My last Reading Lamp column suggested two pieces of excellent fiction that focus on the Islamic culture in Afghanistan, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. This time I’m suggesting two more books full of more insights about that culture in different countries.
Everything Sad Is Untrue captivated me from page one. Though it is called a “novel” and it reads like fiction, it is a true story of author Daniel Nayeri, who was born in Iran and immigrated to Oklahoma as a child of eight with his mother Sima and sister.
Sima has converted to Christianity in Iran. Because there is no freedom of religion there, she was persecuted and tortured by the secret police. When the regime threatened her children with death, she fled with them, living in a refuge camp in Italy for two years before they were granted asylum in the U.S. A church in Edmund, Okla., agrees to sponsor them, and they began life as immigrants there. Daniel’s father, still a Muslim, refuses to come with them.
Daniel, whose Iranian/ Persian name is Khosrou, is the only Persian the kids in his school have ever known, and they treat him with the cruelty that unfamiliarity and prejudice spark in children.
In Iran, Khosrou’s family had been wealthy and prominent. In America they are reduced to penury and lower class status. His mother, a medical doctor in Iran, has no American medical license and can only find menial work to support her children, but she accepts her reduced status with grace.
Khosrou, who is intelligent, much better educated than his Oklahoma counterparts, loving and insightful, suffers feelings of isolation and confusion. He sustains himself emotionally by dwelling in memories of his happy childhood in Iran before the ayatollahs came to power. He comforts himself with dreams of the heroes and heroines of his family and of his rich Persian culture.
Speaking in first person with a pre-teen’s voice, he recounts experiences that are heartbreaking to the reader but seem normal to Khosrou. Because he is so hopeful and kind, he doesn’t interprete his treatment as the cruelty the reader knows it to be.
He says without emotion, “Here in Oklahoma, the kids like to fight me because they know I won’t tell anyone.”
The title Everything Sad Is Untrue reflects the boy’s hope and optimism despite his actual experiences. Courage, resilience and the importance of speaking one’s truth are themes that speak to adult readers despite the book’s classification as a young adult autobiographical novel.
The second book I’m recommending that is based on Islamic culture was also written by a young Muslim — I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot Down by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, co-written with Christian Lamb.
That unwieldy title actually summarizes this autobiography that focuses on an event most of us remember from 2012, the Taliban’s attempted assassination of Malala Yousafzai when the group targets her for advocating for the education of girls in Pakistan.
After a regime change in that country that put the Taliban in power, they issued edicts that ban music, dancing and women being seen in public as detrimental to the Islamic religion. The next ban is against educating women, who are to be “kept in their place.”
At this point Malala’s school closes. As an ardent student, she decides that she must resist the ban and become an advocate for Muslim women’s right to an education. After speaking publically on the subject one day, she is riding a bus home when two Muslim men jump aboard shouting they fire three shots, one each into Malala and two of her friends. One bullet passes through her left eye, out her ear and into her shoulder.
America learned about the shooting when someone filmed Malala being flown out of the country to England for surgery. She remained in England, where she was rehabilitated and continues to advocate for the education of Muslim women.
Her book is the answer to the assassins’ question, “Who is Malala?”
This Islamic attitude toward women’s place and purpose in life makes me wonder about these young female students in America condemning Israel and praising Hamas. I think they’re in love with the “romance” of the so-called Hamas “freedom fighters.” But do they understand what would happen to them in a strict Muslim society? They’d be slapped in a burka with only their eyes showing, padding around the house all day waiting for their man to come and tell them what to do next.
Maybe more of them should cast their reading lamps onto these and other books revealing Islam’s attitude toward freedom.
