an interview with Alya mooro, author of ‘the greater freedom’
When I call Alya Mooro up, author of The Greater Freedom: Life as a Middle Eastern Woman Outside of The Stereotypes, I’m in my trackies, hoping I at least sound professional to make up for the lack of appearing so. I ask Alya how she is, before quickly remembering we're in the middle of a pandemic, and she’s probably just trying to get by like the rest of us. I mention that I don’t want to dwell on the looming crisis for too long; “It’s quite nice that people are actually asking how we are these days! We’re actually listening to each other a lot more than we used to”, she replies. This is one of the more pleasant side effects of the virus.
Speaking to Alya, I feel comforted immediately not only by the fact she’s incredibly friendly and speaks with spirit but that we are both ‘hybrid-Arabs’; Middle Eastern Westerners. The Egyptian-born London-raised journalist tells me that she wanted to write the part-memoir part-informative text because she saw a gap in the media for these kinds of honest female-driven Middle Eastern works. A lot of what we see and hear about Middle Eastern women is either veiled (pardon the pun) with ambiguity or are simply inaccurate and wildly broad stereotypes.
Alya is brilliant at weaving Middle Eastern experiences in with the universal female experience whilst managing to keep her writing nuanced and on topic. Her chapters on sex, specifically, will resonate with women from everywhere, addressing issues such as juggling double-standards, slut-shaming, and the pressures of when to lose your virginity as a teenager. Was this universal applicability intentional, I ask her, or did she find that a lot of topics became applicable to women of all ethnicities as she was writing? “A little bit of both”, she says. “When I was coming up with the book, interestingly even my dad would say, ‘you’re not really this oppressed woman who people want to hear about when it comes to being Middle Eastern”. Alya explains how the fact that she was continuously told she “wasn’t Middle Eastern enough” is what drove her to write the book in the first place, as well as all the mythic stereotypes Alya wanted to debunk. “I felt like this was applicable to everyone”, she tells me, “because I felt like I didn’t necessarily fit into only one or other of the boxes”.
This is most evident in diasporic Middle Easterners who have grown up in the country they or their parents have emigrated to. Imposter syndrome, as Alya catalogues through interviews with other Middle Eastern women, is all too common for those who get caught in the riptide-pull between West and East. Ultimately, a lot of choices can make Middle Easterners feel like they're “choosing [a] side”, especially when women are navigating romantic partners. I tell Alya that, just like herself and the women in her book, I felt very ‘Western’ growing up and assumed I probably wouldn’t end up with an Arab guy, but I still have parts of me tied to family and my love for the region which I find hard for a non-Arab to resonate with. Like Dunya, one of the girls Alya interviews (whose real name is changed as are the other names in the text) sometimes I think it would just be easier to be muhajaba (head-scarved) so that my identity was set; I’m Muslim and that’s that.
Does Alya also think she’d find it easier if she had a set role to fulfil? “We think that, ‘Oh, if I was just one thing or the other it would be simpler”, Alya says. “Now that I've just launched The Greater Conversation (Alya’s new weekly newsletter well worth signing up to), a lot of people have been submitting writing and some of them still live in the country they're from. Some of them do technically fit into this one box but they still don’t feel like they do”. It’s evidently a universal feeling, Alya tells me, and even her friends in Egypt don’t feel entirely different. Essentially, she outlines why it’s impossible to fit into a box because each person is such a unique mix of lots of different ingredients. We’re just a bunch of thumbprints really, no two of us are the same.
I tell Alya that I adore my culture, but I also hate parts of it that can demean and subjugate not only women but also the LGBTQ+ community, and racial or religious minorities in the region too. Saudi Arabian women, for example, still require male permission to marry, and it wasn’t too long ago that I was asked to stand behind the men at my own grandfather’s funeral because it’s 3ayb (shameful) to be near the grave if you don’t have a penis, apparently. The Middle East has its own problem too with decolonising their mentality; black people are still referred to as ‘slaves’ by some (the Middle East was heavily involved in the slave trade) and blackface is just another gimmick on Arab TV. These sentiments result, a lot of the time, in picking and choosing from cultures; it feels somewhat divisive. I ask Alya if she also finds it hard to draw the line between what is simply part of Middle Eastern culture that we have to accept and what are more liberal Western views that conflict with these.
“What even is culture? Culture should never be used as an excuse to violate essential human rights”, Alya boldly states, and she’s right of course. “One negative piece of feedback that really upset me was when a Middle Eastern girl claimed that, basically, I said that the West is amazing, and the East is shit… did I?”. Alya proceeds to note, many of us believe that if you're ‘liberal’ that means you succumb to Western ideas, “and I think that that’s really bizarre”. There have been numerous Arab thinkers and scholars who have gone against the grain, she notes, and it’s such a disadvantage to ourselves if we attribute progress or thought with being ‘Western’ - “then we're really screwed”, Alya claims, and I, nodding incessantly in agreement.
And it’s a brilliant point that we don’t really address enough in a time where people have begun clinging to culture due to the genuine liberty one has in expressing it in today’s current climate; true that culture can be significant in forming part of our identity and recent social progress means more people of colour feel comfortable celebrating their culture outright. But we’re also massively kidding ourselves if we claim that we entirely represent one culture, because today, this is practically impossible. Why do we have to represent one thing or another just to make identity claims?
“Why can't I just be myself, you know?! Why do I have to do this for you to think that I’m that enough?”, Alya says, with a fervour that makes me draw an ear-to-ear smile and also release a breath of relief. She fucking gets it! I think.
Throughout the book, Alya discloses stories of her romantic adventures, family feuds and teenage escapades, the style of which makes the book so loveable by way of its personal nature. If I wrote something like this, my mum would be pretty pissed off, I tell her. “How did you approach that? I’m sure it was very cathartic for you.”
“It was. My family is so open-minded - had they not been, it would have been a lot more difficult for me to write this book in the first place. That’s what made me feel like I had to take one for the team”. If not Alya, then who? “I led them slowly into it,” she tells me. “My favourite moment of this whole experience has been my mum’s reaction to reading the book”, she says. This is a pleasant surprise to me, and it was to Alya too at the time.
“You’ve given me the greater freedom to feel like I don’t need to be stuck anymore”, Alya’s mum told her after reading her daughter’s memoir. Her mum went on to claim, “I’m a feminist too - I didn’t realise I was until I read this”. That’s about as good as any feedback a writer could wish to get from their parents.
And how about the invisible jury, as she calls them in the book - referring to inferred social rules and norms upheld by Middle Eastern society - was she afraid about how they would receive the book? “I was really scared when I was writing this – I get scared when people ask me, I don’t want to jinx it.”
“Okay, I'm touching wood, I'm touching wood,” I tell her, wrapping my knuckles against the desk.
“Me too! But no, I wasn’t worried, not really. I don’t know why – maybe because they dismiss me as not really Egyptian because I grew up in London, or maybe it didn’t reach the people who would be mad.” Alya’s mum told her that the way she wrote the book was not aggressive but was more of a questioning, which perhaps helped ease the subject matter. “We just need to have these conversations”, Alya rightly states, “I just wanted to facilitate them”. And the book’s success and proceeding social following are a testament to just how much she truly has facilitated these greater conversations (I had to).
And what advice, then, would Alya give to young aspiring female writers, from the Middle East or from a minority ethnic background, who are being inspired every day by works such as her own and the many other emerging works today? “Your story is valid. That’s the thing that we all need to hear. Share it. It really does make a difference to other people.” Alya tells me this is why she wanted to launch The Greater Conversation newsletter too, and how impressed she’s been at the responses, “It’s had an impact on people's lives where they feel more listened to, less alone, more “normal”, whatever that means. It’s life-changing.”
Click here to buy ‘The Greater Freedom’ (it’s on Kindle too, save the trees!). And you can sign up to Alya’s brilliant newsletter here.