Shelina Janmohamed the author of Love in a Headscarf was in Doha recently on a trip sponsored by Bloomsbury. I wanted to meet this exquisite writer and wanted my students to get to meet her too. I invited her to speak at one of my classes. I teach a course called “Quest for Identity”, in which students read novels and analyze them according to theories of post-colonialism and multiculturalism. The major theme in the course is identity and the ability and inability to consolidate between the different layers within oneself. One of the issues that the novels deal with is the clash between tradition and modernity, the two components that make up our cultural identities. The challenge is to consolidate between traditions and modernity, and not superficially, in for example architecture or street names, but within oneself, and my visitor is a perfect living example of a balanced hybrid.

  Shelina managed in half an hour to show us through her personal experience as a British Muslim Asian woman how she consolidated between these three identities that aren’t necessarily compatible with each other. She was able to ‘mix and match’ and select the best of each culture. She knew exactly what the most valuable aspects were in her Asian culture and worked on solidifying them within herself, such as family ties. She chose from her British culture the motives to become successful in the larger community. She graduated from Oxford and is a columnist, writer, and blogger- in short a public figure. Her Islamic identity was the strongest. She learnt how to differentiate between what is cultural and what is Islamic.

Bravely, she was the subject of the matter, and took us through a summarized version of her life touching on the challenges she faced to ‘belong’ to the British culture and the struggle to maintain strong ties with her Asian culture- all while being guided by her Islamic beliefs and practices. She read parts of her book that highlighted the challenges, making it more immediate and more real to us.

 The impact of her short talk was evident on the students as they have been renegotiating all through the course their own identities as Arabs and Muslims studying in an American University. The moment she paused, they started commenting and asking her questions. One of the students told her that he could relate to her as he has lived the first fourteen years of his life in England. He agreed that family is the main carrier of the cultural and Islamic identity that kept him grounded and true to him self, sparing him the drama of loosing himself in his foreign surroundings.

One young lady wanted to know more how Shelina as a Muslim woman was able to assert her identity in the British culture and still avoid discrimination. Shelina answered that she might have been lucky as she was never faced by discrimination; On the contrary she has experienced acceptance and tolerance in her work, accommodating her religious obligations like praying and fasting. “This actually contradicts what I have heard from Ed Hussain, the author of The Islamist in his talk in Chatham house last summer, where he said that Muslims in Britain feel tolerated but not accepted and that there isn’t enough tolerance towards the people of faith because of the extreme secularism. This actually reflects the diverse realities of Muslims in Britain. And I for one, living through both 9/11 and 7/7 have never been faced with discrimination or intolerance, but still my personal experience doesn’t negate other Muslims’ experiences facing racism and religious intolerance.”

Two young ladies disapproved of making her quest for finding a husband through arranged marriages the subject of her book. They added that such emphasis on arranged marriages and the need to get married reinforces the negative stereotype about Muslim women being dependent and subordinate. This opened a cultural dialogue, in which Shelina touched on the expectations of her Asian culture, and their perception of marriage as a communal obligation. In Asian culture, the quest for finding a suitable husband or wife for their children is the community’s responsibility. She explained that while a woman relies on her family and her cultural community to do all of the searching to find her a perfect suitor, she has a full control over accepting or rejecting him. It was a chance for us to draw similarities between Asian culture and Arab culture, especially that marriage in our societies is seen as a communal responsibility as well. I added that Shelina’s writings on love and marriage taps into a bigger discourse- that of love in general. She provides a different cultural discourse on love and of finding love through arranged marriages, and thus makes it accessible to the west, hence the possibility of mainstreaming it into the multicultural British discourse becomes possible, which will build understandings and acceptance of different cultures within the dominant one. She tries to emphasize in a way that ‘love’ is not a ‘bad’ word, but is what every woman looks for- even Muslim women, but the path and application may differ.  

One more similarity between both cultures was the issue of successful women and their social acceptance. We discussed the cultural constrains on women who thrive to become trendsetters. What hit a cord with me was when she said that in certain societies a woman should fit a certain type, the modest one, and when she goes beyond it, the society gets perplexed. Some societies can’t accept it when a woman is “too much” of any thing, like being “too educated” or ‘too successful’.

“I believe that a woman needs to be wise in picking her battles. A woman being “too’ educated, even if it wasn’t accepted at the beginning, will eventually bring prosperity to her, her family, and community as a whole.”

The class was vibrant and we all enjoyed having her. Shelina is a captivating speaker, very calm, very composed, and very relatable.