Writing Islam in Contemporary American Poetry: On Mohja Kahf, Daniel Moore, and Agha Shahid Ali

that Jewish subject matter is the domain of some of this country's greatest novelists and poets. "Writing Buddhism" still has an ap pealing ring to it. "Writing Islam" as a topic would not sound inter esting to most Muslim authors in Muslim societies. In fact, "Writing Islam" could sound like a fundamentalist ploy to corrupt the thor oughly secular world of literature in contemporary Muslim socie ties. A more appealing angle might be to focus on writing Islam in the West, or on the global stage, where a growing body of Muslim literature written in European languages is emerging. The authors of this body of literature are outside two folds: Western literature per se and the literatures of their Muslim societies of origin. How do Mus lim authors, specifically poets, fashion a voice when they are writing mostly to outsiders? What subject matter will they treat and in what manner? This essay explores these questions by examining how writ ing Islam is exercised differently by three American Muslim poets, Mohja Kahf, Daniel Moore, and the late Agha Shahid Ali. In E-Mailsfrom Scheherazad (2003), the poems of Mohja Kahf are primarily concerned with demystifying Muslim lives and practices in the United States and in altering misconceptions about Muslim women. These aims fall in line with Kahf's scholarly work, specifically her book Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (1999), and her fiction, most recently the novel Girl in a Tan gerine Scarf (2006). Aiming to educate non-Muslim audiences and to empower fellow practicing Muslim women, Kahf's poems sometimes home in on one segment of her potential readers. In "Hijab Scene," poems 1 and 2, we have cases of comparative weirdness: a Muslim woman wearing a hijab is confronted by a pierced, blue-haired punk teenager and a heavily made-up, skimpily dressed woman. Who is weirder, who is more conformist? the poems ask. If the American woman is acquiescing to a condescending form of male taste, and the punk teenager is conforming to a fad, why is the hijab-wearing woman not their equal,