My story starts with my parents. My Afghan father and Pakistani mother were living in Kabul during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. My father, Mohammad, was strong and stoic with a poor temper. He came home one night and told my mom she had two hours to pack and get on a plane to Pakistan. He was to follow. My mom – the total opposite of my father – complied. That evening, with fake Ariana Airline I.D. cards presenting her as a flight attendant, she was smuggled out of Afghanistan.
My parents settled in Karachi, Pakistan, and soon had my brother and I. Childhood in Pakistan was boring. I sensed the discrimination from my extended family, mostly from my grandmother. My mom’s family, her mother, brother and his wife and three children, and my two free-spirited uncles who later moved to the States, all lived under the same roof, in an estate two streets down from our apartment. We’d spend almost all our free time there, but it was a cold and unwelcoming place and I knew I didn’t belong there.
It’s a strange feeling to be somewhere often and know it’s alien to you, that you don’t belong and are seen as less than. If we’d spend the night, we’d all sleep in my grandmother’s room, which had the square footage of a small home. My cousin, a year older than me, would share my grandmother’s sizable bed and I’d sleep on the floor. I remember one night I’d forgotten to take off my gold ring and place it on the bedside table, following some rule about not wearing jewelry at night. Having already laid on the floor at the foot of the bed, I felt immense dread in getting up again and drawing attention to myself. I didn’t know what would “get me,” the ghost I felt lurking in the long sad hallways, or my grandmother. Either way, I wasn’t risking it. I put the ring in my mouth and went to sleep.
My grandmother wasn’t the sweet granny I read about in my favorite book, The Little Match Girl. She wasn’t even the archetypical crone because she had no wisdom to offer. She had only deep wounds from an unfair life that thrust her at the top in a complex business world in 1960’s Pakistan – a time and place where no one was ready to be told what to do by a woman. And she learned to get by much like many lost and unconnected woman do, through a continual degradation of others.
Another time, I remember my eldest uncle asking me to bring him a cup of tea. He had the air of a retired army general, except he’d never been in the army. He demanded impeccable presentation and wanted to be called “Sir.” I brought him tea with a saucer, walking on some imaginary tight rope, the tinkling of the tea cup teasing a spill with every step forward as a circle of guests watched to see if I could make it. I’m sure they thought it was cute. I thought it was dreadful. The only saving grace in that household was the annual mango party where we’d gorge on the most delicious mangoes with hedonistic fervor. For one evening there was a wildness and the smell of rich mangoes perfumed the air.
That was Pakistan.
I felt the tension in people as they lived day to day life. Something just didn’t fit. Nobody was really comfortable. At five, you don’t make sense of things the same way as you would an adult. You just sense things. I sensed something was not happy about Pakistan.
I wasn’t a fan of too many people at school either. I loved learning but I was bored with my school, zoning out to observe a battalion of thick black ants marching by the teacher’s foot, who was going on about the same lesson as before at a painfully dull pace. I remember thinking the other students were wild animals who couldn’t be left on their own, and that I could be learning a lot more than I was. I also hated the pointless school rules – so I’d break them often in whatever way I could, thinking, “What can they really do about it?” Shimmery glass bangles or a dozen clips in my hair – things that distracted from the uniform were frowned upon. But they were part of my uniform.
And I wanted to be a witch. I wasn’t quite sure what witches did, but that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was about four when I decided upon it. I had a frock of silver with silver leggings and shoes to match, and I thought, “You know what’s missing? A wand with a big silver star at the end.” And that’s when it was decided. In a room full of people at yet another society dinner party, I became a witch.
It was probably a pretty spot-on thing to be. Witches are outliers. They’re women who think differently, deeply and intuitively. They go against the grain in society and against the rules and customs that society has placed on them. While women who have lost their sacred feminine conform, witches are sacred feminine embodied. They hold onto that fiercely and protectively, unafraid to go against authority. That is often the reason why they’re villainized – because they cannot be controlled. They cannot be tamed.
Witches are outsiders and I in no way felt connected to my community. I felt like an outsider. Little did I know that I was going to spend the next 25 years being an outsider because I would need to learn to become an outlier. But first we needed to leave Pakistan.
My mother, who had most of her feminine strength stripped from her years before, and only regained it again years after my father’s death, had just enough left to know something wasn’t right. She felt suffocated by the binds of Pakistani society:
“It was a plastic society. If you didn’t have money, you were nothing. And we were poor. I was ignored by society, and my own family. When you kids were born, my mom told me to bring you to her house to present you to society. She didn’t want her friends to know how we lived. She didn’t want them to know we were poor.”
There’s resentment in her voice and hurt and anger on her face. And if you ever saw her speaking to my grandmother, you’d think a small child was speaking to its parent. Deeper issues and past grievances aren’t discussed – and there are a lot of grievances that have stunted older generations. Stories are sometimes recounted as if you’d been through “the war.” There’s deep trauma and it’s carried with them no matter where they migrate.
So my mom tried really hard to make sure we had the best clothes, and were always clean and presentable. It was important to her that people didn’t look down on her children or think less of them because of our status in society. The money she earned from teaching, she spent on our wardrobes with clothes from London and Canada. What she couldn’t afford to buy, she would sew herself.
In Afghanistan, my father had been a wealthy jeweler working for King Zahir Shah and a trusted close confidant in Kabul’s high society. They had a grand home, he was highly respected, and they had considerable freedom. In Pakistan, he was a tailor and we lived in a two bedroom flat above his shop, with cement walls that were often scaled by lizards. There was no hot running water – or even a shower stall. Water had to be heated up and as children we stood in a bucket to bathe. Neither parent was happy, and it was particularly hard for my dad who was a proud man. So we left when I was five years old.
We made our way to Iran, where my dad had some family. We ended up staying there for several months, maybe longer. The Iranian Revolution had already happened but things were still relatively normal – mostly. Women started covering their hair in public. There was talk of religious crackdowns. Women would drive around and pop out of the car if they saw another woman wearing lipstick. They spotted my mom and offered her a napkin to wipe her lips; the napkin was filled with broken glass.
At five, I was sheltered from that Iran. Iran was beautiful and other worldly – and I was shown tremendous love by my aunt and her family. To this day I’m overwhelmed by how much love they have and how freely they share it – something that is very common among Afghans. I was happy with them in Iran in a way that I never could be in Pakistan. But soon we left Iran too.
We made our way across to Germany, stopping in Turkey briefly. We visited Topkapi Palace and some other ancient places. What I loved most was the hotel basement bar. It was a dark little hideaway where a freakishly tall waiter dressed in an all-white suit maintained a steady supply of strawberry jam and cheese while I listened to the bar play Baltimora’s Tarzan Boy on repeat. The West was looking pretty good.
From Turkey we headed to Germany, to a small little town outside in Springe, called Eldagsen. It was about as picturesque as the south of France, with farmland extending beyond the horizon and a dreamlike haze sheltering the town from the outside world. We’d draw pictures, slip them in bottles and send them down the creek. We’d walk a mile to school every day, even in three feet of snow. I found a best friend. And I fell in love with Pippi Longstocking.
Germans were very welcoming once the pastor and my best friend’s family befriended us. My mom also made it a point that I visit the local church; she said it was important to know how other people worshipped. Life in Germany was pretty idyllic. We assimilated quickly, speaking fluent German in three months and embracing the culture. That takes a mindset, but it also takes a community. My best friend’s mom, Karin, and the pastor were generous with their time, finding ways to help us settle into a new country, gently guiding my mom in adapting to a German way of life. And then we had to leave. Two years in, there were still some issues getting past a refugee status that would allow my dad to work more typically.
We moved to America, the land where children appeared on milk cartons. It was a jarring environment and I struggled with it. While adapting to American culture was incredibly hard compared to Europe, the stories of the American Revolution and the promise that is America stoked a profound respect for freedom. I was born in a culture that struggled to see the individual, and here Americans had individuality fought for two centuries ago – something that they now seemed to yawn at. It took me 10 years to adjust to the States and another 10 years to feel comfortable living here.
I don’t think my dad was ever quite happy here. In a way, like many other first generation refugees of war, he’d never left Kabul. He lost his spark and eventually gave up and passed away in 2006. And over the years, my mom had rediscovered Islam. It’s what happens with many immigrants from secular Muslim societies as they try to maintain an identity in a new country: they find religion.
When I was 13 years old, she tried to get me to attend an Islamic school, start learning the Quran in Arabic, and offer daily prayers. She eventually gave up trying. My sister wasn’t quite so lucky, and spent several miserable years at one of the first Islamic schools in Southern California – where they were trying to figure out how to blend a Muslim identity with an American one, and likely still might be. At age 4, my sister looked like she was Khan of a Mongol tribe. Needless to say, she didn’t fit in either and led wars against the boys during recess, pretending she was Xena, Warrior Princess. Meanwhile, my brother joined the Marines, which gave him the confidence that he’d never found shuffling from country to country during his formative years.
And I did what any other good Muslim girl did. I went to school, made socially acceptable friends, didn’t cross the street without permission; didn’t really do much of anything except a lot of homework. I graduated from university and started law school, checking off all the right boxes in life. Hindsight being 20/20, I was losing my spark fast. Maybe because we had a lot more family around us, and a larger ethnic community, we didn’t adapt and integrate with an outside community the way we had in Germany. There was no Karin Aunty in the States – but there was an Aunty Sarah, who married my mom’s brother. She’d moved from England to the States, but she might has well have been Mary Poppins, cascading down with an umbrella and unsettling and rearranging things the way they needed unsettling.
She was just one person though. Here we didn’t have the same larger grounded sense of community like we had in a small German town. It was easy to get lost in America. Everything was already so spread out and disconnected. I just sort of disconnected too.
And then – in the most impossible way – I met Stephen. From the North of England with a thick accent and a cheeky wit, he had a gravitational field that just pulled people in. He was magic. We had endless conversations, some setting the groundwork for who I was to become. He’d recommend a book and I’d start reading; 8 hours later I’d have read the whole thing to him over the phone and he’d just listen. It was like that. It was an effortless free-fall without labels or expectations. There was deep trust, total honesty, and an unshakeable bond. He was the landscape I wandered in for 7 years. Nothing would make me happier than the sound of his laugh. He was, and still is, completely sacred.
He was a force of nature and he birthed me. From one of our many talks, I realized that I wasn’t comfortable with Islam or my understanding of it. “Muslim” was a label that held no real value or meaning to me. Like most other Muslims, it was a badge we wore and a dutiful allegiance we pledged – but we didn’t know much of it. We couldn’t have a deeper conversation on Islam in a way that mattered or explored boundaries. It was the first time I was curious about Islam.
Stephen pointed to a door that only I could open, and I opened it. There was no going back. Those were an uncomfortable few years as I tried to reconcile my upbringing with the questions that began surfacing after 9/11. I didn’t struggle with identity because as a transient early on, the idea of a pegged concrete identity was smashed. You adapted to new ideas and they became a part of you. My family wasn’t so flexible, perhaps because they weren’t as young when we started migrating. They’d already formed an identity. For me, a set identity is a prison. To say I am just one thing or another would be like walking into a cage. There are markers I’d picked up along the way that would act as guides, but I wasn’t confined by them either. Sufism was one of those markers.
In seeking answers, I stumbled across Sufism – and I knew I’d found home. Considering a third of all Pakistanis are Sufi, and that Afghanistan has its own diverse tradition of shamanism and Sufism, it’s tragic that it took so long to be aware of a rich cultural heritage that housed Islam’s mystical branch. Sufism comes from an ancient line that ties deeply held spiritual beliefs that connect and honor spirituality and sacredness of the individual. It promotes individual awakening to a higher source, and, coming from mainstream Islam that disconnects that divine connection, Sufism was a powerful draw. It tapped into and validated what I always knew as true and felt so strongly: individual strength that draws from a deeper connection with an outside world, above and below.
Sufism holds a tradition of master and disciple and I realized I had one already – Stephen. He was Shams Tabrizi. He was V from Vendetta. He was Herman Hesse’s Demian. And the total devotion and unconditional love disciples have for their teacher, I had – and have – for him.
Stephen cracked the egg and I think he knew exactly what was inside, what he was awakening. Years of almost daily conversations with him laid the foundation for a new path in my mind, unknotting barriers and reworking pathways. Breaking old thought patterns and making room to let new ones form.
During that time, I started digging into faith. I threw myself into independent studies in Islam, Christianity, Kabbalah, Hinduism, Hermetics, Paganism – I threw myself into the rabbit hole. I went to Bible studies, on spiritual retreats with new age Hindus, and met with as many diverse groups of Muslims as I could get my hands on. I explored and experimented. I studied people and I learned to read between the lines. That side of faith and discovery never ends; you have to keep prodding. Sacred spirituality is something that has to always be kept connected, like the umbilical cord from mother to child so you can keep receiving and be connected a divine source, the source of creation.
Stephen unlocked potential. He showed me how holy humanity is what we’re capable of once we destroy old systems. The next natural step was reform, but I still wasn’t a reformer. That was still years away as experience after experience continued to nurture an awareness to hear the call.
[Editorial Note: This essay is included in She Rises: How Goddess Feminism, Activism, and Spirituality?]
Thank you for your powerful work and for the bridges you build.