Growing up as a Black Muslim woman E-Book

Fatima Adamou

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 71

Beschreibung

How does it feel to grow up as a Black Muslim woman in France? Fatima Adamou provides us with some answers in this autobiographical account set in the 1980s and 1990s. Her story narrates the straightforward tale of how she studied her religion, Islam, and how she discovered the diversity of Muslims when she was a teenager, all the while facing challenges because of her skin colour. Anyone interested in learning about French Muslims and their various legacies should read her narrative.

Leseprobe

This tale narrates my own story. First names and family names have been changed.

To my mother.

Have you ever been part of a minority within a minority?

In France, Muslims are a minority and they mostly come from Northern Africa. When I was growing up, Muslims were predominantly depicted as Arab men, North African men, who were the head of their families and the only one to pass on the teachings of the religion, Islam.

I’m Black, my parents come from islands in the Indian Ocean; I’m also a Muslim, and my mother was the only one to pass on the teachings of my religion, Islam. I belong to a minority within a minority. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s.

I’ll tell you my story. Not the story of Black Muslim women in France, just my story. The unique story of a young Black Muslim girl, who’s growing up in her country, France, who’s learning to accept that she belongs to a minority, and who’s also discovering the diversity among people who profess Islam.

Let’s go back in time to the 20th century, to a period before mobile phones, when only five or six television channels were available. Back to the days of audio tapes. To a world before the Internet.

Table of Contents

Part I

My Name is Fatima

Islam is my Parents’ Religion

My Religion is Islam

The Month of Ramadan

The Quran’s Content

Part II

Learning at the Mosque

To Be Different

Back to my Mother’s Teachings

Learning about Islam through Oral Sources

Islam in Books

Woman in Islam

Part III

I Am First and Foremost Black

The Condition of Black People

Black People on Television

Inherited Conflict

Muslims, Africa, and Politics

To Learn about Others in order to Better Understand

Part IV

Other Muslims

Muslims’ Mixed Destinies

The Need to Always Stand up for Oneself

Headscarf

The Lost Ones

How to Be a Muslim Woman… a True One

Ramadan at the

Lycée

Epilogue

Thanks

PART I

My Name is Fatima

I was born in France and grew up in a town in the outskirts of Paris. At the time horse butchers plied their trade in the town, and a magnificent nativity scene was set up at Christmas. My neighbourhood consisted of high-rise blocks in the style fashionable in the 1970s. You could also come across punk youth, whose look I rather liked although I was a bit scared by them. In the building where my family lived, middle-class and working-class people dwelled side by side, including North African families and so-called ethnic French.

I didn’t like dogs. Except my neighbours’ dogs. My mother would send me over to fetch an extra egg from neighbours in our building, and in turn they’d come to us and get a packet of baking powder. Such was our way of interacting with our neighbours for most of my childhood.

My parents, who were both Muslims, brought me up as a Muslim.

Islam is my Parents’ Religion

Islam is above all the religion of my parents, of their parents, and of their grandparents. All of them were brought up in this religion.

My father moved to France in the early 1970s after a stint in the Comoros Islands. My mother joined him after they married, before the Comoros gained independence in 1975. When they arrived, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing1 was at the helm of the country.

Islam is above all my mother’s religion. As a child, I would see her praying on a prayer mat. She’d be reading a little book in Arabic with a gold cover that her father had given her before she left the Comoros for France.

I equated the practice of Islam with my mother’s behaviour: the ablutions she performed before settling on her prayer mat, her fasting all day until sunset during the month of Ramadan.

Like my brother and my sisters, I was brought up in the Muslim religion and the five pillars underpinning it. I had to learn them by heart and repeat them back to my mother, in Arabic and French: the declaration of faith (‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His messenger’), the five daily prayers, the Ramadan fast, zakat (alms giving as a way of purification), and the pilgrimage to Mecca for those who can afford it.

I’d listen to my mother’s stories about God, angels, and the devil, then I began to study, in all seriousness.

1 French president from 1974 to 1981 (Translator’s note)

My Religion is Islam

‘Everyone has a religion: some people go to church on Sundays, others attend the synagogue on Saturdays. As your religion is Islam, you have to learn the Quran’.

My mother began her lessons with this little lecture every time my siblings and I were slow to sit by her side to be taught our religion. Her opening words varied: ‘Your classmates have a religion, yours is Islam’ or ‘Your classmates are learning their religion, and you don’t want to learn yours. But yours is Islam’.

In a way, these words made sense. I saw people going to church on Sundays. My classmates in primary school would tell me they attended the synagogue or the church. I also remember that other children had no religion at all, and didn’t believe in God. I’d catch my sisters’ eyes during my mother’s little lectures, but none of us would have dared raise the topic of atheism at that particular time.

I found out later that it would have been a wasted effort. During holidays in the Comoros, I overheard my siblings trying to convince one of our cousins that there were people who didn’t believe in God. ‘This is impossible!’ he kept repeating, as he gave arguments to prove the existence of God. We had atheist friends; thus, we knew atheism was a fact, not a hypothesis. Therefore, my brother and sisters had fun seeing how our cousin was racking his brains to try to understand such an alien notion.

My siblings and I learned to read suras in Arabic. I’ve been reading vocalised Arabic from an early age and I can read the Quran. My mother taught us when we were still very young – I was around five or six years old the first time. She used a small Quranic book, the Juzz’Amma, that covered the first part of the Great Book. The book also included the Arabic alphabet and a breakdown of the text into syllables. Her father had sent it to help her begin our religious education.

Step by step, I learned to identify the alphabet, join letters, write and read the suras, starting with the shortest ones. As we progressed, we went over all the suras we’d learned.

I wasn’t sure where my mother got it from, but she owned an audio tape stored in a pink pouch. The tape cover featured the photograph of a gentleman with a tiny hat on his head, a little moustache, and a long coat. He was sitting in front of a microphone and was called Minchaoui. This tape covered the suras I was learning, the shortest ones. My mother would turn on the tape, and I’d follow the man’s reading with my eyes on my copy of the Holy Book. The recording lasted an hour, which is a very long time for a child. As I grew older, that pink tape became a bit of a horror: it lasted long enough for me to miss the start of my favourite TV programmes. I did, however, have some preferred moments when listening to it: the reading of the suras of Dawn (Al-Fajr) and of Men (An-Nas), in other words … the suras that ended each side of the tape!

I couldn’t understand why this gentleman took so much time, pulling on each letter, waiting a long time before reading the next word.

As my learning progressed, I listened to other tapes, with longer suras. I felt more and more irritated when hearing those readers. Some verses are long; so, to catch their breath and finish in one go, they would stop in the middle then go back and read the whole thing in one breath. As a result, I couldn’t keep up. I felt I was wasting time.