Analysis Of Scheherazade

The distorted images of Scheherazade have been manipulated by Fatima’s children and grandchildren as marketing strategies. For instance, Zade, Fatima’s grandson opens a hookah bar, naming it “Scheherazade’s Diwan Café” and lavishly decorating it with beautiful calligraphy and a drawing of a half-naked belly dancer, probably portraying Scheherazade. Moreover, on the entrance to Zade’s café, Scheherazade is represented in attire that immediately recalls the images that have been entrenched by orientalists.

When she saw the distorted images, Yunis’s Scheherazade reluctantly refused to recognize herself in a sexualized, commercialized manner. Another more example that The Night Counter puts forth is Soraya, Fatima’s daughter,

As it is explained earlier that Zade and Soraya distorted and commercialized Scheherazade, Randa and her husband have no interest in looking back at their heritage nor are they interested in East at all. Consequently, they try desperately to assimilate within the American society so that they acquire whiteness status. Indeed, this is the second option that most Arab Americans sometimes resort to even if it costs too much. The Night Counter doesn’t recommend such an option nor does it consider it as viable. Randa, Fatima’s daughter, announce her plan for assimilation by dying her hair blonde, changing her name to Randy and her husband’s name Bashar to Bud. According to Nahid Alfrose Kabir, Muslim parents after 9/11 tragedy have been more inclined to anglicize their children’s names, such as changing Muhammad to Martin, so that their children might be better accepted by the wider society (58).Nahid gave an example of her Muslim acquaintance whose daughter’s name was Mehjabin and thought about anglicizing the name because her daughter was bullied at school and taunted as “bin Laden” (58). John Tehranian observed that Middle Easterners have the ‘luxury’ of significant covering in multiple ways, enabling them to perform whiteness and assimilate within mainstream American society, but at a tremendous cost to their identity, dignity, and rights”( ). In fact, this is

What they should do is to reexamine their heritage and benefit from stories like Scheherazade’s. To further explain how they can imitate Scheherazade, Muhsin al-Musawi emphasized that Scheherazade succeeds in “defusing the morose king’s vindictive … plan by deploying a “counter-narrative” that “works within the parameters of Islamic faith (77). The Night Counter envisions a culture that is not seen as Oriental despotism or Islamic terror, but it rather proposes a plural view that can accommodate various experiences of numerous ethnicities, races, and sexual orientations. Celebrating cultural differences and undermining the nostalgia deployed by some characters, The Night Counter strives to ventilate the tension created by the numerous realities imposed upon Arab