Stepping in the footsteps of Hajar to bring home the hajj: dialogical positioning in Asra Nomani's memoir 'Standing Alone'

This paper discusses the hajj memoir Standing Alone (2006) by the journalist Asra Nomani to demonstrate how before, during and after her hajj performance, the author moves back and forth between various moral discourses that inform her daily life in order to make sense of her multiple senses of belonging and to claim more space for women participation and in today’s global and local Umma (community of Muslims). Using ‘Dialogical Self theory’ (DST) (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka) to analyze ‘dialogues’ between the various temporally and spatially situated ‘voices’ that populate Nomani’s hajj memoir, it is argued that what the author experiences as literally ‘stepping in the footsteps of Hajar’, like herself a single mother whose faith in and rescue by God is played out during the Hajj, Nomani finds a strong female Muslim role model to identify with. Thus appropriating Islam as an empowering moral discourse, Nomani takes the extraordinary experience of the hajj back home to her everyday life to become an activist in order to claim Muslim women’s rights as equal citizens in the various communities that she belongs.