الفهرس 
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Abstract
Summary
This thesis presents feminist readings of the Torah and Qur’anic Narratives in selected poems of two American women poets Alicia Ostriker (born 1938) and Mohja Kahf (born 1967). The study analyzes selected religious poems from Ostriker’s Torah-based volume of prose and poetry entitled The Nakedness of Fathers: Biblical visions and Revisions (1994); namely “The Opinion of Hagar” and “Sarah’s Or Defiance” and from Kahf’s Qur’anic-based volume of poetry Hagar Poems (2016) namely “Hagar in the Valley” and “Sarah Laugh II”.
The study highlights the comparison between Kahf and Ostriker’s treatment of the archetypal figures to further explore cultural and spiritual issues of gender, race, class and identity through reading the traditional Jewish and Muslim narratives. As matriarchal models, Hagar and Sarah could be viewed as potential leading figures to feminist Jews and Muslims in the modern American society.
Historically, feminism, in its first wave, was mainly concerned with the economic, political, and social equality between males and females, aiming to transform the male-dominance of the past and to create a fair future for all. The second wave of feminism looked for a way to shed light on women’s roles in history, literature, mythology, and religious traditions.
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Feminist critics of the second wave regularly used religious and cultural discourse that characteristically revolved around religious archetypes and Biblical citations. This emphasis on the religious and the archetypal continued to be present in the third wave of feminism. With its postmodernist emphasis on adaptation and appropriation, this wave has further revived the interest in history and myth.
As the Torah and the Qur’an served as excellent sources of intertextuality, the main themes of comparison come under the tent of Jewish and Islamic feminism. The two poets present archetypal figures of strong mothers as a model for women. They also reflect the poets’ urge to adapt and appropriate religious stories with contemporary issues confirming on the role women should play in finding identity in multicultural nations. As such, the study highlights an area in literary analysis that depends on a scope of knowledge provided by the concepts of archetype, myth, adaptation, appropriation and intertextuality.
The study is divided into an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. The Introduction briefly introduces the background of the study to pose the key questions and to set the perspective of the study. Chapter one explains some of the concepts of Islamic and Jewish feminism respectively as they represent ideological backgrounds for Kahf and Ostriker. Chapter
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two presents the theoretical framework of the study with the following sections: archetype and myth, adaptation and appropriation, and intertextuality. It briefly offers the terms and notions which are going to be used in analyzing the selected poems in the third and fourth chapters respectively. Chapter three is entitled “Hagar: An Archetype Matriarch” in which two poems are analyzed in different sections: Ostriker’s “The Opinion of Hagar” and Kahf’s “Hagar in the Valley”. Chapter four titled “Sarah: The promised Matriarch” also examines two poems: Ostriker’s “Sarah’s Or Defiance” and Kahf’s “Sarah Laugh II”. Ultimately, the conclusion sums up the findings of the study offering a scope of differences and similarities between first the attitudes and trends of the two poets, then between the images of the archetypal women tackled in this study