Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak

PART I CROSSROADS

The women in this book were all raised primarily in the United States as Muslims. For the most part, we don’t recall a time when we were not both American and Muslim. American Muslims can largely be divided into immigrants and American-born Muslims. In this first section we will see how these multiple identities intersect. What’s it like to grow up Muslim in the United States? What was our relationship with mainstream society and with the Muslim community? Who were our role models in crafting an American Muslim woman identity and in personalizing our faith?

The first stories frame separately an immigrant and an American-born Muslim experience in the United States. These stories, told by the first American Muslim novelist of Indian descent and by a Harvard-trained historian, reveal the complexities of growing up Muslim and how our various identities—American, Muslim, female—intersect.

HOW I MET GOD

Samina Ali

I have an old square photo of my family that was taken soon after we arrived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from Hyderabad, India. In it are my parents, my older brother, and me (my younger brother has not yet been born). It is December 1970 and there are three to four inches of snow on the ground, enough to cover our feet to our ankles. Just beyond our figures stands a snowbank that rises taller than my brother’s almost two-year-old stature. It is night and I can just make out the blurry red of a traffic light, trees empty of leaves, footprints that have made a path in the snow. I am less than a year old and dressed in a turquoise winter coat with matching snow pants, red and white shoes. My brother wears an army-green jacket with a broad yellow-and-white stripe down the sleeve. My mother is in a gold sari, her thick braid running to midback of her gray wool jacket. My father wears nothing more than a brown cotton shirt and darker brown pants, tailored for him in India. None of us has on hats or gloves, though it must be minus-degree weather.

It is an odd photo, taken almost on the sly, capturing us at a moment in life when we are simply alive to what is within us, too disoriented by this unfamiliar land to pose. Because of this, not a single face is entirely perceivable. Both my parents are in profile, my father gazing down at me, while I am gazing down at the snow, my small hand clutched inside his larger one. My older brother is almost completely turned away, only the bottom of a brown cheek visible. Something off in the distance has caught his attention, a car horn, a bird, something he has not seen before in Hyderabad, a new and strange sight to behold. My mother seems to be staring at my father, but, when closely examined, I can tell she is really staring off at some thought. She is young, in her early thirties, about the age I am now. She looks haunted and alone.

When we first arrived, I thought America was full of ghosts, my mother said to me twenty years later, when I was interviewing her on video for an undergraduate course I was doing on testimonial literature. She was my subject; I wanted to examine the trauma experienced by immigrants and what they do to overcome it and survive, some staying clumped in their immigrant group, other heartier ones actually assimilating into their new culture, a different way of life. My mother never really assimilated. She wore saris until I was in high school, at which time her Indian-Muslim friends imbued her with enough courage to switch to loose shalwar-kameezes; then slowly, eventually, on my prodding, she put on her first pair of pants and a blouse. My father’s eyes looked ready to pop out of his skull when he came home that day and saw his wife in American clothes. He laughed in delight. My mother, embarrassed, ran into the kitchen to warm up his dinner. Every day she cooked a fresh Indian meal. At home, we only spoke Urdu. She never took a job out of the