The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf PDF Author: Mojha Kahf
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0786735422
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Syrian immigrant Khadra Shamy is growing up in a devout, tightly knit Muslim family in 1970s Indiana, at the crossroads of bad polyester and Islamic dress codes. Along with her brother Eyad and her African-American friends, Hakim and Hanifa, she bikes the Indianapolis streets exploring the fault-lines between "Muslim" and "American." When her picture-perfect marriage goes sour, Khadra flees to Syria and learns how to pray again. On returning to America she works in an eastern state -- taking care to stay away from Indiana, where the murder of her friend Tayiba's sister by Klan violence years before still haunts her. But when her job sends her to cover a national Islamic conference in Indianapolis, she's back on familiar ground: Attending a concert by her brother's interfaith band The Clash of Civilizations, dodging questions from the "aunties" and "uncles," and running into the recently divorced Hakim everywhere. Beautifully written and featuring an exuberant cast of characters, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf charts the spiritual and social landscape of Muslims in middle America, from five daily prayers to the Indy 500 car race. It is a riveting debut from an important new voice.

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf PDF Author: Mojha Kahf
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0786735422
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Syrian immigrant Khadra Shamy is growing up in a devout, tightly knit Muslim family in 1970s Indiana, at the crossroads of bad polyester and Islamic dress codes. Along with her brother Eyad and her African-American friends, Hakim and Hanifa, she bikes the Indianapolis streets exploring the fault-lines between "Muslim" and "American." When her picture-perfect marriage goes sour, Khadra flees to Syria and learns how to pray again. On returning to America she works in an eastern state -- taking care to stay away from Indiana, where the murder of her friend Tayiba's sister by Klan violence years before still haunts her. But when her job sends her to cover a national Islamic conference in Indianapolis, she's back on familiar ground: Attending a concert by her brother's interfaith band The Clash of Civilizations, dodging questions from the "aunties" and "uncles," and running into the recently divorced Hakim everywhere. Beautifully written and featuring an exuberant cast of characters, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf charts the spiritual and social landscape of Muslims in middle America, from five daily prayers to the Indy 500 car race. It is a riveting debut from an important new voice.

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf PDF Author: Mohja Kahf
Publisher: Public Affairs
ISBN: 9780786715190
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
Growing up devoutly Muslim in her 1970s Indiana community, Syrian immigrant Najla Shamy and her siblings struggle to balance the cultures of America and their family, a coming-of-age challenge that the adult Najla remembers years later when she reconnects with friends from other mixed heritages. Original.

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf PDF Author: Mojha Kahf
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 0786735422
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book

Book Description
Syrian immigrant Khadra Shamy is growing up in a devout, tightly knit Muslim family in 1970s Indiana, at the crossroads of bad polyester and Islamic dress codes. Along with her brother Eyad and her African-American friends, Hakim and Hanifa, she bikes the Indianapolis streets exploring the fault-lines between “Muslim” and “American.” When her picture-perfect marriage goes sour, Khadra flees to Syria and learns how to pray again. On returning to America she works in an eastern state — taking care to stay away from Indiana, where the murder of her friend Tayiba's sister by Klan violence years before still haunts her. But when her job sends her to cover a national Islamic conference in Indianapolis, she's back on familiar ground: Attending a concert by her brother's interfaith band The Clash of Civilizations, dodging questions from the “aunties” and “uncles,” and running into the recently divorced Hakim everywhere. Beautifully written and featuring an exuberant cast of characters, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf charts the spiritual and social landscape of Muslims in middle America, from five daily prayers to the Indy 500 car race. It is a riveting debut from an important new voice.

Hagar Poems

Hagar Poems PDF Author: Mohja Kahf
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1682260003
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
“Mohja Kahf ’s Hagar Poems is brilliantly original in its conception, thrillingly artful in its execution. Its range is immense, its spiritual depth is profound, it negotiates its shifts between archaic and the contemporary with utmost skill. There’s lyricism, there’s satire, there’s comedy, there’s theology of a high order in this book.” —Alicia Ostriker, author of For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book “Hagar/ Hajar the immigrant/exile/outcast/refugee mother of a people is given multiple voices and significance in Mohja Kahf’s new book of dramatic monologues, which also reinvents Pharaoh’s daughter, Zuleika, Aïsha, and Mary in poems that are at once lively and learned, agnostic and devout. The sequence on an American mosque, and the poet’s ambivalent love for what it represents, is unique in American poetry.” —Marilyn Hacker, author of A Stranger’s Mirror “‘Where have all the goddesses gone,’ writes Mohja Kahf, ‘I tracked down Isis / incognito on Cyprus. /She told me Ishtar / lived under the radar / in southern Iraq. . . .’ In Hagar Poems, Mohja Kahf’s hallmark qualities—irreverence, imagination, wit, poignancy—are all exuberantly in evidence. A wonderful read.” —Leila Ahmed, author of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America “This brilliant collection captures all the ‘patient threading of relationship’ between Hagar and Sarah as between women, and then between women and men, between human and God. . . . At every turn of the page [Kahf] refuses complacency and circumstance but opts instead for exposing the tenuousness of threads that tie and bind and then come loose before our eyes.” —From the foreword by Amina Wadud The central matter of this daring new collection is the story of Hagar, Abraham, and Sarah—the ancestral feuding family of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These poems delve into the Hajar story in Islam. They explore other figures from the Near Eastern heritage, such as Mary and Moses, and touch on figures from early Islam, such as Fatima and Aisha. Throughout, there is artful reconfiguring. Readers will find sequels and prequels to the traditional narratives, along with modernized figures claimed for contemporary conflicts. Hagar Poems is a compelling shakeup of not only Hagar’s story but also of current roles of all kinds of women in all kinds of relationships.

E-mails from Scheherazad

E-mails from Scheherazad PDF Author: Mohja Kahf
Publisher: University of Central Florida
ISBN: 9780813026213
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
Explores what it is like to be a woman, a person of color, an immigrant, and a headscarf-wearing Muslim in a non-Muslim country.

My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit

My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit PDF Author: Mohja Kahf
Publisher: Press 53
ISBN: 9781950413195
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
In this radiant collection of love poems, Mohja Kahf makes a feast and a celebration, in language and of language. Everyone is invited: "Never drink while another is thirsty. You first. No, you. We could dance like this forever." From dizzying bursts of eros to wry acceptance of mortality, Kahf translates her robust Arabic literary lineage into the regal command: "Always multiply the gift." Pleasure shimmers off these pages with spiritual undertones, glancing subtly at Quran, at hadith. The opening poem, "When I Come to You," echoes a Hadith Qudsi in which God says, "When my worshipper comes to Me walking, I go to her running." With its joyful succession of images calling for reciprocity, this poem, and the collection, honor the mutual desire for union between Creator and creature as a foundation for expressions of human desire. From that generous place, we leap into lyric delight in the physicality of the erotic. It is the reader's task and reward to embrace "this beautiful clumsiness." -from the Preface by Rahat Kurd

Anxiety of Erasure

Anxiety of Erasure PDF Author: Hanadi Al-Samman
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815653298
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Far from offering another study that bemoans Arab women’s repression and veiling, Anxiety of Erasure looks at Arab women writers living in the diaspora who have translated their experiences into a productive and creative force. In this book, Al-Samman articulates the therapeutic effects of revisiting forgotten histories and of activating two cultural tropes: that of the maw’udah (buried female infant) and that of Shahrazad in the process of revolutionary change. She asks what it means to develop a national, gendered consciousness from diasporic locals while staying committed to the homeland. Al-Samman presents close readings of the fiction of six prominent authors whose works span over half a century and define the current status of Arab diaspora studies—Ghada al-Samman, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamida al-Na‘na‘, Hoda Barakat, Samar Yazbek, and Salwa al-Neimi. Exploring the journeys in time and space undertaken by these women, Anxiety of Erasure shines a light on the ways in which writers remain participants in their homelands’ intellectual lives, asserting both the traumatic and the triumphant aspects of diaspora. The result is a nuanced Arab women’s poetic that celebrates rootlessness and rootedness, autonomy and belonging.

Taking Back God

Taking Back God PDF Author: Leora Tanenbaum
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9781429958790
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In Taking Back God Leora Tanenbaum recounts the stories of women across the United States, starting with herself, who love their religion but hate their second-class status within it. If you've witnessed the preferential treatment of men in America's houses of worship, you will not be surprised to learn that there is a surge of women in this country rising up and demanding religious equality. More and more, religious women—Christian, Muslim, and Jewish—are declaring that they expect to be treated as equals in the religious sphere. They want the same meaningful spiritual connections enjoyed by their brothers, fathers, husbands, and sons. They embrace the word of God but are critical of their faith's male-oriented theology and liturgy. They reject the conventional interpretations of religious traditions that give women a different—and, to their minds, lesser—status. Rather than abandoning their faith, they are taking it back and making it stronger, transforming religion while maintaining tradition. Tanenbaum relates the experiences of Catholics, evangelical and mainline Protestants, Muslims, and observant Jews. The conflict they face—honoring tradition while expanding it to synchronize with modern values—is ultimately one that all people of faith grapple with today.

Poppy's Best Paper

Poppy's Best Paper PDF Author: Susan Eaddy
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
ISBN: 1430130504
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
Poppy J. Thistleberry decides she wants to be a writer, but she is struggling to come up with material for her class writing assignments. She is also annoyed when her best friend's papers are chosen by the teacher to read aloud.

A Quiet Revolution

A Quiet Revolution PDF Author: Leila Ahmed
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300175051
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
A probing study of the veil's recent return—from one of the world's foremost authorities on Muslim women—that reaches surprising conclusions about contemporary Islam's place in the West todayIn Cairo in the 1940s, Leila Ahmed was raised by a generation of women who never dressed in the veils and headscarves their mothers and grandmothers had worn. To them, these coverings seemed irrelevant to both modern life and Islamic piety. Today, however, the majority of Muslim women throughout the Islamic world again wear the veil. Why, Ahmed asks, did this change take root so swiftly, and what does this shift mean for women, Islam, and the West?When she began her study, Ahmed assumed that the veil's return indicated a backward step for Muslim women worldwide. What she discovered, however, in the stories of British colonial officials, young Muslim feminists, Arab nationalists, pious Islamic daughters, American Muslim immigrants, violent jihadists, and peaceful Islamic activists, confounded her expectations. Ahmed observed that Islamism, with its commitments to activism in the service of the poor and in pursuit of social justice, is the strain of Islam most easily and naturally merging with western democracies' own tradition of activism in the cause of justice and social change. It is often Islamists, even more than secular Muslims, who are at the forefront of such contemporary activist struggles as civil rights and women's rights. Ahmed's surprising conclusions represent a near reversal of her thinking on this topic.Richly insightful, intricately drawn, and passionately argued, this absorbing story of the veil's resurgence, from Egypt through Saudi Arabia and into the West, suggests a dramatically new portrait of contemporary Islam.