Road to Jannah

"I lost my homework in my backpack."

^This has actually happened lol

Some of you know that I started teaching weekend Islamic school again this year. It’s been amazingly comical, frustrating, heartbreaking and humbling. First I ended up teaching at two different Mosques!! Yeah, I can’t even figure out how this happened lol but since I gave both my word I couldn’t back out!

One school is very very new, in an inner city neighborhood run by brothers (it’s a bit chaotic though because no one’s in charge). The girls are completely separate from the boy’s school. We’re basically just on our own. There’s no printer, no photocopier, no books, broken whiteboards, not enough teachers or resources, the classrooms are pretty small themselves. We can’t leave anything in the rooms because somehow ppl get in during the week and make a mess or plain just take stuff and the men use the rooms for Jumah. There’s construction going on all over. The heat is OFF most of the time. Sometimes I tell the girls to keep their jackets on and when you ask the brother’s side to turn it on no one knows how to/where the key is. Every time I go into the classroom I find weird things, paint chips, wood, old doors, old sinks, huge bags of old clothes all spread out?! Seriously!

And I honestly don’t understand how they expect the school to function without books. They bought a wonderful series called “I love Islam’, however there’s only 1 textbook per teacher. We’re supposed to read from that and the kids are somehow supposed to learn everything we say. This is also the Mosque where we have teachers meetings that are separated in DIFFERENT rooms WITH a curtain. Yeah dudes. Frustrating.

The other Mosque is very well established and has a lot of resources, the trump card being an extremely experienced principal. The school may be stricter and conservative in what they want taught, but they are more willing and open to do anything it takes to teach the kids. But my biggest problem here is the parents. They sometimes bring their kids, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the kids do their homework and sometimes they don’t. Many don’t even bring basic things like a pencil, notebook, their books, etc. And If I hear “Teacher, I left my homework in the car” one more time I may have to call a parent up and tell them to turn around! It just seems so odd to me that some parents believe Islamic school is optional and bring their kids only whenever they feel like.

This brings us to the philosophical question, are kids better off in Muslim countries? Are critics of western Muslims right to think that people come over here and just start thinking about making money and forget about keeping their kids Muslim? I think it’s more that some parents think only culturally, that as long as their child knows how to pray, say a few surahs and has read the Quran once (Ameen parties!) their duty is done.

There are definitely a lot of frustrations but I do love teaching. (part time! lol) The most important thing to me is that these kids develop a love of Islam, and see it as a beautiful, fun thing, instead of ritualistic. Sometimes there are just moments that make it all worth it like when the boys compete with each other begging to show me they know how to pray 2 rakats. Or that they’re so excited to show me that they did their homework. I love that they’re in school mode when they come, ready to learn (most of the time), even as a parent you’ll never be able to have 20 eager faces looking up to you just waiting for you to teach them something about Islam. And then after a few hours you can send them home and relax & recover the rest of the week!!

Sometimes just the questions they ask are amazing, about Jannah, about the Day of Judgment, about praying, about their pets!! One girl, whose mother passed away, asked me that if she makes Dua would Allah choose a good mother for her. <heart breaks> Or one boy who told me defiantly that he would go hide and pray downstairs if his parents wouldn’t let him pray! Lol Or when the girls come early, walking to the masjid from their homes, and ask me “if we’re going to do something fun today”. Or when someone’s mother comes to you ten years later and says ‘oh my son said you were the best islam teacher he ever had!’ and now he’s going to college –scary But priceless. Absolutely priceless.

Update: Alhamdulillah since I wrote the above things have really improved tenfold. Alhamdulillah!!! now on to teaching… I started a thread on our forum with different resources for islamic school teachers so check it out!:  http://jannah.org/madina/index.php?topic=5963.0

Most people around here say Fall is their favorite season. Yet, I really don’t know why? Once, a secretary at a company I worked at happily chirped, “I LOVE Autumn! It’s my favorite season! I look forward to it all year!” When I asked her “Err…why?” She said “It’s just so cool and crisp! The leaves under my feet! I love it!” Uh huh. I think the rule book of common decency says you have to be from bonney ole England or have a six-figure trust fund to say ‘Autumn’, otherwise, it’s just not allowed! I said nothing however because she seemed enraptured!

I have to say I really don’t like Fall. It just represents all manner of bad things. :-^ Fall is when school starts up, unless you love school in which case you need help. If you’re a teacher it’s even worse.  Back from fun holidays, up to your eyeballs in lesson plans trying to teach bratty kids who forgot everything you taught them the year before! Yeah it’s great. Unless you’re a parent, then it must be a happy and joyous time, except for the $chool $hopping. Then it must hurt.

So the college students have moved back in, there’s never any parking, weather has cooled, cold rain has started to fall. Signs of the misery to come… our cold and dark winters. But these are just signs….like impending signs of great doom! Yeah, just kidding. It’s really not that bad. The leaves ARE very pretty in different colors. Some years the colors are just spectacular and everywhere you look is just so beautiful. The weather IS much more bearable. Taking walks can be nice. Driving to the country or Vermont is pretty breathtaking. We sometimes go apple picking, which upstate NY is famous for. Mmm sweet yummy apples straight from the tree. They also have these cider donuts which are sooo amazingly yummy. Just thinking about them can give you a sugar rush.

Then there’s Halloween! I have a lot of great memories of Halloween. We dressed up every year and went around with our friends. Yeah our parents didn’t know any better lol. I don’t think I’d let any kids still do this cuz it seems pretty dangerous nowadays and the connotations around the whole holiday are kinda shirky. But I still can’t be like one of those ppl that turn off all their lights and don’t answer the door or worse yet come out and tell kids that Halloween is Haram! and to go home! So I’m the only one in the house that will go and buy candy. (Yes it’s true we only get a few kids and I eat the rest! But see how kid friendly I am )

Also, Fall is like when you have to take stock of your life….where have you been, what have you been doing. It’s like a mental resume life evaluation. Why Fall? Because Winter you’re just surviving with everyone else, doesn’t matter what happens there, Spring you’re making plans for the future, Summer is just having fun. So Fall has to be the responsible one. Pretty painful that part. BUT… Fall has a trump card.

Yup! It’s Thanksgiving. Not that we “celebrate” it, but we do have big dinners with family and friends and everyone gets together, mostly it’s because everyone has it off. And who doesn’t love a 4 day weekend, which is actually a 6 or 7 day one because no one does any work Thanksgiving week! AND…HALAL Turkey!!! Mmmm nomnomnommm This brings me to the most important question and conclusion of this remarkable essay:  Why don’t Halal stores sell Halal turkey at any other time of the year?

So there you have it, my schizophrenic thoughts on ‘Autumn’ Unlike some ppl, who we won’t name *cough se7en *cough, I actually update my blog at least seasonally.

OK then, Happy Fall everyone

PS. I also hate squirrels!

Last night I attended a local fundraiser at The Egg. It’s called that because, well, it looks like an egg! It’s an unmistakable landmark of this area. When anyone drives up here and enters the city via the main highway there it is. Right there on our skyline. Mainly it’s a theater where they have various performing arts shows and things. Inside is a huge hall with a stage, along with many smaller theater rooms and meeting halls. It’s all part of a something called the Empire State Plaza. Which is this huge state-funded cement complex of buildings/museum/library/archive/theater built in the 1970s. I actually read a very fascinating history of it recently so check it out: http://www.lofaber.com/albany/essaymaking.html
(It was meant to be a futuristic star trek-ish complex, half-underground and half-above, a cultural, arts and business center, but turned out to be a huge anachronism.)

I can’t really remember the first time I’ve been there, the Egg – probably in the 3rd grade when I was 8 we went there for a field trip to watch some ballet/musician thing, have no idea. There’s also a little museum, the only museum around here, that we’ve been to many times on field trips or our parents just took us on random Saturdays. The plaza itself – we went to countless times as kids, to play on the wooden playground, to walk around the huge reflecting pools and fountains. I recently found a really old picture of my brother and I when I was around 5, probably when we first came to America, (my Dad in 70s beard and pants, even though it was the 80s!) sitting near one of the fountains at the plaza!

Every 4th of July there’s a huge fireworks display here and festival all day, our mother used to bring us when we were kids on the bus, we’d bring a sheet and spread it out and run around all day. For some reason I think there was also some kind of dental/medical offices down in there somewhere too? Because I vaguely remember going there for something like that. Later on I used to go with high school friends for the fourth and hang out all day eating fried dough, walking around the stalls, buying glo-in-the-dark necklaces and staking out a place for the fireworks show. There’s also countless festivals at the plaza every year, like the Festival of Nations – food and dances and stalls from every country, an Indian festival, Greek festival etc.

It’s really a quintessential Albanyian thing, the first place we bring visitors, although they don’t seem to get it.

Anyway it was kind of weird, very weird actually to have a fundraiser for a Masjid there. The main hall is huge, like really huge. Could probably fit 2000-4000 ppl. We had probably 400-500 max in there so it felt really empty. Not sure why but it felt like a lot of people were missing, perhaps they were away or because it was a new strange place for them they didn’t come. It is very expensive to rent out and there was some controversy apparently over that, ie the usual ppl saying it was too expensive, why have it there, etc. But I actually think it’s a very interesting choice. I mean why shouldn’t we rent it? Aren’t we Albanyians as well?

The place was set up really nicely with the food catered, with waiters and workers taking care of all that, with nice drinks (including bottled drinks of every kind!) and big cups and ice (trust me these things are veryyyy rare at Muslim events, ur lucky if u get a half cup of orange soda!) The sound system was beyond excellent. I mean you could have a screaming baby next to you (which I did) and still be able to hear everything. They also played a nicely put together video on a big screen about the Masjid and updates on it. A ton of kids were in a seperate meeting room with a magician, movies and stuff to do! So excellent. I know tons of parents appreciated that. The kids didn’t even want to be in the boring main room they were having so much fun over there .

The speaker that came was very funny and interactive and did the fundraising very well. Alhamdulillah we raised over a million dollars in pledges, that’s DOLLARS! An absolutely unheard of number in this area for any type of fundraiser. It was great, and hopefully inshaAllah will bring us closer to actually building a Masjid. We also tried broadcasting the whole thing via internet streaming and some ppl even donated via text!

The speaker was someone I knew years ago (I’m talking 10+ years) who was a real supporter of my website when it first started up. I was hesitant to say salam in case he didn’t remember me, but he did! Thinking about that time I feel very nostalgic about when the internet was new and Islam on the internet was even newer. What hopes and dreams we had. What hopes and dreams we had running around as teenagers on the plaza. Not saying that everything turned out terrible and that we were never to fulfill those, just that things shifted and changed and some different things were realized and new hopes begun.

Anyway this feels like a lot of sharing, which reminds me, why do I post all these personal things on my blog so you guys can read them!! Is it fair that I keep writing and strangers keep reading? I think one day I’ll limit my blog to only other ppl that have blogs, that way it’s a two way street!

OK so for now here are a few pics from the event:

On Sept 11^th, 2010, I found myself in a very surreal experience:  Traveling to New York City on a bus full of non-Muslims nine years to the day of 9/11. As a Muslim-American, I can’t even tell you the pain we feel on the 9/11 anniversary. Not just for what happened on that day, but for all the consequences of it, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the millions of people killed, to the FBI round up of Muslims, hate-crimes against Muslims, discrimination and bias, to the anti-Mosque Islamophobia Quran-burning crusades of today. All of these events have somehow inexplicably led me to being on a bus heading to the very spot 9 years later…

To us, September 11th, 2001 is  a defining date in our lives. There was life before 9/11 which seemed happy and promising, and life after 9/11, full of constant defenses against attacks and painful experiences. At one time we thought America could be the place where we could practice our religion freely, raise our children and live good fruitful lives. I can’t help thinking that those who landed on Plymouth Rock had the same idea. Leaving England for a New World, they hoped to practice their religion freely and establish an equal society.

The bus I traveled on was sponsored by a few organizations in this area including a local Mosque, the Muslim solidarity committee (a group of almost all non-Muslims which have been constant supporters of us in this area), and Project Salam (an advocacy group pursuing all the wrongful prosecutions of Muslims). Not surprisingly, there were only a handful of Muslims on the bus. This upsets me, but I’ve learned the vast majority of Muslims in the US are pained and saddened by what’s happening but they have steadfastly refused to do anything about it. They sit in their homes, continue to watch television, buy their BMWs and pretend that life is like pre-9/11 until something happens to them. How long this denial will go on, I don’t know. And perhaps it’s too late now for us.

Arriving at the planned site of the counter rally in New York City we found it swarming with reporters from all over the world. Organizers were still setting up and there were pre-made signs with slogans like ‘No to Racism and anti-Muslim Bigotry’, ‘Islam has been in NY for 400 years’, and ‘Muslims are Welcome here’. These were heartening to see. As soon as I and another Muslim sister stepped off the bus wearing Hijab, reporters immediately started asking us questions and interviewing us. This was really surprising because we were expecting to attend a really and not actually be interviewed by anyone! We weren’t really prepared and I’m not sure if our answers were the best ones. I’m sure everyone knows by now that being interviewed by the media is a double-edged sword. They tend to take the one or two phrases we say, what they think will go best with the angle they are going for and use it, they almost never convey what you wanted to. The trick for us is to get across how/what we want to present in as few sound-bytes as possible. I think they were attracted to us because we were visibly Muslim. I did want our viewpoint to be heard, but I also wanted them to interview non-Muslim Americans who were supporters.

Some reporters were actually very aggressive like one who asked me if I thought the 9/11 hijackers were Muslim. I said that their act was one of terrorism and did not follow the beliefs of Islam, but he continued to ask “But ARE THEY MUSLIM?” with the camera and lights in my face. I should have said ‘This isn’t relevant to what we’re doing here today’ and bring up the real points, but I guess you live and learn. I also didn’t have exact figures of how many Muslims there are in America (3-6 million) or how many Muslims died in 9/11 (62 names are known, 60-100) or exactly what floor Muslims used to pray in the World Trade Center (17^th floor south tower). Next time I think it’s a good idea to go over these things on the bus going down in case anyone asks us. Mostly I talked about how Muslims used to work and pray in the World Trade Center and also died on 9/11 and asked why it was such a big deal now to have a cultural center two blocks away. Also a lot how Islam doesn’t equal terrorism or all Muslims aren’t terrorists. How I didn’t think the Pastor from Florida represents all of Christianity or all Christians, and the same should be said for the perpetrators of 9/11.

There were about 2000-2500 supporters at the rally, and we were located at least four or five blocks away from the rally against the Mosque/Tea partiers group. There was also another rally of a couple hundred of some religious group, not sure what that was about except they had a lot of signs about how homosexuality was a sin and that “Islam was a lie”. The 9/11 memorials earlier in the day were also placed closer to Ground Zero than we were. At our rally, we heard some speeches from various speakers about the anti-Islam phobia that was spreading across America, about religious rights and how important support of Muslims was right now. The people in attendance were mostly non-Muslims from all walks of life…teachers, students, older people, peace activists, war veterans, Christians, Hispanics, African-Americans, babies… Many smiled at us and were extremely kind. A very strange experience as a Muslim Hijabi in New York City I can tell you! We then marched a few blocks around the park holding up our signs.

A few of our bus group went over to see what was going on at the anti-Mosque rally and reported back that they were in one open block and seemed like 1000-2000. They also had a humongous flat screen TV jumbotron to broadcast the speeches (compared to our truck and megaphone). They also had signs like ‘Bigots are Americans too’??!?! Many supporters went over there to see what was going on, unfortunately creating confrontations and shouting matches that were pounced upon by TV cameras and shown in the media and also maybe increasing their numbers so some reports said there were a lot more anti-Mosque protesters than there were supporters!

On our side we had maybe one or two anti-Mosque protesters walking by who yelled ‘Traitors! Go back home!” There was also one Hispanic/Italian woman standing nearby as we were leaving with a small sign that said “Islam=Terrorism” saying ‘Izlam,Terrorists’, ‘Izlam, Terrorists’ over and over again in a heavy accent. I went up to her and said “I’m a Muslim and I’m not a terrorist”. She wouldn’t look me in the eye and continued repeating that. The only other negative incident I had was when we went to the McDonalds nearby to eat something and an African-American woman came up to me and started showing me a book of printed photographs of 9/11 and said she was in one of the towers. She then started talking about “Shariah law and stoning in Iran”. I told her that we lived in the United States and that had nothing to do with us and then she started quoting (misinterpreted) verses of the Quran. I told her you can’t take verses of context and misinterpret them and then at that point I just realized there was no point, and left.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the main problem. The anti-Mosque people are not against the Mosque. They are against ALL OF ISLAM. They really hate Islam, Muslims and everything to do with us. They are “anti-Shariah” which is the stupidest thing I’ve heard of in the world. No country in the world has complete Shariah law (which is actually extremely flexible and wholesome) yet these people think Muslims will take over America and impose Burkas on them. It’s just so ridiculous. I can’t imagine anyone intelligent actually really thinks this, but they just use it to propel their dialogue of hate. They also equate Islam with terrorism. They say all Muslims are terrorists and that Islam teaches terrorism and that we want to take over the world, etc etc, whatever. They just hate all Muslims and want to expel us from the United States. Their message is so neo-Nazi I’m waiting for the day they come up with their own symbol and hail.

I really wished I had told that woman at McDonalds and the Italian woman to walk over to the Tea partiers and see how they treated them. At the last rally a non-Muslim African-American man had been walking passed them and they thought he looked foreign and surrounded him and started harassing him!! They hate all immigrants and all people of color and I found it sad that those women didn’t realize that.

There is so much misinformation and outright lies being spread about Islam. This is one of the roots of the problem. Unfortunately our lack of Dawah (teaching about Islam) really is an extreme weakness and perhaps downfall right now.  We need to open our Mosques, we need to have interfaith programs, we need to teach our neighbors. We need alliances. We need to do so much work just to prove our right to exist. The right of Islam to exist. But again, Muslims are too busy going to medical school (so they can buy that luxury SUV), trying desperately to fit in and be the least visibly Muslim or active they can.

After the rally was over, we walked back to the bus and on the way home took turns sharing our stories on the microphone. One of the reporters earlier in the day asked me how I felt being at the rally. I said ‘I was actually sad, sad because I had to be there’. It wasn’t a good day. To see so much hate and malignment of our religion is a very difficult thing.

The only highlight of my trip was praying freely on the sidewalk in New York City on one of the protest signs on the ground, surrounded by supporters. I was very impressed with the non-Muslims who were so supportive and defending Islam better than most Muslims. They kept repeating “Assalam Alaikum, Muslims are welcome here”.  It just proves my point that we just need to teach people about the basics of Islam. We do not need to convert anyone. The acceptance of it and psychological space can lead people to their own conclusions. No one has to AGREE with Islam, its beliefs or practices, but as Americans we should all realize the hope and dream of Plymouth Rock. We should all be able to live and practice our religions in peace.

See all the pictures here: http://jannah.org/gallery/main.php?g2_view=slideshow.Slideshow&g2_itemId=4601