Islam in Flash Fiction : References to the Muslim World in Contemporary English-Language Short Fiction 2010-2025

Abstract

This article examines representations of the Muslim world in contemporary English-language flash fiction (mostly North American and British), published largely between 2010 and 2025. The paper argues that progressive literary spaces often reproduce older Orientalist structures even while consciously attempting to complicate or critique them, and that many stories invoke Muslim or Middle Eastern alterity only to subvert cliché through fragmentary detail, irony, intimacy, or unexpected human complexity. Recurring motifs include tourism, war, terrorism, intercultural romance, mosques, refugees, Istanbul, Morocco, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Islamicate memory. This “will-to-complexity” may itself reveal liberal anxiety about representation rather than a full escape from Orientalist habits. The paper identifies fantasy, self-annihilation, memory, and impersonation as central mechanisms through which Muslim spaces and subjects are narratively staged, and locates a major concern in the frequency with which non-Muslim writers adopt Muslim voices, often through vulnerable, marginal, or victimized protagonist - a “compassionate othering” which is ethically ambivalent: empathetic in intention, but still implicated in control, appropriation, and discursive authority.