| Summary: | This thesis examines the interaction between travel, translation and gender in relation to Islam in German and English transcultural literature. The aim is to explore how German- and English-language authors, Muslim and non-Muslim approach notions of physical and metaphorical movement, (cultural) translation (the means of communicating between cultures, languages and religions, and between a migrant’s traveller’s heritage and present), and the significance of gender constructions in contemporary fictive and semi-fictive writing of travel and migration. In my comparative reading of the selected texts, which is guided by postcolonial criticism, I evaluate the similarities and differences between German and English transcultural writing, whilst paying particular attention to the role of Islam in these texts. The first two chapters focus on movement. In the first chapter on migration writing (Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Monica Ali), I analyse what happens when Islam ‘moves’. I ask how the writers approach first-generation Muslim migration and constructions of ‘home’, primarily from their female protagonists’ point of view. The second chapter on pilgrimage and <i>hajj</i> (V. S. Naipaul and Ilija Trojanow) looks into the idea of travelling to Islam, to its ‘heart’ (Mecca and Medina) as well as to its peripheries (non-Arab Muslim countries), and the textualisation of the journeys. The emphasis of the subsequent two chapters shifts to gender issues of the generation that ‘has arrived’ (post-migrants). The third chapter is an examination of the perceptions of the relationship between Islam, ‘difference’ and masculinity among young male Muslims (in texts by Feridun Zaimoğlu and Hanif Kureishi). Chapter four explores the interaction between language, gender and Islam (in the work of Özdamar, Zaimoğlu and Leila Aboulela).
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