Fadia Faqir, an Anglo-Arab author, is known for her fiction, most famously, in my opinion, Pillars of Salt (1997). Her fiction and nonfiction address the sexual, social, and economic oppression of women, and her female characters present a plurality of consciousness in opposition to the dominant social order and cultural script and a resistance to not only patriarchal hegemonic structures and dominance but also to colonization and imperialism. This paper explores Faqir's representation of madness and the links or shifting alliances between madness and woman as "bad." Madness-ism can be construed, in Faqir's framing, as the free space where the realities of a "bad" Bedouin woman are interrogated and rewritten. In her multivocalic novel, Faqir renegotiates the notion of madness and sanity, showing that they are manufactured constructs that are often defined by the ones who have power. Maha is dubbed mad by her brother Daffash, but through the impassioned narrativization of her story, she manages to dislodge herself from her confinement at the mental hospital and to decenter her madness by loudly proclaiming her presence not as a "bad" Bedouin but as a resilient Bedouin asserting her self-determination. Even though Maha occupies the madhouse in her rational mind, she is not insane. She writes herself into the dominant discourse of madness not by affirming it, but by destabilizing it and answering back to the hegemonic Arab's ubiquitous cultural grand recit, which seems to pigeonhole Arab women in a bad-centric niche. Through her appropriation of the label madness which is used against "bad" women, she inverts its function not only to expose the "real madness" inherent in the prevalent social conditions and cultural iconographies but also to question the fixed assumptions of "bad" women which come to unveil the dynamic operations of social control and oppression.