Hijab Politics as Part of the Cultural Identity in Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This?(2005)

Abstract

This dissertation is based on Randa Abdel-Fattah’s first novel, Does My Head Look Big in This?(2005). The novel is noteworthy because of its decisive representation of hijab-wearing Muslim women who lives in the West and had to represent their identity and religion after the world events of 9/11. The ultimate aim of this study is to try to investigate how Muslim families practice religious rituals and cultural traditions of Islam in a new land. This study focuses precisely on one particular period of time, the post 9/11, and on one religious code, the veil, which was widely practiced by Muslim women in Australia at the time as showing loyalty to Islam. A thematic descriptive –analytical approach is used with referring to the chosen concepts of Postcolonial Theory of Cultural and Ethnic Hybridity of Homi Bhabha and to the cultural and social psychological theories of identity to foreground the analysis of this study. This dissertation adopts the contest of young women’s representation of the veil to contest the mainstream representations of Muslim women