by Ayad Akhtar
I went to the bathroom and scrubbed at my hands with soap and scalding water. When I returned to her room, my palms tingling, I found Mina standing behind a chair that faced the window, the direction in which she prayed five times a day. Mina had a long piece of white muslin in her hands.
“Sit, behta,” she said.
As I did, Mina started to wrap my head in the cloth. Her touch was warm. It sent a shudder through me. “We cover our heads in respect for the word of God.” Once she’d finished, she handed me the Quran.
“Kiss it,” she whispered.
I lifted the book to my face. Its soft, green leather-bound cover was cold to my lips.
“Open to the first surah,” she said.
“First what?”
“Surah. It’s what we call a chapter in the Quran. A surah.”
The book’s new binding cracked as I opened it. Inside, each page was like a work of art, covered on the left with a block of black Arabic text enclosed in a golden frame; on the right was the English translation. As I turned the thick pages—heavy like vellum—they released the crisp, pleasing odor of new paper.
I found the first surah, a half page of verse called “The Opening.”
“That’s it,” Mina said. “Read it to me.”
I cleared my voice and began to read:
In the name of God, the Benevolent, the Merciful.
Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds,
The Benevolent, the Merciful.
Master of the Day of Judgment,
You do we serve; You do we ask for help.
Guide us on the right path,
The path of those You favor;
Not those who earn Your wrath,
Nor those who go astray.
I stumbled through the text, tripping on the words “benevolent” and “merciful.” When I’d finally gotten through the text, I was surprised to find that Mina was smiling at me. “Remember when the angel Gabriel came to the cave and made the Prophet recite?”
I remembered.
“Well, behta,” she explained, touching the Quran, “that is how this whole book came into being through our Prophet…peace be upon him.”
I remembered a question I’d been meaning to ask her for some time. “Auntie, why do you always say ‘peace be upon him’?”
“Out of respect, Hayat. The Prophet gave us all so much, so we try to give something back by always praying for the peace of His soul.”
“Do you have to say it every time?”
Mina laughed. “No, behta. With everything in life, Hayat, it’s the intention that matters. As long as you respect the Prophet’s memory, that’s the important thing.” Mina leaned in to turn the page. Her arm brushed against mine, her touch whispering along my skin and echoing up my arm to the back of my neck.
Mina turned the pages, explaining that there were 114 surahs, each the result of a different encounter between Gabriel and Muhammad, sometimes in the cave at Hira, sometimes while Muhammad was at home with his wives, sometimes as he lay dreaming on the rock-hard cot that—Mina said—Muhammad slept on his whole life, even once he had become something like a king and could afford so much more.
Mina explained a way of dividing the Quran into thirty sections of equal length called juz. This was how the hafiz broke it up, the hafiz, or those who knew our holy book by heart. Mina said that becoming a hafiz was one of the greatest things a person could do in one’s life. It meant not only securing one’s own place in Janaat, but a place for one’s parents as well: Janaat, our word for “Paradise”: that garden in the sky that was the ultimate end of all our labors. And though I didn’t know much about our faith, I knew how important Paradise was. To us Muslims, life here on earth was of no value if it did not lead to that abode of endless peace and pleasure, where rivers of milk and honey flowed, and where the famous virgin hordes awaited our arrival.
I didn’t know what the word “virgin” meant, though I knew it had something to do with the uneasy fascination and shame that came over me when, say, Bo Derek floated across our TV screen jogging through a golden haze in ads for 10; or while watching the endless parade of bikini-clad women in high heels stopping to pose for the camera on the beauty pageants that Mother—inexplicably, considering her seemingly ceaseless disdain for white women—watched religiously. I knew the word “virgin” had something to do with the lure of a woman’s unclothed body, still mysterious to me, as I knew nothing more about the facts of life than that it was the name of a television show about four girls at boarding school. And compounding my confusion was the apparent paradox: Why were these bodies so forbidden to us now if they were precisely what was promised to us later in Janaat?
“Are you a hafiz, Auntie?” I asked.
She laughed. “I’m too lazy for that, behta. Learning the Quran is hard work. It takes many years, and a very special person. A hafiz never gives up.”
Nothing seemed more remarkable to me at that moment than the mysterious hafiz, whoever they were.
Mina turned the pages back to the opening. “Let’s read it again,” she said.
“Together?”
“No, behta. You read it to me.”
I did. My voice rattled softly in my throat and chest as I read aloud. When Mina stopped me to ask if I understood what I was saying, I realized I’d been paying no attention to what I was reading, only to the pleasure of the sounds themselves.
So I read the verses to her again.
“I understand the words, Hayat,” she said, stopping me. “I want to know what they mean.”
I was looking at her lips as she spoke, their pink, plump, ridged surface moving with her words. The side of her face was bright, lit by her bedside lamp, and the other half receded gently into shadows. She was beautiful.
“Hayat? Hayat?”
“Yes, Auntie?”
“I want you to concentrate, okay?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Let’s take a look at these lines again. Three words are repeated more than one time …What are they?”
I looked down at the page. In the lamplight, the black letters pulsed against the yellow-white page; Mina’s fingers—tipped with red—moved along the lines. I tried to focus, looking for the repeated words.
In the name of God, the Benevolent, the Merciful.
Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds,
The Benevolent, the Merciful.
“ ‘God,’ ‘benevolent,’ ‘merciful,’ ” I said.
“Good. Now, you already know what ‘God’ means. But how about these other words. Let’s start with ‘merciful.’ What does ‘merciful’ mean?”
“It means nice?”
“Not only. It means something more precise than that.”
I had a soft feeling about the word, something kind, something released or releasing. But I didn’t know how to explain it.
“I don’t know,” I replied, annoyed.
“Let me help you, Hayat…When someone hits you, what do you do about it?”
“Hit them back?”
“Or?”
I thought for a moment. “You tell someone?”
She smiled. “Or?”
I didn’t know.
“You can forgive them,” she said. “If you forgive them, you’re showing mercy.” I was surprised. There was a force in the clarity of her definition. It made her seem even more remarkable to me. “And ‘benevolent’?” she continued. “Do you know what that means?”
I shrugged. I didn’t.
“It means doing good,” she said, softly. “When you do something good, you are being benevolent.” She reached out and touched the side of my face. “So what is the beginning of our Quran saying?”
“That God forgives? And He does good?”
She smiled. “That’s exactly right, Hayat. And I want to tell you something else, something very special…” She leaned in, her voice lowered, her lightly British accent more pronounced than usual as she went on: “Something no one told me until I was older than you…and
I don’t want you to forget it. Okay?”
I nodded.
“Allah will always forgive you, no matter what you do. No matter what you do. All you have to do is to ask to be forgiven. That’s what it means that He is merciful. And Allah is also benevolent. And that means He will make sure that whatever happens to you is always for the good.”
“You mean that even the bad things that happen to us are for the good, right?”
“Exactly, sweetie.” There was a fire in her eyes now. “This surah is telling us about Allah’s nature, behta. That it is His nature to forgive us. And it is His nature always to do what is for the good. And what it means is very simple: You never have to worry. Never. You are safe. As safe as if Allah Himself were holding you in the palm of His hand.” She put out her palm, its narrow, waxen surface glowing above a network of crisscrossing lines. Like the page—and her fingers on it earlier—her hand struck me as startling, vivid, breathing with life. She kissed me on the forehead again. “Allah be with you, behta.”
That night my nerve ends teemed and pulsed. I still recall the vividness of my cotton pajamas against my arms and legs, the fabric pressing here and there, distinct points of contact alive with pleasure. And this was only the surface. Deep inside, things were stirring as well. Even my bones seemed to be breathing. My body felt whole, one, unified, filled with air, expanding with light.
I fell asleep and dreamt all night of Mina’s hands turning the yellow-white pages of my new Quran.
The next night, half an hour before bedtime, I washed up, tied the muslin Mina had given me to my head, and went to see her, my new Quran in hand. Having spent recess at school memorizing the verses we’d gone over the night before, I recited them for her now from memory.
“How wonderful, behta!” She was so surprised. She took me into her arms, and all at once I felt it again: that exquisite shudder running along my limbs, up my back. “I have a feeling about you,” she said into my ear. “I have a feeling you might just end up a hafiz someday.”
4
A New World
The months that followed were witness to a series of spiritual experiences that would remain singular in my life, all revolving around the Quran and my evening study hour with Mina. I would leave her room feeling lively, easily moved, my heart softened and sweet, my senses heightened. Often, I was too awake to sleep, and so I took to my desk—white muslin still bound to my head—to continue memorizing verses. After long nights like these, the mornings were not difficult, as Mother warned when she would find me at my desk past ten o’clock. If anything, these mornings were even sweeter: the trees stippled with turning leaves and bathed in a glorious light that seemed like much more than just the sun’s illumination; the white clouds sculpted against blue skies, stacked like majestic monuments to the Almighty’s unfathomable glory. And it wasn’t only beauty that moved me in these heightened states. Even the grease-encrusted axle of the yellow school bus slowing to its morning stop at the end of my driveway could captivate me, its twisting joint—and the large, squeaking wheel that turned around it—seeming to point the inscrutable way to some rich, strange, and holy power.
At school—I was starting sixth grade—I would find myself, inexplicably, in states of eerie calm and awakeness. For hours, something as simple as the play of sunlight against the classroom’s green chalkboard could occupy me completely. Not to mention the food in the cafeteria. I recall sipping from my carton of milk one lunch hour, shocked. The full, creamy, comforting flavor seemed like a miracle. And while part of me wondered how it was I had never truly tasted milk before, another part of me had already concluded that these experiences had their source in my new contact with our holy Quran.
That October, during a game of touch football one afternoon recess, I ran downfield, looking back over my shoulder and up at the sky, where I expected to find the ball Andy—our quarterback—had told me in the huddle was coming my way. Instead, I saw something round and perfect, a brilliant white circle appearing behind a veil of clouds. And in the few seconds it took for Andy’s uneasy spiral to leave his hands and come floating toward me—and during which I realized it was the sun I was seeing—I found myself already lost in sudden contemplation. The ball fell through my grip. My teammates jeered. I smiled, sheepish, apologizing. But my remorse was mostly an act. My thoughts were focused on the recollection of verses I’d memorized for Mina earlier that week:
Consider the sun and its splendor….
And the day, that reveals it…
And the night, in which it hides…
Consider the sky and the One who made it…
And the earth, spread out before you…
As I made my way back to scrimmage, I gazed over at the school building, its single story of beige bricks fanning out beneath the rows of tall trees behind it; beyond those trees was Worth Park, and beyond that, the shopping center and movie theater and local pharmacy; and beyond that, forests and fields and who knew what else. I turned to the road lined with split-level homes. Beyond those homes were other homes, then a highway, and further homes upon homes. I looked up at the sky, its thin cloud cover against a blue ceiling hiding the way to the dark space I knew lay beyond, a vastness inhabited with glowing stars and turning globes, and—according to our science book—an ever-expanding universe.
I was suddenly awestruck by the thought of infinity. And not just of the universe I couldn’t see beyond the clouds, but of the world around me as well: the countless schools and trees and homes and people in them, and the countless kids on playgrounds, how many of them wondering—just like me at that very moment—about all the endless schools and homes and trees and all the infinite stars above unfolding forever…
It was probably not the first time I’d ever been moved to awe by such musing, but it was the first time I had a word to put to my feelings, a word I’d learned from the Quran:
Majesty.
It’s all God’s majesty, I thought as I jogged back and took my place in the huddle.
“I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. But tea is my one vice!”
I heard Mina say it so many times, but always with a sly half grin that made it hard to believe she really had any remorse. The fact was, her tea was exceptional: bold but discreet, with a sharp, clean bite that made one sit up a little straighter, abounding with complex and subtle aftertastes that drew one—as the flavors faded—to sip again. It was the result of a preparation that bore no resemblance at all to the steeping of bags in cups of hot water that my parents called tea. Mina’s was more like a stew: the loose leaves (Darjeeling or Assam, with a pinch of Earl Grey or Lady Grey thrown in depending on her mood), a crushed cardamom pod, a clove or two, a dash each of cinnamon and ginger powder, and a teaspoon and a half of sugar, all dropped into one part whole milk and one part water brought to a simmer over low heat. She stood over the concoction, attentive, turning it with a wooden spoon, moving the pot off the fire each time it approached a boil. She was waiting for the tea to turn a particular hue—a creamy, deep tan—before cutting the heat and straining the brew directly into cups she had lined along the stove. The aroma of milk and tea and sugar and spices was ample and sweet, and it always made my mouth water.
Father loved her tea so much, he wanted to learn how to make it exactly as she did. I remember the afternoon he first stood beside Mina at the stove while she coached him through the preparations. When they were done—the cups were poured—Father, Mother, and Mina sat together at the kitchen table to taste the result.
“Hmmm. It’s good, Naveed,” Mina said, sipping.
“Not as good as when you make it,” Mother was quick to add.
“It’s his first time, Muneer.”
“First or last, I don’t know. I just know it’s not as good.”
Father ignored her.
“Too much cinnamon,” Mother said.
Mina sipped, considering the flavor. “I don’t think so. I think it just needs to blend a little better. Maybe straining it into a pot to let it
sit before pouring.”
“But you don’t do that,” Father objected.
“But I’m very attentive when I stir. Very slow.”
“It needs more attention, is what she’s saying,” Mother added. Father ignored her, taking another sip. Mina turned to me, offering me her cup.
“You want to try your father’s tea, behta?”
Mother put up her hand. “None for him.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Too young. When you’re eighteen you can drink tea and coffee. Not now.”
“But I’ve had it before.”
“Since when?” Mother asked, surprised.
“I’ve given it to him,” Mina interjected before I could respond.
“Hmm,” Mother hummed, disapproving.
I looked over at Imran. He was coloring in a coloring book, and had a glass of milk before him. Just like me. “I’m old enough,” I said.
“According to the laws of what universe?” Mother asked.
“Don’t make a big deal, Muneer,” Father said. “It’s just a cup of tea.”
“He’s old enough to be praying. Why not a cup of tea?” Mina replied, glancing over at me with a look that made me realize what she was doing. I’d been begging her for weeks to teach me to pray.
“Old enough to pray? Well, that would require Mr. Inattentive here to teach him,” Mother added flatly. In Islam, it was a father’s duty to teach his son to pray.
“You, Muneer, are a total contradiction,” Father replied. “All your complaining about Muslim men, and here you are, criticizing me for not being Muslim enough.”
“There’s no contradiction,” Mother said, tapping her finger nervously against the cup. “What’s wrong with Muslim men has nothing to do with prayers. It has to do with how they treat their women.”