Modalities of Everyday Resistance

Abstract This article examines how faith manifests itself as a modality of everyday resistance in Shelina Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf (2010). Drawing on Braidotti’s perception of deriving residual spirituality in critical theory (2008) and critical theories on everyday resistance (Scott 1985, Abu-Lughod 1990), the article looks into how the author, as a Muslim woman, engages in subtle acts of resistance against prejudices that often contribute to shaping perceptions of her identity and the larger Muslim female community. This is a clear departure from the oft-discussed scholarship on Janmohamed’s work which examines questions of Muslim women’s agency and identity (Hasan 2015), hybrid Muslim diasporic identities (Ahmed, E. 2022), marriage, romance and spirituality (Khaled 2021), sartorial rights and Islamic feminism (Rosman 2023). The article reveals how spirituality becomes the central axis that governs the protagonist’s everyday agentic acts, including her search for a partner. In this context, spirituality is not disembodied but rather, it intersects with her familial and romantic environment and manifests itself physically as the protagonist engages in bodily acts of religiosity.