The Lover

by Laury Silvers

  Zaytuna sighed, “I know. She’s just filled with loss and imagining things. She had her heart set on him. That’s all. Anyway, that’s what the Shaykh meant, the girl’s loss and the boy’s death.”

  Mustafa said, “May God give her ease and accept Zayd with care and compassion.”

  “Amin.”

  “Mustafa, would you come with me to his funeral prayer today? I don’t know where, though. They’ll be done washing him and preparing him for burial by the afternoon prayer, don’t you think?”

  Mustafa nodded in agreement to all of it, “I know a friend of one of Imam Ibrahim’s students, I’ll see if I can find out. But I suspect he’ll be brought to the Shuniziyya mosque. Don’t all the poor from Karkh end up here no matter what mosque is nearer to them? I’m done working at the pottery for the day. Let’s meet there and if we need to, we’ll hurry to wherever he is going to be.”

  They heard the midday call to prayer. The sun was just passing overhead. Zaytuna got up, worried, not having realized what time it was, “Oh no. I’m late for work with Saliha, I’ve got to run. God willing, we won’t lose this job over me.”

  He wanted to reach for her hand again and keep her there, “Thank you for asking me to come with you.”

  She yelled back at him as she hurried away, “I’ll bring Saliha, too!”

  Chapter Nine

  Saliha handed Zaytuna the last of the washing to hang on lines stretching across the roof. Saliha had put the job off when Zaytuna didn’t show up, so she could eat and avoid the midday sun. But the early afternoon sun was even hotter. At least it wasn’t one of the days when the humidity rose out of the marshes, smothering the city. Today the clothes dried almost as fast as they could hang them. They were used to working and sweating in the sun like this, on roofs across the city, their wraps wound around their waist with the long end draped loosely over their heads and upper body to offer some shade, but was still hard on them and they worked quickly. Since the clothes were drying, they’d have time to fold them and bring them down to the housekeeper. That might ease her irritation that they had not shown up in the late morning as agreed. Zaytuna took a wind of cloth from her and apologized again.

  Saliha stopped her, “Zaytuna, enough. You had a difficult morning. I don’t blame you one bit. If we lose the business at this house, we’ll find more business someplace else. I’m not going to bow to anyone.”

  “Well, you would know about that.”

  “Indeed, I do. Here, help me fold this,” she said, holding out the ends of a long piece of sheeting. “What was it like seeing the old man again?”

  “I didn’t listen to him. It was too much. He put me through too much.”

  “Zay, I don’t know why you went to see him if you won’t listen to him.”

  “He helped raise us, all of them did. They are my family. We had nothing and they fed us, clothed us, and cared for us. It’s shameful I visit them so little as it is.”

  “He’s more than an uncle, Zay.”

  Zaytuna began to feel the pressure of the knowledge he had forced on her, the thickness of the ocean waves rising up around her to pull her down, and she felt her knees go out underneath her.

  “Zay!” Saliha grabbed her by the arms, “Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine,” but tears were streaming down her face. “It’s just the heat.”

  “Oh Zay, why do you go there?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand enough.” She went to get her a cup of water from the jug the housekeeper had put in the shade near the vestibule for them and put it to Zaytuna’s lips, “Drink this, you fool.”

  She continued, “I don’t visit him for this exact reason. Look at what he’s done to you. I know I won’t listen to him! I don’t want that on my head. God protect me from myself! It’s enough I pray now and again. I say bismillah before I eat and I say alhamdulilah when I am through. What do I need to see God for?”

  “It isn’t ‘seeing’ God,” said Zaytuna with the heavy clarity of what it was for the first time and not liking it one bit.

  “Yes, yes. You’ve said. You learn to see God with the ‘eye of the heart’. Whatever. The eye of my heart doesn’t need to learn how to see. It sees just fine.” She touched Zaytuna’s cheek, “It sees you, my friend.”

  Zaytuna took a deep breath and forced herself to get up and change the mood, “Give me that last piece to hang. You old mother goat you, so concerned about me. I’m fine.” Zaytuna took the wet cloth and wound it up and tried to smack Saliha with it. Saliha jumped back just in time and it missed.

  “Ha! You know what else the eye of my heart sees, Zay? It sees your brother coming home alone late at night with that battle-scarred body of his. Is it wrong I can’t look away? I’ve never seen a woman who did not at least steal a glance at him. Glory be to God’s creation, Zaytuna, he has your mother’s legendary beauty and it is as if I can see the sword he carried in his hand when he fought at the Frontier.”

  Zaytuna sighed, “You’d think you’d had enough of men.”

  “Zay, I’m not like you. I’m not waiting for the Prophet to fall from the sky and take my hand in a chaste marriage, a kind of marriage, by the way, he never had.”

  “God protect me from evil things, don’t talk like that!”

  Saliha laughed, teasing her further, “The Prophet, God bless him, loved sex!”

  But Zaytuna wasn’t in the mood to be teased; she shot back at Saliha, “You’d rather wait for a man to snap? You’d rather wonder every day when it’s going to begin? I’m not waiting for the Prophet to fall from the sky. I’m waiting for one man to measure up to him.”

  Saliha said under her breath, “It’s a safe bet no one ever will.” Saliha paused, serious now, asking, “You think Tein would snap?”

  Zaytuna didn’t answer.

  “And you think that of Mustafa, too?”

  Zaytuna didn’t have the energy to pretend, certainly not with Saliha, and not about this, not today, “I pray they wouldn’t, but I don’t know.”

  A crisp and consuming image was conjured before her. Mustafa and Tein stood over her, crowding her down onto the ground. She felt hard earth beneath her. A wall behind her, trapping her. Her nose filled with the stink of their sweat of their filthy black qamises. She tried to shake the image off, but couldn’t. She dug her thumbnail into her forefinger and the pain brought her out of it.

  She turned to Saliha, her voice tight, “The Prophet. A Messenger of God. He had to jump on the back of a man. A man who accepted him as bearing a revelation from God. A man who had God’s beloved standing before him. The Prophet had to jump on the back of this man to keep him from beating his wife! That’s how they all are in the end.”

  “Zay, Ayyub beat me within an inch of my life. You know. You defended me against Ayyub when my own family should have in your place. It was you took me in after I escaped. You became my family. But I was the one who was beaten. So I choose the men I want from here on out. No one else speaks for me, not even you. You wonder how I can still love men, I wonder that you cannot love them at all.”

  Zaytuna spat back at her, “I saw my mother raped. I might as well have seen my father rape her, too. What do you think that did to me? This is how men are, Saliha. Walla, how is it that you and I escaped such things when we were girls? How have we escaped it so long now?”

  Saliha said, more harshly than she intended, “Don’t make your problems my problems.”

  “So you find a man who doesn’t hit. So your husband doesn’t force you in your own bed. Then you want a man to have a say over you? Tell you when you can come and go? You want to submit to him as if he were a god? There is no god but God, Saliha! Marriage is nothing but blasphemy!”

  Saliha burst out laughing at her, “Preach, sister! Don’t ever say you don’t have your mother in you. Well, you’ll be relieved to know that I will always remain a Muslim in good standing. I’m not interested in marriage. I just want a bit of marriage bed.”


  “Saliha, really!”

  “No one cares what a widow does, Zay.”

  Zaytuna objected, “As long as no one can see what a widow does.”

  At that, Saliha laughed so hard she barely got it out, “Or hear what a widow does!”

  Zaytuna said, scolding, “Saliha, you know there’s talk.”

  “What is talk to the likes of me? Do I have a reputation to be ruined? What can they do to me, Zay? Take the soaking laundry out of my hands? I’ve got to live, for God’s sake.”

  “Yes, they could take the laundry out of your hands. Talk could mean no work. For God’s sake, watch yourself.” Zaytuna paused and looked away, saying, “You don’t want Tein. He’s been hurt so badly. The war. Our family. Come on Sal, you know this. He drinks a lot. I don’t know what he’d be like. With you. Drunk, I mean.”

  Saliha thought of something and laughed again, pausing for a second wondering if she should say it, then seeing Zaytuna’s serious face decided to say it, “As long as he can still get it up when he’s drunk.”

  Zaytuna laughed despite herself, “Saliha, stop! He’s my brother!”

  “Yes, your brother. And one of these days, I’ll catch his eye.”

  Zaytuna sucked her teeth, tsking, then said, “If you haven’t caught it by now. The way you stare at him as he comes through the courtyard….”

  “I am a patient woman.”

  “You are a crazy woman.”

  Saliha held her hand out to her, “If you didn’t have me, Zay, where would you be?”

  Zaytuna looked at her and took her hand, “Hanging wet clothes on another rooftop somewhere….alone.”

  Saliha laughed and pulled her hand out of Zaytuna’s and slapped it, “Always the two of us up here on a roof, right sister?”

  “That last bit is nearly dry already! It’s so hot. Let’s fold it, get out of this heat and head to the mosque.” Zaytuna smiled at her friend, “You should do two extra cycles of prayer in forgiveness for the way you talk.”

  “I will, insha’Allah, for my soul and for your sake.”

  “Please. I need the prayers, Saliha. I really do.”

  Chapter Ten

  As Zaytuna and Saliha turned the corner toward the Shuniziyya mosque they heard men’s voices raised. There was a crowd growing in front of the mosque doors. As they got closer, they saw two men railing at a group of women who had stopped to return the favour.

  “God protect us from these street preachers,” said Saliha. “What new hadith have they come up with today about all the ways we’re all going to hell?”

  Zaytuna replied, “You should just ignore them, they’re like flies looking for a carcass.”

  “More like wasps.”

  Zaytuna said, “Looks like the women are giving them hell. Must be ‘women are temptresses’ day.”

  Saliha laughed, “Oh look at that one, he’s only got about three hairs for a beard but a full-grown mouth on him!”

  The young man bellowed, “You women come to the mosque, put your heads down, and lift your asses into the air for us to jump on! If Umar Ibn al-Khattab were around to see you, he would beat you over the head!”

  One of the women standing nearby leaned down and gathered some dirt from the road and threw it in the young man’s face yelling, “Put dust in your eyes and stop looking, then!”

  The dirt hit its target and the young man bent over rubbing his eyes and coughing out, “Walla, I can’t help it!”

  “You can’t help it?! It’s our fault that you are like a rutting dog looking to hump a rock?!”

  Zaytuna leaned over to Saliha, laughing, “What made this man think he could mess with the women of Baghdad?”

  Saliha was looking into the growing crowd. “Zay, Zay.” She pointed, “Is that Mustafa?”

  It was. As they came close to the crowd, they could see that he had moved forward to stand in front of the women. She could hear his voice now, it was not loud but it was clear, “You say you know what Umar would do, but it was his son who reported that our beloved Prophet said, ‘Do not interfere with the women who serve God as they go to the mosque’. Surely he would know better what the Prophet said, and what his father, one of the Prophet’s closest companions, would do.”

  The older of the two men spat on the ground before him, “You wrap your turban like a Hanbali yet you defend these filthy creatures?”

  “And you? You call yourself a Hanbali, yet Imam Ahmad Ibn Hanbal himself would decry what you are doing here. You listen! I don’t need to defend these believers, the Prophet himself defended them. You can take it up with God on the Last Day if you like. Insha’Allah, I will be there to testify against you. I will testify that you barred His believers from serving Him and that you called them ‘filthy’.”

  The one who had been coughing now stood and faced Mustafa. Clearing his throat he threw back a hadith, “‘…and the best place for a woman to pray is in the darkest corner of her house’!”

  Mustafa countered, “Now you are going to add repeating a weak hadith, without naming it, to your list of sins. May God give me the opportunity to testify to that, too. Watch yourself! The Prophet warned us, ‘Whoever lies about me makes his abode in Hell’.”

  Saliha, pulled at Zaytuna to move forward through the crowd. Looking behind at Zaytuna, Saliha said, “Well, it’s good of him to do it, but I think the women had this one covered already.”

  Zaytuna looked at Mustafa through the crowd, sighing sweetly at him, saying to Saliha, “Poor Mustafa, he’s so earnest.”

  The older man stood firm against Mustafa and forced a laugh, speaking clearly so that all those standing nearby could hear, “You call a hadith cited by Imam Ahmad himself forged! How did you get the right to tie your turban so, when you know nothing of his own collection. How very embarrassing for you. Here in front of all those who believe you, one of their own even, to be a scholar!”

  The colour rose on Mustafa’s face. He had not said it was forged, but weak. They were turning his words around! The crowd became quiet at his silence to the charge until an older woman stepped forward, poking him in the arm, “Answer him, you are our learned brother, not him.”

  Mustafa raised his voice at the woman’s prodding, not thinking beyond a direct counter to the point to let her know, to let all of them know, that they should not listen to these men. Mustafa said, “Imam Ahmad himself, God rest his purified soul, said there were unreliable hadith in his own collection! And I declare that this is one!”

  The crowd gasped hearing that their Imam of Imams, Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal himself, the pious scholar who had withstood the interrogation of the Caliph’s men during the inquisition, the man who had never compromised his principles, the man would not even sit in the shade of another man’s tree without his permission for fear of stealing from him, could have lied about the Prophet by transmitting reports that may not be true.

  They began to shift, speaking to one another, some voices rising in anger. They may trust their brother, Mustafa, but if they had to choose whom to trust, it would be the perfected memory of Imam Ahmad, not the living, breathing, clearly erring Mustafa.

  The older man smiled, knowing he had the crowd now and said, “Ah, here is your brother and scholar, slandering our beloved Imam Ahmad!”

  Mustafa scrambled inwardly. These men were using the people’s ignorance of hadith scholarship to their own ends. How could he explain? The scholars did not include the people when they shared their doubts and debated every point from every angle. When they were asked a simple question by a simple man, they did not share with the people the generations of arguments on an issue or the careful reasoning on a matter. They did not explain how much context mattered.

  How could he explain that when a woman with many children, who kept sleeping through her prayers out of sheer exhaustion, asked what to do, she was given a different answer than that given to a young man who slept through his prayers out of laziness alone. They were taught to tell the common person what they needed to know for their part
icular situation in that particular moment, no more. How could he explain that you cannot tell a canal worker with no education, an illiterate, that their simple question has innumerable possible answers but only one right answer for him? They were taught that the common folk needed certainty, not knowledge. Give them the answer that is right for them. Nothing more. Didn’t the Prophet teach to leave that which causes one to doubt for that about which one could be certain? Now he was stuck needing to explain that, and stuck fast.

  He turned to face the crowd, not knowing what to do, “I promise you, there is no slander here. Imam Ahmad’s collection was not like what this man says! His son published this collection so that we scholars would know which hadith other scholars had used in the past to decide legal matters. Nothing more. He collected his father’s notes and…”

  A man from the crowd objected, “How is this any better! Now you say the Imams used forged hadith to tell us what to do and Imam Ahmad, God protect him from your lies, agreed to that!”

  The two men did not just stand by to let the crowd finish him, they walked around the people now, whispering to men and pointing to Mustafa.

  Mustafa objected, “No. No. I am not saying that at all!”

  The old woman near him looked at him just as his mother had many times before when he had crossed lines he may not be permitted to come back from and said, “I think you better explain.”

  By now Saliha and Zaytuna had come close to the front of the growing crowd. It had turned into an outright street spectacle and maybe a riot with Mustafa being beaten and the crowd under the sway of the other scholars. As if he could feel them drawing near, he turned and caught sight of them. His face softened, pleading. Zaytuna yelled out into the crowd, “I trust you, Imam Mustafa! Help us understand!”

  Saliha cheered, “Yes! We trust you!”

  One of the scholars called over them, “Ah the women are sweet on him, too soft to see what is going on here!”

  “Brothers, sisters! Please,” Mustafa began, turning to the woman who prodded him to answer, “Auntie Hamida, when you sell us cups of soaked chick peas, ready for the pot, have you not already sorted them and cleaned them for us? You don’t sell us dirty chick peas. You don’t tell us your method of sorting and cleaning them. You do not share how you prepare them. You are the expert. You take care of that for us so that we only have to put your trusted chickpeas into the pot. We don’t ask. We only eat from your nourishing hand.”