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.

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