The Strangest Questions Muslims Are Asked

I was speaking at the LSE Literary Festival over the weekend on a panel about “Islamophobia and Literature”. It was a Saturday night, and thus the full audience made for an impressive turn out on a fairly heavyweight subject.  We the panellists were a light-hearted bunch though – my book on love, and the others had re-written fairy tales, and a book about a Muslim women’s chat group amongst their other credentials.

Anyway, back to the heckler.

“Shove what down whose throats?” I yelled back to him.

“You lot, you Muslims. Why do you try to shove it down our throats?”

It was the usual Daily Mail diatribe (“We’re becoming a shariah state, the Moozlims have taken over! We’ve been eliminated from our own country” etc etc.) so I decided to challenge him back for hard evidence, not just rhetoric. “Give me three examples of when someone has shoved it down YOUR throat?” I heckled back.

He muttered, the wind taken out of his sails, something about ‘Tower Hamlets’ and then grumbled under his breath as though he’d had enough.

If he had had enough of Muslims and Islam, why on earth had he come on a Saturday night to a literary discussion about Islamophobia, I wondered. A nutty form of masochism? A secret penchant for Muslims?

It got me thinking… If you are a Muslim, what is the strangest, funniest or most curious thing that you’ve been asked? What could you barely contain your giggles about, but had to answer seriously? Or what did you think ‘How on earth am I supposed to know the answer to that?’

by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed the author of Love in a Headscarf, a humorous and irreverent story of growing up as a Muslim woman. She is a columnist for The National UAE and EMEL magazine as well as a contributor to Guardian, the BBC and Channel 4 and writes an award-winning blog at Spirit21.co.uk. She was named by The Times newspaper as one of the UK's 100 most influential Muslim women.

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