Today during dinner Abuelita asked if it was true that Salim, her husband, has some issue on his right leg. My mother nodded. She also asked my step-father where his mother Rosita is. “She’s home,” I whispered to her. “She’s doing well.” Both her husband Salim and Rosita died years ago.

My sister’s husband is visiting. He arrived last night. It’s their turn to move to the removed bedroom in the first floor of the house. Now I stay alone on the third floor with Abuelita. A little while ago I changed her and got her ready for bed (I wrote about stepping into this caretaking role this summer here).

“I really loved Salim,” she tells me once I’ve helped her pull up her pants and slip in a robe. “He was my companion. My friend. My lover.”

I caress her hands gently. I repeat the shahada to her. “Let’s go to bed, Abuelita.” I turn off her lights and gingerly walk out her room.

My husband sends me and my mother-in-law pictures of his trip to Morocco – a cultural and spiritual group tour he’s leading for ten days this summer. The three of us have a joint Whatsapp group. My MIL patiently loves each photo, appreciative to be thought of, remembered, included in his far-away adventure to lands so beautiful they look dreamlike.

When I look through the photos, the beauty of Chefchaouen stops me on my tracks. The blue-washed buildings, the shades of indigo and azure that color the markets and streets. Baskets overflowing with flowers. Cobbled alleys and stepped paths. Andalusian patios and ornate arches…The artisan shops…. subhanAllah!

But as my eyes capture the beauty, soon my mind drifts to the calm realization that I feel perfectly content not being there. That that was not meant for me this summer.

A certainty that is a cherished and humbling gift from Allah SW.

The plan had been for all of us to go together. I had confirmed our attendance a few times. I would visit my family in Ecuador for part of July and return to NJ in time to get us all ready to leave to Morocco together.

But then I realized — fully by God’s grace and inspiration— that four weeks in Ecuador would not feel enough to my mother. Particularly because we go back and forth between her house in the capital and my father’s in Pifo. I didn’t want to travel all the way here only for her to feel, at the end of it, that she had not had enough of us.

That was it. I didn’t want to sadden her heart. So I cancelled our vacation to Morocco. My husband understood the principle immediately and supported my decision.

Of course, once I got here I understood how much our presence was needed. How important it was not only to my mother, but to Abuelita and to everyone else. I was reminded that reviving and reconnecting with one’s kin can’t be rushed. That it takes time, effort and putting your own wishes, desires and personal agendas second.

“Two months?!” A friend in New Jersey asked me as I shared my updated summer plans. “How do you manage with the family split for so long? My husband and I don’t like being away for so long. I don’t think we could do that.”

“I don’t know how you sign up for parenting alone for so long,” another friend said. “May Allah reward you.”

And I totally get it. It’s hard. My husband isn’t thrilled to be in a family trip to Morocco without his family. And I am not thrilled to spend all these weeks away from him, parenting alone. I know it takes a toll on the kids too, who need to be constantly reminded that though they miss their friends and cousins in New Jersey, their extended family in Ecuador has a right upon them too.

We’re here above all to please Allah SW and do the right thing. Fun and pleasure come second. That’s a life lesson (and we make sure to go on day trips and take them fun places, of course, but why we are here must be clear and present on all our minds. A principle-led life, is what we’re trying to teach our children).

On a personal level, I would tell you this: There is something so soothing, so reassuring, so anchoring, and so settling about knowing that you are where you need to be and where you are needed, and I wouldn’t swap that for anything.

For years I didn’t know if I was doing what I needed to be doing. Or if I was where I needed to be. Or if I was going in the right direction. Or if I was spending my time wisely… I don’t want that anymore.

By God’s grace alone, things appear clearer now. You hold on to a principle that is clear – in this case, giving your family members their due right upon you—and you hold on to that, though thick and thin.

It’s not that you don’t experience hardship or sadness or difficulty. But feelings fall in their proper place below principle. And that clarity is gold.

What does principle call for you to do now?

May Allah SW grant us all clarity of purpose, and resolve to follow through. Ameen.

Abuelita and us –my mother’s three oldest children—became floor neighbors a few years after my mother’s remarriage, when the house expansion happened. First my oldest sister moved up, then my older brother and I followed. Abuelita moved in with us permanently after she was widowed. Over forty years deep into schizophrenia, her unpredictable quirkiness weaved into the angst of our teenage years.

This was the late 1990s early 2000s, when the current mainstream and monetized version of “mental health” was unimaginable. Mental illnesses were tightly-guarded private matters and any allusion to their existence was a slap of shame. But Abuelita didn’t get that memo. She had pressing things to say, uncomfortable questions to ask, and fantastical stories to share. And she didn’t discriminate. Everyone, both the willing and the unwilling alike, got their fair share of her Marquesian magical-realism.

Abuelita’s prolific story-telling meant that my siblings and I lived in constant apprehension of what she might blurt out in front of our friends and guests. In public, there was façade of normalcy to preserve. But behind closed doors we didn’t give two damns. We wanted La Abuela just the way she was.

“Abuelita, cuénteme algo,” Tell me something, Abuelita. Anything. Wearied by the overlapping minefields of our personal and public lives, my older sister and I would come crashing into Abuelita’s bed after school. And off she would go, recalling memories from her own elementary school days and spinning them with fiction and fantasy. “Sigo?” Should she continue? “Yes, yes, Abuelita, siga siga.”

In a few sentences she would transport us from our heartaches and headaches into her humble childhood in La Vicentina, summers of plush grapes, ripe figs and crisp watermelons in Chtoura, and then back to La Mariscal, now with herself as the matriarch of a household of eight plus several maids, sitters and drivers.

In her prose, the dead were alive, the sick were cured, the distant were close, and geography didn’t matter. Boundaries were negotiable. Time elastic. Reality was as curatable as a dashboard, and hers was filled with all the things her heart willed to be true: Her youngest had called that morning and invited her out (he hadn’t), her grandchildren hadn’t stop phoning her (they had), and her deceased husband who had adored every inch of her existence was waiting for her to visit him, fresh flowers in hand (when would we drive her to him?).

At seventeen, I was convinced that her supple version of reality was far preferable to my rigid and flat one. But beyond the worlds she spun and realities she conjured, it was her heart, soul, and body that kept us returning to her.

Because there was never harshness in Abuelita’s speech. No aggression in her prose. No rough edges around her conjectures and plots. It was all soothingly ridiculous. It was lovingly insane. And it asked nothing of you. Fathom that! Not even a response. And if you softened up to her stories and leaned against her plump, soft body, she’d start stroking your head and rubbing your back. Leisurely. Gently. Carefree. And boy was that selfless motherly touch alone worth her weight in gold!

If that wasn’t the closest thing to heaven we knew back then, I don’t know what was.

“Janan! Are you coming?” My mother repeated, still diaper in hand.

“Si mamita, ya voy…” I tiptoed into Abuelita’s bedroom.

Oh Lord. What was I about to witness here? Was I about to see my Abuela lying half-naked on her bed, her legs positioned for a cleaning the same way I position my toddler for a change?

I’d been in Ecuador for less than seventy-two hours and though I adored my grandmother, suddenly that felt like a closer look than I had ever wished for.

But my mother hadn’t asked me, in the American way I’m familiar with now: “Would you like to come learn?” No—she had told me, in a good Lebanese matronly way, “Come watch.”

So I obeyed.

My mother stood outside Abuelita’s bathroom, leaning against the wooden closet door to spare her knees. She had already spread the large diaper over the bed.

“¿Ya acabó, mamá?” she called out. I shuddered at the sound of my mother’s commanding voice. Dios mio. I sound exactly like that with my children. Am I my mother? Are we even separate people?

Abuelita walked out on her own. I saw that she wasn’t fully dressed, and yet I felt nothing. There was no shock or weirdness at all, but rather a quiet, visceral recognition: My blood and flesh. Mother of my mother. My mother. Myself. My daughter.

Al-jadda fi manzilat al umm. The maternal grandmother is on the same rank as the mother in Islam. So is the maternal aunt. And the mother ranks first in a person’s life. Ummak, thumma ummak, thumma ummak, thumma abik. Your mother, then your mother, then your mother, then your father, said the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).

When I wrote my PhD thesis on child custody in Islamic law, I learned that a mother has priority in custody in the event of a divorce. And if the mother is dead or unfit to be custodian, custody goes to the maternal grandmother. And if the latter is dead or unfit, then it goes to the maternal aunt. In turns out that Islam does not understand a child to have one single mother, but several, all deeply intertwined and interconnected through uterine bonds. “A tribe of mothers,” I called in my dissertation.

A matryoshka of women, we are. The outermost one, encompassing us all, is La Abuela, the innermost one, the youngest, my baby. And in the middle, my sisters, my aunts, myself—all now having exerted themselves to care for this matriarch of ours.

Because summoned into Abuelita’s bedroom to perform this task, I knew that this was a lot more than a rudimentary chore.

I had come back from a distant land to take my place – or to be handed my place, really-- by a higher-ranking woman in my tribe of mothers. I belonged here, claiming my share to this intimate and sacred space. We were here not to “change a diaper,” but to preserve Abuela’s God-given dignity and honor, as our Kind and Merciful God had commanded us to.

Frail, shaky, and a cane in hand, Abuelita stood vulnerable and exposed between my mother and I. My mother stood in front of her and held up the front flap of the diaper, I stood in the back and held the back flap. Zip. Zip. Zip. We stretched the grip tabs, pulled this way and that, and fastened them. Then my mother pulled out a roll of adhesive duct tape. “The diaper isn’t secure enough on its own,” she explained.

“What are you guys doing there?” My children popped their heads through Abuelita’s door.

“We’re changing Abuelita’s diaper,” I explained.

“She wears a diaper?! How?! Can we come see?!?”

“Kadija can come in. Zayd, you wait outside.”

“Yes!!” Khadija walked in triumphant. “What do I do? I want to help dress Abuelita too.” Her enthusiasm caught me by surprise. Did Khadija see in Abuelita an oversized live version of her diaper-wearing dolls? After years of requesting these dolls for Eid and practicing on them, was this her time to shine as a caregiver?

Later, my son, age eleven, pulled me to the side, as he regularly does to tell me secrets.

“Mama,” he said in a hushed voice, “There is something so weird…. It’s like Khadija is proud of having seen Abuelita in a diaper… like she was showing off to me that she got to see her… you know… like, not dressed… and I didn’t… isn’t that so weird?”

“Zayd, I think she was proud that she was welcomed into the private activities of the womenfolk of this house…. She is a little woman herself now, not just a “child.” She felt that. And it made her proud.”

“But that’s not fair mama. How come she’s always allowed in and I’m not?”

“Zayd, when you and baba go places together and do things alone, and Khadija is not included, is that not fair?”

He was quiet.

“And don’t you think a lady would be embarrassed to change in front of a young man like yourself?”

He blushed. “Of course. And I don’t want to see that either. I just don’t like being excluded and I don’t like Khadija bragging.”

“There is always something for everyone, habibi, but in a village (and we are one) it’s not always the same thing for everyone.”

--

Our summer days in Ecuador slip between our fingers. After my sister Hania arrives to fill her place on the third floor of the house, we take turns changing Abuelita or we change her together. She takes one side, I take another, and sometimes we play tug-of-war over who has stretched Abuela’s diaper too much to her side. “This side can’t close!” She protests. “Mine barely closes either!” I respond, yanking the diaper flap to my side of Abuela’s hip and she bends down between us.

“No se peleen!” She reprimands us from below. “Don’t fight!”

“We’re not fighting, Abuelita!” We laugh so hard we bend over too.

It does help that we adore her.

The task of cajoling her out of bed to pee one more time before bed and to wash and change can get heavy. And the stench of leaked urine can get strong. And sometimes when we come get her she does shoo us away: Leave me the heck alone already! I don’t have to pee! (Dejenme en paz. Ya oriné!). And there are nights when Hania and I look at one another and our eyes say: I’m wiped out today, who’s turn is it? And in the end, one of us gets up and walks into Abuela’s room with an overly-exaggerated enthusiastic tone: A ver Abuelita Hermosa!! Al bańo!!

Two nights ago, I am tucking her in bed when she tells me: “Gracias Mademoiselle,” a remnant word of her years in Frenchified Beirut.

“Nunca olvidaré lo que haces por mi.”

I will never forget what you do for me.

Ay, abuelita! I stroke her soft and wrinkly hand and lay down beside her –a girl and her grandma once again. She strokes my head and back, and I feel a gush of tears flowing into her pillow.

This touch.

Still worth her weight in gold.

My mother’s mother. My mother. My sisters. My aunts. Myself. My child.

All one through silat al-rahm. The golden sacred threads of the birthing womb.

Ya Allah. What a priceless gift.

I felt my heart rate quicken.

My father, sweeping a kitchen floor that can never get clean, said: “We used to see winds like these when I was little. They were usually a prelude to earthquakes.”

In the living room, my American children sprawled on the couches, watching American cartoons on their iPads. I had contemplated a screen-free weekend at my dad’s –there’s so much to do in the land! —but the travel exhaustion, a restless toddler, and the unforgiving altitude humbled my ambitions.

At least they were holding those loathed iPads covered in dirt after hours of outdoor play.

“Papi, do you think you could drive us back to Quito this afternoon?” He was sitting on a couch now, stroking his cat Rosa María (Rosita). “I forgot Khadija’s allergy meds at my mom’s, and I forgot to pack clothes for Muhammad.”

These things were true. Barely two days in Quito when my father came to pick us up from my mom’s, I had only packed one of my daughter’s allergy meds –not enough to weather off Rosita’s evils—and I was now dressing Muhammad in Khadija’s seven-year-old girl clothes. “He looks like the boys who sell chicles on the side of the road,” K., my sweet brother from my dad’s side had said, making both of us erupt laughing.

K. works at a construction site from sunrise to sundown, and gets one weekend off every two weeks. We were lucky to have him with us our first weekend in Ecuador.

So I needed to return to Quito for meds and clothes. But I also didn’t prefer to die in Pifo if indeed these crazy winds were a prelude to an earthquake.

“Mami, is it also strangely windy where you are? It’s very bad in Pifo,” I texted her.

“It isn’t. But don’t worry. You just landed. You’re just not used to the climate here.”

“I’m going to try to come back to Quito now.”

“Ahlan wa sahlan,” she said. Welcome any time. “But really, don’t worry.”

My mother isn’t one iota scared of death. This is because when we die, we are returning back to our Creator, and that’s Whom my mother spends most of her time with/for in the first place. When my mother dies we will all feel like she’s finally gone back to her one true best friend.

I love Allah too. And I try my best to live in a manner that would be pleasing to Him. I am not, however, at my mother’s level. Not by far. And I am hyperaware of my flaws, so I just can’t pull off her zen state of peace and calm all the time.

So for instance, two years ago when the house started shaking under our feet in the early part of the night (I was here for the summer), I ran downstairs terrified only to find my mother sipping tea at the kitchen table like nothing had happened.

“Did you feel that?!” I asked.

“Sit, sit, hijita, no pasa nada.” It’s nothing. It’ll pass. “Have tawwakul in Allah.”

I’ve made progress reconciling myself with the inevitability of death. I really have, by God’s grace. I’m not where I was a few years ago. But I digress. On Sunday, it’s not so much that I was trying to avoid death per se. That’d be futile, I know (our return appointments are written, “the pens have been lifted and the pages have dried.”). But I did prefer to be in my mother’s home in the event of a natural disaster. Is that fair?

So Papi drove us home through the cliffside roads that connect the valleys to the capital (these cliffs have claimed many lives…. more visual reminders of death).

My children practically kicked and screamed about our return because “mom, please don’t be offended, but your mom’s house in Quito is kind of boring, okay?”

In Pifo, my children had chased my father’s dogs, picked berries from the bushes, climbed avocado trees, played with Rosa the allergen-inducing cat, and eaten peppers straight off the plants. They had sanded an old wooden swing with my dad, played soccer with K., and watched World Cup games with the family. All of this happened while they were caked in layers of dirt, which nobody in that household gives a damn about.

Always less rules in Pifo.

“Mama, I know you prefer Pifo too. Admit it,” said my eleven-year-old, Zayd, with a cheeky smile, as if he’d uncovered a secret he wasn’t supposed to know.

I smiled. “I love it here too, Zayd, of course. Abuelito Marco’s house is a lot of fun. But I miss my mom.”

“That’s fair,” he said, a knowing look in his eyes.

--

Once at my mother’s pristine and elegant home in Quito, Zayd showered by himself and I bathed the two youngest ones (I brought a big plastic bucket from the laundry room on the third floor of the house, filled it up with warm water, and dunked them in it). I scrubbed the dirt off their feet. I untangled my daughter’s curls. I wrapped them in clean and fluffy white towels and dressed them in fresh pajamas –each in their own actual size—and I even gave Khadija a plush robe.

“Bajen a comer!” My mother summoned us downstairs to eat. She had made grilled-cheese sandwiches and hot chocolate.

“I like Mamigi,” Said Khadija as I tied her robe. “Okay mama, you’re right. It is nice to be back in your mom’s house in Quito. She takes such good care of us.”

“See? I told you. Each place has its own charms.”

A little later, the kids cuddled up in their beds with their Geronimo Stilton books.

I looked around their room. Ugh. Those heavy bookshelves are dangerously close to their beds and their heads—too easily toppled by even a moderate earthquake.

Tawakaltu ala Allah, though. I put my trust in God. Nothing I could do about them right now.

I hugged everyone good-night and went to sleep, but only after I said my night supplication:

“In Your name, my Lord, I lie down and in Your name I rise. So if You should take my soul then have mercy upon it, and if You should return my soul then protect it in the manner You do so with Your righteous servants.”

The relative proximity of death I feel here is in an illusion.

I know.

But that night supplication does come out more earnestly here.

It just does.

We brought up marriage. You were unconvinced about the appeal of domesticity, wifehood and motherhood, particularly when these can derail you from individual ambitions and goals.

‘You’re still very young,” I said. “Maybe you don’t experience the need for a life partner with great urgency now…But when you do, you may decide that although marriage brings about changes and compromises, having that love and companionship and building a life together with someone is worth the sacrifices.’

‘Is it, though? You don’t seem happy khalto Janan.’

I winced and chuckled a little. Staircase conversation indeed!

‘Compared to who?’ I asked. ‘Do you know other women who are?’

‘Yes. I do. I know women who really all they wanted was a married life and they got it and they are perfectly happy with it. And that’s not me.’ And that is not you.

‘Hmmm…. I don’t know. I don’t think that happiness is what I appreciate the most about marriage in the first place. I think I what I appreciate the most is how marriage anchored me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When I was young I felt like a little helium balloon subject to the winds. I didn’t know which way I would go, or what I would do. Would I actually become an academic? Would my life depend on my success in that pursuit? But marriage has the ability to settle a person and to resolve the most basic and existential questions about life so that one can focus on other higher pursuits.’

Higher pursuits?

You look at me hesitantly. Are my higher pursuits changing diapers, organizing the pantry and wiping boogers off toddlers’ faces? Yuck!

Not exactly. Let me explain.

The Road I am on

The spring brings Dhul Hijja. Dhul Hijja brings the hajj season. The hajj season brings Eid. Eid brings a rush of family members and relatives to our home. That physical presence brings increased exposure and awareness of the challenges with aging seniors and this project of intergenerational living.

Around a firepit, in hushed voices, recent anecdotes are shared. Notes compared. Words of empathy and sympathy offered.

Fresh in my mind is an awareness that recently hit me with new clarity: Yes, to your point (and your concern), an inward-looking life that is based on invisible (to people) labor and unglamorous chores can be challenging. Yes, children are needy and the elderly require a special kind of patience. The kinds of efforts one exerts in this relatively secluded life are not translatable into a CV and into social media followers and likes.

But to me, there is a stillness to this kind of life, a quietude that allows crucial things to happen.

The the 13th-century shaykh and sage Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari wrote: “Bury your existence in the earth of obscurity, for whatever sprouts forth, without having first been buried, flowers imperfectly.”

Maybe for some women, marriage and domesticity are themselves the garden and this is enough (is this the presumption behind the “tradwife” movement?)

But while married life and domesticity do indeed yield flowers –and thorns, and weeds—they are most importantly fertile soil to cultivate our spiritual beings and fulfill our obligations in the eyes of Allah SW.

There is a higher pursuit calling us. Allah SW has given us a purpose and a path in the Qur’an: “I have not created the jinn and mankind except to worship me.”

That is the primordial Divine compact we committed ourselves to, a commitment that gives origin to the deepest yearnings of our soul.

True contentment and realization can only occur when that primordial yearning and purpose are met.

But how you find that alignment, and how you accomplish spiritual growth, may not happen in the ways you anticipate or prefer.

My growth wasn’t going to happen reading theory in a trendy Cambridge café

Things happened during my time at Harvard.

Things changed.

I have written elsewhere that I wanted to be the best and the fastest at what I did. I was attracted to the Ivy League because I felt it could give me a kind of elevation I craved for myself. I could get the best education, by the most qualified teachers, be surrounded by the smartest people, and push myself to do better and be better.

But I gradually realized that I actually craved something far more human, more primal, and more spiritual than I had understood.

The surest obstacle to finding Truth is stubborn arrogance. Kibr. And the closest path to finding it lies in humility.

At Harvard, the first thing I lost respect for was arrogance.

I was intrigued to notice that although I was surrounded by brilliant accomplished people, I was only drawn to the humble and kind ones. One of my favorite teachers was the brilliant intellectual historian Khaled El-Rouayeb. Many students sought him because of his mind and academic influence. But I wanted to learn from him because of the humility and kindness with which he carried himself.

Intelligence dressed in conceit repelled me.

Speech that was not grounded in something real and something true disinterested me— It suddenly felt like gaudy fake frosting on a cake baked for display.

These new aversions were not conscious decisions I made one day, but rather something visceral that grew on its own as I myself labored on my soul

I began to understand that the proximity to Allah and the growth I craved would not come from reading the most cutting-edge theoretical work in my field. And it would not come from doing things that came to me easily, pleasurably.

Rather, as with physical muscle building, I would only grow by doing the heavy, grunt work that actually broke the fibers of my spiritual anatomy a little—sometimes a lot—so that repair and growth could occur.

And to me, this was happening not at school, but at home.

Domestic life, marriage, wifehood, motherhood, caretaking, intergenerational living—all these things became my avenue for grounding and my opportunity for growth.

The daily chores may seem banal and contemptible. How can a soiled diaper compare to the painting brush? How can the blabber of toddler compare to the speech of seasoned thinkers? How can running a household compare to running a corporation?

But Allah SW uses the example of the mosquito in the Quran (Q2: 26)–such a trifling little creature! Such an insignificant little thing! —to remind us that the humblest of things can convey the deepest spiritual truths.

But can we see past the apparent insignificant nature of the mosquito to find them?

Getting over our egos, our inflated sense-of-self, and our stubborn ideas of what we want in order to open our hearts to what we need is a test of gargantuan proportions.

Spiritual growth isn’t optional

You can say: Auntie Janan, that’s great that you’re so interested in spiritual growth. Good for you! I am on a different journey. I have other pursuits. Can’t we just fulfill our basic Islamic obligations and dedicate ourselves to growing in some other aspect of our lives? In our intellect, in our career, in our art, in our families, in prestige, in social standing, in muscle mass, etc.?

Here are three problems I see with sticking to the bare minimum in our pursuit of spiritual growth

One— We don’t live in a morally neutral world nor in a sheltered Muslim village.

We live in a world defined by a moral gravity that constantly pulls us downwards (an insight I first heard from Professor Sherman Jackson as a grad student at NYU). If we aren’t’ pushing up with all our might, chances are we are sinking lower.

And we don’t live in an isolated and secluded Muslim village where the Islamic observance of the group and the Islamic mores of the culture will sustain our religious observance even if we don’t pay much heed to it.

We live in cultures that have displaced God in favor of the self, and which encourage and celebrate pursuits, dreams, and ambitions that are entirely worldly and ephemeral.

Which would be okay if this ephemeral and worldly life is all we had, and if we did not have Eternity at stake, and if we didn’t have to meet our Creator one day to account for how we spent our time on earth.

But we do.

Two: A weak spirituality that is scarcely fed and seldom exercised isn’t going to allow you to survive the blows of this life.

Allah warns in the Qur’an that we will be tested (Q2:155). It is the nature of this world. We will experience fear, anxiety, loss of wealth, health and status. We will falter. We will have our hearts broken. We will fall.

And some people will have the spiritual fortitude to face these tests with grace and with patience. And some will fall apart and worst of all lose themselves and lose their faith.

My wish to you when you get tested —as you are bound to be—is that you are ready and prepared to rise even as others around you give in, give up and succumb.

This requires building your spiritual immune system now. Every day. This is your best investment for the future.

Three: A weak spirituality isn’t going to allow you to uphold your God-given responsibilities in life.

You can grow in your career. You can grow in your art. You can grow your family. You can grow in muscle mass. You can rise in money and prestige and status.

But unless you are spiritually strong, will not be able to carry your amanat (trusts) when the going gets tough.

“All of you are shepherds and each of you is responsible for his flock.”

Who/what is your flock, and what is required of you to uphold their rights upon you? (this will vary depending on where you are in life, and what your life circumstances are. But unless you came into this world artificially and completely alone, you have a clear flock).

How much suffering has been inflicted on innocent people in this world simply because people abandoned their flocks when the going got tough? How much heartache? How many primal wounds?

Leading a principled life –one that constantly asks What is the principled thing for me to do now?—isn’t as pleasurable as leading a life of self-pursuit and personal comfort.

But that is precisely how you fulfill your trust of being a khalifa on this earth.

But are you happy?

The extended family starts trickling out around Maghreb time. I climb upstairs to my room and plop on a chair overlooking the side yard. But you don’t seem happy, Khalto Janan. I sit with your words. They poked a little hole somewhere.

(Don’t worry, you meant well, and I actually love me some frank conversation! :)

I think the part about this life being meaningful is clear enough to me. But what about the part about misery and happiness?

Let’s see. The last time I felt deeply happy was in Medina. There was a lightness there, a special degree of joy and cheer that I don’t experience on the regular.

Do other people have such emotions on the regular? Does one have to have them in order to count oneself “happy”?

Other than Medina, there are many happy moments here too, for sure. When Nora gifted me a Cedron sapling, the tree of my childhood, I was so happy I gasped with joy and screamed a little. When Muhamad learns new words and sentences, I am happy. When Zayd insisted on fasting the six days of Shawwal, I was happy. When Khadija draws me on a pedestal that reads ‘best mom ever,’ I am happy.

There are other joyous moments too: brunches with loved ones, communal cooking and gardening classes, family trips (Pearls of the Quran is a favorite!), seeing the broccoli we planted finally sprout…

At the same time, I wonder whether a constant state of happiness requires a lightness and obliviousness that aren’t accessible to me anymore.

At a personal level, our family responsibilities are a weight that perhaps distance could lighten (I know because I have been physically far away and been bewildered by how imminently forgettable we humans are. Scary stuff, to realize how easily you can be forgotten by those who aren’t immediately around you).

At a higher level, the heaviness of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the constantly surfacing photos of children and entire family lines wiped out with impunity casts a permanent shadow over my heart. So does the insidious nature of child abuse at the highest echelons of our society and every level below.

There’s more. The list of heart wrenching things that weigh on my heart is long, and these things visit me in the most unexpected moments.

So what can I tell you?

I have happy days, and sad days, and joyful moments, and heavy ones. But I am deeply grateful and deeply content. Alhamdulilah.

I am fulfilled because I am in spiritual motion. I experience growth. I experience deepening certitude in my connection to Allah SW, and the life I lead teaches me the futility of expecting things from/in people— validation, fulfillment, etc.

I am humbled and grateful to feel myself moving closer to my goal ---not because of/despite of the material circumstances in my life—but through them. My highest aspiration is no longer achieving any kind of worldly station (that feels so pointless and ephemeral now), but rather meeting Allah SW sincerely trying to do my best: Ana ‘ala ‘ahdika wa wa‘dika ma-stata‘t….

My sweet niece, maybe the best thing you can do early on is freeing yourself of happiness as a life goal and expectation.

At the end of the day, it’s not in your hands. Happiness is a rizk (a bounty) from Allah SW, and the extent to which it has been apportioned to you is in His knowledge alone.

Maybe the more important questions are what kind of person you want to be, and how you will prepare yourself for the one and only sure appointment of your life.

But the weather is nice. The basketball awaits players. The staircase awaits us.

Let’s go continue this conversation outside.

V’s House

Newton, MA

I stand in V’s kitchen as she makes me a latte. V was born “in a real Vermont town, not a fake one like Stowe, super touristy and rich and they treated us like crap.” “Okay look,” she says, “when the coffee comes de-own it’s gotta look like a rat tail. There. That’s rat tail enough. The milk foam is not supposed to have these big re-ound bubbles. To avoid that you sink the milk spe-out deeper. Like this. Ismail’s foam is better’n mine, even though I worked as a barista. My brother’s foam is better’n mine, too. But look, this is good foam. Hold on. I won’t give ya this espresso shot. It was the first one we made this mornin’. The crema is off. Look. You’ll see the difference in the crema when I make the new one. The Vermont pottery artist who made this mug is Shari Zabriskie. I love her! No, No, No! Not the same as the artist who made the one you’re holdin’. That mug is from Martha’s Vineyard. Okay, see this crema? It looks wicked different, right?”

“Right! Totally.” I see no difference at all.

“I know! Okay. Here. You take this. Gotta run to work ne-ow. Salams!”

I am at V’s house today because I need a place to work this morning and I need a place to leave my kids when I go see Baber today.

A few months ago we moved back to NJ to fulfill family caretaking responsibilities. That’s where we live now. But I must come to Boston with the kids because dissertation chapters sent to my octogenarian PhD advisor through e-mail go into ‘ālam al-ghayb (the realm of the unseen). And they stay there. This is year ten of my PhD. I’m not taking chances. I’m coming to hand him my chapters in person.

At a loss for why he never finds his e-mails, Baber told me recently: “Someone is coming into my Inbox and stealing my e-mails. Why would anyone do that?” He was indignant at the invisible thief, and at that moment I forgot my own petty dissertation worries and was as indignant as him. How dare they! Who steals from such a dignified old man?!

Yesterday I alongside my eclectic Boston friend group racked our brains trying to figure out who could watch my kids today so I could go see Baber. I was staying at my best friend R’s home in Weymouth. Her apartment has two bedrooms. She gave me the master (my two kids and I slept on her bed) and she slept with her two little daughters in their room. Her girls have tween beds, and R. is a tall woman. I’m not sure where or how she slept. But when I tried to ask questions she shushed me.

“It’s none of your business. I’m okay. Go to sleep.”

“Hader” I said. No point arguing with R. when she sets her mind to something.

And whichever way we slept was totally worth it because the next morning I sat cross-legged on her vinyl kitchen floor with a cup of coffee, elated to be with her in person again.

“I think I’ll get a small kitchen table and two chairs,” she said, looking at me on her bare kitchen floor, a pan in her hand. “Next time you come inshallah you’ll have something to sit on.”

“I have never been more comfortable in my life,” I said, fully believing it.

I met R. when she and my husband worked in the same mosque in Boston. Her oldest daughter was my son Zayd’s age. For a long time, we’d hang out at the mosque’s café after Friday prayer and let the kids play. For a long time, I thought our relationship was good enough. But then the laundry thing happened during Covid.

“So Um Zayd, you know… I don’t have a washing machine at home… the girls subhanAllah go through so many clothes… and now with Covid taking them out masked to the laundromat… sometimes in the cold… it’s getting hard….I was thinking maybe can I use your washing machine when I come to see you?”

“Oh my God, R, of course!” I said, “Why didn’t you say anything before?!”

For shame! How long had I been her friend and not known about her laundry issues? Those weekly lunches at the mosque’s cafe hadn’t do much for us, had they? Did it take a pandemic to shut down our institutions so we’d invite each other into the true vulnerability of our lives and homes? How hard did it have to get to force us to swap “propriety” for raw and real?

So then that became our new thing. R. would arrive to my apartment with bags of dirty laundry, we’d throw them in the wash and let the kids play. The two of us would have coffee, and chat, and eat, and laugh, and hug, and cry. R thought I was doing her a favor, but only because I too had hidden things. Things like how lonely I was and how desperately I needed sisters in my life (Not friends. Not colleagues. Not acquaintances. Not peers. Sisters). So it worked for us both: I would take care of her laundry and she would take care of my heart.

What else could one ask for in this world?

More of it. One can ask for more righteous companionship. More suhba saliha.

So there was R, but there was also N, and there was H, and V, and A, and M, and T…

Now that R left Boston and moved to more affordable housing in Weymouth, our other friend M became her neighbor. During this trip to Boston I wanted to see her too, congratulate her on her newborn , and give her a money gift for the baby, so R invited her over and other friends in the group. “We’ll figure out together how to get you to your appointment with your professor tomorrow, Um Zayd. Don’t worry.”

Leaving NJ I had asked R. to please buy me a money gift card and a welcome baby Hallmarks card from CVS. “I’ll Venmo you right now,” I had said.

With M soon to arrive, R gave me the money card. “And where is the baby card?” I asked her.

“I didn’t buy it. It was six dollars. SIX DOLLARS! I said WHAT?!?! FOR A CARD?! NO WAY. I’m not wasting Um Zayd’s money like that.”

“But R.!! I Venmoed you so you buy me a card!!”

“You don’t know what I did,” she laughed hysterically.

“Oh no, what did you do?!”

“I called M and I asked her if she had a spare baby card that I could give you so you can gift it to her.”

“You did what?!!”

“It’s M. No formalities needed. But hold on. Hold on.” She disappeared into her bedroom and reappeared with a bundle in her hand. “Here is a $1 pack of 12 cards that I bought, you can use one for M. and keep the rest.”

The cards had a big ugly yellow sunflower in the middle.

When M. arrived I gave her the ugly sunflower card, the money gift card, and my husband called to make duah for the baby (This is all M really wanted. She wanted my husband –the imam- to pray for her newborn).

“Okay banat. So who’s watching Um Zayd’s kids tomorrow?” R. interrupted the chatter to figure out logistics.

R herself couldn’t because she was traveling to Jerusalem on Thursday. N, our Pakistani-American friend who is a single mom of four kids under twelve would have them all at home, so no. S, a Kashmiri-British friend and mother of three whose husband is a cardiologist at one of the big Boston hospitals has a big party in her home in Newton and would be prepping for that. H, our Sudanese-American friend and the youngest of us all was off to New Hampshire to visit a friend who’s getting married in Arizona this coming weekend (H is that Muslim sister who knows everyone and whom everyone reaches out for assistance: visiting the sick, washing the dead, collecting money for a woman in debt, watching someone’s kid, driving someone somewhere, bringing groceries to an elderly auntie living alone, etc., etc. H is khidma goals!).

So after we studied all my options, Q. was the best suited to watch my kids this morning. A reserved and gentle Pakistani-American allergist-immunologist at Boston Children’s, she’s not the first person who comes to mind for the job of minding hordes of loud, bouncing children. But she volunteered. In a little bit she’ll be here at V’s house to watch my kids while I go see Baber.

( Later we found out that though we tried to spare N. watching my kids on top of her four, she ended up watching A’s kids— our Italian convert single friend who is a mom of two. She had work and no childcare, so N stepped in to help).

Headed to Harvard to hand Baber my chapters

When the Uber pulls up to Orchard street, I pull up my mask. The app says it’s required. I don’t want trouble with the driver. But the driver isn’t wearing his mask and only pulls it up when he sees me wearing mine.

“No need,” I reassure him. “I’m vaccinated.” I pull down my mask. If he doesn’t care, I don’t care.

But he keeps his mask on.

Around Harvard square nobody but a few Asian students seem to be wearing a mask. The weather is sunny and pleasant. It seems the memory of Covid is beginning to fade around here.

The Uber drops me off in front of Lamont Library at 10AM. I told professor Johansen that I would be at his home at 10:30. I have three chapters to print before I go to his place.

The gardens around Lamont are deserted. Is the library even open? I walk up the steps. It is. I try every door and someone inside signals the one with the enormous sign that reads ENTER HERE.

I walk in and the regular gates are closed. The guard wears a mask. A staff worker does too. “Here, I will see your ID.”

I show him my ID. He says “Okay, I’ll check for your book.”

“Oh I’m not here for a book. I am here to print.” I look right to the Lamont Café where the computers are, and where I have printed for years.

“I am sorry. The facilities are closed. We are only open for book check out.”

“Oh…”

“I’m sorry. We are behind CDC guidelines when it comes to indoor regulations. We were just chatting about it now.” He points at the other staff members behind him. “We lag a few weeks behind whatever the CDC says…”

“Oh! Is that Harvard being extra cautious?”

“That is Harvard being extra slow,” He laughs. “But if you want to put it that way, that’s better!”

I thank them and walk out. What now? I sit on the grass in front of Lamont and google printing places. FedEx and Gnomon are nearby.

Gnomon is, thank God, open. Or else this entire trip to Cambridge would be a waste of time. Not to mention all the mental gymnastics with my friends to get me to come here today (I wonder how Q. is faring with my children!)

At Gnomon, a masked man languishing alone in a printing shop that gets no traffic this time of the year prints my three chapters. I rush out and pass by a trendy cafe. Wow. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a cup of coffee there and write? I miss that sometimes. But I suppose that’s for single people who don’t have Q. watching their children at V’s house.

Everything in this life is a tradeoff.

When I arrive to Baber’s, disheveled and terribly late, I ring the door. “Janan?” It’s Maria Pia with her distinct French-Italian accent. “When I hung up, der will be a strong boozz. Then you must POOSH! the door. If it does not oh-pen, Baber will come down to get you.”

Baber will come down three flights of stairs to get me? This door better open on it’s own.

I walk up the stairs to the third floor and find Baber and Maria Pia — frailer, older…thinner?— standing by the door. Baber holds the door open for me. He walks me in, and does not sit until I sit.

“How are things with you? How are your kids?” He asks me, once we have settled on their slick leather couches.

“They are well, thank you. Growing older.”

“Is that so?”

Oops, don’t say obvious dumb things to Baber.

“Zayd is six years old now and Khadija is almost three. “I heard you had a PhD defense recently Professor?” I remember Maria Pia mentioned it on the e-mail. “Who defended?”

“Oh. Yes. Ari defended.”

“Oh, Ari! How nice! How did it go?”

“It was disastrous.”

Oh no. Poor Ari.

“Not Ari’s dissertation. No. That was good. Everything around it was terrible. The Zoom did not work.”

“Oh! I am so sorry to hear that.”

“I asked them twice before if the Zoom would work and they said it would, then the day of the defense I could not hear my colleagues, or Ari, and I could not participate. It was unbelievable.”

“Oh….”

“They proceeded to discuss without me. I don’t know what they said. I don’t know Ari’s arguments. In my entire career nothing like this has ever happened. And at Harvard no less!”

“And they passed it?”

“Yes! M did call me on the phone, but then they had no time to recount to me what had been said during the meeting. They just told me they approved it…”

Baber speaks in his usual calm, composed and soft tone. But the indignation is clear. This is the ultimate betrayal. A rupture of norms supposedly inviolable. A subversion of the right order of things.

“I will now have to provide all my comments in writing.”

“Ari is all the luckier for it, Professor. He will have your feedbacks and comments in writing and he gets to keep them!”

He hums unconvinced.

“I never imagined I would be on a dissertation committee and not be present at the defense.”

Treason. This was high treason, and Baber is deeply wounded. But what could they have done? I imagined an anxious Ari ready to defend. I imagined all the other faculty and Ari waiting as Baber tried to log in. I imagined them deciding that for Ari’s sake, the defense had to go on as scheduled. Short of going to Baber’s home in person to assist him logging in, nothing else could have been done.

“Harvard has become unbelievable. They could not schedule the vaccines. They are terrible with the retirements package… I lost access to my office and now they even want to take my computer. The West is in decline.”

“The West?”

These moments are rare. A reserved man, Baber keeps his relationships to his students strictly academic. He rarely shares his personal opinions about the world and never opens up about his personal life, which has made it impossible to ask him the questions I really want to ask. Questions like: what’s next for him?

Forget Harvard and losing access to his office. What about when he loses access his kitchen stove, to his Internet connection, and he can’t remember how to pay the electricity bills? Forget having his work computer taken away. What’s going to happen when he has his memory taken away? Do these thoughts cross his mind? Why in God’s name are we talking about Harvard? Did Baber really think Harvard was going to send someone to personally schedule his Covid vaccine for him? And then appoint someone to drive him to the vaccination site?

What do people who devote their lives to institutions expect of them in return? It baffles me and angers me. Where is the family that is responsible for these two aging seniors? Where is the eclectic Boston friend group that will show up with groceries and offer to take care of errands for them simply because “he is not of us who does not have mercy on young children nor honor the elderly” ? Baber wants to know where is Harvard at the eclipse of his career? How about where is his family and community at the the eclipse of his life?

“The West acts defensively now. Like they need to protect themselves. I can’t imagine how they would behave if there was real poverty. Or an actual war.”

I don’t have Baber’s longue durée perspective of the world. Perched on his eighty-plus-tall tree he has a view of the forest that I lack. But in front of me he is and has been for the past ten years of our lives. The lines on his furrowed skin have deepened. The leaves have wilted. Roots are retracting and shrinking, and Baber —once strong, proud and peerlessly bright—shakes.

I don’t know what Baber knows, but I see his decline and I witness his increasing dejection, and it angers me. What kind of civilization elevates a man to the peak of professional and career accomplishment and leaves him so exposed and vulnerable at the end of his life?

“Did you get the phit-ser?” He changes topics.

“The Pfizer? Yes.”

“That’s very good.” A nod to order, to progress, to science, and to institutions.

On the little side table to our side are two piles of CDs, on top of each pile is a CD of Um Kulthum and on top of the other a CD of Y-yo Ma.

On the side table by his couch is a small pile of three books by university presses: the titles read: Dignity, the second reads Justice, and the third reads Dignity again, by another author.

Dignity. Karama, in Arabic. Indeed, We have dignified the children of Adam, carried them on land and sea, granted them good and lawful provisions, and privileged them far above many of Our creatures (Qur’an 17:70).

“Baber Johansen – one of the world’s most eminent scholars of Islamic studies and a leading specialist, in particular, on topics of Muslim law – has accepted a tenured position at Harvard University as professor of Islamic religious studies in the Faculty of Divinity, effective July 1.

Thus read an entry from The Harvard Gazette on March 10, 2005.

Institution-granted privilege.

Institution-given prestige.

And yet who will hold this old man’s hand —when the time comes, as it will— and walk him to the departure gate with his God-given dignity in one piece?

“When is the deadline for these chapters?” He asks me.

Oh…deadlines! So glad you mention deadlines! So about that greatest and surest Deadline we’re all inching closer to, Professor, I was thinking, so what’s the plan?! Are you thinking of moving back to where your extended families are? Are you in touch with your siblings and their children at all? Do they know how you’re doing? Would they visit?

Ah! If I had the gall to say such things! In our world of high academic distinction and high propriety, one does not.

One does not ask about the dirty laundry or bring up one’s own.

No. Your accomplishments and accolades were your own, and now your burdens are also yours alone to bear.

Show up in perfect clothing, speak in perfect diction, and respect others’ “boundaries.”

So, like a very proper student and very proper advisee, I say: “Late September, Professor. I’ll bring you the next chapter before the deadline arrives.”

“Alright.”

“The kids and I leave back to New Jersey today. I better get going, Professor.”

“That’s right. How old is your baby now?”

“Baby? Oh! My daughter. She’s almost three now.”

“So big. You can bring them next time.”

“Thank you, Professor. Maybe I will.”

-

Y’s apartment, Roslindale MA

8:45AM

After I confirmed Baber’s and Maria Pia’s vaccine appointments, I spent a great deal of time worrying about them figuring their way around Fenway Park on their own. I should go with them, I thought. But would it bother them if I came? Would it make them self-conscious? For years, I had been nothing but a student to them, and now here I was, crossing personal lines because I saw no other way around it. I e-mailed them asking if they’d like me to come with them, and Maria Pia responded: “Yes, please. Thank you for thinking about this.”

I left my children with my husband and brother Afifi, my husband’s friend who is a limo driver, picked me up at two in the afternoon from our apartment in Roslindale. We drove to Baber’s apartment through Riverway, past Jamaica Plain, Longwood, then Fenway. We crossed the Charles River into Cambridge. The weather was dark, cold, and foggy. The waters of the Charles were partially frozen, and the streets around Massachusetts avenue, normally bustling with Harvard students at this time of the year, were empty and desolated.

We parked in front of their building on Harvard street and waited. At 2:55PM, Professor Johansen and Maria Pia descended, arm in arm, he tall and lean in a black trench coat, she petite and slim in a black duffle coat. I was anxious. I had not seen them in over a year and a half (had anyone had?).

Brother Afifi and I quickly got off our seats, opened our doors and helped them into the car.

“Hello Professor! It’s so good to see you! Hello, Dr. Di Bella, please, follow me.”

As I would for years with my children, I leaned a bit over Maria Pia to help her buckle her seatbelt, which she was not able to figure out on her own. Brother Afifi helped Baber with his. “Thank you,” he said under his mask.

During the car ride we chatted about the weather, about the conspicuous absence of students in the area this time of the year, and about my husband’s ankle sprain—one must watch the ice these days! Afifi then dropped us off at the stadium and I walked in with Baber and Maria Pia. A cheerful volunteer met us at Gate A, on 4 Franklin st. He gave us directions (follow the arrows towards the registration desk).

Fenway’s gates and narrow alleys must have gazed down on us with wonder. In place of the cheerful, rowdy masses decked in team colors, there was only a hushed crowd of frail elders. Many stood alone, their expressions wary and withdrawn. No matter how much health officials promised safety, a sense of fear loomed over us all.

“You already took the vaccine, I am sure?” Baber asked me as we stood in line.

“No, Professor. I have not. I am not in any priority group yet.”

“So what made you think of this?” he asked.

“Harvard sent an e-mail to everyone alerting those in the 75+ age group that they are now eligible to vaccinate.”

“I did not get that e-mail.”

“Right. I figured that with your computer issues you might not, so that is why I e-mailed it to you and your wife separately.”

“Thank you for thinking of that,” He said.

“Professor, hādhā min faḍl al-muʿallim ʿalā ṭālibihi,” I said in Arabic, with a smile. His eyes smiled back, ever so lightly, with a knowing sparkle.

“What did she say, Baber?” Maria Pia asked him, with an earnestness that suggested a life-long habit of asking him for translations from the Arabic language. After all, Maria Pia–an Italian by birth and French by culture—had been Baber’s most faithful companion in a world of her husband’s choosing, not her own: the academic world of Islamic and Arabic studies.

“She said,” Baber raised his voice and cleared his throat: “Hādhā min faḍl al-muʿallim ʿalā ṭālibihi.”

Maria Pia frowned. “But what does that meeean, Baber?”

Seeing that he felt amusedly disinclined to translate, I leaned towards her and said “That means, this is from the merit/virtue of the teacher upon his student! It is my pleasure to be of help to my teacher, Dr. Di Bella!”

The acoustics of the cloistered space, combined with our muffled voices under double masks, meant she could not hear a word I said.

“HE IS MY TEACHER!” I pointed to Baber in exaggerated arm motions, by means of explanation. She didn’t get it, but gave up with a shrug.

Soon we arrived to a spacious foyer area, where there were up to nine stations vaccinating at the same time.

“Are you together? Go to Five.” A volunteer told us.

I walked them to the makeshift desk marked with the number five, where a white middle-aged lady with thick blonde hair waited for us.

“Please have a seat!” She said to us. I gave her the reservation e-mail, and walked away.

“May I help you?” Asked me a volunteer, as I looked for a place that was far enough from Baber and Maria Pia to give them privacy, but close enough to keep an eye on them, in case they needed me.

“I am with them. I am waiting.”

“Please wait behind this line,” He said. There were lines and signs everywhere—a new topography of disease drawn over a baseball stadium.

I took out my phone and gave updates to my husband. “No, I will not get vaccinated.” “Why?” he asked. “I did not preregister.”

I looked up to Baber and Maria Pia and saw her chatting animatedly with the vaccinating lady. What was she saying that made the lady laugh? She was just being Maria Pia. Baber sat by her side, quiet and solemn.

The next time I looked their way, Baber had taken off his jacket and sweater. At eighty-four, Baber maintained a proud, dignified, and upright posture. He stood tall, still a handsome man (he’d been a swimmer and great at football, Maria Pia once bragged with a twinkle in her eye). When the vaccine shots were done, he gently extended his arm to escort her out. She responded by lovingly interlocked her arm with his. Their love was palpable.

“Wait there for fifteen minutes.” They wanted Baber and Maria Pia “under observation,” along with the other elders.

We walked to a side of the room, where there were two chairs. I arranged them facing each other and asked them to sit. Professor Johansen, ever the gentleman, would not sit. He gestured at the seats with his hands, telling us ladies to sit.

“No, no, Baber, you sit,” said Maria Pia.

Baber shook his head. “I wish to stand for a bit.”

Wishing to honor his chivalry, I sat. But Maria Pia would not sit unless her husband sat. Her eye caught another chair. I went to grab it. Finally, the three of us sat together.

“This was very eeeasy!” said Maria Pia. “They did not ask any questions at all!”

“Yes, it is pretty seamless. I am happy they have made it this easy.” I said.

“Well, they have to make it easy,” Baber said. “They need people to get vaccinated. This happened after World War two in Germany. There was tuberculosis and typhus and they needed people to get vaccinated, so they made it easy. I remember it well.”

“My mother was the director of an orphanage in Germany,” Baber continued. “We were five children. And my mother needed the refugee families and the orphans to get vaccinated. But they would not vaccinate. So one day, my mother lined up her children –all five of us—and vaccinated us so that everyone could see it. If the director of the orphanage vaccinated her children, it must be safe to do so. So they vaccinated too.”

The double-mask muffled Baber’s words, but I wanted so earnestly to catch this piece of his personal history. Who would carry these memories once Baber was gone? The question filled me with an inexplicable sadness and a strange sense of urgency. Once this nightmare was over, I had to return to their apartment in Cambridge to write these memories down for him. Would he be open to that?

“They could not work,” Maria Pia interjected. “Baber’s parents could not work because they objected to the Nazi party. They were objectors, so in that time, if you did not register in support of the party, you could not work.”

But still, his mother had found a way to help orphans. In 1942 they left Germany. “I saw my entire street in Berlin reduced to ashes. And I and the other kids would wake up in the morning and clear some patch of street from rocks, and play soccer. My mother did not like it. My parents were intellectuals, and they thought playing ball was a waste of time. But I told my mother: you cannot stop me from playing soccer. I will not stop.”

The conviction with which Baber still said “I will not stop” –seventy-five years later, across an ocean, in a stadium-turned-vaccination-center--struck me and moved me.

Now a mother, it was easy for me to see in this eighty-four-year-old man the blue-eyed eight-year-old boy he’d once been. I could imagine him kicking a ball amidst war-wrought debris and rubble. I could see him standing up to his mother --a woman raising children and the children of others in a hell of someone else’s making. And I could feel the unease she must have felt, wishing that Baber would stay indoors instead.

“May I help you with anything?” A cheerful man in his late forties suddenly appeared. With blonde hair graying at the temples, he leaned casually against a handrail, looking less like he belonged among frail seniors warding off death and more like a regular at a Cape Cod seafood bar.

“Uh…sure, can you help us with our appointments for the second dose?” Maria Pia asked.

“I sure can! Do you have a smart phone?” He asked her. Seeing her blank stare, he turned to me: “Do you have a smart phone?” I nodded. “Take a picture of this corner in that card.” He pointed at a card in Maria Pia’s hands.

I snapped a photo, clicked on the link that appeared on the screen, and the registration forms appeared on my phone. “Fill that in,” he said.

I began entering Baber’s data—I had it memorized by now, followed by MP’s date. When I hesitated on a question on insurance information, the man took my phone from my hands. “I can help you with that.” He swiped, swiped, swiped, and returned the phone to me.

“There you go. Pick a date.” I did. “Tap confirm.” “Okay, now do it again.”

He got us all registered in under three minutes. “I’m actually not the person who handles registration,” he explained. “I’m the floor physician. I stay in the waiting room in case I’m needed, but since everyone is doing so well today, I taught myself how to register people.” He shrugged, looking less like a doctor and more like a baseball dad making himself useful on game day.

“Thank you!” I said. And, looking around me at a room full of 75+ women and men, I said: “Good thing you have not been needed!”

“Have a good one you all!” the physician waved and moved on to the next group of seniors.

Brother Afifi waited for us outside. The drive back to their apartment felt lighter. Baber and Afifi talked about Sudan. Baber knew the modern history of Sudan inside out, as well as much of its premodern history. He knew the names of its Sufi saints, of its jurists and its scholars. He knew about its climate and geography. Did he also say he’d been there? I can’t recall. But listening them to them speak with such familiarity and camaraderie was pure joy.

I told them that after their second dose, they must return to Fenway Park, but for a baseball game.

“That would not be interesting,” Baber said, meaning it. He had never liked the game. He was partial to soccer.

When we arrived to his apartment in Cambridge, Baber and Maria Pia exchanged some words in French. I understood that it was something about paying Afifi for the ride. I tensed up, knowing that Afifi would be hurt and insulted if he was offered money for his khidma (act of service).

When Maria Pia took money out of her purse, I said, “no, no, it’s not necessary.”

“How?!” She opened her eyes wide. You must pay the man, she said to Baber in French.

But Baber understood.

“Non, ma chérie, ce n’est pas nécessaire.”

Maria Pia insisted. But Baber shook his head slightly but firmly and gave her a look. “Non, non.”

Baber, the octogenarian German Harvard professor, shook Afifi’s hand, thank him and thanked me.

“It’s my pleasure, Professor.”

Arm in arm, Baber and Maria-Pia walked back into their apartment building.

Afifi and I watched them disappear behind the front door and drove away.

Hādhā min faḍl al-muʿallim ʿalā ṭālibihi.

This is from the merit/virtue of the teacher upon his student.

For context: In February of 2021 Covid-19 is raging. The month prior was terrifying. We were told Massachusetts reached the peak of its second major wave, with record-high daily cases. In January 1^st alone the state reached a single-day record of 6,887 confirmed cases, and by January 7, over 219 communities were classified as “Red” (high risk). Boston itself first entered the “Red Zone” on September 30^th, 2020, and wouldn’t exit until much later in the year (June).

Following quarantine orders, my husband and I coop up in our small Roslindale apartment (Boston, Red Zone) with our two small children. My husband is an imam and his mosque is under strict congregation restrictions. I am a PhD student who’s completed two chapters of her dissertation, and wonders often whether writing the remaining three isn’t totally futile. Nothing makes you doubt the utility of writing on 9^th-12^th al-Andalus like having to disinfect every canned vegetable and sack of potatoes that enters the home.

Beyond personal doubts about my PhD work, the practical challenges to writing feel insurmountable. Even before we had both kids at home, I relied on the university’s libraries for work space. But they closed. Public libraries closed. Cafeterias closed. For a while I worked in a café, masked like everyone else, but even that ended when time and seating limits were imposed. Work at home was impossible and many times I almost quit. But Y, a brother from our community, heard of my situation and said I was welcome to use the empty unit in his family condo in Roslindale.

So every other day, for a few hours, I venture out (masked) to Y’s empty apartment to try very hard not to think of the impending apocalypse, and rather focus on writing carefully-worded and meticulously-cited sentences. My communication with my octogenarian advisor, Baber Johansen, is sparse. Over decades, I and many other students met with Professor Johansen in person —first in his office at CMES at 38 Kirkland Street, then in Andover Hall. He personally signed our “study cards,” corrected our papers in actual physical paper and returned them to us in manila envelopes with our names handwritten on them.

But technology gradually pulled him away from us and from the world of academia, where he’d built himself and built his home.

With irreverent absoluteness, it yanked the signposts and simple routines that had anchored him and steadied him all along: Online forms which he could never quite locate replaced the “study cards.” The essays he’d underlined, commented on, and returned to his students in Manila envelopes now disappeared upon entry into the morass of his digital inbox. Even grading — for so long requiring nothing but a reasoned assessment and a quick scribble on the corner of a page— now required learning new (digital) routes, memorizing new directions, and venturing into new (cyber) destinations.

Every new change pushed him further away into unfamiliar narrow roads. He got lost often, but in this cowardly new world there was nobody around to ask for directions. How did others manage? Did they all speak a language he had failed to learn? Was someone going to check on him when they noticed he’d gone missing?

But the people who noticed he’d gone missing were largely the people who wanted something from him. A grade. A recommendation letter. A course permission approval.

And with time, there were fewer and fewer people who did.

We registered for other courses. We found ways to circumvent his absences and silences (the department admin signed our study cards for us in his stead so we — the few advisees left— no longer required his signature). Conference organizers invited other people. The university assigned courses to younger faculty. Colleagues juggled their own workloads, their own aging spouses and their own aching bodies.

And what remained? Who remained? Baber and his petite Italian wife Paria Pia had had no children. Their nearest kin, whom they seldom mentioned, lived in Germany and in Italy.

And now, enter COVID19.

If technology had disrupted his connection to the world he knew best and called home, this global pandemic now threatened to eject him from the world writ large.

And what would remain?

Who would notice Baber’s silences and absences now that silence and absence were themselves the norm? Who would check on him, when most of those who wanted something from him had now long moved on with their lives? (In 2021, I was Baber’s last remaining PhD advisee). Who would worry about his decrepitude and deepening isolation when newspapers hurled death rates and “red codes” to our faces every waking day?

And if —-the thought robbed me of sleep at night— they died, who would find out and how?

Who would bury them?

Who would mourn?

Who would care?

February 12, 2021

It’s 2:30AM and I am completely awake. I give myself forty minutes to fall back asleep, and when that fails, I tiptoe out of the bedroom aiming to work on chapter three. I walk past the kids’ beds making sure both kids were covered. I grab my work bag from the office and I settle in at the kitchen island, perching on one of the tall, uncomfortable chairs.

I open my Harvard e-mail and see this:

Oh my God, Baber and his wife can get vaccinated now! What an immense relief that will be for them! I should forward this e-mail to Professor Johansen and his wife. I’m sure they got it and won’t see it. They’ve been hunkering down in their Cambridge apartment, barely going out and seeing anybody.

I shoot this e-mail to them:

I work two hours on custodial charts for the third chapter. Yasir wakes up around 5AM. Then Khadija walks out of the bedroom half asleep. She wakes up every single morning, without fail, between 5AM and 6AM to ensure that I am in bed with her. If I am not, she punishes us by starting her day then.

I spring off the tall chair, scoop her up, and put her back in bed. She falls asleep again. I pray Fajr and lie down by her side. I have been awake for about four hours and I need sleep. But Zayd is now starting to wake up. There goes that.

My friend Hayfaa picks me up at 8:20AM to go work at Y’s. It’s been a while since our last working escapade.

At Y’s I must be efficient. Time away from the kids to write is measured with a dropper. No second can be wasted. I quickly read a few pages of Marion Katz’s Women in the Mosque — my gold standard in academic writing—to get the academic gears turning again and then switch to my own writing.

Mid-morning, this e-mail pops up on my screen:

They will need help setting this appointment. There’s no way they’ll figure this out on their own. I go online, find the application for the vaccine, and call them. I speak to Maria-Pia. After some friendly chatter I go straight to the point. Hopefully this will be quick.

“Mrs. Di Bella, I have the application here in front of me, in my computer. Let’s get you registered, ok?”

“Sure, thank you. It is so great that the vaccine is available now. It would be such a relief! What do we need?”

“Let’s see….”

I ask the questions. She gives me answers. I enter them into the system. Her mood is cheerful and chatty as usual. She speaks in a heavy French accent, and occasionally turns to Baber to ask him how to say such and such thing in English: Baber, comment dit-on que ma carte a expiré ? “It expired,” he says.

The insurance is on Professor Johansen’s name. I need his information now.

“Dr. Di Bella, can I please have Professor Johansen’s date of birth?”

“He is five years older than me.”

“September 15, 1936,” He says in the back, impatient with his wife’s oblique answers.

“It is September 15, 1936,” she laughs. “He is very old. Very, very old. I need to get a new husband. A younger one. No more than thirty years of age.”

I laugh.

“Okay, let’s see…I am going to need a photo of the front and back of your insurance card. Dr. Di Bella, would you know how to take a picture of the front and back of your card and send them to my phone?

“Yes I can. But then all the people who would want to steal my insurance card would get it too…”

Hmm. I am not sure how to respond to that. But after some thought, she decides that Covid is more dangerous than counterfeit, and obliges: “Okay, I will do that. I will send to you.”

“Thank you. Let’s move on to these questions in the application….” I begin to read:

Is this your first or second COVID-19 vaccination? *

“First.”

“Are you feeling sick today?”

“I am not. But I did not take the vaccine today. I don’t know how I will feel when I take it.”

“Have you ever received a dose of COVID-19 vaccine? If yes, which vaccine product? …Pfizer … Moderna Another product?”

“No.”

Have you ever had a severe allergic reaction (e.g., anaphylaxis) to something? For example, a reaction for which you were treated with epinephrine or EpiPen, or for which you had to go to the hospital?

“Only to some men. But other than that, no,” She giggles.

Have you received passive antibody therapy (monoclonal antibodies or convalescent serum) as treatment for COVID-19? *

“Oh no, heavens no!”

Have you received another vaccine in the last 14 days? *

“No”

Have you had a positive test for COVID-19 or has a doctor ever told you that you had COVID-19?

“Oh no! I haven’t”

Are you pregnant or breastfeeding?

“No, not as of now. Not yet… I don’t know, maybe?”

I write no.

I finish going through the questionnaire with her. “Mrs. Di Bella, I am going to hang up now and give you a few minutes to take a picture of the front and back of your insurance card and send it to me. Then I will call back and get Professor Johansen’s information, okay?”

“Okay” She agrees.

“Will you know how to take a picture of your card with your phone and send it my phone number?”

“Yes. But what is your phone number?”

I give it to her.

“Okay, Mrs. Di Bella, I will wait to receive the photos.”

We hung up. Over half an hour goes by and Maria Pia does not send the pictures. Seated in front of my laptop in the middle of Y’s small living room, I realize it will not happen.

I call the Aging Services Support line provided in the e-mail. Maybe this dumb requirement isn’t necessary.

I dial the number. “If you are eligible to receive the vaccine, the best way to make an appointment is to go to mass.gov/covidvaccine….. If you are seventy-five or older and have difficulty making an appointment please press four… vaccines are limited at this point and yada yada yada ….”

I am finally directed to a woman. No, I am not booking for myself. I am booking for a couple, they are over seventy-five years of age. No, I am not their caretaker. No, I am not a relative. I am booking their appointments online and I am being asked to upload their insurance card… is it absolutely necessary…. It isn’t required. Where I am booking that is asking me for that? I am booking on https://www.cic-health.com/vaccines? No, I am not. Am I on https://vaxfinder.mass.gov/

Where am looking? Because the insurance card is not necessary, the woman says.

“Well, yes, it is allowing me to proceed without it.”

“That means it isn’t necessary…”

“Well, it does ask for an upload…”

“It’s not necessary.”

“Okay. Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know.”

I proceed on the page, only to learn that there are no slots available for the day I have picked. When I go back to select another date, all the information I have entered is lost.

Darn it.

I call Maria Pia. I will get all their data and book over the phone. Forget this online nonsense.

“Hellooo?” Maria Pia picks up the phone in her distinct Italian-French accent.

“It is me, Janan Delgado again. Hello”

“Hello Janan. I have taken the pictures of the cards and e-mailed to myself, but they did not appear anywhere. So I sent them to your e-mail. Did you get them?

“No, I didn’t…. But that’s okay… Can I please have your dates of birth again? I am sorry. I lost the information.”

“Oh don’t be sorry! I completely understand. Things get lost all the time with computers.”

I get their information and hung up.

The phone rings. It’s my husband. Am I almost done with my work for today? The kids are cranky. Khadija is crying. Today is Friday, he has an online sermon for the Wayland mosque at 1PM and he can’t have Khadija shrieking her lungs out in the back. It is 12:30PM now. I check with Hayfaa. She is on a call. She can’t leave now. I will leave as soon as she can hang up, I promise.

I have time to call Mass.gov again.

I call. “If you are eligible to receive the vaccine, the best way to make an appointment is to go to mass.gov/covidvaccine….. If are seventy-five or older and have difficulty making an appointment please press four… vaccines are limited at this point and ….”

When I am finally connected to an operator, we can barely hear each other. She asks : Are you (inaudible) self?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you booking (inaudible)?”

“Am I booking for myself? No I am not. I am booking for an elderly couple who are over seventy years of age.”

“Their names please”

“Baber Johansen…”

“Please (inaudible) (inaudible) that?”

“Excuse me? You’re breaking up.”

“PLEASE REPEAT THAT”

“BAA—BEEE-RRR JOOOOOO. HAAAAAN SENNNNN….”

“Spell that”

“B as in boy. A. B as in boy. E. R as in….uhh… Robin. JOHANSEN…. J as in ….jack….”

“I didn’t catch that. Again please.”

This is ridiculous. How on earth do they expect seniors to book their appointments like this?! If we’re all dependent on this service to save our lives, we’re doomed. Hayfaa comes out of the office. We can leave now. I gather my things, the phone on my ear, and we leave. Khadija is probably losing it right now, and my husband will be starting his sermon soon.

I get in the car, and the lady and I can’t hear each other.

“The other name?”

“Maria Di Bella…” I spell-scream this name on the phone. Then:

“Is (inaudible) alright?”

“Excuse me? When? Tuesday?” I turn to Hayfaa: “Did she say Tuesday?” “I think so,” She says, herself at a loss.

“Yes, is Tuesday, February 16 alright?” She repeats.

“Yes”

“Fenway Park”

“Okay, Tuesday at Fenway park, what time?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t booked a time yet, Ma’am.”

“I am sorry.”

“Hold on the line.”

It is 12:55 now. We drive up Belgrade Ave, crossing to our side of Roslindale. We get home.

“Okay I booked for Johansen….”

I look at my e-mail. The confirmation is there. Allahu Akbar!

“Hold on for the next person.”

Hayfaa and I wait in the car. Several minutes go by. It is now 1:04. My husband is probably giving the sermon now.

“You know?” I tell Hayfaa, “ I read today that a person accompanying an elderly person to get the vaccine is eligible to take the vaccine as well on the same day.”

“Oh awesome! Are you going to take it?”

“No. I don’t want them to think I helped them because I wanted the vaccine myself.”

“But you didn’t even know this.”

“Yeah I know. But still.”

Finally, her voice again “and the other one. Done.”

I refresh my e-mail:

I thank Hayfaa and rush out the car. I yank open the front door of our condo building, run up the stairs, and get home breathless. My husband is in the office speaking. The kids are in the family room watching a movie. The apartment is quiet. Phew! Alhamdulilah..

When my husband finishes the sermon, I ask him: “Can we figure out a ride for them to get to Fenway Park?”

They don’t know how to get an Uber. Hailing a cab is not easy these days. How will they make it on time? Or at all? “Maybe we can send them Muhammad N. or Muhammad A?” I suggest. These men —One born in Egypt, the other born in Sudan—are my husband’s best friends in Boston. They are limo drivers.

“Yes of course,” he says. “We’ll take care of it.”

“Thank you.”

I e-mail them:

Later that evening, Hayfaa texts me:

“You should get it” My husband says.

“No… not this time.”

“That is silly. You have an opportunity to get it. Get it.”

I think we’d be lying if we said we’re not scared. And we don’t know when vaccines will be available for our age group. The vaccine is our safest bet to protect ourselves, right? But I won’t risk Baber feeling that I reached out to them for my sake.

We have dinner, I put the kids to bed…. Up since 2:30AM, I crash.

In four days I will be picking them up from their apartment in Cambridge to take them to Fenway Park. I am nervous. I haven’t seen them in a long time. And I am not vaccinated. Not to mention the awkwardness of this all. Professor Johansen has always carried himself with so much gravitas. And our advisor-advisee relationship is very old school: professional, proper and deeply impersonal.

I guess strange times call for strange measures?

I found out yesterday that my PhD advisor of eleven years passed away in late January, at the age of 89 (he was born on September 15, 1936). I am heartbroken by this news. I had wished so earnestly to come visit him in Boston before Ramadan, but I couldn’t pull it off. I am crushed by the fact that I couldn’t see him one last time before he died. La hawla wala qwata ila bilah.

After a long and illustrious academic career, I was Baber’s last doctoral advisee, to the best of my knowledge. As I toiled to finish my dissertation mothering two small children under lockdown, weathering a global pandemic, Baber and his wife Maria Pia were aging very rapidly. I witnessed the twilight of Baber’s brilliant career closely.

The only way I know to process this death is to go through my journals, revisiting bits and pieces of our long history together. I will share a few entries here on Substack one at a time, inshaAllah, followed by my reflections on his life in academia, and of our relationship.

At some point, I had many thoughts about what I saw— but I was too busy mothering. I jotted down notes knowing that one day, God willing, I’d revisit them and try to make sense of it all. Maybe that time is now.

Good bye, Professor. I am so sorry I did not get to say good bye.

--

I wanted this Ramadan so so bad

A few days before the month started, a dear friend asked me: Are you ready for Ramadan? I said: I’m so ready! I can’t wait! She said: Wow, that’s great! Tell me why! Maybe I can share in your excitement.

And I get it. The apprehension, I mean. Everyone wonders: Will I be able to perform my job/complete my assignments well while fasting? Mothers wonder: Will I have enough energy to run around my little ones? Will I be snappy and exhausted because of the disregulated sleep? Will I feel sad, lonely or resentful because I can’t join in the night prayers at the mosque because of my caretaking responsibilities? And the scariest of all: How will I function without coffee?!

But this year I didn’t care about any of it. I just wanted Ramadan. Bring on the thirst. Bring on the hunger. Bring on the caffeine-withdrawal headaches and lethargy. Bring on the chaotic kid sleep schedules. BRING. IT. ALL. PLEASE!!!!

If I recall correctly, I had never wanted Ramadan to arrive as urgently as I did this year. I had never anticipated so eagerly being deprived from food and drink for over twelve hours during thirty days straight.

Why was so desperate for the month this time around? Have my high hopes for Ramadan panned out as I had wished?

I was tired, in a soul-kind of way

“I think there are generally three types of people,” I tell my youngest sister Shaden as I wipe my kitchen counters one Ramadan day. Shaden, who is visiting me from Egypt for Ramadan, was a toddler when I left Ecuador at the age of eighteen. For two years, I fed her, bathed her, changed her, and put her to sleep. She doesn’t remember any of this. But I like to think this history gives me pontificating privileges.

“What was I saying? Ah. Yes. Three types of people. The first type is met with a difficult situation and says: This is more than I can handle, and walks away from the challenge. These people make decisions based on emotion—often fear—and therefore not on principle. We’re all prone to this of course, but don’t want to be in this group most of the time, and with the big things Shaden, because you can deprive yourself and others of a lot of good. And worse still, you open a big door for remorse later in life. You really don’t want to spend the last twenty or thirty years of your life of knowing that you ran away from a principled action because of fear or selfishness….”

“A second category of people,” I go on, “will understand that is required of them in principle, and take it on. They may not be ready for it mentally (they don’t fully get it). Or they may not be ready for it emotionally (they hate it in their hearts, or fear it tremendously, or are overcome with anxiety about it). Or they may not be ready for it spiritually (they haven’t really internalized the idea that hardship and sacrifice are means of spiritual elevation, or the idea that what we hate for ourselves may actually be good for us and what we love may not (Q 4:19). But still, they take on the challenge in front of them.

This people will often struggle a lot, because their decision will require a great deal of mujahadat al-nafs (striving against the lower self). Sometimes they will rise to the occasion and sometimes they’ll fail miserably. Sometimes they will put up a fight, and sometimes they’ll want to give up. And often, they will feel like that difficult thing they signed up for was totally above their pay grade. And they will experience pain (Pain, not regret, Shaden. We don’t regret principled decisions. We suffer through them, which is different).

The third type of people are those who willingly take on very difficult challenges, and they are ready for them. These people have highly developed spiritual muscles, they have a great deal of emotional maturity, and they know how to submit to the will of God with acceptance, humility, hope (in increased nearness to Him), and even joy (in experiencing their relationship with God flourishing through the sacrifices they have agreed to take upon themselves).

I know people in this third category, Shaden, and so do you. But we’re not in this category, LOL. Personally, I try to at least make it to the second. I hate to give in to cowardice and selfishness, and I regularly expect more of myself. So I will take on something difficult, even if I am woefully unprepared for it. I can think of concrete examples in my life when I have done this…. Long stories for another day… but the point is that I occasionally find myself in difficult challenges, and I feel like I am drowning. And it’s like I am playing spiritual catch-up, you know? Like I am trying to develop the spiritual muscle that will allow me to carry my burden, even as I am already carrying it and tumbling along the way.

And that’s the short of it, Shaden: Before Ramadan, I had been swimming against the tide in aspects of my personal life… and I felt anguish. Anguish, not regret. We don’t regret principled decisions, Shaden. We may just suffer through them. Which shouldn’t scare you. The threat of suffering is overrated. Through it we can rise to new spiritual heights and grow closer to God. Which is the whole point of life in the first place, right?

But I needed Ramadan to remember all of this. And there’s nothing like Ramadan’s spiritual bootcamp to grow spiritual muscles we forgot we had.

Beyond the personal

Beyond the personal, I was tired in a soul-kind of way because of… the Epstein files.

It was inevitable.

I have long been obsessed with the topic of children’s interests and children’s welfare. My PhD is on children’s custodial rights. It is also on religion and the metaphysical realm. So the monstrous scale of child abuse —as well as the odd allusions to rituals and temples—uncovered through this whole event were bound to suck me into a rabbit hole of unprecedented proportions.

After pouring dozens of hours into that hellish evil, I have so many mixed emotions and such little time to unpack them. Most pressingly, I will tell you this: I feel cheated. I suppose this is a very common feeling among common folk. We feel lied to. We feel there is deception at an epic scale, and that it is nearly impossible to access the truth because there are people in power who benefit from hiding it.

But if the whole truth is very difficult to access (it is “redacted”), as we say in Spanish: Donde el rio suena, piedras lleva. If the river makes noise, it carries stones. If all that reaches us common folk is the noise, this by itself is sufficiently nauseating, alarming and ghastly.

But Janan, you will say, you can’t possibly be surprised by lying and deception. We have known all along that they lie. We know it because we saw how they lied for decades on end about Palestine, and about Muslims, and about Islam. People in power lied through their teeth, and we knew differently, but it was impossible to access regular people to tell them the truth. Until, of course, social media came along and people were all of a sudden able to access information without the usual filters of lies upon agenda-driven lies, and so public opinion changed (hence the urgency to acquire social media now, to continue to control the narrative).

Yes, yes, I knew they lied.

But still, this felt a little different. This goes beyond a geopolitical power grab, a mass slaughter and a land grab that could still be explained in somewhat purely material terms, as I had been trained to do in secular academia.

This isn’t that. This is darker. This is rawer. And this is more covert. This takes us back to fundamental questions of good and evil that simply do not fit in secular terms. This takes us back to the foundational stories of Creator and creation which those of us raised in Islam (or Christianity) have known all along, but which we had to check out at the door of secular academia and secular public life.

And now, all that is disconnected from basic fundamental principles, all that ignores the oldest truths captured in Divine scriptures, all of that feels shallow and trivial. It feels like a curated arena where we are supposed to roll up our sleeves and play like well-behaved children who follow instructions and keep their heads down (and get As! Don’t forget the As!). And don’t ask, for example, why the heck are there so many reports of ritual child abuse, lest you come across as a little…. A little what?

And yet I want to know. I. Want. To. know. For Heaven’s sake, I am a PhD in the study of Religion!— Why did it feel acceptable in school to study the countless ways in which peoples across the world imagine and worship God, but we never talked about Satanic worship? Why is it that when some people explicitly –explicitly!—say they worship Satan and they are members of churches to that end, it still feels conspiratorial to talk about it?

I want to know, for instance, what the parents of that Israeli woman who accused them of ritual sexual abuse believe in. What do they believe in? Who do they worship? Why the gag order in Israel not to discuss her case? What is going on? Why are there entire realms of knowledge that feel forbidden, or beyond bounds? (And do you think that woman is lying? I don’t think she is. Man! That’d be a costly lie! ).

And the more I read about the evil of these cases… the more sick and tired I felt at the level of my soul. And the more I needed Ramadan.

(update: in Googling this case to link to this essay, i have just learned that the woman in question, Shoshana Strook, daughter of a zionist expansionist minister in Israel (the zionist expansionist project makes an appearance!) was found dead in her apartment four days ago).

Ramadan--- what we do

We fast during the day, and we engage in additional prayers at night. Where I live, in New Jersey, mosques are packed to the brim with young people and old people who seek their Lord with all their hearts.

God. God. God. God Almighty, the God of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, that is whom we worship. God the Creator who taught us that human life in inviolable, and who warns us in His book about His wrath against those who transgress, particularly the most vulnerable and weak among us.

With the heaviness of the Epstein files, I have lingered on those verses this month.

I have lingered on the verses that warn the evil-doers of His Divine Justice, and His Divine wrath against those who have transgressed in the land.

I never used to linger on those verses before. But since the genocide in Gaza, and now Epstein, I do now. And I reckon that Justice is a fundamental human need, and that some scores will not get settled in this ephemeral lowly world of ours, which we have corrupted, exactly as the angels worried when God announced that He would create mankind (Q 2:30: [Remember] when your Lord said to the angels, “I am going to place a successive [human] authority on earth.” They asked [Allah], “Will You place in it someone who will spread corruption there and shed blood while we glorify Your praises and proclaim Your holiness?” Allah responded, “I know what you do not know.”

(Shoshana and all child victims will get the justice they deserve).

What Ramadan accomplishes

Probably like most Muslims, I read more Qur’an in the month of Ramadan than I do throughout the year. And I am reminded of how desperately I need this spiritual nourishment in my life.

You either believe in the soul, or you don’t. And if you do, you better believe it requires nourishment and care. And Ramadan is that time of the year where we come to terms with the fact that we aren’t bodies with souls, but rather we are souls with bodies that will soon perish and be left behind.

People may think that abstaining from food and drink for 12 hours (more or less) daily, for a month, is very hard.

And sure, it is hard.

But in a world that increasingly lacks ethical restraint, and where every desire and whim of the body is obeyed, it is actually an immense relief to not cave in to the cravings of the body for a whole month. It is an immense relief to put the physical in its proper place, for once, and to elevate the spiritual to the place it actually deserves.

Thirsty and want water? No. Hungry and want food? No. Craving to fulfill sexual appetites? No. Craving to waste time in tasteless and useless entertainment? No. And so on and so forth.

Ramadan builds discipline, and it builds focus. It draws our attention to God and the haqiqa (Actual reality and truth) of this world…

… and when this world causes so much harm, and produces so much ugliness, that renewed focus on God in an immense relief.

An immense relief.

It can’t be done alone

Every Ramadan, alongside a sister and friend, Lena, I host breakfasts (which occur around 7PM) at my house on Tuesdays, and, lately, in other homes if other sisters will offer to host.

These iftars are potlucks. Everyone contributes. We then pray together while the kids keep each other busy and away from their moms (what a relief!).

The idea behind this was that it’s hard for moms to head to the mosque much, especially with littles, which can be isolating and sad. And The intention behind these gatherings was to provide an alternative, so that mothers (and increasingly, all women) feel they have a space to eat together, connect, and worship.

I hate planning and I hate organizing, frankly. But these gatherings are always worth it, and they are an additional little side of khidma (service) I do this month.

I am heartbroken that Ramadan is ending

I type the subtitle above and my eyes swell with tears. I am so grateful for the deeper connection to God which Ramadan facilitates, and I am so sad that this month is ending.

Most nights this month, I didn’t make it to the mosque because the night prayers run too late for my two youngest kids. The oldest, age ten, did go to the mosque every night this month, and completed his first ever khatm of the Qur’an (reading from beginning to end, all one hundred and fourteen chapters, distributed in the prayers over thirty days).

But I did make it with the littles tonight. The mosque was overflowing as usual, so we ended up squeezed into the makeshift tents outside. Thank God they were heated, and we were okay.

Tonight, the Imam completed the last chapters of the Qur’an, and ended the prayers with a long supplication. The supplication was addressed to the One and Only creator of the world, of the heavens and the earth. The Lord Adam, Moses, Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad supplicated to.

And while I kind had taken that for granted all my life –well duh, other than atheists, everyone worships God-- lately, and especially tonight, being a worshipper of God felt different. It felt powerful. It felt reassuring. It felt soothing. It felt hopeful.

It felt important in a whole new way. And urgent.

The silver-lining of Ramadan ending

What soothes my heart is that prayer rug on my bedroom floor, where I can always just prostrate my forehead to my generous, loving, kind Lord, and glorify Him and connect with Him.

Ramadan is ending tomorrow with sunset at 7PM.

But alhamdulilah, alhamdulilah, alhamdulilah (thank God, thank God, thank God), our Lord is ever present.

I am no longer tired in a soul-kind of way. I have found my healing in the rituals God has gifted us with this month. Alhamdulilah!

I have been reminded once again that the challenges of this world are surmountable if only we have our Lord with us. I have been reminded that even material discomfort and pain can be sweet when it is endured for the sake of our Lord. How else would one explain the sweetness of such a physically taxing month?

And oh! Wouldn’t it be nice, Shaden, if we could take this insight and apply it to all of our lives?

Wouldn’t it be nice, Shaden, if we one day we joined that third category of people, who take on Godly work, and who take on challenges for His sake, and who soar to the highest heights in their special connection to the Divine?

Wouldn’t it be nice, if one day we became awliya’ Allah – friends of our Lord?

Ah! That’s the dream, Shaden!

That’s the goal!

!

May you remember the Ramadan

of the mother of a small child.

When your heart aches for the mosque

So eager for its yearly mend,

When your jama’a is two at most

In the place of a thousand men,

May you remember the Ramadan

of the mother of small child.

When small feet run around you,

When mid-prayer fights erupt,

When you hide a little but they find you

Because it’s time for a third snack,

May you experience the Ramadan

of the mother of a small child.

When you crave for time alone

With the Creator of the world,

But your craving must hold off

For the needs of thirds and fourths,

May you experience the Ramadan

Of the mother of a small child.

When instead of the eight raka’as

Or twenty-one you had intended

You must quench your thirst with two,

So quickly wrapped, so sadly ended,

May you experience the Ramadan,

Of a the mother of a small child.

Where instead of the soothing melody

Of the beloved imam’s tajweed,

You must hear but your own voice

So tired as it reads,

May you experience the Ramadan,

Of the mother of a small child.

And like the mother of a small child,

May you stare into the night sky,

And may you know His sight’s upon you,

As you struggle, as you try.

May you soon discover the sweetness

of tears flowing for your Lord,

A small body wrapped around you,

Her own tears wiped and gone.

May you soon find your kushuʿ

Once disrupted by a ringing phone,

Now unshaken by the tempest

Of tossing, turnings and sleepy moans.

May you find your hands full

Now with His word, now with a chore,

Alleviating others’ burdens,

drawing you closer to your Lord.

May you find within you the fortitude,

of mothers today and mothers of yore,

Some in camps, some at home,

Some in peace, too many in war.

And when your Lord wills this phase gone,

May you have risen to a higher station,

of those who lovingly respond

to serve Him and His creation.

Um Zayd

April 22, 2020

My mother-in-law, who has stage-four cancer and with whom we share a home, had caught the flu at the beginning of the winter break. Combined with a knee injury, her chemo, and a debilitating cough, her condition started to look pretty bad. Suddenly, a big number of worried relatives began flocking to our house. They filled up my MIL’s sitting room and the spillover was sent down to the family room where my children lied in ambush.

“Who wants to play Imposter? Who want to play charades?!”

Stuck awaiting spouses and siblings, these adults had nothing better to do than to pretend to be ducks, clowns and magicians. Not what they had signed up for when they showed up to our house, but here they were now, quaking and flapping and pretending to be teapots and brooms.

Upstairs, my MIL’s coughs were so intense that she had to gasp for air, her eyes bulging as she held on to the arms of her recliner. It looked like she was being shaken by violent turbulence, except the turbulence was within her, and it wouldn’t end.

Downstairs, boisterous laughter and loud arguments over games rules filled up the house. Fervent accusations over who was The Imposter flew across the family room. My toddler ran in circles around them daring someone to chase him: “You can’t catch me, You can’t catch meeee.” My seven-year-old daughter cajoled a niece to bake brownies with her.

To make this time even more exciting to my children, some relatives were spending the night here with us. With my husband traveling, they knew we needed the extra help at night. In other words, SLEEPOVER TIME!!! PAJAMA PARTY!!!

But all sweet things must come to an end. One day, my MIL got a little better. One night, she slept through without a cough attack. No more extended family support was urgently needed. And just like the out-of-state relatives returned to their home in Georgia, the local family members said their good-byes and went back home.

My son, broken-hearted, asked: Maybe Nena can be sick for just a little longer, mama? I love when all the family comes together. I’m going to miss everyone so much.

“We don’t need Nena to be sick to invite family over, habeebee. We can invite family over any day we want. Let’s pray that Nena recovers completely, because her cough has been bothering her so much.”

“Okay mama you’re right, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Zayd. I know what you meant.”

Some of my happiest childhood memories are when Grandpa Salim was dying

I really, really knew what my son meant.

When my siblings and I were very little we were always around my mother’s relatives at my grandfather jiddo Salim’s house. That was our happy place. Teresa the cook produced mana’ish in the mornings and other treats throughout the day. Chickens gifted to my grandfather ran around the backyard. My aunts, still single and childless then, were ours alone. They took us out on walks, introduced us to Disney movies, and showed us the first video game console we had ever seen (an Atari, was it?). The joy was endless.

Then my mother’s divorce and remarriage happened, and we stopped seeing our mother’s relatives except in very exceptional circumstances.

During those tough years, our hearts ached for jiddo Salim’s house and our extended family. They had been our entire world, the depth of which I can only truly understand now seeing my own little children’s attachment to their extended family.

But one day jiddo Salim got very sick. He was in his nineties. Being a very wealthy businessman, he got a suite at the best hospital in Quito at the time, Hospital Metropolitano. His room was wide, spacious, and well-lit. It had a balcony overlooking the city and the mighty Pichincha. He had a closet filled with cookies and imported chocolates (Quality Street) to give out to guests.

And sure enough—with jiddo so sick and nearing his last days, the entire extended family flocked to the hospital to visit. So many relatives showed up, that the spillover had to congregate in the hospital’s waiting room.

While some of the adults sat around jiddo Salim, watching him deteriorate over many days, the children and a rotating shift of adults hang out in the waiting room. We hadn’t seen some of these cousins in years! They were teenagers now, and boy were they cool! Primo Ricky had a tear on his jeans (that we pretended in front of my mom not to see) and an earring (things really frowned upon in my religious Muslim home).

Jokes were told. Cousins were roasted. Aunts were teased. It was all happy, and merry, and full of the kind of warmth that only family can provide.

For weeks after going home after school, my mother would tell us to get ready to go out: “We’re going to see jiddo al Hospital Metropolitano.”

It was music to our ears. Nothing beat the hospital. Not the mall. Not an amusement park. Not the cinema. Nothing.

To make things even better, at this time Hospital Metropolitano had the only vending machine we had ever seen in Quito (or anywhere). It was a true marvel: You got to insert a bill or two, press a code like B8 or C6 and you got the candy or chocolate of your choice. Pure genius.

It was at this time that I started my first diary ever—one of dozens I kept throughout the years. I did it because at the age of eleven, I felt this was a momentous time. Something big was about to happen. My grandfather’s death had to be recorded for posterity.

Grandpa Salim passed away in 1996. May Allah SW have mercy on his soul. With his death, the frequent impromptu family gatherings died too.

--

During the winter break New Jersey got a snow storm. The day it happened we had family over, so I retreated to my bedroom for some quiet time. Then, suddenly, I heard my nephews’ voices outside. I looked out and found them shoveling the snow. A few moments later, my own son ran outside to join them. In full winter gear, he grabbed a shovel and began working with them.

My husband was traveling. I was not prepared to deal with the storm (s?) on my own.

Watching them from above, my eyes swelled with tears: Praise God, certainly with difficulty comes ease (Q 94:5).

After shoveling, my nephews (in their twenties—one of them a cop, the other in construction) came in, sat around the dinner table, and ate from a huge vat of spaghetti and meat sauce I had made (earlier, it had hit me that I should probably feed all this family at our house).

I watched my nephews eat and I knew with certainty that I loved them more then than I ever had before. Ahmad, the police officer, offered to wash his plate. “No way. You’re not touching anything,” I said. “You shoveled my driveway. You get to sit and relax and not worry about a thing here.”

He seemed a little perplexed by my effusive gratitude. Such is his and his brothers’ manhood: they don’t notice how incredibly valuable their labor and help are. They expect no acknowledgement and no praise. They keep their head down and work. MashaAllah.

--

Modern societies banish pain, disease and death where they can’t be seen: hospital, hospices, elderly homes. It’s as though decline and endings belong in one place, and renewal and beginnings fit elsewhere. It’s as though we need things to be neatly organized and tucked away to cause ourselves the least disturbance possible.

But our time, comfort, and priorities— so carefully guarded today, are bound to become somebody else’s comfort, time and priorities carefully guarded tomorrow. And equally tragic, they are a missed opportunity for growth and connection now. Connection we all desperately crave for in our siloed lives.

—

On one of those days when we’d had family over all day, and I saw everyone fed and happy and present, I thought: this is what caregiving should look like. This is what it should feel like. Caregiving should not be a one-person job, or a lonely endeavor. It should be an opportunity to bring everyone together. It should leave everyone involved feeling seen, nurtured, connected, needed and important.

(The tribe confers value, purpose and meaning that people will spend lifetimes looking for elsewhere).

Perhaps when caregiving feels burdensome it isn’t because of caregiving itself. Perhaps the burden of caregiving is simply a family’s failure to come together when it should. And while the physical exhaustion of this labor can be quite real, I reckon that isolation and emotional disregard from the pack are actually what cut deeper.

The joy that my mother-in-law’s sickness brought during the winter break wasn’t an aberration. My son’s desire for more sick days was simply a desire for more of life as should always be: a communal affair, both in the good times, and the bad times.

And so we are promised that life will be: qabd and bast (constriction and expansion). Bitterness and sweetness. Difficulty and ease. Old age and youth. Winter and spring. Endings and beginnings. Decline and renewal.

And when these come under one roof—the village we were always meant to be— the tests become bearable, the support sustainable, and the experience of care replicable…

…And yes, even joyful.

I’ve been on this train for over five hours. Something feels off. We should be in Newark by now. The landscape flashing past us looks slightly unfamiliar. More rural, maybe? I should get up and ask. Ask what though? Where am I??

I get a text from my husband: I’m at Penn Station. Parked outside. Are you here?

The train moves fast, mile upon mile closer to God knows where. My muscles tense. I feel queasy. Where is this train taking me?

I must ask. I scan around me for options. Around me, a few middle-aged white men and a couple of women stare at their laptops and phones with a clear look on their faces: don’t talk to me.

A conductor shows up. “Excuse me… uh…what is the next stop?” I ask.

“Trenton.”

“… and… Penn Station…?”

“We passed it.” He doesn’t look at me. He walks away.

Passed it. What do I do now?

I feel stupid. I am not new to trains. In Cairo I took trains all the time. During my masters at NYU I navigated the NYC subway system like a pro. During my PhD I took the Amtrak trains.

But I’ve had two children now. I have been home for a few years. The domestic, once foreign, has softened my edges and is now what I know best. The outside world, where a lost mother-of-two isn’t owed as much as a look from a train conductor, feels alien and somewhat intimidating.

“I missed my stop,” I text my husband.

“Huh?”

“I am not sure what to do.”

“You’ll have to get off at the next station and ask what’s the quickest way to get back. You may have to take an Uber.”

Half an hour and sixty miles later, I get off in Trenton, NJ. The station looks empty. I plop on a wooden bench.

I cry.

--

Twelve-or-so years earlier.

I am a college student at the American University in Cairo and I know exactly where I want to go. I want to get there first. I low-key disdain anyone and anything slow.

Ask me what kind of people I admire the most. It’s driven people with an excellent work ethic. Ambitious people with clear goals, willing to put the time and effort needed to realize their dreams.

Growing up, some of my friends’ favorite animals were dogs. Dogs are loyal. Or cats. Cats are soft and cozy.

But my favorite animal is the bee. Bees work hard and get things done.

I am like the bee. I work hard and get things done.

If all goes according to plan, with my work ethic and drive, I’ll get into the PhD program of my choice, and one day I will teach at a prestigious academic program and publish many books.

I’m on the fastest train there is. Keep up with me, or move to the side.

--

Senior year in college.

My older sister is arriving to Cairo soon. I am enrolled in graduate-level courses by special permission from my department. I am a TF for a Political Science professor who has me entering data into election violence forms. I am a committee director in a Model Arab League conference. My daily calendar is booked from morning to night with very important obligations that further my goals, one small step at a time.

“My sister is coming to stay with me,” I tell one of my advisors as her arrival date approaches.

“Ugh, for how long?” she frowns. “Last time a relative visited me, I got so behind with my writing.”

Her advice? “Make sure she understands your schedule. Set boundaries.”

It’s awful but true: I adore my sister but I dread the amount of time this visit will take from me. I have places to get and very important things to do.

--

Fast-forward four years or-so—

I live in New York now.

One of my sisters will undergo a procedure. I am the only one who can go take care of her.

I have papers to write. Important graduate school obligations. I have PhD applications to prepare. I have academic conferences to attend. Technically, I can’t take time off now. Technically, I am really not supposed to travel. I’ll tell her: I so sorry. I really wish I could come. If only this was happening at a different time.

Chug. Chug. Chug.

This is not a detour I can’t afford right now.

But I book a plane ticket and go to her.

Is something beginning to crack?

--

Three-ish years later.

I am in the first year of my PhD program at Harvard. I am getting married. My fiancé still has one more year of studies and work in al-Azhar (Cairo). We don’t want to spend our first year of marriage apart.

I go to one of my professors to share my happy news.

“I am getting married!” I say. “My fiancé and I plan to spend a year in Cairo. I think I may request a one-year leave of absence.”

“You’ll fall through the cracks,” she says.

No congratulations. No excitement.

Just a train conductor warning me that this stop I am about to make is risky, stupid and irrational. It makes no sense within the fast and clear trajectory I have committed myself to.

(Later, much later, I will remember this incident and ponder this professor’s interest in my academic progress and my academic progress alone, her disinterest in my personal life, and her disdain for my slow transition away from the lone, atomistic individual who only considered her own interests and agendas, into a new being who wanted to adjust to someone else’s needs).

The professor’s inability to connect with me at one of the most important moments in my life cracks something further.

Do I actually belong here?

--

Spring of 2015

I have an appointment with my PhD advisor, a renowned German Orientalist who’s produced seminal work in the western academic study of Islamic Law.

I head to Andover Hall, in the Harvard Divinity School. I wear extra-loosing clothing to hide my seven-month pregnancy.

I have heard enough stories and I am preemptively angry at the comments I may hear.

I won’t have the sacred new life growing within me reduced to an unfortunate threat to my academic success. I won’t have this child discussed like it’s nothing more than a looming delay to my progress. Something that will have to be negotiated. Figured out. Tucked away neatly in some institution so my academic performance can remain steady.

My advisor doesn’t notice that I am pregnant. I conduct my meeting as I would have a year ago. That is, pretending like I am still one person in one body. That is, pretending like my entire world isn’t about to change.

I don’t fully know it yet. But these are the last hours and last days that I will spend in my academic trajectory as a female student that is largely undistinguishable from a man.

From May onwards, when I give birth, I will feel my womanhood like never before –it’s weight, but also its promise and bewildering expansiveness.

A sealed and individualistic version of self — now cracked— will die. A new self —more porous, more self-consciously interconnected— will be born.

Fall of 2015

I try to teach my baby to take the bottle. It will be helpful when I need to be away from him, I am told.

My older sister is visiting me. We try. But Zayd pushes the bottle away and cries.

We try a second time. Again, my baby is distressed. He refuses the bottle.

Then my sister says: We are not trying a third time. He hates it. He’s unhappy. He’s hungry. Breastfeed him now.

I say: Hania, if he doesn’t learn the bottle, I will never be able to be away from him for longer than two hours.

She says: Then don’t be.

And I am not.

For a very long time, I am not.

2017

I am on year six of my PhD program.

The thought of me on fast trains is a laughable distant memory now.

Fatima our beloved Moroccan baby-sitter comes to help me watch Zayd at home. But alas, Fatima has a severe hearing impairment. So I work from home and keep an eye on them both.

Many days, I don’t manage to write more than a page from what is supposed to be a six-chapter dissertation. Many days, I only clean up citations and biographies.

Many days, I want to give up.

Unless you put your kid in a daycare, and you can have at least six hours of uninterrupted work per day –alone—you won’t be able to focus and get this thing done, I hear. And I believe it. This pursuit seems impossible otherwise.

(The mold was for a single young male. The mold for was a dude. I needed to fit back into that mold. To vanish the product of my womb, so I could show up to my work like a single-bodied male).

I ask my friends about daycares. They recommend al-Bustan.

I take Zayd for a visit.

Zayd walks into a playroom. “Go, go!” Says the director. “He’ll be fine.”

I take a few steps away.

Zayd flips out. He weeps. He screams. He begs. Mama. Mamaaaa.

I come back, scoop him up and leave.

2018

I am pregnant with my second child. Fatima’s presence is a blessing from God, particularly as I get bigger and heavier.

I am very lonely. My family is in Ecuador and Egypt. I have no community in Boston. Sometimes I bring Fatima to “work” and have Moroccan tea with her. I listen to her go on and on about the latest in the British royal family. Kate this and William that.

I pretend I am paying for babysitting. But I am paying for company.

Zayd is a little older now. The dissertation is still largely unwritten. I attempt two more visits to al-Bustan.

“Go, Go!” They tell me.

Again, Zayd begs me to not leave him.

“They always cry at first,” they tell me.

But my head spins with questions: Am I rushing a separation? Am I just trying to prioritize my goals over my toddler’s needs and rights upon me? Will this harm him? Who said this whole daycare idea was a good idea in the first place? Women who want and/or need to get back to work? Governments that needed to plump up their workforces and increase their GDPs? Is early institutionalization actually in the best interest of little children?

I don’t want to make a mistake.

I come to terms with the fact that I can only continue this long-held pursuit of mine if my program will allow me to advance at my own pace. If they make room for this new, more expansive and interconnected self I now am.

To fit me in the old mold, they’ll have to break me.

But before that happens, I will leave.

--

Sometime between 2019 and 2020

I am on year eight, then year nine, of the PhD program. My Almighty kind Lord has willed that I have an advisor who forgets that I exist for weeks and months on end. That’s a good thing and a bad thing.

It’s a bad thing because I am doing this whole thing almost entirely on my own. But it’s a good thing because I am not being rushed.

One day I walk up Quincy Street towards the Barker Center, when I see my colleague Shahrad walking in the opposite direction.

Suddenly, I feel a pang of embarrassment. My cohort –cohorts, actually-- have now graduated and moved on to great things (thank you Facebook). And here I am, slow like a snail. No accomplishments to my name. A flimsy CV. A shadow of the powerhouse I once thought I was.

My colleague will ask me: Are you still in the program?!? He will tell me: We thought you had dropped out.

I turn around before he sees me and slide away.

2022

I defend my dissertation ( a saga for a different day). I pass “with distinction.”

“Did you submit it for the Alwaleed Bin Talal Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies?” my sweet friend Laura asks me. “I submitted mine.” Laura is in the Anthropology department.

“Oh my God! Is there still time to submit? I’d love to give it a try!”

“Yes! Make sure you submit!”

Some weeks later, I get an e-mail. My dissertation has been awarded first place: best dissertation in Islamic studies across all academic departments and schools at Harvard University for the year 2022.

Alhamdulilah.

I take this award as a recognition that slow, interrupted, dragged work can be good work.

Worthy work.

--

After I get off at the Trenton station, it dawns on me that had I been on the Acela Express instead of the Northeastern Regional, not only would I have ended up sixty miles away in Trenton, NJ, I would have ended up 95 miles southwest in Philadelphia, PA.

I made a mistake. It hurt. But a mistake on the Acela Express would have been excruciatingly more difficult.

I would have ended up realizign my mistake, much, much further away from home.

Speed is appealing. But it is also unforgiving.

Thank God for the slow train.

I eventually get home, hug my children, and thank God for family and home.

—

This past weekend I shared with a group of Muslim women that some career paths are designed with a particular kind of individual in mind.

That is, with an individual who is autonomous, self-actualizing, self-authorizing, disembodied, and unburdened by any significant emotional, physical and mental bonds to others. An individual who can shut off her dependents’ needs upon herself. Someone who can conceal the effects of her fertility and show up in the public sphere like a man.

It would be helpful if they wrote that somewhere in their program and job descriptions, wouldn’t it?

The things I thought I was before my body literally carried two hearts changed drastically with pregnancy and childbirth.

I could suppress and stifle the person I was becoming to fit in the comfortable and familiar mold of the younger, single self I had been my entire life. But I didn’t want to. I would hurt myself and worse still, I would likely hurt others.

La-darar wa la-dirar. The Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, is reported to have said, “Do not cause harm or return harm. Whoever harms others, God will harm him. Whoever is harsh with others, God will be harsh with him.”

A weighty warning.

With motherhood, an old self that had slowly been cracking, slowly realizing its interdependence to others, died.

The mourning was real. But a new self was born.

I pray that God Almighty allows us to grow, evolve, and realize our servanthood to Him in the capacities He was willed for us.

I pray He grants us the courage to always align our journeys in the way that is most pleasing to Him.

Ameen.

“If you don’t come, I’ll be very sad!” my friend who’s hosting the awaited Madinah reunion texts me. 

“May Allah protect me from ever making my dear friend sad,” I respond. “I’ll be there, God willing.”

Days go by,

Sunday comes

with a cold,

And allergies I haven’t known in forty years.

“I can take the kids,” my husband says.

“I don’t want to disappoint Afsheen,” I say.

Driving south, I look out the window:

the land appears flatter,

more expansive.

more rural.

Photo by Sherebyah Tisbi on Unsplash

My congestion worsens.

A headache looms.

Should I have stayed home?

We arrive.

We park.

My husband and the older kids turn right,

Towards the house.

But Muhammad turns left,

He’s spot little Musa,

Digging something

Under a tree.

Muhammad! He says,

Extending his hand to him,

In it, a token of friendship:

A worm, long and moist.

More guests arrive.

I see them from afar.

Chatter, laughter.

Joy.

Safa, age 8, joins us.

“Hey Muhammad!” She says.

“Azul,” he says,

Pointing at a blue car,

Parked by the street.

My eyes are itchy.

My nose is runny.

Muhammad is running,

To the street.

“Blue! Blue!”

I chase.

“Blue! Blue!”

I blow my nose.

“Watch for the poop on the grass kids!” I say.

Ewwwwww, they say,

And proceed to roll down the hill.

(I hope parents packed spare outfits)

“We’re about to pray!”

Someone calls everyone inside.

A few minutes later,

Through a window I see

Men bowing in prayer:

In the name of God,

The Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.

After prayer,

The boys play basketball,

I see my ten-year-old among them. 

What team am I on?

What team am I on?

He gets no answer from boys

Slightly older

Slightly taller.

Another young boy asks the same question.

No answer.

Now I am glaring.

I say, in my mind:

HEY, WHAT ARE THE TEAMS?

I say, in my mind:

Are you boys making sure to include everyone?

But I hold back.

At what point do I let my firstborn

Be his own man?

Is my place here, at the margin,

as he carves his own

among his own?

Minutes, like hours,

Go by.

Hey! What team am I on?

Hey! Pass the ball to us too!

No answer.

Inside,

An erudite teacher speaks.

Praises to Allah are recited.

Salutations are sung

In love for the Prophet ﷺ.

Out here, by this court,

A mother awaits,

And wonders

Who will be nearest to him ﷺ

in kindness?

Come on, let’s go play something else,

My boy tells the other young boy.

They grab another ball,

walk away,

Tall. 

I am proud.

I cajole Muhammad inside.

I get a plate of food.

I find a studio,

Apt containment. 

“Hola,” I say to the little girl sitting inside. 

Earlier, I heard her speak Spanish to her mother,

the cleaning lady. 

“Hola,” She says. “Quieres jugar?”

“Sure, I’ll play,” I say.

Boardgames.

Puzzles.

Coloring pencils.

“Before you open a new box,

put the other toys away,” 

I tell her. 

She responds: “Tienes más hijos?” do you have more kids. what are their names. how old are they. I have three siblings. are you sick? allergies? can that make me sick because if so maybe you should go outside. but if not, we can play. lets play. lets do that maze and that puzzle and you take these pieces and i take those and you start and I go second and then you take a turn and i take a turn and we take turns and…..” 

Muhammad needs to nap.

“Chao!” I say good-bye to my playmate.

My dear friend, the hostess,

Offers me a room.

I lay my two-year-old

Over my lap,

And sway.

Slowly,

He drifts off

To a land of dreams.

My eyes, too,

Heavy with allergies

unfamiliar to me,

close. 

(or heavy with motherhood.

Or with both).

My phone rings,

Wakes me suddenly

How long have we been here?

Where are you mama?

We are leaving, baba says.

This is Zayd texting.

Muhammad wakes up.

Gingerly,

I walk out,

and down the stairs

of my friend’s elegant home 

(newly expanded,

to accommodate 

two beautiful grandparents). 

My cheeks are flushed

With slumber

And some embarrassment.

Half of the great Madinah reunion,

I chased a 30+ inch human.

The other half,

I cradled a 30inch human,

And slept.

I apologize to my friend.

She says: It’s TOTALLY okay! Don’t even think about it. Take the NyQuil I gave you. It works WONDERS. That and Vitamin C. You HAVE to take Vitamin C. I hope you feel better! 

We drive home.

Would it have been wiser to stay home today? 

But I close my eyes.

And I see Muhammad rolling down a hill-

And I see Zayd in a basketball court, 

holding his own.

And Khadija walking barefoot, because why bother with shoes?

And I kept my word to my friend.

And my husband

Appreciated that I came.

And, how befitting that this was a reunion

after our trip to Madinah

where I trained to find joy 

in whatever was written 

for me, 

by God. 

Alhamdulilah 

On our last night in Madinah the group had a farewell dinner. I had to miss it to run last-minute errands and pack.

After picking up this and buying that, I was walking back to the hotel when I spotted a fried chicken joint. Muhamad and I hadn’t eaten yet, so I stopped and placed an order. “Fifteen minutes,” the man said. I sat on a plastic stool on the sidewalk. Muhammad didn’t fuss, but something moved me to take him out of the stroller and let him play with his toy car.

Just then, a little boy appeared out of nowhere. He was barefoot, and he had bunch of siwak in his left hand. But he wasn’t looking to sell. He dropped to the floor and began to play with my son.

Brothers in faith, I thought. How beautiful. I took my phone out to capture the moment.

The boy noticed I took a picture, and walked up to me to see it.

“Look, this is you,” I said, pointing at the screen. “mashaAllah, look what a handsome boy you are!

He looked at himself in the photo and said: “But I have no shoes.”

“Hmm…. Let me see what I can do about that. What is your name?”

“Ahmad.”

(A variation of my son’s name, from the Arabic root h-m-d: to praise).

I sat Ahmad and Muhammad over a plastic stool. Ahmad seemed a little older that my son, but maybe Muhammad’s crocks would fit him? I tried them on him, hoping that he could keep them, and thinking that I should be heading back to the hotel to pack.

But they didn’t fit.

“Hmm…. They’re too small on you…” I said,

“Khalto, buy me shoes,” he said in a pleading voice.

“Hmm…. of course… but are there any shoe stores around here?”

All I had seen around the Prophet’s mosque was souvenir shops, date shops, and restaurants.

“Yes, yes, let me show you.”

I grabbed our order, put Muhammad back in the stroller and followed the boy. He took me down nearby streets i had never been to before. It was getting late, and I was feeling anxious.

This was only my second time as an adult in Madinah, and the first time with an escapist toddler. So throughout the trip I had not ventured out of the hotel much.

This was quickly becoming more adventurous than I had anticipated.

“Excuse me, are there any stores that sell shoes around here? I asked a man in a souvenir shop.

“No,” he said. “Not around here.”

We kept on walking, further and further away from the hotel.

What if there weren’t any shoe stores in this area? How far and for how long was it prudent to keep on walking?

I stopped and I inquired again to a man in another souvenir shop full of toys, sibhas, and shiny trinkets.

“I have,” he said. He pointed to a pile of shoes in the corner of the shop.

The boy walked in. I walked in behind him, stroller and Muhammad in tow.

The store seller looked at barefoot Ahmad up and down. So did two men standing at the entrance.

But the boy didn’t seem to notice or care about the looks. He had business to take care of.

“Those maybe” he told the seller, pointing at a pair of black crocks.

The seller looked at me. I nodded.

He tried two or three pairs. He found what he liked.

“Khalto, buy me a car like his too,” he said, pointing at Muhammad’s car.

“Go ahead. Pick one!”

The plastic cars made sounds, lit up, and some sang Labbaika Allahuma Labbaik. The boy held a few in his hands, admired them, put them down, pick up others, and eventually chose the one he wanted.

“This is it.” A white remote-controlled pick-up truck was the lucky toy.

“Okay habibi. Mabrouk,” congrats on your new nice shoes and car!

The boy looked at his shoes. He looked at his shiny pick-up truck. And he dashed out of the store. “Thank you khalto!”

He disappeared into the night.

I traced back our steps back to the hotel with Muhammad.

On this last night in the holy city of the Prophet ﷺ, I thought I had skipped the group dinner to pack.

But Allah SW had something written for Ahmad, and I had Allah SW’s gifts to deliver on that night.

As the aphorism goes (paraphrasing): Those who know not, wake up wondering what they will do with their day. As for those who know, they wake up asking how God will use them on that day.

As for the siwak in the boy’s left hand, he held them firm in his grip through it all. Never letting go of his amana.

He’d go back to being a seller later. Tomorrow. The day after. But for a little while, he was just a boy on a mission to get a new pair of shoes and a shiny toy car.

May we meet again, little Ahmad.

I hope once in a while you remember your khalto and your brother Muhammad when you’re out and about in your new shoes, walking so close to our Beloved Habib ﷺ.

He was taking a group to an intensive seerah and Arabic immersion program in the holy city of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). It sounded amazing. But what would I do with my toddler there? Strollers are not allowed inside the mosque (since it’s very tight as it is), but they can’t be left at the entrance either. That means I would not be praying inside. I’d be in the open courtyards of the mosque physically wrestling Muhammad not to run off and get lost among the thousands of worshippers.

In 115F weather.

So maybe I’d skip the mosque all together and roam the city with Muhammad while the two older kids took advantage of the intensive Arabic and seerah offerings. But again, in 115F weather, was that even doable? It seemed that most likely I’d be heading to Madinah to be stucker inside a hotel room with a cranky toddler for three weeks.

Count me in, not?

I texted a friend with long years of overseas travel experience with little kids. Advise me please. Do you think I should go?

The older kids will have fun, she said. But it will be miserable for you.

Forget it, I thought. This isn’t for me this year.

Muhammad performing ‘umra with his father. Photo courtesy of Aminah.

Leaving to the Airport – Where is my suitcase?

The last two days before departing to Madinah from Egypt I had three things to do: Packing up our Cairo rental house, making sure it was in proper condition, and packing for our trip.

But these were also our last days in Egypt this summer, so my sisters and I wanted to spend as much time together as possible. Three out of the four of us ended up staying in the rental the last two days, alongside our children.

The result? Pandemonium.

After a whirlwind of emptying this and packing that, I was down to six suitcases: three large suitcases would go straight to New Jersey, and three large suitcases would come with us to Madinah.

At the airport, my brother-in-law unloaded the suitcases. Two large suitcases- plus a black carry-on, plus a pink kid carry-on.

What is this?! I said, pointing at the pink carry-on.

I told Amu Aimen to put in that in the car for me, said my daughter Khadija. I want it.

And that black- carry on? We’re not taking that either. It’s empty!

My brother-in-law looked completely confused. He’d loaded the suitcases he’d been told to load…

But told by who?

Who had been packing up the house? Who had been cleaning? Who had directed my brother-in-law to load the suitcases? Who had been breaking fights between Muhammad and Omar? Who had been helping the older kids use the bathroom and get ready? Who had been emptying the cupboards?

At some point, we had all lost track of who was supposed to be doing what.

And where is the third suitcase, the green one. With all of the children’s stuff? I looked around, panicking.

There’s nothing else in the car, said Aimen.

Can we go back to get it?? I asked Aimen.

I’m afraid not, he said. You’re cutting it too close to boarding time.

We rushed inside. Up until now, the day of our departure to Madinah, I still didn’t know some basic things about this trip: would my older kids actually fit into one of the Arabic courses? Was the seerah program age-appropriate for them? And if not, how would they spend their time there? Where would I be spending the day with Muhammad, if I could not attend classes or lectures with him? Was there any safe, enclosed, or gated place where I could let Muhammad off the stroller?

Too many unknowns. And the suitcase just made things a little worse.

The flight from Cairo to Madinah

It was one of those flights where a shuttle bus drops you off by the side of the plane, on the runway, and you walk up a set of stairs in open air.

Wow!! Amaaaaazing!! my children said. We have never seen a plane from the outside this way!

Yay.

The air was hot. I left the strolled at the bottom of the portable boarding stairs, carried Muhammad on my right hip, held Khadija’s hand, and climbed up.

Reminds me of when we boarded out of Iraq, I heard the Syrian passengers behind me say.

The plane was hot too. We took our seats.

Don’t speak to me like that! ya allil al-adab! A flight-attendant yelled at a passenger.

The passenger, also a middle-aged Egyptian man, yelled back.

Soon, a brawl broke out.

They threatened to deplane the passenger. He began to apologize profusely: Ha’aq ‘alaya! Ha’aq ‘alaya ya captan!

I asked about the AC.

It’ll kick in when we’re flying, a flight-attendant told me.

People fanned themselves with air security leaflets.

I melted slowly under my several layers of clothing, a sweaty Muhammad on my lap, increasing our body temperatures, and not helping my general anxiety about flying.

I always half-expect to die when boarding a plane.

But we survived departure, and once in the air, I took a deep breath and looked around. A hagga on my left was busy reading her Quran.

Others were flipping their dhikr beads, repeating prayers.

There was no alcohol anywhere.

Everyone was friendly to my children and to Muhammad specifically.

Slowly, vast Cairo became a speck beneath us, and the Holy City of Madinah grew closer and closer.

Hot and squeezed under the weight of a sweaty Muhammad, a certainty struck me my surprise: I am going to like this.

And I was happy.

Arrival to Madinah

Muhammad arrived to Madinah high on sugar.

I had sat still on my seat. But Muhammad had stood up and looked behind. I could not see who was sitting there. All I saw was his chubby hand stretching back empty, and returning full with gummies and other sugary treats.

When dinner came, Muhammad skipped it. Why bother with actual food. He had his dealer.

Oh well, I thought. I guess it’s sugar for dinner today.

My husband and nephew picked us up from the airport. They had rented a car. When we spotted them, all three of the kids ran to their father and threw their arms around him. There were cheers. And kisses. And sticky hugs.

I was numb with exhaustion. The physical and mental strain of the constant fights with the kids this summer (see prior post), of wrapping up our summer in Egypt alone, and of traveling solo with all my kids for the first time had wiped me out.

We boarded the rental car. My nephew drove. My husband sat on the front passenger seat. I sat in the back with the children.

When we started driving, I looked out the window to mountainous Madinah at night, and wept.

I was no longer in charge.

I was no longer at the driver’s seat, alone.

Alhamdulilah! What an immense relief.

We run on kindness here

My husband had some free time between his classes, halaqat, majalis, and masjid commitments. So he kept Muhammad at the hotel during Maghreb. “Go, go!” He said. “This is your chance.”

I’d been in Madinah for about a week, and sure enough, as I had imagined, I had been to the Prophet’s mosque once.

I took Khadija with me. My friend Aisha and her daughter Safa met us on the way. We prayed. Then the phone call came: Muhammad was up, shrieking for me, and I needed to return to the room asap.

Come on, Khadija! Come on! We have to run!

We sprinted back. I found my husband waiting for me outside the hotel, Muhammad on the stroller, calm- but looking like he’d been crying. He threw himself at me.

This is a byproduct of being two months away from his father. After Egypt, Muhammad wants me at all times.

In the lobby of the hotel, I let Muhammad off the stroller for a bit. I didn’t want to go up to our room. It gets lonely there.

He ran in loops. He jumped off the couple steps that lead up the hotel cafe. Look. Mama. Look!

The man who works at the lobby café pulled out a chair, and called Muhammad over. He produced an apple from behind the counter and gave it to him. Muhammad sat on the chair for a total of two seconds, and ran off with the apple to continue climbing the steps and running in loops.

Who does he take after? Musa, a young member of our group looked at Muhammad and asked me. Because you and shaykh are not like that…

I laughed.

The apple. Musa’s friendliness. The brief but kind interactions with the group members when I venture out of the hotel room with Muhammad.

Here in Madinah, I run on little moments of kindness like these.

A little bit is enough

Photo by Aminah A.

I would lie if I said that it hasn’t saddened me to stay in the hotel room so much this trip.

Either a kid is asleep or tired. Or Muhammad won’t stay in the stroller and it’s not safe to take him to such a crowded area alone. Or. Or. Or.

I have walked into the seerah classes, held downstairs in the restaurant, only to walk out again five minutes later because Muhammad is being disruptive.

When we visited Uhud, they made us climb a hill to listen to the history of the battle. I listened to a few snippets here and there, but Muhammad thought that running downhill was a better use of our time.

Other excursions have happened. To that historical site. To this sacred place. To that other special place where Rasul Allah (pbuh) rested, walked, spoke. But they are usually early, and there is usually a kid that needs sleep. I stay with them in the hotel, looking at the pictures that others upload to our WhatsApp group.

Sometimes I feel I am missing out on everything!

And yet.

And yet, so often I feel that a little bit is enough.

Four minutes in the seerah class (before Muhammad becomes too disruptive) is enough to hear about true nature of beauty lying in faith, righteousness and beautiful character…. and to get me thinking all day: Do I understand this? When did I truly begin to understand this? How far am I from this reality myself?

Five minutes in the night majlis is enough to hear a description of the Prophet’s face (PBUH) when he saw Kaab ibn Malik, after the latter failed to join them on a mission to Tabuk.

The description moves me deeply. It makes me tear up for Malik. And it’s a tiny connection, but it feels enough.

I spend many hours in the hotel room, but we can see Mount Uhud from the window.

Mount Uhud is the mountain that offered refuge and a resting place to the Prophet (PBUH) when he was injured and in severe pain.

It is a mountain that loved the Prophet (PBUH), and the Prophet (PBUH) loved it in return.

Many days, when I don’t manage to do much outside the hotel, the sight of majestic Uhud, and the sound of the adhan five times a day, feel enough.

Visiting the Rawda in the Prophet’s Mosque, Brain-scattered and Overwhelmed

I went to visit the Rawda in the mosque or Rasul Allah (PBUH). My first visit and only visit before this one, three years ago, was a lot.

A lot of happiness. A lot of connection. A lot of love. A lot of emotion. A lot of duah for a lot of people.

This time I walked in alone. Tired. Worried about whether Muhammad would need me or call for me while I was gone. Scared that Khadija wouldn’t fall asleep without me in the room.

Brainscattered, like I have been all summer, with loud childcare concerns stifling more subtle thoughts, I could not make any specific duahs.

So I repeated salawat all the way.

The visit was very quick.

Was that it?

This ziyara did not feel like the a lot of three years ago. I felt sadness looming, so close to reach. So easy to slide into.

I felt a little voice that wanted to say: See? This is what happens when you insist on things and it’s not the right time for them. You should have stayed in the hotel.

And yet….

And yet, as I stood in line for my turn to enter the Rawda, I found myself pushed and squeezed by countless Muslim sisters from all nationalities.

SubhanAllah, I thought. Look how eager these women are for their encounter with Rasul Allah. Look how they can’t stand still in line. As though by pressing their bodies against mine the line could move a little faster.

Their eagerness moved me.

They weren’t cutting me off to get into an amusement park ride before me. Or lining up to buy an iPhone.

They were cutting me off in line because they wanted to get to the Prophet (PBUH) before me.

Despite our state of weakness and helplessness, despite the agonies and failings of our ummah, our hearts still throb and long for the Beloved.

My heart felt full.

Photo by Aminah A.

Picking Up Trash

On another occasion that my husband was able to stay with Muhammad in the hotel, I took Khadija to prayer in the Prophet’s mosque.

It was duhr or asr— and we were outside. Because I am always figuring out children-related things, I can never show up to the masjid with enough time in advance to make it inside.

The weather these days has been in the 110s. But I have been pleased to discover that although this temperature scared me, it is actually manageable in the courtyards of the Prophet’s mosque, or walking through the streets around it.

While Khadija and I prayed, a mother next to us gave her toddler a bag of Cheetos, or Cheetos-like chips.

The boy smeared the Cheetos on the green rug, and scattered the crumbs all around him.

The women around us were eyeing this situation with some reprove, and were waiting for the mother to act, but she did not.

You know what is a very good deed, Khadija I said.

What is?

Picking up trash. And cleaning up the Prophet’s mosque… why don’t you pick up those Cheeto crumbs that that boy smeared all over?

Khadija looked at the sticky crumbs, likely moist with the child’s saliva. Yuck.

I don’t want to.

Okay, if you don’t, I will. I leaned forward, and started collecting the little crumbs in a tissue paper.

The toddler walked up to me. He was the most adorable and cutest chunky little boy. I stretched out my hand to him. SalamAlaykum sir, what is your name?

Muhammad Borhan. He returned my hand-shake confidently.

I turned to the mom. Where are you from, sister? She was now bending forward, cleaning with me.

Pakistan.

Nice to meet you!

Khadija too started picking up crumbs with us. And some candy wraps.

Soon, we said good-bye to our new friends.

The Prophet (ﷺ) said, Do not belittle any good deed, even meeting your brother (Muslim) with a cheerful face.

I didn’t do much else the rest of the day. But that felt enough.

Get Ready to be Miserable

Photo by Vincent Marcini on Unsplash

Has this trip been miserable?

The friend who warned me that joining this trip to Madinah with young children and a toddler would be miserable was not trying to dissuade from coming.

Rather, she didn’t want me to come here under any false pretenses. This would not be a walk in the park. It was best to come knowing that.

But has it been miserable?

It’s been very difficult at times. And no doubt, I could have been miserable throughout most of it. But alhamdulillah, this has been far from the case.

Tawfiq (success in any endeavor) is Allah’s first and foremost. We entrust our affairs to Him with tawakul and husn al-dhan (trust, faith, reliance in Him, and thinking the best of Him), because He is the Most Generous and Merciful and He rewards our intentions in the best of ways.

Secondarily, frame, expectations, attitude, suhba, and khidma may have something to do with how we experience this type of challenging situations.

Frame

The first thing that helped this trip was accepting early on that it was not about me.

The kids needed the family together again. The long separation was taking a heavy toll on them. And my husband has obligations he must take care of. So I had two options:

I either flew back to the predictability and comfort of home in New Jersey and continued to keep the family apart, or I flew to the unknown and hardship of overseas travel with a needy toddler and brought the family together.

Equally important, my husband and I recognized that this opportunity to spend time in the Holy city of the Prophet (pbuh) was a very rare opportunity for our family, and we wanted the children to benefit from it.

But I have to admit: the urgency of bringing my children to these blessed lands was not obvious to me until we went through the trip.

Of course I wanted to bring the kids to the Holy Lands at some point. But now? With a needy and escapist toddler?

There’s nothing like the illusion of future chances to avoid facing one’s fears in the present moment: wouldn’t there “always be another opportunity in the future”?

I am now shocked that I ever thought of depriving them of this experience now, out of fear of the load upon myself. Their growth during this trip has been beautiful and humbling, alhamdulilah, and tremendously rewarding.

I accept that at this stage in my life, we cannot all get the same out of this trip (among other things). But their growth and deepened faith feels more than enough.

Frankly, prioritizing them is a freeing frame.

(unlike prioritizing the self —that bottomless pit— which never is)

Expectations

Isn’t so much of life’s misery in general a function of expectations?

I think this is what my friend wanted me to remember: don’t expect an easy ride. Don’t even expect to have fun.

Expect difficulty, and prepare yourself accordingly.

Physical burdens can be taxing. But disappointment can be devastating.

Carrying a baby all day, while running errands, can get heavy. But carrying sadness all day is heavier.

Putting a restless toddler to sleep can be excruciatingly hard. But putting an anxious mind to sleep can be downright impossible.

But while many of the physical burdens we bear aren’t optional (many of them being a function of obligation, principle or sheer survival), what we carry in our minds and hearts is a function of beliefs, frames and expectations that can certainly shift.

That often must shift.

When we understand that struggle is a function of undertaking labor for His sake, and we remember that Allah SW sees everything and rewards our sacrifices for His sake, we spare ourselves the heartache of resenting and resisting difficulty.

Adjusting expectations isn’t easy, of course. In fact, this may be one of the toughest things in life.

Hearing stories from people about the mosque at dawn, or the rawda post-Fajr, or the walks around the Green Dome at sunrise….it stings a little. There’s always that creeping voice (the nafs) that says: should I not be getting that too? I could be getting that too…

The trip to Madinah is just a trip. And the desire not to miss out on an excursion or a class are minor desires yielding minor disappointments.

But maybe this trip is a microcosm of Life.

When our life circumstances don’t match our idea of how things should be, it is easier to be angry and resentful than it is to accept and submit, even when resistance translates into heartache, and submission translated into peace.

I wonder if we often cling to our ideas of what we could have, or what we should have, even when these ideas don’t match reality, because these ideas are our last fortress of resistance to our God-given life.

Resistance to the circumstances and the life Allah SW wrote for us

Attitude

I don’t have a problem accepting hardship in principle.

I believe one must not shy away from doing the right thing out of fear of hardship.

So I’ll periodically put myself through some kind of hardship because I believe in the principle behind it.

But there is a but.

Too often I can get caught up surviving hardship, and forget to find joy.

I think this was the case for a few days at the beginning of this trip. I was not angry. I was not resentful. I was certainly not regretful.

But I was so busy being in survival mode, that I didn’t venture out to find joy outside the hotel room. I was rigged with too many fears and what ifs.

If I didn’t change this quickly—even with a helpful frame and modest expectations, I risked being miserable, just as my friend predicted.

Suhba and Finding joy

Photo courtesy of Aminah.

With the help of great suhba (companionship, community), I started venturing out much more.

The first night I ever prayed at the mosque is because Afsheen forced me: Janan, you still haven’t been to mosque yet?! Come on! Come on! We’ll grow as a group and keep watch on Muhammad together!

I wanted to go to Juice Farm because everyone was talking about for days – an amazing little store that sells the best fresh fruit juices and cocktails, and great ice cream. One night, I asked two young women in the group – Lena and Reem- to watch my kids and my friend Aisha’s kids, and we ventured out alone (alone!) to buy juice.

It was glorious.

Many young men in the group stepped in to take the young boys to the mosque, and did so regularly. Khadija also tagged along often to sisters going to the mosque.

This allowed me time to nap with Muhamamd. And naps = joy.

I got a second visit to the Rawda! courtesy of my dear Mariam, and my dear friend Steffi walked me there.

Kind Aminah, who always on her feet helping someone, watched the kids.

And do you remember that lovely cup of coffee I yearned for in Egypt?

Kifa Coffee in Madinah is great! Prodded by my suhba to get out more, I ventured out to get myself a latte, and I even managed to get a Spanish Latte for Aisha once in a while.

I enjoyed my small treat either during seerah class, or alone in the hotel room, with a view of Mount Uhud.

It was beautiful. And peaceful. And I never wanted to leave Madinah.

Photo courtesy of Aminah.

Khidma

Service. I didn’t get to do much service during this trip. I admired others around me who did: those who set up tables for communal dinners, cleaned after, figured out leftovers, ordered meals, watched children for others, drove people back and forth, etc., etc.,

I felt my hands were full with Muhammad in particular.

Yet I took mental note of the difference between being in survival mode (how do I manage with the children today?) and service mode (how do I accomplish X with the children tagging along?), and I promised myself that next time I have to take on more khidma, inshaAllah.

For now, my humble service might have been just being present, with the right frame of mind and attitude, and supporting my husband in his labor during this trip.

What happened to the suitcase?

It never arrived. My sister, who thought she’d join us from Cairo and bring it along with her, was ultimately not able to come.

Suhba –Sammie in particular—stepped in to let us borrow her children’s clothes.

For underwear, we bought that from the supermarket down the street.

And in the end, we managed without it.

Because, as it turns out, a little bit was enough.

All the fears about the suitcase –as about the trip as a whole, were overblown.

The anxiety was overblown.

It was peaceful. It was beautiful. My heart belonged here.

I never wanted to leave.

Photo by djonk creative on Unsplash

The side yard is covered in sand and dirt. This summer a few patches of grass have accidentally sprouted here and there (spurred by our regular watering, I believe). Jasmine branches drape over a wooden pergola that covers half of the yard providing shade. The other half bakes daily in the scorching Egyptian sun.

I looked at many rental options in Cairo for this summer. I initially narrowed down my options to two small apartments in Rehab, near my sister’s place. When I showed them to my husband he said: You’ll need a bigger place so you can host family. Isn’t that the plan? And also: where are you looking?

I was doing shogl all khawaga: looking online in sites like Airbnb. So my husband picked up the phone and sent a voice note to his Egyptian friend Fath: Fath, we need a villa in New Cairo. Fath sent us pictures. He spoke to the landlord. The two of them spoke about costs and settled the deal. “It’s done,” he told me, “Rabbena yataqqabal wa-ybarik.” May our Lord bless and accept [our intentions for this place and this summer].

We have stayed in this city within New Cairo in the past. My older sister and her husband own an apartment here. In the summer of 2022 we drove by these enclosed villas many times. Although houses and properties have never interested me, I was surprised by how much these Rehab villas tickled my nafs.

I thought: Don’t these houses look so lovely from outside? With their enclosed little gardens and tall lush trees? And wouldn’t it be nice to see what they look like behind those tall fences and gates? Ya Allah, let me see them one day.

We left Egypt, and I forgot all about these thoughts.

One day, shortly after our arrival this summer, it hit me: Oh, subhanAllah. I prayed for this. The wish to see what these villas looked like had been so random. So unlike what I’d normally pray for. And yet, here it was: a whimsical desire realized by the Most Generous, Akram al-akramin.

A little green quiet oasis in the midst of the ever-sprawling and imposing Cairo. A place where we’d try to accomplish our goals for our family this summer.

—

Almost two months have gone by since we got here. I sit in a corner of the rental’s family room. I woke up before my two older kids and my toddler Muhammad. Thank God, I can enjoy some time in silence before the noise and demands of my single-parenting summer life begin.

Around me: An archeology of efforts exerted these past two months.

On the coffee table on my left are children’s English fiction books. An effort to get the kids to read this summer. The last tenth of the Quran (Al-ushr al-akhir). An effort to get Zayd to memorize Juz Tabarak. Toddler wooden stacking toys. Efforts to keep Muhammad entertained while Zayd and Khadija go to Arabic summer camp. A hanging rack with drying clothes. Efforts to keep on top of the chores. My laptop enclosed in an old NYU case that I might have unzipped twice in the past two months. An effort (a wish, rather) to write. Coloring books. Crayons. Barbies. Cars…. Zayd’s unavoidable gaming devices…

Further out, on the side yard, lies more scattered evidence of summer efforts: beach toys buried under dirt and sand. Pieces of a cooking set I got Khadija for Eid. Little plastic plates that served mud pies to a little cousin she met in person for the first time this summer, after years of Facetiming sessions (Lena, I can touch you now! She told her one evening, poking her arm, as they wrapped up dinner together). Shreds of water balloons I filled and refilled to kill time with Muhammad. A forgotten book — Black Beauty— Zayd took outside and never bothered to bring back inside. A water hose used to fill a teeny-weeny plastic pool that brought an amount of joy totally disproportionate to its size.

Also outside, less obvious to the eye: a family of cats (one mother and five kittens) that transitioned from the vacant neighbor’s house to ours this summer. They stand outside our door daily - all six of them, awaiting breakfast, lunch and dinner. My cats, says Khadija; who lost her beloved Za’tar because of her brutal allergies, and has never stopped missing him.

And then there are efforts that have left no material traces.

Efforts that leave marks in the heart alone.

The constant fights with the children. Zayd’s relentless questions at all hours of the day: When are we going back to New Jersey? How much longer do we have to be here? One month??!!?? ONE MONTH? FOUR MORE WEEKS??!?!?!? Khadija’s cries at bedtime: I miss babaaaaa. I want babaaaaaaaaaaaa. The tears to skip Qur’an classes and Arabic summer camp. The heated arguments to persuade the children of the necessity of these sacrifices. Of the virtue of bearing these burdens. The earnest promises that they will appreciate this one day, met with grunts, dramatic displays of displeasure, sobs and tantrums.

My youngest sister, sixteen years my junior, exasperated to see my exhaustion one day, exploded at the children: “Give your mom a break! My mother would have dropped us off without taking one peep from us. Your mom listens to you! She negotiates with you! She tries to meet you half way! You have a very nice mom! Why don’t you try to appreciate that?!”

I appreciated her intervention. I appreciated hearing at that moment that someone thought I was nice.

(Janan, will you leave sooner than planned? Each of my three sisters have asked me at some point or another, seeing how difficult it has been to deal with the children’s emotional rollercoasters this summer).

I did break.

I did text tell my husband over the phone: I am never doing this again. I am never attempting a summer like this again. I thought I could pull this off alone. I have been humbled.

I didn’t believe my own words. He didn’t either.

Because you have to do what you have to do.

My husband works during the summer and he cannot spend this much time with us overseas. But I have duties I must fulfill. I have to do silat rahm (lit. tending to the “bonds of the womb”) with my family. I have to fulfill their rights upon me. I have to visit them, host them, check on them, connect with them, and I have to make sure that my children know them and that they know my children.

(Obligations that weren’t as clear to me during my self-focused undergraduate and graduate student years).

This summer, my siblings and I –all of my mother’s five children—came together again for the first time in about twelve years. Catching up, reconnecting, and frankly knowing and understanding each other takes time, patience, love and care.

It cannot be done in two weeks.

And I also feel I have a duty to ensure that my children learn the language of the Quran and the Quran itself, as my mother did for us when we were young.

There are good Arabic and Quran programs in America and elsewhere in the Middle East, but part of my family is here in Egypt, so I have to make these goals happen here (or in Ecuador, as I attempted last summer).

As long as Allah gives us health and means, silat rahm with the children’s extended family –my parents, my siblings, my grandmother, my aunts, uncles and cousins--is a priority.

** “Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, let him uphold his family ties” **

--

My husband said to me over the phone: “The constant negotiation and fighting with the kids drains you. Why do you do it? Just tell them what is, what is not, and that’s it.”

I could do that.

I could crack the whip.

I could drop them off at camp the number of days and the number of hours I choose, and not accept to hear a peep.

I can do that because I am my mother’s daughter and because whatever strength and iron will she had to do this with us, I have it somewhere in me too.

But what has exhausted me the most this summer hasn’t been a faulty executive function. It has been the uncertainty.

I lack my mother’s clarity, I suppose.

When Khadija tells me: Mama please don’t send me to Arabic camp because I miss you and I want to be with you! I just don’t know: Is it right to send her to camp? Is she perhaps still too young?

When Zayd tells me that all the kids in his class are younger than him, that he isn’t engaged, is the camp I enrolled him in actually the right fit for him? I don’t know.

So I do less hours. I do less days. And since my children have caught on to the fact that the summer schedule is negotiable, every day of the week and every week this summer has turned into a battle of wills.

And boy are these children strong willed!

And boy have I tired of fighting.

--

Hunger.

The family of cats living in our front yard is constantly hungry.

Khadija tosses perfectly good food from our fridge. She says: “Mama, Allah wants us to favor others in charity over ourselves.”

I watch her worry over the cats’ hunger and I feel a knot in my stomach. A few miles away from us, thousands upon thousands of Gazans starve.

This has been a summer of hunger. Of man-made starvation. Of cruelty that knows no bounds. That sends chills down one’s spine.

And I wonder. I wonder. The women and men who starve children to death, who block the entry of baby formula into Gaza, did they once know empathy? Did they once know mercy?

And when they were little children, were they ever moved by the hungry cries of little kittens?

What evils forces robbed them of their souls?

—

The Qur’an teacher drove me to the kid’s camp one morning. She told me: I know a Syrian American woman who wants to come spend a year with her kids here in Egypt. She’d stay here in Rehab.

That’s great, I said. I’m sure that would be great for the kids.

She said: But she’s concerned to do it alone. Her husband can’t come with her.

Well, here we are, I said, with a sigh.

She said: I told her, do you think any of us sees her husband in the first place? Kulli wahed bishuf shoglo. Everyone is busy meeting their own responsibilities. There’s no time to hang out!

There was a refreshing practicality to her.

An understated strength.

An acceptance of life as it is, not as you’d like it to be.

A clarity of purpose, and priorities.

A determination too, to do what’s best for the children and the family, whatever that takes, whatever that means.

A brave call to arms.

(Do some of us women have a softness to us that others elsewhere cannot afford to have?)

--

I feel nostalgia sometimes.

I lived in Cairo for about six years. I was once a college student here. I wrote countless papers in libraries, bookstores and beautiful cafes.

I miss Café Greco in Maadi. I miss Cilantro in Tahrir, in front of the old AUC campus. I miss the Cilantro next to Volume 1, that lovely little bookstore in Maadi. I miss the streets of Garden City, and Zamalek, and Old Cairo.

I miss being able to visit quiet places, with a book, and my laptop. I miss being able to think, and to write coherent thoughts. I miss having an adult conversation with a friend.

I have not been able to revisit any of these places this summer. Not one. Not once. It would be too hard with a rowdy toddler. Too hard without my husband around to take a shift with the kids. And it just hasn’t fit the summer priorities.

Maybe some other time.

Maybe some other trip.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash.--

My nafs liked these pretty villas in New Cairo when I drove through them three years ago. I wanted to see what they looked like. I wanted to stay in one.

I made a little duah, because, why not?

It took three years for that duah to get answered.

It got answered long after I had forgotten about it.

I had settled on a small apartment. But we needed a bigger place to fit family.

I can’t help but notice the way in which this duah was answered. And the timing. When it ceased to be about me and it became about a greater good, Allah SW made it happen.

And it’s been all the sweeter this way. Alhamdulilah.

The pleasure of seeking for one’s own self —our nafs, that insatiable beast— is overrated.

The pleasure of pleasing one’s Lord and bringing joy to others never disappoints.

--

A few days after our arrival to Cairo, a friend in NJ asked me over text message: How’s it going? Are you having a good time?

I thought it through and confided in her: There are sweet moments and these are difficult moments, and this isn’t an easy trip.

(For any of us, my youngest sister reminded me one day. Bringing siblings together in such close proximity for such a long period of time when they’ve been apart for over a decade is bound to be work for all).

But principle-driven actions have the underrated power of freeing you from the pressure of having a good time.

Even if this trip had been all hardship (and it hasn’t), it would still be a hundred percept worth it.

Ease was never what this trip was about.

In fact, I understand that worthy things rarely come cheap. Rarely come without a good fight.

We leave after-tomorrow, inshaAllah.

And all I can hope for, all I can pray for, is that this has been a good fight.

That once we have left, and all traces of our summer efforts have disappeared from sight, they remain secure in the only record that outlives time.

Allahuma taqabbal minna, innaka al-Sami’ al-duah.

Accept our efforts, dear Lord. I bear witness that you listen to the prayers of your humble servants, and that you are most Generous and Kind.

Ameen

Silat al-rahm <3

Early on in our upbringing, my mother taught us that in Islam, sons receive double the inheritance share of daughters. She taught us that this financial advantage is on account of men’s financial responsibility towards not only their wives and children, but also their extended family, if there is a need.

My response, and my siblings’ response (four girls and one boy), was along the lines of: Okay. Makes sense. Good trade-off.

Great trade-off, if you thought of jiddo Salim’s example, who financially supported his wives, children, and unmarried sisters (and one married sister) for seventy years.

Later, much later, when I went to graduate school in the US, I became familiar with ‘feminist Islam’ – an ideological project that sought to ‘fight inequalities in the law,’ and to ‘reform’ the religion to make it ‘fair for women.’

Inheritance rules were one such area that feminists identified as needing reform.

I noticed rather quickly that although I could understand where my peers were coming from, I did not relate to the visceral reaction to the rules of Islam that make a distinction between women and men.

Perhaps because of my experience with jiddo Salim, I had always understood that there was a bigger picture. A wisdom for us to grasp.

That is, long before I knew Allah (I knew about Him, but my knowledge of Him was shallow and immature for many years), I had the blessing of knowing righteous people whose lives offered me a glimpse into the beauty and wisdom of Islam.

Male power: Harm? Welfare? Dependent on which variables?

In graduate school I learned that one of the core assumptions in feminist thought is that when men have power and privilege, they will use this for their own exclusive advantage and/or to the detriment of women. This core assumption is the reason why male power and authority are distrusted, and why, in its activist iteration, feminism seeks to distribute power and authority equally among women and men.

This must be done, so the thinking goes, because the alternative – higher male power and authority– are not in women’s welfare (at best), and are a threat to women (at worst).

But this core assumption of feminism did not sit well with me.

Jiddo Salim had money. More freedom. More privileges than his sisters. And power. But he did not use these in service of his own appetites, “personal dreams,” and “personal fulfillment.” Or even worse, to oppress women or the countless people directly under his power and authority.

Even when he had dreamed of producing wealth (diamonds), the urge to pull his entire extended family out of poverty was front and center in this goal.

When he acquired economic power, he used this in the service of others. In upholding his duties as a man, regardless of his personal feelings or preferences (because in Islam, whether you like, love or loathe the relatives you have responsibilities towards is irrelevant. Duty is duty).

Thinking about my grandfather, and then of the many other men like him whom I have met or known about throughout my life, I have often wondered:

Does it take knowing a good man to reject the conflation of male power with women’s oppression?

Does it take loving one good man and witnessing the anchoring effect of his presence in a family and society to be invested in a project of raising more like him?

Naturally, in my lifetime I have also known of men who did not uphold their responsibilities towards their womenfolk and their families. Still pretty young, I spoke about these men to my mother. I asked her: “Should these men also be receiving more inheritance? They won’t spend it as they should!”

Throughout Islamic history and throughout Muslim lands, parents employed different mechanisms to ensure that their daughters would be taken care of after their death. For instance, anticipating their sons’ larger inheritance share, some parents gifted their daughters larger gifts in life. Inheritance, in other words, was not the only means by which wealth was passed on from parents to children. It was possible to exercise discretion in wealth distribution, particularly taking into account what parents knew about their children and their particular life circumstances.

As Muslims today, these means are still available to us, and we’re allowed to exercise some discretion in how we distribute our wealth to our children in life.

Nonetheless, the rules of Islam are not arbitrary. Through them, Islam fosters a system of familial and social cohesion that maximizes everyone’s welfare, and that especially protects the needs and rights of the most vulnerable.

Beyond finances, a system of social cohesion

When I think about my grandfather’s nearly century-long relationship of care and responsibility towards his sisters, it’s clear to me that this story isn’t exclusively or even primarily about money.

Yes, he received a larger inheritance share. And yes, he took care of his sisters’ financial needs for seven decades, as well as the financial needs of his two wives, his numerous children, his employees, his staff, his clients, and only God knows who else (a story for another day, but he was known to gift appliances like fridges and ovens to his clients of modest means).

To see this as a good financial “trade-off,” as we might have perceived it as teenagers, is short-sighted.

True in some sense. But very short-sighted.

I don’t doubt that his financial provision was a crucial lifeline to many people…. But maybe his dependents could have made do without it. Maybe his sisters could have taken on whatever jobs were available to them and the bare necessities of life would have been met.

But this was always about more than money.

Even if my grandfather hadn’t amassed a great wealth, even if he had little and had been able to help with little, his financial care nurtured emotional and psychological bonds among many relatives, benefiting them in ways that were far superior to mere material provision.

Tight bonds withstanding time and withstanding the distance

Despite the distance between Jiddo Salim and his sisters – a whole ocean separated them, before air travel was easily accessible – despite the fact that he had a wife and “family of his own,” despite his strenuous work life and constant local travels, despite the passing of time that corrodes it all, and (in later decades) despite the illnesses and the infirmities of old age… Jiddo Salim’s sisters always knew they had a brother they could rely on.

They could count on him to never forget them and to always fend for them.

This was a financial, psychological and emotional safety net that Islam made possible for this family.

And what would the alternative have been? Formal equality in right and equality in responsibility – or lack thereof? That each gets their own equal share and goes their own way? That each is expected to figure out their own life on their own? That financial support is left to the unpredictability of personal choice (as opposed to duty)? Or subjected to capriciousness of emotions?

Independence and self-reliance are a myth

Independence and self-reliance in humans is a myth – people need other people to survive and thrive.

When we are young, healthy and strong, it feels empowering to be able to say: ‘I don’t need anybody to meet my needs. I certainly don’t need a man.’ But when we are frail, vulnerable, and old, the only bonds of dependence we may have ever relied on in life (the impersonal ones, such as our jobs) won’t come knocking on our door with a pot of soup.

(No need to wait for old age. If you have been postpartum, ill, convalescent…you already know this).

Sure, dependency isn’t glamorous or easy (the human condition isn’t glamorous or easy). But dependency was never the problem. Lack of integrity was. Lack of taqwa (God-consciousness) was.

It isn’t dependency that hurts us. It’s the latter.

(Nina Zeynet Guler for Unsplash).

Ihsan (the perfection of moral character) is a key component of Islam

Unlike other legal systems, Islamic legal rules must be anchored and sustained by the other key spheres of our deen: that is, iman (belief), and ihsan (moral excellence, the perfection of moral character).

Jiddo Salim’s financial provision bred goodness, love and appreciation because it was anchored in a firm belief system (iman) and in beautiful character (ihsan). The belief system acknowledged the existence of God, who determined that this giving was a duty. Not optional. A right upon him. Not charity. The intent, meaning and nature of his giving mattered.

And his moral character meant that his giving was always done with beauty and integrity. Never with ugliness. Never with harshness. Never used to hang it over his dependents’ heads. So it didn’t harm. It didn’t hurt. How the giving was done mattered.

Often, too often, the temptation to throw the baby out with the bathwater comes from pain caused by user error. Not from a system failure.

But the call of alternative systems is loud and alluring. And the job of raising better users is tough work.

So we switch systems. To varying degrees, we either consciously give up or casually neglect the full teachings and commands of our deen. But we should wonder whether we are simply replacing one kind of challenge (user-error-challenges) with another kind of pain. Because alas, we are freer, but lonelier than ever. More independent, but thirsting for deeper bonds. Unburdened, but stripped of the life-giving sense of purpose that anchored our prior generations.

Islam is a religion that calls for reflection and for wisdom (the Qur’an asks in many different places and forms: Do you not reflect? Do you not ponder?).

God knows best, but it seems to me that we will never truly grasp the wisdom of this deen if we don’t dig deeper. Especially not the parts of it that go against the grain of our cultural moment: ‘He grants wisdom to whoever He wills. And whoever is granted wisdom is certainly blessed with a great privilege. But none will be mindful [of this] except people of reason.’ (Quran 2: 269)

Nor will we reap the life-saving, life-giving benefits of this deen if we don’t embrace it in its entirety: iman, islam and ihsan.

(A hundred, give or take: “Young boys in bilad al-sham tweaked their age to avoid being drafted into WWI,” explains my mom. “So birthdates were not accurate.”)

In Lebanon, he left a wife and five young sisters. Their parents had died when they were still young, and rumor has it that my grandfather Salim married an older woman because he needed help caring for them. Hard times called for practical measures. But the marriage was not loveless. Ramsiye stepped up to the hefty task of raising five underage orphan girls, and secured my grandfather’s love and gratitude well beyond her death.

(My grandfather had a private locked closet in his bedroom. There he kept stashes of money and sweets. On Eids and special occasions, everyone, young and old, got our share. One day, he unlocked the door and I saw a black-and-white portrait of a woman all the way in the back, standing upright against the wall. Who was she? “Jiddo Salim’s first wife Ramsiye,” my mother explained to me later. “Allah yarhama. She was a good woman. My father spoke so lovingly about her that I developed an affection for her too. Until this day, I keep her in my prayers.”)

When his departure to the other side of the Atlantic was imminent, my grandfather Salim made a promise to his wife:

“One day, I will cover you in diamonds.”

Young Salim before his departure to Ecuador. A boy of 15 or 16 in this photo.

He was headed to Amerka. Not the one in the north, where Boston and New York are, and a great statue of a dignified woman holding a torch in her hand stands. Rather to Amerka in the south, where indigenous women in bulky skirts squatted on the sides of the roads to respond to the call of nature (his older cousins who’d pioneered the first waves of migration to Ecuador – now well on their way to affluence – returned to Lebanon with all sorts of tales about the new land. Out of all, this bit about the indigenous women best withstood the test of time).

Penniless and with barely enough food to put on the table, my grandfather’s first wife must have shaken her head at the ridiculous mention of diamonds.

A bit of flour, sugar and oil would have probably been better than her husband’s pipe dreams.

But she supported him regardless.

Ramsiye, my grandfather and his sisters lived in an old, humble home that my grandfather had inherited from his father. There had been some land too.

As per Islamic law, my grandfather Salim got double their share.

Once in Ecuador, my grandfather Salim, Allah yarhamo, became a very successful and wealthy businessman. Like so many of the other paisanos (sometimes called Los Turkos del Centro (Downtwon Turks) because they had arrived with Ottoman passports), he was in the textile industry.

Quito in the 1940s. Venezuela street. My grandfather established a textile business in downtown Quito, a few steps away from the presidential palace. El Palacio Carondelet.

He imported and distributed to many small local businesses in Quito and to many other provinces in Ecuador. He was loved and respected by his clients, and remembered for his forgiving nature when it came to collecting his dues.

In return for his many favors and renowned generosity, his house was always full of miscellaneous gifts: produce, animals, trinkets. Chickens were a recurring gift. As little kids, we chased them in the garden and backyards of my grandfather’s big urban home. Then, Teresa, the cook, would slaughter them, scald them, defeather them, eviscerate them, and turn them into sopa de pollo.

My mother was Jiddo Salim’s first-born daughter from his second marriage to my grandmother Piedad. He and Ramsiye were never able to have children, though they’d wished for it earnestly for many years. So when my grandfather finally had my mother in his fifties, she became the apple of his eye. Jiddo Salim then went on to have four more children with my grandmother Piedad.

My mother Laila, center, the oldest daughter to Jiddo Salim and his second wife, Piedad.

During college, my mother knew she had a job waiting for her in her father’s prosperous business. But she was dismayed when she found herself treated as one and the same with all the other employees. Hurt, my mother told her father: “Baba, I deserve a raise. If you don’t give me a raise, I will have to leave and go work for someone else.”

My grandfather, a man of few words, looked at her and pointed at the door.

Hurt but proud, she thought: ‘I can be self-sufficient and independent. Surely, I don’t need this job with my father…’

She accepted a job selling encyclopedias door-to-door. Her father didn’t deter her. He just patiently waited for her to realize the foolishness of her decision.

And realize she did. Bruised by her dismal door-to-door encyclopedia venture, my mother was soon back knocking on her father’s door. Again, jiddo Salim simply said: “ahlan wa sahlan” and she got her job back.

“And that is how I eventually became his right-hand person at work. And yes, I wrote and mailed the checks that went to his sisters in Lebanon for many, many decades. That is what you wanted to ask me about?”

“Yes,” I say to my mother over the phone. I speak from my home in New Jersey. My mother speaks from our family home in Quito.

“My father didn’t know how to read or write. He had dropped out of school during the first grade and never returned. I helped him sign and mail the checks that went to his sisters in Lebanon…”

Jiddo Salim with his five sisters in Beirut, Lebanon

“How long did that go on for?”

“Well, at the very beginning, when he was still poor, his sisters collected rent from their humble properties in Lebanon, but that was not much. Later, when he started earning well, he’d send them money.”

“Monthly?”

“No. He had enough to send for six months, or for the whole year. It was more efficient to send money that way from his accounts in American banks.”

“Who did he send money to? All his five sisters?”

“The three single sisters who never married he supported for the entirety of their and his life. One of his sisters married a well-to-do man, so she didn’t need her brother’s support. Another sister also married, but didn’t do so well financially, so he would send her money as well.”

“How long was he doing this for?”

“He started around the age of twenty, and I think he died in his nineties, so he supported his sisters overseas for around seventy years.”

“Seventy?”

“Yes, seventy.”

“Allah Yarhamo. May Allah SW have mercy on his soul.”

“This was a responsibility he never wavered from. Later, he also built them a beautiful house in Beirut. They were very grateful. And they had a deep, deep love for him.”

My toddler screams. We hang up the phone.

-

And what about his promise to his wife?

I was eight or nine years old when my mother brought down a jewelry box from the top shelf of her closet. Inside it there were several black, green and red velvet pouches, tied with golden strings. She opened one and produced two earrings: teardrops in white gold, with two encrusted diamonds on each earring. The diamond on top was the size of a pea, and the one in the bottom was the size of a fat blueberry.

Combined, their value today would be enough for a down payment on a house.

“These belonged to Jiddo Salim’s first wife, Ramsiye,” my mother told me. “They are part of a set. One of many. He kept his promise to his wife. He covered her in diamonds.”

-

Allah yarhamo. May Allah have mercy upon Jiddo Salim’s soul.

-

Jiddo Salim, right, always wore a three-piece-suit. He had kind, ligh-blue eyes. He was known far and wide for his generous and forgiving nature. May Allah have mercy on him.

Yesterday my six-year-old daughter shared a bowl of pasta with her baby brother. She shoved big handfuls of farfalline into her mouth, barely giving Muhammad a chance to get any. He screamed.

“Khadija! That’s not nice,” I said. “That’s selfish.”

Happens all the time: One of them wants to be the first to pick candy out of a shared bag and leave their sibling the less appealing bits. Selfish behavior.

One of them may walk into the house and slam the door shut just as their younger sibling is about to walk in. Me-first, thoughtless behavior.

Getting the baby angry is apparently cute, so one of them will frustrate him and try to get him to fight them back, just for laughs. My enjoyment at the expense of others. Lacks Empathy.

I am constantly in shock –after all these years mothering-- at the level of investment and presence needed to help our small humans develop good character. And it scares me. It’s a shared bag of candy with their siblings today. What will it be fifteen years from now if selfishness isn’t weeded out?

What kind of heartache would they cause themselves and others if they carry their flaws into adulthood?

Photo by Melanie Sykes on Unsplash

Humility, Admitting to flaws, before the spillovers

Zayd, at least currently, is more prone to humility than his little sister. He pushes back, but if he is shown his mistake, he is quick to apologize. He writes apology letters. He has been doing so since he learned how to write.

Khadija, who is only six, is quicker to deny her misdeed and push back with an emotional meltdown. Who??! Me?!? When?! I didn’t mean it. It wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t see him. You’re not fair. This isn’t fair!

The children can admit their wrongdoing with humility, apologize, face the consequences of their actions, and move on.

Or they can show no humility, no remorse, and fight back. But they will still suffer the consequences of their actions. As best we can, their father and I try to help them understand that bad behavior has real consequences in the big world out there.

Some consequences befall immediately. And some consequences to our selfishness, thoughtlessness, carelessness, self-centeredness simmer over time. Over years, even. Until one day, something or someone turns up the heat, and the pot comes to a sudden boil.

Some spillovers are irrecoverable.

Some spillovers hurt many innocent people.

But humility, accountability and correction lower the heat. They’re the friend we may not want or enjoy, but need.

Our “upbringing” ends in childhood. Should it?

On one occasion, I watched as my niece told my sister-in-law what had happened in school that day. She was angry at the teacher, whom she said was guilty of x, y, and z.

My sister-in-law calmly disagreed and explained to my niece where the teacher might have been coming from. My niece didn’t like it. This aunt was always taking the teacher’s side, it seemed.

“It’s my job to try to show you the other side,” she explained. “Clearly, your side of the story is all too evident to you. You don’t need help with that.”

I thought to myself: Who performs this kind of labor in our personal lives? Who pushes back against our perspective of events and shows us the other side? Who has the courage to tell us that the difficult situation we may be in, or the argument we got into, may have a lot to do with our own flaws?

In fact, lately, I can’t stop thinking that the tragedy of adulthood is that we cease to be raised.

I correct my children’s behavior all the time. But I am under no delusion that I do not need that heart-and-soul labor myself.

Particularly at a time when our culture encourages us to identify “toxicity” in others and to end such relationships, who will help us point the finger at our own selves?

I am not sure who’s interested in taking on this thankless and risky job. I am not sure we are open to receiving this kind of service from others. But I am sure that performing this labor for others is a khidma (service) of immeasurable value. And receiving it from others is likewise a profound service to ourselves first and foremost and then to others.

Can there be tarbiyya in the absence of hierarchy?

Perhaps the issue with benefiting from tarbiyya – teaching and upbringing—is that our personal relationships as adults tend to be equal. At least here in our post-village modern West.

Contrast the world of personal relationships to the professional world: in a corporation hierarchies continue to exist and matter a great deal. Bosses will certainly point out mistakes, keep you on your toes, force you to comply and to deliver your best performance, or you will lose your job.

But who or what forces us to be on our best behavior in our personal lives and in our intimate relationships? Is it really far-fetched to say that we have more deference towards our bosses than we do towards our spouses or elders? That we take our marriages for granted in a way that we do not take our careers and jobs for granted?

And who will play in your personal life the role of your supervisor at work? Who will take you aside for a “chat,” and tell you where you’ve gone off?

The Prophet (ﷺ) said: "Help your brother, whether he is an oppressor or he is an oppressed one. People asked, "O Allah's Messenger (ﷺ)! It is all right to help him if he is oppressed, but how should we help him if he is an oppressor?" The Prophet (ﷺ) said, "By preventing him from oppressing others."

Who will do that for you?

Speaking Truth to Emotions

“A friend of mine will likely get a divorce,” a friend told me. “She’s in a very bad place. I am calling you because I need to hear your perspective on this situation, without mentioning who it is. But I can tell you that both of them are very good people. The best of the best.”

“Sure, go ahead,” I said.

Love had dwindled. The couple had devolved into roommates who tolerated one another and got their share of the chores done, but without affection. There were no vicious fights. He was too polite to raise his voice. And too tired, perhaps, to argue any further. She wanted more. She wanted his love back. Her marriage back. At this point, even anger would be better than his indifference. A sign that he was still alive. That she still evoked any emotion in him. But she got nothing. Nothing but cold, wounding politeness.

Her side of the story was very clear, but his was not.

What did he need to love her? He’d attempted an explanation, but he was asking for things that either “made no sense” or “were unfair of him to ask.”

“Did you agree with her that his demands made no sense?” I asked my friend.

“Not necessarily…”

“So did you push back?” I asked.

“I don’t think that that is what the phone call was about. She was calling for emotional support. And she was in a bad place. I don’t think she would have taken pushback well.”

“So who will push back on her narrative? If she’s wrong in his assessment of his needs, and that flawed assessment is perpetuating the chasm between them, who will point this out to her?

“I’ve attempted that in the past with others,” she said, “and it hasn’t gone well. I don’t think that that is what friends want of you nowadays.”

The phone call ended.

My friend, perhaps, understood her friend’s husband a little better after our conversation.

But she would not call her friend back. The conversation died there, between her and I.

Professor Sherman Jackson once said: People know of the imperative of speaking truth to power. But what about the need to speak truth to emotions?

And what if pushback was not simply a sadaqa (charity) we choose to bestow on upon friend, but actually it was that friend’s right?

Big Humans need pruning, too.

I think the friend who called me about her friend on the brink of a divorcee was right: too many friendships today favor and prioritize their own survival over the other person’s actual welfare.

We are not willing to risk addressing a friend’s questionable behavior, if it risks frazzling our social bonds.

But shallowness in our friendships won’t help anybody. Too many people are hurting in their personal lives and in their relationships. They could use a hand. A hand that actually lifts up. Not a hand that pats in the back.

And only one key will open the door to receiving this kind of service from others: humility.

The willingness to hold a mirror to ourselves, to forgo the need to show to others that we have it all together all the time, the courage to accept a hand, and the determination to change what needs to change.

“Mas vale un momento colorado que ciento amarillo," as the Spanish proverb goes.

Better one moment of blushing than a hundred moments of pain.

-

“Sick how? What did that mean? My nine-year-old asks as we drive home from school one wintry afternoon.

I am not sure how this topic started.

At home, my children talk about the new Sonic movie, Minecraft, what the teacher said in class, what the pesky fourth-grade-girls did during gym, etc.

But the long drives to and from school on 80 West followed by the serpentine Montville roads often spark in my children existential questions about life, death, God, and family history.

“One of the things that this meant for Abuelita was that she said things that…. Well…that made no sense,” I explain to Zayd.

“She spoke nonsense?”

I cringe at his bluntness.

“Yes, I suppose she did.”

Abuelita would invent things. She’d pick up the phone saying her relatives were calling when the phone hadn’t rung. She’d chat over lunch about how so and so had visited. Except that person had been dead for years. She’d ask guests inappropriate questions, or share fantastic stories that her mind had conjured up.

“Wow, that must have been so embarrassing,” says Zayd.

“Yes, it could be.”

It was.

When I was growing up in Ecuador, we didn’t talk about mental health. We didn’t talk about Abuelita’s condition.

Abuelita lived with us at home for many years. She would of course sit with us for meals and social time, and when guests were over, these times were stressful. What would Abue say to them this time? What would she come up with?

We braced ourselves and preemptively tensed up.

Sometimes my mother would task us with monitoring the situation and averting the worst scenarios. Not easy tasks for self-conscious teenagers.

We developed diverting mechanisms. As she started one of her implausible stories, we would interrupt to offer dessert. Maybe the guest would like another slice of the wonderful carrot cake? She was starting a detailed account about her hemorrhoids? Wow, wow, WOW! It is so cold today, isn’t it, Abuelita? The weather is insane!

Strangely though, although Abuelita’s “nonsense speech” could be cringeworthy and embarrassing to her family, some of us found great comfort in it.

I know my older sister did. I know I did.

During those years, my mother was trying to raise her children as Muslims in a country of thirteen million Catholics. Back then, we were trying to fit in and not stand out like sore thumbs at all times.

This caused clashes. Tensions. Headaches and heartaches.

Up on the third floor of our house – a whole level built in later years to accommodate our growing family-- Abuelita would be found knitting a sweater with oversized arms and undersized torsos. Or escarpines; baby booties with exaggerated pointy heels, as though foot wear for the mystical creatures in her fanciful mind.

“Abuelita, cuénteme algo del Líbano,” I would ask. Tell me something about the Lebanon years. Or something from when you were chiquita.

And it was like pressing the On button in my sister’s radio cassette player: We had these neighbors, and uncle So and So visited on Eid, and we prepared picnic baskets and drove to Ichtoura…. Oranges were in season… Fatme the maid was insolent and talked back…

And then she would diverge to her teacher in first grade, to the mean girls who took her pencils yet she was scolded for it, and to her own grandmother in La Vicentina Alta gifting her a little sweet….

She’d move seamlessly from Beirut to Quito, from trips to South Lebanon to the Catholic functions of her remotest youth.

The distant past was as tangible to her as I was then, lying on her lap as her stream of consciousness washed off the angst of my teenage years.

The recent past –yesterday, last week, last year—all that was a blur.

This went on until I was called back down to dinner. Reminded to do homework. Made to say my night prayers. Yanked back to a life of visible difference and uncertain belonging. A life far less soothing than Abuelita’s tales.

In recent visits to Quito, I have continued to seek comfort in her. I noticed on my last visit that she wouldn’t talk as much. How unlike the grandma I always knew! What was wrong with the On button? Why was it malfunctioning? It unsettled me.

But I sought comfort in her soft wrinkly hands and in long hugs that she accepted unhurriedly. I would observe how, as if by osmosis, my anxieties and heaviness would leave me as my body rested on hers.

A mother’s body upon a mother’s body. Not just my mother’s mother, but my own mother too.

Al-jadda fi manzilat al-um. The maternal grandmother is on the station of the mother. A piece of wisdom I gleaned from my PhD research on custody law in Islam.

“Ya estás viejita!” She told me last time she saw me, two summers ago. You have aged a great deal!

My mother and aunts gasped. “Mamá! Por favor! What things you say!” They threw me apologetic glances and shook their heads.

But I was laughing. “It’s true! It’s true! I am not twenty anymore. Grandma is just dropping facts, right Abue?”

She looked confused. “Perdón.” Literally, forgiveness. A word she says in response to others’ cues that she has said something inappropriate, although the precise nature of her offense eludes her.

Abuelita linda. I hug her, her childlike frankness filling me with tenderness.

“Zayd, there’s something I want you to know,” I say to my nine-year-old as our long drive home draws to a close and we approach our home. I turn very serious. I want him to remember this bit.

“I want you to know that although grandma’s “nonsense talk” could be irritating to those around her, my mother was never rude to her, never unkind to her, never harsh to her.”

Living with someone who, as part of her condition, would talk non stop, and would say nonsensical things, could grate anyone’s nerves. People ranged in their degrees of patience, but to me, my mother was the gold standard in how to treat Abuelita.

As a devout Muslim, my mother lived by a strict code of morality where being harsh or dismissive to parents is a serious sin (Quran 17:23), and where service to parents –regardless of one’s feelings towards them—is a duty one cannot forgo.

“Zayd, my mother would never just tell grandma to be quiet. Would never shush her harshly. She would always just tap her arm gently and say “mamita, mamita, mamita,” lovingly, until grandma understood she should abort her story or change the subject. My mother would always divert with gentleness. I want you to remember that.”

I pull into our driveway. “Okay Khadija and Zayd, let’s go. Don’t forget your backpacks in the car. Come on.”

Zayd opens the door and rushes to the house.

“Mama,” Khadija, my six-year-old, says. She has been quiet the entire ride.

“Yes tutu?”

“Mama. I would have talked nonsense.”

Her words throw me off completely. Huh??

“What do you mean by that?

“I would have talked nonsense back to Abuelita. So she doesn’t feel bad.”

I stare at this six-year-old daughter and teacher of mine in disbelief, my heart racing, a knot forming in my throat.

“Oh Khadija!”

I weep in the driver’s seat.

Against all odds, my mother taught us Islam. All her five children, scattered around the world, are Muslim today by conviction and by love.

But this little girl, at that moment, saw farther, saw deeper, saw higher than all of us ever had.

Khadija reminded me that though we have Islam, the journey towards ihsan is ever-ongoing.

The journey toward doing not only what is good, but what is better. Not only what is fair, but what is beautiful. Not only what is reasonable, but what is excellent. To be ever-kinder, ever-gentler, ever closer to our Prophet’s ﷺ heart, so that we may be, like him, a mercy to mankind.

I love you and miss you Abuelita Piedad.

Let’s hold hands.

Your old mother hands, and my aging mother hands.

Please tell me your stories.

The new, the old.

What’s real in the world. What’s real in your heart.

I want it all.

And this time, Abuelita, nobody will interrupt.