Author Sherry Jones - “I did all this in the service of a truth”
altmuslim: I know a little bit, but I haven’t finished reading Fatima’s book yet.
Oh, yes, well she just basically wrote a little bit about her at the very end of her book. But I actually paid a translator in Seattle $4,000 to translate a book about Sakina that I could only find in Arabic. And she’s every bit as fascinating as I’d hoped. And this guy got so excited, that he’s gone off and ordered a whole bunch of additional books in Arabic about her just so he can read about her.
He’s just totally fallen in love with her. I mean, she was an originator of the literary salon in Mecca, when Mecca was the center of the cultural universe. And she had 5 or 6 different husbands, usually because they died, but with one husband she had this OJ Simpson-style trial of the century divorce because she had a contract with him that he would not have any other women. He had some secret concubines that she found out about and she divorced him and it was a big, huge deal. Everybody came to the trial and she refused to wear the veil and she was just this amazingly strong woman and I became entranced by her too.
But who knows if I’m going to go there, because I have to decide… I’m excited to write about her, but on the other hand I have other books I could write too. I guess I’ll just wait and see. Right now I’m sort of feeling like I need to take a break and take a step back and think about where I want my career to go. I mean, do I want to be known as......
altmuslim: mining Muslim history for ideas?
Exactly! I don’t want to be typecast for that and there are so many other things I want to write also, so we’ll see. Originally, I was thinking that I could even write about Muhammad and Khadijah, because her story hasn’t been told. But who knows, maybe someone else will be inspired to come forward and tell that tale.
[thanks YA]
Oh, yes, well she just basically wrote a little bit about her at the very end of her book. But I actually paid a translator in Seattle $4,000 to translate a book about Sakina that I could only find in Arabic. And she’s every bit as fascinating as I’d hoped. And this guy got so excited, that he’s gone off and ordered a whole bunch of additional books in Arabic about her just so he can read about her.
He’s just totally fallen in love with her. I mean, she was an originator of the literary salon in Mecca, when Mecca was the center of the cultural universe. And she had 5 or 6 different husbands, usually because they died, but with one husband she had this OJ Simpson-style trial of the century divorce because she had a contract with him that he would not have any other women. He had some secret concubines that she found out about and she divorced him and it was a big, huge deal. Everybody came to the trial and she refused to wear the veil and she was just this amazingly strong woman and I became entranced by her too.
But who knows if I’m going to go there, because I have to decide… I’m excited to write about her, but on the other hand I have other books I could write too. I guess I’ll just wait and see. Right now I’m sort of feeling like I need to take a break and take a step back and think about where I want my career to go. I mean, do I want to be known as......
altmuslim: mining Muslim history for ideas?
Exactly! I don’t want to be typecast for that and there are so many other things I want to write also, so we’ll see. Originally, I was thinking that I could even write about Muhammad and Khadijah, because her story hasn’t been told. But who knows, maybe someone else will be inspired to come forward and tell that tale.
[thanks YA]
posted by temporal at 3/09/2009
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