Reading Between Lines
A small group of Brooklyn women is bridging their cultural differences one book at a time.
The Muslim and non-Muslim women are uniting through literature, discussing both reading and life in a unique book club.
“We would say hello to people, but we just didn’t have meaningful conversations,” the group’s founder, Barbara Cassidy, said of the Muslim women she saw at the playground or her kids’ school.
“Now I have friends who are Muslim,” said Cassidy, a writer from Bay Ridge. “We’re having really important talks and understanding each other so much more.”
She launched the club a year ago, recruiting friends and reaching out to the Arab-American Association of New York on Bay Ridge’s Fifth Ave., which hosts the club’s meetings.
About a dozen women – roughly half of them Arab-American and Muslim and half white and from a variety of religious backgrounds – gather every six weeks.
They chat over potluck snacks like baklava or Middle Eastern food donated from a local restaurant while their kids play upstairs.
The books don’t always deal with Muslim issues – they’ve read “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and “American Salvage” – but the group offers a peek into each other’s communities and a comfortable space to ask questions, members said.
Last Thursday, a discussion of Moustafa Bayoumi’s “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America,” quickly turned personal.
Kerry Sahadi, 38, a blond married to a Christian of Lebanese decent, explained how she and her husband were both pulled over for speeding while following each other. Her husband was ticketed. She wasn’t.
Brooklyn-born Thikra Esa, 25, wearing traditional Muslim dress, admitted to anger over having to miss her prom and pass on an internship in Manhattan because of her parents’ strictness.
Bay Ridge mom Omayma Khayat, 31, opened up about her decision during college to cover her hair and her less-religiously strict mother’s embarrassment over it.
Muslims in the heavily Arab-American area are often reluctant to branch out of their tight-knit community, fearful of being rejected amid images of them as terrorists, said Linda Sarsour, 30, the Arab-American Association’s co-founder and a book club member.
“This is an opportunity for people to have a regular conversation,” Sarsour said. “If this can happen in Bay Ridge and be successful, it can happen anywhere.
Elizabeth Lazarowitz
New York Daily News