Dancing In The Mosque

A People Book of the Week & a Kirkus Best Nonfiction of the Year An exquisite and inspiring memoir about one mother’s unimaginable choice in the face of oppression and abuse in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. In the days before Homeira Qaderi gave birth to her son, Siawash, the road to the hospital in Kabul would often be barricaded because of the frequent suicide explosions. With the city and the military on edge, it was not uncommon for an armed soldier to point his gun at the pregnant woman’s bulging stomach, terrified that she was hiding a bomb. Frightened and in pain, she was once forced to make her way on foot. Propelled by the love she held for her soon-to-be-born child, Homeira walked through blood and wreckage to reach the hospital doors. But the joy of her beautiful son’s birth was soon overshadowed by other dangers that would threaten her life. No ordinary Afghan woman, Homeira refused to cower under the strictures of a misogynistic social order. Defying the law, she risked her freedom to teach children reading and writing and fought for women’s rights in her theocratic and patriarchal society. Devastating in its power, Dancing in the Mosque is a mother’s searing letter to a son she was forced to leave behind. In telling her story—and that of Afghan women—Homeira challenges you to reconsider the meaning of motherhood, sacrifice, and survival. Her story asks you to consider the lengths you would go to protect yourself, your family, and your dignity.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE LEACOCK MEDAL FOR HUMOUR, THE KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE AND TWO SASKATCHEWAN BOOK AWARDS Zarqa Nawaz has always straddled two cultures. She’s just as likely to be agonizing over which sparkly earrings will “pimp out” her hijab as to be flirting with the Walmart meat manager in a futile attempt to secure halal chicken the day before Eid. “Little Mosque on the Prairie” brought Zarqa’s own laugh-out-loud take on her everyday culture clash to viewers around the world. And now, in Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, she tells the sometimes absurd, sometimes challenging, always funny stories of being Zarqa in a western society. From explaining to the plumber why the toilet must be within sitting arm’s reach of the water tap (hint: it involves a watering can and a Muslim obsession with cleanliness “down there”) to urging the electrician to place an eye-height electrical socket for her father-in-law’s epilepsy-inducing light-up picture of the Kaaba, Zarqa paints a hilarious portrait of growing up in a household where, according to her father, the Quran says it’s okay to eat at McDonald’s—but only if you order the McFish.

An unforgettable and compassionate look at the lives of the residents of Lahore’s pleasure district The Dancing Girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond District in the shadow of a great mosque. The 21st century goes on outside the walls, this ancient quarter, but scarcely registers within. Though their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history: beloved by sultans, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal culture. The modern day Bollywood aesthetic, with its love of gaudy spectacle, music, and dance, is their distant legacy. But the life of the pampered courtesan is not the one now being lived by Maha and her three girls. What they do is forbidden by Islam, though tolerated; but they are, unclean, and Maha’s daughters, like her, are born into the business and will not leave it. Sociologist Louise Brown spent four years in the most intimate study of the family life of one Lahori courtesan. Beautifully understated, it turns a novelist’s eye on a true story that beggars the imagination. Maha, at fourteen a classically trained dancer of exquisite grace, had her virginity sold to the Sultan of Dubai; when her own daughter Nena comes of age and Maha cannot bring in the money she once did, she faces a terrible decision as the agents of the Sultan come calling once more.

“In this satisfying, lyrical memoir,” an American woman discovers her true faith—and true love—by converting to Islam and moving to Egypt (Publishers Weekly). Raised in Boulder, Colorado, G. Willow Wilson moved to Egypt and converted to Islam shortly after college. Having written extensively on modern religion and the Middle East in publications such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine, Wilson now shares her remarkable story of finding faith, falling in love, and marrying into a traditional Islamic family in this “intelligently written and passionately rendered memoir” (The Seattle Times, 27 Best Books of 2010). Despite her atheist upbringing, Willow always felt a connection to god. Around the time of 9/11, she took an Islamic Studies course at Boston University, and found the teachings of the Quran astounding, comforting, and profoundly transformative. She decided to risk everything to convert to Islam, embarking on a journey across continents and into an uncertain future. Settling in Cairo where she taught English, she soon met and fell in love with Omar, a passionate young man with a mild resentment of the Western influences in his homeland. Torn between the secular West and Muslim East, Willow—with her shock of red hair, shaky Arabic, and Western candor—struggled to forge a “third culture” that might accommodate her values as well as her friends and family on both sides of the divide. Part travelogue, love story, and memoir, “Wilson has written one of the most beautiful and believable narratives about finding closeness with God” (The Denver Post).

This is the true story of the journey of the Midnight Sun Mosque. In 2010 a Winnipeg-based charity raised funds to build and ship a mosque to Inuvik, one of the most northern towns in Canada’s Arctic. A small but growing Muslim community there had been using a cramped trailer for their services, but there just wasn't enough space. The mosque travelled over 4,000 kilometers on a journey fraught with poor weather, incomplete bridges, narrow roads, low traffic wires and a deadline to get on the last barge heading up the Mackenzie River before the first winter freeze. But it made it just in time and is now one of the most northern mosques in the world. This beautiful picture book reminds us that the collective dream of fostering a multicultural and tolerant Canada exists and that people of all backgrounds will come together to build bridges and overcome obstacles for the greater good of their neighbors.

Iraq is a sophisticated, secular country that has been known as the cradle of civilization for 5,000 years. Yet for Westerners fed on CNN, the country is a desert populated by Republican Guards, looting mobs and wailing women. The stories of real Iraqis are rarely heard. Dancing in the No-Fly Zone gives them a voice.Hadani Ditmars has visited Iraq six times in as many years. A woman and an Arab, she can go places most war correspondents never see. Here she writes of her encounters with ordinary Iraqis, bowed but not broken, struggling to go to the theatre, run a hairdressing salon or buy goods on the black market.At one miraculous party during a bombing campaign, Ditmars saw an Iraqi journalist dance with an American reporter while government minders clapped them on. A people who have suffered so much yet can still dance deserve to be portrayed in the full depth of their humanity. It is this spirit that Ditmars captures in Dancing in the No-Fly Zone.