The bad thing about the mainstream U.S. book industry — that it is market-driven, not truth-driven — can also be a good thing: If broad new readerships decide they want to hear more than Victim and Escapee stories, they may push the book world to develop new, equally profitable habits. Non-Muslim editors and publishers ready to question their unexamined assumptions and learn something new no matter how hardboiled and worldly wise they consider themselves are out there in mainstream publishing, as are Muslim readers willing to read more generously and intelligently. Their presences can create space for alternatives to the current dilemma facing Muslim writers. Because, let’s face it, what gives you access to the most readers right now is the mainstream commercial book world, and we need to strategize for our survival beyond the grinding gears of its stereotypes.

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MOHJA KAHF is a professor of literature at the University of Arkansas and the author of the novel "The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf."

SOURCES: 

* My book, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman, studies the literary history of this image.

* Amal Amireh, “Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World” in Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (Syracuse UP 2002).

* Theresa Saliba shows how this worked during the first war against Iraq in  “Military Presences and Absences,” in Joanna Kadi, ed., Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab American and Arab Canadian Feminists (Beacon, 1994).

* Nicholas Kristof corrected this omission in a June 14, 2005 NYT column, “Raped, Kidnapped, and Silenced,” but ten months after his initial story (“Sentenced to Be Raped,” September 29, 2004) was published.

* Leila Ahmed makes this point in Women & Gender in Islam (Yale, 1994).

* I suggest that Huda Shaarawi’s translated memoir has been shaped by this process in “Packaging Huda” in Amal Amireh and Lisa Majaj, Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Garland, 2000).

* Personal conversation with the author (who did not want me to name her), June 4, 2004.

* Susan Muaddi Darraj, Scheherazad’s Legacy: Arab American Women on Writing (Praeger, 2004).

* See Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge, 1994), for a full definition of adab in the golden age of Arabic writing, and its contrast to the side of classical Arabic literature focused on religious scholarship.