For a group of Muslim women, the West facilitates a critical interrogation of their feeling of identity vacillation and creates a useful framework for thinking about their religious observances, which eventually helps them conceptualize and articulate their sense of belonging. While immigrant Muslim men are racked with somewhat unacknowledged exilic anxieties, the challenge and possibility of Muslim women largely concern gender and religion. These two texts show how, face to face with possibilities and pitfalls of diaspora, Muslim women negotiate and prioritize Islamic identity in the metropolis. Therefore, the representation of diasporic Muslim women and their multiple identities in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Shelina Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf is of paramount importance.
However, opening up spaces for the voices of Muslim women especially those wearing the hijab is long overdue. Muslim societies, and especially Muslim women, have often received fetishized attention in (neo-)Orientalist literature. The search for soul mates who are 'men enough' to embrace the almost-schizophrenic personalities of these young women become spiritual journeys of self-discovery. They reflect the aspirations and frustrations of Asian British Muslim women who are smart, well educated, well employed, westernized and yet often deeply rooted to their religion and Asian culture. A literary framework of diasporic literature will be used to analyze the novels of Rekha Waheed, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Ayisha Malik where it will be shown that though they have a limited audience these stories document the lives of diasporic women who are each juggling between at least three labels of being British, being of Asian origin and being Muslim in a predominantly white, Christian, western society. This paper proposes to analyze why chick lit is worthy of academic reflection. When it comes to diasporic Muslim women's chick lit the marginalization is understandably much more severe.
Women's literature has often been dismissed as 'chick lit' as opposed to the 'research-worthy' mainstream literature.
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