Our voices matter. Our stories have universal themes, and our numbers are growing. They are speaking the truth. Muslim authors should be published more often.
Islam has three fundamental values: to reflect, to learn and to share our knowledge. This is what characterises Muslim writing: the urge to share what is good and beneficial. And this is why Muslim writers of our generation, who have mainly been born and raised in Australia, are publishing stories based on their lives and experiences.
Amani Haydar’s Mother Wound and Sara El Sayed’s Muddy People are recent examples of Muslim autobiographies. Demet Divaroren and Amra Pajalic co-edited the Children’s Book Council of Australia-shortlisted anthology Growing up Muslim in Australia, which showcased the full diversity of Muslim writers across different ethnicities. In publishing the anthology, Divaroren said that Muslim writers are being empowered to add their own voice to a story that is being largely hijacked by the mainstream media.
But there’s another characteristic of Muslim writing that most Australians aren’t privy to. Many of us, especially the ones who write for children, are self-published after getting countless knockbacks from the mainstream publishing industry. Huda Hayek appears to stand alone in the middle grade space with her delightful book, Huda and Me. In the picture books, we are aware of only Inda Ahmad Zahri’s Salih and Radiah Chowdhury’s The Khatha Chest. We don’t consider picture books authored by non-Muslims with a smiling-girl-wearing-hijab illustration thrown in for diversity’s sake; we need more diverse children’s books by Australian Muslim authors published.
