I just landed in Iowa for the first time and now I'm going to my first ever Sunday Mass.
I'm definitely the only Muslim in here, but I'm here with someone
who's had a deep connection with Islam for longer than I've been alive.
This is Laura and in 1985, she fell in love with a Muslim immigrant from Egypt,
named Kamal. They spontaneously got married that fall, with an improvised
cake and everything. Then got married again that winter, this time by a priest.
It began more than three decades of an interfaith union that many people still
argue is impossible. What happens when a devout Muslim and devout Christian
commit to each other to build something new, without giving up who they are?
Laura and Kamal invited me here to small-town Iowa, where they raised three boys,
to show me how they did it.
My name is Aymann Ismail. To grow up Muslim means to grow up being feared.
So I'm traveling the country to find out for myself if
there's really any reason to be afraid of American Muslims.
To hear many commentators tell it, the boom in the Muslim American population is a time bomb.
We're just too different. "Western civilization is in a war." But Muslims are
now more than 1% of the US population, and we're growing fast. And we're also
mixing - and to some people, this seems like a big problem.
"Especially when you're dealing with Middle Eastern religions versus Western religions, it's very very
difficult. You're dealing with views on women..." And it's not just on the news.
"If Allah is not the basis of that emotion then in fact it is not pure love."
"A disbelieving woman, she's not better than a believing woman..." But the reality is... these
marriages are already happening all over the country and those numbers will
likely trend upward. According to the Pew Research Center, the American Muslim
population is becoming both younger and more native-born, both of whom are more
likely to marry non-Muslims. Right now, 13% of us are married to or cohabitating
with a non-Muslim, and that means more Laura and Kamals. Laura and Kamal run
this restaurant together. It's called Relish. It looks like a house
because... well, it is a house. They live upstairs. Every night after feeding what
seems to be the whole town, Laura and Kamal hunkered down with the staff for
a family-style dinner. Here, they told me how within weeks of meeting each other
they were married. Laura and I were visiting my sister in Minnesota. My
parents were there, my brother-in-law... At literally three o'clock in the morning
we're talking - "Are you gonna marry this woman?" I said, "Yeah." "When?" "Whenever." He said,
"Why don't we marry you tomorrow?" and she said "as long as we can have another
ceremony with a priest and my family present, I'm cool with that."
So we got married.
I was wearing somebody else's skirt,
somebody else's blouse.. because I think I'd only brought jeans... The next time we
visit her family, her father doesn't even bother looking at me. He looks at her and
says "Okay Laura, Kamal is married now - what about you?"
And it wasn't totally smooth-sailing.
We knew a lot of priests and I was like "no problem getting one of
them to marry us... somehow, my God.. " Was it a problem? "Nightmare!"
Oh yeah... family priest like for years and
years it was like no and I'm kind of like... I mean he didn't think about it!
One of the priests that had been at the seminary when my brothers were there did
agree to do it, but I didn't think that should be a problem but I was really naive.
They're are fascinating couple, partly because neither of them felt the need to
convert to make the relationship work. The next morning I went to the mass with
Laura, where she goes every Sunday five minutes to nine - no earlier, no later.
And later that day, I prayed with Kamal.. with Laura nearby praying on her rosaries.
To talk more we headed above the restaurant. This place is amazing!
There's Christian iconography next to Islamic calligraphy. A Quran next to a Bible.
And that led to a story about how they raised their kids.
We discussed it, negotiated it, basically. For me, if we ever would have kids they
needed to be Muslim. I really just wanted my kids to grow up with a sense
of God, higher power or whatever. I think that was really important to me, more so
than that they be Catholic or even Christian. I was like, okay well, that
means he gets to do all the religion talks. I don't have to worry about that,
and then I don't have to go through that whole --- oh why don't why don't you
pray with us? Especially with the oldest, when she would
remind him of prayer time when I was away -- "You're not Muslim you can't tell
me what to do!" So that's kind of why I sit in the back
and say a couple decades of the Rosary or something. There's that thing in
Catholic families - you know - the family that prays together stays
together. I was like, okay well I can pray with them.
Even when they decided to raise their kids this way, Laura never felt the
need to convert. You know - that was never a question that I asked him, it was
a question I asked myself. And it's never a question I asked her.
I mean people ask me.. Other people asked me - and I said, "what's it got to do with me?"
Why do I need to convert to worship a different way? The Catholic
Church has that culture of patriarchy, and Islam as its practiced often has
that too, you know. It's not frying pan/fire - it's kind of like frying pan/different frying pan, you know?
Did you feel like you guys had to make a lot of compromises to make it work?
I don't think it was compromises with religion, actually. We didn't compromise
our faith. I don't really believe we have problems because of religion.
We have problems because of marriage.. which is
inherited to being married, we have been working together for the last 20 years...
We're in each other's faces constantly. And we get on each other's nerves.
After, I wanted to talk to the couple apart -to really learn how they navigated their
early years, especially in small-town Iowa. I didn't know anything about Islam
He gave me the Quran and I think I read it all, although I don't know how much of it
I retained and that when I was like okay, well, there's nothing in here that I have
a problem with. I hadn't read the Bible through from cover to cover, so I kind of
was like there might be more in here that's a problem for you... there might be more in here that's a
problem for me... Because you grew up in a world before Islam became such a
household issue. I can't imagine what that would have been like if I'd
been bombarded with the stuff that people that are growing up now are
bombarded with. "Do you think Islam is at war with the West?"
"I think Islam hates us." It's painful for me to watch, it's hurtful for me to see,
it's like - that's not my kids, that's not my husband, that's not how I see them
practice their religion. I wondered what it must have been like to move to Iowa.
There just aren't a lot of here. How could that not have had an
impact on Kamal, especially with pervasive stereotypes about how Muslim
men treat women? He said that it just hasn't come up in his personal life, but
there have been some teachable moments around town. Even though I'm not a
professor, I just love to teach. You know, when people find out I'm a Muslim, "is
that why you have a beard?" No dude, I hate shaving. There's nothing
to do with - you know - so I never really broadcasted my religion, but I've never
tried to keep it a secret. I mean I follow the saying "don't walk meekly and
don't walk proudly, walk comfortably." After spending two days with them, I was
still curious: Did they ever wonder, even a little bit, if things would have been
easier if she just married a Catholic and he married a Muslim? Some of it is
just that you know the man-woman thing I'm like and some of it is how you were
raised. I have a sister who's married to another woman, I'm like "would it be
easier if I fell in love with a woman?" I mean like at least she'd get me
sometimes you know? Ironically enough, when I contemplate that and I look
around with with my married Muslim friends, I'm grateful for all I have,
because I think we'll have more religious disagreements. Two people are
bringing in their own cultural baggage. Yes, I can't tell you what would have
been but from what seeing - from seeing what's around me, I think I'm just right.
As unions like Lauren and Kamal's become more common, the makeup of Muslims in
America will change. To me, they show how that's nothing to fear. They raised kids.
run a bustling restaurant and still preserve their faith! And despite the
fear both in and outside the Muslim community, Lauren and Kamal show that it can
not only work, but last.