Samina Ali is one of many brilliant women whose work inspired and assisted me while I was doing research for my novel.
A Muslim-American author originally from India, Ali writes of a near-death experience that occurred while she was giving birth to her son. Starting with a massive seizure, the crisis led to a heart attack, liver and kidney failure, pulmonary and cerebral edema, and a brain hemorrhage, the latter a condition sufficiently serious to kill most patients. Her subsequent survival shook the medical community to its roots, a reality that would be compounded by her total absence of any kind of residual physical injury.
In Ali’s telling, there is at the time of her pseudo-death no light at the end of the tunnel, no spontaneous flashing of her life’s history, but instead a sensation of total darkness, total emptiness, a sense of unadulterated being.
While such expressions might ring somewhat familiar to the average reader, her experience of God in the moment is beautifully rendered:
“If the world can be described in positive qualities – attainment, attachment, gain, power – the world of God can be described in negation – undying, unchanging, unmanifest, unmoving, immeasurable, invisible, infinite. In God’s world, in His presence, I was nothing but pure awareness, pure consciousness, purity.”
More beautiful yet, this absolute sense of divine connection doesn’t end with the ER, but follows her back into life again, allowing her to break free from the myriad ways in which her religious community imposed barriers between God and the Self. She describes the tendency in Indian-American populations for individuals to compete with one another to see who can be the better believer – who fasts the most, prays the most, and so forth.
“People seem to be proclaiming, God is on my side,” she writes, “rather than humbly asking, am I on God’s side?”
The cited essay “How I Met God” appears in the essay collection Living Islam Outloud: American Muslim Women Speak.
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