Proud Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Ibtihaj Muhammad

  Cover design by Amanda Kain

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First edition: July 2018

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  LCCN: 2018938062

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-51896-3 (hardcover); 978-0-316-48723-8 (signed edition); 978-0-316-52549-7 (B&N signed edition); 978-0-316-51895-6 (ebook)

  E3-20180612-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Newsletters

  To anyone who has ever been told they don’t belong. When you let your light shine, it illuminates everyone around you.

  Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.

  —ZORA NEALE HURSTON

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is a memoir, not an autobiography. The stories and opinions recollected in these pages are based upon my memories and are true as I remember them. In some cases, names and identifying details have been changed, and some characters are composites of people who have passed through my life. In order to keep the story moving forward, I have also compressed time in some instances. If I had to describe exactly what this book is, I’d say it is the true story of my life.

  PROLOGUE

  “Muhammad…?” her voice trailed off. The substitute teacher, Ms. Winter, squinted and brought the list of names on the attendance sheet closer to her face. She was stuck, and I could guess why. She was looking at the seven letters in my first name and wondering how to pronounce it.

  “Is your last name Muhammad?” she asked, her eyes fixed on me, the only fourth grader in the classroom wearing a hijab, who happened to be sitting in the front row.

  “Yes.” I nodded. My eyes stayed glued in front of me.

  “And how do you pronounce your first name, young lady?” she asked.

  “It’s Ib-ti-haj,” I said, pronouncing each syllable as slowly as possible. “It’s pronounced just like it’s written,” I added. That usually helped people understand how to say my name, but it didn’t help Ms. Winter. She made another face, the kind of face you make when your mouth lands on something bitter.

  “Oh, that’s too hard,” she said, shaking her head no and scribbling something down on the attendance sheet. “We’re going to call you Ibti.”

  “Okay,” I said aloud, but the way she said “Ibti” made my cheeks burn. I refused to turn my head to see if my classmates were laughing at me or, worse, pitying me for having a name that was too hard to pronounce.

  During recess, I did some quick calculating in my head to be sure, but I was right. My friend Jennifer had eight letters in her name, and Elizabeth Brewster had nine in hers, and yet their names weren’t “too hard.” Their names didn’t require shortening. Why did mine? Ibtihaj was the easiest name in the world to pronounce. All my friends could say it, and they were all only nine years old like me. Ms. Winter didn’t even try to say my name.

  The truth is, for as far back as I can remember, this sort of confusion has existed about who I am, and it always starts with my name. Ibtihaj. “How do you say it?” “What does it mean?” And then the way I identify myself leaves some people perplexed: Black but Muslim. Muslim but American. Hijabi but an athlete. I’ve walked into many rooms and stood on stages where it was clear people didn’t know what to make of me. When no one knows where you fit into the social order of color and creed, confusion ensues until order is restored. Until people understand who you really are; that is when they stop and listen.

  And that’s why I wrote Proud. I want people to understand who I really am and maybe other Americans like me who feel the same, to get to know the journey behind the headlines of the “first US athlete to compete in the Olympic Games wearing hijab.” I wrote this book because I wanted to chronicle my quest to challenge society’s limited perceptions of what a Muslim woman, a Black woman, or an athlete can be.

  I want people to know that much of my strength as an athlete comes from how high I had to climb to release myself from society’s boxes and show up to the party even when an invitation was never extended to me. Along the way, I had to learn how to be tough and tenacious or risk losing the fight before it even started. I had to maximize my expectations for myself because no one else would, and I had to have the guts to pursue what I wanted even though it meant charting my own path. I didn’t have any role models to look up to who looked like me in fencing, and there weren’t any other Muslim women wearing hijab at the elite levels of sport to inspire my quest. I had myself, my family, and my faith, and that was enough for me to persist.

  Proud may seem like a familiar story, as this path I’m on was forged by the men and women who came before me—Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, John Carlos, Althea Gibson, Serena and Venus Williams, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf—athletes who defied the naysayers and triumphed over mountains of adversity. They had barriers thrust in front of them and doors slammed in their faces, yet they still triumphed both on and off the court. I hope that, when reading Proud, anyone who has had an opportunity taken from them because of their race, religion, or gender can find solace in these pages. I hope people feel empowered by my fight and know that they have every right to demand a place at the table of whatever life is offering.

  If someone had told me that my life would unfold the way it has—full of untold blessings and endless opportunities—because I picked up a sword in high school at thirteen years old, I would have called him or her a liar. But I did pick up that sword, and despite the uphill battle, it has been a rewarding journey. It is my hope that everyone finds their own sword to wield in a way that brings them happiness and success, and that the word “no” becomes their motivation to press forward. Inshallah, so may it be.

  CHAPTER 1

  In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

  —ALICE WALKER

  Come on, Ibtihaj,” my best friend, Amy, pleaded. She wanted me to come to her sleepover birthday party, but I knew the chanc
es I would be able to go were slim to none. There was just no way it was going to happen. The rules were pretty clear in our house. No sleepovers. My father had already ruled them out before I even knew what sleepovers were. But I really wanted to go to Amy’s party. She was my best friend. Plus, all the girls at school were having slumber parties now, and I was convinced I was the only third grader at Seth Boyden Elementary School who wasn’t allowed to sleep over at someone else’s house. Usually, on Monday mornings when all the girls were talking about how much fun they’d had together at a party over the weekend, I’d be stuck standing on the sidelines with nothing to add to the conversation.

  “Can’t you ask your dad? Maybe he’ll say yes this time,” Amy prodded as we sat on the picnic table bench in her backyard, resting after playing jump rope and riding bikes. Amy always had the best ideas and was so clever.

  “You know my dad,” I said, sighing. “But I’ll ask him anyway.”

  “Just try to butter him up,” Amy suggested. “Give him a hug.”

  I knew I would find my dad in his room getting ready to go to his evening shift at the precinct. He had gotten promoted to detective at work, so he didn’t have to wear his regular police uniform like he used to. But he was still a cop through and through, and the strict expectations he had at work for his officers were the same ones he had for his children at home. He ran our household with military precision. We knew not to question his authority or bend the rules. But I still held out hope that I’d change Abu’s mind, because I really wanted to go to Amy’s birthday party. I knocked on the door. “Abu,” I called out quietly. “Can I come in?”

  I opened the door to my parents’ room and found Abu sitting on the bed pulling on his socks. I put a big smile on my face to get him in the right mood. Remembering Amy’s advice, I walked right over and gave him a big hug, wrapping my skinny arms around his compact frame and taking care to avoid the prickly whiskers in his thick beard.

  “Abu,” I said, pulling away to look into his eyes. “My best friend, Amy, across the street is having a sleepover party for her birthday and wants to know if I can go. Can I?” I rushed out the words like I’d been holding my breath.

  Abu didn’t even pause before answering. “Ibtihaj, you know the rules. No sleepovers. You won’t be sleeping at anyone’s house except this one. It’s not safe.”

  “But you let me sleep at Auntie and Uncle Bernard’s house,” I reasoned.

  “That’s different. They’re family,” he insisted, walking past me to head out the bedroom door.

  I followed him down the carpeted steps to the living room. My mom was there putting my little sister, Faizah, to sleep on her lap. She still had on her hijab and her work clothes, dark, long, loose pants and a brown cotton tunic top. As a special-education teacher, Mom often found herself having to get on the floor with her students for certain activities.

  “What’s going on?” Mom asked, noting the frustrated look on my face. She saw that I was fast on Abu’s trail, my face a mask of determination.

  “Amy wants me to sleep over at her house for her birthday, but Abu said no,” I whined, willing my mother to make my father change his mind.

  She glanced up at my father and took in what was going on between us. The stoic look on Abu’s face made it clear he wasn’t going to change his mind. Even I could tell that.

  “You know the rules, Ibtihaj,” my mother said, echoing my father’s words from just a moment earlier. My feelings of hope deflated. Sometimes she could help make Abu see things differently, like the time she convinced him to let us keep a stray cat that we had found in the garage, even though Abu claimed he didn’t like pets. The cat ran away after only a few days, but after Abu saw how well we took care of it, he surprised us and brought home a beautiful umbrella cockatoo named Koocah that he rescued while on duty from a group of kids who were abusing her. And even though he still pretended to hate Koocah, she was now a real member of our family. So I knew there was room for my dad to change his mind, and I had inherited his stubbornness.

  “Abu, the kids who are coming to the party are just the girls from my class,” I said. “There won’t be any boys there.”

  My father was shuffling around the carpeted living room in his socks, collecting his keys, his wallet, and his glasses like he did every time he left the house. He stopped moving and turned to face me. “Ibtihaj, no sleepovers means no sleepovers,” he said with firmness in his voice to signal to me that the discussion was over.

  The tears started to form in my eyes, and my dad walked over to me. “Ibtihaj, you don’t need to cry about this,” Abu said, smoothing down the stray hairs that had escaped from my braids.

  I was frustrated. We had a lot of rules in our house. There were things we couldn’t do, like watch television during the week or listen to music on the radio; things we had to do, like wear our hijabs to school twice a week and pray five times a day; and things we were supposed to do, like get good grades and respect our parents. Some of the rules, I knew, came from the Quran, but some, like the sleepover rule, were simply because Abu was a protective father. He was a cop, and he saw bad things happen to good people every day. And some of the rules we followed in our house were because of where Abu and Mommy came from, which was where they didn’t want any of their kids to end up.

  My parents were both born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. In 1967, when my parents were teens, the Newark riots broke out, and the city burned with rage. Newark’s Black residents were protesting the racism and relentless police brutality endemic to the city. The riots ran unabated for four days straight, and when it was all over, twenty-six people were dead, more than seven hundred injured, and more than a thousand people had been arrested. Most of the victims caught in the crossfire were Black. In the aftermath of the riots, most business owners on Springfield Avenue, the key commercial thoroughfare, didn’t bother to rebuild and left their stores abandoned and boarded up. Most of the white people who had the means to do so fled the city, fearing more riots. A lot of people gave up on Newark, and the city became synonymous with urban decay, unemployment, and poverty. Drug abuse and crime were pervasive. When federal dollars poured into Newark to rebuild it in the 1970s, most of that financial capital went to the downtown business districts and did nothing to help the Black residents who still lived in Newark’s residential areas. In other words, even after the riots, Newark remained burdened by the dark shadow of its past.

  My mother, Denise, watched Newark burn, and it only strengthened her resolve to break free. The violence she witnessed frightened her, but it wasn’t wholly unexpected. Violence was something my mother acknowledged as part of the landscape of her neighborhood. But she had a plan. Like her sister, Diana, who was eleven years older and had a good job and lived in New York City, my mom knew she had to do well in school and get out of Newark. She planned to follow in her sister’s footsteps.

  Mom said her friends and family always called her a prude because she refused to party with them. They said she was too serious. But my mother wasn’t a prude; she was just afraid of what would happen if she let herself run loose, even for a day. She watched her own mother try to fight her demons with alcohol and lose the battle every time. She didn’t want that life. She was determined to do things differently. She didn’t want to get stuck like so many of the women she saw on porch steps and street corners looking like they’d been through a war of their own making. Rather than find out what temptation tasted like, my mother sought stability. When she felt the need to hang out, she’d walk just a few blocks to visit her cousin, Sharon.

  Sharon was a cousin from her mother’s side of the family. She was only a few years older than my mom, but she was living a life my mother admired. Sharon lived with her husband, Karim, and they had a marriage that wasn’t punctuated by violent fights and lonely tears like the relationships she witnessed growing up. Inside their small apartment, it felt like an oasis from the chaos in the streets, and it was one of the only places my mother felt really safe. For
one thing, Karim was always home by six p.m. Sharon never paced the living room wondering where he was, whom he was with, or when he’d be home. Karim had a good job as a mechanic, and Sharon said he didn’t drink or smoke or hang in the streets.

  Sharon felt like a big sister to my mom. They’d just watch TV and talk. One night, while hanging out in the kitchen, she asked Sharon how she found a guy like Karim who was not caught up in the streets.

  “Girl, Karim is a Muslim,” Sharon said. “You have to find yourself a Muslim man to marry. They will always do right by you.”

  “Karim’s a Muslim?” Mom asked. “Like he’s part of the Nation of Islam?”

  “No, he’s Muslim. Karim says those Nation brothas are trippin’. He says they’re more interested in starting a revolution than getting right with God.”

  “Are you going to become a Muslim?” Mom asked.

  Sharon shrugged. “I’m thinking about it. Karim wants me to, especially before we have children.”

  Mom considered the way Karim treated Sharon, with such obvious respect and care, so unlike the way her own father treated her mother, and told her cousin, “Girl, you should think about it, considering what a good man Karim is. That has to mean something.”

  And it was at that moment that the seed of Islam was planted in my mother’s brain. Was converting to another religion a possibility for her, too? She began to study the men and women around the neighborhood whom she knew were Muslim. The men who belonged to the Nation were easy to recognize, standing in front of their storefront mosques with their bow ties and bean pies. The women, too, wearing long dresses and head coverings. They all seemed so sure of themselves, so proud. The Nation of Islam is a religious organization based on Muslim principles, but it is also deeply rooted in Black nationalism. My mom wasn’t looking to be political; she was searching for religion.