Meet Nazia Erum, the woman who is learning to be a 'Muslim mother'

She sits comfortably in a tall and plush red sofa chair, facing away from a collection of books and novels neatly stacked on a wooden rack at her 19th floor apartment in Noida near Delhi. In between reading out excerpts from a book she has recently written, she speaks in carefully chosen words and a self-assured tone as she explains why Mothering a Muslim — the title of her book — is more significant in India today than it was ever before. The conversation is only interrupted by her two-year-old daughter, who otherwise keeps herself busy on her mother’s phone.

“At what age should I tell her that she’s an ‘M’ and that her best friend is a Sikh and her teacher is a Hindu, and that makes us different?” says Nazia Erum, deliberately avoiding the word Muslim around her daughter. The comfort begins to recede as she shifts in her chair.

Among the incidents she writes about in her book, for which she met over 100 Muslim families and their children, Erum picks a few. “Are you Muslim?” asks a five-year-old of another boy of the same age at school. “Yes, I am Muslim, but I don’t eat beef,” comes the reply. In another, six-year-old Azania ducks in the backseat of a car at the sight of a group of bearded men coming out of a mosque in their skull caps, and says, “Muslims are coming, they are going to kill us.” “How does one tell her that she is what she fears?” asks Erum.

Erum, 30, spent her childhood in Jorhat in Assam and fondly remembers it being a “secular” environment. She went to a convent school and felt no different from the kids around her. Yet, there was that one joke that stuck with her.

“On a cold night, my brother wrapped a muffler around his neck that also covered his head and a part of his face. ‘Yaar aaj tu to bilkul Hamas lag raha hai (Today, you look just like Hamas),’ a friend jokingly compared my brother to a terrorist organisation,” she recounts.

Erum says the times today are worse and these jokes have now become direct attacks of religious discrimination. “I was mostly sheltered from it in Assam but it quickly changed when I came to Delhi (in 2005),” she says. “I am scared for my child now.”

A 17-year-old is called a terrorist and when his mother complains to the name-caller's mother, she is told: "But your son called my child fat." A six-year-old hits another six-year-old because the latter is Muslim. These are real-life incidents Erum recounts in her book. “I listened to their stories, I wept with them,” she says about the research that went into her book.

“I decided to write this book when I had my child, but I wanted it to be a positive book about a Muslim mother’s experience of raising a child so that I could learn from it,” she says.

Discrimination, says Erum, is underreported. She says her book is doing what it was meant to do: start a conversation. “There’s a world war on my Twitter timeline. The two groups are taking excerpts from my book and fighting over it. This way, at least the rest of us are recognising that there is a problem,” she says.

Back in the sofa chair after pouring herself a cup of coffee, Erum tells a story about the apartment. “When we were looking for a house after getting married, my husband told me how it was going to be a challenge. I didn’t get it at the time,” she recalls. Erum and her husband, both Muslim, were not suitable tenants for many. “The owner of this house is from Assam. I bonded with him over the phone when we spoke in Assamese,” she says. “I don’t want to live in ghettos.”

Modern Muslims are torn between opposing forces. The story explains why Erum writes this in her book: “It's like the way we have to wear our nationalism on our sleeves, we have to wear Islam on our sleeves within the community.”