I am sometimes troubled by the number of things I don’t believe. I move through the world like a house of half-empty rooms, relishing the space, the stillness of the air, while feeling, sometimes, haunted. It catches me in pockets of quiet time—the low hum between night and dawn, or the pang of midnight doubt. Here, the smallness of my life is made stark against the expanse of eternity, and I find myself wishing that infinity had a name.
I feel the emptiness most acutely when someone I love confronts pain. Listening to them explain their illness, their heartache, their financial suffering, I feel impoverished. It seems meager to offer nothing more than my presence, a set of mortal ears and hands. In these moments, I feel indicted by past versions of myself, a more earnest and perhaps better woman, who might have privately prayed for them, or even offered words of divine grace.
But I suppose even in my days of faith, I was haunted—if not by my lack of faith, then by my sacrilege. For whatever language I chose to adopt to speak of faith—Allah, God, Christ—I was committing betrayal. I am the child of a Muslim, Palestinian father and a Christian, American mother. My childhood home was an archipelago, a constellation of fragments arranged in careful separateness. In the years before my birth, a mixed couple living in the Middle East, my parents’ disagreements over faith nearly drove them to divorce. In the end, they chose parenthood instead—their love a fundamentalism of its own.
Born first, my young body moved unwittingly amidst their paradox. My faith was in their smiling faces, their arms outstretched to me, the miracle they could share. It was enough, at first, to make us all feel we could walk on waves.
What were you thinking? I begged them later, as the faultlines in me screamed. Always, their answer came as a pause, the silence of a supplicant after fervent prayer. The color in their cheeks came next—pink for my mother, my father a tint of ash.
We don’t know.
It just felt…meant to be.
Why don’t you believe in JESUS?! the young boy with the bowl cut shrieked as he ran past me. My father, stepping inside from the garage, startled, then dropped his eyes. The boy's mother ran after him, laughing weakly, I’m sorry—from the mouths of babes, right? Dominic wriggled away from her grip. His eyes were fixed on my father, who stood in a carefully tucked button-down and jeans. I want to know! WHY DON’T YOU BELIEVE IN JESUS? My father tried to return the woman’s laugh, but the noise that emerged sounded aching, pierced. His head bowed deeper, his eyes hidden. Six years old, I sat at the kitchen table, hands frozen over my coloring book. I scarcely recognized my father—cornered, shrinking with apology.
My father had arrived home early, a surprise interruption to my mother’s Bible study. Our family life consisted of these partitions. Such was the nature of their detente, the Cold War peace they had staked after their early, tumultuous years. They agreed to raise us neither Muslim nor Christian, leaving our spiritual direction to some nebulous, later date. I knew, of course, that my father prayed each morning, prostrate in the small space between my parents’ bed and the hall. Sometimes, I peered in, enthralled, as he murmured to the unseen.
On occasions of rare courage, I crept into their empty room to finger his sejadah, unrolling it briefly to see the image of a golden dome. I stroked his Qur’an too, awed by the gold-tinted onionskin, the silky pages of ornate script. This was Islam for me, then—beauty shrouded in mystery. A thing belonging to Daddy, to Baba, but never to me. A thing kept mostly hidden, flickering in our private, familial spaces for the span of a bismillah before meals, our yearly trip to the masjid at Eid.
My mother’s religion stayed less contained. My parents left the Middle East a few months before my birth. They moved to her home state of Illinois, settling in a small town replete with churches and corn. Outside the walls of our home, the Christian calendar made itself known. Grocery stores and doctors’ offices bloomed pastel bunnies in the spring, while the streets blazed with holiday colors come late fall. Each winter, I fretted over the plastic babies left out in snow-covered mangers, but envied our neighbor’s fleet of electric reindeer.
My Palestinian family, for those years, was mostly theoretical—voices shouting through static on long-distance calls, strangers peering from photographs. But my mother’s relatives were flesh-and-blood, a stoic Protestant crowd we saw for holidays. At these gatherings, they insisted on praying to Jesus before meals, then pointedly served ham I knew not to touch.
After their move, my mother found friends at a nearby church. She dutifully left us home from services—most of the time—but then the faithful began to show up in our living room. I was kept at the fringes as these white women with plain, worried faces circled chairs in our living room. They often had children in tow—rowdy boys and somber girls in jumpers and barrets. Sometimes, I heard them inquire in hushed tones about my father’s faith. They glanced at my sister and I with concern. Are you worried that he’ll force them to… they asked about arranged marriages, veils, and our education. They gave us brave smiles, offered to pray for my father’s soul.
In this way, my parent’s marriage could never be equal. Like her whiteness, my mother’s Christianity was translucent in America, barely visible with its inherent acceptability in our Midwestern milieu. In this town, patriotism mingled implicitly with Protestantism. My mother shared a religion with the Founding Fathers while, even before 9/11, my own father’s faith put him in league with Iranian kidnappers and Saddam Hussein. These alarming associations, coupled with his brown skin and accent, rendered him opaque, hyper-visible, jarring the sameness in which we moved.
Still, my parents tried to suspend this reality—for us, for themselves. At Christmas, my mother made cookies in the shapes of wreaths as well as crescent moons. They explained to us that mixed families like ours were special, that this was the beauty of the United States. Melting pot, I heard them say, though I always wondered why this destructive imagery had them looking so pleased.
But why don’t you BELIEVE?! Dominic would not relent. He swatted his mother’s hands away, squaring his small chest. He demanded an answer from this cornered man, perhaps the first infidel he had met. But my father would not speak again. His eyes stayed trained on the floor. My mother stood behind her houseguests, blanched and frozen in place.
Somehow, Dominic and his mother got out the door, and my father disappeared upstairs. I sat at the kitchen table for a long time, alone with my ringing ears. I felt the ground tilt. I strained to understand this new world, one where young boys could be taller than grown men.
Ramadan entered our lives suddenly the year I turned nine. By then, we had moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where we would live for five years. The first time my mother woke me for sahur—she cooked the meal for us, though she did not fast herself—I was deliciously disoriented by the smell of food mingling with drowsy dark. There was something ethereal, almost conspiratorial, about huddling together while the world lay quiet outside. My father sliced watermelon for us, admonishing us to eat it for the water, along with feta cheese for the salt. At the end of the meal, I felt a giddy leap in my throat at the sound of the adhan—the signal of another fast begun. Each day, I cherished the slowly-sharpening stomach pains that told me I was a part of something vast. My thoughts floated often to my father, imagining that his stomach rumbled, too.
Iftars were jubilant, feasts my siblings and I relished. The meals were porous, stretching from the dining table to the living room where we sat with masalsalat on blast, trays of fruit, gatayaf, and fiss fiss arranged at arm’s length. My mother, still a devout Christian, labored overtime in Ramadan. Though she left it to my Palestinian grandmother to cook the more elaborate dishes, she grew skilled at many of the essentials—samboosik, shourba, yansoon.
Still, even in the midst of Ramadan festivities, my parents’ divisions remained. My mother was agreeable to us fasting, but she drew the line at prayer. And so, a gap formed each evening, our merriment disrupted as my father left to attend tarawih down the street. The quiet rushed in after him. Waiting for his return, I shuffled from room to room, a little buzzed on gatayaf, and a little bit forlorn. I could not have imagined going with him—in our family, setting foot inside houses of worship was a rarity verging on the impossible. But the choreography of omissions began to unsettle me.
By then, we had grown old enough to understand, vaguely, the world’s obsession with categories. We asked our parents often, what are we? Arabic or American? Their answer was always, nos-nos, half-and-half. But how did such an equation factor into matters of faith? My understanding was their beliefs were all-encompassing, yet somehow, mutually exclusive. Between these parallel, untouching lines, where was I to stand?
For a time, I walked careful, wide circles around my doubt. I tried to hold my questions lightly, leaving room for its hazy, then fading, warmth. As a child, even at my most confused, I still accepted the existence of some God. This deity was an amalgam of the abstract benevolences my parents described: He (always he) was all powerful, and ultimately loving and good. For a time, a delicate balance of naïvete, familial loyalty, and relative privilege left some room to believe this as the simple truth.
For a time, I walked careful, wide circles around my doubt.
But where my family’s paradoxes planted doubt, the world corroded innocence. As a small child, newly arrived in Saudi Arabia, I witnessed poverty in a newly pervasive and visible way. Bodies, dark like my father, and darker, bobbed down traffic lanes. At stoplights, their thin knuckles rapped on our windows. They made meticulous eye contact, motioning towards their mouth with their hands. For months, I felt something inside me freeze each time someone approached. Looking in their faces, I felt my stomach tilt, as if, for a moment, the earth’s gravity was changed.
Sometimes, my father rolled down the window, handing the man, woman, or child a few rolled-up bills. Others, he answered only with a hand on his heart and a slow nod of his head. During Ramadan, my parents had told us that we fasted to teach us compassion with the poor. When I asked my father why we couldn’t give to all who knocked, he said, you can’t help everyone. But you can pray for them, habibti. Sometimes, as the car pulled away, I wept. I cried, too, at the sight of the city’s many stray cats, their clotted fur and scabs. We adopted one, but afterward, my mother’s answers became spiritual: It’s okay, honey. God will take care of them. Soon, I spent entire drives in supplication, waiting to see God’s hand, the end of suffering.
As I matured, so did my questions. On television, I witnessed the Second Intifada, then 9/11, then the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Still in Saudi, we flipped between CNN and Al-Jazeera; on one, I saw George Bush invoking God for the Americans. On the other, I saw children’s bodies lifted from rubble, limbs flopping the wrong way. The sick, cold feeling in my stomach became more frequent. It seemed my parents were not the only ones claiming opposing truths. Slowly, the world came into focus: not only hunger but warplanes, not just sick cats but shattered states.
We moved back to the United States as I began high school. Back in the suburban Midwest, I was newly appalled by the Evangelical Christianity blaring in local politics, bumper stickers, neighbors’ mouths. I was freshly alienated from Islam, too, having entered a phase of life wherein I clashed with my father over clothes and boys. The queasy chill became a constant, like an IV of liquid melancholy slow-dripping into my veins.
I was years away from the Psych 101 class that would give me words like neurotransmitters and major depressive disorder. Years, too, from the introductory feminism that would teach me that, from my first, non-consensual kiss at age twelve, my body had been the subject of patriarchal harm. Longer still before I’d reckon with my suppressed queerness, the way both my parents’ religions taught me to hide myself. All I knew was it felt less and less safe, or good, to be alive.
Trayvon Martin’s murder. A visit to Palestine, where I witnessed slow war punctuated by quick death. Multiple sexual assaults. The events of my sophomore year in college, the year the silence came. More and more, I saw how oppression was not incidental, but integral to the structures that composed the world. For a time, I channeled my heartache into activism, and found camaraderie in cause. Still, too often, our passionate efforts seemed only to underscore how power, from our campus to the White House, was invested in the violent status quo. Many of our classmates dismissed us—or worse. We faced verbal harassment often; at a gathering, I was physically assaulted by a drunk Zionist, his mouth full of slurs.
Somewhere in me, the scales tipped, futility usurping hope. My friends remarked that I was changing, growing anxious and withdrawn. At parties, the approach of men made me flinch. I stopped sleeping, sloshed in a listless malaise. Come morning, I staggered, unable to recall hunger or the shape of desire. At an on-campus therapist’s office, I was asked about stress and exams.
We asked our parents often, what are we? Arabic or American? Their answer was always, nos-nos, half-and-half.
There were no questions about my upbringing, the unreconciled worlds inside my skin. We did not discuss the night I blacked out two sips into a drink, waking the next morning dressed in a man’s t-shirt. No questions, either, about what it felt like to be told over and over, Palestinians don’t exist. In ten minutes, he diagnosed me as depressed, and wrote a prescription for Prozac.
If I tried to reach for God, all I felt was stone. My lungs grew thin. I ceased to pray, saving what breath I had. Towards my parents, I felt a hollow disappointment. They had tried to give me only innocence, two sets of partial, selective truths that left me wholly ill-equipped. Fragments of God, devoid of nuance, which I discarded at last. Exhaustion closed over me. I became like Job. I settled into the dust.
True love was not something I believed in, either. By the time I met my partner, my depression had already made the first turn in what would become a death spiral. We began dating, each hour spent with him like a visit to a different, brighter world. In his presence, I stole laughter, toyed with the taste of sugar on my tongue. For these instances, I was a tourist inside joy. Each time we parted, I felt my limbs grow heavy again, a return to the grayness that I assumed was my true, ultimate state.
Then, a year after our first kiss, he had my initial tattooed onto his skin. When he showed me, I felt my blood freeze. By then, I’d made a religion out of contingency. I believed only in fleeting and partial things—short romances, selective intimacy, and a constant shuffling of place. His faith struck me as insane, especially directed at me—I saw myself as haphazard, destructive. A tiger biting her own stripes. Across from me, he appeared as he always had—possessed of a beautiful, quiet faith that he was destined for, a part of, good. I could not approach that assurance. But I kept allowing a new day to come, and one by one, I chose to stay.
The day before our wedding, I cried for an hour straight. My best friend held my hand as the tears flowed, smooth rivers, hot and fast. Each time I lifted my head to look at her, I burst open anew. I said nothing, only threw up my hands in bewilderment. Inside me, something was stirring. A vibration so slight, it seemed to emanate from a cosmic distance, like waves from a star. As it touched me, I felt something in me shift and settle, silent as a stone reaching the ocean floor. I made eye contact with my friend again, holding it this time. Over the years, we’d watched each other move in concentric circles, oscillating our distance from despair. We’d taken turns begging each other to survive. On that bed, I sensed, for the first time in years, that I would.
I could not have dreamed what lay just beyond that tearful, sunny afternoon. How my mental health would hold just a few months past the wedding, then begin a lethal descent. How my new husband would find the courage to break my stubborn fugue, force me to find the help I needed to begin a slow return. How, shortly after this, a pandemic would slam a lid on the world, unleashing new-old breeds of harm. How, in the midst of this surreality, my body would begin to tell its secrets, old traumas roaring to life in the form of debilitating physical pain.
I spent months dragging my half-limp, half-rigid body from doctor to clinic to hospital. For a while, my determination substituted for a kind of hope. I exhausted every medical option, submitted to test after test. But even after they harvested my bone marrow and pumped me with medicine, my symptoms did not abate. One by one, the doctors began giving up, unable to locate the source. On my own, I began to explore the science of intergenerational trauma, the languages the flesh can speak when grief is denied a voice. Doubling down in therapy, I began to draw connections, forging new understandings of my bodymind as a being entwined with others, across space and time.
Still, to my dismay, these insights did not correspond with physical relief. One sweltering August day, I crashed through the last of my resolve. The tremble I felt was young. So young, and hungry for innocence. Instinctively, I reached for my phone, sent a message to my parents. Please, pray for me.
Later, I placed a call to my father. I asked him about my grandmother, who, for the decades that I knew her, suffered immense physical pain. How did she do it? How did she find comfort? He told me of her bakhoor, its pearly smoke brushing her face when she grew too exhausted for dua’a. You remind me of her, habibti. You’re both strong. Please, don’t lose hope. A few days later, a small box arrived at my door. Inside, small gooey rocks, a familiar, sweet-spiced scent. Wrapped around the incense, a paper with my mother’s handwriting. We love you so much, sweetheart. We hope this lifts your spirits. You’re always in our prayers.
Things will get better someday.
- Mom and Dad
