At nine years old, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh watched from her home in New Jersey as two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That same year, she heard her first racial slur. At age eleven, when the United States began their invasion in Iraq and the television was flooded with anti-Muslim commentary, Amani felt overwhelmed with feelings of intense alienation from American society. At thirteen, her family took a trip to her father's native homeland of Jordan, and Amani experienced firsthand a culture built on the true peaceful nature of Islam in its purest form, not the Islamic stereotypes she heard on the news. Inspired by her trip, and after years of feeling like her voice as a Muslim woman was marginalized and neglected by Western media during a time when all it could talk about was, ironically, Muslim women, Amani created a website called MuslimGirl. As the editor in chief, she put together a team of Muslim women and started a life dedicated to activism. Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age is the extraordinary account of Amani's journey through adolescence as a Muslim girl, from the Islamophobia she's faced on a daily basis to the website she launched that became a cultural phenomenon, to the nation's political climate in the 2016 election cycle with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. While dispelling the myth that a headscarf is a signifier for radicalism or oppression, she shares both her own personal accounts and anecdotes from the sisterhood of writers that serve as her editorial team at MuslimGirl.
Year
2016
Pages
144
Type
Nonfiction
Tags
Description
At nine years old, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh watched from her home in New Jersey as two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That same year, she heard her first racial slur. At age eleven, when the United States began their invasion in Iraq and the television was flooded with anti-Muslim commentary, Amani felt overwhelmed with feelings of intense alienation from American society. At thirteen, her family took a trip to her father's native homeland of Jordan, and Amani experienced firsthand a culture built on the true peaceful nature of Islam in its purest form, not the Islamic stereotypes she heard on the news. Inspired by her trip, and after years of feeling like her voice as a Muslim woman was marginalized and neglected by Western media during a time when all it could talk about was, ironically, Muslim women, Amani created a website called MuslimGirl. As the editor in chief, she put together a team of Muslim women and started a life dedicated to activism. Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age is the extraordinary account of Amani's journey through adolescence as a Muslim girl, from the Islamophobia she's faced on a daily basis to the website she launched that became a cultural phenomenon, to the nation's political climate in the 2016 election cycle with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. While dispelling the myth that a headscarf is a signifier for radicalism or oppression, she shares both her own personal accounts and anecdotes from the sisterhood of writers that serve as her editorial team at MuslimGirl.
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