Memoirs

Memoirs are a valuable way to learn about other people’s experiences. Precisely because they don’t make any claims about objectivity or representativeness, they allow us into the particularities of another person’s world as few other genres of writing can. If you want to get a sense for the detail and diversity of Muslim people’s experiences, memoirs are really helpful.

Memoirs do, of course, have limitations. Only literate, educated people write them, so huge realms of human experience appear only in the background, if that, of memoirs. They are based largely on memory, and memory can be very fallible when it comes to facts. All of us craft stories about our experiences that are a little different from how other people might tell those stories. But how people tell the stories of their lives is enormously informative, even if some of the incidents might be complicated or contradicted if we also had access to written records.

Rather than make specific recommendations, since different readers are looking for different things, I have listed these memoirs in the order in when they were published.

Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964). This classic American autobiography should, I believe, be read by every American. Malcolm X was one of the early leaders of the Nation of Islam, a distinctively African-American form of Islam that at the time had only a tenuous connection with world-wide Islam. He was transformed by his experience of Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims who can are supposed to undertake at least once in their lives, and which Malcolm X completed just a few months before he was assassinated. This memoir is not a representative introduction to Islam, or even to Islam in America, but it is a compelling story of one man’s deep engagement with race, religion, and the question of how to forge a good life in an often hostile world. (Now, about 40% of Muslims in the United States are African-American. The Nation of Islam has been through several transformations, and is again distinctively African-American, but most African-American Muslims see themselves as part of a world-wide multi-racial tradition.)

Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (1999). Ahmed’s memoir is lyrically written and very personal, but it also has a larger vision than most memoirs. It describes her 1940s childhood in a privileged Egyptian family, her father’s fall from favor because he opposed Nasser’s Aswan Dam project on environmental grounds, her studies in the “harem” of Girton College, her encounter with modern feminism, and her move to the United States, where she is now a professor at the Harvard Divinity School. Along the way Ahmed reflects on women’s traditions and men’s traditions within Islam, language and literacy, colonialism and nationalism, Arab identity, the breakdown of Egypt’s multi-religious society, her discovery that many Egyptians in the early 20th century supported Zionism, and how some interpretations and experiences of Islam overtake others. This is one of the most illuminating books I’ve read and I recommend it highly.

Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis (2000-2004). This memoir in the form of a graphic novel tells the story of the Iranian revolution and its aftermath from the point of a young girl who is permanently displaced from the world she knew. It has since been turned into a well-received movie. If you like graphic novels, and don’t know much about what happened in Iran before, during, and after the revolution, and how it affected ordinary people’s lives, you will find this book illuminating.

Tamim Ansary, West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story (2002). Born to an Afghan father and an American mother, Ansary grew up in a stable and loving Afghanistan and emigrated to the United States when he was a teenager. As a young adult he traveled the Islamic world (coincidentally, right after Iranian students took the American embassy hostage) and then settled into an American life of work, family, friends, and home-ownership. He gave little attention to Afghanistan until the reports became too disturbing. On September 12, 2001, he sent a passionate email to twenty friends, discussing the attacks of the day before from his perspective as an Afghan American. That experience led to this memoir. Ansary’s description of his changing perceptions of the Taliban, in a final chapter titled “Hanging On,” is especially compelling. “Growing up bicultural is like straddling a crack in the earth,” Ansary says. Members of the Taliban grew up in a world disrupted by war, many of them in refugee camps. They could not absorb the full richness of Afghan culture as their parents had, but instead grabbed onto a thinned-down version that was stark and harsh and made them feel less small and powerless.

Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003). Nafisi retired from her last academic position in 1995 and used her relative freedom to invite seven of her most dedicated students to come to her home every Thursday morning to study English literature together, on their own terms. This memoir explores the young women’s relationships with the books, with each other, with their families, with the prohibitions and tensions of Iranian society, and with their multiple desires for their lives. It became a best-seller, but American readers should be aware that many Middle Eastern people feel uncomfortable with its implicit assumption that studying Western literature is one of the most valuable pursuits in life, its lack of a larger historical perspective, and its unrelentingly negative view of life in modern Iran.

Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Her Country (2006). If you are going to read just one book on Iran, this would be a good choice. Ebadi (pictured above) was a young judge in Iran until the 1979 revolution, and hers is the best account I’ve read of what happened before, during and after the revolution. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work on behalf of people oppressed by the regime, especially but not only women and children. If you want to understand recent Iranian history, from the perspective of someone who loves Iran, and participated in the revolution, but courageously opposed the theocratic regime that followed it, I recommend this memoir.

Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (2006). This book doesn’t belong cleanly to any genre – it is partly theology, partly history, partly stories from Wadud’s life as a woman, mother, scholar, teacher, and activist. An African-American woman who converted to Islam as a young adult, Wadud is a professor of Islamic Studies who became a figure of controversy in 2005 when she led a mixed-gender group in prayer. Inside the Gender Jihad covers a wide range of topics, from the meanings of important theological terms found in the Qur’an, to the difficulties of working in the field of Muslim women’s studies, to motherhood, prayer leadership, and HIV. The writing is uneven in accessibility, but if you are interested in contemporary Muslim women’s theology or African-American Muslim women, this is an important book.

Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation (2007). Patel is an American Muslim (Ismaili) of Indian birth and the founder and director of the Interfaith Youth Core, which organizes youth of many faiths for conferences and service projects. The reason totalitarian religion is expanding, he argues, is that totalitarian religious institutions are doing much more than pluralist religious institutions to reach out to youth and young adults, answer their questions, help them form their identities, and give them things to do and ways to be of service to the world. Who we become, he argues, is to a large degree a result of the influences we encounter. Many youth are uncertain and questioning and somewhat disaffected, wanting to explore questions of ultimate meaning, and eager to make a difference in the world but not sure how. Patel tells the personal stories of many young people – Muslim, Christian, and Jewish — who became terrorists. He also tells his own story, which led to a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University and interfaith youth organizing, but so easily could have turned out differently. His memoir is inspiring and thought-provoking.

Qanta Ahmed, In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom (2008). Ahmed is a Muslim British national of Pakistani/Indian origin who did her medical training in the United States and spent two years practicing medicine in Saudi Arabia, ending shortly after 9/11. Her fascinating memoir focuses on gender relations in the Saudi Kingdom, her experiences of Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca), and the tensions of Saudi culture. The contrast between Ahmed’s and Malcolm X’s stories about Hajj is striking. Hajj introduced Malcolm X to the possibility of a world without race, where all people are treated as equals. Ahmed, however, was shocked by the blatant racism she encountered on Hajj, which she considered a disturbing betrayal of Islam’s teachings about the equality of all before God – and far worse than anything she observed during her years of living in Great Britain and the United States. The rest of the book is full of stories about the Saudi women and men Ahmed encountered and learned from. This book could have used an editor who is more attuned to the niceties of English prose, but if you can look past the writing it is well worth reading.

G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam (2010). Wilson is an American woman who attended Boston University, was attracted to Islam, moved (temporarily, she thought) to Egypt, and fell in love with an Egyptian man and became part of an Egyptian family. Her memoir is beautifully written and offers a richly textured portrait of some corners of Cairo where Westerners rarely go. Throughout, Wilson seeks to engage with Egyptian people, culture, and traditions on their own terms, rather than asking the people there to adapt to her expectations as, she believes, most Americans do. If you’d like to understand how Islam, both as a religion and as a way of life, could appeal to a Western woman, I recommend this book. And you will certainly learn much about life in modern Cairo among people who are neither rich and privileged nor desperately poor.

See also: Ethnography, Novels