She baked the Queen’s 90th birthday cake
Baker-turned-author Nadiya Hussain from Bangladesh has opened the door for young Muslim women to dream big
At the end of my interview with Nadiya Hussain I couldn’t get the song Blackbirds by The Beatles out of my head. Twenty minutes earlier, Nadiya whirled into our interview in a modest interpretation of a black and white flower patterned tunic dress and a purple hijab that matched her lipstick. Her Disney-like eyes and animated smile only added to the wholesome, contagiously positive Great British Bake Off winner the world met in 2015. Despite her charming and likeable personality, I found myself frustrated at the end of our interview. Not specifically by Nadiya but by what she is starting to represent. As Nadiya told me her disbelief at finding an email request to bake the Queen of England a cake, I had a funny thought. I wondered, whether the Queen of England would have ever guessed that a celebrated Bangladeshi British Muslim woman would be baking an orange drizzle cake for her 90th birthday. “She took the top tier home!” Nadiya said, “I heard the Obamas visited the next day… just saying. Maybe they had a taste too. I can dream.” Nadiya has definitely dreamed and in the process opened the doors for other young Muslims to dream big too. The UK, along with the rest of the world, has changed drastically since the birth of the Queen. For many Muslims around the world, this change hasn’t been the most positive for our international image, heritage, and our pride. I remember when the The Great British Bake Off was being aired in 2015. I initially had no interest in watching it. Baking wasn’t something I found particularly enthralling. It wasn’t until my sister urged me to watch the show that I became interested. ‘There’s a woman wearing a hijab — you have to see her. She’s really good. I think she might win!’ Nadiya was a Muslim woman and there she was on TV, hijab and all. No, she wasn’t playing a terrorist in a movie, this wasn’t a news clip showing a Muslim woman wailing, not a documentary about a girl running away from an abusive husband or father either. This was a baking show and Nadiya was baking and chatting away about her life. I was hooked as a funny little spark of pride welled up inside me. Although Nadiya and I are both Muslims, we couldn’t be further apart in experience, culture, upbringing, life stages and hobbies (I couldn’t bake a potato if my life depended on it). But by watching her simply being herself, I like many Muslims, felt connected to her as she represented some part of our identity that had been missing and still is missing from the mainstream media.
“I’m just one version of this — there are millions of others,” Nadiya said.
Nadiya was here at the 9th edition of Emirates Airline Festival of Literature to talk about her debut novel The Secret lives of the Amir Sisters. The story revolves around four young Muslim sisters in an English village growing up and learning about life. I was and am apprehensive and cautious about reading the book. Especially when I saw a small photo of Nadiya on the cover. Odd. Then when I looked inside I was surprised, then irritated to find that along with Nadiya’s name as author, was the name of Ayisha Malik — a talented author whose book Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged, I read and enjoyed last year.
I don’t understand why Nadiya had to write a novel about young Muslim sisters simply because she is one. Before this book we had no idea that she was a writer, in the literary sense, of any sort. I didn’t really get an answer from Nadiya either, except that it was important for her to represent more than one kind of “Muslim girl” in her book. Fair enough, I suppose.
The uneasy feeling I initially got which turned into frustration wasn’t due to Nadiya deciding to write a novel. If it was in fact her idea to write one and not some marketing person who suggested it, then I really believe that she should have done it on her own. To be clear, the issue for me is that Nadiya had help writing this book from Ayisha Malik and that her photo was on the book cover. I’m sure it was probably not a problem for Nadiya to get the novel published either, given her fan base who are ready and willing to consume anything she produces, whether it be baked goods, cookbooks or in this case, a novel.
Nadiya is talented, Nadiya is relevant, Nadiya is important to Muslims in the UK and probably to Muslims in other parts of the world. I’m still a fan. But Nadiya can’t be the only talented Muslim. I worry that although it seems that Muslims are being welcomed into the mainstream inspiring others to try, they are also being simultaneously restricted.
The Muslim experience in fiction is incredibly rich, under-appreciated and lacking serious presence and diversity in the literary and publishing world. Where are those talented Muslim writers without an existing fan base, struggling to get their voices heard or maybe writing for other people? They are there, writing, I promise you. We should make space for them, they deserve it.
When I asked Nadiya what her desert island song would be, I was surprised that she chose a Beatles classic.
“The Beatles, Blackbird, that’s my dad’s favourite.”
Funnily enough, Paul McCartney had in the past stated that the lyrics of the song were inspired by the state of race relations and tension in the United States in the 1960s. Just when I was going to tell Nadiya this, our time was up and she had to rush to another interview.
maan@khaleejtimes.com Maán is obsessed with opposites. What’s
the opposite of a chair? It’s not a table