Why I Wrote a Middle Grade Book About Religion

When I started sixth grade at my local Catholic school, all I could think about was avoiding Jesus. He was everywhere. In portraits that painted him with a flaming heart, or as a baby with his mother Mary, or seated at the center of a long table with other men on either side of him. But it was the crucifix, hanging above my classroom’s chalkboard that shook me most. Idols are strictly forbidden in our religion, and I couldn’t believe my Muslim family had sent me to a Catholic school so I could stare at a statue of an almost naked man.

I had heard my mother’s arguments, that Catholic school would offer me a more academically rigorous program and that learning about another religion was better than not learning about any. It was the late 1980s, and I was starting middle school in the affluent tourist town of Monterey, California. In my mother’s mind, this translated to a population of children with the money to buy drugs. Now more than ever, she needed me to have peers with similar values.

“Do you know some of these girls already have boyfriends?” my mother would say as if this, too, justified her decision to protect me from the public school masses. “And then their parents act surprised when their daughters come home pregnant!”

Catholic school was merely another place where I had to look out for myself.

Boyfriends or not, I thought my Iraqi-immigrant mother was as misguided about this as she was about so much in America. I was exhausted by how my parents misread situations and people in our new country. If she really was so worried about boyfriends, she should have been more concerned about our next-door neighbor babysitting me and my sister. Her grandson always answered the door without a shirt and a reminder to let him know when I turned sixteen.

Catholic school was merely another place where I had to look out for myself. This time, however, it was a matter of spiritual safety. I would track everything wrong that happened during the school day so I could pray for forgiveness later.

At the top of my list were the portraits and statues. I didn’t understand how something could be prohibited by one faith and holy and revered in another. Next came calling Jesus the Son of God when we believed God was a supernatural being who could not have a son. They also drank wine during Mass which struck me as wrong for a very serious reason. No wonder why so many people became alcoholics. Of course you’d think wine was good for you if they gave it out in church.

Keeping a list of wrongs ordered a world that was new and confusing to me. When I encountered a difference, I didn’t pause to consider another perspective. All I had to do was judge those around me and enjoy the sense of righteousness and pity that followed. How unfortunate for these people to misunderstand so much!

But I eventually realized that this hasty cataloging of differences wasn’t sustainable. As time passed, I came up against ideas and practices that I didn’t know how to categorize. The sacrament of Confession didn’t seem wrong, only unnecessary, when you could say astaghfirullah for forgiveness and be done with it. But I could see the benefit of someone telling you how big of a sin you’d committed and then sending you home with a to-do list to be forgiven.

Often my classmates were assigned to pray the rosary a certain number of times—another practice I couldn’t judge. It reminded me of using a tasbih to count prayers. And although I’d never admit this to anyone, I found my peers’ personal prayers, shared at the start and the end of the school day, deeply moving.

Even if a religion carried a timeless and eternal message inspired by a divine source, it had to be understood within its context.

How else would I have known that other people prayed for the same things I prayed for—for someone in their family to be healthy and safe, or for some special intention for a parent or sibling, or to do well on an exam? I especially liked the prayers that hinted at some kind of classroom drama, like for two bickering friends to get along better. Even though no names were spoken, it was clear these prayers were one part sincere wish and one part public shaming.

I found it all compelling and relatable, but still I could not bring myself to share an intention. Offering a prayer at school seemed to suggest that I wanted to be a part of my classroom’s religious life, and I believed being a good Muslim required me to make it clear that I did not. But I no longer felt as separate from these people who clearly wanted the same things I did in life, to wish my loved ones well while also wishing for them to be put in their place by a generous and loving God.

I’d go on to attend an all-girls Catholic high school, where to my mother’s dismay several girls still got pregnant, and later a Jesuit university, where we were required to take three religion courses to graduate. It was those courses that finally helped me make sense of my religious education both at home and at school. I took classes on both Christianity and Islam, and what stayed with me most was the idea of religion as a human institution. Even if a religion carried a timeless and eternal message inspired by a divine source, it had to be understood within its context. All faith traditions developed in a specific time and place and by a specific group of people.

Looking back, it was such an obvious idea, that a religion’s context was a necessary consideration, but hearing it in a classroom setting freed me of the black and white ideas that had shaped my childhood understanding of religion. I could not help but think about all the people in my life who would never experience this shift. How many of my relatives were still stuck in that tight knot of right and wrong that I’d carried into Catholic school? How many more children in my family were being taught with the same lens? And how much angst could I have been spared if I’d been exposed to some of these ideas slightly earlier?

These questions were not far from mind when I started writing for young readers. Like so many children’s literature authors, I felt compelled to write the book I wished I had when I was younger. When my main character, Mariam, starts Catholic school, she tries to classify everything she experiences as right or wrong in a struggle pulled straight from my conflicted sixth-grade heart.

I have far too much to pray for to hold back from speaking these wishes out loud.

In the book, I exaggerated Mariam’s misbeliefs because it offered me an opportunity to show how a religious symbol, like a crucifix, which has been made normal to us through exposure and familiarity, can be jarring from an outside lens. Over the course of the book, Mariam learns what took me several more years of religious education to understand—that when it comes to our differences, there are far more worthwhile questions to ask of each other, like why a practice is meaningful or what we can learn from this point of difference.

There is tremendous value in having conversations about religion early in life. Not only are our religious differences analogous to relating to any kind of difference, but there is so much religious influence in American society. Religious ideals are deeply embedded in our government, and many of our policymakers make decisions based on their own personal convictions. Now more than ever, we need to be aware of the way religion shows up in people’s lives and how it shapes their thinking. And the younger we start the better.

If I could go back in time, I would tell my younger self that although my neighbor’s grandson did wind up in juvenile hall, my mother was not misguided to send me to Catholic school—it opened my heart and gave me the gift of literacy in another religious tradition. I would tell myself not to shy away from boldly offering my intentions in my classrooms, at a church, or at my mosque. I have far too much to pray for to hold back from speaking these wishes out loud.

For us to understand that we share this world with people who are more like us than different; for us to know that accepting one another is not a choice but a necessity; and for us to forgo our questions of right or wrong in favor of asking ourselves, first and foremost, what is kind.

Oh dear God, please let us choose what is kind.

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Hail Mariam by Huda Al-Marashi is available from Kokila, an imprint of Penguin Random House.