Islam and Identity in Flow: Personal Faith and Cultural Identification in Leila Aboulela’s Short Story Collection Elsewhere, Home

This article examines the short story collection Elsewhere, Home (2019) by Leila Aboulela, highlighting the challenges of cultural identity in defining postmodern subjectivity. Within the context of Islam, the article sheds light on experiences of mobility, exile, and displacement, which generate everlasting processes of subjectivity re/constructions. The article follows a qualitative approach with a detailed analysis of the corpus – Elsewhere, Home – through a close reading method and an eclectic theoretical framework. It summons Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘cultural identification’ to pinpoint the inadequacy of cultural identity in covering the entangled aspects of subjectivity. It relies on Mohammed Arkoun’s insights on Islam to reveal the limits of the traditional Islamic discourse in defining the Muslim individual in the postmodern realities, which pose continuous questions regarding the deeply-grained narratives of the Islamic tradition, and alter various axioms established throughout history. The article concludes that Islam and identity are in constant flow, enforcing massive revisions under the rapidly changing realities and conditions.