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.

Marwan by Aram Schefrin

Just like people in the sixties can tell you where they were when JFK was shot, and people who grew up in the eighties can tell you what they were doing when they heard about the Challenger explosion, everyone you talk to can tell you where they were and what they were doing on the morning of September 11, 2001. I was home with my month-old daughter when the phone rang. My husband was on the line.

"Turn on the TV and tell me what the hell is going on," he said in a voice that didn't give me much reason for concern.

As I waited for the picture to appear on the screen I asked why he was calling.

"Two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center."

September 11th was a day of terrible loss. As I watched the news, day in and day out, sometimes only getting a few hours of sleep, I remembered the words I spoke to my husband when I called him back a while later to tell him of what was going on at the Pentagon.

"We're at war!"

And it frightened me. America had never been attacked in my lifetime and I feared our lives might never be the same.

Several books have been written about the events of September 11th, but none from a terrorists' point of view...until now.

Aram Schefrin is the author of the novel Marwan: The Autobiography of a 9/11 Terrorist. I asked Aram if while he was writing Marwan did it cross his mind that Americans might not be ready for such a book.

Here is his answer:

You ask whether, when I wrote Marwan, if I was concerned that it might be too soon for a book like that.

The answer is: Not really. To understand that, you have to know why I wrote the book.

After 9/11, I realized that I knew nothing of the people who had attacked us, or the reasons why they had done it. I read up on al Qaeda, then on Islamic fundamentalism, then on Islam itself and the history of the region. Then I felt I understood what was behind the attack.

The intellectuals of the jihadist movement may be motivated by theory, and the clerics by theology. But for most of the jihadists, religious extremism is brought about by other problems they have: economic, social, political, cultural, psychological.

The American conversation on 9/11 seems to be based on the conviction that we are in a religious war which is inevitable, unavoidable and will last a long time. I thought – and I think – the book was important because I believe it's critical that people understand (if only for self-protection) that the so-called "clash of civilizations" is not inevitable; that there are things that could have been done, and still should be done, to avoid the likelihood of more 9/11s; that is, by understanding all of the factors that entered into it and variously motivated its protagonists – their frustrations, their humiliations, their sociopathy, their unmet needs, etc. In Marwan, I was able to tell a story which included all those motivations by assigning each to a character who, in fact, mostly acted because of it. Only Marwan, the lead character, is more a product of my imagination – and that’s because I gave him more complexity, in order to be able to explain even more of why these people do what they do.

I finished the book in 2003, and I submitted it then to New York publishers, through an agent. I was hoping they would understand why it was important that the point of view I was working from needed to be discussed. That’s when I found out it was way too early for the book.

New York publishing houses were still deep in grief. They considered it insulting and outrageous to present a book about 9/11 which was written (more or less) from the terrorists’ point of view – even though the book made no attempt to excuse their conduct. Others felt that only a Muslim could write about Muslims. For those reasons (I was told), I could not sell the book.

So much has happened since then as a result of the fact that Marwan’s point of view still isn’t being considered, and nothing has been done to understand – let alone get at – the root causes of Islamic terrorism. We call them Islamofascists – which I consider a ridiculous, meaningless term. We dig in for a war that is going to last for generations. I got an email today from a friend of mine who is afraid that Obama is a secret Muslim (read “terrorist.”) It gets more and more insane.

I don’t believe we are “at war” with jihadists. They will pull off more attacks, but they don’t yet seriously threaten Western civilization – not even as much as some European nihilistic terrorist groups have in the fairly recent past. This so-called war is political cover for a whole lot of other things being done in, and to, the United States – and not by terrorists. Their threat could, however, become much more dangerous – if we continue to be unable to understand them and therefore continue to feed what drives them. Then we’ll have a serious Holy War.

Just to be clear, I don’t think people like bin Laden or Ramzi bin al Shibh can be converted, or diverted. They are too personally invested in what they believe. I think the way to deal with al Qaeda is to marginalize them by taking away the reasons new people flock to the movement – diverting them from the movement, and then wiping out the hard core militarily. We have done plenty of “wiping,” and basically no “diverting.” How the diverting is to be done, I leave to other minds. But it’s high time they started working on it. We really don’t want to have to fight a billion Muslims.

Not too long ago, Jonathon Safran Foer came out with his book “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, which revolved around 9/11. Then there was Updike’s book. I decided that fiction was ready to deal with the topic. However, no one has yet attempted what I did with Marwan. I still think it’s important that people understand what the 9/11 attack was really about – or at least consider what I think it was about. I did not want to deal with publishers again, so I put the book out through AuthorHouse. I believe it’s a book that needs to be read. Fortunately, those people who have read it or reviewed have also said that it is a well-done piece of fiction – so there’s pleasure to be gleaned from the writing itself, although pleasure is not the point of reading this book.


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