Mohja Kahf

A rather amazing book. A novel that reads like lived experience. A young woman's life and times as a muslim american growing up in Indiana. At one time or another she was foreign to everything about her, family and society, but her experiences as an outsider allowed her to grow and make her own peace with the divine. Quite brilliant...

This is a coming-of-age novel about Khadra Shamy, the daughter of Syrian Muslim immigrants in Indiana. Khadra’s father works at the Muslim center in an Indianapolis suburb, and she is steeped in Muslim faith and practice in her childhood and adolescence. After a brief failed marriage in college, Khadra suddenly sees shades of gray where there used to be black and white. A trip to Syria, the barely-remembered land of her birth, confuses her even more. She discovers customs that she thought show more were Muslim are actually Syrian/Arab. She begins to see similarities between adherents of different faiths where before she only saw their outward differences. She needs to work out for herself what it means to be a Muslim woman in late 20th-century America.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It’s longer than it needs to be. Eliminating the repetitiveness and a number of the characters would likely make it a stronger novel. However, I identified with Khadra, who shares enough characteristics with the author to be considered at least partially autobiographical. Based on the timeline of the novel, she seems to be very close to my age. I spent a lot of time in Indiana during the years covered in the novel. My family made the trip north several times a year to visit my mother’s parents and her very large extended family. I sometimes felt like an outsider since the rest of the family knew each other in a way that I didn’t since I lived so far away, so I was very interested in another outsider’s view of Indiana. If I had run into Khadra on one of my visits, I wonder if we could have broken through the cultural barriers to find common ground? show less

A timely story (especially considering the current debate over Middle Eastern refugees) about a Syrian family living on the outskirts of Indianapolis, Indiana. The Islamic faith is vital to the Shamy family and much of this novel explores the daughter Khadra's experience growing up as an Islamic girl and the struggles she endured in trying to stay loyal to her devout family and also to earn the respect of her starkly normal, often white counterparts in her family's neighborhood and school. I show more also appreciated the exploration of Muslim women and the path Khadra navigates as both a feminist and also as a devout and observant Muslim. An interesting and timely tale. show less

This is a poignant and insightful glimpse at what it means to be a person of faith, an ethnic minority, and an American. This is brimful of imagination, empathy, and intellectual criticism for the way we box each other and ourselves into neat identity categories, when the reality is much messier. Highly recommended.