Leila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land: A Counter-Narrative to the 9/11Canon

Abstract

The post 9/11 fiction in English witnessed the burgeoning of novels and short stories that critically address themes and concerns relating to Islam and Muslims. The broad context of these developments is arguably the intellectual and other responses and media spectacles in the aftermath of the terror attack that apparently pointed needles of suspicion on the Muslim community and Islam to the extent of creating what is often referred to as Islamophobia. The literary representations of this geopolitical condition in general and the renewed interest in Islam these developments caused in particular can be approached as instances of renegotiations of the discourse of Islam. The rampant proliferations of the discourse of Islam in the post 9/11 fiction in English can be roughly categorised into three types, viz. those that violently depict the threat posed by the religion, the ones that present introspective positioning of the religion in the new scenario, and those that defend the rising new discourses that place the community on the surveillance mechanism owing to the alleged threat it posed to the world. This paper is limited in scope and seeks to read Once in a Promised Land   by Leila Halaby (2007) as a representative work countering the dominant discourses on Islam and the Muslims that emerged in the post 9/11 political and cultural context.