The Oriental Woman: An ‘Object of Desire and Derision’

‘The stereotype that is so tenaciously attached to the bodies of women...’ Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem[1].

Explore the stereotype of the ‘Oriental woman’[2] in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and The Patience Stone.

Introduction

In Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Rahimi’s The Patience Stone, two figures conform to what Reina Lewis terms ‘the West’s conception of the ‘Oriental woman.’[3] These women— Faten in the former and the unnamed protagonist of the latter— might be described as ‘phantasms’, constructions of a Western ‘obsession’[4] centred historically on ‘that most fertile space of the Orientalist imagination:’ the harem.[5] Further, they are products of ‘an ambivalent mode of knowledge and power,’ objects of ‘desire and derision;’ they are ‘stereotypes’[6] in Bhabha’s sense. A ‘combination of pleasure and danger’[7], this sterotype facilitates sexual gratification for the male Orientalist subject and acts as a means of controlling the female Orientalised object. This essay will explore why the sterotype of the Oriental woman is constructed so, examining how she ‘is always simultaneously… inscribed in both the economy of pleasure… and the economy of discourse, domination and power.’[8]

The Oriental Woman

First, we must dissect the two distinct yet interconnected models of the Oriental woman represented in the texts. The more traditional model is the odalisque, a figure that dominated Francophone Orientalist imagination in the early 20th century. Alloula, in his book on colonial photography in this period, describes her as a woman who spent her days reclining ‘in lascivious self-abandon’ in the ‘harem,’[9] of which she is ‘the very symbol… its hidden, yet available, core, always throbbing with restrained sensuality.’[10] Crucial to the sterotype is the restraint, that dichotomous occult/open nature that Alloula alludes to, as the odalisque was both unreservedly sexual and entirely restricted from contact with men, and thus chaste. Of late colonial Algeria, Alloula says that, ‘history knows of no other society in which women have been photographed on such a large scale,’[11] calling this photography a ‘plethora of images that tirelessly repeat the same subjects.’[12] This phenomenon of colonial photography is consistent with Bhabha’s assertion that ‘the stereotype… must be anxiously repeated.’[13] As in photography, the phantasm of the odalisque was repeated throughout late colonial literature and is similarly in Lalami’s contemporary novel. Faten, a once devout Islamist, is forced to migrate to Spain and take up sex work. It is during her time as a sex worker that Faten self-consciously constructs herself according to the ‘odalisque dreams’ of her Spanish client Martín,[14] who hopes to look behind the haremic curtain. In response to Martín’s questions about her upbringing, Faten says that she “spent all [her] days in the harem” of a “Moorish house.”[15] Of course, her self-construction is entirely imaginary, so, in a sense, the dreams of Martín, the ‘foreign, comparatively wealthy… male,’ ‘[speak] for her,’[16] just as traditional Orientalists (according to Said) spoke for Middle-Eastern women in the past. In this way, Faten imaginatively embodies perhaps the most ‘widely influential model of the Oriental woman’[17].

However, due to the fact that segregated households are ‘a thing of the past’[18] in the contemporary Middle East, the odalisque has come to occupy a less prominent space in Orientalist discourse. Instead, it can be argued that the odalisque has been translated over time into the second model of the Oriental woman: the niqabi, a Muslim woman who wears a full face and body covering. Like the odalisque, the niqabi sterotype involves a curtain concealing a hypersexualised female body. Constricting space is mobilised in the niqab that she wears, making her a conflation of odalisque and harem in Western imagination. The niqabi dominates ‘neo-Orientalist’[19] discourse, its most visible manifestation being in media coverage of the US conflict in Afghanistan. Images of Afghan niqabis are repeated just as ceaselessly as haremic images were a century ago. This phenomenon is alluded to by Lalami, when Larbi speaks of the ‘headscarf tightly folded around’ his daughter’s face ‘like those rabble rousers you see on live news channels.’[20] Faten wears a ‘headscarf’[21] making her a representation of this trope. However, the more stereotypical depiction comes from Rahimi, whose protagonist is one of the aforementioned Afghan niqabis. When outdoors she wears her ‘veil’[22] but takes it off inside, as her room (the novel’s sole setting) covers her instead. In the opening sentence, Rahimi describes the ‘curtains’[23] in the room, suggesting their symbolic importance. We can interpret the curtains, and by extension the room, as symbolic of her veil. Just as the harem space is condensed into the niqab, the niqab is mapped onto the space of her room. Like the harem, which conceals the odalisque from the male gaze, and the niqab which conceals her over-sexualised body, the room conceals the woman’s extra-marital sex— both physically with the young soldier[24] and sonically with her confession regarding the Hakim’s prostitute[25]— from the outside world. It seems the Francophone Rahimi has been influenced by French colonial discourse and cannot help but reinscribe Orientalist modes of perceiving Middle-Eastern women onto his work.

The odalisque and the niqabi are characterised by two features that revolve around cover. First, there are the paradoxical qualities attributed to these covered women, ‘of female privacy and modesty’ and ‘the potential for the covert’ sexuality[26]. Faten is ‘The Fanatic’[27] and ‘The Odalisque’[28], she gives Noura tapes ‘on the loose morals of young people,’[29] and takes the ‘extreme measure’ of having sex to save herself from deportation.[30] Likewise, Rahimi illustrates these qualities in the motif of room-sharing. His protagonist shares a room with her mother-in-law who guards her ‘chastity,’[31] but is also ‘locked up’ in the pitch dark with the prostitute who impregnates her, before returning home at night to ‘sleep with’ her husband, as if to emphasise her infidelity.[32] This dichotomous ambivalence is typical in Bhabha’s estimation, as he asserts that ‘the chain of stereotypical signification is curiously mixed and split, polymorphous and perverse, an articulation of multiple belief.’[33] Second, is ‘the curiosity to see behind the veil,’[34] reflected in Larbi’s question of Faten: ‘She was beautiful… so why hide it beneath all that cloth?’[35] In this light, Rahimi’s decision to frame his narrative from inside the private domain of the room/niqab places the reader in a position of immense and problematic sexual privilege, forcibly transgressing the cover of the veil as if through the ‘holes in the curtains.’[36]

Now that we have examined the characteristics of this Western cultural spectre inscribed onto the texts, we can progress onto the more significant points of analyses. The purpose of this essay is not to analyse how the Oriental woman is depicted in Hope and Patience[37]— we cannot hope to find Middle-Eastern women in a phantasm constructed by the Western mind— but why she is depicted. What do representations of the female Orientalised object say about the male Orientalist subject?

The Economy of Pleasure

Bell hooks writes that ‘the body of the Other,’ is ‘seen as existing to serve the ends of white male desires,’[38] and given Said’s description of the Orient as ‘one of [the West’s] deepest and most recurring images of the Other,’ [39] we can read the imagined Oriental female body as a map of white male desire. Alloula says of the Orientalist photographer that in staging the harem scene, which is the object of his imagery, he ‘literally decomposes (deconstructs) the very thing that propels him.’[40] Applying this notion of staging to the texts, we can deconstruct white male desire through a psychoanalytical reading of the Oriental woman.

Said asserts that ‘there was (and is)… a Freudian Orient,’[41] so let us probe it through his theories of desire. We will begin with ‘A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men’, in which Freud outlines three ‘preconditions’ for desiring this special type of object that map clearly onto the Oriental object. One precondition is ‘that there should be ‘an injured third party’’[42] in the romantic encounter, and this is satisfied by the Oriental woman, who in Western perception desperately hopes to escape her controlling husband, or if not married, is never independent from her father. This third party looms over Faten’s odalisque character, as she pretends to Martín: “I didn’t see much of my father,”[43] and the overbearing presence of Patience’s husband is manifest in the ‘photo of a man with a moustache,’ whose ‘black eyes,’ survey the room[44]. The omnipresence of a male Other tied to the female object provides for the Orientalist subject ‘an opportunity for the gratifying impulses of rivalry and hostility,’[45] as the fear/desire that structures the sterotype begins to manifest itself. This precondition is confounded by another, equally applicable to the Oriental woman: ‘the urge… to ‘rescue’ the woman they love’[46]. It is not hard to see how a Western male reader, when faced with the dire situation of Rahimi’s protagonist, might be ‘convinced that she is in need of him,’[47] especially given the ceaseless Anglophone media rhetoric focused on saving Afghan woman from patriarchal Islam. The sexualised desire to save is clear in Martín too, who tells Faten: “I want to help you,” only moments before ‘slipping his hand down her thigh.’[48] Of course, ‘her acquiescence’ is not ‘required when it [comes] to the matter of helping her,’[49] because in reality, it is about helping himself achieve pleasure.  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the theory though, is the precondition that ‘may be termed… ‘love for a prostitute.’’[50] Faten is a prostitute by trade, while Rahimi’s protagonist is forced to take money for sex,[51] which stimulates the ‘experiencing of jealousy,’ that Freud sees as ‘a necessity for lovers of this type.’[52] Clearly Orientalists are of this type, requiring feelings of hatred to enhance the pleasure they find in the stereotype.

This ‘love for a prostitute’ is developed further in ‘The Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, which deals with the madonna/whore complex. Freud suggests that the incest prohibition is so deeply rooted in those afflicted that they cannot desire those who remind them of the pure image they have of their mother[53]. Thus, ‘where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love.’[54] The subject feels ‘his respect for the woman acting as a restriction,’ and so needs ‘a debased sexual object;’[55] hence the childhood ‘phantasies which degrade the mother to the level of a prostitute,’ that afflict these men[56]. These ‘phantasies’ recall Rahimi’s phantasmic Oriental heroine. In visiting the Hakim, she transforms into the Madonna, a woman that ‘fell pregnant… as if by magic;’[57] a “mummy”[58] whom the Orientalist can love and admire. Yet, she simultaneously becomes an object of Orientalist desire, as the Hakim, ‘mated [her] with a guy they had blindfolded,’[59] with the animalistic ‘mated’ encapsulating the necessary degradation. Returning to Bhabha, the Orientalist male ‘derision’ for the stereotypically depraved Oriental woman heightens his ‘desire’ for her[60], allowing him ‘to acquire’ the texts’ modest niqabis as ‘object[s] of sensuality’[61]. At the conclusion of the essay, Freud elucidates the masculine desire for resistance. He writes:

an obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; and where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been sufficient men have at all times erected conventional ones so as to be able to enjoy love.[62]

The obstacle erected in this fantasy is the curtain of the harem or niqab which seems to be to be transgressed. As Alloula writes: ‘the harem, though opened up by the photographer, must remain symbolically closed.’[63]

Also tied to the trope of looking beyond the curtain is the final aspect of psychoanalytical theory applicable to the stereotype of the Oriental woman, namely voyeurism, or the scopic drive. The scopic drive is the sexual pleasure derived from the desire to objectify an Other by looking at them, which in turn shores up one’s self-perception as subject; as Lacan says: ‘a form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness’[64]. This drive is represented through the brothers in Patience who act as proxies for the Orientalist reader. Their voyeuristic desire is clear in the protagonist’s assertion that “they… spied on me through the little window in the bath house while I was washing myself… and… jerked off.”[65] But as we know, when we identify structures of desire in the sterotype, fear is never far behind. Bhabha explains: ‘in the objectification of the scopic drive there is always the threatened return of the look;’[66] this is called the gaze. Hence, in peering beyond the veil, the white male desires validation as subject through the objectification of the Oriental female Other, but equally fears her returned gaze, in which she would subjectify herself, apparently casting his subjectivity into doubt. Torgovnick, in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, argues that ‘the West’s fascination with the primitive has to do with its own crises in identity, with its own need to clearly demarcate subject and object.’[67] Substituting primitive for Oriental (arguably an equivalence for the Orientalist) reveals the instability of Orientalist male subjectivity, which is manifest in the desire to look on and objectify the Oriental female. We see this when Martín objectifies Faten, comparing her skin to “black olives,” her “breasts” to “ripe… mangoes,” to which she responds: “You’re making me sound like a dish.” [68] We can trace this gastronomic simile to bell hooks’ essay Eating the Other, in which she writes that ‘one desires “a bit of the Other” to enhance the blank landscape of whiteness.’[69] Responding to Faten’s accusation Martín tells her: “I guess you could say I’m a connoisseur,” proving hooks right by showing us that hidden within the desire for the Oriental woman is the fearful need to identify that anxious ‘I’. Here this Orientalist male solves his identity crisis by identifying as “connoisseur”, a subject adept at looking on and taking pleasure in Oriental female objects.

The Economy of Domination and Power

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault (to whom Said expresses an intellectual debt) employs the phrase: ‘regime of power-knowledge-pleasure.’[70] Orientalism might be classified as such a regime, and thus, the economy of domination and power(/knowledge) inherent in the sterotype of the Oriental woman is directly tied to aforementioned economy of pleasure. The desire/fear of the voyeuristic encounter with Oriental subjectivity leads to an intense desire to control this Other subject. Therefore, Bhabha sees the scopic drive as a function of power that is ‘disciplinary and ‘pleasurable’’[71] (my emphasis). In hooks’ terms, ‘it is by eating the Other… that one asserts power and privilege.’[72] It is for this reason too that the harem must remain symbolically closed. The pleasure of voyeurism depends partially on the fear of the returned gaze, but this fear threatens white male control over the Oriental female, and thus, the veil is necessary to make sure that ‘there is no mutual looking;’ ‘one desires contact with the Other even as one wishes boundaries to remain intact.’[73]

However, the more obvious means of control contained within the stereotype is linguistic rather than voyeuristic, the putting into discourse of the Oriental woman. Said writes that Orientalism is ‘power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orient’s nature, and we must deal with it accordingly.’[74] Martín is shown asserting the nature of the Orient when he tells Faten that he ‘knew things about her people and her people.’[75] Fanon, in ‘Racism and Culture’, explains that ‘phrases such as ‘I know them’, ‘that’s the way they are’’ betray ‘a determination to objectify, to confine, to imprison,’[76] and in this light Martín’s desire for the odalisque is revealed to be both a desire for pleasure and control. Hooks explains: ‘not at all attuned to those aspects of their sexual fantasies’ linked to ‘racist domination,’ ‘white boys’ believe that ‘openly discuss[ing] their desire for coloured girls… publicly announces their break with a white supremacist past.’[77] Martín almost paraphrases this, saying he is “not like” his father who ‘hated the immigrants,’ because he “likes” Faten[78]. Faten sees through his words, noting that ‘for all… his declarations of understanding, he was no different from his’[79] “fascist”[80] father. It is for this reason that Martín is ‘pleased with the game’ he plays with her[81]. When Faten presents herself as an odalisque from ‘Casablanca,’[82] she is merely repeating ‘a repertoire’ of stereotypes generated by Orientalist men that ‘she’d learned by heart,’[83] and so it is really Martín (or at least the culture from which he speaks) ‘making statements’[84] about her, not herself. The stereotype that he has her perform is part of ‘the nexus of knowledge and power creating “the Oriental” and in a sense obliterating [her] as a human being.’[85] She is no longer ‘an only child’ from ‘Rabat’[86], an individual subject with a story as real as Martín’s, but an object that he can control for his own pleasure.

A final method of control inherent in the stereotypical depiction of Middle-Eastern women can be identified Patience through reference to the History of Sexuality. Foucault speaks of a ‘will to knowledge regarding sex, which characterizes the modern Occident,’[87]calling this ‘form of knowledge power’ ‘scientia sexualis,’ a procedure centred on ‘the confession,’ of which ‘sex was a privileged theme.’[88] The act of confession strongly recalls the conceit at centre of Patience’s over-sexualised depiction of its heroine, as she calls her husband her “sang-e sabur,” a “stone you put in front of you… to which you confess everything in your heart.”[89] Foucault explains that confession is:

a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority.[90]

Given that the husband is comatose, the role of the interlocutor falls to the only other presence, the Orientalist male reader to whom her stereotypical depiction panders. In witnessing her confession of sexual transgressions— which we know appeals to the madonna/whore aspect of the stereotype— the reader, ‘who listens and says nothing’ is bestowed with the ‘agency of domination’[91] over her that he so desires. Moreover, Foucault suggests that unlike Western sexual science, the ‘Arabo-Moslem’ societies ‘endowed themselves with an ars erotica,’ an ‘erotic art.’[92] This assumption is mirrored when Faten feigns that her sisters “initiated [her] into the art of love-making.”[93] Thus, in this act of confession, the implied Western male interlocutor attempts to integrate the Oriental ars erotica into the Occidental scientia sexualis. Foucault says that ‘with these confessed truths, we are a long way from the learned initiations into pleasure’ of the erotic art, and this is reflected in the gulf between the ‘mystery’ of the imagined haremic rituals and the transparency of the Afghan woman’s confession[94]. If, as Hosseini writes in his introduction to the text, the woman is ‘a proxy for… millions’ of other Afghan women[95], then the Orientalist male reader can feel satisfied in having contained/controlled the unknowable, veiled mass of Middle-Eastern erotic art embodied by the concealed body of the Oriental woman within a comfortable, familiar framework of Occidental sexual science.

Conclusion

Ironically, this dramatic appropriation of Oriental sexuality for Western gain unfolds in a imagined world of phantasms, as close to reality as the Thousand and One Nights. The sterotype of the Oriental woman that so allures and terrifies the Western man is a fantasy of his own construction, a projection of his own anxious, degraded desires. Yet, it is hard to find humour in the situation, as the fictional sterotype of the Oriental women has harmed and continues to harm real Middle-Eastern women; their imaginative domination by Western men translating to realised domination. In the face of this domination, Lewis suggests a means by which Orientalised subjects might enter into ‘resistant forms of cultural production.’[96] In the ‘selective take-up of Orientalist styles, forms and techniques,’ Middle-Eastern women might ‘dissolve the ‘frozen’ categories of Orientalism, disrupting assumptions of ‘both the coloniser’s unilateral power and the disquieting powerlessness of the colonised.’’[97] In this light, Faten, as Orientalised subject, might be seen to construct herself within Orientalist discourse as a means of resistance. She exhibits ‘a self-conscious ability to manipulate cultural codes that is not normally attributed to the inferiorised, silenced woman of the harem stereotype.’[98] More importantly, her manipulation is on her own terms; she manipulates Orientalist discourse ‘to make a living,’ and discards it when her ‘anger’ gets too much.[99] In conclusion, this kind of resistance to the Oriental woman stereotype as a regime of power-knowledge-pleasure is essential in the current political climate, as Orientalist fantasies of voyeurism and control continue to dictate the actions of the empowered men of the West:

As part of the ‘anti-separatism’ bill, the French Senate has voted for outlawing the headscarf for minors in public.[100]

Aljazeera, 9/04/2021

Footnotes

[1] Malek Alloula, ‘The Orient as Stereotype and Phantasm’ in The Colonial Harem, trans. by Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). pp. 3-5. (p. 5).

[2] Reina Lewis, ‘Introduction’ in Rethinking Orientalism Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). pp. 1-11. (p.1).

[3] Lewis, p. 1.

[4] Alloula, ‘The Orient as Stereotype and Phantasm’, p. 3.

[5] Lewis, p.4.

[6] Bhabha, pp. 95-96.

[7] bell hooks, ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance’ in Black Looks: Race and Representation, (Boston: South End Press, 1992). pp. 21-39. (p. 25).

[8] Bhabha, p. 96.

[9] Malek Alloula, ‘Inside the Harem: The Rituals’ in The Colonial Harem, trans. by Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). pp. 67-83. (p. 75).

[10] Alloula, ‘Inside the Harem: The Rituals’, p. 74.

[11] Alloula, ‘The Orient as Stereotype and Phantasm’, p. 5.

[12] Alloula, ‘Inside the Harem: The Rituals’, p. 67.

[13] Bhabha, p. 94.

[14] Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005). (p. 148).

[15] Lalami, p, 148.

[16] Edward W. Said, ‘Introduction’ in Orientalism, (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004). pp. 25-51 (pp. 29-30).

[17] Said, ‘Introduction’, pp. 29.

[18] Lewis, p. 2.

[19] Lewis, p. 1.

[20] Lalami, p. 37.

[21] Lalami, p. 26.

[22] Atiq Rahimi, The Patience Stone, trans by. Polly McLean, (London: Vintage, 2010). (p. 48).

[23] Rahimi, p. 1.

[24] Rahimi, p. 102.

[25] Rahimi, p. 132.

[26] Margaret A. Mills, ‘Between Covered and Covert’ in Land of the Unconquerable : The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women eds. by Jennifer Heath and Ashraf Zahedi, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). [no page numbers provided].

[27] Lalami, p. 21.

[28] Lalami, p. 132.

[29] Lalami, p. 34.

[30] Lalami, p. 147.

[31] Rahimi, p, 54.

[32] Rahimi, p. 132.

[33] Bhabha, p. 118.

[34] Lewis, p. 9.

[35] Lalami, p. 44.

[36] Rahimi, p. 1.

[37] The titles will be abbreviated thus from this point onwards.

[38] hooks, p. 23.

[39] Said, ‘Introduction’, p. 25.

[40] Alloula, ‘Inside the Harem: The Rituals’, p. 68.

[41] Said, ‘Introduction’, p. 46.

[42] Sigmund Freud, ‘A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XI, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1910). pp. 163-176. (p. 166).

[43] Lalami, p. 148.

[44] Rahimi, p. 1.

[45] Freud, ‘A Special Type of Object Choice’, p. 166.

[46] Freud, ‘A Special Type of Object Choice’, p. 169.

[47] Freud, ‘A Special Type of Object Choice’, p. 169.

[48] Lalami, pp. 138-139.

[49] Lalami, p. 149.

[50] Freud, ‘A Special Type of Object Choice’, p. 166.

[51] Rahimi, p. 100.

[52] Freud, ‘A Special Type of Object Choice’, pp. 166-167.

[53] Sigmund Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XI, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1910). pp. 177-190. (p. 182).

[54] Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement’, pp. 182-183.

[55] Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement’, p. 185.

[56] Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement’, p. 183.

[57] Rahimi, p. 132.

[58] Rahimi, p. 11.

[59] Rahimi, p. 132.

[60] Bhabha, p. 96.

[61] Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement’, p. 183.

[62] Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement’, p. 187.

[63] Alloula, ‘Inside the Harem: The Rituals’, p. 69.

[64] Jacques Lacan, ‘The Split between the Eye and the Gaze’ in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, eds. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan, (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981). pp. 67-78. p. (74).

[65] Rahimi, p. 51.

[66] Bhabha, p. 116.

[67] Quoted in hooks, pp. 21-22.

[68] Lalami, p. 137.

[69] hooks, p. 27.

[70] Michel Foucault, ‘We “Other Victorians”’ in The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). pp. 1-14. (p. 11).

[71] Bhabha, p. 109.

[72] hooks, p. 22.

[73] hooks, p. 27.

[74] Edward W. Said, ‘Preface’ in Orientalism, (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004). pp. 11-24. (p. 14).

[75] Lalami, p. 149.

[76] Quoted in Bhabha, pp. 119-120.

[77] hooks, pp. 23-24.

[78] Lalami, p. 138.

[79] Lalami, p. 149.

[80] Lalami, p. 137.

[81] Lalami, p. 148.

[82] Lalami, p. 136.

[83] Lalami. P. 148.

[84] Said, ‘Introduction’, p. 27.

[85] Said, ‘Introduction’, p. 51.

[86] Lalami, pp. 136, 139.

[87] Michel Foucault, ‘Scientia Sexualis’ in The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). pp. 51-74. (p. 65).

[88] Foucault, ‘Scientia Sexualis’, pp. 58, 61.

[89] Rahimi, pp. 74, 71.

[90] Foucault, ‘Scientia Sexualis’, p. 61.

[91] Foucault, ‘Scientia Sexualis’, p. 62.

[92] Foucault, ‘Scientia Sexualis’, p. 57.

[93] Lalami, p. 148.

[94] Foucault, ‘Scientia Sexualis’, p. 62.

[95] Khaled Hosseini, ‘Introduction’ in Atiq Rahimi, The Patience Stone, trans by. Polly McLean, (London: Vintage, 2010).

[96] Lewis, p. 2.

[97] Lewis, p. 2. [Quoting Zeyneb Celik, ‘Colonialism, Orientalism and the Canon’]

[98] Lewis, p. 7.

[99] Lalami, p. 148.

[100] “‘Law Against Islam’: French Vote In Favour Of Hijab Ban Condemned”, Aljazeera, 9/04/2021 <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/9/a-law-against-islam> [Accessed 9 January 2022].

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