Good Muslim/Bad Muslim

I didn’t have a Muslim community growing up because I was afraid. White people were mostly an abstraction for me as a child, and so was their judgment—a question about my accent here, a comment about my body hair there—they didn’t know, early on, specific enough ways to really hurt me. The ones with that particular toolkit were my own people: a comment at Sudanese Sunday school about how I wore such tight jeans because I didn’t have a father in the home. Whispers about my divorced mother. My hair was this. My complexion was that. My Arabic: too this, too that. My family was this. I was too new, then too Americanized. I memorized their voices, anticipated their critiques. This T-shirt was too short and revealed the roll of fat above my hips. This one was too tight and cupped my nonexistent breasts. I was a child, really—there was no reason for anyone to be looking at my body that way. But I would pull on a pair of jeans and anticipate eyes on the curve they made of my lower half. The way they molded to my ass. Or didn’t. I spent most of my early adolescence swimming in fabric—a gray fleece Gap sweater that I wore every day, boys’ cargo pants, oversize souvenir T-shirts my mother brought me from her travels. My own secular kind of covering. I didn’t want anyone to look at me, to say anything.

I’ve been afraid, forever, of performing my identity incorrectly. My Muslimness, my Sudaneseness, my Americanness, my Blackness, my womanhood, all of it. I was a solitary kid, introverted and always reading, painfully shy. I looked to books to teach me how people were with each other—how they talked, how they touched, how they played, how they trusted, how they mourned. I practiced alone at night—jokes, pronunciations, nicknames I wanted people to give me. Tools of American girlhood like playing with my hair and keeping things in the back pocket of my jeans. I wasn’t in any of the books I was reading—maybe a sliver here or there, a character with brown skin, with parents from somewhere else, with curly hair, but never the full extent of my intersections. I never heard anyone talk about the nuances possible in Muslim identity—at least not for women. I grew up watching men I knew drink and smoke and go to mosque, all in the same day. Their Muslimness felt like it made room for everything in their lives. The women I knew were not afforded this nuance—they were regarded either as religious or as secular. There was nothing in between. So I grew up hearing and using terms like “bad Muslim” and “good Muslim” and thinking of them as fixed identities. My first semester of college, I was scared and overstimulated and homesick and lonely, and did not pray for months. And so I thought I was a bad Muslim, and thinking of myself as a bad Muslim, let more months pass without praying, because then it started to feel like something I didn’t deserve to do. I mourned my good Muslimness. I felt my whole life growing increasingly opaque outside to how Muslim I felt inside. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. I’d meet new people who didn’t know for months that I was Muslim. I’d meet other Muslims and obsess later about what they were saying about the fact that I’d been wearing shorts. I was very lonely.

The poems and essays in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me are the Muslim community I didn’t know I was allowed to dream of. This is the Muslim community my child-self could have blossomed in—proof of the fact that there are as many ways to be Muslim as there are Muslims; that my way was one of those ways, was a way of being Muslim that counted. The writers in this portfolio demonstrate the sheer cacophony of Muslimness, of Muslim identities, of Muslim people; the range of things we’re allowed to say and feel and want and mourn and joke about. We’re accustomed, at this point, to media in which a cis, straight Muslim man gets to express his flawed Muslimness, to mess up and stray and return and sin and repent and everything else that humans do. But the cisness, the straightness, the maleness of these voices has kept them safe in their expression of their flaws, in their trying to find their unique place within Islam. There are no stones for their bodies, no disownings, no honor killings. But what about a safe space for those who keep getting left out of the conversation about Muslims and Muslimness? Why don’t we expand the conversation in a way that’s more representative of what the Muslim population actually looks like? My hope is that this anthology is a step in that direction. This portfolio is a space where we don’t have to be afraid of our own people, of being disqualified from our identities. Some freedom, albeit brief, from the governance of shame. This community has existed in our community all along, all over its margins.