Note: in television, bottle episodes are designed to be produced as cheaply as possible. The cast shrinks. There’s usually minimal use of sets (if only one). Supposedly their name came from the old Star Trek series, in which they’d keep the crew on the set of the Enterprise, a “ship-in-the-bottle” episode. Here, I’m just making a bad pun in which I’ll focus on an episode of a show I’d like to dig a little deeper into.
Ramy Youssef’s self-titled Ramy series throws so much food for thought at the viewer each episode that it’s a small miracle it never becomes too much. If anything, it makes the show highly addictive. After you get through the first episode or two, which feel very much like Youssef’s stand-up comedy written in episode form, you get a fascinating examination of what it’s like to be a Muslim in modern-day New Jersey. Youssef and his team make sure to expose us to just about every conflict that resides in bringing such a traditional, long-standing religion into a world that seems to fight against everything about it. The struggle of finding the right kind of food. The struggle of meeting the right partners. The struggle of overbearing parents who don’t quite understand how the generations change. It’s an ongoing battle of trying to find the line between respecting the heritage and finding your own way. It’s a battle many of us recognize, only just wrapped in details we may find unique.
While Ramy feels like a spiritual cousin to Atlanta, it finds a lot of mileage in centering Ramy’s actual spiritual struggle. He truly wants to be a good Muslim. But the world offers too many temptations and messages that run against it. It’s constant fighting against the grain that Ramy sees both as noble and exhausting at once. This spiritual battle goes up another notch in the second season when Ramy seeks the guidance of Sheikh Ali Malik (a fantastic Mahershala Ali) at a Sufi mosque. Early on in the season, Ramy gravitates towards a young, homeless veteran who’s looking for direction. As much in self-interest as in wanting to do good, Ramy brings the young man to the Sheikh, ignoring all the comments the man has made about his experience in the military. When the truth explodes to the forefront and the situation goes south, leading to a hospital and later jail time, Ramy and the Sheikh must go on a seemingly fruitless endeavor to find the troubled man’s dog.
Fast forward to an unbelievably cold Jersey night. No clues are coming up. They’re wandering in more remote places of impending danger. And yet the Sheikh still wants to do a traditional Muslim prayer. Ramy keeps making excuses for why they can’t do it, just another complaint in a long line of them, a steady stream the Sheikh has fought to ignore. Finally, he hits Ramy with some truth:
“You look at everything as a blessing or a curse, Ramy. The truth is, everything is both. We have to see the blessings in the curses and be wary of the curses in the blessings. Both are from God. Both are an opportunity.”
I saw this episode back in March. Ever since, I’ve thought about this line at least once a day. It reminded me of something a wise friend of mine told me in a time of many, many changes: that every change, even the good ones, has a grieving process. When you gain something, you lose something as well. When you move to a new city, you gain opportunities and yet grieve not being able to see friends and familiar haunts so easily. When you buy a new house, you build a home together and yet grieve the loss of some spatial flexibility (not to mention the reality of a mortgage). When you get married, you celebrate the best decision you ever made while also grieving some loss of independence.
But the beauty of what the Sheikh says is that it’s important to look at it from the other direction, too. For everything that seems like a curse, it’s important to find the possible blessing, the silver lining. “What if this search for Boomer isn’t the burden you think it is?” he asks Ramy. “What if it’s a chance? A chance to take responsibility for your actions instead of making excuses. “
There is frequent discussion throughout Ramy of what is and isn’t haram, which is an Islamic reference to anything that is forbidden by Allah or the five Islamic commandments. With the dog search providing Ramy with such a surplus of intimate time spent with the Sheikh, he brings up haram again. The rules seem too flexible. He seeks a definitive answer.
“Nothing in and of itself is haram,” the Sheikh says. “It’s a matter of how we choose to engage with it. Alcohol, for example, isn’t haram. Drinking it is. The rules are very important in our faith. Not for the reasons you might think. I was confused about this once, too. By the grace of Allah, I found my teacher.”
He then launches into another lesson that still has its roots deep within my brain:
“ She taught me that Islam was like an orange. There’s an outer part and an inner part. If someone only got the rules and rituals, they might think Islam was tough and bitter like the outside of an orange. But there’s an inside, a juicy flesh, the divine intimacy, the spiritual experience. The rind without the flesh is bitter and useless. The flesh without the rind would quickly rot. The outer Sharia protects the inner spirituality. And the inner spirituality gives the outer Sharia its purpose and meaning. My teacher helped me understand that I needed both.”
In the time of quarantine, these two lessons have stuck with me. What may have seemed initially like a curse – being stuck at home and unable to see so many people the way we used to – has been a blessing of sorts in getting back the time we lost to traffic, to partaking in projects long sidelined, to reducing the clutter to make way for the meaningful. But the orange analogy has been just as helpful to remember in the struggle of figuring out how to live a life of meaning when there is a limit to where we can go. It’s far too easy to collapse into a cycle of work, rest, and passivity. But it’s also important not to be so strict with rules and guidelines that we cannot find the time and space to truly relax or do deep work. There’s a balance that must be struck for us to feel centered.
Eventually, they find the dog. But the audience discovers something better: beautiful, relatable lessons delivered by one of the best actors in the game.
