postscript
Due to popular demand, and because I really want to update but can’t since I have highly annoying papers to write, I’m instead posting my article that was published in the South Asian magazine on campus. Long-time readers may be interested to know it’s an edited and slightly more formalized version of this post from […]

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the problem lies elsewhere, always, of course
My friend, H, is a Cuban-American convert to Islam. His roommate is an international student from Saudi Arabia. They’re both good-natured and funny, and most of the time they get along really well, but once in a while they’ll burst out with the arguing and aggravate each other to […]

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umbrella terms
My response to being called desi, the word for people from the South Asian subcontinent:
“I may qualify, but I don’t identify.”
On the other hand, if you were to refer to me as a Pakistani (American) Muslim, we shouldn’t have any problems.
The end.

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I, who supposedly never cry, watched my face crumble in the mirror as I stood before it early yesterday morning, arms raised in the act of wrapping a scarf around my head, my mother standing next to me as she relayed the message.
I left the house less than ten minutes later, and cried all the […]

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Yesterday, we went to this wedding shindig thing about 90 minutes away. Although I’d been to fourteen weddings in the course of the eighteen months I lived in Pakistan, this was the first Pakistani wedding in the U.S. that I can remember attending. ‘Twas fun, even though we didn’t know most of the people. Actually, […]

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For all my joking that my mental age is in the single digits (and, hey, it is, okay), all I really want is to be fourteen again.
I was still two weeks shy of my thirteenth birthday the year I traveled to Pakistan, in the midst of Ramadan, for what would ultimately become an eighteen-month stay. […]

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My dad, baffled, a week ago: Yasminay, how can you be my daughter, and not know how to multi-task?Me: I’m sorry, but I just think there’s just something wrong with the idea of cooking chicken and eating ice cream at the same time.
This was after he came home from the grocery store and gleefully presented […]

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I was talking to a Muslim brother a while back, and he was telling me about his upcoming summer trip to Bangladesh. He was born and raised in the U.S., and it’s been 8 years since he’s been back in Bangladesh. Naturally, everyone thinks he’s going back just so he can get married, but he […]

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