My (earnest, irate) thoughts

The Prophet Muhammad, peace upon him, said, “Abandon desire for this world, and God will love you. Abandon desire for others’ goods, and people will love you.”

There once was a man who stomped around in the dark, complaining that each way he turned was darker and harder to see than the place he was before. Here it is so dark, the shadows are as black as night. There it is even darker, the shadows are invisible in the blackness. And so he wandered to and fro, noting and describing and lecturing on the depths of the blackness. All this, as Turkish scholar Said Nursi might say, instead of lighting a candle.

Though we are called to enlighten, often we are content to describe the darkness instead. It’s easier. It’s safer. We feel pleased with ourselves for telling the truth about the darkness.

There are those in the West who detail the atrocities going on in the Muslim world as proof that Islam is false. And there are Muslims who note Western propaganda and militarism as proof that the West conspires to portray Islam badly and destroy the religion altogether. Fingers point, accusations fly. As Hamza Yusuf Hanson put it, Americans watch CNN and Arabs watch al-Jazeera, and the stories are 180 degrees apart. Americans watch Islamist suicide bombers maim Israeli soldiers; Arabs see a Muslim baby blown to bits by zionist shells.

…like the Chinese say, “There are three truths. There’s my truth, your truth and then the truth.” If I’m unwilling to let go of my truth and you’re unwilling to let go of your truth, we cannot see objectively this truth that’s in the middle, between us. There’s good and bad in all of us, and I want to get rid of the cartoon scenario of George Bush’s world and Osama bin Laden’s world, and I want to see it nuanced. I want to see more intelligence here.

In all of us, there is an unfortunate tendency to simplify, to reduce, to make black-and-white. If only people knew how that oversimplifying is dangerous to a fledgling faith! When I first became Muslim, one or two new friends let it drop that only Muslims go to heaven. Drawn to Islam by its light, tolerance and universality, I was devastated to uncover hellfire and exclusivism. Further reading: Islam has a progressive tradition, too.

As the first Muslim in my entire extended family (Americans of Irish, German and Finnish heritage) this careless remark made me needlessly worry for the souls of all my ancestors, none of whom had been Muslim, and the souls of my living relatives, who appeared disdainful of Islam, and the souls of my friends, who seemed indifferent to my new faith.

For months, I was sick with grief. But I kept reading, kept searching. I uncovered this article, which describes the “shades” or archetypes of mankind. It’s not Muslims and non-Muslims, us and them. I should have known that the Book that promises to be a guide for all mankind would never be so black-and-white. Even more, I should have known that the tiny inkling of compassion that I feel stems from The Most Compassionate, and so it’s absurd to worry what He would decide. Anyway, there are degrees of embracement of the divine religion: submitters, believers, good-doers. Just as there are degrees of disassociation from the divine religion: hypocrites, polytheists, sectarians. Just as there are neutral groups, and this includes the People of the Book, the Jews and Christians whose religions are authentic and whose holy books were divinely inspired. As American scholar Jeffrey Lang points out, the Qur’an even includes advice and admonishment for Jews and Christians. Why would it bother, if they were all destined for hell? I could feel the truth of this: This was my Islam, this was the religion I had fasted for, given up alcohol for, covered my hair for. This was light and enlightenment.

Here is another example of the real, unhijacked Islam: the real meaning of the word kafir, a complex word that is often mistranslated as ‘unbeliever’ or ‘infidel’.

So, what is a kafir? The noun comes from an Arabic root kafara, which means ‘to cover’. So, a kafir is someone who covers truth. To hide or cover the truth, one first has to recognise it, so the term precludes ordinary non-Muslims who do not know or truly understand Islam (and that includes people whose only exposure is the “Izlam” on FauxNews). Satan, for example, is a kafir: it believes in God but constantly rejects Him.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace upon him, said, “If a man says to his brother, ‘O kafir!’ Then surely one of them is such.” That’s how serious this business is: Unjustly calling someone else a truth-concealer means that you yourself become one.

The point I’m bumbling toward is this: Christ Jesus, peace upon him, said that we must remove the splinter from our eye before we can see clearly to remove the beam from our brother’s eye. As Muslims, we must first see what is wrong with ourselves before we can accurately assess the world’s problems. The Islamic world, which was a beacon of light while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, seems to have lost its way. We must look to the innermost, purest form of truth. The early Muslims were devouring knowledge, seeking it wherever it might be. They were teaching by example, criticizing themselves harshly, and others lightly. Their words were so pure, so absent of regressive or repressive thought, that others were drawn to the religion like moths to a flame. That is how we must be. We must consciously remove all but pure love, pure beauty, pure wisdom and pure ecstasy from our hearts. We must consciously seek God always… every action, every word and every thought must be for His sake.

I love the conversation between Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction about why the former doesn’t eat pork (In sum, “I don’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces”). It’s a good point.

“Forbidden to you for food are dead meat, blood, and the flesh of the swine.” Qur’an 5:4

Both the Bible and the Qur’an prohibit the eating of pork. Muslims and orthodox Jews observe this strictly, though many Christians do not (my grandparents are seventh-day Adventists who avoid it, but they are an exception). I remember when I was reading the Bible as a teenager. I made the ambitious mistake of beginning at Genesis, so by the time I got to Leviticus I was dying of boredom. But I couldn’t help but notice the prohibition of pork which, at the time, was a fair part of my typically American diet. Distressed, I asked my father why we ate pork.

Aside: I will never understand why I considered him an expert on theology. When I learned about Muhammad’s prophecy to the Arabs in 10th-grade world history class and asked, “How do we know he’s not a prophet?” My father said, “Only Jews can be prophets, honey. They are God’s chosen people.” This is an openly racist, and sadly common, misreading of the difference between ‘family’ and ‘race’. As my husband would say, “God is a nationalist, you think so?”

Anyway, Dad’s answer was that Jesus said it is what comes out of your mouth, not what goes into it, that makes a man unclean. But knowing what I know now, about various people changing the words of the Bible for personal and political reasons, I still wouldn’t say that Jesus never said this. But the quote doesn’t change the fact that Jesus himself never ate pork. The quote also doesn’t change the physiology of pigs or humans. And the quote is certainly not advising Christians to include pork in their diet. It’s interesting that Paul was writing to the Romans (who very much dug on swine) when he, or his followers, casually removed the ancient prohibition. As I’ve written before, I maintain that Paul was a shape-shifter — someone who changed the words of the unchanging God to appeal to a broader audience. Further reading: Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

“Do not eat swine. They have divided hooves, but they do not chew the cud. These are unclean animals.” Leviticus 11:7-8

The Hebrew words used to describe unclean meats (like pork) can be translated as foul, polluted and putrid. Which puts them, according to the lexicon of the Bible at least, in the same category with human feces. But why?

According to The Maker’s Diet by Jordan S. Rubin, a book that tries to pinpoint a Biblically sound diet, the pig is not clean because of its physiology. “Clean animals that chew the cud have an alimentary canal and a secondary cud receptacle. Essentially, they have three stomachs available to process their clean, vegetation-based food into “flesh” in a process that takes more than twenty-four hours in general…Pigs, on the other hand, never limit their diet to vegetation. They will eat anything they can find, including their own young and sick or dead pigs. The pig’s single-stomach arrangement is very simple in design and function and it is combined with a limited excretory system. Four hours after the pig has eaten its polluted swill and other putrid, offensive matter, man may eat the same swill secondhand off the ribs of the pig.”

Then he asks an insightful question: Did anything biologically happen to the pig since Biblical times, or did the digestive tract of man have some miraculous transformation?

Nope. But most practicing Christians, when asked why they eat pork, don’t have a better answer than Vincent: “Because bacon tastes good.” Surely, as religious people, lifelong health and protecting the body from harm should be more important than 30 seconds on the tastebuds. But even if the pig’s behavior and physiology don’t convince you to quit eating pork, here’s some information about American pig farms that should: Vast Lagoons of Pig Feces.

“Martin Luther wasn’t a model of tolerance but even he took the position that, ‘I’d rather be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.’ In this presidential campaign, we should at least aspire to be as open-minded as 16th-century Germans.” These words were shamelessly stolen from a New York Times op-ed titled Obama and the Bigots. It’s funny because it’s true, folks, it’s funny because it’s true.

The whispers about Obama, and whether he is a closet Muslim ready to implement Sharia on an unsuspecting populace or simply the Antichrist, continue. Of course it pisses me off that ‘Muslim’ is the new ‘Jew’. But then, it’s not really new, is it, for Westerners to take issue with Islam, mostly on proven falsehoods like Islam being spread by the sword, or a vague sense of superiority over the East for not sharing the West’s particular sensibilities at any given moment of history.

What I don’t get are the Christians out there who still believe their values are reflected in the ultraconservative militaristic agenda of the Right. It’s OK to use your brains, folks, God gave ‘em to you: Here we have BARACK OBAMA, who with his man-of-the-world persona would give America a needed dose of good PR, being slandered by everyone to the right of Genghis Khan. And there we have JOHN McCAIN, a madman who sings about wanting to bomb Iran, scooping up endorsements from evangelical Christians like The Rev. John Hagee, the ignorant author of Jerusalem Countdown.

And this, when the latest estimates put the Iraq War at costing $3 trillion when all is said and done, our economy is in the toilet, and it’s no fun to travel because everyone in the entire world hates us. And with John McCain, it’s going to more of the same. How can you not know that?

Further reading:
Islam was not spread by the sword any more than Christianity was spread by guns.
But why isn’t the East just like the West — are they stupid or something?
Even conservatives think John McCain is nuts.
The Rev. John Hagee is crazy, that’s why he likes McCain.
The Iraq War will cost $3 trillion, and much, much more.

Just finished Skinny Bitch in a single evening. It’s not a book for people who can’t handle the (vulgar, funny) truth. Those chicks are mean. They called me a moron, a fat slob, and other stuff I can’t repeat that made me burst out laughing.

When my husband came home from school last night — my eyes shining with new vegan fervor — I asked if we could try the 30-day menu in the book. (God bless him for tolerating my bandwagon-jumping.) You know, to try it out, see how we feel, lose weight, assure ourselves it can be done. As I was reading to him from the menu, he mentioned fish. I shook my head. “No fish?” he asked incredulously. A minute later, he mentioned yogurt. I shook my head again. “No yogurt?” he asked, even more incredulously, because yogurt = Turkishness. But he agreed to try, if only for 30 days. Yusuf mentioned he is very impressed with Rusty, a vegan for quite some time now.

Here’s a great article on how the choice to be vegetarian has always existed inside Islam. Some scholars, like freelance monotheist Karen Armstrong, say vegetarianism may be the ideal Islamic diet. Another Mystic Saint article cites the other one, and has other good references. I’m telling you, folks, this is why I love this religion: a path of moderation to God, sensible answers to every question.

“If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad?” Alphonse de La Martaine, 1854

Here’s a great post on the Danish cartoon controversy, which is unfortunately resurfacing as they’ve decided to republish the cartoons that mock the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be God’s peace and blessings. It is so aggravating to watch a few jerks tease and taunt us by ridiculing the Prophet, and then watch the media swarm around the tiny minority of Muslims who do react violently. One-fifth of the world is Muslim, and most of us shook our heads at the Danish newspaper and whispered, ‘Man, do they hate Muslims, or what’ and then went on with our day. But that isn’t a story.

But for those of us who do have some hate in our hearts, it is time to stop burning flags and start burning desires, indeed. And time to stop expecting Islamophobes to give credit where it’s due. And time to model what being Muslim really is: Recite the Qur’an always. When necessary, use words.

I would have thought that it’s highly unlikely that the four-fifths of the world who don’t believe in the prophethood of Muhammad would ever give him the respect he earned. But I would have been wrong. Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica calls Muhammad ibn Abdullah “the most successful of all religious personalities of the world.” And check it out — among the non-Muslim fans of Muhammad are Mahatma Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw!

I recently learned about ’secret shirk’. Shirk, the Islamic term for polytheism or idolatry, is the vice opposite the virtue of tawhid, declaring that which is One, or monotheism. As I understand it, ’secret shirk’ is when you behave as if you’re in the midst of tawhid, for example by performing ritual prayer, but your intention is idolatrous because you strive to beautify those prayers for the sake of other people who are watching.

I like Islam because it is not simply a belief structure, but a way of life. Actions give form to intentions. Actions make belief — in itself an esoteric and intangible thing — a concrete thing.

That concreteness, of course, can also be dangerous. The structure can, over time, take the place of the thing it is supposed to merely contain and give form to. The actions take the place of beliefs, the rituals the place of the intentions, and you have become a hollow shell. That is when we find ourselves engaged in secret shirk — striving to appear holy to other people, rather than striving to be close to God.

On Judgment Day, it is said that God will ask us, “For whom did you pray? Not for me. So go and ask them for your reward.”

It’s so typically Jen, but I’ve always been the type that if I can’t do something perfectly, I throw it aside with great force, and go around telling everyone how unnecessary it is. But I can’t do that with salat. I know ritual prayer is one of the five pillars of Islam, one of, if not the, most important action of being Muslim. I could never tell other people it isn’t necessary. Especially when I can feel the difference in myself… my conscience isn’t pricked as easily, my tongue isn’t as guarded, my hands don’t move as quickly to help others, and, worst of all, my motivations aren’t as pure.

Nevertheless, I have been taking a hiatus from salat because my heart wasn’t in it. Though I prayed to God earnestly to make my heart soft and good, though I asked repeatedly for humility and wisdom, salat wasn’t making me closer to God. I performed the prescribed prayers quickly, out of duty, and my mind rushed on to other things, and I began to hate myself. I, and the prayers I performed, seemed hollow and empty.

Of course, not performing them hasn’t made me feel better or more fulfilled. That’s the big lie. First, the prayers go. Then other things go. Someone I used to know called this ‘the nose of the camel in the tent’. I’m not an expert on the personality of camels, but apparently if you even let their nose in, ultimately they eventually shove their whole body inside. You have to be on guard against the initial intrusion.

So taking this break has been damaging. Now I am without protective armor, more vulnerable than ever to devious whispering. Unbidden, the most vile thoughts come into my head: What a hypocrite you are, why do you wear a scarf on your head? You show everyone you are Muslim, but inside there is nothing. So then what? Take off the scarf? Then: You are so immodest, you don’t even wear a scarf. You’re not really Muslim at all. How absurd of you to talk about Islam. Why do you think about religion at all? And so on and so on, until I am stripped clean of this identity, picked down to nothing.

It is recorded that the Prophet Muhammad said, “Ruined are those who insist on hardship in matters of faith.” He said this three times. He also said, “The religion (of Islam) is easy, and whoever makes the religion a rigor, it will overpower him. So follow a middle course (in worship); if you can’t do this, do something near to it and give glad tidings and seek help (of Allah) at morning and at dusk and some part of the night.”

I feel myself being moved to pray what I can, when I can. To push myself slightly, but not too much. Like Turkish mothers, who always say to their children, Yavaş, yavaş: Slowly, slowly. For an adult, maybe it’s like: Don’t change so fast. Real change takes time.

The author Leila Aboulela wrote these words, which moved me to tears: The mercy of Allah is an ocean. Our sins are a lump of clay clenched between the beak of a pigeon. The pigeon is perched on the branch of a tree at the edge of that ocean. It only has to open its beak.

I hate politics. I particularly hate voting on a weekday, scattered primaries and the electoral college. Everything is designed to ensure that a) no one votes; and b) that those who do vote will be old, white and bigoted.

Lately I’ve been reading about the candidates. This is unbelievable self-discipline on my part, because I don’t hate anything as much as the verbal diarrhea that is shat around election time. I’m a registered Democrat. This is because Florida hates independent thought and bars non-affiliated voters from the primaries. I should have changed my party affiliation to Republican, so I could put my vote toward weeding out John ‘Islamofascist’ McCain and Rudy ‘9/11′ Giuliani.

I went to the CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) website to see if there was a candidate who didn’t think America should keep taking a dump on the Middle East. Just for fun, read anti-Muslim rhetoric from the candidates.

This is *the* topic of late: To have any chance at the presidency, you must have said at least one disparaging thing about Islam or Muslims, and you must have emphasized your own rock-solid, preferably evangelical, Christian faith. Otherwise, you’re soft on terrorism. I’m serious. Here, William Fisher writes about candidates competing to be more ‘Christian’.

If you’re like me, in that you find it hard to listen to jingoistic types who, with broad brushstrokes, paint entire civilizations as backward or evil, you’ll understand why my heart stopped when I read these chilling comments from a Giuliani supporter: “[Giuliani]’s got I believe the knowledge and the judgment to attack one of the most difficult problems in current history and that is the rise of the Muslims, and make no mistake about it, this hasn’t happened for a thousand years. These people are very dedicated and they’re also very, very smart in their own way. We need to keep the feet to the fire and keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them.’ When asked if he was referring to all Muslims, he told the [Monitor], ‘I don’t subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims.’”

The man who said those things, John Deady, co-chair of the New Hampshire Veterans for Rudy group, had to resign.

This is why I hate George W. Bush & Co. His war in Iraq is a war on Islam for many people of many backgrounds. His thirst for oil and wealth, and his use of born-again Christianity as a political tool, have made the huddled masses think the current situation in the Middle East is a holy war, a war to rid ‘Jesus’ country’, Israel, of all the black-chador-clad ‘Moslem’ heathens. These huddled masses don’t know the difference between an Muslim and a Sikh, forget about the differences between a Sunni and a Shi’a, or an Arab and a Persian. If they don’t care about these distinctions, how can they support wars with a religious group, whose ethnicities, customs and yes, beliefs and practices, are as diverse and multifaceted as their own?

But like the other Crusades of the Middle Ages, we know the current Crusade isn’t really about religion: religion is just how you get poor folks to fight for you. It’s really about money, land and its natural resources, and power.

There is a great article in the Boston Globe, Islamofascism’s ill political wind. Linguistically, this word is a disaster and an affront to the English language. And the people who use it are belligerent, right-wing nationalists; that’s ironic but not surprising. Every major politician in America and Europe hails from the authoritarian right, the fascist part of the political compass. It makes sense they would take the focus off their own mistaken ideas by disparaging ‘Izlam’.

As a Muslim, I do wonder who to vote for — who would bother me the least? Who would be least likely to tap my phone or read my e-mail? Who would be least likely to further profile my co-religionists? Who would be the least likely to attack yet another Muslim-majority country?

It goes without saying that John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee, with their ongoing talk about ‘radical Islamic militants’, are hoping to sail into the White House on the ‘fear’ factor. I doubt any of them have any idea what Islam actually is.

Former basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar endorses Barack Obama, but I’m annoyed by Obama’s positions on the Armenian ‘genocide’ and a possible invasion of Pakistan. It seems like he’s trying to vehemently disprove those Internet rumors about his being Muslim by annoying the Muslim countries that dislike America the least. Or something.

Science teacher Hussein Ali calls on all American Muslims to vote for Ron Paul. From what I read so far, Ron Paul seems to be kind of libertarian and isolationist, and I mean that in a good way. In Dr. Paul’s favor he a) voted against going to war with the nations of Afghanistan or Iraq; b) voted against the Patriot Act; c) opposes going to war with Iran; d) favors withdrawing military and financial aid to all nations in the Middle East.

Dr. Paul also supports abolishing several government agencies, from the Department of Education to FEMA to the IRS, because they’re ‘unnecessary bureaucracies’, which sounds cool. But I have to wonder what would happen to the U.S. unemployment rate?

Mysticism is the discarding of the false self — the nafs — in order to ‘meet’ God, which must be the ultimate déjà vu. I apologize for the link-dependent article, but this is the most wonderful thing: Alan Watts writes what to tell your children about God. It’s the story of how God plays hide-and-seek with Himself by pretending that there are people and animals and plants and rocks and stars. I wish someone had told *me* this when I was a little kid.

Each of us actually is God.

The Sufi poet Rumi said ‘People imagine that it is a presumptive claim, whereas it is really a presumptive claim to say “I am the slave of God”; and “I am God” is an expression of great humility. The man who says “I am the slave of God” affirms two existences, his own and God’s, but he that says “I am God” has made himself non-existent and has given himself up and says “I am God”, that is, “I am naught, He is all; there is no being but God’s.” This is the extreme of humility and self-abasement.’ That’s originally from Wikipedia, but I got it here.

Recently I learned about Huston Smith’s argument for a spiritual hierarchy of one-way mirrors. At the bottom is atheism, which sees material existence but nothing else. The next level is polytheism, which looks through the mirror to the world of the atheist but adds to it demons, sprites, angels, gods and every kind of superstition. The third level, which can also see down into the other worlds, is monotheism, where it is possible to understand God as a benevolent Creator. The top level is that of mysticism, which sees the other levels, but also experiences the transcendence of the Divine Reality. I got it here.

“Namaste,” Indians say, as they bow to the divinity within each other. Persian mystic Mansur al-Hallaj said, “I am the Truth”; Persian mystic Bayazid Bistami said, “There is no God but Me” and Jesus Christ said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” These humble mystics were explaining, in as few words as possible, that there is no separation — there logically cannot be — between God and anything else.

“If one person is harmed it is an unpardonable sin, but a whole people’s destruction is something to debate.”

Like most Americans, I was aghast when a British schoolteacher was jailed in Sudan for allowing her students to name a teddy bear ‘Muhammad’. Jailed? Seriously? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. And, without my being fully conscious of it, Sudan was added to my ever-growing private list of places I’m unlikely to visit.

As usual, it feels impossible to be American and Muslim simultaneously. I feel emotions stirring within myself, warring against each other, and it’s hard to know which voices to listen to, let alone sift fact from fiction like grain from chaff. Which is why I’m (usually) curiously silent on the atrocities that happen in the Muslim world. Many native-born Muslims just dump the blame on the zionist bent of our media and government. They point out the wars America starts there, and the empty consumerist culture America exports there. And they demand, “What are we talking about? One teacher? What about Iraq? What about Palestine?” It’s politics, not religion. Then they go on with their day, justice served in their own minds.

But it’s not that simple for me. How can I fit comfortably in the position of Muslim apologist? Though I may, unlike most Americans, actually know where Sudan is, I, too, know very little about the lifestyle of the Sudanese: their culture, their history, their politics, their language, their families, their hearts. It hurts when an American says to me, ‘What’s up with this teddy bear nonsense? Your religion is crazy.’

That’s why I like reading the thoughts of Hamza Yusuf Hanson, born in Walla Walla, Wash., a convert to Islam of Jewish descent who lived in the Middle East for a decade or more. He is thoroughly American, but fervently Muslim, and he articulates the opinions that I think could bridge this gap, real or imagined, that exists between the warring worlds, that of political Islam and that of the secular West. Maybe there is no gap… or maybe the gap is being erased by folks like yours truly, wouldn’t that be sumfin’… but no lie, this world doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense to me.

Here, he writes poignantly about ‘The Real Teddy Bear Tragedy‘.

It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I am not well-suited to the typical American life. And, Kurt Vonnegut fan that I am, I can articulate why: the lack of an extended family. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut writes at length about what women and men really want, and why our nuclear families just don’t cut it.

OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more people to tell dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.

When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this:

“You are not enough people!”

I met a man from Nigeria one time, an Ibo who had six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.

They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages, sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.

Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?

My two-year-old marriage to Yusuf has had more than its share of downs. Our conversations regularly lead to arguments, which ultimately lead to an icy silence. We spend a terrible amount of time feeling old and worn out, as if we’re 80 years old. And we haven’t even had children yet. Sometimes I doubt if we ever will. Life is so difficult already, and that would add this whole other layer. But then I wonder if, by not having children, we’re contributing to the dumbing-down of society; of those breeding, too many are really stupid. And I wonder if we’re making our own relationship worse; the loneliness piling up, causing us to increase the emotional demands we place solely on each other.

Yusuf and I are so different. For him, traditional gender roles are a fact, not an opinion; instead of laughing at his 1950s outlook, I am irritated by it. We’re both passionate overreacters, tortured souls who burn like Roman candles. In the thick of an argument, we have said terrible things to each other, unforgivable things, the sort of things people should never say if they plan on seeing each other ever again. We’ve vowed not to anymore, but it’s as if we’re sitting on this whole pile of hurled insults, a fetid dump of them.

Other times there’s a gulf between us of all the things we don’t say.

Divorce is permitted in Islam but it’s written that, of all permissible things, it’s the one God hates most. I imagine it is a last resort, for adultery or alcoholism or abuse — not for people who haven’t heaved anything except scorn. But if you have a sharp tongue, maybe you know what I mean: sometimes violent words cause more damage than a punch to the gut.

Anyway, Yusuf would be the first member of his family to get a divorce. I would be the first member of my family not to.

It’s one of a number of glaring differences in our outlooks, stemming from our earliest childhood memories in very different places. Yusuf has memories of playing kickball in the street, climbing trees to eat the sour cherries, telling stories to make his friends laugh. He remembers his older brothers disappointing his parents, and it left an impression on him. He made a concerted effort from a young age not to bother them: cleaning up his own messes, doing what he promised, never letting himself get worn down or sick. By the time he was a teen, he was practically grown-up already: dutiful and respectful toward his parents, who he considered wise.

I remember reading in my room, serials about the Sweet Valley twins (identical opposites with eyes the color of the Pacific ocean). I remember that sinking sensation of walking up to my friends, and realizing they’d just been talking about me. I remember being secretly happy when I got sick because my mom stopped everything to dote on me. I remember very few fights, except during my rebellious teenage years when my parents stopped knowing anything.

He never imagined marriage could be this hard. That’s one thing we have in common.

In marrying Yusuf, I gained an extended family. But they live in Ankara, and it will take years for my pitiful Turkish to allow me to have a conversation. Though even without my comprehension, their love for me was so vast that they stared all the time, grinning foolishly, chattering, gesturing wildly. I was jealous that I lacked their emotional security, their steadfast belief in their family’s love. I was lonely in my non-Turkish-speaking bubble, but surely I could learn enough not to feel left out if we ever live there.

In marrying me, he gained a family. And they live here, but only my mom has shown any interest in helping us with our marital woes, though she admits our situation is over her head. My stepfather stays out of it, my grandparents stay out of it, and my brother stays out of it; at first I didn’t assume this was total detachment and disinterest, but now I know that it is.

I attempted to force a family for us here, visiting my grandmother or inviting my parents for supper. But it always seemed so fake: talking about the weather like strangers, platitudes (”Nobody said marriage is easy”) and jokes. Members of my family always trying to lighten, to diffuse, to skip past unpleasantries, as if the point of life is to avoid frowning. I can’t make them real; being phony with them comes so easily that I wonder if I was ever real. And there’s the rub: in joining them in their phoniness, I’ve lost any desire to contact anyone. I remember one really bad fight, where I thought my husband and I were really getting divorced — this is it — and my brother and my baba looked into my sobbing face and said nothing, and didn’t reach out to hug me. They just looked confused.

Though there are many real things we could discuss, several members of my family can’t really understand my husband’s English (how hard are they trying, I wonder) and they’re introverted (better adapted to their situations than I) and there are simply not enough of them… our personal flaws glare dully for each other, unfiltered, not lessened by the more people I think we need.

I think this because of my family’s faces, all glowing happily the night before the Turkish wedding last summer. Hundreds of people smushed together in my in-law’s driveway, spilling out into the street, wearing their best clothes, happy tears streaming down their cheeks. My brother and Baba laughing as they danced in the street, Mom making good friends with a Turkish lady who appointed herself my mom’s bodyguard against the other hundreds of women who wanted to hug or shake hands. Even me, feeling ridiculous in my Aladdin costume, but serene as I surveyed the insanity surrounding me. As Baba put it, “I have never seen 500 people have such a good time without any alcohol.”

And I think of how things might have been, if we were African or Latino… or even if I were Turkish and we lived in Ankara near his family. Maybe one day we can. I have always been able to clearly picture my home with more people — more warmth and more hassles and more drama and more laughter. Once I got it, I’m sure I would want to kick myself for having wanted it. But I would also love it, because for me, more is always better than not enough. Especially for something I feel short-changed on: love.

A Turkish friend was saying to me one thing she likes about America: how people mind their own business. In Turkey, she was saying, family members give their opinions whether you want them or not, they really butt in. So I told her of the flip side to that privacy… that when they leave you alone, they leave you alone.

Maybe Western civilization will evolve out of the nuclear family, shedding it like we discarded other things when we found something better: typewriters for computers, cassettes for CDs. Maybe I can figure out a way to come to terms with my not being born into a family of ten, but I’m hardly hopeful. I am so defensive and prickly, always fretting that I look or sound stupid, overwhelmed by crowds, seeking time alone even though I am unbearably lonely. I worry that my occupation is so individualized and detail-oriented and that it’s making me autistic. This is not normal, but how to fix it?