Let's talk about the first step

All writing that comes from a human being (and what a weird world we live in that that needs to be qualified) comes from an idea.

And here I want to speak about where I think the idea of my novel came from, now only ten months away from publication. I cannot do better than that as, in the end, ideas are mysterious things.

The core idea of my novel is the setting of Medina'tul-Agham, which is a medieval city that is not only an Islamic society, but a matriarchal one as well.

As far as I can tell, that core idea came from the question. "Can the law of the faith that I am a part of... Sharia... explain the faith of the family that I grew up in?"

Background

The thing is that I grew up in Saudi Arabia, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a very socially conservative place built on an idea of Islamic law that did not even allow women to drive a car. While in my family I saw women who had no restrictions on what they could achieve and the education and career expectations on my sister were exactly the same as the ones on me, her younger brother.

So who was following Islamic Law, Sharia, correctly, the country that I grew up in, or my family?

And from there came the thought, could it be that there could legitimately be a version of Sharia that would allow women like the ones in my family to rule?

Lived Experience

There is also a very faint memory that has stuck with me... one of my mother speaking to my sister and me, bluntly stating that in Islam, men are expected to spend all of their money on their families, while women can do whatever they want with theirs. I remember very clearly being very unhappy about this while my sister was equally happy to lord this over me.

All of us have these kinds of memories, and these kinds of experiences, both positive and negative.

A negative experience that I believe made this question very urgent for me was the rise of Islamophobia in the aftermath of 9/11.

The hostility came not only from war mongering conservatives and proselytizing Christians but also from feminists, and from liberal sections of society that increasingly adopted the arguments of the New Atheist Movement that, while it was suspicious of all faith, focused it's ire on Islam and Muslims. It felt like my community was under siege from all directions.

Any concept that seemed Islamic, any word that seemed Arabic was treated with suspicion. Parts of my faith that I had no need to even think about, such as Sharia and fatwas and jihad, were not only being interrogated but used as proof that Islam, and the Muslims who believed in it such as me, were somehow defective. The idea that for whatever reason Islam was 'incompatible' with the West settled into the realm of common sense ideas that did not even warrant being thought about.

While I did not realize it at the time, the tension that I felt as all of this rhetoric was being thrown about was me feeling unsafe in Canada, a place that I thought of as my home.

I can say this for certain, this feeling of being under attack is what led me to defend myself by actually delving into the Islamic terminology that I felt like I was being blamed for.

And that very neatly leads me to the next step in the writing process.

Research.

But that's a story for another blog post!