After Childbirth Put Me in a Coma, I Couldn't Remember My Faith
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.
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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.
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