Book Reviews 

Muslim Women: Crafting a North American Identity 

Shahnaz Khan 

Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. 151 pages. 

115 

Shahnaz Khan's study of Muslim female identity in Canada is a worthy 
contribution to the literature on Muslim experiences in the West. She 
explores how women negotiate their identities in-between the polarized 

discourses ofOrientalism and Islam by occupying a hybridized third space. 
This third space is not only the site of resistance to the dominant Islamic 

and Orientalist prescriptives of Muslim female identity, but a starting point 

for Muslim women to engage in individual and collective projects to re­
map and reconfigure their identities in a process of cultural, political, and 
economic empowerment. Khan argues that progressive politics by and for 

Muslim women are possible only from this hybridized location. Her study 

elucidates this third space's dynamics by examining the dialectic between 

the personal narratives of culturally diverse Canadian Muslim women and 
the political space they inhabit. 

In her introduction, Khan locates herself as a Muslim feminist intellec­

tual who does not practice but is influenced by Islam, as well as Orientalist, 
multiculturalist, and feminist discourses. In order to move away from 
essentialist notions of "Muslim," Khan clarifies that she uses the term to 
reveal the fluidity and diversity of expressions associated with being 

Muslim, including its use in both a religious and non-religious context. 
In chapter 1, Khan draws on the work of various social theorists to rup­

ture the notion of a homogenous, static, and authentic culture. She does t his 
by emphasizing cultural fluidity, permeability, and shifting boundaries. 

Resisting and challenging the former serves as the premise of what is 
termed the third space, whereby hybridized identities are constructed from 

a wide and even contending range of influences, such as eastern and west­

ern cultural forces and religion. For Muslim women, Khan outlines how the 

third space disavows colonial authority and forbids the reign of dominant 
narratives of either Islam (which legitimates patriarchal authority through 

sacred texts) or Orientalism (which represents Muslims as the pejorative 
"Other"). This third space allows Muslim women to negotiate, resist, and 

reinvent the forces informing their realities. 
In the next few chapters, the personal narratives of 14 Muslim women 

elucidate how Muslim women negotiate their own identities as they con­

front racism and lslamophobia in the broader community, and sexism and 







118 The American Journal of [slamic Social Sciences 19:4 

"Muslim" or "Islamic" warrants an analysis of its distinct theological under­
pinnings. However, because the religious identity of being a Muslim, liter­

a lly means to submit to God, is conflated with a non-religious identity, than 

the term Muslim gets appropriated and implicated easily and widely in a con­
sortium of sloppy and ill-defined ways. 

Jrrespective of these shortcomings, Khan offers a valuable and engaging 

contribution to the multiple experiences of Muslim women living in the West. 

By adopting an anti-colonial and anti-racist lens, Khan's critical approach to 
analyzing Muslim experiences is long overdue and sets a positive example 

for future scholarly work in this field. More importantly, her study cements 

the strength of ethnographic research and thereby sets a good example of the 

poignancy in centering women's narratives in academic research. 

Mal iha Chishti 

Department of Adult Education and Community Development 

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education 

University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada