‘There weren’t people talking about the things I wanted to say’: Ogilvy Noor’s Shelina Janmohamed on changing narratives

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I would be watching the news [after the bombings], and the kind of people that were interviewed who were from Muslim backgrounds had extreme views. It didn’t connect at all with my experience. I felt compelled that someone had to talk about the experience that was happy and confident in being British, Western, European, Muslim, female.

I had only been writing the blog for a while. Somehow, a producer persuaded me to do [an interview with BBC Newsnight]. I realized I had something to say that wasn’t being said. I started to see myself in a different way. I was a total newbie to media, and they had put me on the show, which to me said that there weren’t people talking about the things I wanted to say.

I thought long and hard about what story I wanted to write [for the book]. You don’t counter the story by entrenching it. You don’t tell the opposite of the story because that doesn’t change the narrative. So, I wrote a story on the subject of love. It was on my mind because I come from an Asian background, and getting married is a big thing. When you’re a girl, that is your entire life purpose. And it is the question that intrigues everyone: How did you get married? How did you find each other? I wanted the reader to feel like that was the story, and I happened to be Muslim, to have a different heritage and have certain different experiences.

The problem was getting publishers to understand that. I got lots of rejections saying, “It’s a great story, but we don’t know who would buy this.” And when I said, “Nobody’s writing about this,” they said [they] don’t understand a positive story about Muslim women. I took the approach that this is my story, you can agree or disagree, but it would be great if you could understand what it’s like to stand in my shoes.

I have been on the front of so many boundaries and barriers that have been broken that I don’t know who has been there before me. So, the sadness that I didn’t have a mentor can perhaps be of value to people coming behind me.