Thirteen Ways to Say I Love You

Once, in a small town in the Philippines, there lived a girl named Rayda who was five years old.

Her world was exactly the right size for her.

It was the coconut trees behind the house. It was the red dirt road that went to the market and back. It was her mother's kitchen, and the sound of rain on a tin roof, and the same seven or eight faces she saw every single day.

Rayda thought that was the world. All of it.

Then one evening her father said eleven words that cracked the world open like an egg:

"Get your things, anak. We are going to Makkah for Hajj."

Rayda did not know where Makkah was. She did not know how far it was, or how loud it was, or that it was about to reach inside her chest and change the shape of her whole life.

She only knew it meant an airplane.

She had never been on an airplane.

And then she was there.

Where Rayda stood was very hard to describe.

Everywhere she looked — people.

Not ten people. Not a hundred. More people than she had ever seen in her whole small life, all pressed together and moving like water, all the way to the edges of everywhere.

And here is the part that made her mouth fall open:

They did not look like her.

Tall men in white cloth, dark as polished wood. Women wrapped in black with eyes like her grandmother's. Faces pale as milk and faces brown as tea. Old men with red beards. Babies with green eyes. Aunties with skin exactly her colour and aunties with skin nothing like it at all.

And the sound. Voices calling out in Arabic. In Urdu. In Turkish. In Swahili. In Malay. A hundred languages braided together into one enormous, rumbling, beautiful noise.

Rayda held her mother's hand very, very tightly.

She was five years old, and she had just discovered something no one had told her:

The world was much, much bigger than her town.

"Umi," she whispered. "Why does everybody look different?"

Her mother crouched down to her level, right there in the middle of the enormous crowd, and answered her with the most beautiful sentence Rayda had ever heard — because it came straight from Allah:

"Do you hear that, anak? Allah did not make us different by accident. He did it on purpose."

"But why?"

"So that we would have to come and find each other. If everyone was the same, there would be nothing to discover. But Allah made a thousand kinds of people and scattered them all over the earth — like treasure, hidden everywhere — and then He told us: go and get to know one another."

Rayda looked out at the sea of faces.

Not strangers, then.

Treasure.

Now here is where Rayda's mother did the bravest thing.

She did not keep her small daughter tucked behind her skirt where it was safe. She turned to her — this five-year-old, in the biggest crowd on earth, in a country she had never seen — and gave her a real job.

Not a pretend job. Not a "hold this for Umi, good girl" job.

A real errand. A grown-up one. One that actually mattered, that someone was actually counting on.

Rayda's stomach flipped over. "But Umi… it's so big out there. And I'm so small."

Her mother looked at her steadily.

"Yes," she said. "You are small. Go anyway."

So Rayda went.

Her heart was banging. Her legs were shaky. She walked out into that vast, loud, foreign world with her chin up and her small feet moving, and she found her way, and she did the thing, and she came back.

And when she came back she was still five years old — but something inside her had grown three sizes.

Because when a grown-up says you are too small, a child believes them.

And when a grown-up says go anyway, a child believes that too.

That day Rayda learned the three things that would carry her for the next fifty years:

You are capable of more than your age suggests.

The world is not dangerous. It is navigable.

When something feels too big, that is not a reason to run home. That is an invitation to grow.

And then her father lifted her onto his shoulders, and Rayda saw it.

The Kaaba.

A great cube, draped in black and gold, standing perfectly still in the middle of the world.

And around it — turning, and turning, and turning — the people.

Thousands of them. Every colour Allah ever made, moving together in one enormous circle, like the water goes around and around a drain, like the stars go around and around the sky.

Rich people and poor people, all in the same simple cloth so you could not tell which was which. Kings walking beside farmers. A Nigerian shoulder touching a Turkish shoulder touching a Filipino shoulder.

All of them saying the same words. All of them going the same way.

And little Rayda, high up on her father's shoulders, felt something crack open in her chest — something enormous, something with no name.

She could not have explained it then. She was five.

But this is what it was:

Not many bodies.

One.

All those thousands of people, all those colours and languages and countries — one body. And she was a part of it. A small, five-year-old, Filipino part of one enormous body that wrapped all the way around the earth.

She was not a girl from a small town anymore.

She was a girl with a family the size of the world.

On the airplane home, Rayda pressed her face to the window and watched her small country come back into view — the green, the water, the red roads.

And a very strange thing happened.

Her town was exactly the same size it had always been… but it did not fit her anymore.

Because now she knew what was out there.

So many people. So many languages. So many faces waiting to be met.

And something inside her chest — something that had been sleeping since before she was born — sat up and said, in the clear voice that only five-year-olds and prophets and true things have:

"I want to see all of it."

That was a seed.

Nobody saw it land. Not her mother, not her father, not Rayda herself.

But it was planted.

And seeds do not care how small they are. They only care about growing.

Now the years began to turn, the way years do.

The little girl grew tall. She studied hard. She became a scientist, and then a businesswoman. She crossed the ocean with a suitcase and a heart still full of Makkah.

And when it was time to build a family of her own, she remembered the sea of faces — and she made a choice that surprised everybody.

She was Filipina.

She married a Syrian.

One brick, she thought. The first brick of something enormous.

Then her children came — one, two, three, four, five, six — and their home was noisy with Arabic and Tagalog and English all at once, and their table was piled with Filipino food beside Syrian food, because a child who eats from many tables grows up at home in many worlds.

And when her six children grew up, she told them the vision she had been carrying since she was five years old:

Do not marry only the familiar. The Ummah is not a neighbourhood. It is a civilisation. Go and find your family in the far corners of it.

They listened.

And then they went out and did more than she ever dreamed.

Her children married an Egyptian-American. A Tunisian. A British-West African. A Japanese. An Indian-Swiss. And an Uyghur from East Turkestan.

Six children. Six cultures. Six brand-new branches grafted onto one tree.

And then… the grandchildren came.

And in that grandmother's kitchen, years later, there was much to hear.

Because in that one family — one single family, that began with one small girl in one small town —

there are now thirteen languages.

English. Arabic. Tagalog. Spanish. French. German. Urdu. Mandarin. Japanese. Thai. Turkish. Russian. Uyghur.

Thirteen ways of saying good morning.

Thirteen ways of saying Bismillah.

Thirteen ways of saying I love you.

Thirteen doors into thirteen hearts.

And every single one of those grandchildren — the one who speaks Japanese with her other grandmother, the one who dreams in Uyghur, the one who counts in Swiss-German — every single one of them turns the same way, five times a day, and bows to the same One.

Thirteen languages. One direction. One family. One body.

Just like the circle turning around the Kaaba.