Hello and welcome back to ‘Eyb, my bi-weekly newsletter, where I speak frankly about topics that for the first two thirds of my life I was told were ‘eyb, which is the Arabic word for shameful. I also share life anecdotes, and what I’m writing, among other things! If you are new, welcome.
Writing Hijab and Red Lipstick, my debut YA novel based on my own life, was like opening a wound I had hastily stitched together with makeshift materials. There were very real safety and political implications that prevented me from writing an unabridged memoir, but I was so determined to write my story, that I decided to write it in the form of a novel. I transported myself back to my teenage years, and remembered the thoughts and feelings I had at that time, growing up in a patriarchal society where things just really felt unfair as a young woman.
Sending the book out into the world has to have been one of the scariest periods of my life ever. The level of anxiety was akin to periods of time in which I have been ill and had to wait several weeks for medical test results. Then the shaming and gaslighting started from family members, as well as a small backlash from certain parts of the Muslim community in the UK, something I had been anticipating.
I spent January in a fog of anxiety and depression. I came to realize that I had never truly moved on from the traumatic experiences I had been through in my teen years and early twenties. I had been taking SSRIs on-and-off for years, numbing my emotions, and had not had the opportunity to have talking therapy, either because when I lived in the Gulf talking therapy was not yet available, or in recent years because it is an additional cost which I cannot afford. My husband has been my therapist and life coach in the past three months.
At times, I have felt angry. Angry at the continuing insistence of some that if I cannot accept the existing patriarchal interpretations of my religion then I am an “odd ball” or “abnormal” or an “outsider.” One family member told me that Islam is a religion of majority and consensus, and that the feminist Islamic scholars I so admire fall outside of the consensus. Some have even gone as far as to say that their work is dangerous. That they are fooling themselves.
Why is it so dangerous to believe in an egalitarian marriage? What is so threatening about believing a woman is equal in status and rights to a man? I am not arguing or fighting to say that the hierarchy should be flipped so that women hold a higher status in my religion than men, no. Why am I one of a minority for wanting a family in which male and female members are on equal footing?
I struggle the hardest with the word “obey” when it comes to the relationship between wife and husband. I believe this word is not necessary. In a marriage you would imagine that a wife and a husband love each other, and out of mutual respect and love they would yearn to do things for one another. But not out of “obedience.” What does it mean if I cannot accept that I must “obey” my husband, particularly when I work and contribute financially just as much as he does? Does it make me fall outside the folds of Islam? Will I end up in hell?
These questions have kept me up at night, and I’ve spent hours talking to my husband about them.
“Why are you so angry about the patriarchy?” he keeps asking me, “Why are you so angry, when I don’t believe in the concept of obedience, and when I don’t treat you in a patriarchal or misogynistic way?”
What do I do? Do I ignore everything else that is going on around me? Do I stop reading and writing about girls and women in the Middle East, the region I come from, and their continuing fight for gender justice? Do I stay silent when I witness unfair and discriminatory behavior towards female members of my own family, towards my sister-in-law?
It was the works of Leila Ahmed, Fatima Mernissi, Asma Barlas, and Amina Wadud, and the work of Musawah, that allowed me to reconcile a lot of my troubling thoughts and feelings, and to feel reawakened to my faith. What do I do when people around me tell me that these well-respected scholars and organizations are of a minority and that I am odd for following them?
What I’ve been writing…
I wrote a tribute to late Palestinian author and poet, Mourid Barghouti, who sadly passed away two weeks ago at the age of 76. Barghouti was well-known for writing about the experience of the displaced Palestinian, and he will be sorely missed by the Arabic literary world. Read my tribute here.
What I’ve been listening to…
I was so psyched when Tawseef Khan, author of The Muslim Problem (which is out this week), announced a couple of weeks ago that he is launching a podcast called Muslim Actually, which continues from where his book ends. I have listened to the first two episodes, and I love it. Each week Tawseef chats to a Muslim guest about a variety of topics, from queer spaces in the Muslim community, to growing up in a Muslim-majority country, to feminism in Islam, and how they negotiate faith and life. It’s available on Spotify and Apple.
My newsletter is free, but does take some time to put together. If you enjoy my work you can buy me a digital coffee. You can also support me by buying my novel here.