My Accidental Jihad (15 page)

My freshman year in college, I moved into a Southern California dormitory perched on the cliffs over what I had no idea was a nude beach. The first time I jogged down the steep trail to the shoreline, I was shocked to discover so many naked men strolling across the sand or sitting spread-eagled staring out at the horizon, their dangling pink parts cooking like sausages in the sun. I learned to lock my eyes on the packed sand at the edge of the surf as I ran, to absorb myself in the bubbling sea foam, and to never stop to catch my breath—because the moment I did, one of the naked men would approach me without fail to ask me the time of day. Around this time I joined a nature club for students like me who loved outdoor adventures. The club was full of robust, androgynous undergrads: men with glossy blond ponytails and flannel shirts tied like skirts around narrow waists; women with muscled arms and furry legs. One hot afternoon we hiked in the desert, and as the sun bore down on us, my companions began to peel off their shirts one by one—first the men and then, wordlessly, the women, too. In the end I was the only one left wearing a cotton T-shirt soaked through with nervous perspiration.

Discovering feminist literature my first year in college only added to my confusion. Authors I admired gave me powerful messages that I was free to express myself sexually; failing to do so, in fact, would be unhealthy and wrong, a sign of patriarchal oppression. But here on the Southern California coast, the western capital of physical perfection, there was a catch. My so-called sexual freedom must meet certain unspoken criteria: high swollen breasts and a flat, tanned belly, silky lingerie and hairless thighs skinny enough to always allow a sliver of light to pass between them. Sex itself could look like hundreds of different positions, as long as I remained in character: innocent yet brazen, devoted yet undemanding, petulant yet submissive. Layered and contradictory, it was nearly an impossible role to play. I sweated like a Shakespearean actor weighed down by a heavy costume and cumbersome couplets, too anxious for applause to ever really enjoy myself.

In truth, my desires were nothing like images I saw on the screen or in magazines. There was nothing theatrical about my preferences: loving touches beneath a veil of darkness, warm skin and soft cotton sheets. I never liked lingerie. I had no fantasies about whips or leather, no made-up stories to act out in costume. I never imagined skin pounding and colliding. Instead my erotic mind was a mosaic of image and sensation: a blooming night flower with a moist, delicate center. A spoonful of honey fed into a hungry mouth. A garden washed by the merciful rain, dew on a petal like sweat pearling on flesh.
Tell me your fantasy,
my boyfriend whispered to me in the dark. Propped up on one arm, he studied my face, eagerly waiting for me to turn him on. The silence stretched out; I had nothing to say. My deepest longing had no characters, setting, or narrative arc. My most erotic fantasy was simply that I was enough: plain, holy, beautiful.

TH
E FIRST TIME
my skin touched Ismail’s, we were standing in his kitchen, two glasses of cold water on the counter between us. We had just finished a run; we were flushed and smiling. He placed his hand gently over mine, and the unexpected heat from his palm sent a jolt of electricity up my arm. I nearly jumped, hypervigilant about what his next move might be. It was a familiar and nerve-racking feeling, this heightened alertness in response to a man’s unexpected pass. I had known men who scrambled toward sex like racing toward a finish line. But Ismail did nothing else but hold my gaze and smile while his hand rested over mine. I couldn’t help but smile, too, and silence stretched out as I investigated the sensation of his skin. Not since I was fourteen, and the boy seated beside me at church reached for my hand and held it through the sermon, could I recall ever having been given so much time to investigate such a small pleasure.

I soon discovered that Ismail relished small intimacies: holding my gaze, sweeping a strand of hair from my face, prolonging a doorway embrace when we said good-bye. Dropping me off at my house at the end of an evening, he reminded me of a teenage boy: awkwardly extending the conversation in the dark, reaching over the center console to find my hand, leaning across the emergency brake for a hesitant kiss. He moved at an entirely different pace from other men I had known—as if sex were not the grand prize, as if each connection were a revelation. I figured this must have come from spending his teens and twenties in a Muslim country where sex was strictly prohibited, where fleeting stolen intimacies were all a young man could hope for.

A MODERN, LIBERATED
American woman is only supposed to practice submission when toys, costumes, or accessories are involved. In the theater of sexuality we are given a pass, allowed to leave our political correctness at the door. In any other aspect of our lives, submission is seen as weakness. When I moved to North Carolina to attend graduate school, southern summers taught me my first lesson in surrender. On a sweltering July day, I moved into a tiny green house on the edge of a meadow whose overgrown grass stood utterly still in the hot clotted air. The unwieldy air-conditioning unit propped in my bedroom window groaned day and night, delivering a weak stream of relief that evaporated like steam from a kettle. Never one to nap in California, I fell asleep in the middle of the day on my living room futon, awaking to discover my body seeping a shadowy imprint onto its cotton cover. I had to escape the dark oven of this house; I was melting into the furniture. I swung open the door and collided with a wall of hot, thick air.

That first month I stumbled around town muttering like a madwoman, dripping sweat and fuming with resentment for the infernal humidity. I once heard a southerner describe summer days like these as close:
Th
e weather was close.
It was true: the wet heat wrapped me in its moist, fleshy arms, smothered me against its sticky bosom, and refused to let go. Southern summer afternoons climbed onto my lap like a big, hairy dog, its hot breath in my face. I took its assault personally: for three months I was offended on a daily basis by its impositions, outraged by its relentless assault. But over time I learned to submit to the season. I discovered the wisdom of rocking chairs on screened porches, tall glasses of sweet tea, early morning runs in the woods and lazy afternoons at the pool. I rediscovered the pleasure of finishing thick novels. I learned to yield to the season, to find what was good and be grateful for it.

Marriage taught me my second lesson in surrender: I learned to submit to my beloved like a mother submits to an infant’s hunger, offering an aching swollen breast and feeling the sweet relief of doing exactly what she was meant to do. On a good night, when there was peace between us and neither one fell into bed exhausted, Ismail reached for me with gentle, insistent hands. I practiced molding my form to his: my body poised and quivering, tuned by his undivided attention, ready to be played like an instrument. His touch softened my flesh like butter. My body rose to meet his; my skin yielded gratefully to his pressure. Under love’s blanket, there was nothing theatrical or passive about my surrender. It was assertive, ecstatic, playful. He was trained on my pleasure, which then became his own. Giving and receiving became one, as indivisible as a body and a soul.

“How would you rate your love life?” he whispered into my left ear. I was curled on my side, staring out the window at the bright, unblinking moon. His arms around me were soft as worn cotton.

How could I possibly place this love on a scale? If ten was the ecstatic fusion of divine love, the white-hot annihilation of the small separate self, and one was the loneliness and despair of the wrong marriage, then all the years of our married life I had played this scale like a piano, my fingers dancing over all the keys, using each note to make haunting, beautiful music.

“I would not rate it,” I murmured and then, nudging him with my heel in a reprimand, added, “That would not be a very Muslim thing to do, would it?”

He pulled me closer, tucked his chin into the small depression of my clavicle, his face so close that I could hear the nearly inaudible pop of his parting lips: the sound of him smiling in the dark.

“
Alhamdu lillah
is my answer to your question,” I whispered.
“Alhamdu lillah.”

All praise is due to God.

Quiet for a moment, he contemplated my response. And then, propping himself up on one elbow so he could see me: “How exactly would you say it?”

He wanted to study my face as I spoke the word, to discover if I said it with a teasing smile and laughter in my eyes. Did I say it earnestly, with humble gratitude for a gift so precious it warranted no other word? Or did I say the word with a distant look in my eye and a long, forbearing sigh, as one enduring a difficult trial?

These were important distinctions. The straightforward translation for
Alhamdu lillah
is “all praise belongs to God,” but the way it is expressed creates nuanced differences in meaning. It is a heavy, solid container of a phrase—deep enough to hold self-pity, complacency, gratitude or awe. Sometimes when I ask a Muslim friend how she is doing, she replies with a long sigh, and her
Alhamdu lillah
tells me she is struggling to be patient and find blessing in difficulty. Spoken with a certain grim determination, it can mean “if God’s plan is for me to endure this tribulation, then I accept it.” At other times the word is awash with humility, each syllable pouring forth gratitude like water over river stones. No matter how it is spoken, the word washes away our small self-referential stories about the vast mystery of our lives. Trying to find its secular English equivalent, Ismail sometimes responds to the question “How are you?” by saying “I can’t complain.” But this phrase is a poor substitute, the domineering
I
pushing God out altogether and colonizing meaning, forcing each word that follows to march in single file behind the self.
Alhamdu lillah
wipes away the self altogether, like the swipe of an eraser against a chalkboard on which our most cherished stories are written. I murmured the word again, smiling in the dark.

T
he last time he went to Libya, Ismail purchased six prayer rugs in Tripoli’s Old City. The night he arrived home, he hauled his suitcase into our living room, unzipped the bag, and spread the rugs across the floor: six different border designs, six different shades of minarets and tassels. The rugs smelled faintly of incense and dust and the rusty roll-down doors that shopkeepers bring clattering to the ground at the end of a market day.

I was grateful to finally have my own set; prayer rugs were as essential to a Muslim gathering as a nice set of wineglasses were to a cocktail party. In the past I had felt sheepish when a Muslim guest peered out the window at the fading light, checked her watch, and asked if she could borrow a prayer rug to pray. Offering her a towel or a folded blanket was as wrong as serving good wine in a paper cup. Now I imagined passing out my six prayer rugs one by one, to three couples—or maybe two couples and two single people who might enjoy meeting one another. Watching my guests line them up side by side on the carpet, I’d feel the holy satisfaction of anticipating a guest’s every need.

The next time we invited Muslim friends for a gathering, thirty people came. When it was time to pray, we moved aside furniture in our living room to make space for two rows of prayer rugs. Some guests had brought their own; others used ours. Lined up side by side, the rugs made a colorful mosaic of minarets on which our guests rose and fell in unison,
Allahu Akhbar
pulsing through the room like a single heartbeat. Afterward the rugs were refolded and stacked by the door for our friends to reclaim on their way out. At the end of the evening I walked each guest to the threshold, gave away neatly packaged leftovers, thanked them for coming, and said “Peace be with you” as they put on their shoes. I kissed the women on each cheek, touched the faces of the children, and put my hand over my heart as I said good-bye to the men, holding their gaze just long enough for them to see the love and gratitude in my eyes. After closing the door behind the last guest, I went to put away my prayer rugs.

There were only five. One was missing.

“One of our prayer rugs is missing,” I announced, standing in the doorway to the kitchen and addressing Ismail’s back. He was at the sink, rinsing water glasses and loading them into the dishwasher.

“I’m sure it will turn up,” he murmured, without turning to look at me. I went back through my stack, then swept through the living room. Nothing.

“It’s definitely not here.” I reclaimed my place in the doorway and crossed my arms over my chest. Ismail shrugged, a noncommittal gesture that said,
No big deal
or
It’s not my fault
. Either way, I found it annoying.

I could not stop thinking about my missing prayer rug. I imagined it folded at a friend’s house, someone else snapping it open and lying it across the floor for
her
guest. I mentioned it to a friend who said she might have ended up with an extra one. I breathed a sigh of relief—but then she asked me to please describe my missing rug so she could verify I was the rightful owner. This test I did not expect. I could not recall its color or pattern. I knew it only as rug number six. I smiled politely and changed the subject, but my stomach clenched with anger. She had my rug. I knew it.

Later, when I asked Ismail to describe the missing rug to me, he told me he would recognize it if he saw it. As far as I could see, there was only one way to solve this mystery: Ismail and I would drop in to visit friends during prayer times. Each day Muslims were required to pray five times, and each of the five prayers had its own name: Fajr, Zuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and Isha. The first and the last prayer of the day fell outside of acceptable visiting hours—I could think of no good excuse to show up at someone’s house just as the first sliver of light appeared in the dawn sky or right before they went to bed—and another prayer fell in the middle of the workday. That left us with two options: the late-afternoon prayer, Asr, and the early-evening prayer, Maghrib. I figured we could kill two birds with one stone by dropping in on friends who lived farther away during Asr. We might show up just as they were unloading groceries or chopping up vegetables for dinner. We would chat for a while, and then Ismail would look down at his watch. “Shall we pray?” he would ask—a question that left room for only one answer. He would discreetly inspect the rugs as they were laid out. If he did not see ours, we would still have time to graciously excuse ourselves and hit another friend’s house by Maghrib.

When I described my plan to my husband, he studied my face for a long moment. Then he shook his head slowly.

“No way,” he said. “If something else were missing from our house, I’d help you track it down—but not a prayer rug. You’re just going to have to be at peace with the fact that someone is touching their forehead to it in prayer.”

SPRING ARRIVED WITH
an explosion of green. In our new house, it was my first season of tending plants whose names I was still learning: camellia, jasmine, forsythia. A gardener friend told me I needed to cut my butterfly bushes down to the ground. Only when the plant was relieved of the burden of last year’s fading leaves, she explained, would it explode with new growth. Same went for the rosebush. She was a master gardener, so I should have trusted her, but I was skeptical. I was attached to the tangled branches that lined my walkway to the back porch, concealing an electric box and plain siding behind purple flowers and green foliage. I didn’t like the idea of losing all that fullness; I worried about the empty space that would be exposed by such aggressive pruning. What if the plants never grew back as high and lush as they now were? To hack away so much of a living thing felt violent, so instead I trimmed hesitantly, taking too little to make a noticeable difference.

But as I worked I couldn’t help but notice the brittleness of the branches, the dullness of once vibrant leaves, the desiccated brown remnants of purple blooms. Tiny green shoots near the ground, fresh and new, ignited my imagination, and I began to wonder what else might emerge from the dark soil if I cleared away the half-dead remnants of the past. So the following day, armed with my husband’s gloves and a pair of shears, I attacked the bush. I slashed at the undergrowth, forced my way through branches as thick as my thumb, brittle on the outside but still sinewy with life at the center. I cut and cleared, pulled at dead limbs, my elation growing along with the pile of branches beside me. Hacking away at the faded aftermath of a bygone season, I thought,
Th
is is my life, a tangle of half-dead relationships and routines, diminishing pleasures, faded habits, and brittle assumption
s. I felt myself fading, felt the enervation of sustaining half-dead branches of myself. And yet I’d been afraid to cut it away, to confront the emptiness, afraid of what might grow from emptiness and whether it would be lush enough to satisfy me.

SOMETHING INSIDE ME
was withering. I was not addicted to alcohol or drugs. I never lost a job or destroyed a marriage or racked up a mountain of debt from gambling. I was going to work every day, stopping by the grocery store on the way home, keeping the house tidy and exercising regularly and helping my kids with their homework and returning emails and phone calls. I was bottoming out quietly in that stylish suburban middle-class American way: my life not shattered by a single explosive addiction but slowly strangled in the web of so many small ones. Like a grasshopper who has taken a leap into an invisible web—its trembling limbs announcing its arrival to the spider that skitters closer to weave a gossamer shroud. No longer the brilliant green leaping creature he once was, his once-strong legs now paralyzed, his big black eyes now hidden behind a film of gray.

At night I slept restlessly, the chime of my husband’s iPhone announcing the arrival of emails at regular intervals throughout the night from China and India and Europe, inquiries flagged with a red exclamation mark from corporate clients whose gushing cash flow had briefly been obstructed by a glitch in the software. In restless dreams, money was my oxygen, fed into my old and withered nostrils at the end of my life. I woke early in the morning, rose like a zombie from bed, and stumbled downstairs, summoned by the call to prayer of two lords: caffeine and the Internet. I ground coffee, set the kettle to boil, and logged on to the computer. Now my face was lit up by the dim glow of email and Facebook. The blank slate of my rested mind quickly grew cluttered with pictures of my high school boyfriend’s Hawaiian vacation, stills from YouTube videos, close-up shots of the meals distant acquaintances had eaten the night before. One friend I had never met posted cholesterol levels from yesterday’s physical exam; another posted a picture of her toddler on the toilet. Now my fingers were tapping, my mind was racing, the kettle was shrieking, the holy silence was evaporating. Here was a video of a talking shell that kept a dust mite for a pet, here was another of a white-bearded Sufi in Pakistan, here was one more of a motivational speaker whose talk about overcoming anxiety had gotten seven hundred thousand hits. I was listening to Bob Dylan, to a stand-up comedy routine, to the silence of a giraffe giving birth, to the thud of her baby falling from her womb onto to the cold, hard ground. I was racing around the world, and I was nowhere.

COME HERE,
ISMAIL
said.
Sit down.
He was in the living room. I was in the kitchen putting away the last of the dishes.
Just a second
. One more spoon to return to a drawer. One more quick wipe of the countertop. One more stack of papers to sort through and walk out to the recycling bin.

Please, come.

I sighed, put down what I was doing, and went and sat down across from him in the living room. The kids were in bed; the house rested under a blanket of silence. Ismail stared down at the Qur’an on his lap, took a deep breath, and began to recite.
Bismillah ar rahman ir rahim—
“in the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful.” His was the voice of a stranger, high and pleading. I closed my eyes and listened to the strange sound—not exactly singing or chanting but something else altogether.

Over the years I had heard the Qur’an recited only a few times before, and each time it had gotten under my skin: the sound of a human voice saturated with longing, calling out to the unseen. The first time I heard it, I recoiled like I had accidentally stumbled upon someone naked; the sound was so vulnerable it made me want to turn and flee. But when I bore witness to that expression, it broke my calcified heart wide open, releasing the floodwater of compassion usually contained by the high dam of my ego.

One night, at a Muslim banquet, I was seated in a hotel’s cavernous banquet room, at a table covered with platters of hummous and pita, halal chicken and tall glasses of iced tea. When I entered the banquet hall I had scanned that crowded room in search of a single person I might relate to, instantly discounting all those brightly covered feminine heads, women who looked to me like they belonged not just in a faraway country but in a distant century. I dismissed, too, all those dark-skinned Muslim men in their pressed slacks and buttoned-up shirts, their dark hair combed or concealed beneath skull caps, grown men who looked so neat and earnest it was as if their mothers had dressed them. I sighed. I had reluctantly agreed to come to this gathering with Ismail, expecting it would be exactly like this: no one for me to talk to, no one to giggle with me or pass the time. I smiled politely at the strangers seated around me at the banquet table, then stared down at the blank canvas of the tablecloth, rolling the ice from my water glass across my tongue and wishing it was wine. I looked surreptitiously at my watch, mentally calculating what time we’d be home and whether I would make it in time for my favorite television show.

A man from the local mosque began the program by standing at the podium to welcome everyone. His short speech was peppered with references to God as if he were the honored guest this evening. Praise be to God for the crowd gathered here tonight, and God willing we would enjoy this fine program, and in the name of God let’s listen to a recitation from the Qur’an. He stepped aside and a skinny young man strode across the stage, nearly disappearing behind the podium. Silence fell as his lips moved in silent prayer, to the hum of air-conditioning and the
clink
of silverware against porcelain. Then he took a deep breath and began to recite, and it was as if an invisible hand turned down the volume of my internal chatter while turning up the volume on his plaintive, androgynous voice. Sharp as a surgeon’s knife, this sound pierced me to the quick before I realized what was happening. Tears streamed down my cheeks; the rhythm and rhyme of his words were a turning of the knife. I felt as if I had been wandering in a desert, and his voice was water. I was parched for this sound. I gulped it in—but drinking was not enough. I wanted to pour it over my head, dive deep beneath its surface, try to touch the very bottom of this melody.

As he held the last note of his recitation, his Adam’s apple bobbed on his skinny neck like it was trying to break free—and then it was over. The sound stopped abruptly, and I came up sputtering for air. The lanky, acne-faced man at the podium bore no resemblance to the vibration that had filled the room. Looking around me, I saw a few other shining faces that told me they, too, had been drinking in this music, that we had been swimming together in the same ocean. The moment passed. A silver-haired academic took his place behind the podium and began to speak about the immigrant Muslim experience, his catalog of facts and ironclad logic like so many links in a chain locking me back into my intellectual mind after my brief foray into my boundless heart. By the time his speech was over, the recitation was a half-remembered dream. I didn’t even speak to Ismail about it on the way home.

I did not hear the Qur’an recited again until a couple of years later. One night Ismail told me about a famous reciter whose plaintive voice had been the background sound track of his youth. He found a video online and invited me to sit with him and listen. On the tiny screen, a bald old man with shining obsidian eyes began to make this noise from deep in his being—somewhere between a wail and a song, somewhere between a harmony and a howl. Tears streamed down his face as he sang, as if God were wringing him out like a washcloth. He wiped his wrinkled face in a steady motion as he continued to recite, his graceful fingers caressing his cheeks the entire time he was making this otherworldly sound, as if his hands were no longer his own, but the hands of Allah, laid upon him to grant the gift of this haunting music.