Agentic Muslims in the West: A reflection of mis(representation) in Sadia Farooqi’s Yusuf Azeem is not a hero
Abstract
The critical exploration of the themes of Islam, Islamophobia, and postcolonial Muslim identities are analyzed in this study by adopting Edward Said’s Orientalism and Salman Sayyid’s account of Muslim identity in the context of Sadia Farooqi’s novel, Yusuf Azeem Is Not a Hero. The research questions the representation of Islam and Muslim characters with a view to the future positioning of Farooqi’s representation of Islam from the coloniality of the Western gaze with Orientalist inclinations. Drawing on the postcolonial perspective, it is possible to study how the phenomena of Islamophobia are represented in the British Muslim novel and how the novel contributes to the expressions of prejudices against Muslims in Western society. In this way, tools of postcolonial analysis will allow for the identification of narratological biases in the cultural and social imaginary about the Islamic religion and its representatives. The study also evaluates how Farooqi counters conventional portrayals of Islam and puts back the power to Muslim identity often becomes overwhelmingly marginalized in an environment that is usually antagonistic and uninformed. In this regard, this research helps deepen the understanding of how contemporary literature reacts to Orientalist logic and practices the Islamophobia in question while demonstrating initializing and stereotyping tendencies that remain active even in the epoch to which the study is devoted. By engaging the terms that include Islamophobia, Orientalism, postcolonial Muslim identity, and the Western gaze, this research augments the existing debates concerning the way literature not only depicts but also defines cultural perceptions of Islam and Muslims. In this context, the study seeks to extend the novel’s analysis within these critical paradigms to elucidate the nature of contemporary Orientating processes and their impact on the formation of Muslim subject positions in literary culture.
Keywords:Islamophobia, Orientalism, post-colonial Muslim identity, Western perception, Sadia Farooqi, Yusuf Azeem Is Not a Hero, representation of Islam.
