She is Muslim

This piece is inspired from Dina Zaman’s I am Muslim. I have not read her book, but certainly have discovered the IAM2 blog.


“There’s an American Muslim lady living here.” Said a Malay Singaporean.

“Really…as in…”

“As in white American…and she wears the tudung.”

That’s certainly great news - to be able to meet a Muslim, white American and hejab-ed in a place as remote as Mobile, Alabama. There was a sudden rush of euphoria and delight. Alhamdullillah.

“I would love to get to know her.” I said.

There’s so much to ask, so much to learn from this lady. There’s a certain connection. A sister in Islam.

“She has invited me to her house. You can come.”

I was thrilled.



One afternoon, my Malay neighbour called to tell me that she’d be going over to the American Muslim lady home, and asked if I would come. I was ready to go. We’d bring our kids over, as this lady has a young girl about eight or nine years old, and the kids could play while the mommies chat.

So that fine afternoon, we went over to the American Muslim lady's home. She is pretty, young and tall, and the way she dressed that afternoon, in the comfort of her own home, was almost hippy-like. However, there was a certain chaos in her home, from the living room to the kitchen to the bedrooms. She claimed the torrential rain had seeped into her ground floor house, and soaked her carpet. Clothes were strewn on the floor and on the mattress in her daughter’s bedroom. She apologized for the mess, complaining about her brothers’ kids who had came over the weekend, and created the mess. And almost instinctively, she took out a cigarette and lighted it. She continued complaining about her brothers’ wives and their kids, who were rude as they were not raised as Muslims. They came to her house and hoarded the food that she had bought over the weekend, almost US70 worth of food for the week just gone like that. All the while I was listening to her and watching her puffed her cigarettes away. A Muslim hejab-ed lady.

I guess the whole scenario threw me off a bit. It did not matter to me that my Malay neighbour, the one who introduced me to her, also smoked, loved to wear mini denim skirts and baby tees that occasionally displayed her belly button, but when this hejab-ed white American Muslim lady did that, it sort of turned my perception of her upside down. Then there’s this incomprehensible clutter, not only about her house but the state of her life.

After a while, I did ask her “why she became muslim?” Almost instantly, she said, it was the simplicity of the religion. For many years, she was confused, abused and lost and she was seeking something to turn to. Islam gave her peace, and simplicity in her otherwise befuddled life.

She had a brother and father who were hard core addicts. And both of them committed suicide, according to her. She could have been a hard core addict too, she said, if not for Islam, and had contemplated suicide before. I was not too sure about her mother, as at this point, her story was too compelling for me to comprehend. Cruel scenes of her life flashed by me, too harsh for me to digest.

She loved her teenage son and her young daughter, but both had looked different. It was obvious that her teenage son is white, while her daughter is mix. Her daughter has beautiful tan skin, and lovely brown locks – gorgeous in fact. And it will be awfully rude for me to ask where her gene might have come from. She said that her son is not a Muslim, but he will be, Insya Allah. As for her daughter, whom she described as "beautiful, Masya Allah," it was the result of a rape at a party many years ago. She claimed she was attacked by a man that she did not know, and it made her pregnant. She wanted to abort the pregnancy, but knew that the foetus in her was not to be blamed for the things that had happened. She prayed, she said but I was unsure to whom or to what at that point in time of her life. She kept her pregnancy, and gave birth to her daughter. Then she met an Arab Muslim man, either before or after reverting to Islam, again I was unsure and had married him. But the marriage did not last, for reasons that she did not say. However, the Arab man and she were still friends, and in fact, she was working in his company or something of that nature. She said, InsyaAllah, they may get back together. She said, she disliked Arab women. “They are arrogant and obnoxious. They think they are the chosen race.” Those were almost her exact words. They think they were chosen by Allah through his Prophet Muhammad (SAW) to spread Islam. Perhaps, and I can only infer, the treatment that she must have gotten from the relatives of her Arab ex-husband-soon-to-be-husband-again.

Her story had the ingredients of a drama. The bits and pieces that she recounted were at times harrowing, at times hazy for there were other probable missing parts that are only known to her. I don’t know what I brought back from that encounter. But my euphoria and delight of meeting a sister in Islam, subsided at that time. Perhaps I wanted to learn something from her, especially in my seeking into embracing the hejab, but the state of life of this hejabi woman was chaotic, to me, even at that present moment.

Perhaps I failed to see, at that time, the life that she once had - tumultous, and now, despite the chaos in her home and the baggages from her past life that she had to carry through to move her life forward, there was peace, an inner peace that only she knew. I wish I could have known her better, but perhaps I was judging her when I thought I wasn’t and there were no other opportune times to get to know her for she had left the residence to live elsewhere, before I could even figure out my own confusion.