On Representation of Muslims in Literature

As someone spends most of her life reading, there was very little of the me in the characters I consume.

Growing up in Nigeria, most of the book characters I interacted with where foreigners. They got sunburned and were snowed in, took boat cruises and gambled in Monte Carlo, had four seasons and no mosquitoes. And, for a long time, their food made no sense to me. Oh, how I used to hate it when the writer went on waxing lyrical about some fantastic dish and I could only understand about half of the words used! Bear in mind this was well before the advent of Sheikh Google. Now I get my own back by generously sprinkling my own work with a smattering of local, mostly Yoruba, words which I may or may not choose to explain.

In my teen and YA phase, I dabbled in African literature, hoping to find characters with more relatable back stories. That got old pretty fast. For one thing, and this is another topic that has been explored several times, ‘African writing’ has been boxed into a very narrow niche. If it is not about a distant past, before the White Man came, when everything was still Kumbaya,* insert eye roll *, it is about colonization and its myriad of long-lasting ills. And while I do not contend that these are not important, if a little one-dimensional, parts of the African experience, surely, we are more than that.

Preposterous as it may appear, there were, and have been since, parts of our experience that are worthy of being told, quite unrelated to the antics of our colonizers. Those stories were hard to find, though, because they weren’t quite as well received. They are not the big ‘successes’. Africa, and her peoples are viewed only through a certain lens and telling tales outside of that scope is akin to literary suicide.

The other thing I discovered during my experimentation with African writers was that the characters, more often than not, were not Muslim. I would discover the African Muslim, usually Arab and North-African writers, much later but…we’ll get to that later, someday. Most of the books I found then – 1990s and early 2000s – had either Christian, animist or secular characters. And like the beloved foreign characters I have always known and enjoyed their stories – some more than the others – they were not me.

When I returned to the world of fiction after a long hiatus, I was delighted at the growing selection of stories with Muslim characters that were springing up. And to find that there were many Muslim writers, Africans and non-Africans, doing this good work of telling our stories.

Finally, I thought. Characters that share my experiences.

Except…there appeared to be a common thread to these books. One which strives to make the Muslims and their tales relatable, not to the Muslim reader, but to the non-Muslim one. Even if that meant skirting the lines of halaal/haram or portraying the more ‘serious’ Muslims as extremists and judgmental. Like the African one before it, Muslim literature is at risk of becoming an apologetic mouthpiece for the mainstream perception of what Islam and Muslim is. I am unsure if this is a reflection of the Ummah, and how much we have strayed from the ideals of our religion. Or if it is borne of expediency – more people, unfortunately, want to read about the ‘courageous’ ‘progressive’ Muslim who ‘breaks free of it all’, than the Niqabi one who defies all odds to graduate college despite all the regulations and restrictions thrown at her by ‘liberal’ secular institutions.

I am not naïve. I recognize that there is almost no homogeneity in the way this Deen is practiced worldwide. Different cultures and peoples express the religion through their unique prisms of experience. That said, there must be a place in literature for the people, wherever they originate from or reside in, who are still striving, despite the odds, to follow the Qur’aan and Sunnah based on the understanding of the first three generations of Muslims. Strange as they must appear to everyone else, these people – these Muslims – exist. They live life and face challenges. Only some of these are a result of the ideals they try to uphold, others are just…life. These people are no less human, no less Muslim, not essentially any more flawed, or less representative, than the Progressive Muslim stereotypes that are increasingly being peddled in popular literature.

And their stories – at times extraordinary, mostly mundane – are the ones I want to tell. Not as side characters or villains, or the terrorists/extremists/narrow-minded and judgmental/oppressed/oppressive clichés that have long been perpetuated in narratives.

Just meaningful tales of Muslims living their lives, the best way they can.