The Reasonably Prudent Law Student

I’ve been in a mood lately to share more about my personal life here on this blog. I figure that as a young, progressive, educated Muslim American, it’s my duty to do so. Sometimes, sharing my personal life means simply putting up a picture of me and Mama Hoomster from when I was a baby. Sometimes it means sharing Papa Hoomster’s little…um…instances of uniqueness. And sometimes, it means….well, sometimes it just means something.

A man came to the door today. We live in a cheerful but well hidden little cul-de-sac. Depending on the direction you’re headed, you don’t even see it until you pass it. Google Earth street view barely even recognizes us (you can’t even see our house from it).

For this reason, we rarely get Jehovah’s witnesses or Mormons (I usually horrify them by telling them I think Jesus was a great man, but when I’m feeling more charitable, I let them know that we’re very happy with the God we have now) or political-types canvassing for votes, or people trying to sell magazines so their kid wins a dirt bike.

But this man came to the door today. His name was Dennis Clark, a tall, clean cut, distinguished-side-of-middle-age white guy with kind eyes and a nice, humble smile. He was running for the President of the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County.

I was working on my Supreme Court brief for my fourth and final required writing class, my mother usually doesn’t answer the door, and my dad was the only one not in his pajamas, so talking to the guy fell on him. Dennis gave a little schpiel about who he was, what he was running for, and his qualifications. We are always very polite to anyone that comes to our door, even if they’re trying to sell us things we don’t want or convert us – Islam stresses hospitality to guests to levels that might seem ridiculous in Western society – so my dad listened patiently to the whole thing, bid him good luck, thanked him, and said goodbye.

Then this happened.

Papa Hoomster: Huma, here, this is more for you. More your thing.

Me: What is it?

Papa Hoomster: The guy left a flier.

[hands it to me]

Me: What’s he running for? Or who’s he canvassing for?

Papa Hoomster: Something about the Arboretum. Vote for the guy in the next election, okay?

I really shouldn’t be so surprised when little exchanges like this take place. But I am. I stared after him as he wandered off and barely remember calling out something about how you should never, ever vote for anyone without fully researching the candidate. But I knew there was little point.

My father has been here since 1971. Legally. He lived with his buddies in Chicago, then went to college in Alabama (ROLL TIDE!!!1!), then came back to Chicago because, like Frank Sinatra, it was his kind of town. He left in the early 1980s to go back to Pakistan to marry my mother. She got a full scholarship to Boston University, so they came back and settled in Boston. My mother’s citizenship was quickly taken care of (relatively quickly) thanks to BU’s interest in having her in their program and among their adjunct faculty, and she’s been a citizen so long that she’s forgotten what a pain the whole process is. In 1996 we moved back to Chicago and have been here since.

In all the time that they’ve been here as bona-fide American citizens, my parents have never once voted.

Never once.

And naturally, this horrifies me. It horrifies me as much as someone who does whatever he or she can do to get out of jury duty, or, once on the jury, plans to do whatever he or she can do to get the case tied up with a neat little bow as soon as possible.

It also horrifies me as much as garden gnomes.

LITTLE BASTARDS WHAT ARE THEY PLOTTING.

I remember being just out of high school and hanging out in my friend Alex’s kitchen. Alex’s mom got me registered to vote, and I felt awesome when I filled out that little green card. It was like, bring it, political system, I’m armed to the teeth with the right to enact change.

My very first vote was for John Kerry. We all know how that worked out, but what can I say? A girl always remembers her first.

Voting, to me, has never been about a choice. It’s a right. And you exercise your rights to the fullest extent that you can, because otherwise? They mean nothing. I have a right in this country to an expectation of freedom of religion. If I let that right fall to the wayside and allow that right to be curtailed in any way, I do myself a disservice, I do my fellow citizens – Muslims, non-Muslims, monotheists, polytheists, atheists, agnostics, anyone that has any view in any sort of religious or non-religious thought paradigm – a disservice, and I do the Constitution a disservice by failing to take of what it gives me.

Voting is a right, a duty, and is non-negotiable.

As far as I can tell, my parents are hardly alone in their abstention from voting among the South Asian immigrant demographic. Whereas political and social involvement is very high in first generation South Asian Americans, our parents often don’t exhibit the same ideals. I’m not saying no South Asians vote. I’m not even saying that most South Asians don’t vote. I’m just saying that enough don’t that it’s a cause for concern about that particular mindset.

This isn’t about being all high-and-mighty about voting. Plainly put, there’s nothing to be high and mighty about. You vote because you can. You vote because you want change. You vote because you have a voice. You vote because there were people before you who didn’t get to. You vote because it’s American.

(Not to give America some sort of exclusive control over the idea of voting. Substitute a democratic foreign government of your choice in there and it’s all good.)

One big complaint, maybe the biggest, against us Muslims is that we fail to assimilate. I’ve been told that, like the Jews, Muslims in America should abandon the aspects of their faith that set them apart from mainstream social norms, because having this sort of ‘double-identity’ isn’t healthy.

(Yes, those of you of Jewish faith, feel free to be as offended by that remark as I was. ;) I’m not granting myself any kind of exclusive license when it comes to offense either. Hah.)

Well, that’s just too bad. Because there are certain aspects of our religious identity that, if we abandon them, cause us to be outside the folds of our religion.

Women who wear hijab – they would never dream of taking it off outside their homes. Ever. Because that would mean, to them, that they were outside the folds of our religion. Eating meat in public places, like ordering a Whopper at Burger King? Those of us that practice Zabiha-Halal dietary restrictions would never dream of doing that, because to do so would mean, to us, to be outside the folds of our religion. Strutting around in a bikini in public? Those of us who understand that Islam prides a woman in her modesty would never dream of doing that because to do so would cause us to be outside the folds of our religion. Reading the Quran in Arabic and touching our foreheads to the ground five times a day in the direction of Mecca? We will never stop doing that. Ever. Because doing so is the best and most complete way of being outside the folds of our religion.

To abandon those things would mean to not be a Muslim anymore.

And for a country that proudly espouses freedom of religion as its first,  salient principle in the Bill of Rights, guaranteed to all citizens across the land, that is an impossible pill to swallow. It might as well be a cyanide pill, in that respect.

And it’s amazing to me how many simply don’t understand what it means to ask Muslims to compromise that much just to ‘assimilate’ as they define assimilation.

But for all the things we refuse to do, there are certainly things we can do. Things we should do.

We should participate in our community affairs. In a recent LA Times article (that I will be blogging about shortly), a California doctor said, “We’re not travelers. We live here. We’re Americans. We’re Rotarians!” That made me chuckle, I have to admit. But he’s absolutely right. We can and do and must participate in our community affairs. Of course, having a Muslim get elected to Town Council these days is another instance of “THEYRE TRYNA IMPOZE SHARIER LAW ON USSSSSSS,” but what can you do? We can’t afford to be chased out of community involvement this way.

We should continue with our charitable efforts…and draw more publicity to them. Islam has a very, very strong tradition against publicizing acts of charity. One of the most popular hadith regarding charity is that when the right hand gives, the left hand should not know how much. You never publicize what you do, how much you give, who you give it to. The main idea is that you should give charity for the sake of God, not to win glory and respect. And the person to whom you give should be safe in the anonymity of the giver; he should never feel beholden to that person, or feel as if he’s being made to feel beholden.

Our masjids are where we coordinate our charity efforts. Most food drives, clothing drives, charity gardens, fundraisers for local, national, and international disasters, etc, happen at the masjid. Aside from that, once every year, Muslims give 2.5% of their daily income as well as all their possessions (so if you have an expensive car, the value of that car is counted among your net income that year and included in the 2.5% calculation) in Zakat to the masjid. There are sadaqah boxes where Muslims give daily, freely, at will.

I don’t think anyone that doesn’t visit a masjid regularly can even conceive of how much charity is done there. Money, sure, but also acts of charity.

And the problem is, we never publicize this. Ever. That’s our mistake. In order to educate the public about our beliefs, we’re going to have to set aside the Islamic idea of charity in secret, at least for now, because there are bigger things at stake. And one policy seems, at least to me, to clearly outweigh the other.

We should continue to educate ourselves. They see us as fanatics. Mindless drones who pray to a monkey god and bang our heads on the earth five times a day and lock up our women and mutilate the genitals of our girls.

The best way to fight this is not with anger (I have to remind myself – because, hey, I’m a huge work in progress over here), but with intelligence. We must educate ourselves broadly, of course: go to school. Stay in school. Go to college. Go on for higher education, perhaps professional degrees.

We must educate ourselves socially: immerse ourselves in our heterogenous communities, not just our Muslim communities, to really tap into the pulse of social consciousness in our immediate area and learn what people think of us so that we can better learn how to combat those misconceptions.

And we must educate ourselves Islamically, and learn all about our religion that we can. It says in the Quran, over and over and over again, that our religion was perfected for us. The hard work’s been done for us; the least we can do is understand what we believe in, and if we already have that understanding, understand ways in which to better articulate it.

We should continue to speak. After 9/11, my parents told me to keep my head down and not draw attention to myself. Lots of my friends who went to school in public schools or were in college, etc, got that same advice. Do not ever speak against the war in Afghanistan. Do not ever criticize George W. Bush or Guiliani or Cheney in any way. If they’re speaking against Islam, just remove yourself from that discussion. Do not draw attention to yourself, because it’s not safe.

Almost ten years have passed, and it’s still not safe. If anything, it’s gotten less safe. And we’ve learned that staying quiet just isn’t an option.

So we must speak. We must write, we must use our voices, we must use our thoughts, we must use our actions to fight back against these ideas that paint us as militants, as blood-thirsty, as medieval, as bigoted, as a threat to American society.

We tried removing ourselves from the discussion, like a child that covers his eyes and thinks the world doesn’t see him; the discussion found us anyway.

And we must vote. Our parents came to this country because they yearned for its opportunities and its freedoms and its safety. Even if some of them feel disenfranchised or ‘other’ to the point of wishing to abstain from one of the fundamental rights they’re granted here, we cannot make that a pattern. We cannot let that define our demographic, our population. We must vote to enact the change we wish to see; anything less is unacceptable.

Beyond eating a Big Mac, beyond getting offended over nothing, beyond drinking beer in a kiddie pool while watching Independence Day fireworks, voting is the single most American thing anyone here do.

They say we’re un-American. By not voting, we prove them right.

This post was not in any way an endorsement of Dennis P. Clark for President of the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County.