Tag: books
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The Crescent Directive, Khurram Dara
January 13, 2012
[Muslimah Media Watch] The Crescent Directive was, for me, a fun but perplexing read. The concept is simple and noble: it gives guidelines for American Muslims on how to lay a groundwork for action in our communities in order to improve our image in America.Written by Khurram Dara, the book starts out with looking at how Islam and Muslims have evolved in American discourse since 9/11. He then explains the current situation of the American Muslim community and talks about why certain efforts at understanding have failed up to now or will fail long term. He proceeds to establish some base assumptions and outline a strategy for Muslim Americans to improve their image in a post- 9/11 world. Finally, he outlines a series of recommendations as part of a strategy American Muslims can use to raise our profile and humanize us in our daily lives, and discusses how these recommendations could work. He suggests building relationships with non-Muslims (we don’t?), taking part in secular holidays (more on that below), and denouncing our “common enemy,” terrorism.View Comments -
Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish
January 6, 2012[The Wall Street Journal] Ayad Akhtar’s first stab at writing a novel was a spectacular failure. Friends who read the manuscript, about a poet who does database research at Goldman Sachs, had a uniform response: “Don’t show it to anyone else.” “By the time I got through eight people I said, OK, I’m getting the message,” Mr. Akhtar, a 41-year-old screenwriter and playwright, says. He took their advice and shelved it.
So he wasn’t expecting all the hype surrounding his second attempt, a novel about a Pakistani-American boy growing up in Wisconsin in the 1980s. To his surprise, “American Dervish” was snapped up in the fall of 2010 for a high-six-figure sum by Little, Brown, less than 24 hours after his agent sent it out. It sold to 22 foreign publishers. It’s being released this month in the U.S., Italy, the U.K., India, Australia, New Zealand and Denmark—an unusually broad cluster for a debut novel.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203462304577138582345335176.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
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‘The Secret Love Lives Of American Muslim Women’
January 6, 2012[Huffington Post] By Madeleine Crum
The American perception of Muslim women is sadly narrow: We imagine heavily cloistered beauties, submissive to their male counterparts who, we assume, they married because of an agreement between parents rather than love. To expose readers to the true spectrum of Muslim American dating experiences, Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi compiled “Love, InshAlla: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women,” [$15.95, Soft Skull Press] an anthology of romantic relationships, gay and straight, arranged and spontaneous, monogamous and not.
In this telling excerpt, “The Birds, the Bees, and My Hole,” Zahra Noorbakhsh rehashes her mother’s brusque sex talk and how it changed the way she perceived her male friends:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/05/muslim-women-dating_n_1184355.html
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