Thank You for Sharing: what you know about Muslims
Thank You For Sharing is a recurring thread that technically lives behind the paywall but I thought this week’s installment was too important not to be widely read. I got very emotional over what a lot of you wrote about the religion of my people. I really appreciate that the readership of this newsletter is from many different places and offers many different points of view. I was flooded with messages so consider this part 1. Subscribers will get another edition of these in the coming weeks. Thank you for trusting me with your stories.
I’m on deadline for a fun magazine assignment hence the halal (lawful) content today. Don’t get used to it. I’ll be back with haram (forbidden) Gentle Suggestions next week and regular programming on Saturday.
I knew almost NOTHING about Muslims growing up in the 80s and 90s. I grew up on the east coast of Canada and everyone was either protestant or catholic, no other options. I was raised protestant. I didn't know any muslims at all until high school when I met someone whose family had fled Lebanon in . The first way that Islam entered my consciousness was through listening to the lyrics of music by Busta Rhymes and ATCQ.
First! In 2016 my husband and I went to Indianapolis and happened to Airbnb a room in an Anila Quayyum Agha’s house. I believe she was a professor at IUPUI then. She was delightful and she and her partner were fostering tiny kittens. Anyways I grew up outside Chicago with very few Muslims and knew very little about Islam apart from when my Unitarian church Sunday school class went to a mosque. I recently worked in a school district with a really large population of Muslims and was mostly surprised at the varying levels of religious observance. I would see mothers wearing hijabs and their teen daughters not; some students would pray during lunch and others not at all. (Also fun fact, the school district would try to guess every year when Eid would fall so they could put a day off in the calendar and were usually always wrong so then a third of the school would be missing anyway on actual Eid) Anyways I think somewhere I very dumbly believed that all Muslims were deeply religious and adherent and did not think about that like other Abrahamic religions I was familiar with there would be differences in what parts of Islam Muslims followed and also how some of these differences were culturally bound. This seems very DUH now, but truly something I had to learn firsthand in adulthood. Sigh.
I attended a Catholic middle school in Ohio. Each year, we devoted a unit to the other Abrahamic religions because they are our brothers and sisters who also believe in God. In 7th grade, we went on class trips to a local mosque and a synagogue. The nun in charge of these trips told us that only people who don't believe in God at all, or don't believe properly (like Christians who play acoustic guitar for Christ), go to hell. I think the intention was for us to know about who our neighbors would be in heaven.
I was born, raised and am now back in New England. White cis het female, close to 40. I was raised without organized religion in my family and consider myself agnostic. When I was growing up my mom worked on a team of seven, they moved from one company to another as a group, eventually starting their own company.
One of the team members was Mohammed, who was Muslim and originally from Algeria. As a start up a lot of work was done at my family’s house and I remember playing with Mohammed’s daughters while they all worked. I knew he was Muslim, they went to former East Germany for work a lot and pork was a huge part of the diet there, and there were always funny stories from Mohammed about what he subsisted on instead when they came back.
I also knew about Ramadan and that this month was challenging for Mohammed because he was a smoker and also abstained from that during fasting. One year my mom decided to fast for Ramadan as well to share in the experience with him. She was fasting from sun up to sundown, and was very proud of her being able to stick with it. Mohammed felt bad when he had to tell her they actually have to fast from first light to last light, which ads on a few hours. She knew her limits and stuck with sunrise to sunset for the rest of the month.
I was surprised when, in 8th grade social studies, I learned how similar the Quran, Bible and Torah are in their language and teachings. I would say my exposure to Islam was similar to that of Judaism and Catholicism growing up, but I don’t know any Muslims as an adult so haven’t been to a Muslim wedding or funeral like I have those of other faiths.
A friend has become part of the Sufi faith and local community, so I have gotten to experience some of their music, dancing, myths and poetry which has been very nourishing for my soul.
I'm an Icelander and I grew up mostly in Iceland, and I remember learning painfully little about Islam and Muslims growing up. Iceland was very homogenous in the 90s and early 2000s and nearly everyone, including my family, was at least culturally Protestant. The messaging we received was from US media and often cast muslims in a criminal or extremist point of view, there wasn't a lot of nuance there. I remember being so fascinated and surprised when I moved to Copenhagen at 13 and made friends with muslim students in my class - these were kids who were first generation or recently moved from countries like Pakistan, Egypt and Uganda.
Learning about their traditions like Ramadan - fasting for a whole month, what discipline! I thought, and the praying multiple times a day - but most importantly, how much they expressed enjoying and respected their traditions, filled me with a sense of loss of not having such a rich cultural connection with my community.
I was also extremely surprised when I went to a friends house for dinner with her family one day, expecting (and dreading, as I was a picky eater) a lot of new types of food, and finding that we were having chicken nuggets, fries and ketchup. I was so relieved when I realised I'd had nothing to worry about, even though they did a lot of things differently, other things were just the same. That feeling of comfort and connection I felt with a family so different from mine has stayed with me since that day.
My childhood was spent ping-ponging between Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and Miami, Florida. I had an ostensibly Catholic upbringing, but my Cuban family—while faithful—isn't super strict.
The first Muslim person I ever met was Yusuf from Zimbabwe. We became friends in 2001—I know, of all possible years—at 14 or 15, both of us navigating the AP program of an elite international high school in the Dominican Republic. A conversation about 9/11 and the mistreatment of Muslims never came up because we were too busy bonding over our shared appreciation of Jamiroquai and "Jackass," truly. Thanks to my family's hospitality business, I'd already encountered a myriad of people unlike ourselves, so Yusuf's faith wasn't exactly a novel revelation—it was everything else about him.
What struck me most was his paradoxical nature: disciplined to his core in every domain of life—faith, family, academics, hobbies—yet wickedly funny and spontaneous, with an eye for life's absurd underbelly. We were both highly observant (read: writers, or less generously, "a gift to have in class"). Yusuf's talent was forensic: he could dissect any situation and extract the one surprising detail that would etch it permanently into our friendship canon. He operated like a one-man "Curb Your Enthusiasm" writers' room—still does. Now fully grown with a beautiful family of his own, he remains that same mischievous soul. Neither adulthood nor increased responsibilities nor his deepening faith have sanded his edges.
I moved to New York for college and befriended more Muslims there, along with Jews, Mormons, non-believers, Rita Ora stans. Not to sound like a Benetton ad, but I'm grateful for the tapestry of my friendships. That said, we're all just people—and to quote Spike Lee, "Dat's da truth, Ruth." We're extraordinary and mundane. More similar than we are different in our shared anxieties, hopes, ambitions, pettiness, pride... We love to gossip, gather for a meal, spare a thought, and be vulnerable at random, often inconvenient times. This is the substance that makes being alive exciting and worth it.
I was raised Christian (evangelical but not in a super scary way, just a way that made me not realize my own queerness for 30+ years) in a small, conservative, mostly Christian town in New Jersey. I didn’t know any Muslims growing up. I honestly probably didn’t know anything about Islam until 9/11, which was when I was 14. A couple of years later I went to a weekend leadership program at a camp, and I got my period for the first time at camp, so I was one of the only kids who didn’t want to swim. There was a Muslim girl in my cabin who also wasn’t swimming for modesty reasons so we became friends right away. I wish I had met more Muslim people earlier in my life because once I met her I was just like “People think she’s scary? That’s weird.”
I grew up in a small midwest college town, Lawrence, KS. I did receive the same general information as other religions. We learned the five pillars of Islam, not much else, unsure if I knew any Muslims until high school when I became friends with Anesa. She and her family are from Iran. I currently (day by day at this point) work for a resettlement agency in Kent, WA where more than half of my colleagues are Muslim. I am always taken back by the kindness and hospitality I am offered. I was invited to celebrate eid at colleague's home last year. She insisted that my then 2.5 year old be allowed to run amok in the midst of the delicious food and cakes prepared and laid on the floor. This Sunday, another colleague and dear friend called and asked if my family was home and if he could stop by. He delivered oranges, pomegranate, and a giant bag of carrots for juicing to my 3 year old as a Ramadan gift. I am Catholic and it is a gift that Lent and Ramandan line up this year so we can all participate in our own ways of denial and prayer in the hope of a better world.
My earliest memories are from 9/11, I was twelve years old and after the event my father, a Mexican immigrant of very dark and indigenous appearance, was called a Muslim or an Arab, very interchangeably, in a negative way. We lived in south central Wisconsin in a primarily liberal area, but the racism and islamophobia was ever present. My parents were rejecting of this. My mother had worked as a server in family restaurants owned by an Albanian family, many of who were muslim. Later in life I would reconnect in a different restaurant, as a server myself, with one of the young women around my age who was from that family. We worked together again later at a community mental health clinic and by knowing her my understanding of Ramadan and other Islam practices blossomed. I was grateful to be in training with a fellow therapist who maintained strict prayer time, which I was honored to be present for and to make space for. My spouse, who works at a high school, reminds me each spring of Ramadan's approach, because we both value the devotion and ritual. I think we both wish we had devotion and ritual. I think that's what pleasantly surprised me after growing up Catholic (I bailed on that!) and all the rhetoric that other religions are bad. It is in fact not as they said.
I grew up as a Unitarian, mostly in Memphis, Tennessee (1970s). I learned a little about Islam in religious education classes at my church, which I would say treated all the great religions as variations on the same theme. Most of the Muslim people I've known were medical professionals or in medical training. I think what surprised me most was the Muslim women I worked with/taught didn't seem oppressed by their religion.
I grew up in Honolulu and my best friend's dad was from Indonesia and he was Muslim. Her mother was from Alabama and white (Iʻm not sure what religion she was raised in). Hawaiʻi is full of families with diverse cultural backgrounds, but this one was especially unique.
My friend went to Arabic language classes for a brief period, and didn't eat pork, but other than that, she wasn't particularly committed to Islam. She may have been uncomfortable being the only Muslim in our friend group, but she never really talked about it. One Thanksgiving when we were in college, she joined one of my extended family gatherings in Los Angeles for the holiday, and there was a lot of concern when my cousin realized there was pork in the stuffing and had not given my friend a heads up. Of course we told my friend, and she took it in stride, and even had seconds!--we still laugh about it. (I apologize if this is not funny or you find it offensive; I can see how this could seem mean-spirited, but I do think we all bonded over it in a way.)
I always got the feeling that my friend wasn't very close with her father; she had an older brother who was more committed to Islam, or so I heard from another adult at one point. He was two years older than us and I never saw any evidence of that. Anyway, I'm not sure if this is helpful to you in any way at all, but I do think that having a close Muslim friend--even if she wasn't deeply committed to the religion--affected my view. It was always a bit mysterious to me, even though I'd had exposure. I was living in NYC on 9/11 and while it was a sad and terrible time, I knew that the cause of it all couldn't be blamed on one religion. I knew that zealots and extremists were everywhere, in every religion and belief system.
I am not religious--or at least wasn't raised with one. We're "lapsed" on both the European/ white and Asian sides of my family, Catholic and Shinto Buddhist, respectively. I have a lot of respect for religion, though, maybe even because I wasn't brought up with any particular one. I do think that having a friend when I was a tween who was a religion I had very little knowledge or exposure to helped shape my understanding of religion overall, and certainly made clear to me what I didn't know or understand, which I think sometimes helps you be more interested and compassionate, if that's the right word, in the face of accusations or even contempt.
Thanks for asking for insight on this-- thinking about it has been a nice exercise in self-discovery and reflection. About me: Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, not baptized or religious (although I was mildly shocked to learn in my early adulthood that my parents do, in fact, believe in God), now a New Yorker (10+ years here).
33 - Detroit, MI. I grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school until college. I had heard very little about Islam until 9/11 happened when I was in the 4th grade. I remember hearing very negative things about Muslims during that time, but I also remember people defending the majority of Muslims. I think it felt very abstract to me, since I didn't know any Muslims personally. College is when I first had any meaningful contact with any Muslim people. I took a service trip to NYC with a hijab-wearing woman. During that trip, we visited the 9/11 Memorial. We reflected on that visit at the end of the day. Hearing her experience of that terrorist attack was eye-opening. We were the same age, and she discussed the same fears that I remember having during that time but also with the very complex layer of her people being blamed for it.
At my first job, I became friends with a Bosniak woman. Seeing a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, non-hijab wearing Muslim broadened my view of what Islam could look like. I also learned of the Bosnian genocide for the first time in my life.
Now, I work at a school just outside of Dearborn. About half of our staff and students are Muslim. This has been my greatest cultural education. Just like the Catholics I know, we have families that range from "grew up Muslim" to those that are strict observers. It's been so lovely to get to know these families and their values. While I've worked with some staff that have differing views than myself on gender roles and homosexuality, I've grown to understand that those that practice Islam also have a spectrum of views on these topics, just like every other religion. I would be a major hypocrite if I didn't acknowledge that there are many people in the Catholic Church that hold beliefs that I find backwards and harmful.
I don't take lightly my role of supporting our families that are struggling with grief and loss during this particularly fraught time in history. Many have lost loved ones in the war in the Middle East, and many more worry about their families still there. They are also facing a lot of discrimination and harassment here at home. The more I learn about the Islamic faith, the better I can support the children and staff in the way they need
I learnt that it is a peaceful religion shared amongst many different people across the world. This was then confirmed to me when I have travelled to muslim nations -- as a woman travelling alone I have never felt safer and more at peace than in predominantly muslim spaces. Istanbul, Tunis, Marrakech have been some of my favourites to spend time in.
For some reason my parents thought it was important to share that Muslims didn't eat pork (I was raised Seventh Day Adventist) in a "look, you aren't the only one not eating bacon" way. It surprised me to learn as I got older that not every Muslim adheres to dietary restrictions. I know that's such a small thing, but when you've been raised to do/not do a thing, going your own way is a BFD.
My father was in the US Air Force and we moved around, mostly Europe. Growing up all I met were Christians or agnostic people. I think my first exposure to Islam was 9/11. Luckily, because I did gender studies when I went to university 9 years later, I read a lot of post colonial theory about white feminism, Muslim women, etc and so by the time I met a Muslim person at my first job several years later I think I had pretty succesfully de-programmed myself from all of the narratives of Muslim women needing saving and so on (as Spivak says: white men saving brown women from brown men). One of my last roommates was Muslim and last year she invited me to join her for a day of fasting which I really appreciated and enjoyed experiencing with her. I'm agnostic and I currently live in Germany. Lots to say about this society's relationship to Islam and Judaism but that's another story
I grew up in the American south; my family wasn’t religious but everyone around me was at least vaguely Christian. I don’t remember even hearing about Islam until 9/11, when I was 10, and it was explained to me that it happened because of “Muslim terrorists”. I somehow got it into my head that Islam was a small religion - I remember being absolutely shocked to learn of its prevalence in a high school history class. Now I live in Brooklyn and know & interact with Muslims every day. At first it surprised me to learn just how wide of a range there are of how people feel about being raised Muslim - I remember feeling surprised the first time I heard someone make a joke about being a “bad Muslim”. I had this image in my head that Muslims must be completely devoted and serious. But like duh - there’s a wide range of how all my raised-Christian childhood friends feel about Christianity, too.
I grew up in an Indian Hindu family (though I'm no longer religious myself), and I remember when I was growing up in India, my family's community always told us to view Muslims with mistrust.
However, I don't remember my own parents ever paying any attention to those messages, and I remember them being friendly with some Muslims in our community there in India. We immigrated to the US when I was in grade school, and once we moved to the US, it felt like a huge shift in the way we interacted with Muslims. Suddenly my parents had dear friends who were Muslims (and even some from Pakistan, the horror!) because we had so much in common with them culturally and we were all homesick. In the eyes of the white people in the Southern town we'd moved to, we were the same as them anyway. We were harassed after 9/11 just like they were, so in that sense, what difference did it make what religion any of us actually were? For me going to school, it was very similar. I had a couple good Muslim friends in high school, and we would often make jokes about how we were "supposed to hate each other" but never did.
It always surprised me just how similar they were to me despite everything I heard about them growing up. That said, it was always somehow obvious to us all that we could never be more than friends. One of my close Indian Hindu friends had a huge crush on one of the Muslim boys in our class, and it was clear he liked her back, but they never acted on it because it would be a huge scandal in the community.
The only time I really think about the divide between Hindus and Muslims now is in the context of India. I hate the direction India is heading with the rise in hate crimes against Muslims. I hate that I'm from 2 incredibly diverse countries so filled with hate. I went to my cousin's wedding in India a couple months ago, and I didn't know how to respond when I heard that my uncle had banned any Muslim people from even working as caterers at the wedding. He was so repulsed by them, and I couldn't understand it. I wish I could somehow transfer all my happy memories with my Muslim friends to him so he could see that we're all so similar.
I grew up in a conservative, non-denominational-Protestant household in a suburb of Pittsburgh. I was 6 when 9/11 happened, which feels relevant only because it shaped my parents views on Islam quite a bit. Basically the messaging I got was that Muslims were dangerous, that they wished bad things for Americans and Christians, and that the religion as a whole was violent and extreme. The Jews were misguided but not dangerous and it was emphasized that they shared a lot of core beliefs with us, but not the “most important” ones about Jesus. I didn’t know any Muslims that I was aware of- our town was overall very white.
A very clear memory that I have was that a few years after 9/11, we got a dvd in the mail as one sometimes did in the early aughts. It was clearly propaganda, but my dad especially was very susceptible to those things and he made us watch it (only later did he read the fine print and realize the content was explicitly not for children). The dvd showed, allegedly, children in Iraq being trained in schools to hate Americans, training for jihad, and other horrific content. I was extremely upset by the film but my dad maintained that it was important to “know what was out there.” I am so curious to know if anyone else got a copy of this or remembers it at all. It was traumatic to watch and even more troubling to look back on as an adult.
I came away from the religion and politics I was raised with in late high school/early college. I do still identify as Christian, but my faith now is very different ideologically from what I was raised with. After college I moved to a very liberal, large city that is very diverse. I know many Muslims casually, including many of my students and some colleagues. It did initially surprise me that the Muslims I met were not as conservative or overall-religious as I expected. I enjoy when my Muslim students share things with me about their faith and their culture (most of them are East-African immigrants). I also try to educate myself so they are not the only ones teaching me. The book “Hijab Butch Blues” was very helpful in expanding my idea of Muslims as a whole, seeing how many of the stories do overlap with Christianity, and seeing what a more liberal/explicitly Queer Muslim experience can look like.
In 7th grade (public school, upper middle class area, primarily white) we had a whole big unit on world religions where we learned about islam as well as christianity/judaism/hinduism/buddhism etc. Years after I graduated a crazy ass white mom sued the school for “indoctrinating” children into islam by teaching us its most basic core tenets? Of course she had a lot of support from Fox News… She lost tho lol
I'm from Central PA, and grew up agnostic/atheist (though in the past my family on both sides was pretty Irish Catholic). I'm 36 and had a pretty liberal/broad education growing up, mostly due to my mom. My mom was a history major and then became a librarian and then got her PhD in education, and she made sure we had access to reading material across a broad spectrum of ideas and history. I never thought there was anything weird about Islam, mostly because my mom encouraged me to read!
We also lived in Chicago (Oak Park, before it got gentrified) for four years when I was in elementary school and exposure to a lot of different communities (as opposed to the blinding whiteness of central PA) shaped my view too. I read Malcolm X's autobiography when I was in middle school, and it made me want to know more about his journey and also Islam generally. I searched out history books (and tried to find ones not written by white men) and documentaries about Islam and its development.
I never thought it was weird to see folks in hijab or to have friends observing Ramadan, in the same way I didn't think it odd to see folks wearing kippah. After 9/11, my mom made sure we understood that the messaging around Islam coming from mainstream media, the US government, and her own parents was not accurate or appropriate.
My grandparents were Democrats but also racist (no surprises there) and my mom made sure to push back against those comments. I think growing up without any religion at all (truly never been to church except for other people's weddings) made me intellectually curious about folks who did have a specific religion to follow, and because the mainstream US narrative is so narrow around Islam, I wanted to know more and be educated. I really do have my mom to thank for that curiosity.
I went to Catholic school in Canada growing up, and as an East Asian, Catholic kid I knew no Muslims at all. The first time I heard about Islam was probably in high school classes. It was the same general info as what we learned about other religions, I remember learning about Muhammed and the Koran (that's how it was spelled in our books). In university is when I met and befriended Muslims for the first time, mostly because I just hadn't been around many before in my suburbs and Catholic school. One of my friends was an Ismaili priestess for a year, and it surprised me that there are many branches of Islam. Soon after, I befriended a bunch of Persian Muslims who were into Sufism, which reminded me a little of the minimalist, anti-materialist values of the Catholic church I attended growing up (Franciscans). My own religion is agnostic now, bordering on atheist, but probably more humanist than anything.
I'm a white atheist woman who grew up in Saudi Arabia. So first off, thank you for this treat of a Ramadaan introspection. The importance of religion as heritage from our ancestors and elders was such a clear aspect of my friends' and neighbors' faith that I was and still am missing and coveting. The other element of your newsletter that gave me hope today that people always figure out their own ways of doing things and practicing (or not) pieces of inherited wisdom. I think that's one of they key elements of our shared humanity, possibly? And knowing some of the 2 billion Muslims of the world, and seeing and sharing the way they choose to be religious all in different ways, flies just so in the face of the Islamaphobic lines they try to feed us here in the US. There's so much pressure, especially around religion, to do things the "right" way, and my "aHa!" from reading you today is that maybe the individual, evolving personal "take" is the whole damn point after all. Ramadaan kareem 🌙
I grew up Catholic and conservative in Southern California (born 1985) and attended an evangelical nondenominational church for a while in HS. As a child I was taught to regard every other religion, and indeed every Protestant denomination, as wrong, so Islam certainly fell within that. It basically went without saying that any non-Christian was deluded, wrong, and possibly demon-possessed. The exception to that was (some) Jews, since they were still waiting for the Messiah, just hadn't realized it was Jesus. (I think that was the logic.) I remember being vaguely aware of Islam pre-9/11 but the bigotry really kicked in and became explicit after that. Most people in my orbit even in college (Christian SoCal college) were supportive of Bush and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and saw these things as Christian endeavors, or tools of God on Earth, or something like that..
I remember someone saying to me something along the lines of, "you can't be a feminist [the person speaking this sentence was by no means a feminist] and also oppose what we're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan because those women are so oppressed [and the Americans are liberating them, presumably]." Oppressed by head scarves? I wasn't sure, didn't press him. He may not have been totally sure. Relatedly: I didn't know many specifics about sexism in various facets of Islam but I WAS constantly being told explicitly and implicitly that Christian women should not "cause their brothers to stumble" by wearing the low-rise jeans that were inescapable at that point--or merely by existing. Men's thoughts about me were somehow my responsibility. (The sexism was one of the major things that led to my break with that brand of evangelicalism, and you're right--the fundamentalist Imams in all the Abrahamic religions are working on the same project.)
I also remember attending a fast-breaking meal at a local mosque in the spring of 2007, sitting peacefully with other women who gladly shared their food with me and my friend (who had to go to another religion's service or ceremony as part of an assignment for a class--I tagged along). It was beautiful and not at all what I expected--something more pushy and confrontational, such as many of the churches I had attended might have been if a Muslim woman walked in. FWIW in that experience, I did not feel excluded from the men's space, but included with the women, off the hook of worrying about men and all of their feelings and power over me.
I learned a lot more about Islam in practice and the great diversity of practitioners after I moved to Chicago and began to know more Muslims IRL. I also work at a public university with a large Muslim population now and so Ramadan and Eid are observed, the admin sends out messages to remind people that their students may be fasting, etc.
I had no idea Ramadan start time was based on a Lunar calendar -- duh! I'm a 31 y/o from Melbourne, Australia. I'm of Vietnamese heritage. Grew up culturally Buddhist, pretended to be Christian for a hot second to get into a Catholic high school, while there, learnt very briefly about other religious in religious education classes -- though I don't remember learning about Islam very much. We'd learn about Malcolm X in history, but never Nation of Islam, for example.
First mention I heard of Islam in my little child world was from news commentary on 9/11 and ensuing War on Terror. Islam and extremism were always two words heard together, never just Islam (neutral). Afterwards, predominant media conversations were all about pushing back against Islamaphobia. I watched Yassmin Abdel Magied defend Islam on TV, calling it the most feminist religion (she basically then got jeered out of the country by racist media).
Fighting discrimination was the only conversation around Islam there seemed to be space for in Australia. I only got the chance to think about Islam as a faith, about the Islamic world, its arts, history, culture, food, diverse peoples until I was well into my late 20s. This actually sounds insane to think about. I had a couple of Muslim and ex Muslim mates growing up but never had super deep conversations about faith with them – I just remember being surprised that my ex Muslim friend read the Koran often to calm herself.
As a young woman, I travelled to Marrakech during Ramadan and got a shock from the racist catcalls and street harassment. I thought maybe everyone was just super on edge and grumpy from fasting in 40 degree heat, because a female friend of mine had travelled Morocco alone and had an amazing time, but upon reflection maybe that was just regular ol sexism.
My favourite part of travelling Europe a couple years ago was seeing all the Islamic architecture (Southern Spain and Turkey in particular, where grand monuments were revised at various time to reflect Christianity or Islamic power). I loved the places where within 1km you could see old Christian, Roman, Islamic and Jewish ruins (Bulgaria was cool for that). I also loved reading about the ways in which Muslims in the Balkans were able to keep their faith alive even through communism. And art from the Islamic world is so incredible, I just wish I'd been exposed to it much earlier in life. The calligraphy makes me cry.
My favourite thing about travelling in Montenegro was hearing the call to prayer every morning – the neighbourhood dogs would all howl along. In short: I am still learning about Islam all the time! I know next to nothing, really!
I grew up in a Roman Catholic household in the Netherlands (please don’t ask me what the difference is between catholic and Roman catholic…), but we stopped attending church on Sundays around the time I was 10-11 years old. It just became too much hassle with playing softball, homework, visiting the grandparents… My dad was a teacher at a catholic primary school in the last class, for kids aged around 11. It was what we officially (but quite shamefully) called ‘a black school’. Which meant the school was attended by a large percentage of immigrants, with all sorts of backgrounds but many of Muslim religion. The school kept the catholic and Dutch rituals and seemed to manage to integrate it with Muslim celebrations quite smoothly. At least I hope so, perhaps these kids completely disagee! My dad’s main focus was on getting these kids prepped for their next school and maintained an open and curious attitude throughout his career. The one thing he kept repeating to me was that all religions share common origin stories. He had studied the bible and had books on the Koran and he saw connections and a common ground. He didn’t believe one religion was superior over the other or was vastly different and I believe because of that point of view he saw these kids for what they were: kids growing up in a new culture.
Caveat - I'm 45 so school is some time ago and I don't remember well. At my village primary school (rural South of England), there were no Muslim kids. At secondary school in my local town, there were Muslims girls and I was friendly with all and friends with one in particular.
In primary and secondary school we learned about major religions and I think Islam was just the same as the other religions. Our religious studies teacher at secondary school had a lot of respect for all religions and it showed in her teaching. I don't remember my family or teachers paying particular attention to Islam, or to the Muslim kids at school, in either a positive or negative way. I think I had a sense it was "bad for women" - maybe because of the experiences of my good friend in secondary school, who came from a family where her uncle had a lot of power over her dad and it had a big impact on all of her family, and particularly on her choices (she wasn't allowed to go to university - though of course the reasoning for that was probably more complicated than I understood).
I don't know if our press was so rabidly anti-Muslim as some parts of it are now: more just casually racist and filled with assumptions.
The Muslim women I know now (from the school gates) are so different from each other that it's like asking what surprised me about my Christian or Jewish friends. One thing I'm curious about, and I haven't really asked about, is the different ways people observe the religion within the same family. Particularly regarding obvious stuff like dress. e.g. One woman might be strictly in black hijab while her sister-in-law doesn't cover her head at all.
I was raised in the Church of England, though we stopped going when my sister and I were in our early teens and our dad had a sort of reverse Damascene conversion and lost his faith. Not sure my mum ever believed. I lost my faith around the time my grandpa died: I couldn't see how any all-powerful God could preside over what happened to him, or indeed some of the horrible things happening in the news.
I grew up in an incredibly WASPy Connecticut town commuting distance to NYC. I don’t think there was a single Muslim kid in my grade and we had 400 kids. We had a lot of Catholics (I grew up Catholic), Presbyterians, and somewhat randomly, Mormons. Like, a lot of Mormons. Like enough that Mitt Romney would fundraise in our town and Mr. Ballerina Farm was in my grade.
Anyway. Most of my exposure to Islam was through history classes or the news, though if I’m being honest, my first real awareness of Islam probably came about around (I hate to say it) 9/11 (I was in 6th grade). I don’t think we learned as much about Islam as the other religions. I don’t know if this was just my experience and the people I sought out (I was an awk kid so I’d eat lunch with teachers for a period!!), but I think the dialogue was mostly respectful and mostly academic (like learning about Islam).
In retrospect this is kind of surprising to me given how white and conservative my town was/is, but it’s possible I wasn’t privy to uglier viewpoints, though I knew they definitely existed. It wasn’t until college that I met Muslim folks, and my two Muslim friends I met through work (remote company - and they’re both from Toronto). I guess I was surprised by how they seemed like me and had similar interests despite also being observant.
I do not identify with any religion and am generally wary of religion (I might just be projecting my 🤮 with Catholicism unfairly on all religion) which is maybe why it surprised me that they seemed so cool and “normal.” As I’m writing this I recognize how stupid this sounds!
I am Australian, white, non practicing catholic mother, culturally protestant father. I personally identify as agnostic. We never went to mass or church.
We had “scripture” classes in primary school that were split up based on whichever religion your parents identified you with. My primary school was incredibly diverse - there was 400ish kids and about 40 different nationalities represented - and really celebrated how multicultural the school population was. Lots of festivals, learning focus on different cultures, and I once watched my principal stand up an 11 year old boy who called someone a racist slur and dress him down in front of the entire school. I was aware of other religions and curious about them, but wasn’t a super religious kid so it was in a general kind of way.
I turned 12 the year of September 11, and before that I have no memory of Australian culture having much to say about Muslims. People were either ok with immigration or they weren’t - it didn’t feel particularly targeted at a specific religion. That changed after 9/11. There was a real ugly focus on Islam and Muslim people as being “un Australian”, or other. As though they would specifically struggle to assimilate into the culture, or would reject the Australian way of life (a massive lol, this seemed to be based on ‘we like the beach and we’re super feminist’ which if you knew the people making these claims would be even funnier).
It all came to a super hideous ugly head in 2005, the year I graduated high school, when the Cronulla race riots happened. Cronulla is a southern beach side suburb in Sydney that has always been very white and “true blue”. The book Puberty Blues was written about it, think surfing, teen drinking and lots of casual misogyny. But it’s also quite close to a lot of the south western suburbs with large Muslim populations, and large immigrant populations generally (the Australian racist does not distinguish between the two). There was an altercation one week between life guards on the beach and a group of “youths of middle eastern appearance” which got reported on, and then all the worst elements of Australian media (talkback radio shock jocks, tabloids etc) whipped everyone into a frenzy and triggered a two day riot where non-white Australians were attacked. Totally fucked up!
In the 20 years since it’s been a low level simmer - occasionally bubbling over into straight up racism. Other groups get brought into focus too though, our culture must have a boogie man.
I grew up in Sheffield in the UK which was fairly diverse and had a few Muslim kids in my school. We were friendly but we always felt quite unknowable to each other I think. My main memory of Ramadan is Neelam and Salma from my class buying strawberry laces from the tuck shop saying it was ok who cares. I admit to being familiar with Muslim life in the UK but being too shy to get to know people properly.
But lockdown definitely changed that a bit - we live in a very diverse area of Manchester now with our two kids and live next to and opposite Muslim families. I have been so moved by their kindness and commitment to community and family. The dad opposite sees himself as the patriarch of the street and looks out for us all. The mum comes to check on my kids and brings us rice and lamb all the time. She hates food waste! He came to England as a young man and has been a bus driver in Manchester for over 40 years. He invited us to the mosque once for Eid but I was too poorly to go. I wish I was braver and less embarrassed about being somewhere different and could be more proactive about going another time. I am ashamed I don’t know more about them. I would love to write a social history of our street and interview every household about their stories and put them in a little book. That’s my dream project. 1.
I helped the woman next door in lockdown when her teenage daughter struggled with eating disorders and anxiety, and we are now friends. It makes me sad that they were surprised that I wanted to help.
There’s a lot of Islamophobia in this country and I can see why so many young Muslims would be so disenfranchised by our government and their appalling response to Palestine. I do not blame them for their discontent. The Prevent anti-terrorism strategy is also deeply problematic and has probably made things worse.
My young daughter made Palestine posters for all our neighbours and I think this meant a lot to them - I get worried about being all white saviour-y but sometimes I think it’s worth sticking your neck to say ‘I’m with you’, at the risk of being patronising. A Muslim deliveroo driver came to the door once and saw our poster and welled up talking to my daughter about how she just wanted to help.
I’m really glad my kids are growing up a little more integrated with our Muslim neighbours than I was, though I know I have a long way to go and have a lot of innate superiority crap to shed. I’m working on it. We love our community, we are newcomers and have a lot to learn from these wonderful families who have been here for decades.
See you so soon.
It requires a Herculean amount of restraint for me not to comment on each of those but I had to say something about this person: YOU ARE A VERY LOVELY NEIGHBOR AND I HOPE YOU DO THIS PROJECT!
i didn't respond because i thought the first time i'd even heard the word "Muslim" growing up in rural texas was on 9/11 but i just remembered googling it at the library after listening to the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. and by "googling" i of course mean visiting askjeeves.net
Halal today, haram tomorrow!!!