I read the words “Vista Point” on the highway sign and exited. It wasn’t my destination, merely a viewing stop along the way. Since turning forty, I’ve discovered that life’s little moments can be quite breathtaking. I paused in front of the panorama and considered the sequence of events that had brought me here—graphing the phases of my life, from childhood to marriage and fatherhood, against the expansion and contraction of my heart. I have renewed gratitude for this muscle—for the blood it draws into itself and ejects, for the deep, low recitation of my heartstrings. After replaying my memories over and over again, the result is the same. There is an indelible harmony between my Muslim identity and my heart—a song filled with notes of sin, pain, devotion, love, and salvation—the five pillars of my personal cardiac cycle.
The first phase of a heartbeat is known as early diastole. It is when the semilunar valves close and the atrioventricular valves open, and the whole heart is relaxed.
I was five when I first learned I was Muslim. It was after I’d spent a relaxing preschool day as the proud master of my domain, the sandlot. I created paved roads with small plastic shovels, molded houses without interiors, constructed schools and churches without students or followers. As I toiled away at my miniature representation of the world, my shovel exposed a shiny object in the sand. It was a gold cross pendant on a necklace. Immediately, I cleaned it off and placed it around my neck. The crucifix swung below my heart.
Moments later, I saw my father’s olive green Plymouth Valiant pull up in the school driveway. I ran to greet him.
“Daddy! Daddy! Look what I found today.”
He knelt down and caught me in his arms. “What is it? Show me, habibi,” he said in an English accent, the result of British schooling in Egypt.
“Look. It’s a necklace just like all the other kids wear,” I said with wide innocent eyes.
“Oh, wow! That’s a big necklace. May I see it?”
I took it off and handed it to him. He suddenly turned and gave it to my preschool teacher.
“Hey, that’s mine,” I yelled as she took it and walked away.
“Habibi. It’s not yours. Someone lost it and she will help them find it. Now yalla.”
I followed him to the car and got into the front passenger seat. He drove off, pulled into the left turn lane, and stopped at a red light.
“Do you know what we are?” He said looking down at me.
“What?” I asked as I scratched my chest, as if feeling for the cross.
“We are Muslims. We are not Christians.” He seemed to be struggling for the right words to say—words that a five-year-old might understand.
I listened, but gave him no response.
“Only Christians wear that necklace.” Pointing his finger at me, he said, “You are not Christian. You are Muslim. Your name is Mohammed.” He shook his finger at me. “You cannot wear this.”
I accepted my faith, but cried silently. I loved that necklace. I adored the feeling of shiny gold on my skin. I felt guilty inside, as if I’d misbehaved at birth. I didn’t want to be different.
The next day, my mother picked me up from school. I ran to her as I always did after a long day of play.
“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”
“Oh my Heavens! Look at how dirty you are,” she said in that native Texan accent of hers. “Come on now. Let’s go home and clean you up.”
I hopped into the passenger seat and waited for her to sit at the wheel.
“Mommy?”
“Yes, Maddy?” Her pet name for me. “What is it?”
“Are you a Christian or a Muslim?”
“I’m a . . . Christian,” she said with slight hesitation.
“Do you have to pray?”
“Of course I pray. I pray in church on Sundays.”
“You don’t pray all day like Muslims?”
She laughed. “Well, no. But I pray in my heart all the time.”
“Mommy?” I said, watching another church pass by the car window.
“Why can’t I be a Christian?”
The second phase of the heartbeat is atrial systole. The atrium contracts, causing the blood to flow into the ventricle.
My father had a change of heart after bearing witness to that cross around my neck. He made it his mission to teach me and every other Muslim child in the city their deen. He networked all over Houston and invited other families to our house for Friday night Islamic school. Each week cars arrived on our street like blood cells coming into the heart from the remote capillaries of city streets. Our front door became a one-way valve, opening and closing to the parade of proud parents flowing in with hot food to eat and children to teach. My mother, now a Muslim herself, greeted the guests with the customary, “Assalamu Alaykum! Welcome! Come on in,” and showed them into our tiny ventricular living room. Folding chairs occupied the space where our coffee table and couch sat; whiteboards hung from the wall behind the television, and stacks of the Qur’an covered the adjacent dining room table.
One Friday night, when I was in the second grade and in class with other seven-, eight-, and nine-year-olds, I grew bored of all the Islamic activity around me. I leaned my chair back, listening secretly through the thin membrane of the partition. The fourth and final chamber, immediately behind me, was reserved for the most advanced students.
“Who can tell me what verse sixteen of Sura al-Qaf says?” The voice of the instructor was always loud and clear. It was followed by silence. “No one? How about you, Qaseem?”
I could hear the sound of pages rustling. Then a voice echoed out of the silence: “And We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than his jugular vein.”
“Pay attention.” My father’s hand came from nowhere and gently but firmly set my chair back down, sitting me upright in my seat.
“Daddy.” My wisp of an index finger beckoned his ear.
“What?” he asked, eyes locked into mine. He could tell that I wanted him closer to me, so he conceded. “What is it?”
“Daddy, after everyone leaves, can we watch movies?” I was pointing to the Bell & Howell silent-film projector and screen sitting on the floor next to me.
“Maybe. We’ll see. Did you finish your letters? Show me how to write your name.”
“Okay,” I said as I leaned over the card table and carved out the meem, hah, meem, and dal of Mohammed for him.
“Shaatir.”
“So can we?”
“Can we what?”
“Watch movies on the projector?”
“We’ll see. We’ll see. InshAllah.”
I knew he would forget. He wasn’t concerned with the past or the present. His heart bore the weight of the future. He was managing the transition of the school to a new location: a one-story office building that could be converted into a prayer hall, a small school with administrative offices, a shelter, a kitchen, and a parking lot. But this was the lighter of the two loads. He was also managing another transition, a drastic career change that involved relocating our family to Egypt.
My father died in October 1981, before the move. They found him on the floor of his office just hours after he gave his two-week notice. His heart had failed him. He was forty-six. I was nine.
My mother sat my brother and me on the bed and looked at us through her damp, Southern Gothic eyes.
“Boys, your daddy died today. He had a heart attack at work.” She couldn’t finish the sentence. She sounded like a car screeching to a halt trying to avoid a wall of tears.
The look I gave her must have been shocking. I can only say this now, as a parent of two children myself. The eyes of children are windows into their hearts. They’re more telling than their actions or lips. My mother’s face turned pale and she put both hands over her mouth, muffling her shrill cry. I ran over and hugged her. I hated to see her cry. I wanted to cry too, but my anger burned away the tears. Dejected and contracted, the nine-year-old boy in me vowed never to let her cry again.
The third phase involves isovolumic ventricular contraction. The ventricles begin to contract, the atrioventricular valves close, and the semilunar valves are not yet open. There is no change in volume.
My mother took us to Egypt for a visit in the summer of 1982. She wanted us to meet our paternal family—voices we had heard over the phone at odd hours of the night, strangers yelling their love for us over the static, relatives we’d never seen. Initially, it felt like we’d entered another reality.
“Look! There they are. They’re waving to you.” My mother was excited to see my father’s family again after sixteen years.
As we emerged into the arrivals hall, the strangers rushed us and began hugging and kissing me.
“Alhamdila ala salaama! Wahashtoonah,” they repeated, “Welcome! Welcome! We missed you so much!” between suffocating kisses and hugs.
They stuffed us off into an old European taxi and brought us to a rundown apartment building in Shoubra, an aging suburb of Cairo that flourished in the 1940s and ’50s. We walked three flights of stairs and stopped at a weatherworn door. My cousin Ashraf opened it and we filed past him into an apartment that was a time capsule from the ’60s.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“It’s where your father and I used to live,” she said proudly.
“You left Texas to live here?”
“That’s right. We lived here for two years, before moving to Houston.”
“Where’s the refrigerator?” I asked.
“We don’t have one yet,” my mother said.
“But I want a Coke,” I whined.
“Sorry, but we’re having tea right now.”
“What about something to eat? Do they have Doritos?”
“No. But they have pita bread and cheese.”
“No, thank you.”
“Can I watch TV? Maybe The Facts of Life is on? Or Diff’rent Strokes? What channel is NBC?”
“There’s no TV here. We can see about getting one later.”
“Mom! What am I gonna do here?”
My annoying questions continued into the morning and through my first days in Egypt. I wouldn’t see my home again for another two months.
My mother was in heaven on earth. In 1964 she’d abandoned her secretary’s desk at the IRS office in Lubbock, Texas, and bought a one-way ticket to Egypt to marry my father, her pen pal of twelve years. I could see the remnants of their honeymoon in her eyes as she encouraged me to come out of my shell and speak with my cousins. We spent our first few days as tourists, which eased the transition. We rode camels and horses at the Pyramids, shopped at Khan el-Khalili, and wandered aimlessly through the Egyptian Museum.
“Why can’t we see the mummies?” I asked my mother as we passed the closed entrance to the royal mummy room.
“I don’t know. Ashraf is asking the guard right now.”
I watched Ashraf as he spoke to the uniformed guard. Their hands spoke louder than their mouths.
Then suddenly, I couldn’t hear anything. My ears were ringing and I felt dizzy. As I tried to shake it off, I flashed back to the night of my father’s funeral. I stood before the empty pit as they lowered his coffin into the ground. One of the straps came loose and the door of the coffin flew open in front of me. In the split second before the door closed, I recognized the shape of my father’s head underneath the white burial cloth.
“Maddy?” My mother grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me around. “What’s gotten into you?”
“What, me?” I said as I pulled myself to the surface. My mother’s concern helped calm my nerves and I eased under the umbrella of her devotion.
“The mummies have been put in the basement. They’re locked up and can’t be seen right now.”
“I don’t want to see the mummies anymore. Let’s go.”
I decided not to ask any more questions. I was afraid of having another flashback. I had to control myself and think of something other than death and my have-nots. My heart gave in and grew slightly more Freudian that day, and every day thereafter. I forced myself to speak Arabic with my cousins to overcome our language barrier. My mother’s eyes began to light up. As I prayed and recited Qur’an with them, her smile widened even more. The month of Ramadan arrived and I chose to fast for the first time that summer. The suffering was sweet as long as there was a reward; her smile was the best dish on the table for iftar.
When we returned to Texas, I felt proud standing up in front of my fifth-grade class and telling them about my summer in Egypt and my extended family overseas. That night I took the place of my father, reciting al-Fatiha and leading the evening prayer.
The fourth phase is known as ventricular ejection. The ventricles are empty and contracting, and the semilunar valves are open.
In the years following my father’s death I slowly realized that my devotion to family and religion, like my own blood supply, was limited. After isha was over and my mother and brother were asleep, I would stare into my father’s bathroom mirror at the signs of puberty arriving on my skin, and hear them in my voice, praying for manhood to come soon. By the eighth grade, I thought I was ready. I prayed to Allah that a girl like Stephanie, Sarah, or Angela would notice me and that my mother wouldn’t learn about the semi-innocent games of truth or dare, or the middle school parties with make-out sessions to the sounds of mix tapes.
During my freshman year of high school I was lucky enough to have friends with cars—Muslim friends who kept my mother blind to the binge drinking and sleepovers. She eventually caught on and tried to hide her pain. Her angelic son was dead and all that was left was a hormonal halfling heaving under the covers with heathen girls. She tried to rein me back with a fire-and-brimstone version of Islam that she, the former Baptist from pure-white West Texas cotton country, could relate to. I tried to placate her, but I would never be as good as my father. I was a native Texan with an Arab name—the son of a dead Muslim survived by his proselyte.
I was seventeen when I packed all my necessities along with my insecure Arab Muslim baggage and headed off to the University of Texas at Austin with my girlfriend. We’d been attached at the hip since we first met in our sophomore year of high school. But our rocky relationship began to fail during our first year of college, when she was struggling with the freshman fifteen, and with the fifteen she got on her chemistry test. She could no longer pass her classes and was facing expulsion. It ended in a typical out-of-control shouting match.
“Look, I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m sick and tired of fighting with you.” My throat burned from all the screaming.
“Well, what are you going to do about it? Break up with me?”
“Yes,” I said calmly after a long pause. I left her apartment and never went back. My heart was racing over the plunge I had just taken—the “yes” that I’d never uttered before. My replies were usually, “No. That’s not what I mean. I’m just worried about you.” The truth was that I was also failing. I was failing at living in sin. I would also fail engineering, business, and premed. I too was on scholastic probation and faced expulsion if I didn’t repair my GPA.
My only option was to go after the low-hanging fruit. I registered for Arabic 1.0 in the fall of my junior year, and after the first two weeks of class, I had learned more than in all the Friday nights and Sunday mornings in Islamic school. The “A” in Arabic boosted my GPA and gave me the right to call myself Mohammed. That spring I racked up another set of excellent grades in Arabic, geography, anthropology, and the history of the Middle East. There was something about those Middle Eastern studies classes. We just clicked.
“Mohammed, this is a great paper on the negative impact of the Aswan High Dam,” said my geography professor, who had nearly lost his life in a desert flash flood.
“Mohammed, I love your analysis of liminality and the ritual of Muslim prayer,” said my anthropology professor, whose husband was Moroccan.
“Mohammed, is Shamma your family name? Are you Jewish?” asked my adviser from Tel Aviv.
The interest in me, whether genuine or not, didn’t stop with the faculty.
“Mohammed, you should sign up for Model Arab League,” said Blanca, whose boyfriend was Lebanese.
“Mohammed, will you play the tabla for us?” said Debbie the part-time student, part-time belly dancer, who assumed I must’ve played throughout my life.
This royal treatment boosted my ego. Over the next few years, I gained a newfound confidence that I’d lost somewhere between my father’s death and denying my faith and mother’s wishes. I was proudly rediscovering the buried Muslim tomb of my American Egyptian identity. I wanted to meet others like myself.
“You’re Heidi. Right?” She nodded and gave me a cautious smile as I singled her out of the crowd of students leaving the classroom.
“I’m Mohammed. I sit behind you.”
“What’s up?” She said in a casual manner.
All of a sudden, I wasn’t prepared. Five years of studying and learning and now I didn’t have anything to say. The words were locked up inside me. I fumbled for a key, but couldn’t find one. Instead I tried to pick the lock with the closest object I could find.
“That’s a really cool necklace. Where did you get it?”
“Thanks,” she said softly. She made a motion to cover it, but then her hand backed away. “It’s the goddess Isis. My mom got it for me—in Egypt.” Her pharaonic charm had been working on me even before she opened her lips. I didn’t know what ancient Egyptian god she had dangling from her neck, but the shy, downward gazing statue on her neck guided me, like a pair of wings.
Her hands were right to be cautious. I was trying to read her and translate my feelings into meaning. “That’s cool,” I said. I wanted to know where she came from, but was trying not to trip over myself and blurt out the question. “What did your mom like best about it?”
“She knew I liked ancient Egypt.”
“But what did she like about Egypt? Did she go for the pyramids? Or the mosques?”
“What are you talking about? She wasn’t a tourist. We’re from Egypt.”
You idiot, I said to myself. Here I am, outside of a class on Middle East history and I’m acting like I don’t know where the brown-skinned, curly headed girl with the Isis necklace is from. I had to play it off.
“No way! That’s so cool. Where are you from in Egypt?”
“Cairo,” she said blankly.
“Yeah, but where in Cairo?”
“You know Cairo?”
“I know enough to get lost.” Wait a minute. That sounded better in my head than on my lips.
“It’s technically outside of Cairo. You wouldn’t know it.”
Whew! I thought. I must be doing something right. She’s still talking.
“Try me,” I said.
“Maryuitiyya.” The name of the canal street rolled off her tongue in perfect Egyptian Arabic. She was legit.
“Maryuitiyya?” I said as I struggled with the Arabic pronunciation. “That’s where I was this summer. My uncle lives on that street.”
“You lived on Maryuitiyya Street?”
“It’s true. He lives next to the mosque on the west side of the road, next to the KFC parking lot, about five hundred feet from Faisal Street.”
“Impressive.”
I gave her my phone number and said we should hang out for coffee sometime.
“Sounds great,” she said as she knelt down to get something out of her backpack. To my surprise, she tore the corner of a page off her notebook, wrote her number down, and gave it to me.
During the fifth stage, “isovolumic ventricular relaxation,” pressure decreases, no blood enters the ventricles, the ventricles stop contracting and begin to relax, and the semilunar valves close due to the pressure of blood in the aorta.
I sat in front of the blue fountain at the main entrance of Stanford Medical Center, distilling everything that had just happened. I was dreading the call to my wife. I thought about breaking the news when I got home, but one look at my face and Heidi would know everything. What would she say? What could she say? We’d known each other for eighteen years now: married for the past fifteen, parents for the past five. I was building up the nerve to call her, just like the time I’d rehearsed the lines in my head to pump myself up to call her from a payphone in the basement of the UT campus tower.
“Hey, Heidi. Man, I’m so wired on all that coffee and studying. I had to call you to relax.” No, too cheesy.
How about, “I’m getting a study group together. You’re welcome to join.” She’d know it was a lie.
My bride, with whom I exchanged rings at the footsteps of the pyramids, honeymooned in Italy, and returned to Europe, year after year, walking its cobblestone streets and admiring its beauty, would be scared to death of losing her husband and the father of her children.
“Hi. It’s me.” Just me, I thought, the real me—without rehearsal.
“Hi, Mohammed. What did the doctor say? Did he order the DNA test?” I could hear our children playing in the background. She was anxious to hear good news, news that everything was fine, that Kareem and Leila would be fine as they waited for me to return.
“I have it. He showed me the MRI and I saw it.”
The it was the pear-shaped scar tissue in the middle of my heart. It was echoing the involuntary beat signal as it passed through the muscle. It was the cause of my father’s death. Like the religion he had tried to instill into my identity, this was his gift to me.
“Are you sure? Isn’t the DNA test more accurate?” She was good at scrutinizing. It’s one of her traits that I love. It’s also how she survived the PhD program in Egyptian art and archaeology at Cal.
“He said he didn’t need to see a test. It was right there on the screen.”
“But what about the other cardiologists?”
“He said they misdiagnosed me. They only see patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy once or twice a year. Dr. Knowles said he sees three to five patients each week.”
“So does this mean you need a defibrillator, like your brother?”
“Yes.”
“When is the surgery?”
“I have to meet with the surgeon first. And the genetics counselor also wants to meet us.”
“So, how do you feel about everything?”
“I’m scared, but only about having the surgery. I’m optimistic about the defibrillator.”
“Why?”
“Because Dr. Knowles said it will listen to my heart and save me in the event of a heart attack. It will give me a 98 percent chance at a normal life.”
“What is a normal life?”
“A life where I get to die at a ripe old age, like everybody else.” I could tell she wasn’t convinced—no alhamdulillah. I wasn’t convinced yet either. I didn’t really know what a normal life was, but I didn’t want to show it.
I’ve had my implantable cardioverter-defibrillator for almost six months now. When necessary, my cardiologist can read my every heartbeat from the moment he fired it up inside me—my “rebirth.” He tells me not to obsess about it, but I hear the echoes of my life like the very graphs printed before the doctor. I sing atop the peaks, roar in the valleys, and weep in the caves I’ve created along the way. Family dance time on Friday nights or Sunday mornings helps me forget about my midlife crisis. As my five-year-old son, Kareem, mimics Heidi’s crazy hipline moves, I spin my daughter, Leila, round and around until we collapse together, dizzy with laughter. Then the world stops spinning, and I catch my breath.