Ramadan Has Brought Me Closer to My Father’s Memory
For one writer, the holy month is teaching him to speak to himself as much as to God
My father died when I was just seven months old. He left me a few things: his dictionary, his address book, his ruby-and-diamond-studded cufflinks, and his name. I was born Frank Andrew Evans III, and for a while, that’s the only name I knew. My mother didn’t tell me about my Muslim name — Khalid Ali—until I was around 10 or 11. My father must have bestowed it upon me with the hopes that, like him, I would study and practice Islam. But my mother had other ideas. She believes in ghosts, in magic, in the supreme forces of the universe beyond our comprehension, but she would never name them God. Whatever her reasons, she did not share the name Khalid Ali with me when I was young. The significance of the name, the world of ideas and practices and people that it connected me to, was unbeknownst to me.
Just as people often lose the keepsakes and mementos they are given as children, they also grow out of nicknames and friends. Most of the lost things pass without a second thought. It is just the course of nature. Some things linger, though. As my 27th birthday approached last fall, I began reaching through the recesses of my life, searching for things at once familiar and lost to me, forgotten. At…
