There are 24 days, 1 hour, 44 minutes and 40 seconds from the point of which I’m
writing this until the day I turn 24. At this very moment all I can keep thinking about is
whether or not to question myself, what I want in life and who I am.

Up until around four months ago, I thought I very much knew where I stood when it
came to a number of different elements in my life. To note, the areas that have changed
the most, are where religion is concerned. The thing that has changed the least is my
desire to have a family of my own. The two have become interchangeable and
intertwining. It’s a strange clarity I didn’t expect to grace me with its presence this year.
When I explore the deep running roots in my mind as to why for so long I rejected the
notion of Islam, I realise there is only one that stares me in the face yet I had an army of
various and intangible excuses to justify myself. But I don’t want to justify it anymore. It
has little to do with the choices I have made as an individual; the inability to understand
how I could possibly fit into my surroundings, the blue eyed blonde haired popular girls
at school who thought it was cool to have an “exotic” girl a part of their clique, the
teenage years of rebellion, the men who found me attractive or even the dumbfounded
curiosities I wanted to explore just to say I had experienced them. The truth is, being
able to blame a higher being for the suffering I have endured in my personal life is the
only real reason I chose to reject my religion.

It wasn’t until someone recently asked me whether I had planned to bring up the children I
want to have as Muslims or not, that I realised I was not being honest with myself.

Time passes, and in that time it is unnerving how vast amounts can change. Throughout
the month of Ramadan, I kept thinking about how, when I have children, I would bring
them up. I also thought about how so very little of the ideas of my future I had built up
in my head were plausible. By removing myself from the religion I grew up with, I would
also be removing myself from my family. It wasn’t as I had always thought, that they
pushed me out for not being the same as them but rather it was the very opposite. They
would never reject me for the choices I make, it would be me rejecting them.

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Religion to me means home. It’s the love that my family runs on like clock work. It’s the
heritage of my Father’s family, defining the very acts and statements they made in its
name. It’s the mutterings of prayers I can hear my Grandmother making quietly in her
armchair. It’s the thing that binds my Mother and her sisters together as a strong female
unit. It’s my brothers and cousins praying all together on Saturdays no matter the space
they are in and how many of them there are. It’s the only way I can connect to the
memories left of my Grandfather. It is and always has been in every part of my life, when
I wanted it and when I didn’t. I could never walk away from what will always be home.
So, aside from providing the family I have of my own one day with a physical home, I
want to bring them up knowing that there isn’t just one definition for it.

I now have 24 days, 32 minutes and 49 seconds until another year has passed. For a
change, I am settled. Im not afraid of not having achieved everything I wanted to. All that
matters to me now is how the thoughts that form my blurry goals make me feel; a
sensation I would love to be able to lament in words, sadly though scouring the
dictionary hasn’t come up with anything satisfactory for me yet. Let’s revisit this subject
in another 389 days and I might just be able to say.

Amira Hasan

Religion and Home: How Maturity Defined My Understanding of Faith