Salma El-Wardany’s novel These Impossible Things opens with a line that scandalized me when I first read it in 2022: “Do you think Eid sex is a thing? Like birthday sex, but just the Muslim equivalent?” I remember devouring the nearly 400-page story about three British Muslim friends in two days, and then falling into something of a reading slump. Why were there not more books out there like this, that delved into the complexity of Muslim womanhood?
Novels about female Muslims once relied on two major character tropes: the pious, veiled woman with ironclad ethical mores and the oppressed girl who rebels against cultural codes and finds liberation away from her family and faith.
But over the past few years, Muslim authors have produced bracingly original stories foregrounding faith as a cornerstone of identity, rather than a stumbling block. 2025 saw the release of Mariam Rahmani’s Liquid, a novel about a scholar in Los Angeles who vows to go on 100 dates to find a husband before a family tragedy pulls her to Tehran. In 2024’s Daughters of the Nile, Zahra Barri explores Arab and Muslim feminism and sexuality from the perspectives of Egyptian women across three different generations. And in 2023’s Hijab Butch Blues, Lamya H (a pseudonym) bravely reimagines the stories of important women from Islamic history, noting parallels with her own contemporary struggles.
In the realm of YA, authors like S.K. Ali (Misfit in Love) and Tasneem Abdur-Rashid (Odd Girl Out) have expanded what a Muslim coming-of-age story can look like, helping younger Muslims see themselves in literature: wearing hijabs and navigating Islamophobia, but also trying to fit in and falling in love.
At the same time, writing about Muslim womanhood has flourished in the nonfiction space. Authors are reclaiming narratives that have historically pitted faith and feminism against one another, especially when it comes to Islam. It’s a tension explored by Muslim journalist Shahed Ezaydi in The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women, which comes out next month. Candid and relatable, it’s a breath of fresh air in a literary niche where texts are often academic, dense, and daunting for the average reader.
When I set out to write my novel, Turbulence (out now via Dreamwork Collective), the work of all of those authors was inspiring. My protagonist, Dunya Dawood, is learning to separate the essence of Islam from the patriarchal interpretations that tend to cloud it. Pregnant and on a flight from the Middle East back to New York, Dunya reflects on the choices she’s made—setting aside her dreams of filmmaking for marriage and motherhood—when a shocking revelation causes her to go into labor.
It was important to me that Dunya avoided the common Muslim-woman tropes. She’s on an ongoing spiritual journey, somewhere between learning, loving, and interrogating her faith. When Dunya’s friend Sheefah encourages her to challenge traditions supposed to be divinely mandated, certain questions emerge in her mind. Why do women pray behind men? How can the hijab serve as more than a symbol of piety, but of political solidarity? What can gender equality look like for modern, married, Muslim couples?
We’re taught that Islam liberated and empowered women at the time of revelation, so why does it often fail to do so today? Men have been dictating what it means to be a Muslim for centuries, but does that make their rulings immutable? These are conversations that conflict and confuse many of us who are devoted to our faith and, at the same time, identify as feminists.