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>> So unlike the other Abraham scriptures, the Koran is unexpectedly and kind
of surprisingly antagonistic in its attitude toward genealogy and ancestry.
So unlike the Hebrew Bible, or the New Testament, we don't find in the Koran,
which is the Muslim scripture, lists of ancestors of genealogy
and historians have theorized why this is.
Part of it is, perhaps, that the early Muslim community had some anxieties
about the possibility of ancestor worship, and so they didn't want
to make a big deal out of the ancestors.
Another is that, from the Koran's perspective,
perhaps ancestry genealogy is not the best way to organize people.
Now, contrary to what many of us might think,
Arab ancestry is not something that is celebrated in the Koran.
In fact, the Koran doesn't mention Muhammad's ancestry at all.
If Arab ancestry is mentioned in the Koran, it tends to be kind of pejorative.
Famously, there is a verse in the Koran where Muhammad is told by the God of the Koran,
he says "You, Muhammad, prophet, are a prophet sent
to a nation whose ancestors languished in ignorance."
And so within this sort of paradigm, this kind of general suspicion,
and antagonism toward ancestry, it seems that the Koran's Jewish interlocutors,
Jewish-the Jewish interlocutors are kind of an exception.
There is kind of this exceptionalism toward the Jews.
The Koran refers to the Jewish people
by a filial, by genealogical appellation.
It calls them the Banu Israil, the children of Israel,
and it thinks that somehow the ancestry
of the Jews is something that is important to highlight.
And so it can see the Jewish people as being a family.
It is a Rabbinic metaphor for a family.
It thinks of the Jewish ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as being good ancestors,
as opposed to the bad ancestors that everybody else has.
And so it makes a big deal out of them.
Now, speaking of good ancestors, I thought I'd give you a little snippet about my own ancestry.
So my growing up in Pakistan, I heard different stories from both sides of my family.
They each had sort of their own folk tales of where our people came from.
From my mom, her family told them the story.
My mom's family has the kind of like "Mayflower story" in Pakistani terms,
which is that her ancestors were Arabs.
They came over from the Arabian peninsula, the time of the Arab expansions,
they came as believing Muslims, to spread Islam to the heathen Hindus who lived
in the Indian sub-continent at the time, and so this was something
that my mom's family was very proud of.
And I always took this to be true, because it was part of their name.
Their last name connects them to this individual who was a close companion of Muhammad himself.
My dad's side of the family had a different story.
The name of my dad's caste is Jericho.
And I always wondered why the name of that caste was Jericho, so when I was younger,
I did some research to figure out exactly what the story was.
And as it turns out, the local folk story, the local folk myth,
is that the caste Jericho are descendants of Jewish families that were brought
over from Jericho to work as indentured farm hands in the Indian sub-continent.
This was all done by the Arabs.
And they eventually sort of married in with the Indians, mixed, and then converted to Islam,
and now we have this cast called Jericho.
It is an interesting story.
Not something I believe necessarily, but it is an interesting story.
It kind of added some color to my life.
Then recently I got a gift.
A DNA testing package, kit, a 23-and-me kit.
And I sent it in.
I sent in my sample, and a few weeks later, the thing started generating responses.
And since then, I have an X and a Y, I get to find out about both sides of my family.
So for my mom's side of the family, unfortunately, it turns out it's all a sham.
They're not actually [laughter] Arabs that came over from the peninsula.
Rather, they're converts from Hinduism themselves.
It says that they predominantly-the vast majority of their genes are
from Hindu Brahmins in the northwest of India.
I get to tell my mom.
This might be a little upsetting [laughter].
My dad's side of the family, it turns out, had it somewhat right, which is that, surprisingly,
as it turns out, I have Jewish ancestors.
I was looking through and found out that part of the haplogroups or part of the genes
that my dad's family has link them to some kind of Jewish community
within the past 600 or 700 years.
Now, I have, now this biological story.
It is kind of weird looking at yourself as being a composite of genes, of proteins.
Thinking of yourself as kind of like an animal, a specimen.
But it kind of made me think exactly what story do I want to pass on now?
I have the biological story, the DNA kit, and then I have the myth that my parents told me.
Actually the biggest revelation to me, I should mention,
was the fact that I am also 2.8 percent Neanderthal [laughter],
and as it turns out, this is in the 58th percentile.
It is just .1 percent over most of you.
But I'd like to imagine that at some point my ancestors came across a good-looking,
well-adjusted group of Neanderthals and they mated, I'm the fruit of their copulation.
So, on one end, I am a biological organism, in the sense that I have genes that tie me
to these other communities, these other times.
But I am also a cultural organism.
These myths, these stories that my family told me are important.
Just because I found out that they're not exactly-that my parents,
that my mom-isn't exactly descended from Arabs doesn't mean that I just kick that story out.
It doesn't become untrue.
It still tells me something about my family, about my life, about my people.
Ancestry isn't only biological.
It is always ideological.
And ancestry is always political.
And like all other things that are political, it rests on kind of an interplay between fiction
and fact, or maybe empirical fact, biological fact, and ideological fact, myth.
It's always the interplay between these two.
And we find this in the sources that I study.
So one of the sources I studied is an early biography of the prophet Muhammad.
And within this biography, a person that kind of drew my attention was Saphiyya bint Huyayy.
Safiyya bint Huyayy was a lady who was born in the city
of Medina, at the end of the 7th century.
And she belonged to the
Aaronid tribe
the priestly clan of Jews that lived in the city of Medina.
These are Arab Jews.
She was married twice, and widowed twice, and at some point, Muhammad and her meet,
and Muhammad proposes marriage to her, and she agrees.
This is after the death of her second husband.
And so she becomes Muhammad's wife.
Yes, Muhammad had a Jewish wife.
And there are lots of stories.
We actually know a lot about Safiyya because she outlives Muhammad for about 40 years.
So we are able to actually glean a lot from these reports
about exactly what her life looked like.
Now, when her bridal entourage was entering the city of Medina,
this was right after the marriage ceremony had happened.
Muhammad found his other wife, Aishah, in the audience, waiting on the streets,
as they could see this bridal entourage entering.
Now, Safiyya was from the aristocracy of Medina, and so she had a lot of pomp,
and lots of-there was lots of celebration for this marriage.
And Muhammad walks over to his wife, Aishah, and he kind of tugs on her shoulder,
this is what the reports tell us, and he asks her, "Ma raiti?"
which means "What do you see?"
He wanted to get some kind of a compliment.
You know, we know that Safiyya, at least from what the reports tell us,
was a very good looking person, a very good looking lady.
And so Aisha kind of looks at Safiyya and she says, "Well,
all I see is just another Jewish lady."
She says, "Yahudiyya bayn al-yahud."
Kind of like a non-you know, she wasn't expressing a lot
of excitement about what is happening.
And so Muhammad kind of ignored this comment, and later on,
Safiyya moved into Muhammad's compound.
Now, this is not some kind of a nuclear family with white picket fences.
This is the prophetic house.
This is the household of the prophet Muhammad.
There are several people in there.
And these women have a lot of political power.
These women went to war.
They were important political intellectual individuals
who really shaped early Islam in a very direct way.
So the fact that Safiyya, a Jewish woman, was entering this community,
this household, was very, very important.
And she got backlash, as the reports tell us.
So at some point, she and Aishah have this other tiff, and Safiyya comes to Muhammad,
comes and finds him, and she says "Your wife Aishah is debasing me.
I am from the nobility of my community.
I am an 'Aaronid,' I am from the priestly family of my community.
And so for Aishah to debase my lineage, for her to not take me seriously because I am not
from the Qurashis, which were the aristocrats of Mecca,
I am not going to take this anymore, so you should give me some kind of solution.
You should intervene.
So Muhammad didn't intervene.
He thinks about it for a while.
The reports tell us that he suggests to Safiyya an interesting retort.
He says the next time Aishah bothers you, you should tell her just simply that unlike you,
my father was Aaron, and my uncle was Moses.
And my husband is Muhammad, so try to outdo that,
was basically the solution that Muhammad gave to Safiyya.
It is an interesting break from what we know about Muhammad.
Muhammad was always very suspicious of ancestry.
He was an orphan.
He didn't have any male heirs either.
He is kind of like an independent variable.
But he suggests to his wife this really interesting solution which is that she needs
to deploy her ancestry, her Jewish ancestry, in order to basically shut Aishah up.
Now, Aishah and Safiyya, after their marriage, after the death of Muhammad,
this relationship continues and they actually go to battle against each other.
It is an interesting story.
Safiyya now, she outlived Muhammad by 40 years, she is buried in the Jannat al-Baqi Cemetery
in modern-day Saudi Arabia, in the city of Medina.
And if you can see the green dome in the background is
where Muhammad is buried, so she is buried close to him.
We know that she outlived him for a while.
We know that she was politically active.
She was active as a scholar in the community.
She left 180,000 dirham.
She was quite wealthy.
She left that to her Jewish nephew, who was still living in the north of the peninsula.
And then we know a little bit more about what happens with her family.
She doesn't have any children with Muhammad.
But that is the end of that story.
The Koran calls Safiyya the Umm al-Muminin, the mother of the believers.
Which is a very interesting appellation.
It refers to this woman as the mother of the believers.
And what that does is, it connects Safiyya to the Muslim community, the believers,
and it connects the Muslim community to her ancestry, to Jacob and Isaac and Abraham.
So Safiyya in a sense, by being the mother of the believers,
acts as kind of this fiction of kinship.
It connects the Muslims to the Jewish patriarchs, and thus, she is a very,
very important individual for the Muslims.
Now, this fiction of kinship, I am actually going through a similar process,
which is that I am applying for my Green Card.
And so I have been thinking, how do I mix the biology
that I have with the myths of this country?
Right? I am applying to become a permanent resident.
And I have pictures of my ancestors up on my wall in my living room.
This is Zaynab, she was my great-grandmother.
I saw her when I was a kid.
She was a poet.
A scary lady.
And I have her up on the wall.
She died when I was a kid.
I remember her.
But as the years go by, I look at this image, and I feel a certain degree of alienation.
That is what America does.
There is the entirety of the Atlantic, well, I guess over here the Pacific, but the Atlantic,
and all of Europe, and all of Asia, between me and these people.
The life that she lived and the life that I live, they are so divergent.
And this is true for all of you.
All of your ancestors have that moment.
There is somebody, or maybe some of you came over yourselves.
When we come over to the new world, we leave behind in the old world all the tyranny
of ethnicity and language and caste and religion.
When we come into the new world, into this new space,
and we take on these other equally absurd, if not more absurd categories, like race.
Here, we become black, brown and white.
And ancestry is not something that we really think of very often.
But it is something that has been on my mind.
I want to think about my imaginary children.
What sort of ancestry do I give them?
What sort of story?
What sort of myth, fiction, do I give them?
What is really meaningful to them specifically?
Will their ancestors be Zaynab?
Or will they be-will their ancestors be Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X,
or Harvey Milk, or people of that sort?
I think it will be a little bit of both,
centuries down the line, we'll all mix up, right?
That is part of America.
It is kind of horrific, but it is also kind of [laughter], liberating [laughter].
Ancestry, then, ironically, as I discovered with my DNA, is actually the real equalizer,
because in looking at the fact that I have 2.8 percent Neanderthal, I have Hindu in me,
I have Jewish in me, I am the Pakistani, see, that is the other,
I am a Pakistani with Hindu and Jewish ancestors.
I am not making any sense to the Pakistani state, because those are the two others.
Those are the two non-Pakistanis.
But ancestry really is the equalizer.
Because it is not a question anymore of if we have a common ancestor, you and I,
it is when our common ancestor was.
All of us are related.
So was our common ancestor someone who lived in the hill country of northwest India?
Was it someone who lived in the steppes of Central Asia?
Was it someone who was a Neanderthal, perhaps, in southern France?
Right? Or was it someone in the southern tip of Africa?
It is not a question of if, but when.
And the ancients knew this already.
They put this into our stories.
These fictions of kinship are, in fact, not fictions at all.
They are actually fundamentally true.
We are all actually a family.
So now it's Jews and Muslims in the U.S., Jewish and Muslim Americans
in the U.S. This is the question that we have,
which is how do we mix our biology with the myths of this country?
It inevitably will happen, but let's take agency and develop stories, develop fictions of kinship
that are meaningful for our time now, and that is what I'd like to share with you.
Thank you.
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