B & B

Very early in the morning, the day after I started this blog, my Muse shook me awake, hissing into my ear, ‘It was supposed to be ‘Being and Belonging!’ Oh yes, I mentally murmured, I think it was indeed. And then I went right back to sleep. So how did that happen? Does it matter? I think not! 

The idea of belonging is an adjunct of being and becoming. Belonging is about identity, a sense of self as well as feeling part of a greater whole, having a sense of ‘place’ in the world. Yet the goal of being a Muslim is to yield oneself into the greater will of Allah (subhanahu wa ta’ala), to overcome the smallness of one’s petty, limited nature by aspiring to the godly qualities of Allah’s Divine Names. So surely this means abandoning a personal ‘identity’? Or, to frame it in another way, the path of self-awakening, i.e. Sufism (tasawwuf), takes one along the journey of enhancing insight into the nature of reality, that the so-called ‘you’ is but a part of something far greater, far more sublime and indeed perfect, and that ultimately has no ‘identity’ separate to the vaster ‘entity’ of existence, pure beingness or Allah (I must acknowledge here my father for the dual terms of ‘identity’ and ‘entity’ in relation to the individuated self and Universal Self – which I will revisit in another post). In a nutshell: ‘you’ do not exist! How can you therefore claim what does not exist?! (Patience! More posts on this to come!)

And yet… and yet. The only aperture through which you can experience this ‘beingness’, this miracle of existence, is the self, your ‘self’.

The issue of identity has long fascinated me, for mine has been pliable since I was conceived.  I was born of a Danish mother (Lutheran background) and an Iraqi-Persian father (Islamic background), grew up and was educated in Iraq (Baathist but pre-Saddam), Lebanon (civil war days), England (C of E in the punk rock era), the US (booming yuppy times), and married a Pakistani with whom I have lived in three countries. Throughout I traveled extensively with my family in four continents, largely due to my father’s wanderlust and questing. People with our background seemed exotic and difficult to place. Pity for my interlocutors soon taught me to edit myself into boxes with which they could be comfortable. Of course, if I ever wanted to flummox anyone I’d give them the whole story. Every now and then someone would comment on what a problem it must be to not belong to anywhere. I could never accept that:  it simply was not a problem for me. My upbringing had somehow imbued me with enough confidence and cultural fluency that I felt at ease wherever I was, that I had a right to ‘belong’, in as far as I might want to. Whatever the source of that aplomb – the sense of entitlement born of relative privilege, sound parenting or a strong sense of self – overall I never felt I had to belong to one place or one culture alone and thereby limit myself. I relished the sense of the whole world being my oyster. (There is a dark underbelly to all this of course  - more of which another time!). 

From childhood I have had a sense that the need to belong was a spiritual red herring, even as I have variously tended to identify with one stream of influence over another. And life has unfolded to not only prove that true to me, but also to allow malleable and multiple senses of being at one with ethnicity, nationality, gender, class, religion and, indeed, my human fallibility. Ultimately, a liberating sense of my own identity has come by being true to all the layers in the sediment of my self, without denying one or promoting one over the other. The bedrock, however, has evolved over time to be distinctly Muslim. For now this is all I will say on belonging.

A word about my Muse. I’ve been woefully negligent of her advances. This is because she usually visits me in the wee hours, about one or two hours before fajr. Having lived according to the relentless timetable of school-going children for many years (early starts) and a husband who unlike the early bird I am tends towards the night owl, I have had to ignore her enticements to write in favour of much needed sleep. I’m not going to tussle with her any more. She’ll make me sick if I don’t listen to her.

Glossary:

Subhanahu wa ta’ala: May He be glorified and exalted

Tasawwuf: Sufism

Fajr: dawn, break of day (First Islamic prayer time of the day)