The Myth of the Spiritually Weak Muslim Daughter

By MM Salem

Muslims are great storytellers and even better critics. It’s a gift. If we were to follow the words of every crafty orator so easily, then everything would be true and not true at the same time.

We need the skill to decipher wisdom in the lessons of our lives just as we need the ability to share with one another the curiosity of the wisdom we believe. Above all, we need the guidance of Al-Hakeem to show us the difference as we maintain our etiquette in anticipation for knowledge. Thus, the duality of faithful worshippers who are good storytellers and even better critics.

 

In that, I have a story to share. It’s something that happened in real life that I have been trying to put into words.

 

The Death in a Family

 

A few months ago, my mother received a phone call from a friend. She let out a sharp gasp in disbelief. A distant friend’s daughter had died. I tried to understand how we knew this person, mentally drawing out a community map, wondering if I knew the aunt who called.

 

On cue, the women assembled at the home of the family of the deceased to provide prayerful condolence. I had to catch myself from thinking this call was just for older Muslim women who knew every beautiful dua. If a Muslim dies, I too am summoned at a notice – that is a rite in our faith.

 

Thus, our community was called to transition the deceased and their family to a new iteration of life, be it the family coping here with us, on earth, or the soul waiting for its entrance to the barzakh.

 

Soon after the young woman was laid to rest, speculation ensued. She was a college student. That was the first fact I knew. The family shared that her death was sudden. That I too believed. The rest, however, became the community’s unfortunate speculative fiction. Amidst the sobbing of a mother gripped by the disbelief that her daughter was no longer with us, there was an elephant in the room and the older women couldn’t stop themselves from guessing.

 

Why did this young girl die? Did she do it to herself?

 

I was enraged by the question. I admonished my mom to stop discussing it with her friends, and instead asked her to pray for the family and daughter. She listened, but only at my protest.

 

I imagined how a sheikh would help these women see why their discussion wasn’t appropriate. He would tell them, in firm disapproval, “Gossip is a great sin, cease your conversation. Only Allah (swt) knows her afterlife.”

 

Then I thought of how mental health professionals would talk about it. One friend I know in that field of study would definitely say, “This is a form of processing trauma, a stage of grief, an unhealthy way of coping. With community-wide support, better strategies can help soften the discomfort.”

 

Another friend, a public health professional, might say, “Have you read the recent study illustrating that Muslims are in fact committing suicide at measurable rates?”

 

Another, a graduate from a liberal arts college might add, “This is gendered Islamophobia. Muslim women experiencing depression are underdiagnosed, passed off as being ‘unreasonable’ by medical professionals and ‘spiritually weak’ from our cultural community. There is much to be discussed and there are many environmental factors that lead to this. That’s why we need more services, education, and intervention.” I am friends with them and agree on many fronts, so I’ve heard variations of these responses before on different issues.

 

My crime and punishment of being friendly with aunts, the sheikhs and sheikhas, the college-educated, and friends that speak over themselves is that I see all the points they are making, but not the point of my sensitive friend in the power and meaning of her words when she says, “InshAllah her family heals. Allah knows best.”

 

In a moment of chatter an uncle silenced the noise in the room (and my head).

 

“This is what happens when Muslim girls go to college away from their families.”

 

The conversation picked up where it was left off, however, this time it wasn’t the aunts who had a lot of things to say. It was me, who knew emphatically that could not be the reason Allah (swt) revealed to us this test.

 

But how did I know that? Better yet, how can I explain this to a well-meaning uncle now jaded by the death he sees in his own community.

 

I thought of all the examples, case studies, stories of people with lived-experience I could tell this man. Except the one story that would give him and I a new idea.

 

What is the story playing out here in our community that he sees so clearly but has no words for, and that I see so clearly but have too many words for?

 

For that reason, I did not have an answer. I would need hours to explain to him mental health, the trials of Muslim women in America, stigmatization of mental illness, and the exhaustion of it all in an unsupportive environment. I could host hundreds of conferences where my expert friends would say “intervention is a complex issue.”

 

Her uncle only had to say something in seconds for those in the room to believe him, not because he was a man and I was a woman, but because he was tired of this recurring story, and I was too much of an expert to see he was past the point of grieving. We all were.

 

Narratives on Muslim Girls

 

An everyday person does not need a field of study to understand what they are seeing. The field of study is built on studying them. What the field of study needs to do is to not write for other experts, or only surround themselves with the highly educated of their communities; they need to engage and speak to the uncomfortable truths of difference we see from our most confused and misguided believers.

 

Everyone knows there is a problem; there are enough studies to prove that. However, what’s not discussed at length is how favoring the polished speaker has led to a divestment of engaging with our unpolished communities, which continues the perpetuation of harmful narratives about Muslim American girls among our silenced working class communities.

We have turned women and girls, who go through struggle and triumph, as do we all, into the force of our survival as a community.

 

It is easier for her uncle to believe that she died because of something that happened away from her family. That is a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. After all, he watched her grow up; she was bright and memorized the Quran. The only explanation for a man who saw nothing but good qualities in someone he helped raise was to assume a variable he was not familiar with was introduced, and that variable was the university.

 

This is a hard pill for me to swallow, that this man who loved his niece thinks that her fault was pursuing a higher education. And before we assume that his character is to blame, he is not alone in his thinking. The moments we are taught to be fearful are our greatest teachers, however misguided.

 

Since before the early 2000s, Muslim women were catapulted into the public eye and in doing so everyday women have had to answer to the state of national affairs and the Islamic community. We have turned women and girls, who go through struggle and triumph, as do we all, into the force of our survival as a community.

 

The Muslim girl of American dreams is admonished for seeking an education, for her faith, whether she is visible or hidden, how she speaks, what she wears, and if she will succeed at life. If she struggles, as is the process of life, at any one of these things — then that is somehow a failure of retribution for her character and soul.

 

Can we wait for institutes?

 

For the college-educated and the specialists, we have for so long turned to research to try to solve why people are suffering. Case study after case study, there’s a plethora of information as to why the burden of a Muslim woman is compounded and painful. Unfortunately, no matter the research out there, or the institutes formed, none of these professionals can build a healthy Muslim community without engaging the most dispirited parts of our community.

 

Even if we were to put all the great minds of our time in an escape room to come up with one thesis as to why young Muslims are dying in America, it would be too late. Educators rely on their specializations for answers, but alas, experts cannot build societies because societies are not specialized, and neither are our communities.

 

This is not to discredit educators, specialists, local advocates, mosque leadership, or researchers. In many ways, I am asking us to alleviate the burden they carry alone in addressing these issues.

 

If not institutes, then who?

 

Today, we try to remedy pain with more pain. As everyday people, we turned our curmudgeon uncles into caricatures of evil in their own families. We then, as I have done in this post, turn the well-meaning professional into someone out of touch with the realities of the working class. There’s also this belief among younger generations that eventually, new fathers will emerge who are kind and gentle, not like our elders or podcast brothers. We leave those uncles to other men like them —to  the corners of mosques, a cold place of sheikhs and aunts who will never change, so we let them sit in their being. We do this to Muslim girls too. We say that Islam in North America can prosper if we forget we live in America. That the Muslim girl who lives in both is never enough because our country does not look any better with her here.

 

This is two sides of the same coin. We are flipping the sides of coins to see which one we are convinced by.

 

Till this day we don’t know what happened to the girl who passed away in our community, but we are also not shocked by the possibility of what could have happened. For that reason, we look to examples of girls and young women who are living and punish them for that in online community forums that slander their reputation. This comes from men with podcasts who are so focused on a woman’s body that they feel no shame discussing it under the guise of religious concern. Let’s not forget about religious commentators who only speak about women from the point-of-view of men.

I am asking us to have a conversation with one another and ask questions:  Have I seen this too? If not, am I noticing it now?

 

The internet personalities and wayward Muslim commentators seem to forget that Imam Shafi learned from the lectures of Sayyida Nafisa bint al-Hasan (d. 208 AH, d. 824 CE). It was her voice and writings that shaped a school. It was the wisdom and intelligence of the wives of the prophets (may Allah be pleased with them) whose records have given us an archive of history on the sunnah. It is historically women who have risen above the noise of their present to document knowledge that would outlive them, so we as Muslims today know who we are.

 

I am adamant that the spiritually weak Muslim girl is a myth. Why? Because that is not our women, nor our history, and will not be our future. However, there are plenty of examples in the Quran of men who cheated their brethren (Quran 83:1–3), who cowered from justice when it was prescribed for them (Quran 3: 165), and who killed their newborn girls for no other reason than their gender (Quran 81:8–81:10). The Quran is a reminder to mankind of Allah’s mercy for what people would consider unforgivable. It is also a reminder of Allah’s (swt) justice towards the prideful, the haughty, the hypocrite, and the deceitful.

…believing women had prayers that led to written revelations, and yet, men today have reduced the power of Muslim women’s bodies to what they can do with them. 

 

It is Allah (swt) who answered the prayers of Maryam (may Allah be pleased with her) and provided sustenance for a pregnancy she did not expect, while condemning those who denied His miracle with outrageous accusations against her (Quran 4: 156). Do not forget it is Allah (swt) who came to the defense of Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) when Muslim men slandered her loyalty to the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) (Quran 24:11). Aisha, the mother of the believers, birthed a nation that outlived her without ever having children of her own.

 

For my sisters who pray through their deepest depression for not being a good enough mother, daughter, sister, or wife, remember before you were anyone’s anybody, you were Allah’s (swt) creation. Do not forget that He too came to the defense and answered the calls of an ordinary woman whose husband divorced her with an accusation of ‘acting like his mother’ (Quran 58:1–3). In each of these examples, of the few I’ve given, believing women had prayers that led to written revelations, and yet, men today have reduced the power of Muslim women’s bodies to what they can do with them.

 

Thus, I am asking us to have a conversation with one another and ask questions:  Have I seen this too? If not, am I noticing it now? And by noticing this, whatever this may be, who can I ask in my life to make sense of it? Who among the believers can I talk to about this? More importantly, how can we address this with the etiquette of a Muslim?

 

The Way Forward

 

The story of the spiritually weak Muslim daughter is one that I’ve heard a lot throughout my upbringing. I know her as the shame of her family, the bad influence among her friends, the absentminded in prayer, and the trickster graduate who loves being Muslim without practicing Islam. In all that’s said about this tricky woman, I hear the anxieties of a community that is having difficulty navigating the challenges of life. In the process of these accusations I hear a community losing faith in the mercy and glory of Allah swt.

 

The narrative of the “spiritually weak Muslim daughter” reveals more about our fears than our faith.

For the ‘spiritually weak Muslim daughter’ to exist, means that the curmudgeonly uncle and misguided brother who believe all girls go to hell is also real — and that is most certainly a myth. Or at least we have to work to make it one, so that we are not testified against on the Day of Judgement by infant girls buried alive who will ask us what sin they committed other than being born female (Quran 81:8–9). When we rush to judgment about our sisters, we’ve killed them before we allowed them to live. We betray not only our sisters in faith, but also the rich legacy of women in Islamic scholarship that spans centuries. From Sayyida Nafisa’s teachings that shaped Imam Shafi’s thoughts to the invaluable transmissions of the Prophet’s wives (may Allah be pleased with them), our history stands brighter than the myths about us. 

 

The way forward for our community must return to the fundamental Islamic principle of mercy — rahma — in how we speak about and to our sisters who are living life as we all do.

The struggles and triumphs of our women and girls are not evidence of their weakness or strength, but of the very human journey toward Allah (swt) that we all undertake. No amount of new Islamic institutes, research centers, or YouTube channels will do this work if it’s not including the masajid in the poorest of our communities. I end this piece with a reminder for all of us, our true audiences are not people who can afford to read our works, hear us speak, and strategize in private meetings. It is the people who will never enter our rooms if we do not go to them.

 

When that uncle spoke of universities corrupting Muslim girls, he wasn’t just expressing a personal ignorance — he was voicing his confusion. Rather than taking these myths as truths or slandering each other all together for our frustrations, we must bridge the gap between perspectives, not to persuade or delude, but to hold firm this one truth: that the ummah wins not when we slander our girls, but nurture our God-given abilities, whether or not we have children, to birth a nation of believers, leaders, and intellectuals.