Growing up in Mogadishu, Somalia, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel was immersed in the language and culture of Italy, Somalia’s former colonizer. Yet when she moved to Italy as a young mother in the 1970s, she discovered a country where immigrants and Muslims were viewed with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion­–where, even today, she and her children must seemingly prove they are Italian. 
 
In Islam and Me, Fazel tells her story and shares the experiences of other Muslim women living in Italy, revealing the wide variety of Muslim identities and the common prejudices they encounter. Looking at Italian school textbooks, newspapers, and TV programs, she invites us to change the way Muslim immigrants, and especially women, are depicted in both news reports and scholarly research. Islam and Me is a meditation on our multireligious, multiethnic, and multilingual reality, as well as an exploration of how we might reimagine national culture and identity so that they become more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist. 

 

SHIRIN RAMZANALI FAZEL is an Italian writer of Somali origins. She has published two collections of poetry, Wings and I Suckled Sweetness, as well as two novels, Far from Mogadishu and Clouds over the Equator, that deal with the effects of Italian colonialism in Somalia and her experience of migration to Italy. 
 
SIMONE BRIONI is an associate professor in the Department of English at Stony Brook University in New York and an affiliated faculty member in the Departments of Africana Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 
 

— Heather Merrill, author of Black Spaces: African Diaspora in Italy

— Amara Lakhous, author of Divorce Islamic Style

— Marie Orton, coeditor of Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives

— Maya Angela Smith, author of Senegal Abroad: Linguistic Borders, Racial Formations, and Diasporic Imaginaries