The Terrorist’s Son (3 page)

Downstairs, my mother squeezes her friend Sarah's hand in solidarity, and then—drawing a deep breath as if she's diving into the ocean—walks into the mosque. Fittingly, the carpet is the blue-green of waves in sunlight. The walls are decorated with a dense, starry pattern of deep red and gold. The men in the prayer circle are seated on the rug. Some of them wear conventional Western clothing: slacks, even jeans, and button-down shirts. Others wear long, billowy shirts that hang below their knees and round, white skullcaps with needlework in blue and gold. My mother realizes that she knows the word for that sort of cap—
taqiyah
—and she repeats it in her head to calm down. The prayer circle falls silent. They turn to watch the women approach. For a few agonizing moments, the only sound is my mother's whispering and Sarah's socks on the rug.
Taqiyah,
my mother thinks.
Taqiyah, taqiyah, taqiyah
.

She recites the Shahada flawlessly, if in a quavering tone. Only then does her body finally start to relax. Her breathing grows slow and steady again. And, without thinking about whether it's proper, she steals a look at the men in the room. Her first act as a Muslim! She's a little ashamed, yes.
And yet
. One of the men is quite handsome:
he looks like an ancient Egyptian in a painting
, she thinks. She lingers half an instant too long over his bright green eyes.

Two days later, Hani tells my mother that a man from the prayer circle is interested in her and would like to meet her. There is no dating in Islam—
When a man and
a woman are alone together
, the Prophet has warned,
the third person among them is Satan
—so this can only mean he wants to marry her. Marry her! Having heard her utter no more than a dozen words! Hani assures her that the man is a friend. His name is Sayyid Nosair. He is Egyptian. Could he be the Man with the Eyes? She tries to force the thought from her mind.

Within the week, my mother meets Sayyid for the first time at the home of a Libyan couple named Omar and Rihan. Omar has been acting as her guardian because she has no real relationship with either of her parents. He has already initiated the marriage machinery: He's met with Sayyid, made inquiries about him within the community, and satisfied himself that he is a good Muslim, that he's active at the
masjid
and attends as many prayer services as he can. Now Rihan is placing a tray on the coffee table in the living room—hibiscus juice, baklava, shortbread biscuits dusted with sugar and stuffed with dates—and Sayyid is knocking on the door.

Omar goes to the door, and Rihan scurries off to get a look at the visitor. My mother sits nervously on the couch. She hears Omar and Sayyid offer each other peace: her guardian saying,
“Asalaam alaykum,”
her suitor responding more generously than is necessary,
“Wa alaykum assalam wa rahmatu Allah.”
He is trying to make a good impression, my mother thinks. She smiles to herself, a passage from the Qur'an fresh in her memory:
When a greeting is offered, you answer it with an
even better greeting, or (at least) with its like. Allah keeps account of all things.

Rihan scurries back into the living room ahead of the men—she's more nervous than my mother—and adjusts the cookies. “So
handsome
,” she whispers. “And such green-green eyes!”

Within two minutes of sitting down with my mother, my father says shyly, “I guess you know I'm here to talk about marriage.”

In Egypt, my father studied engineering and industrial design, specializing in metals. He is creative. He can design a ship as easily as a necklace. Though he has been in the States less than a year, he's found a job at a jeweler's, where—a few days after meeting my mother—he draws and casts an engagement ring. He spares no expense. The ring is beautiful and heavy. When my mother sees it, her eyes go wide.

•  •  •

My parents marry on June 5, 1982, ten days after meeting for the first time. Such a short courtship sounds ominous, I know—like the prelude to what could only be a tragedy. But the Western world's routine of sex, love, and marriage—which generally arrive in that order—has yielded its share of misery and divorce. Isn't it possible that some other set of rituals and expectations,
any
other set, might work? My mother and father are happy for a time. Truly. My mother has found a man who can teach her Arabic and deepen her understanding of Islam.
A devout man. A loving and spontaneous man. A man who loved my sister at first sight—who got down on the floor to play with her the moment they met. My father is striking and painfully thin because he's been living in a boardinghouse where he's not allowed to cook. His English is already near perfect, if a bit stately. He has a touch of an Arabic accent. Occasionally, he misspeaks, but the effect is usually comical. He loves spaghetti and meatballs, but refers to it as “spaghetti and balls meat.” My mother can't help but laugh at this. He isn't offended. “You are my heart,” he tells her. “It is right that you should correct me.”

By July, my father has found his new family an apartment in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh. My mother feels buoyant for the first time in years. The neighborhood is bustling with culture and full of students like her. Rihan and Omar live close by. The
masjid
is just a couple of blocks away. My mother and father go shopping arm in arm for food and decorations for the apartment. She asks him what kinds of things he likes. “I like everything you like,” he tells her. “You are the queen of our home, and I want you to arrange everything as you like. If you are happy with everything you pick, I will love it, too.”

I am born in March 1983, and my brother a year later. When I'm three, Baba takes me to the Kennywood Amusement Park. On the Dizzy Dynamo, we spin around in giant cups. And on the Grand Carousel, we ride the painted horses: my father chooses a gold stallion
that glides up and down, while I cling to the neck of a stationary brown pony. Later in the day, on a miniature roller coaster called Lil' Phantom, my father pretends to be terrified—“O Allah, protect me and deliver me to my destination!”—to distract me from the fact that
I
actually
am
terrified. I will always remember this day. It is my earliest memory. Not even the coming nightmares will blot it out.

•  •  •

My father does not harden against America overnight. His bitterness builds slowly, coaxed along by random encounters with ugliness and misfortune. At the mosque, my mother starts helping Rihan with
da‘wa
—the campaign to bring new converts to the faith. They don't go door to door or proselytize on the street; they meet with visitors at the
masjid
, educate them about Islam, and answer the sort of questions that my mother herself once had. Many of the visitors are young American women. Girls, really. Some come to the mosque not because they're on a spiritual journey but because they've fallen in love with a Muslim man. Still, enough genuinely curious seekers come through the doors of the mosque—and ultimately convert—to make my mother's work with Rihan fulfilling. Sometimes, if the women have nowhere to stay, my family offers them a bed.

Which turns out to be a mistake. In the fall of 1985, my family welcomes a young woman named Barbara into our home. (I've changed her name, since she's not
here to offer her own version of what follows.) Barbara is sullen and erratic, and looks no one in the eyes. She stays with us for months. Barbara doesn't seem to be truly interested in Islam. Her sister is checking out the religion to make her boyfriend happy, and Barbara is just tagging along. She radiates such an uncomfortable energy that it's hard even to sit in the same room with her.

Soon, she is hanging around with what my parents warn her is “a really bad crowd of Muslims” from another neighborhood. My mother tries to marry Barbara off twice, and twice Barbara is rejected after a single meeting. Her self-esteem plummets. She starts sitting in the tub, fully clothed, and crying in the middle of the night. She accuses us, all of us, of stealing her clothes from her room—clothes no Muslim could wear, let alone a child. My father insists that she move out. She does. Less than a week later—apparently acting on advice from her new Muslim friends, who think she might be able to make some money off my family—she accuses my father of raping her.

There is a rapist loose in Pittsburgh at the moment. Some of his victims have described him as “either Hispanic or Middle Eastern.” The police take Barbara's allegation with the utmost seriousness. By the time a lawyer friend of my family convinces them that the woman has invented the story, my father has been flattened by fear and humiliation. He has stopped getting into bed with my mother at night. He's parked his prayer rug by the radiator in the living room, and curled into
a ball on top of it. He has stopped eating. All he does is sleep and pray for his safety. Even the members of the mosque don't know who to believe—they seem to be split down the middle, as far as my mother can tell—which intensifies my father's pain until it's like a tumor growing in his stomach. A hearing is held at the
masjid
. The mosque's board members are alarmed by the dissent in their midst, and want to settle the matter themselves. They do not trust the American justice system anyway.

My mother will describe the scene at the mosque for me many years later: Barbara arrives with her sister, her sister's boyfriend, and a volatile crowd of Muslim friends. The tension is prickly enough that a fight breaks out. My father sits silently, his head lowered, his hands clutching his knees. Barbara repeats her accusations—my father raped her and my family stole her clothes—and demands restitution. My mother's heart breaks for her husband. To have his devotion to Allah questioned in his own mosque!

A board member asks Barbara to describe my father's body.

“Hairy,” she says. “Hairy chest. Hairy back.
Hairy
.”

My mother barks out a laugh.

My father springs to his feet. He addresses the board: “Would you like me to take my shirt off
right now
so you can see what a liar this woman is?” As fate would have it, his body does not conform to the Middle Eastern stereotype.

My father is told it will not be necessary for him
to disrobe. The board members are convinced of his innocence. To settle the matter, they give Barbara $150 for the clothes she insists were taken. She seems pleased. She and her retinue sweep out of the mosque. As if her lack of respect for Islam wasn't clear enough, she has worn her shoes inside the mosque the entire time.

•  •  •

My parents try to rebuild their lives in Pittsburgh, but the pieces won't go back together. For my father, the mortification has been too great. Sadness and exhaustion hang in the air. My mother is too frightened to do outreach anymore. My father cannot face his friends from the
masjid
. Or anyone else, really. He works. He grows thinner. My only memory of him from this time is of him kneeling on his prayer rug in the living room, doubled over in prayer or pain or both.

In July, we move away from Pittsburgh, and—for a while—our lives are filled with light again. My mother teaches first grade at an Islamic school in Jersey City. My father can no longer find work as a jeweler, but he gets a job at a company that installs stage lighting, and becomes pleasantly pudgy from my mother's cooking. They grow closer and closer. The Egyptian community in the city is a marvel: there are Arabic stores everywhere, and men in tunics and women in
hijab
flow through the streets en masse. Our new mosque, Masjid Al-Shams, doesn't have all the activities for women and families that my mother is used to, but we go regularly for prayers. (I've changed the name of the mosque out of respect for its current congregation.) After work, my father picnics with us in the park. He plays baseball and soccer with me in the yard—or a preschool version of it, anyway. A true calm descends on the family. And then one day the principal of the school where my mom teaches calls her into his office, and tells her that everything's okay, not to worry, it's going to be fine, but he's just received a call: My father has been in an accident at work. He's at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York.

Baba's been electrocuted. He'll recover, but the shock
was sufficient to burn his hand, which was holding a screwdriver, throw him off a ladder, and knock him unconscious. He undergoes surgery. The dead skin is laboriously peeled away, and skin from his thigh grafted on to his hand. My father is taught how to care for his burns, and sent back home to recover with pain meds, as well as a prescription for an unpredictable, heavy-duty antidepressant. He cannot work. Being able to support his family has always been critical to him as a man and as a Muslim.

Though the family can get by on my mother's salary and food stamps, shame spreads through his body like a drop of red dye in water. My mother sees that he's suffering, but Baba is beyond her reach. In many ways, his behavior mirrors the way he acted during the rape allegation. This time, though, my father just doesn't pray obsessively, he pores endlessly over the Qur'an. Even when he can work again—he gets the job maintaining the heat and air-conditioning at the courthouse in Manhattan—he is more inward than ever. He goes to Masjid Al-Shams constantly, praying, listening to lectures, and going to mysterious meetings. The mosque initially seemed moderate, but it has grown into one of the most fundamentalist in the city—which explains why my mother doesn't feel particularly welcome there as a woman, and why there's an anger in the air there that we've never experienced before. It also explains why my father is growing palpably less tolerant of non-Muslims. My mother brings my sister, my brother, and
me to family activities at the Islamic Center above my sister's school, but Baba will not come with us: suddenly, he doesn't approve of the imam there. At home, he still has moments of warmth with us kids, but there's an increasing number of times when he looks
through
us, not
at
us—when he's just a figure brushing by us, clutching a Qur'an. One day, I innocently ask when he became such a devout Muslim, and he tells me, with a new edge in his voice, “When I came to this country and saw everything that was wrong with it.”