Writing Against the Grain: Representations of Muslim Women in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret

Abstract

This thesis analyzes Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret for its construction of female Muslim identity. Aboulela, a Muslim Sudanese immigrant to Britain, portrays a story of migration and conversion to break down the Western image of a stable, essential Muslim woman. She forms part of a larger context of postcolonial, often female, authors who use literature to question or undermine dominant accounts of the world. To understand their work, it is often necessary to examine those dominant accounts and representations as the larger network of meaning in which these authors write.