Negotiating a woman cultural identity between religious and secular discourses in Leila Aboulela's the Translator

Abstract

Throughout The Translator (1999), the Sudanese, Egyptian-born, and British-immigrant author Leila Aboulela describes the position of the non-western Anglophone writer as a translator by default, moving ‘back’ and ‘forth’ between languages and cultures. The present investigation of the novel tries out how Aboulela calls into question conceptualizations of translation that grow out of western religious and philosophical traditions. Opposed to a limited postcolonial Muslim identity, Aboulela’s fiction shows that religion has also become Muslim’s women new concern, besides or even beyond their feminist and nationalist interest. She then represents Islam as a form of personal salvation and empowerment. Yet, based on Majed’s brand of Islamic Postcolonialism, it is argued that in itself the strong affiliation to Islam demonstrated by Aboulela is an Islamic postcolonial text. Ultimately, the research work comes to suggest some prospects that pave the way for Aboulela to draw a literary project that turn upon a reconsideration of Muslim identity, this was exemplified in her oscillation between the discursive combination Foreignizing and domesticating schemes of translation.