Bk Theme: Islam
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A Very Large Expanse of Sea
It’s 2002, a year after 9/11. It’s an extremely turbulent time politically, but especially so for someone like Shirin, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl who’s tired of being stereotyped.Shirin is never surprised by how horrible people can be. She’s tired of the rude stares, the degrading comments – even the physical violence – she endures as…
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Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality
Increasingly in mainstream discourse and rhetoric, there only seems to be one very serious and conservative face to Islam, Muslim communities, and their governments. Mainstream modern Islamic hermeneutics condemn homosexual orientations, sometimes with punishments as severe as death. Nevertheless, there were also instances in Muslim history, culture, and society where religiosity was playful not punitive,…
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We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir
How do you find yourself when the world tells you that you don’t exist?Samra Habib has spent most of their life searching for the safety to be themself. As an Ahmadi Muslim growing up in Pakistan, they faced regular threats from Islamic extremists who believed the small, dynamic sect to be blasphemous. From their parents,…
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Hijāb: Unveiling Queer Muslim Lives
Unveiling Queer Muslim Lives is the first known collection of South African Muslim stories relating to Islam and sexual diversity. This anthology shares real-life stories of people that have struggled, or may still be struggling, to reconcile their spirituality and their sexuality. These are stories that illustrate the oneness of being and reflect on how…
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Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
In Persepolis, heralded by the Los Angeles Times as “one of the freshest and most original memoirs of our day,” Marjane Satrapi dazzled us with her heartrending memoir-in-comic-strips about growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Here is the continuation of her fascinating story. In 1984, Marjane flees fundamentalism and the war with Iraq to begin a…
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Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter…
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Martyr!
A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new…
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Desiring Arabs
Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as…
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