Salaam,
I peak out from my blogging (here) hiatus to comment on the spate of articles that have surfaced at HuffPost Canada, giving Muslim women the permission to marry non-Muslim men. Minority juristic voices as well as a representative from Universalist Muslims, a progressive Muslim organization in Canada, produced articles in the last week encouraging Muslim women who do not have Muslim male suitors to consider dating men "of the Book."
I read this and I wonder what I would have thought about this when I was last single, before I met who is now my husband, this time 5 years ago. Would I be heartened? Would I be frustrated? Would I leave with a lot of questions? Would it have changed anything about how I did things?
Let me take a moment to be quite transparent.
Part of the reason I wrote so little during the last five years was not just about me being a busy resident. A lot of it was that I was actively in a relationship with a secular man, it was different from anything I thought I would experience, and I didn't have a space on this blog to share those experiences. Unfortunately for me, this blog had always been aspirational. It was a great place for me to express all the Muslimah I aspired to be while not dwelling on my shortcomings. I don't think I had more than the normal amount of shortcomings, but this place had fostered for a long time a Muslim community when I didn't have my own. It was a place to lay my thoughts down. It was not a place for me to ponder about the day-to-day realities of a relationship with a secular man.
Yes, he was a secular Muslim man, but that was an accident. I'll explain.
When I matched in Seattle for my residency, I knew I didn't want to spend another several years as I did in Boston. A couple of regrettable relationships later, I didn't want to enter residency in isolation, without working on my future. Marriage and family were the things I always aspired to more than my career, but, as I wrote about at the beginning of my relationship with my now-husband, my want for family felt at odds with my faith.
There was a very real possibility that I could be indefinitely single as an earnest, practicing Muslim sister who only looked for the practicing Muslim men. And in that moment of writing that piece--I decided that if I had to sacrifice part of what made me an earnest, practicing sister in order to marry, as ass-backwards as that sounded...then so be it! I would.
So I cast my net wide, signing up to Muslim dating sites and the standards--Match and OkCupid, and I wanted to see who would bite. Muslim dating sites yielded a man, 16 years my senior, divorced with children, as the only Muslim man in the Puget Sound region interested in me. Match and OkCupid yielded more. I was sure to pepper my profile with hints about my religion and my level of practice. I ended up with two men. One who was also Nigerian who seemed to be more fascination with my existence as an Igbo Muslim than anything else...and my future husband.
Just before Ramadan and after making up super late the part of my fast I missed for menses, I prayed istikhara about these men...and probably also about a classmate I had a crush on. I was surprised when the answer was my husband. I was like, really, God? But he's not practicing. He's very worldly. After bad experiences with religion as a kid, he doesn't think he'll ever be practicing. He's sexually liberal. This is the man I'm supposed to pursue?
And I struggled with it early in our relationship. There were times when I considered jumping ship, counting my losses and getting back on the straight way and finding a good, practicing Muslim man, and not a good secular one.
This only lasted for the first couple of months, but I spent the second year of our relationship doing damage control. He could tell I was distant. But honestly, it wasn't just my trepidation because of religious hangups. I was also a first-year resident and that reality was grueling.
Four and a half years after we began our relationship, we've married, amidst in-law problems, questions of race and other upheavals. And since those early days, I no longer question if it is OK that I am with him.
I don't need him to become more practicing. As long as he stays authentic to his values and continues to respect my clinging to the rites of Islam, then that's all I need. His practice may change over time, and insha'Allah I will support him through it. There is no compulsion in religion and we don't pressure each other from either side.
So when I read all of these articles telling Muslim women that they can marry non-Muslim men, my reaction is lukewarm. I mean, I got over needing to authorities to define what makes me more or less Muslim a long time ago. And besides, I was born of a Muslim woman and Christian man. I remember I had some commenter come and to say my parents' marriage was illegitimate. Rando Muslim man, what purpose does it serve for you? Did you rise in God's esteem by telling a random Muslim sister that her parents' marriage is "illegitimate, astaghfirullah"? What would you have my parents do? Divorce after nearly 35 years of marriage so my mother can find a legitimate spouse, insha'Allah. What is life?
I have long crossed the threshold of feeling the need to get permission for what I do or do not do as a Muslim. This is and has always been between me and God. Is my submission perfect? No, but neither is anybody's. This was my path. Was this the best way? Was this actually what God intended for me? Did I misinterpret the answer to my istikhara and if I had been just a little bit more patient, my actual husband would have come along?
No, my actual husband is here, at my feet, working on a presentation. We have a home and insha'Allah we are building a life. We've done it, it's done, and so God willed it.
And in terms of answers for the single Muslim women who are waiting, as I once did, or searching, as I also once did, for their Muslim mate, I say...I don't have answers. I thought that, whenever I did find love and finally marry, that this would be the thing that defined my faith for the rest of my life. I wasn't wrong about that. But it is less definitive than I imagined. I thought that, from this, I would be able to outline for other women "the way" to do things, but I'm not. My way was highly personal and individual. But, having dated/talked to both Muslim and non-Muslim men, this is what I would say to sisters who may be considering it for the first time:
1) Don't hang around with someone intent on converting you: Nope and nope. I've experienced everything from a Nigerian dude who was intent on trying to sleep with me while saying to my friend, "Ahh, she seems open to Christianity," (and I'm thinking, show me where in the Bible is you trying to sleep with me before marriage OK?) to a pastor friend who was interested in me. In spite of my parents working out, I was generally like, dudes, what are you thinking? My dad is Christian but he's not a pastor and has never tried to convert my mom. My mother tried to convert my dad in the early days and gave up pretty quickly. After having a father who tried to convert me for a while, I decided as a young 20-something, "Nope--only one man in my life is going to try to convert me." Not only is it tiring, but in your spouse, you don't want someone who is not satisfied with you unless you believe and pray as they do, as if your beliefs are less legitimate. That is demoralizing.
2) Find out early where you both stand on sex: I was going to write "where he stands on sex," but it really is a decision for both of you. And when I say sex, I mean everything--sex in premarital relationships vs. waiting until after marriage, and not only that, how you both think of sex. Is sex an act of worship, is sex essential in a relationship, how frequent an essential part of the relationship...? Many "religious" guys of other faiths have a lower threshold for scandal with premarital sex. And, quiet as it's sometimes kept, many Muslims have a lower threshold, too--we're just more tight-lipped about it. If it is important for you, or essential for you, not to have sex prior to marriage, then be upfront about that. Will that weed out a bunch of guys? Yep, because that is no longer a norm for our society. But there are plenty of men who will understand and honor your wishes and be in it with you. ...or, conversely, if you decide, upon thinking about it, that your threshold is lower as well, then think about what that means for your relationship. We are not always the gatekeepers--maybe he's the more conservative one.
3) Talk family planning early and often: If you are planning an interfaith marriage and interfaith family, talk about your kids. Everything is going to be super theoretical until actual little people arrive, but still--talk about how important it is for your kids to follow either faiths. And once the kids arrive, keep talking about it. I am the product of never talking about it, and things got awkward for me as a young adult. Will kids get a taste of both faiths/traditions? Will they be primarily be raised one or the other?
4) Be with someone you can be your authentic self with: I think this was the biggest thing. I had dated Muslim men where I tried to up my practice to a level I was not yet at, because I thought that was what he wanted for me. That was so anxiety-provoking. I was afraid of feeling judged by these men. In my relationship and now in my marriage, I am free to be wherever I am in faith. I had space to figure out my misgivings about my practice. He did not pressure or judge me in one way or the other as I traversed my path.
Mmm...there are probably other things, but these were the big four for me. I think number four was number one for me. Could I have found this in a practicing Muslim man? God knows best. But for where I am right now, authentically--this is where I best am.
Our paths are individual. I pray that we all find the partners best suited for us without sacrificing the essence of our faith. Ameen.
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Friday, June 24, 2016
Make Way for Compassion, Part 2
As salaam alaikum,
Lack of compassion and self-compassion can lead to hatred.
Some of the ways that I practiced Islam lacked self-compassion.
I can only speak for myself here, but I do predict that there are very many who will identify with me in their own practice and understanding of their faith, and not just among Muslims.
This entry is not meant to be a vendetta against Muslim scholarship or a commentary on ahadith. I am not on par with any authority to speak to that. I really just want to look at commonly held beliefs and rules at face value.
The moment I realized that my practice lacked self-compassion is when I wondered if my day's fast had been invalidated by a mistake.
Invalidated.
This is the language that was used, that was taught to me and has undoubtedly been taught to others in the rules of Muslim fasting. Without going through the list of actions and events that will invalidate your fast, I want to highlight vomiting. Vomiting invalidates one's fast.
I never thought of it that way. I thought of it as--if you vomit, you are sick and it is better for you that you don't fast. To say it is invalidated with vomiting makes harsh self-judgment implicit.
Oh, stupid me, I vomited. Now the whole day's fast doesn't count!
Instead of, oh no, I guess I'm sicker than I thought. I'd better take a break and take care of myself and get some fluids in me in preparation for the mud butt that is about to ensue.
Or something like that.
I pause on invalidated because that's such a strong word. Not counting is duly a strong concept, not to get stuck on vocabulary. I'd like to believe that intent would have something to do with it, so if someone put something in their mouth or ate it accidentally and were not, say, sneaking food while no one was watching, that a pure intention for fasting would supersede the accidental ingestion.
I don't know, but I don't care to look up fatawa on the subject because those things are often traumatizing for me.
My mentor in residency preached self-compassion for physicians as we trialed the very restrictive elimination diet. For three weeks, we eliminated major foods that are often the culprits of food sensitivities through leaky gut pathophysiology -- corn, gluten, dairy, eggs, peanuts, sugar, artificial sweeteners, red meat, oranges/grapefruits, vegetable oils -- effectively reducing us to a home-cooked diet. We had to be abstinent from these food groups for three weeks in order to reduce the inflammation in our guts enough to trial the possibly offending foods. For example, no seasoned salt, as it has both corn starch and sugar in it. Even with these restrictions necessary to make this health experiment work, she implored us to practice self-compassion if we slipped up in our diets midway.
I scoffed at that recommendation. I fasted Ramadan for over a decade and dietary restrictions were my way of life. It was easy for me to adhere to the strict diet.
In the end, I had no food sensitivities besides gluten making me really low energy, but I've approached every other diet I've had with a self-compassion script, and its made it even easier.
The Islam I learned is often devoid of a self-compassion script. Or, if there is a self-compassion script, there is often a caveat. It is human to err--but you erred, so you have to make up that whole day again. Sorry.
Of course, the fasting SNAFU was not everything. It was the turning point, the moment of recognition, the catalyst. It helped me to intellectualize what I has been evolving over the last 4 years, from the time I was still a fourth year medical student in Boston attending those conferences on woman and African American Muslims. This reminds me of my father, who, in his last attempts to convert me to Christianity 2 years ago, told me that Islam was a religion devoid of love. That Christianity taught love more than Islam did. I argued him down with Qur'anic citations of my own, but at the end of the day, while Islam is not devoid of love and compassion, the individual practice of Islam is many times lacking.
Again, I can only speak for my own, what I saw modeled, what I was exposed to. Others may identify, some may not. Feel free to counter me.
The Islam I learned was full of judgments, shaming and guilting from human beings. The Islam I learned was rigorous and sometimes unforgiving. A lot of my practice was based on God's obligation, not God's love.
And I know, God obliges us because God loves us, but obligation is heavy.
Obligation is heavy, invalidation is heavy. Both of those terms feel punitive.
Obligatory or what? Obligatory or you will be remote from God's mercy and excluded from Jannah? This does not breed self-compassion. It breeds self-critique and self-judgment.
To which someone may say, yes, self-critique is necessary. It's crucial to keep someone on the straight way. Whereas I feel like we kill our souls a little bit with that.
This is not my announcement of leaving the faith. As long as I believe in one God and submit to God, I will always be Muslim. That has not changed. I just find the level of self-compassion that I am currently living in my life at odds with my practice of Islam, and I've decided that the latter has to change.
Lack of compassion and self-compassion can lead to hatred.
Some of the ways that I practiced Islam lacked self-compassion.
I can only speak for myself here, but I do predict that there are very many who will identify with me in their own practice and understanding of their faith, and not just among Muslims.
This entry is not meant to be a vendetta against Muslim scholarship or a commentary on ahadith. I am not on par with any authority to speak to that. I really just want to look at commonly held beliefs and rules at face value.
The moment I realized that my practice lacked self-compassion is when I wondered if my day's fast had been invalidated by a mistake.
Invalidated.
This is the language that was used, that was taught to me and has undoubtedly been taught to others in the rules of Muslim fasting. Without going through the list of actions and events that will invalidate your fast, I want to highlight vomiting. Vomiting invalidates one's fast.
I never thought of it that way. I thought of it as--if you vomit, you are sick and it is better for you that you don't fast. To say it is invalidated with vomiting makes harsh self-judgment implicit.
Oh, stupid me, I vomited. Now the whole day's fast doesn't count!
Instead of, oh no, I guess I'm sicker than I thought. I'd better take a break and take care of myself and get some fluids in me in preparation for the mud butt that is about to ensue.
Or something like that.
I pause on invalidated because that's such a strong word. Not counting is duly a strong concept, not to get stuck on vocabulary. I'd like to believe that intent would have something to do with it, so if someone put something in their mouth or ate it accidentally and were not, say, sneaking food while no one was watching, that a pure intention for fasting would supersede the accidental ingestion.
I don't know, but I don't care to look up fatawa on the subject because those things are often traumatizing for me.
My mentor in residency preached self-compassion for physicians as we trialed the very restrictive elimination diet. For three weeks, we eliminated major foods that are often the culprits of food sensitivities through leaky gut pathophysiology -- corn, gluten, dairy, eggs, peanuts, sugar, artificial sweeteners, red meat, oranges/grapefruits, vegetable oils -- effectively reducing us to a home-cooked diet. We had to be abstinent from these food groups for three weeks in order to reduce the inflammation in our guts enough to trial the possibly offending foods. For example, no seasoned salt, as it has both corn starch and sugar in it. Even with these restrictions necessary to make this health experiment work, she implored us to practice self-compassion if we slipped up in our diets midway.
I scoffed at that recommendation. I fasted Ramadan for over a decade and dietary restrictions were my way of life. It was easy for me to adhere to the strict diet.
In the end, I had no food sensitivities besides gluten making me really low energy, but I've approached every other diet I've had with a self-compassion script, and its made it even easier.
The Islam I learned is often devoid of a self-compassion script. Or, if there is a self-compassion script, there is often a caveat. It is human to err--but you erred, so you have to make up that whole day again. Sorry.
Of course, the fasting SNAFU was not everything. It was the turning point, the moment of recognition, the catalyst. It helped me to intellectualize what I has been evolving over the last 4 years, from the time I was still a fourth year medical student in Boston attending those conferences on woman and African American Muslims. This reminds me of my father, who, in his last attempts to convert me to Christianity 2 years ago, told me that Islam was a religion devoid of love. That Christianity taught love more than Islam did. I argued him down with Qur'anic citations of my own, but at the end of the day, while Islam is not devoid of love and compassion, the individual practice of Islam is many times lacking.
Again, I can only speak for my own, what I saw modeled, what I was exposed to. Others may identify, some may not. Feel free to counter me.
The Islam I learned was full of judgments, shaming and guilting from human beings. The Islam I learned was rigorous and sometimes unforgiving. A lot of my practice was based on God's obligation, not God's love.
And I know, God obliges us because God loves us, but obligation is heavy.
Obligation is heavy, invalidation is heavy. Both of those terms feel punitive.
Obligatory or what? Obligatory or you will be remote from God's mercy and excluded from Jannah? This does not breed self-compassion. It breeds self-critique and self-judgment.
To which someone may say, yes, self-critique is necessary. It's crucial to keep someone on the straight way. Whereas I feel like we kill our souls a little bit with that.
This is not my announcement of leaving the faith. As long as I believe in one God and submit to God, I will always be Muslim. That has not changed. I just find the level of self-compassion that I am currently living in my life at odds with my practice of Islam, and I've decided that the latter has to change.
Monday, June 29, 2015
No longer a resident
As salaam alaikum,
I've been busy but not busy, if that makes any sense. I've been mentally and emotionally busy, preparing myself for graduation for residency. This included taking (and passing, alhamdulillah) my boards, getting my work schedule arranged for when I start my new job in September, tidying things up for my patients before I hand them off to the new resident, moving...
Ya girl's been busy.
There is also a lot of background noise right now, honestly, that has gone on for the last three years. My faith has been challenged in a very specific way that I have not shared on this blog, because it is a moment in progress. When this metamorphosis of sorts is complete, I will speak more openly and frankly about it. For now, sorry, you just get tidbits.
But alhamdulillah, I have completed residency and I am now a family physician practicing family medicine with obstetrics. This morning, getting up and not going to clinic, I felt starkly naked in a way I never have before in my life. I said at first that I felt naked because I was no longer a resident, but in truth, I've been a resident for only 3 years. It seems like nothing and it seems like forever at the same time.
I gaze at pictures of my co-residents and feel like I miss them already and that I never truly got to know them at the same time. They are a group of 11 people that I love and with whom I have experienced something unique that will not replicate. I feel like I've known them forever and for not that long at the same time. They are excellent people and I hope we continue our road to excellence.
I went in three years from being an insecure medical school graduate, not ready to embrace myself as a physician, to a board certified family physician with no insecurities about my capabilities. Again, alhamdulillah.
This moment, however, reminds me of a song Elis Regina sang, called, "20 Anos Blues."
Ontem de manhã quando acordei / olhei a vida e me espantei. / Eu tenho mais que vinte anos. / Eu tenho mais que mil perguntas sem respostas. / Estou ligada a um futuro blue.
Yesterday morning when I woke up, I looked at life and I startled myself. I am more than 20 years old. I have more than a thousand questions without answers. I'm tied to a blue future.
And while I do not believe I'm tied to a blue future, there were all of those ways, over the past few years, that I realized that I was not my 20 year old self. I am not who I was when I began this journey to be a physician, to be a better Muslimah, to make my own contribution to social justice.
I'm not 20 years old anymore. My grandfather is not on this earth anymore and my brother is an adult with autism who is unemployed, unskilled for most vocations and lives at home with my aging parents. I am a family physician continuing a very separate life on the West Coast, away from my aging parents and away from my brother. My personal life bears harsh realities that I did acknowledge, in a highly dramatized form at 20 years old, but that are more eminent now, as I begin to make plans for marriage and a family of my own.
At the same time, I'm not 20 years old anymore and I don't look for ways to save the world at every turn, in every crevice and with every issue. I'm looking for very specific ways I can make an impact in matters that I care most about and that I know most about.
I'm not 20 and I'm not premed, I'm a family physician. I don't love a man absently who I have no access to, I love one who is here, on earth, with me, who is not a character I created but a real man who doesn't always follow the ideal script for our lives but who is here regardless. I don't look outward for my Muslim identity, I look inward.
So I begin this two months off before starting work period resuming Ramadan (Ramadan Mubarak to all) after the Feminine Interruption. I return to focusing on The Compassionate.
I've been busy but not busy, if that makes any sense. I've been mentally and emotionally busy, preparing myself for graduation for residency. This included taking (and passing, alhamdulillah) my boards, getting my work schedule arranged for when I start my new job in September, tidying things up for my patients before I hand them off to the new resident, moving...
Ya girl's been busy.
There is also a lot of background noise right now, honestly, that has gone on for the last three years. My faith has been challenged in a very specific way that I have not shared on this blog, because it is a moment in progress. When this metamorphosis of sorts is complete, I will speak more openly and frankly about it. For now, sorry, you just get tidbits.
But alhamdulillah, I have completed residency and I am now a family physician practicing family medicine with obstetrics. This morning, getting up and not going to clinic, I felt starkly naked in a way I never have before in my life. I said at first that I felt naked because I was no longer a resident, but in truth, I've been a resident for only 3 years. It seems like nothing and it seems like forever at the same time.
I gaze at pictures of my co-residents and feel like I miss them already and that I never truly got to know them at the same time. They are a group of 11 people that I love and with whom I have experienced something unique that will not replicate. I feel like I've known them forever and for not that long at the same time. They are excellent people and I hope we continue our road to excellence.
I went in three years from being an insecure medical school graduate, not ready to embrace myself as a physician, to a board certified family physician with no insecurities about my capabilities. Again, alhamdulillah.
This moment, however, reminds me of a song Elis Regina sang, called, "20 Anos Blues."
Ontem de manhã quando acordei / olhei a vida e me espantei. / Eu tenho mais que vinte anos. / Eu tenho mais que mil perguntas sem respostas. / Estou ligada a um futuro blue.
Yesterday morning when I woke up, I looked at life and I startled myself. I am more than 20 years old. I have more than a thousand questions without answers. I'm tied to a blue future.
And while I do not believe I'm tied to a blue future, there were all of those ways, over the past few years, that I realized that I was not my 20 year old self. I am not who I was when I began this journey to be a physician, to be a better Muslimah, to make my own contribution to social justice.
I'm not 20 years old anymore. My grandfather is not on this earth anymore and my brother is an adult with autism who is unemployed, unskilled for most vocations and lives at home with my aging parents. I am a family physician continuing a very separate life on the West Coast, away from my aging parents and away from my brother. My personal life bears harsh realities that I did acknowledge, in a highly dramatized form at 20 years old, but that are more eminent now, as I begin to make plans for marriage and a family of my own.
At the same time, I'm not 20 years old anymore and I don't look for ways to save the world at every turn, in every crevice and with every issue. I'm looking for very specific ways I can make an impact in matters that I care most about and that I know most about.
I'm not 20 and I'm not premed, I'm a family physician. I don't love a man absently who I have no access to, I love one who is here, on earth, with me, who is not a character I created but a real man who doesn't always follow the ideal script for our lives but who is here regardless. I don't look outward for my Muslim identity, I look inward.
So I begin this two months off before starting work period resuming Ramadan (Ramadan Mubarak to all) after the Feminine Interruption. I return to focusing on The Compassionate.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
All I Want to Be
Salaam,
As another Ramadan approaches, I'm starting to become more reflective and introspective at a time that my incoming rotation will not allow me to be. I'll be on a surgery inpatient service for the duration of Ramadan. I just have to get in enough calories and hydrate enough during suhoor and before I begin my shifts at 5am, and I think I'll be fine, iA.
But also, as another Ramadan approaches, I reflect on all of the things I've wanted to be over the years, all of the things I want to be, and all of the things that I've tucked away, at least temporarily. One of them is a better Muslim. That definition has shifted over time and looks a bit different than it did 11 years ago when I fasted my first full Ramadan outside of my parent's home as an 18-year-old college freshman.
It looks different than it did when I was a new, 21-year-old hijabi.
It looks different than it did when I was a 24-year-old medical student, struggling with the fear that my first Muslim brother-crush, who was marrying someone else, was maybe the best, the last and the only chance I'd ever get at love.
It looks different than I did when I was 27, newly disillusioned with love and certain aspects of my religion and moving from east to west coast with hopes to realize my dream career.
I think that, more than any time in my life, my self-definition is fluid. That sounds wishy-washy. I mean that I realize that parts of who I am are continually evolving as I grow and learn. I do not expect to reach my destination and still have life left to live.
In essence, I will not attain "better Muslim" at once and then sit pretty for the rest of the time. It will be one of those life goals I will work toward until the end, whether that is the end of my life or the terminal decline of my cognition.
And while one could say that my Islam is all-encompassing of the most important things of my life, I also have other aspects of my life for which I recognize that I will not reach a destination before the end. These identities of mine are constantly growing and changing, and I thank God for that. It means I'm very much alive.
It also means I can't close my eyes and see where I want to be at any given time. I used to be able to close my eyes and see such vivid detail, from the color of my clothes to the height of my husband, to how many kids we'd have at our sides. With maturity these details have necessarily become more vague or are now nonexistent, replaced with an intangible placeholder named insha'Allah.
Because I couldn't have made up the last two years of my life when I was an 18-year-old freshman or a 21-year-old hijabi or a 24-year-old medical student.
And that removes the pressure I feel to be all that I want to be. I no longer feel pressure to be all of these things soon, as if it would never happen otherwise. I no longer feel pressure to be all of the things I want to be at once.
I no longer feel the urgency of being all the things I want to be. It's all insha'Allah, and for the first time in a couple of years, insha'Allah doesn't feel daunting to me.
I guess this is what it means to Submit.
There's so much that I am that I want to be as much of my life as I can, but I cannot, because of the earthly limits of space and time. I want to be all of these things, including a writer, an artist, a singer, a musician - a family physician, a public health practitioner, possibly a medical director - a mother, a wife, a daughter-in-law--while carrying with the things I already am--a Muslim, a daughter, a sister, a cousin, a friend, the list probably goes on. I want to be all of these things at once because I enjoy each of them, in each of them I find meaning and purpose, in each of them I express a little of myself, and to several of them I aspire absolutely.
And for the first time, I'm okay with the fact that there may be some things that I'll never be. I'm not despairing right now with the possibility of never bearing my own children, but maybe I'll adopt or foster. I may never publish a fiction piece, but I'll keep writing. I may never marry, but I'll love and nurture those who are in my life. Not saying that they would not be hard to come to terms with, but I'm accepting.
Whereas when I was a teen, when I saw the future, I saw black, bleak, dark--whereas when I was in my early 20s, I saw future as a series of detailed ideals with a backdrop of grave anxiety--I can't see the future now, as I never was able to, really, and I'm placing my trust in God, the best of planners, while moving forward prayerfully with my own purposeful plans in the meantime.
By God's grace, I will be able to be all I want to be.
As another Ramadan approaches, I'm starting to become more reflective and introspective at a time that my incoming rotation will not allow me to be. I'll be on a surgery inpatient service for the duration of Ramadan. I just have to get in enough calories and hydrate enough during suhoor and before I begin my shifts at 5am, and I think I'll be fine, iA.
But also, as another Ramadan approaches, I reflect on all of the things I've wanted to be over the years, all of the things I want to be, and all of the things that I've tucked away, at least temporarily. One of them is a better Muslim. That definition has shifted over time and looks a bit different than it did 11 years ago when I fasted my first full Ramadan outside of my parent's home as an 18-year-old college freshman.
It looks different than it did when I was a new, 21-year-old hijabi.
It looks different than it did when I was a 24-year-old medical student, struggling with the fear that my first Muslim brother-crush, who was marrying someone else, was maybe the best, the last and the only chance I'd ever get at love.
It looks different than I did when I was 27, newly disillusioned with love and certain aspects of my religion and moving from east to west coast with hopes to realize my dream career.
I think that, more than any time in my life, my self-definition is fluid. That sounds wishy-washy. I mean that I realize that parts of who I am are continually evolving as I grow and learn. I do not expect to reach my destination and still have life left to live.
In essence, I will not attain "better Muslim" at once and then sit pretty for the rest of the time. It will be one of those life goals I will work toward until the end, whether that is the end of my life or the terminal decline of my cognition.
And while one could say that my Islam is all-encompassing of the most important things of my life, I also have other aspects of my life for which I recognize that I will not reach a destination before the end. These identities of mine are constantly growing and changing, and I thank God for that. It means I'm very much alive.
It also means I can't close my eyes and see where I want to be at any given time. I used to be able to close my eyes and see such vivid detail, from the color of my clothes to the height of my husband, to how many kids we'd have at our sides. With maturity these details have necessarily become more vague or are now nonexistent, replaced with an intangible placeholder named insha'Allah.
Because I couldn't have made up the last two years of my life when I was an 18-year-old freshman or a 21-year-old hijabi or a 24-year-old medical student.
And that removes the pressure I feel to be all that I want to be. I no longer feel pressure to be all of these things soon, as if it would never happen otherwise. I no longer feel pressure to be all of the things I want to be at once.
I no longer feel the urgency of being all the things I want to be. It's all insha'Allah, and for the first time in a couple of years, insha'Allah doesn't feel daunting to me.
I guess this is what it means to Submit.
There's so much that I am that I want to be as much of my life as I can, but I cannot, because of the earthly limits of space and time. I want to be all of these things, including a writer, an artist, a singer, a musician - a family physician, a public health practitioner, possibly a medical director - a mother, a wife, a daughter-in-law--while carrying with the things I already am--a Muslim, a daughter, a sister, a cousin, a friend, the list probably goes on. I want to be all of these things at once because I enjoy each of them, in each of them I find meaning and purpose, in each of them I express a little of myself, and to several of them I aspire absolutely.
And for the first time, I'm okay with the fact that there may be some things that I'll never be. I'm not despairing right now with the possibility of never bearing my own children, but maybe I'll adopt or foster. I may never publish a fiction piece, but I'll keep writing. I may never marry, but I'll love and nurture those who are in my life. Not saying that they would not be hard to come to terms with, but I'm accepting.
Whereas when I was a teen, when I saw the future, I saw black, bleak, dark--whereas when I was in my early 20s, I saw future as a series of detailed ideals with a backdrop of grave anxiety--I can't see the future now, as I never was able to, really, and I'm placing my trust in God, the best of planners, while moving forward prayerfully with my own purposeful plans in the meantime.
By God's grace, I will be able to be all I want to be.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
My Parents' Radical Marriage
Salaam,
On September 15, 1983, surrounded by my maternal grandparents and my Uncle Junior, my parents were married at city hall in Flint. My mother wore a modest, lavender dress, my grandmother's favorite color, and my father wore what I wager was one of the few suits he had at the time. My mother would later tell me that the reason why they married at city hall and that she wore a regular dress was because she knew her father was poor and she did not want to burden him with an expensive wedding, or any wedding at all, apparently.
However, it was also convenient, in the marriage of a Muslim woman to a Christian man, that their ceremony was not at all religious. There was no broom jumping, there was no palm wine. My grandfather did not give his youngest daughter away and my Uncles Donald and Temple were not there to see their youngest brother take a wife. And that's the way my parents wanted it. They often cite my brother's autism for the reason they keep to themselves but I have a feeling they've always been low-key.
And characteristic of the rest of their marriage, my mother's family ignored her requests for little fanfare and threw them a surprise reception after they married. My parents, who sounded very much like hipsters of their time, were gracious and excepted the reception as my father accepted his new family.
My father would travel back to Nigeria the next month and return in April of 1984, just in time to conceive me. He would not travel back to Nigeria in my lifetime.
Pictures from this day are in the front of my favorite photo album in my parents' house. It was my favorite as a child because it was the one where I saw the realization of my birth. It began with pictures of my parents marriage, the reception, my parents in their first apartment and soon transitioned to my mother, several weeks pregnant, her baby shower, and then my newborn pictures. As a child, I loved looking at baby pictures of myself. I was a really cute baby. But I always looked at the album in chronological order, including the three or four pictures in city hall of my parents, exchanging vows, my father accidentally placing the ring on the incorrect finger and my mother laughing, and the kiss with my grandparents clasping their hands and smiling in the background.
Already, their marriage was not typical. It was not in a religious sanctuary, a term my mother would use to describe one of the reasons she and my father chose each other. They didn't need a religious sanctuary to practice their respective faiths, she maintained. She remains un-mosqued as she has been my entire life, praying five times a day alone in the house's prayer room. My father is several years returned to church after never having set foot during all the time I lived at home and through my college years.
It was not surrounded by family and closest friends. It was surrounded by just enough of my mother's family to serve as witnesses--and my Uncle Junior, who, as my senior uncle on my mother's side, has attended nearly every major event in my life, from my birth to my graduation from college.
It was not traditional. My father, who was not raised in Nigerian traditions and couldn't explain them to me if I asked, did not dress in traditional Nigerian clothes on his big day and would not dress that way in the United States for another 30 years. My mother did not wear white. There were no bridesmaids or groomsmen. My mother had no engagement ring when she donned her wedding band. And that was it. Married.
But it was also radical. The Muslim daughter of Muslim parents married a Christian man, with the open approval of her parents, though she never asked for it. A Christian man who grew up sitting at his father's feet during sermons married a Muslim woman in spite of all of the things he believed about the Muslims of the north that were responsible for killing his people before the war. He also didn't seek the approval of his family.
When my mother tells it, she never balked at what my grandparents would think of her marrying a Christian man. She did not ask their permission to travel to Nigeria to visit my father in 1981. She told them, then she went. A woman previously sheltered by the strictest parents I've ever heard of in the name of the Nation of Islam traveled outside of the country for the first time to Nigeria, by herself. She has never asked them what they thought of the whole thing and it hasn't mattered.
My father doesn't tell stories about these things, but I imagine he didn't ask or tell very much. Not only did my mother not meet his family when she traveled to Nigeria (tell me more about that month long trip, Ma), but his family just found out that she is Muslim...two years ago? Over the phone? This tells me that my father did not consult his elder brothers, as my grandparents on that side had already passed.
That the children of two families who were essentially religious entities in their community could pull of an accepted interfaith marriage was pretty remarkable. That neither of these adults were hindered by what their family thought was fantastic. Their marriage exemplifies everything a love marriage can be for a Muslim woman, for an immigrant man.
And unlike various in each set of their co-religionists, they do not wonder if their marriage is valid. And they do not doubt that it is recognized by God.
Besides this very radical aspect of my parents' marriage, the interfaith without asking permission part, it is also otherwise unconventional. It was my mother who proposed to my father. And I believe it went a little something like this:
"Hey! Why don't we get married?"
And three years later, after spending most of that time with the Atlantic between them, they did just that. Prior to their marriage, their courtship face-to-face was 10 months total - 9 months in the United States, 1 month in Nigeria. They succeeded in having the longest long distance courtship I've personally known of.
They were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend they hadn't talked to in years. My mother was instantly taken at how my father was so friendly and outgoing that he talked to the DJ at the party as if he'd known him for years, yet he just met him. I don't know what my father was thinking, but I know that he's always adored my mother, and probably felt some semblance of that then.
They were set up but they had met before. My mother was a secretary at University of Michigan, Flint in the offices of Afro-American and Chicano Studies, where my father's cousin, head of the department, worked. My father would visit his cousin and bow his head toward my mother as he entered the office.
And somehow, this was totally unrelated to them being set up.
I don't know if my father dated previously, but I assume he did. I know my mother did. Her first foray into dating non-black men was another Nigerian who happened to be Chinua Achebe's cousin. The date ended, and Mr. Achebe seemed enthusiastic but I guess that was the last date.
(And to think, I may have been an Achebe...more than happy to be who I am!)
And of course, as goes without saying, their union was intercultural.
For all the ways my parents' marriage was radical, unconventional, special, it was also largely ordinary. It's an ordinary story of two people who loved each other and decided to spend the rest of their lives together. It's all about love, as Maurice White sings.
"Bound to fall in love one day. Surely, and you need it!"
They liked each other, then they loved each other, they married, they formed a family.
I don't know what it was about my dad, but he saw my mother transform from being a professional-minded woman who never aspired to have children to a mother who adored and nurtured us without interruption from the days we were born while still developing professionally. And I don't know what it is about my mother, but she anchored my father to a land in which he never intended to stay.
And the rest is history.
On September 15, 1983, surrounded by my maternal grandparents and my Uncle Junior, my parents were married at city hall in Flint. My mother wore a modest, lavender dress, my grandmother's favorite color, and my father wore what I wager was one of the few suits he had at the time. My mother would later tell me that the reason why they married at city hall and that she wore a regular dress was because she knew her father was poor and she did not want to burden him with an expensive wedding, or any wedding at all, apparently.
However, it was also convenient, in the marriage of a Muslim woman to a Christian man, that their ceremony was not at all religious. There was no broom jumping, there was no palm wine. My grandfather did not give his youngest daughter away and my Uncles Donald and Temple were not there to see their youngest brother take a wife. And that's the way my parents wanted it. They often cite my brother's autism for the reason they keep to themselves but I have a feeling they've always been low-key.
And characteristic of the rest of their marriage, my mother's family ignored her requests for little fanfare and threw them a surprise reception after they married. My parents, who sounded very much like hipsters of their time, were gracious and excepted the reception as my father accepted his new family.
My father would travel back to Nigeria the next month and return in April of 1984, just in time to conceive me. He would not travel back to Nigeria in my lifetime.
Pictures from this day are in the front of my favorite photo album in my parents' house. It was my favorite as a child because it was the one where I saw the realization of my birth. It began with pictures of my parents marriage, the reception, my parents in their first apartment and soon transitioned to my mother, several weeks pregnant, her baby shower, and then my newborn pictures. As a child, I loved looking at baby pictures of myself. I was a really cute baby. But I always looked at the album in chronological order, including the three or four pictures in city hall of my parents, exchanging vows, my father accidentally placing the ring on the incorrect finger and my mother laughing, and the kiss with my grandparents clasping their hands and smiling in the background.
Already, their marriage was not typical. It was not in a religious sanctuary, a term my mother would use to describe one of the reasons she and my father chose each other. They didn't need a religious sanctuary to practice their respective faiths, she maintained. She remains un-mosqued as she has been my entire life, praying five times a day alone in the house's prayer room. My father is several years returned to church after never having set foot during all the time I lived at home and through my college years.
It was not surrounded by family and closest friends. It was surrounded by just enough of my mother's family to serve as witnesses--and my Uncle Junior, who, as my senior uncle on my mother's side, has attended nearly every major event in my life, from my birth to my graduation from college.
It was not traditional. My father, who was not raised in Nigerian traditions and couldn't explain them to me if I asked, did not dress in traditional Nigerian clothes on his big day and would not dress that way in the United States for another 30 years. My mother did not wear white. There were no bridesmaids or groomsmen. My mother had no engagement ring when she donned her wedding band. And that was it. Married.
But it was also radical. The Muslim daughter of Muslim parents married a Christian man, with the open approval of her parents, though she never asked for it. A Christian man who grew up sitting at his father's feet during sermons married a Muslim woman in spite of all of the things he believed about the Muslims of the north that were responsible for killing his people before the war. He also didn't seek the approval of his family.
When my mother tells it, she never balked at what my grandparents would think of her marrying a Christian man. She did not ask their permission to travel to Nigeria to visit my father in 1981. She told them, then she went. A woman previously sheltered by the strictest parents I've ever heard of in the name of the Nation of Islam traveled outside of the country for the first time to Nigeria, by herself. She has never asked them what they thought of the whole thing and it hasn't mattered.
My father doesn't tell stories about these things, but I imagine he didn't ask or tell very much. Not only did my mother not meet his family when she traveled to Nigeria (tell me more about that month long trip, Ma), but his family just found out that she is Muslim...two years ago? Over the phone? This tells me that my father did not consult his elder brothers, as my grandparents on that side had already passed.
That the children of two families who were essentially religious entities in their community could pull of an accepted interfaith marriage was pretty remarkable. That neither of these adults were hindered by what their family thought was fantastic. Their marriage exemplifies everything a love marriage can be for a Muslim woman, for an immigrant man.
And unlike various in each set of their co-religionists, they do not wonder if their marriage is valid. And they do not doubt that it is recognized by God.
Besides this very radical aspect of my parents' marriage, the interfaith without asking permission part, it is also otherwise unconventional. It was my mother who proposed to my father. And I believe it went a little something like this:
"Hey! Why don't we get married?"
And three years later, after spending most of that time with the Atlantic between them, they did just that. Prior to their marriage, their courtship face-to-face was 10 months total - 9 months in the United States, 1 month in Nigeria. They succeeded in having the longest long distance courtship I've personally known of.
They were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend they hadn't talked to in years. My mother was instantly taken at how my father was so friendly and outgoing that he talked to the DJ at the party as if he'd known him for years, yet he just met him. I don't know what my father was thinking, but I know that he's always adored my mother, and probably felt some semblance of that then.
They were set up but they had met before. My mother was a secretary at University of Michigan, Flint in the offices of Afro-American and Chicano Studies, where my father's cousin, head of the department, worked. My father would visit his cousin and bow his head toward my mother as he entered the office.
And somehow, this was totally unrelated to them being set up.
I don't know if my father dated previously, but I assume he did. I know my mother did. Her first foray into dating non-black men was another Nigerian who happened to be Chinua Achebe's cousin. The date ended, and Mr. Achebe seemed enthusiastic but I guess that was the last date.
(And to think, I may have been an Achebe...more than happy to be who I am!)
And of course, as goes without saying, their union was intercultural.
For all the ways my parents' marriage was radical, unconventional, special, it was also largely ordinary. It's an ordinary story of two people who loved each other and decided to spend the rest of their lives together. It's all about love, as Maurice White sings.
"Bound to fall in love one day. Surely, and you need it!"
They liked each other, then they loved each other, they married, they formed a family.
I don't know what it was about my dad, but he saw my mother transform from being a professional-minded woman who never aspired to have children to a mother who adored and nurtured us without interruption from the days we were born while still developing professionally. And I don't know what it is about my mother, but she anchored my father to a land in which he never intended to stay.
And the rest is history.
Friday, November 29, 2013
[uncensored]: Part of That World
Salaam,
I've been following along with the recent posts at loveinshallah.com in response to the controversial contribution, "How I Met My Son's Mother." First of all, big ups to this guy who was so courageous to write a piece on this website and be subject to such scrutiny. There's not much left to say that hasn't already been said in several response posts on that website and the 140 and counting comments.
Reading all of these posts about the ideals of Muslim marriage and how we fall so far from that ideal did get me feeling, to use a phrase that I actively despise, "some kinda way..."
I'm probably just ovulating or something and my hormones have come out of a year and a half long hiding, because I almost started crying at a beautiful moment between a tiny newborn and her teenage mother when I was doing baby's exam yesterday. But reading these blogs about people seeking out marriage in the halal way reminded me of what I once wanted for myself, and frankly, what I gave up on a long time ago.
It all unraveled years ago when I was on an online site and this brother from Florida was serious about setting up communication. This was not the first one and nor was he the last. He was also not the first more than 1000 miles away who wanted to skype. In these settings, I usually gave an email that I used to forward my old University of Michigan mail that I used for the purpose of signing up for internet things that I didn't want to spam me...and for online dating. No phone numbers, no skype dates. Anyone who wanted to skype with me immediately I figured were too into my looks, anyway.
So brother from Florida was earnest. He was not at all my time and had a career trajectory that was not appetizing (the lyric comes to mind, "I'm a hustler, baby, I just want you to know..."). But otherwise, he was just fine on initial contacts from an Islamic standpoint. And for him, I was just fine...pre-med (at that time), with a promising career, "just throw a hijab on [me] and [I'd] be perfect."
I didn't take offense to this because I never said never again to hijab, and at this point in the game, approaching 25, I didn't know if I should be so picky as to not want to be with a man who felt hijab was fard.
Then he asked me if I had a wali. Ooohh...
"Because, you know, I talk to sisters on here and they act like they're serious, but then I find out they don't have a wali, which is absolutely required."
This was either about to be my perfect out for the Florida Hustler or it was going to be yet another cop-out for a brother who may have had promise.
I didn't have a wali. I hadn't sought a wali and at that point was unsure if I wanted to, even though I know that it would be required if I chose to go about marriage at this way. What was I thinking? I know exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking that I had to finesse this Muslim marriage thing. I have a Christian father who gets nervous anyone has a Muslim name or comes from a majority-Muslim country for "extremist ties," in spite of being married to a Muslim woman who practices five pillars. My "coming out" as Muslim in my early 20s imposed a deep rift in my family that my adult brother with autism cannot afford, nor can my parents' otherwise loving and functional relationship afford. It's a sucky place to be in as a daughter of an interfaith couple, but so it is. My parents, for this reason, were not fit to guide me through the marriage process.
Of course, my father would love to arrange my marriage with a man that he trusts. That man would be a Christian man. I bet he still would love to, but that's another story.
So, if I wanted to go forward with legit Muslim marriage, by the books, I probably would need a wali. But where would I find one? One of my formerly atheist now Muslim convert friends from medical school who converted to Islam prior to marrying her husband easily told me that I should talk to an imam, that he would help me.
Yes, thank you so much. Because it was so hard for you, dating your Muslim husband the regular way.
I hope this friend is okay. She had no wali and shut herself out from her friends in the time leading up to her marriage. I didn't even get to do my "there is no compulsion in religion" talk with her before she apparently converted and struggled through salat with Arabic words she didn't understand.
So here I was, trying to be more honest, on skype (still wasn't comfortable with it) with Florida Hustler Brother who was right. If I wanted to do this right, I needed a wali. But doing things right would mean ultimately alienating my father from this process, and maybe alienating him from my life as well. I realized that getting a wali was just a red herring. The process of attempting to get "Muslim married" by getting to know a man outside of the dating paradigm and essentially arranging my marriage was incompatible with maintaining a relationship with my father and having my parents at all involved in my decision to marry.
Because my mother is a wife that defers to her husband. My mother is also a woman who did not have patience for her pool of Muslim suitors, which for her as a black Muslim woman in the late 70s were black Muslim men, the new Muslim crew following WD Muhammad or at that point, stragglers from the Nation, who she had seen preferentially select "lost found girls" because "they put out." She is also a woman who does salat in English and does not shudder when people tell her that her prayers will therefore not be recognized. She slides easily from reading the Qur'an daily to living her Islam in the way she sees fit, and in that mode of Islam, she sees no conflict in having married my Christian father, whose morality is more excellent than any other Muslim man she's known, including her own father.
Therefore, she would not be my ally in seeking to get Muslim married at the expense of my relationship with my father.
There's always the slim possibility that I would go about this process, not alienate my father, he meets my suitor and sees past the religious difference to see that he was a genuinely God-fearing man who had the best intentions for his daughter. My mother would also be pleased with such a suitor.
But in order to get there, I would have to begin a serious search, and in order for it to be safe for me as a single woman searching without the aid of family or other elders of a spouse, I would need a wali, a legit one, a trusted guardian who really had my best interests at heart.
And I'd either have to keep it from my father or endure months of disapproval from him until the process yielded success, and the impact that would have on my mother and brother as my father took out his frustration on my mother, as he did when I first told him that I would "never be Christian."
I'm not being melodramatic. My father still tries at intervals to get me to realize my salvation through Jesus Christ and convert.
Some would argue that the decision should be easy, that I should aim to please God more than my parents. And what more example do I need than the father of both my and my father's religion, Abraham, and blah blah blah.
I mean, it is a valid argument. I should want to please God over everything else. But people who make these arguments typically were never in the position I was in. Without my parents, I have no one in this world. And at the very least, as a single woman, that is not safe.
So I closed the Skype conversation with Florida Brother and never spoke to him again. I would not be getting a wali. And from that point onward, it slowly degenerated to, "I will not be getting Muslim married."
To which I occasionally wonder, what will become of me? Marriage being half of my religion, I either will not get married at all or, if I marry, I will be less of a Muslim because of it. The ramifications are clear. I will become like my mother, who has not prayed with anyone else besides me, occasionally, when prayers are silent because I do salat in Arabic and she does salat in English. She fasts in isolation, she practices in isolation. She hasn't been in a mosque since before I was born. She's able to exist as a Muslim woman married to this Christian man praying in English because of her isolation. This was not what I wanted for myself.
It's not true that marrying a non-Muslim man means that you're children will be raised non-Muslim. I've seen more Muslim men married to non-Muslim women raise non-Muslim children than the other way around. Cultures are different, and in ours, often, the mother's faith rules. But it is true that a strong, believing father of another faith will continue to have an influence and somewhat control over especially his daughter's potential spouses, especially if that daughter loves and respects him.
I wore hijab for two years, successfully finding ways to hide it from my father until I couldn't anymore and for multiple other reasons, stopped. The same way goes my plans for marriage.
And I've come out the other side a shadow of the Muslimah that I initially sought to become. I strove to become part of a world that I could not have become a part of without disowning myself from my father and potentially permanently destroying our relationship. But my father is a good Christian man who believes in God with all of his heart who raised me to the best of his ability and wants the best for me and he does not deserve such cruelty.
My mother, a few years ago in my angst about my situation, apologized to me as I spelled this out for her. She should not have placed me in such a precarious position. What a thing to apologize for, to have married a solid husband, a great father and provider.
In the end, I have made a choice about how I will seek my partner. It is one that both of my parents approve of and because of that, feels a lot safer, although in reality, I realize that there is no safe way to do such a thing. Not only in terms of safety of emotions, but in terms of safety of person. I go forward prayerfully as with everything I do.
I've been following along with the recent posts at loveinshallah.com in response to the controversial contribution, "How I Met My Son's Mother." First of all, big ups to this guy who was so courageous to write a piece on this website and be subject to such scrutiny. There's not much left to say that hasn't already been said in several response posts on that website and the 140 and counting comments.
Reading all of these posts about the ideals of Muslim marriage and how we fall so far from that ideal did get me feeling, to use a phrase that I actively despise, "some kinda way..."
I'm probably just ovulating or something and my hormones have come out of a year and a half long hiding, because I almost started crying at a beautiful moment between a tiny newborn and her teenage mother when I was doing baby's exam yesterday. But reading these blogs about people seeking out marriage in the halal way reminded me of what I once wanted for myself, and frankly, what I gave up on a long time ago.
It all unraveled years ago when I was on an online site and this brother from Florida was serious about setting up communication. This was not the first one and nor was he the last. He was also not the first more than 1000 miles away who wanted to skype. In these settings, I usually gave an email that I used to forward my old University of Michigan mail that I used for the purpose of signing up for internet things that I didn't want to spam me...and for online dating. No phone numbers, no skype dates. Anyone who wanted to skype with me immediately I figured were too into my looks, anyway.
So brother from Florida was earnest. He was not at all my time and had a career trajectory that was not appetizing (the lyric comes to mind, "I'm a hustler, baby, I just want you to know..."). But otherwise, he was just fine on initial contacts from an Islamic standpoint. And for him, I was just fine...pre-med (at that time), with a promising career, "just throw a hijab on [me] and [I'd] be perfect."
I didn't take offense to this because I never said never again to hijab, and at this point in the game, approaching 25, I didn't know if I should be so picky as to not want to be with a man who felt hijab was fard.
Then he asked me if I had a wali. Ooohh...
"Because, you know, I talk to sisters on here and they act like they're serious, but then I find out they don't have a wali, which is absolutely required."
This was either about to be my perfect out for the Florida Hustler or it was going to be yet another cop-out for a brother who may have had promise.
I didn't have a wali. I hadn't sought a wali and at that point was unsure if I wanted to, even though I know that it would be required if I chose to go about marriage at this way. What was I thinking? I know exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking that I had to finesse this Muslim marriage thing. I have a Christian father who gets nervous anyone has a Muslim name or comes from a majority-Muslim country for "extremist ties," in spite of being married to a Muslim woman who practices five pillars. My "coming out" as Muslim in my early 20s imposed a deep rift in my family that my adult brother with autism cannot afford, nor can my parents' otherwise loving and functional relationship afford. It's a sucky place to be in as a daughter of an interfaith couple, but so it is. My parents, for this reason, were not fit to guide me through the marriage process.
Of course, my father would love to arrange my marriage with a man that he trusts. That man would be a Christian man. I bet he still would love to, but that's another story.
So, if I wanted to go forward with legit Muslim marriage, by the books, I probably would need a wali. But where would I find one? One of my formerly atheist now Muslim convert friends from medical school who converted to Islam prior to marrying her husband easily told me that I should talk to an imam, that he would help me.
Yes, thank you so much. Because it was so hard for you, dating your Muslim husband the regular way.
I hope this friend is okay. She had no wali and shut herself out from her friends in the time leading up to her marriage. I didn't even get to do my "there is no compulsion in religion" talk with her before she apparently converted and struggled through salat with Arabic words she didn't understand.
So here I was, trying to be more honest, on skype (still wasn't comfortable with it) with Florida Hustler Brother who was right. If I wanted to do this right, I needed a wali. But doing things right would mean ultimately alienating my father from this process, and maybe alienating him from my life as well. I realized that getting a wali was just a red herring. The process of attempting to get "Muslim married" by getting to know a man outside of the dating paradigm and essentially arranging my marriage was incompatible with maintaining a relationship with my father and having my parents at all involved in my decision to marry.
Because my mother is a wife that defers to her husband. My mother is also a woman who did not have patience for her pool of Muslim suitors, which for her as a black Muslim woman in the late 70s were black Muslim men, the new Muslim crew following WD Muhammad or at that point, stragglers from the Nation, who she had seen preferentially select "lost found girls" because "they put out." She is also a woman who does salat in English and does not shudder when people tell her that her prayers will therefore not be recognized. She slides easily from reading the Qur'an daily to living her Islam in the way she sees fit, and in that mode of Islam, she sees no conflict in having married my Christian father, whose morality is more excellent than any other Muslim man she's known, including her own father.
Therefore, she would not be my ally in seeking to get Muslim married at the expense of my relationship with my father.
There's always the slim possibility that I would go about this process, not alienate my father, he meets my suitor and sees past the religious difference to see that he was a genuinely God-fearing man who had the best intentions for his daughter. My mother would also be pleased with such a suitor.
But in order to get there, I would have to begin a serious search, and in order for it to be safe for me as a single woman searching without the aid of family or other elders of a spouse, I would need a wali, a legit one, a trusted guardian who really had my best interests at heart.
And I'd either have to keep it from my father or endure months of disapproval from him until the process yielded success, and the impact that would have on my mother and brother as my father took out his frustration on my mother, as he did when I first told him that I would "never be Christian."
I'm not being melodramatic. My father still tries at intervals to get me to realize my salvation through Jesus Christ and convert.
Some would argue that the decision should be easy, that I should aim to please God more than my parents. And what more example do I need than the father of both my and my father's religion, Abraham, and blah blah blah.
I mean, it is a valid argument. I should want to please God over everything else. But people who make these arguments typically were never in the position I was in. Without my parents, I have no one in this world. And at the very least, as a single woman, that is not safe.
So I closed the Skype conversation with Florida Brother and never spoke to him again. I would not be getting a wali. And from that point onward, it slowly degenerated to, "I will not be getting Muslim married."
To which I occasionally wonder, what will become of me? Marriage being half of my religion, I either will not get married at all or, if I marry, I will be less of a Muslim because of it. The ramifications are clear. I will become like my mother, who has not prayed with anyone else besides me, occasionally, when prayers are silent because I do salat in Arabic and she does salat in English. She fasts in isolation, she practices in isolation. She hasn't been in a mosque since before I was born. She's able to exist as a Muslim woman married to this Christian man praying in English because of her isolation. This was not what I wanted for myself.
It's not true that marrying a non-Muslim man means that you're children will be raised non-Muslim. I've seen more Muslim men married to non-Muslim women raise non-Muslim children than the other way around. Cultures are different, and in ours, often, the mother's faith rules. But it is true that a strong, believing father of another faith will continue to have an influence and somewhat control over especially his daughter's potential spouses, especially if that daughter loves and respects him.
I wore hijab for two years, successfully finding ways to hide it from my father until I couldn't anymore and for multiple other reasons, stopped. The same way goes my plans for marriage.
And I've come out the other side a shadow of the Muslimah that I initially sought to become. I strove to become part of a world that I could not have become a part of without disowning myself from my father and potentially permanently destroying our relationship. But my father is a good Christian man who believes in God with all of his heart who raised me to the best of his ability and wants the best for me and he does not deserve such cruelty.
My mother, a few years ago in my angst about my situation, apologized to me as I spelled this out for her. She should not have placed me in such a precarious position. What a thing to apologize for, to have married a solid husband, a great father and provider.
In the end, I have made a choice about how I will seek my partner. It is one that both of my parents approve of and because of that, feels a lot safer, although in reality, I realize that there is no safe way to do such a thing. Not only in terms of safety of emotions, but in terms of safety of person. I go forward prayerfully as with everything I do.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Want
As salaam alaikum,
I once wanted something for myself, but then I'm pretty sure I gave up because I was convinced that it does not exist. I still believe that it does not exist. Or do I?
I don't think I believe that it doesn't exist anymore. It's just that, after wanting it so much, convincing myself that it was perfect for me...I realized that I didn't want it once I convinced myself that it didn't exist.
And now it exists again, and I don't want it.
This wouldn't be a problem if I hardly knew who I was anymore. And it's not residency specifically that has depersonalized me. It's the ebb and flow of life and making decisions before I have the time to ruminate over my thoughts in a thousand words in a word document, or in a blog entry. I've moved faster than the estimation of myself.
I've even started questioning if I want to be a wife and a mother. I have to remind myself at intervals, of course I do. Do I? Yes. I manage women labor, put their babies on their chest, constantly imagining what I would prefer when I'm delivering, how I hope I am able to handle labor, imagining my husband at my side. Of course I want that...
...or do I?
Life for a while was a constant quest of me searching how to be. How to be optimally, to earn the most love from Allah (swt). And in the course of mindfulness, I learned to be enough, enough right now, enough for myself, to be myself. But in the background, there's the historic me who thought that there was no such thing as being oneself. To be oneself was to be satisfied with the innate mediocrity that we are instead of striving to be better. To never be satisfied with oneself was to be striving. To struggle daily because marriage was not in site was a worthy struggle, because I was struggling in the way of God and what He wanted for me in such a relationship and not settling for less. Prayers were much more cathartic that way.
There was baseline worthiness that I thought would be accomplished by being a baseline Muslimah...five pillars, the minimum, modesty at the minimum. And I never got there...never all at once. And I didn't feel worthy unless I got there.
And probably I was still single because God knew it would be best for me to get there instead of looking for spiritual and religious guidance too much in a man, a future husband. He wanted me to rely on myself, I told myself. I prayed for the best husband I could have on this earth, and it's taking so long because that's what I prayed for, I told myself. Meanwhile, each prayer became like a plead and my pain and depression etched battle scars into my being, that which I thought was worthy, worthy and the struggle for God.
This is the way we are all supposed to live, ultimately, I told myself, if we only knew. Life is struggle enough, but if we're putting it in the right place...I may not understand it now, but it'll only reap rewards for me. This is why God constantly reminds us that the next life is better than this...
...and so I lived a life not so much for the next life but for the next moment and the next stage of being.
I wanted very many things, actually. A certain type of being, a certain type of husband so I could raise a certain type of children, all that would fit into what I already had going for my career. I imagined a being where I was more fit than I am, thinner than I am, hair healthier than it is, clothing my own brand of modesty and elegance as it's not. I hoped to redefine myself into this woman upon entering residency, and instead, I remained as I've always been. Jeans and a blouse, sometimes dry and matted puff on my head.
I acquired a man who loves me, and I him, who will not be that certain type of husband. Nor do I want to be.
I wanted very many things for myself that I convinced myself at one time did not exist and now that I'm over them and I see that they do exist, I no longer want them.
I still want to live God-conscious, but I'm finding a more organic way to do that than molding myself into what I should be to be enough, when we are always enough. God did not create mediocrity. My paradigm is partly the pleasure of God but it's also the understanding of a life that is supposed to bring us the most benefit and equilibrium.
...or is it that I still don't want it?
I once wanted something for myself, but then I'm pretty sure I gave up because I was convinced that it does not exist. I still believe that it does not exist. Or do I?
I don't think I believe that it doesn't exist anymore. It's just that, after wanting it so much, convincing myself that it was perfect for me...I realized that I didn't want it once I convinced myself that it didn't exist.
And now it exists again, and I don't want it.
This wouldn't be a problem if I hardly knew who I was anymore. And it's not residency specifically that has depersonalized me. It's the ebb and flow of life and making decisions before I have the time to ruminate over my thoughts in a thousand words in a word document, or in a blog entry. I've moved faster than the estimation of myself.
I've even started questioning if I want to be a wife and a mother. I have to remind myself at intervals, of course I do. Do I? Yes. I manage women labor, put their babies on their chest, constantly imagining what I would prefer when I'm delivering, how I hope I am able to handle labor, imagining my husband at my side. Of course I want that...
...or do I?
Life for a while was a constant quest of me searching how to be. How to be optimally, to earn the most love from Allah (swt). And in the course of mindfulness, I learned to be enough, enough right now, enough for myself, to be myself. But in the background, there's the historic me who thought that there was no such thing as being oneself. To be oneself was to be satisfied with the innate mediocrity that we are instead of striving to be better. To never be satisfied with oneself was to be striving. To struggle daily because marriage was not in site was a worthy struggle, because I was struggling in the way of God and what He wanted for me in such a relationship and not settling for less. Prayers were much more cathartic that way.
There was baseline worthiness that I thought would be accomplished by being a baseline Muslimah...five pillars, the minimum, modesty at the minimum. And I never got there...never all at once. And I didn't feel worthy unless I got there.
And probably I was still single because God knew it would be best for me to get there instead of looking for spiritual and religious guidance too much in a man, a future husband. He wanted me to rely on myself, I told myself. I prayed for the best husband I could have on this earth, and it's taking so long because that's what I prayed for, I told myself. Meanwhile, each prayer became like a plead and my pain and depression etched battle scars into my being, that which I thought was worthy, worthy and the struggle for God.
This is the way we are all supposed to live, ultimately, I told myself, if we only knew. Life is struggle enough, but if we're putting it in the right place...I may not understand it now, but it'll only reap rewards for me. This is why God constantly reminds us that the next life is better than this...
...and so I lived a life not so much for the next life but for the next moment and the next stage of being.
I wanted very many things, actually. A certain type of being, a certain type of husband so I could raise a certain type of children, all that would fit into what I already had going for my career. I imagined a being where I was more fit than I am, thinner than I am, hair healthier than it is, clothing my own brand of modesty and elegance as it's not. I hoped to redefine myself into this woman upon entering residency, and instead, I remained as I've always been. Jeans and a blouse, sometimes dry and matted puff on my head.
I acquired a man who loves me, and I him, who will not be that certain type of husband. Nor do I want to be.
I wanted very many things for myself that I convinced myself at one time did not exist and now that I'm over them and I see that they do exist, I no longer want them.
I still want to live God-conscious, but I'm finding a more organic way to do that than molding myself into what I should be to be enough, when we are always enough. God did not create mediocrity. My paradigm is partly the pleasure of God but it's also the understanding of a life that is supposed to bring us the most benefit and equilibrium.
...or is it that I still don't want it?
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
[uncensored]: It's Time for me to Wake Up
As salaam alaikum,
It's early morning, I don't have any clinical or community medicine project responsibilities this morning other than putting together an outline to email to my adviser early this afternoon. Applicants will be submitting their rank lists soon and after a busy application season, I suddenly feel ambitious like I never have before.
Maybe this is what happens after you read Christopher Dorner's manifesto first thing in the morning.
I began to think of the state of black people, and specifically black men, in this society. Do not read me wrong, I am not condoning Dorner's actions. The manifesto was completely crazy-pants and any salient points he made about dysfunction and corruption in the LAPD are virtually muted by the fact that his solution is a murderous rampage. I think the whole thing is an unfortunate mess that will not bring about an overhaul of the LAPD or any similarly-functioning police departments but has the potential to result in the death of innocent black or black-looking people who may or may not look like Dorner, as well as whatever other innocent victims Dorner may target in the coming days.
He said a lot in his manifesto about clearing his name. Talk about the opposite of clearing your name, but anyway. That got me thinking about men and the importance of power and position for them. It got me to thinking about what an affront and how emasculating it must be for men to lose position, face, title, influence, whatever the mode of power they feel like they've earned or were otherwise entitled to.
Is it always emasculating? I feel like I'm making a grand gender generalization.
Anyway, this briefly reminded me of an undercurrent in many black families and in parts of the black community that black women have a duty to relate only to black men, and vice versa in a slightly different context. I wasn't raised with this notion but I do feel a special duty to black children, especially black boys, so it almost feels like abandonment sometimes that I am not wedded to marrying a black man.
But that's another topic altogether.
I started thinking about the U.S. penal system and how I won't even dignify it by calling it corrections. Because correcting what? Correcting nothing save by the wills of individual incarcerated souls that may be self-reformed and freed or may otherwise write and reach out to others to right wrongs, to speak out against injustice or to call upon them to not repeat their same mistakes. I opened up a documentary on the war of drugs that speaks a little bit about the U.S. prison complex, but I believe there's a new documentary out there that talks specifically about black men in prison. Anytime 1 out of 4 of the population of black men will spend some time incarcerated, there's a problem on some level, whether its the moral failings of a mass of unrelated individuals, the moral failings of a community or the moral failings of a society translated into law and so-called justice.
I thought about a lot of things. It all came to a head as I was reading the SNMA email newsletter and the first story (but not the newletter headliner) was titled "Black Males Not Applying to Medical School." The article pointed out that black male matriculation in medical school has only increased 36% since the late-70s, whereas males (and females) of other ethnic groups had tripled (Latinos) or even grew to nearly 10 times their 1970s demographic (Asians). Black females in medical school, much like undergraduate school, outnumber their male counterparts by 2:1.
The solution suggestion in the article? Strengthening the pipeline.
This speaks to a lot more than the college-to-medical-school pipeline and to whatever all is behind the fact that our men are so many times more likely to end up behind bars than any professional career.
In between reading this all this morning and drafting my community medicine project outline and thinking about match day and how we had no black male applicants to our program this year and that I've seen two total black residents in family medicine and how so few of my black classmates went into primary care and how I don't know of too many black medical students who aspire to primary care and how I could do a study on that and maybe if I have time during residency I should do a study on this because I think I know some of the reasons why...
...I woke up.
I'm sitting here in my bed, at my computer, lying in what I slept in, living room window open to a cloudy day and a cluttered living space, and I woke up.
I've been awake for three hours but I woke up to what is reality for me, what a lot of people see in me but I hadn't yet seen in me because I've spent so much time trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. There's a lot that needs to be done, and I was born to be one of the agents.
I am blessed to be able to be one of the agents. I was born on a platter of privilege, in upper middle class family and was raised in relatively safe neighborhoods, far from the realities of governmental corruption and economic stagnation of my father's country and far from the realities of senseless violence and economic dilapidation of my mother's home town. I was born and raised as a privileged, young black American-Nigerian American little girl who was allowed to be fat and cute and happy.
I entered the academic world with an unfortunate inferiority complex that sneaks up on me when I'm feeling the most vulnerable. You probably don't have a high IQ but you work hard, a guidance counselor told me in the 8th grade as he reflected on how I had all As. And I hate to admit it, but sometimes I believe that instead of taking responsibility for when I haven't read or haven't studied and haven't felt prepared.
I've let myself be dominated by this and other insecurities and have live a life where I haven't fully realized my privileges and blessings and instead am listening to nay-saying spirits that really have nothing to do with me. Old, warn-out, hackneyed narratives used generically to destabilize, even unintentionally, so powerfully interwoven into the fabric of our society that if anyone did it intentionally, they'd be genius, Nobel-prize level genius if the effort were at all worthy.
I don't even see what I've been blessed to accomplish, who I am...a dual-degree medical school graduate embarking on my career. I am the only black person in my residency program. I am one of four black physicians I've seen at my hospital. There may be a fifth somewhere. Sure, I've been scratching and surviving as an intern and I will continue to do so. However, I can't be who I am and have gotten to where I am and not do something about the fact that black men are more likely to go to prison than to pursue a professional career.
I'm not going to go through this residency with my tail between my legs. We all have a right to be individuals outside of our race or ethnicity but it's not in my blood to be an individual ignorant of these realities.
I am in medicine. This was my chosen path because of my Islam, because of my spirituality, because of my potential to serve. There are many causes and I have many dreams on many levels but I was privileged to not be a victim of racism and I will not think myself a victim of anything ever again, because I'm not. As I said previously, I am my own liable limitation.
I will not envision myself a hero but as an agent to a movement that's already happening. My men, our men, men who have melanin in their skin like I do and kinky hair like I do who grew up in homes like mine and homes very much unlike mine are feeling emasculated in a society that historically views them as less of a man, has made fetish of their sexuality, and in so many other ways has undermined their existence and vital purpose in our society. And again, I hope I'm not generalizing, but I think this is devastating to the psyche.
That article talked about how the waning numbers of black men going into medicine could effect numbers going into primary care with the thought that black people best serve black people and maybe we could get a handle on disparities if there were more black people in the field, at least 13%, so we could be representative of our U.S. population.
My point is, there's some deep-rooted shit that's the reason that so few black men are going into medicine or any other professional field, and why so many are in prison, and why states have historically looked at their third-graders to determine prison enrollment. And we all can't be physicians or professionals, but really, who has to be in jail?
It's time for me to stop being a victim of my own mind, of my own insecurities and fears holding me back from being what I need to be.
It's time for me to start becoming the strong, intelligent black female physician of today because of alhamdulillah all I've been given.
It's early morning, I don't have any clinical or community medicine project responsibilities this morning other than putting together an outline to email to my adviser early this afternoon. Applicants will be submitting their rank lists soon and after a busy application season, I suddenly feel ambitious like I never have before.
Maybe this is what happens after you read Christopher Dorner's manifesto first thing in the morning.
I began to think of the state of black people, and specifically black men, in this society. Do not read me wrong, I am not condoning Dorner's actions. The manifesto was completely crazy-pants and any salient points he made about dysfunction and corruption in the LAPD are virtually muted by the fact that his solution is a murderous rampage. I think the whole thing is an unfortunate mess that will not bring about an overhaul of the LAPD or any similarly-functioning police departments but has the potential to result in the death of innocent black or black-looking people who may or may not look like Dorner, as well as whatever other innocent victims Dorner may target in the coming days.
He said a lot in his manifesto about clearing his name. Talk about the opposite of clearing your name, but anyway. That got me thinking about men and the importance of power and position for them. It got me to thinking about what an affront and how emasculating it must be for men to lose position, face, title, influence, whatever the mode of power they feel like they've earned or were otherwise entitled to.
Is it always emasculating? I feel like I'm making a grand gender generalization.
Anyway, this briefly reminded me of an undercurrent in many black families and in parts of the black community that black women have a duty to relate only to black men, and vice versa in a slightly different context. I wasn't raised with this notion but I do feel a special duty to black children, especially black boys, so it almost feels like abandonment sometimes that I am not wedded to marrying a black man.
But that's another topic altogether.
I started thinking about the U.S. penal system and how I won't even dignify it by calling it corrections. Because correcting what? Correcting nothing save by the wills of individual incarcerated souls that may be self-reformed and freed or may otherwise write and reach out to others to right wrongs, to speak out against injustice or to call upon them to not repeat their same mistakes. I opened up a documentary on the war of drugs that speaks a little bit about the U.S. prison complex, but I believe there's a new documentary out there that talks specifically about black men in prison. Anytime 1 out of 4 of the population of black men will spend some time incarcerated, there's a problem on some level, whether its the moral failings of a mass of unrelated individuals, the moral failings of a community or the moral failings of a society translated into law and so-called justice.
I thought about a lot of things. It all came to a head as I was reading the SNMA email newsletter and the first story (but not the newletter headliner) was titled "Black Males Not Applying to Medical School." The article pointed out that black male matriculation in medical school has only increased 36% since the late-70s, whereas males (and females) of other ethnic groups had tripled (Latinos) or even grew to nearly 10 times their 1970s demographic (Asians). Black females in medical school, much like undergraduate school, outnumber their male counterparts by 2:1.
The solution suggestion in the article? Strengthening the pipeline.
This speaks to a lot more than the college-to-medical-school pipeline and to whatever all is behind the fact that our men are so many times more likely to end up behind bars than any professional career.
In between reading this all this morning and drafting my community medicine project outline and thinking about match day and how we had no black male applicants to our program this year and that I've seen two total black residents in family medicine and how so few of my black classmates went into primary care and how I don't know of too many black medical students who aspire to primary care and how I could do a study on that and maybe if I have time during residency I should do a study on this because I think I know some of the reasons why...
...I woke up.
I'm sitting here in my bed, at my computer, lying in what I slept in, living room window open to a cloudy day and a cluttered living space, and I woke up.
I've been awake for three hours but I woke up to what is reality for me, what a lot of people see in me but I hadn't yet seen in me because I've spent so much time trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. There's a lot that needs to be done, and I was born to be one of the agents.
I am blessed to be able to be one of the agents. I was born on a platter of privilege, in upper middle class family and was raised in relatively safe neighborhoods, far from the realities of governmental corruption and economic stagnation of my father's country and far from the realities of senseless violence and economic dilapidation of my mother's home town. I was born and raised as a privileged, young black American-Nigerian American little girl who was allowed to be fat and cute and happy.
I entered the academic world with an unfortunate inferiority complex that sneaks up on me when I'm feeling the most vulnerable. You probably don't have a high IQ but you work hard, a guidance counselor told me in the 8th grade as he reflected on how I had all As. And I hate to admit it, but sometimes I believe that instead of taking responsibility for when I haven't read or haven't studied and haven't felt prepared.
I've let myself be dominated by this and other insecurities and have live a life where I haven't fully realized my privileges and blessings and instead am listening to nay-saying spirits that really have nothing to do with me. Old, warn-out, hackneyed narratives used generically to destabilize, even unintentionally, so powerfully interwoven into the fabric of our society that if anyone did it intentionally, they'd be genius, Nobel-prize level genius if the effort were at all worthy.
I don't even see what I've been blessed to accomplish, who I am...a dual-degree medical school graduate embarking on my career. I am the only black person in my residency program. I am one of four black physicians I've seen at my hospital. There may be a fifth somewhere. Sure, I've been scratching and surviving as an intern and I will continue to do so. However, I can't be who I am and have gotten to where I am and not do something about the fact that black men are more likely to go to prison than to pursue a professional career.
I'm not going to go through this residency with my tail between my legs. We all have a right to be individuals outside of our race or ethnicity but it's not in my blood to be an individual ignorant of these realities.
I am in medicine. This was my chosen path because of my Islam, because of my spirituality, because of my potential to serve. There are many causes and I have many dreams on many levels but I was privileged to not be a victim of racism and I will not think myself a victim of anything ever again, because I'm not. As I said previously, I am my own liable limitation.
I will not envision myself a hero but as an agent to a movement that's already happening. My men, our men, men who have melanin in their skin like I do and kinky hair like I do who grew up in homes like mine and homes very much unlike mine are feeling emasculated in a society that historically views them as less of a man, has made fetish of their sexuality, and in so many other ways has undermined their existence and vital purpose in our society. And again, I hope I'm not generalizing, but I think this is devastating to the psyche.
That article talked about how the waning numbers of black men going into medicine could effect numbers going into primary care with the thought that black people best serve black people and maybe we could get a handle on disparities if there were more black people in the field, at least 13%, so we could be representative of our U.S. population.
My point is, there's some deep-rooted shit that's the reason that so few black men are going into medicine or any other professional field, and why so many are in prison, and why states have historically looked at their third-graders to determine prison enrollment. And we all can't be physicians or professionals, but really, who has to be in jail?
It's time for me to stop being a victim of my own mind, of my own insecurities and fears holding me back from being what I need to be.
It's time for me to start becoming the strong, intelligent black female physician of today because of alhamdulillah all I've been given.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Trust
As salaam alaikum,
I do not take a break from the wonders and perils of being a woman (hahaha, get it?), but I feel like this is an issue that is sex- and genderless.
This song is how I feel inside of my body right now, from the urgency of that early 90s feel, to the lyrics...I urgently need relief:
I can't listen to it again, because it made me feel agitated. My calm shall be prayer. I had a rough day at the hospital today, and in all the helping voices among my seniors, family and friends, I know there's something that is missing. The trust in myself, which is an extension of my trust in God.
Of course not saying I am God or part God. Not even sure I'm saying God is in me. I'm just saying...for every time I thought I was a failure and a waste of a human being, I'm not trusting The One who not only put me here but gave me abundant blessings.
And for the first time, I'm not beating myself up about that. I beat myself up so much about any twinge of that in the past that I barely acknowledged it as fact. That I don't entirely trust God.
And for the most spiritual among us, it sounds like sacrilege! Even in my least adherent times, I didn't want to make the pronouncement. I was going through a phase, figuring things out, just taking with me my faith in God and having to reform my religion around it.
But my faith and trust have never been complete. And I think to expect that they would was once again my attempt to approximate the near impossible near perfection that I never nearly achieved.
I do not completely trust God. There are things that I trust God more for than others. I personally fear making any pronouncement about which things those are, nor do I want to make the pronouncement of why I am afraid to make that pronouncement, less God makes that fear come to fruition.
And then I'll be left thinking, "What did that mean?"
The things I take for granted daily, I do not pray about. The things I trust God to guarantee to most likely preserve especially if I pray about them, I pray the most about.
I can talk more comfortably about the things I don't have "proper" trust in God for.
I, over time, have had little trust in God in the relationship/marriage department. And by trust in God, it's not that I don't believe He's not here with me and able to help me in decisions. No, I know He's always here. My trust is mainly my trust in prayer, our main conduit of communication, if you will.
I have little faith that my prayers for relationships/marriage will be answered, just because so many weren't, at least within space and time parameters I understood when I prayed. I trust so little that I rarely pray about it anymore. Embarking on a relationship and not being able to bring myself to God about it, the One who I more fully place my trust in for so many other important aspects of my life...is more momentous than the relationship itself has been. And though that is not entirely attributable to my entire unhinging this afternoon...and never has been, but I think is a more comfortable place for me to feel like things are amiss...it's still huge!
The only thing that has brought me relief in this hectic day is admitting the above to myself. All of the above. That one thing, that so important to me thing that I've never really had a lot of trust in God for, before and after the advent of my adherence to Islam. Admitting it makes me realize it for what it really is. And it helps me parse out that other area of my life, other than my growth as a physician, that feels off for me right now.
I feel like, as a result, every step I take is against God, when it doesn't have to be. I will take it to prayer, even though I feel right now that the result of the prayer is that I will be painfully alone for many more years, if not forever. I think I must have hit rock bottom with this as some point because for the first time in a while, I feel like I have a mustard seed of faith...and some small part of me feels like God will actually help me in my current situation and not shun me to a lifetime of loneliness, which was my status quo prior to this.
I'm going to take that mustard seed and run with it! As painful as it feels right now to try to hold fast to that mustard seed of trust! It hurts to trust when you fear getting burned!
Mark my words, dear readers. I'm including this and my stresses at work in prayer, knowing that the more I can trust God, the more that I can trust that I am beloved creation with poise and purpose and if I'm not able to appreciate the value of that realization in and of itself, hopefully I can appreciate that it will make me a more effective practitioner...
I'm praying tomorrow is better, that God guides me in my current relationship, and yeah...in addition to those things that I steadily have more trust in God for.
I do not take a break from the wonders and perils of being a woman (hahaha, get it?), but I feel like this is an issue that is sex- and genderless.
This song is how I feel inside of my body right now, from the urgency of that early 90s feel, to the lyrics...I urgently need relief:
I can't listen to it again, because it made me feel agitated. My calm shall be prayer. I had a rough day at the hospital today, and in all the helping voices among my seniors, family and friends, I know there's something that is missing. The trust in myself, which is an extension of my trust in God.
Of course not saying I am God or part God. Not even sure I'm saying God is in me. I'm just saying...for every time I thought I was a failure and a waste of a human being, I'm not trusting The One who not only put me here but gave me abundant blessings.
And for the first time, I'm not beating myself up about that. I beat myself up so much about any twinge of that in the past that I barely acknowledged it as fact. That I don't entirely trust God.
And for the most spiritual among us, it sounds like sacrilege! Even in my least adherent times, I didn't want to make the pronouncement. I was going through a phase, figuring things out, just taking with me my faith in God and having to reform my religion around it.
But my faith and trust have never been complete. And I think to expect that they would was once again my attempt to approximate the near impossible near perfection that I never nearly achieved.
I do not completely trust God. There are things that I trust God more for than others. I personally fear making any pronouncement about which things those are, nor do I want to make the pronouncement of why I am afraid to make that pronouncement, less God makes that fear come to fruition.
And then I'll be left thinking, "What did that mean?"
The things I take for granted daily, I do not pray about. The things I trust God to guarantee to most likely preserve especially if I pray about them, I pray the most about.
I can talk more comfortably about the things I don't have "proper" trust in God for.
I, over time, have had little trust in God in the relationship/marriage department. And by trust in God, it's not that I don't believe He's not here with me and able to help me in decisions. No, I know He's always here. My trust is mainly my trust in prayer, our main conduit of communication, if you will.
I have little faith that my prayers for relationships/marriage will be answered, just because so many weren't, at least within space and time parameters I understood when I prayed. I trust so little that I rarely pray about it anymore. Embarking on a relationship and not being able to bring myself to God about it, the One who I more fully place my trust in for so many other important aspects of my life...is more momentous than the relationship itself has been. And though that is not entirely attributable to my entire unhinging this afternoon...and never has been, but I think is a more comfortable place for me to feel like things are amiss...it's still huge!
The only thing that has brought me relief in this hectic day is admitting the above to myself. All of the above. That one thing, that so important to me thing that I've never really had a lot of trust in God for, before and after the advent of my adherence to Islam. Admitting it makes me realize it for what it really is. And it helps me parse out that other area of my life, other than my growth as a physician, that feels off for me right now.
I feel like, as a result, every step I take is against God, when it doesn't have to be. I will take it to prayer, even though I feel right now that the result of the prayer is that I will be painfully alone for many more years, if not forever. I think I must have hit rock bottom with this as some point because for the first time in a while, I feel like I have a mustard seed of faith...and some small part of me feels like God will actually help me in my current situation and not shun me to a lifetime of loneliness, which was my status quo prior to this.
I'm going to take that mustard seed and run with it! As painful as it feels right now to try to hold fast to that mustard seed of trust! It hurts to trust when you fear getting burned!
Mark my words, dear readers. I'm including this and my stresses at work in prayer, knowing that the more I can trust God, the more that I can trust that I am beloved creation with poise and purpose and if I'm not able to appreciate the value of that realization in and of itself, hopefully I can appreciate that it will make me a more effective practitioner...
I'm praying tomorrow is better, that God guides me in my current relationship, and yeah...in addition to those things that I steadily have more trust in God for.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Happiness III
As salaam alaikum,
Being mindful that one is imperfect does not mean that one embraces their imperfections anymore than being mindful of one's sorrow means that you are embracing it.
Being mindful of sorrow, for example, after one suffers a loss means that one says to herself, "You know, I'm sad because this person just died. It makes sense that I'm sad, and it's okay."
I didn't use to do this. I would analyze my sorrow, which does also not equate to mindfulness. If I didn't cry, if I were able to rationalize the death medically or spiritually (the life to come is better than this!), then I was strong, spiritually and emotionally. If I cried, I was weak and really only mourning myself, not actually the person.
Or, whenever I was sad, I tried to get as sad as I could, as if I expended all the sad early, it would dissipate faster, and my happy would be even better by comparison.
No. I'm sad because this person just died. There are many reasons why I am sad, but they all make sense, and it's okay to feel this way. It will not be always, but this is where I am right now.
It really helps to not drift into despondency, downward spiraling it to various levels of self-destruction.
Similarly, being mindful of imperfections does not mean that I'm glorifying then, especially when my imperfections may be bad habits or certain strains of detestable behavior.
No. I am imperfect because I am human. This is where I am right now. I have some room for improvement, but it's okay that I am where I am right now.
Mindfulness in the moment. One could feel this way after being rude to someone, using crude language in a way that made someone uncomfortable. Mindfulness is not an oh-well moment. It's knowing where you are in that moment. Moments, just like days, really, are fleeting, and recognizing where one is in the moment does not define the next moment, the next day, whenever.
And that is the power of mindfulness. It breaks up time into a more manageable schema and helps us make meaning of our life while not locking us in any single state for any given period of time.
I'm mindful of my choices and their consequences. I've deliberately made this choice, and while I would have rather done things another way, I am satisfied with my choice for now. I pray as always for God's mercy as I travel through this life, and I pray that my choice elicits only the best of consequences.
Mindfulness, while a very secular exercise, is not mutually exclusive with my own spirituality.
Living life more mindful has made me infinitely more happy at baseline, not just with the shift in the way of thought, but because of the life decisions I've made because of it.
I love that I've found happiness. Mindfulness hasn't changed the parts of life that are difficult, but it has reduced the anxiety. It hasn't changed the fact that I will faced challenges in life, but it makes them less daunting because I now have a much more manageable way of coping. It hasn't changed the fact that I am almost 28 and unmarried but it has taken away most all of the former anxiety that I used to have about that. I look on without jealousy as more friends get engaged, get married and become pregnant because I no longer see those things as impossible for me because I only digest life one moment at a time now and it's no longer near impossible because I have accepted not being nor ever being near perfect.
Right now, I'm not even the best that I can be, and that's okay. I just pray that I am good.
And in this starting over, remaking and rebuilding, that's what I strive to be. Good. I pray that I am a good person, a good physician, a good daughter and sister.
The great thing about being good is that you can be better without reaching your ceiling, ever, in little ways, in little moments, and I pray that I am.
I pray that I can fill my surroundings with peace and charity.
Ameen.
Being mindful that one is imperfect does not mean that one embraces their imperfections anymore than being mindful of one's sorrow means that you are embracing it.
Being mindful of sorrow, for example, after one suffers a loss means that one says to herself, "You know, I'm sad because this person just died. It makes sense that I'm sad, and it's okay."
I didn't use to do this. I would analyze my sorrow, which does also not equate to mindfulness. If I didn't cry, if I were able to rationalize the death medically or spiritually (the life to come is better than this!), then I was strong, spiritually and emotionally. If I cried, I was weak and really only mourning myself, not actually the person.
Or, whenever I was sad, I tried to get as sad as I could, as if I expended all the sad early, it would dissipate faster, and my happy would be even better by comparison.
No. I'm sad because this person just died. There are many reasons why I am sad, but they all make sense, and it's okay to feel this way. It will not be always, but this is where I am right now.
It really helps to not drift into despondency, downward spiraling it to various levels of self-destruction.
Similarly, being mindful of imperfections does not mean that I'm glorifying then, especially when my imperfections may be bad habits or certain strains of detestable behavior.
No. I am imperfect because I am human. This is where I am right now. I have some room for improvement, but it's okay that I am where I am right now.
Mindfulness in the moment. One could feel this way after being rude to someone, using crude language in a way that made someone uncomfortable. Mindfulness is not an oh-well moment. It's knowing where you are in that moment. Moments, just like days, really, are fleeting, and recognizing where one is in the moment does not define the next moment, the next day, whenever.
And that is the power of mindfulness. It breaks up time into a more manageable schema and helps us make meaning of our life while not locking us in any single state for any given period of time.
I'm mindful of my choices and their consequences. I've deliberately made this choice, and while I would have rather done things another way, I am satisfied with my choice for now. I pray as always for God's mercy as I travel through this life, and I pray that my choice elicits only the best of consequences.
Mindfulness, while a very secular exercise, is not mutually exclusive with my own spirituality.
Living life more mindful has made me infinitely more happy at baseline, not just with the shift in the way of thought, but because of the life decisions I've made because of it.
I love that I've found happiness. Mindfulness hasn't changed the parts of life that are difficult, but it has reduced the anxiety. It hasn't changed the fact that I will faced challenges in life, but it makes them less daunting because I now have a much more manageable way of coping. It hasn't changed the fact that I am almost 28 and unmarried but it has taken away most all of the former anxiety that I used to have about that. I look on without jealousy as more friends get engaged, get married and become pregnant because I no longer see those things as impossible for me because I only digest life one moment at a time now and it's no longer near impossible because I have accepted not being nor ever being near perfect.
Right now, I'm not even the best that I can be, and that's okay. I just pray that I am good.
And in this starting over, remaking and rebuilding, that's what I strive to be. Good. I pray that I am a good person, a good physician, a good daughter and sister.
The great thing about being good is that you can be better without reaching your ceiling, ever, in little ways, in little moments, and I pray that I am.
I pray that I can fill my surroundings with peace and charity.
Ameen.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Happiness II
As salaam alaikum,
I'm starting over. I'm letting go of a lot of how I've constructed myself over the past 9 years that I moved out of my parents house and embraced the practice of Islam because somewhere along the way I lost Islam. I lost peace, I lost a way of life compatible with my values, I lost my spiritual solution.
I no longer have a fear of my inherent Western individualism. It makes no sense to live my religion in any other way than what works for me. If it doesn't work for me, then what of it? Do I thrash myself for being imperfect, to I begin to suspect, as I did before I was practicing, that my life is written and I was intended for the hellfire, anyway, so why bother? How did I even get close to being back there?
I still don't believe that the purpose of life is simply happiness but I also don't believe that this should be excluded from one's life pursuit.
Our lives aren't always surrounded by all things beauty, but we do have those moments when it is. Moments when our minds are at ease about our dying relatives and the general injustices of the world. And it's okay to be happy in those moments just as it is okay to be sad or angry in those times when our minds are not at ease about all of the unlovely things in our lives and the lives of those around us. It doesn't make the struggle any less real. And we're all living the struggle, whether we believe in it or not.
I'm starting over and discovering that it's okay to be happy. It's okay to be mentally sound.
Instead of practicing Islam to bring me spiritual balance, I twisted Islam, as many others have, into an insufferable life form that amplified and justified my anxieties. It bred despondency that was already there, thriving on its own. And it's only predictable that that would have happened to me, following a path that many other men and women before me followed and recorded with their own vantage point, colored by their own anxieties.
If I'm happy, it's not because I'm doing something wrong. Not that I ever consciously believed that, but sometimes, that's just the way it would end up.
Happiness, for me, could only be achieved in perfection of faith. Since I also believed that such perfection was impossible (though near perfection was the goal), happiness was always something that would happen later. The standards I set for that near perfect faith were near impossible, of course.
I colored my Islam through the eyes of my own perfectionism. After all, what better realm of life to be a perfectionist than in the realm that determines your eternal fate?
There's so much that, in the last year, I've blamed on Islam as it was constructed before me. I blamed it on my ill-fated quest for spiritual balance that somehow ended terribly wrong. I blamed too much on it, almost everything, from my dysfunction in finding a life mate to my inexperience in hosting a large number of guests at my apartment for dinner.
I finally stepped back and realized that none of this was the fault of my spiritual quest. There were other, less expansive explanations. I've never hosted a large number of people at my apartment for dinner because I've lived with roommates or in dorms for the past 9 years of my life and have therefore never entertained on my own. I had roommates or lived in dorms because I was a student for the past 9 years of my life.
And so many of the other idiosyncrasies in my life have really simple, intuitive answers like this one.
Nothing is quite so grave anymore. The nickname I use in the hospital no longer feels like I've suffered dissociative fugue. Love is not impossible for me anymore because it doesn't have to be near perfect.
Wow. I really like that. Excuse me, I have to repeat it for myself.
Love is not impossible for me anymore because it doesn't have to be near perfect.
Because it's nowhere close to perfect, just like I'm not. And mindfulness helped me accept that. That was something that was incompatible with my version of life before this. Imperfection, being satisfied with imperfection. I should always strive to be better...
I still believe in striving to be better. I just no longer believe that dissatisfaction with one's current state is a prerequisite to that striving.
To be continued...
I'm starting over. I'm letting go of a lot of how I've constructed myself over the past 9 years that I moved out of my parents house and embraced the practice of Islam because somewhere along the way I lost Islam. I lost peace, I lost a way of life compatible with my values, I lost my spiritual solution.
I no longer have a fear of my inherent Western individualism. It makes no sense to live my religion in any other way than what works for me. If it doesn't work for me, then what of it? Do I thrash myself for being imperfect, to I begin to suspect, as I did before I was practicing, that my life is written and I was intended for the hellfire, anyway, so why bother? How did I even get close to being back there?
I still don't believe that the purpose of life is simply happiness but I also don't believe that this should be excluded from one's life pursuit.
Our lives aren't always surrounded by all things beauty, but we do have those moments when it is. Moments when our minds are at ease about our dying relatives and the general injustices of the world. And it's okay to be happy in those moments just as it is okay to be sad or angry in those times when our minds are not at ease about all of the unlovely things in our lives and the lives of those around us. It doesn't make the struggle any less real. And we're all living the struggle, whether we believe in it or not.
I'm starting over and discovering that it's okay to be happy. It's okay to be mentally sound.
Instead of practicing Islam to bring me spiritual balance, I twisted Islam, as many others have, into an insufferable life form that amplified and justified my anxieties. It bred despondency that was already there, thriving on its own. And it's only predictable that that would have happened to me, following a path that many other men and women before me followed and recorded with their own vantage point, colored by their own anxieties.
If I'm happy, it's not because I'm doing something wrong. Not that I ever consciously believed that, but sometimes, that's just the way it would end up.
Happiness, for me, could only be achieved in perfection of faith. Since I also believed that such perfection was impossible (though near perfection was the goal), happiness was always something that would happen later. The standards I set for that near perfect faith were near impossible, of course.
I colored my Islam through the eyes of my own perfectionism. After all, what better realm of life to be a perfectionist than in the realm that determines your eternal fate?
There's so much that, in the last year, I've blamed on Islam as it was constructed before me. I blamed it on my ill-fated quest for spiritual balance that somehow ended terribly wrong. I blamed too much on it, almost everything, from my dysfunction in finding a life mate to my inexperience in hosting a large number of guests at my apartment for dinner.
I finally stepped back and realized that none of this was the fault of my spiritual quest. There were other, less expansive explanations. I've never hosted a large number of people at my apartment for dinner because I've lived with roommates or in dorms for the past 9 years of my life and have therefore never entertained on my own. I had roommates or lived in dorms because I was a student for the past 9 years of my life.
And so many of the other idiosyncrasies in my life have really simple, intuitive answers like this one.
Nothing is quite so grave anymore. The nickname I use in the hospital no longer feels like I've suffered dissociative fugue. Love is not impossible for me anymore because it doesn't have to be near perfect.
Wow. I really like that. Excuse me, I have to repeat it for myself.
Love is not impossible for me anymore because it doesn't have to be near perfect.
Because it's nowhere close to perfect, just like I'm not. And mindfulness helped me accept that. That was something that was incompatible with my version of life before this. Imperfection, being satisfied with imperfection. I should always strive to be better...
I still believe in striving to be better. I just no longer believe that dissatisfaction with one's current state is a prerequisite to that striving.
To be continued...
Friday, January 4, 2013
Happiness
As salaam alaikum,
There were no retrospectives, no reflections, no words for the end of 2012. I meant to, I really did, but I didn't finish the entry, and it's no use now. So much happened in 2012, so many great life shifts, from matching in family medicine to graduating from medical school with my dual degree, from moving to Seattle to making moves in the relationship department. There were a lot of big transitions in my life in the last year of the Gregorian calendar, but many more subtle, though no less great, transitions. I graduated from medical school, becoming a doctor, and now I'm in residency, becoming a doctor.
The transition itself is not so subtle, but I guess I mean that there's no succinct way of describing it.
A big transition for me that I have not at all discussed is still in progress. It's a huge, spiritual revolution of sorts. I'm changing the way that I think about life and my pursuits in this life. I let go of so many anxieties and became a healthier person. And it all started with one afternoon in the park.
One of our faculty members is our resident integrative medicine specialist. She completed a fellowship and brought her expertise to our program. Not only does she have exercises for our patients, but she does a lot for us residents in terms of self-care. So, just a couple of weeks into our program, while we were still in our glorious orientation month, we sat in a circle in a little park just a block up from the residency office and talked about holistic self-care techniques and mindsets. She taught us about mindfulness.
I've mentioned mindfulness before. In fact, it wasn't the first time I'd heard of it. I'd had a counselor in the past that introduced it to me, but part of me was still back with the, "Oh, she doesn't understand. I'm a Muslimah. I can't live this way..." or "She's minimizing something that is a real struggle for me that does not have any easy, religiously-sound solutions."
But it was something about sitting in a circle in a park on a beautiful, sunny Seattle day and where I was in life and everything that happened and all that I had done that allowed the message of mindfulness resonate with me.
And everyday after that, with only a few exceptions, I've been living my life one day at a time, sometimes, one moment at a time. It was a fast but slow transition. I shifted my mode of thought immediately but it took a while for old habits to dissipate. I would live my life one day at a time but still have moments of internal panic at some of the decisions I made as a result. I still occasionally wondered if this was the best thing for me to do spiritually. I made the transition to living one moment at a time but it took me some time to accept my occasional cognitive dissonance with the idea.
I worked hard to learn a theology, a way of life that taught me to keep my eyes on the prize, the Afterlife, and constantly strive to be better. I worked hard to learn a way of life that taught me that the purpose of life is not happiness, it is service. Service to Allah (swt), which for me is often too esoteric for me to understand serving God who doesn't have a need for my service, pleasing God who does is not sustained by my appeasement, so I simplified it to all of the elements of service that make sense to bettering the world in which we were placed. Service was the purpose of life. Happiness was not, especially if it interfered with your service or following one's nafs over God's will for us.
I never aimed for happiness. After all, the next life is better than this. If I suffer in this life in pursuit of service, striving at all times to submit better, be better...then yes, I shall have happiness. In the next life.
It's funny how even though my understanding of Afterlife is organic and yet I never thought of what impact a self-imposed life of tumult would have on the state of my soul after this space-and-time-bound existence expires.
Restated, I believe that when we pass from this existence, we bring with us the balance or the summation of all that we were in this life. If we strove to be good people and fill our surroundings with peace and charity, that good essence will define ourselves and surroundings once no longer on this earth. So somehow, I believed this organic version of Afterlife but did not believe in pursuing happiness at all.
It was more like, service should make me happy, and alhamdulillah, it does, but if I were not to have happiness, oh well, such is life and so God wills.
I've read Purification of the Soul, I used to ascribe to the belief that depression and anxiety were in fact spiritual deficits with spiritual solutions, all the while suffering from both, and I delved into Islam with the hope that this was the spiritual solution to that anxiety and depression, not realizing that popular ways of thinking that I embraced in becoming more practicing actually exacerbated my problem.
I just took it as my personal jihad, that this was something I would tussle with, and insha'Allah He would help me find the solution as I grew in faith.
I never thought for a moment that I'd have to start over...
To be continued, insha'Allah...
There were no retrospectives, no reflections, no words for the end of 2012. I meant to, I really did, but I didn't finish the entry, and it's no use now. So much happened in 2012, so many great life shifts, from matching in family medicine to graduating from medical school with my dual degree, from moving to Seattle to making moves in the relationship department. There were a lot of big transitions in my life in the last year of the Gregorian calendar, but many more subtle, though no less great, transitions. I graduated from medical school, becoming a doctor, and now I'm in residency, becoming a doctor.
The transition itself is not so subtle, but I guess I mean that there's no succinct way of describing it.
A big transition for me that I have not at all discussed is still in progress. It's a huge, spiritual revolution of sorts. I'm changing the way that I think about life and my pursuits in this life. I let go of so many anxieties and became a healthier person. And it all started with one afternoon in the park.
One of our faculty members is our resident integrative medicine specialist. She completed a fellowship and brought her expertise to our program. Not only does she have exercises for our patients, but she does a lot for us residents in terms of self-care. So, just a couple of weeks into our program, while we were still in our glorious orientation month, we sat in a circle in a little park just a block up from the residency office and talked about holistic self-care techniques and mindsets. She taught us about mindfulness.
I've mentioned mindfulness before. In fact, it wasn't the first time I'd heard of it. I'd had a counselor in the past that introduced it to me, but part of me was still back with the, "Oh, she doesn't understand. I'm a Muslimah. I can't live this way..." or "She's minimizing something that is a real struggle for me that does not have any easy, religiously-sound solutions."
But it was something about sitting in a circle in a park on a beautiful, sunny Seattle day and where I was in life and everything that happened and all that I had done that allowed the message of mindfulness resonate with me.
And everyday after that, with only a few exceptions, I've been living my life one day at a time, sometimes, one moment at a time. It was a fast but slow transition. I shifted my mode of thought immediately but it took a while for old habits to dissipate. I would live my life one day at a time but still have moments of internal panic at some of the decisions I made as a result. I still occasionally wondered if this was the best thing for me to do spiritually. I made the transition to living one moment at a time but it took me some time to accept my occasional cognitive dissonance with the idea.
I worked hard to learn a theology, a way of life that taught me to keep my eyes on the prize, the Afterlife, and constantly strive to be better. I worked hard to learn a way of life that taught me that the purpose of life is not happiness, it is service. Service to Allah (swt), which for me is often too esoteric for me to understand serving God who doesn't have a need for my service, pleasing God who does is not sustained by my appeasement, so I simplified it to all of the elements of service that make sense to bettering the world in which we were placed. Service was the purpose of life. Happiness was not, especially if it interfered with your service or following one's nafs over God's will for us.
I never aimed for happiness. After all, the next life is better than this. If I suffer in this life in pursuit of service, striving at all times to submit better, be better...then yes, I shall have happiness. In the next life.
It's funny how even though my understanding of Afterlife is organic and yet I never thought of what impact a self-imposed life of tumult would have on the state of my soul after this space-and-time-bound existence expires.
Restated, I believe that when we pass from this existence, we bring with us the balance or the summation of all that we were in this life. If we strove to be good people and fill our surroundings with peace and charity, that good essence will define ourselves and surroundings once no longer on this earth. So somehow, I believed this organic version of Afterlife but did not believe in pursuing happiness at all.
It was more like, service should make me happy, and alhamdulillah, it does, but if I were not to have happiness, oh well, such is life and so God wills.
I've read Purification of the Soul, I used to ascribe to the belief that depression and anxiety were in fact spiritual deficits with spiritual solutions, all the while suffering from both, and I delved into Islam with the hope that this was the spiritual solution to that anxiety and depression, not realizing that popular ways of thinking that I embraced in becoming more practicing actually exacerbated my problem.
I just took it as my personal jihad, that this was something I would tussle with, and insha'Allah He would help me find the solution as I grew in faith.
I never thought for a moment that I'd have to start over...
To be continued, insha'Allah...
Friday, November 23, 2012
[Uncensored]: Want At Odds
As salaam alaikum,
As I walked home from the hospital this afternoon, wishing that I could fly (like, literally, with my own wings) instead of walking home in the rain, though well-equipped with my Boston umbrella and my boots, I had two thoughts for entries.
One was about my feelings about my getting married one day, how those feelings have changed and current threads of ambivalence.
But before that, I think I need to talk about this.
I was born Muslim and raised Muslim by a Muslim mother, a fact that I still unfortunately feel like I have to defend. But never mind that. Separate from that upbringing, I embraced Islam as a teenager and young woman. I guess I still am a young woman. Young womanhood is a long road.
Anyway, I embraced Islam so tightly for a simple fact. It was in line with something that is really important to me: being a good mother.
Separate and prior to my understanding of the importance of motherhood in Islam, one of my greatest aspirations in life was to have children. Marriage itself usually waxes and wanes depending on various subjects of attraction, but the want to have children has remained pretty much a constant. In the time when I had no particular object of attraction, marriage was simply the (very necessary) means to the end.
And Islam was entirely compatible with three of my core desires: to have strong faith in God, to be a good mother, and to do things the most right.
One could say this about other of the monotheistic faiths. If my mother hadn't been Muslim, maybe I would have been Christian or whatever other religion. But, my mother was Muslim, and I came to understand Islam as the way to do things the most right, including motherhood. Within the Qur'an and in Sunnah, I came to understand, existed an irrefutable formula to live the most right, to be the best mother I could be on this earth, and to have the strongest faith in God as possible. The more I followed this formula to the letter, the more I could be assured that I could have my three core desires.
The problem is, in life, just as in Islam, there are no guarantees. It's all insha'Allah.
Secularly, you can't always get what you want. Sing along!
As a young woman, I wanted to do everything the most right. I am still a young woman, and I still do. I wanted to marry young, meet a good Muslim man and start a family. After all, everything I read and everyone I knew told me that this is what God wanted us to do...this was our nature. Marry, raise families, raise them to follow the Straight Way.
...so why was it not happening for me? I was praying, I was striving, shouldn't it have happened? Maybe I wasn't making my prayers timely enough and maybe I hadn't reached a level of striving...
And then came the stark realization, after years of praying, Ramadans passed with that one prayer remaining unanswered, crying and begging and pleading and wondering if crying invalidated my prayers.
It's all insha'Allah. It's not a definite.
I came into a way of life because it was compatible with my desires. But, as part of this way of life, I have to recognize that I may not get what I want, even if it's ordained for us as human beings, because it may not be God's will. As a Muslimah, I needed to learn to be content with being alone with the prospect of never having children...when that's never what I signed up for.
But we much less sign up for life than religion, and the secular perspective is much crueler. Life's a bitch.
What becomes complicated is when you realize that your Islam, your way of life, is not as compatible with you as you would though. That in your efforts to try to do things right, that one of your greatest desires, you could actually be precluding something else that you want, which is something pure and good to want...to be a mother, and a good one. I say this because I have lived so long in a way that totally precludes my ever marrying, or every marrying in time enough to have my own children.
Being a Muslimah means sacrificing what I want that may be the thing that drew me to Islam in the first place in favor of a greater good, greater purity, greater goal...
And I found myself in desolation and desperation because my wants were at odds with my faith.
Which they can be for any of us at any time.
Because if we are extremely fatalistic, anything we want that we don't get is clearly not God's will, because we didn't get it. This breeds struggle at best, disbelief at the other extreme. Especially when the things we want are reasonable things, things we feel entitled to as believers, as human beings...
Want at odds.
Would I rather be a mother or a Muslim? I'd rather be Muslim.
Would I rather be a good mother or a good Muslim? I'd rather be a good mother.
Would I rather be a good mother or a Muslim? I'd rather be a good mother.
Of course, I don't believe the latter two statements to be mutually exclusive. Yes, the latter two.
I just...months ago I found myself in a conundrum, where I believed that in order to have sufficiently strong faith, I should rather be single for the rest of my life with no children than to have a family and be a good mother, what I most want, which in itself is farther from guarantee than having children itself.
And I couldn't say that. I couldn't rather be single for the rest of my life with knowledge of my strong faith in God. So I'm not.
The fact remains, nothing is guaranteed. It's all insha'Allah. I'm less guaranteed to be a good mother than a mother at all. I chose a way of life that was compatible with my own personal desires and many of my values. My way of life may be compatible with those desires but does not guarantee those desires much more, if any more, than if I had existed in my native state, outside of my understanding of Islam, within the innocence of the religion my mother taught me.
But it's relatively illogical that I should desire so much to bring children into the world. For what? For them to suffer through some of the same emotional and spiritual struggles that their mom has and did, and those of their own? Why are some of us so intent on reproducing ourselves?
This led me to question what I saw in marriage, besides securing someone with whom to reproduce.
Next time, though...
As I walked home from the hospital this afternoon, wishing that I could fly (like, literally, with my own wings) instead of walking home in the rain, though well-equipped with my Boston umbrella and my boots, I had two thoughts for entries.
One was about my feelings about my getting married one day, how those feelings have changed and current threads of ambivalence.
But before that, I think I need to talk about this.
I was born Muslim and raised Muslim by a Muslim mother, a fact that I still unfortunately feel like I have to defend. But never mind that. Separate from that upbringing, I embraced Islam as a teenager and young woman. I guess I still am a young woman. Young womanhood is a long road.
Anyway, I embraced Islam so tightly for a simple fact. It was in line with something that is really important to me: being a good mother.
Separate and prior to my understanding of the importance of motherhood in Islam, one of my greatest aspirations in life was to have children. Marriage itself usually waxes and wanes depending on various subjects of attraction, but the want to have children has remained pretty much a constant. In the time when I had no particular object of attraction, marriage was simply the (very necessary) means to the end.
And Islam was entirely compatible with three of my core desires: to have strong faith in God, to be a good mother, and to do things the most right.
One could say this about other of the monotheistic faiths. If my mother hadn't been Muslim, maybe I would have been Christian or whatever other religion. But, my mother was Muslim, and I came to understand Islam as the way to do things the most right, including motherhood. Within the Qur'an and in Sunnah, I came to understand, existed an irrefutable formula to live the most right, to be the best mother I could be on this earth, and to have the strongest faith in God as possible. The more I followed this formula to the letter, the more I could be assured that I could have my three core desires.
The problem is, in life, just as in Islam, there are no guarantees. It's all insha'Allah.
Secularly, you can't always get what you want. Sing along!
As a young woman, I wanted to do everything the most right. I am still a young woman, and I still do. I wanted to marry young, meet a good Muslim man and start a family. After all, everything I read and everyone I knew told me that this is what God wanted us to do...this was our nature. Marry, raise families, raise them to follow the Straight Way.
...so why was it not happening for me? I was praying, I was striving, shouldn't it have happened? Maybe I wasn't making my prayers timely enough and maybe I hadn't reached a level of striving...
And then came the stark realization, after years of praying, Ramadans passed with that one prayer remaining unanswered, crying and begging and pleading and wondering if crying invalidated my prayers.
It's all insha'Allah. It's not a definite.
I came into a way of life because it was compatible with my desires. But, as part of this way of life, I have to recognize that I may not get what I want, even if it's ordained for us as human beings, because it may not be God's will. As a Muslimah, I needed to learn to be content with being alone with the prospect of never having children...when that's never what I signed up for.
But we much less sign up for life than religion, and the secular perspective is much crueler. Life's a bitch.
What becomes complicated is when you realize that your Islam, your way of life, is not as compatible with you as you would though. That in your efforts to try to do things right, that one of your greatest desires, you could actually be precluding something else that you want, which is something pure and good to want...to be a mother, and a good one. I say this because I have lived so long in a way that totally precludes my ever marrying, or every marrying in time enough to have my own children.
Being a Muslimah means sacrificing what I want that may be the thing that drew me to Islam in the first place in favor of a greater good, greater purity, greater goal...
And I found myself in desolation and desperation because my wants were at odds with my faith.
Which they can be for any of us at any time.
Because if we are extremely fatalistic, anything we want that we don't get is clearly not God's will, because we didn't get it. This breeds struggle at best, disbelief at the other extreme. Especially when the things we want are reasonable things, things we feel entitled to as believers, as human beings...
Want at odds.
Would I rather be a mother or a Muslim? I'd rather be Muslim.
Would I rather be a good mother or a good Muslim? I'd rather be a good mother.
Would I rather be a good mother or a Muslim? I'd rather be a good mother.
Of course, I don't believe the latter two statements to be mutually exclusive. Yes, the latter two.
I just...months ago I found myself in a conundrum, where I believed that in order to have sufficiently strong faith, I should rather be single for the rest of my life with no children than to have a family and be a good mother, what I most want, which in itself is farther from guarantee than having children itself.
And I couldn't say that. I couldn't rather be single for the rest of my life with knowledge of my strong faith in God. So I'm not.
The fact remains, nothing is guaranteed. It's all insha'Allah. I'm less guaranteed to be a good mother than a mother at all. I chose a way of life that was compatible with my own personal desires and many of my values. My way of life may be compatible with those desires but does not guarantee those desires much more, if any more, than if I had existed in my native state, outside of my understanding of Islam, within the innocence of the religion my mother taught me.
But it's relatively illogical that I should desire so much to bring children into the world. For what? For them to suffer through some of the same emotional and spiritual struggles that their mom has and did, and those of their own? Why are some of us so intent on reproducing ourselves?
This led me to question what I saw in marriage, besides securing someone with whom to reproduce.
Next time, though...
Thursday, October 25, 2012
The Only Liable Limitation
As salaam alaikum,
First of all, Eid Mubarak to my Muslim family!
In 2002, I was introduced to the hauntingly symbolic song and video by OutKast, "The Whole World." What could be dismissed as just another goofy OutKast song for me as a 17 year old was full of social commentary. The song's chorus for me symbolized the plight of the black man in the United States over time.
The whole world loves it when you don't get down...Michael Jackson, by then no longer remembered as the Prince of Pop but as a child molester.
And the whole world loves it when you make that sound...every eye-bucking, shucking and jiving or just trying to make a living in the guise of buffoonery black comedian ever.
And the whole world loves it when you're in the news...OJ Simpson (umm, who can write a doctoral dissertation on the racial dynamics of the OJ Simpson trial? Many of us can...).
And the whole world loves it when you sing the blues...
I'm not sure why it struck me so much as the black man at that time, but I realize it could also apply to other celebrities. In general, people love to be entertained by the lives and misfortunes of others. And the video, with the all-black circus backdrop and the mainly white male cooperate audience clapping in unison really gave me that feeling...
Meanwhile, while the show seems to be all for the entertainment of this off-putting audience, Dre and Big Boi (can't say much for the guest artist who wins the prize of fitting as many sexual references and as much double entendre as he can into his section) drop a lot of critical analysis at the time.
The one lyric that hit me recently that has a lot to do with where I am now, spiritually, is the following:
"The only liable limitation is yourself."
The only liable limitation is yourself, huh?
Let me tell you about me being my only limitation for becoming all I want to be...
I think that, in the years since becoming a more practicing Muslim, I've too often looked outside, to others, to complete my identity as a Muslimah. I came into practice seeking a community to help me. There were many communities that I've been a part of or was at the fringes of, but none of them in particular helped me. I tried to hard to be a part and in the process lost some of myself and my original motivation for practicing more along the way. I ended up spending many years morphing myself into what I thought others wanted me to be instead of actually nurturing my natal spirituality.
While God reminds us that we are in loss, "except for such as have faith, do righteous deeds and join together in the mutual teachings of truth," that joining together in the mutual teachings of truth does not have to be within a discrete Muslim community, and it does not have to be with Muslims only. We Muslims, after all, do not have the market cornered on Truth. Truth has many dimensions, and as a Muslim without a Muslim community at this point, it would be negligent of me to ignore those other dimensions of Truth while not in the company of my coreligionists.
I can live the Truth that is our purpose in life...to help each other through life, with others than Muslims. Insha'Allah I do this daily through my profession.
I am my own liable limitation. I should not have waited with bated breath for a community to embrace me for my identity and practice as a Muslimah to be complete.
When a community that I fit into seemed out of my reach, I then looked to marriage. I didn't need a Muslim community per se if I acquired a good Muslim husband and therefore built a Muslim family. Maybe the husband would come with a community I could thereafter fit into. Then not only would my identity as a Muslimah have been complete, but I would be fulfilling my duties as a Muslim...to marry and build a household dedicated to Allah (swt).
I didn't realize that this had nothing to do with my practice as a Muslimah, either.
I am not limited by a lack of community or the lack of a good, pious, egalitarian, professional, whatever other adjective Muslim man seeking me for marriage. I didn't seek practice as a Muslim to join a group or to get married. I thought they were necessary, but really, we are born alone and we die alone. The community or husband I wait upon to complete my life will not be there to vouch for me when I die, that I was a good Muslim. It just is and has always been me, myself and Allah (swt).
My non-Muslim co-residents, when I talked about my long-standing discomfort in praying in public places that are not mosques or my own home, offered 5 locations on campus where I could pray. And I've been using them with comfort, alhamdulillah. Some of these people who offered me places to pray don't even believe in God, and yet they respect me and my beliefs. And we can be colleagues together, living the Truth that is the guarantee of health care for all.
I love being in the company of a man who has always respected my beliefs and practices and perhaps has a greater understanding of them, having been raised with a Muslim background
It has never been more evident to me that I am my only limitation in being the Muslimah I want to be. I may never have that Muslim community or that Muslim husband that unifies my practice, but I will have a community and insha'Allah a husband that complement, not supplement, me as I nourish my natal spirituality.
I have always been my own limitation. I drew boxes on a plane in two dimensions and tried to fit myself into them, but I'm three dimensions. God have mercy on me if the way that I choose is errant and leaves jagged edges on my soul, but God please guide me aright anyway, though I err. Ameen.
First of all, Eid Mubarak to my Muslim family!
In 2002, I was introduced to the hauntingly symbolic song and video by OutKast, "The Whole World." What could be dismissed as just another goofy OutKast song for me as a 17 year old was full of social commentary. The song's chorus for me symbolized the plight of the black man in the United States over time.
The whole world loves it when you don't get down...Michael Jackson, by then no longer remembered as the Prince of Pop but as a child molester.
And the whole world loves it when you make that sound...every eye-bucking, shucking and jiving or just trying to make a living in the guise of buffoonery black comedian ever.
And the whole world loves it when you're in the news...OJ Simpson (umm, who can write a doctoral dissertation on the racial dynamics of the OJ Simpson trial? Many of us can...).
And the whole world loves it when you sing the blues...
I'm not sure why it struck me so much as the black man at that time, but I realize it could also apply to other celebrities. In general, people love to be entertained by the lives and misfortunes of others. And the video, with the all-black circus backdrop and the mainly white male cooperate audience clapping in unison really gave me that feeling...
Meanwhile, while the show seems to be all for the entertainment of this off-putting audience, Dre and Big Boi (can't say much for the guest artist who wins the prize of fitting as many sexual references and as much double entendre as he can into his section) drop a lot of critical analysis at the time.
The one lyric that hit me recently that has a lot to do with where I am now, spiritually, is the following:
"The only liable limitation is yourself."
The only liable limitation is yourself, huh?
Let me tell you about me being my only limitation for becoming all I want to be...
I think that, in the years since becoming a more practicing Muslim, I've too often looked outside, to others, to complete my identity as a Muslimah. I came into practice seeking a community to help me. There were many communities that I've been a part of or was at the fringes of, but none of them in particular helped me. I tried to hard to be a part and in the process lost some of myself and my original motivation for practicing more along the way. I ended up spending many years morphing myself into what I thought others wanted me to be instead of actually nurturing my natal spirituality.
While God reminds us that we are in loss, "except for such as have faith, do righteous deeds and join together in the mutual teachings of truth," that joining together in the mutual teachings of truth does not have to be within a discrete Muslim community, and it does not have to be with Muslims only. We Muslims, after all, do not have the market cornered on Truth. Truth has many dimensions, and as a Muslim without a Muslim community at this point, it would be negligent of me to ignore those other dimensions of Truth while not in the company of my coreligionists.
I can live the Truth that is our purpose in life...to help each other through life, with others than Muslims. Insha'Allah I do this daily through my profession.
I am my own liable limitation. I should not have waited with bated breath for a community to embrace me for my identity and practice as a Muslimah to be complete.
When a community that I fit into seemed out of my reach, I then looked to marriage. I didn't need a Muslim community per se if I acquired a good Muslim husband and therefore built a Muslim family. Maybe the husband would come with a community I could thereafter fit into. Then not only would my identity as a Muslimah have been complete, but I would be fulfilling my duties as a Muslim...to marry and build a household dedicated to Allah (swt).
I didn't realize that this had nothing to do with my practice as a Muslimah, either.
I am not limited by a lack of community or the lack of a good, pious, egalitarian, professional, whatever other adjective Muslim man seeking me for marriage. I didn't seek practice as a Muslim to join a group or to get married. I thought they were necessary, but really, we are born alone and we die alone. The community or husband I wait upon to complete my life will not be there to vouch for me when I die, that I was a good Muslim. It just is and has always been me, myself and Allah (swt).
My non-Muslim co-residents, when I talked about my long-standing discomfort in praying in public places that are not mosques or my own home, offered 5 locations on campus where I could pray. And I've been using them with comfort, alhamdulillah. Some of these people who offered me places to pray don't even believe in God, and yet they respect me and my beliefs. And we can be colleagues together, living the Truth that is the guarantee of health care for all.
I love being in the company of a man who has always respected my beliefs and practices and perhaps has a greater understanding of them, having been raised with a Muslim background
It has never been more evident to me that I am my only limitation in being the Muslimah I want to be. I may never have that Muslim community or that Muslim husband that unifies my practice, but I will have a community and insha'Allah a husband that complement, not supplement, me as I nourish my natal spirituality.
I have always been my own limitation. I drew boxes on a plane in two dimensions and tried to fit myself into them, but I'm three dimensions. God have mercy on me if the way that I choose is errant and leaves jagged edges on my soul, but God please guide me aright anyway, though I err. Ameen.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Illegitimate Daughter
As salaam alaikum,
If any of you couldn't tell, I got some daddy issues with Islam.
Some major daddy issues.
When I came into practice in late 2003 after growing up in an interfaith household, I searched for a way to bring meaning and sense to my world, a world that, in my teenage mind, tended a little too much towards chaos. Without having ever read the entire Qur'an myself or having gotten any religious instruction outside of what my mother taught me, I didn't understand how a just and merciful god could allow such suffering in the world.
Of course, being a teenager and just journeying into the world of abstract thought, I had no idea that this was a major philosophical question that has puzzled people for eons before my time, the answer of which has led many before me on several paths between devotion and atheism.
Of course, my life was good. I was an upper middle class kid from a semi-rural small town who had nearly everything she wanted. It wasn't just given to me, mind you...I afforded college because of merit scholarships, not Daddy's money. And of course, the grace of God, which I was spiritual enough to recognize at the time, but I wanted more. I was plagued by my own emotions, my own angst. If I was suffering so much from things just in my head, I could only imagine what it must be like for people with real suffering...women and girls subject to rape and sexual assault on regular bases, people starving, people without homes. It just caused me to delve deeper into a downward spiral of despair. If God didn't help these people who obviously needed it more than me, why would he ever help me who had the "fake" problem of depression?
So, as I entered college, I searched for more solid standing within Islam, to provide me with a much needed foundation for my spirituality, and to provide me with comfortable answers to my questions about the nature of God. Submission to God was the answer for me, and that would solve the problem of my depression and anxiety.
I was so not expecting to come into an Islam, practiced by Muslims I've encountered here in the United States, that would not always be that comfortable place to seek refuge, to submit to God, to rest my weary spirit from the unforgivable secular world.
I wasn't expecting to find out I was, in fact, an illegitimate daughter of Islam.
Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I had remained in a state of innocence. I wish Islam had remained for me as simple and organic as my mother taught it. As I delved into Islam in college, I came upon a version of Islam that was at times hostile, inflexible and merciless. It felt very much unlike the way I was raised to believe in God, the Most Gracious, Most Merciful of my Yusus Ali translation of the Qur'an that my mother used to read to us when we were little.
It wasn't the first sticking point, but the most painful sticking point was the fact that my parents' marriage, under most interpretations of Islamic law, is invalid, because my father is not Muslim.
So I am illegitimate.
I mean, for a while, it didn't really matter, because people would see me at MSA meetings and think I was a non-Muslim interloper anyway, because I was black. Never mind that the first major populations of Muslims in this country were black. Never mind that the first president of the MSA at my college years ago was a black woman. How strange to enter a context in your own country where you are made to feel foreign when, as a Muslimah, especially a searching, striving Muslimah, I should have been made to feel welcome.
I'm always an outsider because my name and ethnicity make me a mystery. I always have to explain how I was raised Muslim.
So it hurts to be considered otherwise illegitimate by my coreligionists.
I struggled to find a way in a faith, as I understood it, that would require me to deny my father, or deny his culture, in a certain sense, if the culture considered itself diametrically opposed to Islam. Maybe it was the fact that I was exposed to Muslims on my mother's side that were not so rigid that I did not go down that road that many of those that come into the religion later in life do.
Maybe it was the fact that it was partially the values that my father raised me with that brought me to Islam. So how could I rebuke the man who was responsible for bringing me into the world and partially responsible for my Islam? It made no sense...
I could easily give up on a religion that always considered my parents' union, the union responsible for my life, illegitimate. I was always a bastard, anyway, so why even bother? Why even bother, if God never blessed my parents' union? Why even bother, if I'm completely dispensable in a community of believers, believers, the best of communities of people in this earth, because my ethnicity isn't usual, because my name isn't right? Believers will continue to strive in the way of Allah (swt) and insha'Allah find their reward with Him in paradise without missing the little misfit that either sat, tugging at her sleeves without hijab in the center of the room or sat, tugging at her sleeves with hijab at the corner of the room, spoken to by only a couple of sisters that took pity on her isolation.
I've given up on a few things over time, but alhamdulillah it never leaves me with nothing. When I let go of everything, I'm left with the simple, organic Islam my mother taught me, and Islam that would make sense for an illegitimate daughter like me to practice...illegitimate in the sense that I'm living here in a non-Muslim country, as an ultimate minority, irremediably and unabashedly American, beautifully black and proud, unlikely to fit in a country perceived to be more halal for me because of all the things that I am, unlikely to fit into Random Muslim Community USA because all of the things that I am...
My mother became expert at practicing Islam in almost complete isolation. And while I will not stay so isolated, this is the Islam for me, free of some of the toxic impurities that we have somehow absorbed over time and taken as dogma.
So yes, I grew up in Islam without a Muslim father, without a "father." But I think my fellow Muslims make huge mistakes in this life when they ignore people like me who are several ways "illegitimate." I think if we do this, we're missing the point, we're missing the purpose of life, we're missing out on blessings and we're missing out on forgiveness.
If any of you couldn't tell, I got some daddy issues with Islam.
Some major daddy issues.
When I came into practice in late 2003 after growing up in an interfaith household, I searched for a way to bring meaning and sense to my world, a world that, in my teenage mind, tended a little too much towards chaos. Without having ever read the entire Qur'an myself or having gotten any religious instruction outside of what my mother taught me, I didn't understand how a just and merciful god could allow such suffering in the world.
Of course, being a teenager and just journeying into the world of abstract thought, I had no idea that this was a major philosophical question that has puzzled people for eons before my time, the answer of which has led many before me on several paths between devotion and atheism.
Of course, my life was good. I was an upper middle class kid from a semi-rural small town who had nearly everything she wanted. It wasn't just given to me, mind you...I afforded college because of merit scholarships, not Daddy's money. And of course, the grace of God, which I was spiritual enough to recognize at the time, but I wanted more. I was plagued by my own emotions, my own angst. If I was suffering so much from things just in my head, I could only imagine what it must be like for people with real suffering...women and girls subject to rape and sexual assault on regular bases, people starving, people without homes. It just caused me to delve deeper into a downward spiral of despair. If God didn't help these people who obviously needed it more than me, why would he ever help me who had the "fake" problem of depression?
So, as I entered college, I searched for more solid standing within Islam, to provide me with a much needed foundation for my spirituality, and to provide me with comfortable answers to my questions about the nature of God. Submission to God was the answer for me, and that would solve the problem of my depression and anxiety.
I was so not expecting to come into an Islam, practiced by Muslims I've encountered here in the United States, that would not always be that comfortable place to seek refuge, to submit to God, to rest my weary spirit from the unforgivable secular world.
I wasn't expecting to find out I was, in fact, an illegitimate daughter of Islam.
Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I had remained in a state of innocence. I wish Islam had remained for me as simple and organic as my mother taught it. As I delved into Islam in college, I came upon a version of Islam that was at times hostile, inflexible and merciless. It felt very much unlike the way I was raised to believe in God, the Most Gracious, Most Merciful of my Yusus Ali translation of the Qur'an that my mother used to read to us when we were little.
It wasn't the first sticking point, but the most painful sticking point was the fact that my parents' marriage, under most interpretations of Islamic law, is invalid, because my father is not Muslim.
So I am illegitimate.
I mean, for a while, it didn't really matter, because people would see me at MSA meetings and think I was a non-Muslim interloper anyway, because I was black. Never mind that the first major populations of Muslims in this country were black. Never mind that the first president of the MSA at my college years ago was a black woman. How strange to enter a context in your own country where you are made to feel foreign when, as a Muslimah, especially a searching, striving Muslimah, I should have been made to feel welcome.
I'm always an outsider because my name and ethnicity make me a mystery. I always have to explain how I was raised Muslim.
So it hurts to be considered otherwise illegitimate by my coreligionists.
I struggled to find a way in a faith, as I understood it, that would require me to deny my father, or deny his culture, in a certain sense, if the culture considered itself diametrically opposed to Islam. Maybe it was the fact that I was exposed to Muslims on my mother's side that were not so rigid that I did not go down that road that many of those that come into the religion later in life do.
Maybe it was the fact that it was partially the values that my father raised me with that brought me to Islam. So how could I rebuke the man who was responsible for bringing me into the world and partially responsible for my Islam? It made no sense...
I could easily give up on a religion that always considered my parents' union, the union responsible for my life, illegitimate. I was always a bastard, anyway, so why even bother? Why even bother, if God never blessed my parents' union? Why even bother, if I'm completely dispensable in a community of believers, believers, the best of communities of people in this earth, because my ethnicity isn't usual, because my name isn't right? Believers will continue to strive in the way of Allah (swt) and insha'Allah find their reward with Him in paradise without missing the little misfit that either sat, tugging at her sleeves without hijab in the center of the room or sat, tugging at her sleeves with hijab at the corner of the room, spoken to by only a couple of sisters that took pity on her isolation.
I've given up on a few things over time, but alhamdulillah it never leaves me with nothing. When I let go of everything, I'm left with the simple, organic Islam my mother taught me, and Islam that would make sense for an illegitimate daughter like me to practice...illegitimate in the sense that I'm living here in a non-Muslim country, as an ultimate minority, irremediably and unabashedly American, beautifully black and proud, unlikely to fit in a country perceived to be more halal for me because of all the things that I am, unlikely to fit into Random Muslim Community USA because all of the things that I am...
My mother became expert at practicing Islam in almost complete isolation. And while I will not stay so isolated, this is the Islam for me, free of some of the toxic impurities that we have somehow absorbed over time and taken as dogma.
So yes, I grew up in Islam without a Muslim father, without a "father." But I think my fellow Muslims make huge mistakes in this life when they ignore people like me who are several ways "illegitimate." I think if we do this, we're missing the point, we're missing the purpose of life, we're missing out on blessings and we're missing out on forgiveness.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Muslim Community vs. Muslim Isolation
As salaam alaikum,
As Ramadan approaches (it's essentially right on top of us, hehe), I usually like to get all reflective, center myself, mentally prepare myself for a month of prayer, devotion, repentance and mercy.
Insha'Allah, the month will still be those things for me, but I may not quite find the center before the beginning of my fasting. This year has been emotionally and spiritually tumultuous, in the best possible sense of the word. There have been ups and downs, goods and bads...it's been a pretty awesome year, in the range from positive to negative senses of the word. In one year, I've graduated from medical school, moved across the country, bought my first car...
...and may have given up on marriage.
Like, really, in the way that you give up and you don't think wistfully back and you don't shed a tear.
I haven't given up on marriage entirely, no. I'm not going to turn away what God provides me, if he so wills. But...
...I just recognized how much undue stress and worry came from me trying to find a suitable match in a niche market. It really was depressing and ate away at my self-esteem. I was looking in a very specific pool, which is so small, it's not even a pool at all.
No one can say there's a pool of practicing Muslim men who actually have good character (i.e. are not racist, sexist or misogynist, for starters, then the requisite positives), who are ambitious, either professionals or students, speak at least one language that I can also speak, and who would consider a black woman as a wife.
Of the ones who are not married, I can't say that any exist. I've never met one.
So I'm convinced that they don't exist. So what am I waiting for? Nothing. So I've stopped holding my breath, truthfully.
And aaaaaahhhh what a relief it is!
Because, look at how damaging that list is. One of the things that stressed me out the most is sweating about whether I would be acceptable to such a man. When there's a specific type of man that you're looking for in your niche market, that a few may exist isn't the problem...the problem is if they'll be attracted to you.
It's such a damaging way to view potential relationships. It led me to settling for a whole lot of other things...like, whether I was attracted to the man.
And it set me up for a constant feeling of inferiority, because as I saw friends marry very compatible, God-fearing men, the only conclusion that I could come to was that it was me who was not enough.
Thus my chronic, though waxing and waning low self-esteem.
It's all but the grace of God, we all know, but we can't help but feeling that we actually are at the mercy of human beings. Though my eventually marriage is really contingent on God's plan for me, and if He brings someone compatible and suitable into my life...we can't really feel God as much as we'd like to, so I really feel like I'm at the mercy of human beings.
And I realized that the decision I'm making, year after year, as my reproductive organs age, was really about Muslim community vs. Muslim isolation. It's one branch of that decision, anyway. I've searched and faltered in my search for a compatible community, just as I've searched and faltered (and faltered some more!) in my search for a compatible Muslim partner. More times than not, I'm completely isolated as a Muslimah when it comes to community.
And in terms of my marriage prospects, I face two options of Muslim isolation. I either don't marry at all, or I don't marry Muslim.
As a woman dealing with my niche market, not an eligible and compatible Muslim bachelor in sight, I have consciously made the decision, over time, that I will sooner live a life alone with no partner than to end up with a non-Muslim partner. So, with no community and no partner, I am a Muslim in isolation.
Even if I were to choose to marry a non-Muslim, I am still a Muslim in isolation.
Neither is what God meant for me, meant for us.
And I feel like it's because a lot of us (myself not excluded) are living in ways that God didn't mean for us...
...making it hard for me to find a community and for a community to find me.
Making it hard for me to find a partner, and a partner to find me.
I can't fit into my local Muslim community, unless I were no longer myself. And I can't be but myself.
I can't marry into my niche Muslim market, unless I were no longer myself. And I've tried, several times, but I can't but be myself.
But it's true. Life for me is much less stressful and I can focus on important things once I'm no longer trying to make myself fit into my Muslim niche market, hoping for a Muslim man who will put up with the fact that I can't speak Arabic, I have kinky hair, I am black, I don't wear hijab right now but don't exclude it in the future...and everything else that I am that no Muslim man has ventured to know more about because I guess talking more to me would be haram.
Or he's already married.
No more worrying if I'm enough. Time for me to be enough for myself.
Because I guess we are born alone and die alone...
As Ramadan approaches (it's essentially right on top of us, hehe), I usually like to get all reflective, center myself, mentally prepare myself for a month of prayer, devotion, repentance and mercy.
Insha'Allah, the month will still be those things for me, but I may not quite find the center before the beginning of my fasting. This year has been emotionally and spiritually tumultuous, in the best possible sense of the word. There have been ups and downs, goods and bads...it's been a pretty awesome year, in the range from positive to negative senses of the word. In one year, I've graduated from medical school, moved across the country, bought my first car...
...and may have given up on marriage.
Like, really, in the way that you give up and you don't think wistfully back and you don't shed a tear.
I haven't given up on marriage entirely, no. I'm not going to turn away what God provides me, if he so wills. But...
...I just recognized how much undue stress and worry came from me trying to find a suitable match in a niche market. It really was depressing and ate away at my self-esteem. I was looking in a very specific pool, which is so small, it's not even a pool at all.
No one can say there's a pool of practicing Muslim men who actually have good character (i.e. are not racist, sexist or misogynist, for starters, then the requisite positives), who are ambitious, either professionals or students, speak at least one language that I can also speak, and who would consider a black woman as a wife.
Of the ones who are not married, I can't say that any exist. I've never met one.
So I'm convinced that they don't exist. So what am I waiting for? Nothing. So I've stopped holding my breath, truthfully.
And aaaaaahhhh what a relief it is!
Because, look at how damaging that list is. One of the things that stressed me out the most is sweating about whether I would be acceptable to such a man. When there's a specific type of man that you're looking for in your niche market, that a few may exist isn't the problem...the problem is if they'll be attracted to you.
It's such a damaging way to view potential relationships. It led me to settling for a whole lot of other things...like, whether I was attracted to the man.
And it set me up for a constant feeling of inferiority, because as I saw friends marry very compatible, God-fearing men, the only conclusion that I could come to was that it was me who was not enough.
Thus my chronic, though waxing and waning low self-esteem.
It's all but the grace of God, we all know, but we can't help but feeling that we actually are at the mercy of human beings. Though my eventually marriage is really contingent on God's plan for me, and if He brings someone compatible and suitable into my life...we can't really feel God as much as we'd like to, so I really feel like I'm at the mercy of human beings.
And I realized that the decision I'm making, year after year, as my reproductive organs age, was really about Muslim community vs. Muslim isolation. It's one branch of that decision, anyway. I've searched and faltered in my search for a compatible community, just as I've searched and faltered (and faltered some more!) in my search for a compatible Muslim partner. More times than not, I'm completely isolated as a Muslimah when it comes to community.
And in terms of my marriage prospects, I face two options of Muslim isolation. I either don't marry at all, or I don't marry Muslim.
As a woman dealing with my niche market, not an eligible and compatible Muslim bachelor in sight, I have consciously made the decision, over time, that I will sooner live a life alone with no partner than to end up with a non-Muslim partner. So, with no community and no partner, I am a Muslim in isolation.
Even if I were to choose to marry a non-Muslim, I am still a Muslim in isolation.
Neither is what God meant for me, meant for us.
And I feel like it's because a lot of us (myself not excluded) are living in ways that God didn't mean for us...
...making it hard for me to find a community and for a community to find me.
Making it hard for me to find a partner, and a partner to find me.
I can't fit into my local Muslim community, unless I were no longer myself. And I can't be but myself.
I can't marry into my niche Muslim market, unless I were no longer myself. And I've tried, several times, but I can't but be myself.
But it's true. Life for me is much less stressful and I can focus on important things once I'm no longer trying to make myself fit into my Muslim niche market, hoping for a Muslim man who will put up with the fact that I can't speak Arabic, I have kinky hair, I am black, I don't wear hijab right now but don't exclude it in the future...and everything else that I am that no Muslim man has ventured to know more about because I guess talking more to me would be haram.
Or he's already married.
No more worrying if I'm enough. Time for me to be enough for myself.
Because I guess we are born alone and die alone...
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