Birthdays

My discontent had to do with my birthday, with the way Mustafa had not said anything -- no congratulations, no cake, no gift -- even though he knew the day was my birthday. Periodically, I checked my Facebook page to see who had posted on my page. As the numbers grew, I felt worse, not better. Why could the father of my child not, likewise, offer some acknowledgment? But then Mustafa did not know the date of his birth. As the sixth of eight children, he had never celebrated birthdays as a child. He knew only what his mother had told him: his birth had taken place sometime in late June/early July in the late 1970s. His astrological sign was Cancer, not Gemini, but beyond that, he knew nothing.

No one in the family ran down to the newsstand. No one checked out the estimates on the exact date at the chai shop. No one ventured down to the town hall to inquire as to the day of the year. After forty weeks of carrying Mustafa in her stomach, his mother had taken no photos of his birth. In fact, she had taken no photos of any of the children. There were class photos and a few random photos, taken by whom and for what purpose, he did not know. Only he had burned them, in order to protect himself during his earlier activist period.

Birthdays tend to be considered a western phenomenon in the Muslim world. In her memoir Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia, Carmen Bin Laden explains the troubles she ran up against in her attempts to throw a birthday party for her daughters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. None of the other wives would venture to disobey their husbands and bring their children to the party. A quick scan on the internet reveals the same phenomenon. Mommy Muslim at Mommymuslim.wordpress.com writes:

"Al Hamdulilah! My daughter just turned four this week. I wanted to celebrate it with her and invite a few of her friends (Muslim) over. I was told by one of the parent's (sic) that no one would come because no other parents allow their children to celebrate birthdays. We are new to this masjid and I didn't realize that this was a major faux pas. I do understand their position. If they tell their children that "Muslims don't celebrate birthdays" and then the kids come to my daughter's birthday, they will wonder why she gets to celebrate and they don't. So I totally support their position. Consistency is vital."

Mustafa would likely object to being called a Muslim, since 1) he was raised an Alevi, and 2) he is now an atheist, if anything. The Alevis do not worship in a mosque, but in an assembly house, in a service that consists of men and women dancing and singing together. The leaders of the assembly house even open up the religious topic of the week to discussion. Perhaps this is why Alevis have a reputation for liberalism and for holding religious views somewhere between Islam and Christianity.