Some of the first stories I ever loved were ones from the Qur’an and hadith. They filled the colorful pages of picture books my mother kept on a high shelf right next to the shelf where we stored the more stately hardbound, gold-trimmed volumes of the Qur’an. These stories are part of my earliest memories; I remember listening with awe as my parents told me about angels who could eviscerate ancient mountains in the blink of an eye, a Prophet who survived inside the belly of a whale and another who split the Red Sea neatly into two different-colored halves. The worlds in these stories defied the physical laws of the world I lived in and these stories taught me to believe in things that seemed improbable or thwarted logic. Most of all they taught me to imagine realities other than my own; just because something sat outside of my experience and eluded my senses did not mean it did not exist.
As I began to read more books, this belief was reaffirmed. Children’s literature thrived on imagination and young adult literature challenged possibilities. But once I graduated to adult novels, I realized that elements of the impossible threatened literary merit. Stories for grown-ups are often demarcated along neat lines into serious, realistic fiction and everything else. In fact, creative writing professors and literary magazines often discourage you from dabbling in fantasy or science fiction.
Why, I wondered, should we not take literature that contains elements of the implausible or paranormal seriously? After all, many of the pre-modern texts assigned in high school and college English classes take place in magical lands with magical characters. From the enchanted island in Shakespeare’s “Tempest” to the creature with multiple tongues, eyes and ears that represents fame in Chaucer’s “House of Fame,” these pieces of writing don’t shy away from the supernatural but rather relish in the impossible, and this has never cast any doubt on their literary merits.
So it seems as though dismissing the unbelievable is a thoroughly modern preoccupation, and one that’s likely brought on by the age of reason/enlightenment. In fact, this attitude arises from the very same impetus that sets up religiosity as intellectually inferior to that which science can explain. Faith, without concrete scientific evidence to back it up, is simply no longer good enough; it is no longer acceptable because it is seen as downright unintelligent and childish. But why should we be so uncomfortable with what we cannot see? Why should we insist on such a myopic view of the world?
It is important to see outside of oneself, to have faith in what cannot be seen. I don’t find God through quantifiable proofs. I find Him in the quiet comfort of pressing my forehead to the ground in prostration. I find Him when I slowly, purposefully recite the words of Al-Fatihah, the first chapter of the Qur’an, and try to imagine what infinite compassion and mercy looks like. I find Him when I feel compassion for someone else’s suffering. None of these moments and feelings are quantifiable but that doesn’t make them any less real or faithful.
If we really sit down to think about it, the natural laws of our world, which we so readily accept as fact, are actually quite strange, even fantastical. That leaves should turn to shades of rust and crumple in autumn, that crystalline frozen water should fall as light snow in the winter, that certain flowers should turn into fruit in the summer—it’s all weird. And it tells me that sometimes clinging to reason can be unreasonable.
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Sauleha Kamal is a recent graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University where she studied Economics & Social History and English.
Photo: Jayne Booton
