‘Croods’: musings on fatherhood

We watched Croods yesterday. Bravo, DreamWorks. You combined evolutionary science with well-timed cultural analysis of a historical shift in parenting styles as we know them. The distantly loving ‘cavemen’ dads of a previous generation are giving way to the protective but more permissive and more nurturing fathers of today – at least in the popular imagination they are. So it’s to be expected that I found myself awash in tears in the last half hour of the movie, holding my 7-year old daughter’s hand, as my heart ached for my own parents. When Grug finds himself unable to connect and communicate with his daughter Eep, I cringed as I recall the innumerable explosive conversations I had with my father (and to a lesser degree, my mother).

The saddest moment of the movie is probably when Grug resolutely steels himself, without hesitation, to toss all the members of his family into the distance over to safety, saying, “All I have is my strength,” accepting that he is just a caveman with few original ideas, little flexibility for changing times, and sparse emotional intelligence. But he loves truly and strongly, and his emotional illiteracy is reflected in his lack of narcissistic self-regard as he does not spare a single thought for himself. I see this in many fathers.

Naturally, as I write this, I am awash with tears again. I think of the stolid, strong, volatile-tempered father, who was absent from home through much of my youth because he was working two jobs and when he returned home, he was tired, sullen, and focused on his dinner. I think of how he was unable to exorcise his childhood nightmares of losing his mother, and thereafter perpetually negotiating access to his father via a difficult stepmother.

Even now, when he sees me off at Lahore airport, he turns away without a word after embracing me tight, unable to speak. No Disney speeches from my abbu. I remember the day when he vented his frustration at our complex relationship in words of hurtful anger and when I shouted that I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just communicate, why he had to always end up hurting me instead, why couldn’t he just say things without erupting like a volcano.

And then in 1993, my parents shuttled from office to office, negotiating with difficult bureaucrats, struggling to help me pursue my dream of an education abroad, even as I sensed their hearts breaking. My parents were now retired, no longer active, and they would suffer no late-in-life move to the West. Like Grug, my father picked me up bodily, and tossed me into the void where he could not follow me.

How does a parent have the strength to do that? As a parent, I don’t know. Maybe I will not learn until a very, very distant day in the future when my daughter, grown up, tells me she has to detach herself from Mama, that she is no longer “hooked” to Mama, and that she has a life to live, a life that is separate from my own. For now, I will plan on college down the street and a house next door (a la My Big Fat Greek Wedding). The Grugs of a previous generation have changed with changing times, and it has been painful. Who knows what changes lie ahead for the children of these fathers?

 

Interfaith marriages are here, but.

As I pointed out some time ago, interfaith marriages between Muslim women and non-Muslim men are definitely here to stay in the Muslim diaspora. While Muslim religious leaders have not generally come out endorsing interfaith marriages, a small trickle of leaders have begun supporting and counseling interfaith couples (and no, supporting and counseling doesn’t always mean converting the non-Muslim spouses). The fact is, it’s time to accept interfaith marriages, both for Muslim men and women. Sociologically, there is no alternative.

This is not to say that interfaith marriages are a simple matter, both theologically and socially, as Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl points out, or that general rules may be applied to all. Each individual must consider her individual circumstances in such decisions. For example, she must consider the question: how important is my faith to me? How ecumenical is my disposition? How much do I care about transmitting my faith to my offspring? How likely is a prospective spouse to be generous in the socialization of offspring? A few years into interfaith marriages, when children start elementary school, a spouse/s often experiences religious change, so that all bets are off. This, of course, can easily happen to a couple that professes the same faith, but I would bet that the chances of conflict on matters of raising children religiously are statistically higher for interfaith couples. In other words, individuals entering upon such a marriage ought to consider every possibility, including the possibility that the beloved will, a few years hence, become an intransigent opponent of his spouse’s faith. What then? Is the resulting compromise acceptable to her?

Consider this: according to Dr. Abou El Fadl, the rationale for the juristic consensus against Muslim women is based on potential religious coercion by the husband and on fact that traditionally, offspring inherit the father’s religion and last name. Today, while Western nations are patriarchal without a doubt, as are Muslim societies, what if such patriarchal lineage were to be disrupted? What if father and mother had equal power to socialize their offspring and pass on their respective faiths? Within such contexts, would the juristic consensus be different? For such individuals, even those within patriarchal societies, could a juristic alternative be imagined?

By and large Muslims do not seem overly concerned about Muslim men marrying non-Muslim women. In Western societies, where legal frameworks favor women in some cases, ought this juristic consensus (in favor of Muslim men marrying non-Muslim women) to be revoked?

For those who approach the debate in a de-contextualized fashion, a rule is a rule is a rule, no matter where it is being applied, and social realities are irrelevant. Islamic law does not function in this way. Still, scholarly consensus can be a useful tool for gendered fears and identity insecurities in non-Muslim majority societies.

On a writing deadline

I haven’t been particularly prolific lately, and I am on an imminent deadline to submit my book manuscript “Muslim American Women on Campus: undergraduate social lives and identities” to my wonderful editor at the University of North Carolina Press. As always, much remains to be done. In an ideal world, one would be merely fine-tuning in the final 3 weeks before manuscript submission. But this is the real world. My luxuries during these last weeks – which coincide with the first few weeks of 2013 – include reading a heartbreakingly beautiful article “Not Talking About Pakistan” by Taimiya Zaman, who is, it seems, a much younger and far smarter me, except in San Francisco. Enjoy.

Representing Muslims: ‘All-American Muslim’

After the first day, the new TLC show ‘All-American Muslim’ raised quite a few Muslim hackles in my social circle. Among other things, some were offended by its focus on liberal Arab Muslims. ‘What about the rest of us?’ some religious Muslims asked. ‘Why do we have to be assimilated, almost-Whites for us to be on TV? Why can’t our exemplary Muslim lives [er] be represented so we can show how we can be normal AND religious?’

Many Muslims’ desire to have good Muslims (not in Mahmood Mamdani’s sense of moderate, palatable, liberal Westerners who eat falafel) represented on TV was frustrated. Many like myself simply desired a diversity of images; in the case of minority groups, images are few and far between, and most such images are politicized.

Representation is fraught with complexity. Who represents? The bellydancer or the hijabi physician? The Pakistani college student or the Somali taxi-driver? The beer-drinking football fan or the mosque imam? And who is the audience? Liberal secular America, with its fears of all forms of religiosity? For such, their fears might be assuaged by Muslims who behave almost entirely like them.

Perhaps the audience is the right-wing person who donates to Church missions to Muslim lands, fervently believing that the presence of Muslims in America (rather than among the audience of international missions) is a cancer, an offense to the Christian character of the American nation. For such, neither positive nor neutral form of representation or visibility will be either acceptable or palatable. Representation of religious Muslims (whatever that is) will be infuriating, and representation of irreligious Muslims (whatever that is) will be perceived as an insidious attempt at normalizing Muslims.

Then the Facebook page calling for a boycott of TLC was born. And now, under pressure of such organizations as the Florida Family Association, Lowes has pulled its advertising from the show. “All-American Muslim is propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values,” the Florida Family Association claimed, also saying “The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.”

Essentializing, it appears, is a desire shared by both Islamophobes who want bad Muslims in the show and some religious Muslims who want only good, observant Muslims represented. Both sides wish to represent Muslims in a specific way. Since there is no such thing as ‘reality’ in Reality TV, the choices are important. The Florida Family Association would prefer TLC to feature Muslim hijackers in training, or Muslims on death row for rape and murder (preferably for honor killing) – extraordinary rather than ‘ordinary folks,’ Muslims who threaten American values of liberty. Perhaps the opposition of ‘All-American Muslim’ would like to feature a dark, bearded Muslim father with a strong accent, who mandates black veils for his wife (wives?) and daughters, and will not permit his family to drink or to date.

But I wonder where the right-wing Christian organizations would ally themselves on the issue of sexual freedom. Perhaps a Muslim father who forbade his wife from getting an abortion on her seventh pregnancy? Would that help or hinder the cause of representing really bad Muslims? Or would it unnecessarily complicate the picture and cause confusion?

Images are inherently confusing. They never really do what we want them to do.

The ubiquity of visual technologies and our ability to share images globally has rendered the gaze central to our religious and political lives and identities. How people are represented in entertainment media galvanizes individuals, organizations, churches, mosques, corporations, and large quantities of monies. At the heart of most religion, however, is the Divine – the human being alone with God. This aloneness is an uneasy bedfellow, embroiled in an unwilling orgy with our anxieties – indeed, our obsessions – with showing, representing, seeing, preventing-from-showing, adamantly-not-seeing or preventing-from-seeing in the media.

Breaking down fences that make dreadful neighbors

Recently, I was under the weather, and found myself in need of some external help. Some wonderful, sympathetic friends in my town took on the tasks of sending me family meals on days that I was too tired, and to pick up my daughter from school.

This warmth and assistance was invaluable to me. I was truly moved.

But on another level, my emotional response to these gifts disturbed me. I felt strangely burdened. My mind started rattling off ways that I could “repay” these “favors.” I tried hard to STOP calling people for help – even when they’d urged me to call and not to hesitate. I started, in effect, holding up my hand, drawing boundaries, putting up fences — which, we all know, make pretty terrible neighbors.

This made me question myself. When did I become this person who was unable to ‘take’ what was freely and lovingly given? When did I develop such a cold distant sense of self and other? When did I cut myself off from others?

On such days, I found myself missing a distant time in my (relative) youth, when I would show up sick and feverish at a friend’s house, fall asleep on her couch, wake up to a cup of tea and then lunch, fall asleep again, and wake up to snacks and desultory chat. The idea that my friend/s would find me burdensome did not cross my mind. The exchange had already happened emotionally, and that the giving and receiving was merely an outward thing, nothing that had to be earth-shattering. Invaluable, deeply appreciated, thankfully welcomed, yes. But not a disaster for my sense of personal security. Nothing that affected my independence. Nothing that broke my pride.

It is an uncomfortable thing, this fenced-in selfhood. It is frozen, unable to bend, incapable of flexibility,  illiterate in the art of freely accepting. This selfhood is crippled when it is forced to take. “What do I have to do to deserve this? Why are they doing this for me? Will they weary of my need? When I am not able to serve them, but have to accept service, will this disadvantage me socially? Will it put me in a position of emotional dependence, and then what if I am abandoned?” …

Many years of rootless wandering from continent to continent, community to community, do make you feel like you don’t belong – anywhere. Anywhere you go, you have to invest time to develop those solid relationships where giving and receiving are almost the same thing. When you’re done investing time in one place, you move, and start over. You remain somewhat of a stranger.

And then, when you feel like you are a stranger, you start making others into strangers.

I think that during my recent visits to Lahore, my family might have found my habit of saying “thank you, ammi” and “thank you, Svend” to be oddly exotic. Now, it may sound like I was raised ill-mannered, but we did not say ‘thank you’ in my family. We just did things for each other. ‘Thank you’ wasn’t necessary, or expected. ‘Thank you’ was a little bit of fence. Of course ‘thank you’ is a wonderful thing, and it sends out the aroma of warmth and appreciation even into long-standing relationships, and awakens them out of stagnancy. But in some cases, ‘thank you’ doesn’t occur – not because we don’t appreciate, but because the boundaries between self and other are not marked out so very darkly. Do I thank you for being in my heart? Do I thank you for being, in many ways, an integral part of me and my life? How do I set you apart, and then thank you?

In the early centuries of Islamic Sufism, we find numerous stories of Sufis whose shaikhs put them through a period of rigorous training, which included service to others and the performance of low-status work. Often, they were commanded to take up their begging bowls and to beg for scraps in the streets. Culturally, today, the pride that closes us off from asking or receiving is billed as an entirely positive thing. But in the spiritual traditions, the ability to erase pride – indeed selfhood – is praiseworthy. The Prophet described a mustard seed worth of pride as blameworthy. “What is a mustard seed worth of pride?” my shaikh asked me. “It is selfhood.” Naturally. this is not about greed for others’ possessions. Acquisitiveness is the opposite of this lack of pride.

I am trying to re-learn to take, but this is a difficult degree to obtain. The mastery of this art is a form of surrender. It is vulnerability, and yet it is emotional strength that is not shaken by give and take. I’m hoping I can regain that strength that I have somewhat lost along the way.

Immigrant religion: curbing the impulse

Read my latest Religion Dispatches post here: An Immigrant’s Tale: The Pull of the Homeland.

Immigrant Eid

And here is another poem that strikes a similar note. Some of you have already read it, and I thought it could use a re-run.

- immigrant eid -

they announced Eid today.

my house is silent.
i hear more sirens than usual outside.

my husband’s at work.

this morning
i couldn’t get out of bed and go
to eid namaz.

i really should push myself, i thought,
and go, but thought, then, go for what?
so my husband and i can split up
at the mosque front door to go and sit
with our respective strangers inside?
so aunties in abayas can look
at my pants, because they’re shabby and
because they’re pants, and then look up
at my face unseeing-
When we’re done i come out and wait
for him in the cold parking lot
watching people hurry to cars
and segregated parties in their
tight little colour-coordinated groups-
while a bearded man in a jalabiya
stares at this female body jammed
outside in a twisting river of men.

when i got out of bed at last, i didn’t
want to, and i couldnt stop crying
in the shower.

In Lahore,
ammi has cooked two types of sivayyan
and put them out in glass bowls,
with carrot halva and Kashmiri chai.

My Eid outfit complete with sparklies
is lying ironed on the bed.
Auntie Shaista in the drawing room loudly
waits to see how my outfit looks.

Little Izza is knocking at
my door, asking when i’ll be ready,
when I will come out to admire
her pink sharara and bright new shoes.

Asad is watching TV, but
the corner of his eye is waiting for me

Abbu and Imran are just returning
in white kurtas from eid namaz.

but here
in the fortunate first world
where I’m supposed to be bettering my life
and speaking english all the time–
here, where there is no dust, no flies,–
here, in the warm clean tiled shower
i can’t stop sobbing

Alone, with sirens screeching outside,
i prayed two rak’ahs afterwards
with seven takbeers
and seven tears hit the ja’inamaz
with far too loud a splash, and then
i read some pages of the eleventh sipara
–ironically, ya’tazirun–
and sent sawab to the Prophet,
my shaykh, my uncles and aunts,
grandparents, like ammi does, and then
i said,
I’m sorry i didn’t go to Eid namaz
and then i couldn’t stop crying again
my heart broke right there on the rug
and spilled wide open

and i said please don’t be mad at me.
look, i’m here, and my outfit’s in Lahore,
and Izza’s knocking on the door,
and I have no sivayyan,
and my heart the poor tattered heart
that I know You love
is broken today.

He looked at me, with those quiet eyes
and said, yes, I know. i cried again
and said that eid is eid
only because You’re here with me.

ten years in this new home of mine
and still eid day is not quite eid.

They say it’s eid today, but there,
on the rooftops of Lahore, young boys
saw a little sliver of moon that shone
through smoggy clouds and snaky cables
as an eagle swam across the sky.

Here, i saw no moon, i saw
moonsighting.com, and wrote an email-
eid mubarak exclamation point-
and cc’ed it to everyone.

i thought of calling ammi to say
eid mubarak. but i was afraid
my voice would catch, and she would hear
who i am here

and then i’d know for sure that she
was there, and there are no sivayyan
on my IKEA table, no halva
on the stove, no kashmiri chai
steaming in pretty china cups
no smiling niece outside my door
and no red kurta on my bed

Immigrant nostalgia

I had forgotten all about this poem, until today when I went digging in the ruins of my “writing” folder. Here is a poem over six years old.

- Immigrant nostalgia -
If I say it, you will put me on the old brown shelf–
So I’ll only whisper to the moon at night
how my heart strains for the absence of time
while it absorbs the concreteness of place
in quiet afternoons and expanding dawns.
How my niece’s brown hopeful, patient eyes
give me reason to live at a kindergartner’s pace.
How the endless nights still call for me
back to searching the clouds for light.
How the settling of dust on leaves can mean
much more than pages of printed lines.
How the gathering of heavy clouds assembles
hymns of rapture like an endless choir.
But if I say it, you will shelve me out of sight,
some Other drawer, with some Other label.
To you my knowing of yesterdays
are denials of your here and now.
But I don’t spin on my own axis alone.
Without a second line, my poem won’t rhyme.
How can you understand? Your life is sufficient
to itself, and I am forever split
into one who weeps when the other has flown.

(March 11, 2002.)

Immigrant ramblings

Scene: a graduate class. Students poring over papers. I’m sitting by, alert to signals from anyone.

Suddenly, I’m in Lahore, in Pakistan, and I see my mother’s hands. Her frail, busy hands are laboring on something as usual. And as I sit there, in a clean, institutional space on an American university campus, I’m suddenly lost. Where is the dust? The noise? The family? The chaos? The smells and sights?

Suddenly, my classroom, my space, my work and my persona are unreal. I need to reach out and touch what was real to me for so many years of childhood and adult life. How is one to move out of one real into another, and stay there?

We talk incessantly about how “people are people” and “life is the same,” but the concrete realities of life are dreadfully different between the U.S. and Lahore. I am shaken by this again. It just takes a moment of reflection, and I am transported.

The next moment, when I am called on with a “Dr Mir, I have a question -” I have to return.

Something about the chaos, the dust, the sights and smells is too real. When I go back for visits, its realness stuns me almost to the point of immobility. I can barely function in it. And yet I yearn to go back and touch it again, so that I may feel real again.

A minaret against a cloudy sky. The sound of adhan in a quiet evening. The sound of a donkey braying, a child laughing, a peddlar calling out, all at the same time. It is too much, when I go back. It overwhelms me, the routineness of it, the gray-dusty-normalcy of it. The clean, angular lines of life here sometimes feel like they are synthetically designed. They are predictable. The phones will work. Traffic will be bad on game day.

Home is noplace in particular. Home is in hot chaos. Home is in cold routine.