Motivational Quote

Today's motivational quote comes from British writer and essayist, William Hazlitt.

“A strong passion for any object will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.”

I've read, or at least featured, several books about passion here: Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Turn Your Passion into a Solid Business by Christy Strauch, Young Guns by Robert Tuchman, You Are More Than Enough: Every Woman’s Guide to Purpose, Passion, and Power by Judi Moreo, and Birthing the Elephant: The woman's go-for-it! guide to overcoming the big challenges of launching a business by Karin Abarbanel and Bruce Freeman, to name some of them.

Also on The Book Connection, there have been books written because an author was passionate about a certain topic or social issue: The 100 Sporting Events You Must See Live by Robert Tuchman, How Can I Run a Tight Ship When I'm Surrounded by Loose Cannons by Kathi Macias, Saffron Dreams by Shalia Abdullah, No Teachers Left Behind by HBF Teacher, Real Men by Greg Middleton, and The Culture of Excess by Jay Slosar would all make that list.

Passion is what drives us. It is what moves us foward and motivates us to keep reaching for our dreams. At one point, my passion to be a published author just wasn't strong enough. If it happened, great. If not, I always had readers who enjoyed my dabblings in the world of fan fiction, and my article writing.

I'm not quite sure when that passion changed. I wish I did because then I could pinpoint what was going on in my life at the time the change occurred. All I am sure of is that once it happened, I never wanted to look back. I was no longer satisfied with maybe working on a manuscript.

Of the books I've read from the list above, the author's passion is evident from the very first page. Tuchman took his passion for sports and created TSE Sports and Entertainment out of his one-bedroom apartment. TSE went on to appear on Inc. 500's list of America's Fastest Growing Privately Owned Companies. Tuchman had a vision, and he made it happen.

Tuchman later went on to write two books about that passion: The 100 Sporting Events You Must See Live and Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneur's Guide to Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking Out on Your Own.

Frustrated by the deterioration in our public school system, HBF Teacher wrote a book about a fictional middle school to showcase the challenges facing teachers today. Shalia Abdullah's Saffron Dreams provides a glimpse into how things changed for Muslims living in America after 9-11.

As someone who has lived in New England her entire life, I also think of the story of Mike Kittredge, the founder of Yankee Candle. Kittredge was 17 when he melted down crayons to make his mother a candle for Christmas. A neighbor liked it so much that she bought it from Kittredge, who took that money to buy wax to make two more candles--one for his mother and one to sell.

And from those humble beginnings, Kittridge turned his "passion for fragrance" into a company that is the most recognized name in the candle business.

This is the type of passion that we need to apply to our writing if we wish to be successful. It is going to be hard. There are going to be setbacks. But as long as our passion remains strong, we can keep moving forward, continuing to reach toward our dream.

You have the power to make your dreams come true. Use it!

Saffron Dreams by Shaila Abdullah--Book Review

Saffron Dreams by Shaila Abdullah is an eloquently written and moving story of a Muslim woman living in America, whose world is turned upside down on September 11th.

Arissa Illahi is a Muslim artist and writer living in New York City with her husband Faizan. Expecting their first child, they are happy with life. But on the morning of September 11, 2001, Faizan would go to work in the World Trade Center...and never return.

Always free to live as a Muslim in America, after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Great American Melting Pot doesn't seem to blend so well. People who greeted Arissa with a smile before that fateful day, barely look at her. Feeling adrift after her loss, Arissa wanders through the days awaiting the birth of her unborn son, a son Faizan would never hold. The discovery of her husband's unfinished manuscript may be the key to her survival. And perhaps by finishing Faizan's legacy, Arissa will redeem a race.

If ever there was a book more eloquently written than Saffron Dreams, I would like to see it. The words simply fly off the page and float into your consciousness; their power touching you in a way like no other book might ever touch you again. The struggles of being a 9/11 widow and a Muslim, come together in a moving story that will find you filled with every emotion ever experienced by a human being.

Abdullah's masterful storytelling draws you in from the very first moment and does not release you until you've turned the very last page. Anyone who has ever loved and lost will be touched by this heartrending, yet triumphant story of one woman's difficult journey to pick up the pieces of her shattered life in a country that has suddenly put her and an entire race under a microscope in order to make sense of a monumental tragedy. The descriptions and details put you right alongside Arissa so that you are totally captivated by her world, her dreams, her struggles, and her triumphs.

The stunning cover art must be seen up close, as it is even lovelier and more striking in your hands than what you see posted here.

Saffron Dreams is destined to add more awards to Abdullah's portfolio. This is a must read book for 2009!


Title: Saffron Dreams
Author: Shaila Abduallah
Publisher: Modern History Press
ISBN-10: 1932690735
ISBN-13: 978-1932690736
SRP: $19.95 (U.S.)

Shaila Abdullah Shares the Impact of 9/11 on Ordinary Muslims in Saffron Dreams

Today's guest blogger is Shaila Abdullah author of Saffron Dreams. I am in the middle of reading this book and I can't put it down. Look for my review of this touching novel...coming soon.

Shaila's turn:

There was a time before September 10, 2001, when I could jaywalk down 6th street in downtown Austin and blend in with the locals. I was colorless, stripped of ethnicity, even faceless at times. After all, diversity is what added to the flavor of the city––that and a certain cross dressing gentleman in thongs who once ran for the city mayor.

That was before some of the locals exchanged their world vision glasses with compromised ones and took a serious look around. What they saw terrified them. They were in a minority in their own land with a group of people they knew little or nothing about. It scared them that the color of their skin matched the ones who took the towers down. After all, didn’t all Muslims prostrate in the same manner as the attackers? Did they not worship at mosques as well? Then came the lumping-of-all-potatoes-in-one-sack epiphany. If all Muslims prayed the same way, surely they must share the same ideology as the terrorists. As the overly-corrected vision of the locals turned blurry from the daily input they received from the media and those around them, they learned to live in fear. With every change in color in the national security threat level, their hearts sank even more. Could they trust the friendly Muslim neighbor across the street, the one who greeted them every morning but sported a beard and whose wife wore a headscarf? The day after 9/11, Muslim-Americans woke up to a new America––the one where they were no longer regarded as locals but outsiders and lumped together with the fundamentalists. They struggled to know themselves, only to lose themselves in the interpretation of others.

The geopolitical concerns that have drawn Islam and the West into many conflicts since 2001 have also generated a thirst for fiction and nonfiction, with a Muslim angle. At a time when much of the world associates Islamic culture with oppression and terror, the new genre is tackling such universal themes as love, hope, and women's issues.

Saffron Dreams is the story of basic human desire to be accepted in society, no matter what your background, ethnicity, or race. The tragedy of 9/11 was a great shock to the American psyche. Some of that anger was directed towards those who shared the race and religion of the terrorists, especially those who publicly exhibited symbols of their faith such as veils, beards, even their own names. In the terrorist attack of 9/11, the shards of glass reached far and wide wounding the hearts of Americans who had been very accepting of the melting pot their country had become. The event put them at odds with a community that had come to this country with very simple objectives: to work hard and lead honest lives.

In Saffron Dreams I have attempted to capture how ordinary Muslims were affected by the tragedy of 2001—the silent majority who lead very normal lives and are law-abiding citizens of this land. They are the ones we never hear about because their lives are too ordinary to be the subject of the nightly news. The protagonist of my novel, Arissa Illahi, is a veil-wearing Muslim artist and writer in New York. Pregnant and alone after the tragedy of 9/11, she discovers the unfinished manuscript of her husband and decides to finish it as a tribute to him. In the opening scene, the protagonist discards her headscarf, which has become almost a scarlet letter for her following the attacks of 2001. In a courageous attempt to take charge of her life, she transfers “her veil from her head to her heart.”

Where the media instilled fear in the heart of the nation about Muslims, lately they have also attempted to learn the true purpose of Islam by bringing in renowned and respected scholars and researchers to interview. There still needs to be more dialogs with positive role models of Islam like His Highness the Aga Khan who stresses upon the importance of pluralism in a civil society and speaks about the clash of ignorance. Others like Karen Armstrong and Dr. Ali Asani who time and again have taken center stage to correct some of the misconceptions that exist around Islam. Much work still lies ahead but as with any wound on the psyche of a country, it will take awhile to heal. There is a great need in the U.S. for various religious entities to come together and build bridges of understanding and tolerance to find a common ground—work that Dr. Eboo Patel is doing through the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core.

And so, as the readers scramble to buy yet another book about Muslims in an effort to understand that group, they need to be clear about one thing: even the followers of mainstream Islam can’t tell them what drives terrorism. We are as clueless as the rest of the people but keep on reading. You might learn a thing or two about the true face of Islam.


FREE GIFT

Thank you and thanks to the readers of The Book Connection. For those with comments and questions, I can be reached at shailaabdullah@gmail.com. If you mention The Book Connection, you will receive a free e-book called A Taste of Saffron, containing recipes of dishes mentioned in Saffron Dreams. Readers who sign up for updates on my website will get a free excerpt of my 2005 book, Beyond the Cayenne Wall.