This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
Aymann Ismail has a variety of identities that keep him busy. When I asked him to tell me about himself, he replied, “I’m a journalist, a parent, and a full-time Arab American.” He is also the author of the new memoir, Becoming Baba: Fatherhood, Faith, and Finding Meaning in America.
One of the things I appreciate most about Ismail, who is Muslim, is the way he subtly incorporates reflections on his faith into his writing. In Becoming Baba, Ismail relates how he sat down to read the Quran, only to vehemently disagree with what he read. This led him to explore his doubts and questions, which Becoming Baba explores in an engaging and refreshing way.
“One thing I think I would like to put out there is that this book is not written to be preachy at all,” he told me during our interview. “I tried really hard not to be preachy because I know how taxing and tiring it could be to read a book and feel like you already know where it’s going.”
Ismail succeeds in writing a book that is inviting instead of preachy, a spirit that permeates his other projects. Whether it is his documentary series Who’s Afraid of Aymann Ismail? or as a staff writer for Slate, Ismail has a knack for communicating his perspective without apology or ego.
In our interview, we talked about his book, his family, faith and doubt, 9/11, and what made him want to become a journalist. In talking to him about his experience with faith, doubt, parenthood, and love for the band The Fall of Troy, I realized we shared much in common.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: Your new book is called Becoming Baba: Fatherhood, Faith, and Finding Meaning in America. And rather than asking you to just tell me what the book is about, I want to ask you, what has it been like to become a baba?
Aymann Ismail: It’s like my greatest dreams coming true and also my greatest nightmares coming to fruition. Throughout my life, it has often felt like I needed to become a different version of myself to succeed at different stages. But at the same time, you need to figure out what you love about yourself and what needs to die to get to that ideal. And in becoming a baba, I was expecting that to happen.
But one of the things I write about in the book is this moment when I’m holding my kid for the very first time. I built it up in my head. I’m like, “This is the moment I’m gonna become a dad. I’m gonna transform into this person who’s gonna be totally different than who I was one day earlier.” And that doesn’t happen.
I have a podcast called Man Up, and I’ve spoken to a lot of dads. I had always heard that there’s this big, magical moment where you almost wanna cry. And then when it was my turn to experience that, I guess I built it up so much in my head that that was all I could think about.
But it’s been a process of discovering unknowns and then accepting that you’ll never truly be in control. I think that’s the best way I can describe it without bending your ear.
You recently wrote that you “wrote Becoming Baba to unpack the pressure of passing down to your kids a faith your parents fought to preserve.” How have you tried to deal with that pressure now that you are a father?
By writing the book, one of the wonderful things to come out of it is my new understanding of what it means to be a faithful person. I do this on purpose, but Islam and religion are almost invisible characters in the book.
Islam itself, as a religion, is growing up and becoming more sophisticated. Early on in my life, my faith was just muscle memory: I don’t really understand what’s happening, but I’m doing it anyway because I have to. And then it’s about self-control and following the rules.
And then my faith becomes, “How do I impress this girl that I just met who I really like? How do I impress her family?” And then when my wife and I had a miscarriage, I needed to understand something that there was really no real answer to. In that context, that was the first time I ever needed faith.
But I think I’m going to do the same thing my parents wanted to do, which is to try and preserve Islam in my kids and instill in them the Islamic identity and values. What I’m not gonna do is start by just giving them a download and then expecting them to feel and be Muslim.
READ MORE: I'm a Christian and an Interfaith Educator. America Needs Islam.
I’ve come to learn that Islam is this relationship that you have with the spiritual that exists in all of us. You can go your whole life without ever feeling it. I want to give my kids the tools so that when they do go on that journey, when they do discover in themselves a desire to be tapped into that, they already have that muscle memory.
It’s all about continuity and relationship, and it’s about keeping the spirit of our great ancestors alive in this new place that’s not my ancestral homeland, even though I grew up in the U.S., in New Jersey. Islam is part of their heritage in the same way that the Arabic language or the Egyptian identity is. I feel like it’s all tied into one.
You and your family are public people, and so I wonder how you balance the importance of teaching your kids about privacy and safety while also emphasizing that they shouldn’t be afraid to be who they are?
I think about this a lot. I didn’t want to post any pictures of my kids for those reasons. But then, because the book is about parenthood, I almost felt obligated to. This is one of those things that I’m not going to be prepared for as much as I want to be. One of the things I have my heart set on doing now is putting my kids in an Islamic school.
You could probably relate to this: Having an identity that is inherently political sort of forces you to be public. You can’t live a private life. People are going to act like they know you and act like they know everything about you based on one part of your identity. Because people are going to be like, “Oh, you’re Muslim, you’re Arab. Tell me about 9/11. Tell me about Palestine/Israel.”
I grew up in a neighborhood of immigrants and Black and brown people. That’s the saving grace. That really let me just be a kid all the way up until college. And then, at that point, it was about like, “Alright. I need to be very comfortable very quickly with being politicized.” Because it was not up to me.
I feel like your faith influences your writing and your journalism. Is that right?
Yeah, it totally does. I think it has more to do with the experience of being Muslim in America than it does with anything in the book. I think it comes down to being 11 and 12 years old and needing to help other kids our age understand what just happened after our country was under attack from Muslims abroad. I feel emotionally attached to both sides of that attack.
For a lot of people, 9/11 is as simple as, “These people in caves couldn’t stand to see us having fun on this side of the ocean.” As a Muslim person, that won’t pass the smell check. So, when I was 11 and 12 years old, it was really apparent that people needed guidance. They needed someone to tell them that’s not the case. Early on, I discovered I liked being that guy. I liked it when people would ask me questions.
In my mind, it’s really easy to understand how somebody like that could end up becoming a journalist where their whole job is just trying to understand the deeper story, the story behind the headline, and then communicating it to people who are generally curious and want to understand it.
You write about how your wife, Mira, helped you question aspects of Islam that troubled you, and this helped you reconnect with your faith. For people who have doubts and questions about their faith, what would you encourage them to do?
My advice would be to lean into them. Allow yourself to be curious, not afraid of those doubts. It’s really easy to say, “I must be misunderstanding this. I’m not even gonna touch this. Who cares? I’m just gonna go ask somebody for the answer and then just fully accept their answer as truth.” That’s the easy thing to do.
The more productive thing to do is to go and find those answers yourself. Go in the text, read the books, find people that you trust and have broad discussions about how they came to their conclusions. If that gels with you, continue talking with them.
When it comes to faith, there’s an overlap between belief and practice. I think it’s a mistake to think of those things as distinct. If you’re practicing without faith, you could do that, but it’s still just practice without faith. And if you’re faithful without practice, you can do that, but you’re still just faithful without practice. But if you do both, that’s where that enlightenment comes. That’s when it becomes really rewarding. In Becoming Baba, I explore a lot of these doubts.
When I went to the Quran for myself for the first time as an adult, I was about to get married and was wondering what I could learn from this book that I’ve been told has all the answers about becoming a good husband. I found something that I really didn’t agree with: If I had a disagreement with my wife, I should hit her. There’s no world in which I would ever lay hands on my wife like that. There’s no world where I would ever accept that’s a normal thing to do to your wife. The thing I could have done was ignore it, pretend I didn’t read it, and bury those feelings. But what I did instead—and this is what I recommend for people to do—is talk about it out loud with people that you trust.
Here’s the other thing: When it comes to Islam, and this is probably true for all faiths, there’s this idea that it’s supposed to be timeless, and it’s applicable for all people in all times. And the thing that is interesting to me is that if you reflect on your own personal life and your lived experience, and you think about how you interacted with those same verses [at various stages of your life], there’s no world in which your understanding of those verses will remain consistent. Imagine how different you are from your parents or how different you are from four generations ago. For anything to be applicable to all people of all time, it requires, from my point of view, a person to be able to reflect and come to their own understanding.
Doubt is there to challenge you and get you to a position where you’re closer to your spiritual side and that spiritual connection that we all share.
“Doubt is there to challenge you and get you to a position where you’re closer to your spiritual side.”
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!