How To Be An American Muslim

By Hafsa Arain. Originally published in Threshold 2009, DePaul University's art, literature and multimedia magazine.

You are ten years old, and your mom tells you that you cannot wear shorts anymore. You don’t really understand why, but you listen to her anyway. In sixth grade, you have to get a special note to get out of swimming.

“What for?” asks the gym teacher, a buff man with graying hair.

“Religious reasons,” you say.

In ninth grade, you are sitting in World Cultures class, and the teacher asks you how to spell “Qur’an”.

“K-O-R-A-N, right? Koran?” she asks, staring you in the eyes.

When there are hot dogs for lunch, you pack your own from home. During Ramadan, you don’t eat anything during the day. When everyone asks you why, you just pretend you’re not hungry.

“Are you sure you don’t want some of my sandwich?” they ask nicely.
You grow taller. Your hair is longer, blacker than it was when you were younger. You begin to notice your skin color, its darkness. You resent it. Everyone else starts drinking, starts dating, starts smoking up. You can’t do any of that. You can’t go to the Homecoming dance, not even with your friends because they’re all wearing sleeveless dresses and you’d look weird with a sweater on.

You’re in eleventh grade when the boy who sits next to you in English stands shyly by your locker after class one day. You pretend not to be flattered when he stammers while he speaks, and tells you that you’re smart and interesting. He smiles at you, and you check your watch hesitantly. He asks you what you’re doing on Saturday night, and you pretend you’re not going to be watching a movie with your sister. He wants to keep talking.

“I’ve got to catch the bus,” you say suddenly. He frowns before walking away, and you feel awful. You want to go, because it would make you just like everyone else. But you can’t go, because you’re not like everyone else. When you tell your sister, you pretend it wasn’t such a big deal, except it was. Because it was the first time it happened, and it was also the last time. It was the last time because when you grow up, you tell boys they can’t ask you out unless they’re Muslim, too.

When you are at home, you don’t pray five times a day, because it never feels right. You don’t talk about being Muslim, you just are. But you are not Muslim like your God-fearing grandmother, who lives half the world away, fingering her prayer beads and reading the Qur’an. You want her instead of your dad, who has grand existential theories about life and religion, but you can’t speak to her that well because you speak English and she doesn’t. So your whole construct of her is of everything not said between you two.

When you graduate high school, it feels liberating. You feel older and wiser, and surer of yourself. You move into the dorms in college, and you feel free as you wave your parents away from your life. And then you see the beer runs, the fake IDs, and suddenly you can’t participate in college either.

You sit in your classes, and you learn that race is social construct. That race isn’t the color of your skin. White professors profess in front of discussion based classrooms, and a bunch of white heads nod in agreement. You nod, too, but you feel robbed of something. Only you can’t place it very well.

When you get your fake ID, you go to bars and clubs, and you drink Diet Coke. When boys don’t hit on you because you are sober, and Pakistani, and fully clothed, you pretend not to care. You laugh with your friends, but it’s more like laughing at them because they can’t say your name after an hour into the party. You hold their hair back when they throw up in the bathroom at the end of the night.

“You’re so cool for not drinking,” they say at the dingy bar, “I really respect that.”

You look back at them with confusion. They say this as they take sips from their mixed drinks, or slurping their champagne. Ten minutes ago, they were walking to the White Hen, excited about pre-gaming.

When you go home on the weekends, you don’t tell your parents that you were at a party last night. Even when you only drank the leftover cranberry juice everyone else was mixing into their vodka. You don’t tell them about the knee-length skirt you wore once, and felt guilty about for a month. You want God, but He’s hard to find in the sour smell of alcohol and overwhelming guilt of lies. Your life is full of lies. You lie to your friends, who don’t think your left out at all. You lie to your mom and dad. You lie to your grandma when she asks you if everything is okay. Sometimes, you want it to be easy. But then your grandma tells you that it’s never easy. It’s always hard, being a Muslim.

When you read the Qur’an, you are crying. And you want to remember everything you did wrong, but you did it all for a reason and you can’t forget the reasons. Because you still want the same things you did in high school, but you want to move on. You want to grow up.

You don’t want to be American anymore – anything else will do, because when you watch the footage from the September 11th attacks, you feel guilty, even though you didn’t do anything wrong. When people call you a terrorist because you’re walking down the street with your aunt who covers her hair, you feel like yelling but it doesn’t feel right to say anything. You have a strange taste in your mouth – it feels metallic and the knot in your throat grows but you don’t want to cry on the street in front of every body, and you don’t belong anymore.

But you never belonged to anything – the mini-skirts, the tank tops, the hot dogs, and mispronunciations of your name. You didn’t belong in Pakistan, where you can barely speak to anyone, and you feel strange for wearing jeans and t-shirts. You don’t belong here, where everyone treats you like a visitor, but you’re not a visitor. You are permanent.

You feel alone. So you write poetry and short stories and you read books. You write pages and pages about being different, and your friends call you emo. You write about the social constructions of race, and how just a simple social construction has changed your life. You read books by Jhumpa Lahiri, and you feel centered. You read poetry by Rumi, and you remember why you call yourself a Muslim in the first place. You watch the world through train windows, through TV screens, through Internet pages. You read about Israel and Palestine, and it makes you angry. You read about the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and it makes you furious.

It all makes you furious – the fact that you’re Muslim and not anything else. Because everyone else can fit in just fine, because they can drink whatever they want and date whoever they want, and be whatever they want. You wish this piece could be about whatever you want, but it can’t be because this is who you are. Because you have to stand for something, be the representative of the idea. You can have to talk write specific things, say specific things, and be a specific person because you are an American Muslim.

And now, you’re told that you must reflect and think about the past. You have reflected, and you have seen where you don’t belong. You have seen everyone clearly beside yourself. And now, you look straight, forward into the future, and you welcome it with open hands. You take with you your Muslim identity and step into the light, to a place where you will finally belong, if only because you made it so.