Between Two Worlds: Being Muslim in Lima
At school I was too Muslim. At the mosque I was too Peru. I spent years feeling like I belonged nowhere.
There were exactly 6 Muslim families in Lima when I was growing up. We'd see each other at the one mosque — a converted warehouse on Church Street — and nod like survivors of the same quiet war.
At school, I was the kid who didn't eat the non-halal burgers 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 abaya wasn't perfect. Uncle Tariq once told my mother I was 'too Westernised.' I was 11.
High school was the hardest. After 9/11, a classmate in my history class asked if my mother was a terrorist. She said it casually, like asking about the weather. The teacher heard. He pretended not to hear..
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 3 Muslim students in my neighbourhood who laughed at the same jokes and prayed in the same study rooms.
It was realising that the Islam of the Lima aunties and the Islam I was building for myself could be different and both be real.
I'm 34 now. I work in education. 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 Peru and Muslim. I just existed. And it turns out, that's enough.