Scopic Dilemmas: Gazing the Muslim Woman in Fadia Faqir’s My Name Is Salma and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret

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This article discusses the representation of racist and sexist gazing in two British Muslim women’s novels, namely Fadia Faqir’s My Name Is Salma (2008) and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005). It argues that both novels foreground a binarized model of seeing in which their female Muslim protagonists veer between racialized and sexualized ways
of being seen. The texts suggest that a visual emphasis on sexuality has the power to displace the visibility of race and vice versa, implying a dynamic yet inverse relationship between the two dimensions of the gaze. Although both authors gesture toward the interconnectedness of the racist and the sexist gaze, their emphasis on a binarized
model of seeing cannot fully account for simultaneous and overlapping effects, such as the phenomena of racialized sexuality and gendered Islamophobia. This dualist model is a reflection of the authors’ representational politics and yet a reproduction of the separation between the racist and the sexist gaze in critical theory.