Richard Phillips

Claire Chambers

Nafhesa Ali

Star-studded and beautifully written, this collection offers diverse stories about love and desire by South Asian-heritage British Muslim women authors, including Ayisha Malik (Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged) and Shelina Janmohamed (Love in a Headscarf). Although outsiders often expect Muslim women to be timid, conservative, or submissive, the reality is different. While some of these authors express a quiet piety and explore poignant situations, others use black humor and biting satire, or play with possibilities. Still others shade into the territory of a Muslim Fifty Shades of Grey, creating grey areas where the mainstream media sees only black and white. If grooming-gang scandals grab headlines, characters are more scandalized by suitors' sloppy personal grooming. Finding the right crimson lipstick for a date or the perfect power outfit for meeting a cheating ex-husband are commoner preoccupations than the news. Stylish but far from shallow, the stories also reflect on migration, racism, arranged marriage, gender differences, lesbian desire, bearding, and many other subjects.

A Match Made in Heaven

Indrani Karmakar

Kristina Diprose

Storying Relationships explores the sexual lives of young British Muslims in their own words and through their own stories. It finds engaging and surprising stories in a variety of settings: when young people are chatting with their friends; conversing more formally within families and communities; scribbling in their diaries; and writing blogs, poems and books to share or publish. These stories challenge stereotypes about Muslims, who are frequently portrayed as unhappy in love and sexually different. The young people who emerge in this book, contradicting racist and Islamophobic stereotypes, are assertive and creative, finding and making their own ways in matters of the body and the heart. Their stories – about single life, meeting and dating, pressure and expectations, sex, love, marriage and dreams – are at once specific to the young British Muslims who tell them, and resonant reflections of human experience.

Nafhesa Ali

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