What’s in a Name? Headaches if You Share One With Iraq’s Strongman

by Dr. Mahjabeen Islam-Husain

Life as a Muslim in these United States is indeed interestingwith the word “interesting” retaining all the more dubious accretions it has acquired in our uncertain times. Even though I had traveled to many parts of Europe and Asia prior to coming to the United States, the American experience was in many ways both more and less than anticipated.

Confident “hellos” from fellow joggers I encountered were so welcome after the frigid non-acknowledgements of Europeans, and the reticent awkwardness of Asians. Even after 14 years in the United States, I remain impressed with the comfortable friendliness here between absolute strangers.

I learned rather quickly, however, that this warmth and welcome could also serve as a veneer, covering rather thinly, both credulity and bias. Something which still irks me is the appalling lack of geographical and historical knowledge of the average (and sometimes above-average) American. I’m tired of explaining my origin and eliciting an uncomprehending stare with the word “Pakistan.”

I know already that the questioner has tagged me erroneously as an Arab. So, being obsessive-compulsive, when I explain that Pakistan is next to India, further irritation awaits me because I suspect that most questioners don’t know where India is either, and that their “Oh, OK” is a cover-up.

I fleetingly toy with the idea of pulling out a map and asking them to point out India. Even as I hastily dispense with this socially inappropriate fantasy, I resentfully wonder how people can have forgotten where a huge place like a subcontinent is. And why, just because my English is accented and I am “browner-skinned,” I must necessarily be “Middle Eastern.”

“How does South Asian sound, guys? A tad away from the “Middle” and a smidge more to the “East.”

Perhaps it’s my name. Life before marriage and hyphenation was so simple! No smart remarks about Saddam Hussain. No guarded looks. Very little prejudice.

In fact, no one I came across in my days as a single person with a single last name ever seemed to have figured out that people with the name “Islam” were Muslim, or even what Americans love to call us, Islamic. Back then I was just another person. But along came marriage and, some years later, the Gulf war.

Life before marriage and hyphenation was so simple.

Thanks to Saddam Hussain and, perhaps, a deficiency in the American educational system, we were catapulted into infamy. A phone call at 2 a.m. threatening to “get some meat on the knife!” really rocked our routine for a bit. Clearly someone was on sensory overload and wasn’t interested in hearing that the name “Husain” is almost as common in the Muslim world as is “Smith” in the United States.

Some concerned Muslim friends advised me to change my name. If Husain was a problem, Islam-Husain was “too much,” they said. I felt like retorting that perhaps I should change my name to Jane Smith, add a little twang to my accent, dye my hair blond, affect blue contact lenses and let people assume I was a WASP baked to perfection in the warm Florida sun!

Of course I didn’t say anything of the sort. Instead I replied somewhat officiously that, since my name “Islam” means submission to the will of God, if it was His will that I be targeted and persecuted, so be it. I submit. I rejected as overkill the possibility of adding that the other part of my name, “Husain,” is the name of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Husain, who is Islam’s most memorable martyr.

It did seem to me, however, that people were being amazingly air-headed for suggesting so casually that we make such a major concession to mindless ignorance as changing our name. On the other hand, it may have been that “the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves,” and that I was being unnecessarily intense, stuffy and serious.

In any case we survived the Gulf war with no wounds beyond the threatening phone call, and actually a moment of amusement, fraught with potential embarrassment. The day after the war started, at a JCPenney store, I wrote a check with the dreaded name printed at the top. Several minutes after a nervous cashier had disappeared to find him, none other than the manager of the store came to validate the check. I’d have given a few dollars for his thoughts at the time!

“The Black Sheep of the Family”

Even more value for the money might have been provided by the thoughts of patients in the emergency room where my physician husband works. To anyone who had the temerity to ask him, “Saddam Hussain, any relation?” My husband would reply, with the straightest face, “Yes, uncle, black sheep of the family!”

But, of course, my husband wasn’t trying to cash a check.

Another American foible is a patronizing condescension in regard to the English language. We have never been asked where or at what age we started learning English. The question, instead, is “How long have you lived in the United States?” It was fun when the answer was two months. People would say, “Wow, you really speak so well.”

Now when I answer “14 years,” I have to resist saying that since I started learning English right from kindergarten, I suspect my English may be as serviceable as that of the average (or above average) American.

Again, obviously, I’m too intense and my husband’s dry wit is a superb “fix-all.” When one well-meaning soul praised his English and asked him where he had learned it he responded, “on the flight here,” and changed the subject. Had I been there I would have empathetically suffered deep embarrassment at the entire encounter.

I’m told that many Americans are deficient in their knowledge of other countries and cultures because it is very superficially touched on in school. This, in turn, is because in real life knowing or not knowing exactly where Italy is located is not going to hamper performance in a minimum-wage job, or even as CEO in any but a multinational company.

I’ll acknowledge that familiarity with events in one’s own community or small town, and understanding how to influence them, can have a far greater impact on day-to-day life in the United States. But surely an education should include more than just the ability to read and use a computer.

I was jarred on a recent Monday morning when a patient, the service manager at a Toledo auto dealership who has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, came into my office and, after an exchange of pleasantries, asked me why my Qur’an has no mention of the word “love.”

I was taken aback by both the ridiculousness of the statement and the conviction with which it was uttered. At the same time, I could easily visualize the kind of Sunday preacher my patient was quoting, serenely planting mixed seeds of bigotry and fallacy in the minds of congregants for whom Islam is only a synonym for terrorism.

Perhaps I am wrong in assuming that a philosophy major could be expected to have acquired at least a cursory acqaintance with the major religions of the world. But, regardless, it seems to me that common sense would counsel that in all such religions the supreme Deity is not hateful, but rather gentle, loving and kind.

If only different religions could be examined purely on their merits rather than presented merely as inferior contrasts to one’s own beliefs. The central concepts in Christianity are love, and personal salvation through love. It is true that Islam’s central concepts are not love, but belief and deed. There is belief in the One God, in the prophets, and in the Day of Judgment. And, since Islam is a deeds-based religion, what you sow, you reap—in this life and in the hereafter.

But none of this is to say that there is no mention of love. Every chapter of the Qur’an starts with the invocation, “In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful.” Muslims start practically every activity with this phrase, recounting thus the great love that God has for His creation. In the Qur’an ninety-nine names, or attributes, of Allah are mentioned, out of which ninety-four are moving descriptions of His love and mercy.

Muslims are enjoined to be kind to their parents, their families, their neighbors, travelers, the wayfarer, the poor, women, and children. Love and kindness alone are not going to cut it, though. Loving God and/or Prophet Muhammad is not a Muslim’s salvation. His conduct in this world is the key to that.

Islam is a composite whole of principles and practice. A true Muslim cannot adopt one and discard the other. The principles are the belief in One God, the Prophets and the Day of Judgment. The practice is 1) the Shahadah, or statement that there is no God but God and Muhammad is His messenger, 2) prayer five times a day, 3) daytime fasting in the month of Ramadan, 4) Giving 2.5 percent of one’s savings annually to the poor and needy, and 5) making the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime by those who can afford it.

Even my witty husband would agree that misleading remarks such as that of my patient do not merit a rebuttal in kind, nor the hurt they can produce. What’s required is a calm statement of what Islam truly is, and not an attack on a tunnel-visioned preacher, who may feel personally threatened by the surging tide of Islam. And sympathy and forgiveness.

One of the oft-repeated qualities of God is His forgiveness. Muslims are enjoined to practice God’s qualities, for that demontrates our love for Him and facilitates peace on earth. Therefore I must forgive not only my patient but also the preacher who I fear has never learned that the same Jesus Christ who said, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do,” is one of our prophets too.

In fact my patients are very easy to forgive. It goes back to that incredibly welcoming trait I’ve noted since day one in North America. Here are men and women who aren’t quite sure where I’m from, know nothing of my ethnic background, and whose knowledge of my religious beliefs is, to put it gently, flawed. Yet I am their physician, and the one to whom they entrust their health, quite the invaluable commodity. The paradox here is very endearing. So many patients see foreign physicians, a variegated gamut of hues, accents and cultural and religious persuasions. Perhaps this emanates from the very impressive quality of trust, that instinctive welcoming trait that Americans have. The genesis of this trust is difficult for me to understand. Its instinctive innocence makes the onus heavy, yet strangely fragile. I pray its never broken.