by Malu Halasa
At the front on the church’s templon is a panoply of the holy. In between life-size paintings of the archangels—Mikhail brandishing a sword and messenger Gabriel—are midsize canvases of Enoch in a chariot of fire, a haloed Christ holding the book of alpha and omega, the Annunciation, and an early archbishop wearing a fur stole symbolizing the beard of Haroun. A minute painting, almost as an afterthought, has been placed down in a corner. It depicts the patron saint of Fadhma’s family. Clad in a tatty lion’s skin, an emaciated Saint Sabas stoops over, his back not yet broken by the heavy cross he bears.
The desert father was one of many in a seething landscape of divination and revelation. From anonymous hermits to the big headliners of the Bible, seers of esoteric knowledge isolated themselves from women in barren wastes, remote caves, or fortified mountain monasteries. Regardless of their persuasion, Christian, Muslim, and Jew consulted them freely, though there were never enough of them to satisfy demand. Like wild dogs, the monotheistic religions became territorial. At the slightest provocation, tensions erupted over a bit of bone or ill-omened prophecy.
From this central pew she also gazes on the place where her husband’s most memorable intercession averted a religious war. A party of workmen had removed some rotted floorboards in the oldest part of the church. Beneath nearly a millennium and a half’s worth of debris, an ancient mosaic was discovered, and soon after the village became a pilgrimage site for religious fanatics and archaeologists alike.
From Lebanon to the Nile Delta, the Mediterranean Sea to the Eastern Desert, the oldest surviving map of the Holy Land revealed ancient sites in tiny colored stone tiles. There were the porticoed streets of Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; palms signifying water around Jericho and a wise oak for Hebron. Greek inscriptions identified Bethlehem, Gaza, Beersheba, and Ashkelon. Fish in the blue tiles of the Jordan River had the good sense to swim away from the Dead Sea, where two fishing boats were not having much luck. The fisherman and Jesus walking on water had been defaced, and bridges crossed the water to the West Bank and a church where John the Baptist baptized his lord.
The map reveals a land undivided by man-made boundaries. Its makers lived when the region was the center of the civilized world, circumscribed by the four rivers of Paradise, long before Columbus and Vasco da Gama sailed out of the Bible’s sacred geography and filled charts with new continents and enigmatic oceans. Their world eclipsed the old as completely as the church floor once hid the mosaic.
An old shepherdess came down from Jebel Musa to view the curiosity at the church. She entered tranquil enough but, after a few minutes inside, emerged hysterical. When she was finally able to speak she said the waters in the mosaic flowed with blood. As soon as word reached her, Mother Fadhma retrieved Al Jid from the fields, and he joined the priest in an emergency consultation.
For several hours the two men remained sequestered inside the church. They discussed the prevailing light for that time of day and the effects of temperature variation. On their knees, with an oversize magnifying glass supplied by Abu Za’atar, they inspected the map. Then they interviewed the woman who witnessed the apparition. Inevitably they came to different conclusions.
To the waiting crowd outside, the priest was the first to proclaim, “The age of stupendous miracles is over. I don’t dispute that it is possible for the home of blessed Birth Giver Theotokos to be preserved from Saracen defilement by flying from Jerusalem and appearing brick by brick in southern Italy. But our world has changed. The best we can hope for now are small wonders, the sick getting well or the reunification of feuding families. These things I myself have witnessed.”
Al Jid passionately disagreed. “God still moves in mysterious ways. If He no longer performs prodigious feats, it’s because we as people have lost the imagination to appreciate them. Blind faith is one of many solutions. Read the signs around you closely.” He refused to believe that the pinkish glow faintly visible in the mosaic waters was necessarily an optical illusion.
Whatever the conclusion, the mosaic ceased to be a mildly interesting archaeological sideshow and took on the distinction of a full-blown religious phenomenon. As news of the shepherdess’s vision spread, a steady stream of pilgrims thronged to the village. Some claimed to see the map bleed; others fell into ecstatic trances when they drew near to it. In the charged atmosphere, sectarian fervor accumulated. The question of ownership of the miracle mosaic assumed tremendous importance.
Sporadic acts of violence broke out among the people who gathered at the church. A militant minority began pressing for the exclusion from the church of all non-Christians, whose mystical revelation demanded it should be declared a mosque. This was countered by vague threats to repossess the mosaic by force. The two sides became progressively more entrenched. There were rumors of weapons being stockpiled. The threat to public order was such that the king dispatched a group of suited officials from the capital to adjudicate the dispute.
The villagers and numerous outsiders who assembled before them were invited to state their cases. For the duration of the public meeting members of the various factions maligned one another’s God, with calls for ousting all Christians from the country. The crowd was growing ugly. When Al Jid took his turn, the yelling died down. He began by saying he didn’t wish to presume on anyone’s patience. “However, if any one person is responsible for the abiding existence of Christians in the Islamic world, it is Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph after the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be upon Him. Caliph Umar decreed that Christians and Jews should be allowed to practice their religions, and so it is until today.”
The officials said nothing, which Al Jid took as a sign to continue: “Even after the conquest, the Muslim soldiers left populations of the two other religions alone. They were protected, ahl al-thima. They were not required to convert to Islam; their conquerors did not want them to. It was more profitable to tax the vanquished than to make them change religions. Later still, when the Jews were ousted from fifteenth-century Spain, who gave them refuge but Muslim Turkey? They would be still living among us had not Israel claimed them.”
Few dared to call the nation across the river by its name. In the newspapers, it was still referred to as the “hijacked country” or, if the official name had to be published, government censors blacked it out. Propaganda considerations required that the proper designation never be used—something nameless was more difficult to empathize with. While shocked voices rose in the crowd, the officials remained indifferent.
Al Jid began again: “History has shown that Islam has embraced non-Muslims, and sometimes the situation has been reversed. The Prophet Himself, may God forgive us all, fled Mecca during the Hijra and lived among the Arab and Jewish tribes of Medina. Certainly the Qur’an recounts subsequent disputes with those same tribes, but wise and all knowing that the Prophet was, never once did he tell his followers, ‘Deny ahl al-kitab, the People of the Book, the right to live and worship.’”
His voice rose above the tremor of assent running through the crowd. “Islam is a great religion made greater by its tolerance and love of the poor, no matter their religious persuasion.” He directed his next words to his community. “Should not our own Christian tribes remember this and graciously return the favor? If our neighbor is threatened, should we not come to their aid? If evil befalls them, surely it is only a matter of time when it knocks on our doors. We have more in common than we think.”
Afterward there were congratulations all around. Fifty lambs were slaughtered, and Mother Fadhma and the women of the village cooked and served a feast to which they were not invited. The problem was ignored and that was how it was solved.
As Mother Fadhma sorts through her memories, another mosaic comes to mind. She never saw it herself, but Al Jid’s mother, Sabet, spied it as a young widow, after the Christian tribes from the fortress town in the south came and fought for the crumbling Byzantine ruins in the mountains. Near the end of her life, Sabet described it in detail to her sec
ond daughter-in-law.
Vividly colored, the mosaic was of a beautiful woman, bare-breasted, with dark flowing hair. She reclined on an opulent bed, with a graceful hand against her forehead. Notwithstanding a long flowing skirt, her fitna—sexual danger—was on display. Audaciously her eyes followed anyone in the room looking at her. Sabet had been adamant: there were other mosaics of women with bejewelled breasts that the Christian tribes unearthed in ruined Byzantine palaces and houses. Those images, like that of Christ in the church mosaic, were considered so dangerous that an outraged male hand defaced them, ostensibly to save an innocent world from everlasting damnation.
Sabet also speaks to Fadhma across the threshold of life and death, and her advice is more straightforward than her son’s. She often comes to Fadhma in church, and today is no different: “Believe what you like, but every Omar, Abdullah, and Ahmad has a saint on a family tree, where the names of only the men have been recorded for posterity. Where are the mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and cousins? Our family history is like so many others. Five Muslim brothers walked out of Egypt. To eat, live, and survive, some of them switched religions. People must be deluded if they think God notices or cares.”
Fadhma has never once disagreed with her forthright mother-in-law in this world or the next. But now, with so many troubles of her own, she would prefer to pray for salvation alone by herself.
16
“No way!”
Muna wants to stop sounding like a stupid American, but her trip is turning out stranger than she imagined. She and Samira are deep in conversation on the front terrace, with Fuad playing with a toy car at their feet.
“Okay, sleeveless blouses I get, even if I don’t agree. But pigs?” Muna says disbelievingly. “The law dates back to a time when there were no refrigerators. They were not ‘unclean’; you could have died from eating them. I mean, what would the Filipinos do without pork?”
She can almost hear her mother laughing contemptuously. “Why do you want to go to Jordan?” She made no effort to hide her disapproval, after her daughter broke the news of her trip over the phone. “For God’s sake, don’t stand out,” her mother stressed. “They hate their own people. Who knows how they will react to a stranger.”
“I’m not a stranger, Mamma.”
“We can talk about that after you get back.”
Muna’s mother had never been keen on her husband’s large family. Muna never knew of their existence until she was five years old. One day she was arranging the pretty stones near the married students’ quarters. A man in a suit and tie approached her and said, “I’m your uncle Boutros.”
“I’ve never had an uncle before.” She took his hand and led him to her parents’ apartment.
Her father was proud. Later at bedtime, as Muna’s hair was being bobby-pinned into tight little curls, her mother threatened to poison the new uncle.
On Sundays when his wife was studying, Abd often borrowed a friend’s car and drove his daughter through the flat midwestern landscape, occasionally stopping by the roadside to pick wild tiger lilies. Once they left the car hidden in a lane and made their way into a wheat field. Her father urged her to keep up. Obscured by the tall plants, he gathered up two armfuls and they walked back through the slowly lengthening shadows.
By their car waited an old farmer in denim overalls and a straw hat. He accused Abd of stealing wheat, then calmed down once Muna’s father described the arid fields of his youth. He explained, “I just wanted to show my little girl how lucky she is.”
The farmer spat out whatever he was chewing. “In America you get more than you bargained for.” His voice crackled like the wheat stalks roasting over the fire her father lit in a garbage can at home. While the stalks cooked in aluminum foil, he distracted Muna from the heat by making the leaves sing. The two blades of grass in between his thumbs, laid against his mouth and blown into, made a trumpeting noise. By the time she managed to copy him, the stalks in the fire were blackened. These were rubbed before another puff from her baba scattered the chaff. The remaining seeds tasted burned and crunchy in her mouth.
At night, two scratched LPs were stacked under the automatic arm of a secondhand record player. First there was a selection from Fairouz, then Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. The violent crashing cymbals always frightened Muna—it was the same sensation of dread she felt whenever she overheard her parents arguing—but the romantic interlude of the violins that followed never failed to send her off to sleep.
After her father found work with a large plastics company in the next state, the family moved. This house had a porch with a rusted swinging chair and a fence in the shape of a musical scale with notes that ran down to the sidewalk. There was a yard with two plum trees and a garage that backed onto a wall behind a local YMCA, where Muna and her girlfriends spied on teenagers making out after Friday night dances. As more of Abd’s brothers and sisters immigrated to Ohio with their spouses and children, they settled in rambling, run-down houses in the same working-class neighborhood. From the homes of her relatives came the sounds of babies crying and the TV on too loud and a strong smell of meat cooking.
It was a rough neighborhood. On the first day of junior high school Muna made friends with the fattest, meanest girl in her class to get through the informal system of segregation enforced by students, who established separate entrances for black and white. By then she had outgrown fairy tales, and her sister became the main beneficiary of her father’s bedtime stories. Over the years his focus shifted away from the land to the stern but benevolent figure of Al Jid. Abd regretted that his daughters never met the old man, so he tried to make him alive for them by fashioning a mythical version of his life, one free from hardship. As an awkward preteen, Muna hid in the shadow of her sister’s doorway and listened, half entranced, half skeptical. The landscape of her father’s imagination was difficult to reconcile with the nastier comments of her mother and the stark images of the Iraq War presented on the TV news. When her father’s half sister Hind moved in with them and was placed a grade behind because of her English, Muna refused to walk to school with her.
The families of her aunts and uncles were different from her own. Her aunts spoiled their husbands and sons. Muna suspected that her father would have preferred similar treatment, but her mother, a sociologist, wasn’t about to stay at home and bake baklava. At her relatives’, the regulation of their daughters, the suspicion of outsiders—including Muna’s mother—and the ritual slaughtering of lambs in the garages were at odds with American culture. While this should have united the brothers, misunderstandings over money and feuding spouses kept them apart. During the rare occasions the entire family got together, punches sometimes flew in front of bewildered sisters, wives, and children.
Muna’s mother resented Abd’s family. All the brothers, bar her husband, married cousins from the old country, a custom she regarded as backward. Since she didn’t speak Arabic she was bored in their company. An immigrant herself, she had come to the States to avoid the kind of family commitments her husband seemed intent on embracing. The opportunity to cast off outmoded values was one she was not going to permit herself or her daughters to miss. As she and Abd rose in their respective professions, she participated fully in the American dream, moving from the inner city to suburbia, giving dinner parties, and voting Republican, even after the start of the 2003 Iraq War.
Despite outward appearances, Muna’s home life remained turbulent. Caught between the old and the new, her father would have never forced his eldest daughter into an arranged marriage, but there were always distant cousins in the offering. Without her mother’s support, Muna would have never made it to New York City. On finding out that she had been accepted to a liberal arts college there, her father threw a chair through a patio window. In a single wink of an eye, Muna’s mother showed her daughter that independence was a process of negotiation, one in which her mother had the upper hand. All along she had been standing like barbed wire around Muna and
her sister, protecting them from their father’s conservatism.
Having escaped the restrictive atmosphere of her family, in New York Muna was more concerned with exploiting her new freedom than with identifying with the past. However, as she made new friends and became more familiar with the city, she was inevitably asked about her background. Much of the anti-Arab bias she encountered was based on what she was perceived to be, and she was quizzed, sometimes unpleasantly, about her Arab family, Islam, and terrorism. This gave her insight into her father. He had idealized his old life because he must have found himself at times unwelcomed in America. His florid descriptions of country and family—part love, part denial—were a way of reclaiming an inheritance that he abandoned. Her father was sentimental—something she promised herself she would not be.
As the Arab Awakening erupted on television screens and Muna watched the news obsessively, she felt ashamed for never believing in the region. She begged her father to let her visit Jordan, but when caution prevailed she began her own tentative investigation, even going so far as attending a meeting of the college’s Islamic Students’ Union. It didn’t matter that they weren’t Christians like her family. Her younger cousins who attended the Orthodox Church camp every summer would not have understood, but Muna wanted to go at least once.
During a well-publicized event, a foreign scholar was addressing the Islamic Students’ Union on the authority and authenticity of the Hadiths. Muna arrived early and sat on the left side of the auditorium. One by one the seats around her were taken by male students, a few of whom, she noticed, glared in her direction; across the aisle a young woman nodded and smiled, seemingly welcoming her. Only after the lecture began did she realize her blunder: the men and women in the audience were sitting separately, and she was on the wrong side. She should have taken a place among the women, the majority in headscarves. Muna was dressed in her usual outfit for class—thick purple lipstick and skinny jeans.