Publisher's Synopsis
At the age of twenty-three, Ayesha removed her face veil to begin her studies in New York City. Braiding together Western, South Asian and Qur'anic storytelling styles, the author illuminates what it means to exist in a world that demands something different from each of her identities. With lyrical prose and scholarly precision, she weaves her personal experiences with incisive social commentary to uncover the meaning of faith and belonging, love and betrayal, family and womanhood. In so doing, she offers us a vision of freedom that isn't measured in fabric. "The Colour of God meditates on the ways--illuminates the ways--identity, nation, religion, gender, and family are constituted and troubled. I love and admire this book for many reasons: the deep, rigorous, intersectional thinking; its cyclical mode of storytelling, which is itself a mode of inquiry; it's heartbreaking and, at times, really funny; the profoundly generous heart behind the questions this book asks. But perhaps most moving to me is how The Colour of God offers us a sustained exploration of home and belief and the tendrils between the two?and reveals, again and again, how these ideas are always contested and contesting. The Colour of God is a beautiful and necessary book that remarkably, wonderfully, makes our world larger and smaller at once." ROSS GAY, bestselling author of The Book of Delights
