How to be a Bad Muslim and Other Essays

Description:
This is the breakout non-fiction book from award-winning New Zealand writer Mohamed Hassan.
From Cairo to Takapuna, Athens to Istanbul, How To Be A Bad Muslim maps the personal and public experience of being Muslim through essays on identity, Islamophobia, surveillance, migration and language.
Traversing storytelling, memoir, journalism and humour, Hassan speaks authentically and piercingly on mental health, grief and loss, while weaving memories of an Egyptian immigrant fighting childhood bullies, listening to life-saving '90s grunge and auditioning for vaguely-ethnic roles in a certain pirate movie franchise.
At once funny and chilling, elegiac and eye-opening, this is a must-read book from a powerfully talented writer.

"Mohamed Hassan takes the things we universally love - food, music, family, dreams of travel, a heart's desire - and affirms their gorgeous ordinariness. Then he reveals how othering shatters what we share; how it splinters "us" to create confusion, ignorance, hurt and even hate. Sometimes his writing is gently observational, sometimes sad, sometimes justly angry, but always important, timely and true."
- John Campbell

"The book is amazing. Mohamed Hassan is so talented. In How To Be A Bad Muslim, he pulls off that rare trick of taking a poet's grace and applying it to his essays, making them as beautiful to read as they are illuminating."
- Dominic Hoey

"Mohamed's is a fresh voice but most of all, an important voice. We already have his poetry, which has been rightly recognised, but now New Zealand literature is all the riche