Ground Zero Narratives - by Mubarak Altwaiji (Hardcover)

About the Book

Ground Zero Narratives: Islam and Muslims in Post-9/11 American Narratives and Arab American Counter-Narratives analyzes the relations between post-9/11 America and the Islamic world. This book presents narrative discourse to detect literary incitement to typological and cultural representations.

Book Synopsis

Ground Zero Narratives: Islam and Muslims in Post-9/11 American Narratives and Arab American Counter-Narratives analyzes the relations between post-9/11 America and the Islamic world. This book presents narrative discourse to detect literary incitement to typological and cultural representations.

Review Quotes

Ground Zero Narratives seeks to highlight that we should not stimulate the epistemic clash between "East" and "West" by suggesting a way forward claiming "Western" inferiority and "Eastern" superiority, but rather, Mubarak Altwaiji provides a compassionate and uncompromising Arab-Islamic spiritual path emphasizing dialogue. Mubarak Altwaiji is an elegant and provocative thinker, and here he is at his absolute best.

In his investigation of representations of Islam and Muslims in post-9/11 Euro-American and Arab American narratives, Altwaiji (Northern Border Univ., Saudi Arabia) not only engages postcolonial theory in his critique of the Western Orientalist literary tradition but also historicizes Orientalism as a binary thinking mode in its evolving religious, geopolitical, technological, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Reading what he calls "Ground Zero narratives," which range from John Updike's The Terrorist and Tom Clancy's The Teeth of the Tiger to Richard Clarke's The Scorpion's Gate and John Elray's Khalifah, Altwaiji argues that these Euro-American authors equate Islam with terrorism and Muslims with violence and irrationality, which would justify Western domination of the Arab nations and the Middle East. Moreover, he also notices that Arab women in Euro-American women's narratives have equally been reduced to sexualized victims of the Islamic tradition and system. In response, Altwaiji invokes the work of Arab American women authors, particularly Abu-Jaber's Crescent and Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land, as counter-narratives against the discrimination and demonization of Arab and Muslim Americans in American culture and society. Recommended. Faculty.

It's an encyclopedic body of knowledge on Post-9/11 American Novel. It's a reference for Arab and American readers.

About the Author

Mubarak Altwaiji is associate professor of literary theory and criticism, as well as head of the department of English Language Skills at Northern Border University.