Seeing her perched on the corner of her light blue comforter, with her preternaturally tan complexion and blonde-streaked hair falling down around her shoulders, it is not difficult to peg Zuleikha Hester ’11 as a California girl. But at first glance, few guess the rest of Hester’s heritage.
Hester thinks it’s funny that people are always so surprised by the rest of her story. Like the part where as a child too young to take part in Ramadan customs, she would resentfully sit with her sandwich and feel excluded as her parents fasted until sundown for a whole month. There’s also the story of how her Christian-raised father, Tom, and Pakistani mother, Nazhat, met working on a movie set in London, with her mother in the costume department and her father creating special effects with makeup.
Her father would ultimately convert to Islam and end up knowing the prayers better than her mother. Together, they raised Hester with the traditions and lessons of their shared faith.
Turning the page on one of the open Arabic workbooks strewn across her bed, Hester carefully relays another childhood memory, that of an annual trip to the Los Angeles Convention Center with her father during Eid, a holiday marking Ramadan’s close.
“Hundreds of thousands of Muslims met and everyone prayed in this huge room,” she said, describing how powerful it was to watch the great mass of people together taking part in something so sacred. Although she had never been taught how to pray formally, she mimicked what everyone else was doing.
Here at Wesleyan, Hester has found herself a part of a new community: the small but tight knit group of Muslim students on campus.
Muslim Student Association (MSA) secretary Noumaan Shamsi ’10 estimates that there are roughly 35 to 40 Muslims on campus, with about 15 to 20 consistently observing with the group.
“Starting last year,” he said, “the Muslim community has become much more present.” Shamsi directly attributes their emergent role on campus with last year’s arrival of Chaplain Sohaib Sultan.
Sultan, who Shamsi describes as being “very connected” as well as being graced with the ability to “really get people on campus and get people thinking,” spearheaded last year’s introduction of an annual Islam in Conversation Week.
Among others, Shamsi also praises MSA presidents Nadeem Modan and Jamal Ahmed, citing the success of a recent Ramadan fast-a-thon that raised more than (at last count) $4,200 for charity, as well as several well-attended cultural events that were hosted by Turath House.
“In this post 9/11 world there’s a real need for Muslims to clump together and hopefully teach people,” Shamsi said.
He also spoke about the effect of 9/11 on college campuses across America, describing the proliferation of Muslim Student Associations on campuses across the country.
“People are becoming more and more aware of the need for dialogue and the need to be aware. There is a need for people to think beyond what they’ve heard on Fox News,” he said, explaining how one of the major themes of Islam in Conversation week has been
breaking down popular stereotypes.
Shamsi, who grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, was struck by the many cultural differences he was forced to deal with when he came to America, particularly regarding halal, or the Islamic codes that regulate intake of food, drugs and alcohol.
“Everything is halal in Pakistan, so for me it was a big shock to come here and have KFC not to be halal and McDonalds not to be halal,” he said. “I’ve lived in a Muslim society so I took these things for granted.”
After a difficult transition that involved its fair share of homesickness, Shamsi found a haven in a little building on the corner of Church and High streets, at Chaplain Sultan’s desk at the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life.
For people of all faiths, religious observances often tend to be just as cultural as they are spiritual, and for Shamsi, “the fact that we would get together on such occasions made such a difference.” He added that all these things “made my life a lot easier than it would have been going to a university that didn’t have these resources.”
Hester did not come from such a traditional background. Before Wesleyan, she attended a private girl’s school in the WASP-y Hancock Park section of Los Angeles where she was one of the only Muslim students. She was continuously forced to wrestle with ways to integrate the importance of her faith with her secular school life.
“[In L.A.], I knew who I was but I was also embarrassed to show my cultural side at the time,” she said. “I used to kind of go with the crowd, you know what people perceived me to be. I was that person, but eventually I realized I can’t be afraid who I want to be.”
This realization, she says, was largely spurred by a trip she made to her mother’s birthplace.
In the summer between eighth and ninth grade, Hester traveled to Pakistan and spent three weeks driving around the country with her mother, grandfather and cousin, an experience that she is quick to describe as “earth-shattering.”
For her, a defining moment came when she visited her Grandfather’s native village. The village doesn’t have a name, so she can only identify it by what it is commonly called “ “pnind”” which is simply the Urdu (Pakistan’s national language) word for village. She had been there only once before, as a toddler.
“I walked in and they looked at me, and they remembered who I was from when I was three years old, and there was this feeling of them looking at me and knowing everything about me,” she said. “They recognized immediately exactly who I was.”
When she came home, something had shifted inside of her. She longed to know more about where she was from and what her religion meant. Ultimately, she wanted to explore her heritage and learn Urdu, so that someday she could return and stay for a “very long time” and understand enough so that she could simply experience the village, and be present in a way that she was too overwhelmed and too awed to be during her first visit.
That next school year, she was tested when, during a school trip, the ninth grade cool girls“who she refers to as “The Blondes””handed her a glass of what they claimed to be water. The Blondes watched as she thirstily chugged down a large gulp of what was actually vodka, which would turn out to be Hester’s first and last sip of liquor, since as a Muslim the consumption of alcohol is forbidden. The experience was horrifying, she said.
“I realized what it was and threw the glass on the table and was bawling the rest of the night,” she said. “I felt tricked but I also just felt like I had done so wrong.”
At Wesleyan, Hester has found it easy to abstain from liquor, and she feels comfortable explaining why to anyone who is interested enough to ask. She also has found a haven in the community that extends out from Chaplain Sultan’s office, attending weekly Quran study sessions in his office and actively participating in the MSA.
Her faith also plays a large role in her approach to dating.
“The custom that my mom always taught me was that going out with boys wasn’t really something that Muslims did,” Hester said. She laughingly explained that she wasn’t even allowed to see a movie with a boy, or a group of boys, until she was 17. But she understood where her mother was coming from and instinctively respected her rules, adding that although her faith did not dictate her decision to attend an all girls’ school, it certainly made her parents feel more comfortable.
“I always thought that if I was going to be able to follow what my mom said, then whatever relationship I had after would mean so much more to me,” she added.
Hester does have a boyfriend“Skyler Grant, who attends Pierce College in California”but her relationship began much differently than the drunken hook-ups and instant message flirtations that characterize the start of so many of her friends’ relationships. Instead, Grant asked her parents for their permission to date her.
Since so few people identify Hester as a Muslim on looks alone, she says she put pressure on herself throughout high school to emphasize her faith and organize as much as she could around her campus, writing articles about Ramadan in her school newspaper, and getting friends to fast with her. As she describes this, she laughs, hops off her bed and grabs something off her bookshelf. It is her high school yearbook. Under every senior girl’s picture there is a superlative that the rest of the class came up with. In small dark text under a smiling picture, Hester is identified as “most likely to tattoo ’I’m half Pakistani’ on her forehead after being offered the lead role in White Chicks II.”
“People came up to me afterwards and were like ha-ha that’s so you,” she said. “I was like yeah, you know, it is. And I felt really proud, which was nice.”
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