ABSTRACT
The post-9/11 era has seen a recycling of Orientalist tropes that mobilize the image of the “oppressed Muslim woman” as a boundary marker between “us” and “them” in the global “War on Terror” and a convenient justification of its interventionist policies, both foreign and domestic. The wide circulation of this trope has also contributed to a restrictive reception landscape for Muslim women writers. They are called upon to conform either to a caricature of oppression or to a liberated figure who has rejected her faith and embraced the freedom and possibilities of the West. Leila Aboulela is a writer who has managed to chart a path through this difficult receptive terrain and find success while publishing fiction that maintains an Islamic worldview. Her novel The Translator, in particular, has had critical and commercial success while also being deemed “halal fiction”. This chapter argues that one of the ways this is accomplished is through Aboulela’s appropriation of the domestic novel genre. Setting her story of courtship and marriage between a Sudanese Muslim woman and a Scottish man within this familiar generic world facilitates a “translation” between a narrative driven by Islamic religious principles and a largely secular readership. In addition, through its manipulation of the genre’s rhetorical machinery, The Translator recasts the historic opposition between the “home” of the European domestic fiction and the “unhomely” space of the Muslim harem. Significantly, it is by employing a narrative that appears to be wholly embedded in the private sphere that the novel makes a discursive intervention into the politics of the encounter between East and West, Islamic and secular, in a challenging mediascape with a limiting horizon of expectations for Muslim women’s voices.
