Your fatwa does not apply here

Posted by Maryam Namazie
On September 5, 2013
5 Comments
Karima Bennoune

The brilliant Karima Bennoune has just published her first book: “Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism.”

Inspired by her father Mahfoud Bennoune’s work in Algeria, it tells the stories of progressive people (journalists, artists, women’s rights activists…) who have risked everything to stand up to extremism and terror – stories rarely heard in the West. She interviewed nearly 300 people of Muslim heritage from almost 30 countries – from Afghanistan to Mali – for her book.

I would think this book is a must read; I’ll be getting my copy immediately.

By the way, you can also visit her site to see additional material not in the book and read about her work in an interview on Open Democracy.

5 Comments

Usama Khizar

Sep 9 2013
Reply

just want to ask i dotn have money to buy and would like to know whats in the boook . if anyone can give me the e-book link i wil be greatful Regards UK

rafiqmahmood

Sep 8 2013
Reply

Please read this book. I have just read the introduction and it has helped me to understand myself a lot better and I hope it will help others understand what being a "person of Muslim heritage" means. I have often been angry at "losing" 40 years to Islam but perhaps, for what it is worth, it has given me something. I often read stories from people in Ireland and the US who were brought up Catholic and the struggles they have had with their society, family and, most of all, with their internal selves. I have never been able to fully understand that because for me Catholicism has always been a strange and foreign land. Similarly I am totally confused and bewildered by the bizarre "over-the-top" shenanigans of US evangelists and southern baptists. (US politics has equally bewildered me with its extraordinary quasi-religious enthusiasms.) I do have some distant childhood understanding of the genteel and attenuated tradition (hardly even a religion at all) of Anglicanism and restrained English protestantism of the Methodists and Salvation Army. I have no Muslim heritage in the sense of being brought up in it. My family were not Muslim but 40 years under the crescent did have a profound effect and I think I can justifiably claim to have an adopted heritage. I do feel that Karima Bennoune speaks for me and how I feel and think. Her words resonate. It is an astonishing book. Please read it. Once again it is the women who have the most powerful voices.