EAST BRUNSWICK Tackling topics ranging from culture shock to interfaith relations, author Sabeeha Rehman discussed her life as an American Muslim during a recent visit to the East Brunswick Library.
Rehman came to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1971 after a hurried arranged marriage. She said raising Muslim children in the absence of a Muslim community was a daunting challenge, so in the early 1980s, she began establishing a Muslim community in Staten Island which culminated in the building of a mosque.
“I wrote this book because I wanted to raise awareness about Islam and about Muslims in America. I wanted the reader to know that the heart and soul of a Muslim mother is like that of any other. And, because I don’t want my grandchildren to be afraid to say, ‘I am a Muslim,'” Rehman said.
More than 25 people attended Rehman’s book discussion on Sept. 13, when she highlighted various chapters of her memoir, “Threading My Prayer Rug: One Woman’s Journey from Pakistani Muslim to American Muslim.”
“My memoir is the story of the Americanization of Islam through my experience. It is the journey of my pursuit to define an American Muslim identity for myself, my children, and now my grandchildren, and my transformation from a Pakistani Muslim to an American Muslim,” Rehman said.
A turning pointing in Rehman’s life came when her eight-year-old grandson Omar, who has autism, was detained at a Philadelphia airport due to airport authorities believing that he was a terrorist who was on the no fly list. At that time, Rehman was the co-founder and former president of the National Autism Association New York Metro chapter. Using her position in the association, she said she contacted local government officials and the press about her grandson.
“My dear little grandson – and I couldn’t do a thing to help him. I made a lot of noise and continued to make noise … but we couldn’t make a dent in the system. Omar is now 14, a handsome young boy with a sprouting mustache. What’s going to happen the next time he gets on a plane? I pray,” she said. “That is when my husband said to me, ‘You’ve got to write a book.’ It’s not enough that we are having interfaith dialogues amongst people in our comfort zone [and] in our closed communities. We have to tell our story – not an academic discourse, we are not scholars – just tell a personal story [and] put a face to the faith.”
Rehman recalled how she came to marry her husband and the cultural differences she encountered when she first arrived in Jamaica, Queens. In 1971, Rehman was living in her native Pakistan and had earned a bachelor’s degree in home economics when her parents decided it was time for her to get married. Rehman said that her grandfather suggested a man who was a doctor living in New York City. Her grandfather already knew the man’s family and after a roundtable discussion among her family, Rehman was married and got on a plane to New York.
After she arrived in Queens, she and her husband began a 45-year marriage.
Due to being a busy homemaker and lacking a Muslim community, Rehman said, “I just folded away my prayer rug and put that to rest. I couldn’t fast. Ramadan came, Ramadan went year after year because the communal spirit that goes with fasting wasn’t there. Eventually once my children started growing up like all parents I started getting worried.”
Wanting her children to grow up to be Muslims, Rehman ran into a cultural dilemma and said, “To what degree do we assimilate without compromising and diluting our cultural heritage?”
One dilemma she faced was when her children wanted a Christmas tree. Since they are Muslims, Rehman said she found it difficult to explain to her children why they do not celebrate Christmas. Understanding her children’s desires to want to be a part of the holiday, Rehman said after speaking with her Jewish friend Nancy, she decided to give her children a substitute by celebrating a Muslim holiday.
With three Muslim families living in her neighborhood at the time, Rehman and the others celebrated Eid al-Adha by having a big feast, giving gifts and decorating, similar to Christmas traditions, she said.
Rehamn said she never got her children a tree and despite her best efforts to substitute Christmas, her children still wanted a tree. Decades later, while visiting her son’s home, she saw that his wife had a little Christmas tree in their home.
“My conservative nice Muslim daughter-in-law had demonstrated far more sense than I. Holidays are an issue and you know that we all get religious when it’s holiday time,” Rehman said.
In the early 1980s, Rehman and her family moved to a primarily orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Staten Island. Encouraged and inspired by her neighbors, Rehman said she and her husband decided to start a mosque and Muslim Sunday school.
“Once we built the mosque and people started coming to the mosque we noticed that we had people from the African American community, from the Albanian European community, Turkish, Indian, Pakistani, Indonesian, Malaysian, all parts of the world, and everybody was expressing the faith in their own way. Everybody thought that their way was really the truth,” Rehman said. “That’s when it became apparent to us that a lot of the way in which we express our faith is the product of our culture and we associate it with religion.”
In order to address the interfaith divisions that were developing in her mosque, Rehman said that she, her friends and her husband studied the scriptures in order to figure out “where does the faith end and the culture start.”
By figuring out the theology of Islam, Rehman said they were able to identify the religion’s core values and beliefs. After stripping the religion down to its core beliefs and values, Rehman said that, “Once we were able to figure out what really is the theology we then wrapped that in an American flag, an American expression of Islam, [and] let it be an American cultural expression of Islam: an American Muslim identity, an identity that is wholly Islamic and wholly American.”
Rehman has spent the last several decades engaging in interfaith dialogue with faith communities. She volunteered as the director of Interfaith Programs at the American Society for Muslim Advancement and served as the chief operating officer at The Cordoba Initiative.
The event was co-sponsored by the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom Chapters of New Jersey and the East Brunswick Human Relations Council.
For more information about Rehman and her book, visit www.sabeeharehman.com/synopsis/.
Contact Vashti Harris at vharris@newspapermediagroup.com.
