For a child of immigrants—like myself—the story I’m going to tell is entirely unsurprising and, at the exact same time, totally shocking. It’s both precisely what I’ve understood would happen to our identities over time and, just as much, incredibly hard to come to terms with. Because it pokes one of the most immense and enormous anxieties known to any person. That we have expiration dates.
Sure, other than megalomaniacal dictators and wholesale narcissists, all of us know we’re going to die. We comprehend it, at least. So we look for continuity in faith, legacy, nation, tribe, tradition, or family. What happens, though, when you live in modernity, where, as Marx put it, “all that is solid melts into air,” the ruthless, heartless juggernaut of all-that-is eating away at anything and everything?
Growing up the son of Pakistani transplants, I struggled with identities. I even did my graduate work in Indo-Islamic studies, examining the legacy of Muslim philosophy and culture in late colonial South Asia, trying to better understand. Unlike many of my peers, I didn’t just know some Urdu, but I went ahead and learned how to read and write it. I even taught Urdu at Columbia University, to second-year students.
All of this is important background for you to know and me to cry over.
For I studied medieval and modern Punjabi, Persian, and Arabic. I learned the Devanagari and Gurmukhi scripts, so that I could read South Asian languages in three alphabets. (Almost all of that is gone now; Shahmukhi is great, but it hardly pays bills.) If I’m getting a little lost in the weeds, and your eyes are glazing over, freaking good. That’s the point. It makes what’s coming even more compelling.
Even more devastating.
I also studied other immigrant experiences in America and I was simultaneously active in American Muslim communities. Out of both these, in tandem, I realized that ethnic identities usually dissolve in America—though some larger categories, like race, do not—and processed that if the enormous pluralism of American Islam was to survive, ethnic particularities would have to recede.
Fortunately, as I said, they would inevitably fade.
Even before we got married, my wife, understanding the importance of these subjects to me and my life trajectory, warned me that many of the things she and I were invested in were simply irrelevant to the kids, both because they weren’t yet at the age many of us explore questions of identity as intensively—I think that usually happens later (say, in college) and because they were just too far chronologically removed.
That said, it’s one thing to know something.
It’s a whole different thing to experience it.
Context, Characters
This is the kind of golden anecdote that this Substack always hoped for. One of our daughters—I’m not going to say which one—is extremely sensitive to anything that might remotely approximate racism, bias, or prejudice. That’s funny, because she’s a central character in this story. But before we get there, she’s not the only character. There’s also me, my wife (of course, her mom), and in absentia, “Khadijah.”
Who’s “Khadijah”? Khadijah is one of our daughter’s childhood best friends, who she grew up with and has known for, well, close to a decade. Not only that, but—and this is very important to this incident—Khadijah is Palestinian. Not just Palestinian, though. Her family isn’t only a very influential Palestinian family, but her mom advocates for Palestinian rights across the country.
Conversation, Consternation
The setting: Suburban Cincinnati. Sometime after sundown.
My wife is talking to me across the dinner table, and mentions Khadijah’s mom, and says, “you know, she wrote about being Palestinian on—”
Our daughter interrupts—the one who’s been friends with Khadijah for years and years—absolutely astonished. Like floored. “Wait. Khadijah is Palestinian?”
My wife sits back in something like shock. I am at this point only amused. I interject, “You didn’t know where one of your best friends is from?”
Daughter stumbles. “I thought she was brown.”
Brown? What in the fatwa is brown? As in she thought Khadijah was desi—as in, from the Indian Subcontinent? I look at daughter in confusion. Now it’s my wife’s turn to savor this. “I told you,” she said, “that these kids don’t know this stuff.” She laughed. “Come to think of it, Khadijah may not even know she’s Palestinian.”
But this is too much for our daughter, who has transitioned seamlessly from legitimately surprised to morally charged. “Mama,” she protests, “how can you say that? Of course she knows she’s Palestinian.”
At this point, I could not help myself. May God forgive me. I had to know. Even if part of me didn’t want to know. I turned to our daughter, addressing her by name. “Where are you from?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Your grandparents—what’s their ancestry, their ethnicity?”
She said,“Pakistani,” although there was a hint of a question in her answer. Like this conversation was going somewhere she didn’t want it to go.
This was correct, of course, but not exactly what I was looking for. “But what kind of Pakistani? What’s our ancestry, our ethnicity, the group we come from?”
When she paused, entirely unsure, I added in, entirely unhelpfully, “This is a population of about 200 million people.”1
We waited in a pause that was probably more painful for her grandparents than it was for us—and it was painful for us. (We live in a multigenerational home.) But she didn’t know. She had no idea. Her sister, who’s usually on her case about everything (and the sentiments are reciprocated) rode in to her rescue. “Punjab!” she said. Which was mostly accurate. We are all, in different ways, of Punjabi ethnicity and ancestry.
Game, set, match.
I won the battle and lost the war.
Elderflower
Okay, while it’s funny that kids who are really invested in sensitivities about race and identity don’t know the answer to their own ethnicity, at least sort of kind of and for some of us, here’s the thing. Should she have known?
And what if she didn’t?
As someone who studied history, teaches history, and loves history, yes, of course—we should know such things. I find the modern obsession with the eternal present to be sad and scary. If we don’t know how things were, we don’t know why things are the way they are. It’s not about mindlessly preserving or revering the past. But you can’t creatively and thoughtfully approach the world if you think it emerged ex nihilo.
We don’t believe that theologically. Why would we believe it otherwise?
That said, let’s be realistic. They’re Americans. As far as we know, their kids will be Americans. My wife and I know more about being Pakistani because, well, we’re closer to Pakistan. When I was growing up, we went every year. But I haven’t been back in five years. Allah knows the next time I’ll visit. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that, with my mother passed, God bless her, and my father so much older…
What’s the motivating reason to go?
My generation also had to negotiate an identity. Are we also supposed to pass on the existentially schizophrenic mode many of us spent years, if not decades, enmeshed in? America is home for their (step)parents. America is that much more so their home. This is where they live. It’s a question of priorities. But this is where things get complicated. By way of background, lineage and family are religious values.
When Muslim scholars in medieval times tried to figure out what revelation (Shari‘ah, incompletely translated as “Islamic law”) was meant to do, what the purpose of all these rules and regulations were, they discerned something called their maqasid (their objectives, goals, purposes). These were largely five in number: Protecting life, religion, intellect, property. And family.
Your heritage is part of your religion. But religion is a lot like economics. You have to decide where to focus your attention. You can’t do everything, because you’re not omnipotent, or omniscient, or even particularly prescient or particularly competent. (I mean all of us, not solely you.) Consider those modern contexts. In the past, ethnic identities in America often dissolved, softened, or transformed, into larger racial coherences (the Irish became white—Italians did, too), but religion often endured.
Not in the same ways. But it did endure. Meaningful Italianness dissipated. Meaningful Catholicity thrived. (Growing up, I knew plenty of kids of Italian heritage—not very Italian, but still Catholic.) Now, though, religion is fading, too. So the question is: How do we ensure a continuity of values that matter? And, related to that, how do we decide between values? I’m so happy that the kids are so good with their prayers. They forget sometimes, but they always make it up when they’re reminded.
But should I be concerned that their go-to reflex on seeing their cousins is “hi,” and not “salam,” and I mean is that just really silly? Or do these smaller practices and rituals create webs that produce stronger identities, that reinforce the core practices, and are reinforced, in turn, by the core practices—there is, as my wife points out, no religion without culture(s). (And we have many cultures: I’m Pakistani, and Punjabi, and American, and a Midwesterner. Add in class, gender, and etc.)
But here’s a question: Is there culture without religion? And what kind of religion survives when the culture surrounding it is increasingly informed either by no religion—or by religious ideals and practices deeply incompatible with the religion you want to pass on? How do American Muslims negotiate Americanness and Muslimness? Yes, of course, you can be American and Muslim. But that’s not an interesting question to my anymore. Maybe it was twenty years ago.
I’m absolutely not saying you have to be Pakistani to be Muslim. That’d be silly.
I’m also not imagining it’s a zero-sum game, both because culture and religion aren’t opposites or substitutes, and also because we’re not robots, we’re embedded and embodied beings. What I am saying is: What do we do at the places where the two seem to conflict? What do we do when the values informing one set of cultural practices, say among our peers, conflict with the values informing one set of religious practices, say our pieties?
Does knowing where we come from have any effect on who we want to be?
Muslim in the Mirror
When I was in Pakistan in the late 1990s, when I was several years older than either of my daughters, I was sitting in the family room of my eldest maternal aunt’s house—my Apa Khala. I heard her speaking Punjabi, and was confused. My father spoke Punjabi, that I knew. He was Punjabi. But I’d only ever heard my mother speak Urdu. “Why,” I asked Apa Khala’s daughter, “is your mom speaking Punjabi?”
“Because…” she said, confused. “…we’re Punjabi.”
“We are?”
She all but slapped me.
All’s well that ends well. An essay, for example. Or a life. For another example: I returned from a mehndi, the ceremony that starts my wife’s cousin’s wedding weekend. (It’s a very South Asian thing: Learn more here.) As you will be amazed to learn, and no doubt my past selves were too, I not only practiced a dance, but performed one, at least attempting bhangra in a public setting.2
While F flatly refused to participate, Z did tentatively dip a toe in, but hopping on one leg while raising the roof was a bridge too far. Somehow, though, it was nothing at all for R who is now ten years old and eagerly careened around the dance floor, having the Punjabi time of his life. So I suppose there’s divergencies, continuities, and the excess self-consciousness of early adolescence.
That too shall pass—and I want to trust in what comes after. After all, if it took me till my early 40s to do something that turned out to be so much easier than I expected—not that I was any good, but at least I didn’t fall flat on my face—and so much more fun than I imagined, then who am I to sit here and judge when anything comes together? And I mean what kind of Punjabi man doesn’t dance?
Last night, after the mehndi, lots of family came over. R stayed up with his, but eventually yielded, and passed out on the couch. Eventually, long after everyone had left and in between cleaning up, I convinced him to go to his room. As he stumbled towards the bed, I said, “you don’t need to read surahs tonight,” conscious that he was effectively already unconscious.
R is a very affectionate child. Last night, for the first time in ever, after I as per usual told him I loved him, he told me he did, too. I got to meditate on this a long time, because foolishly, my wife and I had chai, the hardcore kind, around nine pm, and paid for it with a night that never ended, long after everyone else’s did. But hey. All’s well that ends well. We had donuts for breakfast.
Because it feels like Eid already.
According to Wikipedia, I am extremely wrong on this. There are about 150 million people of Punjabi ancestry in the world. That said, with current birthrates, give it, I don’t know, ten years, and then I’ll be right. Isn’t that why you love Sunday Schooled? Because it’s like you’re living in the future—and it was free to subscribe.
There is a video, and I’m not averse to showing you do what I thought approximated rhythm, coordination, timing, and placement, except that there’s like fifteen other people in the video, and far be it from me to out them. Unless, of course… they allowed me to. In which case, well, stay tuned. Once again, this Substack anticipates the future.
Video evidence, or it didn't happen. 😂
Thank you for sharing your meditations on forms of identity (and your play by play hilarious reactions along the way).