ABSTRACT
This chapter lays foundations for an analysis of South Asian and Middle Eastern Muslim women's writing, a comparative field which, to date, remains largely unmapped. Here the chapter explores affinities in fiction, set against decolonizing and post-colonial backdrops, from the South Asian subcontinent and the Maghreb or 'Arab' west. It focuses on ways in which women writers from these regions, divided by at least 4,000 miles, reflect a shared cultural heritage and simultaneously project post-national communities. Thinking beyond the nation imaginatively reconfigures regional and trans-regional contexts and is one feature that marks writing as feminist. One of the bridging phenomena is Islam in its cultural, social, and spiritual dimensions. The chapter discusses indictments, in fiction by women from each region, of (ab) uses of Islam by patriarchal regimes that structure private and public domains, but this is not the only story: women's creative work also presents Islam as source of trans-local exchange.
