The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  Ebtehaj and Wajdy and the Dawah-style Muslims were very dubious about popular Islam, Islam as practiced by the regular believing masses. It had heaps of wrongheaded customs substituting for real religious knowledge and mixed in with modern shortcuts. They were out to purify it. Not telling your kids about puberty when they were close to it was one of the legacies of prior generation of Muslims that they felt was not in tune with authentic Islam, the Islam of the Prophet's time.

  "You should know, because puberty makes your Islamic duties fully incumbent on you," Ebtehaj said. "Now you are of age. Now sins count."

  "They didn't count before?" Khadra said. Nobody'd mentioned that! So-eating the pig candy corn didn't hurt?

  "Mama, is this my period?" she said, passing her underwear to her mom from behind the bathroom door. "I thought it would be red. This is brown. How does this belt contraption work?" The belt held the big fat pads in place. "Mama, what are tampons?"

  "Virgins mustn't use tampons," her mother replied. "They're for married women. And even then-" Ebtehaj, who had distinct views on many health issues, felt tampons were unhealthy. "How healthy can it be to keep waste stuffed inside your body instead of letting it drain out?"

  "But Livvy said they're more comf-"

  "American girls don't care if they're open down there!"

  The big bonus from getting her period, of course, was that Khadra got to break her fast. She pulled her fist toward her in triumph: Yessss! She made a triple-decker beef salami sandwich on sesame-seed bread with tomato, lettuce, mushrooms, mayo, ketchup of course, and beet pickles.

  "Periods rock," she mumbled with her mouth full.

  Eyad walked in and did a double take. "You're cheating?" he said. "You're cheating in Ramadan!"

  "Nah, I ain't cheatin'," his sister crowed. She chomped down on another fat bite. He eyed her sandwich, mouth watering. "Tell him, Mama."

  Eyad knew about periods too, for the same reason Khadra did; he'd learned it as part of shariah studies.

  "Young lady, you might be more discreet about it," Ebtehaj said. "And more considerate than eating in front of a fasting person," she added, looking sideways at Khadra's chunky sandwich dripping its tomato juices.

  Ebtehaj sneaked a peek at her watch. It was still hours to iftar time. She went back to marking a passage in her book very lightly and carefully with pencil. She was reading Zamakhshari on Aisha's contention with the scholars and enjoying it tremendously. How could you not admire Aisha, the courageous daughter of Abu Bakr? So full of intellect and activism, so well studied, not only in Islam but also in medicine and history. Even her mistakes only revealed her love of the faith and zeal to protect it, Ebtehaj felt.

  Khadra's father took her to pick material for her first real hijabs at Philpot's Fabric Emporium. "You want a fabric that breathes and has good drape, binti," he said.

  He knew his fabrics. After the jilbabs Ebtehaj brought with her from Syria began to get threadbare, even her favorite sky-blue summer linen one, it was Wajdy who made new ones for her. He made Ebtehaj a winter jilbab out of a nubby polyester double knit. He cut it fashionably on the warp so the cross-hatching went diagonally, and gave it a big pointy collar right off the pages of a fashion magazine. It was Ebtehaj's first American jilbab. "This will never need ironing!" Wajdy had exclaimed as he guided the wondrous newfangled synthetic under the sewing machine arm.

  For her headscarves, Ebtehaj used only ultralightweight crepe georgette, fine as onionskin and supple as a living membrane. This she wrapped around her head with a precision that made the other Dawah women marvel. Never a hair out of place, that was Ebtehaj's hijab. You could tell if Ebtehaj had been in a town on one of her Dawah trips with Wajdy by the fact that, in her wake, women would try to imitate her scarf style. Ebtehaj influenced hijab fashions from Fort Collins to Cleveland.

  Ebtehaj hand-washed her scarves. She sang softly to herself while she worked up a lather:

  Then there was the grand and wonderful shaking out of the scarves, for she never wrung or twisted them to dry. Ebtehaj lifted the wet lump of delicate fabric out of the basin. She held one dripping end and the son or daughter helping her held the other. They backed away from each other until the crepe opened to its magnificent full length between them, a gossamer bridge.

  "Hold it from the corners. Don't let it fall to the floor. Onetwo-three-SHAKE! And one-two-three-AGAIN!" and then Ebtehaj gathered up the ends of her scarf from her daughter or son and neatly brought each corner to corresponding corner and hung it on the shower curtain rack to drip dry. Gazelle, gazeh-eh-elle, healed, my wound is healed.

  Jihad loved to run underneath the gauzy canopy and get a soft rain on his face. The space under the gently rising, gently descending parachute was curved and graceful. You could be Sinbad under the wing of an enormous bird. You could be anything anywhere.

  At the Washington Square Shopping Center looking for the cloth of her first hijabs, Khadra could not find crepe georgette as fine and lightweight as the fabric her mother treasured from Syria. She found instead lightweight seersucker in cornflower blue with yellow daisies, a white cotton eyelet that would go with anything, and a jade jacquard in sophisticated chiffon. And a warm woolen paisley for winter. Buying all this at one go was a breathtaking splurge.

  "This is a special day, Doora," Ebtehaj said, using Khadra's baby nickname. "You pick whatever you want."

  Wajdy gave her scarf edges a rolled-edge finish using the zigzag stitch feature on the sewing machine. And then Aunt Khadija gave her a sparkly topaz brooch she had been saving for her-she'd bought two at Montgomery Ward's, one for Khadra and one for Hanifa. The topper came from Ebtehaj: she had Wajdy make a tan, polyester double-knit jilbab for Khadra, out of the same fabric as her own, so they could have matching mother-daughter jilbabs to wear on Eid!

  The sensation of being hijabed was a thrill. Khadra had acquired vestments of a higher order. Hijab was a crown on her head. She went forth lightly and went forth heavily into the world, carrying the weight of a new grace. Even though it went off and on at the door several times a day, hung on a hook marking the threshold between inner and outer worlds, hijab soon grew to feel as natural to her as a second skin, without which if she ventured into the outside world she felt naked.

  "Aren't you hot?" Khadra and all the other hijab'd girls and women often got asked by Americans.

  "Even if I am hot, same as anyone on a hot day, I'd no sooner take off my hijab than you'd take off your blouse in the middle of the street, Livvy," she said to her American friend.

  Tayiba, ever one step ahead in hijabi fashion, had silkscreened a T-shirt that explained it all. "You think I'm hot?" it said across the front. Danny Nabolsy's jaw dropped when he saw her wearing this bit of sass. Then she turned around, and on the back it said, "It's hotter in hellfire-lower your gaze!" and his ears turned red.

  If there was a common thread, when our better writers took a hard look at Hoosier living, they seemed to find a tight-lipped people, afraid to take risks but longing to leave, just trying to hang on in a tough world. Trucks didn't run well and neighbors were as likely to shoot you as lend you a cup of sugar.

  -Michael Wilkerson, "Indiana Origin Stories," Where We Live: Essays About Indiana

  At first, TEta just observed Mrs. Moore gardening. She was absorbed in her task. She wore a big straw hat and canvas gloves, and carried a pad for her knees.

  "You've got a fallen tomato branch," Teta called to her in Arabic, pointing to the branch which had fallen in an area visible to Tdta but not to Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Moore came around to where Tdta was pointing and plucked the red tomato off the groundlying vine.

  "Thank you," Mrs. Moore replied in English, propping the fallen stalk.

  "Your lilacs are doing very well," Testa said in Arabic, indicating the tall bushes. "Lilac" was recognizable; it was the same word in Arabic, "leylak. "

  `El-hamdo-leelah, " Mrs. Moore said, spreading her palms open heavenward.

  Testa was pleased with Mrs. Moore's Arabic
and didn't bat an eye. "I have lilacs too," she said. "In Syria."

  "Vous etes Syrienne?"Mrs. Moore said. "Queue belle terre---de civilizations tres anciennes, n'est-ce pas?"

  "Bien An "TEta said. "Damas est la plus ancienne ville du monde. "

  And away they went, throwing in Arabic or English whenever they got stuck in French, and hoping the gist came through. They discussed the merits of honeysuckle and cyclamen and the multitude of medicinal benefits of sweet bay laurel. As a treatment for arthritis, rashes, stomachache, female troubles, there was no end to its uses. And it warded off evil eye. Testa had a bay laurel tree at home in Syria that she would have loved to show Mrs. Moore.

  Mrs. Moore's yard had a large weeping willow and a walnut tree, recognizable to TEta because both species also grew in Syria. She also had a ten-foot shrub with round leaves that she called a Wayfaring tree.

  "But every garden should have a fruit-bearing tree," Testa suggested. "Fig? Or perhaps cherry."

  Mrs. Moore shook her head. "Wouldn't grow here. Wrong climate."

  True. Te to mostly came in the warm weather; she had never wintered in Indiana, but she knew it was much harder than the Syrian winter, where they might get a dusting or two of snow but never the knee-deep drifts the Shamys told her about.

  "But then, the lilac grows here and there, both," Teta said. They pondered different plants and their adaptability. When Ebtehaj came looking for Teta, she was wondering what might happen if she could manage to bring a cutting of her cyclamen.

  "(:a depend, " Mrs Moore replied.

  `A quoi?"

  "Le genre de temps. " If the plant could weather the first few seasons, if you avoided planting it in the high heat of summer, and protected it well the first winters, it might catch on and thrive, they concluded.

  "I am going to visit this Madame Moore in her home," Tr to said magnanimously the next morning over breakfast, with its little plates of olives and cheese. "Wajdy, when you go in to work today, would you please ask her when her reception days are?"

  Ladies in Damascus had standing `reception days' when you could pay a formal visit and sip Turkish coffee and leave your calling card and be visited back in your home on your own reception days. TEta's days, for example, were second Mondays and first Saturdays.

  Mrs. Moore made high tea for Teta. Then Teta invited her to the Shamy house for Turkish coffee, which, Mrs. Moore cried, she hadn't had in ages, simply ages.

  And so their mutual visits became an essential part ofTEta's every trip to Indiana. Mrs. Moore introduced her to her garden club, and Teta crossed the threshold of sweet little southern Indianapolis and Simmonsville homes that the Shamys would never have thought to enter. Teta brought Mrs. Moore cakes of laurel soap and ground laurel bark hair balsalm, and oval wooden boxes of birdnests, a treat that featured pistachios arranged in the middle of tiny shreddedpastry nests drizzled with syrup.

  "There was a family lived in that house, you know." T6ta liked to pass on tidbits of Mrs. Moore's stories. "Where you work, Wajdy." She was squatting in the tiny patio out back, pulling a few weeds from around the spearmint in Ebtehaj's little herb patch. "A nice big Catholic family," T6ta continued. "Nine children at the turn of the century. They gave them such a hard time, though."

  "Who?"

  "The Protestants. They don't even consider the Catholics real Christians, imagine."

  Wajdy hadn't realized the gulf was so huge. They were all Christian to him. "Like the Sunnis and the Shias, I suppose," he said.

  "In the twenties, they tried to run them out of town," T6ta went on, shifting her knee pad under her. She had taken a cue from Mrs. Moore's nifty gardening knee pad-with a vinyl casing, it was sturdier than a folded up old towel-she made Wajdy sew up one like it for her to take back to Syria. "Terrorists wearing white masks," she said.

  "Them I know," Wajdy said.

  "They killed Zuhura," Khadra informed T6ta solemnly.

  "We don't know that for sure," her father corrected her.

  "Them, or people like them," she said.

  The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which whiteAmer- icans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes ... invincible in battle and wise in peace ... dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors ...

  -James Baldwin

  That November, revolutionaries in Iran blindfolded American embassy workers and took them hostage. They let the women go. They knew women didn't run America. Then they let the black men go, because blacks were oppressed by America just like Third World peoples. That left fifty-two white American men hostage.

  "A taste of their own medicine," Wajdy said. "They make everyone else in the world suffer while they live like lords. They create terror in other people's countries while they live in safety and luxury. Let them see how it is to have to worry."

  Kuldip said, "Anyway, they're not tourists. Half of them are CIA. They knew the risks."

  "Acting the innocent victims now, Americans," Omar Nabolsy, the Palestinian Dawah director, said.

  Everyone at the Center agreed that under normal circumstances, hostage taking was bad. But they could understand why the Iranian students did it. The Iranians had suffered under the Shah, who imprisoned protestors, tortured prisoners, encouraged booze and corruption, and tried to eliminate Islamic identity in his country. All with America's blessings and weapons.

  For the first time, the Iranian people called the shots. Now the tables were turned and the powerless were powerful. Fifty-two white American men, used to having the final authority over any situation, had to sit helplessly at the other end of the guns of young bearded men (and one scarf-wearing woman!).

  This made America hopping mad. America was mad at Khadra personally, the Shamy family, and all the other Muslims of Indianapolis. Simmonsville residents who didn't know the Shah of Iran from Joe Schmoe yelled "Long live the Shah!" as their Muslim neighbors got out of their cars and went into the blue house on New Harmony Drive. Vandalism of the Dawah Center with soap and white spray paint was something the police couldn't seem to stop; they only came and took pictures every time it happened.

  Khadra took pictures too, with her own camera. She showed them to her father, and he showed them to Uncle Kuldip and Uncle Omar, and they actually used one of them under The Islamic Forerunner's article "Hostage Incident Sparks Increased Vandalism of U.S. Islamic Centers."

  Even if the schoolbooks didn't say so, Islamic civilization was responsible for most of the good scientific inventions of the world, up until the last hundred years or so. The clock. Eyeglasses. "I thought Benjamin Franklin invented them," Khadra said.

  "He may have, I don't know this Ben-Yameen," her father said. "But if he did invent them, it's because Ibn Sina advanced the science of optics in the eleventh century."

  There was a picture in the ninth-grade social studies book of an Arab with an unkempt beard standing in a dirty caftan next to a camel, and a picture of an African bushman with no clothes and a bracelet threaded through his nose that made Khadra wince.

  "Islam is scientific," Ebtehaj said, in English because Hanifa was there with Khadra. "Not like Christianity. Islam, it encourages us to learn science. In history, Christianity killed the scientists."

  "It was an Arab who discovered the world was round," Wajdy said. "This is why Christopher Columbus came to America."

  But Tayiba's parents said it was an African scientist who discovered the world was round. So which was it, an African or an Arab? It was a Muslim named al-Idrisi. He was African and wrote in Arabic. Aunt Ayesha spoke of the great empires of Mali and Ghana and the glories of Timbuktu and Benin, while Ebtehaj told of the glories of Al-Andalus and the beauties of Baghdad and Cairo in their prime.

  None of this information was in any book Khadra could find at the school library. Sometimes she wondered if maybe a little bit of Muslim pride made them exaggerate.

  One time her father told her Shakespeare was really
an Arab. "Just look at his name: It's an Anglicization of Sheikh Zubayr," he said, with a straight face.

  She insisted on it for fifteen minutes to her language-arts teacher the next day. When she got home and related the story, her father threw his head back and laughed, and only then told her he'd been joking.

  To back her claims about Islam and science before her doubting daughter, Ebtehaj showed Khadra one of her old Damascus University books on Muslim contributions to medicine. But it was too hard to read, in close Arabic print with no pictures.

  Khadra and Eyad could just about manage the little Arabic readers that their parents made relatives send from Syria every year. "See Mazen run. Rabab goes to market. See Father and Mother. Father is brave. Mother reads a letter from Father at the front." Father wore a Syrian Army uniform and Mother never wore hijab. They were secular Baathist textbooks, with a picture of the Syrian president, Hafez Asad, in the front. The first thing Khadra's parents did was tear that page out and throw it away. Then they set to teaching the children Arabic, and gathered them on the prayer rugs to recite the Quranic suras they worked hard to memorize. Eyad was working on The Cave, an ambitious project. Khadra was all the way up to Surat al-Fajr, the "0 Soul made Peaceful" section: Come in among My worshipers, and in My Garden, enter.

  No matter how hard they worked, however, the children could never keep up with their cousins in Syria, whose always exemplary Arabic composition was pointed out to them whenever the featherweight bluepaper letters arrived by airmail. Khadra harbored a secret loathing for Reem and Roddy.

  By the rivers dark, I wandered on I lived my life in Babylon

  By the rivers dark, where I could not see Who was waiting there, who was hunting me

  -Leonard Cohen, "By the Rivers Dark"

  Where was the soul at peace? Somalis were in the grip of a terrible famine. There was fighting in Western Sahara. Afghans filled refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. Patani Muslims were being persecuted in their Buddhist-dominated country. Life in Lebanon was a hell of shelling and death. None of this was an important part of the news in America. Whereas the minute details of the lives of the American men held hostage, and the tears and hopes of their mothers, fathers, grandparents, and second cousins in Kissamee made news every day. Only they were human, had faces, had mothers. People wore yellow ribbons for these fifty-two privileged white men who now were, if the American news was to be believed, the most wretchedly oppressed of the earth. Anchorman Walter Cronkite counted out the days of their captivity at the end of each news broadcast.