The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  Before the garment industry emerged, introducing its readymade sizes-clothes that do not know a body do not acknowledge each body's distinctiveness ... we in the East ... were making fabrics that were increasing in beauty ... refining [our] expression of the unique relationship between the cloth and the body ... Who, these days, sees in a length of cloth its origin, its place of birth, the caravans' voyages?

  -Hoda Barakat, The Tiller of Water

  Here is something new. On Old State Road 37 near Bloomington, a placard at a construction site says "Coming soon: Dagom Gaden Tensung Ling Monastery." Khadra does a double take. She gets a mental image of Hubbard hobbling angrily across the street from a colony of tiny men in orange robes. But no, times have changed. Haven't they? As if to prove it, a car whizzes by her, its bumper sticker proclaiming "Visualize whirled peas."

  Khadra arrives on the IU campus knee-deep in the golden Indiana day, time for duhr prayer. It has been transformed into Muslim Land for the weekend. Thousands of Muslims fill Assembly Hall, the great basketball stadium where the Hoosiers practice, turning the Big Ten bastion into a high-raftered mosque. Khadra enters the arena just as the imam calls the first "allahu akbar." She steps out of her cute strappy sandals and slips into a prayer line next to a woman whose petite body, a presence of bone and flesh under the fabric, brushes against her.

  Several hundred Muslim foreheads touch the arena floor in unison, her own widow's-peaked one among them. Only a thin bedsheet between the forehead and the hardwood. Palm, palm, knee, knee, points of contact with the ground. Campus staffers in Go Big Red T-shirts watch the Muslims pray, their eyes widening when everyone goes down in prostration.

  "Here is the way Muslims touch the ground," Khadra thinks in sajda. "Here is the way we shift our bodies daily, and alter our angle of looking." In prostration, you see the underbelly of things. Daddy longlegs moving carefully side to side. Old gum underneath a bleacher plank. Hems, sari edges, purse buckles beside your eye. Feet. Long bony toes of tall skinny women and little cushiony ones of short round women, the littlest toe barely there, tucked sideways shyly. In the rising posture, she looks down at her long tissuey skirt with its Mayan temple images in blue and bronze. Her mother's voice in her head tsk-tsks her bare feet. In response, she wriggles her stubby toes.

  After the salam, Khadra decides she will try low camera angles. It is not the prayer she will photograph, not from the outside, but: what does the world look like from inside this prayer?

  She helps fold the dormitory sheets that have served as prayer rugs. She picks up one end and someone picks up the other, a young woman who is perhaps Bosnian or East European, wearing a floral fcharpe. Khadra loves being in this forest of women in hijab, their khimars and saris and jilbabs and thobes and depattas fluttering and sweeping the floor and reaching out to everything. Compact Western clothing doesn't rustle, or float, or reach out to anything.

  Khadra spots a familiar figure across the prayer hall. Stray red hairs are sticking out from under a calico prayer wrap. "Aunt Trish!" She is bent over someone in a wheelchair. She turns, pushing the wheelchair. It is Uncle Omar-Khadra gasps softly. She'd heard he had developed multiple sclerosis, but never dreamed it had gone this far so quickly. She remembers how he'd gone after Ramsey with a strap after catching him with Insaf Haqiqat when they were teens; he'd been powerful as an ox.

  "Khadra Shamy?" Uncle Omar says through his big mustache. "I haven't seen you since you were this high! Where have you been hiding all these years?"

  "Oh," she says brightly, "I'm in Philadelphia now."

  "Why don't you have a baby in your hands and three more behind you?" he demands gruffly-winking.

  "I-well-how are you?" Khadra says. "I was so sorry to hear-"

  "It's stage three progressive," Aunt Trish explains. "He had to go to a wheelchair within a year of diagnosis." She is matter-of-fact about it, although he seems to slump at her words.

  Khadra is about to add a word of condolence for Ramsey, but she doesn't have the heart to bring up another sorrow just then.

  On her way to check in at the Union Hotel, Khadra picks up a bright green flyer.

  FIRST TIME EVER AT THE DAWAH CONFERENCEISLAMIC ENTERTAINMENT CONCERTS FOR MUSLIM YOUTH!

  • Nasheeds by Phat in the Phaith!

  • Hijab Hip-Hop by Nia Group!

  • Spoken Word to Your Mother, then Your Mother, then Your Mother-with Brother Bilal!

  • Special Performance by The Clash of Civilizations! (Islamic behavior and attire required of all youth attending. Responsible adult chaperones to supervise. Concerts strictly in accordance with shariah restrictions as per Dawah Conference Committee Guidebook on Islamic Rules for Entertainment Programs.)

  Was Hijab Hip-Hop a girl group? Hunh. The Dawah has evolved, Khadra muses, stuffing the flyer in her bag.

  The Clash of Civilizations is her brother's band-her little brother Jihad. It's an eclectic group of boys. Sort of a Muslim John Cougar Mellencamp meets Wes Montgomery, with a Donny Osmond twist. There's Jihad and an African American Muslim teen from Gary named, coincidentally, Garry, but with two rs. Garry Abdullah. The Osmond twist is the Mormon component, Brig and Riley Whitcomb. They're leaving out the instruments this gig, singing a capella, so it will be acceptable to conservative Muslims who have issues with musical instruments.

  Of the thousands of people at the conference, she keeps running into Hakim. Here he is at the Union cafe.

  "Good to see you again, Sister Khadra," he says stiffly. An invisible veil falls over his face now, a curtain that keeps her out.

  Sister? He never called her that before. It seems to be for the benefit of a cluster of conference brothers ordering coffee ahead of them, who recognize him and nod.

  "You know what, I think I'm going to go ahead and get coffee, Sister," he says, edging away from her.

  "You know what, Hakim, me too." She steps right next to him, directly behind the group of bearded brothers.

  "How's your mother?" she says sweetly. The brothers in front of them glance around at Imam Hakim, then back at Khadra.

  "Fine, praise God," he mumbles. Khadra remembers that she heard his wife had gone heavy traditional on him during their latest stint in Mecca, and taken to niqab and black gloves, even back in the States. Did Mahasen go full-steam Wahhabi?

  "And how's your wife? Any little ones on the way?" Khadra presses on, knowing she's being just as obnoxious as the aunties who used to pry into whether or not she was pregnant during her brief marriage.

  "We-we-" He has a look of extreme discomfort on his face.

  Khadra is immediately sorry. She only meant to be a little pushy. "Never mind," she says hastily. "That was forward of me."

  His expression shifts, as if he's undecided, weighing, and then he shrugs and says, "I might as well tell you. I was just talking about it with your brother this morning. I'm ready to tell friends," he says. Now his tone of voice is normal. He orders coffee.

  It's nice to be acknowledged as a friend, Khadra thinks, even if you can't shake hands or hug. "House coffee please," she says. "Goodness, no, just the small size. Thanks." They walk to a table and set the cups down. Khadra sits but Hakim stays standing awkwardly.

  "We've divorced," Hakim says. "Mahasen and I got a divorce about seven months ago." A brother in the group of beards who are now clustered at a nearby table shoots a sideways glance at him.

  "I'm sorry," Khadra says. Imam Hakim with those famous khutbas on marriage! `The couple that reads Quran together, stays together!' She used to listen to the tapes during her own marriage troubles. "Is it-is it final, then?"

  "Yeah. The iddah is over and all. We tried to get back but it didn't work." Hakim pulls out a chair across from her and sits down, ignoring the curious brothers at the next table. Khadra hopes that means he will spill the beans. What was his divorce about?

  "Mahasen and I were going in different directions," he begins carefully.

  "Really?" Khadra says with equal care. Did Mahasen leave him or did
he leave her?

  "Alhamdulilah," Hakim says. Khadra hates when people say that as a replacement for specific information.

  "It-it must be painful. I'm sorry." What do you say? There were set phrases for marriages, births, deaths, but not for divorce.

  "After the hard time, there is the easing," he says, after a minute. So it was she who left him, Khadra speculates. His face smoothes out. "After the hard time, there is the easing."

  There is no single word in English that conveys the scope of the Arabic word Salat. `Prayer,' `blessings,' supplication,' and `grace' are implied, but all fail to convey the Salat's marvelous integration of devotional heart-surrender with physical motion.

  -Coleman Barks and Michael Green, The Illuminated Prayer

  Zuhura led the three "Little Sisters"-that was what she called Khadra, Hanifa, and Tayiba-in duhr prayer. It was a quiet Saturday at the Thoreau home in the Fallen Timbers. They stood in line next to her tall plump form in her two-piece patterned prayer wraps of leso cloth. Khadra hastily took her half-chewed gob of bubble gum out of her mouth and stuck it on the coffee table. She nestled into Zuhura's side, shadowing her every motion as Zuhura imamed them through the four rakats of duhr prayer.

  After the salam, before the girls made to dash off, Zuhura held them back. "Say after me," she said. "My dear God, you are Peace."

  It was only by comparison with Zuhura that some aunties called Tayiba "the quiet one" of the two sisters. Tayiba wasn't that quiet; she just didn't have the leadership energy that fired Zuhura, her easy command of speech, her forward drive. In any environment, but especially in a small community, Zuhura would stand head and shoulders above not only her peers, but her elder and younger cohorts. It was natural for the three younger girls to follow her lead, not because they were docile-they were not-but because she had presence, and they felt it.

  "My dear God, you are Peace," the younger girls now said in unison. Khadra had already stuffed the wad of gum back into her mouth.

  "And from you cometh Peace," she chanted.

  And from you cometh Peace," they said, Khadra through bubble gum.

  "And to you belongeth Peace."

  `And to you belongeth Peace. "

  "Blessed be You and All-high."

  "Blessed be You and All-high."

  "You of the Majesty and the Welcome."

  "You of the Majesty and the Welcome. "

  Zuhura wiped her face with the cupped hands of prayer and the girls all wiped their faces likewise, and were indeed at peace, for one microsecond, before they ran noisily out to the porch and clambered onto their bikes, speeding off into the sunny, littered streets. Leaving her swathed in her prayer clothes and the noontime calm. But no-she ran out after them to call, "Don't forget-dinner at Uncle Abdulla's!" Khadra groaned. Uncle Abdulla made you eat too much. Zuhura went back inside to work on a paper about colonialism in Kenya.

  There had always been murmurs of disapproval about the amount of latitude Zuhura's parents gave her in allowing her to commute to the Bloomington campus. Khadra's parents, for their part, believed a Muslim girl should go to college close to home. What was wrong with the Indianapolis branch of IU? Zuhura was going farther afield than a Muslim girl ought to be, especially when it entailed driving home late at night by herself.

  "She's a smart girl," Aunt Ayesha said firmly."She can take care of herself."

  Zuhura knew better than to stop in Martinsville, at any rate. She may not have had many of the other survival skills developed over generations by American blacks, but everyone in Indiana knew that Martinsville was no place to be unless you were white.

  True to her mother's expectations, Zuhura began to be active in the Campus Muslim Council. A dean's list student, she helped lobby the university administration to recognize Muslim holidays, and organized speaking events on "Islam, the Misunderstood Religion" and on social justice issues. Sudan, Uganda, Palestine, Iran, Cambodia, Kashmir: everywhere, Muslims were being persecuted, it seemed. She was the first Muslim to write for the IU paper and get a front-page-above the fold-byline. Her op-ed supporting the Islamic dissent in Iran caused a campus stir.

  It was agreed that the Shah was a tyrant. Iranian Muslims were rallying for change and being persecuted for rallying. The Islamic Forerunner tried to keep Muslims in America up to date on events there, the exciting stirrings toward, possibly, the first Islamic state in the modern world since the destruction of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924. Most people who read The Forerunner, and certainly all who worked for the Dawah Center, believed that an Islamic state and an Islamic society was, or should be, the hope of every believing Muslim today. In it, everyone would be good and God-fearing and decent and hardworking; there would be no corruption or bribes; the rich would help the poor; and all would have work and food and live cleanly, because an Islamic state would provide the solution for every social ill.

  "But if Iranian Muslims made an Islamic state, would that count, being Shia?" This was Khadra's father asking the question as he spread newspapers on the carpet in Abdulla's Fallen Timbers living room.

  The answer came from Zeeshan, Brother Zeeshan Haqiqat, a favorite sparring partner. "In Hyderabad, Hindu fanatics didn't stop to ask my brother if he was Shia or Sunni before they beat him to death."

  Zeeshan's point stopped Wajdy cold. Like the first Pilgrims, the immigrants of the Dawah Center came to America with persecution and suffering at their backs. Sunni or Shia, they had too much in common not to work together.

  The tensions between the sects in the Dawah organization would not explode until a few years later, when funding from wealthy private donors abroad started to come in. Powerful Sunni donors made exclusion of Shia elements a condition of the money, some said. Others said no, it was the Shia members who had a problem taking money from Sunnis. The donors had attached no strings. There would be shouting matches in the blue Victorian house, at the annual Bloomington conferences, and even in the little apartments at Fallen Timbers. Uncle Zeeshan would eventually leave the Dawah staff and Khadra would no longer see his daughters, Nilofar and Insaf, every Eid in their gorgeous ghararas, and Auntie Dilshad's fried samosas would no longer be on the potluck table at the women's weekly Quranic study (hot! run for a glass of water! mouth on fire!)

  "Wajdy! Zeeshan! We'll have none of your Sunni-Shia arguments tonight," Uncle Abdulla called out, his face jovial. "Tonight for eating only!" This hospitable Egyptian and his wife, Aunt Fatma, brought out platter after platter to set on the newspapers before the men. The women at at the table in the dinette; the kids ran amok everywhere.

  "Eat, eat!" Uncle Abdulla bellowed, grabbing Khadra's paper plate and heaping greasy rice and slabs of fatty meat onto it. She didn't know how to fend off his generosity. Between that, and your parents telling you it was haram to waste food, you were stuck, and had to eat it all.

  Uncle Abdulla had spent five years in the concentration camps of Gamal Abdul Nasser for belonging to the Muslim Strivers, an Islamic movement that strove to reform Egyptian society along Islamic lines. Starvation for days at a time was one of the punishments the wardens had inflicted on Abdulla in the prison camp. The poorest man in the little neighborhood of Muslims in the Fallen Timbers, he wanted everyone to be well fed in his home.

  After dinner Zuhura cheerfully volunteered to do the dishes. Luqman, Fatma's handsome younger brother newly arrived from Egypt, carried armfuls of crusted casserole pans and blackenedbottom aluminum pots to her into the kitchen. The older kids had to watch the younger kids out on the playground. They were glad to get out of the overfull apartment.

  When only Khadra, Eyad, Hakim, and Hanifa were left outside, they took turns putting pennies on the train tracks that ran behind the fence at one end of the apartment complex. Leaving their bikes in a heap in the high-grown weeds, they crawled through the tunnel made by thickets of wild raspberry bushes. They went down one as far as they could, to where it bent in the undergrowth. They scrabbled for sweet dark berries, getting stabbed by thorns in their fingertips,
knuckles, knees, palms, feet, and smudged faces. The last sunlight filtered through the raspberry bushes as the children crawled through flickering light and shadow within.

  I reckon-When I count at allFirst Poets-Then the SunThen Summer-Then the Heaven of GodAnd then-the List is done-

  -Emily Dickinson

  The four children Lewis and Clarked over a lush summer carpet of fallen berries. They emerged, mouths and knees berry-stained, at the edge of a cornfield bordered by shagbark hickory and silver wattle trees. There they forded a yard-wide creek. Its dark shimmering banks crawled with frogs and crawdads and other small rustling life, forms, fully deserving the total surrender of their attention. The mud that oozed between their toes soothed their feet. Upon crossing the creek, leaving their shoes behind, they found a dead possum. It was crawling with maggots. Hakim and Eyad wanted to dissect it. Hanifa and Khadra wanted to bury it. They didn't have the tools for either. Then Khadra yelped. She had stepped on a crawdad and its pincers grabbed her toe. "Get it off, get it OFF!" she screamed, hopping around, and Hanifa laughed, and kept going "Ew, ewww," but Hakim helped her get it off, and Eyad said now she would need a "tetmas" shot. It was only after the crisis passed that they began to notice that the darkness had thickened to a rich eggplant hue.

  By the time they recrossed the creek, collected their shoes, crawled back through the raspberry tunnel, jumped the tracks, hopped on their bikes, and pedaled homeward, their parents had begun combing the streets and parking lots of the apartment complex. Having had no luck locating the children, Khadra's father was about to call the police.

  Their father dragged Khadra and Eyad by their ears to the door, flung open by their mother, a cranky and tired baby Jihad straddling her hip. They were mudspattered, tufts of cobwebs and twigs clinging to their hair, covered very likely with impurities that would require washing seven times. Ebtehaj was trembling all over, her pale ivory face ashen.

  She looked like she was about to cry, but what she did was scream. "Do you think we are Americans? Do you think we have no limits? Do you think we leave our children wandering in the streets? Is that what you think we are? Is it?" Then she burst into sobs.