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She often wondered how many people felt this way, spellbound by words, wishing to be tucked inside a book and forgotten there.
“Boys are a handful, going and coming as they please. They’re not like girls. You can’t control them.”
A man is the only way up in this world, even though he’ll climb a woman’s back to get there.
Palestine or America. A woman will always be alone.
listening to Eminem’s words, knowing that somewhere out there was another person who felt trapped by the confines of his world—comforted by the fact that you didn’t have to be a woman or even an immigrant to understand what it felt like to not belong.
“Especially in this country,” said one of them. “The boys are twice as needed and the girls are twice as hard to raise.”
God help any woman who has to raise a daughter in America.”
“What’s the point of marrying off our sons if we are going to help their wives? The point is to lessen our burdens, not add to them.”
Even the Qur’an said that girls were a blessing, a gift. Lately she had been reciting the verse in her prayers. Daughters are a means to salvation and a path to Paradise.
“Forget all this American nonsense about love and respect,” Fareeda said to Omar now, turning to make sure Isra was setting the table. “You need to make sure our culture survives, and that means teaching a woman her place.”
“You know what your problem is?” Sarah said. “What’s that?” “You stopped reading.”
“It’s not strange at all,” Sarah said. “It’s the loneliest people who love books the most.”
Everything we draw into our life is a mirror of our thought patterns and beliefs. In a way, we can control the outcome of our future just by thinking more positively and visualizing only the things we want for ourselves.
Aladdin was adapted from A Thousand and One Nights,
What could she say? That her books had finally taught her the truth: love was not something a man could give you, and she didn’t want her daughters thinking it was?
She knew she had to teach them how to love themselves, that this was the only way they had a chance at happiness. Only she didn’t see how she could when the world pressed shame into women like pillows into their faces.
“They said no,” Fareeda said when she’d hung up the phone. “No. Just like that.” Sarah looked up from a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale.
“The cruelest thing on this earth is a man’s heart.”
When we accept that heaven lies underneath the feet of a woman, we are more respectful of women everywhere. That is how we are told to treat women in the Qur’an. It’s a powerful verse.”
Do you think you’ll write another novel? I’m writing another one right now. It’s not a sequel, but it’s about the same themes, different characters, with a millennial twist to it. This interview originally appeared in the Chicago Review of Books by Rachel León on March 12, 2019. Used with permission.
