This summer I've been in Chicago and, though it's the seventh day of Ramadan, I have yet to visit a mosque. When I first went to college, I realized I had unsettling apprehensions about visiting a mosque to which my parents do not belong. I realized I didn't know how to belong to Islam or the Islamic community as an individual dissociated from my family. I was afraid, for awhile, that I wanted so badly to dissociate from my family that unconsciously, I was attempting to dissociate from everything I associated with my family. For a long time after leaving home, I designated my religious practice to times and spaces I shared with my family.
The weird thing is, I have long been disillusioned by the Islamic community to which my family belonged. I say belong in the past tense because that community has become so fractured that it's hard to say if it exists anymore to the point that my family, being Bengali, can belong to it. What broke my heart about that community was the very racist/nationalist sentiments within it that turned Muslim brothers and sisters against one another. What broke my heart about that community is that it treated its members like they did not belong.
At first, I didn't understand why the people of my community could not look past their differences and realize their common ideal was one of peaceful surrender. Their conflicts tended to flare up over the appointment of the Board of directors and that of the Imam, the religious leader of the mosque. The race of the Imam, the language in which he should give Khutba and the power he should have in the community were all viciously argued over, at times resulting in physical confrontations between grown men.
Where was this thirst for power, a thirst so maddening that it involved petty racism and blind hatred-- where was is coming from? Many of the members of my mosque were distinguished members of local society outside the mosque. They are doctors, lawyers, engineers, pharmacists, city-council members, hospital board members, volunteers, soccer moms, interfaith leaders, and hardworking, exemplary citizens. Some of them are the downtrodden, clinging to Islam and Allah for some serenity in this life. All of them, outside of the mosque community, as respectable people.
Despite that, as Muslims and minorities, they are of a disempowered group. They work so hard to show to outsiders that they are okay and that they belong here, that they care about America as much as they care about their own well-being, that they are optimistic and level-headed. However, a part of them knows that outsiders do not perceive them as such. A part of them knows that it is impossible to overcome the racial casting endowed them by the majority culture and it is enough to be utterly disempowering.
This is a narrative of domestic violence where the domicile is the mosque and the members of the family are the people who worship in that community. Unlike in domestic violence narratives, it is apparantly easier to begin a new and separate mosque than it is to begin a new home without the abusing members of your family. But I believe, to a certain extent, the emotional scar of a fractured family is the same in both cases. It always hurts to know you cannot trust those with whom you have a deep bond-- those people that you supposedly should be able to trust unquestionably.
Many of the families in the community, like my family, are also fractured. The parts reflect the whole on every level. The American Muslim is a fractured identity, broken from inside and out. What I didn't understand at the beginning of college was that, this American Muslim identity is mine.
Knowing the larger social context, knowing that like Indigenous America, immigrant America, gay America, Black America, female America, rural America, urban America, conservative America, liberal America-- Muslim America is fractured by the America part, the part that includes all of these people fighting to belong to one America-- one huge dysfunctional family, finally makes me feel at home, sometimes, in my own skin. We are each a kaleidoscope, reflecting every color, though in a different way. We are each a mother, father, brother, and sister all in one. And this is the American identity that is mine.
I have finally begun to feel comfortable with my religious beliefs and have even begun, though slowly, to practice them in my own right.
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