Everyday Muslim

My mother frequently reminisces about her earliest memories of Calcutta where she was born, and life in Dhaka where she grew up. It could be something mundane that invites these memories like a piece of crockery, an advert on TV or rearranging her wardrobe and noticing a saree she hadn’t seen for ages. During the Covid lockdowns when I stayed with her, the places, people and incidents seemed to grow, maybe remembering a time of normality was a comfort. I was working on a manuscript at the time, and occasionally asked her questions to double-check details I wanted to include about place names, or the meaning of a word in Bangla. These queries would lead to her share a repertoire of scenes from her childhood; the daily boat trips to reach their primary school in Chandpur; skipping high school classes to sneak into Dhaka Stadium to watch cricket matches and so on…

As my grandfather was a Magistrate, he was posted to numerous districts of Bangladesh and so my mother gathered more than one neighbourhood’s worth of experiences and characters in their everyday rural and urban

settings. During these spontaneous recounts, I often found myself caught between wanting to return to my laptop to work, and wanting to hear more of her stories. It hit home, in a raw way, how easily and unintentionally our elders’ experiences get sidelined, bit by bit. There’s always something more pressing or urgent to do than simply listen. Embarrassed at my own haste to carry on with my work, I decided to slow down, listen and take in this distant world. Slowing down, helped to absorb layers of her life and ways of thinking and being half a century ago. The recounts were a gift that I almost sprinted past.

The manuscript I was writing focused on covering contemporary Muslim mothers’ realities from the mundane to the exceptional, in thirty fictional letters. It embodied a type of ‘push back’ at the invisibilisation of our maternal work. Having written one book for mainstream consumption on Muslim mothers and their children’s schooling, I wanted to contribute another work which addressed Muslim mothers directly, without being concerned about appeasing any other gaze or framework.

As I processed my mother’s narratives, I decided to capture the voices of our elderly from further afield and include them in the letters. I interviewed a close friend’s elderly Aunt of Somali heritage to learn about postnatal traditions; I spoke to more elderly women locally about their birth experiences after the 1947 partition. I researched and spoke to a contact about Moroccan doula traditions she learnt from her grandmother who preserved rural practises. I was fortunate to correspond with a young Somali mum – a writer and poet – Deqa Mohammed who generously shared her poem encasing her foremothers’ advice: Dhexda xiro ‘Tighten your waist.’ Marriage, raising a family, women and their many types of work were intertwined organically within our lively conversations! And so the manuscript, enriched by these voices, finally came out in 2023 as the book: Dear Mother – Letters From The Heart, with eight out of the thirty letters centring an elder character sharing their perspectives on the modern-day chaos of being a mum!

I learnt a great deal more than I had anticipated from the process, and I’m sharing why the elderly community needs to be centred more in our work, be that in books, podcasts, articles or community projects. Here are five reasons for starters:

1. Language: None of us exist in a linguistic vacuum. Preserving our language heritage is central to a sense of identity. The inclusion of poetry, phrases, titles of events or even the existence of a certain colour in another language, all adds to making sense of who we are now.
2. Culture and customs: The rites of passage are when culture and custom, that may not appear daily, make a grand appearance! The subject of birth, and the perinatal period for a mother is anchored in cultural customs. A critical look at these helps to keep what serves contemporary mothers and replace what doesn’t work for the times and places we live in now. If we don’t draw on the cultural practices in the first place and give them space in our literature, we literally throw the baby out with the bath water!
3. Challenging Ageism: There’s a lot we all stand to lose if we box the elderly into negative stereotypes and reinforce a dismissive attitude towards them. There are practical implications of marginalising the elderly in society as it justifies excluding them in social and community settings, which in turn increases their isolation and all the health problems associated with that. To make a change, we need to use our resources, be that including a neighbour, or making space in literature to represent their stage of life honestly.
4. Spiritual legacy: Dear Mother confidently centres the faith framework around maternal work. No apologetics there. To this end, there are precious spiritual practices embodied in our elders that happen quietly in the background. Mothers invest in the weighty work of spiritual labour on a daily basis; teaching the faith directly to children; cultivating faith-related practices in the home as a way of living – the daily, quiet consistency. At major milestones, they make sure faith-based etiquettes are upheld. Whether it’s the voluntary acts of worship they do or the insights and wisdom they’ve gained through contemplation, we can gain a great deal from them personally and professionally.
5. Timeless values: With or without migration, the passage of time means customs and cultures will evolve into new shapes, as they always have done. Values are different. The beliefs and principles that make life better for everyone, young and old, don’t need to be reinvented; they just need a chance to be reapplied. In letter twenty-nine, Lateefa’s grandmother shares memories about the challenges of married life and raising a family in her generation:

Why am I sharing this with you, my Lateefa? It’s to show

you there were frictions and difficulties in our time too,

before and during motherhood. Through those problems

though, the one thing that bound us together were our

values: certain gold standards – the zari motif running

through our community. No matter how the shape of the

motifs differed between family to family, they were still

woven from the same zari threads.

Values are timeless. Time moves us on to new places, new

ways of living and thinking. Certain values, though, when

raising a family, need to be protected through the social

storms and new versions of ‘normal’ that will appear. Values