The Weight of Two Worlds: Growing Up Muslim in Small-Town Ohio
At school I was ‘too Muslim.’ At the mosque I was ‘too American.’ I spent years feeling like I belonged nowhere.
There were exactly three Muslim families in Dayton when I was growing up. We’d see each other at the one mosque — a converted house on Wayne Avenue — and nod like survivors of the same quiet war.
At Jefferson Elementary, I was the girl who didn’t eat the pepperoni pizza at birthday parties. The girl who disappeared from class during Ramadan lunch breaks to sit alone in the library. The girl who had to explain, every single December, why there was no Christmas tree at her house.
But the mosque wasn’t refuge either. Aunties would whisper if my hijab slipped. Uncle Farooq once told my father I was “too friendly with the boys” because I played basketball at recess. I was twelve.
High school was the hardest. After 9/11, a boy in my chemistry class asked if my dad was a terrorist. He said it casually, like asking about the weather. The teacher heard. She said nothing.
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 at Ohio State and feeling my heartbeat slow. It was finding three Muslim girls in my freshman orientation who laughed at the same jokes I did and prayed in the same study rooms.
It was realising that the Islam of the Dayton aunties and the Islam I was building for myself could be different and both be real.
I’m 28 now. I work in public health. I wear hijab on my own terms. I pray five times a day — not because anyone is watching, but because those five pauses are the only times my brain goes quiet.
Last Ramadan, I drove back to Dayton. The mosque isn’t a converted house anymore — it’s a proper building with a dome and a parking lot. There were kids everywhere. A little girl in a sparkly hijab ran up to me and said, “Are you fasting too?”
I told her yes. And I thought: she will never have to sit alone in a library.