A One Night Stand with Islam 

I am 14 years old, in the downstairs bathroom of my old home in the small town of Bottesford, Scunthorpe. Cherubs hang on the walls, and the lights are a buzzing, electric white. I am crying.

                For the first time, I am questioning things.

                                                         what do I believe?

                                                                                 who do I believe?

I pray Genesis 1:27 is wrong. If God created man in his image, I fear he must be very lonely.

 

My parents taught me from a young age to worship and fear Allah. I learnt how to pray, I learnt the different surah’s and I studied Islam. It was all much easier back then. In the old Volvo, on the 20-minute car ride to Scawby primary school, I would sit and pray salat out loud whilst my father checked my pronunciation. In the drawing room, late at night, I would sit and read the Qur’an out loud as my parents sat next to me and checked to make sure I was doing it correctly.

                                       

 it didn’t matter if I was crying, it didn’t matter if I was upset – the Qur'an

                                          can still be read with blurry eyes, after all.

 

When you finish the whole Qur’an, you have a ceremony: khatam al-Quran. All the aunties would be invited, and there would be food and prayers. It was a whole celebration.

                                   

i remember mine – we didn’t do anything like that. it was an embarrassment how long I                                            took; why would we celebrate that?

Instead, we sat at the kitchen table. My mum made chicken and rice – the usual. It had been a stony silence, one that you couldn’t cut with any knife no matter how hard you tried (or prayed). I remember the smell of the curry, my growling tummy, my mother’s deadpan stare.

i was just glad it was over.

Reputation seems to follow me wherever I go. Looming eyes and piercing stares down every street, around every corner. No matter how much I moved around, I can’t ever seem to escape it. Small town or big city; the fear always follows. My circle was small, growing up, and I felt compressed, choked, begging to be free. Aunties whispered over my shoulder whenever I left my home; I could always hear them – “Ah, do you see her? Look at how she gained weight, look at how she doesn’t cover her head, doesn’t she have any sharam, any shame?”

These whispers haunted my mother. She hated them. Her fear clawed its way up her throat; it became an obsessive need for control, a hunger I could never satiate.

The aunties are a phenomenon all their own. Family and family friends, both comfortable and close yet terrifying. They’re like magnets; I feel both drawn and repelled by them.

they feel like home.

Growing up in Bottesford and moving only two minutes away to Messingham means I have always grown up in a small town. I went to school in villages as well, both Scawby and Gainsborough. My circle never went farther than 20 minutes away from my home, and everything resided within it.

I have lived in small towns with mainly white population. I stuck out like a sore thumb, amid the English culture; I hated leaving the house wearing any sort of kurta or shalwar kameez – anything that would make me the odd one out even more. I felt like an ugly dark spot amongst pristine white, trying my hardest to camouflage myself.

What made it worse, was the traditional hierarchies and pressure set above me by my Pakistani heritage. Asia is notorious for their cutthroat beauty standards, and Pakistan was no different. I grew up surrounded by a multitude of face whitening products, slimming green teas and unsafe crash diets.  My mother bought me goats milk whitening soap and would call me ugly if I tanned too dark.

i still use fair & lovely brand moisturizer.

Because of this, I started writing poetry at the age of 16. I needed an outlet, something that could hold my heavy words, so I didn’t need to carry them anymore. The poetry felt like when I spoke urdu; dense and dangerous.

I stopped speaking urdu when I went to primary school: “amma” became “mum”, “abu” became “dad” and “Mehwish” became “mev”. My own name was too hard to say, so I didn’t want to burden people with pronunciation.

if I could go back in time, i’d stuff urdu down all their throats until they were full and choking.

i’d tell me to never lose myself trying to become someone else.

When I was in year 9, we had a culture day. I was so unbearably excited to share my Pakistani culture, cooking halwa with all my heart in order to have people see the foods I am used to. I was so proud when I was done, letting it set in the fridge and going to bed with a pounding heart.

I woke up the next day with a fuzzy head and sickness. I couldn’t stand the smell of the food I’d poured my heart into so lovingly and was sick from just the thought of it. I watched my brother take it with him, watched him go to the bus stop in order to drop it off at school for me. I waved from the door with a heavy heart and the taste of vomit still in my mouth.

I still can’t eat halwa.

I found that stepping away from everything made it become so much more bearable. When I was allowed to go to a friend’s house, when I went to school, it felt like heaven. For a small, brief moment, I could become me. I could embody someone new, someone I didn’t know. Someone I wanted to get to know, so badly that it hurt.

I started seeing things in three dimensions. I watched myself from the side-lines, wondering to myself who she was. I looked in the mirror and prayed that one day maybe, I’d recognise her. 

i found out later that that was derealisation, a trauma response.

Pakistan culture and religion seem to go hand in hand, from what I’ve observed. I grew up around Islam, with my parents intermixing the reasoning behind any decision with either that it’s because of ‘our religion’ or ‘our morals’. When I was younger, I hated Islam. I turned 14 and started to gain my own view of the world and how I grew up and it was easy to blame something, even if that something was as heavy as religion. I used to cry and scream and curse Islam for how I grew up, why my family was so dysfunctional.

It's a blessing I had my brothers. Both older than me, by 4 years and 12 years; they were by my side during the time I was experimenting and doing things on my own that my parents would have turned me black and blue for.

They both don’t believe in religion – they have very agnostic views. There could be a God, sure, but as my brother once told me:

‘It is as easy to say there isn’t a God as there is to say there is a God. It’s a

paradox in and of itself; there is no way to prove either side. Faith, however,

is different. Religion is a man-made construct, and when it starts to become

something more harmful than good, that is when it is a problem.’

This quote still resides in my head. Late night discussions were common between us, and what he said kind of blew my mind back then. That he could condense everything I was feeling into a short paragraph, or quote, felt uplifting and strangely bittersweet at the same time.

Though we grew up in the same house, with the same parents, we had different house lives. They are going through the same journey of self-discovery and identity as I am on now, with culture and religion, but they had different experiences to me, partly due to the culture.

Islam and Pakistan are very traditional. They run on hierarchies and segregation – the women are expected to behave and be raised much differently to the men. I have had experiences with my mother and father that they cannot ever imagine.

Mothers are funny. She views me as everything she wishes she was and everything she hopes she isn’t. She shoves expectation and expectation down my throat, making me full on pressure and burden. She sees the cracks in me and paints them with belief before pushing me back together. I used to hate her and yet, crave her like an addiction. 

My mother believes tradition is important. The women cook and clean and the men do the heavy lifting and the big things. In functions and weddings, the men and the women are kept segregated, and should we have to go past a male at the functions, we must be properly covered and maintain proper purdah.

I hated this. I could never be close to my cousins, I could never show ‘too much skin’ or have too much skin ship with them, I couldn’t sit close to them or be the only girl with the boy cousins. I had to keep an eye on how I laughed, how I carried myself. I wasn’t even allowed to wear shorts around my brothers or my father. It disgusted me, made me feel shameful for who I was and everything feminine within me. It has taken years to come to terms with my own sexuality and how to express it; containing it meant when I opened Pandora’s box it felt like I had set off a bomb. 

Dinner parties, or dawuts, are big in Pakistani culture. We host them very regularly at our house, and within them I see this tradition the most. Whilst my father talks and laugh with his friends, my mother is hectic within the kitchen and I am flung around trying to help and serve tea as well. The men get food first, the men are served tea first, the men usually state when to leave first.

However, despite this, I love my culture. There are, of course, these moments in which I am cursing the double standards. Why are my brother and father allowed to wear shorts when I am not? Why are they allowed to wear short shirts when mine must go down to my knees and I must cover myself with a coat and a scarf whenever I leave the house? It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, acidic, boiling anger.

However, despite this, I love my culture. The community, the familial closeness, the comfort; being part of this wider circle and being different – I have come to love all of it.

The relationship I have with my family is funny. I love my father more than I can even imagine, probably an unhealthy amount. I love my brothers to pieces, yet I hated them when I was younger. I still love, and hate, my mother. My family has a strict way of acting, due to traditional pressures and cultural differences. Never show any form of discourse in public, maintain an ‘image’, never question your parents. Obedience is key.

Coming to Liverpool for university was an eye-opening experience. I go to the mosque here from time to time, as per my mother’s wishes, and it feels wrong and stuffy. I miss the mosque in Scunthorpe, where I know everyone, and I am calm, and it is easy.

When I go home, it’s much easier as well. It’s a type of thinking I can’t really explain or understand. I love my parents, and when I go home it is easy to do the things I once had such hatred for, like going to the mosque or covering my head, because it means so much to them and it isn’t such a big deal like I once thought. Having the distance from it all and not being trapped in the small town means I can go back home and know that it’s all temporary.

This stepping back, as a coping mechanism emotionally and physically having a home away from home, has helped me a lot. It’s given me an almost nonchalant view on everything I went through growing up, a voice in my head that says ‘it’s really not that deep’: I can both love and hate religion, I can both love and hate Islam, I can both love and hate my culture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Ahmadiyya Muslim Community (no date) Al Islam. Available at: https://www.alislam.org/ (Accessed: 2023).

Ismail, S., Loya, S. and Hussain, D.J. (2015) “Obsession for Fair Skin Color in Pakistan,” International Journal of Innovation and Research in Educational Sciences, 2(6). Available at: https://www.ijires.org/ (Accessed: 2023).

Jamison, L. (2015) The Empathy Exams Essays. London: Granta.

Kunial, Z. (2018) US. Faber & Faber, Limited.

MacLoughlin, N. (2017) “Novemberance Issues,” The Paris Review, November. Available at: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/columns/novemberance/ (Accessed: 2023).

Nelson, M. (2016) The Argonauts. London: Melville House UK.