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Amani Al-Khatahtbeh Quotes

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Famous Amani Al-Khatahtbeh Quotes

“Listening to my tutor tell me the story (of Khalid ibn al-Walid at the Battle of Mu'tah), I was overwhelmed with such pride in my history that I decided in that moment that I wanted to wear a headscarf, as a public marker that I belonged to this people. I wanted it to be so that before people even knew my name, the first thing that they would know about me is that I am a Muslim. I told myself that upon my return to the States, I would wear the headscarf with pride as my outward rebellion against the Islamophobia that had seized me and suffocated me for most of my life. With that decision, I inherited the entire history to which the hijab had been tied, and carried it on my head like an issue for public debate.”

IslamAutonomyMuslimFemale EmpowermentHijabHeadscarf
Book:Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story
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“The theft of brown women's narratives is not only an injustice placed on them, but also one extended to their male counterparts; by insisting they need to be liberated from their 'barbaric' civilization, Laura [Bush] summoned the colonial assertion that brown women need saving from brown men, when, in actuality, brown women have suffered at the hands of white men more than at those of any other oppressor in history.”

FeminismRacismIslamColonialismMuslimIslamophobiaMuslim WomenWhite Feminism
Book:Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story
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“When all the public eye sees are headscarves instead of individual stories, our community is collectively tokenized. It creates the perception that opportunity is limited and only a rare few of us can make it. Whenever that happens to an already marginalized community, it pits its own members in a competition against one another instead of against the restrictive frameworks that put us in that position in the first place. The first hijabi whatever won't eliminate Islamophobia just as the first black president hasn't eliminated racism, though both are signifiers of some type of progress — symbols of ascending beyond adversity.”

RacismIslamOppressionMuslimIslamophobiaMarginalizationTokenization
Book:Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story
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“It makes me sad to think about all the resources the Muslim American community has been forced to waste for the past decade on campaigns, events, and media efforts to prove that we, too, are American; that w, too, are human, begging and pleading the public to not believe the racist rhetoric being spewed about us. I can't imagine the types of institutions, programs, and civic society we could have cultivated for our community—the type of backbone we could have had the opportunity to grow—had we not been forced into this position.”

MuslimMuslim American
Book:Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story
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“I started to see the bigger picture of things: Islam was not relegated to the tiny, sometimes frustrating and seemingly arbitrary details of practice, but rather entered the larger picture of spirituality and worship that contextualized my womanhood. In order to be able to derive these logical conclusions about my religion, I had to go back to the basics and understand the very fundamental principles upon which it was founded: justice, social equality, racial equality, financial equality, and, possibly most important of all, gender equality. Thus began my lifelong love affair with Islamic feminism.”

ReligionFeminismIslamMuslimIslamic Feminism
Book:Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story
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