Muslim Writing, Writing Muslimness in Europe

Transcultural Perspectives

Carmen Zamorano Llena, Billy Gray, Carolina León Vegas, Carles Magrinyà Badiella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040436509
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the so-called Muslim question has intermittently, though persistently, taken centre stage in Western media and political discourses. In terms of culture within the European context, there is also a substantial body of literature that has engaged with Western anxieties projected onto the Muslim "Other" and, in particular, the Muslim migrant "Other". Literary criticism of Muslim writing and writing about Muslims in Europe has often highlighted the need to offer a more nuanced articulation of Muslim identity that contributes to challenging such othering practices.

Critical studies on Muslim writing produced over the last two decades have predominantly focused on contemporary literature, and the novel in particular, and they have often centred on specific linguistic and national frameworks. This collection of essays adds complexity to existing analyses of contemporary Muslim writing and writing about Muslims and Islam in the European context by emphasizing the comparative perspective of writings produced in different epochs and different linguistic and cultural contexts. Drawing on transcultural and world literature perspectives, Muslim writing is redefined so as to incorporate genres other than the novel and critical approaches that expand on disciplinary redefinitions of literature and literary studies.

The thematic focus and the rigorous in-depth analysis of the different case studies will make this collection relevant to students and academics within the fields of literary and cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, as well as to those in European studies and global studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Narratives of Muslim(ness) in twenty-first-century Europe from a transcultural perspective
• 2 “To resist the claims and expectations of the world”: The absence of Islam and the presence of Muslimness in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West
• 3 Displacement, emplacement and mobility in Jamal Mahjoub’s The Fugitives
• 4 On being “the Other” in both France and Algeria: Muslimness in Waciny Laredj’s Lolita’s Fingers
• 5 Thinking and writing the Muslim Otherness in the Burgundian travel tales and romances
• 6 Transcultural identity formation in the memoirs of Halide Edib and Huda Shaarawi
• 7 Transcultural voices from the past: Marabouts in Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote
• 8 Traumatic heritages, hybrid memories and uncertain multiculturalism: Narrating Muslimness in contemporary Italy
• 9 How our children’s books help to negotiate good parenthood: A participatory discourse analysis of Dutch Islamic children’s books with Muslim authors and parents
• 10 The Islamic literary field and its recent transformation in contemporary Turkey
• Index