By Elisabetta Povoledo

Tuesday, May 29, 2007
MILAN: Take a heroine in the Bridget Jones mold. Sure, she gabs to her girlfriends about boys and clothes, but more than fretting about her fashion sense, the real quandary - as a young Muslim woman coming of age in 21st-century Milan - is whether or not to wear a veil. And how cool can a boy be if your mother has chosen him for you?

Meet Jasmine, the heroine of "Oggi Forse Non Ammazzo Nessuno" (Perhaps I Won't Kill Anyone Today), a novel by Randa Ghazy that gives a multiethnic spin to the popular chick-lit genre. At the same time, the title's tagline - "light tales of a young Muslim woman who, oddly enough, is not a terrorist" - is a tip-off that deeper broodings are in store.

The author claims that the work is not autobiographical, though Ghazy, like her heroine, is an Italian-born 20-year-old of Egyptian extraction raised in a traditional Muslim household.

And both writer and character are viscerally engaged in a delicate balancing act, attempting to merge an inherited culture with an acquired cultural milieu.

It's not an easy act to master. Straddling two often-opposing cultures, "you're never calm, never serene," Ghazy said, admitting to considerable inner turmoil.

"My friends see me as a totally integrated and satisfied Milanese girl," she said. "But inside I have many doubts, many struggles."

Besides, she said, personal experience has taught her that "paradoxically others never see you as Italian once they find out you're Muslim. There's always curiosity, or diffidence, which means you're never seen as equal."

"In the end, you're always a hybrid," Ghazy continued in an interview at a downtown café here. "The most difficult thing is getting the half measures right so that you assimilate into Western culture but maintain fixed points" and principles from Islam.

Finding the right balance, and the peace of mind that comes with it, becomes the quest of Jasmine, the book's protagonist. Which may be easier said than done because she, like Ghazy, comes off as a very opinionated young woman, and not one to back down from confrontations.

Ghazy learned this the hard way with her debut novel, "Dreaming of Palestine," written in 2002, when she was just 15, and later translated into six languages.

Drawing from news reports and her own research, "Dreaming of Palestine" painted a bleak picture of the life of a group of young Palestinians caught up in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Portraying the protagonists as helpless victims of Israeli oppression, the book inflamed Jewish critics who blasted it as promoting anti-Semitism and suicide bombings against Israeli targets. In France there were calls for it to be banned.

"My first book was very angry, impulsive, sanguine, but I've changed in recent years. I've grown up," said Ghazy.

"Oggi Forse Non Ammazzo Nessuno" takes a softer tack. On the surface, she said, her novel is about "the foolish problems that a girl my age can have living in Milan."

And most young women, regardless of their cultural or ethnic extraction, will relate to family feuds caused by generational gaps, or the career-over-children conundrum, or the debate over virginity; and many have agonized that their dreams and aspirations could crumble under the pressure of social obligations.

But unlike their mothers, often forced to put up with the repression of prefeminist society, young Italian women today aren't subject to the cultural gap that exists in many immigrant homes.

Ghazy said the book also allowed her to have her say about other issues.

Only now, whether she's chiding Italy's strict immigration laws, biased or racist Western preconceptions against Islam, or certain self-proclaimed Muslim leaders who make it their business to tell women what to do or how to act, Ghazy has adopted a more lighthearted, ironic tone through which to vent her outrage. "I sense the message may get across more effectively this way," she said.

That's not to say she's backing down from her opinions.

"The veil question is complicated," Jasmine muses in the book. "I believe many things, but above all that men should keep out of it. It's as if a woman were to accept advice from her husband on how to deal with her pregnancy."

It's passages like this that spurred her mother, Sana, who emigrated here 26 years ago, to carefully vet the book before it is released in Egypt later this year. "I didn't want her to touch overly inflammatory issues," said Sana, who accompanied her daughter to the interview, along with a representative from Ghazy's publisher, Fabbri. As someone born and raised in Egypt, Sana felt she had a better sense of what would ruffle feathers than her outspoken offspring. "I do get worried."

For Souad Sbai, the head of the Moroccan women's association and a leading Muslim voice in Italy, any occasion to speak about these issues adds another building block to greater integration.

"The real issue is that so many immigrant women aren't educated," Sbai said in a telephone interview. Of the thousands of Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb who come to Italy, most come from rural regions and about 80 percent cannot read or write, she said. "Most would not even be able to read Ghazy's book."

"You have to break down this wall, otherwise we'll never get out of the present situation," she said. Of course, children of immigrants, like Ghazy, will go to school in Italy. But for many first-generation immigrant women, marginalization through ignorance is a real drama.

If you ask her, Ghazy, who aspires to a career in journalism once she has finished her studies in international relations at the University of Milan, will tell you that she wrote the novel because she does not see herself represented in the words of many people who claim to stand for Muslims, or the Muslim viewpoint, in Italy.

"The media in Europe has tended to latch onto the fundamentalist and radical elements of Islam, not moderates who have problems of integration," she said. But Muslims are not a "monolithic block." And the book presents the thoughts "of a moderate, someone like me."

But mostly, through the novel Ghazy seems to be trying to work out and become comfortable wearing her double identity.

Though she sees herself working in an Arab country in the future, and perhaps getting involved politically (change, she said, works better when it "come from within") she thinks she'll settle in the West. "I'm used to the Western world and I like it and I like things that the Arab world still has to conquer, but I don't want to forget my real identity," she said. In the end, it's about exploiting the ability to straddle both cultures. "In the Arab world, there's still a lot to be done."