‘Floating in painful limbo, I belong to no one,” writes British-Palestinian doctoral student NS Nuseibeh in her first book of essays. She uses memories, historical research and stories from early Islam to reflect on her identity and on what it means to be a Muslim feminist in these turbulent and sorrowful times. Born in East Jerusalem, Nuseibeh doesn’t fit cliched expectations of a Palestinian Muslim. She has light skin and an American accent, and studied the Qur’an at university, not in a mosque. In moments of doubt and insecurity, she searches for connection with her indomitable ancestor and namesake, Nusayba, a mythic warrior, mother and early convert who fought alongside the prophet Muhammad. Nusayba is an enthralling conduit into her family’s cultural heritage and “easy for me to imagine, as I sit curled up here on my bed, in a slightly cold room in Oxford, thirteen hundred or so years later: a stout, muscled woman atop a horse, licking sweat from her lips as she strings a bow one-handed”.
Nuseibeh and Nusayba may share a name, but their other similarities are buried under a layer of stark contrasts. Nusayba rides screaming into battle, loses a hand and carries on undeterred. Nuseibeh is “studious and apologetic” and starts her book by stating her “positionality”. Nusayba is full of hunger and rage. She plunges into her new faith and demands a role in it. Nuseibeh is a thoughtful academic who struggles with her health and finds in modern discourse “very little room for the Muslimness I embody … [a] neutral, secular connection to religion I see Christian and Jewish friends and writers wearing easily … without being labelled ‘religious’, let alone fanatical or extreme”.
