On Being a Muslim Author: Sharing your voice is one of the most important things you can do
If I was ever going to be a writer then it should have been before motherhood, when I had the time and the mental clarity to get some words onto a page. | This is a 10-minute read.
Hello and Salaams my friends,
I hope you’re faring well and your writing is going smoothly. We’re back again with another guest post – a very affirming and introspective piece about being a Muslim woman writer.
Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. Back then, it meant letting my creativity loose on a page and seeing my elaborate stories in the hands of my loved ones. I was constantly concocting fictional worlds, illustrating them on scraps of paper and presenting them to my parents to read with wide, proud eyes. My imagination was unencumbered by things like imposter syndrome and inferiority complexes, unaware of the boundaries of race and class that form a barrier to inhabiting that sphere of ‘Being A Writer’.
As I grew older and studied English, and then trained to be an English teacher, the concept of being a writer became connected to those things that had been invisible to me before. Being a writer now meant being white and wealthy. It meant having the luxury of endless stretches of free time spent gazing out into nature and seeking inspiration in the minutiae of the everyday that most of us never have the time to notice. I looked around me at university, at the writers I was obliged to teach in the classroom, the up and coming writers I idolised online, and then becoming a writer became about having the right kind of tortoise shell glasses, an antique oak desk, a ceaseless stream of ironically-sized coffees brought to you in a hipster cafe, or the right connections to get noticed in a publishing industry that was a mystery to me.
In my early and mid twenties, being a writer felt further away than ever. I no longer had the time or the limitless imagination of my childhood self and was crippled into untreatable writer’s block by the impenetrable ideas I had sold myself about what it meant to ‘be’ a writer. Instead, I thought I’ll be a reader: there’s a far lower barrier to entry there!
I set myself the task to read as much and as regularly as I could and somewhere deep down I told myself it was research for whenever the stars would align and that country mansion with the antique desk (prerequisites to being a writer, of course) would fall into my lap. I set up a Bookstagram and wrote long captions about other people’s writing instead of attempting my own.
And then I became a mother.
Looking back, it’s funny because I had always imagined maternity leave to be some sort of extended holiday in which I might actually be able to finally write that book that had been brewing inside of me my whole life whilst loosely bouncing a perfectly behaved baby on my knee. However, a mere few hours into the tumult of new motherhood taught me that that’s not what mothering looks like. Amongst the burping and the feeding and the putting-to-sleep and the holding-whilst-asleep (because he won’t lay in the cot) and the changing nappies and the maybe finding some time in all of that to drink a lukewarm coffee you made earlier, there’s scarcely time to think about narrative arcs and world building.
Ironically, though, that’s when that internal burning desire to ‘become a writer’ hit me hardest. When the things that you have spent your adult life creating: your career, your hobbies, your very identity are stripped from you and hidden behind that new cloak of ‘Mother’, it causes a lot of introspection. Plus late night cluster feeding and hours of rocking a small crying human leave you a lot of time to think and dream. Despite this fresh chapter of my life bringing unparalleled joys and new fulfilment, I couldn’t help but feel as though I had failed. If I was ever going to be a writer then it should have been before motherhood, when I had the time and the mental clarity to get some words onto a page. I thought I had missed the boat and that I’d have to wait until I was done with having children, until they were In Sha Allah married themselves and only then might I find time for myself again.
I say I don’t know how it happened, but truthfully I know it must have been a sign from Allah, pushing me to pursue using my voice even if it might be tough with a small child. It was early 2022 and Russia had just invaded Ukraine. Our television screens and social media feeds were filled with commentators flabbergasted that “blonde haired, blue eyed” Europeans might find themselves fleeing war (unlike those Arabs like my own family who are used to it, presumably.) One day, I was scrolling through social media and found myself filled with such anger and frustration at the double standards obvious in how Ukrainian men were being lauded for defending their homes from occupation and how Ukrainian women were portrayed as feminist icons for making homemade weapons to support the war effort.
Comparing this to how Palestinians are perpetually seen as terrorists or how my own family rising up in the Arab Spring were portrayed as militant rebels left me with a motivation to do something more than just tweet about it.
I researched how to go about writing opinion pieces for newspapers because I had no idea how to, and I sent what must have been some incredibly bad pitches to major newspapers (which were, unsurprisingly, ignored!) before I managed to get commissioned to write for a small publication championing the voices of minority women called Aurelia. Once I had one byline under my belt and with lots more research on how to write more effective pitches, I managed to get commissioned by increasingly bigger platforms until I found myself writing for the likes of The Guardian, Independent and AlJazeera.
Writing short form articles like opinion pieces became a route into writing that I had never imagined pursuing, but the short one-thousand word bursts fit perfectly into my new lifestyle as a mother. I could get an article written in a nap time or even at night when my son finally slept. Yet, despite the fact that during maternity leave, I wrote about an article a week - often more - I still didn’t consider myself ‘A Writer’. That still felt like an inaccessible plane that I was yet to traverse.
And then, one day, after having read my articles, a literary agent reached out to me and asked if I’d ever considered writing a book and it felt like Allah had answered du’as that I hadn’t even dared to make because they felt so impossible.
Fast forward two years, and my book Veiled Threat: on being visibly Muslim in Britain has just been published, Alhamdulillah! Through a combination of personal vignette and political essay, it is an exploration of what it means to navigate islamophobia and misogyny, the white saviour complex and criminalisation in a nation intent on forced assimilation like Britain. And as surreal and fulfilling as it is to see my work finally in the hands of readers and on the shelves of the bookstores I’ve visited since I was a child, it has made my imposter syndrome more prominent than ever. It is this experience that has caused me to reflect on what it means to be a writer and to interrogate the inhibitions I still hold when it comes to writing, even after having a published book.
I have realised that the only thing that makes you a writer is (surprise surprise!) the act of writing itself. This might sound obvious but once I had a book deal and a hard deadline to meet, writing no longer became something I had the luxury of dreaming about or languishing over. I no longer had the ability to think that if I just sat in the right kind of cafe or wrote with a fountain pen instead of a decade-old laptop then I might be a ‘real’ writer. If I spent time comparing myself to the social media platforms of writers with hundreds of thousands of followers who retweeted their work millions of times then I would never be enough – and I’d have wasted the precious little writing time I could carve out of a busy day.
But when writing became something that I needed to do if I was going to fulfil this opportunity I had been given to finally write a book, this changed how I viewed it. I treated it like work that needed to be done – like the washing or life admin. Such an idea would have been almost sacrilegious to me before. Writing was meant to be creative, right? It was supposed to come to you in waves of inspiration: an art not a chore.
But the fact is that some of us don’t have that privilege. Systemic racism, misogyny and islamophobia means that if we come from materially disenfranchised communities, if we are bound to physical labour or to long work hours through deprivation, if we are barred from access to the kinds of lifestyles that mean we might have hours each day to dedicate to our craft then it becomes a necessity to view writing through a different lens.
As a Muslim, I believed that I had been blessed with this book deal for a reason, and that Allah was telling me I needed to use my voice to advocate for Muslims in Britain and shed light on our manifold oppressions. Likewise, as a Muslim woman, I realised that I had a duty to speak up about the kinds of things that are so often used against us, whether that be the hijab, Andrew Tate or the way our children are policed in British schools.
Having this as my prevailing motivation meant that writing had to look different. It had to become ten minutes on the notes app of my phone whilst we waited for the bus or random half-formed sentences sent in all-capitalised, frantic WhatsApp messages to my husband. It meant using the time I did have more productively whilst my son slept or someone else looked after him. It meant seeing writing like something I had to constantly plug away at, a hundred words at a time, but it also meant that writing became something I could reclaim for myself – an old part of me that I had lost in early motherhood. It was ironic but undeniable: forcing myself to do it whenever I had any free time made me a writer in a way that years spent dreaming about writing retreats never did. And I might compare myself to those who went and booked a week in Venice to hash out a bestselling novel, but the fact is the finished product is what matters, not the journey to get there.
The reason I am sharing these musings is because as Muslim women, there will always be reasons we cannot write. It might be because our day job is needed to support our families or because there’s too much housework or because of bringing up children or caring for sick relatives. It will often be because someone is telling us that our voices don’t matter, that our narratives shouldn’t be shared – whether that’s from inside our own communities or from a system that has no desire to humanise us.
But I’m here to say that sharing your voice is one of the most important things you can do – and it doesn’t need to take away from the other vital things you do, day in day out.
Your words matter because they have been deliberately silenced for so long. Our silence is convenient for a world that wants to see us as victims in need of saving or as terrorists in disguise. By not using our voices, we legitimise the states that want to criminalise our religious dress or the governments that invade and bomb in the name of liberating us. By believing that what we have to say doesn’t matter, we cosign the selective outrage of white feminism that cares about us when we are burning our hijabs on the street but not when we are burying our babies who have been massacred by western allies.
I write this as half of my screen plays Miss Rachel and my son attempts to stick a breadstick up my nose. I may be a ‘published author’ but the writing process, I have come to accept, may never look glamorous for me. But that’s okay, because that’s not what it’s about. It’s about putting words together in whichever way you can and then offering them to the world with the intention that they might change things, even if just a little bit.
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Till next time,
Suad
I felt like Nadeine was speaking to me. What a wonderful and inspiring read!
This is so well-written; Nadiene has beautifully captured her thoughts and feelings on her journey to accepting that she is, in fact, a writer — something many Muslim women (myself included) can relate to.