Both/And

A Life in Many Worlds

Huma Abedin

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501194825
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Biografías de ciencias sociales

In this beautifully written and propulsive memoir, Huma Abedin—Hillary Clinton's famously private top aide and longtime adviser—emerges from the wings of American political history to take command of her own story. The daughter of Indian and Pakistani intellectuals and advocates who split their time between Saudi Arabia, the UK, and the United States, Abedin grew up in many worlds. Both/And grapples with family, legacy, identity, faith, marriage, and motherhood with wisdom and sophistication.Abedin launched full steam into a college internship in the office of the first lady in 1996, never imagining that her work at the White House would blossom into a career in public service, nor that the career would become an all-consuming way of life. Still in her twenties and thirties, she thrived in rooms with diplomats and sovereigns, entrepreneurs and artists, philanthropists and activists, and witnessed many crucial moments in 21st-century American history—Camp David for urgent efforts at Middle East peace in the waning months of the Clinton administration, Ground Zero in the days after the 9/11 attacks, the inauguration of the first African American president of the United States, the convention floor when America nominated its first female presidential candidate.Abedin's relationship with Clinton has seen both women through extraordinary personal and professional highs, as well as unimaginable lows. Here, for the first time, is a deeply personal account of Hillary Clinton as mentor, confidante, and role model. Abedin cuts through caricature, rumor, and misinformation to reveal a crystal-clear portrait of Clinton as a brilliant and caring leader a steadfast friend, generous, funny, hardworking, and dedicated. Both/And is a candid and heartbreaking chronicle of Abedin's marriage to Anthony Weiner, what drew her to him, how much she wanted to believe in him, the devastation wrought by his betrayals—and their shared love for their son.It is also a timeless story of a young woman with aspirations and ideals coming into her own in high-pressure jobs, and a testament to the potential for women in leadership to blaze a path forward while supporting those who follow in their footsteps. Both/And describes Abedin's journey through the opportunities and obstacles, the trials and triumphs, of a full and complex life. Abedin's compassion and courage, her resilience and grace, her work ethic and mission are an inspiration to people of all ages."This journey has led me through exhilarating milestones and devastating setbacks, " said Abedin. "I have walked both with great pride and in overwhelming shame. It is a life I am—more than anything—enormously grateful for and a story I look forward to sharing."

PART ONE

DENIAL

Happy is the man who avoids hardship, but how fine is the man who is afflicted and shows endurance.

—Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)

I was a newly arrived American in Saudi Arabia when I got lost in a sea of abayas. It was 1978. I was three. It was hot that night. Actually, it was always hot. My parents had taken us shopping to Balad, to look for curtain rods. Balad is Jeddah’s old city—a labyrinth of winding streets leading to a myriad of alleyways where an explosion of sights and sounds meets your senses, emanating from small shops packed closely together. Brightly colored children’s clothing, tight bolts of fabric in black and white, endless displays of lamps and dates and perfume, electronics galore with every gadget turned to maximum volume, gleaming jewelry shops with twenty-four-karat-gold necklace sets seeming to float in air-conditioned windows. Overhead, fluorescent tube lights made it seem like perpetual, garish daytime. The air carried layered scents of baby formula, musky incense, grilled meat from the shawarma stands, and shisha smoke.

Men wore long white thobes with pantaloons peeking out from below, and either white or checkered headdresses. All the women, including my mother, were covered in black abayas. Back then, abayas were loose robes made from black silk or polyester with small armholes on either side, and open down the front so one hand was constantly clutching it closed. Draped over the women’s heads were black scarves. Some covered their faces entirely, so their world was always a muffled gray. Others had slits cut in the fabric across the eyes to allow them to see more clearly.

My mother only settled after haggling on a reasonable price with the salesman, mandatory for shopping in Balad. My older brother Hassan was helping my mother carry one end of the curtain rods, and my big sister Hadeel and I were holding on to her abaya as she led us through the confusing, crowded streets toward the car where my father was waiting. We stopped at a shop that sold dates. Before me, at eye level, lay massive round copper trays heaped with different varieties of the dried fruit, all stacked taller than me. Dark syrupy sweet dates, honey-colored dates that were tougher and chewier, dates dipped in nuts or chocolate.

As my mother bent down to sample one, she must have felt the pull of my hand on the back of her abaya. She turned to look at me, and I found her face oddly covered with a veil, which she quickly lifted. I was staring at a stranger. In this mass of identically clad women, I had grabbed the wrong “mother.” I let go and she watched me back away, saying nothing. I was overwhelmed by grown-ups towering above, uneven cobblestones under my feet, lines of shops on either side, shopkeepers advertising their wares in singsong voices. After what felt like forever, straight ahead, through a parting in the crowd, I saw my mother’s face. She was screaming my name and, when her eyes locked on me, she ran toward me and grabbed me tight. Her warm tears fell into my hair and down the side of my neck. I have only seen my mother cry during two periods in my life. That was the first time. She quickly ushered us to our father and into our waiting car and we returned to our temporary apartment.

We were visitors here. Kalamazoo, Michigan, was home. It was where I was born, where I spent my earliest years and every summer for years after we had left. There we took no evening trips to crowded bazaars. We lived in a suburban ranch-style home with a large picture window, a backyard with a lawn, and a small field of asparagus stalks. We spent weekends shopping at Harding’s Friendly Market, picnicking at Milham Park, or driving two hours to a kosher butcher in Gary, Indiana, where the proprietor usually mistook our Muslim family for Sephardic Jews.

The year I turned one, America turned two hundred, and that summer was jam-packed with bicentennial celebrations—county fairs, small-town parades, and displays of fireworks, all honoring the triumphant spirit of the red, white, and blue throughout the country, including in our hometown. My brother ran around the neighborhood with kids named Brian, Benji, and Shannon, and my parents went to backyard barbecues with friends. We were surrounded by mostly white people in the middle of white America, and our family felt welcomed with warmth and curiosity. We adapted in ways that made sense to my parents, letting go of cultural traditions that were no longer practical while holding on to the customs and practices that were important to them.

Our home was always filled with visitors. According to tradition, my father’s mother moved in with us as she aged so my parents could care for her. There was always a relative coming through town, some just having arrived from India or Pakistan—for dinner, a weekend, or a few weeks before they made their own new American homes or headed back to the motherland after their studies were complete. My parents hosted dinner parties for friends and colleagues where they would discuss literature, religion, and culture over heaping servings of biryani. They didn’t consume or serve pork or alcohol, and no one seemed to mind. Thanksgiving quickly became our family’s favorite American holiday. Christmas Eve we spent at our close friend’s house helping with tree trimming and preparing family feasts, opening the door from time to time to listen to Christmas carols.

A few months before my second birthday, my father was diagnosed with progressive renal failure. There were unidentifiable deposits in his kidneys, and his creatinine levels were abnormally high. “Your kidneys are failing,” the doctor at the Ascension Borgess Hospital in Kalamazoo told him. “At most you’ve got five to ten years, so you should probably get your arrangements in order.” My father was forty-six years old. In response, he simply smiled, nodded, and thanked the doctor for his help. My mother almost fainted from shock.

Despite the news, my parents, both professors, decided to go ahead with a long-planned sabbatical year. My father had intended to spend the year in Italy, but as they weighed various options, Saudi Arabia became a more appealing choice. At the time, flush with oil money and a rapidly growing economy, the Saudi government was investing in infrastructure and education and recruiting teachers to come and support inaugural programs at new institutions, and King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah made an inordinately generous offer. My parents would both be given faculty positions, plus free university housing, a stipend to pay for school for all three children, free medical care at the university hospital, and first-class round-trip airline tickets twice a year back to Michigan. Also, they would pay no taxes. On any of it. Their only expenses would be food, clothing, entertainment, and gas. We could live comfortably off of my father’s salary alone, because the cost of living in Saudi Arabia was a fraction of what it was in the U.S., and put my mother’s paycheck in the bank so she could continue to use her own money as she saw fit just as she had done for my parents’ entire marriage. Perhaps the most compelling reason they accepted the offer was the opportunity to teach us kids about our faith. My father thought it would be a great experience, and plus, it was just a year. His enthusiasm became contagious.

Somewhere there is a photograph of the road not traveled. It is of me in our Kalamazoo home at my second birthday party, a little “English rose,” as I was nicknamed by an aunt because of my rosy newborn skin, in a long pink dress holding a miniature golf set I had just received as a gift. The girl in that photo might have led a quintessentially middle-American life of Michigan football games and senior proms and road trips to the Grand Canyon. But just weeks after that picture was taken, we were gone, not just to another country, but on a grand adventure. My parents walked out of that hospital in Kalamazoo, and they just didn’t stop.

The denial that kept my parents from ever sharing the details about my father’s health with anyone was, in part, a refusal to let it become a burden. His illness never dragged them down. It only propelled us all forward.

My father was told he was dying, so he went out and lived.

CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection.

—Rabindranath Tagore

My father was curiosity itself. Whether with a bellman or a prince, he would strike up unexpected conversations. Sometimes, he would hear someone’s accent and tell them he had traveled to their country and had written about it and wanted to hear their story. Or he would tell someone that he understood the current political situation in their country must be troubling them. Sometimes he offered a turn of phrase in their language. People must have wondered why he was so interested in their life experiences, why he never seemed to be in a hurry. Who was this charming, cosmopolitan bespectacled green-eyed man with a shock of brown hair that never went gray years after his beard was salt-and-pepper, whose back was ever so slightly bent, and who was always dressed in a perfectly cut and pressed suit?

To some degree, he was a mystery to me too. Though a lover of history, my father rarely spoke of his own past. He would say the reason our eyes are in the front of our heads is to look ahead, not backward. As a scholar, he certainly believed we should learn from the past, but that it should be a platform for flight, not an immovable weight to which we are chained.

How did he arrive at this fundamental optimism, this relentless posture toward forward motion? This I learned from the stories told to me on visits with my aunts and cousins in Canada, England, India, and Pakistan. In these homes, where black-and-white photos and newspaper clippings adorned walls or jammed photo albums, I learned in bits and pieces, most of it long after I had lost him, about the man who came to be my father.

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Syed Zainul Abedin was born in the spring of 1928, in New Delhi, India. To me, he was Abbu, derived from the Arabic word for father, but in his official correspondence he was always Syed or Zain. “Syed” is the honorific title given to a Muslim man who can trace his lineage back to our last Prophet Muhammad, and his name was a reminder of the legacy we were raised to honor.

Zain’s family was well regarded in their community in North India. His mother, whom we called Api, was the eldest daughter of the chief physician to the Nawab of Bhopal, a state which had been ruled by women for one hundred years starting in the early nineteenth century, so it was no surprise that though still restricted by her place in society—in those days, living in purdah, or seclusion, was the norm for women of her social status—my grandmother was independent minded. She was homeschooled by the wives of junior British army officers stationed in Bhopal. Api married a man from Delhi who, like her own father, was a government physician. They had twelve children, six girls and six boys. Three of the boys died in infancy, and two of them didn’t live past the age of nine. That left Zain as the only surviving son. Losing one child, let alone five, might have broken most people, but Api was said to be tremendously resilient and never lost her faith.

Zain’s ancestors originated in the Hejaz region of Arabia and traced their path over a few generations through Baghdad, then Central Asia, before finally settling in the area that would become New Delhi, now the capital of India. The story of their migration over the centuries is the story of how Islam came to India, culminating in the rule of the Mughal Empire in the mid-sixteenth century, until the 1700s when the British invaded. The next phase of the story was the movement for Indian self-government. On August 15, 1947, the Indian subcontinent gained independence from the British crown after two hundred years of colonial rule. Days later, amid growing sectarian violence between Muslims and Hindus, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British attorney sitting in his London office, demarcated the borderline between the two new countries, largely secular India and the Muslim states of East and West Pakistan. Immediately, Partition sparked a mass migration of 15 million people: Hindus to India, Muslims to East and West Pakistan. It also triggered unthinkable brutality and violence—tens of thousands of rapes and incidents of arson, dismemberment, and murder, resulting in as many as 2 million people dead within a year.

The turbulence that was the Indian fight for self-rule touched many Muslim families, including Zain’s. In the bloody Indian mutiny of 1857, his father’s brother was killed while traveling by train to Meerut for his government service when, despite his protests in their native tongue, his attackers mistook him for an Englishman.

Partition tore families apart and the question of whether the family should move to a newly formed Pakistan was left to Zain, a nineteen-year-old college student and the only son, to decide. Zain had been raised in a mostly secular manner, so he decided to remain in India on principle. “I don’t need a country to tell me I’m a Muslim,” he said. So, they stayed. He believed that India could flourish, and always had flourished, as a nation made up of millions of people speaking different languages, keeping different traditions, and practicing different faiths. Segregation based on religion would solve nothing. Unless people were willing to respect one another’s identities and values, a border would lead only to more division, more violence, and more mistrust.

At Aligarh Muslim University, Zain worked toward his master’s degree in English Literature, and wrote poetry, both in English and in Urdu. He played nearly every sport, and rode for the university’s equestrian team, competing in show jumping events across the country. One summer day in 1948, just as he was about to graduate from university, Zain was jumping hurdles during riding exercises when his horse pulled up short, launching Zain forward, and the iron bar he was meant to clear, broke his fall instead. For a week, he told everyone he was fine, grimacing through the pain, crawling up stairs when he thought no one was looking. When his friends finally carried him to see a doctor, the surprised physician asked how it was possible that he’d been walking around for seven days with a fractured spine. And that, I learned from one of his sisters, was how my father broke his back.

A long and agonizing recovery began at home. Medical treatment at the time consisted of lying flat on one’s back on a pile of burlap sacks filled with sand, which Zain did for a full year, spending the time reading novels, writing poetry, and delving into books on history, theology, and politics. The doctors had no sense of what a long period of being immobilized would mean for his ability to fully recover. Undaunted, Zain threw himself into researching alternative Ayurvedic and holistic treatments, which became a lifelong pursuit. He essentially willed himself to walk again, but his spine never healed properly. He would also learn he had a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, a rare form of arthritis that causes stiffness in the neck as well as chronic back and joint pain. He was left with a permanent tilt, looking like he had bent slightly to pick up a paper at a newsstand, just a little tip forward, at the top of his back.

After his yearlong convalescence, having completed his master’s degree, he then taught English Literature at his alma mater for the next decade. Eventually, he applied for and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

In the summer of 1963, when Zain boarded a ship in the port of Bombay to carry him across the ocean, first to Europe and then to America, he had no idea the journey would be one-way. He was expected to return when his studies were complete, to marry a woman his parents had informally promised him to. That particular ship’s manifest consisted of other students who had received Fulbright scholarships. Zain’s Hindu cabinmate woke before dawn every morning to perform his daily puja prayer, complete with beautiful chanting and ringing bells. Zain followed shortly thereafter to quietly perform his own fajr dawn prayer. The Christian students held makeshift Sunday services. The merging of religious diversity was seamless, and they were headed to the one country founded on the principle that whatever they practiced would be honored and protected.

At Penn, Zain developed interests in eighteenth-century American drama and the American slave trade, and wrote his dissertation on the Barbary Wars, America’s first foreign conflict, fought against the Muslim nations of North Africa.

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A year later, another Fulbright scholar, Saleha Mahmood, arrived at Penn from the same part of the world: my mother had come to pursue her doctoral studies in sociology and demography.

Like my father, my mother never spoke of her own youth. I only got glimpses of the firecracker she had been from stories my sisters and I would drag out of my aunts during lazy summer afternoons in Queens or late nights in New Jersey. She was bhaji to them, the eternal elder sister, and they spoke of her with respect, wonder, and awe. They would open conversations about her with “You know your mother was the first woman to…” Then they would conjure a character so fiercely determined, so independent, I had trouble reconciling it with the mild, uncomplaining mother who slept in the bedroom next to mine.

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Saleha’s ancestors originated in the Middle East, migrating from Iraq and Yemen before settling in Hyderabad, where her grandfather and great-grandfather served as civil servants in the court of the Nizam, then the rulers of Hyderabad. Her grandmother Fatima lived in purdah, like my father’s mother. When women in Fatima’s family did go out, to pay a social call at the home of a relative or another family, they did so veiled. Covered carriages would pull up to the main entrance of the house, and household staff would hold up two sheets, creating a corridor between the door and the carriage. Shielded from view, the women would board, ride to their destination, and disembark the same way.

Fatima loved reading and writing and wanted to study in a school, but that simply wasn’t an option for her. Even if she had been free to travel the streets, in the late nineteenth century there wasn’t a single girls’ school for her to attend anywhere nearby. Formal schooling was available only to boys. The education that women recei...