Soul Searching

‘Proud of My Religion’

Zainab Alwan ’08

Her parents wanted her to be a doctor. Her two siblings wanted her to be a doctor, as did her aunts and uncles and cousins. So after three years on the pre-med track, Zainab Alwan ’08 took the MCAT.

Trouble was, she wanted to be a lawyer. Two weeks after the exam, she bought an LSAT book and started studying. Her parents didn’t take it very well.

“My faith definitely helped me get through that,” she recalls.

Her faith is a large part of the reason she’s drawn to the legal profession.

“In Islam, you have the vertical and horizonal dimension,” Alwan explains. “Vertically, you try to connect with God. Horizontally, with society. I knew that being a doctor was about helping patients, but I also knew that my passion was to be an international human rights lawyer. My faith told me to do whatever I could do to help people the most.”

That passion came out of a seventh-grade trip to Iraq, where she realized she had to do something “to change the condition of other people.” After spilling the news to her parents about law school, she sought comfort and guidance every night before bed in a Qur’an verse about the fortunate helping the needy.

Alwan grew up a minority in the small farm town of Allegany, NY.

“I wasn’t ashamed of being Muslim or an Iraqi and I wasn’t uncomfortable with looking different or having a different name,” she remembers, “but definitely other people were uncomfortable with me.”

She adds: “I had to work extra hard to be nice to everyone and show that even though I’m Muslim, I was just like them.”

At college, as a religion major and president of the Muslim Student Association, Alwan has gone from following her family’s faith “in a blind way” to questioning and ultimately accepting it—toward the end of her junior year—on her own terms. Constantly having to defend Islam against its portrayal in the media, she says, helped her along.

“After fighting for it for so long, I started appreciating everything I had been fighting for and really started to be proud of my religion.”

Alwan rises at 5 a.m. every morning to pray, and prays five times a day. She invokes passages from the marked-up Qur’an her mother passed on to her once she learned Arabic from it in elementary school. If she’s in the library studying and doesn’t have her prayer mat, she finds a quiet spot between the stacks and uses a piece of paper.

“When I’m happy I turn to faith, and it’s there for me throughout the day whenever I have a problem,” she says. “Insha-Allah. God willing, things will happen.”