Read and Write with Natasha
This podcast discusses writing life, reviews books, and interviews authors and industry professionals.
Read and Write with Natasha
Dr. Daisy Khan wants to narrate untold stories of Muslim women
🎥 You can watch the episode on YouTube here.
Join us for an engaging conversation with Dr. Daisy Khan, a pioneering advocate for Muslim women's rights.
From her early days in architectural design to becoming a powerful voice for gender equality, Dr. Khan shares her inspiring journey detailed in her memoir, Born with Wings.
Her story unfolds against the backdrop of 9/11, driving her leadership in officiating marriages, tackling community issues, and challenging stereotypes about Islam.
We discuss the persistent hurdles of Islamophobia, focusing on its impact on young Muslims in education and their careers, and examine the resurgence of social justice movements aiding the establishment of a Muslim community center in the U.S.
Dr. Khan also talks about her ongoing efforts in gender rights, the power of storytelling to combat adversity, and her latest book, which champions the legacies of Muslim women like Hagar and Fatima of Fez through modern media.
Tune in to discover how Dr. Khan's work is reshaping perceptions and empowering Muslim women
****************************************************************************
➡️ P.S.: ☕ Love the show? Support it with a coffee!
If you enjoy the podcast and want to help keep it going, you can fuel it (and me!) with a cup of coffee at Buy Me a Coffee. Every sip counts—thank you! 💛
I have several dreams. I'm a fairly energetic person and I can achieve a lot. It's my dream but it requires the right kind of team to come together is to actually profile amazing Muslim women, civilizational heroes that we have never seen on the silver screen. That we have never seen on the silver screen. And in my research, in my book, I found so many treasures of Muslim women. If you just told their stories, if you just really fleshed out who they were, how they came to be, how they influenced Islamic civilization, that our understanding of Islam would permanently change.
Speaker 2:Hi friends, this is Read and Write with Natasha podcast. My name is Natasha Tynes and I'm an author and a journalist. In this channel I talk about the writing life, review books and interview authors. Hope you enjoy the journey. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Read and Write with Natasha.
Speaker 2:I have with me today Dr Daisy Khan, who is an award-winning speaker, author and an activist, and she is the founder of WISE, the Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality. For over 20 years, she's been a leading voice on Muslim women's rights and Islam in America, recognized for her efforts in peace building and gender equality. She's a prolific speaker and media commentator, and her memoir Born with Wings chronicles her journey as a modern Muslim woman. She's born in Kashmir and she now lives in the New York area with her husband, daisy. Dr Daisy, or Daisy, thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 2:I'm so excited to talk to you for joining me today. I'm so excited to talk to you as we were chatting before we started recording. I'm familiar with your work I've been following it all through the years, so I'm excited to have you on the podcast. So, daisy, I think my first question is about your memoir. I read amazing reviews of it, including one of Queen Noor of Jordan, and so my first question is what is this memoir about? I'm someone that believes that everyone needs to tell their story, and everyone has a unique story, so what is this memoir about and what makes your memoir unique?
Speaker 1:Well, so first of all, I was not even writing a memoir. I went to an agent and told them that I wanted to do a picture book of amazing Muslim women from all over the world, because I had started WISE and I had met all these amazing women who were on the front lines of change everywhere, from Saudi to Yemen to Indonesia. And I said somebody needs to showcase these women because they're amazing. And I had this idea. And then they said to me oh, coffee table books are dead. Nobody does those books anymore. And then they looked at me and said have you thought about writing your own story? And I said, well, who would want to read my story?
Speaker 1:And they said we would, and that's how the idea for the memoir came about. Because I was so busy doing work in my own community I never thought of sharing my story with people. But my memoirs essentially is about how a woman can step into a greater role that she had envisioned for herself. Because I was a career woman for the first 25 years of my life Like I worked in architectural design and, by incidences beyond my control, I fell into this job because I was married to an imam and 9-11 happened in my neighborhood and it was my city, my state. My mosque was only 10 blocks from there. Everything was under attack and I felt personally that I was under attack, my community was under attack and I had to step up and assume some sort of a responsibility and a mantle. And just by assuming, that mantle meant that now I had to get active.
Speaker 1:In addition to having a career, I now had a second job evening shift, weekend shift, basically telling people what Islam was and what it was not. And you're somebody who's been in the media and you know how the media covers Islam. You're somebody who's been in the media and you know how the media covers Islam. You know like 700% more coverage of terrorists than there is of any other religious terrorists, you know. So, yeah, we were up against a very big battle, but then, slowly, by osmosis, I had to assume a leadership role in the community that I never expected I would have. So, you know, somebody said to me, well, I was counseling people on weddings because they were all coming to the imam for these weddings, and I was like, oh, he would say to me, you do it, I don't have time for this. And then the first couple said to me we actually want you to perform the marriage.
Speaker 1:And I said oh, women don't perform marriages and they said, yeah, but we want you to officiate the marriage because we're really comfortable with you. And then I discovered there was nothing prohibiting a woman from officiating a marriage In Egypt. They've been doing it for a decade, so I officiated my first marriage in 2004. Literally, I was the first woman officiant and I picked up that role. Then people wanted baby blessings. Then people wanted you know a fatwa from me on. Can I have a corner egg?
Speaker 1:I was hearing all these questions. Can a Muslim woman marry a non-Muslim man? And so my memoir traces that, and it shows how you can evolve into a role that you had never envisioned for yourself, but that was already destined for you, that was planned for you and you were just you didn't even realize it and how to keep yourself open for that possibility of serving the greater good and to be a vehicle for that. And so I tell stories of other women and my interaction with other women, including non-Muslim women, and what I learned from them, and so it's my own journey, but it's also a way to show what woman is capable of when she really puts her mind to it.
Speaker 2:Oh, fascinating. I was also, and I remember I heard about it back in the day, but I don't remember much of the details. But I read something about Ground Zero Mosque and there was a lot of chatter about it and I'm just curious what is your perspective of what happened and what were the lessons learned?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, there were a lot of lessons to be learned, but primarily it was you know, I was the one behind it, because I'm the one who kind of like conceived the idea of what kind of a community center Muslims needed. Because, you know, I had, we had seen the evolution of Christians in America and Jews in America, and everybody eventually establishes centers like cultural, like the YMCA and the JCC, cultural like the YMCA and the JCC. So you know, you have your synagogue, but you also have your cultural center where Christians live a Christian life, and you know there's reading rooms, there's libraries, there's cafes, there's gymnasiums. So I said this is what we have to do, this is what Muslims have to create. And we bought a building very close to our mosque, which was just two and a half blocks away from Ground Zero, and then we planned to build it and we announced the plans and our community board loved the idea and they said because we were renewing the neighborhood.
Speaker 1:The neighborhood was dead at that point because of the attack and and, and. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, all these Islamophobic machinery came out against us and started attacking us and saying it's a ground zero mosque that's how they labeled it, so the press covered it as a ground zero mosque. It was neither at ground zero nor was it a mosque. It was a community center that would have one floor designated for prayer space and the rest was kitchen, you know, cultural center, and it was supposed to be multi-faith, like people of all religions could come and interact with her and be at plans for a souk and all this great stuff. And it never manifested because the plan was very premature. It was just a plan, because we still had to fundraise for it. We hadn't done the fundraising for it.
Speaker 1:But you know, they pulled the rug from underneath us and they made sure that we did not proceed. And what was the lesson I learned there? The lesson I learned there was that America always has difficulty with newcomers and you're always challenged, and the integration of newcomers is always prevented by some group or the other. And the integration of newcomers is always prevented by some group or the other. And in our case, what that meant was they wanted to continue to frame Muslims as a foreigner, like an outsider who does not have the right to be integrated into the American fabric.
Speaker 2:So that was the message, because the message to me, specifically, was not you not here, not now. And I was like why and how did they stop? How did they you know, let's say the Islamophobes, as you call them how did they manage to stop the building of the mosque?
Speaker 1:So first of all, they rallied together. All these groups that hated Muslims for all kinds of reasons rallied together. They came together. They started a campaign called the Stop the Islamization of America. They linked terrorism to us. They said oh, this is just another place where bombs will be fabricated.
Speaker 1:Trope of Islamophobia that had been that had gotten into the imagination of the American public from the terrorist attacks of 9-11 and from the Iranian revolution and from the war in Afghanistan all these negative images. And they tied those negative images to the center and they scared people. And so then we couldn't raise the money, because it's very hard to raise money when you are in a massive national news every single day. So the prance couldn't materialize because we didn't have the ability to, to to bring the right kind of donors forward. They were employing the same kinds of strategies that they're employing today with, you know, with the students who are protesting, calling them terrorizing. So imagine that you have college campuses and then you know, and here was a center that was going to become the flagship and then we were going to establish in other cities a similar, smaller version of that. So that was very threatening to them and they wanted to make sure that we didn't proceed, so we could not continue because we didn't have it, so would you try again now?
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm going to talk about the shifting of opinions, you know it's a dream that I hope I can see in my own life, and many people have told me why don't you rethink the whole thing? And it's possible, I mean, if I can just clear some other things from my plate and I can focus on it. We need it, we still need it. We desperately need it.
Speaker 2:And there are no other Muslim community centers around the nation, like in Michigan or any other places.
Speaker 1:Well, there is a museum, but there is nothing like this, which is kind of a template. People are still building mega mosques. Now there are mega mosques, sort of you know, modeled after the megachurches. They're similar, but still it's a mosque primarily with additional spaces, but ours was primarily a center that was open to all meaning. It's a mosque primarily with additional spaces, but ours was primarily a center that was open to all meaning. It's a center that's open to all. You can have membership, you can come, and if you want to go to a gym in our center, you can do that. If you want to take cooking classes in our center, you can do that. That was the plan. The plan was to open it up to the public. So you're inviting the public in and still you have space for your prayer and your you know. So I hope in my lifetime, natasha, I can do it. We just need some good donors to come forward.
Speaker 2:Hey, I'm on board and I'll get it done, yeah, yeah. So let's say this was. That's good, that's good to hear. So let's say that this was 2004,. Right, we're 20 years later now and 2010. That was 2010. Okay, so let's say what? 14 years or no, 16 years? I need to do the math. But so if you would do it again now, would you get the same pushback, or even more, after what happened the past year? You know the war in Gaza and all of that because, honestly, for me, I've been living in the US for 20 years I've never seen as much support for like the Palestinian cause, as as much as I saw last year, like the Palestinian cause, as much as I saw last year. People say it's because the Gen Z and the students at the Gen Z, they're more into social justice than, let's say, millennials and Gen Xs like me and all of that. But so if you try again this year, would you get the same response, or maybe even you would get more opposition. So I'm curious what's your analysis?
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, we're very matured and we know how to handle the opposition. Now, at that time, we were taken by surprise, right? Because we were so surrounded by our little, you know interfaith community. Everything was beautiful, we were interacting with one another, we had done theater projects together, we had built a whole kumbaya the Jews, the Muslims and then we get attacked from nowhere, from outsiders who were not even part of our community. So we were taken by surprise and because the attack was always in the news, it was very hard for us to. It was a crisis. You know, they say crisis communication. So we couldn't get out of the crisis because then we had elections and then all the people who are running for office seized on it and then it went on for six months. So we were in the news for six months. It was the biggest reported religion news story in America that year 40,000 citations. Oh wow, what would have? What happens to you when you've been cited so many times? So today it's a very different world. Yes, I would absolutely tell you we have now allies that we don't know who they are, where they are. They will come out of the woodworks. So if we were to come back and say we're building that center that you all heard about. That never got built because of all this opposition and we want to build it and it's a private project and we're inviting all these allies together. I think we would be able to build it.
Speaker 1:I think that there's a whole new level of consciousness that people didn't have at that time. People have a heightened awareness of how much Islamophobia there is in America, how much Muslims have been inaccurately branded, how Islam has been twisted for political aims. All those reasons and, of course, since the since October 7th, what we have witnessed overseas, people are seeing that Muslims are being unfairly treated in America. Right, you know they're not being even acknowledged. People have lost entire families. They're not being acknowledged. So you know, people of conscience are feeling that pinch like it's right. So you have a lot of people who want to help and they don't know how to help and they don't know how to come forward. So I think that this is this is a better time for us, ironically, than than than the previous time.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So what caused the number of allies to increase through the years?
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, there was a lot of educational outreach that we had already done, so some of it was just knowledge sharing. Right, you know, we did a lot of excellent programming like getting people to come to Ramadan, meeting people, Muslims as individuals, as humans, as neighbors. So that kind of outreach built a lot of friendships, bonds, friendship. Right Even today, October 7th, happened. I thought of my Jewish friends and my Jewish neighbors and I picked up and I called up the people that I needed to call Say is everything okay? Are you okay? Somebody from your family, okay? And then I found out some of the members of our community hey, somebody from your family, Okay. And then I found out some of the members of our community, their families were in the kibbutz. Just receiving a call from me was enough for them to say, oh my God, we haven't spoken since then. Things have, you know, and sometimes they look at me and they say I'm sorry for what's happening. So this once you build those kinds of relationships, then people share that with others, and so, number one of who Muslims are, what their religion really is, separating the terrorists from the religion itself.
Speaker 1:A lot of that educational work was done over the last two decades. And so then today we have the Gen Z generation that has grown up with a lot of diversity within the school system. They usually know a Muslim, they usually know an Arab, they usually know a Palestinian, they usually know an African American, they usually know an immigrant. So they are so aware of who these people really are. So they don't need to be taught anything, they're already aware, and that's why they're on the streets. You see so, from the older generation that we educated and from the younger generation. This is why the two coming together is the confluence of these two. That's an interesting for me. That's an interesting confluence of the older generation that we educated and the younger generation that's already primed, because they were already prepared for this in the school system.
Speaker 2:So, since you study Islamophobia and I think, specifically concerning Muslim women, correct? Do you think, after October 7th, compared to 9-11 and October 7th, where is the level of Islamophobia now? Where is the level of Islamophobia now, given the context of the Gen Z that there's? You know, all of these different things that happened. Where do we stand when it comes to Islamophobia?
Speaker 1:So, Islamophobia was very much confined to people who were seen. As you know, islamophobic machinery would be unleashed at people that were doing something that the Islamophobes didn't want them to do. So like building a mosque, you know, the Islamophobes would come out and say, oh, you're not going to build a mosque here, because this is a place of terrorism, blah, blah, blah. So then the mosque would get attacked, the leadership would get attacked, and then the mosque would have to attack back and they would have to hire lawyers and fight, and in many cases they have fought, and thank God for religious freedom. That is guaranteed under the four freedoms that we have, you know, religious freedom, and often, majority of the time, these cases have been won. So, but now Islamophobia is at a completely different level. It's a new iteration of Islamophobia which I have never seen before. It's a new iteration of Islamophobia which I have never seen before.
Speaker 1:And now, if you are a young Muslim and you're in campus or you're a protester, you are now as much of a threat as that mosque was right. You are as much of a threat as quote unquote that terrorist overseas who was threatening you. So you are linked to terrorism just by the virtue of the fact that you are coming out and protesting. So that's one thing. So that means now we don't have the right to protest, we don't have the right to express ourselves.
Speaker 1:So the things that we take for granted that religious freedom that we took for granted, and the thing that we also are guaranteed, which is freedom of expression, is now something that we have to be worried about, right, because it's very hard to fight that fight because the other one has a very specific statute. You can go to the legal community and you can tell the legal community hey, we're trying to build a because you're building a structure and they're preventing building that structure. But what are you going to tell a lawyer? Oh, they're preventing me from speaking, right, so that becomes very hard to, uh, to use the legal system for that.
Speaker 2:But? But isn't there, like the first amendment, you know, the right to assembly, all of that that you can use legal?
Speaker 1:but they always tie it to terrorism. Yeah, oh well, you're really a potential terrorist or your potential security threat. So that's a very dangerous area to go into that, because they don't know how to control this, so they keep, you know, using these tropes. Then there's doxing which people's identities are, you know, made public. There is jobs being rescinded. You know you have a job offer. You go to an Ivy League school. Your job got rescinded. Charities are under attack. People are debanked. You don't get a call from your bank saying we're not banking with you anymore.
Speaker 2:Imagine oh wow, in the US, in America, yes, people have been debanked After crypto. Then we should all go to crypto, decentralized, okay.
Speaker 1:So you have a lot of new issues that people don't even know that are happening. You know you can get terminated because a troll from overseas reported you and you can get terminated from headquarters and your supervisor doesn't even know you're getting terminated because you posted something on social media, so, um, and then also because, uh, most people don't know how to have a conversation about israel and palestine in their workplace, in their school, is creating a lot of silencing and a lot of friction that even the management doesn't know how to address. Right, correct? Yeah, because it's such a fraught issue that people think there are two sides to this. There are two competing narratives, but there's shared humanity in the middle. So where's the shared humanity? And people can't come to that point of shared humanity because they don't know how to discuss this.
Speaker 1:So my work right now is about going into corporations, into the workplace, into the schools, to teach them how to have a conversation about this topic, because of the years of experience that I have with this topic, but also because, personally, I'm very passionate that women somehow you know, the Islamophobic trope is that all women are oppressed and women are subjugated and women, all women, are covered. So therefore, if a woman is wearing hijab, she's a national security threat because she's the other and she's unknown to this culture. So that's the framing, and that framing came from Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution when we saw those burqa clad women and chadar clad women. Revolution when we saw those burqa clad women and chadra clad women and they were seen as the other. And then that is imposed on to the general public here the muslim woman who's wearing hijab, who's born in brooklyn right so so do you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, do you think some people don't see you like as muslim enough because you're not wearing hijab and you say oh, you can't speak for muslim woman. Do you get that?
Speaker 1:I don't get that too much because I'm such a leader in the community, because I've been a leader in the community for many, many years. So privately they might be thinking that, but publicly no one has said that to me yet. But because I've been on the media so much, I became the voice of the Muslim community. You know, even after 9-11, I used to get calls all the time because I knew that there was this gap and if I didn't fill the gap then there would be nobody speaking on it, right? So you know, I remember once Fox wanted a immediate on camera response because there was some video game that had come out that said Allah waqar. You know, they needed somebody to.
Speaker 1:And I said I'm cooking in my kitchen. I can't eat right now, don't worry about it, we'll come there, I swear. And they came to my house. I was in the middle of cooking rice and biryani and steam was going on. I took off my apron and I stood in front of all these beautiful hadith embossed books, you know, and I just, you know, wiped off all the stuff off my face and I said, okay, I gave my comments, because that's how important it was to always be on camera and to speak to the public. So I've done my little contribution and this is why I think there's not been a pushback on me, because I'm recognized as a Muslim woman leader.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's good. That's good to know. So still on the topic of like attire or you know what to wear, for me, the issue now is not actually not the hijab. What's happening is the kofiyeh, right? So I grew up in Jordan, so my grandparents wear kofiyeh. I wear it when it gets really cold and sometimes it snows. In Jordan, we always wear the kofiyeh as a scarf, so for me, it's just like what I wear, and I have a number of them. I think I might have a picture here of my grandparents. Yeah, I'll show you one. So this is like, uh, the old Kofi. These are my grandparents. She was born in in Palestine and he was born in Jordan, and so that was like a different, uh style of coffee. So for me, that's just what we wear. It has nothing to do with politics or religion or anything like that. And now in the US, can you even wear it? Now? I'm honestly scared to wear it. In the past it was not the case. So how do you see the shift when it comes to traditional dress.
Speaker 1:So this is something that we must never allow, because this is cultural co-opting, co-opting somebody's culture and denying somebody their cultural symbolism and tying something that is so integral to the culture itself and then co-opting that and calling it a tying it to the stroke of terrorism, which is what it is Right. It's a time to the trouble of terrorism. This is extremely dangerous and I have been very vocal about this and I've been speaking to all my colleagues and every time I mention it I say you know, it's unacceptable, you can't do that. I mean, I'm a Kashmiri.
Speaker 1:If somebody told me, a Kashmir shawl all of a sudden became like, you know, it's unacceptable, you can't do that. I mean, I'm a Kashmiri. If somebody told me, a Kashmir shawl all of a sudden became like, you know, because somebody wore it and then I was wearing it, and it's like two degrees of separation that we call right Separation that somehow I'm now wearing a Kashmir shawl and I can't wear that, you know. So that's, that's basically a co-opting your culture. So that's unacceptable. What I have not seen, which I would like to see, is a day where people take back the kafir and you know, like, like Muslims took back the hijab and they called it the you know, the annual hijab day. They created a hijab. I think there should be a kafir day where everybody talks about what it means to them job.
Speaker 2:I think there should be a Kofia day where everybody talks about what it means to them.
Speaker 1:And that way you can tell your story of your grandparents and what it means to you. Because the American public has not seen that. They have not seen a picture to it, right? So all they see is three kids in Vermont who got shot because they were speaking in Arabic and they were wearing a Kofh, and now that creates a fear amongst everybody else to wear it. You know, I went to a Palestinian event the other day. It was a fair, you know of little stores, and now young entrepreneurs have created the kind of T-shirt that you're wearing and the T-shirt has these very beautiful, like a, like a teddy bear, yeah, and the teddy bear is wearing a little scarf that's in the shape of a cup. Yeah, it's like the tiniest little, tiniest little thing, but it's there. You have to get very close up to it to see it. But, uh, so they are getting very creative on how to show it. But, uh, no, I don't. You should never let somebody co-opt your culture.
Speaker 2:Interesting and you know, yeah, and in jordan it's both christians and muslims, uh, where it has nothing to do with religion or anything, yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm like, I'm like, what are you going to ask?
Speaker 1:you know, crown Prince Salman to remove his kufi.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, and like my uncles, they still wear it. So I love the idea of the International Day of Kufi. I mean let's work on it. I love it. I mean because just to take it back and realize it's.
Speaker 1:You have to take it back. And you have to take it back culturally. You have to because it's a cultural symbol and you have to take it back with arts and with culture. And you know, I've seen a lot of people who wear fashionable clothes now that are, you know, made with keffiyeh and you know they're beautiful and, yeah, I mean it's like it's. It's something that once it gets framed in a certain way, it's hard to change that framing and right now there's still an awareness about it and, uh, not, not everybody thinks of it that way, you know, um, but, but there are some people who, who may object it, but you, you don't want to be in that space where you're hiding your keffiyeh in your drawer because you don't want to wear it, because you think that it's going to be endangered.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so fascinating. So I want to go back to your book Born with Wings. Did you tell the story of the mosque and what happened and did you offer some sort of a way forward? I'm just curious how you framed what you went through in your memoir. Was it just telling or did you actually give some solutions?
Speaker 1:Well, I think, because I had to report on what happened and what I felt and how we were treated. So, um, I, I do, I do mention at the very end that, uh, it made me more resilient, you know, and it also, um, I lost all fear of death forever because of death threats. Death threats they come and they go and you lose. You, you have no fear of death after that because because you, yeah, death threats they come and they go and you lose. You have no fear of death after that Because you know if you can overcome something that is, you know such a horrendous attack on you, your person, your religion, your everything.
Speaker 1:You know your money, everything you know your money, all of these false reports of you know the money is coming from Qatar, they're taking Saudi money, falsification of stuff online getting reported without anybody checking into it, and and then you had to sit there and justify that and explain that. And this is when my faith came in right. So I would walk into the office and I would have all of my team looking at me, because there were these horrendous headlines every morning you had to look at. I don't know if you know this, but we have a newspaper called New York Post and that's like a tabloid newspaper.
Speaker 2:The New.
Speaker 1:York Post. Yeah, I know, Every morning there was like a tabloid newspaper, the New York Post. Yeah, I know. Yeah, Every morning there was like a tabloid picture of something. Yeah, and so they would buy that and they would keep that. And we would always have a morning meeting and I would tell people I said this is I'm going to tell you the hadith of the prophet. That's really informing me right now.
Speaker 1:I said that prophet used to walk by a lane and there would be a woman throwing garbage at him because she was so angry with him and his message and the garbage on those days was entrails, human entrails. So he had to duck, but he would keep walking, keep walking. And one day he walked and all his companions would say why do you do that? And he would just duck. And then one day he didn't see her. The next day he didn't see her, and then he said what happened to her? Where is she? And then they found out that she was sick and he said I'll go visit her. And he went to her. Oh, that's nice. And then she said Mohammed, you are a good man. I didn't realize, you know. And she realized her mistake and her error and of course she became his follower, and so I told that story.
Speaker 1:I said today, those human entrails are the newspapers, the newspapers that are coming to you. Think of it as an entrail that is being thrown at you, and I just want you to just pack them up, record them, put them on an Excel spreadsheet of when these happen and then just ignore them, because we're going to ignore these entrails. So sometimes, you know, this is when my faith and my belief in God and belief in what we were going through because I felt that the challenge was also meant to teach us how to become more resilient as a community, To never fear death, Because you know so, I become fearless as a result of that, and so I'm grateful for that moment, Because sometimes trials and tribulations are a blessing in disguise.
Speaker 2:Correct. Yeah, so I'm curious about your publishing journey. Many of the authors that I talked to really struggle with finding an agent, finding a publisher, for many reasons, and you know many of them are really talented, but they just, I guess, did not get the opportunity to go in front of an agent. I think taking, given your role in the media, you have a lot of networks, so maybe you were able to publish the unit, but how did you land your agent or your publisher? What was your publishing journey like?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that you're right, I was a bit more privileged than most people are, because I was a known entity already and, like I said I wasn't even planning to write my book.
Speaker 1:People told me, I had to write the book and there was already an agent that somebody had connected me to that I just wanted to do a publishing book of Muslim women. So once I landed an agent, that agent was able to get me you know Random House an imprint of Random House, and so I was introduced to all the. An agent is very important because then they put you in front of all the publishing houses. But things have changed a lot since then. Publishing houses have changed the way you now people have many more options of self-publishing or hybrid self-publishing and going with somebody who has expertise.
Speaker 1:But my biggest challenge was writing while I was also working, because I was not only a writer, I was a full-time. I worked full-time, I was traveling, so I had to find ways to write and to where. What was my biorhythm? You know, people don't know what works for them. So a writer friend of mine just told me just spend two hours writing, find the best time when you can write, like when you're really creative. And I discovered that my best writing time was 9 pm oh wow, to 12 pm, 12 am.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's when I was able to, because everything was quiet. Yeah, if I could just designate just two hours, you know, dedicated two hours, I could finish it. And then of course I had an excellent editor. Two hours, I could finish it, and then of course I had an excellent, you know, editor. Uh, I had several people helping me um, craft the whole outline and everything, so. So then you know that that was my journey, but then I wrote this book. I don't know if we mentioned this, this is my latest publication.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I saw it. Uh yeah, while doing the research.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 30 rights, yeah, so this took four years to write and it just got published so it's out there on Amazon right now and bookstores. This book I wrote because of the demand in the community itself saying you know, do I have the right to inheritance?
Speaker 1:Of course you have the right to inheritance. I mean, what about polygamy? Oh well, let me explain everything about polygamy. What about a woman's leadership? Can a woman be a leader? Can a woman have a career? All these questions that I had heard through my nonprofit work and I was already doing work in this area I thought, why don't anything at one given time in one scan? And then I did the research. I started researching and I left it completely open and I wasn't writing, I was doing primarily research.
Speaker 1:First, now I had to research the Quran, then I had to research the Hadith, then I had to research what all the jurists had said over all the different schools, and then I had to see what the opposition was to that right. Yeah, like, what are people using against women? Yeah. And I had to find women in medieval era. Who these women were that were already, you know, already living examples of these rights, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then I had to find women in contemporary times who were also, you know, playing or exemplars of that right, like you know, women's financial independence, right, something. But I tied her to Khadija, who was a tradeswoman in the 7th century, and then I said, here we have a 7th century example and here we have another woman who's somehow involved in contemporary times in a sort of a similar role. So I juxtapose the two and I show the two, but I also then provide evidence of women's financial independence and entrepreneurship from the Quran. What does the Quran say about it? So this way, people have you know, they have this book in their hand where they can say OK, I know what my rights are.
Speaker 2:So did you get any pushback? Because, you know, some people have different interpretations of what they see, so they would have different views. Like, as you know, some would insist for a woman to wear the hijab, or someone say that women get half the inheritance than her brother. So what was the feedback that you got?
Speaker 1:Well, so far mostly people who are reading this book are women, but also men who are very supportive of women. Those men are all on board. They're like, yes, this is what we always believed. You know, when I was writing this book and it was done, I gave it to my father. My father's 92 years old and his first three children were his three daughters. Ok, so he was a. He was a father of three daughters and then two sons came out to that. So you can imagine what a woman is my dad had to be because he had three daughters. Right, yeah, I gave it to my dad and I said, can you read this? And yeah, yeah, controversy regarding a Muslim woman is in the book he says you have addressed everything in here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I thought that you would have, probably some pushback.
Speaker 1:What we call controversy today, in older days, was not a controversy. It was a difference of opinion.
Speaker 2:It was a discussion in the majlis and all of that, yeah it was a difference of opinion.
Speaker 1:This scholar had a difference of opinion with this scholar and it was respected. I have my opinion. I disagree with your opinion, but I respect your opinion. That was our tradition. Yeah, yeah, we have lost that tradition.
Speaker 1:So we think, oh, she wrote this in the book. That's not the interpretation. Well, that's, your interpretation is equally valid. My interpretation is equally valid. It's the itch they had of how I arrived at this, that you should be asking, that you should be appreciating that. So how did I come to this conclusion? How did I arrive at this conclusion? That's the discussion, not what is the end result of this.
Speaker 1:So, on the hijab article, I had to spend literally seven pages on that, because you know how complex that is. Right. Do you speak Arabic? Do you speak and understand Arabic? No, I don't, and this is the other thing. So I want people to know how much real jihad went into doing this research. It's jihad. It's jihad, but like this struggle every day, relying on everybody else's work. But OK, so I also what you asked me a very interesting question. You said to me what was the lesson I learned? What was I trying to convey through Born With Wings? I had not written this book. When I published Born With Wings right, okay, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I want people to know what you can be capable of if you really put your mind to it.
Speaker 1:I never imagined that I would become a lay jurist. I never imagined in my wildest dreams an architectural designer who came from Kashmir to the United States to study the arts, that I would be writing a book like this. Because they would say, well, I don't speak Arabic, I'm not a scholar, I'm not this, I'm not that. And I said, okay, I'll break the mold for everybody else, because I want to disprove and I want people to tell me you know, I mean listen, the few scholars that have read it have said it's an amazing encyclopedia of a reference book of a few. A few male scholars have read it, who I respect very much. But the point is, if you can put your mind to it and you have the right intention and you are very much about seeking the truth and then showing how you arrived at that, that's what is valuable. And so I wanted to disprove this notion that a woman like me, who looks like me, who doesn't look the quintessential part of a Muslim woman, can actually produce a book like this.
Speaker 1:So this is the message the message is just go for it, because God is yours. You are a creature of God. God has invested in you, has vested in you this authority and has given you the permission to do God's work. And if you feel that you want to be of service to God, go for it. Nothing's preventing you from doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is great. So for your book Born with Wings, since you mentioned the whole mosque, the whole community center and all of that, did it open a new wound for you and did it also bring the people who attacked you?
Speaker 1:No, actually it was a closure, because when you write, you put your words writing and just the process of writing it and putting it down on paper and letting people read it, and then people being inspired by it. I get comments on my info email all the time. Oh, I'm reading your book. I was so inspired by it. I can't believe what you went through or I'm so inspired by what you've done. So so the book is out there and um, for me it was a closure of a chapter and uh, but I didn't realize that this chapter would open up the chapter that opens now. I never expected that I would see even a more shriller, more sort of sharper edge to Islamophobia than when we had experienced it. You know, I never expected that college kids would be attacked, that college kids would be attacked. I never expected the level. You know that a doctor, you know, would lose his entire clinic because he ripped a poster somewhere that he thought was going to create more conflict. So I never imagined that ordinary Muslims would be subject to this.
Speaker 1:And that's what worries me today of projects in mind. Number one I think that I have to go public with the message of this book, because people are receiving information differently than just reading. So I will probably be creating some kind of a platform, a podcast, something that is available on YouTube for people to listen to, so the message can be conveyed through that platform. Second it's my dream. I have several dreams. I'm a fairly energetic person and I can achieve a lot. It's my dream but it requires the right kind of team to come together is to actually profile amazing Muslim women, civilizational heroes that we have never seen on the silver screen.
Speaker 1:And in my research in my book, I found so many treasures of Muslim women. If you just told their stories, if you just really fleshed out who they were, how they came to be, how they influenced Islamic civilization, that our understanding of Islam would permanently change, because you would show that women were so active in early Islam and shaped so much of the thinking of Islam. And to this day they're doing it. But just telling the stories of these heroic women in a kind of a Netflix type of a series where you are doing an exploratory, walking around, like just imagine telling the story of Hagar. Yeah, that story is like theater. Yeah, it's literally so theatrical. It's full of tension. There's conflict between Sarah and Hagar, there's family dispute, there's the baby in the desolate valley, there's the struggle of the woman going up and down these hills, and then the woman found Smaka right, she's the founder of Smaka I don't care what anybody says.
Speaker 1:She stayed behind. The well came about because of her. She was the one who was managing the water well, people were flocking and a town got established right. So do we ever think of her that way? No, we only think of her at the time of the Sai, when we're going between Safa and Marwa. But her story is so integral and she lived 4,000 years ago how is it that we have not told her story in an effect to show her bravery, to show her resilience?
Speaker 1:What does it mean to say okay, I'll leave behind, you can go. I have a little baby here with me, that's okay, go ahead, I have a bag of dates and some water to survive on. Would you do that if your husband said to you I have to leave you in a desert valley because I got a message from God? Would you do that if your husband said to you I have to leave you in a desert valley because I got a message from God? Would you do that? So I ask women today would you do that? Would you have that kind of courage If somebody told you I need to leave you in a mountain by yourself? Probably not, probably not. Would you have that kind of courage and conviction in God. So this is about testing. So if we could just find the right kind of people to come forward, we can change the whole perspective of Islam through the lens of women.
Speaker 1:And these women's stories have never been told. They've never been told, they're not even in the consciousness of Muslims Muslims. While I was writing my book and I was like, how do we not know this stuff? I mean, we always know about Khadija, we know about Aisha, we know about Hagar, we know about Maryam.
Speaker 1:You know, these are the four or five people that we know, but we don't know that the oldest university in the world that is still running, still operating First degree-granting university, was established by a Muslim woman in Fez, morocco, fatima, and that is what gave rise and is older than Soborn and Oxford and all these kind of quote unquote established Western universities.
Speaker 1:She established it and how do we not know that? How do we not know that story? There's a school still there that you can go to and trace that, so so I think film is where it needs to be now and we need to work on this and we need, we need to have women donors that come from all over the world who have deep pockets, who say you know what, let, let's do it, let's do it, and then we can get Netflix to do it, and then it can be global. That's what my that's where I want to focus my next, next energy on, because that will change men's perception of women as well, because so many men think that women should be relegated to only this role, and then you see an ancient woman who was playing this role. That breaks the stereotype within the community as well.
Speaker 1:So, I saw you're pretty active on social media and social media is a Not so active actually Not as active as I used to, yeah, but now it's.
Speaker 2:Social media is a double-edged sword and I'm just curious if people want to reach out to you, what's the best place to reach you? Is it like through Twitter, because you were?
Speaker 1:named, one of, I think, the 100th. No, I mean they can reach me through Twitter. I'm on Facebook. They can just follow me and they can friend me, send me a friend request. I am on Instagram. I think it's Daisy Khan, new York, NYC. Daisy Khan, nyc. On Instagram. Facebook is just Daisy Khan. Linkedin. I am on LinkedIn Also, I think Dr Daisy Khan, and then on Twitter, just Daisy Khan. So I'm on all these platforms. People can also do info at daisykhancom, so I do. I do have my own website. I do have an info. I get those emails immediately. So if somebody is seeking information or wanting to connect with me, um, you know, that's the way to do it and your books are available everywhere, right on amazon, on the bookstore.
Speaker 1:Yeah so this is the hottest one. If you're interested in learning about women's rights, definitely get this one. And then Born With Wings is also on Amazon and in bookstores. It's an older book, it's from 2018. So, and yeah, both these books are available. So I mean, I have some other ideas for books, but, you know, because now people are telling me you need to write another book. Actually, somebody said to me you need to write about the prophet because, um, while writing this book, I really fell in love with the prophet because I, um, and I fell in love with seventh century Arabia because I felt so comfortable there.
Speaker 1:The milieu, what was happening, how men and women were interacting, how the prophet was interacting with women, was similar to how my father would interact with women. You know he was so supportive of women. Every time he was trying to lift a woman up and telling the men stop doing this to your women. You know he was always there empowering women, enabling them, helping them. How did we change? Empowering women, enabling them, helping them? How did we change? How did it become so misogynistic when our prophet was so forward-looking, so progressive, so empowering of women? So people are telling me I need to write just that part. You know about the prophet how he was with women, so that's something that I might consider doing.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is great. Well, dr Daisy, this has been amazing. I learned a lot from you and I'm sure the audience learned a lot. And for anyone who wants to reach Dr Daisy you can find her books, find her on social media and her website and for anyone who's listening or watching, thank you for joining us for another episode of Read and Write with Natasha. And until we meet again, natasha Tynes, if today's episode inspired you in any way, please take the time to review the podcast. Remember to subscribe and share this podcast with fellow book lovers. Until next time, happy reading, happy writing, thank you.
