by Esther Ahmad
My father was spending an increasing amount of time with the militants, and to my surprise, he did not protest my mother’s decision to pull me out of the madrassa and send me to a more academically rigorous school. Perhaps he was too busy to pay much notice, or perhaps he really didn’t care what happened to me. Either way, I felt excited about what the future might hold.
Excited, and nervous, too. My year at the madrassa had taught me a lot about world events but little about science. I was terrified that I would not succeed and my father would put an end to my education, so I committed to studying harder than ever.
The one condition my father placed on my leaving the madrassa was that I would continue to have regular religious training with someone from the mosque. I was assigned to one of the female clerics. Like most of her kind, she spent much of her time educating and leading women and young girls. She was well read and passionate about how to be a devoted Muslim, and I looked forward to these weekly meetings. Spending an hour each week talking about stories in the Qur’an made for a pleasant break from cramming all that science and math.
The further I got into my first term at the state school, the clearer it became that my science and math needed work. My mother discussed the matter with my father, who discussed it with one of the clerics, and soon I had an extra weekly study session on my calendar.
My tutor was Anwar, the same mullah who had persuaded my father to let me attend the madrassa in the first place. He was highly educated, and according to the rumors, he had even studied abroad when he was younger. My mother took me to Anwar’s house every Tuesday afternoon. She would wait in the courtyard out front while I went inside for my lesson. I was grateful for his help; while the teachers at the madrassa had struggled to explain things to me, Anwar had a way of making things clear in my mind.
I knew exactly why my father agreed to my study sessions with Anwar. It was not just that he was educated or wealthy, though his house, with its marble floor and imposing wooden furniture, was on a scale far grander than our own. My father chose him because Anwar was the leader of the militants in the city.
Yet Anwar did not look down upon me for my lack of understanding or my gender or because he held more status and wealth than my family. In fact, he treated me in a way that no other male had treated me. He treated me as an equal. Better than that, he would call me “Daughter.” Even though I knew it was a common term of endearment, whenever he said the word, I felt alive inside.
One Tuesday afternoon, as I sat working on a math problem Anwar had given me, I became aware that some men had entered the room. I had been concentrating deeply on my work, but when I heard Anwar tell his visitors that they could talk freely in front of me, explaining who my father was, I started to pay attention. I was careful to keep my eyes fixed on the page in my book.
“The brothers in the mountains need more arms,” one of the men said.
“What about the last gold we collected?” Anwar asked.
“We sold it all and bought as many weapons as we could, but it wasn’t enough. We still need more.”
“How much money do you need?”
The first man mentioned a figure so large I struggled to comprehend it.
Anwar paused. When he spoke again, he sounded almost disinterested. “Very well. Leave it to me, and I’ll organize some more collections.”
Did this mean that the gold that had been collected at the meetings at our home may have been used to buy weapons? It was a shocking conclusion, but I could find no other explanation. I was even more stunned by the figures mentioned. Millions of rupees. Tens of thousands of dollars. This was possibly the most impressive thing my young ears had ever heard. Intuitively I knew that this was information I would need to keep to myself.
†
“Do you love English, Daughter?”
I looked up from my books and studied Anwar, thrown completely off balance by the question. My father often raged about how English was the language of infidels. I knew exactly how he would expect me to answer the question. But I also knew that Anwar and my father were different.
“Yes,” I said, my voice suddenly shaky.
Anwar smiled at me. “That’s okay. I have lived in America and the UK, and there’s much to learn there. But that learning is only possible if you can read and speak English.”
I decided to risk a question. “Why did you go there?”
“University,” he said. “I studied engineering in London and then in California.”
I was on a roll, so I kept going. “Was it dangerous?”
He shrugged, his smile fading. “What I will tell you is this: there’s no country like Pakistan. It’s the only place where true followers of Allah can live as we do.”
A silence settled on the room for a while. I could feel a hundred questions taking flight within me, but my mouth could not seem to form the words.
It was Anwar who spoke next. “Maybe one day you will go to the West and study or work there. And when you do, you can join the work our Muslim brothers and sisters are already doing in those countries.”
“How?”
“If you can speak English and you know how to say the right things, it isn’t hard to turn Christians away from their religion and bring them into Islam. Besides, there are many Western boys who would be ready to fall in love with a pretty girl like you.”
I could feel my cheeks burning as I turned back to my book.
“I’m serious,” Anwar said. “There are many Muslim sisters who go and study in the West, find husbands, and bring them into Islam.”
I felt awkward and a little embarrassed, but I knew he was right. On one of the field trips, the mullah had shown several pictures of Pakistani brides standing next to Western husbands. He told us that women have the power to change a husband, especially when they have children together.
To redirect the conversation, I brought up a question that had been percolating in me since one of my Qur’an study sessions with the female cleric. She had shown me the passage about Joseph, but the story seemed incomplete. I had asked her what happened next, but all she would say was that it was in another book. If anyone could tell me more, I was sure it was Anwar.
“You want to read about Joseph?” he asked.
“Yes, and Abraham, too.”
“There’s only one book that tells those stories. I don’t have it here. It’s a black-colored book—”
“Can I read it? Where can I get it?”
He stood up. “It is called the Bible. It’s a Christian book, and you can only get it from them, but you shouldn’t have anything to do with those people. Maybe one day I’ll find one for you. But for now, you just need to read the Qur’an.”
5
I had a clear reason for wanting to do well at school. More than gaining my father’s approval—which had become an increasingly remote possibility the more deeply involved he became with the militant group—I had a single, clear goal in mind. I wanted to be a doctor. Specifically, I wanted to be a cardiologist. I did not want to fix just any stranger’s heart; I wanted to help my mother. If I didn’t, I knew she would die.
My mother’s health had started to deteriorate when I was at the madrassa. Sometime after I changed schools, she had been diagnosed with a heart condition, and lately the pain had been increasing. The doctors knew exactly what was wrong and that she would continue to get worse. They even had a plan for surgery that would restore her to full health again. But there was one problem: the only surgeons capable of carrying out the operation in our local hospital were men. For both my mother and my father, this was a deal breaker.
No matter how much I begged her to change her mind and allow them to operate, she refused.
“If I die in surgery after a man has touched me, I will die unclean. I would rather live in pain and die a good Muslim than risk facing Allah like that and be sent to hell.”
It was a conversation we repeated often, and it always had the same ending. My mother would look at me and say, “Ever
yone has to die sometime.”
As her body weakened and her pain increased, my own frustrations mounted. I grew to understand my mother’s desire to avoid Allah’s judgment, and I even came to see her commitment with a degree of respect. What bothered me was that the older I got, the more unlikely it seemed that I would be able to help. Even with Anwar’s tutoring and an upturn in my grades, every hospital visit reminded me that there was little room for female doctors in my community. Now that I was sixteen, I could see that I was pushing an impossibly large boulder up a mountain. How could I ever hope to succeed?
At the same time that I began to doubt my own abilities, I started to ask questions of the world around me.
It happened at the hospital one morning. I was sitting next to my mother while she was having tests done. As she lay there wired to a couple of machines, I peeked around the back of one of them. It read, “Made in Germany.”
I checked the other machine. “Made in the UK.”
In the days that followed, I was on a mission to determine the source of all the medical equipment that was helping my mother. Sure enough, it all came from the West. That prompted me to wonder about other inventions, so I looked in reference books in the school library. I researched everything from the telephone, tape recorders, and monitoring machines to bullets, bombs, and cell phones. I could not find a single invention that came from a Muslim nation. And almost every inventor’s name was Christian or Jewish.
All along, the same question rang loud and clear in my head: Why?
Why would Allah give so much wisdom to the infidels instead of to us, his beloved and faithful followers?
And why, when I’d been told all my life that people in the West were not good, did they seem so happy all the time? Every advertisement and newspaper photograph I saw showed them smiling. Why, if they were living so badly and in need of being saved, did Allah not make them sad? It did not make sense.
And if Muslims really were the beloved of Allah, why would he allow our enemies to beat and burn and kill us? Why didn’t Allah send an angel to destroy them?
It was as if I’d picked a thread at the end of an old rug. The more closely I looked at things, the more everything seemed to unravel, and the more questions I had.
Inevitably, I did what my mother and Anwar had taught me and turned to the hadith. I remembered a famous story I had read about Muhammad’s followers who were hiding in a valley called She’eb Abi Talib. People were chasing them, and since they had no food, they had no choice but to eat the grass. Their suffering lasted for three years. When I compared this story to the account in the Qur’an about Moses hitting the rock and water gushing out or Allah providing the Jews with bread as they wandered in the wilderness, it made no sense. Why would Allah feed the infidels but let his own people starve?
These thoughts would force their way into my mind without warning, but it was when night had fallen and the house was still that I heard them the loudest. There in my room, where all was silent apart from the sound of my older sister’s deep breathing, I would feel the anger rise within me. I would rage against Allah, shouting silently at him for treating his people so poorly and for treating our enemies so well.
My fury never lasted more than a few seconds. Almost as soon as I released the anger, I felt the fear rise within me. My chest would pound, and my stomach would twist. Raging at Allah was not something a good Muslim was supposed to do. At times like those, I would climb out of bed, walk to the prayer room, and kneel on the floor, begging for Allah’s forgiveness, desperately hoping that he wouldn’t block his ears to my cries.
†
My rebellion, such as it was, was not confined to matters of theology and science. Like teenage girls on every continent, I entered a phase when I fought with my mother regularly about fashion. All those afternoons spent in her workshop had nurtured in me a deep love of dresses and style, and the older I got, the more opinionated I became about what I liked.
Of all my mother’s magazines at the workshop, my favorite was the one full of photos of rich people getting married. I spent hours staring at the women in their white dresses, tiaras sparkling on their heads. I even managed to smuggle a couple of issues of the magazine home, where I could continue my browsing uninterrupted.
“When I get married,” I announced to my mother one day after we had returned from the market, “I want to wear a white dress.”
She made a noise that was midway between a snort and a cough.
“What?” I said. “Why not?”
“Red is the best color to marry in. White is what you wear when you are mourning the loss of a husband.”
“But why should the color of a dress make any difference to anyone?”
“Zakhira, it just does. Everybody knows that to wear white when you aren’t mourning is to invite death. It’s the same with black. A woman wears black only when she wants to curse someone. If she wears it at any other time, her brother will die. Now stop this nonsense, and put the garlic away.”
I was halfway up the stairs when she finished talking. When I returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, she screamed.
“What are you doing, Zakhira?”
I stood in the doorway, smiling. I did not particularly like the heavy black dress I had changed into—the cut was all wrong, and it was a little too big on me. But this was not about fashion. This was about logic—and making a statement to my mother.
“I just want to see if my brother dies or not.”
“What?” she yelled. “You want to kill your brother?”
“No,” I said calmly. “I just want to see whether what you say is true or not.”
It took hours for my mother to calm down and agree that my brother was still alive and well. After several days of my arguments, she finally agreed to let me wear black again if I wanted to. Still, it wasn’t much of a victory for me. What I really wanted was to be able to wear white, like the brides in the magazines. And I longed to make sense of my religion, to know that it could withstand a little testing.
Shortly after this act of defiance, I made a dress for myself that was like the ones I admired in the bridal magazines. I found some white cotton in my mother’s workshop and spent weeks embroidering a delicate pattern by hand all around the neck. All the other women there admired it, and even my mother commended me on the quality of my work. But she still refused to let me wear it.
When a family wedding approached, I began lobbying harder than ever. For days on end, I tried to convince my mother to allow me to wear the dress. “Everyone says it’s beautiful,” I begged over and over. “Why won’t you let me wear it? What are you afraid of?”
It was no use. She would always dismiss me with a wave of her hand and a roll of her eyes. In response, I would turn and storm out of the room.
I’d return and try again after a few hours, but my mother was immovable.
And so on the day of the wedding, being every bit as stubborn as she was, I stayed home alone while everybody else in the family went.
Did I regret it? No. A part of me knew that it was foolish to fight over something as insignificant as a dress. Deep down, I knew that it was not about the dress itself. I had found a crack in my religion, a fault line that bothered me. If my own mother, who had taught me so well what it means to be a good Muslim, could be bound by such a foolish and illogical superstition, what else had she gotten wrong?
†
It was Anwar who helped me to see things more clearly and put a halt to my questioning.
“I have a question that has been troubling me,” I said one day when I was about to leave his house. “Why did Almighty Allah choose to feed Moses and the Jews but not Muhammad, peace be upon him, and his followers?”
“You shouldn’t think so deeply, Daughter,” he said with a smile. “Don’t think deeply about Allah, and don’t read deeply into the Qur’an. Don’t think about each and every word; otherwise you’ll go astray. You’ll end up questioning Allah himself.”
I could fee
l the blood rush into my head as he spoke. Did he know about my angry outbursts toward Allah?
“I’m sorry,” I said, regretting that I had asked the question. “I won’t think about these things anymore.”
I was desperate for the conversation to be over, but I could feel Anwar’s eyes on me. The silence weighed heavily, and I could feel my heart beat faster.
When he spoke again, his voice was quiet but firm, as if he were giving instructions to a child. “Do you know what happens when you die?”
I searched Anwar’s face, wondering what he was trying to tell me. I said that I knew a little—that my mother had explained to me about the angel on the left and the angel on the right and how all our good deeds will be weighed against the bad.
“That’s all true,” he said. “And how you live here on earth will determine how you are rewarded in heaven. For those who serve Allah the most, paradise will be the best. Women will sleep on beds as soft as roses, surrounded by pearl-white cushions. Each one will have a garden surrounded by a high wall that no man can peer over. Anything you want will be just a thought away. If you wish, you can even keep your earthly husband. And the men who are rewarded the most will each receive seventy-two virgins, whose very sweat will be fragrant like perfume.”
My mother had told me most of this already, but I still shifted awkwardly in my seat as he spoke.
“Those who never listened to Allah or who never accepted Muhammad, peace be upon him, as the last prophet will stay in hell forever. They will be thirsty because of the great heat, but the only drink available to them will be boiling water that burns all the way down or pus so vile it could make the strongest stomach sick.”
Anwar waited awhile, letting the image swirl in my mind. “That is the choice you face: spend your life as a dedicated follower of Allah and receive the rewards, or choose to turn from him and endure an eternity of punishment. Everyone has to die.”
