This book looks at oppositional narratives of four contemporary Muslim authors writing in languages of European provenance. In the study of these narratives I endeavor to bring out their specificity and divergences that inveigh against our seeing the authors as each setting out to do the same thing in the same way. I am interested rather in the commonality of their aims, which emerges in their categorical rejection of the hegemonic and totalizing forces of institutionalized thinking that impinge on human individuals and minorities who deviate from the well worn paths of conformity.

In terms of narrative, I am particularly interested in the ways these authors have each set about to fashion a specific, localized idiom, while under the ideological shadow of the dominant discursive structures of their respective societies. Though invariably their writing is marked by a dissenting, contestatory mode, it is marked as strongly by the rich profusion of beliefs and practices of the Islamic and Greco-Roman–Christian traditions and the diverse secular ideas and customs upon which they have drawn. I find it as important to see how they have used these riches as to look at how they have expressed their divergences.

Of the authors I study, three write in French and come from the North African littoral: Abdelkebir Khatibi and Tahar Ben Jelloun from Morocco and Assia Djebar from Algeria. The fourth author, Salman Rushdie, comes from the Indian continent and writes in English. I shall on occasion speak of the writings of these authors as postcolonial, but the individualized character of their writings prevails against any misguided attempt to enclose them within an undifferentiated grouping or system of reference.