Zeba Talkhani is a 27 year old Indian woman, who grew up in the ex-pat community of Saudi Arabia.
This book is her brutally honest memoir of her journey to find freedom as a feminist Muslim woman, through her experiences in India, Saudi Arabia, Germany and the UK.
This is a book about a young Muslim woman trying to establish her own feminist identity within the patriarchy of her religion and family.
She starts by using her earliest memories of her relationship with her mother to explain her confusion at the behaviour of the women close to her.
Zeba then goes on to detail her experiences at school; her fight to be allowed to study at university, particularly since this meant living away from home; her studies in Germany; her studies in England; and finally working and trying to meet a suitable husband.
Zeba's home life was further complicated by the fact that she suffered from alopecia, which her mother found extremely difficult to handle. In a community where marriageability is judged primarily on appearance, Zeba's hair loss placed a great strain on her close family's relationship with their friends and neighbours and rumours about her condition led to some, quite frankly, appalling behaviour on the part of her extended family.
All through this book, Zeba explains how she has had to fight against the expectations placed upon her by the patriarchal dictates of the Muslim community, to establish herself as a self-reliant young woman.
Her different experiences have led her to educate herself about living a feminist life within Islam, which has not been a very easy thing to do! Considering she is still a very young woman, I have to admire how far she has come at such a young age.
Although, she has been privileged in some ways, by having a family who have learnt to respect her wishes, she tells of the experiences of her less fortunate young women friends and relatives and this makes for grim reading.
One of the things, I found most interesting is that Zeba explains that in Saudi Arabia she felt too dark-skinned and a foreigner unable to speak Arabic; whilst, in India, she still felt an outsider, as a minority Muslim, so she felt a foreigner there too. However, she does consider Saudi Arabia to be her home and she has much love for this country - despite the assumption from many people believing she must have hated her time under the strict regime imposed upon Muslims in that country. It was very interesting to read about the different experiences Zeba had in Saudi Arabia, compared to the Saudi women, as an ex-pat resident - albeit still a Muslim.
Zeba has done a lot of thinking about her place in life for such a young woman. She has reached some very mature conclusions about why Muslim women living under a strict patriarchy allow the restrictions placed upon them to continue - after all, many of the most unpleasant consequences of being a young Muslim woman are perpetuated by older women.
I find this situation very difficult to come to terms with, and having a daughter myself, only want her to have everything good in her life and to protect her from the bad. It is particularly shocking that the things Zeba has fought for are things which I would consider to be basic freedoms - for example, the freedom to have your personal space respected; the freedom to choose what you study at school; the freedom to choose if you get married and, if so, to whom.
Zeba has formulated that older Muslim women are in fact traumatized by their own experiences as young women and are therefore, too afraid to stand up to the patriarchy. She reasons that her own mother struggled with the expectations placed on her to behave in a particular way as a wife and mother, which made it impossible for her to behave as she would have wished.
I think there is some truth in this, but I wonder if she will be quite as philosophical about it when she has her own children - especially if she has daughters.
This book is absolutely fascinating. I have not read anything quite like it before and could not put it down. In short, this is a book which should be read by everyone - especially young women.
Zeba has suffered from some pretty traumatic experiences in her young life and the arrogant behaviour she has been exposed to is very difficult to read about. However, she has been very lucky as a young Muslim woman in a lot of ways and she has been able to get to a place where she is happy with her own identity and able to live the life she wants to lead. She is a fine role model.
This is an important and brutally honest book from an interesting perspective.
I understand that her honesty has not gone down well with some members of her family - not surprising considering the way some of them have behaved in the past.
I admire Zeba's stance that she has only detailed the parts of her life she remembers quite clearly as affecting her deeply, without speculating on the intentions of those involved, but in many cases you can assume that their intentions were far from good. This is something they will have to come to terms with themselves and I can imagine they are not happy about having their own shortcomings made public.
I can only say that they should use this memoir as a basis from improving their own hurtful behaviour (and writing scathing comments in a review of this book on Amazon, will hardly gain them any sympathy from someone who has read the contents of these pages).
I have been pleasantly surprised about the crop of excellent books by young Muslim women being published at the moment, and this is definitely one of them. Long may this continue.
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