Small Strokes Big Oaks

Over the past few weeks, Safa – the author of the following guest post – and I have written back and forth quite a bit and have found that we are quite kindred spirits.  Her wedding is in October, and so is mine.  In many ways, her family situation is similar to mine.  She is also a feminist working against the confinement of patriarchy while still following many of its rules, as am I.  She also blogs about weddings and marriage as a feminist choice rather than something that should be regarded with feminist disdain, as do I.  As you can imagine, we have had much to talk about.

So when Safa asked me if I’d like to cross-post this article about what it means to be Muslim, Iranian, Catholic, American, a feminist, a fiancee, all of the above and none of the above all at the same time, I jumped at the change.  Her words are incredibly pertinent and passionate, and so important.  And this is only a part of what she has to say.  I encourage you to go read her blog, especially if you like what you’ve read here lately.  Safa’s words exist in the space between contradictions, paradoxes, and binaries and, as such, challenge us to explore what it means to exist on a spectrum between these ends.  As you read her words here, think about what your culture means to you and what your partner’s culture means to him or her, because it isn’t always simple, and, sometimes, when it’s not simple, that’s when the most beautiful revelations begin.

According to recent surveys, 18-20% of the American population thinks President Obama is Muslim.  Why, I don’t know—maybe it’s because he’s black, or because his middle name is Hussein, or because he was raised Muslim, or because he’s been sympathetic to Muslims trying to build an Islamic Center by Ground Zero.  Maybe it’s because it’s Ramadan.  Not pardoning the blatant American ignorance that’s soaring twice as high as our national unemployment rate, another part of this equation bothers me, and that is the shock factor I see played up in the media, like the idea of having a Muslim president comes as a source of shame.  His Christian affiliation is repeatedly reinforced, and it makes me wonder, why should it matter in the first place?  Under the First Amendment, Obama can prescribe to any religion he wants.  What, I ask the media, is so sensational about being Muslim?

It’s a question I’ve been grappling with lately, because even though I chose not to prescribe to an organized religion, I was Muslim-born, and while my religious book of choice for my wedding is Hafiz and not the Koran, I still feel an attachment to Islam, in all its spiritual beauty and politicized dysfunction, more than any other religion, because that was what conditioned me for the world.  Catholicism, which is what Rene was confirmed into, was a moderately close second, but that was more because of Jesuit nuns than its doctrines.  When I was a child, my mom received her nursing degree from St. Louis University (Jesuit capitol of the US) and then went on to work at a Catholic hospital.  Both housed the Sisters of Mercy, and when they saw my veiled mother, they took her in immediately and protected her because to them, her hejab was no different than their habits.  So I grew up with a different version of Catholicism than many people I know, and for the longest time, I didn’t see it as any different from Islam, because these women, who were just as covered as my mom, looked after me and coddled me like a group of grandmothers.  I hear the word infidel thrown around today, and the word is Islamically so foreign to me, because my mom made sure I grew up with a version that wouldn’t damn these sweet nuns to hell.

The other night, a Persian friend of mine of Zoroastrian and Jewish descent asked me, “How did you get out of the radical part of Islam and still learn to respect the religion?”  I told her I think it was the mix of several factors—I had contact with my American (Catholic) family, I spent time with nuns on a regular basis, I was always an outsider because of my artsiness, and I couldn’t play and socialize with the other Muslim kids.  The house our Iranian Shia community would congregate in at least once or twice a week belonged to a family that also owned several guinea pigs.  For some reason, going near the guinea pigs put me into anaphylactic shock.  I still remember the first episode.  I was eight years old, and right after petting the animals, I broke out into hives, my eyes swelled shut, and my wind pipes closed.  Somehow, blind and unable to breathe, I stumbled my way downstairs to my mom.  Immediately, she rushed me to the ER.  It was the only time in my life I saw myself dying, and the idea scared me so much, I fought to cry, only my eyes were too swollen to make the tears and my throat was too constricted to make the sounds.  For the longest time after that, we thought I was allergic to rodents, but after living in New York without a single rat or mouse-induced episode, I don’t know what made me trigger that night.  All I know was that it stayed in that house.  For the next three years, my father would insist on going back to that house, and he forced me to come along, arguing that if I didn’t touch the guinea pigs, I would be fine.  He couldn’t be more wrong.  On the nights he dragged the whole family over, my mom had to give me Benedryl so that I arrived there so drugged up, all I could do was sleep in her lap.  On the nights she worked or was in school, I didn’t have any medicine, so I spent all my time outside on the house’s front porch swing, away from the other kids.  It sounds lonely, but really, it ended up being a blessing in disguise, because it taught me to look at my father’s version of Islam from an outsider’s perspective, and from that, I created my own adaptation of it, one that valued women and artists and little girls who couldn’t go around guinea pigs, one where you could dance with God, like the Hafiz poem.  Little did I know at the time that my Islam was closer to the real thing than my father’s was.

This is the Islam I carry with me today, and this is the Islam I see get threatened in political rhetoric that paints it as less American than say, Christianity.  What eventually drove me away from worship wasn’t Islam or Christ himself, but that organized religion is just that, a system of categorizing people based on what name they call God.  Each faith leads you on a different path up to the same hilltop, and for that reason, I see spirituality as a very personal relationship, one that shouldn’t be anyone else’s business but the person who holds it.  Instead, I see people blindly putting their fates in God, and then turn around and damn others who are different, as if they have the power to determine what every holy book says is beyond man’s control.

So when I hear all this rhetoric going around, particularly about Obama’s past and current Christian faith and this Wall Street mosque, I can’t help but feel threatened, because it makes me feel like I’m navigating a middle ground where no matter where I step, I’m bound to topple the balance, because embracing either my Muslim or my non-Muslim side implies some sort of betrayal of the part of me that gets discarded.  It bothers me that people use hyphens to separate others from the rest of Americans; what if I used mine to elaborate what type of American I am?  Most of us came here from somewhere else in the world.  I have a hard time feeling comfortable with the establishment of ethnic and inter-personal borders when so many of us have the shared experience of some person in our family crossing a border to come here.

This has been my life—an Orientalist, mumbo-jumbo of us versus them, and borders getting drawn all over the place, north, south, east, west.  It didn’t help that my father loved Khomeini and my grandpa mapped the moon.  Iran versus America—the rhetoric of my childhood, and in the middle was the mixed girl from both worlds who wasn’t enough of one, so I constantly felt like the other.  Add in annual FBI visits we used to get when I was a child—I grew up a somewhat schizophrenic childhood where I really wasn’t quite sure if America wanted me and was protecting me, or if it was stuck with me and kept an eye on me to make sure I wouldn’t cause any trouble.  I can’t help but wonder if this is how other Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans feel too, because if you’re wrongly attributed to be Muslim, people are very quick to correct.  Islam is a legally recognized religion in this country, so what’s the big deal?

And now that I’m marrying a non-Muslim, it seems like such a no-brainer to let that part of me go, especially because we agreed not to raise our children within an organized religion, but I can’t.  Islam is almost like Judiasm, where it’s so embedded with an ethnic region of the world, that to deny it and still call myself Middle Eastern feels almost like I’m denying where half of me comes from.  So where does that place me?  Am I American?  Am I Iranian?  The logical thing would be to say both, but politics have placed the two worlds on such different binaries, I still feel like the little kid playing by herself on the front porch swing, like maverick solitude is the only way to survive two countries bickering like a pair of divorced parents.

Safa is a writer based in Denver, Colorado. She writes mostly autobiographical stories that look at womens issues, performance studies and ethnic identity.  Her essays have appeared on numerous sites online, and her one-woman shows have been seen in Denver, New York, Vermont, and abroad at the Women Playwrights International Conference at the University of Mumbai.  She is currently the author of the blog Naked Lady in a White (Silk) Dress.

This was a guest post in a series on feminism and relationships, but is also about the author’s relationship with feminism and with religion and culture. If you’d like to submit a guest post for this series, see the guidelines here and submit your post to samsanator(at)gmail(dot)com.