“Amma said you were at Salim Uncle’s yesterday. Did you … talk to him about me? About what I said?”
Abba’s smile dissipates and he nods solemnly. “Actually, I’m working on something for him right now.” He waves me over so I can look at his laptop screen. I shuffle over to find a word document.
Islamic Center Outreach Program it says at the top, and a picture of our local mosque is pasted toward the bottom.
“What’s this?”
“Well … what you said, it made me think a lot about the people who were voting for me yesterday. Everybody I saw at the mosque, they were voting for me because they trusted in the fact that I’d represent them … as a Muslim.” Abba heaves a sigh. “Hani, has your Amma ever told you about how things were like when we first came here?”
I shake my head slowly. Amma and Abba have been living here for more than three decades now. They know Ireland like the back of their hands—it’s their home. Maybe even more than Bangladesh, since Bangladesh wasn’t even an independent country when they were born. But neither Amma nor Abba have spent a lot of time talking about the past—except to rave about all the ways things have gotten better.
“Well, when we first moved here, it was … difficult. There were barely any Bangladeshi people here, and there were barely any Muslim people here. There was no mosque, nobody from our communities. For the first few years we were here, we couldn’t even find any halal meat.” Abba has a faraway look in his eyes as he says all this, like he’s remembering a time that he had all but forgotten. “We both missed Bangladesh, and we missed our family. But … we had fought so hard to come here. And the money your Amma and I made here was putting some of your cousins at home through school and university. We couldn’t give up.”
“You wanted to give up?” I can’t imagine Amma and Abba ever wanting to give up on anything—especially not something as big as setting up their life here. But I also can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for them to come to a completely different country where everything was unfamiliar and try to start a life.
“Sometimes.” Abba chuckles. “But your Amma and I had each other, and then soon Akash was born. That helped put everything into perspective. Akash, Polash, you … you’ve all had more opportunities here than you ever would have had in Bangladesh. But … being here, it was always difficult to hold onto some things … and I guess one of those things was … Islam.”
“Oh …” I’d never thought about how something like immigrating to a completely different country could affect your faith. Of course I hadn’t, because I had spent my entire life in this very house, with my exact same friends. With everything the exact same. How can I possibly understand the things that Abba and Amma have done to get us here?
“It was more difficult when there was no mosque to go to every Friday for jummah prayers, no family and friends to celebrate Eid with, nothing that … held us close to Islam, I suppose.” Abba heaves another sigh, like it’s paining him to speak about this. “I guess gradually it became easier to just forget about those things, to … distance ourselves. So when Clonskeagh mosque was built, when a community started coming together … it didn’t feel like our place anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, mostly because it’s the only thing I can think of saying. It has been so easy for me to find myself in Islam, to read the Qur’an, and go to the mosque every chance I get.
“Don’t be sorry.” Abba shakes his head. “You know, when you started becoming interested in Islam, when you asked your Amma and me about praying and fasting for Ramadan … all of those things made us feel a little closer to Islam again. And … now I’m realizing you were right. I shouldn’t have used the people at the mosque for a vote when I didn’t feel like I was a part of that community. When I’d never been a part of that community before.”
“But it’s not your fault,” I say quickly. The last thing I want is to make Abba feel like he has anything to prove—to me, to himself, or the people at the mosque. “It’s easy for me because you’ve given me everything I need to make it easy. To study Qur’an, and pray, and go to the mosque. But … I didn’t know it was so hard for you and Amma.”
“It was,” Abba admits. “But I’m not completely blameless either. And … yesterday your Salim Uncle and I had a long talk about all of this. And … we made a decision together.” Abba points again to his computer screen. “This outreach program is for the local South Asian mosque. With your Salim Uncle’s help we’re going to work on making it better. On making it into a proper Islamic center, and more inclusive as well.”