Defying Jihad

by Esther Ahmad

  “Allah!” I called out in Urdu. “Please be merciful!”

  I kept searching for an exit but stopped when I saw a single light appear in front of me, a little ways off. The closer the light came, the more clearly I could see. It shone brighter than anything I had ever seen. It was like the sun in full blaze, yet somehow I could look at it. As the light came closer, I saw that it had a face, hands, and feet. It was not just a light; it was a person. A man. And he was speaking to me.

  “Come and follow me.”

  “No!” I replied.

  “Esther, come and follow me.”

  The name this man used confused me. “I’m sorry,” I told the man made of light, “but I’m not Esther. I am Zakhira Ahmad, and I don’t want to follow you.”

  The voice was softer when it spoke for a third time. The warmth and love that flowed with the words spread deep into my skin. “My daughter, come and follow me.”

  I couldn’t say no a third time. I didn’t want to say no. I wanted to live in that voice, to inhale those words and float on them forever. As I breathed, it dawned on me that perhaps this person in my dream might actually be able to help get me out of the graveyard. Why was he calling me his daughter? I had no idea, but I decided to do as he said.

  As soon as I made that decision, the light started moving through the graveyard. I stood, transfixed, and watched his feet as he went. Every bush and stone on the path in front of him was swept away by invisible hands as soon as he approached. Wherever he stepped, the darkness faded away. And he left behind a trail of light—and not just light, but life.

  Oh! I said to myself. This light really is showing me the way out. I started to chase after him, running along the path, which was now flooded with light. When he stopped in front of a grave, I stood at his side.

  “Come out,” he said, looking into the grave. I watched, amazed, as a dead man immediately rose out of the earth. Under other circumstances, I would not have been able to take my eyes off the resurrected body, but in the dream, all I cared about was the man made of light.

  “Who are you to be giving life to dead people?” I asked.

  He turned to me. I could feel the light deep in my lungs. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he said.

  “Please, help me.” My voice sounded small. “I want to get out of this graveyard.”

  He put his hand around mine. The moment he touched me, the graveyard fell away. In its place was a sight of beauty the likes of which I had never seen before. In front of us lay an ocean of brilliant light—but solid, as if it were made of crystal. Beside us and behind us was a building whose walls were made of gold. But this was not the sort of gold I had seen in even the finest jewelry. That kind of gold was lifeless and frail, while these walls were full of life and power and light.

  When I was younger, I would sometimes turn on the tap in the bathroom and listen, enchanted, to the sound the water made as it filled up the sink. In my dream, I heard that same sound nearby, only this time it felt as though I could hear it with every cell in my body.

  The light was equally all-encompassing. Everything around me wasn’t just bathed in light; it was light. The crystal ocean, the golden walls, even the waterfall that was hidden from my view—they all seemed to pulse with light. It was as if my eyes were seeing for the very first time.

  The view before me was beyond anything I had ever seen, beyond anything I could imagine. I needed all my senses to take it in. I tried desperately to hold it in my mind, to go deeper into it, to understand what this place was.

  Then I woke up.

  The prayer room was silent. The air was still. I looked around me, reminding myself of my surroundings by looking at the familiar objects: the pile of rolled-up prayer mats, the cupboard filled with copies of the Qur’an, the window that looked out onto the courtyard. I was at home. Where I belonged.

  And yet I suddenly felt like this was not home—that there was somewhere else I longed for at the core of my being. I had received a taste of something I’d been craving for years but had never found.

  For the first time in my life, I felt peace.

  10

  As I got my bearings after waking up in the prayer room, I realized my mother was kneeling beside me in prayer. I listened as she recited the words that were as familiar to me as the threads of my own prayer mat. She finished, gently stroked my arm, and left in silence.

  In the light of morning, the dream was as real to me as it had been a few hours earlier. So, too, was the feeling of peace that had settled inside me ever since the man of light had spoken to me in the graveyard.

  I did not like it.

  Why would I feel peaceful when I had been dreaming about a graveyard—a place that everyone knows is unclean? Graveyards are never good places for Muslims to be, so why was I there?

  And why would I dream of light? Surely the light was a good sign, but would something good be found somewhere so unclean?

  I remembered the fear I had experienced at the beginning of the dream—how it felt like the darkness would consume me. But then the man made of light called that dead person out of the grave. How was that even possible? Why did he call me “Daughter,” and what was that place he took me to?

  Perhaps the thing that troubled me most was the dream itself. If it was from Allah, why would he send it to me when I was unclean?

  It was all too much. The questions gnawed at my mind like fleas in a bedsheet. I wanted them to go away. They did not seem like the sorts of questions a good Muslim would be asking a few days before she went off to fight jihad.

  And yet the peace remained. In spite of the dream and the knowledge that I was only four days away from leaving my family forever, I still felt at peace.

  †

  Thanks to Anwar’s support, my father had consented to my enrolling in college. My grades hadn’t been good enough for medicine, but I had made it into a pre-engineering course at a local university. I was enjoying my studies, though the morning of my dream, I was too unsettled to eat breakfast before I made the long walk across the city to my classes. All the traffic and people were welcome distractions from the chaos in my mind.

  Unlike most days, I didn’t find myself looking sadly at the familiar trees on my route or wondering how long it would be before my fellow students forgot about me. I quickly made my way to my first lesson and waited for the physics practical to start.

  “Hello, Zakhira,” Azia said as she sat next to me. I did not know her well, but I always looked forward to killing time with her in idle conversation while we waited for the lecturer.

  That day the conversation was anything but idle.

  “Are you okay?” Azia asked.

  “Yes. Why?” I was obviously flustered.

  “You don’t look like you usually do. You look different.”

  I tried my best to brush her off, explaining that I was just tired from an early morning. She smiled and opened her book.

  By the time the lesson began and Azia and I started our work together, my mind was once again flooded with questions. All morning I had been able to hold them back, but one comment from Azia was enough to break the whole dam.

  I worried that if Azia could tell something was different about me, others would notice too. I’d be rejected from the jihad camp, and not only would I fail to secure my and my family’s position in paradise, but I would bring shame on my parents for failing to fight fully for Allah.

  Most of all, I could not stop thinking about the light. What was it? Who was it? I didn’t think he was an angel, because he had no wings on his back. And I knew Allah wouldn’t show himself to any human being, since humans are lowly. What did he mean when he said he was the way, the truth, and the life? That strange phrase made no sense to me. Surely any messenger from Allah would have simply declared, “I am of Allah.” And why was Allah sending me a messenger at all, when I was about to die anyway?

  The most powerful image from the dream was the place where the light had taken me. Was that what heav
en looked like? There were no high-walled gardens or soft, ivory-white pillows, but it looked even more beautiful than I’d ever imagined.

  “Zakhira!” Azia nudged me in the ribs, warning me too late to stop my precarious tower of books from toppling over and crashing to the floor. The whole class turned to look at me.

  “What’s the matter today?” Azia whispered as I rearranged my side of the table.

  “Nothing,” I said automatically. Then I thought better of it. “I had a strange dream last night.” I hoped that if I said it out loud, the dream would lose some of its power.

  Azia wasn’t satisfied. “Really? What happened in it?”

  I sighed. “It was nothing, really. Just one of those strange dreams.”

  Azia let it go for a while but soon leaned in close and lowered her voice. “You seem troubled by it, though. Would you let me pray for you? Whenever I’m worried about something, I try to pray. It helps.”

  I knew all the eight prayers by heart, and none of them fit what she described. They were all about Allah’s power and judgment, not about our worries and weaknesses. “What kind of prayer do you pray?”

  “It’s a Christian prayer.”

  I recoiled. I had no idea Azia was a Christian—her name was a common enough Muslim name, and she wore a dupatta like the rest of us. I had never really met a Christian before, but I knew all about them. My mother had told me that they had rewritten the Bible, changing it from its original version. They could not be trusted, and they performed black magic. As far as I was concerned, I would do whatever I could to avoid them.

  “I don’t want you to pray for me at all,” I said. “I’m not interested in your black magic. I’m a Muslim, remember?”

  “I know,” she said, her voice cracking. “We can pray for Muslims, too.”

  “Not me. I don’t want anything like that from you—do you understand?”

  When the practical was finished, I left before Azia could say another word. My walk home from college was much worse than my trip there. Instead of being a distraction, the rickshaws and crowds were an unwelcome manifestation of all the thoughts that were crowding in on me.

  When I arrived at home, I refused the food my mother offered me. I saw my group of students for their usual afternoon tutoring, but my mind was an ocean away from the pages we were working through. Afterward I sat alone in the prayer room and then walked up to the rooftop to look out at the setting sun. Everywhere I went, everything I did, the questions swirled within me, closer than the breath in my lungs.

  Why did I have this dream?

  What does it mean?

  And why do I feel this strange peace?

  †

  When I arrived at class the next day, I made sure I was early. I didn’t want to see Azia and run the risk of her offering to pray for me again. I took my place in the lecture hall, tucking myself away in a corner and hiding my head in a book.

  My heart sank when I sensed someone approaching. Even before I looked up, I knew it was Azia.

  “Can you come outside? I want to talk to you.”

  “No.” I tried to fill my voice with the kind of strength that would communicate how serious I was but not attract attention from anyone else. “I’m waiting for class to start.”

  “But I have something I want to give you.”

  I shook my head firmly, glared at her, and went back to my book.

  Azia sat next to me. Were all Christians this unstoppable?

  She held a canvas bag in front of her, her hands grasping the handles tightly, as if whatever was inside was either fragile or extremely dangerous. “I brought these for you,” she whispered. “It’s some books and a cassette. I think they might help you understand your dream.”

  “What books?”

  She looked right at me, her mouth twitching. When she finally spoke, her voice was so quiet I could barely hear her. “One of them is part of the Bible.”

  A wave of anger surged within me. “I don’t want them!” I spit out my words like knives. “Did I ask you to bring any books in for me? Did I ask you to pray for me?”

  “No,” she said, “but I—”

  “Listen to me! I’m not interested in whatever you have in that bag. Everybody knows that the Bible has been changed anyway. Why would you think I’d be interested in reading it?”

  Azia looked away for a moment. The lecture hall was filling up, and people were starting to file into the chairs nearby. When she looked back at me, her eyes were wet and her voice was shaking with fear. “Please, Zakhira. For me, just take them. If you don’t want them, you can bring them back tomorrow. I promise I’ll take them back.”

  Her fear reminded me of my own.

  “Okay,” I said. “Put them in my bag.”

  †

  As I sat in my room later that day, having carefully placed the books and cassette at the back of my closet, it struck me that Azia was the first Christian I’d ever had a conversation with. Part of me was intrigued. I was surprised that I hadn’t known about her faith, and I admired her courage.

  Another part of me was repelled by Azia. The things my mother had told me about Christians had impacted me deeply. And I could not forget the images I had seen years earlier when I attended the madrassa. Yet somehow I couldn’t imagine Azia hurting one of my Muslim brothers or sisters. She was far too gentle for that.

  The house was empty. For a moment I thought about reaching into the closet and reading one of the books Azia had given me. What would I find in the Bible? Would it help explain my dream? Might it give me the answers I was looking for?

  My thoughts stopped dead.

  What was I thinking? I was three days away from being taken for jihad, and I was already worried enough that menstruating made me unclean. How fierce would the rage of Allah be if I let my mind be seduced by the lies of an infidel?

  I reached for the books and the cassette and ran to the kitchen, my hands tearing up the pages without even looking at them. I didn’t want to infect myself in any way. I worked fast, nervous that someone would return at any moment. Using the mortar and pestle, which smelled of garlic and ginger, I used all my strength to crush the cassette. When the bowl was a mess of plastic shards and crinkled black tape, I carefully scooped it all into the trash, along with the ripped-up pages of the books. I was careful to bury all of it deep beneath the kitchen scraps.

  As I left the kitchen, I saw a piece of paper on the floor just as someone was opening the front door. I hid the page in my dress and went back upstairs.

  Later that night, I took some matches to the bathroom and burned the page from the Bible in front of an open window. My hand was shaking as I held it. As the last embers lost their glow and the thin line along the edge faded from red to black, I thought about Anwar. What would he say if he saw me now? Would he smile at me, offering gentle encouragement? If so, why did burning the page like that feel somehow wrong, even dangerous?

  I brushed the final pieces out the window and hoped my mother was right about the Bible being distorted. If not, I feared there was even more trouble to come.

  11

  My mother’s cries woke me up the next morning. The call to prayer followed soon after, but it was the sound of my mother in pain that stirred me to action. Her heart condition had caused her discomfort for years, but recently her health had declined even further. I often found her curled up on her bed in pain or pausing, breathless, midway through some simple task. Even so, hearing her cry loudly enough to wake the entire house meant that she was experiencing a whole new level of agony.

  As the oldest daughter at home, I felt it was my duty to skip college for the day and take my mother to the hospital as soon as possible. She struggled to make it out to the street, and even stepping into the rickshaw left her clutching her side and gasping in pain.

  She did not talk much as we slid through the traffic, and I let my thoughts return once more to the plan I had been developing all morning. I decided there was no shame in admitting that my dream had t
hrown me and that it was impossible for me to ignore the questions it had left me with. It was therefore logical that I give myself some time to work it out.

  The jihad training was due to start within forty-eight hours, but if I could delay my departure for a while, I’d be able to think through the dream and suffocate my doubts once and for all. A month should be more than enough.

  Even though there were no female surgeons in the area, there was a female doctor on duty at the hospital. After examining my mother carefully, she prescribed painkillers and told her to visit the lab on the second floor to have blood drawn and tested. It was a short walk to the lab, and I had accompanied my mother on this journey more than once before. But this time was different. Her feet shuffled slowly. Every step was a battle.

  I entered the lab and found a seat for my mother. Then I called out a traditional Islamic greeting to the man with his head hidden behind a stack of papers: “As-salaam alaikum!”

  “Salaam,” he replied.

  His greeting angered me. “Excuse me?” I marched over to the desk so I could see him more clearly. “Why didn’t you greet me properly? Don’t you know that you’re supposed to reply ‘Wa-alaikum salaam’ [And may the peace and mercy and blessings of Allah be upon you]? Did you forget, or are you not really a Muslim?”

  “No,” he said, clasping his hands together in front of his chest and smiling at me. “Thank God, I’m a Christian.”

  I could not believe it—this was the second Christian I had met in the span of two days. What was going on? I decided not to let that bother me and instead to see this for what it was: an opportunity to put into practice all that Anwar and the other clerics had taught me over the years.

  I would be polite and invite him to join Islam. Once I’d made friends with him, he would feel relaxed and trust me. After that I would plant a doubt about Christianity in his mind, and then another. Soon I’d win him over—I was sure of it. And when that happened, I would know that Allah was surely with me and that my reward in heaven was secure.