My life in books

If You Could Be Mine, the debut novel by Iranian-American writer Sara Farizan, is that very important thing, a story for young adults about queer and trans characters in non-Western cultures. Set in modern Iran, the novel explores a variety of aspects of queer and trans life under the ayatollahs, where same-sex attraction can lead to death, but being transgender is considered a medical problem and gender confirmation surgery is paid for by the state - though trans folk do experience discrimination in many areas of life.

The main character is Sahar, a young woman from an impoverished branch of a wealthy family. She is serious, studious, takes care of her father who is emotionally adrift after the death of his wife, is studying hard for the entrance exams to get into the best university in Tehran so she can become a doctor. She is also in love with Nazrin, who’s been her best friend since childhood. Nazrin the pretty, somewhat vain, and to my mind rather selfish and shallow daughter of a wealthy family. She says she loves Sahar, and they share modest physical intimacies, but she has accepted the marriage proposal of Reza, a young and ambitious doctor favoured by her family, and she expects that Sabar will continue being her devoted lover even after she marries Reza - in short, she wants the best of both worlds without thinking about Sabar’s feelings or future.

Sabar in determined to prevent the marriage snd find a way that she and Nazrin can be together. After meeting Parveen, a trans woman who is a friend of her wealthy cousin Ali, who is gay and, thanks to his wealth and ability to bribe the police, able to live almost openly as gay, Sabar hits upon the idea of transitioning to male in order to marry Nazrin herself.

As Sahar explores the options for transgender people in Iran, all the while knowing that, unlike Parveen and the other trans men and women she meets, she is not really transgender, the day for Nazrin’s wedding grows closer and Sahar becomes more desperate to find a way to be with Nazrin. Yet at the same time, she begins to see that while Nazrin may love her, she also wants the security and conventionality of a family, a professional, financially well-off husband, and children, things that Sahar cannot give her now.

This is no fairy-tale romance. It ends honestly, with no one getting everything they want, but everyone a little wiser and more self-aware. The story drags at times, but is strong enough to hold the reader’s interest. The writing has many of the flaws of an inexperienced writer, but that is something that time will rectify. And the light it casts on queer and trans issues in Iran is truly interesting.

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, the founder of MuslimGirl.com, a prominent website created by and for Muslim women, has written a memoir about growing up as an American-born Muslim, the daughter of refugees from Jordan and Palestine, in a post 9/11 world. It’s an account that’s both deeply saddening and angering, and a celebration of the determination of a young woman to survive despite the violence and hatred directed toward all Muslims because of the actions of a radical minority.

The wave of Islamophobia that swept the West following the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001 were perhaps to be expected. Racism is always close to the surface in the West, and one of the characteristics of racism is that whatever wrong may be done by one member of a racialised group is held to be a general fault of all, while any good is seen as the act of an exceptional person, someone who ‘isn’t like the others.’ Before 9/11, racism against the peoples of the Middle East had been muted - they certainly weren’t white, with all the privilege that entails, and the stereotypes were many and varied, but they had not been actively criminalised, the way black people in North America had. 9/11 changed all that. Suddenly, the image of the Muslim from the Middle East became that of a fanatical terrorist, bent on committing violence against all white nations and their citizens.

Al-Khatahtbeh was only a child when this change happened around her. With the exception of a brief period when her father attempted to move the family to a place of greater safety, returning to the US after a health crisis which nearly killed her mother, Al-Khatahtbeh grew up in a hostile environment where her sense of her self as a Muslim, as a child of immigrants and refugees, sometimes her very right to exist was challenged.

She writes movingly about the effects of this constant devaluation of herself, about the sense of inferiority that overwhelmed her, making it almost impossible for her to speak up for herself or even ask for her due. At times, she even denied her Identity as a Muslim to avoid the response of those around her.

It was in part the time spent among her cousins, attending a Jordanian school and living among fellow Muslims who might idolise the US in some ways, but had not had to face the consequences of being a young Muslim in an Islamophobic society, learning about the history of Islam, that helped her reaffirm her pride in her religion, not just as a personal choice, but as a part of her identity, that helped bring her to the decision, as an adolescent, to make that identity visible by wearing the hijab. She writes about the symbolism of the hijab:

“With that decision, I inherited the entire history to which the hijab has been tied, and carried it on my head like an issue for public debate.

Throughout time, the headscarf has evolved to symbolize autonomy and control over Muslim women’s bodies. An empowering rejection of the male gaze, colonialism, and anti-Muslim sentiment, it can just as easily be twisted into a disempowering tool of subjugation and repression through its forced imposition. In any given time period, the headscarf would be at the center of a tug-of-war between people and their governments, between colonizers and colonized people. During the French colonization of North Africa, the veil became an object of extreme sexualization, with white men writing literature fantasizing about ripping the scarf off sexy Arab women’s heads—an act that became, in their minds, the most gratifying assertion of power. Edward Said taught us of the orientalized depiction of Middle Eastern women as seductresses hidden behind fictionalized harems—forbidden spaces kept for women only—that were a figment of the white man’s imagination, an imagery that colonizers would stage for postcards to send back home to Europe. Today, some governments are just as eager to mandate its wear in public as others are to forbid it. 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. Iran’s honor police enforce that all women wear a headscarf in public, while today’s French laws forbid the veil in public schools. 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. Sexism has been employed in many ways throughout history to uphold racism.”

Al-Khatahtbeh began developing the Muslim Girl web presence with some friends while still in high school, spurred by the lack of media representation and Internet presence of young Muslim women. Though she would work for several mainstream media outlets after university, Muslim Girl became a larger presence in her life and she began to be sought out for the Muslim women’s perspective. The latter part of the book is as much a critique of the representation of Muslims in the media, and the ways that has affected the lives of Muslim men and women in America as it is a personal memoir. She writes about the narratives of terrorism, violence, barbarism, and gender inequality that have dominated the public images of Islamic peoples in America and around the world. She talks openly about being afraid, at times, to go out in public as a hijabi. She writes about the ways in which the Trump campaign - the book was written before the election, although it’s clear that she expected he would win - aggravated the situation, inciting a new level of violence against Muslims.

“Trump discovered that milking anti-Muslim sentiment, with complete disregard to the dangers it poses to our very lives, keeps him in the spotlight and gets him more airtime. Since his ascension to the national stage, I have been receiving press requests around the clock during his media circuses to explain, again and again, “the current climate for Muslim women.” By the time the ­Muslim-ban comments came, I had run out of different palatable ways to say, “Our lives are under threat right now”—ironically, not from ISIS extremism or the brown men that our society is raising pitch forks against, but from our own Western society itself.”

But there have also been breakthroughs, and Al-Khatahtbeh, through her work with Muslim Girls and her activism a a voice for Muslim women has been a part of these. She ends this memoir, which contains much of her pain and fear, and that of other Muslims in an Islamophobic world, with an acknowledgement of all this, and with hope.

“I think of the little girls we were and the little girls we could have been, and the little girls who never were and what little girls will be if we have anything to say about it. I think of how our generation is a fateful one. We were the little girls who had our voices robbed of us. We were the little girls who had our bodies and our homelands ripped apart while our hands were tied behind our backs. We were the little girls who were told to sit down and shut up while our world betrayed us. We are rising up—we are the ones reclaiming our voices, the ones talking back, and the ones reminding the world that no, we haven’t forgotten. We grew to become our own saviors.”

Best of Everything is a self-published pdf-only anthology of short stories (some very short) by sff author Ahmed Khan (the collection is available from the author, who can be contacted via his Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ahmedkhanwrites/ - at the time I acquired the pdf, the author was asking a donation of one dollar for the compilation)

Khan has a definite gift for writing stories that challenge expectations - you think they are going somewhere, but they end up someplace quite different. His stories are, generally speaking, fun to read, but his endings - now those can be quite thought-provoking indeed.

I often feel when reading one of his short stories that his style has been heavily influenced by oral story-telling traditions. He’s not one for lush description, or complicated proses. There is a deceptive simplicity to his style, something that often makes me think of his stories as parables, or fables - and yes, his work often carries with it a moral of one kind or another, as parables and fables are wont to do. Sometimes, however, I feel that this tendency to write in parables tends to sidestep the ethical complexities of real life, and present things which are multi-hued as though they must be black or white.

There’s often a touch of dry satirical observation in Khan’s writing, which I find quite delightful. An example:

“Earth people live like animals. Our conquest will be a blessing for them in disguise," said the Commander, as is typical of so many commanders all over the universe.
"How true!" murmured his men, as is typical of commanders' men all over the universe.

Bits of writing like this make me smile, and sometimes even giggle.

Among the stories in this collection that I particularly enjoyed were:

“Close Encounter of the Preposterous Kind,” in which an attack on Earth is foiled by a most unusual saviour. The story combines the tropes of two very different genres of speculative fiction to produce an unexpected ending in a way that strikes me as quintessential Khan.

“Face It” is a science fictional in-joke - but it’s also a comment on rushing into things you know little about. A plastic surgeon convinces a man disfigured in an accident to participate in an experiment to test the premise of physiognomy - with a result that will leave every long-term science fiction fan nodding in recognition.

“Knock, Knock” is perhaps my favourite of the stories collected here. Khan notes that the piece is inspired by the work of Urdu novellist Qurratulain Hyder - and after reading this piece, and reading about her on the Net, I’m going to have to see if I can locate any of her works in translation. It is, I think, a definitely non-western story in its approach. Deeply lyrical, it places importance on the journey rather than the goal, the state of mind more than the specific achievement. It spoke to me in profound ways about the standards we use to assess the value of a life.

“Mynah for the King” is a teaching parable of leadership and governance - but though it speaks about what kinds of things should inform the policies of a ruler, it is also applicable to the ways in which we make our own decisions, reminding us that wisdom and creativity can be better guides than pragmatism.

“Veils” is a story about a young woman who learns that judging the value of others by their outward appearance and sweet words leads to disappointment, while looking behind the surface to the real feelings and actions can be a much better way to discovering the real value of a person.

Several of the stories here are very short - a paragraph or two at the most, and it is in these that Khan’s playfulness shows most strongly - most notably in “Infringement.” But inherent in the word play are ideas worth thinking about seriously.

A few stories rather missed the mark for me, though. This feeling was strongest in the story, “How To Write a Fantasy,” an otherwise clever piece of metafiction, Khan describes the sole character in the story as “A man-hater of the variety who would like to decimate all the men from the face of the earth and spend the rest of her life making love to machines.” As a feminist who has ben described so many times as a man-hater, and seen so many other feminists described the same way, this shook me right out of the necessary receptive mood. I don’t know if Khan intended this to evoke the idea of a feminist, but it’s such a common insult, and one that many men as well as women would interpret as referring to feminists, that the impact was to turn what might have been an ironic twist into a something that felt like a nasty revenge fantasy.

Two of the stories in this collection would appear to rely rather heavily on the idea that consensual sexual activity outside of marriage is intrinsically wrong - a belief that I do not share, and that made my appreciation of these two stories, “Seventeen” and “The World, The Times, and The Unicorn,” less than complete. However, in both stories, it is possible to engage in a somewhat subtextual interpretation, in which the moral failure is not so much the physical fact of having sex, as it is the reasons and choices leading to it. Read this way, both stories are, in different ways, about choosing the spirit over the world.

In “Seventeen,” a young man meets a girl who seems to him to embody innocence and hope, but after he spends an evening in a casual sexual encounter, he feels unworthy of her affection. I’m not comfortable with the idea that sexual ‘purity’ equals innocence and sexual expression is a loss of innocence. But the choice he makes, can be seen as one of greed, of wanting everything without regard for the feelings of another. In “The World, The Times, and The Unicorn,” a man is offered a choice between great wealth, and a fantastic journey to an alien land. He chooses wealth, but is stymied when, in order to achieve that wealth, he must find a virgin within a specific period of time, and he fails. Here, I choose to read the fault as a choice of materialism over the chance fir new experiences and deeper understandings. When he chooses wealth, he dooms himself to an unfulfillable condition, not because the world has no virtuous women in it to give him what he wants, but because his own greed traps him. I’d like to think that the author would not object to these readings.

Taken all in all, there’s quite a lot to enjoy in this collection, and I’m glad that the author assembled these pieces and made them available.