Location
Palermo
Start Date
26-6-2025 11:30 AM
End Date
26-6-2025 1:00 PM
Description
In my latest scholarship, I focus on fictional texts that incorporate and yet challenge the conventional pilgrimage narrative, and the nexus of spiritual, personal, and professional elements involved in travel to sites of sacred significance, often tracing traditional pilgrimage routes. In this paper, I will revisit that diasporic element in SK Ali's young adult novel Love from Makkah to Madinah (2022), which again transgresses definitions of genre, incorporating a pilgrimage narrative, a romance of two young adult Westernized Muslims, and a focus on grounded (sand) and simultaneously transcendent (stars) travel through sacred space and text.
My study integrates dialogue with the author regarding target audience, research undertaken, structure of narrative, and the significance of the Umrah for diasporic” and particularly South Asian” Muslims in North America, the UK, and in cosmopolitan communities throughout the world. Ali’s response to mainstream narratives of her own youth and their allusions to biblical, literary, and multiple colonialist paradigms is a challenge to assumptions of orientalist writers. Her work builds on The Road to Makkah (Assad), Malcolm X’s memoir, and Michael Wolfe’s publications and videos for diverse audiences, but notes how the Umrah (repeating the Hijrah or Hegira) is a frequent choice for 21st-century diasporic Muslims, who are not able to undertake the Hajj. Package tours to Makkah have become ubiquitous in Canada, and Ali particularly noted the significance of the Umrah in her own life, and the response of secular young readers seeking a unique romance novel and following the story of Adam (A) and Zayneb (Z) in an earlier novel, Love from A to Z (2019). I will conclude by providing a glimpse of package tours” like the one undertaken by Adam and Zayneb” in Canada.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/we4n-x931
Included in
C4) Rewriting Pilgrimage Narrative for a Young Audience in Love from Mecca to Medina
Palermo
In my latest scholarship, I focus on fictional texts that incorporate and yet challenge the conventional pilgrimage narrative, and the nexus of spiritual, personal, and professional elements involved in travel to sites of sacred significance, often tracing traditional pilgrimage routes. In this paper, I will revisit that diasporic element in SK Ali's young adult novel Love from Makkah to Madinah (2022), which again transgresses definitions of genre, incorporating a pilgrimage narrative, a romance of two young adult Westernized Muslims, and a focus on grounded (sand) and simultaneously transcendent (stars) travel through sacred space and text.
My study integrates dialogue with the author regarding target audience, research undertaken, structure of narrative, and the significance of the Umrah for diasporic” and particularly South Asian” Muslims in North America, the UK, and in cosmopolitan communities throughout the world. Ali’s response to mainstream narratives of her own youth and their allusions to biblical, literary, and multiple colonialist paradigms is a challenge to assumptions of orientalist writers. Her work builds on The Road to Makkah (Assad), Malcolm X’s memoir, and Michael Wolfe’s publications and videos for diverse audiences, but notes how the Umrah (repeating the Hijrah or Hegira) is a frequent choice for 21st-century diasporic Muslims, who are not able to undertake the Hajj. Package tours to Makkah have become ubiquitous in Canada, and Ali particularly noted the significance of the Umrah in her own life, and the response of secular young readers seeking a unique romance novel and following the story of Adam (A) and Zayneb (Z) in an earlier novel, Love from A to Z (2019). I will conclude by providing a glimpse of package tours” like the one undertaken by Adam and Zayneb” in Canada.