Portal 51
It’s a hard thing to keep everyone happy when you’ve got three kids of two genders and two age stages. F and Z are 15 and 13—in fact, Z’s almost 14, give or take a Ramadan—but R is not only a boy, but a nine year-old one. Sometimes, as my wife and I noticed, he gets lost in the mix, crowded out by more assertive older siblings. Worried, my wife suggested R and I share more deliberate male bonding time.
For some reason, my first response to this great proposal was MBC’s 31-episode Ramadan serial, Omar, which is now ten years old. Very much like the title suggests, this is the televised story of the second Righteous Caliph, one of the fathers-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and foremost companions, ‘Umar (er, Omar) ibn al-Khattab, may God be pleased with him.
I’d seen it years and years back.
I thought it might be fun for R and I to watch; his Nano and Nana, his grandmother and grandfather, joined too. This enterprise went off course for at least two reasons. The initial, immediate, direct source of fail was that MBC’s Omar, which had been available on YouTube with English subtitles some years back, was apparently (largely) not there anymore. After watching the first episode, we struggled to find the second.
This is not to mention that the first episode was dubbed in Urdu, but at least it was still translated into English on the bottom of the screen. (R is not an Urduphone.)
There was however a much bigger catastrophe involved.
Who Dey?
A couple days later, the wife and I were seated in the bleachers at R’s Elementary School, watching his basketball team take on a local private school’s. (We won, though it was down to the wire, the clock expiring with us up 19 to 17.) My wife revealed truth to patriarchy. Though R was loath to admit it, he found the thirty-odd minutes of Omar we did watch to be pretty meh. Though I was loath to admit it, I could see why.
It’s a lot of dialogue, sometimes quite stilted and forced, and not a lot of action. Good for Nanos, Nanas, and Abus, but not so much a single-digit kid.
More urgently, she pointed out, this conception of male bonding threatened to decisively reduce me to a domesticated Imam, whose one and only role was Sunday schoolish, which wasn’t ever supposed to be the endpoint of the halaqa.
Is that what I wanted to be?
I dwelled on this for a little while, pretty quickly understanding that she was right, but our attention was diverted by an abrupt realization: although one basketball team wore blue, and our side wore green, the stands were almost entirely orange.
Because the Cincinnati Bengals were playing the Las Vegas Raiders that afternoon at 4:30! We were invited to an old, old family friend’s house for what was supposed to be pizza and the very big game, but turned into a full-on Punjabi spread and the really huge game.1 That too, proceeded as a kind of nail biter, though the clock stopped with the Bengals victorious, breaking a three-decade-plus playoff victory drought.
On an interception. An interception. A yard out of the end zone. Turned out that one of our friends was at the game. Why the heck weren’t we?
I’ve never even been to an NFL game.
I remember saying to my wife how dumb it was that I’d not seen the local teams in action—the Bengals, for example, or the Cavs.2 Though they’re a three-hour drive away in Cleveland, they’re still Ohio, they’re doing surprisingly well this season, holding their own in the playoff race, etc. A light bulb went off in my head. Monday was a day off. Was there a Cavs home game R and I could attend?
The Prodigal Son Returns
Although I was raised a Lakers fan, and identified very strongly with the Lakers for much of my life, and my wife and our daughters became Lakers fans by way of local boy turned superhero, LeBron James, R is assuredly not with us. He has decided to affiliate himself with the Brooklyn Nets and especially Kyrie Irving, the now-Muslim brother who was part of the LeBron-led 2016 Cavaliers championship squad.
He left under testy circumstances, to say the least.
On Monday, January 17th, Kyrie was coming home. So to speak.
And there were still seats! Without thinking about anything else (like, you know, the weather, which should be a normal consideration heading towards the Great Lakes in January), I bought two seats—in the nosebleeds—and didn’t tell R till the next day.
As would of course be the case, there was a big snowstorm the night before, scheduled to taper off at 10 AM game day. (The game was at 3—and the drive, as I said, was three hours and change.) The drive up to and until Akron was pretty decent, but once we reached the outskirts of Cleveland, we found snow piled high, poorly-plowed highways, and a downtown full of slipping and sliding cars and pedestrians alike.
Somehow we made it early, gorged on nachos and pretzels, clear and caramelized soda and, probably because of the major storm, found ourselves in an almost entirely empty section, in a stadium that was only half-full. After the first quarter, and sure we weren’t harming anyone, we scooted down a number of rows and found ourselves much better seats, and watched what turned out to be a fantastic game.
Masked. Socially distanced. And having the time of our lives.
Though R was pretty bummed Durant was injured and out, I know he had a great day. I know I had a grand day. The contest kept us on the edge of seats we didn’t pay for and couldn’t have afforded until the very end, a match that entertained and excited us so much so that, full of food, bladders bursting, we only left when the buzzer sounded, cleared Cleveland by 6 PM—and couldn’t stop talking about it.
Why’d Harden make that pass?
Why did Blake Griffin take that three?
What were the chances Kyrie’s triple would bounce in-and-out?
Why didn’t we do more of this?
Shouldn’t we come back for some playoff games?
Oh, and we won four tickets to a future Cavs game. (Of course, that doesn’t count March 21st, when LeBron and the Lakers descend on The Land.)
Let ‘Em Know
On the drive home, R controlled the music, playing his favorites, which included big hits from the ‘60s and ‘70s, but open to me suggesting songs he hadn’t heard of before—we rocked out and raced down 71-S to Pearl Jam, Green Day, Metallica, the new Lumineers album, though, being me, I managed to sneak in a short Omar Suleiman khutbah, which honestly I’d wanted to listen to for myself, too.
I can still remember my first baseball game. It was the Yankees, at Yankee Stadium, against who cares. My friend Chris Scott’s dad took us. I’ve no idea what happened to Chris, but the experience is burned into my brain.3 The first basketball game I remember was, I kid you not, Game 2 of the 2004 NBA Finals, when Kobe drilled a last-second shot, carried the game to overtime, and we won.
Of course, they lost the next three games and saw the Pistons raise the trophy. And then the Lakers imploded, ending a dynasty that’d delivered a three-peat. But it depends on how you look at things. The Qur’an doesn’t say “after every difficulty, there’s ease.” The correct translation is “with every difficulty, there’s ease.” So, yeah, that was the last time Shaq and Kobe donned home uniforms for the same team.
But that’s it. It was the last time. The last time they were together in the Finals. The last time they won a game.
That’s pretty damn special.
I hope R remembers this day for a really long time. Sure, it was 450 miles of occasionally treacherous driving, and on the ride back we gorged on McDonald’s while I struggled not to curse the drive-thru workers who’d heard “coffee with cream and sugar” as “coffee with no cream and no sugar,” meaning I was drinking gasoline while burning gasoline while cutting diagonally across the Buckeye State.
In bed that night, R pronounced the day “his best ever.” He was a champ too, taking the Nets’ loss in stride, analyzing the team’s mistakes but focusing on the things the team did right and still has going for them. I, on the other hand, found myself vexed. Yeah, I like the Cavs’ wine-and-gold color scheme, two things Muslim men aren’t supposed to (a) drink or (b) wear, but it’s more than just a sartorial preference.4
After all, I love the Browns’ logo and, well, the whole brown-and-orange thing. But I don’t find myself cheering Browns victories.
So what is it?
Thing is, I haven’t liked basketball in a few years. Maybe I’ve been too busy. Probably I’ve been too serious. Likely I needed this game as much as R required this. Two years into a pandemic, why the hell not? But that wasn’t it alone. I was actually cheering for the Cavs. (Yes, we supported opposing teams; no, I did not overtly celebrate. But when they won, quietly and inwardly, I smiled.)
Yesterday was all kinds of awesome. R and I talked, listened to music, cheered, commiserated, and chowed down for over twelve hours, and there wasn’t a single awkward or difficult moment.
I rooted for the Cavs in a way I haven’t rooted for any team in a long time. The Lakers, sure. That’s a part of who I was—and always will be. But Los Angeles has been an abstraction, a Cuiviénen I always wanted to visit, a mode of basketball Makkah, which you only occasionally get to circumambulate. Cleveland, though, felt like an extension of something deep within me.
Real. Tangible. Undeniable.
Something that’s part of me now in a way California won’t ever be. Something, some missing piece, that I didn’t know how to find, or even where to look for, for most of my life, but now feel consumed by. I connected with Kobe the way R relates to Kyrie. And that’s a good thing, a great thing, a wonderful thing. Enough to get me to plunk down four figures for one ticket on the other coast of the country in my early 20s.
But it’s not the same thing anymore.
The Lakers are a dream. A team that’s very often too good to be true—and sometimes too magical (sic) to meaningfully relate to. We don’t make HBO series about just any old basketball team after all. But at some point, as we grow up, whenever that happens to happen, we come to inhabit where we are, where we’ve put down roots, where we want our life to end and where the lives we are responsible take our places.
Where we accept that fight not for ourselves but for those smaller than ourselves. So don’t belittle the little things. The teams, the cities, the states we overlook. The off-days squeezed in between the busy ones.
And if you don’t believe me, take another Omar’s word for it.
Halaqa Housekeeping
For anyone keeping track, last week I shared the first lesson of the halaqa. In my next post, I’ll share the quiz I passed out based on this halaqa. The two go hand-in-hand so they should technically go back-to-back. But I felt like the lesson I learned this week, about taking a good thing far too far, is important enough to justify an interruption.
That isn’t everything I wanted to say, though.
On Sunday, I spoke at Seattle’s eLimmud, a virtual Jewish conference, where my topic was this Substack. I talked about where Sunday Schooled came from, what, how, and why I wanted to teach Islam.5 Not only did I come up with some smart, sophisticated, slick PowerPoint slides for this conference, but I think I did as good as I could.
(Because virtual events just aren’t my thing. I like real engagement much better.)6
There was only one question at the end of my remarks, though. A woman pointed out that I had made a lot of jokes but, so far as she knew, Muslims either weren’t funny or couldn’t be funny. Deep breath, Haroon. Worse still. It’s one thing to think that. It’s another thing altogether to say that. But how should someone respond to that?
I tried to answer as calmly and coolly as I could, because I had to. For all the purported communication we have and allegedly enjoy, we rarely compassionately converse with people different from ourselves. We see screens as often as we see stereotypes. There’s hardly ever a full, complex, nuanced person there.
So, yes, a small part of me was offended, but a bigger part of me also knows the way I’ve heard some Muslims casually talk about other skin colors, other religions, other ways of life, including, just a few months ago, an Imam at Friday Prayers, referring to other sexual orientations as “filth.”
Coming the day after an obviously very disturbed Muslim man took hostages in a Texas synagogue—who, mercifully, bravely escaped—I tried to remember: That might be all some people know about my faith community. Some folks say it’s on people to educate themselves out of their own bigotry.
And I get that. I do. But. But. But. I wonder: How will anyone know where and how to find their way out? That’s like my telling a person who comes to me trying to learn more about Islam to figure it out on their own. I mean, technically they could. But what would they find? And, just as importantly, can I just exit my obligation?
We have rights and duties. People owe us. We owe them.
Above all, we owe God.
If I had told that flummoxed woman that her question was outrageous, insensitive, and, well, a little absurd—humor is about as universal a human trait as there is—where would she have gone from there? While I might have felt good about myself, having sated my ego, she would leave remembering at least two things.
A Muslim mocked her. On a recorded, live-streamed event.
Knowledge is like wealth. Scratch that. Knowledge is superior to wealth. And if our religion commands those with wealth to compassionately, thoughtfully, and respectfully share our wealth in ethical ways, shouldn’t the same apply, if not more so, to what we’ve come to know and understand, whatever that amounts to?
Don’t look down on what others don’t know.
There’s a lot I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t do.
Pizza for the under-16s, with nihari, bhindi, naan, and chicken for the adults. That doesn’t include appetizers—popcorn shrimp and egg rolls—and desserts—all kinds of everything, punctuated by Diet Coke (I am addicted) and chai.
If this is every Bengals game, I am so down.
Of course, there’s also the Reds, but I understand almost nothing of baseball. Oh, and we went to a Reds game this summer, and I still understand next to null. But R loves the Reds, and baseball, and always has a fun baseball fact at the ready.
I have no context for any of said facts.
In case you are the Chris Scott, drop me a line. Not that I haven’t been looking for you, but finding the Chris Scott—there’s a lot of you out there—on social media, when you haven’t been in touch since 1999, is pretty hard.
There’s also navy and black, but don’t be that person. Nobody likes that person.
As soon as the video’s out and up, I’ll let you know!
With Two Billion Caliphs dropping on April 12, 2022, I’m hoping to focus on the Midwest for that month and then, the next month, traveling the East Coast. May 18th I’m confirmed for Boston, Mass., for a book reading and discussion. And then another one, the next day, in Philadelphia, Penn. Appearances in Pittsburgh, Hartford, and a few other cities are in preparation. Stay tuned.