THE MUSLIM (M)OTHER

Bint Rehan discusses the pressures faced by Muslim moms in this nonfiction blend of social criticism and religious commentary.

It’s hard to be a mother in any society, but for Muslims, the stress of modern parenting’s contradictory demands can sometimes seem impossible to bear. With this book, bint Rehan offers “an excavation of the environment in which we parent, as digital citizens often in secular societies, and how that impresses so intimately upon us as Muslim mums in sometimes ‘negative’, sometimes ‘positive’, almost always invisible ways.” Bint Rehan—a mother of two daughters—dissects her own position through the lenses of the personal, the digital, the political, and the cultural. She writes about her relationships to beauty, to self, and to God; parenting in the social media age, when it seems one is always somehow doing it incorrectly; the specters of Islamophobia, Trump, and Gaza; and the highly unsettled role of women, both in Muslim and secular society. The author touches on everything from the age-old notion of a woman’s value being bound up in her fertility to curious modern phenomena like the “Incel,” the “TradWife,” and the “Muslimah BossGirl.” Bint Rehan is a shrewd social critic: “Society depends on mothering specifically—and parenting more generally—in a way that it doesn’t any other area of human skill or expertise,” she writes. “For this reason, and many more, it is a passionately contested subject we all feel we have a claim to.” Her perspective is decidedly religious, with frequent references to relevant Islamic teachings. Those expecting chattiness or personal examples from bint Rehan’s life will be disappointed; the text reads as more academic than confessional. Nevertheless, the author presents a convincing way forward despite the complexities of the topic. Readers interested in a view of contemporary Muslim motherhood from the inside will find much here to chew on.

A thought-provoking, multifaceted analysis of the expectations placed on mothers in the Muslim world.