Description
Book SynopsisGrowing up in Mogadishu, Somalia, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel was immersed in the language and culture of Italy, Somalia’s former colonizer. Yet when she moved to Italy as a young mother in the 1970s, she discovered a country where immigrants and Muslims were viewed with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion–where, even today, she and her children must seemingly prove they are Italian.
In
Islam and Me, Fazel tells her story and shares the experiences of other Muslim women living in Italy, revealing the wide variety of Muslim identities and the common prejudices they encounter. Looking at Italian school textbooks, newspapers, and TV programs, she invites us to change the way Muslim immigrants, and especially women, are depicted in both news reports and scholarly research.
Islam and Me is a meditation on our multireligious, multiethnic, and multilingual reality, as well as an exploration of how we might reimagine national culture and identity so that they become more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist.
Trade Review“In this thought-provoking reflection on belonging, Fazel and Brioni make a powerful argument against damaging Eurocentric representations while demonstrating the generative anti-racist capacity of collaborative knowledge.”— Heather Merrill, author of Black Spaces: African Diaspora in Italy
“Poetic and autobiographical,
Islam and Me examines the intersection of media, memory, and language while questioning traditional models of knowledge. As a Muslim woman in one of the world’s most distinctively Catholic countries, Fazel advocates for transnational belonging, and her witness is for everyone working towards more equitable societies today.”— Marie Orton, coeditor of Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives
"Shirin Ramzanali Fazel narrates the daily life of diasporic Islam in Europe with deep lucidity and courage. This book shows that Islam has become the religion of European citizens, not just immigrants, and that diasporic Islam is a major test for European constitutional democracy." — Amara Lakhous, author of Divorce Islamic Style
“Deftly blending self-reflection with critical analysis, Fazel and Brioni convincingly challenge the distorted representation of Islam in Europe by offering complex, unapologetic insights into Fazel’s lived experiences as a Somali-Italian Muslim woman.”— Maya Angela Smith, author of Senegal Abroad: Linguistic Borders, Racial Formations, and Diasporic Imaginaries
Table of ContentsForeword
Charles Burdett
An Introduction to a Meticcio Text
Simone Brioni
Note on Translation and Alphabetization
Shirin Ramzanali Fazel and Simone Brioni
Dear Italy
My Daily Islam
Birmingham
Islamophobia
Contradictions
A Dialogue on Memory, Perspectives, Belonging, Language, and the Cultural Market
Simone Brioni and Shirin Ramzanali Fazel
Coda: A Note about This Collaborative Project
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Notes on Contributors
