The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  "Mistakes? It's all a lie, don't you get it?" Ramsey said as they pulled through Zionsville. "I don't get how anyone could even be Sunni after finding out about Karbala."

  Khadra struggled to remember what she'd learned about the Sunni-Shia thing from Sunday school. The Sunni-Shia split had by now rent the Dawah Center. No one talked about it anymore.

  "Sunni Islam is just a sellout," Ramsey went on, his voice rising. "It's just a load of compromises and lies told by cowards too cowardly to fight for what they believe in."

  "Keep it down!" Uncle Omar yelled from the driver's seat. They froze, because he could get a little scary sometimes.

  Aunt Trish turned and smiled lamely. "Everything okay back there?"

  The argument petered out.

  Later, Khadra asked her father if it was true.

  "Is what true?" he said.

  "That Yazid killed the Prophet's grandson, and no one did anything about it?"

  It was true. "Why didn't everyone rebel? Why didn't they all go Shia?"

  "To avoid further bloodshed and strife," her father said. He tried to put a good face on it, just like he had about becoming citizens. It was his nature to see things in the best light, the kindest interpretation, rather than the worst. But that just confirmed Khadra's fears. The bottom fell out. The whole rest of early Islam after the life of the Prophet-including all the scholarship-had been formed under the government of a dynasty that had mercilessly slaughtered the Prophet's own grandson and most of his remaining kin.

  Led by the boozing, whoring Yazid-and the Sunni scholars knew how corrupt he was-the whole thing had been a travesty of the faith. It was awful, just awful. How had this been glossed over in Sunday school?

  Radical action was required to redress all this, Khadra felt. The Haqiqat sisters, Nilofar and Insaf, agreed. She deliberately hung out with them, knowing that, as Shia, they were now persona non grata in the Dawah circle. Radical Islam was her James Dean.

  Khadra and her friends applauded the assassination of Sadat and wished Saddam had met the same fate before he'd crushed the Shia Islamic resurgence in Iraq. They cheered the growing anti-Israeli resistance of the Shia Amal militia in the south of Lebanon. Insaf now liked to wear men's shalvar-qamises in stern plain grays and browns. She "liberated" them from her father's closet.

  "If I were an Amal girl," Khadra said, on purpose choosing to identify with the sect opposite her Sunni background, "they'd have to torture me to try and make me tell them anything. Uh-huh. They'd have to kill me, like Sumaya." Sumaya, the first Muslim martyr, died under torture, killed horribly-with a spear thrust upward through her-by her master, an enemy of Islam.

  Eyad found Khadra's radicalism bewildering. He was in the swing of an Islamic modernism phase. Earlier, he had gone through a yearning-for-traditional-Islam phase, when he'd felt that there was something missing in his life which learning classical Islamic scholarship and classical Arabic beyond the Muslim Sunday school level would set right. His parents were glad to oblige. He had been sent to seminars in D.C. and a two-month summer shariah program at Al-Azhar University, Cairo. However, Khadra hadn't had the opportunities afforded Eyad. Travel abroad, a girl alone? For the Shamys, it was out of the question.

  Khadra went on a regime of dates and water to emulate the diet of the Prophet.

  "That is ENOUGH," her mother said on the fourth day. "You will eat my cooking!" And she slammed the pot of okra on the kitchen table so hard it splashed Jihad with hot tomato sauce so he screamed. "Look what you made me do!" her mother shouted.

  The next morning Wajdy came and leaned on the edge of Khadra's desk and said quietly, "Do you know how much we spend weekly for groceries? You mother cuts coupons till her hands blister. Do you know how much dates cost? Five or six dollars for a small package that lasts one day with you eating nothing else. Binti, the Prophet ate dates because they were the most abundant food of his land. You can emulate him by analogy. Not by being ridiculous."

  "Soybeans," Eyad said to her. "That's what Shafie would have said." The ninth-century scholar he'd studied had pioneered the idea that local conditions of different lands should be taken into account when crafting Islamic laws.

  "Say what?"

  "Soybeans are to Indiana what dates are to Arabia. The most important crop.

  "Yeah, we're surrounded by soybeans. So?"

  "So, eat soy-based foods. If you want to emulate the Prophet by analogy, in Indiana, you eat soybeans."

  "Soybeans?" Insaf hooted.

  "I know! Can you believe him?" Khadra said. Her goal of doing something to further the cause of Islam in the world was being realized already: She and the Haqiqat sisters were making buttons that said "Islam Rules!" to sell at Islamic conferences. To fundraise forwell, for future projects that would raise the glorious banner of pure, revolutionary Islam in the world; they just weren't sure what.

  Then Nilofar got a marriage proposal from a handsome young Delhi-born doctor interning in Chicago. Khadra was shocked when she accepted. They had passionately discussed not getting married young but going to college first and becoming Islamic activists.

  "He's really into Islam and all," Nilofar insisted to a dubious Khadra. She showed her the velvet box with the wedding jewelry. "Look-he had it specially made-it's a star-and-crescent pattern."

  Insaf exchanged dark looks with Khadra behind Nilofar's back. "But I'm still going to be an Islamic activist," Nilofar exclaimed. "You'll see, I'm going to start a halaga that will revolutionize Chicago!" She got pregnant the first month.

  "Well, really, the best contribution to an Islamic revolution for a woman is to educate her children in the true Islamic values," she said plaintively on a visit home in her first trimester, dressed in a becoming, pale pink shalvar-qamis. Then she ran to the hall bathroom to puke. Khadra and Insaf, lying on their sides looking at each other across Nilofar's old bed and several shoeboxes full of "Islam Rules!" buttons, mourned the death of another Muslim warrior woman.

  But there is a oneness of the self, an integrity or internal harmony that holds together the multiplicity and continual transformations of being, and it is not an "Imitation" of the unity of the Logos, nor is it the individual's `piece" of the Logos. In every individual . . . the whole principle and essence of the Logos is wholly present...

  -James Olney, Metaphors of the Self

  Hai! Their parents announced it. They were going this year! "Mecca-be square or be there," Wajdy said, in a valiant attempt to use the hip youthful language he was picking up from the new American secretaries at the Center. Khadra and Eyad were so astounded by the news, they forgot to roll their eyes.

  "Wash your hair several times," Ebtehaj called from outside the bathroom door. Khadra could tell she had her mouth pressed right up to the door by how loud her voice was even over the running water.

  It was bath night before the Haj trip. They were going to don ihram on the plane midway to Saudi Arabia, and wouldn't be able to bathe after that until their pilgrimage was over.

  "Do any personal shaving you need to do now, Khadra," Ebtehaj called again. As if she was standing and waiting at the door. "You need a clean razor?"

  "No, Mama! Leave me alone. I can bathe myself!" Khadra muttered the last bit to herself.

  Instead of using a razor, Khadra leaned dripping out of the shower, pulled open a drawer, and fumbled for the hair scissors. She pulled a clump of hair and clipped, clumsily. Ow. Cut into some labia. Ow! Carefully washed and dried off the scissors and stuck it back deep in the drawer.

  "Give your hair three rounds. Did you give your hair three rounds of shampoo?" Ebtehaj called from the doorframe.

  "LEAVE ME ALONE!" Khadra shouted, smarting from her cut.

  Khadra pasted her face to the airplane window. There was Indianapolis, laid out like patchwork. That splotch to the south had to be Simmonsville, and beyond it the squarish outlines of farms and then-gone, under the clouds. Khadra felt funny. The phrase "leaving home" came into her head. But Indianapolis is not my home, s
he thought indignantly. Catchphrases from Islamic revival nasheeds flashed in her head-how a true Muslim feels at home wherever the call to prayer is sung, how a true Muslim feels no attachment to one nation or tribe over another. I don't even care if I never see the Fallen Timbers Complex again, Khadra thought. Over the lump in her throat.

  Ebtehaj had a tear in her eye as the plane rose over the city of Indianapolis. "Our community is the best ever," she sighed, leaning her head on her husband's shoulder. "Those sisters are my best friends in the world."

  In Amsterdam, the tone of the plane changed. From white to brown. From the Shamys being almost the only Muslims on board, to a scene in which the white middle-aged American couple whom Khadra had spied in first class, the only people left over from the Indianapolis leg of the journey, now looked distinctly out of place among the mostly Muslim, mostly darker folk that boarded the Amsterdam-Jeddah connection, some of them already in their pilgrim whites. The American woman, a blonde who had those tanned, speckled arms that American women get when they age because of the careless way they expose their bodies in youth, slipped on a long-sleeved white blouse.

  That's right, you cover yourself up, Khadra thought, catching a glimpse of her through the curtain that marked off first class. We're the majority now.

  A funny thing happened in the airspace over Jeddah. The Arab women who had boarded in Western clothing, black hair splayed down their shoulders, suddenly covered up in black abayas and turned into picture-postcard Saudis dotting the airplane rows. Ebtehaj, who was sitting at a distance from Khadra, shook her head and said loudly, "As if God sees them only in one country and not in the other."

  Ihram time. Wajdy, Eyad, and Jihad emerged from the bathroom in their white towel sarongs and white towel shoulder scarf. Eyad was self-consciously trying to tie his shoulder piece so his bare white chest would not show, seeming to feel the eyes of all the women on the plane upon him. It was the sensation of being underwearless in public that was doing that to him. Underwearless beneath the ihram, due to the rule barring clothing with seams-for male pilgrims only, not women. Ihram, the great equalizer-making men feel the nakedness and vulnerability of their bodies the way women more often did, in the usual run of things.

  Jihad thought the ihram outfit was the coolest thing. "Where's yours?" he asked Khadra. She and her mother had already changed into simple cotton caftans and white wimples.

  "We don't go topless for Haj, kiddo," Khadra said, tickling him under his now bare arms. He squirmed and almost mooned the entire left wing passenger section when his bottom towel wriggled half-off.

  They landed. At last, Khadra thought, someplace where we really belong. It's the land of the Prophet. The land of all Muslims.

  Three lanes separated people for visa processing: Saudi and Gulf nationals, U.S. and European passport holders, and "Other." Khadra was dismayed to find that she and her family fell in behind the American couple in the U.S. line.

  The American couple sailed through the entry gate and headed toward baggage claim. A Saudi clerk was leading them looking eager to please, Khadra noted.

  "Gimme a break," she said, rolling her eyes at their receding figures.

  Wajdy followed her gaze. "Yes, did you notice them?" he said, smiling.

  "Why are they even here?" Khadra said. "To prey on Saudi oil?"

  "To do Haj," her father said quietly.

  "But-they're not even-are they even Muslim?" Eyad objected. He'd noticed them too.

  "They are Muslim," Wajdy said.

  "Converts?" Khadra asked sharply. If so, why weren't they practicing Islam? Which she could tell they weren't, by the way they dressed.

  "No," her father said. He seemed to be enjoying her confusion. "Born Muslim."

  "Well, obviously they know nothing about Islam," Khadra huffed. "They don't even know enough to be wearing ihram."

  "I would be surprised if they did," Wajdy said. "It's an amazing story, really. The man told me-I chatted with him in the bathroom at Amsterdam-I was making wudu and he asked me how."

  "He's a Muslim and he doesn't know how to make wudu?" Eyad scoffed, holding the knot of his shoulder piece tightly.

  "He wasn't allowed to learn. They're Albanian. Did you know Albania is a Muslim country? The only Muslim country in Europe. When he was a child, there was a communist takeover. They didn't let Muslims practice. They forbade them to learn Quran or go to the mosque. His family and his wife's both managed to come to America."

  "Glory be to God," Ebtahaj said. Maybe it was the tiredness, but she was moved almost to tears. "And yet they want to make Haj."

  "They don't remember very much about Islam," Wajdy said, matching her feeling. "But they want to learn. They didn't have anything in English with the prayers in it. So I gave them our guidebook. I gave them the Dawah phone number and invited them to visit after we get back home. Imagine, Ebtehaj, they live only two hours away from Indianapolis, yet they've never heard of the Dawah Center." You could see it in his face, how the story of the Albanian couple had renewed his sense of mission already.

  The Shamys rode into Mecca on the back of a Japanese pick-up truck full of Kurdish pilgrims, sunken-faced elderly men, and elderly women dressed in big calico farmdresses to their ankles, with cotton britches underneath. Everyone had just spent hours and hours being processed in the chaotic, pilgrim-filled Jeddah airport and was exhausted. Jihad drooled on Khadra's sleeve, asleep, while she leaned her own sleepy head on her father's shoulder.

  Wajdy began leading the talbiya: "Here I am, 0 my Lord, Here I am!"

  To which the whole truckload responded, "Here I am, 0 my Lord, Here I am!"

  Into the night air they sang, into Mecca they jostled. Past the billboards that said, "Welcome, Guests of the Compassionate One," "Seiko," and "Panasonic." "Give praise to God, the Lord of the Worlds," flashed another highway sign, and beside it, brilliantly lit, a picture of a VCR with the Sony logo.

  The hotel room was so tiny you couldn't open the door all the way. It hit the foot of the bed. They all jumbled in somehow. And then somehow Khadra had slept through the night and the next thing she knew there was adhan floating through the air. Such a beautiful sound. Melodies on top of melodies, from mosque after mosque, circled through the living air, clearing sleep from the consciousness. Penetrating the seen and unseen worlds, drawing them together like a magnetic force.

  Khadra and her family arrived at the Sanctuary. The Kaba, with her embroidered Black Dress hitched up around her waist for the heavy work days of Haj, welcomed them. She was wonderful beyond the clumsy image of her on the kitschy rug above the faded couch way back in Fallen Timbers. She was the Hostess. Come in, come in. Come into my circle, gracious and kind. For they were guests of God now. Many pilgrims threw themselves into her Lap or Hijr, the half-circle on one side where the Kaba used to extend, where Hajar and Ismail slept: where a black woman lay buried in the heart of Islam.

  Khadra tried to keep the joyous talbiya in her mind and on her tongue: Here I am, 0 my Lord, Here I am! Labbaik, allahumma, lab- baik! But she kept getting it crossed with Phil Collins in her head crooning, "I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lo-ord ... I've been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lo-ord. . . "

  Everything was ceaseless motion around the Lady of Night, and the Lady was absolutely still. She was Sakina, the serenity within the whirl. Imagine, Khadra thought, looking at the massive tides of pilgrims around the Kaba, these circles get bigger and bigger, as people all over Mecca face here to pray, then all over the world, even as far as America, wave after wave of people, in concentric circles going all around the earth, and I am here at the center of all that. Khadra was a little stunned, and then she was taken up swirling too, and her mother was pleading, "Hold onto Jihad! Hold him tight!" and her father was calling, "Stay with me! Stay with me!" And they were off, part of the sea.

  A small elderly man jabbed Khadra in the ribs without being aware of it. He was scrambling to keep up with a litter bearing what looked to be his wife.
Suddenly a wall of Arab Gulf men stormed through, elbows locked around their women kin. They shoved everyone aside, barking "We have womenfolk, make way for them! We have women!" What are we, chopped liver? Khadra thought as she was pulled over to the right. A tall black teenaged girl, roundshouldered like Zuhura, got pressed up against her. Despite the discomfort and the fray, her face, up close to Khadra's and meeting her eye, was serene. "Peace," she whispered in Khadra's ear. "Salamu. Ya salam. " She seemed to surrender herself to the chaos with a sort of trust in its ultimate direction.

  After tawaf, Khadra waited for an opening to ford the river of people. She found a place to pray and then sat very still, her knees tucked under her chin, contemplating Islam's Lady in Black. Here was the center of the world just as the heart was the center of the body. The massing multitudes about her, flowing like blood through a vein-in the circulatory system of what larger consciousness?

  I'm glad God's ways are not your ways, He does not see as man; Within His love I know there's room For those whom others ban.

  -Frances E. W. Harper, "A Double Standard"

  Stately date palms towered over the adobe wall around the house. An evergreen bush at the door bore creamy yellow flowers. A middle-aged man with a white ghutra covering his head answered the door, all smiles through his full beard. A couple of stocky younger men stood beside him.

  "Welcome, welcome," Zaid Jafar Tihamy said, extending his hand to Wajdy, Eyad, and little Jihad. He touched his heart in respectful greeting to Khadra and her mother. "My sons, Bandar and Anwar," he said, indicating the young men by his side.

  They passed through a courtyard lined with tamarisks and palm trees. The men went left, into the public parlor, and the women went right, where a lovely floral scent grew stronger and appeared to be coming from a compact tree in a soil bed near the door. A large, heavily ornamented woman welcomed them warmly.

  "My henna tree," Aunt Saweem said, after greetings. "Isn't it wonderful?" She turned up her plump, braceleted hand to gesture at the tree, displaying the henna arabesques that adorned her palm.