Red, White, and Muslim
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Red, White, and Muslim

Asma Gull Hasan

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eBook - ePub

Red, White, and Muslim

Asma Gull Hasan

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About This Book

An Inspiring Account of One Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her Spiritual and Cultural Identity

For Asma Hasan, being a Muslim is not merely a matter of birth, but a matter of choice and faith. Hasan's personal relationship with her religion was, and continues to be, a defining element of her life, and through her writing she inspires a new understanding and appreciation of a frequently misunderstood tradition. This is her American story.

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Information

Publisher
HarperOne
Year
2009
ISBN
9780061971426

Chapter 1

Born Muslim

He it is Who shapes you in the wombs as He wills.
There is no deity save Him, the Almighty, the Truly Wise.
Qur’an 3:6
“When forty-two nights have passed over the drop,
God sends an angel to it, who shapes it and makes it ears, eyes, skin, flesh and bones.
Then he says, ‘O Lord, is it male or female?’
And your Lord decides what he wishes.”
Hadith (saying)
attributed to the Prophet Muhammad,
from the Hadith collection of Sahih Muslim
I grew up in a rural, minimetropolis about one hundred miles south of Denver: Pueblo, Colorado. Our house was Mediterranean-style stucco with a red-tile roof. We were the sole Muslim and Pakistani family for years and, even with a few additions, the Muslim and Pakistani population was never high. Pueblo is the gateway to the southern Colorado community and the Southwest. It had a large Latino and Chicano population, of which I became an honorary member because of my dark hair, eyes, and complexion. Native Spanish speakers would solicit me in conversation.
Como está?” an older Latino man would say to my sister and me while we waited for my mom to pay for her groceries.
“Oh, we don’t speak Spanish,” my sister would say authoritatively, taking her role as the older sister very seriously.
“Bah, you kids don’t care about your culture no more,” the man would gruff and then stomp out of the store. Spanish speakers would become very irate when we wouldn’t respond “en español.” But as we would later tell Mom at home, we weren’t Latino.
“Yes, you are!” My mother replied.
“Mom, how can we be?” my sister asserted the way that an eleven-year-old girl does with her mother.
“Your ancestors were the Moors,” my mom said, “who conquered Spain.”
“But Mom, I thought we were Mongolian,” I whined, confused.
“Your mother claims to be related to everyone!” my father’s phantom voice piped in from the background.
As my mother had told me many times, she once again related our history: In the late thirteenth century, the descendants of the Mongolian warrior Genghis Khan traveled just off the Silk Road from their Central Asian home to an area in what is now called Afghanistan. The grass was high. Tigers and lions roamed freely then. The Mongolians wore long, parka-like coats with fur collars and cuffs to stay warm in the winters. They had fair skin but dark hair and Oriental-looking eyes that were narrow and smooth. They were Muslims. They were the Khans. Their people would live in the shadow of the Himalayas for centuries.
Hundreds of years later, in 1970, Seeme Khan, who belonged to the family branch that had moved to India and then Pakistan, married a man from a different ancestry—the Aryan tribe of India, descended from migratory Europeans—who took her to America, where she gave birth to me in Chicago. I was born a Muslim and on the small of my baby back was the blue blemish all Mongolian babies are born with and which eventually fades away in infancy. Called the Mongolian spot, it is found among direct descendants of Genghis Khan.
My mother wanted to name me Scheherazade after the narrator-character of The Arabian Nights. My grandmother wanted to name me Asma (ahh-si-muh), after her sister who died young and whom she never knew. My mother found the choice a little macabre and said, “We’ll let her father decide.” When my father came to visit me at the hospital the day after I was born, he said, “I love my mother-in-law so much, she can have whatever she wants.” So my father, much to my mother’s shock, named me after her late aunt.
Asma means “high” or “exalted” in Arabic. Asma is derived from the Arabic and Persian word asmaan, which means “sky.” Although my dad is a doctor, he didn’t realize that people would forever be calling me “Asthma.” Throughout my school days and until only recently, boys would mockingly breathe heavily in front of me, simulating an asthma attack, each one thinking he was being quite original. The latest assault on my name comes courtesy of Microsoft Word’s AutoCorrect feature, which automatically corrects my name, ASMA, to ASTHMA. Once a law-school professor of mine wrote an e-mail to me reading, “Dear Asthma, I know your name is Asthma and not Asthma, but my Microsoft Outlook e-mail is automatically changing Asthma to Asthma. Sorry!”
My great-aunt Asma, and as a result I, had been named after one of Islam’s bravest women: Asma bint Abu Bakr (which roughly translates as “Asma born of Abu Bakr”). Abu Bakr was one of the Prophet Muhammad’s closest advisors and led the Muslim community after the Prophet’s death. Asma was one of the first converts to Islam. In 622, Muhammad heard news of an assassination plot against him. His fellow Meccans, fed up with his talk of this new and just religion, were going to finish him off before he could gain more converts. Unlike the rest of the early Muslim community, Asma had not yet escaped Mecca for Medina. The Muslim community had been invited to resettle there by the locals in exchange for Muhammad’s services as an arbitrator between Medina’s factions. Now Muhammad was going to make the journey to Medina, not just to resettle but to flee from the attempts on his life.
In the dark, desert night, and with his cousin Ali sleeping in his bed, Muhammad sneaked out of Mecca, en route to Medina. Abu Bakr accompanied him. They took no provisions. Just in case someone did recognize them in the dark, they didn’t want them to realize that Muhammad was in the midst of an escape. They knew they would be camping out in the Arabian desert for a few days to let the murder plot unravel. They hid in a cave with a small opening.
The next day, Asma set out for the cave, a spot that had been chosen beforehand. She had bags of food and water hidden on her body, which she was going to sneak to her father and Muhammad. She had to be extremely careful. Everyone was looking for Muhammad now as the deception of Ali sleeping in his bed was revealed. A bounty was put on Muhammad’s head: anyone bringing him to the ruling elite of Mecca dead or alive would be handsomely rewarded. But Muhammad might have ended up dying of starvation and thirst first. He would dry up in the desert cave before any bounty hunter could find him. Asma made sure he did not.
For several days, she brought them food surreptitiously, and not one of the ruthless Meccans found Muhammad. She was pregnant at the time, too, and soon she escaped to Medina where she gave birth to her son Abdullah just outside the city limits. The early Muslims considered Abdullah’s birth a blessing. He was the first Muslim to be born to the now-free Medina Muslim community. Asma had lived up to the meaning of her name: sky. Like the sky, she sheltered Muhammad and her father, securing Islam’s growth and success for the next twelve years, when her father’s leadership of the community ended with his death in 634.
When I was a baby, my grandmother told me the story of Asma bint Abu Bakr and her own sister Asma. She spoke to me in Urdu, the language of her home country, Pakistan, while I dozed in and out of naps as a baby does. When I was a child, my parents spoke to me in the tongue of their youth: British-Pakistani English. But when they wanted to tell each other secrets, they spoke in Urdu, not realizing that I had already dreamt in that language as a baby. When my mom talked to her siblings on the phone, she sometimes spoke in Punjabi, a secondary language of Pakistan. I spoke American English, the language taught in school.
With all these languages in my head, I guess I could not keep them straight. In first grade, my teacher told my mother that I was “retarded.” My mental disability, she said, meant I would never learn to read or write English without special help. I sat quietly watching my teacher tell my mother that I was retarded. I had a disease, my first-grade self thought. I accepted it. I knew that all the other kids in the class knew the alphabet better than I. It took a lot longer for them to say it than for me: A B C K L V Z was my alphabet, roughly.
My mother was defiant at my diagnosis. She said to the teacher: “My daughter can read. You just don’t know how to teach her.”
That day, before we had dinner, my mom called me downstairs to the playroom in our basement. “Sit down here,” as she pointed to a spot next to her on the couch. She had a book of the alphabet in her lap. Thus, I began learning British English from my mother, every day, after school for an infinitely long hour. English had, until then, been a haze to me, a blur of black and white letters and pages, out of focus and flashing by me.
“Make the sounds,” my mother would tell me. “C sounds like cuh, cuh.”
“Cuh,” I said breathily one afternoon, “ah-tuh. Cuh-ah-tuh.” Recognition shook my entire little body. I knew what this was!
“CAT!” I squealed proudly. The blur of the letters had started to come into focus just a little bit. I was so excited.
“That’s right,” said my mom.
When the Prophet Muhammad received the first Qur’anic revelation, he had been meditating alone in a cave, as was common in that time. He was a religious man without a religion. He had heard of Christians and Jews and wondered why his people did not have a movement like those. Out of nowhere, an apparition appeared before him—it was not a person but it looked like one. The apparition squeezed him, hard. Muhammad felt like he couldn’t breathe.
“READ!” the apparition commanded him. It was the angel Gabriel. The Arabic term for “read” is Iqra.
Muhammad, now practically suffocating, knew very well he couldn’t read. He was illiterate. Having been born an orphan into a poor family, he was not educated.
I can’t! he must have thought, pleadingly.
The angel insisted again, “READ!” IQRA!
Muhammad wasn’t sure if he was going mad or not, but he felt the angel right there in front of him, squeezing the life out of him.
“READ in the name of thy Lord who created you,” Gabriel insisted.
Caught in this furious embrace, he felt the words rise up out of him. Something had taken hold of him, and the angel’s grip kept him from fighting it. His mouth began moving with the most amazing words:
Read in the name of thy Sustainer, who has created—
created man out of a germ-cell!
Read—for thy Sustainer is the Most Bountiful One
who has taught [man] the use of the pen—
taught man what he did not know!
Qur’an 96:1–5
Muhammad received the first revelation of the Qur’an. Islam was born. It would change the life of Muhammad, his wife Khadijah, and, eventually the lives of more than a billion people, including me.
Muhammad, despite receiving revelations till his death twenty-two years later, never learned to read. Reading was a luxury in pre-Islamic Arabia. In fact, even today most of the Islamic world is illiterate. Unfortunately, the Qur’an that Gabriel exhorted Muhammad to READ cannot be read by most of the world’s Muslims. I would not have this problem. I was lucky enough to be born to a mother who could read and who taught me British English. The homework my mother sent me off to school with would read: “colour” instead of “color,” “theatre” instead of “theater.” I would return home with the graded paper, which my teacher had marked as incorrect with these spellings.
“No wonder she thought you couldn’t read,” my mother said. “She can’t even spell!”
By the end of the year, I was the strongest reader in my class—in any kind of English. Not bad for a “retarded” Mongolian.
I was born a Muslim. When you are born Muslim, you are born with the history of Islam behind you. The birth of each Muslim continues the epics of Islamic history. My Islamic ancestors were great scholars, conquerors, and philosophers. They invented algebra and modern navigation. They fought the Crusades, and they brought peace to Arabia, Spain, and India. Islam is more than a religion. Islam has been one of the world’s greatest and most successful movements ever. The famous Pakistani poet Iqbal wrote of the cycle of Islamic history that “Islam is revitalized after every Karbala.” By referencing the Karbala massacre, where Muslim factions fought each other, killing the Prophet’s grandson Husain in the process, Iqbal reminds us that the story of Islam is one of both disappointments and triumphs. The poem continues by saying that for every time, for every group of Muslims, they must face their own version of a Karbala before they can move into the next phase. Just like the Moorish Muslims spoke Spanish in Cordoba, this South Asian Muslim girl spoke Spanish in Pueblo.
Islam teaches that we are all born Muslim, actually—a concept called fitra. Then, over time, we lose touch with the religion of our birth. Many are assimilated into another religious tradition, either because the family the child is born into is not Muslim or the child’s surroundings and environment don’t facilitate spiritual growth. Fitra should not be misunderstood though. When Islam says that we are all born Muslim, Islam is saying that we are born wanting to submit to God’s will, that we are all born innocent and able to recognize right from wrong. The word Muslim means a person who follows Islam. Islam means submission. The implied object of this submission is God. A Muslim is one who submits to God and God alone. Fitra is the idea that we are born ready and able to submit, inherently capable of doing right instead of wrong:
And so, set thy face steadfastly towards the one ever-true fa...

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