Laughing All the Way to the Mosque

by Zarqa Nawaz

  Laughing All the

  Way to the Mosque

  Zarqa Nawaz

  Dedication

  To my husband, Samiul Haque, who always consoles me with the words “Sometimes grit is more important than talent.”

  And to my parents, Parveen and Ali Nawaz, who instilled that grit at a very early age and made me believe it was talent.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Recess

  Hairy Legs

  Hijab

  Muslim Summer Camp

  Medical School Reject

  Meeting Sami

  How to Name a Muslim Baby

  Hajj

  BBQ Muslims

  Coming Full Circle on Circumcision

  Water Jug Blues

  The Packing Crate

  Behind the Shower Curtain

  Little Mosque in the City

  Jinn—A Muslim Thing

  Eid Dinner

  Dying, Muslim-Style

  Photos with White Men

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix: Zarqa’s Recipe for Halawa

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  When I was seven, I went up to a little boy in the schoolyard. He was sitting alone on the swings, sucking on a jawbreaker. He had black wavy hair and was a little on the chubby side.

  “Davy, do you believe in God?”

  He shrugged.

  “Because it’s really, really important to believe in God.”

  Davy just wanted to be left in peace, but he could see the proselytizing fire in my eyes. As far as he was concerned, I was certifiable. He did what any kid faced with a raging, fundamentalist Muslim child would do. He made a Faustian bargain.

  “I’ll believe in God if you push me on the swings for as long as I want,” he said.

  I agreed. My arms ached and recess was torture, but that was the price of saving Davy’s soul. A little while later, Davy’s mother invited me to his birthday party. I was thrilled. As I sat at their table munching on some snacks, she watched me with worry. I was afraid that he had told her about me—the little Muslim kid who was trying to keep him from burning in hell. You’d think that she’d be grateful. Instead, she walked up to me, her hands on her hips.

  “Don’t eat that,” she said.

  “But it’s yummy.” I stuffed more food into my face.

  “That’s ham, and I’m pretty sure pork is forbidden in your religion,” she said, frowning. “Aren’t you Muslim?”

  I stopped mid-bite. I couldn’t believe my taste buds. The meat was so good, it felt like eating a piece of heaven. I stuffed the last pieces into my mouth as fast as my guilty conscience would allow. I looked sadly at the tray of cold cuts that she quickly removed from my hypnotized gaze.

  Davy’s mother apologized to my mother when she came to pick me up later.

  “I just thought she would know what pork was,” she said.

  My mother looked at her greedy Muslim child and sighed.

  “We send her to the mosque,” she said. “But her attention span is limited.”

  I was a little insulted. At least I had gotten the God part right. Who knew that the pictures of cute pigs with a giant X through them would translate to tasty morsels on a platter?

  Davy looked at me.

  “Are you going to hell now?”

  “Of course not,” said his mother, appalled. “She made a mistake, and like we learned in church, Davy, God forgives.”

  “Davy goes to church?” I asked, disbelieving.

  “Of course. We’re Roman Catholic. Davy’s a choirboy.”

  “Will you still push me on the swings?” he asked.

  After that day, I still pushed Davy on the swings because it was the right thing to do, even if I had started for the wrong reasons. But I decided to pay more attention to my lessons at the mosque. Religion was a tricky business. God was probably teaching me a lesson: Worry about your own soul, which always seemed in constant peril. And if I was really, really good, I’d get to eat pork in heaven.

  Dear reader, I’ve written this memoir so that one day, should you find yourself facing a pint-sized, self-righteous Muslim trying to save your soul, you will be armed with understanding of the other side. You will have all sorts of interesting ammunition to catch them off guard with, like “Isn’t there a prayer that you’re late for?” or “As soon as you figure out the moon issue, I’ll listen to you” and the perennial “Exactly how clean are your genitals?” But please be kind to the crazy-eyed Muslim. Remember, each of us has to face our own demons, even if they are in the form of a piece of fried bacon.

  Dear Muslim reader, don’t think I’ve forgotten you. First, stop sulking. This book could have had confessions about drug problems, strange sexual fetishes and criminal activity—basically the stuff of white-people memoirs. Although I enjoy reading them, I know you don’t. There are no confessions of having sex while swinging from a chandelier. My husband says he’d be very annoyed if his colleagues were laughing at him behind his back. So you don’t have to be scared of this book. But I did include some of my misadventures in the Muslim community. Don’t get me wrong, I love my people. But we have a bit of a contentious relationship. And I am tolerated because it’s not nice to throw someone out of a mosque. Although they did try once (see the “Little Mosque in the City” chapter).

  When you grow up in the West, sometimes things get lost in translation. Plus, it doesn’t help that I’m a bit of a kook. This story will show you what I mean: The other month I was responsible for organizing the mosque community potluck. My friend Faeeza and I watched guests arrive with dessert after dessert, and no main courses in sight. She eventually turned to me.

  “How did you arrange the potluck?” she asked.

  I had decided not to leave the food up to chance, and sent out an announcement dividing the food based on last name, just to make it easy.

  “I asked the first half of the alphabet to bring dessert and the second half to bring a main dish,” I replied.

  “You realize that the majority of Muslim last names fall into the first half of the alphabet, right? Ahmed, Abdullah, Ali …”

  No, that had not occurred to me.

  As the dessert table overflowed with trays of baklava and boxes of doughnuts, we were forced to pile the sweets under the tables and in various corners of the room. Discontent was brewing, though, as people started to get hungry. I could hear grumbling stomachs. I looked at the two chicken dishes on the table.

  “Order pizza,” said Faeeza.

  A few tardy Yusufs and Zakariahs brought a few more chicken dishes while we waited for the pizza. The potluck was officially two hours late, and even though we fast every year during Ramadan, our group of hungry Muslims couldn’t wait any longer. The crowd devoured what protein they could scrounge and topped it off with ample dessert and tea. By the time the twenty pizzas arrived, everyone was in the throes of a carb-induced stupor and had no interest in the bright orange boxes.

  “What are we going to do with all this pizza?” I asked Faeeza.

  “Sell it?” she suggested.

  I took to the microphone and made an announcement. “We are raising money for a new mosque. Everyone who buys a pizza will be contributing to the fund. They’re ten dollars each.”

  “How much were the pizzas?” I asked Faeeza after I came back from the podium.

  “Twelve dollars. We’ll take it out of the new mosque fund, which never seems to grow.”

  No one was volunteering to buy the pizzas, so I went over to where the men were sitting. I figured they’d still be
hungry.

  “Ask my wife,” said Wael. “She makes all the decisions in the family.”

  You would have thought I was asking him to refinance his house. But it was no use. Faheem, Abdul-Rahman and Gamal said the same thing. I eventually gave up on the men and negotiated with the women. The women, of course, could smell our desperation. They took pity on us and bought the pizzas. I felt as victorious as if I had found families for homeless puppies.

  A week later, my husband, Sami, let me know that a complaint had been emailed to the board of the Islamic Association.

  “Oh no,” I said, worried. “Someone’s upset that there wasn’t enough food?”

  “No,” said Sami. “One of the men felt that there was a woman who was fraternizing with the men too much. He wrote that ‘the standard of the mosque potluck has fallen with all the lascivious gazing going on between the genders. How we can continue to call these events Islamic is beyond the pale.’”

  On the bright side, he hadn’t complained about being hungry or going into a sugar coma from the desserts. My potluck would go down in history as a sex scandal, rather than a culinary travesty.

  And that, dear Muslim reader, is why so many of my interactions in our community end up going sideways. I know, I know, I should never have been in charge. But the mosque is short on volunteers and I need brownie points to get to heaven. And I don’t think all those brownies at the potluck count. So basically I’m writing about how I have an incredible talent for bungling everything I do and how I occasionally take my family and my community down with me. It’s the price everyone pays to be close to me. Just ask my husband, who pays the greatest price of all. I know you would have preferred a look at our community that wasn’t warts and all, but better to laugh with us than at us. And we’re kind of warty.

  So now, dear readers, you will get to experience my life in its full glory. I’ll let you read it even if you don’t believe in God. And I promise to push you on the swings for as long as it takes to finish the book.

  Recess

  “Could you make me a sandwich, like the other kids’?” I asked my mother as she wrapped curry chicken drumsticks in aluminum foil for my lunch.

  She raised an eyebrow at me. But my mother was the reason I was a social pariah at school. Each day, I would watch the other girls eat their dripless lunches while mine radiated smells like some sort of onion-infused nuclear bomb. After lunch, all the kids at Fallingdale Elementary School went out for recess. The girls skipped rope while I sulked by the brick wall. My oily chicken legs were keeping me from assimilating. No one came near me because I was probably contagious. They might catch whatever it was I had. I wanted to be like Kathleen, with her long, shiny blond hair, light, airy summer dresses and lunches that smelled like vanilla. Her hair, her clothes, her sandwich. I envied all three. But I could only change one.

  My poor mother silently listened to my request. She worked so hard to make sure we were fed and dressed. And yet it was her curry drumsticks that stood between me and Kathleen. I was a clumsy carnivore among graceful herbivores.

  “People look at me strangely when I eat those things,” I said, pointing. “No one wants to play with me because of my lunch.”

  She looked at me with a level gaze. I’d expected a fight, but she surprised me by agreeing to buy white bread, peanut butter and jelly.

  The next day I walked to school armed with my sandwich, which smelled like candy instead of cumin. It was the aroma of triumph, an answer to the question of whether I could belong. I anxiously waited for lunchtime, and when it came I looked over at Kathleen, sinking her teeth into a chocolate doughnut. This was it. It was about to happen. I would open my brown paper bag, pull out my waxed-paper-wrapped sandwich, and suddenly my world would change. I’d be at Kathleen’s house, and she’d let me comb her long blond hair while we talked about planning her ninth birthday party. I, of course, would wisely suggest getting a piñata for the festivities, at which point she’d say, “I’m so glad I met you.”

  “What made you notice me?” I’d ask.

  “The sandwich,” she’d say.

  As I opened the aluminum foil package—could my mother never be trained?—Kathleen turned and looked directly at my sandwich. The sandwich was working! I almost brought up the piñata before I realized that directly behind my sandwich in her line of vision was the cutest boy in our class. Kathleen gave a little wave—not to my sandwich—before turning back to her shiny-haired friends. The sandwich had failed me. There wasn’t enough white bread in the world to make me instantly fit in with white kids.

  As I sat dejected and hungry (because, in a cruel twist of fate, it turns out that curry drumsticks are much more filling than peanut butter) on the carpeted floor with my grade three classmates, I contemplated my options. I thought back to Kathleen’s trifecta of perfection: hair, clothes, sandwich. The hair was out of the question, but maybe, just maybe, I could change my clothes too. I looked different from the other girls. It wasn’t just because I was brown and had long braids. It was the way my mother dressed me. My clothes were odd. I looked over at Kathleen. She was wearing a miniskirt with a halter top. I was wearing brown cords with a matching corduroy shirt. She was the fairy princess and I was the ugly stepsister. But even ugly stepsisters could go shopping. If I could convince my mother to make me a sandwich, how hard could it be to convince her to let me wear a dress? I dragged my beleaguered mother to Kmart and found a white peasant minidress that fell to my knees. It was perfect.

  The next morning, I ditched the corduroy, put on my beautiful white dress and looked at myself in the mirror. My legs were a little cold, never having been exposed to that much air before, but I looked like a brown princess. My mother had become my fairy godmother, and as I grabbed my sandwich on my way out the door, my metamorphosis was complete.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” asked my mother.

  “To school,” I replied. I knew I was sunk.

  My mother dressed only in traditional Pakistani clothes, which consisted of the shalwar kameez, a long tunic with baggy pants. To her, wearing a dress without pants underneath meant you were halfnaked, like forgetting to put on your shirt in the morning and going to school topless.

  “You’re not going out dressed like that,” she said, staring at my bare legs.

  I dutifully returned upstairs and put on my cords under my dress. I looked in the mirror again. My fairy godmother was actually a fairy godmonster and had reversed the spell. Now I was uglier than ever.

  My assimilation stopped at peanut butter and jam.

  To explain, it was only my third year in Canada. We had moved from Liverpool, England, to Brampton, Ontario, when I was five. I had been hanging on to the ears of my giant red rubber ball, happily bouncing it down the street, when my father called me over. We were moving to Canada, he said. I never saw my ball again.

  Now I was eight and experiencing my first existential nightmare. I wanted to tell my parents that I didn’t fit in, but I realized they didn’t fit in either. They had left behind their entire lives to make a better one for their children. Being in Canada meant opportunities that a life in rural Pakistan or even in Liverpool couldn’t provide, and for that they were grateful. But I, their only daughter, had been forced to leave behind a giant red bouncy ball, and was not grateful at all. I was ugly, and that was worse than being a starving child with maimed limbs in Karachi, Pakistan. At least those kids fit in.

  In Canada, I was the only brown girl in my class. I was shy and quiet and had no idea how to make friends. Looking different made it harder to break the ice. When I came home for lunch that day, corduroy pants noisily brushing under my dress, I must have looked extra sullen.

  “Why are you here?” my mother asked. “I made you a sandwich. Did you lose it?”

  I pulled out my sandwich and munched on it sadly. I’d relied on that sandwich to fix everything that was wrong with my life.

  “I want to eat at home.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked
my mother. In a rare moment of honesty, I told her.

  “The kids don’t like me. I have no friends.”

  “Did someone tell you that?”

  “No one says anything to me,” I said. “It’s like I’m invisible.”

  “You should try harder,” she said.

  I did, I thought to myself. But someone made me wear pants.

  My mother regarded me thoughtfully. Her childhood in Pakistan had been a happy time. She and her friends used to jump rope endlessly in the summer heat during school breaks. Her family’s wealth meant she always dressed in the most fashionable clothes and was one of the most popular girls in her class. If anyone had had the power to be a bully, it was my mother. My father used to tell me that she had servants to wash and iron her clothes and get her ready in the morning. My mother would vehemently deny these stories as horrible exaggerations, but she had a suspicious penchant for destroying my laundry. Every wool sweater I ever owned wound up a shrunken scrap of felt. I suspected there was a grain of truth to the story of her privileged upbringing. But now she was raising an ugly duckling out of water.

  Then my mother said the most unexpected thing.

  “I’m coming to school with you.”

  I looked up to where I thought God must live, thinking, Am I not suffering enough without adding my mother to the mix?

  Surely if God could create an entire universe in seven epochs, erect mountains and fill oceans full of resplendent creatures, he could find a way to let me wear a dress without pants. But no, in his limitless glory, God’s solution was to have my mother come to school with me. She was the mother ship of uncoolness, and I had unwittingly unleashed her. I assumed I was being punished for complaining.

  She wouldn’t listen to my stammering protests and marched me back to school. The playground was full of children, mostly girls with spaghetti-strap tops and short skirts that revealed snatches of brightly patterned underwear when they jumped rope. I could see the shock on my mother’s face. She must have thought the playground was a nudist colony. This was not going to help me shed the pants from under my dress. My mother stopped in the middle of the playground, surveying the lay of the land with the authority of a general assessing the battlefield. She walked up to the leader, who happened to be Kathleen, my Kathleen, who was wielding a rope.