Embassy News & Events
21 August 2008
Webchat audience members discussed the authors' views on religion and American society and made suggestions for the upcoming second edition of The American Muslim Teenager’s Handbook.
One day Yasmine Hafiz was looking in the bookstore for a book about Muslim teenagers in America (she had seen similar books for teenage Christians and Jews), but she couldn’t find any.
Instead of finding a book, the Hafiz family -- Imran, 16, Yasmine, 18, and their mother, Dilara – decided to write one.
In 2007 the family wrote The American Muslim Teenager’s Handbook to begin to shed some light on Islam (America’s fastest growing faith) and to provide a resource for other young Muslims trying to balance the American culture with their religion.
On August 20th, the Embassy invited 30 British Muslim teenagers to have a webchat (via internet video conferencing technology) with the Hafiz family, who were speaking from their home in Arizona, USA. The event was viewed simultaneously throughout the world and the authors received questions from countries such as Russia, Egypt and Ethiopia.
The audience of British teenagers, all of whom had read the book before hand, offered the authors both compliments and critical feedback about the book. For a complete transcript of the webchat portion of the event, click here.
About the authors: Imran Hafiz is a junior at Brophy College Preparatory in Phoenix, Arizona. Yasmine Hafiz is a freshman at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.