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In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the popular Dutch author of Iranian origin, Kader Abdolah, felt compelled to respond to the anti-Muslim discourse prevailing in the Dutch public debate and to publicly justify his position towards Islam. In doing so, he explicitly took up the role of a cultural intermediary between the West and Islamic culture. This article explores how he set off to accomplish this goal in his novels written during the 2000s. It focuses on the portrayal of Islam as it emerges from these books and the literary strategies the author employed in order to question the prevailing negative image of Islam, but also to offer his Dutch reader a spiritual alternative to the formal religion in the form of Sufi mysticism. As Abdolah extensively comments on his work’s political purpose and presents it as autobiographical, such an analysis also allows to draw conclusions about how these literary portrayals are part of his self-representation as a public figure. To analyse the discursive functions of fictional representations of Islam and how they relate to constructing Abdolah’s public image, the conceptual framework of Phelan’s rhetorical narratology will be employed.
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