This is the story of a child raised in Canada by parents who embraced a puritanical version of Islam to shield them from racism. The author explores the joys and sorrows of growing up in a fundamentalist Muslim household, wedding grand historical narratives of colonialism and migration to the small intimate heartbreaks of modern life. In revisiting the beliefs and ideals she was raised with, Chaudhry invites us to reimagine our ideas of self and family, state and citizenship, love and loss.

Ayesha S. Chaudhry is the Canada Research Chair in Religion, Law and Social Justice and Professor of Islamic studies and Gender studies at the University of British Columbia. She is a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellow. She has held residential fellowship at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study at UBC and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is the author of The Colour of God (Oneworld, HarperCollinsIndia, 2021) and Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition: Ethics, Law, and the Muslim Discourse on Gender (Oxford University Press, 2014). Dr. Chaudhry’s research focuses on Islamic law and theology.