Magical Shields And Desperate Hopes
My mother had no choice but to believe in the divine. As I vote for the first time I ever, I can now relate
Qul Al-Nas, Qul Al-Falaq, Qul Al-Ikhlas and Qul Al-Kafiroun. Together they are commonly referred to as the four Quls. They are the easiest chapters in the Quran to memorize given their short length, about 4–6 lines each. They also are the recipe for a superpower.
At least that is what my mother believes. Every morning for as long as I can remember she would slowly recite the four Quls and then gently blow them over me. In doing this, she believed she was covering me in an invisible shield that would protect me from all that may do me harm. A shield so powerful, so impenetrable, it would keep at bay all that she couldn’t.
I first realized how much she believed in this shield when I was nine. I grew up in a Muslim family in Mumbai, and my home state was governed by the Shiv Sena, a right-wing party that believed in an India only for Hindus. This party was the chief architect of the 1992/93 Hindu-Muslim riots which left hundreds of Muslims dead. They raged for weeks, during which time there were curfews throughout the city and normal life was severely upended. Most historians now label those riots as an anti-Muslim pogrom. On one particularly bad night, there were rumors that a large mob was coming for the Muslims in our neighborhood. So, my mother took my sister and me to a neighbor’s home, which was deemed safer, to hide. While my father, along with other men from our building, stood guard outside.
As my mother tucked me into a strange bed, she asked me if I wanted to go to a friend’s birthday party the following week. Her question threw me off. Here we were hiding out because we feared for our physical safety, and she was asking me about a party! When I asked her how she could plan for the future on a night like this, she reminded me that I had nothing to fear. Everything would be alright because she had recited the four Quls and blown them over me, and then she repeated her question. Sitting in this unfamiliar bed, feeling unsafe for the first time in my life, I remember feeling awestruck by her conviction. I did not understand how her faith made her so impervious to the horrors that were near our door.
That was until today. Today, almost twenty-eight years from that terrifying night, I voted for the first time ever in a U.S. Presidential election. As I cast my ballot, I thought a lot of my initial journey to this country and what I envisioned America being before I came here — and how wrong I was about it. But instead of feeling despair or regret, I felt a strange resolve. A conviction that left me feeling calm, much in the same way that my mother did that night. It was not a feeling I ever thought I would have about this country when I first arrived here.
I came to New York to attend college in the fall of 2001, the first person in my family to come to the U.S. I left all that I knew behind because I had built in my mind an image of America as a country where you could be whatever you wanted to be, without fear of persecution based on your identity. You didn’t need to be expectational to be treated with respect or identify with the majority to be safe. I believed the United States to be a place where I could expect equality, not just hope for it.
This magical image of America I created in my head was in large part due to reading about the Civil Rights Movement. Learning about these events blew my mind. Still scarred from the riots, living in a city governed by a party whose leader openly called for the removal of Muslims, I was in awe of a nation that allowed for a movement which forced it to grapple with what it had done to a group of its citizenry. I took this to signal that it was a country on its way to being accepting and supportive of all who dwelled there. To a Muslim teenager from Bombay, knowing a place existed that simply strived to right its past wrongs was sufficient reason to leave my home, friends, and family.
And so, on a late August evening I stood by the entrance of the Mumbai International Airport, about to board the first of two flights that would take me to New York where I was to begin my undergraduate degree at Columbia University. Thirty-three people came to the airport to see me off. Among them were my parents and sister, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, and even the owner of the neighborhood grocery store. I spent almost an hour saying farewell to everyone in this noisy, crying entourage. When I got to my mother — my last goodbye — I noticed she was calm and appeared not to have shed a single tear. I, however, broke down and buried my face into her shoulder. She kissed my head, held me like only a mother could, and then stepped back and started reciting the four Quls. Once she finished, she gently blew them over me, gave me another kiss, wiped off my tears and told me, with utmost certainty, that I would be alright, and so would she. Allah would take care of us, and she loved me more than I would ever know. Then she motioned me to head into the terminal and sent me on my way.
After an almost 24-hour journey, I walked up the steps of Penn Station onto Seventh Avenue in New York City. There I was greeted by the biggest billboard I had ever seen. It was probably sixty feet high, and maybe another sixty feet wide and curved to cover almost two entire facades of the building on which it rested. While the right half of it was mostly white space, the left half, the half that faced me, had a picture of a man. A serious looking young man in a green and black outfit, with a peculiar shaped ball in one hand and a helmet in the other. Next to him were the words: Joey Harrington, except Harrington had a line through it and was replaced by the word Heisman. And then below his name: Oregon Football.
My first thought was that he was a famous athlete being celebrated after leading his team to championship glory. To have a huge building-sized billboard in the heart of New York City across from Madison Square Garden, one of the most iconic sporting venues in the world, must have surely meant this young man had accomplished something special.
It turned out, as the cab driver taking me from Penn Station to Columbia informed me, Joey Harrington was just “some kid trying to win the Heisman trophy.” He continued, “I read his university paid a quarter of a million bucks to put that billboard up. Guess they think he is pretty good.”
My initial reaction to this information was surprise. Surprise that an educational institution would spend so much money on what was a marketing campaign for a student, especially a student who actually hadn’t achieved anything. But as the cab made its way uptown, my surprise turned to awe. “A college kid was put on a giant billboard by people who believed in his potential,” I said to myself. “How great is that?” Just like my mother believed that blowing the four Quls over me would grant me a superpowered shield, I believed that simply being in the U.S. would grant me the superpower to be more than I could be anywhere else in the entire world. And seeing Joey Harrington — sorry Joey Heisman — reinforced to me that I had made the right decision to leave everything behind to come here, reinforced to me that America would be my superpower.
In the nineteen years since I arrived in the U.S., I have come to see how far America’s reality is from the ideal I assigned to it. It is a nation with crumbling structures, wealth undivided, and many of its citizens are forgotten and derided. A country where I still have to worry about my safety given the criminality and undesirability associated with my Islamic faith. A worry that often pales in comparison to what Black people contend with every day. It is painfully evident that the belief I held about America was sorely misplaced.
Today though, as I filled out my ballot, I found myself feeling what my mother did that January night in 1992, full of hope. Because like her, I have no other choice but to be hopeful. I do not have the luxury to despair. I have to believe in this nation’s ability to do what seems outrageously impossible, create a society where all minorities will expect, rather than merely pray for, safety. Like her, I cannot let the reality of the situation take away my faith and belief that the aspirations I held about the country are in fact achievable. That this nation of immigrants actually can build a state where all can live without fear or judgement and with access to the same opportunities. If I lose that, then what will I tell my sons? If I do not believe that they will grow up in a land where they won’t fear their identity, won’t have to think twice about saying “As-salaam alaikum” at an airport, then there really is no point in any of this. My mother’s faith that night was not an act of choice, but one forced on her due to lack of any other recourse.
And like my mother’s faith, I am going to need mine to last beyond this particular precarious moment, where it feels like the survival of this country is at stake. Because even if the candidate I support prevails, I am going to need all of my faith to believe that this nation can rectify its shortcomings that have recently been laid bare. And if the other candidate wins, well, what else will I have but hope. A naïve, almost sad hope, one that my own sons may question me about. If they do, I will tell them that this desperate hope in America still somehow fulfilling its aspirations is all I have. Well, that and reciting and blowing the four Quls over them.
