The story of Creative Writing for Social Change starts in the sands of the Sinai Peninsula in 1999 when I was seventeen. At the end of a camel trek through the desert, I was enjoying the refreshing hospitality of our Bedouin guides. As I sipped a glass of sweet mint tea, I noticed one of the Bedouin slip out of the tent and quietly unroll his prayer mat on the hot sand, almost out of view. As he humbly went through his prostrations, I never took my eyes off of him.
I had grown up in communities that were virtually 100% white-British, and I had never seen anything like this before. In that moment of observation in Egypt a seed of curiosity was sown inside me that would determine my life’s vocation.
Two years later, as the dust was still settling on the streets of New York and DC after the al-Qaeda attacks, my curiosity about Islam turned into a burning fascination. In a fortuitous turn of events, I was in the process of switching from a Psychology degree to Theology at the University of Birmingham, UK, in the year that the Islamic Studies department merged with Theology. I signed up for every module I could on Islam; Tafsir (interpretation) of the Qu’ran, A History of Islamic Philosophy, Islam and the West, A History of Christian-Muslim relations, etc.
In the post-9/11 atmosphere there was a terrible level of Islamophobia on campus and in the wider community. And it was then that another watershed moment in my life occurred. The professor of the Tafsir of the Qu’ran module was an Egyptian scholar who took pity on me as the only non-Muslim in her class. She invited me to meet in her office so that she could give me a crash course in the basics of Islam. In that meeting we also spoke about the tension between Muslims and non-Muslims on campus. We agreed that fear of the Other was the problem; that fear was borne out of ignorance and prejudice, which in turn came from neither group knowing each other.
So we decided that if we wanted to reduce the fear we needed to facilitate meaningful interaction and mutual learning. And so the next week we became co-chairs of the university’s first Christian-Muslim dialogue group that met every week for the next two years. That experience taught me the power of forming deep and trusting relationships through the process of sharing and listening to each other’s stories.
My journey since then has taken me across the Middle East and beyond, listening to people’s stories from Beirut to Baghdad, from Gaza to Quetta.
I have earned a Masters degree in Islamic Studies and spent eight-years working in counter-radicalisation in London, where I worked particularly closely with the incredible Somali community.
Now that my two children are less dependent on me I am able to bring to fruition the culmination of all my skills, experience and passion in the form of Creative Writing for Social Change.
I would love you to come and be part of the story!