i.

i know this girl who was raped when she was 8. she was 13 when i found out. i know this girl who’s known her father was a rapist since she was 11. she was 12 when i found out. i know this boy who’s had to spend time with a man who he knew sexually assaulted young boys. he was 17 when he told me. i know a girl whose friend was raped by her uncle. she was 12 when she told me.

muslim kids, you know. muslim rapists to match.
we trust our own, if only because we don’t trust others. this is why we keep close watch on our kids, on our daughters especially, because we want to keep them safe. we want the best for them, for them to be safe. we want to protect them, so we trust sparingly,

we trusted too much.

i know a woman who knows her husband is a pedophile and had a child with him after she learned this about him. and is still married to him. she said she does it for the children, because she can’t afford to leave him.

(this is poor. this is about money, calculating freedom to the cent and the day. a cost of living.)

i know a girl who is the top of her class, every day. i know she’s the top of her class because i taught her, and i’d snap at her to stop reading novels during classtime, to keep pace (that is, to slow down infinitely) with the rest of the class. her essays were always, far and away, the best of the lot. and one day she wrote me a letter, Please don’t call the police. Please don’t do this to me. It’s not fair. and it read like the letter of any 12-year-old. rounded, childish handwriting on lined paper torn out of a notebook. and i wrote back, Please forgive me.
then i took photocopies and made sure everything was dated.

and i didn’t write, One day you’ll thank me for this. One day you’ll understand, because this child was already older than i’d ever be. there was nothing i knew about the future that she didn’t already know.

so we’re careful. our kids don’t loiter in dark alleyways in the middle of the night and they don’t dress provocatively and they don’t date and they don’t drink and they don’t and they don’t and they don’t. and we wear hijab, and sometimes we wear niqabs, and we say our prayers five times every day, and sunna and nafl, too. and we take them to bayaans and khutbahs and conferences and on jamaat. we read the quran and the riyadus salaheen and the fazail e amaal. we made sure we knew all the right duas for all the right prayers. taraweeh and qiyam, and janazah and on both eids. we had a maltitude of reasons for following the seerat ul mustaqin, for being as true and as righteous as we could be. and one of those reasons we held aloft like a talisman, to ward away the evil that creeps outside the thresholds of our homes: we wanted to keep them safe.

ya rabb, if we failed our children, know that we did it because we didn’t know better. we loved them, and love them still, and you told us they were a wealth and a mercy. we knew them as an amanah, a trust in our old age and a measure of our humanity. but if we didn’t do enough, you know it was because we didn’t know what else to do. why could the pain have not been ours. if the failing was ours, why did they have to suffer it. dear god, we followed the rules, all of them, every last one, however bitter, however hard. if we went astray somewhere, why was the punishment visited on them. hold us accountable, now, but why did you not protect them. ya rabb, there is no one else but you. we kept them decent, so they’d be able to find good partners later, hoping that their characters would stand them in good stead, when our poverty meant few suitors would look our way, and maybe they’d find better partners than ours, someone who could heal them, make things better for them. we wanted them to be happy. we wanted a future for them. and you saw everything.
ya raqib, you saw, everything.

we did everything we could. we kept them as safe as we knew how.

we did everything we knew. god in heaven knows we never willingly put our children in danger’s way. we worked double shifts so they could eat, or we stayed at home so we could cook. we made sure the doors were locked and that their friends came from good families. we didn’t let them stay out late, and when, after months of saving, we bought them computers and paid for access in our government subsidised houses, we monitored their usage, because the internet is a filthy place. we enrolled them in islamic schools and classes, so they’d know the deen.

god knows, ya rabb. we did everything we could. this was love.

you know what was funny? it wasn’t funny, actually. or it is, if you look at it from a certain light, the kind of light that filters down when you’re sitting in front of a computer screen, wondering who you ask for help when it’s not you that was hurt, only that you’re trying to help these kids and there is no form of help that doesn’t look a lot like pain. what is funny then, in the kind of way that twists a heart into a shape it’ll never unlearn, is the realisation that the kids not only know more than we thought they did, they know more than we do.

how many of the adults knew about him? i was the broken latch, the leak between the world the children lived and the one the adults thought they had under the control. i was the unruly tear in the boundary that the children had knowingly and willingly helped patrol. why did the kids do it? why did they not just admit their own knowledge?
what does it mean to refuse sex ed classes to a child who’s been raped, because you think none of the girls in your class know about sex and it’s not appropriate, because they don’t need that knowledge. they’re only 12 - have some hayaa, they can ask their mothers about it when the time is right. but they were already sitting out prayers and counting up missed fasts, and her mother was married to the man she most hated and most feared. what was there left for them to learn? what did you think they talked about during recess?

few, very few, of the adults knew about him. and the few that knew anything at all, knew very little. i was the first to learn as much as i did about him, and who knows how much more there is to know. meanwhile, all the children knew. and, in their own ways, had began to plot defences. the boys were thinking up plans to waylay him in the mosque one night on jamaat. so imagine: a ring of teenage boys, hopped up on the thrill of anger and hope, and one middle-aged uncle. (yes, uncle. still some call him uncle.)
the girls were less outwardly violent, but they’d write things or say things that would freeze me for hours. after a while, they stopped talking to me about it. they’d shrug when i asked if they were ok, if things were ok. and i learned to stop asking, but i held on to their email addresses and phone numbers. i promised myself i’d leave them my contact info with every move i made from here on in. because One day you’ll understand and maybe you’ll have something to say to me then. you’re only 12 now; life is a long way ahead yet, and it gets scarier and lonelier. sometimes you need someone to scream at. i photocopied: Please trust me. Please remember that I’m here. and Please forgive me.

so all these performances we put on for the benefit of the kids, they saw right through them. the softshuffling around STIs and pregnancies, around heartbreak and marriage, all the beautifully straightforward narratives of Happily Ever After that we made up for their benefit, they saw right through. they knew what we were doing, and they played along, for our benefit, to keep things simple for all of us.

and as far as i could tell, they didn’t hate us for our playacting. they didn’t despise us or judge us or even seem to think much less of us for it. this, above all other things, was what underscored their naivety: to them, we were still their elders. perhaps we didn’t know as much as they did, but simply by virtue of our being their parents and teachers, shuyukh and family, we were accorded a basic level of respect. the children thought that this was how relations between children and adults necessarily functioned: a mutual deception, where one side grossly overestimated its own awareness. we taught them well, didn’t we. so well that even we’d forgotten how little we knew, how flimsy was the foundation upon which we’d built our silences.

that’s the funny part, the funny part that can drive a person to tears. who was being protected from whom, if these kids where hiding their hurts because this was the system we said we’d set up for their benefit?

i was 23 and i thought that number signified something. i thought i knew what it meant to be alive, to be responsible for another person’s well-being. i thought i knew what courage entailed, and what the good looked like. i mean, i was twenty-three. surely those years counted for something. but the funny part was these kids had undone everything i knew. they were children, they were my students and my siblings. i was older than them, i signed papers for them, and graded their tests. i was supposed to know better than them, that was what my signature on their permission forms meant.
but i didn’t. they’d seen right through me, too. it’s hilarious.

—
note: all of this is true.