Racing Away from Race

The Literary Aesthetics of Islam and Gender in Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s The Prophet of Zongo Street and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s The Whispering Trees

Dados Bibliográficos

ID12115306
AutoresShirin Edwin (Sam Houston State University, autor correspondente)
Ano2016
Volume7
Fascículo2
Páginas133-158
Data de publicação2016-11-02
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoIslamic Africa (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0803-0685 • E-ISSN: 0806-7120
EditoraBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/21540993-00702010
OpenAlexW2564628711
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas4

Some literary discussions on Islam in West Africa argue that African Muslims owe allegiance more to Arab race and culture since the religion has an Arab origin while owing less to indigenous and therefore “authentic” African cultures. Most notably, in his famous quarrel with Ali Mazrui, the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka wrenches race to serve a tendentious historicism about African Muslims as racially Arab and therefore foreign to African culture. In their fiction, two new West African writers, Mohammed Naseehu Ali and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, allegorize African Islamic identity as tied to Arab race and culture as madness, lunacy and even death. In particular, Ali’s short story “The Prophet of Zongo Street” engages with this obsessive dialectic between African Islamic identity and Arab race. Although not explicitly thematizing Islamic identity as tied to Arab race or culture, three other stories by the same authors, Ali’s story “Mallam Sile” and Ibrahim’s stories “The Whispering Trees” and “Closure,” gender the dialectic between race and Islamic identity. Ali and Ibrahim show African Muslim women’s abilities to effect change in difficult situations and relationships—marriage, romance, legal provisions on inheritance, prayer and honor. In so doing, I argue, these authors reflect a potential solution to the difficult debate in African literary criticism on Islamic identity and Arab race and culture

Aesthetics · Allegiance · Identity (music · Islam · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · African history and culture studies · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Religious studies · Religious Studies