Description
Fariha Roisin
Google The writer, Fariha Rosen and write a paragraph telling me what you found the most interesting about her.
Then read, “Meet a Muslim” Page 495 (Page numbers will vary)
When you’re done reading the story, write two paragraphs on your thoughts on the story. Tell me how they story made you feel and why? Then answers the following questions below.
1. Who are the characters?
A character can be a person, animal, or other being. Even objects and settings can serve as a
character within a story.
2. What is the setting?
Setting is also important to a story.
A story can have multiple settings, as setting is just where the action is taking place.
However, setting can and should be so much more than just where the action takes place. The
setting can impact the character(s) and plot in some way.
3. What is the plot?
Plot is the story your writing revolves around. It intertwines the sequence of events, the
numerous conflicts, and characters into one cohesive story from start to finish.
Every plot needs a beginning, a middle, a climax, and a resolution. Within that structure,
conflicts and tension build, readers learn about the world, and they experience the story with the
characters.
4.What is the conflict?
Conflict is different than plot, though it feeds back into the plot. In essence, conflict is some kind
of problem the character must solve, and the plot revolves around this conflict.
5. What is the resolution?
A resolution is simple. It’s the action characters take to solve their problem. This might take
place in something as simple as a conversation or as dramatic as a giant battle for the fate of the
world.
Answer questions 1 and 2 only on page 499 (page number may vary)
Now answers the following questions:
Unformatted Attachment Preview
FARIHA RÓISÍN Meet a Muslim
Published in Go Home! (2018), an anthology of memoir, poetry, and stories that deal with
identity and displacement. The collection was edited by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.
MY SISTER PUT ON THE HIJAB when she was twenty years old. I remember the color of her first
scarf—a pale blue green, maybe chiffon, crinkling at the corners of her smiling eyes, enveloping
the circumference of her perfect moon-shaped face. My sister was one of the most beautiful
women I knew growing up. Perhaps challenged, in beauty, only by my own mother. She had
plump lips, pale and pink like the color of figs, but full like plums, always chapped like creases
behind knees in the warm summer heat. She was strong, smart, and terrifying.
I was thirteen when she put on the hijab. Two years after September 11.
The day she put it on we were sitting in her cul-de-sac room. The window overlooked our
pristine blue pool with leaves dredging on the surface from our overarching mango tree,
shedding its leaves with a tranquil languidness. But I did not feel calm. A feeling of dread
panicked through my tiny little body. My stomach lay ill with concern, plummeting through all
the reasons why she shouldn’t do what she was about to do. My heart, emptied out, carved only
by fear, thudded against the cavity of my chest. It was like watching someone about to take a
vow, an oath—a samurai, putting on their armor. I felt scared for her.
Since then, she has explained to me that the hijab is much like armor. It acts as a shield against
the world of men, meaning: by and large the patriarchy—where women are so often disposable.
The hijab acts as a litmus test; it balances the playing field where men are encouraged to take
women seriously not for their beauty, but for their intellect. The best explanation I’ve been given
from my sister is that the hijab is like a second skin. It’s protection from all of the earth’s
defenses and energetic toxicities.
Paragraph 5
The first time I realized I was Muslim, and thus different, was in grade school when I didn’t
know any of the words to the Christian hymns in religion class. I also knew that my religion—
Islam—didn’t have an assigned class dedicated to it. Back then it was considered acceptable for
kids of other faiths to go to Bible Study. I used to think that this was because it bred religious
tolerance, but as I got older I realized it was just out of laziness. Strangely, however, I liked
going to religion class.
My sister was seven years older than me, and went to an all-girls private Catholic school in the
suburbs of Brisbane. She wore a uniform that consisted of a pale yellow shirt and a forest-green
checkered skirt and really ugly earth-brown socks and shoes. Every day, I would pick her up
from school, my father in the front seat of the car waiting. In the interim I’d walk around the
Christ-on-the-cross-laden halls and feel supremely content with my surroundings. Sometimes, if
I was lucky, I’d watch the nuns mulling around the convent on campus, and even talk to Sister
Catherine, my favorite sister—who was particularly zealous and enthusiastic. I developed a love
of religion and spirituality in those halls, a love of the religious iconography, the gravity and
significance of religious worship. It felt like a house of God, and I was deeply grounded by that
feeling, the feeling of being embraced.
My parents weren’t religious, though they weren’t particularly nonreligious either. My mother is
a painter and works with kids on the side, she’s prayed five times a day since I’ve been alive. My
father is a Marxist with a fondness for international development and Islamic philanthropy. He is
inspired deeply by the Quran, though he never imposed it on either my sister or me. In fact, he
taught me all things that I love and hold dear about Islam.
Together, we’d watch documentaries about Islamic architecture; or he would take me to
exhibitions dedicated to Islamic art. I learned early on about Islamic science—and how it was
responsible for so many historic findings, such as the removal of cataracts, or even the inventions
of hospitals and pharmacies as we know them today. From philosophy to astronomy—from Ibn
Battuta (a historic Islamic traveler) to Avicenna (the OG Renaissance man who was both a
medical doctor and philosopher)—I read obsessively about Baghdad in its prime, the poet Rumi,
and would listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
1
and dream of the universe and galaxies ahead of, and
beyond, me.
It’s a Mohsin Hamid
2
quote where he says that the day before 9/11 he was just ostensibly another
American—just one with a strange name—then the day after 9/11 he was suddenly a loaded
word: Muslim, a suspicion, a target.
Paragraph 10
I would not be able to count on my hands the amount of times my sister has been harassed on the
street for wearing a hijab. I’ve heard so many stories of the lewd sexual harassment of Muslim
women or other forms of sexual abuse, and even in some extreme cases, death. Muslim women
are murdered because they represent something that the West still refuses to understand.
Ironically, the misogyny that fuels a person to kill a woman is overlooked because the deaths are
warranted by how a Muslim woman chooses to represent herself. Which is an offense, to some—
but apparently the harassment of women isn’t.
A few years ago, Richard Dawkins, your resident atheist-science bro, suggested broadcasting
“loving, gentle, woman-respecting erotic videos” into Islamic theocracies, like Iran, as a means
of challenging the institutionalized religion that exists in those societies. This rhetoric—one of
misguided sexual and “modern” interventionism—continues to other these cultures. And of
course the narrative impales Muslims as unnatural creatures who know nothing of pleasure, and
only of dogma. I’m so glad that he wants to save us from our boring sexless lives. The hubris it
must take to be Richard Dawkins.
To him, and his trusty band of naysayers, science—or rather the absence of religiosity—is
misapprehended as a trapping of intellect. Not only that, the fetishization of Islam as a guilty
male-ego-driven monolith obscures and dismisses all the powerful women making so many
strides in the Muslim world. Just read Isobel Coleman’s Paradise beneath Her Feet, which
dissects feminism in the Muslim world from country to country (Pakistan and Malaysia are some
case studies). This disavowal of Islam by the West pushes forward an entropic worldview that
men—especially white men without religion—are not corrupted by their bravados. Which is a
farce. Dawkins probably doesn’t believe in God because there’s nothing that he could believe in
more than himself.
Men like him are so consumed by their own egos that they assume that the position of women in
the Western world is not lacking in anything. That on the altar of freedom and democracy we, as
women, have been given all our rights and everything is fine. That intersectional identity doesn’t
exist. That, in America, women no longer experience sexual harassment just by walking down
the street. That women receive equal pay for equal work. That between 40 to 70 percent of
female murder victims are not killed by their intimate partners. That 83 percent of girls aged
twelve to sixteen do not experience some form of sexual harassment in public schools.
After Charlie Hebdo in 2015, the question of freedom of speech garnered much support.
#JeSuisCharlie became an international phenomenon and world leaders even marched to support
a concept of freedom that some of them haven’t even institutionalized in their own countries. In
2010 the Senate of France banned the wearing of the niqab and burqa. They even employed
Fadela Amara, a Muslim, who served as a junior minister in the French government, to state the
following: “The veil is the visible symbol of the subjugation of women, and therefore has no
place in the mixed, secular spaces of France’s state school system.” Thing is, what the French, or
the West, don’t understand is that it’s an act of “subjugation” to a society that has a very specific
idea of what a woman should and shouldn’t wear.
Paragraph 15
To me, that’s not the feminism that I take solace in. To me, feminism is open and brimming with
diversity. I believe in a feminism for women of color, trans and queer women, nonbinary femme
folk, and most definitely one for Muslim women. France’s idea of secularism is based on
homogeneity. The problem of that stance is that it only further negates and dismisses the
identities that are more complicated than just the one prescription they have of a woman. It’s a
deeply limiting perspective.
I don’t wear a hijab, nor do I plan on ever wearing one. But I do believe, and purport to believe,
in the right of freedom for all. I, as a Muslim and a feminist, understand that feminism means
comprehending that there are things outside of one’s existence and frame of understanding that
are just as valid as what we know for ourselves. In a post-9/11 world we have imposed so many
restrictions on Muslims and yet expect dedication in return. With every drone that strikes a child
in Pakistan, we refuse to comprehend the roots of Islamic terrorism; with every ban of religious
freedom of expression, we tautologically debate the concept of freedom for the West; with every
speech that is delivered that encourages love and compassion, we isolate a religion, and its
mostly peace-loving majority because it supports our international, and national, narratives of
what it means to be a nation.
Muslims are Human beings. There are over 1.5 billion of us.
It’s been hard growing up in this world that has decided on what it means to be you. From every
TSA checkpoint, to every nasty comment on the absurdity of the veil, Islamophobia is a very real
thing. Making a concerted effort to understand Muslims is actually where it all begins.
Paragraph 20
There’s something sacred about a religious experience.
Recently, I participated in a debate at Trinity College in Dublin where the motion was “This
House Believes Religion Does More Harm Than Good.” I was on the opposition side, explaining
that to say something is outright bad can’t be applicable when it affects so many lives in such a
deeply positive way. I don’t really know if it’s possible to describe the nuances and folds of
Islam to those who’ve never wanted to understand it. How do you explain what it feels like to
dive into something that feels embracing, all-encompassing, how Islam, like most religions, I’m
sure, has great peaks that are undefinable? That it gives you meaning and hope in a glorious way.
That it exalts you and revitalizes your being. How can we explain what that feels like? How do
we define religion and its impact? Is it really quantifiable?
Things shift within a religious identity; since wearing the hijab my sister has experienced rapid
changes in how she feels about herself and the world. There are times she’s grappled with the
weight of such a symbol, and she’s come to terms with what she needed in those times. I’ve
experienced that in my own way, embracing that all identities evolve and change and rupture and
blossom. I’ve done things to myself I’d never comprehend doing as a young Muslim kid, like
drinking or trying drugs—aiming to be honest and live with integrity within each moment has
been key. Getting older has meant understanding that the limitations of my identity are abstract,
and that faith is malleable, as is desire. Everything is complex.
I think back to the day when my sister wore that hijab, a day that things changed for her, but also
inevitably for me. In many ways it was a humbling moment, a terrifying experience of
understanding what it feels like to be openly hated, to witness others publicly disgusted. Through
that, it was a day when I realized (though it took me years to fully understand) that there is
something deeply powerful in subverting the norm. Pushing boundaries is how we learn, so with
each step that I change a bigoted perspective, each time I allow someone to question and
challenge their unfounded beliefs, I find some solace. If opening up about the nuances of life is
eye-opening for others, then why not give words to your experience.
Truth is, there’s no other way.
It’s an act of survival to speak up, it’s revolutionary to say: hey, here’s my story, please listen.
MLA CITATION
Róisín, Fariha. “Meet a Muslim.” The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction, edited by
Melissa A. Goldthwaite et al., shorter 15th ed., W. W. Norton, 2020, pp. 495–99.
QUESTIONS
1. Fariha Róisín opens with an anecdote of her sister putting on the hijab, and she returns
to that anecdote at the end of the essay. Why do you think this moment is so important to
her and to the essay?
2. How would you characterize Róisín’s tone? Are there places where it shifts? Why might
the author shift tones where she does?
3. Róisín ends her essay by writing, “It’s an act of survival to speak up, it’s revolutionary
to say: hey, here’s my story, please listen.” What is your story? Write a personal essay
that explains some aspect of your identity. Consider titling it “Meet a ______.”
Endnotes
• Pakistani singer and musician (1948–1997). Return to reference 1
• Pakistani novelist (b. 1971); his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), is
about a Pakistani man who goes to school and works in the United States and moves back
to Pakistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Return to reference 2
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