The mystical as a social commodity in Raja Alem's My Thousand and One Nights.

This paper argues that Raja Alem's Sufi-oriented Islamic feminism is the fruit of the sociocultural atmosphere of Mecca; a city that contains Islam's holiest mosques, as well as Alem's own home, and is the main site of her feminist battles. In Alem's novels, her feminist discourse is interwoven with an epistemological one that locates women's religious agency within the confines of spiritual knowledge. Alem's My Thousand and One Nights sheds light on the way Sufi patriarchs exert power over the mystical in order to manipulate women's religiosity. This sets her apart from other Islamic feminists such as Saba Mahmood, who attempts to address the issue of gendered measures of religious agency by adhering to literal readings of sacred texts. Furthermore, this paper studies Alem's reference to spiritual knowledge as a resource for women's religious agency. This paper highlights Alem's belief that even though women's knowledge is acquired through inheritance rather than individual motivation, spiritual knowledge is the only way to combat the social hierarchy over the mystical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]