《铿锵丽人》中的伊斯兰女性形象及其两难困境

论文总字数：41536字

摘 要

欧洲的文化是以基督教和天主教为基础的，而穆斯林的文化是以伊斯兰教为基础的，两种文化之间存在着巨大的差异，不仅表现在价值观、道德体系和思维模式的不同，也表现在生活方式和行为模式的差异。因此，在西方文明影响下的伊斯兰形象及穆斯林在两种文明中生存的两难困境是一个值得研究的话题。生活在欧洲的穆斯林很难被欧洲同化，或者换过来说，是移民到欧洲各国的穆斯林很难融入也不太愿意融入欧洲主流社会，穆斯林有着强烈的宗教认同感和民族认同感，这使得他们极力保持着穆斯林的生活习惯和文化氛围，特别是穆斯林在欧洲的聚居为这种文化习性的保持提供了便利条件。然而对于长期生活在西方的部分穆斯林来说，他们多多少少也会受到西方文明的一些影响。但是他们对西方文明是批判性的接受，他们渴望摆脱传统伊斯兰教中的一些束缚，探索出一条穆斯林生存的新道路。

在中断了伯明翰大学的伊斯兰研究学硕士课程后，拉斐尔 ‧塞尔伯恩开始撰写小说Beauty《铿锵丽人》，小说讲述了一个孟加拉穆斯林女孩逃离强迫婚姻的故事，精准地描绘了一个富有同情心和挑战性的拥有多元文化的英格兰都市。书中所描绘的许多生活场景是41岁的塞尔伯恩相当熟知的世界。他渊博的知识让这本小说所描述的世界愈发悲惨，矛盾愈发尖刻。本篇论文通过对女主人公两难表现的描写，改写了西方文学作品中被动客体的穆斯林女性形象，展现了一个能动主体的穆斯林女性新形象并为现代伊斯兰文明的发展提供了一些参考。

关键词：拉斐尔 ‧塞尔伯恩；美丽；穆斯林女性；伊斯兰；西方文化

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

English Abstract ii

Chinese Abstract iii

Introduction 1

1. Biography of the Author 1

2. Social Background 1

3. Literature Review 2

4. Arrangement of the Thesis 3

Chapter One: Revolt against Islamic Traditions 5

1.1 Life Style and Customs 5

1.2 Ideas and beliefs 7

Chapter Two: Reflecting upon Modern Western Civilization 10

2.1 Prejudice against Non-white Cultures 10

2.2 Criticism against Western Mainstream Culture 11

Chapter Three: Return and Reconciliation 14

3.1 Individual freedom 14

3.2 Familial responsibility 15

Conclusion 17

Works Cited 18

Introduction

1. Biography of the Author

Raphael Selbourne is a famous English writer who used to win the Costa Book Awards. He was born in an eminent family of scholars in Oxford, England in 1968. He studied politics in Sussex University and then went to Italy. He lived in Italy for many years, where he worked in succession as a teacher and as a translator before moving to West Midlands in 2004. He then became a salesperson and sold scooters. He even went to a China to teach there. He knows the limit of autobiographical novels which fatally suffer from a lack of originality. So he decided to stop writing and went to Wolver Hampton. However, before long, he started to write the novel Beauty after dropping out of the Master’s program of Islamic Studies at the University of Birmingham. Beauty tells a story of a Muslim girl from Bangladesh who resisted her forced marriage. It describes a multicultural city in England, full of chances and challenges. Scenes of life in this book constitute a textual world familiar to 41-year-old Selbourne. His profound knowledge makes the world of this novel plausible and the cultural conflicts it reflects more symptomatic.

1. Social Background

European culture is based on Christianity and Catholicism, while Islamic culture is based on the creed of Koran. There is a huge difference between them, which is not only shown in values, morals, and thinking modes, but also in lifestyles and behavioral patterns. Therefore, it is worthwhile to study the image of Islam under the influence of western civilization and the cultural dilemma faced by Muslims who live along the gap of these two cultures. The Muslims who live in Europe are difficult to be accepted by Europeans. In other words, it is hard and reluctant for Muslim immigrants in different countries of Europe to get assimilated into the European society. They have a strong sense of religious and national identity, which enables them to keep their living habits and cultural attachment, even in a largely Christian

environment. The exclusive community formed by Muslims dwelling in Europe provides a favorable condition for them to keep this cultural character intact. However, some Muslims have lived in western countries for such a long time and have been profoundly influenced by western civilization. They tend to accept it critically and are longing to break away from the restriction of Islam in order to explore a new path to modernization for Muslims to rely on.

Huge differences existing between western culture and Islamic culture generate fierce cultural conflicts and clashes when these two different cultures encounter with each other. Islamic culture need to take appropriate steps of transformation when it is confronted with western culture in a more advanced and more powerful form. The study of the image of Muslim women amidst a cultural dilemma in Beauty might reveal the embarrassment of Islamic culture in the process modernization on one hand, while showing the living conditions and the cultural transition of Islamic women in western society on the other to point out a way of reconciliation through textual expressions.

1. Literature Review

Foreign scholars have discussed in length Islamic images in the texts of the first half of the twentieth century. The study of Islamic images in western literature can be traced back to the following works, to name a few, The Islam in the View of Europeans in the Middle Ages and Modern Times by David Blanks and Michael Fraser, Saracens: Islam under the Impression in the Middle Ages by John Tollan, The Islam and the West by Norman Daniel, and Views of Europeans to Islam in the Middle ages by Sauter bernier. Most of the scholars discuss the understandings and opinions about Islam held by Europeans in the Middle Ages, limited to fixed subject and scope.

Most Chinese scholars placed excessive emphasis on the following issues: the influence of Islam on European society, the situation of Muslims who live in Europe, the policy that European countries make for Muslim minority groups, the impact of Islamic culture on European society; Islamic radicalism; Muslim immigrants in Europe, and the like. There are only a couple of papers dedicated to Islamic images in western literature. One is the Tentative Analysis on Western Recognition of o Saracens in the Middle ages by Xia Yihua, East China Normal University, and the other is Demonized Islam Images in Europe by Lin Fengmin. As for Muslim women, Mu Hongyan wrote a series of thought-provocative papers which dealt with female liberation in Iran. As she put it, in the wake of the constitutional movements of Iran, women’s emancipation in thought developed rapidly. Iranian women went out of home, came to school, received modern education, and because of that, began to emerge on the literary scene in the twentieth century. Iranian women show their own power in the new-style poetry campaign in the early twentieth century, as manifested by the modern poetry movement in the 1970. This study provides a new perspective on how Muslim women redefine their cultural identity via literature in modern times.

The studies on the author Raphael Sellborne are rare as well. There are some essays and news reports, such as Raphael Sellborne by abc, Raphael Selbourne Shines a Light on Hidden World in Beauty by Jackson, and Lorne’s Beauty by Raphael Selbourne, which won 2009 Costa First Novel Awards. They argued that Beauty, the maiden work of Raphael Sellborne, catches the authenticity of human nature in the contemporary world. Raphael Sellborne presents a comedy over the clashes between cultures and classes with vivid colors and she posed a challenge against the readers’ values when he makes contrasts between whites and Asians, men and women at intervals.

1. Arrangement of the Thesis

The paper is divided into five main parts. The first part is the introduction which includes biography, background of the study, literature review and thesis arrangement. And the second, third and fourth parts are devoted to a well-rounded analysis of the main female character of Beauty.

The heroine of the novel is a Muslim girl called Beauty who came from Bangladesh and lived in England. However, she was forced to go back to Bangladesh to marry a Mullah who is over 45 years old according to the custom of arranged marriage prescribed by the Islamic tradition. Knowing that, she pretended to be insane in such an ostensible way that her father had to take her back to England. She obeyed traditional Islamic rules in her daily life, such as wearing turbans, praying, washing up her body every day, and so on. But under the influence of western civilization, she also wanted to get rid of the constraints set by Islamic traditions and did something that goes against Koran, such as smoking, cutting short hair, escaping from the marriage, running away from home, and so on. Beauty wanted to discover a new lifestyle that fits modern Muslim women and she thought that running away is the only way out. Nevertheless, Beauty found that she was put in an environment that she was not able to deal with it alone after just a few hours after she left home. Doubtable strangers, hopeless youngsters, and annoying welfare officials were all around her. Beauty realized that she lapsed into a dilemma and didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do. She was steadfast, lively, but meanwhile tortured by paranoia. Therefore, Beauty had to reexamine her own belief and think about her future seriously. When her old bother looked for her all around, the opposition between her pursuit of freedom and her sense of family responsibility grew more and more dramatic. In this regard, this novel depicts a new image of Muslim women through Beauty, which transforms the old image characterized by passiveness and submission western literary history to that of independence and self-reliance and thus provides possible reference for the modernization of Islam in the contemporary world.

Chapter One Revolt against Islamic Traditions

1.1 Life Style and Customs

Beauty is a young girl who was born in Bangladesh and moved to London when she was five years old. Though she was given the name “Beauty,” her parents thought she was not beautiful at all since her skin color was extremely dark. They claimed that no one would like her because of her ugly appearance and they hoped she could become more and more beautiful as she grew up. However, Beauty’s life was not beautiful either. When she was a little girl, she began to undertake all of the housework and look after the whole family. In spite of that, she was still mistreated and overlooked by her family and then forced to marry an old man. After a few years living with her old husband in Bangladesh, she didn’t want to live this miserable life any longer. So she was taken back to England in the disguise of madness. She did not want to be such a Muslim woman all her life. She wanted to open up a new possibility of life and become a new Muslim woman. She would not like to live for others, but according to her own wishes. When she was young, no one took her seriously. She just expected to love whatever she loves, do what she wants to do, and as a consequence, she determined and made every effort to change.

In Islamic countries, women have low social status and are at the very bottom of the society. They suffer from religious oppression, patriarchal authority, moral asceticism, and a variety of social institutions. The immutability and authority of Koran and Hadith (the body of tradition and legend about Mohammed and his followers, used as a basis of Islamic law) are the cultural root that politics, economy, law, moral principles, and the social customs rely upon and continue to exist over a long period of time in the Islamic society and they also turn out to be the very reason why it is difficult for Muslim women to change their life. Islam doctrines stipulate that every part of a woman’s body except the face and hands are all awrah (some body parts which are forbidden to be seen by others), including the hair. These parts cannot be exposed to other people, especially men. The turban is used to cover the hair which is forbidden to be seen.

As a Muslim girl, Beauty followed some of the basic rules of Islam. Muslim people cherish cleanness and pay a lot of attention to their personal hygiene. There are some explicit prescription of bathing and washing in Koran. (Koran, 5)The whole bathing and washing process is very complicated and focuses on every detail. For example, it requests people to wash both hands and wrists three times every day. In the beginning of the novel, there is a detailed description of Beauty bathing herself:

She used the budna to clean herself and flushed the toilet. At the sink, she

washed both hands and wrists three times - Bismillah hir Rahmaanir

Raheem - rinsed her mouth with water, and cleaned her wet hands over

her hair and shaking them off, she passed her forearms under the tap, and

washed her feet in the bath. (Beauty, 3)

From these details we can see that Beauty strictly obey the rules of Koran in matters like bathing and washing. She had to carry on the traditional way of life according to Islamic customs to be accepted by the Muslim community.

More importantly, as the eldest daughter of her family, Beauty were also required to undertake almost all the housework and meekly put up with her family members. She did everything for her family, just like a servant girl:

She went through to the kitchen to drink some tea on her own

before the day started. She’d have to make sure the little ones got up to

pray and were ready for school. Only they weren’t so little any more.

Faisal was thirteen now, and Sharifa nine. Her mother would be up at

midday. Her old brother, Dulal - she always called him Bhai-sahb,

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