These verses of an Iraqi woman and a Syrian man of the immediate post World-War-II generation of Arabian poets who challenged the strictures of Western and Islamic culture, speak of issues taken up by the con-temporary Muslim authors we have studied: giving voice to doubt in the face of hegemonic power and calling past tradition and literary and social thought itself into question. Djebar, Ben Jelloun, Khatibi, and Rushdie are inheritors of such early literary and social revolutionaries who struggled under authoritarian rule.

The struggles we have witnessed in the works of the writers studied in the previous chapters take a variety of forms, and, should we have looked at the writing of other postcolonial writers, we would have seen a still greater diversity of literary expression. No closure is possible for this study. The infinite variation of narratives of postcolonial writers from the so-called Third World, and the rich profusion of narrative positionings and repositionings they bring about in relation to conventional narrative, obviate any attempt to postulate any such imaginary construct as a (undifferentiated) “postcolonial” mode of writing.