“Halal fiction” and the limits of postsecularism: Criticism, critique, and the Muslim in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret

This article examines Leila Aboulela’s 2005 novel Minaret, considering the extent to which it can be seen as an example of a postsecular text. The work has been praised by some as one of the most cogent attempts to communicate a life of Islamic faith in the English language novel form. Others have expressed concern about what they perceive as its apparent endorsement of submissiveness and a secondary status for women, along with its silence on some of the more thorny political issues facing Islam in the modern world. I argue that both these readings are shaped by the current “market” for Muslim novels, which places on such texts the onus of being “authentically representative”. Moreover, while apparently underwriting claims to authenticity, Aboulela’s technique of unvarnished realism requires of the reader the kind of suspension of disbelief in the metaphysical that appears to run contrary to the secular trajectory of the English literary novel in the last 300 years. I take issue with binarist versions of the postsecular thesis that equate the post-Enlightenment West with relentless desacralization and the “Islamic world” with a persistent collectivist and spiritual outlook, and suggest that we pay more attention to fundamental narrative elements which recur across the supposed West/East divide. Historically simplistic understandings of the secularization of culture — followed in the last few years by a postsecular turn — misrepresent the actual evolution of the novel. The “religious” persists, albeit transmuted into symbolic schema and themes of material or emotional redemption. I end by arguing for the renewed relevance of the kind of analysis of literary “archetypes” suggested by Northrop Frye, albeit disentangled from its specifically Christian resonances and infused by more attention to cultural cross-pollination. It is this type of approach that seems more accurately to account for the peculiarities of Aboulela’s fiction

Public Rights of First Refusal

Public authorities, at all levels of government, have been using a little-known land-use power to acquire property. This power, known as a right of first refusal, enables the government to acquire private property as long as it matches the price of any third-party offer. In this Note, I show how governments use rights of first refusal in areas as diverse as transportation, conservation, and affordable housing. I argue that public rights of first refusal can, under certain conditions, provide a means of balancing individual and collective needs that is superior to both eminent domain and regular purchasing

The Singularity of Areopagitica

Literary critics and historians often interpret authors and authors\u27 works as more or less significant, but are reluctant to quantify those works. The interdisciplinary field of creativity studies, however, poses methods of quantifying the eminence of an author\u27s works. This study uses four measures from that field (anthology entries, scholarly citations, entries in books of quotations, and auction sale records) and one measure from the fields of computational linguistics and data mining (ngrams using millions of books digitized by Google) to assess the eminence of John Milton\u27s thirty-one prose works and their relation to his greater achievement in epic poetry. These measures indicate the singular eminence of Areopagitica, Milton\u27s 1644 tract on the liberty of unlicensed printing