Feminizing Islam and immigrant Arab masculinities in The Road From Damascus

Abstract

Non-western masculinities were extensively shaped by the Western colonizer to a large extent. It has been frequently discussed that Western colonizers in South America, Africa, and Asia deliberately aimed to establish a hetenormative gender order and boost patriarchy so as to break the mould of non-heteronormative and fluid concepts of gender in indigenous cultures and to ensure social and political domination by redesigning gender representations. The patriarchal understanding is dominant in the Global South, especially in Arab masculinities. In addition, a guarantee of the autonomy of the Western sense of masculinity is the feminization of marginalized cultures. In this way, Western hegemonic masculinity guarantees its global domination. Feminizing the religion of Islam as the other is a severe source of crisis for Western immigrant Arab masculinities because the man, who continues to dominate in his own culture, becomes the party whose own culture is feminized in his new society. In this context, this study aims to discuss the feminization of Islam in the Global North on a theoretical basis by focusing on Robin Yassin-Kassab's novel The Road from Damascus and examining the immigrant Arab masculinity crises with examples from the novel.