I could believe how her husband treated her.

She was doing what she thought was the best and honestly sometimes life is like that. It honestly was a dumb move on her part, but I don’t blame her. Here is this woman, in a rural village that can’t speak Arabic and doesn’t know anything about the culture and has no one to speak to besides a husband who ignored her. At least I could escape to a coffee house and luckily, I don’t have kids either. I had my Bengali in-laws living with me and I could barely make it through the two months having them in my space. Th book could be feel at times as one big sob story, but honestly, she was in culture shock and no one was there to help. Eventually, she made her way to Egypt, living in a separate space from his first wife. Then comes a supposed religious scholar who should have been the opposite of what he actually was. She didn’t know any better, she was newly converted and didn’t know that much about Islam. This man abused her and made her believe that her religion required her to be a slave to her husband. The second husband, the Sheikh Ameer, was a red flag from the beginning and while it is obvious to the reader, for the author now, I understood at the time, it wasn’t that easy of a decision to be with this man whom she fell for. Being told by almost all the Muslims she met that marriage was what she needed to be a complete woman. Here is a woman, who from the get-go was peer pressured into finding a husband. As a white Muslim convert, I couldn’t help but feel a connection with all her experiences. Um Dayo is a woman who converted to Islam and married the wrong man, and this book is a manifesto of one bad marriage with a Sheikh. T hings That Shatter: A Memoir by Kaighla Um Dayo was an interesting read, one with loads of “GRRRRRRRLLLLLLLLL” moments.

Things That Shatter by Kaighla Um Dayo