Sabika's Story
April 30, 2019 3:16 PM   Subscribe

Sabika Sheikh, a Muslim exchange student from Pakistan with dreams of changing the world, struck up an unlikely friendship with an evangelical Christian girl. The two became inseparable—until the day a fellow student opened fire. (Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly; audio version available)
Sabika was scheduled to return to Karachi on June 9, which meant that she would be spending most of Ramadan, the holiest period on the Islamic calendar, with the Cogburns. Sabika explained to them that every day during the monthlong observance, Muslims are required to fast from dawn until sunset. They are not allowed to engage in thoughts or behaviors considered impure. It is a time of introspection and communal prayer. Sabika told the Cogburns that she couldn’t even drink water.

Jaelyn, Joleen, and Jason responded in a manner she couldn’t possibly have expected. They said they wanted to fast with her. They didn’t care what their friends might think of them performing an ancient Muslim ritual. “It was our way of honoring Sabika,” said Joleen. “It was our way of letting her know how much she was loved.”

And so, on May 16, the first day of Ramadan, Jason, Joleen, Jaelyn, and Sabika woke earlier than usual and prepared a full breakfast, which they ate before the sun rose. At school, Jaelyn and Sabika still walked laps during PE, but they didn’t take a sip of water. When they got home, they avoided the kitchen. Joleen prepared a dinner of chicken spaghetti, and the family gathered around the table, waiting for sunset. “We can’t eat it yet, but you can smell it!” Sabika said. At precisely 8:08 p.m., they devoured the meal.

Afterward, Sabika went upstairs for her evening prayer, and as she unfurled her prayer mat, the bedroom door opened behind her. There stood Jaelyn, holding her own prayer rug. She placed it beside Sabika’s and said she wanted to pray with her. Sabika nodded, dropped to her knees, and prayed to Allah.

“Ashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah,” Sabika recited.

“Dear precious Lord and Savior, thank you for this day,” Jaelyn began.
posted by Johnny Wallflower (32 comments total) 37 users marked this as a favorite
 
Read that yesterday - sincerely decent family and such a damn waste. (And I say that as someone who's a staunch atheist who really boggles at the nature of biblical literalism.)
posted by drewbage1847 at 3:19 PM on April 30, 2019 [12 favorites]


The Cogburns are what evangelical Christians should be.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:34 PM on April 30, 2019 [31 favorites]


So sad.
posted by suelac at 3:52 PM on April 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


Yeah I’d be a Christian too, if they largely followed Christ’s teachings. I mean they’re out there, but in my experience they’re a disappointingly small percentage of people who self-identify as Christians. Unfortunately a lot of them largely invoke their religion to hate and hurt on Others, which is not what Jesus Would Do.
posted by SaltySalticid at 3:54 PM on April 30, 2019 [6 favorites]


. . . .
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posted by XMLicious at 3:57 PM on April 30, 2019


Fuckity fuck fuck.
posted by hydra77 at 4:05 PM on April 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


if they largely followed Christ’s teachings. I mean they’re out there, but in my experience they’re a disappointingly small percentage of people who self-identify as Christians.

probably a far greater percentage than you think. It's just that the more hypocritical they are, the LOUDER.
posted by philip-random at 4:45 PM on April 30, 2019 [23 favorites]


This is the most heartbreaking thing. I am going to natter a little just to stop thinking how sad it is.

Nattering: suppose you had a factory trying to manufacture people like the Sheikhs and the Cogburns. You could expect a lot of failures, because that level of . . . goodness, I guess you'd say? . . . requires the most delicate balance of partly incompatible traits. You would get bigots, fanatics, hypocrites, dullards, and all the rest of the defects we associate with religious people. On average, taking your failures and successes into account, you would wind up with a group of people who averaged out a little more charitable and a little more likely to stay married, and otherwise about the same as everyone else, which is about how religious people average out.

But, oh, the successes. Just look at them. Maybe the whole project is worth it for them.
posted by ckridge at 5:11 PM on April 30, 2019 [4 favorites]


My sister and her husband and dyed in the wool Christian fundamentalists. She turns a blind eye to her intelligence, tells me straight-up that the world is six thousand years old, which I found hard to contain my laughter on. My brother-in-law is totally into it, a self-taught preacher (which is to say: unschooled). Both of them are arrogant -- the KNOW what the world needs, and, also, what YOU need. They supported Bush and his merry band of mass murderers, hundreds of thousands dead. For what reason? To suck the treasury dry, load up Haliburton and all of the rest of those pieces of shit. They are Trump lovers -- I do not understand that one, not at all. It's bizarre.

But. My sister especially but both of them will help you if you need help. When I had my hard time, and lay comatose in a hospital here in ATX, they cried all the way down here, left their home within an hour of hearing what had happened to me. Love, real love, love as a verb, an action -- they get that, and they do that.

There is a member here who has gotten hell beat out of her behind being a big-time Christian -- so many of us here have been so abused by jesus-jumper fundies that punching her hard, it's just reflexive, it's impulsive, and/or compulsive -- this is a safe place for those of us who've suffered due to religious lunacy. So, she gets hell beaten out of her. But it so happens that I know she helped one of our best members in time of dire need, gave of herself, supported, loved hard one of our best. My sister would do that also.

If I had my way? Every bible burned. Every quaran or koran or torah, all set to the fire. I've been known to tear religious garbage to shreds, then throw it in the recycle bin. It has caused so much pain, it has kept humans from loving one another across cultures. Let people pray together, if they want, if it brings them peace. But none of this "My god is bigger/better than your god." bullshit.

What I like, and what both of these families practiced, is this: Turn to your left, turn to your right -- on either side is a hand reaching out to hold your hand, to comfort you in hard times, to celebrate with you in good times. In short: To love you.


Always keep your heart
Connected to your wrist
'Cause everybody knows
You can't shake hands with a fist.
~~ Guy Clark
posted by dancestoblue at 5:29 PM on April 30, 2019 [19 favorites]


I'm a heartless bitch and I'm sniffling over here.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:39 PM on April 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


What a sad story -- toxic, entitled masculinity strikes again.
posted by benzenedream at 5:47 PM on April 30, 2019 [6 favorites]


What stayed with me from this story is the quality of friendship that emerged when we let kids do cultural exchanges. And the absolute pain of loss when hatred and violence roll through.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:30 PM on April 30, 2019 [12 favorites]


I'm not sure what's making me cry more: this story or the fact that here's yet another school shooting that I hadn't even heard of before, one in a line of many, no end in sight.
posted by Slothrup at 6:52 PM on April 30, 2019 [15 favorites]


.
posted by riruro at 7:35 PM on April 30, 2019


I keep reading this and crying. The strange alignment of stars that had to come about to make two girls become such committed friends against all the odds of geography, religion and all the rest of it, and then it all gets destroyed in an instant right where they should have been safe. So much grief and suffering and just multiplied by everyone who died in that shooting and the others.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:39 PM on April 30, 2019 [6 favorites]


Damn. I knew this would be about Santa Fe. It sounds like Sabika was pretty extraordinary and I'm very sad to hear of her death.

I will balance the world a little by pointing y'all to an article about a 17-year old who survived a different mass shooting and is running for Houston City Council. He's got a pretty strong grasp on things: “[Gun] death, selling people for sex, and flooding homes are our issues." I hope he and others survivors help keep the pressure on legislators.
posted by librarylis at 8:05 PM on April 30, 2019 [5 favorites]


Yeah, average Christians may stay married more and give a little more money, but they’re also way more likely to kick out their own kids for being gay or trans. Religion is just another tool of the same patriarchy that led the shooter to think he should kill over not getting a date. These girls were working out that the differences in their faiths were bullshit, and then that was cut short.
posted by rikschell at 8:30 PM on April 30, 2019 [8 favorites]


.

I think the anti-religion sentiments in these MeFi comments are getting a bit out of hand. This was the perfect example of a cultural exchange that was going extremely well then was met with tragedy. I think we should provide everyone with a bit more respect for their beliefs than talk about how these Christians "are not like other Christians" and shoot out thinly veiled jabs at religion.

Anyways I need to get some more tissues.
posted by vespertinism at 9:03 PM on April 30, 2019 [39 favorites]


Yeah, I realize that the article is built around the girls’ religious lives, but the shooting had nothing to do with religion — that seems to have been toxic masculinity and easy access to firearms, along with (maybe) some teenage social dynamics. I think the heart of the story is about two isolated girls who chose friendship and joy and an isolated boy who chose death (abetted by American gun culture), not the specifics of religion.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:53 PM on April 30, 2019 [7 favorites]


To me the interesting question is how this affected the beliefs of those involved. Do they believe their friend is burning in Hell forever? Did she think they all faced the same fate? If not, doesn’t that mean that belief in Jesus/Mohammed is not, after all, essential? It’s a hell of a big elephant in that room, but it gets no attention.
Yeah, it’s nice that the Cogburns welcomed a stranger. But at some point the failure to examine the contradictions in your own beliefs becomes culpable. It starts to look like wilfully ignoring a revelation that the world, or God, why not, is sending you.
posted by Segundus at 12:08 AM on May 1, 2019 [5 favorites]


It looks like the Cogburns were ok with Jaelyn praying in a Muslim way....the article states that Sabika was able to make clear to them that Islam considers Jesus holy and she may have told them that "Allah" just means "God".
posted by brujita at 1:05 AM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]


Religion-wise, there is an awful lot more in common between Christians and Muslims than is portrayed in the media.

That said, this isn't a belief commonly held by fundamentalist members of the religions, which Jaelyn was (not clear on whether that was the case for Sabika). So this is a story of how friendship and love can flourish where popular culture tells us none can exist. It shows the power of simple human connection. The author focused on the girls and not on the shooter because that was the story they wanted to tell. So I think it's really shitty that instead of contemplating the possibilities of people being able to form relationships across supposed cultural divides, commenters here are either focusing on the shooter (how often do we say that we SHOULDN'T be giving them airtime?) or on bringing up their grievances with the girls' faith and focusing on why they should dislike each other.

Humans are social creatures. Our belief systems exist to reinforce our tribalism and social groups--but in real life can prove entirely flexible when it comes to accepting different types of people into our tribes. Polarization is fucking US politics up and facilitating the truly abhorrent behaviors of those in control and stories like this offer us hope to see a world where we can fucking TALK to each other, feel compassion for one another--which is the first step to changing minds. We CAN have that kind of discussion. If we choose to.
posted by Anonymous at 3:42 AM on May 1, 2019


To me the interesting question is how this affected the beliefs of those involved. Do they believe their friend is burning in Hell forever? Did she think they all faced the same fate? If not, doesn’t that mean that belief in Jesus/Mohammed is not, after all, essential?

For many of us religious people, our religion is about finding the best way to live while alive, not fear of an afterlife. I know fear of hell has been drummed into many people as the entire message of religion, but there's actually a lot more to it than that, as these girls showed in their lives, and for many of us, it's not about an afterlife at all.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:58 AM on May 1, 2019 [5 favorites]


But at some point the failure to examine the contradictions in your own beliefs becomes culpable.

The more my beliefs have led logically to conclusions that felt intuitively morally wrong and I have just stopped dead, without being able to see what was wrong with my beliefs, because it just felt too wrong, the less it has seemed to me that willingness to tolerate contradiction is a bug. The more rigorously consistent practitioners of libertarianism, Marxism, Randism, Catholicism, and Chicago school economics I meet, the less I think that consistency is a feature.

I think all the time, though not all that terribly well, and so eventually come up with some set of distinctions that irons out inconsistencies between what I believe and any absurd, repulsive consequences of what I believe. I don't have a whole lot of trouble with busy, practical, extraverted people who don't think often doing loving, kindly, just things that are at odds with their beliefs without fixing their beliefs afterwards.
posted by ckridge at 6:49 AM on May 1, 2019 [2 favorites]


I'm shocked that so many commenters are jumping in to voice their views on religion, and whether it's good or bad, and how religious people should or shouldn't act. One wonders whether they even read the article, or just came here to express their own beliefs, with little regard for what actually happened.

The religious element of the story barely registered for me. I found it pleasing that two young people with different religious beliefs became best friends, and looked for the good in each other's differing beliefs, rather than dwelling on what made them different -- but that was about it, in terms of religion.

Instead, this article left me with a profound sense of loss, and indignation about the senseless gun violence that snuffed out a truly good person's life, leaving deep scars on those who knew her. This article left me thinking that it shouldn't be this way.

But it is this way. Meaningful gun reform is not happening, because people would rather cling to their long-held beliefs, rather seek ways to come together and work for the common good of society.

It's dismaying to find that same attitude here.
posted by vitout at 7:18 AM on May 1, 2019 [18 favorites]


I get why people are all raging about Christianity, but I find it depressing that a story of friendship and loss between two devout and kind girls is getting aldisplaced by deciding that here is the place to rage about Christianity in general.

Religion, and not just Christianity, was fundamental to both these two families sure, but this is also a story about two friends and the way that families and friends deal with tremendous inconsolable loss and how people choose to remember and honour the dead. It would be nice if that too could be remembered.

Or at least mention Sabika and Jaelyn before you go on the rant about Christianity.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 8:02 AM on May 1, 2019 [8 favorites]


Well I don't know about you folks, but I've got tears streaming down my face.

I wish I had something profound to say on religion, on grief, on trauma, on service, on guns. But the only profound thing I can think of is the profound loss of loved ones. Theirs. Mine. Perhaps yours, though I hope not. Anyway maybe it's good to weep sometimes. And it's always a good time to tell someone you love them.
posted by gryftir at 8:14 AM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]


I think the big takeaway from the article for me was that, in the end what matters isn’t what you do or don’t say you believe but what you do or don’t do. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 8:29 AM on May 1, 2019 [5 favorites]


These families.

"I want to go to Texas and live with mad, heavily armed, deeply foreign Christians."

"You sure? You thought this through? OK."

"I want to have this Muslim girl I like come live with us in our house that we have carefully set off to be a religious refuge from the rest of the world, and you to look after her along with your other six children."

"You sure? You thought this through? OK."

"They shot my friend, so now I have to go live in Belize and care for orphans."

"You sure? You thought this through? OK."

These are not laissez-faire parents, either. They put a whole lot of work into those girls. And the Cogburns let Jaelyn go after learning that young girls who travel aren't necessarily safe.
posted by ckridge at 9:14 AM on May 1, 2019 [14 favorites]


It starts to look like wilfully ignoring a revelation that the world, or God, why not, is sending you.

there's a scene toward the end of the first season of SKINS (the British version obviously) where the father of the one kids, a devout Muslim (the father, that is), discovers his son's much loved best friend is gay. The father is shocked for a moment, then he laughs, shakes his head and says something like, "Oh Allah, you perplex me in so many unexpected ways."

It's a wonderful moment of a faith not be shaken at all, but enriched, a man being reminded that he is, after all, just a man who should not begin to presume to know the mind of his god. But what he doesn't do, doesn't even consider doing, is to let go of the love that god inspires in him.

As I've heard it put elsewhere, if your faith doesn't sometimes force you to engage with paradox -- you're doing it wrong.
posted by philip-random at 9:15 AM on May 1, 2019 [16 favorites]


I cried, and cried.
In my mind, this was a very well-written feature, and also a terribly tragic story. It makes it clear that religious families are not all the same, here both families trusted their intelligent, high achieving daughters to make the right choices, whatever the consequences.
Personally, I was born and raised atheist, and I'm not changing my ways. But these families share a lot of the same values as me, and live them. I respect their choices, even as I disagree.
posted by mumimor at 9:48 AM on May 1, 2019 [3 favorites]


I think the anti-religion sentiments in these MeFi comments are getting a bit out of hand.

Speaking as one of the few (I generally assume) Christians on MetaFilter, I generally have to say that we're a pretty hostile place towards Christians, and I think we generally have some pretty darn good reasons to be that way. I'll be the first to own that Christianity in general as a religion has a pretty solid record of being epic-ally shitty to people over the centuries it's been around.

I was raised to hate gay people. Indoctrinated from a young age. I'm talking actual conversations about why "love the sinner, hate the sin" wasn't a feasible approach. Now I go to pride parades with "I'm Sorry" signs and have really interesting conversations that start with me apologizing for how the Christian church has systematically failed the LGBT community in our lifetime. I also no longer have a relationship with my parents, in no small part because the church we attend is welcoming to the LGBT community.

I'm not sharing this to say "Hey I'm one of the good Christians." I am just struggling to try to quietly get by and love everyone around me, frankly. I still get things wrong, frequently, often right here on MetaFilter. I'm pretty confident that will keep happening. And I see so, so many other Christians getting things wrong so much of the time too.

Ghandi's trope that always gets trotted out around here about Christians being more like Christ is well intentioned enough, but kind of misses the point that all Christians are also fallible humans, unlike Christ (according to our belief). I'm not saying this to excuse Christians Behaving Badly. I'm just saying its a little unfair to hold everyone to a standard of perfection. You don't do that for yourself, right? They should be called to account when they are being shitty to other people and giving Christianity a bad name. We should also offer them the same grace we offer ourselves to be wrong, and a chance to change our mind and maybe try not being so incredibly shitty to other people, particularly in the name of Christ. You know, instead of *just* being angry at them. Being angry at them may be right, but if that's all you ever are, nothing's ever going to change. I think we're better than that.

tl;dr - if people are mad with Christianity in general, they probably have more than enough good reasons for feeling that way. Also, we could all be a little kinder to each other, despite our beliefs. I think that's what Sabika would have wanted.
posted by allkindsoftime at 1:59 PM on May 1, 2019 [15 favorites]


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