Book Description: Faith Beyond Blood - A Memoir of Childlessness in the Muslim WorldWhat does it mean to live a childless life in the Muslim world-across its many cultures, histories, and ways of believing? How do faith, family, community, and expectation shape the experience of those whose lives unfold without children?Faith Beyond Blood is an intimate and wide-ranging memoir that explores childlessness across the diverse Muslim world through personal reflection and shared stories. Anchored in Anwar's own journey, the book moves between inner life and collective experience, offering a compassionate, accessible exploration of what it means to belong beyond blood.Through narratives drawn from Muslim communities across regions and generations, the book engages both voluntary childfree lives and childlessness shaped by circumstance. Readers encounter community mothering and chosen kin, childless men and women, queer Muslims, widows and divorcees, refugees and immigrants-each navigating faith, identity, and social expectation in deeply contextual ways. History, theology, and lived testimony are woven into the narrative without academic distance, allowing complex ideas to emerge through human experience.Faith Beyond Blood examines how childlessness is understood and lived across Muslim-majority societies and diasporas in both past and present, shaped by cultural norms, religious interpretation, policy, class, and race. It reflects on everything from reproductive technologies and adoption, mental health and grief, elder care and care networks, colonialism and patriarchy - within the overarching lens of the Muslim WorldAt its heart, this is a book about faith beyond bloodline-faith as compassion, surrender, resilience, and purpose. Expansive yet deeply personal, Faith Beyond Blood honors lives lived outside inherited expectations and invites readers to reimagine value, belonging, and kinship within the rich moral and spiritual traditions of the Muslim world.Jody Day review of 'Faith Beyond Blood: A Memoir of Childlessness in the Muslim World' by Jahida Anwar"Jahida Arden's book is a much-needed, profound and sensitive exploration of childlessness across the Muslim world. In it, she weaves her own experience as an educated, professional, childless Muslim woman of South Asian heritage with Quranic reflection and the rarely discussed experience of childless Muslim individuals across the world. Through the often hidden traditions and teachings of her faith, Anwar refutes the systemic pronatalism that drives so much of the personal suffering and societal othering that childlessness can provoke. This is a book about faith: one that is made stronger by her exploration into the lives of Muslim people without children, including the Prophet Mohammed's own radical, egalitarian teachings about women generally, including those without children. Seen through the lens of Islamophobia, as well as sexism and pronatalism, Anwar refutes the mainstream ignorance that her religion and race would necessarily make her life as a woman without children inherently more difficult. I learned so much from this powerful and delicate exploration of childlessness, and am deeply touched that my work was part of Anwar's process of reaffirming to herself, and to her community, her intrinsic worth as a woman, and as a human being -- whole and complete without children. A bold, informed and meaningful book that will alleviate both suffering and ignorance around the Muslim experience of childlessness." Jody Day--psychotherapist, author of 'Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future without Children, ' and the founder of Gateway Womenwww.gateway-women.com