Turbulence: The tale of a young Muslim woman navigating faith and feminism after marriage

When Modesty: A Fashion Paradox author and journalist Hafsa Lodi came across a news report at the height of COVID-19 about a Nigerian woman who gave birth aboard an Emirates flight, she shuddered at the thought of going into labour mid-air.

That fear stayed with her, and a year later, she found herself contending with it again when she was due to board a flight to Canada in her third trimester.

However, that fear soon transformed into the plotline for a novel — what if her female protagonist gave birth on a flight to America? And what would it take to trigger her to go into labour?

Between changing nappies and milk feeds, Hafsa sowed the seeds for a novel about a young aspiring British Pakistani filmmaker who gives up her career before it has even started to marry the love of her life. They move from New York City to the Gulf, where cultural and societal expectations slowly erode her feminist ideals. Dunya Dawood was born.

Aptly named Turbulence, Hafsa's first novel, published by The Dreamwork Collective, isn't just about the terror of giving birth while a plane jerks you about in the Earth's lower stratosphere; it is also about the ways in which women are shaken to their core when everything they believe to be true changes.

Our protagonist, Dunya, believes she is a feminist, but when those beliefs are challenged by her best friend, Sheefah, Dunya realises she may be guilty of being all talk and little action. She believes she has made the right decision by giving up her career and moving halfway across the world for love, but then those choices, too, are challenged.

Dunya picks up on the human rights abuses, classism and social injustices in Middle Eastern society and wants to film a documentary about them, but her husband Rahim quickly shuts her ideas down, pointing to censorship in the region. And then, when cracks begin to show in her marriage and in the façade of wealth and high society in the Gulf, Dunya chooses silence over standing up for justice. She becomes a woman she no longer recognises.

"I wanted to shed light on the idea of feminism in practice versus theory," Hafsa tells The New Arab.

"Dunya keeps saying she's a feminist and thinks she's an activist. She wants to make all these game-changing documentaries and bring real change to her community. She's saying this, and suddenly 10 years have passed, and she hasn't done anything except fulfil the cultural roles expected of her. So, I wanted her to be this contradictory, flawed and more passive than active character, because I think it's true of a lot of us."

Growing up in London, Dunya did not have a conventional Muslim-Pakistani upbringing. Her feminist mother Sherry divorces her abusive husband when Dunya is young, and they go to live with Sherry's brother Tariq, who has escaped family pressure to get married.

Sherry then retrained as a lawyer. She puts no pressure on Dunya to go to madrassah and, if anything, discourages Dunya from getting married.

"It was very intentional throughout the book for me to debunk a lot of these myths and disprove a lot of stereotypes," says Hafsa.

"A typical South Asian mum is going to be like, 'get married.' I wanted Dunya to be someone who wants to discover faith on her own terms. So, that's why her mother is not only non-religious, but almost anti-religious. I didn't want Dunya to be someone who's forced to study Islam. I wanted her to be passionate about learning this beautiful faith from the ground up, being something that she wasn't allowed, first of all, to do," the author adds. 

"With uncle Tariq, I wanted him to be the exact opposite of the typical assertive patriarch who oppresses women. I wanted him to be a gentle, loving, nourishing, almost father figure in her life."

Hafsa Lodi

Hafsa Lodi was the Features Editor for Vogue Arabia

Hafsa Lodi is an American-Muslim journalist who has been covering fashion and culture in the Middle East for more than a decade

Hafsa writes about the intersection of faith, fashion, and feminism

'I call it her ascension'

Turbulence opens with what appears to be Dunya in a garden; it is unclear whether this is the barzakh, the Islamic realm between death and the Day of Judgement, or Heaven. We don't know if our protagonist is dead or alive.

And then Hafsa has done something quite bold.

A woman dressed in white robes approaches Dunya in this otherworldly garden, rosary beads in hand. At first, she thinks it is her Creator. But the Creator would not be praying on rosary beads. So, who is this figure?

Inspired by the re-imaginings of female figures in Islam by N. S. Nuseibah in her book Namesake and Lamya H in Hijab Butch Blues, Hafsa took on the risk of reimagining one of the four greatest women in Islam. And it turns out, this was the very first chapter she wrote, before she even had a storyline.

"I call it her ascension," shares Hafsa. "The ascension chapter is so important to me, so important to the book. That spiritual element is an undercurrent throughout the story, and I wanted to just bring a hint of it to the start to grab readers' attention. It almost feels like that chapter is the jewel of the book."

If one thing is clear, it is that Islamic feminism is a central theme in the novel, from the Muslim feminism course Dunya attends at university in New York with Professor Kiara to the subtle ways she tries to instil the values of gender equality in her son, Rayyan.

In this Gulf society, she struggles to find her tribe between women who follow a patriarchal interpretation of the Islamic faith, encouraging each other to be subservient, obedient wives, and her South Asian friends who are part of the glitterati, only interested in the latest designer clothes and attending swanky soirees.

I wonder whether Dunya, had she found people like Professor Kiara or Sheefah in the Gulf, would have had more courage in both her marriage and her career.

"Dunya's always seeking that inner fulfilment and that spiritual foundation from her youth, from the loving and nurturing Islam lessons with Uncle Tariq to Professor Kiara's circle in university. She is always looking for another Sheefah in the Middle East and never finds her," says Hafsa.

"She can't find a deeper fulfilment on a friendship level, on a spirituality level, or in her partnership with Rahim."

Whether you are an Arab woman, Asian woman, Muslim woman, or woman of the Global Majority, we are susceptible to the trappings of the patriarchy and marriage, in the same way Dunya is. We all start out with feminist ideals about how we want our relationships to look, and at varying levels, that feminism gets quietened post-marriage.

"Often we can claim to embody or believe in certain principles such as gender equality, but then, actually, a lot of the time, we end up just following society's call into these preordained cultural roles," says Hafsa.

"Dunya gets swept up by the marriage, the role expected of her and into the wealth aspect of it. This could have happened in other places too, but it was fun to explore some of the realities of life in the Middle East."

Turbulence is published by The Dreamwork Collective and is out now

Yousra Samir Imran is a British-Egyptian writer and author based in Yorkshire. She is the author of Hijab and Red Lipstick, published by Hashtag Press

Follow her on X: @UNDERYOURABAYA