Lujain’s Comments (group member since Nov 03, 2018)

Lujain’s comments from the Our Shared Shelf group.

I always try to be self-conscious about not stereotyping refugees into only victims, yet the effect of the Media and how they portray refugees as victims with no agency is so strong that I sometimes find myself falling into that mistake. Reading Solito Solita opened my eyes to how different the experiences of refugees are. While some of them suffered a traumatic childhood, many of them had happy homes as children.
What's your biggest takeaway from reading the books?

I tried to read more than one book at the same time before but I found it quite hard. If I'm reading a book and I have to read another one for any reason I usually pause the book I'm reading and come back to it when I'm finished with the other one. I think the reason is that I get too emotionally connected to books that I like to fully live the story and characters for a period of time and then move on to a new one.
But I think some suggestions here are brilliant so I'll definitely try some of these techniques!

Hi Katie! Mezzaterra gave such a strong political insight on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. If you're looking to read a novel about the Palestinian conflict i suggest checking "Mornings in Jenin" by Susan Abulhwa. It's not so much political, but it tells a story of a Palestinian family in a heart wrenching way.

I didn't go through all the pieces, but so far my favorites are Mazzaterra by Ahdaf Soueif and Us by Chimene Suleyman.

Hi! I’m Lujain, a Sudanese/Muslim woman currently residing in Ireland. I moved to Ireland last year to study Gender Studies. I recently joined Our Shared Shelf as a Moderator and I’m looking forward to all the enriching and mind-opening discussions we will have. Having experienced being a Muslim woman living in a western society, I was able to relate to many of the pieces in “The Things I Would Tell You”.

Chimene Suleyman piece “US” was able to capture unjustifiable islamophobia in a short story of only four pages! It left me in tears, because it’s something that I have experienced, maybe not in the same intensity but it still left its mark on me. She brilliantly captured the ‘us and them’ dichotomy, and how this dichotomy only works to widen and exaggerate the differences instead of finding a common ground, or what Ahdaf Soueif calls ‘Mezzaterra’. The ‘us and them’ dichotomy creates those who belong in space and others who are invading it, and ofcourse ‘our’ space needs to be protected from ‘them’ invaders. That’s where Islamophobia, racism and other types of prejudice are created.

The ideology of Muslims being “guilty until proven innocent” puts so much pressure and limitations on women living in western societies. And I say Muslim women because I believe women might encounter Islamophobic acts more than men, specially women who choose to wear Hijab because they become ‘visibly Muslim’. These encounters create limitations for women and adds another layer of discrimination and oppression against them.

For me, being visibly Muslim makes me feel responsible of proving that not all Muslims are terrorists, not all Muslim women are oppressed, and that my Hijab isn’t a sign of oppression but rather empowerment for me.

This is highly due to the misrepresentation of Islam and Muslims that Ahdaf Soueif talks about in her strong piece “Mezzaterra”. She talks about the identification of Islam as the enemy in the western media, and the identification of Muslims as passive people who need to be saved from themselves. These identifications play a huge role in creating a public prejudice against Muslim people in western societies. While reading Mezzaterra I remembered a great talk by Chimamanda Ngozi titled “The danger of the single story” which talks about how it’s dangerous to have a single story created by the media, and how people should claim back their narratives.

On the other hand Triska Hamid highlighted a very important issue in “Islamic Tinder”, which is how men feel intimidated by women who are more educated or occupy higher jobs than them. But i found her categorization of Muslim men as “losers who want their mums to find them a wife, or idiots who spend their time sleeping with white women before marrying someone from the village in the mother country” to be an unfair generalization and a description that would work on recreating negative stereotypes about Muslim men, these stereotypes automatically translate into stereotypes about Muslim women and their oppression. For me the issue of men being intimidated by strong women is a global problem and not only related to Muslim men.


Overall I really appreciated the diversity of the book and the different topics it tackled beautifully.


Which piece resonated with you the most? And what thoughts do you have about it?

Thank you so much! I honestly can't wait for all the amazing discussions we'll have :)