Shelina Zahra Janmohamed wore a pink silk headscarf scented with bukhoor (woodchips soaked in fragrant oil) and put on her fashionable glares. She tucked in the stubborn wisps of hair trying to sneak out of the edges of her hijab, got into her convertible and drove to a nearby bookshop. As she browsed the shelves, she got “utterly fed up with the misery memoirs of Muslim women”. Over an Internet chat from London, she says, “The covers were unfailingly of black niqab-clad women, with deserts or camels behind them. The blurbs read ‘Kidnapped and sold into marriage…’ or ‘Brought up as a strict Muslim, she escaped from a life of oppression….’ Weren’t there any other stories of Muslim women, I wondered.”

Back from the bookshop, Janmohamed, now 34, decided that her story must be told. That was the beginning of her debut memoir, Love in a Headscarf (Aurum Press, 10.99 pounds, 267 pages). The book, with the image of a girl in a purple headscarf, follows her hugely successful blog, spirit21.co.uk. “I love wearing colour, it makes me happy. I use pink in a lot of my imageries because it provides a stark contrast to the black that is constantly associated with Muslim women,” says the British woman of Indian origin who has been wearing the hijab since she was six (her great-grandparents had left Gujarat for Tanzania and later her parents reached the UK with two suitcases and $75).

Janmohamed says she struggled with publishers since she didn’t fit into any of the boxes they had reserved for Muslim women such as “oppressed”, “liberated”, or “terrorist”. Her tale, instead, was of an Oxford-educated hijabi Muslim marketing professional who, at the age of 13, dreamt of Hollywood actor John Travolta arriving at her North London flat, falling in love with her, converting to Islam and marrying her. Of course, Shelina never met Travolta. Instead, she baked samosas every weekend as prospective grooms and their families came visiting, she searched for suitable matches on websites and went for speed-dating till she fell in love with a man she met through a common friend and, soon, married him.

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