A Poem For A Muslim Identity Crisis

For when you’re Muslim but the world doesn’t understand that

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I couldn’t help but grin like an idiot reading this poem.

I’m currently reading Seeing For Ourselves by Suhaiymah Manzoor Khan and although normally I don’t share snippets until I’ve finished reading, I was dying to share this one with you all!

It’s difficult to express my thoughts coherently yet, but one feeling I’ve had throughout this book is this profound sense of feeling heard and understood. All the emotions and stories Suhaiymah mentioned are ones that most of us British Muslim women have experienced in some shape or form living in the UK – the need to be performative, the need to justify identity, the representation paradox. We feel these feelings, but (speaking for myself) struggle to put those feelings into words and so we eventually find ourselves numbing ourselves to it. Pretending it never existed.

But I’ll stop my review there! I really wanted to share her poem with you because who would’ve thought those letters at the start of all those surahs, the ones we scratch our heads at, would give us comfort in our identity?!

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