. Critical Inquiry

Call for Submissions

This anthology seeks to re define the stereotypical definitions of "Muslim" women that over flow Western discourses on the Islamic Other.   The veil, seemingly the age-old symbol of our repression and the archetypical rationale for our rescuing by the west, has become a transparent symbol of Islamic "barbarity."   In this anthology we seek to move beyond such sterile representations and narrow debates, calling for work that engages the complexity that make up "Muslim" women's contemporary realities.   We seek to construct a multiple-voiced text and many-sided vision of our lives as "Muslim" women   by forging ourselves into new creative collectivities.   In this process the category   "Muslim" must be rendered anew through our own politics and cultural practices and such a rendering must reflect the many valences of our multiple histories because we come from all parts of the "Muslim" world--whether we are from Saudi Arabia, Britain, Indonesia, Sudan or Black Muslims in the United States.   Through this anthology we seek to build coalitions among "Muslim" women, broadening the definitions of "war," and giving voice to the multiplicities of our lives.   The reason why we have put "Muslim" in quotes throughout this call is to move away from those tendencies that seek to reduce us to monological stereotypes and to define us in one homogeneous way.  

This anthology encourages submissions that might subvert these stereotypes, claim them and move beyond them or perhaps simply ignore them. Through poetry, prose and photography we wish to express the multiple voices that move within us and in our communities, voices that trouble the dominant generalizations.   Submissions should speak of war broadly but of struggles specifically and re define war and warring, from our bodies to the so-called war against terrorism, from the war against hetronormativity in our homes to the construction of the nation, from the war for control over our sexuality to the war against cancer.  

For ages it seems we have been torn between two empires, one that claimed our freedom in rapacious capitalism and another that claimed to breaks these bounds by divesting us of our cultures.   Both were caught in a shadow dance of proliferating arms. Now with the end of this so-called Cold War, the nuclear race over and bombs under every pillow we are at the beginning of another divide.   Today, the US and its military is seeking to impose a (new) world (dis)order creating new dictionaries of control, defining, normalizing which person and populations, which nation and which culture can enter the theater of "civilization."   Sometimes this is simply a matter of which look matches this weeks terrorist.   Can we really believe what they claim constitutes a threat when people are being held captive without due process, unjustly profiled and targeted and carpet bombed, from immigrant ghettoes of the US to Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay, from Palestine to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Kashmir?   We are living in a period where violence is the rule of the day, where states sponsor and legitimizing violence seeking to control populations, to define a "just" death and to monopolize the right to kill.   

As our lives become targets of manufactured "truths", and the real questions hidden behind corporate media sound bytes, Islam becomes the new demon to be exorcized. While corporate radars drain our economic and natural resources, and war lord militias backed by the US confiscate our lands, our cultures are "occidentalized"; the Pentagon has co-opted The Battle of Algiers.   It becomes even more urgent to open our selves to the multiple forms of struggles--to the many becomings that our survival demands.   As "Muslim" women we are at the forefront of struggles and war all over the globe. We are targets of hate crimes in the US, we are also suicide bombers in Palestine, "Muslim" women are taking up arms and throwing their bodies against military machines while offering their sons, brothers, husbands, fathers and friends to... war.

Through poetry, prose and photography this anthology seeks to bring together the experiences, dreams, nightmares and views of "Muslim" women in their daily struggle in and against wars throughout the world.   As the war against "terrorism" unfolds, we seek submissions that address the every day of "Muslim" women's lives and that reconnect our resistances, spirituality and religion, and our memory, loss, violence, sexuality and love.   

Issues such as but not limited to:

Submission deadline: November 15 th , 2004

Please send submissions to:

Sarah Husain
muswymnanthology@comcast.net :

1115 Lasswade Dr.
Tallahassee, FL 32312
USA