Season of Martyrdom

by Jamal Naji

  “And what you did with that bastard in France,” she screamed, “wasn’t that haram? I swear if you had told me before you married Nael, I would have cursed that bastard and his whole family! I would have dragged him through the courts and made him pay up and down for what he did!”

  “So I should repay the sin with another sin?” I said.

  “Shut up, you whore!” she screamed. “Whores are the last people who should talk about halal and haram!”

  I shut my mouth. She went back to hitting the palms of her hands together. “If Nael finds out,” she said, “he will divorce you.”

  “That might be for the best,” I said. “He is very stingy, actually.”

  Of course my father didn’t know anything about what transpired between my mother and me. I think fathers are the very last to know about such matters, if they ever find out at all.

  My mother took me to see a gynecologist she knew, to perform the abortion for me. She was a doctor with blonde hair – a little too blonde, really, and on top of that, she refused, saying it was against the law and she would get in trouble if she did it.

  We went to a male doctor that we didn’t know, and he also refused. He said it was haram.

  The situation grew complicated, but my mother kept looking for a solution. Then two days later, she raised her eyes to the heavens praising God and said to me, “Listen, you whore. According to the doctor, you will give birth in less than seven months, because by then the fetus will have completed nine months. You have no choice but to refuse to have the baby in the hospital and ask instead for the registered midwife to attend the birth. Then leave the rest to me. I will make her let your husband think his son has been born prematurely.”

  “Do you think such a plan could work?” I asked.

  “It worked for a woman I know,” she piped up, “a woman the likes of you. And don’t forget your husband is stingy and midwife fees are nothing compared to the hospital.”

  I felt as though God was truly sublime in His wisdom. He created premature babies in order to protect the likes of women like me.

  I began thinking about how another being other than myself existed inside me, a being that would develop and grow.

  What kind of blood would circulate through its veins?

  Sari Abu Amineh

  Never before in my life had I felt such anguish and anxiety as I did now.

  Mrs Samah wanted to know what Uroub had told the Basha.

  Most importantly, Mrs Samah was the daughter of Nayef Shahadeh, the grand Basha, the shrewd gentleman she introduced me to as we were leaving the Sheraton Hotel ballroom after a classical musical performance by a Greek musician invited by one of the princes.

  I had taken my wife, Rasha, to the concert, in the company of Fawaz Basha and Mrs Samah. There we met Nayef Shahadeh – a man with thin white hair and a fair complexion speckled with brown age spots. He had cold blue eyes, but they were cunning, too, I thought. He was slim and neatly attired and had an air of determination and tranquil reverence.

  He was wearing a navy blue suit with a subtle pattern of tiny white dots, over a pure white shirt whose starkness was broken by a sea-blue necktie. It was a perfect display of an older gentleman dressed with lavish elegance.

  Despite her father’s involvement with so many people who wanted to shake his hand and stand close to him, Mrs Samah grabbed my wife by the hand and said to both of us, “Come let me introduce you to my father.”

  Fawaz Basha was also wrapped up with hand shakers and people wanting to stand with him.

  Mrs Samah walked ahead of us, without letting go of Rasha’s hand, and went right up to him, right through the crowd of people surrounding him, and introduced us. Pointing to Rasha, she said, “This is the beautiful Rasha, Mr Sari’s wife.”

  He bent forward respectfully and kissed her hand. The crowd withdrew, leaving us alone with him – Mrs Samah, Rasha, and I.

  The man was roughly eighty-five years old.

  Then Mrs Samah pointed to me and said, “Sari is the man I told you about.”

  He greeted me with captivating kindness and we shook hands. His hand was very soft. Then a bald man who had been standing nearby approached us and handed me a business card with Nayef Shahadeh’s name and phone number on it.

  Rasha was the height of elegance in her wine-colored dress with slits in the shoulders and sleeves. That dress perfectly complemented her figure and skin tone and her hair, which was very long in those days.

  But what was I to do about Mrs Samah and what she wanted to know about the Basha? Did I have it in me to let myself squander the Basha’s secrets? And to whom? His wife?

  Sometimes I felt the presence of a thing in my life called ‘bad luck’. A kind of lurking unluckiness that lay in wait, ready to pounce on me at just the right moment. That happened to me while I was at the insurance company, before I started working with the Basha. Another time my son, Suhayl, fell off the wall near our house in Um Uthaina and broke his leg just hours before I took off on a trip to Milan with the Basha. And when I got back, my wife informed me the doctors had discovered she had breast cancer, which made me worry about her incessantly while I looked after her throughout her chemotherapy treatments until she made a full recovery.

  If Mrs Samah were to find out what Uroub said, she would turn the world upside down. At least that’s what I thought.

  As for the grand Basha, if Nayef Shahadeh were to find out, only God knew what would happen.

  That was a very frightening possibility indeed – for Mrs Samah and her father to find out that the Basha had had an affair with another woman, and had fathered a child with her, all this while she sat happily at home living the kind of peaceful life that would be difficult for any other woman to achieve.

  I didn’t think the fact it had been so many years since the Basha had the affair would necessarily work in his favor, and I knew Mrs Samah would never allow herself to be the last to know. She seemed quite determined to find out the truth.

  In the end, as long as she was searching for it, it was inevitable she would eventually stumble upon the truth. That was a principle I had complete faith in.

  True she was a refined and proud woman, but these kinds of situations were considered to have crossed the boundaries of refinement, tolerance, and pride.

  “OK,” she said to me. “What is it that is worrying the Basha so much and causing him to wake up several times a night, every night?”

  “You are closer to him than I am, ma’am.”

  She scowled and said, “But this only started happening after your trip to India.”

  “You’re right,” I said in a comforting tone. “But I don’t have an explanation.”

  She stared at me a long time. “I hope for your sake that what you’re saying is true.” Then she gave me a scornful look and said, “How beautiful and peaceful life was before Uroub showed up!”

  Muntaha al-Rayyeh

  My mother’s plan worked. Nael was overjoyed by the birth of what he believed was his baby boy, two months premature. He obtained a birth certificate for him under the name Walid Nael Shakir Dughaybil using the stamped official document provided to him by the midwife, who took care of Walid at our house for a week after his birth.

  He was always asking me about “al-Walid,” “the baby,” “the Walid.” He would say, “Where is al-Walid ?” and “How is al-Walid?” It got to the point where I even started calling him “al-Walid” instead of just “Walid.”

  Nael came to be known as “Abu al-Walid,” and he loved to dote on him in a high-pitched voice while I held him in my lap. He made whistling noises with his mouth that sounded like a bird chirping.

  As the months passed, I noticed al-Walid bore a strong resemblance to Fawaz. I started lying to Nael, saying things like, “He has your forehead, and your face and neck, too.”

  That made him so happy I started fe
eling sorry for him. When al-Walid turned one year old, Nael said to me in front of my mother, “His forehead doesn’t look like mine, and neither does his face.”

  My mother quickly changed the subject. “Children change a lot, but his forehead is an exact replica of my grandfather’s, God rest his soul. He resembles you in his eyes and his neck. God is such a wonderworker!”

  Two years after we got married, Nael repainted the white walls of the living room a light green color. Within just a few days after that, he became a religious fanatic, even though he had not been religious at all before, and he immersed himself in his work.

  He grew a beard and started wearing a short dishdasha robe. He also started carrying a miswak twig around with him and would take it out and brush his teeth with it from time to time. It disgusted me the way he bared his teeth while brushing them with the miswak. His front teeth were brown in color up near his gums. But I didn’t say anything to him, because he seemed very excited about his newfound enlightenment and piety. He even re-merchandized his clothing store and started specializing exclusively in Islamic women’s dress.

  When al-Walid turned seven, Nael started taking him along with him to the mosque. Then he taught him to go on his own and to attend religion classes and whenever al-Walid would tell us about what he heard and learned at the mosque, Nael’s face would beam with joy and satisfaction.

  It seems Nael felt there was something imperfect about my name, so to avoid it he started calling me “Hajji,” even though I had never performed the Hajj. I had been content covering my hair with a scarf and doing modest prayers, like all the other women in our quarter. But that scarf was the source of many a problem with Nael. I didn’t like winding it tightly around my head and neck, because it made me feel like I was choking. Whenever he would see my hair sticking out from under the scarf he would blow up in my face and accuse me of harlotry and unveiling and other expressions I can’t remember and can’t pronounce. Then he swore he would never go out in public with me unless I wore niqab.

  And in fact, we did not leave the house together after that, and he also started avoiding me, to the point that I felt a vast distance growing between us.

  Al-Walid never learned how to lie. He was truthful, just like Nael. And he used to pray for God to protect us and protect our home, especially when he performed the night prayer.

  He seemed much older than he actually was. He had a tendency to isolate himself in his bedroom and I would often find him sitting cross-legged submissively on the floor, the Holy Quran in his hands. Whenever I asked him about something during his silent Quran readings, he wouldn’t answer, as if he were living in some other place outside our home and my voice didn’t reach him.

  He read a lot, to the point where he hardly talked to me at all anymore. His room was redolent with a smell that reminded me of the embalming fluids they use on the dead before burying them. The smell bothered me. Numerous times I cleaned his room while he wasn’t home, and burned incense, and splashed essence of marjoram to try and get rid of that smell. But it would come back as soon as he reentered the room, as if I hadn’t cleaned or fumigated it.

  I complained to Nael about him and he sharply retorted, “How can you interrupt him when he is reading holy verses? How can you remove the smell of perfume oil from his room? Don’t you know that what you are doing is a sin?”

  “But that smell bothers me, Nael,” I said.

  “Bothers you?” he replied. “Do you know that using perfume oil was a practice of our noble Prophet? And do you know he would rub musk oil into his hair and one could see its sparkle and sheen in the part of his hair?”

  Mutual understanding between Nael and al-Walid and me worsened with the passing of the months and years, especially once black hair started sprouting out of al-Walid’s chin and under his nose and his voice deepened and he shot up in height.

  Samah Shahadeh

  Fawaz started receiving visitors I had never seen before. I happened upon them a number of times while sitting on the second-floor balcony as they were leaving their cars and drivers and entering our house through the garden on their way to Fawaz’s office.

  They were men dressed in fine suits, seemingly preoccupied with important matters. Their faces were indecipherable. Each time they came they would meet with Fawaz for an hour or more and then leave, with the same faces and same expressions. There were seven of them in total.

  I noticed that Sari was always away whenever they came around. In fact, those particular men never met with Sari, at least not at our house.

  “How come Sari doesn’t join in your meetings with those people?” I asked Fawaz.

  He gave me a look of surprise and said, “Are you seriously asking this question? If so, I’d have to say that you are living in one valley and I in another!”

  Using this as an opportunity to show him my concern about what was going on with him, I said, “As a matter of fact, we have been living in two different valleys for some time now!”

  “Not so much that you should start thinking Sari must accompany my every step,” he added.

  “But you took him along with you to see the sage in India,” I said.

  I was expecting to see some kind of reaction in his face or his speech, but he didn’t show any evidence of surprise at my knowing that bit of information.

  Nothing surprised Fawaz anymore, as if surprise had vanished from his life. As if there was no longer anything in this world that could shock him.

  Ever since he returned from India, he had become cold and unexcitable.

  I said to myself that either he had reached such heights of understanding that he was immune to excitability because he had seen it all before, or he had been bombarded with so many surprises that he had lost heart and simply could not respond to another one.

  Either way, it was unsettling.

  “I get the feeling there is something new in your life,” I said to him. “At the least, those people never used to come to our house before.”

  “Not at all,” he replied. “Nothing new, Samah.”

  I sensed he had read between the lines and answered the question hidden in my words.

  So what was the secret that had been hidden from me for so long?

  On the other hand, why couldn’t Uroub be a liar?

  Why had I granted her all my trust and believed everything she said?

  Muntaha al-Rayyeh

  When al-Walid was almost eighteen, he let his black beard grow, and he was no longer the child I used to take care of. He started avoiding me. He was closer to Nael than to me, and I felt he was like some entity growing and developing, far away from me.

  The imam from the mosque started asking for him to read the Holy Quran during Friday prayers and to recite prayers after him. Then he memorized the Quran, and I used to hear him reading verses out loud in his room. He won first place in the Quran memorization contest, and the Religious Endowment Ministry rewarded him generously. But afterwards he just kept to his room, quietly reading verses from the Quran and performing prayers. He quit reciting the Quran in a loud voice like he used to, as if he had hit upon a Quranic interpretation forbidding that practice.

  After that, his words and manner of speaking changed.

  He started saying, “As-salaamu ‘alaykum,” (Peace be upon you) rather than “Good morning,” or “Good evening.” And he began criticizing me for being unveiled, even though he and Nael were the only men in the house. In addition, he started tacking the phrase “hadaaki Allah,” (May God guide you on the right path) onto his requests to me. For example, if he said, “Wash my robe,” he would tack on, “hadaaki Allah,” instead of “please.”

  Little by little, al-Walid’s speech became new to me, and unfamiliar.

  When he passed the Tawjihi Baccalaureate Exam, he received the distinguished academic achievement scholarship and began studying Shari’a law at the Jordanian University.<
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  But he would come back home from the university very upset and would complain to his father about the immoral ways of the students − female and male − and their disregard for religion. Then he started meddling in my personal affairs, insisting I wear niqab whenever I left the house, and his father backed him up on that. It got to where I felt there was a male opposition front against me.

  I said to al-Walid firmly, “I do not want to wear niqab, you hear?”

  “Our law does not succumb to whims,” he replied. “It is the duty of every Muslim man and woman to abide by it.”

  I claimed I was allergic to niqab, that it stifled my ability to breathe. But he insisted and kept repeating that men were the guardians over women, which is the verse I thought pertained only to marriage. I came to find out it applied to all males, even to a woman’s son. Likewise I discovered that my relationship with him had been shaken up. He started taking on the role of my preacher or my father rather than my son, and I dodged those sermons the way a daughter dodges such lectures from her father.

  The battle over the niqab ended in his defeat, because I gathered up all my strength and put him down. I told him that the person who would force me to do what I didn’t want to do had yet to be born, and if God created such a person, I would kill him with my own hands before I let him interfere with my life.

  And when he shouted at me, I slapped him on the back of the neck three times.

  He endured the slaps and said, with his hand on his neck, “May God forgive you, Mother.”

  That night, I heard him praying to his Lord, loud enough to be heard, for me to be guided onto the right path.

  I liked the way he respected me after I slapped him, so I reconciled with him, but he told me he was not upset about what I had done, because respect for one’s parents was a foundational tenet of Islam.

  A month later, al-Walid and some of his sheikh friends decided to perform the Umrah pilgrimage. And so I asked him whether he would be missing classes as a result.