Book excerpt: In the wake of September 11th. Muslim women in the West found themselves more marginalized than ever by a panicked discourse that did little to promote a true understanding of Islam or the Islamic world. Here. in this ambitious volume that includes essays. poetry, fiction, memoir, plays, and artwork, Muslim women speak for themselves, revealing a complexity of experience and thought that escapes most Western portrayals. Islam is, as editor Fawzia Afzal-Khan puts it only "one spoke in the wheel of our lives." In Shattering the Stereotypes. essays by such writers as Ayesha Jalal, the Pakistani-American historian, poems by award-winning poets including Sucheir Hammad and Nathalie Handal, and a selection of short fiction and plays that are not just ethnically but attitudinally diverse, together make a more rounded portrait of what it is to be a Muslim woman in the 21st century.