Being a Muslim is a journey that must be active and ongoing.
For second-generation Muslim American youth, I think it is especially important
to have mentors that are also searching to enhance their understanding of
Islam. It is also important for youth to integrate their different interests
with their faith so that Islam becomes seamless with all aspects of their
lives.
Actively exploring Islam with my parents as a young adult made
it possible for me to connect with the religion. As a college student, I had
begun learning about the world in a sophisticated way. I was experiencing new
things all the time. I was being trained to question and analyze everything. So
it only made sense that, in order to connect with Islam, the process would have
to be similarly analytical and exploratory. A didactic approach would never be
enough. Thus, my parents became my colleagues as well as my mentors as we
explored Islam together.
When I was a kid, my parents always did their best to
explain things to me in a way that would make sense to me at the time. As I got
older, that challenge became increasingly difficult.
I have always had strong faith and belief in God, but in my
first years of college, I felt disconnected from Islam as a religion. I could
not relate to the other Muslim students on campus at all. Their practice of
Islam seemed very far removed from my own sensibilities. I could not get
involved with the Muslim community there. I admit that for a long time I didn’t
pray regularly. I had not yet figured out how to connect my faith with my
social life, my academic pursuits, or even my identity.
My parents felt an urgent need to help me internalize Islam as
a young adult. They recognized that the process could not wait. That was one of
their motivations to intensify their study of Islam. They began to put
extensive effort into researching and interpreting Islam in a way that makes
sense to them, and in a way that can make sense to a second-generation Muslim
in her twenties.
The most important factor in this endeavor was that my
parents included me in the process. They always shared what they were learning
and discussed it with me. They challenged me to consider every example from
both my own perspective and the perspective of others.
Finding a community that we could relate to helped all of us
to broaden our connection with Islam.
When I was growing up, I sensed my parents’ dissatisfaction with the
conventional Muslim communities we knew then, and that in turn made me feel
alienated from those communities. But when my parents discovered the Webb
community, and started meeting all of you, and introduced me to the group, I
was able to connect with other Muslims for the first time. Like my parents and
I, this community is searching for a better way to engage with Islam. Finding a
Muslim community I was comfortable with helped me learn how to relate to
Muslims in other communities, no matter where they’re coming from. Now, I am
actively involved with the Muslim student community where I currently live in
Berkeley.
The initiative to start your own prayer group was also a
formative opportunity for me. It offered the first Friday prayer experience
that I could relate to and find fulfilling. I feel completely at home in this
gathering. Hearing everyone’s personal
experiences and perspectives on Islam has helped me to realize that I am not
alone in my struggles, and that understanding Islam needs to be a continuous
process no matter what stage of your life you are in. I never used to attend
Friday prayer service in college except on Eid. Now here I am giving a khutbah.
Observing my parents’ evolving practice of Islam has also
had a critical influence on me. In their own journeys, they have shown me the
real purpose of ritual in Islam. For example, when my father returned from Hajj
a couple years ago, I could tell how transformative it was for him. It gave him
a new lease on life, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. I have seen a
similar transformation in my mother since she committed to praying five times
every single day. She comes away from each prayer very calm, focused, and
reassured. Following my parents’ journey taught me that maintaining a
connection through ritual allows Islam to permeate your life and give you
balance.
My parents never pressured me to pray with them, but always
invited me to do so. Eventually, I felt compelled to get back into it regularly.
They always encouraged me to lead the prayer. This summer I decided to start attempting
tajweed. With some coaching from my father on the guidelines, I started
developing my own style of recitation. It has made prayer a more deeply
spiritual experience for me. I now feel that, through recitation, I can relate
to that level of transcendence I have observed in my parents’ practice of Islam.
I’m going to recite part of Surah Al-A’la…
I went from not praying at all to praying every day because
I was sharing the experience with my family, and because I was able to
personalize the ritual. Now it feels as natural as anything else I do.
Although I felt distanced from the religion early in my
young adult life, the most critical factor that made it possible for me to
connect with Islam was sharing the journey with my parents and with our community.
If I had been handed a codified set of rules, with no room for interpretation
or growth, I never would have been able to connect with the religion. But
because it has been such a dynamic process, and a shared experience, my
practice of Islam has become completely congruent with my faith and with every
other aspect of my life.
[Pause]
One way that my parents encouraged me to engage with Islam
was to connect it with other things I was learning. This allowed me to take
agency of my understanding of Islam. It also helped me to bridge my faith with
my academic endeavors, which were also very important to me. I’d like to share
an example of how my non-Islamic studies actually helped me to understand
Islam.
One of the most difficult questions I struggled with growing
up was the question, “why does God make bad things happen?” I used to ask my
father this question periodically. It was one of the few for which he did not
have a clear answer. He said, “I don’t know, Sara. There are some things only
God knows the answer for.”
This question continued to occupy me over the years, and it
still does. But I found a way to reconcile the problem through an
unconventional source: earth science.
My studies of earth science have trained me to approach
every matter through the lens of “deep time,” as we refer to geologic history
on the order of millions of years. I
have thus adopted the habit of considering everything from scientific problems
to personal matters on both short- and long-term scales. And I find that alternating
between the two allows me to see how things are connected.
Consider, for example, earthquakes. Earthquakes can
devastate towns and kill a lot of people. Why would God make such a thing
happen?
Consider the deep-time perspective: earthquakes happen when
tension is released between two tectonic plates (large pieces in the Earth’s
crust) that slide past each other. Tectonic plates typically move very slowly,
in pace with the growth of your fingernails. Over time, stress builds up
between the two plates, and eventually that stress is released all at once as
an earthquake.
I have learned that movement of these tectonic plates is
actually vital to our existence. Tectonic plates made the Earth habitable by
life billions of years ago. Volcanoes that formed of the margins of tectonic
plates spewed out gases that created an atmosphere. The atmosphere allowed
water to condense and collect on Earth’s surface as a liquid. It also trapped
enough of the Sun’s heat to keep the planet from freezing over. The movement of tectonic plates also shapes
the planet; it forms continents with mountains and plains; it affects climate
and environment, which affects the evolution and distribution of organisms. Without
these processes, we would not be here, nor would we have any of the natural
resources on which our survival depends.
Earthquakes are a necessary consequence of tectonic
activity, a byproduct of the laws of physics. Earthquakes are not punishments
from God; they are a necessary part of the system God created that allows us to
exist. It is therefore up to us to use our capacity for observation and
analysis (as the Quran tells us to do repeatedly) to figure out where
earthquakes are likely to occur and how to mitigate their effects on people’s
lives.
So in answer to the question, “Why does God make bad things
happen?,” I would suggest that God does not make
bad things happen, but rather, that bad things sometimes happen as a
necessary consequence of the system God created that allows us to exist. That
still doesn’t explain why a given earthquake must strike at a particular time,
or affect particular people. But I also believe, as all Muslims do, that every
injustice, whether circumstantial or deliberate, will be accounted for on the
Day of Judgment. Taking the “big picture” perspective does help me to reconcile
these and other disastrous events and understand why they must happen.
So in summary, what helped me connect with Islam was
exploring it with mentors who encouraged me to search for my own answers, and
who were actively searching for answers themselves. Islam has to be an ongoing
journey. Here’s to a fruitful journey for all of us in the New Year,
insha’Allah!
I will end by reciting the second half of Surah Al-A’la…
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