How Reclaiming My Muslim Surname Became An Act Of Love
A graphic of a figure sitting in prayer as they are surrounded by plants. The headline reads ‘Acts Of Love: How Reclaiming My Muslim Surname Became An Act Of Love’. The article is by Taimour Ahmed
‘Sorry, can you confirm your name again, please? Is it Taimour Ahmed or Taimour Fazlani?’.....There it is, the question I’ve been anxiously waiting for. My automatic response to this question typically sounds something like ‘oh, it’s Taimour Ahmed but you can use Fazlani instead’. Most of the time, as I’m responding I can see the growing confusion on their face and it makes me more nervous but I persist. Sometimes, depending on who I am talking to, this works, if I am lucky. However, most of the time it doesn’t, and that typically creates the polar opposite response of what my intention was from the start, which was to minimise suspicion. While I recognise that my ‘surname swap’ play must be very confusing for the person asking, believe me, it’s exhausting for me, the person who’s been playing it for most of his life.
Following a reflective year in lockdown and more importantly coming of faith through Sufism, I wanted to understand the deep Islamophobic origins of where and when this issue started for me. At the same time, I want to explore how empowering it has been for me to finally start embracing my Muslim identity and surname after years of shamefully hiding from it.
My hope by the end of this piece is to have greater clarity, mainly for my own mental wellbeing and sense of identity. If by any chance, this article helps a young Muslim kid who is going through what I and many others of my generation went through then I would wholeheartedly welcome it. This one is for us Muslim kids who grew up denying our identities due to Islamophobia.
Let’s Start With A Clean Slate
Let me start at the top, my legal name is Taimour Ahmed, it always has been, but my family name is Fazlani. Most of the time people use their legal name because that is what you do. However, I’m not one of those people. In my case, for the last two decades, I’ve been using Taimour Fazlani as much as possible, especially socially.
That’s Silly, Why Have You Been Using A Different Name?
The reason I’ve been using a different surname socially is that I grew up in an era (2001-2010) of extreme Islamophobia. Due to the rampant Islamophobia that played out during the period, I made every effort to invisibalise my Muslim identity, starting with my surname. I was naively hoping that by replacing my surname ‘Ahmed’ with ‘Fazlani’ I would have at least some autonomy in being seen as a human as opposed to being seen as a vilified and dangerous brown Muslim man.
Remembering My First Memory of Islamophobia
I remember in 2002, our local Ahmadi mosque in Glasglow, UK would hold weekends for young boys such as myself full of learning, sport, and discipline. While they meant well we simply treated it as a weekend to mess around with our mates. As part of the sporting section of the weekend, we would go play cricket in the park near the mosque. The one thing I remember from that weekend was that as we were heading out to play cricket, our murabbi (teacher) asked all of us kids to take our Taqiyah (caps) off before leaving the mosque. It was a shocking moment because he would always be the first person to typically scold us if he ever saw us without our caps on, in or outside of the mosque. It was a very strange moment, especially because he followed this command (that man did not believe in the art of ‘request’) saying ‘goray decklenge, uttar lo cap’ (‘white people will see, take your caps off’). At the time I remember we all complied and got on with it because we wanted to play cricket. Although I repaint this moment in a slightly humorous tone, I distinctly remember the mix of fear and anxiety on his face. Especially when you consider he was known amongst us kids as the ‘hard disciplinary one’. It was a surreal moment as he swung his head left and right scoping out the road before we walked to the park. Looking back this was probably the first time in my life that I saw what I would define as ‘true fear’ as a kid. It was the kind of fear that debilitates you physically because your mind takes you into hundreds of scenarios for the coming moment, just that in all those scenarios you imagine something bad is about to happen.
As I got older, scenarios like the one mentioned above gradually started to become more routine rather than ‘one-off’ incidents. This was an experience felt by the majority of Muslims living in the west (or the east as they had to contend with invasions and drone strikes). Not only were the attacks physical or verbal, they were compounded by the constant demonetization of Muslims in mainstream culture and news outlets. The consequences of all this felt very real for Muslim communities, physically and mentally. For example, research shows that anti-Muslim assaults significantly increased in 2001, in comparison to previous years. It’s worth mentioning that anti-Muslim assaults hit a new spike in 2016 following Trump’s presidency win.
How Did This Make Me Want To Erase My Identity?
Growing up in a landscape that was full of suspicion and vilification towards Muslims meant that I wanted to be as distant as possible from being identified as one. While it was frankly shit and dehumanising having to deal with ‘what’s in your bag?!’ jokes growing up, it was actually more exhausting never being seen as a human being. Islamophobia was everywhere and in everything, something I was quite naive about. For example, while my white counterparts were cherished and celebrated for donning beards as they came into fashion, for me I was met with the comment ‘don’t grow your beard too big, you don’t wanna look like a terrorist’ from an ex’s mum.
Due to the fact that the threat associated with being a Muslim was so strong, I started to mold my identity in a way that was as ‘un-Muslim’ as possible. One concrete way I did this was by actively introducing myself as ‘Taimour Fazlani’ as opposed to ‘Taimour Ahmed’. Similarly, other ways in which I distanced myself from my Muslim identity was by actively doing things that proved how ‘un-Muslim’ I was, such as drinking in white spaces, eating pork, and even agreeing with Islamophobic views in white social circles.
Navigating this line of wanting to appear as un-Muslim as possible was a tricky and dehumanising one. However, it was one that was deeply rooted in a desire to protect me from this gigantic structural and societal plague that could easily rob you of your humanity in a matter of seconds.
The desire to disengage from our Muslim identity was an experience other people have previously spoken about also. For example, this article by Shawna Ayoub Ainslie highlights ‘21 ways in which her life changed following 9/11’. Cited within the article are countless ways in which she started to disengage from Islam such as ‘I stopped going to the mosque’ to ‘I left public play spaces if my son said an Arabic word or I had performed any action that might reveal me as Arab or Muslim’ and ‘ I learned how to be invisible’.
How Reclaiming My Muslim Surname Became An Act Of Love
My journey in embracing Islam has been quite a slow one, it is something I am still figuring out. It most likely is the case that I will be ‘figuring it out’ for the rest of my life and I am okay with that. What matters is that I have taken the first few steps.
A place of comfort and solace, it is during the pandemic that I have found myself becoming more deeply attached to Sufism after years of research. This is something that has gone a long way in helping me feel grounded during recent turbulent times. It is through Sufism that I have started to accept and apply important Islamic concepts like ‘surrender’. This means that I’ve started to sit with situations rather than actively try to resist forces out of my control. In a practical sense, this has ultimately enabled me to navigate something as anxiety-inducing as the pandemic with better ease and reflection. Ultimately, all of this has supported my mental well-being. Similarly, it is through the ritualistic practices of Islam, that I’ve started to cultivate set times in my day (morning and night) that allow me to connect with my mind, body, and spirit.
Specific to re-engaging with my Muslim identity, one of the first ways I started this journey towards actively undoing years of internalised Islamophobia was by publicly using my Muslim surname. Something I never imagined I would do growing up. An experience that has been a very empowering process.
The reason it feels so empowering to finally embrace and publicly acknowledge my Muslim identity and surname is that it gives me a sense of pride knowing I am owning something which I embrace and love, despite it being so vilified and demonised since my youth. At the same time, I feel a great sense of peace knowing I don’t have to navigate my identity in a way that is rooted in fear and shame anymore. There is nothing more dehumanising than denying what is at the core of your being.
While I don’t want to over-romanticise my coming of faith, reclaiming my Muslim identity and surname now feels like an act of love. And it is with this love that I hope to spend the future cultivating a new identity that is borne out of something rooted in love and social justice, inshallah.
This article is dedicated to Shuranjeet who has been instrumental in my development towards faith. It is through seeing how he uses his faith for social activism that I have moved towards reconciling my own faith from the lens of social activism.