Muslim Women Power List<\/a> that has been making its publicity rounds the last few months. Rather, these are women a lot like your mother, grandmother, daughter, and friends. Their stories are so deeply personal that you sometimes think you\u2019re reading a private journal dripping with confessions and secrets. Far removed from the overarching debates about the hijab and burqa that seek to define Muslim womanhood are real women who struggle with their faith while balancing their careers and private life.<\/p>\nThe most touching story in the book is Syima Merali\u2019s dilemma of choosing between having to serve alcohol in her restaurant or suffer financially. Wearing the hijab and selling alcohol became a testing time for Merali, made more difficult by castigation that her earnings are haram<\/em>. The compromise she makes\u00a0 echoes the many difficult compromises practicing Muslims make in a secular, predominantly non-Muslim country.<\/p>\nAnother piece I found inspiring is Elana Davis\u2019 \u201cMusic \u2018n\u2019 Motherhood\u201d, in which she talks candidly about raising three sons the Islamic way single-handedly and teaching street dancing in college. As a young convert who wears her Islamic identity proudly, Davis\u2019 represents a face of Islam in Britain that now exists on the margins of history: Black Muslims have been in Britain since the 16th century and black conversion to Islam has been a growing phenomenon in the last two decades. Also a hijabi, does Davis find her street dancing and love for hip hop in contradiction with her religious identity? No, she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomeone told me actually that I shouldn\u2019t wear my scarf because I teach dance. I think if you listen to what everybody\u2019s got to say, you will get confused, as at the end of the day, I became a Muslim for myself. I\u2019ll learn myself, and if I do something wrong, that is something that I\u2019m going to have to deal with, with God \u2013 nobody else\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There are several stories of unflinching patriotism from women who came to Britain to find a land of opportunity and freedom to dress and express their religious and cultural identities however they please. Some found their British identity a refuge from the personal limitations placed by tradition and ancestral culture. While most British Muslims are expected to be two-dimensional characters defined by ethnicity and religion, women like Sensei Mumtaz Khan, whose job as a ju-jujitsu teacher appears to trump her Islamic and Afghan identities. For Khan, ju-jitsu forms a core component of her life as she remains, contentiously, a cultural Muslim.<\/p>\n
Our Stories, Our Lives<\/em> allows the voices of Muslim women to be heard rather than be silenced and spoken for (often through the mouthpiece of the media and community leaders, who are always men). But the ever-expanding body of research and books on British Muslims shows that much more is needed to feed the political and public interest in an extremely visible but misunderstood religious minority. It also indicates that there is little informal communication bridging different ethnic and religious groups here, and no end to the mystification of Muslim women in sight.<\/p>\nMuslimah Media Watch would like to thank The Policy Press<\/a> for generously giving us <\/em>Our Stories, Our Lives for review.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our Stories, Our Lives is an anthology of a diverse group of women in Bradford, England, offering a glimpse into their lives and their issues with reconciling their Muslim identities with being British. With the media\u2019s daily onslaught on the image of Muslims and assumptions about so-called conflicting alliances (Islam and the West), a \u201cproud […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":157,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[223,231,233,1026,1027],"class_list":["post-4621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booksmagazines","category-culturesociety","tag-book-review","tag-britain","tag-british-muslims","tag-our-lives","tag-our-stories"],"yoast_head":"\n
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