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Muslim Feminism in Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream”
It has been established time and again that Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain, writer and social reformer from Bengal, constructed a feminist utopia in her 1905 book “Sultana’s Dream,” wherein the traditional gender binary is upturned in a display of creative speculation about a social system diametrically opposed to that of British India. But it is equally noteworthy that in the process she constructed one of the earliest literary exemplifications of Muslim feminism in Asia. It is important to view this as not only a work of general feminism but also as one particularly relevant to the rhetoric of the Muslim woman. The frequent erasure in science fiction discourse — even if unintentional — of Hossain’s identity as a Muslim social reformer is rather disadvantageous, because today we find ourselves at a time when Islam is strategically advertised as misogynistic, and Muslim women stereotyped as needful of ‘being saved.’ It is particularly time-appropriate to locate and acknowledge Muslim voices of gender-based activism.
Writer and academic Darko Suvin had theorized that a conclusive characteristic of science fiction is its capacity to create what he called cognitive estrangement, the contemplation of alternate realities that dissociate from and challenge present reality. Of course, the present reality is an ontological requirement for the scope…
