Who Am I? Read this and (sorta) find out

As Salaamu Alaikum, wa Rahmatullaahi wa Barakaatuhu

Peace be upon you, and the mercy of Allah and His blessings

So, who is Muslimah in Progress? I’ve been writing for years now, sharing my experiences and ideas with family, friends, and a whole lot of strangers. Now, at the ripe young age of 47, I hope I have accumulated some wisdom to help me put all of my experiences in perspective. It is my prayerful wish that everyone who reads what I write benefits in some way, either through my humor or by taking a message to heart. I write for me, but I write for you as well.

I grew up in Southwest Oklahoma, one of two daughters of an army man and his German wife. They met when he was stationed in Germany and after they married he got moved around a bit and finally stationed at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. My sister is about three years older than I am. She was born in El Paso, Texas, and I was born in Verdun, France. I told you he got moved around a bit!

I am the only Muslim in my family, may Allah give them hedayah (yeah, you family members reading this, I DO pray for you, nannie-nannie boo-boo, but you know I do it out of love and I’m not going to be showing up at your door with religious tracts so hopefully you can deal with it). After a, oh, I suppose mostly normal childhood, I hit the teen years about the same time my parents were getting divorced and life kind of hit the crapper for a while. I won’t bore you with the details but I came out of that time period with enough baggage to fill the cargo bay of a 747 and spent a good decade or more trying to unpack.

Eventually I landed in Kansas City, Missouri (there is a less-famous and somewhat more squalorous Kansas City KANSAS just across the river, but since I lived there I think it’s been largely replaced by a NASCAR super speedway). I got a job in food service, then a grocery store, then a print shop, then a Kinko’s, and was actually doing all this while converting to – ah, I bet you thought I was going to say Islam, didn’t you! Nope! I was in the process of converting to Judaism. That is a story in itself which I’ll tell you about another time inshaAllah. Anyway, I was studying Judaism, spending Shabbat (the Sabbath) with an Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic family, learning how to pray in Hebrew, and getting ready to go live on a kibbutz in Israel, and then, something happened. Muslims happened.

I remember the very first time I came into contact with a Muslim (that I knew about). I was in a McDonald’s restaurant on Broadway about midway between downtown and the Plaza. It was not far from where I was living with my mom at that time. I was reading something, Torah or one of the commentaries on it, and then a young man who was a manager at the store passed a few words with me while he was tidying up the dining room. I guess he saw the Hebrew and was curious. I don’t even remember what we talked about. It was not a confrontation or anything. I think he suggested I read a Qur’an or something. I smiled and continued my studies, eventually left and life went on its merry way.

Some months later, I was still in Kansas City, but I had started to drift away from the Jewish community. I had gone to New York City to formally convert to Judaism, had done a dip in a traditional mikveh and the whole routine, but the more I studied the more I realized that I still had the exact same questions in my mind that I had when I was studying Christianity. The Old Testament is the same for both faiths, after all, and though I had hoped to finally get answers to all my questions, it did not turn out to be the case. So I was becoming disillusioned, unhappy with where I was going, still planning on going to Eretz Israel, but losing steam. I never really clicked with the Jewish community. The Hasidic people are too insular and you are really always on the outside looking in, and the mainstream community distrusts the ultra-Orthodox so even as a practicing Jew I was viewed as something “other”. I was slipping away and was in danger of giving up and just being nothing.

Then the Muslims started impinging on my consciousness again. I still lived in the same area of Midtown and I used to go for a run and then stop at a little convenience store for a paper and water. All the clerks there were Muslim, from Pakistan. They were always polite and friendly. One day I went in and the manager was about to chow down on some food from Popeye’s, where I just happened to work. I stopped him before his first bite and told him there was ham fat in the gravy. He was incensed because he had specifically asked the manager (my manager, from the same store I worked at) if there was any pork in anything and was told no. Well, I had just cut open a bag of that gravy the day before and it says very clearly on the label “ham fat”, so I called my manager and told him and the Pakistani guy chewed him out – and thanked me profusely. I think his name was Naeem Ghani, and he married a girl named Kelli. Well, that kind of started my contact with the Muslims in KC and there’s a whole nother story involved there but for privacy concerns I’ll leave 99% of that out. Sorry about that, but this is not a Kardashian-style expose.

The important thing is, I ended up getting involved with the Muslim community. A young man gave me an English language translation of the Qur’an, which ended up not being terribly helpful because it was the Pickthall translation full of thee’s and thou’s and lots of flowery language, making the actual message about as clear as mud, but eventually I got copies of Towards Understanding Islam and Islam in Focus, and they were really helpful to me. And one day, I got up the guts to actually go to the masjid on 99th and Holmes. I sat in a class with eight year old kids and learned. I was scared to death and very shy but I went, and then I went back. Over time I connected with the ladies in the community and went to the Sunday sisters’ class. I learned. I made friends. I studied. I got answers to the questions that had bothered me for years. I felt like I was finally learning the truth, and ultimately, I submitted to Allah and said my Shahadah and became a Muslim.

I remember the day I reverted. I had been in the multi-purpose room with the sisters at a class. I remember Mervat Ibrahim, a petite Egyptian whirlwind who has always been a pillar of the community. And Deqa Rabile, a sister from Somalia who pretty much raised her sisters and brothers and Aisha Wahed, a sweet, quiet African-American sister who never wanted to be in the limelight. I remember a Paskistani sister, wife of a doctor, who started practicing Islam more as an adult even though she grew up as a Muslimah. Her son Ehsan was a teenager at that time and I remember she still treated him like a little boy. These women were more than just friends. They were my beloved sisters, and they encouraged me without pushing, loved me without judging, and on this day they responded with joy when I told them I was planning on reverting.

I had told them that I was going to do it next week because I wanted a special friend to be there to witness it, but they gave me the “What if you get hit by a bus” argument to not delay, and I couldn’t argue with their logic, so I decided to go see the Imaam after the class.

I didn’t want to do it with a lot of people around, so I literally waited until the masjid was almost empty. With my heart in my throat, I approached Br. Adnan Bayazid (may Allah have mercy on him) and told him I wanted to become Muslim. Standing there in the front foyer of the building with a noisy vacuum whirring in the background, he quizzed me to ensure that I knew what I was doing. He asked me about the pillars of Islam, and my duties as a Muslimah once I reverted, and once he had satisfied himself of my sincerity, he had me repeat the Kalimah after him in Arabic and in English:

Ash hadu an la ilaha il Allah, wa ash hadu anna Muhammadur Rasool Allah

I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, an I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.

Whew. One little phrase, just a few simple words, but such meaning, and such power to change a life. My life.

Br. Adnan told me that now I was like a newly born babe, free of sin and pure. With an emphatic gesture of his hands he told me that any sins, any mistakes I had from the past, were gone, forgotten. This proved to be my undoing and I started to cry from the enormity of what I had done. He smiled but almost started to get a bit misty himself so he excused himself, and I went back into the multipurpose room and bawled my eyes out, all by myself, and that was fine. I didn’t revert for anyone but me, so it was appropriate that Allah was the only witness to my cleansing tears.

I managed to pull myself together, and that day became two, and then three, and more and more days piled up and became months and years. I continued to learn with the sisters at the masjid and went to lectures and potlucks and Eid prayers and worked and did life. Over the course of few years I learned so much and was fortunate to avoid the Super Muslimah Burnout that plagues so many. Eventually I moved to Virginia to get married and fast forward sixteen years or so and here I am. Older, a LOT grayer, hopefully wiser, a more rounded Muslimah, conservative but not judgmental, strict on myself but merciful with others, and hopefully with the ability to string sentences together in a manner that is pleasing to others.

So, that’s me. A military brat, part redneck, part pickled-fish eating German with roots in the US that go back to Revolutionary times and then to England, Ireland, and the Netherlands before that, with a smattering of Choctaw and Cherokee in there somewhere. A writer, cook and baker, reluctant entrepreneur, wife of a crazy Egyptian who is a leader in our community, mom to a passel of great kids, owner of five chickens and owned by one cat. I live in the ‘burbs and make my own yogurt and pita bread but still let the kids occasionally drink Koolaid and I have good days and bad days and by the way I have ADD and an anxiety disorder but that’s a tale for another day.

I am a practicing Muslimah. I believe in the deepest depths of my heart that Islam is the truth and that the best way to live as an individual and in the community at large is according to the Qur’an and the Sunnah. I am proud of Islam and I don’t believe that we Muslims have to apologize for our beliefs. I will poke a stick in a hornet’s nest of Islamophobia or Muslim ignorance. I sometimes speak very plainly and will use the occasional cuss word. I will tell you exactly how the cow ate the cabbage, and if you have no idea what that means, it’s because it’s a redneck term so go look it up on the Google.

It’s Saturday and the kids just got back from their Islam class that Daddy teaches, and I have a mountain of laundry to get through and the bed is not made yet and there’s a crochet project I’ve neglected for far too long, and I have to put air in the tires of my bike so I can go for a ride later and my son will be bugging me to make salted caramel cinnamon rolls, so with all that in mind I better get off this computer and get busy. If you’ve hung in reading this long, thank you, and I look forward to helping you understand more about Islam and maybe life in general. Bring your big girl panties, though, because I’m a firm believer in tough love and telling it like it is. I guess that last sentence is the TL;DR version.