“In one context, we’re too Muslim for comfort. In the other, we’re not Muslim enough”

Nazia Erum demonstrates that fierce wears many faces.

Hers is of journalist, writer, mother – and woman who could not look away when she discovered a brutal story that needed to be told. Her new book, Mothering a Muslim – is an essential, urgent read that is generating buzz and, we hope, triggers deep introspection as it illuminates a grim, ugly reality we’d prefer not to acknowledge.

And in The Elephant In Our Schools, Nazia Erum told that invisible story – the heartbreak of mothering a Muslim and the shocking hate we’re all a part of.

Evoking her experience of mothering a Muslim child, and the experience of other Muslim mothers with children in affluent private schools in cities like Delhi, Nazia made visible an uncomfortable truth. This prejudice doesn’t lie only in ghettoes and working class relations: it is a part of our immediate, elite world.

Listing many experiences across schools, she spoke of the frightening pincer movement of uber-nationalism on the one hand, and escalating Islamisation on the other. In one context, she said we’re too Muslim for comfort. In the other, we are not Muslim enough. Between the hate squads and the haram police, Muslims don’t have the luxury of being just plainly Indian.

Not everyone in the audience bought her story though. Many asked if she was exaggerating; why bullying Muslim kids was any different from the bullying all kids face; or indeed whether Muslims were responsible for the “othering” they face. The questions, in a sense, represented the blind spot and highlighted why it’s important to trigger many more conversations like this. As Nazia said at the end, this wasn’t just a Muslim problem: hate is hate, and it tends to consume all.