Between Two Worlds: Being Muslim in Beirut

There were exactly 5 Muslim families in Beirut when I was growing up. We'd see each other at the one mosque — a converted shop on Church 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 hijab wasn't perfect. Uncle Tariq once told my father I was 'too modern.' I was 10.

High school was the hardest. After 9/11, a classmate in my English class asked if my father was a terrorist. She 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 bedroom and feeling my heartbeat slow. It was finding 4 Muslim guys in my new job who laughed at the same jokes and prayed in the same study rooms.

It was realising that the Islam of the Beirut aunties and the Islam I was building for myself could be different and both be real.

I'm 18 now. I work in law. 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 Lebanon and Muslim. I just existed. And it turns out, that's enough.