A faith of one’s own: a Muslim woman writes back to Virginia wolf

The persistent neglect of historical, biographical and experiential diversity of female gender across cultural locations in the mainstream feminist circles has turned re-writings of the classical feminist texts into a potent source of directing readerly attention towards the question of difference. Among such re-writings is ‘The Talented Sister’ a chapter in Elif Shafak’s bio-fiction Black Milk: on Writing, Motherhood and the Harem–which recreates the story of Judith Shakespeare from a Muslim perspective. By writing back to Virginia Wolf’s essentialist claim made in A Room of One’s Own regarding the historical female exclusion from the literary canon, Shafak challenges the exclusionary practices of the canonical feminist discourses that show a lack of understanding towards Muslim women. In contemporary times when the position of Muslim women appears frightening by Modernist feminist ideals, this research posits ‘The Talented Sister’ as a literary spinoff whose role is identified as a cultural producer in the lived world by entering into dialogue with dominant historical, ideological, and feminist debates that single out Islam as denigrating and repressing towards female creativity. By historicizing the life of Muslim women in Wolfian tradition, this research claims that this text performs a cultural work by interfering in feminist identifications of ‘false consciousness’ through which religion restricts Muslim women’s agency to domestic space.