Does My Head Look Big In This?

Yes your head does look big in that, and you should go back to the taliban and blow up some shit. Thats the idea I felt was trying to be portrayed in Randa Abdel-Fattah's Does My Head Look Big In This? Everyone loves a good read about teen angst in high school and what better audience than a high schooler themself, what I liked a lot about this novel is that there was a lot of good lessons to learn from the oh so dangerous Muslim point of view. Amal is the main charater in this novel who decides that she will wear a hijab, or religious head covering for Muslim women. I thought it was amazing being able to see what it is like for another student struggling with the same issues as any other highschool student on top of trying to fit in in a setting where you are the minority. The key facts that I learned about the Muslim faith from this book is that most Muslims love their religion and God more than anything else this world has to offer and that the act of wearing a hijab or veil-like cloth over their head is one of the greatest acts of respect and subission to God a woman can make. Although that statement is debatable this novel makes it seem less like a culture shocker and more like reflection of a womans love for her faith. Amal shows great patientce with putting up with racist remarks and I think if any high schooler were to read this book either in class or outside of class, could gain from reading this book not only knowledge about another culture, but also how much what you say or dont say affects another person.

Five Years of My Life

It was disappointing to me that we had to cut the semester short due to the lovely Michigan weather, but I must say that the most rewarding novel I read this semester in our Middle Eastern interpretation class was definitely Molly's selection of Five Years of My Life. This memoir was the first time my brain was opened to the horrors and ugly secrets of Guantanamo, sure I have seen it in the headlines and even made jokes with my friends about it, but it was more of a shocker than i could have ever imagined. The fact that a nineteen year old young man traveling to Pakistan to advance his education could be stopped in transit at an airline and sold for a seemingly small price to American soldiers under little to no speculation of the man being a terrorist is sickening. Until reading this memoir I was under the impression that the humiliating tortures described ended with Vietnam. Boy oh boy was i wrong, this event took place no less than a little under ten years ago. After reading this it really had me question our government as a whole and made me realize that the media will do anything except tell you the truth, they will dance around touchy subjects and controversial issues and take the smallest fragment of a truth and stretch it into a bold-face lie.

I was surprised that this lack for a better word epiphany, did not occur to me earlier in the semester. As a student this was the very first time I was exposed to such atrocity and have to say it was very stimulating for my brain to go off into "what if ?" mode. What if the war on terrorism is nothing more than a sham to gain control of wealth in terms of oil, what if 9/11 was a conspiracy, what if good ol' dubbya was behind all of this for personal gain?

I promise you I will not begin to bore you with my politcal beliefs, I just wanted to let all of you who didn't get the chance to read this book for class to know that if you were unsatisfied with the subject matter we covered, you owe it to yourself to read it. If anything, you will definitely be satisfied with yourself for reading something so twisted but so true. I think thats what I liked most about this class, that everything we read had a direct correlation to waht is going on in the world in todays day in age versus learning about allegory and symbolism from ancient pieces of literature.