Conditional Belonging in Muslim Women’s Writing: S.K. Ali’s Love from A to Z

Abstract

Conditional belonging refers to a set of rules to determine one’s eligibility to belong to a certain group. In migration studies, it is used to understand the status hierarchy that exists between members of the dominant majority and the minority immigrant community. In this paper, I offer a two-part discussion on conditional belonging. I first attempt to contextualize its practice in the genre of Muslim women’s writing in the West. I argue that their creative endeavours are often subjected to certain expectations of readers and publishers, leading to the creation of stock images. Ironically, within these restrictions, some writers subvert the marginalization of Muslims by offering positive stock images of Muslim characters. Here, in the second part of the article, I bring in S.K. Ali’s Love from A to Z (2020), a young adult (YA) novel, as an example. By portraying a young hijabi woman as the protagonist, the novel challenges the practice of conditional belonging both as a theme in the novel, and in the larger contextualization of the Western book industry. It demonstrates that the potential solution against prejudice is often found within the community that one is in and within the identity that one subscribes to.