Muslim Girl Quotes

“My Islamic faith taught me that if you can’t change something with your hands, change it with your tongue, and if you can’t change it with your tongue, then desire to change it in your heart.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“It’s funny how, in our patriarchal world, even two entities at the opposite ends of the spectrum can be bonded by their treatment of women’s bodies.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“In all cases, any decision to intervene in how a woman dresses, whether to take it off or put it on, is just the same assertion of public control over a woman’s body.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“When all the public eye sees are headscarves instead of individual stories, our community is collectively tokenized. It creates the perception that opportunity is limited and only a rare few of us can make it. Whenever that happens to an already marginalized community, it pits its own members in a competition against one another instead of against the restrictive frameworks that put us in that position in the first place. The first hijabi whatever won't eliminate Islamophobia just as the first black president hasn't eliminated racism, though both are signifiers of some type of progress — symbols of ascending beyond adversity.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story

“I started to see the bigger picture of things: Islam was not relegated to the tiny, sometimes frustrating and seemingly arbitrary details of practice, but rather entered the larger picture of spirituality and worship that contextualized my womanhood. In order to be able to derive these logical conclusions about my religion, I had to go back to the basics and understand the very fundamental principles upon which it was founded: justice, social equality, racial equality, financial equality, and, possibly most important of all, gender equality. Thus began my lifelong love affair with Islamic feminism.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story

“The theft of brown women's narratives is not only an injustice placed on them, but also one extended to their male counterparts; by insisting they need to be liberated from their 'barbaric' civilization, Laura [Bush] summoned the colonial assertion that brown women need saving from brown men, when, in actuality, brown women have suffered at the hands of white men more than at those of any other oppressor in history.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story

“It makes me sad to think about all the resources the Muslim American community has been forced to waste for the past decade on campaigns, events, and media efforts to prove that we, too, are American; that w, too, are human, begging and pleading the public to not believe the racist rhetoric being spewed about us. I can't imagine the types of institutions, programs, and civic society we could have cultivated for our community—the type of backbone we could have had the opportunity to grow—had we not been forced into this position.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story

“We can never speak on their behalf or have our single stories represent their struggles, but what we can do is attempt to use our privileges to make radical change.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“Sexism has been employed in many ways throughout history to uphold racism.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“It is mentally emotionally and physically exhausting to have to have to assert your Humanity time and time again”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story

“I hope she knows my pain is genuine, I thought. I hope she doesn't doubt that a Muslim American can be impacted by 9/11, too. The truth is that 9/11 never ended for us.”
― amani al-khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story

“My Islamic faith taught me that if you can't change something with your hands, change it with your tongue, and if you can't change it with your tongue then desire to change it in your heart.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story

“Listening to my tutor tell me the story (of Khalid ibn al-Walid at the Battle of Mu'tah), I was overwhelmed with such pride in my history that I decided in that moment that I wanted to wear a headscarf, as a public marker that I belonged to this people. I wanted it to be so that before people even knew my name, the first thing that they would know about me is that I am a Muslim. I told myself that upon my return to the States, I would wear the headscarf with pride as my outward rebellion against the Islamophobia that had seized me and suffocated me for most of my life. With that decision, I inherited the entire history to which the hijab had been tied, and carried it on my head like an issue for public debate.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story

“Because our racist society is quick to view minorities as monoliths, and because our sexist society is quick to reduce women to the attire they wear, Muslim women who wear headscarves have undoubtedly become the involuntary representatives of an entire religion. Following the irrational logic according to which Muslims are judged (i.e., if one Muslim commits terrorism, then all Muslims are terrorists), every action that a visibly identifiable Muslim woman takes in public is immediately attributed to our religion as a whole. In this way, we exist in the public sphere in a perpetual state of constant awareness and consciousness of the outward eye. Our actions are constantly manipulated, negotiated, and limited to serve that purpose—another manifestation of the oppression we suffer from Western society. We are on the front lines of Islamophobia. Physical assault, hate crimes, and harassment against us are not only attacks upon us as individuals, but attacks on Islam itself. Like lightning rods, we attract and bear the brunt of the hateful attitudes, rhetoric, and media frenzies prompted by Islamophobia.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“I feel that the horrible scapegoating we’ve had to endure has forced us into a corner of defensiveness, dissipating our energy in this endless game of pushing back against the misconceptions that ultimately victimize us. Imperialism behaves in this way not only out of sheer contempt for peoples different than its own, but also in a deliberate effort to prevent these groups from building themselves up. It makes me sad to think about all the resources the Muslim American community has been forced to waste for the past decade on campaigns, events, and media efforts to prove that we, too, are American; that we, too, are human, begging and pleading the public to not believe the racist rhetoric being spewed about us.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“Especially post-9/11, double consciousness manifested itself in the evolution of Muslim American engagement. Under microscopic scrutiny for terrorism and the collective expectation for us to constantly denounce, apologize, and take responsibility for the individual actions of extremists, we have severely internalized the public perception—empowered by media misrepresentation—of our communities as being made up of violent and crazy outsiders. As a result, we inadvertently prioritized shifting our image in the eyes of others rather than turning inward and cultivating our survival in this new trek we were forced to embark upon. I don’t blame our community for this.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“It is not an overstatement to say that 9/11, one of the worst attacks on our country in recent memory, for which followers of Islam were generically and collectively blamed, spawned a new age of double consciousness that impacted young American Muslims at a sensitive and vulnerable time in their developing lives.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“My responses of “I’m from New Jersey” are met with “But where are you really from?”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“Similarly, it is this exertion of power over our bodies that motivates TSA patdowns of headscarf wearers at airport security checkpoints. Think about it: We already have to walk through what is pretty much an X-Ray machine that allows you to see straight through our clothes. It is a monstrosity so invasive that, in 2011, there was a public outcry over a TSA whistle-blower’s blog post in which he detailed how agents would ridicule the rolls of fat on passengers’ bodies as the agents watched from their screening rooms.3 Surely the headscarf is not made of some fabric that can defy such a machine, but nonetheless we are always, always, always stopped for an extra patdown, with TSA hands invariably laying claim to our bodies. The search isn’t about security, but rather about hitting us where it hurts. As one TSA agent let slip to me during one of these encounters, “We have to check you if you’re wearing that,” and as another said on a separate occasion, “You’ve traveled with headgear before, right? So you know how this goes.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“In 2015, Chicago police attacked a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf and a face veil, suspicious of the food she was carrying in her purse to break her fast during Ramadan. They ripped the hijab off her head and strip-searched her, on video, which they then later released to the public. This wasn’t just a random act of security. There is a feeling of entitlement to brown women’s bodies, and her strip search—already an exertion of power over women—was compounded not just as an act of sexual humiliation, but also a racial one because of her ostensible religious identity.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“Later, instead of questioning the employee who had slashed our tires, the police who arrived would instead question my father regarding accusations that he wanted to bomb the toy store. The police were used like a weapon against us, as they had been for people of color for a long time. Becoming the scapegoat meant that anyone could hold your identity against you at their will. It became a wound that people could prod and poke to try to bend us at their pleasure.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“I hope she knows my pain is genuine, I thought. I hope she doesn’t doubt that a Muslim American can be this impacted by 9/11, too. The truth is that 9/11 never ended for us.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“Being assailed with the intention of rape or assault is practically mundane.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story

“That’s all it took. I needed to decide that I wanted to be first. That I could be first. That I, too, deserved to be first.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

“The police were used like a weapon against us, as they had been for people of color for a long time.”
― Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age