Even though it was never my intention to travel so far away to go to college, being recruited to fence at one of the country’s most prestigious universities with the added benefit of being five hundred miles away from Sam felt like an unexpected gift. I was ready to continue my fencing career somewhere I didn’t have to deal with people like Sam Jones. And I looked forward to pursuing my career in medicine. The way I looked at it, it was my time to close the door on this chapter of my life, and start a new page.
CHAPTER 7
Women are intersectional human beings who live multi-issued lives.
—LINDA SARSOUR
Ibtihaj Muhammad, 2005 Junior Olympics National Champion.” I ran my fingers over the inscription on the trophy and tried to dredge up a small amount of the elation I had felt just two days ago when I scored the winning point and secured the gold at the Junior Olympics tournament in Ohio. It was an amazing moment. A marked contrast to my first Junior Olympics in high school. The pinnacle of my fencing career so far. But I couldn’t muster up that feeling anymore. All that was left of that day was the trophy sitting on the windowsill in my dorm room.
“What’s the matter, girl?” my roommate, Kendall, asked. “You’re over there moping like you lost your best friend and you just won that big ol’ trophy. Why aren’t you out celebrating or something with your team?”
I sighed and tried to plaster a smile on my face. The Junior Olympics was an individual event and had nothing to do with my membership on Duke’s fencing team. But even still, I wouldn’t have anyone to celebrate my win with from the Duke team anyway. The sad, lonely truth was that after a year and half on the fencing team at Duke, I could only call one teammate—Josh—my friend. He was the only other Black person on the entire squad, and we immediately bonded over that commonality. Josh could make me laugh and tried to get me to not take fencing so seriously, but I didn’t know how to be anything but serious when it came to sports. I came to every practice on time and to every tournament ready to win. When it came to sport, I had an unapologetic intensity that not everyone understood, and because I already had a winning record to show for it, most of the other women on the team didn’t seem interested in getting to know me. Whether it was jealousy since I was the best saber fencer on the squad, because I looked different than the rest of the squad, or something else, I’ll never know. Unfortunately, I knew at that point I’d never have the family feeling at Duke that I had on my high school team or at the foundation, which was unfortunate because the majority of my time as a college athlete was spent with my team.
I didn’t think Kendall needed to hear all of that, so I said the first thing that popped into my head.
“I don’t have time to celebrate, Kendall,” I said, which was actually true. “I have that chem test on Monday and I didn’t get a lot of studying done on the plane ride back from the competition.”
“Well, I guess that means you don’t want go to Central Campus. Me and Tesia and Sandra are going to a step show,” Kendall said.
“Thanks, but I can’t,” popped out of my mouth on autopilot. As much as I would have liked to go hang with my roommate and the other girls from our dorm, I knew there wasn’t enough time. There never seemed to be enough time to fit a social life into my schedule. The only reason I was barely able to keep up in my classes and fence was because I had eliminated all of the extras from my life. Socializing was the first thing cut—just like it had been in high school. Only now, I wasn’t socializing with my fencing teammates.
“You sure?” Kendall said. “You know you need to have a little fun once in a while.”
Before I could figure out another nice way to say “thanks but no thanks,” someone knocked on our door.
“Who is it?” Kendall called, although we could tell from the giggling coming from the other side of the door.
“Bitch, open the door,” someone said, and more giggling.
Kendall jumped off her bed and flung open the door. Tesia and Sandra stumbled into the room laughing. They were both dressed for a night out. Tesia wore black leather leggings, a red belly-button-baring midriff shirt, and a tapered denim jacket. On her feet she wore high-heeled, black strappy sandals. Sandra wore dark denim jeans and a purple blouse with a plunging V-neck, and she had similar strappy sandals, only hers were gold. Even though they had invaded my dorm room, I suddenly felt incredibly underdressed in my bulky blue sweatshirt.
Sandra came over to my bed. “Ibtihaj, why don’t you come with us? You need to get out, girl.”
I smiled. “First of all, I wouldn’t even know what to wear to hang out with you three,” I joked.
“Well, it’s not going to be that tired Duke hoodie,” Tesia said, and everyone laughed. Even though I didn’t hang out with these girls on the weekends, we were a tight bunch of Black women who lived in the dorm together. Duke had decided for us that all the Black women should have Black roommates and live on the same floor. They weren’t very subtle with their attempts to segregate us or at making a safe space for people of color, but the truth was, I appreciated the sisterhood we’d formed. It was nice to have women who looked like me in close proximity on a campus that was overwhelmingly white. The culture shock I’d felt when I first got to campus was real. Duke, unlike anything I’d ever experienced in Maplewood, was truly a majority white environment.
“I’m making an executive decision,” Kendall said. “You’re coming with us, and I don’t want to hear any more excuses. Even if you only stay for one hour, you’re going to have a little bit of fun tonight.”
I looked at the chemistry book on my desk and then back at my friends, who were all looking at me expectantly. It wasn’t a hard choice: my friends won.
Two hours later, I was standing in a fraternity house in Central Campus wondering why I had agreed to come out. The evening had started out so well, too. We’d gone to a step show and watched a bunch of guys from the Black fraternities compete for bragging rights as the best steppers on campus. I didn’t get into the craziness of Greek life, but step shows were fun to watch. The choreography these guys came up with was really intricate. It was like they were having a conversation with their bodies. Then after the step show, Sandra swore she knew about a small party that was happening that was going to be “totally low-key.” If low-key meant pumping music, throngs of people sipping on beer or mixed drinks, and clouds of smoke hanging in the air, then that’s exactly what it was.
“Really, Sandra,” I screeched when I saw what type of party she’d brought us to, “this is not low-key in any way.”
“Oh, Ibtihaj, you needed this,” she said. “Trust me. You are going to thank me in the morning.” And with that she slipped off to look for something to drink.
Pretty soon Tesia and Kendall also went off making small talk with people they had met around campus. Meanwhile, I stood in the hallway and tried to figure out where to train my eyes, how to stand so I wouldn’t attract attention, and what to do with my hands since I wasn’t holding a drink or gripping a cigarette.
“Hey, Ibtihaj!” a guy named Mark from my dorm came up to me. He was one of the handful of African-American guys who still lived in our dorm. Most of the African-American students liked to live around Central Campus. “I didn’t know you partied. Someone told me Muslims didn’t drink.”
“I don’t drink,” I said, holding up my empty hands.
“Well, you wanna dance then?” he asked.
I felt my face flush but knew Mark wouldn’t be able to see the color in my cheeks because it was so dark in the room. I didn’t want to tell Mark that I couldn’t and didn’t dance. Part of that was because of my religion and part of that was just my unfortunate lack of rhythm. So I just said, “No thank you,” as politely as I could.
Mark simply shrugged and moved on. I was grateful he didn’t press the issue. After Mark, a couple other guys came over to talk to me; one offered me a drink to see if I was “really a Muslim” and one just wanted to tell me he’d never seen a Muslim at a frat party before.
“What am I doing here?” I groaned out loud. I couldn’t feel any more out of place. I did a quick check to see if anyone was staring at me. I squinted my eyes and scanned the room, looking for a familiar face. I decided I’d put in enough time at this party, and it was time to leave. I brought my phone up to my face. It was 10:30 p.m. I figured if I left right away, I could still get some studying in back at the dorm. I started moving through the crowds of people. I saw my roommate close to the door.
“Hey, Kendall,” I shouted, “I’m going to head home.”
Kendall’s brow furrowed in concern. “Are you sure? We just got here.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m okay. I just have to go home and study.”
Kendall cocked an eyebrow, and her hand went on her hip. “Really, Ibti. You’re going to study? Now?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. I was going to force myself to get in an hour of chemistry, but that wasn’t what was making me hightail it out of that party. I didn’t feel comfortable, and I was clearly making other people uncomfortable as they walked past me in my hijab, doing double takes and then whispering to their friends.
“Kendall, I am going to go study, but I also don’t need to be here. You guys have fun. Tell me if I miss anything good.” And with that I left the building and headed to the bus stop where I would catch the free shuttle back to my dorm. I promised myself that would be the last frat party I’d ever go to.
Back in our room, I wouldn’t allow myself to feel bad for trying out the “normal” college student experience for one night. Sometimes I just wanted to fit in, hang out, and be like all of the other girls in my dorm, but I could never quite get it right. I wanted to do well in my classes. I wanted to qualify for the National Collegiate Fencing Championships or the NCAAs and I wanted to spend time with my friends. But I couldn’t fit academics, fencing, and socializing into my schedule. And I was still struggling to figure out how to be social in a way that aligned with my faith. Frat parties clearly weren’t it.
I changed out of my jeans and cashmere sweater back into my sweats. I unwrapped my hair and forced myself to sit at my desk with my chemistry book in front of me. I willed myself to read. After only five minutes, I felt my eyelids grow heavy, and my bed started calling my name. I tried to refocus, but it was no use. I stood up and did ten jumping jacks, my go-to method to boost my energy levels. Then I walked over to the bookshelf Kendall and I shared. I looked at the books we’d accumulated in the last six months. Between the two of us, we’d amassed an impressive collection of books written by twentieth century Black female authors. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, and Zora Neale Hurston were all represented. I pulled out a copy of Morrison’s Song of Solomon and flipped through the pages. I loved the African-American literature class I’d taken my freshman year where we had read fiction to try to understand American history in the nineteenth century. I learned so much in that one class. Just thinking about that class made me wish I could just stop and read Alice Walker instead of memorizing formulas and definitions. I went back to my desk and tried to dive back into chemistry, but I was getting nowhere. I kept rereading the same sentence over and over again to make the information stick in my brain.
I slammed the book shut. “This sucks,” I said to the empty room. “Why can’t I study something that I’m actually interested in?” Saying that sentence aloud made me pause. And then I realized something fundamental. I didn’t really want to study chemistry. Not only that, I didn’t want to take any more math and science classes. I wanted to read more Toni Morrison books and learn more about African-American history. I wanted to learn more about where my people came from, where I came from, and all the great contributions Black people had made to American civilization and society. There was a giant hole in my knowledge bank about these fundamental parts of history that had been skipped over in all of my education up until now. But I couldn’t just drop my plans to be a doctor, could I? I had been working toward a medical career for my entire life.
I got up from my desk and fell into bed. I tried to figure out what options I had. I still hadn’t officially declared my major, so there was still time to decide. If I majored in African and African-American studies, what would I do upon graduation? There wasn’t a clear career path associated with African-American studies majors. I could be a lawyer, or a teacher, or my worst fear, unemployable. I fell asleep thinking about the potential look of disappointment on my parents’ faces when I told them I didn’t want to be a doctor anymore.
The next morning, I woke up feeling uneasy about dropping my medical school plans, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it, because there was little room in my schedule for indecision. I was the girl who always had a plan, and I attributed most of the successes in my life to staying faithful to those plans. Now wasn’t the time to switch things up, I told myself, because there was too much going on.
If I thought balancing academics and athletics in high school was challenging, college was ten times more intense. Every morning I started with weight training, then I had my academic classes, followed by fencing practice, which ran from three p.m. to seven p.m. in the evenings. Competitions generally fell on the weekends, and we usually had to travel out of state for those. I’d return to campus sometime between late Sunday evening and early Monday. After spending the entire bus ride home from competitions studying and doing homework, I’d stumble to my room and fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. The whole process would then start all over again when I awoke. I also had a part-time work-study job at the Duke Annual Fund where I would call alumni to ask them for donations.
Most of the time I functioned on autopilot and moved through my schedule with practiced determination. The fact that after nearly two years on campus I hadn’t found a social group to call my own was disappointing, but most of the time I was too busy to even think about it. Lately, I found myself looking forward more and more to my daily prayers. Those precious moments were the only time in my day when I required myself to slow down, reflect, and remind myself of what was important.
A few weeks later I made two critically important decisions in my life. Despite my best efforts to convince myself that being a doctor was my destiny, I decided to double major in African and African-American Studies and International Relations with a focus on the Middle East. I also chose to add a minor in Arabic. These were the subjects I was truly interested in studying on a deeper level. These were the issues that whetted my intellectual appetites. Becoming a doctor had really been my parents’ dream, not mine, and now I was ready to deep-dive into my own identity politics, from race to religion. When I told my parents that I was ditching my plans to be a doctor, they were surprised because I’d always been so career focused, but they still said they would support me in whatever path I chose.
“If there’s one thing we know about you, Ibtihaj,” my father said to me over the phone when I told my parents the news, “it’s that you always come out on top.”
“Yeah, we’re not worried,” my mother added. “We trust you.”
The other major decision I made had to do with my social life. I was losing my connection to Islam, and I realized how much I missed my Muslim community back home. Even though there weren’t many Muslims in my high school, we had a diverse Muslim community in New Jersey that formed such a large part of my childhood and teen years. At Duke, I was literally the only hijabi on campus, and I found myself mostly practicing my faith alone. My first interaction with the Muslim Students Association (MSA) as a freshman hadn’t resulted in the warm welcome I’d expected. As the only hijabi and one of only two Black Muslims in the group, yet again, I felt like an outsider where I should have found an immediate connection. The female upperclassmen did not approach me or make any real efforts to be my friend, so I only went to the meetings sporadically my first year. I’d convinced myself I didn’t need to be involved with the MSA to be a devout Muslim on campus, only it turned out I did.
Lately, I’d found myself praying mostl
y in times of distress, when classes felt too hard, when the members of my fencing team were giving me a hard time, or when I was homesick. But I didn’t want to be a Muslim who only turned to Allah when I needed something. I knew that wasn’t right. I needed to center my faith, and I knew having a community could help me do that.
Even though the MSA was a group with way more men than women and still had zero other hijabis in the organization, I decided to officially join the MSA and get from the group what I could. It wasn’t about what other people could bring to my life, it was what I wanted for myself. And what I wanted was a Muslim community that I could pray with and also have fun with. I was looking for a safe space where I could be social but I didn’t want “being social” to involve anything that would compromise my faith. I knew how easy it was to make mistakes with drinking and drugs a normal part of campus life. And I knew if I kept hanging with my non-Muslim friends, those vices would always be around to tempt me.
That wasn’t what I wanted from my time at Duke.
By joining the MSA, I promised myself from now on—even with my fencing schedule—I’d make an effort to attend Friday Jumu’ah services as often as possible. The MSA would be my community. I didn’t have to be best friends with all of the members in the group, but I wanted the MSA to be a source of light for me on campus.
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