Abstract
The increase in the number of Muslim Americans today, particularly those born and brought up in the US, has resulted in the production of literary narratives that highlight the exclusion of the Muslim diaspora from American society and the state’s discriminatory practices against Islamic institutions. One such prominent and visible symbol of worship and community building for Muslims is the mosque which constitutes a real and imagined thirdspace given the hybridity of its functions. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the literary representations of the mosque as a nonsecular thirdspace, as a place of hospitality, and as a borderland, as well as exploring its role in shaping attitudes toward Islam amongst the first- and second-generation diaspora, through a close reading of Ayad Akhtar’s novels. The intergenerational attitude toward Islam in the novels highlighting the differences between Muslims inside the community is discussed. The struggles of first-generation immigrants to build a mosque in the US and the exclusionary obstacles and disruption created by the dominant group are examined in both the novels. In doing so, the functional and formal aspects of the mosque as a space traversed by feelings of fear, the unknown within, and a place within the nation-state but not fully of the nation for non-Muslims are explored. The literary analysis is juxtaposed with sociological analysis to better illustrate the inclusionary and multipurpose role of the mosque for contemporary American Muslims and the exclusionary responses toward this important structure and symbol of Islam in the wake of 9/11.
Thirdspace becomes not only the limitless Aleph but also what Lefebvre once called the city, a “possibilities machine”; or, recasting Proust, a madeleine for a recherche des espaces perdus, a remembrance-rethinking-recovery of spaces lost […] or never sighted at all.
—Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Ayad Akhtar is a second-generation playwright, screenwriter, and novelist championing the Muslim-American immigrant experience through his award-winning plays and novels determined to appeal to a broad spectrum of American and global readers. His first novel, American Dervish (2013), has been translated into twenty languages, and his recently published second novel, Homeland Elegies (2020), reaffirms the characterization by The Economist (2015, n.p.) that his literary works “are as essential today as the work of Saul Bellow, James Farrell, and Vladimir Nabokov were in the twentieth century in capturing the drama of the immigrant experience.”
- 2.
O Bani Israel! / Remember how I favored you / Fulfill your promise to Me / I will fulfill my promise to you / Of Me alone stand in awe! / Believe in what I have given / Confirm the truth you know / Be not the first to deny / Do not give away My revelations for a trifling sum / Of Me alone be aware! (2013, 177).
Works Cited
Ahmed, Akbar. 1992. Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise. New York, NY: Routledge.
———. 2007. Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
———. 2010. Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Ahmed, Dilruba. 2011. Dhaka Dust. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.
———. 2020. Bring Now the Angels. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press.
Akhtar, Ayad. 2012. Disgraced. London, UK: Methuen.
———. 2013. American Dervish. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company.
———. 2014. The Who & the What: A Play. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company.
———. 2020. Homeland Elegies. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company.
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.
Bagby, Ihsan. 2020. US Mosque Survey Report 1: Basic Characteristics of the American Mosque. Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Accessed 22 September 2021. https://www.ispu.org/report-1-mosque-survey-2020/.
———. 2021. US Mosque Survey Report 2: Perspectives and Activities. Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Accessed 22 September 2021. https://www.ispu.org/mosque-survey-2020-full-report-2/.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1990. The Third Space. In Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, 207–221. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Chittick, William C. 2006. Foreword. In The Mosque: The Heart of Submission, ed. Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, ix–xvi. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
Corbett, Rosemary R. 2017. Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the Ground Zero Mosque Controversy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Esposito, John L., and Dalia Mogahed. 2008. Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. New York, NY: Gallup Press.
Griffith, Sidney H. 2008. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Holod, Renata, and Hasan-Uddin Khan. 1997. The Mosque and the Modern World: Architects, Patrons, and Designs since the 1950s. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson.
Kabir, Nahid Afrose. 2017. Muslim Americans: Debating the Notions of American and Un-American. New York, NY: Routledge.
Kahera, Akel Ismail. 2002. Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender, and Aesthetics. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Knott, Kim. 2005. The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. Equinox.
Lavie, Smadar, and Ted Swedenburg. 1996. Introduction: Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. In Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, ed. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, 1–26. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London, UK: Blackwell.
Mahmutćehajić, Rusmir. 2006. The Mosque: The Heart of Submission. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
Mirza, Fatima Farheen. 2018. A Place for Us. New York, NY: SJP for Hogarth.
Moghul, Haroon. 2017. How to Be a Muslim: An American Story. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Parkin, David. 2000. Inside and Outside the Mosque: A Master Trope. In Islamic Prayer across the Indian Ocean: Inside and Outside the Mosque, ed. David Parkin and Stephen Headley, 1–22. New York, NY: Routledge.
Pluralism Project. 2020. Early American Mosques. Pluralism. Accessed 24 December 2021. https://pluralism.org/early-american-mosques.
Roose, Eric. 2009. The Architectural Representation of Islam: Muslim-Commissioned Mosque Design in the Netherlands. PhD Dissertation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Schwartz, Alexandra. 2020. Making a Scene: In the Age of Trump, a Writer Explores America’s Divisions–And His Own. The New Yorker, September 21.
Sciupac, Elizabeth Podrebarc. 2017. US Muslims Are Religiously Observant, but Open to Multiple Interpretations of Islam. Pew Research Center. Accessed 22 September 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/28/u-s-muslims-are-religiously-observant-but-open-to-multiple-interpretations-of-islam/.
Soja, Edward W. 1971. The Political Organization of Space. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers.
———. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places. London, UK: Blackwell.
The Economist. 2015. Q&A: Ayad Akhtar. The Economist. September 3. Accessed 24 September 2021. https://www.economist.com/prospero/2015/09/03/q-and-a-ayad-akhtar.
Wang, Yuting. 2014. Between Islam and the American Dream: An Immigrant Muslim Community in Post-9/11 America. New York, NY: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Khorakiwala, M. (2024). Nonsecular Thirdspaces in Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish and Homeland Elegies. In: Barba Guerrero, P., Fernández Jiménez, M. (eds) American Borders. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30179-7_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30179-7_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-30178-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-30179-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)