Miniskirt Democracy: Muslim Women’s Memoirs
Roxanne Varzi, 31 July 2008
In school we were asked to write a short story: fiction, not autobiography. I began mine with the sentence: ‘Bombs dropped, the sky was ablaze, there was no night.’ The teacher, who had been making her rounds, looking down at our papers as she went, saw mine and sniffed: ‘Fiction does not have to be “real”, but it does have to be truthful. A writer writes what...