Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque
(In this illuminating study, Mohja Kahf traces the process...)
In this illuminating study, Mohja Kahf traces the process through which the "termagant" became an "odalisque" in Western representations of Muslim women. Drawing examples from medieval chanson de geste and romance, Renaissance drama, Enlightenment prose, and Romantic poetry, she links the changing images of Muslim women to changes in European relations with the Islamic world, as well as to changing gender dynamics within Western societies.
(In Mohja Kahf's poems, Muslim ritual and Qur'anic vocabul...)
In Mohja Kahf's poems, Muslim ritual and Qur'anic vocabulary move in next door to the idiom of suburban Americana, and the legendary Scheherazad of the Thousand and One Nights shows up in New Jersey, recast as a sophisticated postcolonial feminist. Kahf's carefully crafted poems do not speak only to important issues of ethnicity, gender, and religious diversity in the United States, but also to universal human themes of family and kinship, friendship, and the search for a place to pray.
(Beautifully written and featuring an exuberant cast of ch...)
Beautifully written and featuring an exuberant cast of characters, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf charts the spiritual and social landscape of Muslims in middle America, from five daily prayers to the Indy 500 car race.
(Hagar Poems is brilliantly original in its conception, th...)
Hagar Poems is brilliantly original in its conception, thrillingly artful in its execution. Its range is immense, its spiritual depth is profound, it negotiates its shifts between archaic and the contemporary with the utmost skill. There's lyricism, there's a satire, there's a comedy, there's the theology of a high order in this book.
(My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit rakes along the skin like a ...)
My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit rakes along the skin like a soft touch exciting the nervous system. The juices of the language in these iridescent poems hint to the succulence of many fruits as Mohja Kahf beckons to lovers real and desired.
Constructions of Masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa: Literature, Film, and National Discourse
(A multi-disciplinary exploration of how masculinity in th...)
A multi-disciplinary exploration of how masculinity in the MENA region is constructed in film, literature, and nationalist discourse Constructions of masculinity are constantly evolving and being resisted in the Middle East and North Africa.
Mohja Kahf is an Arab-American poet, writer, and educator. Her writing spans several genres, as she has published poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and written online columns. Kahf's most well-known books include her first book of poetry Emails from Scheherazad, and the novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf.
Background
Mohja Kahf was born in 1967, in Damascus, Syria. Kahf's family had strong anti-regime ties. Her grandfather, a member of the Syrian parliament, was exiled from Syria in the late 1960s. Her father was a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. Her mother had learned nonviolent social change and personal spiritual transformation with Laila Said, an influential speaker and peace activist from Damascus. Her young parents opted to leave Syria to continue their studies abroad and immigrated to the United States in 1971.
Education
At 10, Mohja Kahf wrote a little ditty that got published in the newsletter of her insular community. At 15, she won a prize in a high school poetry contest sponsored by one of the colleges in New Jersey. As a teenager, Mohja Kahf lived briefly in Iraq, during her sophomore year in college in Saudi Arabia. She attended Rutgers University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts with honors in comparative literature and political science in 1988, and a Doctor of Philosophy in comparative literature in 1994.
In 1994-1995, Mohja Kahf was an instructor at Rutgers University. In 1995-2000, she was an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas, becoming an associate professor of English in 2001. Kahf is currently is a professor of English at the University of Arkansas. She is a contributor of many articles to books and anthologies, and poetry to journals, including Exit 9, Exquisite Corpse, and Vision International. She is also a contributor to periodicals, including Arab Studies Quarterly, Banipal, Cyphers Literary Journal, and World Literature Today. In 2004, Kahf co-wrote a column on sexuality for the website Muslim Wake Up.
Themes of immigration, the struggles of fitting into a new country while simultaneously trying to maintain connections to home, Islam and spirituality, and intersecting identities appear frequently throughout Kahf's work. Her experiences growing up in the United States shaped her perceptions of the differences and similarities between the cultures of her home and adopted countries. Her poetry is an amalgam of both Syrian and American influences. Kahf sometimes satirizes stereotypes about Muslim women - she has tackled hairstyles, sex, and clothing. In addition to contemporary Muslim women, Kahf's poetry also explores figures from Islamic history including Hagar, the wife of the prophet Abraham, Khadija and Aisha, wives of the Prophet Muhammad, and Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad.
Mohja Kahf's first book, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque, examines the changing representation of Muslim women in literature. She takes examples from medieval chansons, Renaissance drama, Enlightenment prose, and romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century. She shows the changing images of Muslim women in relationship to Western interactions with the Islamic world.
Her first collection of poetry, E-mails from Scheherazad, evokes the mixture of pride and shame involved in being different, with characters balancing on the line between assimilating and maintaining the habits of a good Muslim. E-mails From Scheherazad illustrates the journey of Scheherazad, a young girl who immigrates to New Jersey from Syria. The poems reflect the challenges of immigration, negotiating different cultures and identities, and dealing with stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. E-mails From Scheherazad is extremely counter-hegemonic in its powerful articulation of the lived experience of Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants. By poignantly discussing the difficulties in leaving home and facing pervasive anti-Arab and Muslim sentiment, Kahf strongly challenges the binary oppositions that posit Arab countries like Syria as violent, backward, and oppressive, and idealize the United States as wholly free, civilized, and just.
In her first novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, Mohja Kahf immerses readers in the world of Khadra Shamy, who grows up in a devout Muslim family in the middle of Indiana. Although Kahf was born in Syria and spent some of her childhood in Indiana with her devoutly Muslim family, the novel is not primarily autobiographical. She pointed out two clear divergences. First, the author's mother, who has "the sweetest temperament," bears little resemblance to the fictional Khadra's mother, an important figure in the novel. Second, in the real Indiana of Kahf's time, "there were many more incidents of violence and vandalism" than could be included in the novel. The fictional family and the aunties and uncles of the neighborhood are a cast of characters who nurture, challenge, and aggravate the young Khadra, who grows during the course of the novel to become "a woman true to herself." Kahf created some characters, such as the Syrian poet and the German professor, based on experiences in her own life, people "I had found because I needed them." One of the warmest and most complex characters is Téta, who is the protagonist's Syrian aunt and a composite of a number of women from the author's life. Kahf shows the adult Khadra Shamy using her art - photography - to convey a complex picture of Muslim lives. In one scene, she considers how best to photograph the familiar scene of a prayer hall and decides to use low camera angles to emphasize the experience of prayer.
(Hagar Poems is brilliantly original in its conception, th...)
2016
Religion
Mohja Kahf believes the emphasis on tradition in the Arab world long ago warped the open spirit of Islam. Although Kahf grew up in a devout household, she finds the Muslim Brotherhood's interpretation of Islam too narrow, calling it an anti-colonial political movement that is just not spiritual enough to incorporate all facets of Islam. That would include sex, and in 2004, Kahf Kahf co-wrote a rather graphic online sex column that drawn ire, even a death threat, from the orthodox. One column described a dream in which a revered medieval Islamic scholar is described in flagrante delicto, while another depicts a Syrian village where the local imam has declared that women too can take more than one spouse. Relations between the sexes is a subject she said she often used when asked to do readings to church groups around Arkansas. The women cannot always relate to stories about Muslim immigrant anxieties, she said, but she finds common ground with poetry talking about a man's chest as "that forested mountain with the bluffs and crags where a woman likes to hide."
Of the intersection of Islam and art, Mohja Kahf says: "One of the primary messages of the Qur'an is that people should recognize the beautiful and do what is beautiful. This is not simply a moral beauty but a visual and auditory beauty as well. Conduct should be beautiful, writing should be beautiful and speaking should be beautiful."
Politics
Mohja Kahf is a member of the Syrian Nonviolence Movement. She marched against the United States war on Iraq and was an early signatory of the United States Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. With many other engaged United States celebrities, including Slavoj Zizek, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, and others she had been fasting a day to protest against starvation in Syria and called to end the blockades.
Mohja Kahf's political poems can be searing. In "We Will Not Deny the Holocaust," she lays out the common Arab perspective that Israel literally gets away with murder, using the Holocaust as a canopy to deflect criticism of widespread human rights abuses against the Palestinians.
Views
Mohja Kahf believes that the growing body of Muslim American literature has reached the critical mass where it might be considered its own genre, including works like The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner, and a bestseller The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Kahf's conception of Islamic feminism influences the themes of her poetry and writing as do other issues facing American Muslims.
Quotations:
"You knew you were an Arab if your ride from the airport was two dozen people."
"All women speak two languages: the language of men and the language of silent suffering. Some women speak a third, the language of queens."
Membership
Mohja Kahf served on the board of the Ozark Poets & Writers Collective. She is a founding member of the Radius of Arab American Writers.
Association for Middle East Women's Studies
,
United States
Syrian Studies Association
,
United States
Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society
,
United States
Phi Beta Delta Honor Society for International Scholars
,
United States
Phi Beta Kappa
,
United States
Connections
Mohja Kahf is married to Najib Ghadbian. They have two children. In 2011, Mohja Kahf and her then 17-year-old daughter visited the Turkish border with Syria to work with Syrian escapees. Before they could spend time there, they learned that Syrian agents had offered 100 million Syrian liras - two million United States dollars - for both of them. They decided it was time for them to leave.