A Quote by Noureen DeWulf

I'm used to always being different, in any context. People always want to know how I grew up, so I just say I grew up Muslim. That's the truth. Two Muslim girls can write me two extremely different letters - and they do. Some are very supportive, and some question what I do.
I grew up having two different perspectives - one in English, one in Spanish. Two different cultures, very different - but I think that, to me, it's one. I'm just as American as I feel Latin.
I grew up as a Muslim. I went to an Islamic elementary school. Most of my community was Muslim, so I grew up praying five times a day.
I grew up as a kind of nondenominational Christian. I have two uncles who are Baptist ministers. I went to a Samoan church when I was younger. I went to a Catholic school, so I was actually able to experience a lot of different religions. Mormonism, as well. My father in-law, who I'm very close with, is a Muslim.
I grew up being very different and being ready to fight people. I wanted to stand up for myself, and I wanted to not let anyone think they know me based on appearances, so I was always just fighting back with people.
I mean, I've always felt like a lot of people's misconceptions of me have to do with how I grew up. I grew up poor, and I grew up rich. I think some people who have never met me have a misconception that when I was living with my father when he was successful, that I was somehow adversely affected by his success or the money he had and was making at the time.
My father was a Muslim immigrant; when Donald Trump started talking about banning Muslim immigrants from this country, I grew my beard out. My mother hated it. She never wanted me to look particularly "Muslim." She thought if I grew my beard out that people would know, right? "Don't make it hard for yourself. Don't let people know."
I was raised with this consciousness of being part of this global Muslim community. At the same time, I didn't even know if I wanted to be Muslim. It was this incredibly complicated moment: I just needed to balance these two things where you care about people on some deep level who are my co-religion and are being killed because of their religion. Then, at the same time, I'm like ah, I don't really know if I want this.
I definitely grew up differently to most of my friends, and that was a little bit of a struggle then. I wouldn't want to change anything about the way I grew up, even though it was a different situation. I still love the way I grew up, and I had an amazing childhood with a really supportive family.
One thing that I noticed is having met some former Taliban is even they, as children, grew up being indoctrinated. They grew up in violence. They grew up in war. They were taught to hate. They were, they grew up in very ignorant cultures where they didn't learn about the outside world.
I've always felt like a lot of people's misconceptions of me have to do with how I grew up. I grew up poor, and I grew up rich.
I'm dying to go to India... because the culture seems so vastly different from what I'm used to in the States. I would love to do some yoga there. And be amongst people who are so different than myself. There's so much you can learn from people who grew up in a different environment.
I was always bigger than the other girls. My sisters are very, very beautiful and very skinny, and I've always had a more muscular body. So I grew up with a different mentality.
I stay around for two or three hours after every show signing and taking pictures with everybody, and people come up and say hi and they say, "I didn't know what to expect but it was so different to what I imagined, it was so cool". I want to believe they're not lying. You know so, some people don't get it, some people do.
The Muslim world, with its history and cultures, and indeed its different interpretations of Islam, is still little known in the West. The two worlds, Muslim and non-Muslim, Eastern and Western, must, as a matter of urgency, make a real effort to get to know one another, for I fear that what we have is not a clash of civilisations, but a clash of ignorance on both sides.
I grew up basically in a predominantly, you know, white community and I was mixed but as a kid you don't know that. So I was always different, always stood out and people would always make fun of me.
People ask me what it's like to be tall, and I don't know what to say because I don't know any different. I grew up in a very tall house, so I wasn't an anomaly there.
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