My Accidental Jihad (4 page)

H
eaving my eighth-month belly before me, I hurried past the bright storefronts of the mall, holding on to Ismail’s arm with my ringless left hand and barely noticing the curious stares of shoppers who looked away sheepishly when they caught my gaze. In our small southern town, we presented a strange picture: a tall, very pregnant blue-eyed blonde in her twenties, led by a balding, dark-skinned middle-aged man with a discernible accent. I waddled on swollen ankles as quickly as I could; I was running out of time. We had driven straight to this mall from our obstetrician’s office, after her eyes had widened in surprise during my pelvic exam. “It looks like this baby is coming sooner than we expected,” she said. “Do you have everything you need at home?”

She rolled back her stool and peeled off her latex gloves, revealing the largest diamond ring I had ever seen. I stared at her hand, briefly imagining that glittering gem on my own finger, then shot a nervous glance at Ismail. The only evidence in our house that we were expecting a baby was the checkered blue bassinet in the corner of the bedroom, which we had recently purchased at a yard sale. From the moment I had discovered, to my great surprise, that I was pregnant, it felt like we had been scrambling to catch up with reality as it unfolded. I’d imagined we would spend the final month of my pregnancy preparing a nursery, but now it appeared we might not have that time.

“We’ve got everything we need,” Ismail replied with calm conviction, as if he truly believed that all a newborn needed was a mother’s milk and a father’s gentle hands. “Well, we
are
missing diapers,” he added, then flashed me a nervous smile.

“Pick some up on your way home,” the doctor said briskly. “Krista’s cervix is already dilating; just a few centimeters more and she’ll be in labor.”

As Ismail drove to the nearest mall, I rested my head against the window and recited a jumbled and increasingly panicked list of purchases we needed to make before my cervix yawned open another few centimeters: a crib and a changing table, a soft cotton layette and a tiny wardrobe, plush animals and hypoallergenic detergent, and a musical mobile to soothe our baby to sleep.

With one hand on the wheel and the other resting over mine in my lap, Ismail tried to reassure me. “We’ll be fine—
Insha Allah
.” he said, rolling that rhyming, openmouthed Arabic phrase across his tongue, the soothing murmur he added to any statement involving the future. I knew it meant “God willing,” and normally I found it endearing, but today it exasperated me. God wasn’t going to prepare our nursery; God wouldn’t help us pick out baby clothes.

“My mother gave birth to thirteen babies—each time at home—without any of those things,” he reminded me. I stared out the window and chewed the inside of my cheek. In the childhood memories he had shared with me from North Africa, the sound of his mother in labor was as familiar and constant as the sound of his Muslim father’s call to prayer. He’d told me this one night recently on our drive home from birthing class, where he had stared blankly at the words our birthing instructor wrote in capital letters on a chalkboard:
BIRTH IS A NATURAL PROCESS
.
He’d glanced around at the expectant parents jotting notes on either side of him, then back at me with a baffled expression that said,
What else could birth possibly be?
But he had also told me that his mother had lost one of his siblings during birth, and four more had died in infancy or early childhood—facts that were so utterly incomprehensible to me that I had sputtered “What?” and stared and made him repeat himself.

At the mall, we made a beeline toward the drugstore, where we knew we’d find the essentials we needed. As we passed a jewelry shop, Ismail tugged me spontaneously toward the door. “You need a ring to wear into the delivery room,” he announced, squeezing my hand.

Throughout my pregnancy I had insisted I didn’t care about a ring, but when he pulled me toward the glass countertop and I looked down at row after row of glittering diamonds resting on blue velvet, I knew I had lied to both of us. My heart leapt with awe and anticipation, like a child’s on Christmas morning. For as long as I could remember, from movies, television, and magazines, I had known that only diamonds reflected the brilliant white light of true love. Over and over again I’d seen images of a beautiful woman’s eyes shining with gratitude and awe when a man presented her with a sparkling ring at least as precious and enduring as her own devotion.

It was a stretch to imagine us as beautiful or radiantly happy as couples on commercials seemed to be. Actors on the screen fit together like two pieces of a perfect human puzzle; Ismail and I, on the other hand, kept bumping against one another’s rough edges as we struggled to make our lives fit together.

Our relationship had been gestating along with the baby; for these past nine months we’d been getting to know one another in the waiting room of the obstetrician’s office, at birthing class, while unpacking the boxes that contained everything I owned in his small home. During these turbulent months, the evidence had been rapidly mounting in my life that fairy-tale endings only happened in picture books. There would be no Prince Charming to sweep me away into happily ever after, only this gentle and maddening Libyan man who was totally committed to the hard labor of making a home and raising a family with me. But a small voice deep inside still insisted that the jagged pieces would fit together if I wore a sparkling gem on my finger.

I scanned the display case hungrily, my gaze landing on a square diamond in an antique platinum setting: not big enough to be ostentatious nor small enough to inspire pity. Its classic setting evoked a certain nostalgia, a purchased connection to the past. Its shimmering white platinum looked virginal, pristine. Everything about it suited me; it was perfect. The jeweler slid the case gently open in one smooth motion, as if trying not to wake me from a sleepwalking dream. Instead of handing the ring directly to me, he placed it suggestively in Ismail’s upturned palm. This was Ismail’s cue to act out the longstanding middle-class American courtship ritual.

When Ismail turned to me and slipped the ring onto my outstretched finger, the bright fluorescent lights of the jewelry store turned fuzzy and soft, the water in my ankles seemed to recede, and even his thinning hair seemed to curl with new vigor. I held my hand up to the light and saw an appendage transformed: my fingers slender, elegant, finally all grown up. Ismail was absolutely right: I needed this diamond in the delivery room—more than Ismail’s comforting touch, a supportive midwife, or my own deep, measured breaths.

“It’s very beautiful,” murmured the jeweler in a near whisper, as if it were the face of my newborn.

“How much?” broke in Ismail gruffly, in a voice loud enough for everyone in the store to hear, the voice of a man who was wide awake. The jeweler told him the price. An explosion of air burst through Ismail’s lips: somewhere between a cough and guffaw. He fixed the salesman with a broad smile that said,
Let’s stop messing around and get serious now, shall we?

“Listen: I will pay you
half
that, in
cash
, and I plan to take this ring home with me
tonight
,” Ismail announced loudly, pounding the glass countertop with his index finger.

Silence fell as the jeweler tried to figure out how to respond. Nearby shoppers glanced furtively over at us, unsure if they were witnessing a negotiation or a holdup.

I gasped, as if water had been thrown in my face. I was painfully aware of the curious stares of other shoppers, suddenly aware, too, of the bloated fingers of my own raised hand in this harsh light, my borrowed maternity shirt creeping up to reveal the orb of my enormous belly and the stretched elastic band of my borrowed maternity pants. In the blink of an eye, Ismail had transformed my glittering fantasy of happily ever after into a nightmare of public shame.

This was not the first time Ismail’s bartering had made me intensely uncomfortable. It had happened a few weeks prior, in a cavernous rug store that smelled of incense and damp wool. A Turkish shopkeeper had unrolled a carpet with a flick of his wrist: the perfect size and color for the hallway between our bedroom and what we hoped would become our nursery. Ismail and I had looked from the rug to one another in wordless agreement; this was just the piece we were looking for, at a price we could afford. I turned toward the cash register and dug into my purse for a credit card, expecting Ismail to load our purchase into the car.

I glanced back just in time to see him pat the shopkeeper on the back and ask, with a broad smile, what he
really
intended to charge us for the carpet. The shopkeeper’s eyes widened briefly in surprise, and then he smiled at Ismail as if he had just recognized a long-lost friend, even as he began to shake his head back and forth in emphatic disagreement. It was as if both men had stepped onto an invisible stage—their gestures suddenly larger, their expressions more melodramatic. For the next few minutes they hurled prices back and forth—their voices rising in anger, dropping in concession, then rising again in disbelief—until finally, smacking his palm against his forehead, the shopkeeper consented to Ismail’s price. He rolled up the rug while I stood behind Ismail feeling sheepish, flashing the shopkeeper apologetic looks and grappling with the temptation to slip him more money. The men loaded the rug into our car and shook hands. Then Ismail gestured toward my swollen belly. “Now what do you intend to give us as a present for our new baby?” he asked casually.

The shopkeeper chuckled, shook his head, and invited us back inside. He dug into a tall stack of carpets, unfolding a small brown rug intricately woven with blood red and fiery orange like the setting sun. He folded the rug and handed it to me with great sincerity and warmth, asking me to promise to return to the store after the baby arrived so he could hold our newborn.

In my family, talking about money, like talking about sex, was considered vulgar. We knew that cash, like body fluids, was exchanged behind closed doors, and we even intuited that these transactions were the unspoken foundation of our lives, but we never discussed them openly—and we certainly never made a spectacle of ourselves in public.

But this time was far worse: he was corrupting what should have been one of the most significant memories of my life—the moment a diamond ring was slipped onto my finger. It was bad enough that I had to witness the purchase; to stand by as he haggled, tossing out numbers and pointing out the ring’s flaws, was unbearable. The jewelry store salesman repeated his price. Ismail rolled his eyes and flicked his wrist in the air as if swatting away a fly.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. For
this
ring?
Th
is
tiny diamond? Come on, we both know how inflated diamond prices are!”

He pulled the ring from my finger and placed it onto the glass countertop with a decisive
plink,
reached for my arm, and turned to leave. Just before we made it through the doorway, the jeweler called after us. We turned around, and he gestured impatiently for us to meet him in the back corner of the store for a private conference. Speaking in a low murmur and glancing around to make sure no other customers heard his offer, he reduced the price by thirty percent. Speechless, I stared at him: in all my years of wandering through malls, never once had I imagined that the numbers on price tags were negotiable.

Ismail nodded immediately in agreement—this was exactly what he had been expecting—and shook the man’s hand. I left the store wearing a diamond ring that now appeared exactly thirty percent smaller on my finger, as if it, too, had shrunk in embarrassment. One day, I imagined, this child I was carrying might run her fingers over the sharp edges of this jewel. “Tell me the story of how my dad gave it to you,” she would say, and curl into the crook of my arm, wide-eyed with anticipation of a romantic tale. What would I tell her about this day? We left the jewelry store, stopped by the drugstore, then wove through the parking lot back to our car. With diapers under one arm and my hand in his, Ismail beamed like a man returning to his cave with fresh meat from the hunt, like a warrior who had just protected his beloved from a band of marauders, like a man who felt that he was truly blessed.

I
smail was not interested in a bachelor party or a ring for himself or a honeymoon. He had only request: for this marriage to be blessed in Islam.

I peppered him with questions. Would a ceremony have to be done in a mosque? Whom should we invite? What would we wear? He shook his head. It did not have to be done in a mosque—in fact, he would prefer for it to be done in the countryside, in an overgrown field beneath the endless blue sky. His only request was for Surah al-fatiha, the opening prayer of the Qur’an, to be recited before at least two witnesses. I couldn’t understand why this was so important—and in fact, it seemed almost superstitious to me—but it was an easy request to fulfill. All I needed to do was stand with him and two friends under the open sky and let Arabic tickle my ears like a gentle breeze. When he offered to translate the prayer, I politely declined, only half joking that as long as I didn’t understand it I could not be held responsible for any promises made that day.

We invited the only Muslim couple we knew in town, Jamal and Maryam, along with our non-Muslim friend Jim. My mountain biking partner and one of my first friends in North Carolina, Jim was an investment manager, a triathlete, and a spiritual seeker who tackled the enterprise of enlightenment like it was a start-up company—launching a new practice from the ground up in a burst of creativity and ambition, then cutting ties and starting over when he was struck with a new and better idea for salvation. His dual passions were to make money and to know God. He had piercing blue eyes, a prematurely receding hairline, and an ironic smile, and his strenuous workout regimen made him glow with the luminosity of the enlightened or the extremely fit.

His ramshackle home at the end of a dirt road in the country was covered in Middle Eastern rugs and floor pillows. Mountain bikes hung from the ceiling. When I visited, he invited me to select from a cabinet bursting with teas from all over the world. He poured boiling water from a sea green kettle whose spout was the mouth of a dragon, whose nostrils flared twin plumes of steam. Seated on floor pillows and cradling our steaming cups, we had animated conversations about spiritual teachers who offered the shortest path to God, or concepts for a new stock option he swore would make him rich. On our bikes in the woods, he raced up hills reciting Rumi poems that drifted back to me in fragments, then flew down steep winding trails and skidded abruptly to a halt, dropping his bike and falling to his stomach in the dirt to examine wild ginger plants almost totally concealed beneath ivy.

Jim studied with a a Sufi teacher in town known as Shaykh who had a handlebar mustache, a gray cottonball of a ponytail at the base of his neck, and a belly that spilled from the ornately embroidered vests he wore with jeans. He and his wife lived in an apartment complex beside the train tracks, among undocumented workers and Burmese refugees, but could usually be found lounging in front of the local health food store, drinking black coffee and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Each week Shaykh gave teachings at a local hookah bar covered with floor pillows and faded Persian rugs that smelled of patchouli and musty wool. The owner was a towering Moroccan who walked all over town in leather sandals with an ornately embroidered satchel bouncing against his back. Fluent in Arabic, he sat at Shaykh’s side, translating his teachings to a hodgepodge crowd that drifted in from the darkened street.

On nights when Shaykh taught, the cafe filled with spiritual seekers with ADD like me and Jim—middle-class Americans shopping for a spiritual path that would offer instant enlightenment with no up-front investment. A doe-eyed hippie whose bangles jingled like spare change swished through the door in a floral skirt that swept the floor. Dark-skinned men clustered in the doorway in a nicotine cloud, chatting in Arabic and sucking the last long drag from their cigarettes. A few Muslims would sit straight-backed at the edge of the gathering, looking well groomed, disoriented, and slightly uncomfortable, as if they had showed up at the wrong party. Jim showed up a few minutes after the lecture began because he’d lost track of time while surfing the Internet or working out or engrossed in a discussion with friends over a cold beer in the bar next door. He squeezed in at the front and turned his radiant, tanned face to his teacher, surreptitiously checking his triathlete watch as Shaykh droned on in Arabic.

Back then I thought all I had to do to know God was lounge on pillows with friends, drinking strong, sweet tea, or spin like a dervish in a long flowing skirt. The god I liked best did not require me to pray or perform acts of service, go to the church or the mosque, or change any aspect of myself. It was as if he had given this strange little gathering a special pass, granted us VIP access, exempted us from Islam’s tedious requirements of five daily prayers, fasting, study, or self-examination. A few years later, amid rumors of sexual improprieties among Shaykh’s close circle, Shaykh and his translator left abruptly for Morocco and never returned. The once-bustling hookah bar locked its doors, and his followers, who had once greeted one another with radiant smiles and long, meaningful hugs, now split into factions—those who believed the rumors and those who did not—and avoided eye contact when they passed one another on the street, like onetime lovers now ashamed of their late-night hungers and misguided vulnerabilities.

On the day Jamal was to read the Fatiha to bless our union, Ismail and I stood in an overgrown field beneath a towering walnut tree. It was spring in North Carolina, the time when trees exploded with pink blossoms and everything green looked as if it had been plugged into an electric socket. Maryam loaned me a gauzy white tunic, pants, and a flowing embroidered scarf. Jamal wore a white tunic, too—buttoned high on his neck, like a chef’s jacket—and a black beret which made him look like a French painter. We walked out to the middle of a field and stood beside a towering oak, the sound of traffic humming in the distance. Jim stood beside Jamal, wearing a suit and an ironic smile, his eyes hidden behind wraparound sport sunglasses whose lenses reflected my image back to me, blurry and small.

We stood in a tight circle, the overgrown grass tickling our ankles. Maryam gave me a bouquet of multicolored roses wrapped in brown paper, which I cradled to my chest like a newborn. My hands rested on Ismail’s palms—whose warmth always surprised me, as if they were heated by some mysterious source. I had fallen in love with those hands first, before I loved the rest of him, because his touch made me feel like my veins ran with syrup, sweet and slow. Jamal began to recite from the Qur’an, and because I could not understand the words, I listened instead to his baritone voice rising and falling with rhythm and rhyme that fluttered over our heads and drifted away on the breeze. I looked into Ismail’s eyes and knew that I could never claim ignorance about this vow; in the bottomless black of his pupils, I read the translation of each syllable that washed over me. No spoken word or written signature was required; my unwavering gaze was my promise.