A faith of one’s own: a Muslim woman writes back to Virginia wolf

Abstract

The persistent neglect of historical, biographical and experiential diversity of female gender across cultural locations in the mainstream feminist circles has turned re-writings of the classical feminist texts into a potent source of directing readerly attention towards the question of difference. Among such re-writings is ‘The Talented Sister’ a chapter in Elif Shafak’s bio-fiction Black Milk: on Writing, Motherhood and the Harem – which recreates the story of Judith Shakespeare from a Muslim perspective. By writing back to Virginia Wolf’s essentialist claim made in A Room of One’s Own regarding the historical female exclusion from the literary canon, Shafak challenges the exclusionary practices of the canonical feminist discourses that show a lack of understanding towards Muslim women. In contemporary times when the position of Muslim women appears frightening by Modernist feminist ideals, this research posits ‘The Talented Sister’ as a literary spinoff whose role is identified as a cultural producer in the lived world by entering into dialogue with dominant historical, ideological, and feminist debates that single out Islam as denigrating and repressing towards female creativity. By historicizing the life of Muslim women in Wolfian tradition, this research claims that this text performs a cultural work by interfering in feminist identifications of ‘false consciousness’ through which religion restricts Muslim women’s agency to domestic space.

Keywords:

• Creativity
• Muslim women
• feminist ideals
• patriarchal oppression

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Jeroen van de Weijer, Shenzhen University, China

SUBJECTS:

• Literature
• Literary History
• Literature Primary Texts & Anthologies
• Women’s Literature
• Feminist Literature & Theory
• Literary/Critical Theory

Introduction

Since 2000, the proliferation of the rewritings of canonical literary texts demands readerly attention towards the neglected historical, biographical, and experiential diversity across cultural locations. Following Virginia Wolf’s lead in raising the issue of female exclusion from literary history in A Room of One’s Own, In Black Milk: On Motherhood and Writing, Elif Shafak affirms that Muslim women, like her Western sisters, are absent from the literary canon, too. Thus, in the case of these two texts, the fiction genre becomes the liminal space for the exchange of ideas between the Western and Muslim sisters. But as spinoffs are the product of contemporary times, more precisely claimed as a genre ‘that arises from present cultural needs, anxieties, and concerns as well as socio-historical developments, and that performs specific kinds of cultural work within its historical and cultural contexts,’(Spengler, 2015, p. 16), they enter into a cultural dialogue too. They respond to and reflect upon the present moments in which they are produced. Following Wolf’s footsteps in imagining Shakespeare’s sister Judith, Shafak creates – Firuze, an imaginary sister of the great Oriental Muslim poet of the Middle Ages, Fazuli. The implications of such literary engagement may appear dubious to feminist thinking that critiques religion as restricting female creativity. In particular, considering the occasion of Wolf’s famous statement that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’, (p. 4) when the ‘bishop’ declared that ‘it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare’, (p. 46) appropriation of Wolf’s question to Muslim sister raises concerns regarding the critical potential of Shafak’s text that foregrounds ‘Muslim-ness’ of Muslim women while entering this fertile debate. Does this shift of the subject from the historical exclusion of Western women to Muslim women acquire specific meanings? If yes, what are they, and what cultural significance do they entail for feminist critics and feminist theory?

Instead of a general investigation of what this shift communicates and how it communicates it, this research approaches ‘The Talented Sister’ a chapter of Elif Shafak’s bio-fiction Black Milk: On Motherhood and Writing as a literary spinoff. In this chapter, Shafak recreates Wolf’s classic question regarding female exclusion from literary canon from the Muslim perspective. For developing the analysis of Shafaks’s response to Wolf’s seminal question, this research chooses to work with the idea of literary spinoffs as postulated by Birgit Spengler (2015). Since, Spengler conceptualizes literary spinoffs as a new genre of fiction that emerged in the new millennium as a resistance ‘in the face of the imposition of "global" narratives of meaning, identity, religious belief, and progress’ (p. 17), whereby the trend to revise or re-work with the classical texts of the past point to the need of attending to the local, historical, ethnic or cultural specificities that are rendered marginal to ‘the construction of ‘our’ consciousness’ (p. 51). Such conceptualization of the spinoff facilitates not only the consideration of the past in terms of ‘writing back’ but it also attends to the present cultural moment in which it is rewritten. Therefore, by employing this dialogic notion of a spinoff to the reading of ‘The Talented Sister’, this research considers both the text’s postulation of Muslim women’s historical exclusion from the literary world and the text’s cultural function in resisting the stereotypes that surround the image of the Muslim woman in the contemporary times.

Before proceeding with the recommended ‘micro-level of close, but culturally situated’ (Spengler, 2015, p. 18) reading of the selected spinoff fiction in keeping with the three-dimensional approach that encompasses the past and present of the spinoff, the theoretical and methodological description required for deciphering the selected text’s literary, historical, cultural and discursive implications is developed in the following section. Next, in keeping with the content-and-context-specific demands of this approach, the subsequent sections first outline the literary status of the pre-text, which is then followed by the cultural and discursive contexts with which the text enters into critical dialogue with feminist literary thoughts.

Spinoffs and pre-texts: towards theoretical and methodological clarification

Literary spinoff is a term coined by Birgit Spengler, who reserves its use exclusively for those contemporary fictional rewritings ‘that “spinoff” earlier works of literature in a way that challenges our understanding of the pre-textual world.’ (2015, p. 12) Developing this idea further, Spengler (2015) states:

Fictional texts that take their cues from famous, and often canonical, works of literature, which they revise, rewrite, adapt or appropriate as a whole or in parts, thus producing alternative voices and/or historical or geographical re-locations for texts that are generally well known to contemporary audiences—be it because of their status as cultural classics and long-term readers’ favorites, or because of their medial presence in cinema or tv versions (p. 11).

This use of the term is limited to the texts that explicitly refer to the other text. Due to their deliberate associations with and rewriting of the pretext, Spinoffs are distinguishable from other indirect, subtle, or accidental forms of rewriting. For Spengler, the ‘degree of obviousness and sustained use of the pretext as a textual matrix’ (p. 51) marks spinoffs as a distinct form of rewriting that is concerned with not only redefining the ideas of the past but also offering an analytical view of the context in which the text is produced. In the process of rewriting, revising and re-visioning their literary predecessors, spinoffs put ‘emphasis on the voices and points of view of those who have been excluded from the world of the pretext’ (Spengler, 2015, p. 21) to create additional layers of meanings. The concept of pretext is equally crucial to the understanding of the spinoffs. Spengler’s (2015) identification of pretext is not restricted to a ‘text’s literary predecessor’ but is inclusive of the ‘sense of pretext’ or excuse. In this sense, a literary predecessor provides a pretext for writing another story. Thus, the term raises but ultimately rejects the idea of subsidiariness. So, for a given pretext is just a ‘pretext’ for writing, the supposedly ‘subsidiary’ work has its own agenda but uses the other text as a ‘hook’ or ‘vehicle.’ (p. 13) Therefore, the notion of the spinoff is significant in the context of present research since it ‘allows addressing questions as to the specific contexts that are revisited, revised, or re-(en-)visioned, as well as focusing on the text’s negotiations of popular notions about the pre-text and its historical setting, and its engagement with processes of …cultural meaning-making’(Spengler, 2015, p. 18).

On a theoretical level, Spengler’s view of spinoffs as a contemporary genre carries a significant implication. First, as a socially and culturally context-specific form of rewriting, the function which spinoffs play and the intertextual strategies they employ cannot be predetermined. They may vary due to temporal, socio-cultural, geographical, ideological, and discursive shifts. Contrary to conventional forms of rewriting that keep diachronic orientation towards literary communication, spinoffs in engaging with re-visionary work, are simultaneously responsive to the past and present. In revising the pretext, spinoffs are the corrective of the past narratives, which excluded their voices and experiences. However, their role is not limited to literary communication. So, the cultural contexts with which the spinoffs enter into dialogue are central for their re-visionary work; history and cultural contexts become the intertext of literary communication. Rather than merely revising the ideas of the past, spinoffs help us reconceptualise the present.

Accordingly, Spengler (2015) proposes a three-dimensional framework suitable for the analytical consideration of spinoff fiction. This three-tier approach comprises three axes, which are conceptualized as ‘the axis between writer and reader, that between text and literary context, and that between text and cultural/discursive context’ (p.83). The model’s first axis is based on identifying the moment of reading and writing the spinoff. The second axis of the model stresses the importance of determining the relationship between the spinoff and the pretext. The third axis of the model suggests the analysis of the settings of the pre-text and spinoff. However, Spengler (2015) does not prescribe a rigid and systematic response to these axes by acknowledging the fact that a text is not an automated formal ‘literary play of agentless-source-less play of signifiers’, so favours an eclectic approach to be adopted in consideration with these three dimensions of communication. Such an approach is significant since it necessitates for the reader ‘an integrative act of understanding that brings together experientially the intertext, pretext, and their discursive backgrounds as well as the reader’s own culturally situated experience, previous knowledge (of the pretext, but also of the discursive environments in which pretext and spinoff – or the intertextually-constructed text in general – participate and those which the diegetic worlds of pretext and spinoff construct), and subliminal existence’(p. 84).

(Re)contextualising the female exclusion from literary canon: A Room of One’s Own as a pre-text

A Room of One’s Own is central to feminist and literary scholarship. Since its publication, the text has commanded a significant readership and continued presence in academia. Wolf’s famous claim that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ (1929, p. 4) has acquired the status of a popular slogan that is used in the feminist campaigns against the traditional assumptions of female writers, and on rediscovering previously ignored or neglected women writers. The certainties this claim implies have spawned numerous adaptations, rewritings, and responses in both prose and alternate genres by subsequent women writers and critics. Among the best-known examples that reinforce Wolf’s ideas about patriarchal domination and female dependence on men that stifle female creativity is ‘A House of My Own’ a vignette that appeared in Sandra Cisneros’s novella The House of Mango Street (1984). Cinsero strengthens Wolf’s ideas about the liberating potential of writing that has the ultimate power of freeing a woman from a life of dependency on men. Based on her personal life experiences, she narrates her memories through the character of Esperanza, a strong, independent female who was critical of living in small houses where she never had enough private space. She always dreamt of, ‘Not a flat. Not an apartment in the back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own’ (Cisneros 1984, p. 108). Her ideas echo Wolf’s ideals of male dominance which silenced women’s stories. Another notable appropriation of Wolf’s ideas is noticeable in Lawrence Lipking’s essay Aristotle’s Sister: A Poetics of Abandonment (1983). However, from the 1980s onward the insistence on the recognition of ‘difference’ and acceptance of gender as a multivalent concept demanded equal attention to race, class, age, sexuality and ability. This resulted in questioning the essentialist notions of Wolf’s ideals related to women’s absence from the literary canon. Turning away from the essentialist notion of gender which held biological sameness as the basis of the women’s experience, feminists like Alice Walker and Tillie Olsen who were staunch advocates of socially constructed view of gender started rewriting Wolf’s ideas regarding the imaginary sister of Shakespeare as a resistance to the dominance of the Western feminists on the theoretical front.

Comparable to writing, which holds a privileged position in feminist circles, rewriting has become a tool for non-Western women writers to aim for geographical and cultural specificity to fight social and economic injustice. Adrienne Rich postulates the importance of re-writing in her essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ as:

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of a male-dominated society (Rich, 1972, 18).

By re-visioning and rewriting Wolf’s ideas and the story of Judith Shakespeare, Shafak indicates that knowing the details of one’s own past is not enough; we must connect our lives and identities to the world’s history, across cultures. While reading and re-visioning A Room of One’s Own, Shafak thus questions the essentialist basis of Wolf’s ideas by highlighting the difference in a Muslim woman’s experience, most notably in terms of faith. This issue becomes significant in contemporary times when:

the ‘Muslimness’ of a Muslim woman is seen as enough evidence of her victimization and oppression through the ‘double tyranny’ of her religion as well as patriarchy, thus eliciting responses of horror, pity, anger, and even hate against the community by and large and Muslim men in particular. More often than not, the Muslim woman herself has little or no say in such a characterization which yokes together women of diverse regions, cultures, class, and linguistic demographics as a homogenous lump (Hamid, 2022, p. 133).

Contrary to the revisionist impulses of the traditional rewritings, Shafak’s impassive contemplation of Wolf’s argument is her strategy of re-vision through which she offers insight without any rhetorical manipulation into the text that has been revered by feminist readers specifically for imagining the female experience to recover the life of the ‘invisible’ women from the literary canon. So, she does not dispute the story of Judith, which is contextualized in Western society and imaginatively constructs the reality of Western women in the literary past. Thus, Shafak acknowledges the value of A Room of One’s Own, a text still worthy of attention even after seventy years of publication. Yet, her application of the assertions of this classical literary text on the Muslim society points to the need of re-appropriating and adopting it to respond to the needs and expectations of a diverse readership.

Historicizing the writing and reading of the spinoff

Writing holds a privileged position in feminist circles. Feminists approach it as a tool for gaining empowerment through the communication of ideas about gender biases and discrimination that exist across societies. Humm (2004) identifies the ‘issue of communication’ as one of the major thematic concerns of feminist writing from the 1970s to the present. Working with the idea of the text popularized by feminist theorists as ‘a sign-based communicative practice that involves readers or viewers activating signs to generate meanings’ (Cranny-Francis et al., 2003, p. 89). Under the influence of Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and later publications like Elaine Showlter’s A Literature of Their Own, the debate related to ‘issue of women’s exclusion from the academy’ (Humm, 2004) in women’s writings continue. The authority of the author ends when the text is offered for reading. Though the way the author uses the signs posits the readers to determine the textual message in a predetermined manner, the acceptance of the reciprocal relationship between the text and the reader enables the possibility of alternative readings of the same text. It is argued that the signs in the text produce the meaning that the reader constructs. This recognition of the active social and cultural character of reading in mainstream feminist criticism throws a challenge to the authority of mainstream or complaint reading practices that dictates ‘how a specific text is likely to be used; the kinds of meanings which it can be expected to generate’ (Cranny-Francis et al., 2003, p.115). Accordingly, the reader of the text is negated as an essentialist construct. Instead, a reader is viewed as a social actor whose reading practice is influenced by the complex forces of gendered, cultural, political, economic, and religious determinations. Such a poststructuralist understanding of the text has resulted in recognizing the plurality of reading practices. Among them is the emergence of resistant reading, which ‘resists the complaint or mainstream reading, and its positioning of the individual as a subject who accords with the values it articulates’ (Cranny-Francis et al., 2003, p. 117). However, Amireh points out that though the practice of resistant reading has helped Euro-American feminist scholarship to challenge the biased projection of patriarchal femininity in canonical literature, for Muslim women the problem persists:

At the centre of this challenge has always been the question of ‘representation’ in both its political sense (who speaks for/instead of whom) and its aesthetic sense (the production of images of other women). Both kinds of representation are interlinked, of course. Middle-class Western feminists claimed political representation of all women—the right to speak for them—by constructing the image of universal womanhood that privileged categories of gender and erased those of race and class (p. 185).

Despite Western feminists’ attention to gender differences, more than race and class, faith-based differences in women’s experiences worldwide have largely been overlooked in mainstream feminist criticism. So the question arises: how do ‘other’ women resist the representation of universal womanhood in Western feminist writings? This difference is highlighted in rewriting the canonical texts in various ways, including but not limited to ‘parody, sequel, imitation, reference, allusion, or even by rewriting the entire text’ (Sol, 2002, p. 20).

In keeping with the communicative role, the rewriting of the classical text accords Shafak – the reader of the pre-text, an active position in the meaning-making process. Shafak’s engagement with Wolf’s text, first as a reader, and then as a re-writer, marks a shift in Shafak’s identity from a passive reader to a writer, which implies that reading can potentially split up the signification of the subject of representation. At the same time, this move destabilizes the liberal rhetoric:

Post–September 11 cultural discourses present the fate of Muslim women as tied to the fate of civilization itself. Muslim women are oppressed by a barbaric, medieval religion, and ‘Islamland’ represents a sort of final frontier in humanity’s struggle for freedom from the bonds of the past (Khader, 2019, p. 76).

In the aftermath of 9/11, Shafak’s juxtaposition of the Muslim sister with Shakespeare’s sister is a strategy to attract attention to the false conceptions propagated related to Muslim women as stuck in the past. Her depiction of the life of Firuze, her imagination, the guidance and love which she had in her house is a strategy of response of writing back. Within the mainstream feminist thinking, religion is despised. It is argued that religion sanctions gender inequality and justifies false female oppression. According to Abbas (2013): ‘Increasingly, in theoretical discussions about religion, Muslim women are the pretexts for working out a series of tensions in contemporary thought. They have become the site upon which a cluster of wrinkles in liberalism is ironed out’ (p. 188). Therefore, instead of creating her own story, using A Room of One’s Own to narrate the experiences of Muslim women, Shafak’s use of literary text from the dominant culture and to contrast it with a culture that is at its odd serves important cultural function.

How will she write? When will she write? ‘Let us now apply Virginia Woolf’s critical question to the Middle East’

To begin with the analysis of strategies of revision, the spinoff title holds a prominent position. Judging the story by its title, Shafak’s dialogue with A Room of One’s One begins through the choice of the title. For Spengler claims that title is the most significant paratextual feature, which ‘function in terms of a “contract” with the reader’ (2015, p. 317). Elif Shafak names her story ‘A talented sister’. While acknowledging the crucial influence of Wolf’s imagination on her own choice of title by retaining the word ‘sister’ in the title, Shafak’s recycling of the title disrupts the readerly expectations about a Muslim woman who is mainly perceived as ‘a figure to be saved from backward cultural practices of purdah, seclusion, early marriage, and religious superstition’(Khoja-Moolji, 2018, p. 6). Surprisingly, defying this popular imagery, the title of the text by maintaining the intertextual relationship with Shakespeare’s sister, the use of the word ‘sister’ works as a foil for the ensuing reading. However, the use of ‘talented,’ which precedes ‘sister,’ foregrounds the creative genius of Firuze over her relational identity. The focus on her imaginative genius works as a ‘digression’ from Judith’s historical narrative, which was more about the gendered discrimination that existed between the lives of Shakespeare and her sister. Like the opening lines of Judith’s story, where the reader is told that ‘a different set of rules holds for men than for women’ (Shafak, 2011, p. 32). However, unlike the foregrounding of brother-sister relation through which Wolf’s narration where patriarchy is blamed for perpetuating the gender inequality between Shakespeare and sister is developed from the start to the end, Shafak’s exclusion of any reference to Fuzuli till the time when Firuze herself visits him appears strategic to deflect readers’ attention from a stereotyped understanding of a Muslim woman. Shafak’s refrain from using Fazuli’s name, the great oriental poet of the Middle Ages and imagined as Firuze’s brother, renders the relationship between the spinoff and the pre-text as complex. As such this fictional re-vision of Judith’s narrative challenges the contemporary expectations of ‘a persistent and almost predictable storyline about the figure of the Muslim woman/girl. Muslim women had emerged as an ideal site for reform’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2018, p. 6).

Every story has a beginning; however, where the story begins is of considerable importance. In the case of a spinoff, the story’s opening becomes all the more strategic, considering the dialogic engagement of the text with the pre-text. In the case of ‘The Talented Sister’, Shafiq opens the story with a direct reference to the pre-text, A Room of One’s Own, which holds a central position in literary and feminist scholarship. However, the passage in which Shafak chooses to open her story is more significant than the literary status of A Room of One’s Own, which has reached the status of a ‘classic’. So, ‘The Talented Sister’ begins as:

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf makes the claim that it would have been impossible for a woman, any woman, to write the plays of Shakespeare during his age. To clarify her point she brings up an imaginary woman whom she introduces as Shakespeare’s sister. She names her Judith (Shafak, 2011, p. 31).

With the allusion to ‘sister’ in the title to the opening and closing parts of the chapter, Shafak directly rewrites Wolf’s ideas. She follows her footsteps in creating the imaginary sister of a Muslim poet with the same diegetic world like A Room of One’s Own. Such an opening becomes a double gesture of communication that offers two levels of meaning. On the discursive level, reference to Wolf’s ideas activates the reading of the spinoff epistemologically within the history of feminist literary criticism. In rewriting a literary text of the past that asserted the impossibility of creative writing not just for a single woman but for ‘any woman’, the reader is reminded of the essentialist approaches regarding the issue of female exclusion from the literary canon. On the level of narration, reference to Wolf’s creation of the imagined sister of Shakespeare serves as a subtle hint to the prevalence of Eurocentrism within the literary imagination.

As the narration progresses, Shafak continues paraphrasing Judith’s gendered experiences as fictionalized by Wolf in A Room of One’s Own without any pause or analytical break. From the particular experiences of Judith to the general statements that are part of the overall weave of the governing argument of the book, Shafak repeats Wolf’s ideas in her narration without any desire to resist. After a mosaic of such references, Shafak clinches before proceeding with the re-imagination of Judith’s story as:

From the very beginning, the opportunities presented to Shakespeare will be barred from Judith. In this world where girls are discouraged from developing their individuality and are taught that their primary role in life is to be a good wife and mother, where women are vocal in the realm of oral culture but mostly invisible when it comes to written culture, women writers start the game down 7–0 (Shafak, 2011, pp. 31–32).

On the surface level, till this point, Shafak’s focus on Wolf’s text affirms feminist critique of female marginalization: from then onward, the narratorial announcement, ‘Let us now apply Virginia Woolf’s critical question to the Middle East,’ (Shafak, 2011, p. 32) marks the possibility of contradiction. Thus, to answer this question, the Muslim woman is imagined differently. This decision may suggest another case of religious injustice that is ‘pressed into service to ‘liberate’ Muslim women, secularize Muslim culture, ‘save’ the Muslim world’ (Abbas, 2013 pp. 158–159).

One of the prominent ways of activating a difference from the pretext is the difference between the creative sensibilities of both these sisters does not go unnoticed. Though both Judith and Firuze are the imaginary sisters of two great poets of the time and the fact that both texts are set in the Middle Ages, Wolf’s story does not detail Judith’s intellect. Whereas, Firuze is introduced as a wise and intelligent girl, ‘a whiz kid, an explorer by nature, bent on learning, bubbling with ideas’ (Shafak, 2011, p. 32). More than her physical appearance, the narratorial focus offers a scenic description of her mental faculties. Such as;

her mind full of questions each tailing the next one. Like images in opposite mirrors, her ideas multiply endlessly, extending into infinite space. Imagination flows out of her sentences like water through the arches of an aqueduct, always fresh, always free. She loves stories, the more adventurous and dangerous the better. She endlessly tells the stories to her mother, grandmother and aunts. She relates them to guests, servants and whoever else in the family shakes their heads in unison and say ‘Girl, you have an imagination deeper than oceans’ (Shafak, 2011).

The above description not only reveals the extraordinary imagination of Firuze but also shows the praise and admiration her imagination received from every family member. The appreciation that Firuze gets from the family is contrasted with the experiences of Judith who was as talented as Firuze, and as fond of literature as Firuze, but was discouraged by her family from developing her individuality. Thus, Judith had ‘a hard time finding wiggle room in the “sociable-wife, meticulous-housewife, faithful-mother” box she is expected to fit into’ (Shafak, 2011, p.31). Noticeably, the kind of encouragement and appreciation that Firuze received from her family was absent in the life of Judith. The largely domestic world of Shafak’s story has enough evidence to question the Western narrative about Muslim women’s oppression too. The above excerpt conveys that Firuze was not living a life of oppression and seclusion. Firuze used to share her tales with her nanny, grandmother, and mother, who never stopped her from creativity. Moreover, several instances in the story point to the idea that Firuze was living in a socially active family. She was not restricted to her room, nor was she not under a strict purdah which, according to the West, is a sign of a Muslim women’s oppression. The above lines convey the idea that guests used to come to Firuze’s house, and there were servants other than the family members. So, it was the house where people often came and went.

‘How do you come up with all these stories’? Against the grand theory of religion and false consciousness

More, surprising than the encouragement that Firuze received was the amazement of the family elders who questioned her source of imagination; ‘Girl, you have an imagination deeper than the oceans. How do you come up with all these stories? Do you sneak up to the peak of the Kaf Mountain in your sleep and eavesdrop on the talks of the fairies till morning breaks?’ (Shafak, 2011, p.32). Her family’s astonishment is not inconsequential since the readers get to know the sources which feed her imagination. By turning to the power of faith as a source of Firuzi’s imagination, Shafak’s intertextual dialogue with Wolf reveals another contrast in the characterisation of Firuze. Some passages show the richness of her imagination, and through the details of this richness, the reader learns the instrumental role of religious knowledge in enriching her vision. This is validated through the inclusion of the translation of Quranic verses about paradise which she has read herself, ‘Those who are accepted into heaven will be adorned with golden bracelets and be given clothing made of the finest green silk’ (p. 33). The fact that ‘she has read herself’ in Quran falsifies the common feminist assumption that Muslim women are ignorant and majorly dependent upon Muslim men in terms of gaining their religious guidance. Further, using this particular verse as a reference is suggestive of Firuze’s religious conviction that human life is temporary and that the Divine power will reward good deeds in the afterlife. This recognisability activates her imagination. Accordingly in the ensuing description, her favourite pastime is shown to be ‘One of her favourite pastimes is to close her eyes and imagine herself donned in fine silks, jangling crafted bells on her ankles as she walks by streams of the coolest waters, picking juicy fruits from the trees, each bigger than an ostrich egg’(p. 33) This description without any reference to the subordination of women goes against the ‘common saying that woman is religion’s best friend religion is an enemy of the female sex’ (Mikaelsson, 2016, p. 761).

In modern feminist circles, the debate over religion and its effect on the lives of women has remained aggressive which sides with the idea that religion instills false consciousness in women by subordinating them to men. Largely originating in the Western world, this critique of religion was not limited to the disapproval of Christianity but extended to almost all world religions. Summarising the mainstream feminist view of religion, Lisbeth Mikaelsson in her study of religion from a feminist perspective posits that ‘In all the so-called world religions, male elites controlling the interpretation of sacred texts have been privileged as carriers of religious authority: whereas religious doctrine has legitimated male leadership roles, restricting women’s agency in family and society at large’ (2016, p.761). In the nineteenth century, The rise of the feminist movement in the Western world caused the decline of religious ideology. The largely sceptical attitude towards religion by modern feminists has caused the decline in religious faith within the Western world. Crucially this objection extends due to its odd abstraction, Islam too has been imagined as a religion that treats women as subordinate to men. To cite Simon de Beauvoir:

Man enjoys the great advantage of having a God endorse the codes he writes; since man exercises sovereign authority over woman…For the Jews, Mohammadan and Christians, among others, man is master by divine right; therefore the fear of God will repress any impulse towards revolt in the downtrodden female. One can bank on her credulity. (….) But if women quite willingly embrace religion, it is above all because it fills a profound need. (Beauvoir, 1949, p. 632)

Shafak, with a detailed description of the role of faith in the life of Firuze enters this dialogue to disapprove of the feminist identification of religion as a source of ‘false consciousness’. Through Firuze’s reading of the Quran, Shafak dismisses the idea of Muslim women’s dependence on men to read the Divine book. She is not obligated to consider her father or brother in matters of religion.

How religion functions in Firuze’s life is clear from her metaphorical conceptualization of dream and reality. Her passion for writing poetry does not blind her to the deception of a dream, which may lure the beholder by its enticing beauty as ‘a rosy-cheeked lass, as charming as a water nymph, and just as playful. If you attempt to hold her in your arms, she will slip out of your grip, lithe and nimble, like a fish, like the mirage she is. Those who crave her touch only wear themselves out.’(Shafak, 2011, p. 33) In contrast, reality appears detestable due to its unnerving appearance as ‘a crone with hair as grey as stormy skies, a toothless mouth and a chilling cackle. She is not ugly, not really’ (Shafak, 2011, p. 33) but does not betray. This metaphorical comparison serves a double role. By describing the two contrasting images, the reader gets access to the inner recesses of Firuze’s consciousness as being alert to the potential dangers hidden in the pursuit of her creative dream. When read under the shadow of Judith’s life choices, they ironically hit Judith’s short-sightedness in leaving her parental house in the middle of night without considering her material reality. It’s the acceptance of this harsh reality that made her run straight to her mother when one morning, ‘Firuze wakes up with a strange wetness between her legs and a red blotch smeared upon her nightgown’ (Shafak, 2011, p. 33), instead of running away from the reality like Judith who was tempted by her dream to the point she ‘let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London’ (Wolf 1929). Later, young Judith had to pay for her blind decision which made ‘the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman’ (Wolf 1929). The same biological reality that Firuze’s mother made her aware of by telling her, ‘It happens to all women’ (Shafak, 2011, p. 33) and which Firuze repeats to herself appears again in her conversation with the aged nanny. When Firuze confided her desire to become a poet, instead of dismissing her passion with any patriarchal excuse, the story the nanny told as a reply caught her imaginative sensibility. Instead of the gender inequality, the realization of the gender difference is stressed when the nanny concludes the story by saying ‘there is a reason why God made everything as it is and we’d better respect that reason, lest we want watermelons raining on our heads’ (Shafak, 2011, p. 36). The message she gets through the story of Nasiruddin Hodja is to accept that if men have produced knowledge, women’s bodies are blessed with the capability of giving birth. The dialogue between Firuze and her aged nanny appears to be between Shafak and those liberal feminists who based her criticism of religion on the Classical biblical mythology related to Adam and Eve. They claimed inequality of the sexes to have originated in the relationship between the first human couple, Adam and Eve. They claim that Adam’s early creation suggests the primary role assigned to a male, and the subsequent birth of Eva traps women into secondary status, created for male companionship. Beauvoir (1949) claims that the inclusion of this myth in the Bible endorses misogyny by forcing women to see themselves and the world through it. In the revised versions of the Bible, the blame for the original sin is placed on women. Since both Christianity and Islam are the book religion the same story of the creation of Adam and Eve is also narrated in the Quran. However, what is not known to secular feminists is that not a single Quranic verse blames Eve for instigating the original sin.

Further negating the prescriptions, restrictions, and prohibitions that are believed to have curtailed the creativity of Muslim women, the brief encounter between Firuze and Fazuli calls for attention. When Firuze takes out her poems from ‘the velvet box’ and heads toward her brother, the love and surprise with which he welcomes her shows the loving sibling relationship between the two. With a serious expression and without any hesitation or fear, she gives her poems to him and implores him to read them. The description slows down the exact moment as he starts reading: ‘Time slows down and moves to a different rhythm, like a sleepwalker. And after what seems like an eternity, Fazuli lifts his head, a new flicker in his eyes that wasn’t there before’ (Shafak, 2011, p. 37). Without words both Firuze and the reader sense the approval and appreciation which Fazuli feels for her talented sister. With these subtle but noticeable differences between the choices and experiences of the Muslim sister and her Western counterpart, the reader gets Shafak’s answer to Wolf’s question in the middle of the narration. Firuze has a room of her own with all the privacy and leisure that Wolf claims to be a requisite for writing. The reader is allowed to peek inside her room as ‘she rises before the morning breaks, puts a shawl on her thin shoulders and starts to write. Those who hear the soft tinkering from her room think she has risen to pray’ (Shafak, 2011, p. 35). It was neither patriarchy nor the absence of private space, which is postulated to have denied Muslim women’s experience. The answer lies in her brother’s poem, which inspires Firuze the moment she reads it:

All that is in the world is love

And knowledge is nothing but gossip

Firuze’s love for the couplet is also crucial in deciphering why she is absent from literary history. Muslim women may have talents like men, but their priority seems to be love rather than worldly knowledge, which is not worth the betrayal of her family’s love or the sacrifice of her body. Answering the question in poetic form enacts Shafak’s subjective response to largely theoretical questions, is suggestive, and opens up the generative space interpretation for the feminist literary interpretation.

Final comments

As a creative process, spinoff fiction holds great significance. As a response to the classical texts, the reader-turned-author rewrites these texts from the ‘other’ perspective to enter into an intellectually responsible dialogue with their literary precursor. Elif Shafak’s dialogic engagement with A Room of One’s Own proves the same. Through employing Spengler’s idea of spinoff and pre-text, this research asserts that the absence of a Muslim woman just like her Western sister from the literary canon should not be mistaken as a sign of patriarchal oppression. However, without falsifying any of Wolf’s claims regarding the absence of women from literary history, Shafak’s detailed projection of a Muslim woman’s life is a gentle reminder that attitudes towards literary creativity differ from society to society and from individual to individual. However, certain general trends may be shared. With the story’s orientation to the past, Shafak, through the story of Firuzi points out that if the priority of a Western woman was mind, for a Muslim woman, her body was her priority as per her faith. Her spirituality derived her more towards the fulfilment of her femininity than the pursuit of her desires. Attending to the present moment of the rewriting of Wolf’s classical story, the objective of this research is not to demean the Western feminist tradition but to emphasize that it would be unfair to link their present subordination as a historical phenomenon. The historical contextualization of a Muslim woman and the positivity and respect that she had in a Muslim society dismisses the mythic accusations raised against Islam as a misogynist religion. In contemporary times, under the influence of local, cultural, and political forces, the case of Muslim women is just a case in point. On a discursive level, this study concludes that a dialogic interaction between Western and Muslim cultures is needed to remove misconceptions, suspicions, and phobias. Such a dialogue is vital for the peaceful future of humanity.

Acknowledgment

This study is supported via funding from Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University project number (PSAU/2024/R/1445).

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Aisha Jadoon

Dr. Aisha Jadoon is currently working as Assistant Professor, Department of English at Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. She has a PhD in English Literature from the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad. Her doctoral research focused on the representation of divorced women in post-colonial fiction. In her present role, she is pursuing her research interests concerning the oppression of Muslim women in fiction and life writings. She is interested in Postcolonial Literature, especially in Indian/Pakistani Fiction, feminism and religion.