Between Two Worlds: Being Muslim in Abu Dhabi
At school I was too Muslim. At the mosque I was too UAE. I spent years feeling like I belonged nowhere.
There were exactly 5 Muslim families in Abu Dhabi when I was growing up. We'd see each other at the one mosque — a converted warehouse on Oak Street — and nod like survivors of the same quiet war.
At school, I was the kid who didn't eat ham sandwiches at birthday parties. The one who disappeared during Ramadan lunch breaks. The one who had to explain, every single December, why there was no Christmas tree at home.
But the mosque wasn't refuge either. The aunties would whisper if my headscarf wasn't perfect. Uncle Abbas once told my mother I was 'too modern.' I was 11.
High school was the hardest. After 9/11, a boy in my history class asked if my mother was a terrorist. He said it casually, like asking about the weather. The teacher heard. The teacher changed the subject..
I want to tell you there was a dramatic turning point. There wasn't. It was slow. It was reading Surah Ad-Duha during a panic attack in my dorm room and feeling my heartbeat slow. It was finding 5 Muslim friends in my neighbourhood who laughed at the same jokes and prayed in the same study rooms.
It was realising that the Islam of the Abu Dhabi aunties and the Islam I was building for myself could be different and both be real.
I'm 37 now. I work in finance. I pray five times a day — not because anyone is watching, but because those five pauses are the only times my brain goes quiet.
I stopped asking for permission to exist as both UAE and Muslim. I just existed. And it turns out, that's enough.