The Light We Give by Simran Jeet Singh

Author:Simran Jeet Singh [Singh, Simran Jeet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-five

Limitless Love

One Sikh memory recalls that during his travels across Asia in the sixteenth century, Guru Nanak comes to a town filled with spiritual teachers. A group of leaders meet him at the edge of the town, and one hands the young guru a bowl of milk filled to the brim. Just like there’s no room for more milk in this bowl, there’s no room for you in our community.

Without batting an eye, Guru Nanak plucks a flower from the ground and places it on top of the milk. His wordless message comes through clearly: When we open ourselves up, there’s always room for more.

(Pro tip: This spiritual lesson also provides a good justification for eating dessert even when you’re full from dinner.)

I heard this account as a child and hadn’t thought of it for years. I must have filed it in my memory bank, though, because it came back to consciousness unexpectedly in 2017 while I was teaching at Trinity University in Texas.

One of my students, Miguel, had started visiting my office hours to discuss course material when he was a sophomore, and his visits grew into a weekly tradition of discussing life over coffee and cookies. One afternoon Miguel walked into my office as I was finishing a phone call. When I hung up, he smiled: “Getting flowers for the wife? So smooth, Dr. Singh!”

I laughed and corrected him, explaining that I was anything but smooth and that the flowers were for a student whose mother had just had a heart attack.

Miguel said he had just heard about a classmate, Andy, whose mother had had a heart attack. When I confirmed that I was speaking about Andy, too, his eyes widened in outrage.

“Are you joking, Dr. Singh? You know Andy hates you, right? He’s the one who wrote that anonymous note telling you that you’re not welcome here! And he’s one of the students who got you on the Professor Watchlist and tried to get you fired! You know that, right?!”

I appreciated Miguel’s protectiveness and reflected on the strife I had already been through that year. Death threats credible enough to warrant police and FBI involvement. Calls to the university president’s office demanding that I be fired. Right-wing outlets including Campus Reform, Breitbart, and Turning Point USA harassing me incessantly.

I would have been naive not to expect abuse teaching Islamic studies at a university in Texas, especially given how I looked. It was 2017, after all, a time of heightened polarization when attacks on academic freedom were rampant and anti-Muslim bias was high. I prepared myself for attacks from right-wingers the day I signed the contract to teach at Trinity, and there were a handful of students, like Andy, who seemed to make it their mission to make my life difficult. It was not that their hatred for me caught me by surprise; it was that the attacks came more swiftly and vigorously than I had anticipated. It also saddened me to realize that students like Andy would come after me without ever getting to know me.

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