Excerpt:
Shukri Hassan was 10 years old when she arrived in London from Somalia. Her father had died, and her mother stayed at home to look after her siblings: Shukri arrived in her new country, speaking no English, in the care of an older sister, who was 20.
London was a strange, complicated and very different world for her. And then – on top of having to learn English, master new subjects, make new friends and survive without her mum – she became a teenager, and had to cope with all that entails. "What I desperately needed," she says, "was a place where I could go and hang out, and talk to Muslim girls who were maybe a few years older than me, who understood something of what I was going through, and who could help me make sense of it all."
But there were few youth groups for young Muslims. Where they did exist, they catered mostly for boys – and sessions for girls tended to be run by much older women, who didn't have the same life experiences as her. "What I really needed was someone who'd had the experience I'd had, who'd been born here or moved here as a child – someone who was juggling both cultures in the way I felt I was."