Summary

Mohja Kahf is the author of numerous poetry collections, short stories, essays, and scholarly articles. She immigrated from Syria to the United States with her family at a young age, and she identifies as a Muslim American writer. Her writing debunks dominant narratives that construct Arab Americans as perpetual foreigners to US culture and history. Kahf conceives of her work as belonging to a long tradition of Muslim American literature, including the Black Arts movement, diasporic writing, and second- and third-generation literatures. Drawing upon Arabic, Islamic, and mainstream US cultural references and imagery, Kahf’s work meditates on the challenges of hybridized identities. Through her poetry and essays, she confronts Orientalist narratives about Muslim women as perpetual victims of an oppressive religion, and challenges anti-Muslim racism and xenophobia. Her coming-of-age novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, with its complex relationships and nuanced representations of Muslim American characters, asserts an Islamic feminist ethos and challenges stereotypes of Arab and Muslim Americans. Centering on Muslim women’s embodied experiences, Kahf’s writing celebrates women’s sexuality and desire and condemns the policing of women’s bodies, particularly in her poetry collections, her column “Sex and the Ummah,” and her writings on hijabs. Her scholarly work investigates historical representations of Muslim women, seeking to expand literary cannons to include Muslim women writers and correcting misinterpretations and translations of their work. An antiviolence human rights activist, Kahf writes against US occupation and invasion in the Middle East, and advocates solidarity across racial, gendered, ethnic, and national identities. Her work references Islamic values of mutual vulnerability and is imbued with an ethics of mutual caretaking and social justice.