Meet the Muslim Author Who Counts Kim K As a Fan
Right before she boarded a plane to Paris, just days before the infamous robbery that shook pop culture to its core, Kim Kardashian was photographed in New York City with this book in hand.
She even posted her pic with the book on her website.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, so what, Kim reads? But, for someone who is constantly accused of being a vapid sex symbol, it’s so cool that she was spotted reading “Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age” which was released last week.
The author, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Muslim Girl, an online blog where “Muslim women talk back.” She felt that her voice as a Muslim woman was marginalized and neglected by Western media, which constantly seems to cast Muslim-Americans in poor light in relationship to terrorism.
In the book, Amani talks about what it was like growing up in the United States as a young Muslim American woman in a post-9/11 world and during the never-ending war on terror.
But when Kim was seen with the book, it really meant a lot to Amani, who has made it her entire mission to make Muslim voices heard.
“Kim K is literally the queen of pop culture right now,” Amani says, “so of course it’s symbolic to see her carrying a book in her hands of an underrepresented Muslim woman’s voice in today’s society.”
Amani says that especially with the current election cycle, “it’s easy to lose sight of how anti-Muslim rhetoric surfaces in our everyday lives, especially for Muslim girls, and makes it so much harder for us to survive.”
Particularly around election season, many politicians use the threat of Islamic terrorism as a scare tactic, erasing the dialogue of the Muslim-Americans who are oppressed by that kind of fear-mongering.
But even then, that’s not the biggest misunderstanding about Islam.
“The biggest misconception about Islam in the US is that it oppresses women,” Amani says. “While we experience oppression in different forms, including Islamophobia, it’s not our religion that’s the problem.”
Amani considers herself a proud feminist and a Muslim.
“I wish everyone would recognize that it disempowers Muslim women even more when people try to say that we don’t have a voice or can’t speak for ourselves,” she said. “This book is my own way of talking back.”
