A Muslim Woman's Journey - "Love in a Headscarf" published today

The Guardian is joining me today in announcing the publication of my book "Love in a Headscarf"

I wanted to write about my experiences - not of oppression, or turning away from religion - but of love.

I sometimes wonder what someone who has never met ordinary Muslim woman thinks we are like. Perhaps they see us all as black-veil-wearing creatures in voluminous cloaks. Certainly those who search for images in Google under "Muslim women" are likely to think so.

Perhaps if you've never met a Muslim woman you might think we are all failing to "integrate", whatever that means, or to communicate with the people we live amongst, as Jack Straw would have us believe. It's possible that they think we are all opposed to freedom of speech and will use violence to attack it.

If you walk into any bookshop you will find stories of Muslim women with words like "oppressed" "sold" or "kidnapped" in the titles. Their tales of horror rightly need to be told, and the abuses which have been perpetrated need to be stopped. However, this genre of misery-memoir about Muslim women is fed constantly by publishers eager to confirm and exploit this stereotype. The tales are topped off with accounts of rejection of Islam and the nirvana of "liberation" from it. Both of these archetypal stories feature book covers almost exclusively of women with sad oppressed eyes staring out from behind a tightly wrapped niqab, camels and deserts in the background.

It is hard to tell whether publishers illustrate their books in this way because it reaps easy commercial rewards. Or is it that they themselves cannot see the complexity and variation amongst Muslim women, or are simply too lazy or cowardly to bring us new stories that avoid this one-size-fits-all approach.


I speak from experience - today sees the publication of my first book "Love in a Headscarf", a memoir of growing up as a Muslim woman. I was fed up of seeing the same old stories told all the time, and wanted to share one "from the inside", and in a way that itself was groundbreaking.

So I chose to write a humorous and light-hearted tale. I wanted to tell a story that touches each of us as human beings, looking at questions of love, life and meaning that we all share, but through the eyes of a Muslim woman. Most of all, I wanted to explore the contradictions and contrasts that we all face, and humour was the best medium for that. As Peter Ustinov said, "Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious."

I took the book to a number of publishers whose commissioning editors loved the story, but couldn't see it fitting with the existing mould of books about Muslim women. "We need an 'alias' of a book that is already out there so people understand how it relates to previous books," they explained, meaning it should be either a forced marriage story or one of escape from Islam.

With such black and white views about the stories that Muslim women are permitted to tell, how can it ever be possible to create an understanding of our diversity and complexity?

I hope my book brings a fresh perspective to the discussion about Muslim women. But there is a serious question to be asked – will it provoke the Muslim community to look into itself and wonder why these lazy stereotypes exist? Sometimes as Muslims we lack an intellectual honesty about ourselves, and are not brave enough to tell our stories as human beings on a journey, with all our flaws. If publishers are guilty of monolithic misery memoirs, then Muslims must also take some of the blame for not sharing our universal experiences in a language and context that everyone can relate to.

We need to connect to those around us at that very fundamental level of human experience. Today, on Valentine's Day, let's do it with love.