A Very Muslim Thanksgiving

I just returned from Thanksgiving weekend with my family. They live 500 miles away, which is a perfect distance because it isn’t too far for a quarterly road trip but it is too far away for impromptu drop-ins. Every visit with my parents and siblings is rife with family-dysfunction landmines, no matter how peaceful relations seem to be leading up to the visit. This trip was no different, so I’ll be processing the psychic aftershocks for weeks to come. The origins of these land-mines will be explored in the forthcoming thinly-veiled autobiographical novel, so I won’t delve too deeply here. Suffice it to say that, despite my high hopes, the family peace continues to be almost as tenuous as that between the Sunni and the Shi’a.

One diversion from the traditional sources of family tension was the anticipation of my younger sister’s impending nuptials, which is a joyous occasion, to be sure, but also a new source of tension. My sister is a cool and funky lady. She is an acupuncturist who is into yoga, meditation, art, and music. She’s independent, sensitive, and smart, and she holds very high yet idiosyncratic standards for her friends and potential partners. She once called me distraught because her then-boyfriend (now-fiance) did some kind of trippy visual meditation during a Zen mindfulness meditation group and, consequently, she didn’t know if she could trust him. Coming from a conservative middle-class Catholic background and living in a blue-collar city, she is quite a cocktail, and she has had some problems connecting with guys. The fellow whom she is planning to marry is a bit out of the mainstream himself. He is a Syrian Muslim who sometimes goes to Catholic mass and, as mentioned, attends Buddhist meditation groups. He is great with kids and pets, does Internet design for a living, plans to go back to school for an MBA, and runs marathons. He is a millennial man.

My sister surprised my mom this Thanksgiving by inviting her fiance’s family – three siblings and his mother -- for dinner at the last minute. There was plenty of food, and on such a family-oriented holiday it was perfectly appropriate to share a meal with the future family. Despite some panicky grumbling, my mom did a surprisingly good job of rolling with it. She explained a bit defensively that she hadn’t invited them herself because she didn’t know whether the fiance’s family celebrates Thanksgiving since they are Muslims. Rather than explaining that Thanksgiving is not a religious holiday and that everyone can give thanks without worrying about breaking the rules, I took a breath and congratulated her on being so flexible and welcoming to my sister’s future in-laws.

We had a lovely dinner. The fiance’s family was warm and gracious and seemed to enjoy the food and the company. There were a few variations to our typical Thanksgiving dinner. The fiance’s mother and younger sister wore hijabs and remained behind for a few minutes to perform private prayers before joining the rest of us at the dinner table. The grace that my dad mumbled when we were all sitting together was a little more stilted and generic than usual. The Muslim guests abstained from drinking the wine that my father poured generously for my family (except for my mom, who is in AA). Otherwise, though, the experience of sharing a holiday with a Muslim family seemed more mundane that I would have expected. We played pool, watched football, and worked on puzzles with the kids. We all groaned about being too full of pie and complained about the weather and the economy.

In one of those funny little cosmic coincidences, my husband and I turned on "The Simpsons" for the first time in a long, long time when we got home from our trip, and the show was about Bart’s new Muslim friend, Bashir. Marge and Homer invite Bashir’s family to dinner, but Homer’s motives are less than friendly – he grills Bashir’s parents about their connections with terrorists and offends them so much that they leave in the middle of dinner. In his effort to make amends, Homer breaks into their home and goes all Jack Bauer on them, hacking into their computer and searching through their mail. This was funny, because prior to our Thanksgiving meal together I could imagine my parents behaving similarly, if slightly less excessively. They are both pretty freaked out about my sister’s marriage.

I haven’t spoken to her about it, but I’m sure my sister recognizes my parents’ apprehension. I found a book that she bought for them called “The Muslim Next Door,” which I picked up and started to read. It is a memoir, written by a young Muslim woman who grew up in Suburbia USA, which demystifies some of the questions and misperceptions about Islam, particularly as it relates to life in the Western world. One thing that I thought was interesting in the book is the way that the author explains that Islam is a religion of orthopraxy, or one that emphasizes behavior and conduct, as opposed to orthodoxy, which emphasizes faith and belief in the way that most versions of Christianity do. Basically, Muslims must wear their religion on their sleeves. Just saying that they believe in the Koran, or even believing that they believe in the Koran, doesn’t count. They can’t skip Ramadan or refuse to wear a hijab and then go to confession to wash away their sins. Islam is not just an individual belief, but it permeates family relationships, the educational system, and the legal system in the countries where it represents the majority. This outward demonstration of belief challenges the deny-and-repress, don’t-ask-don’t-tell religious attitude that permeates most of our day-to-day relationships in this country.

This can be awkward and inconvenient, and it can challenge our personal beliefs. Waiting for my sister’s future mother- and sister-in-law to say their private prayers while we all stood around the Thanksgiving table was a little uncomfortable. The kids were hungry and cranky, and the grownups didn’t really know what to say to each other. The publicly private display of piety made us all feel like heathens, which probably accounts for my dad’s mumbled version of grace. My sister and her fiancé visited us for a weekend at the beginning of Ramadan this past summer, and her fiancé was too tired from fasting during the day to do much more than sleep on the beach. He also needed special food for his pre-sunrise and post-sunset meals, and it felt weird to have him sit at meals with us but not eat. This was all kind of a hassle, and it made us non-Muslims feel a little bit like jerks for not fasting with him.

When it comes down to it, though, I think, or hope, that even my parents recognize that our lives will all be enriched by stretching the family boundaries to include different global perspectives. Every family merger challenges the status quo, no matter how similar the families seem to be on the outside. A family's fate becomes tied to that of relative strangers by a sacred bond between members of the two clans. My brother’s wife’s family has a similar religious background and values to those of my parents. They live in Mexico City and don’t speak English very well, though, which initially caused my parents a great deal of consternation. My parents are still puzzled and irritated by the language barrier (Sample conversation between my mom and my brother about his two-year-old bilingual son: Mom -- "It's cute how Derek makes up his own words for things." Big brother -- "He's not making them up, Mom; he's speaking Spanish."). But they enjoy having family in Mexico, which is a great place to visit. As far as my own challenge to the status quo, my husband's family is highly functional. All of the healthy, joyful communication among these in-laws probably made my parents very uncomfortable at first, but I think they have found a way to live with it.

It's a slow evolutionary process. While every addition to the family brings about its own new sources of tension, it seems to dilute the old sources of tension and send them a little bit further into the background. The family disputes that used to be more akin to atom bombs have now become mere land mines. Hopefully, over time, these land mines will become just shimmering fireworks as the creative destruction of my parents’ family unit approaches its peaceful conclusion.