The New Yorker:

What it feels like to laugh when the world expects you to disappear.

By Hanif Abdurraqib

I sometimes say that I consider myself a junior-varsity Muslim. Whether this comes off as a joke or as an invitation for scolding (spoken or unspoken, loving or otherwise) depends entirely on the other Muslims in the room. But, hey, I say hands up and palms out: I take Ramadan very seriously, more seriously than I take anything. Inside me is still a child of rigorous routine. I don’t drink, or smoke, or use drugs, though I suppose that has less to do with my relationship to Muslimness, and more to do with my former commitment to being a high-level athlete and then, when that failed, to my enjoyment in a dalliance with a straight-edge girl in the punk scene. And then, when that failed, I found myself too anxious about how much stranger my already coruscating idiosyncrasies might become when surrendered to inebriation of any sort—which is to say, I have no faith in my own brain, but I do have faith I place elsewhere. I feel most Muslim when I am stunned by a moment of clarity within my own contradictions. Beyond whatever disconnects may exist in my faith practice, I still feel deeply connected to the ummah—the body, the community—and the responsibilities that this connection carries. A Hadith that I love, and which underpins many of my actions, states that “the believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.”

The Hadith says that, through our faith, the body is one, and therefore your suffering is inextricably linked to my suffering. When a beloved elder in my community, after years of illness, no longer recognized her own body and hardly recognized her own mind, she and I prayed together, seated in two chairs, because she’d decided that, if she was barely able to move, her movements should be toward God. It is in these moments, when I feel the distance between the ease of my life and the pain in the lives of others, that I feel both most and least Muslim. In the distance between holding my cellphone in a dark room and looking at the images on it: a starving baby in Gaza, a child being pulled from rubble, the ruins of a cancer hospital. In the distance between those ruins and my home. In the distance between not being able to fall asleep and the luxury of having a bed in which I am not able to fall asleep.

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