Book Lists

Although this is certainly a book for mothers and daughters struggling with interfaith tensions, it is equally meaningful for mothers and daughters who feel divided by tensions in general. An important work for parents whose adult children have left the family's belief system, it will help those same children as they wrestle to better understand their parents.

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. On Tuesday October 9, 2012, she almost paid the ultimate price.

Living Out Islam documents the rarely-heard voices of Muslims who live in secular democratic countries and who are gay, lesbian, and transgender. It weaves original interviews with Muslim activists into a compelling composite picture which showcases the importance of the solidarity of support groups in the effort to change social relationships and achieve justice. It is about finding ways to live out Islam with dignity and integrity, reconciling their sexuality and gender with their faith and reclaiming Islam as their own.

As Muslims grow in numbers, and as Islam's role in world affairs becomes larger, we've begun to see the breakdown of unity among believers. The misunderstandings and friction between Islamic civilization and the modern West continue, but even within Islam, Iran's clerics are split, militant fundamentalists clash with students from Islamic universities, and moderate Muslim-Americans think nothing like Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia. Islam seems to be at war with itself. Extremist factions whose angry rhetoric currently shapes our fears and prejudices have attempted to co-opt the Islamic faith. In Islam in the Modern World, one of the foremost Islamic scholars in the United States takes that faith back, describing and defending traditional Islam against all critics—without and within the faith.

Omar Saif Ghobash was born in 1971 in the United Arab Emirates--the same year the country was founded--to an Arab father and a Russian mother. After a traumatizing experience losing his father to a violent attack in 1977, when he was only six years old, Ghobash began to realize the severe violence that surrounded him in his home country. As he grew older, eventually being appointed as the UAE Ambassador to Russia in 2008, he began to reflect on what it means to be a Muslim, establishing a moral foundation rooted in the belief of the hard grind that is the crux of spiritual and practical living. This book is the result of the personal exploration Ghobash went through in the years after his father's death.

If the Oceans Were Ink is Carla Power's eye-opening story of how she and her longtime friend Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi found a way to confront ugly stereotypes and persistent misperceptions that were cleaving their communities. Their friendship-between a secular American and a madrasa-trained sheikh-had always seemed unlikely, but now they were frustrated and bewildered by the battles being fought in their names. Both knew that a close look at the Quran would reveal a faith that preached peace and not mass murder; respect for women and not oppression. And so they embarked on a yearlong journey through the controversial text.

Documents the author's conversion from all-American atheist to Islam, a journey marked by her decision to relocate to Cairo, romance with a passionate young Egyptian, and her efforts to balance the virtues of both cultures.

In this book the Muslim leader best known for his contributions to the establishment of an interfaith community center near Manhattan's Ground Zero offers insight into his progressive beliefs and advocacy of tolerance and equal rights. Muslims in America who reject extremist or fundamentalist expressions of Islam at home and abroad feel the urgent need for a voice that can represent them in the current debate about Islam, America, and the West. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the so-called Ground Zero Imam, has become that voice. This is his vision for a new, American Islam.

Imran Ahmad shares his story of life as a Pakistani Muslim growing up in England in this coming-of-age memoir.

Some fourteen hundred years after the Prophet Muhammad first articulated God's law-the shari'a-its earthly interpreters are still arguing about what it means. Hard-liners reduce it to am­putations, veiling, holy war, and stonings. Others say that it is humanity's only guarantee of a just society. And as colossal acts of terrorism made the word "shari'a" more controversial than ever during the past decade, the legal historian and human rights lawyer Sadakat Kadri realized that many people inthe West harbored ideas about Islamic law that were hazy or simply wrong.Heaven on Earthdescribes his journey, through ancient texts and across modern borders, in search of the facts behind the myths.

The decisions that change your life are often the most impulsive ones. Unexpectedly denied a visa to remain in the United States, Qanta Ahmed, a young British Muslim doctor, becomes an outcast in motion. On a whim, she accepts an exciting position in Saudi Arabia. This is not just a new job; this is a chance at adventure in an exotic land she thinks she understands, a place she hopes she will belong. What she discovers is vastly different. The Kingdom is a world apart, a land of unparalleled contrast. She finds rejection and scorn in the places she believed would most embrace her, but also humor, honesty, loyalty and love. And for Qanta, more than anything, it is a land of opportunity. A place where she discovers what it takes for one woman to recreate herself in the land of invisible women.

For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments.

Hugh Pope lived and worked in two dozen countries throughout the region. Following in the footsteps of Sir Richard Burton and Lawrence of Arabia, Hugh Pope's explorations of the people, politics, religion, and culture of Islamic nations shows there is no such thing as a monolithic 'Muslim World'.

The story of a young couple willing to risk everything for love that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women's rights in the Muslim world. Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor. They are still in hiding.

At nine years old, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh watched from her home in New Jersey as two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That same year, she heard her first racial slur. At age eleven, when the United States began their invasion in Iraq and the television was flooded with anti-Muslim commentary, Amani felt overwhelmed with feelings of intense alienation from American society. At thirteen, her family took a trip to her father's native homeland of Jordan, and Amani experienced firsthand a culture built on the true peaceful nature of Islam in its purest form, not the Islamic stereotypes she heard on the news. Inspired by her trip, and after years of feeling like her voice as a Muslim woman was marginalized and neglected by Western media during a time when all it could talk about was, ironically, Muslim women, Amani created a website called Muslim Girl. As the editor in chief, she put together a team of Muslim women and started a life dedicated to activism.

In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father's glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since.

Acts of Faithis a remarkable account of growing up Muslim in America and coming to believe in religious pluralism, from one of the most prominent faith leaders in the United States. Eboo Patel’s story is a hopeful and moving testament to the power and passion of young people-and of the world-changing potential of an interfaith youth movement.

The inextricable embedment of religion in Muslim culture has forced a new generation of non-believing Muslims to face the heavy costs of abandoning their parents' religion: disowned by their families, marginalized from their communities, imprisoned, or even sentenced to death by their governments. Struggling to reconcile the Muslim society he was living in as a scientist and physician and the religion he was being raised in, Ali A. Rizvi eventually loses his faith. Discovering that he is not alone in his beliefs, he moves to North America and promises to use his new freedom of speech to represent the voices that are usually quashed before reaching the mainstream media--the Atheist Muslim.

In striking, virtuoso graphic style that captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervor of political idealism, Riad Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France, Gaddafi's Libya, and Assad's Syria--but always under the roof of his father, a Syrian Pan-Arabist who drags his family along in his pursuit of grandiose dreams for the Arab nation.

Relates the life experiences, from birth to beginning boarding school, of a boy growing up on a rubber plantation in rural Malaysia.

Kamala Khan is an ordinary girl from Jersey City -- until she's suddenly empowered with extraordinary gifts. But who truly is the new Ms. Marvel? Teenager? Muslim? Inhuman? Find out as she takes the Marvel Universe by storm! When Kamala discovers the dangers of her newfound powers, she unlocks a secret behind them, as well. Is Kamala ready to wield these immense new gifts? Or will the weight of the legacy before her be too much to bear?

The great-granddaughter of Iran's last emperor and the daughter of ardent Marxists describes growing up in Tehran in a country plagued by political upheaval and vast contraditions between public and private life.

Scarlett, a sixteen-year-old private detective in the fictional city of Las Almas, finds herself at the center of a mysterious case--involving ancient curses, priceless artifacts, and jinn--as she discovers that her own family secrets may have more to do with the situation than she thinks.

Fifteen-year-old Janna Yusuf, a Flannery O'Connor-obsessed book nerd and the daughter of the only divorced mother at their mosque, tries to make sense of the events that follow when her best friend's cousin--a holy star in the Muslim community--attempts to assault her at the end of sophomore year.

Naila's vacation to visit relatives in Pakistan turns into a nightmare when she discovers her parents want to force her to marry a man she's never met.

Laia is a Scholar living under the iron-fisted rule of the Martial Empire. When her brother is arrested for treason, Laia goes undercover as a slave at the empire's greatest military academy in exchange for assistance from rebel Scholars who claim that they will help to save her brother from execution.