I married a Muslim. All thanks to Morgan Freeman.
I went to see Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves during its opening weekend at the Loews Natick theater in 1991 rather than waiting for it to play at the second-run Flick theater down at Sherwood Plaza. I mean, Sherwood Plaza for a Robin Hood movie, c’mon! (And, at half the price for a ticket.) But I was only fourteen, and had little time for poetic flourishes. I was too busy running to all the new experiences my New England suburban life offered to waste a moment on inessentials. The bad guy from Die Hard was fighting Kevin Costner—this was important.
Besides implanting that Bryan Adams song in my head for all the rest of my living days, Robin Hood turned out to have one lasting legacy: it introduced me to my first Muslim. Azeem Edin Bashir Al Bakir, wrongly convicted twelfth-century Muslim warrior played by Morgan Freeman, was a man of great wisdom, fearsome skills, and a rich baritone voice.
Okay, maybe, thinking about it, Azeem wasn’t my first Muslim. . . considering that he is fictional, Freeman himself is agnostic, and the likelihood that I had encountered someone in my scant adolescent lifetime who practiced Islam. I grew up with Siddiquis, Patels, and Kasims in my classroom. They had to be . . . something, right? I just never took notice of them. Of basically anything outside my solipsistic field of vision. Given the early-nineties demographics of my hometown, the casual and offhand tolerance I enjoyed as a Reform Jew in a liberal community, there’s every likelihood I knew a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Sikh. Azeem was, then, the first time I paid attention to people outside of my narrow Jewish–Christian dichotomy. He was noble, principled, patient, deep, and lethal. (Trust me, lethal means a lot to a red-blooded American boy.) In short, he was cool. But, if he wasn’t Jewish or Christian, then, outside of being a Jedi, I had no category for him. And, anyway, I was too busy with important things: X-Men comics, the Boston Celtics, unscrambling the Spice channel signal on our cable box, and, closely related to that, girls.
I had no way of knowing that Azeem/Morgan Freeman/Islam would someday all be connected to a girl. A woman, actually, and the mother of my child. Muna Ahmed Al-Yussif.
Nearly a decade later, when Muna mentioned that she was Muslim, ding! his image came into my head. (“Allah loves wondrous variety,” as Azeem said.) I had managed four years of college, a relocation to Washington, DC, and entry into graduate school without having to form any more sophisticated an understanding of Islam than quotes from Robin Hood.
To be honest, though, it could have been worse; I had Aladdin, True Lies, and VHS tapes of David Lynch’s Dune all available to skew my perceptions of Arab culture and Islamic principles. Not to mention when camera crews flooded my campus in 1995 because of its “Jewish identity,” looking for student reactions after the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a fellow Israeli Jew. A number of friends seemed all too willing to give the reporters heart-wrenching sound bites. I couldn’t be bothered with politics or the mumbo jumbo of religion. Jews, Israelis, Arabs, Muslims, they were all caught up in the ugly swirl of religiosity, I felt. Besides, I had important things to do. Like learn HTML. Or write a review for the school newspaper. Truly important things were, by definition, secular things.
By early 2001, though, “important” had, thank God, changed. I was still apolitical, but I had a new appreciation of family and of friends, now living several hundred miles away from them. Some burgeoning desire to improve myself as a human being had sharply developed. I looked for opportunities to tap into a meaningful, larger discussion, not just be defined by my insulated, neurotic space. Who was benefitting from my holding an annual Oscar pool? What purpose did my massive comic book collection serve? I was attempting to move from the solipsist to the humanist, admittedly in very small steps. And yet, despite graduate study focusing on ancient lore, myth, and narrative, I still felt an allergy to religion. This was, I know now, a limitation: my aversion to religion kept me in a little life of easy things and overblown cares. In the ten years since I had seen Robin Hood, little had changed when it came to personal spiritual expansion.
One day, though, changed me a great deal. It was January 2001, and, to offset the cost of my grad degree in English literature, I was working in the school’s administrative offices. Not a bad job and one that had suited me fine all fall semester. It was on this morning that I was introduced to my new workmate, Muna.
“Where I come from, Christian, there are women of such beauty, that they can possess a man’s mind so that he would be willing to die for them,” marveled Azeem.
It wasn’t love at first sight—but it was fascination. She had an easy smile, a kind laugh, and these amazing, impossible eyes. I think I’m supposed to describe them as “almond-shaped,” but I hate almonds and I love these eyes. Brown and rich, with a glint of enchantment. I can admit now, a dozen years later, that I may have caught a glimpse of Princess Jasmine in them, a twinge of exotic, Orientalist allure. Yet, I very easily overcame my programming, hacked my Disneyfication, as I grew to know the woman behind them.
The courtship was a literal one: I invited her to play racquetball. Innocent enough, right? Here’s a doughy, lapsed Jew from Boston inviting his lovely, curvy coworker out to a platonic match at the campus gym. There’s no romance, no ulterior motive, and certainly no head game. I was safe and eager to make a friend. Muna, to my astonishment, agreed. Years later, at our wedding, the maid of honor would gently jibe that, for the first few months of what would become my “wooing” of Muna, the two of them referred to me by the title “Racquetball Boy.”
“A wise man once said: ‘There are no perfect men in the world; only perfect intentions.’”
I didn’t intend to fall in love with Muna. She was beautiful and enthralling, no doubt, but racquetball was never Stage One of some romance strategy. (Honestly, has anyone ever used racquetball as some opening move in a romantic gambit?) And it wasn’t our court time that did it, not directly. Two things, one large and one small, drew me to her.
First, she challenged me. I played a mediocre game of racquetball, and she quickly caught up to that—but that’s not what I mean. Our games sometimes went late, and we soon started to grab the occasional bite to eat afterward. (You know, to offset any calories we had actually lost.) It was at The Tombs, the landmark restaurant on the fringe of Georgetown’s campus, where we sat, ate, and talked. I told her my stories, which were relatively easy ones to tell: suburban Boston kid, liberal arts major, pop-culture junkie. Her life had been far, far more compelling: American mother and Arab father, born and raised in the Gulf region, lost father suddenly to heart condition, saw rockets fly overhead during Desert Storm, relocated to rural U.S., reinvented herself in college, and was putting herself through grad school.
She was bilingual, well traveled, and sharp. Muna had views on international affairs but also a cringing dirty joke to unleash upon the unsuspecting (namely, “What do two tampons say as they walk down the street? [PUNCH LINE REDACTED]”). Sibling rivalry with an older brother had brought out her inner tomboy, her video game nerd, and even a Dungeons & Dragons streak; college-age rebellion had cultivated a rave-dancing, drum-and-bass-grooving modern woman. Any stereotypes or exotic fantasies I may have had of her were quickly blown away. Here was a woman like none I had encountered before. She was, in a word, formidable.
“Where I come from, we talk to our women.”
The second thing that drew me to her was that, as much as she would attempt to stay composed and only “glisten” when we played racquetball, her sweat smelled like faint, sweet pumpkin. Pumpkin! It was so charming and so unusual that I tried to hold on to that scent in my olfactory memory hours after we had each gone home.
Until Muna, I had been in retreat. I had been thinking of leaving grad school, of going home to Boston. Life outside of my college cocoon had rubbed me raw. It was all the usual stuff, I suppose: working for an income, living on my own, and having no social safety net. What made it especially hard for me was the well-hidden, very shameful anxiety disorder that I had been combatting since adolescence—a crippling panic that would sometimes grab me, the frenzied loss of control that plagued me. Over the years, I immersed myself in film, books, television, and popular culture as a method of casually combating it, but it was too big and too daunting to maintain so far from home. It left me safe nowhere and comfortable with no one. With such a primal fear always ready to erupt, it was difficult to feel fully human.
I explained my anxiety disorder and sadness to Muna using film metaphors. I likened myself to Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets, as a man whose mind got in the way of his search for happiness. I returned to Morgan Freeman, this time as Red in The Shawshank Redemption, paralleling how the various strategies I’d crafted to avoid panic attacks left me as trapped as his “institutionalized man.” I never thought I would be free of it and, if I ever was, I didn’t know who I would be. I chose not to hope—because, as Red warned, “Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”
Muna was calm, compassionate, and direct. I couldn’t retreat, she told me; I had to keep pushing. Her friendship and, later, her affection, became inspiring. Her faith, too, encouraged me. Her beliefs were a personal experience for her. Rather than being defined by mosques, alcohol, or pork, Muna demonstrated the power and effervescence of Islam. God may not be within us, but the divine can connect intimately with that which is within us. She never proselytized, never foregrounded her religion in any of our interactions; it was her example and depth of thought that compelled me to reach for more.
Too afraid to get in a car, I would ride my bicycle all the way to her apartment on cold nights. I would confide in her things it had taken years to tell friends. From this, I felt stronger. As Jack’s character said in As Good as It Gets, she made me “want to be a better man.” And like Shawshank reminded viewers, in addition to being a dangerous thing, hope can also set one free.
“Get busy living or get busy dying,” Red decides. “That’s goddamn right.”
If I were to liken myself to any movie object it would have to be Andy Dufresne’s rock hammer in Shawshank. Day by day, I scratched my way into Muna’s life. Andy used the tiny rock-sculpting pick to carve himself free of the penal institution. My quiet perseverance made a slow path to Muna’s core. It wasn’t that I was subtle; she knew I was there, was interested, and was smitten. But I was also the harmless “Racquetball Boy” with mind demons of his own. Who knew that being steadfast and unabashedly reliable could have a charm all its own? And, unlike the leftover nub of the rock hammer by the time Andy escaped, the slow dig to my new life made me stronger, not weaker.
By August 2005, my life had transformed from one of self-imposed limits to one of possibility. I had stayed in Washington, DC, to complete graduate school, to work at the college, and to immerse myself in the study of religious narrative. The agnostic disdain I had felt was washing away, and I was already thinking about a PhD that would somehow incorporate religious study. Muna and I had begun dating, then moved in together. When people asked how it was for a Muslim and Jew to live together as a couple, I’d joke that it was like that line from Ghostbusters: “Dogs and cats! Living together! Mass hysteria!” In truth, we took a lot of comfort and strength from each other, especially in the wake of the September 11 attacks and ensuing jingoistic Islamophobia. Rather than retreating, we actively chose to return to Boston together that year.
(We also got cats. Named them Bamf and Snikt, sound effects from the X-Men comics. Her idea, I swear! Do you see why I love this woman?)
I won’t paint our relationship as a fairy tale: like Morgan says in Se7en, “Hell, love costs. It takes effort and work.” But it had become the core of the important stuff that now shaped my life. In August of the year we moved to Boston, as we were sitting on Nantasket Beach, I nervously asked Muna to marry me. Even though it was too dark for her to see the ring, she said yes without reservation.
Our wedding was a blend of traditions, a civil ceremony officiated by my best friend (the son of a rabbi), featuring both Jewish and Islamic elements. When our daughter was born a few years later, the little girl took my surname but was given an Arabic name: Ayah, a sign from God. And she was—she is.
In fact, I now see every aspect of my life, from the major moments to the most cheesy movie quote, as some sign from God. Yet, all those signs, in all their forms, require effort and dedication. Take it from Morgan as God, in Bruce Almighty: “People want me to do everything for them. What they don’t realize is they have the power. You want to see a miracle, son? Be the miracle.”
Muna admits now that she suspected the same thing I did—that starting in 2005, I was on a path to become Muslim myself. It had taken years to move from being a scared jokester to a responsible man, a process that included therapy for my anxiety disorder, reprioritizing, and flat-out work. Moving toward Islam would take a similar journey on my terms—my Islam. I kept my birth name, I pray frequently but not daily, and I still hold an abiding respect for Judaism. These rituals, to me, never defined whether one was Muslim or not. My practice and my household only determine what kind of Muslim I am—how I fulfill the promise and the gifts God has given me. But, most especially, the love I’m fortunate enough to enjoy.
As Azeem, Morgan Freeman may have exposed me to Muslims and to the idea of religious pluralism. But I didn’t know Islam until I met Muna. Whatever God’s plan may be for us, separate or together, I now welcome it instead of fear it.
I married a Muslim, and, now, I am a Muslim. Thanks in part to Morgan Freeman.