" Sometimes a shift makes me remember " deplacement, identity, and religion in Leila Aboulela's Minaret
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Date
2016
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university of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
Literature of migration is a continuous chain of vivid literary representations of migrant's day-to-day life. It speaks up the minorities voices. Captivatingly, muslim contributions to this field cannot be denied or excluded. This dissertation, accordingly, attempts to analyze Leila Aboulela's Minaret (2005) in a way that evokes culture, identity, and religion for the sake of finding migrants' lost identity after being a subject to displacement effects. The objective of this study, thus, is to question the reality behind the process of the cultural change expressed in the novel and its outcomes on muslim migrants. It investigates the role of an 'exotic' cultural setting in defining migrants' identity and religion. At this level, culture, society, economy, and politics would be approached comparatively between Migrants' place of departure and place of arrival. To get to this point, this research will be divided into three chapters. The first chapter highlights 'migration literature', under which Minaret is perfectly located, in relation to arab muslim cultural settlement in the West. The second extracts the different instances of displacement and its two-ways of influence on muslim communities. It also tries to approach minaret from a cultural materialist view to understand the process of change. The last tackles the religious identity under the examination of (dis)placement and migration. This will throw light on the beneficial integration that muslim migrants may embrace to achieve what they lacked in their homelands. Finally, reading aboulela's minaret in the context of this research suggests a more comforting, reliable, and practical solution for grasping the good effects of (dis)placement and opens the way for other researches on this positivist tendency in predicting the future of islam and muslims in Europe.
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Novel : Aboulela Leila : Minaret, Literature of migration