by Mohja Kahf
"What is that, one of your funky Gulfie things?" Khadra said curiously.
Aiwa, "Juma said. Smoke wafted up from it: Sandalwood.
"Mmm," she said. They lay on top of the polyester bedspread, breathing deeply. He pulled her in to him and she nestled her head in the crook of his shoulder. Exhausted, they fell asleep that way.
And across the sands, from among its lavish gifts, the Gulf scatters fuming froth and shells
-Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, "The Rain"
High up on a mezzanine in the Kuwait airport, behind a clear fiberglass partition, a great throng of men, women, and children stood waving energetically at Khadra and her husband. Juma waved back. His parents had flown the new couple to Kuwait for a second wedding reception.
"Who's all that?" Khadra said.
Juma shrugged. "Just a few of my relatives."
Khadra grinned. You knew you were an Arab if your ride from the airport was two dozen people.
She and her husband walked out of the air-conditioned airport and it was like stepping into a sauna. The very air was dripping sweat. The crowd of relatives descended upon them, exchanging hugs and welcomes. Besides his parents, there was Johar, the older sister who was a pediatrician, his younger sisters Fowz and Farida, cousins Muhammad, Big Ali, Osman, Omar, Bakr, and Little All and-well, assorted others, more than she could keep track of. The entire caliphate of Islam was there, she joked.
The Tashkenti family compound had a main house for the parents, a second house for a married son to live in with his familythat would be Juma and Khadra and their future children ("but we don't have to, we can go out and get a place of our own," Juma assured Khadra)-a guest cabin, servants' quarters, and an extra house in case any unmarried daughters needed to live there in the future. A poor relation of Juma's father had been living there for years; her name was Moza, and she was divorced, with four children.
The courtyard walls spilled over with bright pink bougainvillea. Bird-of-paradise plants were carefully tended and palm trees swayed, yes, Khadra thought, even if swaying palms is a clich€, by golly sway they did with the weight of their high bundles of ripe fruit. Khadra had never tasted fresh-picked balah, or early dates, and found them delicious. She'd never imagined dates could be as juicy as plums. "I did not mean to finish the whole bowl of balah in the refrigerator, forgive me, but they were so cold and so sweet."
Khadra's favorite in-law was Juma's grandfather. He was a leathery old man, small and spry, who spent most of his days at the docks. Family members spoke of him in a protective way that indicated he was a bit senile.
"He used to be a pearl diver," Juma's father said with a sigh, "before oil was discovered. He hates oil." In the fifties, the grandfather had fought-uselessly-the changes the petrol industry wrought in his country. They'd rendered a man with his skills defunct.
The old man refused to sleep in his luxury suite. His preferred space was a tent at the back of the compound with a payload of sand in front of it. The camp was equipped with a campfire and tin cooking gear. Khadra sat out there with him one evening and ate his coal-blackened fish.
"Bless your heart," Juma's mother said when she came in. Her own daughters dodged grandpa-sitting duties as often as they could.
"We hate roughing it," Fowz said. "Mosquitos!"
"We prefer shopping!" her sister added.
Kuwait City was mall after high-rise mall of shopping with Fowz and Farida. Because of Free Trade zone agreements that made the place a capitalist's heaven-and a hell for workers' rights, Khadra knew Joy would've pointed out-the shopping centers overspilled with stuff you never saw in America, the latest appliance brands from Europe and Japan and China, a dizzying smorgasbord. Khadra was uncomfortable with her sisters-in-law's level of spending and felt terrible about the modest amount of it she herself did. That seemed to be what you did in Kuwait: you shopped and shopped.
"What you can't carry, we'll stock in your house," her mother-inlaw said.
Khadra realized with a start that she was referring to the house in the family compound that would be Juma's when he returned. "Ours, when we return," she mentally corrected herself. But she couldn't see herself there.
Any insect that undergoes a complete metamorphosis has several different life stories, ones that describe how it lives in its immature, larval forms, what goes on in its pupal transformation-if it has one-and how it behaves as a mature sexual adult.
-Sue Hubbell, Broadsides from the Other Orders
Back in the Tulip Tree apartment tower in Bloomingon, it was too much fun to have a little place of your own with your own little set of pots and pans in a teeny-tiny kitchen. Your own little dinette where you could entertain. With its own dimmer switch on the cute mini-chandelier so you could create "mood." And your own mirrored dresser where you could set up your own jewelry boxes and curvy-curly perfume bottles, and, and, and, your little things. To be a married woman of your very own, on equal terms with married women and other real people-in the community, only married people had prime status.
Married life was bliss. To have a friend always, a built-in friend. To pray fajr beside him in the dark misty dawn and then sleep beside him in your full-sized bed-your very own man. To watch him shape his beard and do unfamiliar manly things that bespoke a whole man-world different from the one inhabited by your father and brother. To be beautiful in the mirror of his eyes, a doorway into a whole woman-world for him. To lie in the curve of his body watching TV or falling asleep, his arm slung along your hips, making you feel very feminine and tender. At long last, finding the one place where you could soften like that, and not have to be hard and guarded and defensive and worried. And then to do even more interesting and absorbing things in the curve of his body, the bronze and the olive-colored limbs entwined, belly on belly.
It took her twice the work to get where he got with half the effort. It got easier as they got more experienced together.
"I had no idea it was that much work," Juma said, his hand cupped over her crotch afterward, as she lay breathing hard, her whole heart pounding under his hand. "Mine's like a-what do you call it, the no-brainer camera? A point-and-shoot."
Khadra laughed at that.
She fit the profile of the wife Juma always knew he'd have. An observant Muslim, of course, but also a modern, educated woman, not old-fashioned and boring. Khadra would fit right in with his family when he moved back-she would maybe have to adjust to some Kuwaiti customs, but his mother and sisters could help her learn. Her Arabic was not bad. And being married to a Syrian woman would give him cachet in Kuwaiti society. Plus, he was a breast man and he could tell from the first time he saw her that she was not flat, even under those boxy jilbabs of hers. He was not disappointed.
"Juma" meant "Friday" in Arabic so Khadra called him "my man Friday," but he didn't get the Robinson Crusoe reference. His bookshelf had only engineering manuals and a Quran. And one slim volume of Nabatean poetry because, as he put it, "You can't be an Arab without poetry."
She made him read the Defoe novel. "So what do you think?" she asked, lying on her back on the grass at Brown County State Park.
"His work ethic is very Islamic," Juma said. He was stretched out beside her. A butterfly flittered around the mat, lighting for a moment on his shoulder. It had jaggedy, angular wings.
"A question mark!" she exclaimed.
"What?" Juma pulled himself up on his elbows. The butterfly flew off.
"That butterfly, it's called a question mark. See the cut of its wings?"
They watched it flirt with a ruffle of leaves on a tree branch then float away.
"If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have three items, what would they be?"
"Aw, Khadra. I hate games like this." Juma heard a rustling on the trail that cut around their picnic area and he started to sit up, but relaxed when what surfaced was two American hikers, a guy and a girl in khaki shorts and tank tops.
"What would your three things be?"
He sighed. "A Q
uran."
"I knew you were going to say that. A Quran and your engineering manual, right?" Khadra snickered.
"You don't want me to bring a Quran? You wouldn't take a Quran?"
"My Quran is in here," she said with a self-satisfied tap on her chest. "I don't need paper and leather. When you memorize it, you own it."
"You're not a hafiza."
"I know. But I've got enough to go on for a few years on a desert island."
"In there, huh." He put his hand on her breast, fondling it through her sweater.
She smacked it lightly away.
"You know, for a Syrian girl, you're not very adventurous," he muttered.
"What the heck is that supposed to mean?" They'd been conversing in Arabic, but she said that in English.
"Nothing." He replied in Arabic.
"No, what is it supposed to mean?"
"Nothing! And sit up! Someone's coming." It was Arab guys this time, people he knew. That meant she had to change her unladylike sprawl to more suitable body posture.
Khadra frowned, but he didn't notice.
One thing her friend joy found bizarre was Khadra's belief in a woman's right to abortion.
"Wait-you're supposed to be the religious nut in this picture," Joy said. They were biking to the library on a nippy autumn day. The trees that lined the quads of white limestone were offering their last blazes of red and orange turning to rust and brown.
"Yeah, well, Islamic law allows abortion up to four months," Khadra called out, pedaling harder to keep up with Joy. Passersby looked up at the word abortion, their faces reflecting the strong and various emotions it stirred. "All the schools of thought allow it. The only thing they differ on is how long it's allowed. Four weeks to four months. That's the range."
"But-but only in case of rape or health reasons, right?" Joy pleaded, slowing down for Khadra.
"No, not just for emergency reasons, actually. Like, al-Ghazali says you can do it if you don't care to lose your figure."
"Oh my God, no," Joy protested. Intellectually, she supported abortion rights, but something in her deeper than politics still found it horrifying.
"But only until the beginning of the fourth month," Khadra said.
"Why the fourth month?"
"That's when ensoulment happens."
"Ensoulment?" Joy called. Khadra had fallen behind again.
"The fetus-the fetus gets-the fetus gets the breath of life blown into it," Khadra panted. "At four-at one hundred and twenty days-four months."
"So you've got it all pinned down to the exact moment that the soul enters the body."
"You betcha."
"Because a whadyacallem, a hadith tells you so."
"You betcha." Green-veined orange leaves whirled up around her.
Joy pedaled away in frustration, crunching brown leaves under her bike tread.
In the months after the wedding, not a week went by when someone didn't ask Khadra if she was pregnant.
"Why not?" Aunt Fatma said in dismay, when Khadra explained that not only was she not pregnant, but she didn't plan to be just yet. "You're using prevention? Haram!"
"Oh, Fatma, you know it's not haram," Ebtehaj took her daughter's side.
"Well, but it can be harmful, I tell you," Aunt Fatma insisted. She was a little teapot, short and stout. "My aunt took the pills and do you know what?"-Aunt Fatma lowered her voice, her eyes widening-"they made her sterile. I hope you're not using the pills!" She pulled Khadra close and whispered, "The West sends the pills to Egypt and the other Muslim lands to make us all sterile!"
Khadra wished she had never divulged her plans.
Ebtehaj stepped in. "Stop making her worry. When did your aunt take the pills, in the sixties? Horse pills! Big dosages-they tried them out on poor Third World women before deciding what was safe."
"I'm telling you, God doesn't like you trying to prevent life," Fatma pressed. "I'll admit, Abdulla and I tried it once."
Khadra stage-gasped.
"And thats when God sent us the twins!" Aunt Fatma blurted.
"Still," her mother told her at home, "you can have babies and finish college too. You can do it all. Look at me: I did."
And her father said, "You have a stable home, and your husband's not poor, even if he is a student. What are you waiting for? Yes, birth control is allowed in shariah, but not indefinitely," he said gravely.
"Maybe you should have just one," Aunt Trish offered. "One, then wait." Her son, Danny, and his wife, Tayiba, had started out with the resolve to postpone children too, but it hadn't taken them long to produce a lovely little granddaughter for her, after all.
Juma's mother, on the weekly phone call from Kuwait, concurred. "Have just one," she cajoled. "At least then you'll know you're able to have them.
What Juma heard was: "Real men don't use condoms," and "I hear spermicide can make you impotent."
"Not impotent, dummy, sterile."
"Bad enough, either way!"
"What's wrong?" Juma asked, when Khadra slid out of his embrace one evening.
"I can't," she said, staring at the ceiling. "It's like they're all here in bed with us, going `Have babies! Do it, do it!"'
Things came up in their marriage. Little things at first. Like Khadra's bike.
"Where are you going?" Juma said. Khadra threw her leg across the seat. She'd biked to class a couple of times since they'd been married, but he hadn't noticed. Or perhaps he had, but hadn't said anything.
"To Kroger for milk." She'd added a wire basket to the front handlebars. It was all tricked out for cute newlywed couple grocery shopping.
"But-" he looked puzzled. She was an Arab girl, familiar with Arab customs. He hadn't expected her to be doing things that would embarrass him. If he'd wanted to have to explain every limit of proper behavior, he'd have married an American. "But someone might see you."
"Of course someone might see me, honey. It's not a secret or anything."
"No, I mean one of the Arab guys. Please don't do it. Don't do it," he begged. Plus, he leaned in and whispered that he'd make it worth her while to stay home. She felt a tingling where the bicycle seat pressed between her legs. They stayed in all afternoon and didn't even miss the milk and groceries that earlier had seemed so urgently needed.
The same scene was repeated the next week. "It's unlslamic. It displays your body," he objected.
But it was hard for Khadra to resist a bike on a fine spring day.
"Say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty that they should not display their beauty and ornaments, "he quoted. And this time he didn't throw in any fringe benefits.
The next time they argued over the bike, Juma took a different approach. "You look ridiculous," he told her flatly. "It's idiotic, riding a bicycle in hijab. You look totally stupid and clumsy and clownlike."
Khadra stared at him dully.
It didn't help when her husband moved on to another tactic. One that he thought would be particularly effective with her, as religious as she was.
"Have you examined yourself on this, Khadra, really examined your ego?" he asked. "Is this willfulness of yours pleasing to God? Or are you following your desires and seeking the pleasures of this world in defiance of God's rulings."
But it wasn't God's rulings. It was just his own sensibilities, the way he'd been raised in Kuwait. So why was he bringing God into it?
She laid a copy of the Quran in front him-their wedding mushaf with the indigo and gilt Moroccan binding, the one they always read from together. "Show me where in the Quran it says women can't ride bikes in public."
"It's not that simple. You know Islamic law is not that simple. And custom is important. Custom is recognized by the Law." His tone was hostile.
Khadra remembered a line from one of Hakim's khutbas, which were circulating on audiocassette and becoming popular already, and he still a grad student at Harvard Divinity. "Show me a couple that reads Quran together and I'll show you a marriage
that will never fail." Maybe things were not so cut-and-dried, Khadra thought.
Whenever she biked after that, Juma would get in his black car and roar off. Not tell her he was going. She, who had never spent a night alone in a house, would have to be by herself all weekend in their apartment, sour and crying and waking up with a jolt twenty times in the long darkness, imagining the clink of somebody breaking in. From his cousin's in Terre Haute, Juma would call her, but he only came back when he was ready.
She lay in bed thinking about Zuhura lying in her ditch. Unnamed worries gnawed the bottom of her belly. Turning over on her side, she stared absently at the jewelry box on her dresser. There, under a tangle of necklace chains, were the mysterious Osmanli coins, Teta's gift. What had she said when she gave them to her? "... because there may be days when you wake up and feel the future closing in on you, the horizon shrinking." It felt like that now.
Finally, Juma pulled rank. "I forbid you," he said, laying his hand on the bike seat. "As your husband, I forbid you."
Khadra recoiled. She couldn't believe he would out and out say that, even if it was Islamically valid. Her father never said things like that to her mother. It was alien to everything she felt and knew.
But eventually, she put the bike in the resident storage area of their building's basement. Such a little thing, a bike. In the overall picture of a marriage, what was a bike? The gears rusted and the tires lost air. Something inside her rusted a little, too.
Reason stutters famously here, unable to dance nimbly in leaden clogs.
-Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
Khadra took an elective with the German Islamic studies professor, over Juma's protest that it was a waste of time and money. It started out as, "I'm going to sit in on her class to make sure she doesn't distort Islam in her teaching." But as the semester progressed, Khadra began to admit to herself that there were whole areas of Islam that all her Dawah Center upbringing and Masjid Salam weekend lessons hadn't begun to teach her. All the Islam she knew before, she'd looked at from the inside. In Professor Eschenbach's class, she began to see what her belief looked like if you stepped away and observed it from a distance.