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They argue that the American construct of Arab risks erasing important cultural and historical differences among those designated Arab, even though the category makes it possible for the highly diverse communities of Arabs in America to speak with a collective, though marginalized, voice in the first place.
Through their writings, the Arab American writers in this book defy any neat categorization and speak articulately to the diversity of Arab American women and their ideas, desires, emotions, and strategies for survival. They insist that no monolithic Arab women exist, and they point out that geographic boundaries between Arab homelands and diasporas are fluid. Rejecting any essentialist, monolithic, and static notion of culture, Arab American women writers warn of the dangers of making civilizations and identities into what they are not: opposing entities that share only a history of religious wars and imperial conquest rather than one of exchange and cross-fertilization. These Arab American women writers not only use their writings as a form resistance to Orientalist and Arab fundamental regimes and construction of identities but also as a means to explore and express their feelings about their hyphenated identities, exile, doubleness, and difference.
The four authors help others see beyond what Mohja Kahf calls “the blind spot” (E-mails, 33), learning about this other woman beyond the stereotypes the media shows: the victim oppressed by custom or the exotic female clad in difference. In a political environment of increasing hostility toward Islam, Arab American women writers demonstrate the face of Islam, neither as essential and monolithic nor as mere passive victim—veiled or not veiled—of religion and culture. They suggest that Islam per se does not oppress women but, rather, the continuity of patriarchal values within nationalist and religious ideologies limit women’s agency. In fact, if Arab/Arab American women had known and asked for rights that Islam originally endowed, they would have never found themselves in such a vulnerable position. If these women had really looked into the Quranic interpretations, they would have realized the dignity and freedom their religion has actually granted them.