Every Family is an Oyster
By Kaden Habib
On my mother’s side, we have some rich family history that I have never had a clear timeline to. When I was a little kid, I asked many family members to clarify things, but between broken English, aging memory, and the comprehension skills and maturity of a child, I was never able to get the full picture. Now, since I am older and wiser, I decided to piece together the gaps in the story with my mother’s help. This is additionally supplemented with the fact that my maternal grandmother has been staying at our house recently, and has been recounting some of the stories. The following reflection is essentially my mother and I’s best guess, and is most likely a very accurate story of the real thing.
While my family history has many facets (I am Arab-Indian, so there are a lot of branching paths), I decided to focus more on my grandfather, and how my mother’s side (The more Arab side) came to be in Hyderabad, India.
This story mainly hinges on my great-grandfather, and it is through him that the family moves around.
In the beginning, my great-grandfather was born in Saudi Arabia. Not much could be said or remembered about when he was young, the relatives of mine who would remember this are either far off somewhere in the regions of Saudi Arabia and India, or are unfortunately not with us anymore. The story really kicks off when he became of working age. He bounced around jobs for a bit, not finding his true calling in a lot of fields; carpentry, academics, you name it, he’s tried it. Nothing was sticking, and he felt like he could be doing more, to help more people, and create a bigger impact.
His calling came to be when he decided to be a religious missionary, and spread the word of Islam. With this newfound goal, he traveled around the region, in and out of different countries, trying to get his message as far reaching as he could.
This is where things get fuzzy.
I asked my mother and grandmother what he did while being a religious missionary, but not much could be said about the work actually being done. While I know it had to have some substantial time commitment, nobody I asked could speak to the experience. This is part of the reason I’ve heard so many variations without ever getting a clear answer;
everyone is a secondary source, and being a secondary source puts the story through the blender, so to speak.
Everyone recounting stories tells them a little differently, exaggerates different parts, and you can tell that everything said is tinted with their own perspective, their own thoughts and experiences at play, shaping the narrative uniquely. While this makes sense — everyone is going to have different parts resonate with them, and recall the other bits of information differently because of the way we naturally process information — it makes it rather difficult to get an accurate picture of what actually happened.
Back to the story, my great-grandfather traveled around a lot, sticking to the region. He was quite successful at what he did. To be fair though, the region he was in, Saudi Arabia, was pretty much the Muslim Capital of the world. Sure, there were small sects of other things going on, but the main religion there was (and still is) Islam.
Now for a little aside. There are mainly two different sects in Islam; Sunni and Shiite. Saudi Arabia and other countries like Egypt, Oman, Yemen, Syria, and the UAE are mainly populated with Sunni Muslims. Countries like Iraq and Iran are mainly populated by Shiite Muslims. Since you can trace my heritage back to Saudi Arabia, it would be a smart (and accurate) assumption to believe that my family, including my great-grandfather, are Sunni Muslims.
Why does this matter?
Well, being a religious missionary means that you travel places to promote your side of religion, so it came about that my great-grandfather would travel to the Iraq and Iran region to promote the Sunni branch of Islam. This is interesting because of a few things.
One, in that time period — and still to this day to an extent — it was dangerous to go against the grain in those countries. Meaning, promoting the Sunni branch of Islam is more of a dangerous task than you would expect. Sometimes when people hear about religious missionaries, they expect the people who wave signs on the sides of the highway, or those people who work in megachurches, or other positions where you stand on a street corner or knock on doors and promote the word of God. Now, I can’t claim to completely understand the work my great-grandfather did, but it is much more complex, and dangerous than that.
Two, the divides between Sunni and Shiite extend to all things in those regions. When the government is connected to religion, it suddenly becomes a much bigger deal. Lawmaking was interwoven with religion, and it wasn’t in any sort of subtle ways.
Naturally, the step that one would take to gain better understanding and access to regions that are potentially life-threatening would be to seek out guidance from a higher, more authoritative power. So, with that in mind, my great-grandfather sought out some of the royalty in Saudi Arabia. According to some family members, it was the prince at the time, according to others, it was the king. While I don’t know what’s exactly true, I know either of them weren’t anything to scoff at.
This is possible because of two important factors. One, my great-grandfather’s work as a missionary was very successful.
While again, I reiterate the point of nobody knowing exactly what he did, he was very good at whatever that was.
He had gained quite a bit of fame in the missionary world and that helped back him immensely. Two, remember the points I made about religion being intertwined with the government? Well, everyone on my mother’s side is a descendant of Prophet Muhammad ( صلى†الله†عليه†وسلم) and that gains a lot of attention in the Muslim world. With that backing my great-grandfather, he met with the royalty, got their advice and support to continue on to more dangerous territories, and journeyed to the Iraq-Iran region. Somewhere in this process he met my great-grandmother (nobody could give me a clear answer of when this happened, and if she was from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, or elsewhere) and continued his work.
Once again, things get a little jumbled. He was very successful in missionary work in the Iraq-Iran region, and after some time, he went back home to Saudi Arabia. There, the king (most people agree on this part) was very pleased with what he was able to accomplish. So much so, that after my great-grandfather got his much deserved rest, the king had a task for him. Well, both a task and a gift. India was another area that Islam had been trying to reach, with tense, violent relations between the Hindus and the Muslims. The king thought it best to send my great-grandfather there, to continue his missionary work. But this wouldn’t be without reward.
The king decided to gift my great-grandfather a large amount of land that he owned in Hyderabad, India, as well as a significant amount of wealth.
So my great-grandfather and great-grandmother moved to India, where he continued his missionary work. With the large amount of land he owned, and the significant wealth, he could put his all into his work. However, this did not come without hardship. The tense relations between Muslims and Hindus were backed by a decidedly Hindu government, and they harassed my great-grandfather to no end.
One of the ways this manifested was the government building (or allowing others to build) on the land that my great-grandfather owned. My mother could recall one memory of her time at the estate in Hyderabad, where something tense was happening, and her grandfather instructed her to stay inside, while he “went out with some scary looking men… who looked like they had machine guns… and fierce dogs.”
This missionary work continued until my great-grandfather was of retirement age. By that point, he had already had nine children, my maternal grandmother included within that. He lived out the rest of his life comfortably, in a beautiful estate, surrounded by family.
Unfortunately, when he passed, the Hindu government stole even more land, and inheritance between the nine siblings was clouded by in-family politics and fights. Regardless, he is a man remembered for his fiery gentleness; ferocious yet caring as he strove to spread peace to all those who would listen.
To wrap up, my grandmother met my grandfather in Hyderabad. Once they married, they came to the US, where they had my mother and my two uncles. My mother married my father, whose family was coincidentally Muslims from Hyderabad, him also being first generation in America. My parents later have my sister and I, and the rest of it is history.
When getting the full details of my great-grandfather’s life, I could have never imagined it. While some of the stories may be embellished or misremembered, that’s how all of history is.
In the modern day, sure, it’s easier to tell what happened in the past, but for thousands of years, all humans could do is pass down their traditions, values, and stories to their loved ones, and hope the memories of old survived to the younger generations.
There’s a poetic beauty about oral history. The story, it’s meaning, and the lives that have such rich complexity to them never fail to amaze me.
While in the case of my family’s history, the world was a much different place, it is not a unique case.
Every family is an oyster of sorts, pearls forming without anyone realizing, and are just waiting to share their stories.
I like to hear stories of old because of the different perspectives they bring. My great-grandfather lived in a time of religious strife and violence, and chose to dedicate his life to spreading peace through religion. He journeyed a region that is almost alien to our own, in a time where things were handled much differently. If he lived in this day and age, his goal would undoubtedly be the same, but perhaps would not include much of the violence and danger. Who knows how much outreach he could have due to the internet.
I liked to believe, and my family would agree, that our morals and beliefs are defined through our actions. My mom and her family, and now me more than ever, try to live our lives in a way to honor the work and sacrifice that my great-grandfather went through, and hope that in each day of our lives, we are able to make him proud, and add to the richness of his legacy and my heritage.
I’m Kaden Habib, and this is my family’s story.
