Love, InshAllah and the power of possibility

#40days40books entry 26

Love, InshAllah is a collection of stories by American Muslim Women talking about love and their love lives. The book and website are a wealth of wonderful writing about every aspect of loving relationships.

Here are stories of lost and found love, unexpected love, unrequited love, that one guy who was a terrible idea but oh well love - all of it. The women are from all over the country and world and their stories are in no way same from one to the next. They share labels and it is in the context of those labels that this collection finds its connections. It is well edited, well organized and engaging.

A bunch of us got together in the fall of 2014 to start a book club called Feminists in Love, in which we read about loving relationships and feminism and talk about how it all fits together in narratives, rhetoric and our own lives. It's been challenging, building, and transformative. This book was the first anthology that we read. It's been a bit since we all chatted about it, but a thing that I remember noting is that while many of us are well-read and progressive, none of us had read so many different Muslim voices before (Representation Matters!).

I'd learned about the website (which is wonderful and which should be required reading at least once a week) from the podcast Good Muslim Bad Muslim with Taz Ahmed and Zara Noorbakhsh (both are anthologized in this book). The podcast is produced monthly and is incredible and everyone should listen to it.

Love stories are important. Not the force fed ones with terrible gender politics and classism and racism, etc. and ad stupididem. The ones that we tell each other about our own lives - how many of us know the stories of how our parents met, how Stephen Colbert met his wife, that one time when you just stopped breathing because someone walked in the room. We fall in love. We love our friends. We love our families. We love our cities and our gardens and the furry/feathered ones who live in our houses. Love is daily. We tell its stories because it is our stories.

This collection reminded me.

#40days40books list