The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  I sit down in a circle of six-year-olds as they chant:

  Iqraa bi ismi rubika althee huliqa

  Huliqa Al-Insan min Aliqin

  Iqraa warubuka alikram

  Althee alm bi qulum

  Alim Al-Insan ma lam yalam

  Read! In the name of the Lord who created

  Created man out of a clot of blood

  Read! That the Lord is bountiful

  He who taught the use of the pen

  Taught man that which he did not know.

  Six years old. When I was their age, I was busy taking gymnastics lessons and riding a bicycle with training wheels. When they finish reciting, I stand up and make my way toward the door leading to the second floor. After a few steps, I am intercepted by some of the young pigtailed girls, only one of them old enough to wear the headscarf.

  “What’s your name?” they ask me, shyly.

  “Stephanie.”

  “Are you here to memorize the Quran?”

  “No,” I answer. “I’m the new English teacher.”

  One of the girls pulls a package of potato chips from her bag, opens it, and offers them to me. I take one.

  “How many chapters of the Quran have you memorized?” she asks.

  “None.” I am a little ashamed to admit this, for I already sense that there is status attached to how many Quranic chapters you know, and in some childish way I want in on it.

  In the youngest circles, there are a few small boys, the sons of teachers, allowed in the women’s mosque only because they are much too small to worry themselves with the presence of girls in the room. Noor motions for me to wait for a moment. She walks across the room toward me, and on the way plucks one of the boys from his circle and leads him to stand in front of me.

  He is small and very shy, his hair in a bowl cut, his dark eyes staring down at the floor.

  “Ahmed is our best student,” Noor says, patting him on the shoulder. “He memorized the Quran when he was only six. Now he is learning the entire book over again, with tajwid.”

  It strikes me that many Muslims do not learn tajwid in their entire lifetimes. “How old is he now?”

  “Eight.”

  I nod my head to him, signaling him to begin, and stand and listen as he recites verses from the story of the Virgin Mary. He closes his eyes, and the words begin flowing out in a torrent, too quickly for me to understand all of them, rising and falling, his voice holding the last note in each line. He is chanting, singing the verses.

  When he finishes, he looks up at me, with that face of his as young and clear and innocent as the moon. I think, How will I ever read this book in the same way again, knowing it is held within the body of this singular child?

  15.

  THE SHEIKHA IS WAITING FOR ME in her office upstairs, with teachers swarming around her as she answers the phone, balances trays of coffee on her arm, and engages in several conversations at once. I love that the Sheikha is at every moment both a teacher and a mother, caught up in being a spiritual guide while simultaneously lamenting, “Eat! Eat! You haven’t touched your cake!” This is one of the most endearing elements of the women’s mosque. It feels like such a holy place, and at the same time vaguely like an Arab woman’s kitchen.

  When she sees me she manages to keep everything in her hands and still lean over to kiss me on both of my cheeks. She introduces me to the others. “This is Istifanee, and she will be the new English teacher.” They all put their hands on their hearts in a gesture of respect or lean forward to take my hand.

  The Sheikha gives me the flimsy green textbooks I will use to teach my class: The Book of Islam in English.

  “I can’t read it,” she says, apologizing for the fact that she can’t read English. “But can you tell me if the textbook is appropriate?”

  I sit down among the dozen other women crowded into her office and flip through the book. My class is designed to help Muslim students already proficient in English talk about their faith. But even for them this text will be a challenge. It is a difficult intermediate text designed to explain Islam in English to non-Muslims considering conversion. The book has clearly been written after September 11 and with feminist critics in mind. Chapters clarify the role of women in Islam, the difference between jihad and terrorism, the role of the family. Over all, it seems a rather liberal text.

  It is only then, in flipping through the first chapter again, that I notice a detail I had overlooked. In a section on the most commonly asked questions about Islam, the author of the book poses the hypothetical question, “My friends and family tell me that I can be saved outside of Islam. Is that true?”

  The answer given is uncompromising: though our friends and family may balk at a conversion to Islam, on the Day of Judgment, non-Muslims will certainly be sentenced to hellfire.

  I become nervous. I know her stance on non-Muslims, but I have experienced that only privately. I take a deep breath. At her desk, the Sheikha is busy writing down the names of the dozens of girls interested in studying English. I stand in front of her hesitantly.

  “How is the book?” she asks, still writing down names.

  “It’s not bad. The topics look interesting: women in Islam, the family, jihad…”

  “Ma’shallah,” she says approvingly.

  “There’s only one problem…”

  She raises an eyebrow.

  “In the first chapter, it teaches that all non-Muslims will go to hell on the Day of Judgment,” I begin, shifting from foot to foot. “I don’t think I’ll be able to teach that.”

  She looks at me for a moment, trying to register what I have just told her. I know that she has placed an enormous trust in me by allowing me to be here, that in mosques in many places, non-Muslims are not even permitted inside, much less asked to become teachers. Then, slowly, her lips turn upward. She begins to laugh, softly at first, and then louder and louder, until the women around her can scarcely suppress their giggles.

  She stands up with a majestic air and announces to the room, “Listen to this! Stephanie looked at the book on Islam in English, and in the first lesson, it says that non-Muslims are going to hell. And she said she can’t teach that, because… she’s a Christian!”

  The room erupts into laughter at her punch line. “Oh, you poor girl!” someone calls out. I manage a shy and awkward smile.

  When it quiets down again, the Sheikha turns to me and says softly, “You know I believe that others can go to heaven provided that they follow what is in their own holy books. God is Rabb al-Alameen, the Lord of the Worlds, not Rabb al-Muslimeen, the God of Muslims.”

  Cool water is what her voice sometimes sounds like to me. I walk to the other side of the mosque, breathing again, the pile of books in my hands.

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK my students begin filing into the back of my classroom, one after another, each of them approaching me individually and shyly introducing themselves. “As-Salamu Aleykum, Peace be upon you, Teacher,” they say, half in Arabic, half in English.

  “Wu Aleykum Salaam, Please don’t call me Teacher,” I respond. “Call me by my name.”

  The classroom for Islam in English is not a classroom at all but an empty corner of the women’s section on the second floor of the mosque, with windows overlooking the main hall where the men gather to pray. At the beginning of class, the muezzin recites the call to prayer, and the sound empties from the speakers above our heads into the room and onto the streets around the mosque. Some of the students excuse themselves and prostrate in the corner in prayer.

  Most of my students are between twelve and twenty years old, and unlike the children with vibrant clothes I saw downstairs, they all wear the exact same white headscarves tucked firmly beneath their chins, the same long tan-colored coats, and skirts that reach down to their ankles. Only their faces are all distinctly different, almost all without makeup, glowing. From the color of their eyes, I can imagine what they might look like in the privacy of their homes, with their hair unfastened.

  W
e do not have tables or chairs. I sit on a cushion on the floor, my legs crossed, in front of a small wooden table with a Quran placed on the side of it. In front of me, twenty girls sit on the floor in a semicircle, staring at me intently. I ask the girls their names, and then ask them how many of them have memorized the entire Quran. About two-thirds raise their hands. It is incredible, the patience it must take to memorize some five hundred pages of Arabic. I can’t even remember my own phone number.

  I reach into my bag and hand out sheets entitled “The Five Pillars of Islam,” on which I have neatly written the basic principles of the faith in English: the Profession of Faith, prayer five times a day, fasting during Ramadan, paying charity, and the pilgrimage to Mecca for all those who can afford it. We review the material, beginning with the first pillar and moving down the page.

  Noor taps on my shoulder. “Teacher? What is the Profession of Faith in English?”

  I respond hesitantly, realizing that, technically speaking, to say the words of the shahadeh out loud is enough to officially make me a Muslim. “I witness that there is no God but God, and that Mohammed is the messenger of God.”

  All of the girls begin copying the sentence obediently.

  “So Rasul means ‘messenger’ in English?” Noor persists.

  “Yes,” I say, carefully. “But it is a little more complicated than that. In Arabic, a Rasul is a prophet who receives a holy book from God, like Moses and Mohammed. But in English, a messenger can be anyone. The mailman is a messenger. When you’re on your computer corresponding with and sending e-mails to your friends, you might use Instant Messenger. And a message can also be anything. It can be a book sent by God, or it can be a note written down by your sister reminding you to return a phone call.”

  The girls seem uncomfortable, particularly that the mailman carries the same title as the prophet Mohammed in English. I make a mental note not to tell them that New York City can be called a “shopping Mecca.”

  It is the first of many difficult questions, and I soon realize that I am not as prepared as I had anticipated. I stumble over whether Muslims fast from dawn to dusk or sunrise to sunset and whether they are required to pay a charity or a tax. I can’t remember if the Profession of Faith is the name Muslims give to their statement of beliefs or the name Catholics give when they recite the Nicene Creed during Mass. I can’t fathom the English names for the prayer positions in Islam, and after one of the students demonstrates all of them we finally settle on bowing, kneeling, and prostrating. I have spent years studying what Muslims believe, but I have not even grasped the basics of what they do.

  We arrive at the final pillar, the hajj to Mecca, and Noor asks again what hajj means in English.

  “It means ‘pilgrimage,’” I say, sighing at the gap between the word and its translation. “But again, a pilgrimage can be a journey to any special place, to Rome, to the village where you were born, to visit the grave of a poet you love. To make a pilgrimage is simply to travel with a special purpose in mind.” The mystics say that the greatest pilgrimage is into our own heart.

  “So there’s no special word for the pilgrimage to Mecca?”

  “Hajj,” I answer. “We just say hajj.”

  I am tempted to tell them that there is a certain tragedy in translation: the sense of diluting what was once a powerful drink, of tearing a small plant from its roots and trying to place it in a soil and climate where it does not belong. Arabic is so exact, the vocabulary so vast and specific, that each thing takes on its own world of associations, nuances, suchness. In English, the concepts of the holy merge so quickly with those of the mundane, the prophets with the postmen, the pilgrims making a journey to Mecca with the passengers on the Mayflower. There is a sacred space in the Arabic language where only the holy can live.

  Wa’fa, a shy, soft-spoken girl in her early twenties with a quiet round face and pale green eyes, asks me, “What does it mean, to have faith?”

  It takes me aback. “I suppose,” I say, “it means to believe in something that you don’t see.” Then I reconsider for a moment. To have faith is not the same as believing in ghosts.

  “Why don’t you make some sentences, beginning with ‘I have faith’?” I suggest to them.

  The girls nod.

  “I have faith that God created the sky.”

  “I have faith that the Quran is the word of God.”

  “I have faith that on the last day, God will ask what I have done right and what I have done wrong and will judge me with justice.”

  “I have faith that beside me there are two angels, one on my left shoulder and one on my right shoulder.”

  I look at them, answering me so earnestly. I have no business, really, knowing these intimacies. I will not tell them mine. That this question—What is faith?—is the raft I have spent my whole year clinging to in the midst of rough waters.

  I look up again. Some of my students are taking notes, others glancing at the clock. The hour has passed without my noticing it. I fold up my notebook, and as the girls prepare to leave, I have a thought and hold the class for a minute longer.

  “In English, we often use the expression ‘have faith.’ If ever any situation seems hopeless, without a way to escape, you might hear someone say to another, ‘Have faith. Things will only get better.’”

  There is a look of recognition on their faces, and we smile at one another. Have faith, they all say softly. I watch them as they leave the class, repeating the phrase over and over to themselves: Have faith. Have faith.

  16.

  July

  A WEEK LATER, Frédéric knocks on my front door, and my summer balanced between a monk and a mosque begins. He has slung a battered green backpack full of notebooks over his shoulder and tucked his cross into his shirt, so that I sense immediately that he is a monk incognito, that for the next thirty days he wants simply to live like everyone else. He waves from the window and I grin at his loose hair and normal clothes and the funny, laid-back, and unmonastic way he is suddenly carrying himself, so much less transcendent that he could almost be wearing beach sandals. I have been waiting for this knock on the window for days, for the morning when I would open my door to him as though it were the most ordinary gesture in the world.

  “Do you want to grab something to eat?” I ask casually after he kisses my cheeks hello, celebrating in my heart as I utter those words. They are so normal. They are the kinds of things ordinary people in love ask each other.

  He grins. Then we set off to grab a sandwich at the Armenian restaurant around the corner, because they give me a discount after all, and the food is clean.

  “You’re the Baron’s girl, aren’t you?” the man behind the counter asks.

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s what I thought. You give him my greetings.” Then he hands me a substantial wad of change for being a member of his clan, and I wink at Frédéric as we walk away.

  Despite the fact that Frédéric knows Damascus, I am determined to be his guide through my version of the city, the life I discovered after my post-Ignatius descent into despair. I lead him to the stall where Ahmed sells his famous sweets, informing Frédéric that he is partaking in the famous knafeh Nablusi, the finest knafeh in the world, and that this shop is hallowed ground. I introduce him to the neighborhood coffee shops, the florist who descends from a family of florists and insists that he has “flowers in his blood,” the Kurdish juice vendors and Shiite pizza vendors and furniture seller who speaks Aramaic, the language of Jesus. As I walk up and down the streets, I narrate to him the gossip of everyone’s lives, and we duck into all of the churches and chapels dotting the streets to light candles, while just nearby is the house of a famous neighborhood saint who has oil flowing from her hands.

  “I thought I was coming to Damascus to study Arabic,” he teases me. “I wasn’t expecting an intensive English course.”

  When the day is over, we say good-bye in the crowded streets, and he tells me the second sentence I have been dreamin
g of hearing: “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says.

  IT TAKES A WHILE for Frédéric to get used to life in the city. He wakes up in his room across town with the Little Brothers of Jesus, fills his blue glasses, and reads for an hour from the Quran. Then he catches a bus to the French Institute, to sit through several hours of lessons in Arabic. The first day, he arrives to meet me almost in tears.

  “It’s so violent,” he says softly. “They just talk at you, and you don’t have a chance to speak.”

  I hadn’t considered the shock of classes after the silence of his life in the desert, this sudden immersion into noise and rote learning. The first time I took an Arabic immersion course, I woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare of Arabic letters raining down on my face, penetrating it like bullets from a machine gun. It must be even more difficult for Frédéric, who has become truly otherworldly in his monastic life. He doesn’t know how much cabs should cost or whom to ask for directions. He is scandalized when merchants try to cheat him—he hasn’t been in a world of bargaining for three years, and as a monk he doesn’t even handle his own money. I can see him reacting to car horns and arguments, he who has spent the last years in a world where people tend to be on their best behavior.

  “Just be patient,” I promise him. “It will be easier in a few days.”

  Sure enough, by the end of the week we are sitting in a café where he is smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, and he is beaming, having just devised a new system for memorizing Arabic words. He calls it “mapping Arabic,” and it is the most complicated form of memorization I have ever seen. He writes each Arabic word on the center of a card in black ink, and then he sketches a map of all of the places it has ever traveled, the words it has been in its past lives, all of its roots and relatives.