Centering relational-meaning making and self-understanding

Abstract

The Muslim woman who writes about Muslim women is never fully able to write away from the voyeuristic gaze fixated on saving, pitying, or vilifying the Muslim girl/woman. If one documents Muslim women’s advocacy, then they risk reifying the trope of the brave/liberated Muslim woman (subtext: liberated from the barbaric Muslim man and misogynistic religion); if one documents instances of how Muslim women navigate patriarchy in their lives, then one can prop-up notions of Muslim woman as victim. While this bind is not unique to Muslim women, scholarship on Muslim women and girls within the field of education often falls into the deeplydug ditches of dehumanizing narratives. Stories We Live and Grow By: (Re)telling Our Experiences as Muslim Mothers and Daughters by Muna Saleh is one such exception. Instead of starting her book with the sociopolitical context of Islamophobia (which is often done in studies of Muslims in the West), Saleh begins her book with memories of her childhood home and, in particular, reflection on the trees that were planted and grew around her. Through this recollection, Saleh sets the tone of an introspective work weaving between memory, transcripts, poetry, and process/analysis. It is clear from the first chapter that this text is not written as a response to anti-Muslim sentiment or as a plea for the reader to humanize the Muslim subject. Instead, Saleh centers her wonderings from a desire for greater self and communal understanding. Using the flourishing of trees as a primary metaphor, Saleh describes stories as the nurturing of soil, allowing shape and growth for the metaphoric trees. She reflects on the ways in which intergenerational stories inhabit the self while also wondering how others who share her subjectposition live within their own stories. She explores this wondering by engaging three pairs of Muslim mothers and daughters whom she terms her “co-inquirers.” Through multiple sessions of story-telling, Saleh grows a close bond with her co-inquirers in which the stories that are retold are done so relationally.