{"id":7318,"date":"2020-12-17T11:58:59","date_gmt":"2020-12-17T09:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/twistislamophobia.org\/en\/?p=7318"},"modified":"2020-12-22T15:50:59","modified_gmt":"2020-12-22T13:50:59","slug":"muslim-women-are-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/twistislamophobia.org\/en\/2020\/12\/17\/muslim-women-are-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Muslim women are everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interview to Dr. Seema Yasmin, author of the book \u201cMuslim Women Are Everything\u201d carried out by the New York Times<\/a> for its series <\/strong>In Her Words<\/a><\/strong>. This books aims at portraying the many different paths, struggles and achievements carried out by Muslim women across the world.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tahani Amer, an engineer who grew up in the suburbs of Cairo, endured a string of rejections before she finally secured a job with NASA\u2019s Aeronautical Research program.<\/p>\n

Marah Zahalka, Noor Daoud and Mona Ennab \u2014 members of the Speed Sisters, an all-female car racing team based in the Palestinian territories \u2014 defy expectations with every race they win.<\/p>\n

Gisele Marie Rocha is the unexpected face, in a niqab and burqa, behind Eden Seed, a thrash metal band in Brazil.<\/p>\n

These women are validation of the premise behind Dr. Seema Yasmin\u2019s new book \u2014 that Muslim women can be\u00a0anything<\/em>. The book, \u201cMuslim Women Are Everything,\u201d was released earlier this year.<\/p>\n

A book to challenge stereotypes<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>More than 40 profiles of Muslim women \u2014 illustrated by Fahmida Azim \u2014 aim to tear down the tiresome tropes of what Muslim women are: what they look like, what they wear and what they do or don\u2019t do. Page after page dares the reader to say these women cannot, or should not.<\/p>\n

As for Dr. Yasmin: She is a Cambridge-trained medical doctor, a specialist in epidemiology, a journalist and the director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. She teaches at Stanford and is a visiting professor at U.C.L.A.<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t get there easily.<\/p>\n

She was born in Britain to a teenage mother, who was stuck in an arranged marriage. When Dr. Yasmin was just 5, her mother left the family to pursue her own education. As Dr. Yasmin tells it, \u201cMy mum was like: \u2018I\u2019m going to leave everything I know behind. I\u2019m going to find a way to university so that you can have an education.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

What followed for Dr. Yasmin was a childhood shuttling between worlds \u2014 the university where her mother was studying and her family\u2019s conservative Indian Muslim community in the British Midlands.<\/p>\n

This book was born out of a \u201cfrustration that the narratives about Muslim women were so one-sided, so narrow, so unimaginative,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Dr. Yasmin sat down with\u00a0In Her Words<\/a>\u00a0to talk about her work and what she means when she says, \u201cMuslim women are everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

How did you get the idea for this book?<\/h3>\n
\n

I think it\u2019s misogyny combined with Islamophobia. When you have a dominant culture that is male and white, it allows very little space for the rest of us to be our full selves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It all started as a\u00a0very angry tweet<\/a>. I was just absolutely fed up that even when\u00a0Ibtihaj Muhammad<\/a>, the American fencer, won a medal at the Olympics, the way that she and other Muslim women were celebrated was like, \u201cOh my God, look at that woman, she\u2019s an athlete, and she\u2019s a Muslim.\u201d<\/p>\n

And I was like: Wait, are you really trying to celebrate us by making it sound like we can\u2019t do anything?<\/p>\n

There was an editor who saw the\u00a0tweet<\/a>\u00a0and said: This would make for a great essay \u2014 will you write an essay? And I said, no. Instead, I ended up writing this kind of prose poem. It was called \u201cYes, Muslim Women Do Things<\/a>,\u201d and it featured Muslim women doing amazing things like digging salad out from between their teeth and\u00a0taking a nap<\/a>. My point was that some of us do open-heart surgery; some of us go scuba diving; some of us are too lazy to do the dishes.<\/p>\n

I think it really hit a nerve. A lot of people hated it. But some publishers were like, this would look great as a book.<\/p>\n

The proposal started off about fictional women doing esoteric things and then it became about real-life Muslim women who are troubling all the definitions and messing up all the boundaries of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be Muslim.<\/p>\n