by Ayesha Mattu
After lunch the next week we decided to walk around the mall. Muna and her friend walked a little bit ahead of us as Zaiba and I chatted. We were having a great conversation when out of nowhere we began talking about soccer and I insisted on showing her a cell phone picture of my new cleats.
“They’re black on black!” I pointed out.
Zaiba politely agreed that they were indeed an excellent choice. A moment later, I realized what had just happened. AwkwardMan had made an appearance. No girl should be subjected to an extended conversation about the benefits of Adidas Predator soccer cleats, their history, and the list of famous players who wear them. But Zaiba hadn’t reacted with a weird look or a shocked response. She accepted my awkwardness warmly, never made me feel stupid, and carried on as though things were normal.
I asked if she wanted to hang out together soon afterward. And, when that went well, we hung out again. Then, I randomly called her on the phone while she was out of town and soon we were hanging out often and talking every day. Each time we saw each other it felt a little better than the last. Within a few months, I realized I’d fallen completely in love with her. I loved her sense of calm, the way she treated her friends and family with such importance, and the care and effort she made in those relationships. I loved our conversations and the fact that AwkwardMan no longer had to be a secret identity. He was a part of me, and I finally accepted him as a personality quirk.
There were moments when we talked about my past, about how it had altered my outlook on life and how I was still in some ways rebuilding myself. But I was well on my way to a complete recovery, especially since Zaiba accepted me as I was, AwkwardMan and all. It was the most cared for I’d ever felt. For the first time in a long time, I allowed a good thing to happen to me.
Exactly a year after we first met, I took Zaiba to the place where we had had our first dinner. We ate our shawarmas, grabbed a selection of cupcakes, and headed over to Seal Beach. As we sat down, I took out something from the picnic basket I had brought with me. It was a jigsaw puzzle made up of photographs from our year together, including ones of an evening cruise around Newport Harbor, our fantastic time at Griffith Observatory, and the time I took her to see an LA Galaxy soccer game.
As Zaiba started piecing the puzzle together, I thought about how selecting the photos had given me a deep appreciation of our relationship. As she finished, I took out the last two pieces of the puzzle from my pocket. I said the words written on the pieces as I completed the puzzle: “Will you marry me?”
It was the moment my life had been building up to—as though the pain I had experienced was just one part of the Big Man’s carefully designed plan. That pain made me grateful for the woman who accepted me as I was, and with whom I could share conversations, uncontrollable laughter, and even some lovely and awkward moments. Zaiba was the missing piece in the puzzle of my life, and I loved her dearly.
I waited, wanting to hear the same word that had changed my life and taken me from brokenhearted solitude to a happy life.
She said yes.
In the Unlikeliest of Places
By A. Khan
“Water, stories, the body,
All the things we do, are mediums
That hide and show what’s hidden.”
—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmi
It was a sunny autumn day in New York. I was twenty-four years old. As my parents’ marriage talk had heated up, I’d started feeling sickeningly guilty, knowing we were on different wavelengths.
I broke the news to my family on the phone, my hand held by a friend as we stood in a quiet Manhattan high-rise stairwell. I did want to marry—but it was probably going to be to a man, not a woman. This was my truth, and in sharing it, the anxiety that had ballooned inside me burst open. Even as my mother shouted that I would be ensured a spot in hell and then hung up, my body and my mind felt lighter and clearer.
Though shaded with a similar, palpable sense of loss, my father’s response was different. Instead of quoting the Qur’an or threatening hellfire, he simply said, “Oh. Is marriage between men allowed in New York? Well, we will talk about it later. But I love you no matter what!”
Neither of my parents had been strictly observant for the majority of their lives. I was raised with a connection to my Islamic lineage, but never taught to root myself in an exclusivist or rigid interpretation of what being Muslim meant. While there were general guidelines, being “good” was implemented on a case-by-case, contextual basis.
I went through the prescribed ritual prayers mechanically as a child. They only started making sense as a spiritual practice of acceptance and gratitude during college. Even then, it seemed like it was a marker of identity as much as an act of devotion, and if I knew one thing, it was that my identity was not exclusively rooted in simple acts such as these.
For a couple of months after the phone call, I was strong. I was able to meet my parents’ confusion and heaviness with love. Would I tell anyone else in the family? No one else needs to know for now, I suppose. Had I become confused by hanging out with the wrong people? Working overtime at a clinic where coworkers bonded during happy hour and commuting from the gentrifying neighborhood of Washington Heights, I was not part of a Muslim community—and after all, I had attended a liberal arts school. And what of the girl I had been in a relationship with for over three years? I had experienced the deepest love with my girlfriend. It was that love that had helped me become more myself, and helped me see my limitations, strengths, and desires more clearly.
I no longer fit the “good eldest son” role for my family. This turn of events I hadn’t thought out. Inevitably, my heightened sense of clarity faded. I had thought that going through a “coming out”—like most good, queer American men of my generation—was enough. Courageous enough, illuminating enough, powerful enough. What I had invited my family into, I soon realized, was a tangled web of displacement. The unease I felt with myself did not go away, and doing the “right thing” by coming out started to feel hollow. It became harder day in and day out to walk a path of uncertainty, in the most fundamental of my relationships. My family, no matter what, was the beginning and the end of all the love in my life.
My mother cited God’s words, but I did not feel any other participation of the divine in my life. I also couldn’t be myself in my social landscape, whether of my extended family, the larger Muslim community, or my coworkers. Each of these groups understood some part of me, but no one got the whole picture.
When I still drank, I would visit bars and frequent websites that allowed me quick hookups with nearby men. Perhaps because of the seeming randomness to these interactions in a big city drunk on anonymity, and because of the cloud of silence generally associated with hookup culture, which privilege sexual fulfillment as the primary force in human relationships, there was little to guide me in unearthing and building human meanings from these experiences. I certainly did not think Allah had anything to say to someone who was looking for absolution without sacrificing the crutches of hooking up and drinking that kept me going in the loneliest of times. Life went on like this for a couple of years; I became immured in a false sense of perpetual crisis because of the very crutches that had initially helped me dull the pain of feeling fragmented in my identity, pulled apart by seemingly irreconcilable frameworks.
In the summer of 2010 I was at a point where loneliness, endorphin cravings, and a young man’s testosterone overdrive collided and meshed together often—at least once a week, usually on the weekends. One rainy afternoon, I logged on to a dating/hookup site with a few movements of my fingers, wanting to be with someone.
I was in for a fun two hours: this was a particularly vibrant log-on session. I had multiple conversations going, and the temporary glow that came with feeling desired was in full flush as I flirted and calculated my way toward a “date.” Eventually, I settled on an olive-skinned, silver-haired man whose ethnicity box was checked “Middle Eastern” and who lived on a fancy block a bit sou
th of me. I did not make much of his Middle Eastern connection—he could have been Arab, Persian, Israeli, or lying—but he did have the right time line in mind: meeting as soon as possible.
I got myself ready and, excited by the unknown, got on and off the train in fifteen minutes. There was also a glow inside me from the awareness that I did not have to wait. How much your body feels it can fly in such moments, how much I would later wish I could freeze such moments in my life for future use. It was a nice walk to his building from the train stop. I previously had had little reason to visit this residential block of real houses and storied apartments in a city teeming with characterful patches. My senses tingling, I passed the doorman and realized that my date lived in the penthouse.
It turned out that he was a physician who worked downtown. He opened the door with a smile. The living room seemed like it was from the eighties, with its old TV, couches, and rugs like those my parents had at our home. The medium-size television was tuned to an Arabic-language station. What happened between my entering and the sex is absent from my memory now, but what we did in bed I can vividly recall. I remember being kissed on the couch, and that the kissing was smooth, and that it continued for a long time as we were lying down in bed. There were few words exchanged, as if our bodies might be enough for that afternoon.
A couple of hours later, I was silent and spent. He got up from the bed and put on some hot water for tea in his kitchenette. He then went to take a shower. I, for some reason, refused the offer to join him or take one separately, sitting back on the couch with my clothes on. When he came out fully dressed, he was smiling. It was time to water his plants, he said. But, after handing me a mug of steaming water along with some honey, he brought out a prayer rug from his bedroom, and started to perform asr.
I sat on the couch behind him, sipping my tea as he went through his prostrations. I started to become aware that I had been out of my body even when I thought I had been in it. I was observing myself even now, imagining how bizarre this scene might look to someone who really understood what it meant for me to not be praying. Even my nonobservant father had taught me that it was special to have the chance to pray in communion with others. I found myself wanting to join him by the end of his prayers. But I was still too stunned that this man was adding prayer to our “hookup” time together.
Afterward, I helped him water his plants—his wraparound balcony was covered and lined with them.
“I was raised Muslim. My mother was French, and I grew up in Brazil and some other places, as my father was a Lebanese diplomat,” he said.
“Sounds like an interesting life.”
“You have no idea. Are you hungry?”
I was.
“I’ll make you a sandwich.”
He toasted some bread on a pan and then spread butter and marmalade on it. He didn’t have any himself. After putting on his glasses, he sat down with his own mug of tea and I returned to the couch to chew on the simple meal. I too had grown up across continents, but we were of different generations, and I wasn’t sure what to make of this commonality. I did not feel, at the moment, very interesting, in contrast to the confidence of my older host.
Instead of opening up about my family, I talked about what was the bulk of my life and another point of intersection with his: my job. I worked as a patient liaison, and he was a doctor who had anatomy and physiology textbooks adorning his living room bookcases. He sounded like he had fun with his work; in any case, he worked only three days a week at his private practice. I was near the bottom of the pecking order at my office and perennially close to wanting to quit. My latest challenge was that Ramadan was now cycling into the summer months. While I had always had fun fasting, I worried that the demands of my workplace and the dehydration I already suffered from would be exacerbated by the ritual.
“Not at all! You will be all right,” the man said. “Tell me about everything that worries you about it.” He had answers to all my objections, and told me that despite the pressures of his life, he had fasted each year after his first time doing so in childhood. There was nothing, he exclaimed with a smile, that could get in the way of my being as good a Muslim as I wanted.
At some point soon after, it was clear we were no longer in the afternoon but in the shadow of dusk, and that “tea time” was over. I hadn’t been magically transported into a dars or an imam’s office; he had some work to do, he said, pointing to a stack of paper. He also “would be happy” to see me again, but there was only a week left until Ramadan, and he tended to not hook up during the month. Perhaps we could meet again in what remained of the month of Shaban, or we could meet for iftar during Ramadan.
“Great meeting you!” he said with a parting kiss.
I headed back down the elevator and past the doorman for an early-evening “walk of shame.”
After I left, I thought, “What am I here for but for this?” It was an oddly expansive sentiment to have for something that in the big picture was so complicated that I could not even relate the experience to another person in a straightforward way. Who does one even share something like this with?
I would not see him again in person, though I stayed on the dating site I had met him through and would see him pop up once in a while. He tried to get in touch once, but I did not know what to do with a man who was this much older than me; I did not want a “daddy” to take care of me. I needed to feel the comfort of my own father and mother. I could not even wrap my mind around the idea that I had begun some sort of relationship, when our meeting had been, for me, about seeking transcendence through escape, not connection.
Ultimately, our encounter was a lesson in the power of intention that I had failed to learn until then; while fortuitous incidents happen to us and around us all the time, and while we can always get fresh chances, the root intent of our actions matters. I had lost the ability to cultivate good intention for its own sake during the time that my relationship with my role models—my parents—had become one fraught with fear and guilt. I reawoke to this after that rainy summer afternoon, as I began to question my willingness thus far to accept myself as someone who was destined to lead a fragmented, compartmentalized life.
That said, I was also reminded of the love that was inside of my vivid desire for men, something that was easy to forget when it was an objectless and generalized desire, when it was seen as an aberration or something purely hormonal by so many. A common way to belittle same-sex models of love and marriage is to call them nonprocreative. This simplification fails to deal with all the little miracles this love can give birth to in the lives of people who have already been born.
Meeting the nameless man that day did that for me, and I only knew him for a blink of an eye. It takes repeated shocks to the system of those who are dependent on a drug—instead of being fully dependent on themselves—to remind themselves that they are alive and vulnerable and that this is not incidental to the playing out of something transcendent within the mundane. Never before meeting him had I met another Muslim who could pair his sexuality and piety in this way. It was the beginning of the end for me of the separation of the two. I had discovered that if these things could be reconciled, even in quiet ways hidden in the midst of giant metropolises, so too could I be reconciled to my parents.
He helped show me that the key to my salvation, so to speak, could be in building community with others in similar situations. A new wave of LGBTQ Muslim advocacy was cascading in the U.S. and across the world. In New York City, I eventually cofounded a meetup group for LGBTQ Muslims. When my new “family” began to expand with good souls I met through this work, I was able to start reforging my relationship with my birth family. In the slow grind toward full mutual acceptance, my parents and I are agreed that, at least, our communication had never been more honest.
The year 2010 also marked my first summertime Ramadan. While I had always fasted during Ramadan, I started to see prayer as an important, defining aspect of the month, and of daily life, after that encounter
with the nameless man. The cliché that God works in mysterious ways becomes real only when you wake up to these mysterious ways in the small moments, in the unexpected and, yes, dark places. Love, and wholeness, emerge in and from places where society says they aren’t supposed to.
Planet Zero
By John Austin
I was in Tokyo again after five years, sitting in a quaint café in the bustling district of Ikebukuro called “Planet Zero.” I’d made a habit of frequenting this particular place on the weekends despite the long train ride from my neighborhood. I had come to Japan so I could be anonymous. My search for my own brand of Muslim-ness had derailed back in the States, and in the eight years since my conversion I’d found neither peace nor fellowship.
A close friend of mine from college had been running her own company, providing educational services to autistic children, and was in need of managerial experience. I’d been running my own design agency for some time, but decided to help make her company profitable. My business partner and I decided I should take a leave of absence in the hopes of eventually expanding our own business in Asia. I was in my early thirties and felt ready to take on an executive role. I also needed a change. Where else was an African American Japanese Muslim convert to find perspective?
Most weeks I left the house at 6 a.m. and didn’t return until the last train, close to midnight—if I returned at all. The Planet Zero café, despite becoming part of a larger routine, broke up monotonous days and endless hours. There were no westerners there, which was my primary criterion for frequenting it. If there were no westerners, there would be no conversations in English. No conversations meant no exchanges of information, no e-mails, no end to my anonymity.
Planet Zero faced an alleyway. On the other side of the alley were old apartment buildings and various small shop fronts. The street side of the building appeared to be abandoned and I passed it several times before discovering, quite by accident, the alley that led to the coffee house. It was the difficulty in finding this place that provided me with the sense of comfort.