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On the contrary, Islam has endowed Muslim Arab women with rights that, if only they know about them and ask for them, they will definitely enjoy a dignified life.
Finally, the tension of the hyphen for these Arab American women writers heightens when they try to find home in a hostile environment, as Arab Americans have done in America through decades of racism, discrimination, and negative stereotyping. This has only become more overt since 9/11. In fact, the post-9/11 sensibility makes it particularly timely to give voice to silenced, marginalized Arab American women writers. Who better to articulate criticism of racism, oppression, and marginalization in the U.S. than those who experience it while uncovering the particularities of their own ethnic histories?
This book focuses on Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage (1999), Mohja Kahf’s E-mails from Scheherazad (2003), Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan (2003), and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent (2003). These Arab American women writers use their writings as a form of resistance to explore what it means to be part of a nation that wages war in their Arab homelands, supports the elimination of Palestine, and racializes Arab men as terrorists and Arab women as oppressed victims. They study the Eurocentric racialization of Arab culture as inherently backward, uncivilized, and patriarchal. These writers also react to American feminists who consider Arab and Arab American women passive victims of patriarchal oppression who need saving. They argue that what American feminists define as the main problems of Arab and Arab American women—the veil, the harem, and female circumcision—do not represent the only important issues for Arab and Arab American women. The latter have more pressing issues with which to contend, such as the physical survival of Arab women in the occupied territories of Iraq and Palestine and the lack of education and health care in other Arab countries due to poverty. These Arab American women writers are skeptical about the very notion of one essentialized Arab identity, as they negotiate in the West in relation to Western discourse on the Arab world and Islam. Indeed, they make clear that the category Arab American itself is neither united nor monolithic.