The farthest back I can go is the mid-1700's, when two young brothers, Fazal-Din and Khair-Din, migrated from Kashmir to Amritsar, a city today just inside the Indian Punjab border. From then on, it is the story of Fazal-Din's descendants which becomes my story, on my dad's side. The late 1800's saw my grandfather, Chiragh-ud-Din (meaning "lamp of faith") in the town of Sagar, in the heart of India. Although originally Punjabi, he was a travelling hakeem, or traditional doctor. His caravan was looted at the turn of the century near Sagar where he eventually settled. His family grew to include eleven children altogether, the third oldest boy being my father. By the time the tragic events of the partition came to pass, the family had already moved across the soon-to-be border of Pakistan. My father, Urdu-speaking originally, grew up then in a Punjabi village. He majored in zoology as an undergraduate, but then decided to pursue medicine as a neurologist. His training took him to the U.K., where he spent seven memorable years training in different places (many favorite stories from the Isle of Man). It wasn't until after he decided to move to Cincinatti that he was introduced to my mother, who had just completed the same move from Pakistan to England.
My mother's family traces their descent all the way back to Hassan (RA), the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, in a book called Ash-Shajarah, or "The Tree", which I finally got to see in my 1995 trip. My great-grandmother was widowed at the tender age of 18, with my two-year-old grandmother, in 1910. My grandmother grew up fatherless, and excelled in her studies, but turned down an offer of scholarship study to take care of her mother. She married my grandfather, who was her cousin, and had three children, the oldest of whom was my mother. Alongside raising the children, she spent her time educating the girls of her village to read and understand the Holy Qur'an. My mother pursued medicine with a perseverance that allowed her to rise above poverty and traditional feminine roles, and chose the field of psychiatry. She worked in a hospital in Lahore before going to England for further training, where she met my dad's sister... Somehow, for some unknown reason, my dad decided to move to Fayetteville, NC (affectionately called Fayette-nam) of all places, which is where he and my mom got married, and my sister and I were born.
I was born in '76, and my younger sister Ayesha in '78. We went to school together all the way up through college, which was The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My sister then did a master's in English at the University of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland. She took a couple of years off before going to the University of Maryland, College Park where she's doing her second master's in journalism and mass communication. She worked at the Islamic e-zine islamonline.net as well. She got married in August 2003 and now works as a reporter for the Prince George's County Gazette.
I took a year off after undergrad teaching Hindi and Urdu and trying to decide what to do with my life. I took the LSAT in December 1996 and three months later, got into Tulane Law School. I moved to New Orleans in August 1997.
I got married in May of 1999. My wife Rabiah, is a hometown Detroit girl all the way (on the "pop" side of the soda-pop debate), and just before the wedding she graduated from Wayne State University with a degree in Communications. She worked at a full-time Islamic School down in New Orleans. She completed a master's in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003. Now she is the Communications Coordinator at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Me, I passed the Maryland bar in 2002. I spent the next year teaching Urdu and Hindi at NC State, classes on Islam and law at Carolina Friends School, doing some real estate work, memorizing the Qur'an, and trying to hook up a job in the DC area.
We moved to Maryland in May of 2003. Rabiah started at CAIR, and I did some temp work at White & Case in DC before signing on as an of counsel lawyer with Kemet & Hunt, PLLC. I've handled everything from criminal defense to traffic to divorce to general civil litigation to immigration. But these days I'm trying to focus my practice to immigration and criminal defense.
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