The Struggle Of Veiled Muslim Women In America Through Mohja Kahf’s “the Girl In The Tangerine Scarf”

Résumé: Abstract This dissertation discusses the struggle that Muslim Arab veiled women encounter in the American diaspora. Written by the Syrian American writer and poet Mohja Kahf, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf is used as a corpus to analyze and understand this issue. This semibiographical novel presents a great opportunity to address oppression, religious intolerance and double consciousness, which are constant issues that Muslim Arab women immigrants generally confront. The study is significant in the sense that it brings to view the unspoken of all injustices and bias against American Muslim Arab veiled women. In other words, the conflict had existed prior to 9/11 era. However, it was those bloody attacks which functioned as a catalyst accelerating both oppression of these women and gave rise to their commitment to struggle that subjugation. The dissertation equally analyzes the biased western view, which boils down to the way the West is blinded by its own failure to recognize its stereotyping actions on one hand, and criticizes the West beliefs of own culture to be far more superior than Non-Western cultures, on the other. Hence, to achieve its intended purpose which lays in revealing the different layers of hardships waged against Muslim women, the study calls for postcolonial approach, the choice that resorts to Edward Said’s Orientalism theory.

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