Muslim Chick-Lit

The term ‘chick-lit’ was first defined by the academic Cris Mazza in 1995 whilst compiling the anthology Chick-lit: Postfeminist Fiction. Mazza identified the genre as: ‘frank and wry; honest, intelligent, sophisticated, libidinous, unapologetic, and overwhelmingly emancipated. Liberated from what? The grim anger that feminists had told us ought to be our pragmatic stance in life. The screaming about the vestiges of the patriarchal society that oppressed us. Liberated to do what? To admit we’re part of the problem. How empowering could it be to be part of the problem instead of just a victim of it?’ Whilst the definition originates from an academic context, the genre was a runaway commercial success. A close relation of the romance or romantic comedy genre the chick-lit plot is usually centred around a romantic quest balanced with career aspirations. The challenges and pleasures of maintaining a financially precarious but consumerist lifestyle are often explicitly part of the storyline. The genre is marked by a self-deprecatory tone and an intimate form of address. The style of writing classically creates an imagined community of female bonding. Although the heroine is usually in her early thirties there is an informal intimacy, something of the high school best friend in the tone in which it is written. Heart break looms large and imposter syndrome or some sort of comic humiliation is often part of the narrative arc. In contrast to the passionate highs and lows of the romance genre, in chick-lit emotions are often demoted, made light of and rendered in a comedic register. The urtexts of the chick-lit genre, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City, were published in the same year, 1996. Neither were inherently novelistic works. Both started life as newspaper columns and swiftly became global phenomena that generated millions of dollars with the sales of the books and the ensuing long-running film and television successes that still grace screens across the world thirty years later. There is a wealth of academic literature debating the ideological parameters of the genre and whether chick-lit was merely a derogatory, and therefore misogynist, marketing ploy for popular female fiction, or a new mode of address that empowered and embodied new feminist realities. Either way, the category had lost its commercial pulling power by the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Whilst chick-lit was no longer a fashionable label in terms of marketing in the West, the global iterations of the genre continue to have selling power. A closer look at Muslim chick-lit, in particular, reveals how this sub-genre navigates cultural and religious expectations, offering a unique perspective within the broader landscape of contemporary fiction. Raja Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh published in Lebanon in 2005 and then in the UK by Penguin in 2007 is the ground breaking, best-selling example of the global variant of the genre. The novel self-consciously adopts and adapts American televisual tropes. As in Sex and the City, we have a friendship group of four well-heeled Saudi women navigating the competing challenges of careers, sex and romance, although these twenty-something protagonists are set on marriage above all else. As in the Cecily von Ziegesar’s series of young adult Gossip Girl novels published between 2002 and 2011, an omniscient anonymous narrator emails salacious observations about the privileged young protagonists to an online chat group. Despite their education and potential careers, these girls seek fulfilment chiefly through shopping and romantic love. They enthusiastically embrace consumerism. Like their New York sisters, the girls of Riyadh live lives of branded plenitude. They watch Hollywood blockbusters, carry miniature pedigree dogs in designer handbags, go to the gym, console themselves with rhinoplasty and chemical peels, drink daddy’s secret stash of Dom Perignon and dance the night away in Badgley Mishka or Roberto Cavalli. However, sequestered under Sharia law with little in the way of basic human rights, they must display a great deal more ingenuity than their Western counterparts in order to meet men. Yet the impossibility of independent lives does not politicise or alienate them from Islamic fundamentalism. Indeed, they congratulate one woman for the ‘bold spiritual step’ of deciding to wear the full hijab.

The hijab and the burqa make women the most visible symbol of Islam, and also Occidental prejudices and anxieties around it. In June 2025, the newly elected Reform MP Sarah Pochin raised the issue at Parliamentary Question Time, when she invited British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, to ban the burqa ‘in the interest of public safety’. The symbolic fault line between the covered and the uncovered is one that reoccurs in Muslim chick-lit, just as much as it does in Western representations of Muslim women. The difference is that in some Muslim chick-lit the decision to wear the hijab is an act of self-expression and liberation rather than oppression and invisibility. It is central to both Ayisha Malik’s 2015 novel Sofia Khan is Not Obliged and Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha At Last published three years later. Both feature diasporic Muslim heroines navigating a path towards professional fulfilment and love who seek empowerment through consumerism and individualism whilst also embracing traditional religious values and aspiring to find a way to build an identity and life where both can co-exist. In his essay 'Algeria Unveiled', published in 1965, the clinical psychiatrist and theorist Franz Fanon conjectured that the covered Algerian woman is perceived as a threat because she ‘sees without being seen’ and thus frustrates the colonial gaze. Her presence is unnerving because ‘there is no reciprocity. She does not yield herself, does not give herself, does not offer herself’. To observe without the possibility of being seen defies the colonial order.

So, veiled or not, what exactly does the woman from a Muslim background observe when she sees? And how does she represent herself? How does she speak back in mainstream Occidental culture? Does the popularity and accessibility of contemporary genre fiction, namely chicklit, written by Muslim women, liberate them by giving them a voice, and a chance to articulate hitherto unspoken identities that disrupt the Islamophobic presumptions about them? Or are these genre fiction narratives primarily addressed to a mainstream Western readership, designed to reassure and placate, to domesticate and neutralise the frightening spectre of the Muslim other? Within this political, social and cultural context, Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis raises thought provoking questions about who the audience for these works are and what the authors are trying to tell them.

Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, Younis’s debut novel has the key characteristics of Muslim chick-lit: we have a ditsy, libidinal heroine, a cosy demotic form of address, the hijab marks a fault line of identity and the plot tackles some weighty issues with humour. What is it that inspires the radicalisation of diasporic young Muslim women? Why do they become ISIS brides? Are the United Nations and NGOs effective in helping rebuild war torn regions? Younis’s heroine Nadia is, like the author herself, an academic in her thirties with a Muslim heritage who takes a job leading a humanitarian aid project in Iraq. Younis has had an impressive career as an expert on peace building in Iraq. She has worked for the Atlantic Council as director of the Future of Iraq Task Force, where she led research on ‘how the United States could best protect its national security interests and promote Iraqi interests’ and has held Fellowships at European Institute of Peace, Chatham House and European Council on Foreign Relations. She has written articles on Iraq for The New York Times and The Guardian and weighty reports for the Atlantic Council. From 2019 to 2020 Younis worked, via an NGO, as an adviser to the Iraqi government, designing deradicalization programmes for women allegedly involved with the Islamic State. It was this latter role that inspired her debut fiction. Fundamentally is a world away from the serious articles and reports Younis penned, but just as prestigious, Weidenfeld & Nicolson won the rights to publish it after a fierce bidding war and the screen rights have already been snapped up.

Younis honed her authorial tone for the novel by doing stand-up comedy and the novel is littered with saucy one liners: ‘I don’t look a well-hung gift horse in the mouth’, and bawdy jokes: ‘how was your date with the student? He was so young my breasts tried to lactate when he sucked on them’, that doubtless raised laughs in comedy clubs. Chick-lit is conventionally a gently comic genre. In Fundamentally, like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer, which are both successful television series developed via stand-up comedy, the plot is constructed around more robust humour and darker subject matter. Nadia is a feisty, foul-mouthed heroine who prefers comic monologues to contemplative ambivalence or soul searching. On arriving at the UN camp with her broken heart, new designer ‘statement’ handbag and a suitcase packed full of Primark suits, Matalan shirts, a copy of Cosmo with handy tips on rimming, her vibrator and plenty of spare packs of batteries she asks herself, ‘what cunty-bollocking madness had possessed me to come here?’

In Muslim chick-lit, swearing is a signifier of empowerment. Swearing is one of the ways the Muslim female subject speaks back to power. Ayisha Malik’s heroine Sofia, calls out the racist who identified her as a terrorist because of her hijab by calling him a cunt. Younis takes swearing to another level. Despite her PhD in criminology, Nadia’s vocabulary is limited and unremittingly vulgar. ‘I didn’t move to Iraq for shits and giggles’ she declares. She finds any words beyond the most basic vocabulary pretentious and states that ‘when people start using the word “purview” that’s when you know you’re working with cunts’. Her swearing is unremittingly built around a disgust for female genitals. Sometimes her descriptions are graphic and surreal - ‘he looked wounded, as though I’d bitch-slapped him with my oversized labia’. At other times her swearing is merely tautologous. ‘Pierre wasn’t a twat’ she observes, ‘he was a grade-A cunt’.

Any illusions that the world of humanitarian aid might be altruistic or ethical are swiftly disabused. Nadia observes that ‘instead of becoming a beacon of democracy, Iraq had lunged from one civil war to another, and the UN had twisted around the carcass like knotweed’. The United Nations is as nepotistic, cut throat and corrupt as the world of finance or politics. Nadia’s boss Lina is intimidatingly sophisticated with her expensive international education and extensive couture wardrobe. Her office is a stylish haven of Nordic designer furniture, where she doesn’t seem to do any actual work, instead conversing with her beloved pet budgerigar in Lebanese Arabic. Nadia’s colleagues are a hard partying crew, who spend most of their time getting drunk and getting off with each other in the UN tiki bar. They are an entitled and largely nepotistic crew. Pierre the son of the French ambassador to the United States, is constantly playing practical jokes when he isn’t on Grindr. Apparently, Grindr has a very active user base in Iraq. His friend and fellow jester Charles is a scientist whose father worked with Mandela. Posh Priya sports 24 carat gold jewellery, a caramel balayage hairdo and a cultivated Delhi accent. Sherri, the Australian psychosocial support specialist is a woke yoga enthusiast with a red face and even redder hair. While Tom the Geordie, a muscular and well-meaning working class hunk loves his nana, resembles a Disney prince and is a fan of Lawrence of Arabia and Jordan Peterson. His sexism makes Nadia want to sit on his face, although he is so sexy it’s not just to stop him from talking.

Nadia finds that putting her deradicalisation programme into practice requires much political manoeuvring and bribery, including expensive holidays to the Mövenpick in Beirut for the Minister of Humane Affairs and her lover. However, despite initial misgivings and lack of cooperation from her team Nadia settles into UN compound life where they ‘fight like siblings, drink like college girls and work like deckhands’. Food fights in the breakfast hall and cocktails in the tiki bar are interspersed with trips to the camp where ISIS brides are detained indefinitely without charge or access to any due legal process. Nadia’s ill-fated and incompetent United Nations programme employs an eccentric American imam. Sheikh Jason, a Californian revert in a Nirvana T shirt and shorts, espouses meditation, yogic breath work and the healing energetic of crystals as methods of deradicalisation. He comes across as more Buddhist than Muslim but he is chosen in preference to a Shia cleric who would alienate the ISIS women or the Sunni candidate who is anti-American and anti-Semitic.

In the internment camp Nadia meets Sara, a ‘sweary’ young East Londoner who joined ISIS at fifteen. She is a sharp, cheeky teenage Londoner who enjoys rollerblading, reading X-Men and eating gummies. Every sentence she utters is peppered with a hyperbolic contemporary masala of East London patois: ‘swear down bruv … gwan … you been down my ends is it? You’re kinda jokes’. Nadia becomes obsessed with saving Sara whilst bonding over a taste for Dairy Milk, McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish, ‘the staple Muslim order’, and ‘waxing nostalgic about discount handbags at TK Maxx’. Nadia soon forges a strong sense of identification with the young ISIS bride and risks everything in order to help her escape. Whilst Nadia represents the model of a Western assimilated Muslim woman: professional success, financial independence and sexual liberation, Sara is her antithesis: an uneducated working-class teenager who followed her best friend Jamila, her ‘ride or die’, to join ISIS. Sara’s story echoes the Shamima Begum case. She has been widowed three times, stripped of her British citizenship, and is mother to a young daughter from whom she has been separated.

Fundamentalist Sara is both the polar opposite to secular Nadia and also represents a path she might herself have taken. Like the author herself, as a teenager Nadia attended a summer camp taught by Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki, a charismatic Muslim cleric, whose compelling narratives about the suffering of Muslims at the hands of imperial powers lead her to flirt with fundamentalism. Anwar al-Awlaki is not a fictional character. Born in the United States in 1971 to Yemeni parents, al-Awlaki became an imam and taught in the US and the UK before returning to the Yemen where he worked as a university lecturer. He was incarcerated by the Yemeni authorities for eighteen months in 2006, after which he began to openly advocate violent resistance and jihad against the United States. Placed on the CIA kill list by Barack Obama in 2010, he was the first US citizen to be targeted and assassinated by a US drone strike, in Yemen in 2011. For Nadia, Sara’s plight could so easily have been her own had al-Awlaki tried to radicalise her during that summer school. Nadia observes that Sara and ISIS brides like her ‘were flogged a wet dream (only to be flogged for real when they turned up)’. Nadia is now in her thirties though and knows better, there is nothing tempting about Islam for her now that she has ‘had enough sex to know that devout Muslims have tedious chat and give crap head’.

Younis’s novel shows us that there is no single way to be a Muslim woman. We meet a range of women from different parts of the world and different classes. They range from the ultra-conservative to the ultraliberal, rich and poor, from European teens groomed and kidnapped by fundamentalists to the bleached and Botoxed Iraqi Minister of Humane Affairs in her Chanel two-piece bought on a recent UNICEF trip to Paris. Their experiences and characters are shaped and vary according to their geography, sect, race and class. Some are cynical careerists like Lina and the Minister, some are brainwashed ideologues like the ISIS brides whilst Nadia, although highly educated is very naive. She confesses that ‘live poultry probably grasped the political dynamics better than I did’. This plurality of representations challenges the singular stereotype of the uneducated, downtrodden Muslim woman as victim. Nadia is determined to deradicalise and save Sara but ultimately Nadia’s values and motives are called into question. The book refuses easy certainties about heroism, trauma, or feminism. Sara sees Nadia as ‘a coconut sell-out’ and a ‘slag with a saviour complex’ and whilst Nadia is certain that in rejecting Islam, she has improved her life immeasurably, her career in the aid sector doesn’t live up to her ideals, ‘it felt shitty being on this side of the bulletproof glass: institutionalised, feckless and corrupt’.

Younis operates as a cultural intermediary introducing us to a world she is familiar with. The novel brings issues like citizenship stripping and refugee policy into genre fiction. The plot emphasises humane approaches to teenage recruits and argues, with humour, for justice not abandonment. Iraqi politicians are corrupt and self-serving whilst the foreign diplomats and NGOs are merely opportunistic hedonists lolling by the pool when they aren’t partying in the tiki bar. Younis’s depiction of the political establishment in Iraq, the British the diplomatic corps and the United Nations is dark and damning but it is also served up as entertainment, played for laughs. The joke is not only or always at the expense of the powerful however. Younis is able to make jokes no non-Muslim would venture without risking the accusation of prejudice. Younis is obsessed with Muslim hirsutism. Nadia in her hijabed youth was ‘an unloved hairy little vole’, a devout Muslim with ‘a monobrow and a moustache topped off with a headscarf’. All Muslim men are terrible in bed, except for an American convert into choking. ‘What makes sex halal?’ Nadia quips, ‘saying a prayer draining all the blood out and failing multiple heath inspections’.

At times Younis writes as though she is English. Nadia finds Middle Eastern food too heavy and oily. She tries ‘not to grimace at the taste of aubergine’ and tells us that ‘my palate had not kept pace with my social climbing’. This might make sense if Nadia were a white working-class girl raised on baked beans, chips, and pizza, but she is a Pakistani girl from Leicester for whom aubergines would be a very familiar and homely vegetable and carry no particular social cachet. Jokes about a ‘burning arsehole’ caused by spicy kebabs and the warning that the body can adapt to local food ‘but you may get tapeworm’ are familiar squaddie or tourist humour. This is Muslim chick-lit for a white audience. Younis operates as both cultural intermediary and as native informant. For the literary theorist Gayatri Spivak, who developed the concept, a native informant is a go-between whose role is to offer up ‘inside’ information that authenticates and legitimises the colonialist’s world view. Younis will reach a wider popular audience with her fiction and its screen spin offs than from her think tank reports but her prescription in both her fiction and her factual reports serve the same Occidental market driven ideology: a university education, ‘moderate’ family values, and a job in the private sector are what will save Muslim girls from being attracted to Islamic fundamentalism. Putting an end to American atrocities in the Middle East isn’t in the equation.