On Being a Bad Muslim

and turning 25

I turned a quarter of a century old the other day.

You half-century-old’s and three-quarter-century-old’s must be smiling in amusement at whatever wisdom I think I have gleaned in these short two and a half decades, and whatever tragic failures I must beat myself up over.

By chance, if one of you is a centenarian, well, it’s a little hard to imagine living four times as much as I have, but it also doesn’t feel difficult at all. Perhaps I’ll hit a 100 one day too, and if I do, I hope that world is a better one than the human-made Pompeiian catastrophe we see today.

I’m here now at twenty-five when I was only five before, and my sister’s friends on the girls’ side of the masjid would gush over how naturally shiny my little fingernails were while I fiddled with my sister’s then revolutionary iPod with its little spinning scroll wheel (or at least I think it used to spin).

Should I live longer than any of my grandparents, I’ll still have only reached baby numbers by the standards of prophet Noah’s people, peace be upon him. Heh, just imagine, humans living a thousand years. I can only wonder how child development worked then. How long were pregnancies? Would the frontal lobe mature around 25 or 250?

Only Greenland sharks can come close to those numbers, apparently reaching sexual maturity around 150 years old, living for at least 250 years and maybe even more than 500. I wonder how different the world was when Jonathan the giant tortoise was born, about a 195 years ago. I wonder if my ancestors had become Muslim yet in the early 1800’s.

How insignificant time must feel to such creatures.

If I had a good deed for every time I failed to do good, I’d have a heck of a lot of good deeds; I hope God weighs me by my failures

I haven’t read many books, certainly not any amount of classics (another failure of mine as a writer), but I did love this one book I picked up from the featured shelf in undergrad one day as I waltzed into the library to probably procrastinate with friends, The Bad Muslim Discount.

The title itself is quite interesting once you find out where it comes from in the story. I don’t really recall much of the plot, other than it starting with a qurbani, but I do remember relating quite a bit with the MC, as far as he was desi and part of his uni’s MSA. It was the first time I felt like a book was written for me, or had people in it I could have been had I been born to another mother.

I was particularly impressed by the complexity of the characters and how humanly flawed they were. As the title suggests, they were bad Muslims. Even if the struggles aren’t the same, there is comfort in reading stories of bad Muslims, real or fanaticized, because aren’t we all just that? Bad Muslims?

I thought the author captured the woes of young adult Muslims well enough to warrant this book becoming part of every Islamic high school English class curriculum and a must-read for every youth book club at the masjid (I might be getting ahead of myself thinking that book clubs even exist in our masajid).

Rather than analyzing 1984 or The Great Gatsby (I wouldn’t toss out the classics of course, since they remain classics for a reason), a book like this would likely hold much more meaning for students on the cusp of adulthood, offering examples of what could happen as you transition into undergrad, the sorts of people you may meet, and the outcomes of the choices you make.

My only qualm with the book was in the needless sensual details of certain scenes. While good writing requires us to develop authentic and complicated characters who struggle with their values and grow over time, and despite this book being in the YA genre, we don’t need to appeal to mainstream spiciness trends and flex our descriptive muscles in describing the finer details of a character committed zina. There are times where we really need to tell and not show.

The older I grow, the more I appreciate how little credit we give to strangers, or even people we know very well, for their shortcomings and fatal flaws. In healthcare, we are told to presume competence when working with clients. I think we also ought to presume complexity of case history.

When you meet a person, presume competence and complexity and offer compassion (this is a reminder for myself first). If you dig a little deeper, beyond the dichotomous differences, there is a human heart in there somewhere, beating much like yours and probably with just as much atherosclerosis as yours.

Silco sitting at Vander’s statue—Arcane, Season 1

As I write this, my mind goes back to Silco and Vander’s fight in the first few episodes of Arcane (season 2 was unfortunately nowhere as good, but it had its fun moments), where their differences seem so great that one could not imagine their previous brotherhood, and Silco’s eventual understanding of what Vander felt as a father figure (and why he abandoned arms) when Silco adopts the adopted daughter - Jinx - of the man he murdered.

As Silco sits at the statue of Vander, now knowing what it means to raise and love a child and not willing to sacrifice Jinx for his lifelong ambition of building the Nation for Zaun, he pours one for his once brother-in-arms and speaks with remorse, “Is there anything so undoing as a daughter?”

What is wrong can and must be called so and the doer ought to be held accountable, but it is difficult for us to see beyond the singular action and caste judgment wholistically (Silco kills Vander, but Vander wasn’t free of guilt either, and they all had reasons for doing what they did, wrong or right); it is characters like these — and just meeting people and hearing stories and making mistakes — that affirm for me the need for the Day of Judgment, and for there to exist a being who has knowledge of all and can deliver the ultimate justice, and can also offer more mercy than anyone else.

وَٱللَّهُ يَحْكُمُ لَا مُعَقِّبَ لِحُكْمِهِۦ ۚ وَهُوَ سَرِيعُ ٱلْحِسَابِ
Allah decides—none can reverse His decision. And He is swift in reckoning. (13:41)

Sinning and procrastinating carry a lot of shame, and I don’t know what utility the shame serves. I’m sure it has a purpose, and it can spur change in the right amount and at the right time, but where I am in life with my decades old habits of procrastinating, I don’t think shame helps. And if something doesn’t help, then it is a severe folly to keep trying to solve your problems through it.

Proof of my falling into old proscrastinative patterns after a good several weeks of consistent MCAT prep. And boy did I slip back down faaar into the depths of utter bed rot.

Today marks the 12th day of not having done any UWorld MCAT practice questions. I was averaging around ~150 questions/week recently, and when I needed to take it up a notch and effectively double the questions to finish the whole Qbank by the end of July, I faltered hard. They say to not miss two days in a row, and it’s clear why.

With every day I missed — which I justified by saying I had assignments to finish and exams to study for [I submitted the assignment a day late and barely studied for the exams] — the guilt grew greater and greater, and the deeper you sink into the quicksand of misery, the harder it becomes to even muster the courage to crawl out.

I don’t know what happened and how I slid this far down the slippery slope of “escapation,” but I know I won’t get out by “punishing” myself or focusing on the shame of wasting away so much time. The other thing I realized is that we wrongly put the burden of healing on the individual alone, when healing is a communal effort. There is no denying that the person themselves must bite the bullet, but the path to recovery is made shorter, or at least less steep, with the help of friends.

This is especially true when doom scrolling is a behavioral addiction, and where there is addiction, there is the reality of relapse and the continuous fight for recovery and maintaining sobriety. The modern bed rot phenomenon is ruining us all. Some of us manage to keep functioning just enough to pass exams and go to classes, and I’m sure some slip down further, while others operate a bit more functionally and keep the behaviors at bay decently well.

And we ought to not forget how epigenetics can make a person more or less susceptible to addictions. The more you think about it, the less it makes sense to try and tackle these maladaptive behaviors alone. I still grew up in the 2000’s when the most exciting thing was when my dad got a flip phone and I found a game on it (probably a snake eating apples or something similar).

I can’t imagine how cooked kids these days are when they’re born listening to short-form addictive content from inside the womb as their mothers and fathers understandably engage in momentary escapation within hearing distance of the fetus.

Reflecting on the shame of sins, I think you must never assume God has forgiven you, but you must carry yourself with dignity and conviction as though you were not only forgiven but also that your bad deeds have been transmuted into good ones, for God takes no pleasure in your punishment; He is your benefactor, and your book of deeds is amendable in His hands.

Of course, one must right their wrongs if they harmed others before they can think of being forgiven, but when the transgression is against God alone, there is none more compassionate and loving than Him.

Anywho, I best put on my big boy pants and get back to MCAT prep. Before I go, I leave you with the last stanza of Samih al-Qasim’s poem, “My Lord, I am Sorry.”¹ Though it speaks to much more than seeking forgiveness, I thought it fitting to share.

إلهي، إلهي أمِن مغفرة؟
ألا مغفرة؟
ولا مغفرة؟

إلهي، عذابي طويلٌ وقاسٍ ومؤسف
وأنتَ غفورٌ، رحيمٌ ومنصِف

إلهي إلهي أنا متأسِّف
أنا متأسِّف إلهي
إلهي أنا متأسِّف
أنا متأسِّف
…أنا متأسِّف

My Lord, my Lord is there any forgiveness?
Is there no forgiveness?
Not even forgiveness?

My Lord, my suffering is long and harsh and disheartening,
and you are forgiving, merciful, and just.

My Lord, my Lord, I am sorry
I am sorry, my Lord
My Lord, I am sorry
I am sorry
I am sorry…

Pray for me,
Walyullah

1. I came across it on IG, so here is that reel. The imbedded audio is from this vid here of the poet himself reading the poem. You can read the full poem in Arabic on aldiwan, and I also found an English translation here.