Rabia Chaudry > Quotes

“Culture is a powerful force that influences our perceptions, our mindsets and even our domestic and foreign policies. The rich, messy complexity of 1,400 years of Islamic civilization and 1.6 billion Muslims has been reduced to token stereotypes. We are either avatars of destruction or the good Muslim who helps the national security narrative. But the overwhelming majority of us live in the giant middle—the grey zone—where impressions exist in more colors than just black and white.” *”
― Rabia Chaudry, Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial

“The only way I can process it is through my faith. That God was not going to let Adnan suffer all this in vain. Why he suffered any of it, why innocents suffer at all, is not a question mere mortals have ever been able to sufficiently answer. It's enough for me to know that all through out history, incredibly good people have suffered terribly, and suffering is not punishment. But much suffering is followed by redemption, sometimes that redemption even coming after the death of great people.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial

“The only exception was my mother, who unabashedly took up for Adnan, fought with anyone who had anything negative to say about him, never stopped talking about him with Aunty Shamim, and prayed for him with the intensity of a thousand burning suns. I”
― Rabia Chaudry, Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial

“But when I dug deeper, I realized the self-loathing was less about what I looked like on the outside, and more about feeling out of control and helpless.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat, and Family

“What confused Abu about Mama’s dishes was that they all seemed like variations of the same thing to him—tomato sauce, pasta, and cheese. He couldn’t tell the difference between spaghetti and linguini and ziti and lasagne other than the shape of the noodles. They all tasted the same, and pasta itself didn’t seem right to him. It looked like uncooked dough, pale and flabby. Who boils dough? Dough should be baked or fried. Pasta was a neglected doughy stepchild that didn’t quite complete the journey to being actually cooked.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat, and Family

“The propaganda worked, not just on my mother, but across the region. It was, we know now, a global scheme engineered by Nestlé to get mothers hooked on formula and to give up breastfeeding. Mothers were taught the risks of breastfeeding and discharged from hospitals armed with sample boxes of formula and baby bottles, ready to rear their children like their wealthy, wondrous, Western counterparts who had already bought into the marketing. But when my grandfather examined the ingredient list on the back of the Nestlé tin can, he flung it across the room. “What is this nonsense?” Dada Abu raged. This was not milk from a living creature. Not from a goat or cow or buffalo or sheep. It was dead milk, made from dead, fake ingredients. And no way was his granddaughter going to be drinking this trash.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat, and Family

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― Rabia Chaudry, Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial

“Adnan was deluged with letters, notes, pictures, and prayers. Some were short messages of support, others were pages and pages of personal divulgences. Adnan was stunned at the sometimes very intimate nature of the letters, people pouring out their pain and tribulations to a stranger. He realized it was sometimes easier for people to share their deepest sorrows with a stranger than with people they knew. I told him that’s how the Internet mostly works. Students”
― Rabia Chaudry, Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial

“bigotry everyone is comfortable with. And there’s a reason for this. A dedicated, well-funded, dynamic cottage industry of “Islamophobes” and anti-Muslim bigots has been operating for years under the guise of research, academia and policy-making. In 2011 the D.C. think tank Center for American Progress published a landmark report called Fear, Inc. It traces, in painstaking detail, the millions of dollars that annually support the very strategic creation and dissemination of misinformation about Islam and Muslims to policy makers and media and the grassroots and state-level legislative organizing against Muslims.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial

“The chaotic joy of a desi wedding, the bride and groom’s families with them every step of the way, the noise and colors, the jewels dripping off the bride and pretty much every woman in attendance, now that was a celebration.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat, and Family

“Fair desi men didn’t marry dark girls. Only dark desi men married dark girls, but if they could avoid it, they’d marry a fair girl, too. After all, they had to think about the next generation. These were the unwritten rules of our racist culture.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat, and Family

“The impact of the work of this industry is no joking matter. Their influence has led to numerous Congressional hearings on the “radicalization” of American Muslims and a veritable witch hunt of any American Muslim engaged in policy or government work.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial

“The only way I can process it is through my faith. That God was not going to let suffer all this in vain. Why he suffered any of it, why innocents suffer at all, is not a question mere mortals have ever been able to sufficiently answer. It's enough for me to know that all through out history, incredibly good people have suffered terribly, and suffering is not punishment. But much suffering is followed by redemption, sometimes that redemption even coming after the death of great people.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial

“Every person, I'd argue, has the right to pursue what feeling good means to them.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat, and Family

“The sighs were deep and heavy. A daughter. Their younger brother’s first child was a girl. It wasn’t the end of the world, but a first-born son was just so much more desirable. A son would grow up to take care of his parents, but a girl would be raised and basically just given away to another family. A son would bring home a wife, and the wife’s dowry. A daughter meant you had to establish a dowry and give it away in order to marry her off. Sons relieved you of burdens, and daughters brought them on. When you’ve been raised to believe that this is just how it is, it’s natural to keep passing it on.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat, and Family

“Next, the prosecutor made a move he probably immediately regretted—he asked her about the security guards. Hamiel caused laughter in the courtroom when she responded that the guards were mostly a deterrent, so useless they were called “two-and-a-halves” because police were called “five-o’s.” She particularly remembered the single guard who worked there in January of 1999, who she dubbed “Useless Steve” because she did more security work than he did. On”
― Rabia Chaudry, Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial

“It wasn't just Adnan being indicted at this grand jury proceeding, it wasn't just him being prosecuted. His faith, his ethnicity, his community--they were all on trial.”
― Rabia Chaudry, Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial