‘Floating in painful limbo, I belong to no one,” writes British-Palestinian doctoral student NS Nuseibeh in her first book of essays. She uses memories, historical research and stories from early Islam to reflect on her identity and on what it means to be a Muslim feminist in these turbulent and sorrowful times. Born in East Jerusalem, Nuseibeh doesn’t fit cliched expectations of a Palestinian Muslim. She has light skin and an American accent, and studied the Qur’an at university, not in a mosque. In moments of doubt and insecurity, she searches for connection with her indomitable ancestor and namesake, Nusayba, a mythic warrior, mother and early convert who fought alongside the prophet Muhammad. Nusayba is an enthralling conduit into her family’s cultural heritage and “easy for me to imagine, as I sit curled up here on my bed, in a slightly cold room in Oxford, thirteen hundred or so years later: a stout, muscled woman atop a horse, licking sweat from her lips as she strings a bow one-handed”.
Nuseibeh and Nusayba may share a name, but their other similarities are buried under a layer of stark contrasts. Nusayba rides screaming into battle, loses a hand and carries on undeterred. Nuseibeh is “studious and apologetic” and starts her book by stating her “positionality”. Nusayba is full of hunger and rage. She plunges into her new faith and demands a role in it. Nuseibeh is a thoughtful academic who struggles with her health and finds in modern discourse “very little room for the Muslimness I embody … [a] neutral, secular connection to religion I see Christian and Jewish friends and writers wearing easily … without being labelled ‘religious’, let alone fanatical or extreme”.
In these ways, Nuseibeh is very much like me, and similarly prone to asking troublesome questions. She confesses to mistrusting a group of white men, converts, proselytising for orthodox Islam on the street in Oxford. “What about Islam has attracted you?” she wonders, asking herself “whether they find in this particular community an easy way to control women and feel somehow righteous in doing so”.
Though she is quick to label this thought unfair, problematic, her confession delights me. Her fiery foremother, whose allure is becoming clearer now, wouldn’t have shied away from such a suspicion. Nusayba symbolises a “yearning for an organic, unencumbered Muslim and Arab feminism”. And yet, as a fellow secular daughter of Muslims (that’s my positionality for you), I find myself sceptical. I don’t believe that any of the Abrahamic texts are compatible with feminism. But I believe in keeping in touch with one’s cultural heritage and community history, and I too find Nusayba exciting.
These essays make remarkable connections, braiding surprising, disparate aspects of womanhood: homecooked food as a gentle way to present Arabness and disordered eating as the negation of need. The somatisation of worry and our fathers’ worry beads. The anger of “nasty” women. Conversion (even to feminism!) not as epiphany but as a gradual way of becoming “more authentic versions of who we were before”. Why a good mother might send her children into battle, and why she might be demonised for doing so. As a girl who was forced to wear hijab for three years, I was surprised by the link between covering up and traditions of hospitality, and the idea that boundaries at the level of the body might come as a welcome relief when the boundaries of the home were so porous. It’s ironic, Nuseibeh writes, that now “a cloth designed to create privacy brings with it so much exposure”.
The most moving aspect of the essay collection is Nuseibeh’s motivation in writing it – she wants so much to belong, and to show a string of mothers that she understands them. “I am born of my community,” she writes, “and I want to be a dutiful daughter.” She tells a mortifying story about an incident in Specsavers when she hesitates over pronouncing a Muslim technician’s name, only to emphasise the Arabic sounds so much she comes off as “insane, or racist”. The young woman raises an eyebrow at her colleagues. “I wanted to reassure her frantically. You have my great-aunt’s name! … I’m one of you!” Later, she wants to blurt out similar apologies to non-Muslims, fearing that her interest in her heritage will send people running to the Prevent hotline. “I’m not the kind of Muslim you’re thinking of! … I’m the good kind, I swear!”
Was early Islam sexist and violent? Nuseibeh answers with grace and sober intelligence, but are these fair questions? Early Christianity was sexist and violent. Early Judaism was sexist and violent. Everyone else is allowed a modern secular version of their faith. Christian feminists don’t answer for the crusades. And yet Nuseibeh makes room for a familiar shame, one shared by many Middle Eastern people: the treatment of women in the Muslim world. “Had Nusayba lived another two hundred or so years, she would have seen [her] faith … turned into an institution that is strictly segregationist and deeply misogynistic. She would have been more than disappointed. She would have been ashamed.”
Searching and honest, these essays carry the reader from New York dinner parties to seventh-century battlefields to Jerusalem checkpoints and down the alleyways of a shrewd and compassionate mind. As she trails Nusayba, the academic in her recedes and you can hear a girlish heart racing, her belief in her own courage blossoming. This subtext is what makes Namesake a pleasure to read: the shy, people-pleasing scholar behind all that incisive research diving headfirst into old myths as if trying to resurrect her redoubtable foremother. Will she find belonging and a connection to her ancestors? Will she ever return to Gaza or get flagged by Prevent? Will she stop worrying, make peace with overstaying houseguests and English aubergines? Will she be allowed to introduce herself as Arab and feminist without having to reject her Muslim history? At once vulnerable and intellectually rigorous, here is an illuminating and trenchant exploration of Muslim feminism (a term I understand better now, though I still have a lot of arguing left in me). An essential read in the war against lazy stereotypes, cultural annihilation and every form of apartheid.
• Dina Nayeri is the author of The Ungrateful Refugee and Who Gets Believed?. Namesake by NS Nuseibeh is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
