We read this long-form work critically, attending to manifest advances in depictions of the relationships of Muslim-identified individuals over the last decade or so, while also remaining alert to lacunae and limitations in the individual representations. This takes us to the journalism, life writing and creative non-fiction of Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and the fiction of Ayisha Malik and Amjeed Kabil. Instead, we search for a more complex picture, one that unsettles stereotypes about the sexual lives of Muslims without simply idealising its subjects. In doing so, we will not simply set pictures of sexual misery against their binary opposites, namely pictures abounding in the promise of sexual happiness. We then consider how these negative representations are being challenged and how they can be challenged further.

These 'frame' Muslim men as tyrannical, Muslim women as downtrodden or exploited, and the wider world of Islam as culpable. Across a range of mainstream print media from the New York Times to the Daily Mail, and across reported events from several countries, can be found pictures of 'sexual misery'. We begin this article with a close look at some contemporary pictures of sexual life in the Muslim world that have been painted in certain sections of the Western media, asking how and why these pictures matter. The search for soul mates who are 'men enough' to embrace the almost-schizophrenic personalities of these young women become spiritual journeys of self-discovery. They reflect the aspirations and frustrations of Asian British Muslim women who are smart, well educated, well employed, westernized and yet often deeply rooted to their religion and Asian culture. A literary framework of diasporic literature will be used to analyze the novels of Rekha Waheed, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Ayisha Malik where it will be shown that though they have a limited audience these stories document the lives of diasporic women who are each juggling between at least three labels of being British, being of Asian origin and being Muslim in a predominantly white, Christian, western society.

This paper proposes to analyze why chick lit is worthy of academic reflection. When it comes to diasporic Muslim women's chick lit the marginalization is understandably much more severe. Women's literature has often been dismissed as 'chick lit' as opposed to the 'research-worthy' mainstream literature.

Courting Samira by Amal Awad