Lebanese Adoptee, Searching for His Roots, Finds Islam

By MARK OPPENHEIMER AUGUST 1, 2014

The weekly TV recap — the snarky, obsessive, scene-by-scene description of a TV show, written by a fan working through what’s clearly a love/hate relationship — is now a ubiquitous genre, peddled online by Slate, The Onion, New York magazine, and others. But its progenitor was Daniel Drennan’s “Beverly Hills 90210” recap, which he wrote online from 1994 to 1998. Columbia Journalism Review credited Mr. Drennan with inventing the form, citing his successful mix of “opinions on bad writing and terrible acting”; pointed attacks on “receding hairlines and terrible outfits”; and “personal stories tangentially related to what was on the TV screen.”

With that, Mr. Drennan became a minor celebrity, appearing on three episodes of “This American Life” and publishing “The New York Diaries,” a collection of essays, in 1998. But before long he became very difficult to find. By 2014, it seemed there was no Danny Drennan, at least not on the Internet.

But a search of his pen name, Daniel Ibn Zayd, reveals that he lives in Beirut, Lebanon. He teaches graphic design. He is an anti-adoption activist. And he is a convert to Islam. In a recent conversation at a Manhattan coffee shop during a visit to the United States, he recounted his journey.

Mr. Drennan was born in 1963 in Beirut, but at three weeks of age he was adopted, through a Roman Catholic orphanage, by the New Jersey family that raised him. About 10 years ago, he became interested in his origins.

“When I turned 40, I had come into
with other adoptees who had been adopted to France,” Mr. Drennan said. “We started talking back and forth, and they were the ones who got me thinking about the politics and economics of adoption.”

Mr. Drennan began a process of critically evaluating adoption, seeing it as a way that wealthier families, and wealthier parts of the world, absorb the children of families whose poverty they have a role in causing. When he looked at the name on his birth certificate, he had a disturbing revelation. His name and place of birth had been invented — by well-meaning nuns.

“I realized in the paperwork, the name was fictitious,” Mr. Drennan said. “It was given to us by the orphanage. I went into a tailspin. I once had a friend’s father translate the papers for me, and he said, ‘These are all from different offices within the government, from the parish priest, but it’s all the same handwriting.’ It had the legality of it, but the nuns had done it all.”

“That got me thinking, ‘I want to go back, I need to go back,’ ” Mr. Drennan said.

At first he thought of taking just a summer course in Arabic. But when he saw a posting for an instructorship of graphic design at the American University of Beirut, he applied and got the job. In 2004, he moved back to Lebanon.

At first, he said, living in the land of his birth family was “overwhelming” at times. “Because of the way Lebanese culture works, at any given time, I can be three, four, maybe five steps away from my family,” he said. “When I first got there, I would focus on facial features, or hair patterns, or the shape of their hands.”

He said he was “looking for clues.”

Mr. Drennan is tall, bald and goateed. When I met him, he was dressed in black: black jeans, black T-shirt, black sweatshirt. He could have been a downtown graphic designer of many ethnic origins: Arab, Jewish, Latino, Italian. In the articles that he writes and in the conferences that he attends, which had brought him back to the United States for several months, he sees himself as allying with adoptees of all cultures, and with immigrants, too.

“I consider there to be common cause between us and immigrants, those who are gentrified” out of their neighborhoods, he said. “Anyone who does not have the agency to claim place, they become natural allies.”

He was adopted through a Catholic orphanage, but cannot know his birth family’s religion. So what led him to Islam?

“There were probably a dozen reasons,” Mr. Drennan said. “I joke that I spent 10 years in Catholic school, 10 years getting over it. I was more or less agnostic, but searching. I looked into Judaism, Zen Buddhism, the Tao, Eastern religions and studying, on my own, Islam.” When he viewed Islam in its Lebanese context, he gave it another look.

“I started reading the Quran, and one verse in the Quran says your adopted child is not as your biological child,” he said. “When I first read that with a very American mentality, it upset me, because it was like saying your adoptive child is bogus.” But after further study, he formulated an interpretation that “it’s the orphan as metaphor for the weakest member of society.”

Through the study of commentary on the passage, he came to believe that the larger meaning was “this idea of communal care, and how we should look at children, and getting us away from stigma of bastardy and the stigma of children being born out of wedlock,” he said.

Mr. Drennan, who now teaches design and illustration part-time at a school in Beirut, became a Muslim in 2005. His practice has grown, slowly. He loves Ramadan and iftar, the evening meal to break the fast, which he enjoys sharing with neighbors. He reads the Quran in a cycle, every lunar month.

Mr. Drennan says he is uncomfortable with such labels as Sunni or Shiite, and with religious outlooks that he considers divisive, particularly those that “lend themselves” to “an individualistic, colonialist, and capitalistic/neoliberal outlook.” He is drawn to “more liberationist theologies, which advocate for equality.”

He is young in his faith. “I feel a disconnect between my apparent age and my ‘spiritual’ age,” he said. “There is so much for me to learn historically and philosophically that I refuse to reductively describe myself, nor to limit myself in terms of what feeds into this education. It’s an evolving process.”

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