21 March 2011

A Thousand Sighs: Part five, Heroes of the Return

Heroes of the Return
June 1991 – August 1991


Departure


Our departure from Riverport was, for me, a relief. It wasn’t as much of one for Aisha; she was disappointed to quit her job at the stable and not be there all summer … and at least as sad to say farewell to horses and friends. And her friends came to see her off. I half wondered whether, by some fluke, Lori would show up and at least say goodbye …. But, of course, she didn’t.
And off we went to the airport and my father dropped us off with all manner of instruction and my mother and Alia and Amr waved like loons as we went through the gate for the flight to New York.
When we got there, we found Raghad and Rania … and …
Well, we had some random stranger take a photograph of the four of us a little later. In it, we look like by face, four related people, but each so different on that June day in JFK:
Aisha is brown haired, hazel eyed, bare-headed, a little nerdy looking, kind of mousy, wearing jeans and a pink sweatshirt. Soft-spoken quiet, nice, not too fashionable, just a normal American girl … she’s smiling ….
I’m next to her … looking like I hope that I belong in art school, Amina Queen of the Night … dark, almost black hair broken by a crayon blue streak over my left eye … unnaturally pale skin, dark eyes, too much eyeliner … black skirt, black blouse, black boots … and skeletally thin … staring off like I’m distracted …
Next to me is Rania … looking like she’s about to blossom. Long wavy dark hair worn loose, shorter than Aisha or me, she’s already developing a figure … full lips, dark eyes, smiling eyes … she’s the most stereotypically cute of the four of us but also the youngest.
And finally Raghad. She has the same sort of features and coloring as her sister and she’s by far the most adult looking of us: she has a real figure and men definitely notice her; it’s obvious even while we’re in the airport But she looks tense even though she’s trying to smile … and she’s looking in the wrong direction. And, unlike the rest of us, she’s covered; she has a red scarf tied around her head, covering her hair completely … she didn’t when last I saw her. I’m curious about it but I don’t know if I want to ask … otherwise still dressed ‘American’ even if long sleeves and jeans are a bit much for the summer.
We have our bags checked and pass through security … to wait at the gate while other people bound for Damascus filter in. Arabic is all around me …
Rania and I start gossiping. Aisha is reading a magazine, listening to headphones … Raghad, I realize, has been crying … she keeps going to a payphone and trying to make a call, but whoever she is calling never answers, every time she comes back more frustrated.
I ask Rania what’s that about?
And she tells me.


Raghad


In some ways, I suppose, Raghad has always been the least fortunate of us all. Of course, she had one of the worst possible names for an Arab woman living in the USA. All through her time in Georgia, teachers, officials, classmates, random strangers would see her name written out and would call her ‘rag-head’, even if they didn’t know it was an ethnic slur … (and when they did? Pity the girl.) So, very early, she’d adopted the nick-name of ‘Rose’. At least Rose didn’t incite laughter.
She was also the oldest of us when we came. Born in 1972, she was almost ten when she got Georgia … and eighteen going on nineteen when she returned. She was the first to graduate from American high school and, as far as I knew, planned to start college in Georgia when we got back from Syria.
With her parents working almost endless hours, Raghad had had to be almost a second mother to her siblings and, I suppose, had done fairly well by them … at least until that day. Rania explained what had happened with an almost wide mouthed look of shock on her own face:
“Raghad has a boyfriend!”
I asked who, what, how did it happen and, from Rania then and later from Raghad, it was a simple enough story:
Back in the fall, Raghad had heard about some kind of anti-war protest in downtown Atlants. She was interested and wanted to go … and since it was on a Saturday, she’d been able to. There, she’d struck up conversation with a white guy who was a college student and they’d hit it off nicely. But nothing much came of it.
A little while later, Raghad went to another one of these protests and she’d taken Ridwan (the brother in between her and Rania in age). Anyway, there she’d run into the same guy again and they hit it off even more … and Ridwan had dropped a pocket knife that one of Alex’s (the guy) friends had picked up after they’d left.
So Alex said he could get in touch with the sister … and was on a mission to get her phone number; they knew somebody or other in common. He’d called Raghad and the two of them started chatting for hours and hours every day …
“Nobody noticed?” I asked when Rania told me that.
“Well, Mom and Dad weren’t home and, you know how Ridwan is oblivious to almost everything?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “But you knew?”
“Of course,” Rania shrugged.
“And you didn’t tell your parents?”
“Why should I?” Rania looked perplexed. “It’s nobody’s business but Raghad’s.”
I nodded and Rania told me more.
So, Alex and Raghad got to be friends even though he was like a junior in college and he wasn’t an Arab or anything else.
“What does he look like?” I wondered.
“I dunno,” Rania shrugged. “I’ve never actually met him, but I’ve answered the phone a couple times when he calls and he seems really nice and smart. I did see his picture; he’s like totally blond and blue eyes and pretty hot … y’know River Phoenix? He looks a little bit like him.”
I nodded. Well, no wonder Raghad fell for this guy; I remember once when she was visiting us one summer that she’d said how she thought blond, really Anglo-looking guys were so hot … I disagreed but at least it made sense.
Anyway, Raghad started coming up with reasons to meet up with Alex; they both went to every anti-Gulf War thing in metro Atlanta and, apparently, at some point, friendship became romance … and they were kissing each other and doing other stuff, Rania wasn’t sure what exactly, but definitely things that Raghad wasn’t supposed to be doing. Raghad would be out late … and she always had some plausible thing or other that she was doing …
And, weirdly, at some point like around March or April, Raghad started covering and praying all the time … and their parents thought that was great. Raghad was really excited about going to Syria; Rania sort of thought the whole thing of the four of us going to Syria was her idea. Maybe it was …
Later on, the little more I found out about Alex was that he was a major in Religion and Arabic at one of the colleges in Atlanta, he was from somewhere like Minnesota, and, apparently, he’d actually converted to Islam. That summer, he was off at an intensive Arabic school in Vermont and, apparently, he was planning to ask Abu Ridwan for her hand … in Arabic. And it was Alex in Vermont that Raghad was so desperately trying to get on the phone and, again and again, failing. She still hadn’t been able to get anyone on the phone before we boarded the plane.
The reason she was so worked up about all this, Rania told me, was that after they’d gotten to the airport in Atlanta and before they’d gotten on the plane to New York, Aunt Saffiyah had wanted to doublecheck their bags … to make sure they had everything they’d need and so on and so forth.
Rania’s bags were fine … but, when their mother opened up Raghad’s bag, she’d found a whole bundle of letters and pictures and Raghad had tried to stop her from opening them … and had almost, Rania thought, hit their mother. But Aunt Saffiyah started reading:
“Dearest Rose, azizti Raghad, I can’t stop thinking about being with you and going over every moment we spend together … WHAT IS THIS?”
And the realization … ya Allah! Raghad has a boyfriend!
Some kind of redneck boy … and she’d disgraced herself with him …
And there was screaming and yelling in the airport … and Raghad said she was going to marry him and Uncle Omar swore that he wouldn’t let her marry some dumb redneck …
And … well, we’d be in Syria soon …. And who knew?
I thought I was a disgrace … but at least I hadn’t gotten caught!


Damascus


Of course, we don’t just gossip about Raghad the whole way; Rania and I talk about usual nothing stuff, paint our nails (I want to paint mine black but I don’t have nail polish the right shade so blood red will have to work), talk about school and friends and stuff. She asks how my friend Lori is doing, I tell her we got in a big fight over some stupid stuff so we aren’t friends now. She tells me about Georgia and how life is there and I’m actually already looking forward to it.
And we sleep and I read and we watch the movie they are showing and the flight goes on and then we are flying over Europe and then the Mediterranean … and everyone gets excited when we are over Syria and we are coming home.
When we land, I’m shocked by how dry and brown everything looks … I’ve seen pictures but it is so different to me after almost a decade away. And everyone is speaking Arabic as we get off the plane and pass through customs and when we come out, there’s a man who looks familiar watching everyone … Raghad recognizes him, Amm Hamza …
Ahlan, sahlan, ahlan beek … and we are all happy to see him, except maybe Raghad. He looks at her funny; I wonder if he knows something but he is closemouthed on that …
and we are all five piled in a tiny taxi and going home …
And the city seems dusty and dirty and there’s garbage on the edge of the road coming from the airport and unfinished buildings and all the cars are old, small, or both.
Ammi is talking to us all, you remember so-and-so? He died … or he’s back from Kuwait … and see that land over there? It used to be ours …
Soon, we are stuck in endless traffic and we are in the edge of the city …Qasioun rises ahead like a natural wall … and we are into the old city. And we are home …
Everything seems old, dusty, narrow streets and stone from a thousand years. Smells hit me, spices, food, human waste, jasmine, citrus … Hamza opens the door and we are inside … and the house looks old and kind of run down but huge … and Hamza’s wife comes and greets us; we’ve never met her before, not that any of us recall anyway; Miriam … and she doesn’t seem all that much older than Raghad but I guess she must be …. She’s our cousin also somehow …. And then their children, Laith, who is less than a year, another Amr and another Ismail, both too young to go to school …
They show us our rooms; they are the same ones from when we were children, barely used since. There is one for Aisha and Raghad, one for me and Rania and we dump out our bags and, we are told, as soon as you wash up, come down …
And dinner is wonderful even if the food is nothing remarkable and some other cousins come by and we are sort of paraded around by everyone else … and Ammti Miriam wants to talk about our prospects, especially Raghad …
And I get worried suddenly, really worried.
I pull Rania aside and ask her if I am right, were we sent back here because they’re going to marry all of us off?
And Rania tells me not to be silly, well, maybe Raghad … at least before it turned out she had a boyfriend …


Suqhs


The summer soon found its own rhythm. We went out sometimes all of the four of us, sometimes with Aunt Miriam and the boys, sometimes just me and Rania, sometimes even me by myself … we visit and explore the city and all the tourist places that none of really remember. We pray at the great mosque sometimes and wake up in the night and before dawn with the call to prayer.
Raghad has gotten religious and never misses her prayers; Rania and Aisha soon follow and me less often. In the streets, more women are covered than I remember; Islam is returning, we are told softly. When we were here before, I learn later, women in hijab were sometimes pulled from cars by Rifaat’s bully boys. Those days, alhamdullilah, are now over/
We spend money easily in the suqhs and Miriam teaches us to barter. Clothes are essential for all of us, of course, and there are so many things that the uncles want us to bring back. But I find hardly enough books for sale for me.
I wander off on my own a lot as the other three are soon busy with their own things that don’t include me. I go to the museum and spend hour after hour there, making notes and sketching things and learning history. I study old mosques and old buildings and sit by myself as I learn to drink coffee.
People look at me oddly for my odd clothes and my blue streak … but for the first time I can recall not for the things I can’t control. I look like everyone else. And that pleases me.
I go and buy old stamps from the little shops by the postal museum where everyone knows me and stroll back home along the river. I pass crowds of Iranian tourists led by their Ayatollahs, snapping photos of each other … it strikes me that many of these are on religious pilgrimage and they look like Muslim versions of folks from the little country churches in Virginia. Some of the Iranian ladies point at me and I know they think I look like I am crazy; some even snap pictures of me.
I don’t care even if I smirk when I think of appearing in an endless slideshow in some Iranian little town. I have lots of time and privacy and, whatever else, no one here thinks that I am a sicko lesbo or a terrorist.
One day I am walking back from the museum by myself and a very expensive looking silver Mercedes almost runs me over, stops and pulls up. Two men at least as old as my father are in it. I can smell the whiskey even from feet away. One of them asks me in a funny accent how much I would charge to sleep with them.
Get away from me! I yell
They have Saudi license plates, I notice, and wore Saudi clothes.
I almost run home, I am so angry. I tell Aunt Miriam.
“Maybe you should cover,” she says gently.
I tell her I am too young and isn’t it true that once you cover, you cannot stop?
She says yes, yes, you are right, but maybe when you go out into the streets … at least for now. I nod.
The next time I go out in the suqh alone, I wear a scarf. Miriam shows me how to put it on. No one stares or looks at me. No one asks me to sleep with them.
But I wonder if I am presenting a lie. If I claim that I am religious by wearing it, shouldn’t I be? But if I go out with blue hair, what am I saying?
And what do I really want to say?
I don’t know.


Aisha


I never quite understood how Aisha did it but, somehow, she figured out where the horsy-set of Damascus hung out … and was very quickly out at a stable, riding and jumping and so on. Of course, the other people out doing those things tended to be daughters of generals and politicians and millionaires and so on. Aisha didn’t really seem to notice or even care very much that her new horsy friends were exceedingly well-connected – though other people did! Hamza was slightly stunned when he realized that one of Aisha’s new friends was the President’s daughter and another was a prominent Lebanese warlord’s …
But they didn’t talk politics, just horseflesh as far as I could ever see …. And Aisha loved it. She kept getting better at equestrian stuff; eventually, through those contacts, she would have gone to the Olympics if the Syrian team had qualified …
One of the days when she was off riding or doing whatever they did out there, she met a guy who worked with horses. He, unlike some of the others who came out to ride, was not from a wealthy or powerful family. His father and his father before him had kept stables and Khaled grew up knowing everything there was to know about horses …
And he was a bit older but they started talking about horses and things like that … and they still do.
Theirs was a very Aisha-like courtship; slow and awkward except around horses … but they wrote back and forth and called each other when they could and when Aisha came to Damascus, Khaled was always the perfect gentleman. After five years courting, they married even if he were from a lower social strata and had never been to college … and a dozen years and more later, they are still happy.
As far as I know, Aisha never dated anyone else or was ever really interested in anyone else and I’d be surprised if Khaled ever were either. It must, I suppose, be nice for things to be easy like that.


Raghad’s engagement


Things were easy enough for the sisters from Virginia and both Aisha and I were enjoying ourselves as much as we could, Aisha with horses, me with my solitary walks through the city and its history. In some ways, we were acting much as we would have if we’d been back in Virginia.
For our cousins, though, it was another matter. Aunt Saffiyah had called Miriam and Hamza before we got there and, so, they had clear instructions about Raghad. She wasn’t to make any phone calls to anyone in the US or be allowed to wander off by herself; when she went out, they made sure that someone went with her. And they were to start looking for a husband for her. Soon enough, Saffiyah told them, she herself would be coming and, she hoped, she’d be present at Raghad’s wedding.
The Search for Raghad’s Husband, as I called it, began fairly quickly. She was – and is – an attractive woman and had a lot going for her: a very good family lineage, good looks, intelligence, she covered, she prayed, she had American citizenship … and, even if she was rather young, suitors began presenting themselves.
Raghad sent most of them away with sullen refusals … but some were more persistent. One of those was the son of a female cousin of my father who’d married a man from another family that we’ve intermarried with a few hundred times over down the generations. Muhannad Tawfiq al-Azm was, in my opinion when I first met him, very unmemorable. Not especially good looking or well-dressed or charming or anything else but, at least, he had no terribly negative attributes. He’d grown up mostly in Kuwait and he’d returned after the Iraqi invasion and before the American one. In Kuwait, he’d run his father’s business and, now, he was trying to start up again in Damascus (they’d had an architectural firm).
After his second visit, I asked Raghad what she thought of him and she told me, “He’s OK, I guess, I mean, if I wanted to marry a stupid cousin …”
And then she started crying.
She went on a semi-structured ‘date’ with him. And they talked. She spilled the whole story about Alex and how her family was so upset and how they wanted her to get married. And Muhannad listened and was … nice to her. Many years later, she told me,
“He was the only one, not even you guys or Rania, who ever really paid attention to how I felt or that I was hurting horribly. And he didn’t seem to have any agenda or want anything much from me; he was just nice, listening and understanding and wanting me to be happy … “
That’s probably the most she ever shared with me about what was going on with her and that was a long time later; I was, after all, almost four years younger and a weirdo little nerd who’d rather read or look at stamps and coins than discuss important issues like hair and makeup and boys.
Saffiyah arrived and was like a whirlwind … and Muhannad came with his father and his brother and sat with Uncle Hamza and drank the coffee that Raghad served them … she came back and talked to us and we asked what was happening (because we were all eavesdropping).
“He wants to marry me,” she said.
“So how are you going to say no?” I asked, stupidly.
“Why would I?” she said and looked at me like I was crazy. I started to ask about Alex but thought better of it.
And so they were engaged and a wedding date announced for the middle of August. I asked why so soon?
“So she’ll have little time to reconsider,” Aisha told me, “and he’ll have even less.”
“Then why not right away?” I asked.
“She can’t,” Aisha said and I was confused.
So, she explained to me how a woman cannot get married until at least three months have passed since she had sex with a different man. And suddenly I realized what was going on – because I was more than a little socially dim, it took me this long – Raghad had slept with the white boy … and that was what all the fuss was.
When she did, she had brought shame on herself and on the family, or so I was told. Now, she was making up for that. I was confused. Wouldn’t it make more sense, I wondered aloud, if she’d brought shame by sleeping with the white boy to pressure her to marry him, rather than somebody else?
Didn’t I get it? He was not a Muslim, not an Arab, not from Damascus and probably some stupid redneck …
What about my mother? I wondered.
That was different; your father was an adult and a man and he didn’t do anything improper or in secret.
Raghad was a woman … but, worse, she had decided it was no one’s business but her own when and with whom she’d lose her virginity. And by handing over that treasure to the first likely man who’d asked, she’d disgraced herself. By sneaking around behind everyone’s backs, she’d shamed us all …
It almost made sense to me, at least as logic. I didn’t think I agreed but at least I could make sense of it.
Then, Rania reminded me that Raghad was lucky; we were medini, after all, not bedouin or Kurds … I asked her what she meant.
“You’ve never heard of honor killings?”
I had read something but, until Rania pointed it out, never seen it as anything particularly related to my own family. Yes, we were medini so we didn’t do that and considered such to be backwoods stuff from the Age of Ignorance … but Raghad still had a gentler version; follow her heart and lose her family as she would be utterly cut off … or marry someone who was approved.
She chose The Family over Love.
I wondered whether I’d ever have to make a choice like that and hoped that I did not ever have to. And I wished that if I did one day fall in love, it would be someone where I wouldn’t need to. But even then, I had a suspicion it wouldn’t be that simple.


Rania’s New Scarf


While Raghad was going through her own personal torments, Rania was also changing. Though she was technically a year younger, she’d also started her period around the same time I did and, unlike me, she was already beginning to really look like a girl. And men were already beginning to notice.
Rania loved the attention but, especially after the whole debacle with Raghad, she was quite emphatic that she wasn’t interested in dating. What she was interested in was praying and making sure she was pure and clean.
One of her maternal cousins, Iman, was a year older than us and quite obviously pious; she always dressed in long coat and clean scarf when she went out in the street and she was almost preternaturally pretty; pale skin big black eyes … She invited the two of us to come to a meeting to discuss religion and morals and things like that. We agreed and, a day later, came for us in a very fancy Mercedes driven by another covered woman who must have been in her twenties.
We piled in and were introduced to Hind who was even prettier than Iman and seemed to me like the most self-assured woman I’d ever seen and quite possibly the most beautiful … dark eyes, clear skin, the kind of smile that made you utterly trust her and utterly melt when she turned it on you.
They took us to a very nice house in Abu Rumaneh and there were about a dozen women our age or a little older, sitting around and talking and being very earnest. Everyone was sweet and friendly … and then we all prayed and Hind, who was the oldest of the girls, the one who’d been driving the car, led the prayers and then talked about a section of the Quran and we talked about what it meant and how we could live it … and everyone talked and talked and, after a while, we had some food – really, really good food, mostly sweets if I remember – and then more prayer and discussion. Hind spoke very clearly about what the Miss had said, almost like she was reading a speech but I could tell that she was just saying what came into her mind, and everyone nodded … and we were all supposed to go do certain prayer things and read and memorize Quran …
It was quite late when we were finished and Iman and Hind took us home. On the way, they asked us what we had thought.
“It was wonderful!” Rania gushed and I nodded.
I didn’t say what I was thinking, that this must be how Bible study and Church Youth groups and things like that were for my peers back in America, even though that was (and still is, I suppose) what I thought. I knew comparing Muslim things to Christian was always a faux pas. So I held my tongue …
Rania gushed and Iman asked if we’d like to come to more and Rania said, of course! Of course! And I nodded, thinking, why not? It wasn’t like I knew oodles of people … and I’d never been really courted by any cliques of girls back in the States. And, I recognized, these girls were a clique of sorts … and Hind was smart, smarter than anyone I knew, and very pretty and strong and self-assured and to think that someone like her might want me around her almost made my heart skip …
So, we went to more such study circles and prayer sessions and we met more and more women our own age. Afterwards, sometimes, we’d all go out walking together and, maybe, eat ice cream … gossip about life, point out who was going against Islam by the way they dressed or what they did …
All of the older girls were covered; of course, when I went out in the streets, I’d usually wear a scarf too, ever since the incident with the Saudis and Rania had started covering ‘for real’. More and more, she was copying the style of our new circle; she always wore a long tan jilbab, something that looked rather like a trench coat that reached to her feet. I didn’t yet wear one though I did buy one, just in case …
Rania went to more and more meetings with Iman, Hind, and the others; soon, they were filling her every hour … and, some time in late July, she was invited to join the organization and did so gladly, putting herself under the spiritual direction and discipline of the Miss. I, for reasons I could guess, wasn’t yet invited for I hadn’t yet shown myself pious enough …


Summer Days


Not everything was either dark and grim nor filled with showy piety. Some of the relatives I was getting to know were actually quite secular and interesting in their own right. One cousin was a journalist for one of the official papers and, despite the big gap in our ages, he and I became good friends. Raed and Anan, his wife, had no children and, strangely, didn’t seem much bothered by it. They were, as much as any one could be, sort of hippy intellectuals. She was originally a shia from South Lebanon; they’d met in Beirut before I was born where they both were part of the whole ‘revolutionary’ scene …
And that fascinated me, both in the details of their stories and the thought of that other Arab world that almost was. The two of time were fascinated by art and history and took me out with them to meet actual artists and see galleries tucked in little side streets … and to the kind of smoky cafes that exist in every Arab city … but to the ones where women sat with men and hardly anyone was covered. And I’d drink coffee and tea with them and, sometimes, smoke Anan’s cigarettes.
People would come and join us for a while and conversation was fascinating … their friends quoted poetry and history and actually talked about interesting things. I loved it.
They would point out little things around us that I’m sure I wouldn’t have caught on my own; the waiters are Kurds, the people at the next table are from the Party, those holes are from bullets … and on and on. Endless detail about everything around us … and endless gossip! Raed seemed to know nearly everyone in the city and had endless tidbits of less than flattering information about everyone … who was sleeping with whom, who had had whom killed, who was stealing money and so on … I ate it up.
They took me around to meet a few of Damascus’s more infamous residents as well as he seemed to have entry everywhere … we went to a concert of traditional Palestinian music and dance and, afterwards, when everyone was standing around and chatting, Anan asked me if I wanted to meet the Doctor. Not knowing who ‘the Doctor’ was, I soon found myself having my hand kissed gently by an older Palestinian man with thinning white hair and a bushy mustache; only later on did I realize that he was a famous terrorist once upon a time.
Anan loaned me books, lots of books; their apartment when I visited it seemed more like the annex of a library than any home I’d ever been in before. She loaned me books of poems by Qabbani, Darwish, Tuqan, and many, many more, novels and stories of Filistin, of Arab history, and on and on. Some, she warned me, I ought not read in public as they were banned. Some were fascinating. As I read and read, I even thought a little on my own.


Up on the Roof


Our house is quite large for that part of Damascus; it’s rather a wonder that the government didn’t seize it at some point in the past and turn it into a school or a museum or level it for new construction. Most of it was probably built during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with new wings and additions since then (as well as some recycling of older parts as some things no longer make sense economically). To this day, much of the house is under-utilized and, considering that it’s in a densely packed city, that’s quite odd.
There’ve always been rumors and speculations in the family and among the servants who’ve come and gone that there are ghosts and jinn living in the house. I remember as a child being frightened by some of those tales and I’ve even frightened my smaller relatives with them in turn, stories of how the Jinn dance on the roof or live in the cistern. But I’ve never taken them too seriously.
But, if there are really ghosts, Damascus strikes me as a place that ought to be thick with them; ten thousand years of human habitation built right on top of each other, grisly deeds and human sacrifices done in the dawn of time, slaves and prisoners cruelly executed, wars and battles and so on … certainly far more ghosts should live there than in your average American city. And our house is old enough that it should have its fair share.
But I’ve never seen any. Nor, for that matter, have I ever seen any jinn. Jinn? You ask, what’s that?
Well, according to Arabic tradition, the Jinn are a second race of beings who live sort of a parallel existence to our own world and can interact with it … all sorts of trickery and magic and so on is, in Arabic folklore, said to be done by the Jinn.
And Jinn were, in a couple of those stories I’d been told, supposed to live in our house; how seriously anyone believed it, I don’t know, but all my elders always claimed that they did, that there were jinn living there alongside us. One family story claimed that they were ‘our’ jinn from way back; a clan of Jinn who’d migrated north from the Hijaz with us and were Muslims, possibly even from the same jinn clans of Mecca who had listened to the Prophet himself, and were perfectly decent. Another claims that my great-great-grandfather had converted the jinn from whatever heathenism jinn fall prey to … but most stories were of the nursery variety.
That summer, we repeated the same stories to little Amr and little Ismail and they ate them up. Then, Miriam told us that she’d seen evidence that there really were jinn present; sometimes, they’d turn on and off lights and, often enough, she’d even find them using the washing machine up on the roof …
Well, that sounded silly to me … but, later on the same day, the hottest day of the whole summer, when the sun blazes like a furnace and even the shadows are like fire, I was almost the only one at home and I heard someone running up the stairs and I heard doors slamming … and I raced up the stairs to see who it was … but no one was there and the washing machine was running … so I looked in and saw there were no clothes, at least not any visible ones …
And I wondered if, maybe, there really were jinn living up there on the roof … so I pronounced “istaghferallah!” (I seek comfort in God alone!) three times and recited the first bit of Quran that came into my head:
“Wa 'Anna Minna as-Salihuna Wa Minna Duna Dhalika Kunna Tara'iqa Qidadaan, Wa 'Anna zananna 'An Lan Nu`jiza Allaha Fi Al-'Ardi Wa Lan Nu`jizahu Harabaan, Wa 'Anna lamma sami`na Al-Huda 'amanna bihi faman yu'umin Birabbihi Fala Yakhāfu Bakhsāan Wa Lā Rahaqāan, Wa 'Anna Minna al-Muslimuna Wa Minna al-Qasituna Faman 'aslama Fa'ula'ika Taharraw Rashadan.”
(“There are among us some that are righteous, and some the contrary: we follow divergent paths. But we think that we can by no means frustrate God throughout the earth, nor can we frustrate Him by flight. And as for us, since we have listened to the Guidance, we have accepted it: and any who believes in his Lord has no fear, either of a short (account) or of any injustice. Amongst us are some that submit their wills (to God), and some that swerve from justice. Now those who submit their wills - they have sought out (the path) of right conduct.”)
I though of that because that had been the Surah we had been working on on the previous day. I sat down on the rooftop and hoped that either I’d see some sign of jinn or I’d see some thing that would explain everything rationally, like a stray cat roaming around or a kid on some neighboring roof.
It was hot, maybe close to a hundred degrees, and the sun was blazing. The muaddhan made the call to prayer from what seemed all around me:
“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Eshadu’an la illaha illallah, Eshadu’an la illaha illallah, Eshadu’an Muhammadan rasul Allah, Eshadu’an Muhammadan rasul Allah, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar!”
And the sound echoed from one mosque after another. I started to have an almost waking dream … where everything swirled around and, I thought, I could see my life laid out before me. Who was I? What was I?
I saw one road rising and I saw myself throwing off all these backwards Arab things … go back to America and announce when I started a new school in a few weeks, “I am Amy, not Amina.” I could lighten my hair or not … and maybe I could figure out this whole crazy sexuality thing … and when I was older, I might ‘come out’ … or not; maybe I would get an American boyfriend … and I would turn my back on all this. That would make life easy; forget this stupid family and all their crazy fears and worries. I could live without them.
Or I could be the rebel Arab girl, be like Anan and be all intellectual and progressive and smoke cigarettes in the cafes at night …
Or I could be like Iman and Hind and believe and know …
Or I could do none of these … what did I want? Who was I? I just wanted to be myself and be free … but I knew that I wasn’t even sure of who I was.
I stood up … and I walked to the edge of the roof and I looked down. I saw the pavement far, far below me and, suddenly, I thought …
Here, here is the answer to all my troubles, so simple, so perfect, so sublime… climb up to the edge and spread your arms … reach out and fall, fall gently on the breeze, like an oakleaf tumbling from a tree, fall, fall, so simple, so much easier than all these fates before me … and when I fall, at the end, there will be blood and a brief moment of pain and then darkness and then nothing …
Or will there? Maybe, I will rise up to the skies and look down … and see all this city shrink below me, see countries and continents and a shrinking globe, day and night, day and night blink by …. Everything shrinking fading …. And the swirl of stars and nebulae and galaxies and ever farther and farther …
And darkness comes and I would embrace and with it no fears, no hate, no love nothing matters … and everything seems so far away and so distant and what do I care? I am nothing, I have nothing, I was born to suffer and fear and nothing will ever get better just pain …
So I think and I ready myself for that great fall and that great leap into all embracing darkness …
And, just as I am about to, I feel like a gripping hand embrace me and pull me back … no one is there but I look up. Above me swirling in the sky are blackbirds, ravens or crows or vultures, swirling round me in the sky, thousands of them … and instead of leaping, I let go and I fall backwards onto the rooftop and I lie there …
Sounds come from all around, voices calling out in distant streets, a thousand, a million voices, all blending together into a hum, car horns blaring, sounds of trucks and cars, a jackhammer somewhere echoes, bells ringing, a bird calls out … and all of a sudden, everything merges into one …
I am borne up on a cloud of sound and everything is blue, a dark blue, a radiant blue, almost like light coming from everything, pouring out of everywhere. The sun is small and white and I can see it is a star and the sounds around me all become clear … and what they are all saying is the same thing, and the light is saying the same thing, the stones and trees call out the same thing …
“Love, love, love, … ahubb, ahubb, ahubb …”
And I embrace it …
And the muaddhan calls out again because I have been here on the roof on this blazing day a long time:
“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Eshadu’an la illaha illallah, Eshadu’an la illaha illallah, Eshadu’an Muhammadan rasul Allah, Eshadu’an Muhammadan rasul Allah, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar!”
And I stand up and I shout along with him:
“Eshadu’an la illaha illalah! There is no God but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God … God is Greater!”
For I know that I have felt something there on the roof and I know that it is God who has pulled me back from the edge. Suddenly, for the first time in all my life, I believe … I say the words and I testify no God But God ….
And God is Greater … Greater than Me, Greater than all my sins and errors, Greater than my troubles and my questions …
In that moment, I give over my fears and worries and I am free and I have more energy and hope and happiness than I have ever known … I am exultant …
“Eshadu’an la illaha illalah!” I am saying over and over again. “Eshadu’an la illaha illalah! Eshadu’an la illaha illalah!”
No God But God
And God has Saved Me
God has taken me in his embrace …
Iqraa!
“Eshadu’an la illaha illalah! Muhammadun rasul Allah!”


Hind


I was bubbling with excitement and happiness. The following day, I woke up, still full of my newly warm and theocentric view of the world. I wanted to share it with everyone I met … suddenly, there was nothing anyone said or did could possibly bring me down. Life was good and the world was good.
After I’d come down from the roof, I’d washed myself and made my ablutions more carefully than ever I had before. I made raka’ah after raka’ah, trying to make up, it seemed, for every prayer I’d missed in my whole sin-soaked life.
I was up before dawn with the muaddhan, praying again … and full of this awesome feeling of happiness and Oneness and love.
That day, Rania and I went to another study session with Iman and, again, Hind led the discussion. For the first time since we’d been going, I actually felt like I had something to say and I bubbled up with things that were little more than platitudes but, for that moment, felt so very true and real to me.
When we broke to eat a little, I pulled Hind aside, grabbing her narrow wrist in my hand and actually pulling her.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” I said. “Yesterday afternoon, I felt the presence of God and, and suddenly everything was right.”
And she nodded and her dark eyes lit up and met mine, giving me that smile and her full attention … she was, I thought at that moment, incredibly beautiful, like an angel dressed in white … and she began to explain to me how this was real and she had found the same thing, too … and how I must turn this Feeling of the Presence of God into the Truth of My Life Everyday and Begin Living in Accordance With God’s Law and God’s Final Revelation.
“Yes, yes,” I nodded, “I want to! Help me, please!”
She nodded and agreed; was I free the following day?
Of course I was, I told her.
We arranged to meet in the plaza between our house and the Great Mosque and, between now and then, she gave me a list of ayat to study. I ought, she told me, bring paper and pencil with me as well.
I was thrilled and I was excited; I was about to start living life completely …
Hind was, quite easily, the most impressive woman I had met until then; I would still say that she is among them. She was, when I met her, a student in Damascus University; since then, she’s received her doctorate from a British university. She was, as I mentioned, quite physically attractive; liquid dark eyes, clear brow, olive skin, fine bones, dark hair, slender and slightly shorter than me, but exuding a sense of incredible self-discipline and self-possession as well as ferocious intellect. She has near perfect Arabic; her normal speaking style is almost the pure classical tongue with very little trace of dialect. She also is very convincing in her writings and speech.
And she was to become, in some very crucial ways, the most important person in my life for the next seven years though I would hardly have guessed it then. Whether I was in Syria or America, she was to be my personal spiritual guide and teacher more than any one else. I would strive to be like her and to follow the path she showed me. To please her and have her approval was what pleased me most.
Which may seem strange but isn’t; in case you’ve not guessed, that day, I was joining a radical Islamist organization – or at least that’s how it’s been described! When Hind and I met the next day, she showed me what I needed to do to join and what I could now wear as an actual member; as an initiate, I would wear a white head scarf and a tan jilbab. In time, perhaps, I, too, could wear blue or black. In those days, Hind still wore blue, but, soon, she’d be wearing black; I aspired to that more and more.
I began keeping, under her guidance, careful track of my prayers, my sins, my thoughts, my good deeds, and writing everything down carefully in a journal … which I was to show her at least once a week. Of course, she pointed out, this would be harder to do once we returned to the US but, with Rania and I in the same city to support each other, we would be able to do quite well. She would expect me to send her regular reports on my spiritual progress and, insh’allah, I would soon be advancing in my own study of the beauties of the religion.
I had since childhood memorized quite a few bits of Quran; now I was to begin doing so systematically. She and I worked out a schedule of memorization as well as for studying ahadith and Quranic reasoning in addition to secular studies.
By the time I left for the USA, I had a massive program of study and steadily increasing self-discipline ahead of me. It may sound odd, but I found myself welcoming this. If I had learned anything, I thought, in the previous year, it was that the flesh, that is my flesh, was weak and needed some sort of discipline; pain came far too easily if I simply followed my own desires.
I had, at least since that day Lori turned from me, felt myself to be a foul and dirty creature filled with sin and spite. I had, I thought, floundered because of my lack of discipline and my lack of rigor. If I could instill those in myself, I could rise above my mundane desires and transcend them. The shaitan that was within me constantly tempted me, filling me with unnatural desires and inspiring sin-filled actions. I wanted more than anything to rid myself of that Shaitan but it wouldn’t leave; even as Hind taught me how to use reasoning and logic necessary for tafsir (Quranic exegesis), I would occasionally find myself wondering what it would be like to kiss her soft lips or lie naked pressed against her. And I would beat down those thoughts.
I was determined to defeat my shaitan and, by sheer will if necessary, cast out those desires and thoughts of sihaqa and dreams of committing the crime of musahaqat al-nisa with Hind or anyone else … I’d think myself straight and by the power of the Lord of the Day of Judgment that I had felt on the roof, I was certain I would be able.
And just as I clearly had a deep desire for this sort of strictness and discipline, it had been no accident that the Sisterhood had sought out Rania and I; on the one hand, we were from a very prominent family and our involvement would enhance the movement as it recruited and, in time, we’d be able to bend the ears of our fathers, brothers, and, most importantly, our future husbands and sons to the groups goals. We would be part of the long-term dream of returning Syria to Islam. And, perhaps even more importantly, the two of us would go back to the USA and, in time, we would begin to recruit and expand the Sisterhood in a new continent. We had, I later learned, been identified as possible leaders for that and, in time, we would try to do that.

A Thousand Sighs: Part four, First Loves

4. First Loves
August 1990 – May 1991


War Drums


In the days and weeks that followed, things seemed to get worse and worse.
A diplomatic crisis erupted and American troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia. My father as ‘prominent local Arab’ appeared on the local news and was called by the paper; my Kuwaiti cousins got interviewed too. Some local church people came out to suggest that they could lend a hand … and Uncle Hamuda gently refused, explaining he was hardly poor and had put his money in banks outside Kuwait.
Eventually, the Georgia cousins headed back home; the Kuwaitis stayed on for a while, until it began to look like they might be here a long time. Uncle Hamuda applied to the Kuwaiti embassy for some sort of pay; nothing went out as what there was was reserved only for ‘real’ Kuwaitis. Zaynab started college (and Rob dropped by to bid her farewell). Her parents decided that they would be better off in a city than in a small town; they followed Omar and his brood to Georgia, found a short term lease on a house … and, eighteen years on, are still living in Georgia.
School started; I was in high school now. People talked about the possibility of war in the halls; teachers discussed it in class. In world history class, my teacher asked me to explain the situation to my classmates. I tried as best I could, stumbling only a few times as I tried to get across the basic cncepts. After class, Mr. Perez asked me to stay a moment; he said he was impressed, wondered if I’d ever considered joining the debate team (which he coached). I said, maybe, both my cousins had done well … he was startled and impressed as Jim and Rob had been state champions (or master debaters as they preferred), told me to think about it … and I felt smart that I’d actually impressed someone with my intellect.
Not every student was so impressed; someone I didn’t recognize called me ‘rag head’ in the hall the same day and a lot of people laughed (while I turned crimson).
Meanwhile, local National Guardsmen were called up, a couple of guys who’d graduated a few years before went to the Gulf … my cousin Jim, Rob’s brother, was in Navy ROTC at Virginia Tech with only a few months left before graduation; we all wondered whether he’d be sent out the following summer if a war dragged on. A second cousin went to sit in a tent in Saudi Arabia …
Yellow ribbons and American flags sprouted … people speculated what would happen in event of a war, how many thousand dead Americans and so on … I saw ‘no blood for oil’ spray painted on a wall …
And, for the first time, I began to be acutely conscious that I was an Arab and a Muslim and an American all at once. And, when people asked, I’d point out that we were Syrians and that Syria was now an ally of the USA and that Syrian soldiers served alongside American ones … though I knew that was something I ought to be ashamed of.
I wished intensely to be normal; most things were normal. My family generally got lots and lots of support from our friends and neighbors, even if, more than once, we all (well, maybe not Alia) had the experience of someone saying something like ‘well, between you and me, you know this war is really being manipulated by Israel’ or other Anti-Semitic conspiracy stuff (something that rather annoys me to this day as it happens often enough; some Anglo assumes that, since I’m an Arab, I must share their antipathy for Jews; as you’ll see, eventually that was proven quite wrong).


Homecoming Weekend


Even under cloud of coming war, life went on. And my life was that of a gawky high school freshman girl who’d rather be reading history books or adventure novels than in school, with only one really close friend.
After Lori and I had been friends for what seemed forever and mooned over countless boys who were about 0% likely to give either of us the time of day if they even knew our names, we got ready to start high school and pine away for even older guys who wouldn't care a whit about either of us.
Now that we were in High School, we knew that we were supposed to get boyfriends – or at least, pimply-faced boys to take us to the big homecoming dance. We speculated on who would ask us, each of us guessing that so-and-so would and how we’d respond. Of course, no one asked either of us, certainly not any of the ones we were fixated on. Naturally, those guys were star athletes and popular guys while we ignored the boys who were more like us as hopeless dorks. When I had suggested to her that we should join the debate team together, she dismissed the idea as the debaters were all losers … the guys worse even than the girls. And, if we wanted boyfriends or, at least, dates to a high school dance, that was the worst thing to do so we shouldn’t …
I remember, as a joke, saying to her, “You know, Lori, it’s too bad we can’t just take each other!”
“Yeah,” she laughed, “I bet we’d have more fun than with any of these loser boys!”
That Friday night was the night of the Big Game; I think we played Western Albemarle, but I’m really not sure. If it mattered, I guess I could go look it up. Lori was spending the night at my house so we had gone with my parents and my siblings; my older sister was in the high school band, my brother was off running around with other junior high boys, my younger sister was reading while my parents greeted neighbors and friends; you could tell easily who was from Riverport, who wasn’t by whether they greeted my parents.
A few, at least, of the people from other towns did do double takes on seeing my father; he had dark, wavy hair, dark eyes, Arab features, a thick mustache … and looked a little like that fellow in Iraq (many, many people have noted that over the years). Saddam, of course, wouldn’t have been caught dead in a high school booster club jacket or baseball cap … but … (my dad was asked in seriousness to ‘play’ Saddam Hussein in a mock trial at a local college and had the decency to refuse.)
Lori and I walked around and around … looking backwards, it was very much the picture of small town Americana and probably one of my most “American” of memories from that time. Honestly, I would say that that was about as ‘unforeign’ as I ever felt back then.
After the game, we all went back to our house together … Aisha was talking on the way back about her homecoming plan; a group of her friends – mostly band girls (and, if I remember correctly, several of them were from the larger conservative religious groups, Mennonites mostly, around) and a couple of harmless boys – were going to go to dinner and the dance together. My father had already given her permission, over, he said, his better judgment. I was jealous that she’d go and I said so …
“You’ll take Amina and Lori?” my mother asked Aisha immediately and, reluctantly, she agreed.
Lori and I were ecstatic; we’d get to go with upper classmen and we were going to our first high school dance! When we got back to our house, Lori and I were discussing nothing else … the only break we had was that she called her mother and told her the exciting news and got her mother to agree to pick us up after the dance.
We talked about what we’d wear and on and on … whom we’d dance with and all sorts of silly stuff like that. Finally, we weren’t going to be the nerdiest females in the whole ninth grade; that honor would have to pass to someone else …
After we’d headed upstairs to my room, we kept talking about everything. What would we do if so-and-so asked either of us to dance or what if everything went perfectly and one of us got invited by a boy to wander off … what then?
“Well,” I said, “I guess I would kiss him.”
“OK,” said Lori, “but, tell me the truth, have you ever really kissed anyone?”
“Just relatives,” I mumbled.
“Well, that doesn’t really count,” she said. “I mean have you ever kissed a real live boy?”
“No,” I blushed, embarrassed, “you know you’d know; I’d’ve told you if I’d kissed some guy over the summer … what about you?”
“Me neither,” she sighed. “What do you think it would be like?”
“Really nice? Maybe?” I suggested. “Well, if the boy was really cute … but, what if I made a mistake … and he decided that he hated me or made fun of me …”
“Yeah, I know,” Lori nodded. She paused for a long time, looked at me a little funny. “Y’know, I’ve got an idea … what if we tried out with each other, I mean not as a real kiss, but just as practice so we can make sure that we’re doing it right? And that way, neither of us will do anything wrong …”
“That,” I smiled, “sounds like a good idea, ‘cause if it turns out that I’m like a really bad kisser (or you are), it won’t really count and you won’t hate me or anything, right?”
“Yeah, of course not, you’re my bestfriend,” she smiled nervously and sat closer to me on my bed. Neither of us was really sure how to go about this.
“Maybe we should be standing up,” I suggested so we did and we were standing face to face. I felt really nervous and tried not to giggle.
“I think you’re supposed to close your eyes,” Lori said.
“Yeah,” I said and closed mine, tried to relax and felt Lori’s lips against mine as she bent slightly to kiss me. I remember that I was really surprised at how soft her lips were, but warm. After about a minute we stopped.
“That wasn’t so bad!” I laughed and she did too.
“You tasted nice,” she said.
“You did, too,” I said shyly. “Do you know what French-kissing is?”
“Uh huh,” she nodded. “It’s lke with your mouth open?”
“Yeah,” I nodded, “maybe we should try that …”
“That’s probably a good idea,” she said so we tried that and it was even better.
We kept practicing for a while, and, I remember, it felt really good. She asked me who I was thinking about and I lied and named one of the boys in our classes and she laughed and said she was too … so we kept making out and sat on my bed and tried some more but, eventually, realized we’d need to go to sleep …
We talked as we were lying in darkness about how we’d both be really good kissers and all the boys would want us both … and, eventually, fell quiet … and as I drifted off to sleep, I remember thinking, why would I want a boyfriend anyway if I had Lori to kiss?


Saturday


Lori’s mom came and got her in the morning and took her shopping for her first high school dance; she brought her back to our house late in the afternoon. When Lori got out of their car and walked from the driveway to the backdoor, I thought she looked absolutely beautiful; I know my heart fluttered a little looking at her. She was wearing a new dark red dress (or at least one that I’d never seen before) that left her shoulders bare and gave a hint of her ample-for-a-freshman cleavage. Her legs were shown off and she was wearing heels. She wore the necklace I’d bought for her in the summer and her long golden curls were neatly styled. Obviously, her mother had helped her look so nice …
As her mother walked up behind her, I was terribly self-conscious; I knew I looked nowhere near so nice; a long skirt and a nice sweater … nothing fancy or revealing, just plain-old, square-old Muslim me. I knew Aisha was dressed in the same dull manner but I wanted to be all glamorous too.
But both Lori and Mrs. Armstrong were all smiles. My mother came out and talked to hers. Cameras appeared and they took photos of each of us and, then, both of us standing together.
My father came racing out; he’d gone out and bought corsages for both of us (and for Aisha and a couple of her friends) and insisted on pinning them on us each in turn. In these photos, everyone is smiling and young …
My father pulled me aside before we left and warned me sternly:
“Remember, Amina,” he sent, waving a finger, “if the young man and the young woman are alone together, the Shaitan makes three!”
“Yes, dad,” I nodded. “No Shaitan, I got it.”
“So,” he continued, “don’t go off alone with any boy; if someone asks you too, take Lori with you …”
“OK!” I started to blush, embarrassed …
But he let us go and we – Lori and I – piled into the Arraf family van; Aisha was driving (since we’d both been ‘held back’, she was the first of her friends to get a driver’s license) and her friends all piled in … and Lori and I were both overwhelmed by all these older girls and felt ourselves to be very mature just to be included, even if these older girls were just as much dateless nerds as we considered ourselves to be.
Aisha’s friends were all dressed nicely, even if with little fashion sense; nice blouses, sweaters, skirts … though, as far as I was concerned, Lori was far better dressed than any of them. All of us, in those days, had spent hours with hairspray, mousse, and curling irons working to puff up and out our hair, trying to get as big as possible; everyone would look hopelessly dated and silly now.
We went to a decent, medium priced restaurant; I can’t even recall where now; there, we met up with more of Aisha’s friends (including several guys, at least one of whom – Dan – I was fairly certain was gay even then; I googled him as I was writing this and, no surprise, found his MySpace page listing him as ‘single, gay, and looking’; he sat across the table from Lori and I and he joked with us through dinner and was flirty in way that felt to me like a pretense even then) …
And, then, we headed towards the high school … where others were already wandering in to a gym filled with balloons and crepe paper while some unknown to me class officer was collecting money for tickets … paid up and entered … and I was at my first real live high school dance!
Which was far less exciting than television, movies, and adolescent fantasy had previously suggested it would be. A few dozen students dressed slightly better than normal stood around the edges of the gymnasium or sat here and there … fewer actually danced in the dim lights (and that dancing seemed more like inept shuffling than dancing even to square old me). Bad top forty music played: Vanilla Ice or MC Hammer or some other pop rap alternating with other, equally dismal music (this was the golden age of Milli Vanilli).
I suppose, in my mind, I had envisioned (if I’d considered it at all) such things as being like what I saw in films or, at least, what I had seen at Arabic weddings I’d attended (but whiter, less ethnic and cooler): people moving perfectly in time to the music, everyone grinning maniacally, and, when I arrive, the crowd parts for my entrance … dancing boys and girls compete for my attention …
I don’t know if Lori sensed my disappointment but she pulled my arm and half dragged me into the gym … and we stood for a while watching people nervously, hoping that someone would approach us and ask us to dance … and no one did …
Time passes, I feel a bit foolish; I can tell that Lori does too. Aisha’s friend, Dan, came over and talked to us about nothing; a record started playing, “Groove is the Heart” (Dee-Lite), if I recall.
“I love this song!” Lori said.
“Me too!” replied Dan.
And he grabbed our wrists and half dragged, half-led the two of us to dance with him.
Now, I had often danced growing up; you can’t be an Arab woman and not. But almost always to Arabic music and with Arab friends and family around … and I started dancing enthusiastically along with the music, doing all the steps I’d learnt from Zainab and Rania and so on … arms in the air, hips moving … a mix, I suppose, of biladi and debke steps … my eyes closed as I enjoyed the music …
And opened them to see both Dan and Lori (and several others) watching me rather oddly. What they must have seen was a scrawny, geeky girl suddenly gyrating in a hyper-sexualized bellydance of the sort rarely, if ever, seen in the gymnasium of John Singleton Mosby High School …
My eyes widened and for a moment I felt embarrassment but … they started imitating me … and I was thrilled … and danced and danced …
And, eventually, I was feeling parched so Lori and I went looking for a soda or juice. As we walked up to the punchbowl in the cafeteria, Vicki White. an older girl I’d never spoken to was filling her cup. I recognized her as one of the more ‘popular’ juniors; I knew she was dating a football star, was a cheerleader, etc., etc.. You know, the basic Ms Popularity … She saw us, made eye contact with me and spoke.
“What was that spazzing you were doing?” she asked me, scorn in her voice.
“Um,” I mumbled, “it was Arabic dance.”
“Arabic?” Vicki repeated. “What are you, some kind of Iraqian terrorist or something?”
I looked at my feet, felt myself about six inches tall and melting into the floor. I couldn’t speak.
“Actually,” I heard Lori saying as she stepped closer to the older girl, “Amina is Syrian. And the word is Iraqi, not Iraqian. But, even if she were Iraqi, she’d never be a total bitch to someone she didn’t know!”
I looked up; Vicki was almost shaking with irritation. She slammed down her cup and stormed out of the lunchroom. Lori laughed.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I told her.
“Yes, I did,” she said as she put her arm over my shoulders. “Nobody insults my best friend in front of me!”
I thanked her; we danced a little more, even if we looked like spastic Iraqian terrorists. And, then, the dance ended and we sat outside on the school steps, looking up at a thousand stars in the cool night air until Lori’s mother came for us.
On the way home, we both babbled about how great everything was … and I gushed about how brave Lori was … and when we got to their apartment, we went up to her room to keep on babbling.
“You were wonderful,” I told her for the hundredth, “showing Vicki up like that!”
“No, you were!” she said.
“Too bad,” I said, “that we didn’t either of us end up kissing any boys!”
“Yeah,” Lori said and looked right at me. “Maybe we should try to practice some more?’
“Yeah,” I said and I just melted into her, my hero and my friend.
The two of us made out far longer with far more passion than the night before, hardly even pausing to pretend we were thinking of boys, until we were both so groggy that we fell asleep with our limbs all entangled.


Autumn


Days moved quickly. My father rushed down to Georgia a few times and back again but I barely noticed. Life seemed to be quickening and I knew I was getting older. For too long, I thought, I had been a little girl, with a little girl’s mind and a little girl’s body, but, at last, that was done.
One October morning I woke up and my gut hurt in a way I couldn’t understand; I thought maybe I had the flu or maybe an ulcer or I was getting some kind of cancer. I’d never hurt there before, certainly not like this …
And when I went to the bathroom just after, I saw that there was blood in my underwear … and blood in the toilet …
And I was so excited; I was a week short of fifteen and I’d been expecting something like this for years and years, at least since the day in fifth grade that all the boys were sent out of the room and we had to watch a stupid filmstrip … and, when nothing had happened and nothing had happened and nothing had happened for long months turning into years, I’d begun to have a growing anxiety in the back of my mind …
What if I were somehow different? What if I never got my period, what if I never grew breasts or curves? What if I stayed a physical child forever?
But, at last, the day had finally come … and I could begin to think of myself as a woman. Legally, I knew, under Muslim law I could now be married … and, at some point, a slight fear ran through me that what if, contrary to everything I knew about my family, my parents decided I needed to be married off and sent for a suitable boy? Would I refuse?
And I knew, too, that I was now old enough to fast Ramadan, to start covering even when I wasn’t praying and to start becoming a woman in dress as well as in theory. Back then, covering seemed just one mor of the weird backwards ways of my Arabic family … so I didn’t quite yet.
But, oddly, I noticed that I did start changing in other ways. The breasts I prayed for didn’t show up but … I started caring more about clothes and hair and make-up, probably for the first time in my life actually caring …
But I was a weirdo …
My last class of the day was Freshman Honors English. I loved that class … Lori was in it, of course, but so were the other kids in our grade that I actually liked and the teacher was great and we had fun and we wrote poems and had discussions … and then there was Ms. Peterson …
Just remembering her makes my heart skip …
Julia Peterson, our student teacher, twenty-two or three, always dressed in black and always wearing laced up boots … rather ‘Goth’ and sophisticated and cool … pale skin, almost milky, bright red hair, pale blue eyes … from Alexandria and about to graduate from Madison. I hung on her every word. She was the coolest person I had ever met until then and, when I saw her, I thought, I want to be like her … I even deliberately got in trouble so I would have to stay after class as ‘detention’ as she would have to sit while Mrs Warner was off doing whatver English teachers do at the end of the day … and I’d just talk to her about whatever … she told me about bands she’d seen and music she liked; I copied all that … she talked about going to Goth clubs in DC and poetry and on and on …
Yes, I had a crush … I had a few dreams about her; we went to club together, she combed my hair … she kissed me … and I woke up sweating and tingling …
I started dressing more like her; no more clueless nerd girl. Now, I abandoned tennis shoes for Doc Martens I bought at the mall … started wearing more and more black, no more jeans, but long skirts …
I dyed a bright blue streak into my hair and came to school and everyone looked at me like I was crazy … but Ms Peterson told me it looked nice …. I started wearing eyeliner and silver jewelry from back home …
I turned in a composition I’d written on the fly, a morbid poem … and Ms Peterson insisted it be published in the school’s literary magazaine …
Maybe I should have been worried, crushing on my teacher, maybe Lori should have been, I don’t know. Eventually, though, that autumn passed into winter like a dream. Lori and I were as close friends as we’d ever been but were now, suddenly, closer. I think we passed more notes, called each other more often and so on; we were practically inseparable in school and, when we were alone, we kept ‘practicing’ kissing each other … a lot.
Fridays, if we were going to her house together, almost as soon as we were inside the door, we’d be making out … and almost all the time that we were together alone passed that way. And, while we were practicing kissing, we began touching each other -- because this was just 'practice' too ... At least that's what we said to each other so we could justify fondling and nuzzling each other's breasts, groping each other, and finger banging.
I remember admiring her, her breasts, her soft curves, her long curly hair, her bright blue eyes … and thinking of them when we were apart. I know that even then I knew that we were only pretending that it was all about getting ready for some future boyfriend but, when I was fifteen, I couldn't handle the thought that I might be a lesbian or bisexual, couldn’t handle that only women were in my dreams.
But, however it was, a lot of Saturday mornings (and some Sundays) I'd wake up in Lori's arms after a night of kissing and holding each other. And we'd sometimes lay there naked, touching each other, and talk about some heartthrob or other unattainable male in the vaguest of ways; I was pretending – if I weren’t thinking of her, I was thinking of Ms Peterson – and I suspected she was too...


January


School ended for the Christmas break. New Year’s Eve 1990, I spent with Lori like we’d spent most every New Year’s, watching the countdown on TV and eating chips. Just before midnight, she reminded me of that When Harry Met Sally movie, so, at the stroke of midnight, we kissed lightly, said “Happy New Year!” and then kissed long and hard after that. Just practice, y’know?
Classes started back and things got tenser at home … my Dad was watching CNN continuously if he wasn’t at work, arguing with the television, constantly on the phone talking in Arabic … and my mom was nearly as tense …
Last minute peace deals and so on all fell through and …
Then came the war.
Up all night glued to television. My father’s face is wet with tears. He’s on the phone to Omar in Atlanta …
Minnie comes obver; she couldn’t get through on the phone. I hear her and my mother talking in hushed voices, they don’t want my father to verhear or any of us children. What if thousands of Americans are killed? What happens to us? My mother says no one in Riverport would ever bother us. Minnie tells her don’t be so sure …
My mind races … I remember Anne Frank … she looked like me …
And it goes on and on for a month. My parents likely wouldn’t notice or care what I did … I get a second set of piercings in my ears … and it’s months before my mother mentions that. I come home from school late and I know I stink fo tobacco and cheap perume … nothing.
In school, the teachers are so nice to me. Mr. Perez asks me to stay back after class. Have I reconsidered debate team? No, I tell him. Has anyone bothered me because of …?
The war? I ask. Yes.
I tell him, no … and he says that’s good, but if anyone does, plese tell him … he knows what it’s like to have an odd name and be a little different …
I leave in a hurry.
Ms Peterson is gone now but Mrs Warner asks me the same, suggests maybe I should write about being an Arab at Mosby High …
And I leave in a hurry.
They don’t, I think, get it. I don’t want to talk about being different, I don’t want to talk about being an Arab, I don’t want to discuss being an Arab in wartime … I want to talk about becoming a woman and being good looking and how not to be a nerd … tell me how black makes me seem deeper and more poetic … but please …
Aisha gets it even worse; she’s in US history and her teacher keeps putting her on the spot, asking assinine questions like ‘why do you support Saddam?’
I want to dig a deep hole and hide. Someone calls me Towelhead behind my back as I walk through the hall … I hear Lori telling whoever it was to stick it but I don’t turn and just keep walking …


February


Lori is my guardian angel then and so many times … I can’t imagine life without her and our games are getting steadily more possessive. But …
One Friday night came; it was the first week of February, if I recall … I was, I know, already thinking about Valentine’s day coming up and wanting to do something for Lori for it … and knowing that I was thinking that tells me that I knew what I was about; at fifteen, I wasn’t wholly innocent even if I were virtually virginal; it’s amazing how much one can glean from books and films and television …
We were playing our usual late night games and were both just about totally nude. These had been progressing slowly over the past few months; at first, we just kissed and kissed, then one time, Lori had kissed down my neck and pulled off my shirt and kissed my nearly non-existent breasts while blood had rushed through me … and I’d done the same. And we kept pushing the boundaries farther, touching and kissing and holding each other.
That night, I recall, she had straddled me and stripped me while we kissed … and, when I was naked, Lori had slid a few fingers inside me and, as she was getting pretty good at it by then, had me really turned on; I was a woman in love and was lying nude entwined with my lover in her bedroom, having sex, even if I couldn’t have stated any of that clearly then.
"I want to try something new,” I whispered to Lori and got her to lie flat on her back.
I started kissing her breasts, then down her soft belly, and, then, at last, went down on her. Obviously, I was utterly inexperienced but she really seemed to like it ... after about ten minutes of my kissing, sucking, licking her, she was shaking and shuddering, pulling my hair and moaning ... it was the first time I'd seen a woman orgasm and, I think, was probably her first time, too. I thought she was more beautiful than ever … and I was touching myself like crazy and came about as close as I could come then to crazy. I nearly thought her thighs would crush me at one point but I’d never been happier – and, when we were both through, we lay for a long, long time just holding each other...
I didn't know quite what to say and said the most obvious line anyone had ever thought to say, "I love you. Lori"
She didn't say anything but just started sobbing. She cried herself to sleep and shoved me away when I tried to comfort her …
The next morning, we acted normal and, when my mom came to pick me up,
Lori said she'd call me later on. She didn't. Ever.


Monday


Monday, I missed my morning classes because of a dental appointment; I had no cavities but still needed my teeth cleaned. The dental hygeinist asked me how I’d colored my hair, said it looked good … So I was late coming in to school and, when I did, my whole world came crashing down.
Before I'd gotten to school, Lori had told some other girls that I was a pervert, a lesbian. When I'd walk through the halls, I thought I heard people saying 'lesbo', ‘dyke’; I could feel the stares burning me...
I went to Lori's locker to wait for her, but she ignored me as best she could. As soon as I got home, I called her. No one picked up so I let it ring and ring, ten, twenty, thirty times. At last, she answered, "Hello?"
"Come on Lori," I told her, "it's me, Ami"
"I don't want to talk to you anymore."
"Why not?"
"Cause you're sick!"
“What?”
“What you did to me!”
"But you liked it!"
"Just don't bother me anymore!"
And that was that; she hung up and wouldn’t pick up when I called (or the five hundred times I called after that). She ignored me at school no matter what I did; I left her notes and letters; love letters and apologies and pleas and promises I’d never do ‘it’ again and everything I could think of. Soon, she had other friends and I was sure I overheard her telling them, when I went by, that I was a sicko dyke...


Minnie


I went home from school with my head hung in shame, that Monday and every day after that. I was miserable and wanted to die. I’d go up to my room, listen to the same mournful cassettes over and over (mostly second generation ones of Marcel Khalife, Fairuz, The Cure, The Cult, and so on …
I was ashamed, I was disgraced, I felt like I wanted to die. I hated myself and was disgusted by the idea that there was really something wrong with me …
I was also heartbroken and mournful; the only really close friend I’d had, that I thought I could share everything with had deserted me … I scrawled:
“If only I'd thought of the right words,I could have held on to your heart. If only I'd thought of the right words,I wouldn't be breaking apartall my pictures of you.Looking so long at these pictures of youbut I never hold on to your heart. Looking so long for the words to be truebut always just breaking apartmy pictures of youThere was nothing in the worldthat I ever wanted moreThan to feel you deep in my heart.There was nothing in the worldthat I ever wanted morethan to never feel the breaking apartll my pictures of you.”
I wrote horrid poems, filled with self pity and anger and desire for death … I scrawled on my notebook: “I’m waking up I can not see that there is not much left of me. Nothing is real but pain now. Hold my breath as I wish for death. Oh, please God, wake me!”
My immediate family didn’t notice much; we were Muslims, Arabs, living in the USA … and these were the days when the worst images were coming from Iraq, of round the clock air raids and slaughters in bomb shelters, ‘turkey shoots’ and highways of death. I drew pictures of grim scenes … piles of dead bodies, ruined landscpes …
My parents watched CNN incessantly and had trouble sleeping; they were irritable and depressed, angry and outraged and no way to express it in the outside world. If they even noticed that I was walking around looking like death, they likely assumed I was also feeling the pain of two hundred thousand dead Arabs.
I could barely eat; if I looked at myself in the mirror, I was disgusted by the grotesque blob staring back at me. No wonder people hated me, I thought. I quit buying lunch at school, saving my money for cigarettes from the Seven Eleven (which I smoked only in great privacy). I lost weight – and there hadn’t been much of me to begin with.
I wandered into my great aunt’s house one day, collapsed on her couch; I didn’t want to go home. Minnie had always let me (and my sisters and brother and our other cousins) come and go as we pleased … and, now, if anything pleased me, it was not being at home.
She looked at me and knew I was in distress and asked me in her smooth, seventy odd year old way, what was wrong … and I told her in one long, gushing breath:
“Everything, everything, everyone hates me, she hates me, and I didn’t do anything, all I did was be her friend and tell her I loved her and do what she wanted and she kicked me away and made me like dirt and I just want to die and everything is horrible and I don’t want to live and …”
and, and, and …
and Minnie just listened and nodded and when I ran down, said to me softly:
“Amina, a broken heart is a terrible thing and it feels like the world is ending and nothing could ever be worse, but it will get better.”
“You don’t understand!” I blurted.
And she shook her head and said, “Child, I’ve been married three times. I buried two husbands. And, believe me, there isn’t a day I don’t think of both of them. And it hurts every time. But I go on. And the other one? I loved him … and he loved me, but sometimes love isn’t enough … and, even when it is, it doesn’t always work the way we want it. You might love someone and they don’t love you back. And nothing you do will make them love you. So, you’ve got to go on.”
And she took my hand and held it. And I wasn’t quite so sad.
(And I didn’t think until a long time afterwards why she was the only one around who made the connection that I was heartbroken from a failed romance – and didn’t seem bothered by the object of my affection’s gender. When I did, I did wonder … Aunt Minnie was an odd bird for her time and place; she was ridiculously progressive and liberal and always had been … and she had had a best friend for years and years, another older, childless widow. And the two of them went to Hawaii and Florida and Montreal together; Minnie had pictures up of the two of them in all those places … and Ellen was a little butch … and when I wondered about that, or why she had books on her shelf that I read later on – Rubyfruit Jungle, Wells of Loneliness, Orlando – whether my Great Aunt wasn’t totally straight, it was way too late to ask about …)


Ramadan


That year, Ramadan started in the middle of March. For the first time, my parents allowed me to fast … and I was excited to have a reason not to eat or drink. Even when it came time to eat, I was still reluctant to eat.
It was a time of brutal images; the Uprisings and their suppression were underway in Iraq, bringing mixed feelings as well as recollections to us. People with names or ancestry like ours were being strung up, tortured and killed in the South of Iraq; an Omar or Aisha in the family tree was as a death sentence to the Shia groups. Yet, the repressors were from the same party (even if a different, less sectarian branch) than that which had repressed the Muslims in Syria. Images of the Kurds fleeing were horrible; we gave money to groups to help them and tried to get others to care (in a very short time, many of those Kurds would start arriving in our area).
My parents thought that I wasn’t eating well and walking around depressed for the same reasons they were; that the torment of watching all this, of hearing endless gloating by the Americans at a ‘bloodless’ war that had brought the death of hundreds of thousands, had gotten me down.
It did, but my own internal misery was far worse. I would sit and think that I wished I could explain my heartbreak to … well, Lori. And, she treated me, if I were lucky, as non-existent. I couldn’t help but think of myself as evil, foul, a sinner, and a corrupter … I hadn’t realized how utterly my life had centered on Lori and, when she was gone, I had nothing.
And I ate little, stayed up at night … stumbled through school. The first of the year, I’d weighed 108 pounds; by May, I had shed sixteen of those. I could see my ribs clearly, my hips were jutting points …
I thought about running away, about suicide, all of the depressed teen stuff; I’d lock myself in my room and listen to depressing music or write bad poetry, spent my lunch period sitting alone chain-smoking near the art students ...
The only light in my tunnel came when my parents decided to move to Georgia; my dad had been having long conversations with Uncle Omar and they’d decided to go in business together. Later, he told me that he was also concerned that we were too far from other Muslims, from family (even if we had a thousand cousins in them thar hills), that we were getting too American; he’d told his brother about Aisha and I going to school dances and Omar had been shocked; “Next thing you know,” Omar had told him, “they’ll be marrying Christian men.”
And they had other ideas …
End of April, it must have been, my Dad says over dinner to Aisha and I,
“Would you like to go home?”
We both look at him blankly.
“What do you mean?”
“Sham, Damascus … I talked to Omar and Hamza and they want Raghad and Rania to go home for the summer. Would you like to go?”
“YES!” I almost shout.
Aisha’s more thoughtful, but nods …
“What happens if we don’t?”
“You’ll have to help us pack.”
“Pack?”
And it all comes out … we’re moving … and Aisha and I will leave one house and return to another … I am ecstatic.

Deraa

remember what happened:

we had small, peaceful demonstrations all over the country. elsewhere, worst thing that happened was a few arrests and a few bruises.

in deraa, that was what would have happened ,,, except that the security forces there over-reacted and used live fire on a small peaceful demonstration. people died.

and when the funerals happened the next day, people were angry ... and the security forces used tear gas and force.

protesters lit the ministry of 'justice' office on fire there -- as well as those of syriatel (which is _not_ as odd as you might think, at least as seen from damascus. who do people hate here? secret police and the phone duopoly ...)

word is about one hundred injured, 10 dead as a high report

deraa demonstrators:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eGLzLk0kHY&feature=player_embedded

the _good_ news is that the regime is at least attempting to measure its response as far as we can tell and has met with derawis about their demands, released arrested juveniles, etc

maybe we'll get more concessions???

Abortion, Islam and the Catholic Church

Interesting thing I stumbled on the other day:

while doing reading on the 7th century, I was looking over one of the earliest English works of canon law, the Penitentials of Theodore of Tarsus (north Syrian immigrant Archbishop of Canterbury). While looking for something else, I noticed a rule on abortion:

it was only a sin in c690 AD after the fortieth day after conception ...
and Theodore says that this is the rule for both the Roman Church and the
Eastern churches ... and forbidden after that

Odd thing to me was that that's the _islamic_ rule as well. Up to 40 days,
perfectly legal, no harm no foul ...

anyway, thought that was interesting both in suggesting how, c 690, christianity
and islam were considerably less different _and_ that the present day papal
teaching is _not_ that of the Catholic Church in years past ...