Mel A young woman experiences being Muslim in America. By Melody Moezzi My parents, especially my father, have always cautioned me against religion in general, and for the most part, they have been right. They never fully endorsed the practice of one religion to the exclusion of any others in raising either my sister or myself. The last time I remember going to mosque with my family, I must have been seven or eight years old. We had gone to this mosque in downtown Dayton, Ohio every couple weeks since I could remember. I liked it mostly because they always had doughnuts, which we never had at home, and because the kids were always just playing hide and seek when they weren’t eating donuts. On that last visit, we were greeted by police. The mosque had been vandalized by some neo-Nazi kids who apparently thought it was a synagogue. It was covered in swastikas and the windows were all broken. We stopped going after that because my dad said it wasn’t safe and eventually, my sister and I started going to piano lessons instead, which I hated because I was always being upstaged by this Korean prodigy half my age at every recital, and on top of that, there were never any doughnuts. If anything, the religion of our household was education, and focusing on one tradition of any variety - religious, cultural or otherwise - would only limit our education. My parents had no problem sending us to a Catholic school when it was the best school in our district. Similarly, they had no problem sending me to live with nuns in Spain to study alone at the University of Madrid when I was only sixteen because my Spanish teacher told them that it would be a priceless educational experience. My dad used to make me look up and write down every word I ever heard or read in English that I didn’t understand in a steno pad, and he would test me on them weekly. He refused to let me get away with having less than perfect English just because he did. ____________________________________ My parents had no problem sending us to a Catholic school when it was the best school in our district. ____________________________________ More than anything else, though, he refused to let me have a chip on my shoulder just because I was the child of immigrants or looked different than most other kids growing up in Dayton or spoke a different language or didn’t worship Christ. There was an absolute prohibition on bitching about that kind of thing in the Moezzi household. I remember going to a slumber party in eighth grade and having a couple of girls corner me as I was trying to go to sleep. They insisted that I accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God before I go to sleep. They assured me that if I didn’t, there was no doubt that I was going to hell. They told me that they wanted to be able to hang out with me in heaven because I was fun and that I had to accept the Savior before I went to sleep on that night or we couldn’t hang out later. I kept telling them that I thought Jesus was cool and all and that I thought he was a Prophet but that I didn’t think God was up to conceiving children. After a few hours they lost hope and left me alone, but not before reminding me that I was definitely going to hell now. When I told my dad about this he laughed and told me I should have just said, "Yeah, sure, whatever you say" and gone to sleep. When I told him I didn’t want them to have the satisfaction, he told me that if I cared so much about God, I wouldn’t care what they said or thought. That same year when a deathly pale, chubby, red-headed, freckled friend of mine told me that she could no longer be my friend because her mom said she should have more Christian friends, I was so shocked that I again told my dad about it, somehow forgetting that whining about such things was strictly forbidden. He told me that he was happy because he could barely stand looking at her because she was so ugly and he wished that she had said so earlier before she threw up in our basement at my thirteenth birthday party. Both my parents lived through, and eventually fled, the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I was born in the spring of 1979, at the height of this revolution, not in Iran like my parents but in the middle of America. Having experienced the revolution and its aftermath, my parents have always been understandably averse to anything overtly religious since I can remember. They have always strongly advised me never to be the one to bring up the topic of religion, especially Islam, in conversation or writing - especially with or intended for American audiences. "They’ll think you’re a fanatic; they’ll stop taking you seriously; they’ll laugh at you; it just doesn’t look good." They’re right. It doesn’t "look good," in most of the Western world, to say you are Muslim, but I am no longer so concerned with appearances. I am not a terrorist; I do not think women are scum; I do not hate Jews; and I am not a member of Hezbollah. I am neither Arab nor African. I don’t even speak Arabic. I don’t mean this to be presumptuous of my reader. I say it as a response to stereotypes I have been consistently presented with throughout my life. People seem to always want to know what I think about these things when they find out I am Muslim. Instead of asking about Islam, they ask me what I think of the Israeli-Palestinian debacle or feminist ideals or terrorism. These issues, which are inherently political and/or criminal, have much to do with power and manipulation, but nil to do with faith. Still, I admit that even without wanting to or even thinking about it, at least one of these or similar associations manages to cross my own mind when a stranger tells me she or he is Muslim. This type of disgusting Pavlovian response is, to me, the worst form of cultural oppression, and it is my sincere belief that such oppression can only be combated through education. Not necessarily through academia, but through learning, compassion and understanding. This, along with a personal attraction to Truth and any journey which might lead to it, most fully explains my inspiration and motivation in writing this book. It took a series of unexpected personal experiences in my own life, followed by the appalling and tragic public events of September 11, 2001 and the worldwide response, however, to actually get me to write a single word. ____________________________________ Instead of asking about Islam, they ask me what I think of the Israeli-Palestinian debacle or feminist ideals or terrorism. ____________________________________ Several years before those tragic events, I was faced with a personal awakening disguised in the form of disaster. After nearly twenty years of good health and good fortune, I got sick. The saga began upon my graduation from high school. My graduation party was shared with several other graduates who were all members of our large Dayton Iranian community of family friends that had been my second family since childhood. It was in the ballroom of some hotel near the Dayton Mall, and the hotel was catering the event. I remember doing a lot of dancing and eating a lot of junk food. If Iranians know how to do anything, they know how to throw parties, and to the credit of all our parents, this party was no exception. I wore a bright yellow chiffon dress with spaghetti straps that hung just above my knees. When I look at the pictures now, I cringe. I looked like a banana with a little brown head and long flailing limbs to match. Still, everyone kept telling me how beautiful I looked and how proud they were of my personal and academic accomplishments so far. My dad, to this day, still says that I was the victim of the evil eye and had he burned esfand (a heavy, strong smelling incense, which according to Persian superstition is supposed to ward off the evil eye) over my head that night, this all probably would have never happened. I don’t think he really believes it. There was clearly a good reason behind all of it. That night, after opening more gifts than I had ever received in my life, I started having slight stomach pains. They were still there the next day, and by that night I was in excruciating pain. My parents insisted it was gas, but I forced them to take me to the ER. They were so convinced though that they made a pit stop at the Elmis’ house because they were going to Iran the next day and my dad had brought some medication for them to take to his family in Tehran. By the time we got to the hospital, I was sobbing uncontrollably from the pain, and they rushed me into an exam room. After a few lab tests it was clear that I was having an attack of acute pancreatitis, common among overweight, middle-aged alcoholic men. Everyone was convinced I had been doing some heavy celebratory post-graduation drinking, but after assuring them that I didn’t drink at all for religious reasons they ordered a CT scan. The results suggested the presence of a pseudo-cyst in the middle of my pancreas, and that night I nearly died. They arranged to take me to a hospital in Indiana via helicopter and I vaguely remember being read my last rites by a priest before leaving. Not being a fan of flying, I asked if we could just drive, and while the doctors weren’t encouraging, my parents gave in and ended up driving me to Indianapolis, hanging my IV on the coat hook in the back, at outrageous speeds. I made it through that night and was treated for a week in Indianapolisótreatment consisting mainly of starvation. After that, I started becoming familiar with hospitals around the country. For the next two years I was placed on a restrictive diet, underwent several endoscopic procedures and eventually was forced to undergo surgery. ____________________________________ At the time, I was busy burying my head in the writings of old dead white men, mostly philosophers. ____________________________________ On the morning of April 11th, 1999 I was finally released from Chicago’s Rush Presbyterian Hospital after undergoing a risky invasive surgery that I can’t pronounce to this day. During that week, my family and I were presented with the following series of details concerning my condition: first, I had a tumor and not a cyst; second, this tumor was malignant and the cancer had spread to outlying tissues, and finally, two days later, that some dye didn’t pick up on a couple slides, and I had correspondingly been misdiagnosed: the tumor was in fact benign, and I was going to live. All of this happened while I was at Wesleyan, a freethinking, picturesque liberal arts college in the central Connecticut valley. At the time, I was busy burying my head in the writings of old dead white men, mostly philosophers. I read all of the works assigned assiduously, hoping to reach some great spiritual awakening through reason. Getting sick, however, marked a defenestration of reason for a good while. After being admitted to the ER on several occasions for eating foods that my pathetically deficient pancreatic enzymes were failing to digestóa chocolate chip muffin, overly oiled pasta, anything friedóI made the unilateral decision to stop eating all together. Having always been thin, I had never taken any notice of the food I put into my mouth or the power that action entailed until I was forced to monitor it, literally to save my life. Out of frustration and despair, I took things to an extreme, and I spent half of my college years with a raging eating disorder as a result and the other half in recovery, undergoing intensive outpatient treatment in the form of psychotherapy which, by the grace of God, worked. While I had endured extreme physical pain due to my pancreatic condition, it never came close to matching the resultant pain I inflicted on myself. I have no doubt that I absolutely lost my mind for almost two years of my life, and that, not a tumor, was what led me to start contemplating committing the most selfish of all human endeavors. I fantasized about suicide incessantly for a period, and by refusing to ingest food, I was well on my way. Every day there was less and less of me, and somehow I found this comforting. My only other comfort at the time was in books, and after a certain point, all of the philosophers started to sound the same and I began to question some of their intentions in writing anything at all. Upon reaching this state of desperation, I took an unknowing step toward God, and before I knew it, He had taken a thousand toward me. Having never read the central text underlying the religion to which I had always claimed to subscribe, I decided, out of boredom and frustration with the great rational philosophers, to read the Qur’an. I intended to read it as a break, and while I began reading it feeling like a literary critic approaching a new genre, I finished reading it feeling like a naÔve and misinformed idiot. To my surprise, I had only three of four points of contention upon completing the text, and those were easily resolved through a little deeper thought and/or reconciling translations from English to Farsi to Arabic. I had expected, at best, to find the kind of insight I’ve found in great novels. My expectations were far surpassed. I had unwittingly found a path that looked like it could work for me, and the fact that this path accepted the viability of other paths and other pilgrims was what most convinced me that it could work. It was then that I chose to retrieve my mind. After having read less than half of the Qur’an, I began to feel a strength and ease hitherto unbeknownst to me. It was this strength which led me to finally seek help for my eating disorder on my own terms, for as my family and friends had all made countless well-intentioned attempts to help me before, I was not yet ready to do the work. A year after starting treatment, I finally underwent surgery to remove the growing mass in my viscera. The final and most pleasant part of this awakening took place less than one month after surgery, when, against the advice of my surgeon, my parents and most everyone else but me, I chose to drive cross-country to spend the summer in the most beautiful wilderness I had ever or since beheld. ____________________________________ After having read less than half of the Qur’an, I began to feel a strength and ease hitherto unbeknownst to me. ____________________________________ I got a job folding t-shirts and making fudge and espresso at a resort, and I spent every minute I wasn’t working in awe. I learned the words of the Prophet Muhammad’s daily prayers in Arabic and most importantly, their meaning. Amidst the mountains, lakes and glaciers of northwestern Montana, without a mosque, a mullah or even another Muslim anywhere in the vicinity, I came to believe fully, not only in the power, presence and beauty of God, but in the fact that He had a plan for me and that His grace, patience and mercy refused to let me forget it. Thus began my genuine attempt to pursue the path of Islam. At that time, I was aware of and experienced a general ignorance about Islam among most Americans, but it was a harmless ignorance in that I ran across only a few people who actually hated me for having this background and/or belief. The great majority of them just didn’t know what being Muslim meant and while they may have had some negative associations with the faith, their ignorance prevented them from necessarily stating, believing or acting on them. In Montana, I worked with many other young men and women, mostly college students as well, and every single one of them was Christian. I knew of not a single Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or Baha’i. I was not only the only Muslim, but I was the only non-Christian and the only brown girl who wasn’t a member of the Blackfeet Native American Tribe, whose land had been stolen a couple hundred years before my arrival to create "Glacier National Park." There were no Blacks, no Asians, no Arabs, no Hispanics. Just white Americans, Canadians, the Blackfeet, and me. This brings me to Elizabeth, a girl I worked with at the St. Mary’s Lodge & Resort gift shop. Elizabeth was a constant source of amusement for the rest of us, as she was incredibly ignorant in most matters. Nevertheless, she was very sweet and bore no ill will toward anyone. People would come in asking for books on Indian Paintbrushes, some of the most popular wildflowers in the park, and she would tell them that we only had normal paintbrushes and that maybe they should drive down to the reservation and ask the Indians about them. She asked me once, after catching me praying outside one afternoon, what religion I was. I told her I was Muslim, and in response, she asked me what denomination of Christianity "Muslim" was. I told her it was kind of like Methodist, not being in the mood for long explanations. I regret my selfish laziness and arrogance now. Today, the explanations are ten times as long, as the assumptions and perceptions are ten times as misguided, and now, instead of taking a couple of minutes to tell the Elizabeths of the world that Indian Paintbrushes are wildflowers and Islam is a separate religion from Christianity but with similar moral bases, I feel compelled to write an entire book about it. Thus, some two years before perhaps the greatest public disservice that has ever been done to Islam, I began my very private and personal conversion through prayer, study and thought. Thus, when several murderous thickheaded zealots crashed civilian airliners into the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, my first reactions were tears, prayers and fear. Soon after those subsided, however, I had another familiar response that has always accompanied witnessing such mindless, vicious and surreal acts of horrific violence for me: "Please, God. Don’t let these fools end up claiming Islam." But they did, and I prayed that people would see past the idiocy and sensationalism and realize that they could have claimed anything and it wouldn’t matter because they were still murderers of innocent men, women and children, and I am not aware of any God-loving religion which rewards, encourages or tolerates such slaughter. ____________________________________ "Please, God. Don’t let these fools end up claiming Islam." ____________________________________ Soon after 9/11, some drunken hick drove his truck into a Hindu temple near my parents’ house in Dayton thinking it was a mosque. One of my friend’s uncles, who is Sikh, had a guy slam a 2x4 over his head in a Home Depot in Rochester because he thought he was Muslim since he was wearing a turban. My best friend, Christina, and her family, along with the large Egyptian Coptic community in Dayton, got so much crap from people who thought they were Muslim that they eventually had to schedule an information session at the middle school and high school to inform everyone that most all of the Egyptians in the district were Christian - and on a side note, it’s bad to harass Muslims just for being Muslim anyway. As Sikhs, Hindus, and Christian Arabs were getting mistaken for Muslims, I was waiting tables and living in a tiny apartment with Michael and Wendell, an adorable middle-aged interracial gay couple, and their five cats. My apartment had one window that overlooked a fallout shelter, and it was in the middle of a largely Dominican and Puerto Rican neighborhood on the upper west side of Manhattan. As the only Arab-run convenience store across the street was being vandalized and eventually forced to shut down, I was still being mistaken for Latina. Before 9/11, I never felt the need to clarify my origins or faith to those mistaking me for something, anything, else. Everyone in the neighborhood just assumed I was Puerto Rican because I spoke Spanish and because I had brown skin and dark curly hair. I wasn’t ashamed of my faith or my heritage. I just didn’t see the point in publicizing it unless someone explicitly asked. After 9/11, however, I felt like continuing to "pass" would be wrong. I was eating an empanada and waiting for my clothes to dry at the laundry mat by my apartment shortly after the convenience store next door shut down when Maria, who had worked at the laundry mat since I’d been there and with whom I’d developed a camaraderie, started talking about how happy she was that Ali and Malik, the Lebanese brothers who owned the store next door, had been forced to leave the neighborhood. She told me that she should have known better than to have ever bought even a stick of gum from those disgusting Arabs. Then she told me that we were lucky that we had a glorious, civilized, Catholic culture that helped us stick together and succeed. I told her that I liked Ali and Malik and that I used to watch soccer games in the back of the store with them because they had satellite. Then she asked me why the hell I did that, given all they ever watched were all the Middle Eastern countries’ matches. I had told her twice that I was Iranian, and it now became clear to me that she either had no idea where Iran was or that she wasn’t listening to me. "Maria," I told her, with tears running down my face by that point, "Soy irani. Soy casi arabe, y soy musulmani" [I am Iranian. I am almost Arab, and I am Muslim]. I threw the remainder of my empanada at her and ran home, leaving my laundry to fend for itself. ____________________________________ She then thanked me for being honest and debunking her prejudice and stereotypes through my example. ____________________________________ After telling Michael about it and crying some more, I went back that night when I knew she would no longer be working. But she was still there, sitting in a lawn chair on the sidewalk in front of the store watching traffic. I walked straight past her without saying a word, and she followed me in. When I asked her why she was still here, she told me that since her shift ended over an hour ago, she stayed to wait for me. At this point I noticed that someone else’s clothes were in my drier and mine were nowhere in sight. "Damn it! Where the hell are my clothes?" That was the first time I had ever spoken to her in English. She took my hand and led me to the back of the store, where she had neatly folded and wrapped all of my clothes in tissue paper. She apologized and told me that she was embarrassed and ashamed. She then thanked me for being honest and debunking her prejudice and stereotypes through my example. I have no idea where Maria is today or what she is doing or even her last name. Still, I am grateful for her example as well, for she gave me hope in the persistent power of friendship and human interaction, no matter how brief or minimal, to impact our lives and attitudes. Without this hope, I could have never even begun to write this book. I am a product of my experiences, memories and relations, and so is each one of the individuals around whom the following chapters revolve. These individuals are not characters; they are not case studies, and they are not literary devices. They are all real, and they are all awake and dynamic. As such, each of them has given me an education for which there is no worthy or appropriate degree, and I thank them.   Melody Moezzi is a 25 year-old writer and JD/MPH student at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where she lives with her husband, Matthew, and cat, Olyan. She is currently writing a non-fiction book about Young Muslim Americans, from which this piece has been excerpted, and for which she is still seeking a suitable publisher. The picture was provided courtesy of her husband. She can be contacted at mmoezzi@law.emory.edu.   This website: Copyright © 2004 Dream World Media, LLC. / Urban Mozaik Magazine. All rights reserved. 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