“I’m only the woman I am today because of the women I’ve had around me. And that’s what I wanted to put on the page. And I wanted it to be that they happened to be Muslim.”
Salma El-Wardany is described in the bio of her popular Instagram page as “another screamy woman,” and although the quote is attributed to “a man on the internet,” she seems to carry the title with pride.
“The book is a love letter to female friendships and how important they are and how they will save your life, no matter what happens to culture, to religion, to faith, to men in your life. It is the women in your life who will come in and get you off the bathroom floor, like my girlfriends have often done. It’s the women in my life that have made me a better version of myself.”
El-Wardany joins Bryony Gordon on this week’s Mad World podcast, which you can listen to on the player at the top of this page, saying, “And I never saw myself or my friends on the literature pages, and I was a real bookworm I read nine books a week when I was young And nowhere was I to be found in those pages And, you know, I loved all the classics, but I guess there’s only so much you can relate to Emma by Jane Austen If You Were a tan, Muslim girl growing up in Newcastle upon Tyne, whose working class.
And so the half-Egyptian, half-Irish Muslim writer decided to take on the task of seeing herself on the page by writing her debut novel These Impossible Things, which charts the friendship of three British Muslim women and what life has to offer them. .
El-Wardany, who also hosts a radio program on BBC London, deplores the stereotyping that so often accompanies Muslim characters in literature, such as ‘the emancipated Muslim’. “The West has freed them from the shackles of an oppressive religion, and now they are here and they are living a better life for it. And I remember going through it all and thinking, but I’m not in any of my girlfriends .”
“We all loved our religion and our culture and our faith, and we didn’t want to give it up. And we went out and we got drunk and had sex and did all those things too. And everything we went through enriched us and we were there better for it, but we just weren’t there in the pages.”
“And I think that’s really devastating. It’s definitely made my life harder. It’s made my girlfriends’ lives harder. It’s made it harder for us to move through the world. And so there’s that quote, is there’s not, that if there’s a book you want to read that isn’t there, you better write it. So I always knew I was going to be a writer, so I thought I’d better start with this book.”
You can listen to the full conversation with Salma El-Wardany on Bryony Gordon’s Mad World podcast using the audio player at the top of this article, or at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.