The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  Ayesha trembled. She took off her rhinestone-studded turquoise cat's eye glasses and wiped them. And they did not crucify him, but it was made to seem to them as if they did. The Quran said that. The Quran said that about Jesus, peace be upon him. It was made to seem to them.

  Sometimes God did things like that. Made things seem what they were not. But why? But why? It was a test. It was a test. A test for the believers. For men who believe and women who believe. Ayesha peered through the morgue window again. Her glasses clattered to the floor. She didn't bother to retrieve them. What was the point? Why was God making her see this? Yusuf bent and picked up her glasses and tried to give them to her; she pushed them away. Her eyes were too bleary to see clearly, and she didn't want to look anymore, anyway.

  Without the familiar glasses, she looked naked, broken. All her fierceness gone. Yusuf had to keep his arms around her shoulders to hold her up. Her body was so small suddenly. Who knew she was so petite under the voluminous robes she liked to wear? Whereas before, you couldn't be in a room with Aunt Ayesha without being intensely aware of her presence, now she came and left all crumpled, like nothing. People tried not to look at Ayesha because it was so hard to see her like that, and there were many men and women alike, and even a few bewildered children, who almost wished she would fix them with one of her famous unnerving stares.

  Clearly it was religious bigotry, the Muslims said. Salam Mosque and Dawah people agreed. It was related to her vocal espousal of Muslim causes on campus, it was political. The Indianapolis Freeman-Uncle Jamal brought over a copy-said it was about race, said how could it not be, in light of the Skokie affair and recent area rumblings from the Klan? It called Zuhura "a young black woman" and didn't mention that she was Muslim at all. On the other hand, the Indianapolis Star pretended like race wasn't there at all, calling Zuhura a "foreign woman" and "an IU international student," as if her family didn't live right there in town. The Indianapolis News article treated it like just some random crime, giving it one tiny paragraph in the back pages. The front-page news was about a march. A photo that showed a group of white women yelling "Take Back the Night!"

  "We liked her to pieces, but she was an opinionated little bit," a student council rep said in the college newspaper, and a classmate described her as "a little black spitfire." Tayiba passed the article to Khadra without comment.

  "But that makes no sense," Khadra said, reading it. "Zuhura was big and tall." How could anyone call her "little?"

  "She should not have been traipsing about the highways at midnight alone," Wajdy and Ebtehaj agreed in late-night kitchen-table voices. And the whispers and undertones around the water cooler at the Dawah Center agreed: She had been asking for trouble. Sad as it made them to say it. And her family should've given her more guidance. You protected your daughters.

  "Women wash the body of a woman and men wash a man. It is a service incumbent upon members of the faith. Seven pieces of shroud for a woman; three for a man." Ebtehaj reviewed the janaza chapter in her tattered Fiqh al-Sunnah book and went out to take part in the washing of Zuhura. When she came home afterward she unwound her headscarf silently, shaking her head. She unzipped her long jilbab and folded it over her arm and went upstairs to take "the purification bath required of those who wash the dead. "

  And what of the dead, where do they lie in a non-Muslim land? Next to kuffar graves whose graven images may deter visiting angels? And what do you do if a country's laws require burial in a box, when a Muslim should be buried with nothing but a seamless shroud between her and the receiving earth?

  These were some of the questions of adjustment that the Dawah Center was created to address. In America, you could not be passive about enacting your faith; you had to "Do for Self." No one was there to do it for you, like in the Old Country. There were hardly any Muslim institutions yet in this wilderness. You had to study your faith, dig out the core principles from underneath all the customs that may have accrued around them in the old Muslim world, and find a way to act on those principles in the present conditions. The spring after Zuhuras funeral, the Dawah Center would print up a pamphlet giving all the answers in easy-to-follow directives based on sound shariah research. Wajdy Shamy was one of the authors. Untold numbers of the U.S. faithful appreciated How to Be Buried as a Muslim in America.

  Maybe we don't belong here, Khadra thought, standing next to Hanifa in the crowd at Zuhura's graveside. Maybe she belonged in a place where she would not get shoved and called "raghead" every other day in the school hallway. Teachers, classmates-no one ever caught her assailants. They always melted into the crowd behind her.

  The whole Indianapolis Muslim community came out for the funeral-they were all family-and a lot of students from Bloomington, even some non-Muslims. There was a Nigerian athlete, and another young black man who cried hard and left quickly, mystifying the Dawah folk. But he exchanged a few quiet words with Zuhura's mother, and she nodded, seeming satisfied.

  Instead of looking for the killers, or rounding up any of the APES (American Protectors of the Environs of Simmonsville) for questioning, the police handcuffed Luqman and threw him in the back of a car. Where was he that night? they asked. Was Zuhura seeing someone on the side? they asked, maligning her morals with horrible questions. "No!" he shouted, "She was an honorable girl!" The Indianapolis Star reported on him being a suspect: Murder Possible Honor Killing-Middle Eastern Connection, they said, with a sidebar on "the oppression of women in Islam."

  No charge of murder was brought against Luqman. He was deported anyway, on a technical visa violation.

  Zuhura's murderer was never caught. The Dawah community labored on with its godly task, if a little heavier of heart. "Just like the early Muslims," Khadra's mother said. "When one fell, another one picked up the banner and struggled on."

  If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath it allwhat then would life be but despair?

  -Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

  Khadra's father and the other Center workers took the Dawah on the road. They drove to chapters across the country, developing Islamic awareness. Ebtehaj was just as involved in organizing local Muslim women's groups, although she was not a salaried Center employee like Wajdy. So the whole family piled into the station wagon for these mission trips.

  In this way, Khadra and Eyad got to see more of America than most of their American classmates. They made ablutions in the Great Salt Lake (it really was that salty!) and prayed duhr at Mount Rushmore with the giant faces of the presidents gazing down upon them ("Carved by a Klansman," Wajdy said). They uttered the journey blessing in unison as they went up the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and they pushed Jihad's stroller between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

  One of the road trips took the Shamys to the Grand Canyon. The family stood at the top of a lookout point on the South Rim. Jihad was on his mother's hip. Her sky blue jilbab swept the ground and her white crepe wimple outlined her head against the sky. Khadra's father stood next to her in his double-stitched tan leisure suit, his arm around Eyad. Khadra brought them into focus and snapped the picture.

  An elderly white-haired man in an old-fashioned suit coming up the stairs stopped short before this family scene. "Santa Maria.'" he murmured. He came up the rest of the stairs without taking his eyes off Khadra's mother. "Beautiful, beautiful," he said, to himself-or to her, it wasn't clear. He had some kind of European accent.

  Ebtehaj looked flustered, and shifted Jihad from one hip to the other. Wajdy seemed amused.

  Later in the day, the family was walking along Hermit's Road, the sunset painting thick magenta and turquoise streaks across the sky above the deepening indigo and saffron of the canyon, when a siren wailed behind them. They scurried to the side of the road to let the police car pass; instead
, the officer waved them down.

  An elderly man had climbed out to a ledge and was poised to jump. He kept calling for "Madonna in the blue robe. Madonna with the angelic child! Madonna of the mountain!" Would Ebtehaj talk to him?

  It ended well. Afterward, before she could stop him, the old gentleman lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. "God sent Beauty to save me!" he said.

  Khadra's mother got all flustered again. She didn't even shake hands with men, and now her ablution had to be remade, of course. "It was not me-it was God's will," she said sternly, but not without compassion.

  "What happened up there?" Wajdy asked, back at the Motel 6. The children were piled into one of the two double beds with chintz coverlets, asleep, except for Khadra, who heard her parents talking as she drifted to sleep.

  "He said he just loved God and wanted to be with Him," Ebtehaj said, taking her hair out of the clip at the nape of her neck. "He said the world was too ugly. He wanted to see God's Beauty."' Her chestnut hair fell down her shoulders, curvy from where it had been held back all day.

  "And then?"

  Ebtehaj made an impatient noise. "I said you can't do that, that's haram, of course! In your religion like in ours. Ifyou love Him, you must obey Him." That was love, she felt. Not following your own desires, willy-nilly. The sun was setting and she'd said to the man, My God isn't this enough beauty for you, Mister? She now dabbed a bit of night cream on her face and smoothed it. "Wajdy, do you think," she said, considering a brand-new problem, "their prayers are counted by God?"

  "They're People of the Book; of course their prayers count," Wajdy said, yawning. "Though not like ours," he added, before he fell into the silence toward sleep, leaving Ebtehaj staring absently at the hairpins on the chipped veneer of the nightstand and behind it, the grubby hotel drape.

  Beyond that lay the striped asphalt road with its caravans of people and the immense gaping canyon and the question of what does it all mean, the question which, if not answered by faith, is answered by what? Then what railing would hold us from falling into the great gulch? No. The sure footing is the straight path, the rock-solid first ground of faith, where she was. She settled into the thin pillow.

  Returning, there was always that funny Indiana smell. A sign of home.

  "What is that smell, do you think?" Ebtehaj asked. "That Indiana smell?"

  "Gas," Wajdy said.

  "Who farted?" Khadra wondered, joining the conversation from the sleeping-bag-padded cargo area, and Eyad guffawed.

  "No really, the smell of the state comes from natural gas," Wajdy insisted. Everyone in the car was laughing now. "All these towns in Indiana used to sit on top of natural gas reserves."

  "Indiana has to make wudu!" Eyad hooted.

  "Gas used to be the basis of the whole state economy," Wajdy went on, but it was no use. Even their mother gasped that she was going to have to renew her wudu at the next rest stop, as she had laughed so hard she may have broken her ablutions and impaired the purity of her underwear. That set off a new wave of laughter in the back seat.

  They purified for God in foul-smelling rest-area bathrooms. They prayed by the side of an Amish country road in the dirt and ironweed, in the shade of a shagbark hickory tree. They made symbolic ablution by striking their hands against a rock in the Painted Desert. They prostrated in a windy corner of the observation deck of the Sears Tower in Chicago ("Built by a Muslim engineer, you know!" Wajdy told them). Once, lost trying to get to Mishawaka, they even prayed next to a giant roadside egg. Twelve foot high, made of concrete. The lettering beneath it declared, "Greetings from Mentone, Indiana-the egg basket of the Midwest."

  "Don't worry about people looking at us," Khadra's father said. "Focus on the patch of earth in front of you." He pointed to the place where the forehead would touch the ground. They had pitstopped at a Dairy Queen outside Kokomo, on the way back from visiting the Mishawaka community.

  The Shamys had been scandalized by the Mishawaka Muslims. They had one of the oldest mosques in America up there, founded by Arab Muslims who had come to America as far back as the 1870s. But slowly, over generations, they had mixed American things in with real Islam, Wajdy explained, so that now they needed a refresher course in real Islam from the Dawah Center. None of the women up there wore hijab and none of the men had beards-they didn't even look like Muslims. And they did shocking things in the mosque, like play volleyball with men and women together, in shorts. And they had dances for the Muslim boys and girls-dances! "Mishawaka Muslims" became a byword for "lost Muslims" in The Islamic Forerunner.

  At the Kokomo Dairy Queen, Ebtehaj got out of the big clunky station wagon in her tan double-knit polyester jilbab and a beige headcover. With a fussing Jihad in tow, she headed for the restroom, people's stares following her. Her washing-up cup was in her handbag. She was always looking for handy personal hygiene cups, and this one had a collapsible design that folded into the shape of a compact.

  Their father spread the Navajo blanket as a prayer rug for Khadra and unrolled a narrow woven mat for Eyad.

  "But you don't have a rug," Eyad said.

  "I don't need a rug, son." Wajdy said. They were on a patch of weedy dirt at the rear of the DQ.

  "What if the ground is impure?" Khadra said, remembering Islamic school lessons: purity of place required for salah.

  "The earth itself is considered pure, binti," he said. "All the world is a prayer mat." Even central Indiana Dairy Queen backlots were okay with God. So Khadra and Eyad knelt on the knobby ground behind their father. A blue beetle started picking its way up and down a pile of broken bricks near Khadra's head during the first rakat and made it over by the end of prayer. Palm, palm, knee, knee, foot, foot, forehead. Rising, her father brushed off bits of gravel that had embedded in his forehead.

  A whole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer is fine!"

  -Fanny, in Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

  From when Khadra first became aware of Ramadan, she begged to be allowed to fast. Because you got to wake up in the dark dewy predawn, part of a secret club. The rest of the human world was asleep. No faint whoosh of cars from the main road, and the parking lots of the Timbers were absolutely still. Even the crickets, even the birds, were asleep. The milkman hadn't come yet to take the empties left in the tin box on the porch and replace them with full bottles of milk. Khadra's mother and father padded around in the little kitchen, bleary-eyed, setting out suhoor food on the chipped Formica table. Sometimes little Jihad woke up from hearing the unaccustomed noise at this hour-they'd look up and find him standing there in his PJs, casting at the family a look of such accusation for leaving him out, such a baleful "et to?" glare that, young as he was, he was soon a participant in the ritual.

  "Lentil soup, eat," Wajdy said, as Ebtehaj ladled it. "Protein. It will stick to your belly, binti. It's a long fasting day." The clink of spoons in soup bowls were the only sounds in the whole black universe. An alarm clock sat on the kitchen table tick-tick-tick is there time for one more bite tick-tick-tick is there time for a long cool gulp of water tick-tick-tick.

  "Khadra ate past Time!" Eyad said, pointing at the clock.

  "I did not!" Khadra said, horrified.

  "Did too!" The clock hands were incontrovertible. One minute past the correct time to stop eating.

  "It wasn't Time when I started the bite!"

  "It's okay, Khadra. What's already in your mouth can be swallowed," her father said.

  "Yeah, Eyad!" Khadra said. She hadn't known this before. "Back off, boy!" she added, snapping her fingers at him.

  "Enough!" her mother said. "The two of you clear the table and then go make wudu."

  Each of them slipped away to make ablutions and came back, face wet and fresh from the washing. They spread the prayer rugs and prayed fajr together on the floor between the threadbare couch and sunken armchair. After the salam, Eyad lay his sleepy head in his mother's lap while she counted out Glory Be's on her fingers. When she finished, she smoothed his ha
ir back from his forehead.

  After everyone went back to bed, Khadra stepped out on the patio. She felt the first stirring of birds and other things that lived in the earth and trees and skies. And those that lived in the Fallen Timbers Townhouse Complex stirred too, here and there a window filling with yellow light in the dimness. It was a whole other world Ramadan gave you, eerie and dreamlike. The faint sound of a train grew closer. Then the filmy glow in the sky spread into pink streaks that got wider and wider and became daylight, and things slowly took their ordinary shape.

  "Khadra?"

  She whirled around. Jihad was standing behind her. She put an arm around him.

  When Teta's visits coincided with Ramadan, there was always a tug of war at maghreb between her and Ebtehaj: Eat first or pray first? Ebtehaj said pray first. Teta said eat first. She quoted the Prophet, and she always won. As soon as the meal was over, Ebtehaj clapped her hands and said "Prayer! Prayer time!"

  "For goodness' sake, give us time to fart!" Teta protested as she got up to make ablutions.

  Ebtehaj gave her a look as the children giggled. Wajdy hid his mouth behind his hand.

  "What?" Teta said innocently. "If you don't fart first, then all you're thinking about in prostration is how not to let it fly."

  When your daughter's menarche comes, cook sweet wheatbean pudding and distribute it to your neighbors in celebration!

  -Damascene custom of unknown origin (now nearly defunct)

  Khadra finally got it in the middle of Ramadan-her period. Her mother had prepared her. Ebtehaj, having been pre-med once, pulled out full-color anatomical diagrams with fallopian tubes and all sorts of things labeled. She went over it scientifically-the descent of the egg, and so on, and also Islamically-the requirements of the purification bath, the excused prayers and fast days. "My mother never told us," Ebtehaj said. "She was very traditional. But that's unIslamic, see?"