Hey Cassie! I love Cordelia and her connection to her Persian Middle Eastern roots. I was wondering if we would ever see something similar and have a Muslim character? Thank you for all the representation you put in you books itâs really nice to see yourself represented in a character. â¤ď¸
Iâm glad you like Cordelia! A great deal of love and research went into her and Alastair. :)Â
I recognize it may be frustrating for some readers to encounter a Persian/Iranian character who isnât Muslim. Iâve written about this before here. Unfortunately, Cordelia and her family canât be Muslim, just as Cristina couldnât be Catholic, Will canât be Church of England, Jem canât be Buddhist, etc. Shadowhunters have their own religion. Itâs part of what binds them together, and itâs also necessary â both to the characters, and to the concept of Shadowhunters at all. They believe all the stories are true, because I realized early on in the creation of this world that they couldnât participate in mundane/human religions. There was no way to have the Shadowhunters be of a religion that actually exists in our world; that shut too many people out of being Shadowhunters, and made the books essentially an embrace of one religion over others. Nor could they all follow different real-life religions, without a constant ugly argument over the source of their magic â i.e. what kind of angel is Raziel? What religion does he represent? What religion does all this power they have come from? What is heaven, what are angels, whatâs after death â for the Shadowhunters to function as a demon-fighting group, they need to share core beliefs about what demons and angels are. I gave them a religion that didnât correspond to a real-life religion because I wanted to forstall that kind of infighting, both on the page and off it.
Cordelia and Alastair do come from a Muslim-majority country. But they are not Muslim. They are Shadowhunters. Cristina comes from a majority-Catholic country, but is not Catholic. She is a Shadowhunter. (There are also, of course, many non-Muslim Iranians; I knew many growing up, as my parents retained a lot of the friends they had made in Iran. Some were Jewish, some Zoroastrian, some BahĂĄĘźĂ. Part of what I love about Iran is that it is a tapestry of incredible history and different cultures; itâs definitely not a monolith!) This is a fundamental part of the Shadowhunter booksâ world-building that has existed since the first book.
Fundamentally, Shadowhunters hold beliefs that contradict those held by every real-world religion Iâm aware of. They canât be meshed in with existing religions without compromising the tenets of those religions and I believe it is more offensive to present a warped or halfway version of a real religion than simply to say that the characters youâre writing do not practice that religion at all. This is in part why I am writing Sword Catcher, because its magic system is based on Jewish mythology â something I canât do in the Shadowhunter books, though Judaism is my own religion.Â
Cordelia is a woman of color, she is biracial, she is Middle Eastern in her heritage. But she is not Muslim. I understand that Cordelia and Alastair not being Muslim means some readers will have trouble relating to them; but this was a world-building decision made long before Cordelia and Alastair were invented. I needed to present all religions, all mythology as equal, without any religion being the âonlyâ one Shadowhunters can practice. If that means you donât want to read about the Carstairs, I understand, and can recommend some wonderful books based on Islam-inflected fantasy instead, like Saladin Ahmedâs Throne of the Crescent Moon. However, this is not a new piece of information about Shadowhunters, or the way their world works.Â
I believe Islam to be a beautiful, deeply felt and peaceful religion, and while I cannot write Muslim (or Jewish or Christian or Hindu) Shadowhunters, there certainly is nothing that says there cannot be Muslim Downworlders, sighted mundanes, etc. (I have written other Muslim characters, like the Reyjavis in Magisterium, who are observant.)Â
I will say only one other thing, which is that Iâve received some pretty anti-Semitic asks about this specific issue of religion. Iâm answering this ask because I wonât reply to asks that contain anti-Jewish content (and I will block the sender). Or asks that just say âyou suckâ or âCordelia and Alastair are badâ because yeah. I mean, why bother. As a member of a minority religion myself, I can say Iâve grappled with how to respect and uplift my rarely-depicted-in-fantasy religion in these books while also making clear that all other religions are regarded equally as âall true.â (Simon, for instance, is Jewish while he is a mundane, and after he becomes a Shadowhunter, must struggle with how to reconcile his Judaism with his new beliefs which run contrary to the religion he was raised in. That is however unique to someone in Simonâs situation, and I wouldnât feel qualified to write a character who must decide whether to discard their Muslim or Catholic heritage in order to be a Shadowhunter.)
I do not believe the people writing/and or sending me anti-Semitic comments represent my sincere Muslim readers. There are, however, kinds of anti-Semitism that are coded into certain language (especially discussing âgreedâ, âcontrol of mediaâ, âclannishnessâ, using the word âZionistâ instead of âJewishâ, and suggesting I must disrespect Islam or Christianity specifically because I am Jewish) that people may not always recognize for what it is. It is of course always fine to critique representation and how itâs done. (There is no such thing as perfect rep; itâs generally always going to be flawed, even if itâs something as small as a spelling error.) I would only urge not attacking the religion or ethnicity of a writer in doing so.Â
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