When I was lying in a coma, after complications during my son’s birth nearly killed me, I heard my mom speaking.
It’s the only memory I have from those five days I was comatose.
“Keep your faith in Allah,” my mom whispered over the beeping of the life-support machines.
My kidneys had failed. My liver had failed. My heart was damaged. My blood wasn’t clotting and my lungs had filled with liquid. Most concerning was the acute damage to my brain, which had lost oxygen when I had a grand mal seizure. A neurologist told my family that if they were lucky, I would die. If not, one of them would need to decide whether to take me off life-support. I was 29.
My parents turned to rituals for hope and for help.
From San Francisco, where I was in an intensive care unit, they ordered sheep to be slaughtered and served as mutton biryani at every orphanage in my birth town of Hyderabad, India. They also asked an imam there to rush to the top of a holy mountain to sit and read the Quran in its entirety. They prayed, and they had family and friends do the same — saying salat five times a day so that, across the various time zones, there would always be a prayer in God’s ear for my recovery.
Rituals have always been an important expression of my family’s faith, the repetition of each rite connecting us back through the centuries to the first Muslim community.
Seconds after I was born, my dad whispered the declaration of Islamic faith into my ear. There is no god but God, Ashhadu an la ilaha illallah.
At 5, when I could recite the first verse of the Quran from memory, my parents threw an elaborate party and I stood before everyone, draped in jasmine leis, and proudly pronounced myself a Muslim with the same words: Ashhadu an la ilaha illallah.
From then on, the sun’s movement across the sky sliced my day into five segments. No matter where I was, in India or the United States, I knew how to orient my body toward Mecca. For one month every year, I woke before dawn to consume my first and only meal of the day. Growing up, I witnessed my parents giving alms to those in need, and then, after I left home, began giving alms myself. On our annual trips home to Hyderabad, my family made a pilgrimage to the same holy mountain where my parents would send the imam. And I’ve always accepted that before I die, I must circle the Kaaba in Mecca.
These ancient rituals gave my life direction — an orientation toward God.
When I emerged from the coma, I had forgotten all this: No memory that I’d given birth, no memory of who I was. My English was shredded by severe aphasia. The diffuse brain damage had reduced me to my primal self. I was no longer a writer and a thinker. I had lost those abilities — not just my words but my capacity to imagine, to plan, to create, to reason. And I could no longer conceive of a god.
I was like my newborn son, discovering the world for the first time. The rituals of prayer and devotion were replaced by the tedious, repetitive acts of rehabilitation.
Learning to put one unsteady foot in front of the other, straining to string one coherent word after another. I also did my best to fulfill the rites of new motherhood when I needed mothering myself: changing diapers, nursing and simply holding my newborn.
It was the worst kind of solitary confinement, year after year of isolation and confusion inside a shattered brain.
When I could finally conceive of a god, I began muttering in anger. Help me! Grant me mercy! Show me compassion!
These were prayers of desperation, not devotion. I’d lost trust. I didn’t orient my body toward Mecca anymore. I didn’t deny my body during Ramadan. I wasn’t moved to connect with the divine. I blamed God for what I’d become.
In total, it took three years to heal and seven to feel normal again. In that time, I managed to do what my doctors believed impossible: first to survive the total collapse of my body and then to rewire my brain so wholly that I could again imagine, reason and write.
Stunned by my improvements, at my last follow-up exam, my neurologist called me the Miracle Girl.
Hearing this, my parents again slaughtered sheep, fed orphans, recited prayers, all to express gratitude for God’s mercy.
The neurologist’s unexpected pronouncement brought me to my knees. While I believed I had abandoned faith rituals, I found myself creating one of my own. Every year on my son’s birthday, on what should have been my death day, I unroll my prayer mat and touch my forehead to the ground.
Samina Ali is a novelist and the author, most recently, of “Pieces You’ll Never Get Back: A Memoir of Unlikely Survival.”
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