Religion, Hegemony, & Self-identification in Arab American Literature by Adam Yaghi BA, The Islam

340 Pages·2015·1.55 MB·English

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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
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(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.
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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. Catholics, the Klan members thought, take orders from Rome and the Pope and
they therefore were deemed un-American. Other works of American literature that touches on the phenomenon of
the KKK include Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), Karen Hesse’s Witness (2001) and Joe Martin’s
Fire in the Rock (2001).
3

you see?” (17-18). The racist hysteria Tom exhibits here was symptomatic of the 1920s.
Similarly, “The Rise of the Colored Empires” is not entirely a fictional title. Fitzgerald more
likely alludes to Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide of
Color against White World Supremacy (1920). In The Rising Tide, Pankaj Mishra writes,
Stoddard “proposed a straightforward division of the world into white and coloured races. He
also invested early in Islamophobia, arguing in The New World of Islam (1921) that Muslims
posed a sinister threat to a hopelessly fractious and confused West” (10). This idea of a
predominantly white Protestant West clashing against the colored rest, including Muslims,
continued throughout the second half of the twentieth century and arguably culminated in the
publication of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(1996).3 The idea has gained further momentum in the twenty-first century with the publication
of numerous works that reinforce the clash of civilizations logic and warn of a global Muslim
takeover. Personal narratives by American cultural conservatives of Arab or Muslim descent, like
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel (2007), Nomad (2010), and Heretic (2015), belong to this still growing
phenomenon.
The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf is not merely a critique of the American Ku Klux Klan’s
religio-racial supremacy. It primarily references Huntington’s hypothesis and engages, albeit
indirectly, autobiographical works by American cultural conservatives of Arab or Muslim
descent who adopt his thesis to argue that Islam is the ultimate enemy of the Judeo-Christian

3 In the body of my study, I demonstrate how the idea of a clash of civilizations preceded Huntington’s hypothesis
by decades. In the 1970s, it was popular among mainline Evangelical Christian Zionists who, after Huntington
circulated his thesis, took its premise especially the existential clash with Muslims to be unquestionably true. In the
early 1990s, the clash idea was articulated by Bernard Lewis also before Huntington published and later developed
his article into the book version. This popularity of the idea in the second half of the twentieth century, as I have
suggested earlier, is traceable to publications from the 1920s and 1930s like Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color
against White World Supremacy (1920) and Basil Mathews’ Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of
Civilizations (1926).
4

white United States. Naming the Muslim-Mormon American musical band “The Clash of
Civilizations” and using the phrase at least three times in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf is
Kahf’s subtle way of ridiculing, by mimicry, not only Huntington’s thesis, but also the adoption
of his thesis in numerous contemporary transnational works authored by cultural conservatives.
The latter have revived and reproduced his thesis to achieve three goals: first, they interpret the
Middle East, Arabs, and Muslims for their Western audiences and re-imagine future submissive
Arabs, Muslims, and a different Middle East—one more in line with official American and
European interests. Second, they advise the U.S. and Europe on how to preserve the Judeo-
Christian tradition and white culture. Third, from their perspective, the Judeo-Christian tradition
and White culture are and ought to always be the basis of what the West is. Culturally
conservative works like Ali’s are policy-oriented, not unlike Huntington’s.
Indeed, in The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington cautions his Western readers against
mistaking The Clash of Civilizations for “a work of social science”: “It instead meant to be an
interpretation of the evolution of global politics after the Cold War . . . [and it] aspires to present
a framework, a paradigm, for viewing global politics that will be meaningful to scholars and
useful to [Western] policymakers” (13). In it, Huntington contends that the contemporary
“Islamic Resurgence and the economic dynamism of Asia demonstrate that other civilizations are
alive and well and at least potentially threatening to the West” (302). “To preserve Western
civilization in the face of declining Western power,” Huntington recommends, the U.S. and
Europe must act on two levels: internally and externally (The Clash 311).
Internally, the U.S. and Europe must show that they are “capable of stopping and
reversing the internal process of decay” (303); they must address “economics,” “demography,”
and other “problems of moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunity in the West” (304).
5

In Western nations, Huntington asserts, “Western culture is challenged by groups within Western
societies.” Some of these groups are “immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation
and continue to adhere to and to propagate the values, customs, and cultures of their home
societies.” Opposition to assimilation, Huntington adds, “is most notable among Muslims in
Europe, who are, however, a small minority. It is also manifest, in lesser degree, among
Hispanics in the United States, who are a large minority.” Failing to assimilate these minorities
will result in “internal strife and disunion” in the U.S. while in Europe, “Western civilization
could also be undermined by the weakening of its central component, Christianity” (304-05).
Multiculturalists are partly responsible for this failure. “Multiculturalism,” Huntington insists,
“threatens the United States and the West” because a “multicultural United States will not be the
United States; it will be the United Nations” (306), and “[i]f the United States is de-Westernized,
the West is reduced to Europe and a few lightly populated overseas European settler countries.
Without the United States the West becomes a minuscule and declining part of the world’s
population” (307). To survive,4 the West therefore must re-root itself in Western culture,
identity, and Christianity because “Islam is exploding demographically with destabilizing
consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbors; and non-Western civilizations generally
are reaffirming the value of their cultures” (Huntington, The Clash 20).
Externally, Huntington advises, the U.S. and Europe must solidify the ties between all
Western nations to prevent non-Western civilizations from weakening the West. They must
include Western nations from Central Europe in their military, economic, and political bodies
like NATO and actively westernize Latin America. They must “restrain the development of the

4 Huntington argues, the “survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and
Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew it against challenges from non-
Western societies” (The Clash 20-21).