In my paper, I would like to explore Muslim narratives of self outside the Middle East post-9/11, focusing on the novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and the novel The Road from Damascus. I would like to examine their responses to the constructions of Islam that emerged after the attacks. While there is a long history of negative images of Islam and Muslims, after 9/11, constructions of Islam as homogenous, static, and permanently an "other" have become highly problematic because they can be deployed so easily and have serious consequences. It is in this context, I will trace how Islam as a construction--more than as a faith--is challenged, reconsidered, and reconstructed by Muslim writers. Both novels elucidate the way in which the novel, as a genre, can be utilized as a medium for the contemporary Muslim to negotiate a narrative of self in a globalized world. Specifically, I will argue that the novel, as illustrated in these two works, has become an important space to dismantle and reformulate discussions on identity and offer insight into the way language, religion, and resistance are deployed in a medium with increasing currency. With the September 11th attacks functioning as a defining moment, both of these novels respond to different, and sometimes competing, constructions of Islam that have emerged in the global discourse. These two novels, the first situated in the United States and the latter in the United Kingdom, engage themes that resonate with the experiences of those who face exclusion (intergroup and intragroup)and revolve around questions of representation in the contemporary setting where globalization has brought different cultural worldviews into contact, at times producing dialogue and constructive exchange and at other times leading to discernible violence, engendering a more pronounced sense of alienation and exclusion. I will address how these two novels are able to challenge the concept of boundaries to demonstrate the interconnectedness implied when we construct our narratives of self. Both novels express the ways in which what differentiates between people binds them through a process of recognition, to borrow from Judith Butler. Focusing on these two novels, I will examine how Muslim writers, responded to 9/11 by negotiating and constructing narratives of self that counter those that have been constructed for and against them.