Muslim Women Crafting a North American Identity by Shahnaz Khan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. 151 pages.)

Abstract

Shahnaz Khan's study of Muslim female identity in Canada is a worthy
contribution to the literature on Muslim experiences in the West. She
explores how women negotiate their identities in-between the polarized
discourses ofOrientalism and Islam by occupying a hybridized third space.
This third space is not only the site of resistance to the dominant Islamic
and Orientalist prescriptives of Muslim female identity, but a starting point
for Muslim women to engage in individual and collective projects to remap
and reconfigure their identities in a process of cultural, political, and
economic empowerment. Khan argues that progressive politics by and for
Muslim women are possible only from this hybridized location. Her study
elucidates this third space's dynamics by examining the dialectic between
the personal narratives of culturally diverse Canadian Muslim women and
the political space they inhabit.
In her introduction, Khan locates herself as a Muslim feminist intellectual
who does not practice but is influenced by Islam, as well as Orientalist,
multiculturalist, and feminist discourses. In order to move away from
essentialist notions of "Muslim," Khan clarifies that she uses the term to
reveal the fluidity and diversity of expressions associated with being
Muslim, including its use in both a religious and non-religious context.
In chapter 1, Khan draws on the work of various social theorists to rup­
ture the notion of a homogenous, static, and authentic culture. She does this
by emphasizing cultural fluidity, permeability, and shifting boundaries.
Resisting and challenging the former serves as the premise of what is
termed the third space, whereby hybridized identities are constructed from
a wide and even contending range of influences, such as eastern and western
cultural forces and religion. For Muslim women, Khan outlines how the
third space disavows colonial authority and forbids the reign of dominant
narratives of either Islam (which legitimates patriarchal authority through
sacred texts) or Orientalism (which represents Muslims as the pejorative
"Other"). This third space allows Muslim women to negotiate, resist, and
reinvent the forces informing their realities.
In the next few chapters, the personal narratives of 14 Muslim women
elucidate how Muslim women negotiate their own identities as they confront
racism and lslamophobia in the broader community, and sexism and ...