Another author produced a collection of essays by Arab women who are neither victims nor escapees, but the publisher put an exotic niqabi (face veiled) woman on her cover, having nothing to do with the book’s contents. The image of an inscrutable niqabi, an army of identically hijabed (covered) Muslim women looking sullen, and a Muslim woman staring from behind a barred window, are some of the most clichéd visual expressions of the Victim stereotype. The author happens to be a Christian Arab and still the publishers put the stereotypical Muslim woman on the cover — with black minarets sticking out of her head, I kid you not. The author objected, but the contract allowed the press “sole discretion” over the jacket — publishers insist on this. I called her to offer support and to say, “I know the cover wasn’t your choice.”

The bizarre thing is that even when a Muslim woman writer doggedly carves a different shape for her narrative, the publishing industry, with its limited institutional intelligence, will still try to squeeze it into a Victim or Escapee package. Interviews given by Iranian Nobel Laureate Sherine Ebadi, for example, can be read as an indication of what’s right with Iran. Her choice to live and work in the Islamic Republic as an activist and professional woman is an affirmation of that system’s elasticity and strength and openness to reform. Yet in the mainstream U.S. media, she was constructed for us, inexplicably, as an Escapee (and then, predictably, you had Muslims reacting against her for that).

Of course, some authors are all too happy to be eaten by the machine. There are those who are naive about its workings. There are those who are — very understandably — reluctant to question the gift of publication. It is unfair to dismiss the financial motivation as base, either. Writing is a profession, after all, not just a hobby, and Muslim women who work as writers deserve, as much as engineers or schoolteachers, or male Muslim writers, to make a living (and to pay their children’s rising college tuition!).

Merciless Muslim Readers

Many Muslims, meanwhile, have no mercy. Critics in Muslim institutions tend to equate the Muslim woman writer with the machine, even if she is trying to keep her work from being mangled by its gears. “Brown memsahibs!” they call Muslim women writers who have “made it” to mainstream trade publishing, seeing them as in bed with the stereotypers’ agendas. Often they begrudge a Muslim woman writer any success she experiences outside the mosque-centered community, somehow impugning a woman’s success as a selling out to “the world.” Muslim men writers can attain semi-celebrity status in mosque communities (a status, by the way, not available to Muslim women in the mosque community because it hinges on being able to preach at the minbar, or pulpit) without that rise being construed as a deen versus dunya (spirituality versus worldly) slide on their part. In a way, the reading patterns of Eurocentric readers and Islam-centric readers unwittingly collude against Muslim women writers, the first by welcoming us for the wrong reasons, the second by rejecting us based on wrong suspicions.

A century ago, W.E.B. DuBois wrote that black people in America have “double consciousness”: how they see themselves and, because it is necessary for their survival, how they perceive themselves being seen by white people — a split perspective that affects every black writer. Many Muslims don’t even seem to bother with the first of these, with “What does this Muslim-authored work containing Muslim content have to say to us?” Instead, there is a tendency among Muslims, if they read trade fiction and nonfiction at all, to go straight to the second, painfully defensive level, where every bit of writing by a Muslim is judged only by “how it will make us look in front of non-Muslims?” We read to “media watch” what others say about us, not for our own education or delight. We have such an inferiority complex that we cannot give our own writers support without reference to this powerful outsider looking over our shoulders.

Learning from Other U.S. Minorities

My perspective on this scene is colored by my experience as an immigrant woman.  Black American women, Muslim and non-Muslim, face a version of this dilemma multiplied by, among other things, “The Color Purple” syndrome — the debate raised by the 1982 publication of the eponymous Alice Walker novel over whether and how a black woman writer will address the sexism of black men in the midst of a racist mainstream climate. Walker was criticized for portraying abusive black men in a novel affirming the dignity and survival of black women. A lot of water has gone under the bridge among African American readers and critics since then and, guess what? The best answer turned out not to be attacking black women writers who take out the black community’s “dirty laundry,” but accepting that this “laundry” is going to be aired, one way or another — so isn’t it better to do the airing on our own terms, to enter a dialectic of self-critique on our own initiative?

Jewish American writing, especially a few decades after the great influx of Eastern European Jews in the late 19th century, is another instructive example. Anzia Yezierska and other writers weathered, in their emergence in the 1920s from the immigrant Jewish neighborhoods of New York into mainstream publishing, some of the same issues of inside/outside that Muslim women writers face today. A generation later, Philip Roth irked some Jewish Americans with his hilarious, humane portrayals of neurotic aunts and insecure young men from Newark, N.J., and was charged with promoting anti-Semitism in his writings (now embraced as classics that enrich Jewish American culture and American literature). Contemporary novelist Amy Tan speaks of keeping her novel out of the hands of screenwriters who came to it with “dragon lady” stereotypes about Chinese women. Immigrant Muslims can learn from these experiences.

The Mischief of Others

Just because the West has its stereotypes does not mean that fear of what the West will think gets to determine everything we write. That is self-crippling. It is a reaction to a reaction. You can’t live that way: second-guessing how the West will read every move you make and tiptoeing around your community’s dirty laundry. Nor is it an ethically sound position. “Do not let the mischief of a people swerve you from doing justice,” the Qur’an says (Al-Maidah, verse 8). You do not avoid truth-telling because it makes your tribe uncomfortable, and then create a rationale for that swerving based on the whine of minority victimization.