Beyond the Good Muslim Woman: Humour, Anger, and Ethical Becoming in Diasporic Fiction

Abstract

This article examines how Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home dismantle the figure of the “Good Muslim Woman”
by foregrounding humour and anger as modes of ethical self-formation. Moving beyond dominant critical frameworks that read Muslim women’s writing
primarily through identity politics, resistance, or Islamophobia, the article situates these novels within the ethical and post-secular turn in literary studies. Drawing
on theories of ethical selfhood and ordinary ethics, it argues that Kahf and Jarrar construct diasporic coming-of-age narratives in which Muslim female
subjectivity is shaped not through idealized piety or liberal emancipation, but through affective engagement, moral imperfection, and everyday ethical struggle.
In Kahf’s novel, humour functions as a reflective ethical practice that enables critique without moral foreclosure, while Jarrar’s irreverent narrative mobilizes
anger as an ethical refusal of respectability and normative coherence. Read together, these texts reframe diasporic Muslim women’s fiction as a site of ethical
experimentation, challenging reductive binaries of piety and rebellion and offering a post-secular model of ethical becoming grounded in lived experience.