallāda Bint al-Mustakfi: A Muslim Princess Speaking Passionately and Persistently in the “Palimpsest” of al-Andalus

Doaa Omran

2. Seaming Sisterhood/Seaming Seams: South Asian Muslim Women in London-- Community among Precarity

Feroza Jussawalla

3. Romance and Reception: Ayisha Malik’s Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged and the Limits of Self-Representation of British Muslim Women

Lopamudra Basu

4. Ethical Witnessing and the Politics of Memory in Rohina Malik’s Unveiled and Yasmina’s Necklace

Megan Stahl

5. Muslim Women in A Hindutva World: Gendered Violence in A Burning and The Lucky Ones

Nalini Iyer

6. A Suitable Girl: Willfulness and Militant Femininity

Umme Al-wazedi

7. Exploring the Landscape and Trajectories of Women’s Movements and Islam in the “Post-reformation” Era in Indonesia

Yuniyanti Chuzaifah

8. Unraveling Conflict Amongst Muslim Female Characters in Malay Chick Lit

Diana Abu Ujum and Jariah Mohd Jan

9. Between Memory and Struggle: New Historicism and Autotheoretical Persistence in Radwa Ashour’s Atyaf (Apparitions)

Heba Gaber Abd Elaziz

10. Afghanistan’s “Bacha Posh”: Gender-Crossing in Nadia Hashimi’s The Pearl That Broke Its Shell

Amel Abbady

11. Writing Comes from the Society Around You and the Life You’re Living

Muddasir Ramzan

12. The Garden Belongs to Her: Rewriting the Sacred by Kashmiri Muslim Women

Asiya Zahoor

Biography

Feroza Jussawalla is Professor Emerita at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA. She is the author of Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (1984) and has edited and co-edited several influential works, including Conversations with V.S. Naipaul (1997), Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial World (1992), Emerging South Asian Women’s Writing (2017), Memory, Voice and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from Across the Middle East (Routledge, 2020), Muslim Women’s Writing from South and South East Asia (Routledge, 2021), and Sing Slivered Tongue (2025). Her poetry collection, Chiffon Saris (2002), was published by Kolkata’s Writer’s Workshop and the Toronto South Asian Review.

Doaa Omran is Adjunct Faculty member in the English Department at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA. Her research focuses on transnational and transhistorical feminisms, with a particular emphasis on post- colonial feminist theory. A Medievalist, she specialises in the Middle Ages and its resonances in contemporary literature. She co-edited Memory, Voice, and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from Across the Middle East (Routledge, 2021) and Muslim Women’s Writing from Across South and Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2022). Dr. Omran is the author of eight articles and book chapters and serves as the administrator of the Facebook group “CompLitScholars,” which connects a community of over 5,200 international researchers.