Welcome back to ‘eyb - the newsletter! Each week I delve into a topic that growing up I would be told is ‘eyb or shameful to speak openly about. If you have just subscribed, welcome!
Over the Christmas holidays I read Amrou Al-Kadhi’s memoir Life As A Unicorn, which I haven’t stopped gushing about it since. In their memoir, Al-Kadhi relates to us how Islamic Studies lessons triggered their OCD, and I found myself crying. It brought back the memory of the time a halaqa, a gathering where you learn about Islam, caused a relapse in my OCD.
The Islamic Studies lessons and gatherings I attended when I lived in the Gulf were a far cry to the ones I attended when I grew up in London. My own father has run halaqas since I was 4 years old, and as soon as I started Year 1, I was sent to Saturday School. Saturday School in London in the ‘90s is a whole other conversation which I will leave for another time!
On Tuesday evenings I went to a halaqa ran by the wife of one of my father’s friends, and I looked forward to it each week, as she taught Islam to us in a way that was fun and engaging. As well as teaching us the Qur’an, she also did things with us like baking and crafts.
Learning about my religion was a very different experience in Qatar. Faith was taught to children and teenagers through fear and scaremongering. When I was in my late teens, I went to one halaqa ran by a group of Qatari women, and the topic of that particular gathering was prayer and wudu, a ritual of washing you perform before each prayer. The teacher in this gathering kept repeating that if you made a single mistake, your wudu and your prayer would not be accepted by God.
I went home after that gathering feeling defeated. What if I had been making wudu and performing my prayers incorrectly all these years?
I started to perform wudu repeatedly. If I felt that I hadn’t washed out my nose correctly, or if I hadn’t got water to touch all parts of my head, I’d stop and start over. Soon, my hands became irritated and red from the sheer amount of times I was performing wudu.
And it was the same with my salah, or prayer. If I felt I had not performed it exactly as the women in the gathering had shown us, or if I had one invasive thought, (which is difficult when you have OCD as you get many invasive thoughts), I would perform the prayer again. I remember once performing the same prayer 10 times.
It came to breaking point, and I felt that prayer had become too difficult. I was ready to give up. My parents had noticed, and I was taken to see a psychiatrist about it. Together we came up with a plan. I was to make an actual prayer chart, perform wudu once, walk away from the bathroom, and tick it off on the chart. Then I was to pray once, tick it off on the chart, and then walk away and occupy myself with another activity. It was difficult forcing myself to walk away from the bathroom sink, but I managed to do it, and as simple as the plan sounds, it actually worked! As the weeks passed, I found it easier to perform wudu one time and walk away, and ditto for my prayers.
My experience is not the only example of how teaching faith through fear can have detrimental effects on young people.
When I lived in the Gulf, there were religious men called daa’ees and religious women called daa’eyahs who worked voluntarily, and they visited boys’ schools and girls’ schools respectively to talk to students about faith. Their job was to encourage young people to adhere to the religion. Bear in mind that the sect of Islam promulgated in Qatar is Wahabbism, which is a very puritanical sect.
When I was 23, I worked as a TESL teacher for a state secondary school for girls. When a daa’eyah came, we were all made to attend the session. Each session comprised mainly of horror stories that were designed to scare students into sticking to the tenets of our religion.
There was the story of the young man who listened to music. He was driving and listening to Michael Jackson, and then his car crashed. As he lay dying in the middle of the road, people surrounded him and urged him to say the shahadah, the declaration of faith, but instead all he could say were Michael Jackson lyrics. What was implied by this story was that music was dangerous, and that it would leave you in a state of kufr or disbelief, therefore music was haraam, or prohibited.
Then there was the story of the young man who masturbated. There are two versions of this story. In one version, masturbating makes him go blind. In a second version, the young man dies while masturbating, and his mother walks in on her dead son while he is in that position.
They also had an obsession with punishment. The daa’eyahs went to great length describing the punishments of the grave, and punishments in Hell. There was no leniency, nor context given behind why they deemed certain things forbidden, they were “just forbidden.” If I, an adult, walked out of each session with a very heavy heart, I can only imagine how my 16-year-old students felt.
As a Muslim who is observant of my faith and its tenets myself, I see no issue with teaching children and young people about their faith. After all should I ever have my own children, I’ll be teaching them about our faith - it is the approach though that can make or break a human. It’s only in recent years, that I have come to explore and rejoice in my religion, free of puritanism, and discover that actually our faith was meant to make life easier, not harder. A middle path is what is actually encouraged by the Prophet Muhammed, peace be upon him.
My Qatari friends laugh now when they recall the horror stories they were told by daa’ees and daa’eyahs as children, but can you imagine the impact those stories may have had on some young people?
I ended up leaving that teaching job, and the way in which they scared the girls into adhering to our religion was one of the reasons why I resigned. I just could not be in an environment where things like this were being taught. And if I had spoken up, I would have been fired anyway - I had seen it happen enough times to others.
In recent times, some people within Muslim communities - communities in the Middle East, and communities in the UK and America - (and they often tend to be men) - talk about the “threat” of young Muslims leaving the religion. But have they ever stopped and paused to think that teaching faith through compulsion, fear, and scaremongering cause young Muslims to think “this is too hard” and leave?
What I’ve been reading…
I feel incredibly lucky to have received a proof of Layla Al Ammar’s second novel Silence Is A Sense (Borough Press) which is released on 4th March 2021 and available to pre-order now. Our unnamed female protagonist is a Syrian refugee who lives in a tower block in the UK, trying her best to remain hidden while observing the going-ons in the flats around her. In this story Al Ammar demonstrates how silence can both protect and harm.
Elias Jahshan’s thoughtful exploration of one’s roots and identity, and the annoying question, “where are you from?” in Dispatches Of An Insufferable Third Culture Kid.
This wonderful interview with Amrou Al-Kadhi on queer love, marine biology and quantum physics on ShakoMako.net.
Alia and Lina Al-Hathloul speak out about their sister, Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain Al-Hathloul’s sentence in Marie Claire Saudi Women’s Rights Activist Loujain Al Hathloul Is Not A Terrorist.
What I’ve been listening to…
Thanks to Alya Mooro, journalist and author of The Greater Freedom, for putting this episode of Unswtnd + Unfltrd on my radar. It’s an older episode, with author Etaf Rum, on why it is important to write about the uncomfortable truths in our cultural communities.
I wish you a fruitful week ahead.
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