So I've posted the first two chapters of a book I've been working on, on and off for several years. I'm going to go ahead and post a couple more ... and would love to see comments or reactions as this whole project has been quite difficult for me. How much to write? How much to delete? How much to alter to 'protect' other people' identities?
All of that.
22 February 2011
A Thousand Sighs: Part Two
(See part one, posted yesterday)
2. Sham
October 1975 – March 1982
I am Born
How should I tell it? I don’t remember any of it … but I can say that come October 1975, I came into the world in the usual way, in the hospital down the street from the house where Woodrow Wilson was born, a normal birth unspectacular in any way … and a seven and a half pound baby girl was taken home and nursed by her mother and watched by her father … and sometimes I wonder, what would have happened if I had been switched at birth? What if instead of writing down on my birth certificate “Amina Abdallah Arraf”, they’d written something more usual for that hospital on that day, something like “Amanda Lynne McClure” that would never have looked odd or been strange … and would I be anything like myself? Does what we inherit in our blood make us who we are? Or is it what we inherit in other ways from our parents and all the rest in that mountain of names that came before? Would I be writing this, would I be happier or sadder or more confused or less confused if I’d been that Amanda?
Amanda, in my mind, that twin that isn’t, would have long golden hair and bright blue eyes … not hair that’s wavy and dark and was always out of control or eyes that are dark. I was the darkest child of my parents; Aisha got brown hair and almost hazel eyes while the two you haven’t met have green eyes and the youngest is really blonde … but life is unfair and, maybe, if I had looked more like my mother’s folk than my father’s, I would have been stuck forever somewhere where those marked me as an oddity.
Syria
But my memories haven’t yet begun before I leave Virginia for the first time; I’m less than a year old when we leave and go to Damascus.
There’s a tradition that, when he was leading caravans north, Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) refused to enter Damascus for he said that it looked to be tooo much like paradise. Back then, the city must have been just the old city, a sort of gem of a city in the midst of an immense oasis, blooming green in all directions. And, then, the oasis simply stops and desert takes over.
That oasis comes from the Barada river, flowing down from the Lebanese mountains and losing itself in what must once have been marshes. If you are coming into the city from the west or the south, you come up over the mountain of Qaisouyan and suddenly … you are looking at the city. Nowadays, it’s not the wondrous oasis Muhammad must have seen; urban sprawl has eaten up most of the oasis and is even spreading out into stretches of what were once desert. Out that way, the city runs out in poor, refugee camps built for the Palestinians and working class suburbs and, beyond those nowadays, more dusty slums for Iraqi refugees … but I get ahead of myself.
How can I describe Damascus? In some ways, it is almost like writing about how your own mother looks; you love her and see perfection but could you describe her to the police? Sham is like that … smell of jasmine in the summer, stone walls blankly looking out on narrow, twisting ancient streets of the old city, new quarters beyond ….
Our house opens on a narrow alley, in the heart of the Old City, where the sounds of the minarets of the great mosque roll through like gentle breeze. Once, this was a neighborhood full of the Old Families in their great houses; most of the rest long since moved out to more modern homes in newer streets as have many cousins, But my grandfather was stubborn and wouldn’t leave, staying on as neighborhood drifted from former wealth to creeping poverty, now turning the wheel again as houses like ours become hotels and restaurants.
Oranges grow in the courtyard; the scent of orange blossoms and the sound of splashing are my first memories. Around that courtyard and its fountain rise the open rooms of the house, seeming endless to the child. Some were long forbidden to me, like the men’s diwan where my grandfather in ancient days heard his clients complaints or had iced glasses of whiskey served up when his Christian and Druze friends came to call – one must always be hospitable, my father will tell me whn I ask about that, and Sheikh Atrash was Jiddu’s closest friend and ally … and who in their right mind would want to offend him? – while others were empty save for broken furniture and dust. Kitchens, baths, pantries seeming within out end stretch off and pile on top of each other. Electricity clearly came late; the wires are outside the walls, while indoor plumbing is modern.
Narrow cobbled street outside the heavy steel reinforced wooden door leads with twisting bends to the endless covered suqh and its stalls going one way, to the other, our alley leads to a Street Called Straight.
Circling birds rising on warm air seem to drift on the notes of the muaddhan, coming from the minaret that, for our roof, seems almost close enough to touch. Someday, they say, Jesus will come back and arrive there; we will, we joke, be the first tto greet him. Coffee? Tea? Cigarette? And when he’s refreshed, off for the War of the End of the World …
Birds of Passage
And maybe that war has long since begun; sometimes when I cannot sleep when I am older and in America, I’ll watch late night programs where a man with eyes that don’t blink explains that, Hallelujah!, we are living in the End Times and Jesus is Coming … because of events that week in June 1967 when ‘ammi was killed on that hill.
Maybe, maybe a clock was started. Certainly, the course of events that took us back to Damascus began then. After Amr died, my grandfather mourned the death of his sweet son. So did Amr’s brothers and sisters. But Amr’s next brother, Omar, he started to wonder why. And, like those TV preachers, he found answers in scripture.
In the Year of the Elephant, when Abraha came up from the south and invaded the land of the Two Cities, his forces were everywhere attacked and harased by the much smaller and weaker forces of Quraish and all the other Arabs. All that is except the Banu Thaqif, a people utterly without honor. Abu Righal, a man of Banu Thaqif, revealed to the advancing army the way to Mecca. When Abraha was at last overcome, his people were disgraced and his grave was ever afterwards pelted with stones.
Omar read that and thought, A-ha! The new Abu Righal and the Banu Thaqif that live up in the mountains by the Sea, they did this treason.
When first he proclaimed this to his father, Jiddu nodded his head and clicked his tongue, “Omar, don’t be a fool, the Arab are still waking up … and to say that the Minister of Defense would conspire with the Enemy and sacrifice his own men is madness.”
But, while the awakening did not come and Abu Righal grew in power, Omar and his circle became more and more aghast at the crimes down by the Banu Thaqif. When the Palestinians called out for promised aid in 1970, Abu Righal stabbed them in the back and seized power in Sham for himself. And Omar began meeting more and more often late at night with his fellows, or sitting for long hours discussing hadith and Quran crosslegged on the carpetted floors. Something, something must change, no more shame of a nation, but honor, no more rule by worshippers of idols …
1975, when I was in womb, over the mountain, they said, the revolution was beginning in the streets of Beirut; majority rule would soon come to Lebanon and a new age might dawn. And if the Muslim no longer was second class in Lebanon, how long before the Muslim of Sham came to have rule in his own home? How long before the Muslim of Jerusalem and Jaffa?
Abu Righal, of course, could read these things as easily and feared that the next corrective movement would truly correct things. So, before the people of Syria could be inspired, Abu Righal sent his forces into Lebanon on the side of the separatists, Zionists, and Crusaders, and savagely attacked the National Movement just as it seemed on the verge of victory.
Omar and his companions looked out in the streets of the cities of Syria and in the villages and saw that from one end to the other, there was disgust and outrage at Abu Righal. Now, they thought, was the time to riseup and return the governance of Syria to its people, to establish a governmant based, not on imitating the Christians but on our own Islamic heritage. So, in 1976, they announced that they had been on their knees too long, now it was time to arise.
And arise they did.
But again, Abu Righal and his people were clever. No one would cast them aside so easily. A long and bitter war began between Abu Righal and Abu Ridwan, between, as they saw it, Islam and Ignorance, the People of the Example against the Polytheists and Atheists. And, when those first attacks occurred, the Security Services began snatching up the men they thought were leaders, for they were trained by the East Germans and knew infiltration well.
Omar was one of those and, when he was snatched up, a call was placed halfway around the world,
“Please come home, you are the third son but your oldest brother is dead and the second one may be soon.”
So, we went back, heir of the house, foreign bride and two half-breed baby girls …
Child’s Eyes
Memories of my own start to emerge when I am five or so. Before that, there are only incoherent bits and pieces; Rania and I sitting baby Amr down in front of us and pretending he is a doll, dressing him, tickling him, Rania pointing out that he is misshapen and has a little ‘finger’ growing from his stomach; playing in the garden and the street; not knowing where Uncle is nor picking up that we should be worried.
I remember running through the house on a summer’s day, finding pots as tall as we are filled with oil and dropping pebbles into them and laughing when it splashed, drawing in chalk on the walls of a room where old things go and saying that I have written words, though they are only scribbles …
And, then, I go off to school; Rania is too little, she can’t come with me. I remember telling her that was because she was a baby and had to stay with the other babies, Amr, Alia, Reem, and Ramzi: I am a big kid, so I will go to school with the other Big Kids, Aisha, Ridwan and Raghad ….
Rania is jealous … and I am smug, even as I struggle along behind my older sister and cousins …
I learn my letters and I teach Rania: alif, baa, taa … going over and over with her. She is a slow student, I tell her …
I like school, like my teacher, Miss Su’ad, like my classmates … Zeyneb, Salma, Randa, I remember now and wonder if they recall me at all …
Life seems happy enough to me.
Winter comes; it is gray and cold and I recall it raining and raining; I wonder if the sky is falling. I hear noises at night that scare me.
I walk out of our room; I can hear my parents talking, talking in the way they talk when they don’t want to be understood, in the secret code I think I am beginning to follow.
Something about leaving, my mother’s aunt, Uncle Omar, other things that make little sense to me …
My father opens the door and sees me cowering in the light.
“Have you been spying on us?” he asks, almost smiling but I can see something is wrong.
“No, daddy,” I shake my head, “but why must we leave?”
He looks at me strangely, then at my mother. Now, they both stare at me.
“You heard us talking?” my mother asks.
I nod.
“And you can understand?”
I nod again.
“Amina, Amina,” my father shakes his head, reaches for me and picks me up, then speaks to me in the way he only ever talks to my mother, “you are a clever one. How long have you been listening to us when we talk like this?”
“As long as I can remember,” I say.
“And can you speak like this?” he asks.
“No, sir,” I shake my head.
He and my mother look at each other; they are speaking without words now, I think.
“Amina,” my mother says and strokes my hair, “would you like to go somewhere where everyone speaks like this?”
My eyes grow wide; I can’t imagine such a place where everyone talks in code.
“Yes?” I offer, frightened.
“And meet your other cousins?” she asks.
“Yes?” I offer again. I am scared.
And my father sings to me a song about a gazelle and he carries me back to bed and I fall asleep, thinking it was a dream.
But, the next day, is even stranger. Uncle Omar is back again after his last absence … but he is changed. I can’t tell where he has been and no one will tell me. He has bandages around his eyes and he is thinner … he talks strangely …
None of us go to school; I complain and see this is an injustice. It is Saturday, I insist, so I must go to school. I am told to be quiet.
Then, uncles Hamza and Hani are around and everything becomes more confused. We children are shunted off and are given candy even though we haven’t had a meal. Uncle Omar kisses everyone except my father, my father does the same, then they leave. Aunt Saffiyah starts crying loudly; my mother hugs her. Hamza stands uncomfortably.
“So many children,” he keeps saying and I don’t understand why, pacing and looking at no one.
My mother and aunt watch him.
“We go,” he says.
And, in minutes, we do; I know they have gathered up papers but little else, just a few bags. I look around and I am confused. The adults herd us like animals as we go down our little alley, out to the street called straight. There, Hani has found two taxis, cars made in Europe before my mother was born, for us; I am put in one with my mother, my siblings, in the back, Hamza sitting by the driver. Aunt Saffiyah is with Uncle Hani and her children in the other.
Uncle Hamza talks rapidly with the driver, shows him something, something I should know later must be a lot of money. We leave. My mother, I notice, is crying. I don’t know why. Hamza tries to tell jokes but they fail.
Farewell to That
I have never seen my mother smoke and I will only see her smoking one other time the rest of my life, but, today, she is smoking, furiously. My father’s youngest brother is also smoking furiously; so is the cab driver. And, in the back seat with my mother, I am getting choked along with my infant sister, my toddler brother, and my older sister.
I can barely stand it. All three adults are barely speaking. I complain about the smoke loudly as we go down an almost empty street. Stores have drawn their doors closed. No one is about though it is Saturday.
My mother waves me to silence.
My uncle suggests another route.
The driver nods, takes it. I am scared and I hate this cold, damp, smoky air.
We go down a street, empty like the others. The car stops.
The driver says something I don’t understand then. My uncle repeats it softly. My mother says, ‘Shit,’ the first time I’ve ever heard that word; I guess from her expression that she is upset.
I think now I can get out of the smoky car. No one notices at first; my mother says my name in warning but I ignore her; I am excited to get out of the car.
Instantly, I wish I hadn’t: there is a powerful, pungent stench in the air, a smell that reminds me of Alia’s diapers and rotting garbage only much, much worse. It is a smell that will stay with me forever, the smell of death, loosed bowels and putrefying flesh.
I look up.
At once, I wish I hadn’t. Hanging above the street, on a sign that probably repeats some Party slogan, are four men. Their clothes are bloody and torn; two are wearing stained robes, the other two western styles. Their bearded faces are broken and bruised. They are limp, lifeless. Three of them are barefoot, the fourth wears one shoe. Their feet are swollen. I stare at them in horror. One of them seems to stare back at me from his protruding, bloody eyes, his tongue sticking out at me in defiance. This will be the stuff of nightmares for years; their faces will never be forgotten.
Uncle Hani gets out of the car, grabs me, pushes me back in and gets in the front seat.
“DO NOT DO THAT AGAIN!” he says to me and I am more afraid; I feel like I have made these bad things happen.
The driver puts the car in reverse and we go backwards for a long way down the narrow street.
We turn onto another road and then another and then another. The tight-packed alleys give way to wider roads; we pass blocks of tall, hastily built apartment buildings. Still, hardly anyone is out.
Then, we begin to go up into the mountains and the City is behind us.
“Don’t look back,” Hani says to her, then recites, “Fanajaynahu wa ahlahu ajma ‘aina. Illa ajuzan fi al ghabirina.”
My mother looks at him and laughs, the first time today.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I don’t have any intention of being Lut’s wife!”
The driver laughs at that; the children are mystified.
And we leave Damascus.
Flight
That winter of ’82, I’ll learn later, was a terrible time in the Land of the Left Hand. Abu Righal, as my uncle would call him, or the Lion as he’s better known decided that he’d had enough of the Society of the Muslim Brothers and it was time to finally suppress them. Things had been getting worse for a while and my uncle was deeply involved.
The year I was born, the Lion of Jaulan sent the army into Lebanon to take sides in the civil war; against the Muslims, against the nationalists. At the Hill of Thyme in that land, Muslims were massacred for, so we believed, doing nothing more than trying to achieve equality in an Arab land. And the Lion of Jaulan had suppressed them on behalf of the splitters, the French speakers, the friends of the Zionists, the Christians …
So, Muslims in Syria began to agitate against the Lion and the rest of his tribe, began saying more loudly that an Arab nation with a Muslim majority shouldn’t suffer under the polytheists’ rule …
And my uncle was loud among them in the capital. So, he was picked up and jailed. And, when he was, my father decided it was time to return and care for the family, as he was now eldest brother. So, we’d gone back.
And my uncle had been released soon after but wasn’t able to teach at the University any more so my father stayed on and supported him and his children. And Uncle Omar worked for the brotherhood instead.
And he was jailed again, taken off to Palmyra for a longer time. There, they killed most of the Brothers in the prison. My uncle was lucky; we have a cousin who was well placed in the Party and, for his sake and for the memory of Omar’s father and brother, his life was spared, as he’d done nothing more than agitate. But he was tortured; he left an eye in Palmyra.
And they released him again in the days of massacre, when the law that all members of the Brotherhood would be killed. Laws are one thing; family another, so even a Renaissance Man like our cousin could be moved by ties of blood to let a kinsman go.
Omar returned … and he and my father and mother and aunt and uncles knew it was time to go. We knew we had hours only. So, we fled, fled with nothing but the clothes on our back and the papers and money on our persons.
This is how I left the seat of my fathers. This is how our clan’s diaspora began. Two brothers to America, a sister to Kuwait, a brother to Saudi Arabia, another to Denmark … wherever would take us. We go where we have passports and visas, leave the keys to the house with Hamza who will stay to take care of my grandmother and to tend the memories and keep the papers intact for the rest of us.
The Road From Damascus
I don’t remember ever being out of the city before that day; I have seen a photograph that shows a very young me picnicking somewhere in the Barada Gorge but I don’t recall it. So, everything is new and comes in a rush; I see cattle and sheep just standing in … emptiness. I can’t quite understand why the horizons are so large, why there are no buildings to hem us in. There are mountains that we twist and turn past.
We enter Lebanon, and cross the first of many checkpoints. Men with guns make us get out of the car, look all through it, everyone’s papers are in order.
“Americans,” I hear the Syrian soldiers who let us go towards Lebanon say.
I don’t quite understand why; the little that I clearly understand about Americans is that they live far away somewhere and give comfort to the enemy. Or so Miss Su’ad has told us, told us when she has us practice what to do if the enemy launches a new attack on us, for the enemy is filled with hate and greed and jealousy, hates us for what we have and wants to take it from us, as he has done so many times before.
Another checkpoint, it happens again …. Slowly I make a connection; I recall that Father brought mother from America. Maybe they mean us? I remember that Aisha and I were born outside the city, to our great shame.
I ask my mother, Are we going to America?
Yes, she says.
I ask, is America near the sea? I’d like to see the sea …
Yes, you will see the sea …
More checkpoints; Syrian army, Lebanese ones, the country is a crazy patchwork in the beginning of 1982 and the short ride to Beirut by car takes many hours, made even longer by crying children, hungry children, children who need to pee …
At last, we come into the outskirts of the city and still more checkpoints before, finally, we reach the docks and I see the garbage strewn oily water that is the Mediterranean, smell the rich funk of rotting fish and garbage and saltwater … and I am entranced … here is the Sea! If I’d known the words, I’d’ve shouted thalassa! Thalassa! Every time we glimpsed it coming down the mountain had I known it was there to glimpse.
We leave the taxi and hani goes and buys tickets on the ferry for all of us. The second taxi comes … I wonder where is Daddy? My cousins wonder the same but no one will tell us. We’ll see them soon, they reassure us.
Hani buys candy for us. I notice it is warmer here than at home. And then we arre made to line up, led over a creaking gangway onto a ship that’s seen better days.
A boat ride? I’m a little scared but excited. Rania is starting to cry in fear.
But somehow, we are all on the boat before too long, then off over what I suppose must have been a wine-dark sea to Cyprus as the sunsets, then nervous waiting crowded all in a single hotel room. My mother rushing around, taking charge of things a bit more easily now as her language is talked by many here … Aunt Saffiyah does more of the child-herding … Hani is still with us and he is rushing around too …
And, after three days of confusion, Hani comes back from the dock and thrills everyone; with him are my father and my uncle. They tell a story that makes little sense, mountain roads and backtracking, finally coming through a checkpoint into the Bekaa with Omar in the trunk and catching a ferry in Tarablus.
Yes, Hamza wil be able to get the car … if he can get to Tarablus. He has a key …
More days of stress and … tickets are ready for onet half of us;
Omar had said he’d go to Khurasan and join with the Black banners being unfurled there but my father convinces him otherwise; a camp in Peshawar is no place to raise a family … and many calls and much wrangling and somehow there are visas for Omar and his family so we will all go to America …
And we go to the airport … and we fly! First to Europe, then switching planes in some country where everyone looks sickly pale, then a flight that goes on and on and Alia is screaming most of the time from the pain in her ears … and I am running through the plane having the time of my life … until the mean lady in pale blue tells me I can’t anymore …
And we are landing; we six fly in to Dulles and hit the tarmac and walkout , pass so fast through customs … we carry so little, we are citizens …
And there, standing to greet us are faces that are bright and excited and happy and completely alien … someone who calls himself an uncle, two gangly giant boys, an aunt, someone who says she is my grandmother …
And they all terrify me …
2. Sham
October 1975 – March 1982
I am Born
How should I tell it? I don’t remember any of it … but I can say that come October 1975, I came into the world in the usual way, in the hospital down the street from the house where Woodrow Wilson was born, a normal birth unspectacular in any way … and a seven and a half pound baby girl was taken home and nursed by her mother and watched by her father … and sometimes I wonder, what would have happened if I had been switched at birth? What if instead of writing down on my birth certificate “Amina Abdallah Arraf”, they’d written something more usual for that hospital on that day, something like “Amanda Lynne McClure” that would never have looked odd or been strange … and would I be anything like myself? Does what we inherit in our blood make us who we are? Or is it what we inherit in other ways from our parents and all the rest in that mountain of names that came before? Would I be writing this, would I be happier or sadder or more confused or less confused if I’d been that Amanda?
Amanda, in my mind, that twin that isn’t, would have long golden hair and bright blue eyes … not hair that’s wavy and dark and was always out of control or eyes that are dark. I was the darkest child of my parents; Aisha got brown hair and almost hazel eyes while the two you haven’t met have green eyes and the youngest is really blonde … but life is unfair and, maybe, if I had looked more like my mother’s folk than my father’s, I would have been stuck forever somewhere where those marked me as an oddity.
Syria
But my memories haven’t yet begun before I leave Virginia for the first time; I’m less than a year old when we leave and go to Damascus.
There’s a tradition that, when he was leading caravans north, Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) refused to enter Damascus for he said that it looked to be tooo much like paradise. Back then, the city must have been just the old city, a sort of gem of a city in the midst of an immense oasis, blooming green in all directions. And, then, the oasis simply stops and desert takes over.
That oasis comes from the Barada river, flowing down from the Lebanese mountains and losing itself in what must once have been marshes. If you are coming into the city from the west or the south, you come up over the mountain of Qaisouyan and suddenly … you are looking at the city. Nowadays, it’s not the wondrous oasis Muhammad must have seen; urban sprawl has eaten up most of the oasis and is even spreading out into stretches of what were once desert. Out that way, the city runs out in poor, refugee camps built for the Palestinians and working class suburbs and, beyond those nowadays, more dusty slums for Iraqi refugees … but I get ahead of myself.
How can I describe Damascus? In some ways, it is almost like writing about how your own mother looks; you love her and see perfection but could you describe her to the police? Sham is like that … smell of jasmine in the summer, stone walls blankly looking out on narrow, twisting ancient streets of the old city, new quarters beyond ….
Our house opens on a narrow alley, in the heart of the Old City, where the sounds of the minarets of the great mosque roll through like gentle breeze. Once, this was a neighborhood full of the Old Families in their great houses; most of the rest long since moved out to more modern homes in newer streets as have many cousins, But my grandfather was stubborn and wouldn’t leave, staying on as neighborhood drifted from former wealth to creeping poverty, now turning the wheel again as houses like ours become hotels and restaurants.
Oranges grow in the courtyard; the scent of orange blossoms and the sound of splashing are my first memories. Around that courtyard and its fountain rise the open rooms of the house, seeming endless to the child. Some were long forbidden to me, like the men’s diwan where my grandfather in ancient days heard his clients complaints or had iced glasses of whiskey served up when his Christian and Druze friends came to call – one must always be hospitable, my father will tell me whn I ask about that, and Sheikh Atrash was Jiddu’s closest friend and ally … and who in their right mind would want to offend him? – while others were empty save for broken furniture and dust. Kitchens, baths, pantries seeming within out end stretch off and pile on top of each other. Electricity clearly came late; the wires are outside the walls, while indoor plumbing is modern.
Narrow cobbled street outside the heavy steel reinforced wooden door leads with twisting bends to the endless covered suqh and its stalls going one way, to the other, our alley leads to a Street Called Straight.
Circling birds rising on warm air seem to drift on the notes of the muaddhan, coming from the minaret that, for our roof, seems almost close enough to touch. Someday, they say, Jesus will come back and arrive there; we will, we joke, be the first tto greet him. Coffee? Tea? Cigarette? And when he’s refreshed, off for the War of the End of the World …
Birds of Passage
And maybe that war has long since begun; sometimes when I cannot sleep when I am older and in America, I’ll watch late night programs where a man with eyes that don’t blink explains that, Hallelujah!, we are living in the End Times and Jesus is Coming … because of events that week in June 1967 when ‘ammi was killed on that hill.
Maybe, maybe a clock was started. Certainly, the course of events that took us back to Damascus began then. After Amr died, my grandfather mourned the death of his sweet son. So did Amr’s brothers and sisters. But Amr’s next brother, Omar, he started to wonder why. And, like those TV preachers, he found answers in scripture.
In the Year of the Elephant, when Abraha came up from the south and invaded the land of the Two Cities, his forces were everywhere attacked and harased by the much smaller and weaker forces of Quraish and all the other Arabs. All that is except the Banu Thaqif, a people utterly without honor. Abu Righal, a man of Banu Thaqif, revealed to the advancing army the way to Mecca. When Abraha was at last overcome, his people were disgraced and his grave was ever afterwards pelted with stones.
Omar read that and thought, A-ha! The new Abu Righal and the Banu Thaqif that live up in the mountains by the Sea, they did this treason.
When first he proclaimed this to his father, Jiddu nodded his head and clicked his tongue, “Omar, don’t be a fool, the Arab are still waking up … and to say that the Minister of Defense would conspire with the Enemy and sacrifice his own men is madness.”
But, while the awakening did not come and Abu Righal grew in power, Omar and his circle became more and more aghast at the crimes down by the Banu Thaqif. When the Palestinians called out for promised aid in 1970, Abu Righal stabbed them in the back and seized power in Sham for himself. And Omar began meeting more and more often late at night with his fellows, or sitting for long hours discussing hadith and Quran crosslegged on the carpetted floors. Something, something must change, no more shame of a nation, but honor, no more rule by worshippers of idols …
1975, when I was in womb, over the mountain, they said, the revolution was beginning in the streets of Beirut; majority rule would soon come to Lebanon and a new age might dawn. And if the Muslim no longer was second class in Lebanon, how long before the Muslim of Sham came to have rule in his own home? How long before the Muslim of Jerusalem and Jaffa?
Abu Righal, of course, could read these things as easily and feared that the next corrective movement would truly correct things. So, before the people of Syria could be inspired, Abu Righal sent his forces into Lebanon on the side of the separatists, Zionists, and Crusaders, and savagely attacked the National Movement just as it seemed on the verge of victory.
Omar and his companions looked out in the streets of the cities of Syria and in the villages and saw that from one end to the other, there was disgust and outrage at Abu Righal. Now, they thought, was the time to riseup and return the governance of Syria to its people, to establish a governmant based, not on imitating the Christians but on our own Islamic heritage. So, in 1976, they announced that they had been on their knees too long, now it was time to arise.
And arise they did.
But again, Abu Righal and his people were clever. No one would cast them aside so easily. A long and bitter war began between Abu Righal and Abu Ridwan, between, as they saw it, Islam and Ignorance, the People of the Example against the Polytheists and Atheists. And, when those first attacks occurred, the Security Services began snatching up the men they thought were leaders, for they were trained by the East Germans and knew infiltration well.
Omar was one of those and, when he was snatched up, a call was placed halfway around the world,
“Please come home, you are the third son but your oldest brother is dead and the second one may be soon.”
So, we went back, heir of the house, foreign bride and two half-breed baby girls …
Child’s Eyes
Memories of my own start to emerge when I am five or so. Before that, there are only incoherent bits and pieces; Rania and I sitting baby Amr down in front of us and pretending he is a doll, dressing him, tickling him, Rania pointing out that he is misshapen and has a little ‘finger’ growing from his stomach; playing in the garden and the street; not knowing where Uncle is nor picking up that we should be worried.
I remember running through the house on a summer’s day, finding pots as tall as we are filled with oil and dropping pebbles into them and laughing when it splashed, drawing in chalk on the walls of a room where old things go and saying that I have written words, though they are only scribbles …
And, then, I go off to school; Rania is too little, she can’t come with me. I remember telling her that was because she was a baby and had to stay with the other babies, Amr, Alia, Reem, and Ramzi: I am a big kid, so I will go to school with the other Big Kids, Aisha, Ridwan and Raghad ….
Rania is jealous … and I am smug, even as I struggle along behind my older sister and cousins …
I learn my letters and I teach Rania: alif, baa, taa … going over and over with her. She is a slow student, I tell her …
I like school, like my teacher, Miss Su’ad, like my classmates … Zeyneb, Salma, Randa, I remember now and wonder if they recall me at all …
Life seems happy enough to me.
Winter comes; it is gray and cold and I recall it raining and raining; I wonder if the sky is falling. I hear noises at night that scare me.
I walk out of our room; I can hear my parents talking, talking in the way they talk when they don’t want to be understood, in the secret code I think I am beginning to follow.
Something about leaving, my mother’s aunt, Uncle Omar, other things that make little sense to me …
My father opens the door and sees me cowering in the light.
“Have you been spying on us?” he asks, almost smiling but I can see something is wrong.
“No, daddy,” I shake my head, “but why must we leave?”
He looks at me strangely, then at my mother. Now, they both stare at me.
“You heard us talking?” my mother asks.
I nod.
“And you can understand?”
I nod again.
“Amina, Amina,” my father shakes his head, reaches for me and picks me up, then speaks to me in the way he only ever talks to my mother, “you are a clever one. How long have you been listening to us when we talk like this?”
“As long as I can remember,” I say.
“And can you speak like this?” he asks.
“No, sir,” I shake my head.
He and my mother look at each other; they are speaking without words now, I think.
“Amina,” my mother says and strokes my hair, “would you like to go somewhere where everyone speaks like this?”
My eyes grow wide; I can’t imagine such a place where everyone talks in code.
“Yes?” I offer, frightened.
“And meet your other cousins?” she asks.
“Yes?” I offer again. I am scared.
And my father sings to me a song about a gazelle and he carries me back to bed and I fall asleep, thinking it was a dream.
But, the next day, is even stranger. Uncle Omar is back again after his last absence … but he is changed. I can’t tell where he has been and no one will tell me. He has bandages around his eyes and he is thinner … he talks strangely …
None of us go to school; I complain and see this is an injustice. It is Saturday, I insist, so I must go to school. I am told to be quiet.
Then, uncles Hamza and Hani are around and everything becomes more confused. We children are shunted off and are given candy even though we haven’t had a meal. Uncle Omar kisses everyone except my father, my father does the same, then they leave. Aunt Saffiyah starts crying loudly; my mother hugs her. Hamza stands uncomfortably.
“So many children,” he keeps saying and I don’t understand why, pacing and looking at no one.
My mother and aunt watch him.
“We go,” he says.
And, in minutes, we do; I know they have gathered up papers but little else, just a few bags. I look around and I am confused. The adults herd us like animals as we go down our little alley, out to the street called straight. There, Hani has found two taxis, cars made in Europe before my mother was born, for us; I am put in one with my mother, my siblings, in the back, Hamza sitting by the driver. Aunt Saffiyah is with Uncle Hani and her children in the other.
Uncle Hamza talks rapidly with the driver, shows him something, something I should know later must be a lot of money. We leave. My mother, I notice, is crying. I don’t know why. Hamza tries to tell jokes but they fail.
Farewell to That
I have never seen my mother smoke and I will only see her smoking one other time the rest of my life, but, today, she is smoking, furiously. My father’s youngest brother is also smoking furiously; so is the cab driver. And, in the back seat with my mother, I am getting choked along with my infant sister, my toddler brother, and my older sister.
I can barely stand it. All three adults are barely speaking. I complain about the smoke loudly as we go down an almost empty street. Stores have drawn their doors closed. No one is about though it is Saturday.
My mother waves me to silence.
My uncle suggests another route.
The driver nods, takes it. I am scared and I hate this cold, damp, smoky air.
We go down a street, empty like the others. The car stops.
The driver says something I don’t understand then. My uncle repeats it softly. My mother says, ‘Shit,’ the first time I’ve ever heard that word; I guess from her expression that she is upset.
I think now I can get out of the smoky car. No one notices at first; my mother says my name in warning but I ignore her; I am excited to get out of the car.
Instantly, I wish I hadn’t: there is a powerful, pungent stench in the air, a smell that reminds me of Alia’s diapers and rotting garbage only much, much worse. It is a smell that will stay with me forever, the smell of death, loosed bowels and putrefying flesh.
I look up.
At once, I wish I hadn’t. Hanging above the street, on a sign that probably repeats some Party slogan, are four men. Their clothes are bloody and torn; two are wearing stained robes, the other two western styles. Their bearded faces are broken and bruised. They are limp, lifeless. Three of them are barefoot, the fourth wears one shoe. Their feet are swollen. I stare at them in horror. One of them seems to stare back at me from his protruding, bloody eyes, his tongue sticking out at me in defiance. This will be the stuff of nightmares for years; their faces will never be forgotten.
Uncle Hani gets out of the car, grabs me, pushes me back in and gets in the front seat.
“DO NOT DO THAT AGAIN!” he says to me and I am more afraid; I feel like I have made these bad things happen.
The driver puts the car in reverse and we go backwards for a long way down the narrow street.
We turn onto another road and then another and then another. The tight-packed alleys give way to wider roads; we pass blocks of tall, hastily built apartment buildings. Still, hardly anyone is out.
Then, we begin to go up into the mountains and the City is behind us.
“Don’t look back,” Hani says to her, then recites, “Fanajaynahu wa ahlahu ajma ‘aina. Illa ajuzan fi al ghabirina.”
My mother looks at him and laughs, the first time today.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I don’t have any intention of being Lut’s wife!”
The driver laughs at that; the children are mystified.
And we leave Damascus.
Flight
That winter of ’82, I’ll learn later, was a terrible time in the Land of the Left Hand. Abu Righal, as my uncle would call him, or the Lion as he’s better known decided that he’d had enough of the Society of the Muslim Brothers and it was time to finally suppress them. Things had been getting worse for a while and my uncle was deeply involved.
The year I was born, the Lion of Jaulan sent the army into Lebanon to take sides in the civil war; against the Muslims, against the nationalists. At the Hill of Thyme in that land, Muslims were massacred for, so we believed, doing nothing more than trying to achieve equality in an Arab land. And the Lion of Jaulan had suppressed them on behalf of the splitters, the French speakers, the friends of the Zionists, the Christians …
So, Muslims in Syria began to agitate against the Lion and the rest of his tribe, began saying more loudly that an Arab nation with a Muslim majority shouldn’t suffer under the polytheists’ rule …
And my uncle was loud among them in the capital. So, he was picked up and jailed. And, when he was, my father decided it was time to return and care for the family, as he was now eldest brother. So, we’d gone back.
And my uncle had been released soon after but wasn’t able to teach at the University any more so my father stayed on and supported him and his children. And Uncle Omar worked for the brotherhood instead.
And he was jailed again, taken off to Palmyra for a longer time. There, they killed most of the Brothers in the prison. My uncle was lucky; we have a cousin who was well placed in the Party and, for his sake and for the memory of Omar’s father and brother, his life was spared, as he’d done nothing more than agitate. But he was tortured; he left an eye in Palmyra.
And they released him again in the days of massacre, when the law that all members of the Brotherhood would be killed. Laws are one thing; family another, so even a Renaissance Man like our cousin could be moved by ties of blood to let a kinsman go.
Omar returned … and he and my father and mother and aunt and uncles knew it was time to go. We knew we had hours only. So, we fled, fled with nothing but the clothes on our back and the papers and money on our persons.
This is how I left the seat of my fathers. This is how our clan’s diaspora began. Two brothers to America, a sister to Kuwait, a brother to Saudi Arabia, another to Denmark … wherever would take us. We go where we have passports and visas, leave the keys to the house with Hamza who will stay to take care of my grandmother and to tend the memories and keep the papers intact for the rest of us.
The Road From Damascus
I don’t remember ever being out of the city before that day; I have seen a photograph that shows a very young me picnicking somewhere in the Barada Gorge but I don’t recall it. So, everything is new and comes in a rush; I see cattle and sheep just standing in … emptiness. I can’t quite understand why the horizons are so large, why there are no buildings to hem us in. There are mountains that we twist and turn past.
We enter Lebanon, and cross the first of many checkpoints. Men with guns make us get out of the car, look all through it, everyone’s papers are in order.
“Americans,” I hear the Syrian soldiers who let us go towards Lebanon say.
I don’t quite understand why; the little that I clearly understand about Americans is that they live far away somewhere and give comfort to the enemy. Or so Miss Su’ad has told us, told us when she has us practice what to do if the enemy launches a new attack on us, for the enemy is filled with hate and greed and jealousy, hates us for what we have and wants to take it from us, as he has done so many times before.
Another checkpoint, it happens again …. Slowly I make a connection; I recall that Father brought mother from America. Maybe they mean us? I remember that Aisha and I were born outside the city, to our great shame.
I ask my mother, Are we going to America?
Yes, she says.
I ask, is America near the sea? I’d like to see the sea …
Yes, you will see the sea …
More checkpoints; Syrian army, Lebanese ones, the country is a crazy patchwork in the beginning of 1982 and the short ride to Beirut by car takes many hours, made even longer by crying children, hungry children, children who need to pee …
At last, we come into the outskirts of the city and still more checkpoints before, finally, we reach the docks and I see the garbage strewn oily water that is the Mediterranean, smell the rich funk of rotting fish and garbage and saltwater … and I am entranced … here is the Sea! If I’d known the words, I’d’ve shouted thalassa! Thalassa! Every time we glimpsed it coming down the mountain had I known it was there to glimpse.
We leave the taxi and hani goes and buys tickets on the ferry for all of us. The second taxi comes … I wonder where is Daddy? My cousins wonder the same but no one will tell us. We’ll see them soon, they reassure us.
Hani buys candy for us. I notice it is warmer here than at home. And then we arre made to line up, led over a creaking gangway onto a ship that’s seen better days.
A boat ride? I’m a little scared but excited. Rania is starting to cry in fear.
But somehow, we are all on the boat before too long, then off over what I suppose must have been a wine-dark sea to Cyprus as the sunsets, then nervous waiting crowded all in a single hotel room. My mother rushing around, taking charge of things a bit more easily now as her language is talked by many here … Aunt Saffiyah does more of the child-herding … Hani is still with us and he is rushing around too …
And, after three days of confusion, Hani comes back from the dock and thrills everyone; with him are my father and my uncle. They tell a story that makes little sense, mountain roads and backtracking, finally coming through a checkpoint into the Bekaa with Omar in the trunk and catching a ferry in Tarablus.
Yes, Hamza wil be able to get the car … if he can get to Tarablus. He has a key …
More days of stress and … tickets are ready for onet half of us;
Omar had said he’d go to Khurasan and join with the Black banners being unfurled there but my father convinces him otherwise; a camp in Peshawar is no place to raise a family … and many calls and much wrangling and somehow there are visas for Omar and his family so we will all go to America …
And we go to the airport … and we fly! First to Europe, then switching planes in some country where everyone looks sickly pale, then a flight that goes on and on and Alia is screaming most of the time from the pain in her ears … and I am running through the plane having the time of my life … until the mean lady in pale blue tells me I can’t anymore …
And we are landing; we six fly in to Dulles and hit the tarmac and walkout , pass so fast through customs … we carry so little, we are citizens …
And there, standing to greet us are faces that are bright and excited and happy and completely alien … someone who calls himself an uncle, two gangly giant boys, an aunt, someone who says she is my grandmother …
And they all terrify me …
A Thousand Sighs, and a Sigh: An Arab American Education (part one)
1. Openings
Beginnings
Here I start and, since I am the one writing here, I will begin this my way (since, of course, that’s the best way):
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar Rahim;
which means:
In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate;
and is the way any account is Supposed To Begin.
And having a simple way of beginning, a formulaic one, if you will, saves some troubles. I set myself a task: make sense of contradictions and explain myself to me. But to do that, I realized, I needed to understand the parts that make me. If I were to do that wel, I decided that I wanted to explain ourselves to us and asked everyone who we were and everything seemed endlessly complicated. Every beginning led to another tale, every answer another question.
Where to begin? is just the first of those questions. Should I start at some randomly chosen day in my life or at the time of some great epiphany? Should I start with my birth or my earliest childhood memories? And, when I’ve shared that, paste together those other remembered things …
Or should I begin with some intricate formula: perhaps, I’ll set the tone by beginning each section with a new letter like so:
“A: am Amina Abdallah Arraf, an Arab and an American. All along are adventures and amusements Amina asks an audience’s attention and Amina articulates Arab activities and American assimilation. Amina arrived at Atlanta after awesome adventures around Aleppo …”
But other people have done that sort of writing better than I have and, amusing though it might be, it’s not exactly the most natural way of writing (and not all ‘A’s are A’s; some are alifs, others are ayns … and so on).
Or I could start by simply giving the basic stats of myself, like you’d find on a baseball card, in a résumé, or in a personal ad:
“Amina Abdallah Arraf, Syrian-American Muslim Princess, born Staunton, Virginia, October 1975. Father: Abdallah Ismail Arraf, Syrian Arab. Mother: Caroline McClure Arraf, American Christian by birth. Second of four children. Lived in Damascus, Syria (1976-1982), Riverport, Virginia (1982-1991), Lilburn, Georgia (1991-1999), Chicago, Illinois (1999-2002), Atlanta, Georgia (2002- present). Married in Damascus, 1999. BA, MA from Georgia State University … devout Muslim, geek, perpetually confused … I love Hank, Marcel, Dolly and Fayrouz and I have Shakira on my iPod … I like watching NASCAR and parsing Hadith and you can take me to meet your Jiddu or your Daddyjack …”
But, while giving the facts in reasonable order, does it say anything, really?
Perhaps, then, we can start this account as though it were a fairy tale; “Once upon a time, there lived …” or “Kan wa ma kan”; it was and it wasn’t” …
But this isn’t a fairy tale or an Arabian night’s tale; instead, what I’ve written down is a “True History”, of everything that happened (and most of it is true) with only minor embellishments, conflations, name-changes (to protect the guilty), and a few event made up out of whole cloth (do recall that I – as well as some others involved -- am an Arab and, if you’ve read much of the current, how shall we say it, more ‘Orientalist’ press, you’ll know that it’s axiomatic that Arabs are unreliable and prone to lie (if not to lie prone), so, if you buy that whole reasoning – and why not? It is the dominant paradigm – you’ll expect me to lie at every turn. I won’t but what’ll it matter? And the rest of us come ultimately from Ireland …and there are other stereotypes there that invalidate our truths).
It’s a true story told here, more or less, so, to my eternal regret, a fairy tale beginning won’t do …
Instead, perhaps, I could begin at the very beginning, “The Earth cooled, the Dinosaurs lived and, then, an asteroid wiped them out, etc.” or, if you prefer, “God created the Heavens and the Earth …” But both those seem a little impersonal, regardless of the presence of a Deity.
So, instead, in the manner of an old chronicle, I want to begin by talking of ancestors and such. I’ll show how my two sides diverged and, then, how they rejoined to form me.
Family matters
Where do you begin in tracing family matters? Do you start from the beginning? It would, I suppose, be easy enough; I’ve relatives on each side that can recite the names of ancestors (some real, some who probably never lived at all) all the way back to Noah and the Flood …
And, I suppose, that would make a good enough starting point; after all, my father’s family got off the boat and went one way, my mother’s the other: Shem and Japheth, both determined to keep down Ham and his descendants, right? That’s what I’ve heard when Muhammad Speaks …
But, what would be the point?
If I look in an older book, I’d see that my mother’s people could trace through long lists of strange names; there are other ones that dispute those accounts of Brutus and Hiscion and so on and talk about Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures, leading to the Wessex Culture as well as North British Picts and so on for my mother’s tribe while others dispute that my father’s tribe descended from Father Abraham and speak of mercantile elites descended from nomads. And those books that rely on the facts of archaeology and history usually don’t give very many names so they aren’t much use for those who’d research their own family trees.
All those mountains of facts will tell you what, exactly?
They were born, they lived, they died … and what does that show? It explains nothing, reveals nothing and says only that we have ancestors and we’re related to other people. That you and I are probably cousins somehow and that you have other cousins and, if you traced far enough back, you could show that everyone of us was endlessly related and that we were all cousins and what would it matter?
No more digressions … let me begin!
Mother’s Family: An American Tale
My mother’s family is a long time in America, far longer than my father’s. They are that sort of people whom, when you say ‘American’ to a lot of people around the world, comes first to mind: white, fair-skinned, lots of blue eyes, plenty of blonds (though with a red head or two as well as plenty of brunettes); English-speaking from as long as anyone recalls; whatever relatives are on the other side of the ocean long since forgotten so ‘ethnicity’ beyond American is theoretical. British with a trace of German, Protestant and so on … So I’ll start with them.
And, for some of my readers, there’s will be a familiar story of old white America, redneck America if you want to be rude about it. I owe have my make-up to these people yet I am a Muslim which sets me apart from them. This is the Red America half of me comes from but my banner is green.
Or maybe not. Maybe half of me is from here and everything else is confusion between those two sides, the stranger and the native, the believer and the infidel.
So, I should speak of them plainly and with respect. Now, I’ve heard my Syrian father claim that my mother’s family was still swinging from trees while his ancestors were building cities and writing books so that might have something to do with it; if you’re brachiating through the jungles of Scotland, it’s hard to pause and write down your family tree …
So, that’s where they began and got the name McClure: it’s supposed to be from Gaelic and means ‘son of the Pale Youth’ so, I suppose, I must have had an ancestor known as the Pale Youth; living in the west of Scotland, getting that nickname would take some doing so I’m going to assume that this fellow must’ve been either an albino or about as close as you can get. Certainly, had he gone visiting my father’s kin, he’d’ve gotten sunburn so, I think, it’s safe to assume he was solidly a redneck …
Anyhow, one of this Pale Youth’s descendants went from western Scotland bound for Ireland in 1608 to join in the Plantation of Ulster. The Catholic nobles who’d been fighting the English had all run off to Spain and forfeited their lands so the English government determined that settling the Northwest of Ireland with hardnosed, hardheaded Scots Presbyterians would bring peace to an unsettled land (and, like a lot of British government schemes, that one went so very well … but that’s another story, not mine). So, anyway, John McClure and his family joined Montgomeries and Pattons at the point of the Protestant sword and went off to begin farming just outside the town of Raphoe in County Donegal; when I was in high school, I went there looking for them … and found not much at all.
Of course, Ireland wasn’t exactly peaceful so these McClures spent most of the rest of the century fighting Catholics and trying to make it, reproducing and growing ever more numerous. Eventually, crops failed and some of these transient Scottish Presbyterians decided to move on from Ireland. Some had gone ahead and wrote back about the wonderful land beyond the sea. So, in 1730, Halbert and Elizabeth McClure took their children and what little they had and headed down the valley from Raphoe to Londonderry, got on a ship and left the waters of Lough Foyle for Philadelphia.
In the year 1742, Halbert, his wife, and their son, James, arrived in the Parish of Augusta in the Dominion of Virginia and set out to build themselves a cabin and all of that. There, between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny, they would prosper for more than two hundred years. The whole land soon filled up with others who’d come over from Ireland along with a few English and Germans.
The Presbyterians built themselves a fine stone church and when, a little later, the French and their Indian allies came down from over the hills, James (who was now grown up) holed up in it and fought them off.
It’s still there; there’re family graves near it and I, the head-scarfed Muslim descendant, go there when I can.
And, when I do, I think of how I’d like to see this place one day: it is built of bluish limestone, sits on a hill and is strong as a fort, built for ages. Sometimes, I imagine it redone in some future day, a day when all the distant cousins who still farm around here or work in one of the towns slowly growing closer will believe as I do … and my Christian ancestors will rest outside their descendants mosque. And, when I think of that, I’m happy; I believe that, someday, all these hills will be home to a circumcised nation when, in the fullness of time, all America comes to accept Islam ….
But I digress. I was speaking of my Presbyterian ancestors. They stayed in the Valley, generation to generation: they went over the Blue Ridge and fought at Yorktown (earning me the right to be in the DAR); though they owned no slaves (not from any principle but because, like most of this family before and since, they didn’t own much of anything) and probably were opposed to secession, but, when Virginia left the Union, so did my McClure ancestor. He joined up with a unit of his fellows that quickly picked up the name of its commander and was called the Stonewall Brigade; Jackson marched them up and down the Valley, over it and up to Sharpsburg and Gettysburg. When the war was over, he returned to a ruined land; the North had fought a total war in the Valley, burning all the fields of wheat and all the barns so, presumably, the McClures had to spend a good while rebuilding and getting back together but still hung on.
And more time passes but no one goes far.
Now, we leave archival stuff and come into the realm of memory; my civil war ancestor, Ephraim, named his son after his old commander and he named his the same: Thomas Jackson McClure I & II. Tommy Number II was, from what I’ve been told, a big strapping man who’d run wild as a youth but, when he had gotten a few years on him, attended a revival meeting and heard the altar call. He responded and soon joined up with a Methodist Church. He took ‘the Pledge’ and never drank another drop but threw himself into his godly activities whenever his farm would allow him.
Tommy was quite fervent in attending tent revivals and would sometimes travel to nearby towns. One of these took him all the way into the next county. There, he met a young woman who’d also been caught up in the fervor. She, though, wasn’t Scotch-Irish or even English at all but was from a family of Mennonites. Her people had been Amish but, in time, had left them. Now, they farmed west of little town called Dayton. Anyway, this woman, Barbara Stoltzfus, was tall and blonde and, even if her clothing was plain, immediately caught Tommy’s eye. He talked to her and soon began courting her. Her family was none too pleased by the attentions she was getting from outside their community but, Tommy was still a good Christian man and Barbara was quite headstrong so, she broke with her family and married him and became a Methodist.
Barbara McClure wasn’t the last headstrong rebellious woman in this story; her descendants count more than one, I think, women who went off and did what their families wouldn’t have wanted, women of courage and strength. She did, I’ve been told, have a trace of a sort of dutchified English common among Mennonites and Amish back then even when she was old … she lived to be quite old, almost ninety, and outlived two of her own children and almost met me. I think, sometimes, I must have inherited some traits from her, even if not her particular faith.
Anyway, Barbara and Tommy settled down on his farm and set about raising corn and cattle, chickens and vegetables. She would bake lots of pies – especially the Shoo fly pie she’d brought with her from her own people – and so on and so forth. They had four children in quick succession; another Thomas, Vincent, Frances, and Robert. When war came, Tommy stayed home despite his own wishes. Afterwards, the children collected pennies and helped their parents make relief packages for the starving, suffering children in far off and exotic places with names like Beirut, Damascus and Aleppo.
Thomas, who was called Stony, was the oldest; when his father died, he took over the farm and carried it on before passing it on to his son, another Thomas (or Chip), who farms it still. Vincent left home early, moved to Richmond, and, after several missteps, died there in 1970. Neither of them plays too much a role in this story so we can move on.
Frances was always called Minnie – I have no idea why; no one has ever been able to quite explain it – but she always thought one of her brothers had given it. She was an odd one, perhaps, for her generation. She married three times: the first one never came home from the Pacific, the second one took off after some tremendous fight in the 1950’s, the third died from a heart attack. All were gone before I was born. She had no children of her own but took in her brother’s kids and his kids’ kids. She taught high school and wrote letters to the local paper and taught her students that segregation was wrong; the Klan burned a cross in front of her house so she moved to a new school and a new town. When I was young, I wanted to be like her; maybe, I am?
Robert, her brother, was a drunk according to Minnie; my mother denies it but it explains a lot. Robert Lee McClure, as he was legally known, or “Sleepy” as his friends called him, grew up on a farm near a little Virginia town in a conservative pious environment, discovered that he liked the bottle, a lot, and passed on his screwed up genes to us.
He wasn‘t a perpetual drunk though and went through long periods of sobriety, like when he got married to our grandmother. He had two sons, Robert Lee McClure, Jr. (“Buck” as they called him) and Charles David (“Dave”) and then, December 9, 1941, left them behind and volunteered for the US army, landed at Omaha Beach and, late in 1945, came back from Europe, found his wife and two little sons waiting for him, had another child, Caroline Anne, my mother…and everything was supposed to be happily ever after.
Buck was the model child: Eagle Scout, baseball star and, when he was eighteen, he went off to West Point and everyone was so proud. His father put a picture of the son he was proudest of up on the dashboard of his truck and endlessly bragged about him. He’d stayed sober all this time but …
One day, men came to their little wooden house and told Sleepy and Ruth McClure that their eldest son had been killed in Southeast Asia … and Sleepy McClure went out and got good and drunk and came home and yelled at his wife and his daughter in high school and cursed his living son for going to college and graduate school, skipping the draft and not backing up his brother … and never quite sobered up ever again after that.
A week or two later, he drove his truck off the old highway going over the Blue Ridge; he was supposed to be heading towards Charlottesville … and, when his truck was found, he was already dead. It was listed as an accident; back before they built the interstate over Afton Mountain that happened a lot. It still does. But, though he left no note, I’m sure he killed himself; he’d gone through Rockfish Gap a thousand times before ...
I don’t know if he knew that Viet Cong or whatever hadn’t killed his son; Uncle Buck got fragged. Apparently, the soldiers with him didn’t really care for the all American Boy Scout … or, at least, that’s what my cousin Rob told me when I asked him. He says he heard that from his father who ... Though, I’m not so certain … it was the summer of 1967, what the media calls the Summer of Love that year, and fragging didn’t get common until later … at least not from what I can find …
But if it is true, if I start there, with the drunken father killing himself and the son being killed by his own men, I could look at how that doubly screwed up everyone who survived; maybe, it’s that moment, that summer of love where everything really gets started, not just for the Seed of Sleepy but for another family …
So, Virginia, summer 1967:
My other uncle had gotten married, got his doctorate, had a son and was off on his first teaching job at a third rate state university. Within two years, he had a son named Rob after our dead uncle, the same one who says he’s named after an officer who was fragged; their mother died within a week from a hemorrhage that would have been staunched had they not been in the back of beyond of North Carolina, way up in the Smokies, somewhere near the University of Rocky Top. So, they had a triple tragedy, brother, father, and wife to deal with and two little sons … so Charles moved back home to Riverport, got a job teaching in one of the colleges and let his sons run wild …
My mother was a lot younger that summer and she was just finishing high school, dreaming of college, with a year to go, when she lost her brother and her father … and Caroline’s mother sat silently, mourning them both, staring out the window and over the rolling hills and pastures towards the blue mountains on the horizon and barely noticed that her daughter was even there.
So, Caroline moved into town at seventeen and lived with her father’s maiden sister … and they’d sit up at night, neice and aunt, wondering why; Minnie encouraged Caroline to think out answers for herself and not just take those that were given her, whether by her teachers or by the minister at the white clapboard church down the street. So, Caroline read and questioned and wondered … and eventually, went off looking for answers and found them in a new faith and married into it … and wound up back in Riverport with a bunch of non-English-speaking kids …
and everything twists and turns and comes back around and those deaths of people we never knew haunt us in our generation (and I know that my brother is named after both the same uncle as my cousin and after another uncle who died around the same time on another battlefield; more twists, more turns).
Father’s Family: An Arabian Tale
The way to begin this history of my father’s family is by reading al-Fatiha:
“Bismillah al Rahman al Rahim, al hamdullilahi rabbi’l alamin, al Rahman al Rahim, maliki Yum al Din; iyyaka na’budu wa iyyaka nasta’in. Ihdina al Sirat al mustaqim. Sirat al ladhina an’amta ‘alayhim ghayril maghdubi ‘alayhim wa lad dalin. Ameen.”
This is the touchstone and the key. Then, I can begin to sing of myself.
Let it be clear and written down on the next line:
I am an Arab, I am a Muslim, and I can never deny that.
Having done that, then I should make clear how our family begins: how our ancestor was an infamous persecutor of Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) and the Companions but, when he was told that his sister had become a Muslim, he went to her and took the Surat she was reading and recited it:
“Ta Ha! 'O beloved! We sent not this Quran upon you that you may be put to trouble. Yes, as an admonition to him who fears. A sent down by Him who has made the earth and the high heavens. He, the Most Affectionate, is established on the Throne (Befitting to His Dignity).”
And he saw the beauties of the religion there and then and testified that he had become a Muslim and was, after that, the greatest of the Companions of the Prophet, so much so that, after that, he was no longer known as Omar ibn al-Khattab ibn Nufail ibn 'Abdu'l-'Uzza ibn Riyah ibn Qart ibn Razah ibn 'Adi ibn Ka'b ibn Lu’ayy ibn Ghalib ibn Quraish but as Omar al-Farouq, the Distinguisher (between truth and falsehood).
Then, I should tell some of the other famous stories about him, about all the battles he fought to help spread Islam and how he liberated Jerusalem and dealt justly with all the people that were living there, invited the Jews who had been sorely persecuted by the Romans to return and the pact he made with the Christians and how he would not pray in the Church even though it was time to and so many other famous things.
Then, after this, I might make mention of how he was murdered by the Persian slave of Ali ibn Abu Talib but only after he had spread the religion to all Syria, Iraq al-Arab and Egypt as that might serve as foreshadowing. Next, I might talk about all our famous ancestors down through the ages and of how I am a Daughter of Quraish, of Bani Adi, of al-Umari, al-Farouqi, and so many other notable names.
Then, in best Bedouin style, I might make a list like this of my ancestors, perhaps chanting it like a mu’addan might:
Amina bint Abdallah ibn Ismail ibn Musa ibn Muhammad ibn Arraf ibn Abdul Rahman ibn Ahmed ibn Jamal ad-Din ibn Muhammad ibn Omar ibn Salim ibn Abdallah ibn Hisham ibn Omar ibn Abdul Nasser ibn Amr ibn Abdul Qadr ibn Yahya ibn Ibrahim ibn Omar ibn Abdallah ibn Hassan ibn Ibrahim ibn Tariq ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Musa ibn Ismail ibn Omar ibn Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Jibreel ibn Adel ibn Salim ibn Abdallah ibn Omar ibn Hisham ibn Ahmed ibn Abdul Rahim ibn Qusai ibn Amr ibn Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn Abdallah ibn Omar ibn Abdallah ibn Salim ibn Abdullah ibn Omar ibn al-Khattab.
Then, after that, I could write about some of these distinguished ancestors and their deeds. I’d also write down some other stories of the families we are related to, of how our great-grandmother was Cherkessk and how her family fled the persecutions of the Tsar, and so on down to the recent past and then write about how our family was affected by all the upheavals of the past ninety years. Write about how our grandfather saw the French overthrow the Arab kingdom and how my father saw the French go and write about how his brother, Amr, was killed by the Israelis when the Lion refused to roar. Then, I might write about how they came under false guises and persecuted the Muslims here and we had to flee to America. Write all this down as a way to begin. That’s what I could do.
Or, I could write as a way to brag about past glories, rattling off the names of the villages my grandsire and his grandsire before him had the rent from or the wealth they gathered and nicknames they earned back in feudal times, times that only ended fully when my father was a boy. But what good does that do except to bore?
And, maybe, if I am writing in this format, among these famous stories told a thousand times before and better, I could also tell some of those that aren’t quite so well known. I could write about how the fathers and brothers and husbands made the decisions for the women of this family without asking them, of how they were made to marry men they didn’t love and abandon men they did. I could start with our many times great aunt Hafsah and how her father put his love for the Prophet above whatever love he had for his own daughter and spoke harshly to her. Then tell of all the generations that came and went of all the bartered brides and all the men that struck them, about how it is related that Omar argued with Muhammad (peace be Upon Him) that striking one’s wife ought not be a crime and the cursed legacy our ancestor gave us.
Or, I could write about the ones that refused the husbands chosen for them and the ones who took off their veils, the ones who refused to be submissive and the ones who were like Hind bint Utbah and were even fiercer than the men.
And, if I tell all this, of how, in spite of being a distinguished and ancient family, still many of the women were beat down and had their happiness denied, then when I come down to the present day, then all the truths of our lives will be revealed, of how we must choose between honor and happiness and how some of us were broken and of how I escaped.
Father’s People: Life in the Dream Palace
When the long Nineteenth Century ended, my father’s people were living in Damascus as they had done for centuries. Over time, the city rose and fell and rose and fell but still abided. But life for my people stayed much the same generation to generation; the life of 1870 wasn’t so different from 1770 or 1570 (and even 1570 wasn’t that different from 770 or 570); sometimes, Damascus, or Sham as we call it sometimes, is like a dreaming city that hasn’t awakened from a long dream of ten thousand years.
My great-grandfather at that time was accorded the seventh richest man in the City and had a magnificent old house to prove it (built, if I remember rightly, around the time Saladin was ruling there); it still stands and still belongs to us, though little else does.
Outside, this house was almost featureless, save for the alternating rows of black and white stone and tiny windows with little wooden screens. The walls were thick, built in the old style as a way to stay cool, there on the edge of the desert. Inside were rooms upon rooms, all surrounding a lush garden centered round a fountain. Each room was filled with richly woven carpets, hangings and paintings, carved and inlaid furniture … old books written by hand filled much of one room … the kitchens were immense and had their own vast oven. Huge jars filled with oil and all the other produce of the land filled rooms. Everywhere, in those days, there were members of the family, servants and hanger-ons. Some of the servants had been slaves not that long before; some of those slaves, in days that weren’t yet forgotten, had been brought from the south and were dusky-skinned like the folk of the Zanj. Others had been brought from the north and still had the look of those lands.
I have a picture of my great grandfather, Hajj Musa Muhammad Bey. It must have been taken some time around 1890 or so and was placed in a gilt frame not long after. He sits by himself in a magnificently carved chair. On his head, a fez sits at a jaunty angle with a tassel suspended to the left. He is wearing a western style suit, vest and pocket watch and all, and has a thick, waxed mustache. His photograph could be that of any local gentry across the empire of his time, taken anywhere from Basra to Sarajevo.
Hajj Musa collected the wealth of dozens of villages; I have heard he held the leases for something like 20,000 dunams of farmland. He also had mills, shops, and other properties and had, I believe, invested a great deal in the Hijaz Railway. So, for all this wealth, he (and his father and his grandfather before him) had never done a bit of work; rather, he was what one would call an almost feudal lord. If there was ‘work’ that they did in that family in those days, beyond collecting rents, they were judges and jurists, experts on the law which their ancestors had done so much to write in the first place. Did the wealth from those rents allow them to be judges and preachers, muftis and imams? Or did those positions allow them to accummulate lands? I have my own suspicion.
When he was a young man, Hajj Musa Muhammad had married his uncle’s daughter as such was the tradition in those days. She gave him three daughters and a son who had a weak heart and died before he had even learned to pray. Hajj Musa grew angry with her and refused to touch her. But he did not leave her for she was his kinswoman and he could no more put her out than he could put out one of his daughters.
Instead, he looked at one of the servants in the house and laughed and joked with her. She, he thought, was of strong spirit and had great beauty. She told him her name was Nashqua; he said that sounded strange to him. So, she told him her story:
Nashqua had been born far away in the north, in a green and mountainous land where the women were beautiful and the men all brave and strong. And they had lived there since before time began, on the slopes of Caucasus, under a sky that stretched away forever to the North. But, then, the Christians had come down from the farthest north and the Tsar had ordered all the Muslims driven forth. So, Nashqua had fled along with her family down from the mountains and to the coast of the sea. Behind them, their home and those of all their people were burning; before them was nothing but exile. So they had run.
And the Sultan had sent ships to fetch them, remembering once in his centuries long sleep that he was also Caliph and friend to all Muslims. He had sent some of these Circassians to all parts of his realm. Nashqua and her mother and her brothers and sisters had come, penniless, to Damascus and found themselves in this dry, brown land, so much hotter and stranger than home; their father had been left behind with others from their clan, killed by the Tsar’s brutal warriors, buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in that sad land.
Now, Hajj Musa tried to take Nashqua to his bed for she enraptured him. She refused him, saying that, though she was a servant now, she had been born free in her own land and was of an ancient noble lineage; if he would have her, he would need first to ask for her hand and do all things properly. She was no slave and would be no man’s doxy.
And, despite himself, Hajj Musa did as she asked for this young girl from a strange land had stolen his heart. He couldn’t think of anything save her strange gray eyes and pale skin, her thick dark curls and the shape of her. So, he went to her brothers who were little more than boys and were themselves barely more than beggars and asked them for her hand. Then, he went with her to a qadi who was his cousin and they were wed.
Now, Hajj Musa had two wives and the older one hated the younger for she saw how a servant had displaced her in her own home … and, where she was descended from nobles and famous men going back centuries, with the blood of Caliphs and Conquerors in her veins, the other wife had come penniless from a barbarous land. And the house was filled with tension. And the tension never left; years later, her kinsmen and her daughters descendants still nursed grievance.
But Nashqua, or Najah as she was now called for it was easier on the tongue, soon gave Hajj Musa a son and then another shortly after that. And her sons and her daughters were healthy and clever and were the delight of their aged father’s eyes. Now, Nashqua the Cherkes refugee was called Umm Ismail for she had given birth to the son of the house. And this name seemed most appropriate for they all recalled our ancestor of the same name and his humble birth to a serving woman.
When the Kaiser visited Damascus alongside the Turkish Sultan, my Great Grandfather posed in pictures with them; on the wall in his house, there is still a picture of him looking stern in his fez and western suit as he stands with the two emperors in a crowd of dignitaries. Life seemed good then; the provinces ruled from Damascus – what they called the Bilad-i-Sham (Land of Sham) – were prospering in 1898. The Germans and the other Franks were all investing heavily in a land reawakening from a slumber.
And, then, everything changed. First, revolution – and the Sultan was no longer real ruler but, instead, there were Young Turks who wished, it seemed, to move away from Islam and away from Arabic. Then came war; the Caliph of Islam, Sultan of the Turks, Commander of the Faithful and Qayzar-i-Rum sided with the other two Kaisers in Vienna and Berlin against Tsars, Franks, and English.
Musa and Nashqua’s eldest son, Ismail, volunteered as soon as he could to defend his land against the Christian invasion; his mother had often told him tales of what manner of beast served the Tsar and what sort of savagery they would doubtless inflict upon any Muslim that fell into their hands. But, instead of sending him north to meet that enemy, the Enemy whose blood Ismail dreamt of drinking in vengeance for the grandfather they’d slain, Enver Pasha’s officials felt it better to send him south to meet the enemy coming up out of Egypt.
As he was of an old family, Ismail Bey was made an officer of horse though he was only twenty two. He rode south with other sons of the old families of Damascus and their servants, down past Mount Hermon and the Sea of Galilee, through Jerusalem, praying at the Mosque of Omar (where they recalled Ismail’s ancestor who’d liberated it a thousand two hundred seventy nine years before and traded verses), and on to Gaza. From there, it was off to the Front.
All them with him were in high spirits; they laughed about what they would do when they liberated Cairo, whether they would go first to al Azhar or see the Pharoah’s pyramids. Like endless travelers before them, they spoke of the fleshpots of Egypt with envy. They spoke of how the Christians would collapse before them, how the Egyptians would welcome them as liberators when they cast off the English Yoke …
But they’d never make it. Instead, on the banks of the Canal, the British army met them, held them, and pushed them back … and Ismail, in his very first battle, caught a bullet with his thigh.
He lived; but Ismail’s war was over. Instead, he returned home and watched mutely as campaigns went on without him, leaning on the cane he’d always walk with, as the tides of war rose and fell. The streets of Damascus became filled with refugees from the north; Muslims fleeing the Russians, as Ismail would expect, and others, Christians but Christians of the Empire, fleeing from the Turks and Kurds up by the front.
And Ismail began to question the rightness of the war. He gave money to the Armenians when he saw them and wondered how someone supposed to be the Commander of the Faithful could let such things happen. And he began to think that, perhaps, the problem wasn’t so much the invaders but those who had invaded long before; the Turks had been a yoke on the Arabs for too long and, now, they were abandoning Islam and talking of sacrifices needed to free the Turks of the East rather than defending Islam …
So, Ismail began meeting now and then with other young men who had similar thoughts and arguing with his father about what use there was in fighting for a state that cared more for Turks in China than for the Arabs or the Religion. And his father scorned these ideas, saying that talk of an Arab nation was treason and was a dream of the Christians, not fit for Muslims. But Ismail grew closer to those who spoke of a reborn Syria …
But all he did was talk, even when the Governor hung some of the young men for dreaming of a day without the Turks.
And, then, on the Plain of Armageddon, the Turkish army was destroyed; barely had the news sunk in than foreign soldiers entered Damascus. The next day, October 1, 1918, in came Arab soldiers, proclaiming that they were there to establish an Arab kingdom … and my grandfather was thrilled, rushing to join them. He and his friends were ecstatic that, finally, an Arab ruler from the House of Hashim had come. The future seemed, after the devastation of the war, bright; a new dawn for Syria and the Arabs had come.
In that same year, Ismail’s father died and he became head of the family. Walking on his cane, he surveyed the wreckage and looked to the future. King Faysal sat with him and took his counsel as Ismail sat with those other notables from Damascus along with the army officers, Hijazis, nationalists and such who gathered round the new king.
But this idyll wasn’t to last; after less than two years, the dream was over. The French came from the West and Ismail Bey leaned on his cane and watched the little army head off to meet them. Outnumbered, they were slaughtered by the French, even though daughters of Damascus had rushed to the Kingdom’s defense. The king and many of Ismail’s friends fled to Baghdad or south to Amman; my grandfather stayed behind to tend his own lands. And to try to survive the alien rule.
The French didn’t take his wealth or his patrimony. But they imposed new ways and new laws. And, so, the notables gathered quietly and whispered and, before long, the people rebelled and the French shelled Damascus, destroying parts of Ismail’s house. But, he rebuilt and went on.
One evening, they tell me, Ismail was sitting in a café with some of his friends, discussing politics and the future of the nation and all such things over tea and coffee and tobacco. Among the group gathered that night was a recently married teacher and the two of them were deep in conversation. In rushed another man, the teacher’s much younger brother.
“Come home, come quickly! Our sister needs you!” he insisted, though the older brother was reluctant to break off conversation.
So, Ismail accompanied him, leaning heavily on his cane as they moved as fast as they could, deep in conversation, to the teacher’s home. There, they found his sister, nearly shaking with rage and asked what had happened.
“At twilight,” she said, “I was walking home, down our own street, and a French gendarme saw me and began to call out to me; ‘Fatima, Fatima, show me your charms!’ But I ignored him and he followed me, saying all manner of things. I was almost before the door and he accosted me, grabbed my veil and pulled it off!”
“In our own street?” he brother said and shook with anger.
“Yes, yes,” she explained. “It was so … “
And she spoke long about how she had been attacked. And Ismail and her brother listened as she said that, if she would choose to go unveiled in the street, that would be her choice but never that of the Franks. The three of them sat there, talking long into the night about this outrage and how another rebellion was neeeded and what would happen when the Franks were expelled.
And, when it was nearly dawn, she said how she wondered whether after this disgrace any man would ever consider her.
Then, Ismail laughed and said, “where is your father?”
She asked him why and he said that he wanted to ask for her hand. She smiled and said that she wanted him to do so.
And less than a month after that day, Ghada bint Hassan and Ismail ibn Musa went before the Qadi and swore out the wedding contract, though she was barely more than a child and he was already nearly into mid-life. From that day, theirs was always a solid enough union; Ghada was considered clever and well-read – for a woman in those days – and, despite having an education, she stuck a bit longer to the old ways. The photographs from those days show her dressed in almost western clothes but still wearing the veil for at least a few more years.
Soon, they began having children: Musa, Omar, Abdallah, Amr, Hani, and Hamza were their sons, Zainab, Lena, and Ibtisam were their daughters. Musa, who was the firstborn, died when he was still a baby; the others save one are still alive.
And, when the French left, after again shelling the city, these children waved them off … and new times seemed to be ahead. Damascus now ruled a reduced land but, still, the Syrian Republic had a brilliant future. The old families still had their role and most of them were easily elected to the parliament; Ismail Musa Bey took his seat along with the rest, just long enough to vote for yet another war, one that brought more refugees to Damascus; now, though, they were Palestinians. Ismail was shamed by the failure of the army against the invader; he sold off some of his lands to raise money that he could give as relief, gave space in his house for distant relatives from the South and old business partners until they could find their own way.
And, elsewhere, others thought that the problem, again, wasn’t the invader but rather a problem of the government. So, they overthrew the young republic and turned Syria into a dictatorship, ruled forever after by one clique of officers, their children or their friends. And they looked to Russia as a model now, taking the lands of the old families and giving them to those who had worked them for years and never earned a profit or giving them to their own people.
And where his father and his father before him had been great men, now Ismail found himself a pauper, barely able to manage his own house let alone his former estates. Few now used the old titles of respect; no longer was he referred to as bey or pasha and rarely even as effendi. Gone were most of the servants, gone was the gold. But, still, he held on to his house.
Where he had been a gentleman without need for work, now his sons would need to learn trades. Amr went off to the army and trained to be an officer; they always said he’d been the fiercest of them. Though he was only a child, Amr had pledged in 1948 that he would go, personally, to free Palestine and avenge the Arabs or die trying. When he was older and rising through the ranks of the army, the family half-joked, half-whispered that, one day, Amr would be the officer seizing power for himself.
Omar went off to Beirut and trained to be a scholar of the past; he, the family said, was the one when they were young who’d most loved walking through the city and seeing all the places where the heroes of the past had lived. Sometimes, he’d write long poems in the old style; when his older brother first received a commission, Omar wrote a poem for him hailing him as the new Salah ad-Din.
Hani followed Omar to Beirut and studied medicine while Hamza studied the law in Damascus. Abdallah, though, had a gift for numbers and designs so he began training as an engineer; they say that when he was a child, he was forever building models of things exactly to scale.
Their sisters, meanwhile, went off to University too, leaving the modes of a thousand years behind, just as they now went out in the streets bare-headed. A photograph from those days shows them all, all the brothers and sisters on the Corniche in Beirut, maybe when Omar finished university. The women all have their dark hair piled up and coiffed, their arms and legs bare. Some of the brothers wear sport coats though Amr wears a tie. Omar gazes off in the distance. Looking at them, you might think that this family is from Naples or Barcelona; hardly any of them are those that I recall.
In the university, the sisters found husbands from other old families and settled down in the city; Ibtisam’s husband, Muhammad, was a classmate of Abdallah and, later, was an engineer in the Gulf. Lena married ‘Adil, a merchant from a family that, though younger than ours, had been wiser in the recent past; somehow, every change of ruler and government always seemed to bring them up a small bit until they owned factories, hotels, and other new things throughout the country. Zeinab, though, married the opposite; her husband, Hassan, was a scholar and a holy man but never a good supporter for he always needed to be right rather than successful. And Hassan was always close to Omar …
As he was a Sunni and from one of the old families, Amr’s advance in the army was slow. Officers who weren’t Muslims – Druze and Alawis and Christians, mainly – and who, no matter what religion they’d been raised, rejected religion, had come to power over army and over state. They said that they were the Party of Rebirth (or Renaissance) – the Hizb al-Bath in Arabic – and claimed that they stood for “Unity, Socialism, Freedom”. But, as often as not in years to come, they would appear to belief in rule by one man, stealing from all, stomping on freedom.
By 1966, Amr had become a lieutenant in command of an artillery barrage on the southwestern border. And there he sat with his soldiers in a strongly built look out post, watching and waiting for the Invader, sometimes sending shells down on them when they violated the ceasefire lines.
When war came the next year; his commander, Hafez al-Assad – literally ‘Guardian of the Lion’ though we used to call him the Lion of Golan – had the radio broadcast that the Heights, al Arraf, had fallen. And there was panic in all the units; some thought that they must be the last unit left and decided that they would do well to flee. Others, though, thought that they would live and die as Arabs and as free men, defending their homeland.
Amr was one of the latter; he and his company stayed and fought when the Israelis came with their planes and tanks. But, they were hopelessly outnumbered and hopelessly outgunned. And they died at their post on Tel Faher, every single one … heroes, perhaps, maybe even martyrs but definitely dead in a lost war.
And Amr’s father who had survived battle himself and watched as other outnumbered armies had been destroyed knew that it was his commander’s decision that had failed his son. The Heights there should have been impregnable; only a mad man or a traitor would have pulled troops away and left Amr to die.
And Ismail heart was broken. His living children sat with him as he stared blankly when representatives of the Party appeared. They, the surviving sons felt, had taken their father’s lands, his dignity, and his pride in his son. And all of them said nothing. And Ismail lived out the rest of his days in near silent mourning.
Now, Omar Ismail was the oldest of the living sons so he took over his father’s house. In those days, he was teaching at the University, teaching about the days of the Prophet and the first Caliphs. And, as he taught and studied these matters, he became convinced more and more that, if the nation was to prosper again, it would need to return to the old ways, the ways of the religion, and abandon all the imported philosophies and corruptions that had grown up. The heathen would need expulsion from government and the state could be reborn. Quietly, he began meeting with others who thought as he did, organized study groups of students to discuss these ideas.
Meanwhile, he married the daughter of one of his colleagues, Saffiyah Abdul Rahman. Saffiyah had stood out from among the girls her age; where others embraced the latest fashions from Paris and Beirut, she steadfastly refused and insisted to dress as a Muslim woman should. They say that, once when she was in school, the teacher objected to her wearing a covering and told her that she must come to school the next day bareheaded or she would be expelled. And when the next day came, all the other girls were covered as well for all stood by her though they didn’t share her belief. Others smoked and drank in cafes; she sat at her prayers. And, when she was done with university, she was willing to marry Omar. Together, they’d have many children: Ridwan, Raghad, Rania, Reem, and Ramzi, all born in the house of their ancestors in those years.
Meanwhile, Omar’s brother, Abdallah, had finished a degree in hydrological engineering and had been working for some years for the state, helping to plan and build new wells, dams, and waterlines. He was good at it and only his lack of a membership card in the Bath Party held him back. Omar urged Abdallah to marry but no one took his fancy. Instead, he decided that he would leave Syria and seek further education.
It had been centuries since any of them had traveled beyond the lands of Islam, if not all the way back to the beginning, so this was a bold thing for him. But, he was able to get a visa and set off to enroll at a school with a name that sounded good to him, the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in a Masters program.
The End of the Beginning
When her brother and father died, Caroline McClure was seventeen. Her mother could barely take care of herself or the small country house she’d lived in with her husband. So, Caroline went to live with her great aunt in town. Soon enough, her mother had sold the house and followed, moving into a small apartment by herself.
Caroline meanwhile finished high school and started college. Her plan when she began at Madison College was to be a high school teacher, rather like her aunt and housemate. Caroline was a day student rather than a boarder and, while she was in college, worked as a waitress in one of Riverport’s few restaurants.
As a student, Caroline read widely on religion and spirituality and such; I suppose some of that was in the zeitgeist in those years of the Nixon Administration and some of that zeitgeist seeped even into small towns in the hills of Virginia. Then, too, Caroline was, I’m told, intensely curious and interested in first and last things even before the men in her family started dying.
Somewhere in these years, Caroline decided that she didn’t believe in the incarnation and the trinity and quit going to church; her mother was scandalized, her aunt said there was no reason to do something just because that was what was expected of you. Caroline announced she was a Unitarian. Unfortunately, there was no Unitarian Church in those parts so she was a congregation of one.
I suppose she must have dated but no one terribly seriously. She was, I suppose, a rather somber young woman …
One day, as she was finishing up class work and only had her student teaching left to do, Caroline went to work at the little restaurant she waitressed at. The usual locals of Riverport wandered in, had the usual conversation … and around lunchtime, in came a familiar face along with two strangers.
She greeted the town’s water manager, gave menus to his companions. One, she barely noticed. The other immediately had her full ateention. Handsome in a swarthy sort of way with a thick mustache and neat trimmed hair, she could barely keep her eyes off him … and he of her.
Abe, she learned quickly, was his name; he and the other stranger were engineers in town to look over upgrading Riverport’s water and sewers. Dull enough … but there was something unusual about Abe. He had an accent Caroline had never heard before ...
and over the next few days, he came in with his companion for almost every meal; there were few restaurants in Riverport and that one was closest to the office they were working in.
Caroline made casual conversation with him and, after what seemed forever, he asked her out on a date. And when they went out to see a movie in the next town, they never made it to the film but sat and talked about God and their older brothers killed in battle five years before. They spoke of dreams and journeys. Abe – whose driver’s license read Abdallah Ismail Arraf – described his home in Syria and told her how he’d come to Virginia for a Master’s degree then stayed on to learn skills. And, when the evening was over, she refused to kiss him, saying that she wasn’t the type of girl who did such things.
And Abdallah realized he’d met the woman of his dreams. As his project was wrapping up, he proposed to her … and she agreed …
and, New Year’s Day, 1973, they married before a justice of the peace. No one from Abdallah’s family was there. From Caroline’s, only her aunt and her brother came … and some in Riverport wondered why even they had come to see her get married to some kind of negro … Everyone said it would never last.
But it did. They had a daughter late the same year; Caroline stayed home to raise baby Aisha and never, ever used her teaching degree. And, two years after that, they had another daughter, born in the same town that Woodrow Wilson had been born in eighty years earlier …
And, thus, after however many interminable pages, we reach my own birth (you’ll of necessity admit I’m far more concise than Sterne at reaching this point).
Beginnings
Here I start and, since I am the one writing here, I will begin this my way (since, of course, that’s the best way):
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar Rahim;
which means:
In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate;
and is the way any account is Supposed To Begin.
And having a simple way of beginning, a formulaic one, if you will, saves some troubles. I set myself a task: make sense of contradictions and explain myself to me. But to do that, I realized, I needed to understand the parts that make me. If I were to do that wel, I decided that I wanted to explain ourselves to us and asked everyone who we were and everything seemed endlessly complicated. Every beginning led to another tale, every answer another question.
Where to begin? is just the first of those questions. Should I start at some randomly chosen day in my life or at the time of some great epiphany? Should I start with my birth or my earliest childhood memories? And, when I’ve shared that, paste together those other remembered things …
Or should I begin with some intricate formula: perhaps, I’ll set the tone by beginning each section with a new letter like so:
“A: am Amina Abdallah Arraf, an Arab and an American. All along are adventures and amusements Amina asks an audience’s attention and Amina articulates Arab activities and American assimilation. Amina arrived at Atlanta after awesome adventures around Aleppo …”
But other people have done that sort of writing better than I have and, amusing though it might be, it’s not exactly the most natural way of writing (and not all ‘A’s are A’s; some are alifs, others are ayns … and so on).
Or I could start by simply giving the basic stats of myself, like you’d find on a baseball card, in a résumé, or in a personal ad:
“Amina Abdallah Arraf, Syrian-American Muslim Princess, born Staunton, Virginia, October 1975. Father: Abdallah Ismail Arraf, Syrian Arab. Mother: Caroline McClure Arraf, American Christian by birth. Second of four children. Lived in Damascus, Syria (1976-1982), Riverport, Virginia (1982-1991), Lilburn, Georgia (1991-1999), Chicago, Illinois (1999-2002), Atlanta, Georgia (2002- present). Married in Damascus, 1999. BA, MA from Georgia State University … devout Muslim, geek, perpetually confused … I love Hank, Marcel, Dolly and Fayrouz and I have Shakira on my iPod … I like watching NASCAR and parsing Hadith and you can take me to meet your Jiddu or your Daddyjack …”
But, while giving the facts in reasonable order, does it say anything, really?
Perhaps, then, we can start this account as though it were a fairy tale; “Once upon a time, there lived …” or “Kan wa ma kan”; it was and it wasn’t” …
But this isn’t a fairy tale or an Arabian night’s tale; instead, what I’ve written down is a “True History”, of everything that happened (and most of it is true) with only minor embellishments, conflations, name-changes (to protect the guilty), and a few event made up out of whole cloth (do recall that I – as well as some others involved -- am an Arab and, if you’ve read much of the current, how shall we say it, more ‘Orientalist’ press, you’ll know that it’s axiomatic that Arabs are unreliable and prone to lie (if not to lie prone), so, if you buy that whole reasoning – and why not? It is the dominant paradigm – you’ll expect me to lie at every turn. I won’t but what’ll it matter? And the rest of us come ultimately from Ireland …and there are other stereotypes there that invalidate our truths).
It’s a true story told here, more or less, so, to my eternal regret, a fairy tale beginning won’t do …
Instead, perhaps, I could begin at the very beginning, “The Earth cooled, the Dinosaurs lived and, then, an asteroid wiped them out, etc.” or, if you prefer, “God created the Heavens and the Earth …” But both those seem a little impersonal, regardless of the presence of a Deity.
So, instead, in the manner of an old chronicle, I want to begin by talking of ancestors and such. I’ll show how my two sides diverged and, then, how they rejoined to form me.
Family matters
Where do you begin in tracing family matters? Do you start from the beginning? It would, I suppose, be easy enough; I’ve relatives on each side that can recite the names of ancestors (some real, some who probably never lived at all) all the way back to Noah and the Flood …
And, I suppose, that would make a good enough starting point; after all, my father’s family got off the boat and went one way, my mother’s the other: Shem and Japheth, both determined to keep down Ham and his descendants, right? That’s what I’ve heard when Muhammad Speaks …
But, what would be the point?
If I look in an older book, I’d see that my mother’s people could trace through long lists of strange names; there are other ones that dispute those accounts of Brutus and Hiscion and so on and talk about Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures, leading to the Wessex Culture as well as North British Picts and so on for my mother’s tribe while others dispute that my father’s tribe descended from Father Abraham and speak of mercantile elites descended from nomads. And those books that rely on the facts of archaeology and history usually don’t give very many names so they aren’t much use for those who’d research their own family trees.
All those mountains of facts will tell you what, exactly?
They were born, they lived, they died … and what does that show? It explains nothing, reveals nothing and says only that we have ancestors and we’re related to other people. That you and I are probably cousins somehow and that you have other cousins and, if you traced far enough back, you could show that everyone of us was endlessly related and that we were all cousins and what would it matter?
No more digressions … let me begin!
Mother’s Family: An American Tale
My mother’s family is a long time in America, far longer than my father’s. They are that sort of people whom, when you say ‘American’ to a lot of people around the world, comes first to mind: white, fair-skinned, lots of blue eyes, plenty of blonds (though with a red head or two as well as plenty of brunettes); English-speaking from as long as anyone recalls; whatever relatives are on the other side of the ocean long since forgotten so ‘ethnicity’ beyond American is theoretical. British with a trace of German, Protestant and so on … So I’ll start with them.
And, for some of my readers, there’s will be a familiar story of old white America, redneck America if you want to be rude about it. I owe have my make-up to these people yet I am a Muslim which sets me apart from them. This is the Red America half of me comes from but my banner is green.
Or maybe not. Maybe half of me is from here and everything else is confusion between those two sides, the stranger and the native, the believer and the infidel.
So, I should speak of them plainly and with respect. Now, I’ve heard my Syrian father claim that my mother’s family was still swinging from trees while his ancestors were building cities and writing books so that might have something to do with it; if you’re brachiating through the jungles of Scotland, it’s hard to pause and write down your family tree …
So, that’s where they began and got the name McClure: it’s supposed to be from Gaelic and means ‘son of the Pale Youth’ so, I suppose, I must have had an ancestor known as the Pale Youth; living in the west of Scotland, getting that nickname would take some doing so I’m going to assume that this fellow must’ve been either an albino or about as close as you can get. Certainly, had he gone visiting my father’s kin, he’d’ve gotten sunburn so, I think, it’s safe to assume he was solidly a redneck …
Anyhow, one of this Pale Youth’s descendants went from western Scotland bound for Ireland in 1608 to join in the Plantation of Ulster. The Catholic nobles who’d been fighting the English had all run off to Spain and forfeited their lands so the English government determined that settling the Northwest of Ireland with hardnosed, hardheaded Scots Presbyterians would bring peace to an unsettled land (and, like a lot of British government schemes, that one went so very well … but that’s another story, not mine). So, anyway, John McClure and his family joined Montgomeries and Pattons at the point of the Protestant sword and went off to begin farming just outside the town of Raphoe in County Donegal; when I was in high school, I went there looking for them … and found not much at all.
Of course, Ireland wasn’t exactly peaceful so these McClures spent most of the rest of the century fighting Catholics and trying to make it, reproducing and growing ever more numerous. Eventually, crops failed and some of these transient Scottish Presbyterians decided to move on from Ireland. Some had gone ahead and wrote back about the wonderful land beyond the sea. So, in 1730, Halbert and Elizabeth McClure took their children and what little they had and headed down the valley from Raphoe to Londonderry, got on a ship and left the waters of Lough Foyle for Philadelphia.
In the year 1742, Halbert, his wife, and their son, James, arrived in the Parish of Augusta in the Dominion of Virginia and set out to build themselves a cabin and all of that. There, between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny, they would prosper for more than two hundred years. The whole land soon filled up with others who’d come over from Ireland along with a few English and Germans.
The Presbyterians built themselves a fine stone church and when, a little later, the French and their Indian allies came down from over the hills, James (who was now grown up) holed up in it and fought them off.
It’s still there; there’re family graves near it and I, the head-scarfed Muslim descendant, go there when I can.
And, when I do, I think of how I’d like to see this place one day: it is built of bluish limestone, sits on a hill and is strong as a fort, built for ages. Sometimes, I imagine it redone in some future day, a day when all the distant cousins who still farm around here or work in one of the towns slowly growing closer will believe as I do … and my Christian ancestors will rest outside their descendants mosque. And, when I think of that, I’m happy; I believe that, someday, all these hills will be home to a circumcised nation when, in the fullness of time, all America comes to accept Islam ….
But I digress. I was speaking of my Presbyterian ancestors. They stayed in the Valley, generation to generation: they went over the Blue Ridge and fought at Yorktown (earning me the right to be in the DAR); though they owned no slaves (not from any principle but because, like most of this family before and since, they didn’t own much of anything) and probably were opposed to secession, but, when Virginia left the Union, so did my McClure ancestor. He joined up with a unit of his fellows that quickly picked up the name of its commander and was called the Stonewall Brigade; Jackson marched them up and down the Valley, over it and up to Sharpsburg and Gettysburg. When the war was over, he returned to a ruined land; the North had fought a total war in the Valley, burning all the fields of wheat and all the barns so, presumably, the McClures had to spend a good while rebuilding and getting back together but still hung on.
And more time passes but no one goes far.
Now, we leave archival stuff and come into the realm of memory; my civil war ancestor, Ephraim, named his son after his old commander and he named his the same: Thomas Jackson McClure I & II. Tommy Number II was, from what I’ve been told, a big strapping man who’d run wild as a youth but, when he had gotten a few years on him, attended a revival meeting and heard the altar call. He responded and soon joined up with a Methodist Church. He took ‘the Pledge’ and never drank another drop but threw himself into his godly activities whenever his farm would allow him.
Tommy was quite fervent in attending tent revivals and would sometimes travel to nearby towns. One of these took him all the way into the next county. There, he met a young woman who’d also been caught up in the fervor. She, though, wasn’t Scotch-Irish or even English at all but was from a family of Mennonites. Her people had been Amish but, in time, had left them. Now, they farmed west of little town called Dayton. Anyway, this woman, Barbara Stoltzfus, was tall and blonde and, even if her clothing was plain, immediately caught Tommy’s eye. He talked to her and soon began courting her. Her family was none too pleased by the attentions she was getting from outside their community but, Tommy was still a good Christian man and Barbara was quite headstrong so, she broke with her family and married him and became a Methodist.
Barbara McClure wasn’t the last headstrong rebellious woman in this story; her descendants count more than one, I think, women who went off and did what their families wouldn’t have wanted, women of courage and strength. She did, I’ve been told, have a trace of a sort of dutchified English common among Mennonites and Amish back then even when she was old … she lived to be quite old, almost ninety, and outlived two of her own children and almost met me. I think, sometimes, I must have inherited some traits from her, even if not her particular faith.
Anyway, Barbara and Tommy settled down on his farm and set about raising corn and cattle, chickens and vegetables. She would bake lots of pies – especially the Shoo fly pie she’d brought with her from her own people – and so on and so forth. They had four children in quick succession; another Thomas, Vincent, Frances, and Robert. When war came, Tommy stayed home despite his own wishes. Afterwards, the children collected pennies and helped their parents make relief packages for the starving, suffering children in far off and exotic places with names like Beirut, Damascus and Aleppo.
Thomas, who was called Stony, was the oldest; when his father died, he took over the farm and carried it on before passing it on to his son, another Thomas (or Chip), who farms it still. Vincent left home early, moved to Richmond, and, after several missteps, died there in 1970. Neither of them plays too much a role in this story so we can move on.
Frances was always called Minnie – I have no idea why; no one has ever been able to quite explain it – but she always thought one of her brothers had given it. She was an odd one, perhaps, for her generation. She married three times: the first one never came home from the Pacific, the second one took off after some tremendous fight in the 1950’s, the third died from a heart attack. All were gone before I was born. She had no children of her own but took in her brother’s kids and his kids’ kids. She taught high school and wrote letters to the local paper and taught her students that segregation was wrong; the Klan burned a cross in front of her house so she moved to a new school and a new town. When I was young, I wanted to be like her; maybe, I am?
Robert, her brother, was a drunk according to Minnie; my mother denies it but it explains a lot. Robert Lee McClure, as he was legally known, or “Sleepy” as his friends called him, grew up on a farm near a little Virginia town in a conservative pious environment, discovered that he liked the bottle, a lot, and passed on his screwed up genes to us.
He wasn‘t a perpetual drunk though and went through long periods of sobriety, like when he got married to our grandmother. He had two sons, Robert Lee McClure, Jr. (“Buck” as they called him) and Charles David (“Dave”) and then, December 9, 1941, left them behind and volunteered for the US army, landed at Omaha Beach and, late in 1945, came back from Europe, found his wife and two little sons waiting for him, had another child, Caroline Anne, my mother…and everything was supposed to be happily ever after.
Buck was the model child: Eagle Scout, baseball star and, when he was eighteen, he went off to West Point and everyone was so proud. His father put a picture of the son he was proudest of up on the dashboard of his truck and endlessly bragged about him. He’d stayed sober all this time but …
One day, men came to their little wooden house and told Sleepy and Ruth McClure that their eldest son had been killed in Southeast Asia … and Sleepy McClure went out and got good and drunk and came home and yelled at his wife and his daughter in high school and cursed his living son for going to college and graduate school, skipping the draft and not backing up his brother … and never quite sobered up ever again after that.
A week or two later, he drove his truck off the old highway going over the Blue Ridge; he was supposed to be heading towards Charlottesville … and, when his truck was found, he was already dead. It was listed as an accident; back before they built the interstate over Afton Mountain that happened a lot. It still does. But, though he left no note, I’m sure he killed himself; he’d gone through Rockfish Gap a thousand times before ...
I don’t know if he knew that Viet Cong or whatever hadn’t killed his son; Uncle Buck got fragged. Apparently, the soldiers with him didn’t really care for the all American Boy Scout … or, at least, that’s what my cousin Rob told me when I asked him. He says he heard that from his father who ... Though, I’m not so certain … it was the summer of 1967, what the media calls the Summer of Love that year, and fragging didn’t get common until later … at least not from what I can find …
But if it is true, if I start there, with the drunken father killing himself and the son being killed by his own men, I could look at how that doubly screwed up everyone who survived; maybe, it’s that moment, that summer of love where everything really gets started, not just for the Seed of Sleepy but for another family …
So, Virginia, summer 1967:
My other uncle had gotten married, got his doctorate, had a son and was off on his first teaching job at a third rate state university. Within two years, he had a son named Rob after our dead uncle, the same one who says he’s named after an officer who was fragged; their mother died within a week from a hemorrhage that would have been staunched had they not been in the back of beyond of North Carolina, way up in the Smokies, somewhere near the University of Rocky Top. So, they had a triple tragedy, brother, father, and wife to deal with and two little sons … so Charles moved back home to Riverport, got a job teaching in one of the colleges and let his sons run wild …
My mother was a lot younger that summer and she was just finishing high school, dreaming of college, with a year to go, when she lost her brother and her father … and Caroline’s mother sat silently, mourning them both, staring out the window and over the rolling hills and pastures towards the blue mountains on the horizon and barely noticed that her daughter was even there.
So, Caroline moved into town at seventeen and lived with her father’s maiden sister … and they’d sit up at night, neice and aunt, wondering why; Minnie encouraged Caroline to think out answers for herself and not just take those that were given her, whether by her teachers or by the minister at the white clapboard church down the street. So, Caroline read and questioned and wondered … and eventually, went off looking for answers and found them in a new faith and married into it … and wound up back in Riverport with a bunch of non-English-speaking kids …
and everything twists and turns and comes back around and those deaths of people we never knew haunt us in our generation (and I know that my brother is named after both the same uncle as my cousin and after another uncle who died around the same time on another battlefield; more twists, more turns).
Father’s Family: An Arabian Tale
The way to begin this history of my father’s family is by reading al-Fatiha:
“Bismillah al Rahman al Rahim, al hamdullilahi rabbi’l alamin, al Rahman al Rahim, maliki Yum al Din; iyyaka na’budu wa iyyaka nasta’in. Ihdina al Sirat al mustaqim. Sirat al ladhina an’amta ‘alayhim ghayril maghdubi ‘alayhim wa lad dalin. Ameen.”
This is the touchstone and the key. Then, I can begin to sing of myself.
Let it be clear and written down on the next line:
I am an Arab, I am a Muslim, and I can never deny that.
Having done that, then I should make clear how our family begins: how our ancestor was an infamous persecutor of Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) and the Companions but, when he was told that his sister had become a Muslim, he went to her and took the Surat she was reading and recited it:
“Ta Ha! 'O beloved! We sent not this Quran upon you that you may be put to trouble. Yes, as an admonition to him who fears. A sent down by Him who has made the earth and the high heavens. He, the Most Affectionate, is established on the Throne (Befitting to His Dignity).”
And he saw the beauties of the religion there and then and testified that he had become a Muslim and was, after that, the greatest of the Companions of the Prophet, so much so that, after that, he was no longer known as Omar ibn al-Khattab ibn Nufail ibn 'Abdu'l-'Uzza ibn Riyah ibn Qart ibn Razah ibn 'Adi ibn Ka'b ibn Lu’ayy ibn Ghalib ibn Quraish but as Omar al-Farouq, the Distinguisher (between truth and falsehood).
Then, I should tell some of the other famous stories about him, about all the battles he fought to help spread Islam and how he liberated Jerusalem and dealt justly with all the people that were living there, invited the Jews who had been sorely persecuted by the Romans to return and the pact he made with the Christians and how he would not pray in the Church even though it was time to and so many other famous things.
Then, after this, I might make mention of how he was murdered by the Persian slave of Ali ibn Abu Talib but only after he had spread the religion to all Syria, Iraq al-Arab and Egypt as that might serve as foreshadowing. Next, I might talk about all our famous ancestors down through the ages and of how I am a Daughter of Quraish, of Bani Adi, of al-Umari, al-Farouqi, and so many other notable names.
Then, in best Bedouin style, I might make a list like this of my ancestors, perhaps chanting it like a mu’addan might:
Amina bint Abdallah ibn Ismail ibn Musa ibn Muhammad ibn Arraf ibn Abdul Rahman ibn Ahmed ibn Jamal ad-Din ibn Muhammad ibn Omar ibn Salim ibn Abdallah ibn Hisham ibn Omar ibn Abdul Nasser ibn Amr ibn Abdul Qadr ibn Yahya ibn Ibrahim ibn Omar ibn Abdallah ibn Hassan ibn Ibrahim ibn Tariq ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Musa ibn Ismail ibn Omar ibn Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Jibreel ibn Adel ibn Salim ibn Abdallah ibn Omar ibn Hisham ibn Ahmed ibn Abdul Rahim ibn Qusai ibn Amr ibn Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn Abdallah ibn Omar ibn Abdallah ibn Salim ibn Abdullah ibn Omar ibn al-Khattab.
Then, after that, I could write about some of these distinguished ancestors and their deeds. I’d also write down some other stories of the families we are related to, of how our great-grandmother was Cherkessk and how her family fled the persecutions of the Tsar, and so on down to the recent past and then write about how our family was affected by all the upheavals of the past ninety years. Write about how our grandfather saw the French overthrow the Arab kingdom and how my father saw the French go and write about how his brother, Amr, was killed by the Israelis when the Lion refused to roar. Then, I might write about how they came under false guises and persecuted the Muslims here and we had to flee to America. Write all this down as a way to begin. That’s what I could do.
Or, I could write as a way to brag about past glories, rattling off the names of the villages my grandsire and his grandsire before him had the rent from or the wealth they gathered and nicknames they earned back in feudal times, times that only ended fully when my father was a boy. But what good does that do except to bore?
And, maybe, if I am writing in this format, among these famous stories told a thousand times before and better, I could also tell some of those that aren’t quite so well known. I could write about how the fathers and brothers and husbands made the decisions for the women of this family without asking them, of how they were made to marry men they didn’t love and abandon men they did. I could start with our many times great aunt Hafsah and how her father put his love for the Prophet above whatever love he had for his own daughter and spoke harshly to her. Then tell of all the generations that came and went of all the bartered brides and all the men that struck them, about how it is related that Omar argued with Muhammad (peace be Upon Him) that striking one’s wife ought not be a crime and the cursed legacy our ancestor gave us.
Or, I could write about the ones that refused the husbands chosen for them and the ones who took off their veils, the ones who refused to be submissive and the ones who were like Hind bint Utbah and were even fiercer than the men.
And, if I tell all this, of how, in spite of being a distinguished and ancient family, still many of the women were beat down and had their happiness denied, then when I come down to the present day, then all the truths of our lives will be revealed, of how we must choose between honor and happiness and how some of us were broken and of how I escaped.
Father’s People: Life in the Dream Palace
When the long Nineteenth Century ended, my father’s people were living in Damascus as they had done for centuries. Over time, the city rose and fell and rose and fell but still abided. But life for my people stayed much the same generation to generation; the life of 1870 wasn’t so different from 1770 or 1570 (and even 1570 wasn’t that different from 770 or 570); sometimes, Damascus, or Sham as we call it sometimes, is like a dreaming city that hasn’t awakened from a long dream of ten thousand years.
My great-grandfather at that time was accorded the seventh richest man in the City and had a magnificent old house to prove it (built, if I remember rightly, around the time Saladin was ruling there); it still stands and still belongs to us, though little else does.
Outside, this house was almost featureless, save for the alternating rows of black and white stone and tiny windows with little wooden screens. The walls were thick, built in the old style as a way to stay cool, there on the edge of the desert. Inside were rooms upon rooms, all surrounding a lush garden centered round a fountain. Each room was filled with richly woven carpets, hangings and paintings, carved and inlaid furniture … old books written by hand filled much of one room … the kitchens were immense and had their own vast oven. Huge jars filled with oil and all the other produce of the land filled rooms. Everywhere, in those days, there were members of the family, servants and hanger-ons. Some of the servants had been slaves not that long before; some of those slaves, in days that weren’t yet forgotten, had been brought from the south and were dusky-skinned like the folk of the Zanj. Others had been brought from the north and still had the look of those lands.
I have a picture of my great grandfather, Hajj Musa Muhammad Bey. It must have been taken some time around 1890 or so and was placed in a gilt frame not long after. He sits by himself in a magnificently carved chair. On his head, a fez sits at a jaunty angle with a tassel suspended to the left. He is wearing a western style suit, vest and pocket watch and all, and has a thick, waxed mustache. His photograph could be that of any local gentry across the empire of his time, taken anywhere from Basra to Sarajevo.
Hajj Musa collected the wealth of dozens of villages; I have heard he held the leases for something like 20,000 dunams of farmland. He also had mills, shops, and other properties and had, I believe, invested a great deal in the Hijaz Railway. So, for all this wealth, he (and his father and his grandfather before him) had never done a bit of work; rather, he was what one would call an almost feudal lord. If there was ‘work’ that they did in that family in those days, beyond collecting rents, they were judges and jurists, experts on the law which their ancestors had done so much to write in the first place. Did the wealth from those rents allow them to be judges and preachers, muftis and imams? Or did those positions allow them to accummulate lands? I have my own suspicion.
When he was a young man, Hajj Musa Muhammad had married his uncle’s daughter as such was the tradition in those days. She gave him three daughters and a son who had a weak heart and died before he had even learned to pray. Hajj Musa grew angry with her and refused to touch her. But he did not leave her for she was his kinswoman and he could no more put her out than he could put out one of his daughters.
Instead, he looked at one of the servants in the house and laughed and joked with her. She, he thought, was of strong spirit and had great beauty. She told him her name was Nashqua; he said that sounded strange to him. So, she told him her story:
Nashqua had been born far away in the north, in a green and mountainous land where the women were beautiful and the men all brave and strong. And they had lived there since before time began, on the slopes of Caucasus, under a sky that stretched away forever to the North. But, then, the Christians had come down from the farthest north and the Tsar had ordered all the Muslims driven forth. So, Nashqua had fled along with her family down from the mountains and to the coast of the sea. Behind them, their home and those of all their people were burning; before them was nothing but exile. So they had run.
And the Sultan had sent ships to fetch them, remembering once in his centuries long sleep that he was also Caliph and friend to all Muslims. He had sent some of these Circassians to all parts of his realm. Nashqua and her mother and her brothers and sisters had come, penniless, to Damascus and found themselves in this dry, brown land, so much hotter and stranger than home; their father had been left behind with others from their clan, killed by the Tsar’s brutal warriors, buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in that sad land.
Now, Hajj Musa tried to take Nashqua to his bed for she enraptured him. She refused him, saying that, though she was a servant now, she had been born free in her own land and was of an ancient noble lineage; if he would have her, he would need first to ask for her hand and do all things properly. She was no slave and would be no man’s doxy.
And, despite himself, Hajj Musa did as she asked for this young girl from a strange land had stolen his heart. He couldn’t think of anything save her strange gray eyes and pale skin, her thick dark curls and the shape of her. So, he went to her brothers who were little more than boys and were themselves barely more than beggars and asked them for her hand. Then, he went with her to a qadi who was his cousin and they were wed.
Now, Hajj Musa had two wives and the older one hated the younger for she saw how a servant had displaced her in her own home … and, where she was descended from nobles and famous men going back centuries, with the blood of Caliphs and Conquerors in her veins, the other wife had come penniless from a barbarous land. And the house was filled with tension. And the tension never left; years later, her kinsmen and her daughters descendants still nursed grievance.
But Nashqua, or Najah as she was now called for it was easier on the tongue, soon gave Hajj Musa a son and then another shortly after that. And her sons and her daughters were healthy and clever and were the delight of their aged father’s eyes. Now, Nashqua the Cherkes refugee was called Umm Ismail for she had given birth to the son of the house. And this name seemed most appropriate for they all recalled our ancestor of the same name and his humble birth to a serving woman.
When the Kaiser visited Damascus alongside the Turkish Sultan, my Great Grandfather posed in pictures with them; on the wall in his house, there is still a picture of him looking stern in his fez and western suit as he stands with the two emperors in a crowd of dignitaries. Life seemed good then; the provinces ruled from Damascus – what they called the Bilad-i-Sham (Land of Sham) – were prospering in 1898. The Germans and the other Franks were all investing heavily in a land reawakening from a slumber.
And, then, everything changed. First, revolution – and the Sultan was no longer real ruler but, instead, there were Young Turks who wished, it seemed, to move away from Islam and away from Arabic. Then came war; the Caliph of Islam, Sultan of the Turks, Commander of the Faithful and Qayzar-i-Rum sided with the other two Kaisers in Vienna and Berlin against Tsars, Franks, and English.
Musa and Nashqua’s eldest son, Ismail, volunteered as soon as he could to defend his land against the Christian invasion; his mother had often told him tales of what manner of beast served the Tsar and what sort of savagery they would doubtless inflict upon any Muslim that fell into their hands. But, instead of sending him north to meet that enemy, the Enemy whose blood Ismail dreamt of drinking in vengeance for the grandfather they’d slain, Enver Pasha’s officials felt it better to send him south to meet the enemy coming up out of Egypt.
As he was of an old family, Ismail Bey was made an officer of horse though he was only twenty two. He rode south with other sons of the old families of Damascus and their servants, down past Mount Hermon and the Sea of Galilee, through Jerusalem, praying at the Mosque of Omar (where they recalled Ismail’s ancestor who’d liberated it a thousand two hundred seventy nine years before and traded verses), and on to Gaza. From there, it was off to the Front.
All them with him were in high spirits; they laughed about what they would do when they liberated Cairo, whether they would go first to al Azhar or see the Pharoah’s pyramids. Like endless travelers before them, they spoke of the fleshpots of Egypt with envy. They spoke of how the Christians would collapse before them, how the Egyptians would welcome them as liberators when they cast off the English Yoke …
But they’d never make it. Instead, on the banks of the Canal, the British army met them, held them, and pushed them back … and Ismail, in his very first battle, caught a bullet with his thigh.
He lived; but Ismail’s war was over. Instead, he returned home and watched mutely as campaigns went on without him, leaning on the cane he’d always walk with, as the tides of war rose and fell. The streets of Damascus became filled with refugees from the north; Muslims fleeing the Russians, as Ismail would expect, and others, Christians but Christians of the Empire, fleeing from the Turks and Kurds up by the front.
And Ismail began to question the rightness of the war. He gave money to the Armenians when he saw them and wondered how someone supposed to be the Commander of the Faithful could let such things happen. And he began to think that, perhaps, the problem wasn’t so much the invaders but those who had invaded long before; the Turks had been a yoke on the Arabs for too long and, now, they were abandoning Islam and talking of sacrifices needed to free the Turks of the East rather than defending Islam …
So, Ismail began meeting now and then with other young men who had similar thoughts and arguing with his father about what use there was in fighting for a state that cared more for Turks in China than for the Arabs or the Religion. And his father scorned these ideas, saying that talk of an Arab nation was treason and was a dream of the Christians, not fit for Muslims. But Ismail grew closer to those who spoke of a reborn Syria …
But all he did was talk, even when the Governor hung some of the young men for dreaming of a day without the Turks.
And, then, on the Plain of Armageddon, the Turkish army was destroyed; barely had the news sunk in than foreign soldiers entered Damascus. The next day, October 1, 1918, in came Arab soldiers, proclaiming that they were there to establish an Arab kingdom … and my grandfather was thrilled, rushing to join them. He and his friends were ecstatic that, finally, an Arab ruler from the House of Hashim had come. The future seemed, after the devastation of the war, bright; a new dawn for Syria and the Arabs had come.
In that same year, Ismail’s father died and he became head of the family. Walking on his cane, he surveyed the wreckage and looked to the future. King Faysal sat with him and took his counsel as Ismail sat with those other notables from Damascus along with the army officers, Hijazis, nationalists and such who gathered round the new king.
But this idyll wasn’t to last; after less than two years, the dream was over. The French came from the West and Ismail Bey leaned on his cane and watched the little army head off to meet them. Outnumbered, they were slaughtered by the French, even though daughters of Damascus had rushed to the Kingdom’s defense. The king and many of Ismail’s friends fled to Baghdad or south to Amman; my grandfather stayed behind to tend his own lands. And to try to survive the alien rule.
The French didn’t take his wealth or his patrimony. But they imposed new ways and new laws. And, so, the notables gathered quietly and whispered and, before long, the people rebelled and the French shelled Damascus, destroying parts of Ismail’s house. But, he rebuilt and went on.
One evening, they tell me, Ismail was sitting in a café with some of his friends, discussing politics and the future of the nation and all such things over tea and coffee and tobacco. Among the group gathered that night was a recently married teacher and the two of them were deep in conversation. In rushed another man, the teacher’s much younger brother.
“Come home, come quickly! Our sister needs you!” he insisted, though the older brother was reluctant to break off conversation.
So, Ismail accompanied him, leaning heavily on his cane as they moved as fast as they could, deep in conversation, to the teacher’s home. There, they found his sister, nearly shaking with rage and asked what had happened.
“At twilight,” she said, “I was walking home, down our own street, and a French gendarme saw me and began to call out to me; ‘Fatima, Fatima, show me your charms!’ But I ignored him and he followed me, saying all manner of things. I was almost before the door and he accosted me, grabbed my veil and pulled it off!”
“In our own street?” he brother said and shook with anger.
“Yes, yes,” she explained. “It was so … “
And she spoke long about how she had been attacked. And Ismail and her brother listened as she said that, if she would choose to go unveiled in the street, that would be her choice but never that of the Franks. The three of them sat there, talking long into the night about this outrage and how another rebellion was neeeded and what would happen when the Franks were expelled.
And, when it was nearly dawn, she said how she wondered whether after this disgrace any man would ever consider her.
Then, Ismail laughed and said, “where is your father?”
She asked him why and he said that he wanted to ask for her hand. She smiled and said that she wanted him to do so.
And less than a month after that day, Ghada bint Hassan and Ismail ibn Musa went before the Qadi and swore out the wedding contract, though she was barely more than a child and he was already nearly into mid-life. From that day, theirs was always a solid enough union; Ghada was considered clever and well-read – for a woman in those days – and, despite having an education, she stuck a bit longer to the old ways. The photographs from those days show her dressed in almost western clothes but still wearing the veil for at least a few more years.
Soon, they began having children: Musa, Omar, Abdallah, Amr, Hani, and Hamza were their sons, Zainab, Lena, and Ibtisam were their daughters. Musa, who was the firstborn, died when he was still a baby; the others save one are still alive.
And, when the French left, after again shelling the city, these children waved them off … and new times seemed to be ahead. Damascus now ruled a reduced land but, still, the Syrian Republic had a brilliant future. The old families still had their role and most of them were easily elected to the parliament; Ismail Musa Bey took his seat along with the rest, just long enough to vote for yet another war, one that brought more refugees to Damascus; now, though, they were Palestinians. Ismail was shamed by the failure of the army against the invader; he sold off some of his lands to raise money that he could give as relief, gave space in his house for distant relatives from the South and old business partners until they could find their own way.
And, elsewhere, others thought that the problem, again, wasn’t the invader but rather a problem of the government. So, they overthrew the young republic and turned Syria into a dictatorship, ruled forever after by one clique of officers, their children or their friends. And they looked to Russia as a model now, taking the lands of the old families and giving them to those who had worked them for years and never earned a profit or giving them to their own people.
And where his father and his father before him had been great men, now Ismail found himself a pauper, barely able to manage his own house let alone his former estates. Few now used the old titles of respect; no longer was he referred to as bey or pasha and rarely even as effendi. Gone were most of the servants, gone was the gold. But, still, he held on to his house.
Where he had been a gentleman without need for work, now his sons would need to learn trades. Amr went off to the army and trained to be an officer; they always said he’d been the fiercest of them. Though he was only a child, Amr had pledged in 1948 that he would go, personally, to free Palestine and avenge the Arabs or die trying. When he was older and rising through the ranks of the army, the family half-joked, half-whispered that, one day, Amr would be the officer seizing power for himself.
Omar went off to Beirut and trained to be a scholar of the past; he, the family said, was the one when they were young who’d most loved walking through the city and seeing all the places where the heroes of the past had lived. Sometimes, he’d write long poems in the old style; when his older brother first received a commission, Omar wrote a poem for him hailing him as the new Salah ad-Din.
Hani followed Omar to Beirut and studied medicine while Hamza studied the law in Damascus. Abdallah, though, had a gift for numbers and designs so he began training as an engineer; they say that when he was a child, he was forever building models of things exactly to scale.
Their sisters, meanwhile, went off to University too, leaving the modes of a thousand years behind, just as they now went out in the streets bare-headed. A photograph from those days shows them all, all the brothers and sisters on the Corniche in Beirut, maybe when Omar finished university. The women all have their dark hair piled up and coiffed, their arms and legs bare. Some of the brothers wear sport coats though Amr wears a tie. Omar gazes off in the distance. Looking at them, you might think that this family is from Naples or Barcelona; hardly any of them are those that I recall.
In the university, the sisters found husbands from other old families and settled down in the city; Ibtisam’s husband, Muhammad, was a classmate of Abdallah and, later, was an engineer in the Gulf. Lena married ‘Adil, a merchant from a family that, though younger than ours, had been wiser in the recent past; somehow, every change of ruler and government always seemed to bring them up a small bit until they owned factories, hotels, and other new things throughout the country. Zeinab, though, married the opposite; her husband, Hassan, was a scholar and a holy man but never a good supporter for he always needed to be right rather than successful. And Hassan was always close to Omar …
As he was a Sunni and from one of the old families, Amr’s advance in the army was slow. Officers who weren’t Muslims – Druze and Alawis and Christians, mainly – and who, no matter what religion they’d been raised, rejected religion, had come to power over army and over state. They said that they were the Party of Rebirth (or Renaissance) – the Hizb al-Bath in Arabic – and claimed that they stood for “Unity, Socialism, Freedom”. But, as often as not in years to come, they would appear to belief in rule by one man, stealing from all, stomping on freedom.
By 1966, Amr had become a lieutenant in command of an artillery barrage on the southwestern border. And there he sat with his soldiers in a strongly built look out post, watching and waiting for the Invader, sometimes sending shells down on them when they violated the ceasefire lines.
When war came the next year; his commander, Hafez al-Assad – literally ‘Guardian of the Lion’ though we used to call him the Lion of Golan – had the radio broadcast that the Heights, al Arraf, had fallen. And there was panic in all the units; some thought that they must be the last unit left and decided that they would do well to flee. Others, though, thought that they would live and die as Arabs and as free men, defending their homeland.
Amr was one of the latter; he and his company stayed and fought when the Israelis came with their planes and tanks. But, they were hopelessly outnumbered and hopelessly outgunned. And they died at their post on Tel Faher, every single one … heroes, perhaps, maybe even martyrs but definitely dead in a lost war.
And Amr’s father who had survived battle himself and watched as other outnumbered armies had been destroyed knew that it was his commander’s decision that had failed his son. The Heights there should have been impregnable; only a mad man or a traitor would have pulled troops away and left Amr to die.
And Ismail heart was broken. His living children sat with him as he stared blankly when representatives of the Party appeared. They, the surviving sons felt, had taken their father’s lands, his dignity, and his pride in his son. And all of them said nothing. And Ismail lived out the rest of his days in near silent mourning.
Now, Omar Ismail was the oldest of the living sons so he took over his father’s house. In those days, he was teaching at the University, teaching about the days of the Prophet and the first Caliphs. And, as he taught and studied these matters, he became convinced more and more that, if the nation was to prosper again, it would need to return to the old ways, the ways of the religion, and abandon all the imported philosophies and corruptions that had grown up. The heathen would need expulsion from government and the state could be reborn. Quietly, he began meeting with others who thought as he did, organized study groups of students to discuss these ideas.
Meanwhile, he married the daughter of one of his colleagues, Saffiyah Abdul Rahman. Saffiyah had stood out from among the girls her age; where others embraced the latest fashions from Paris and Beirut, she steadfastly refused and insisted to dress as a Muslim woman should. They say that, once when she was in school, the teacher objected to her wearing a covering and told her that she must come to school the next day bareheaded or she would be expelled. And when the next day came, all the other girls were covered as well for all stood by her though they didn’t share her belief. Others smoked and drank in cafes; she sat at her prayers. And, when she was done with university, she was willing to marry Omar. Together, they’d have many children: Ridwan, Raghad, Rania, Reem, and Ramzi, all born in the house of their ancestors in those years.
Meanwhile, Omar’s brother, Abdallah, had finished a degree in hydrological engineering and had been working for some years for the state, helping to plan and build new wells, dams, and waterlines. He was good at it and only his lack of a membership card in the Bath Party held him back. Omar urged Abdallah to marry but no one took his fancy. Instead, he decided that he would leave Syria and seek further education.
It had been centuries since any of them had traveled beyond the lands of Islam, if not all the way back to the beginning, so this was a bold thing for him. But, he was able to get a visa and set off to enroll at a school with a name that sounded good to him, the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in a Masters program.
The End of the Beginning
When her brother and father died, Caroline McClure was seventeen. Her mother could barely take care of herself or the small country house she’d lived in with her husband. So, Caroline went to live with her great aunt in town. Soon enough, her mother had sold the house and followed, moving into a small apartment by herself.
Caroline meanwhile finished high school and started college. Her plan when she began at Madison College was to be a high school teacher, rather like her aunt and housemate. Caroline was a day student rather than a boarder and, while she was in college, worked as a waitress in one of Riverport’s few restaurants.
As a student, Caroline read widely on religion and spirituality and such; I suppose some of that was in the zeitgeist in those years of the Nixon Administration and some of that zeitgeist seeped even into small towns in the hills of Virginia. Then, too, Caroline was, I’m told, intensely curious and interested in first and last things even before the men in her family started dying.
Somewhere in these years, Caroline decided that she didn’t believe in the incarnation and the trinity and quit going to church; her mother was scandalized, her aunt said there was no reason to do something just because that was what was expected of you. Caroline announced she was a Unitarian. Unfortunately, there was no Unitarian Church in those parts so she was a congregation of one.
I suppose she must have dated but no one terribly seriously. She was, I suppose, a rather somber young woman …
One day, as she was finishing up class work and only had her student teaching left to do, Caroline went to work at the little restaurant she waitressed at. The usual locals of Riverport wandered in, had the usual conversation … and around lunchtime, in came a familiar face along with two strangers.
She greeted the town’s water manager, gave menus to his companions. One, she barely noticed. The other immediately had her full ateention. Handsome in a swarthy sort of way with a thick mustache and neat trimmed hair, she could barely keep her eyes off him … and he of her.
Abe, she learned quickly, was his name; he and the other stranger were engineers in town to look over upgrading Riverport’s water and sewers. Dull enough … but there was something unusual about Abe. He had an accent Caroline had never heard before ...
and over the next few days, he came in with his companion for almost every meal; there were few restaurants in Riverport and that one was closest to the office they were working in.
Caroline made casual conversation with him and, after what seemed forever, he asked her out on a date. And when they went out to see a movie in the next town, they never made it to the film but sat and talked about God and their older brothers killed in battle five years before. They spoke of dreams and journeys. Abe – whose driver’s license read Abdallah Ismail Arraf – described his home in Syria and told her how he’d come to Virginia for a Master’s degree then stayed on to learn skills. And, when the evening was over, she refused to kiss him, saying that she wasn’t the type of girl who did such things.
And Abdallah realized he’d met the woman of his dreams. As his project was wrapping up, he proposed to her … and she agreed …
and, New Year’s Day, 1973, they married before a justice of the peace. No one from Abdallah’s family was there. From Caroline’s, only her aunt and her brother came … and some in Riverport wondered why even they had come to see her get married to some kind of negro … Everyone said it would never last.
But it did. They had a daughter late the same year; Caroline stayed home to raise baby Aisha and never, ever used her teaching degree. And, two years after that, they had another daughter, born in the same town that Woodrow Wilson had been born in eighty years earlier …
And, thus, after however many interminable pages, we reach my own birth (you’ll of necessity admit I’m far more concise than Sterne at reaching this point).
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