This study examines postcolonial narratives of four major Muslim authors of fiction from diverse origins and backgrounds, who have elaborated counterdiscourses in European languages. It focuses on the problematics involved in developing such counterdiscourses while staying within the frame of the linguistic and cultural “systems” of the power structures within and under which these authors have written. While their narratives vary too greatly to suggest a single model of oppositional writing, the tendency and emphasis of their writings give evidence of a common aim – to refute totalizing, universalizing systems and reductive processes, in whatever society or form they may be found, which threaten to marginalize individual and minoritarian dissent, and to create a dominant cultural discourse that is univocal.

My personal experience leads me to emphasize narratives by French-speaking writers from the Maghreb (North Africa), more particularly from Morocco (Tahar Ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi) and Algeria (Assia Djebar). I have also chosen to study the writing of Salman Rushdie, who, while brought up in the Islamic tradition in the Middle East and writing in English, shares with his French-speaking counterparts knowledge and experience of Muslim beliefs and practices, and offers another model of the postcolonial writing of authors versed equally in European culture and diverse cultures in countries where Islam is the primary system of faith.