I quickly discovered that nothing squashed the Christmas spirit more quickly than the question why. The how was so much easier to explain: how to strap a tree to our car with bungee cord and soak its trunk in ginger ale so it would stay fresh in our living room; how to pierce the fattest part of a piece of popcorn, thread it onto string, and drape it from needly branches; how to tuck the highest tip of the tree beneath the frilly skirt of a glowing angel. But why? Each time he asked this question, my mind was as blank as a desert. Searching that stark landscape for a grain of significance, I glimpsed for the first time an ominous cloud in the distance, the remote and unsettling possibility that my rituals had no meaning.
Like a closely choreographed dance, Ramadan was tethered so tightly to tradition that it allowed no room for creativity. My holidays, on the other hand, were amenable to improvisation. To raise the stakes of our annual Easter egg hunt, my father brought out a stopwatch and timed us like it was an Olympic sprint; Thanksgiving had become the day for our annual bean bag toss tournament. More recently, my family had constructed a new Christmas ritual: the annual gift drawing. A month before Christmas my parents drew names of each relative from a hat. Shortly thereafter we received an email (subject line: Ho Ho Ho) informing us of the person for whom we would play Santa that year.
To have one’s name in the hat was to be officially embraced as a member of the family. But failing to grasp the honor and symbolic weight of being included, Ismail only dreaded participating in such a baffling ritual. Each year I had to calm him down and outline the procedure for him all over again. Step one: call or email the person whose name he had selected—my acupuncturist aunt in Santa Barbara, my younger sister’s boyfriend with the tattoos and the penchant for pit bulls, my father who had returned or exchanged every gift he had received since 1980. The purpose of step one was to obtain as much information as possible about what this person wanted. Brand names, colors, and sizes were ideal. Just pretend you are Santa bouncing their inner child on your knee, I told him. This only made him more confused.
The level of detail gathered in step one made step two—the purchase—that much easier. A thorough interview could save additional trips to the mall or, if one was shopping online, shave down the process from five minutes to two and a half. Simply enter key words into Google, browse through options, and then click Pay Now (not forgetting to select the gift wrap and personalized card options). The most important part of all was to remain at all times, from start to finish, in the Christmas spirit.
The hardest part for Ismail was not giving a gift but receiving a call from his personal Santa Claus—who was not calling from the North Pole but from the college town where she was working two jobs in order to put herself through school or from the home she would soon lose to foreclosure. Well-meaning relatives called to ask what he longed for, and when he replied honestly that he didn’t want anything, they sent him a fleece jacket nearly identical to the one that hung in his closet or a sweater that hugged him a little too tightly around the middle.
“Can’t we all just go out and buy ourselves something each Christmas?” he asked me more than once—a question to which I didn’t even bother responding. Instead I just flashed him a withering look that said, I don’t know where the hell you left your Christmas spirit, buddy, but you’d better find it fast.
I SHOULD HAVE been more sympathetic, since I found it nearly impossible to capture the “Ramadan spirit” during Ismail’s monthlong fast. People said that for a relationship to work, a couple needed to have a shared passion. My husband and I did have one: food. Years ago, when we first met, we shared other passions, such as travel, long runs on wooded trails, live music. But now that we had a small child, those indulgences had fallen by the wayside. No matter how busy our lives became, however, we had to eat. On days when it seemed we had nothing in common, when I struggled to recall what brought us together in the first place, one good meal could remind me. Ismail was an amazing cook. I could still remember in great detail the meal he prepared for me the first night we spent together: the walnuts simmering slowly in the thick, sweet bloodred pomegranate sauce; the chicken that slipped delicately away from the bone, like silk falling from skin. The next morning the scent of coriander ground into strong coffee filled his small apartment as he served me olives and fresh bread for breakfast.
But during Ramadan, our relationship became a bland, lukewarm concoction that I found difficult to swallow. I was not proud of this fact. Despite the amorphous nature of my holiday celebrations, I did try to maintain a spiritual practice: I stumbled out of bed in the dark most mornings and meditated in the corner of our room with my back to him, trying to find that bottomless truth beyond words. Once in a great while, I dragged him to church on Sunday. Whenever I suggested we say grace at the table, he reached willingly for my hand, and words of gratitude flowed easily from his mouth. He never criticized my practices, even when they were wildly inconsistent or contradictory. But Ramadan was not ten minutes of meditation or an hour-long sermon; it was an entire month of deprivation. Ismail’s god was the old-fashioned kind, omnipresent and stern, uncompromising with his demands. During Ramadan this god expected him to pray on time, five times a day—and to squeeze in additional prayers of forgiveness as often as he could. My god would never be so demanding. My god was a flamboyant and fickle friend with a biting wit who liked a good party. My god was transgendered and tolerant to a fault; he/she showed up unexpectedly during peak moments, when life felt glorious and synchronous, then disappeared for long stretches of time.
But Ramadan left little room for dramatic flair. There was no chorus of voices or public celebration—just a quiet and steady submission to God in the privacy of one’s home. For some Muslims who lived in the West, the holiday became even more private, since their friends and colleagues were often not even aware of their fast.
During the early days of Ramadan, Ismail dealt with his hunger by planning his next meal and puttering around the kitchen. In the last half hour before the sun set, he rearranged the food in our refrigerator or wiped down our already-clean counters. At night in bed, as I drifted off to sleep, he reviewed each ingredient in the baklava recipe he intended to make the following evening. “Do you think I should replace the walnuts with pistachios?” he whispered. In the middle of the workday, when I called his cell phone, I heard the beeping of a cash register in the background. He was wandering the aisles of our local grocery store. “I needed to get out of the office,” he said matter-of-factly, as if all men escaped to the grocery store during lunch.
The last hours before he broke his fast were the most volatile time of day for him. Coincidentally, they were the same hours at which I returned home from work. I’d open the door and find him collapsed on the couch, exhausted, our children, Aliya and a son who was born five years later, Khalil, running in circles around the room. Ismail was irritable, and his thoughts trailed off in midsentence. I dreaded seeing him in this state. I counted on my husband to speak coherently, to smile on a regular basis, and to enjoy our children. This humorless person on my couch was no fun. Every few days I asked (with what I hope sounded like innocent curiosity) what he’d learned from his fast so far. I knew this was an unfair question. How would I feel if he poked his head into our bedroom while I was meditating and asked, How’s it going? Emptied your mind yet?
One balmy Saturday in the middle of Ramadan, we went to hear an outdoor lecture by a Sufi Muslim teacher who was visiting from California. The teacher sat cross-legged under a tree on a colorful pillow while the sun streamed down on him through a canopy of leaves. After a long silence, he swept his arms in front of him, a beatific expression on his face, and reminded us to notice the beauty that surrounds us. “If you don’t,” he says, “you’re not fasting—you’re just going hungry.”
I took a sidelong glance at Ismail. He was looking very hungry to me these days. I guess I imagined that during his fast a new radiance would emanate from him. I imagined him moving more slowly but also more lo
vingly. I imagined a Middle Eastern Gandhi, sitting with our children in the garden when I got home from work. In short, I imagined that his spiritual practice would look more . . . well, spiritual. I didn’t imagine the long silences between us or how much his exhaustion would irritate me. I didn’t imagine him leaping out of bed in a panic, having slept through his alarm, and running downstairs to swallow chunks of bread and gulp coffee before the sun came up. I didn’t imagine his terse replies to my attempts to start a conversation, or his impatience with our children.
Ismail told me that in the Middle East, Ramadan was a time of extremes: There were large celebratory gatherings of family and friends at night, and there was also a tremendous public outpouring of charity and generosity to those in need. At the same time, the daytime streets became more dangerous, filled with nicotine and caffeine addicts in withdrawal. People stumbled through the morning without their green or black tea, normally drunk so dark and thick with sugar that it left permanent stains even on young people’s teeth. Desperate smokers who lit up in public risked being ridiculed or even attacked by strangers. The streets reverberated with angry shouts and car horns, and traffic conflicts occasionally escalated into physical violence.
Our home, too, became more volatile during Ramadan. Ismail’s temper was short; my patience with him ran thin. I accused him of being grumpy. He accused me of being unsupportive. I told him he was failing at Ramadan, as if it were some sort of exam. I didn’t ask for this spiritual test, I told him. As if I could pick and choose which parts of him to take into my life. As if he were served up to me on a plate, and I could push aside what I didn’t care for—his temper, his self-pity, his doubt—and keep demanding more of his delicious tenderness.
And then there was my husband’s unmistakable Ramadan scent. Normally I loved the way he smelled: the faint scent of soap and laundry detergent mixed with the warm muskiness of his skin. But after a few days of fasting, Ismail began to smell different. Mostly it was his breath. The odor was subtle but distinct and persisted no matter how many times he brushed or used mouthwash. When I got close to him, it was the first thing I noticed. I did a Google search for “Ramadan and halitosis.” This, I learned, was a common side effect of fasting—so common that the prophet Muhammad himself even had something to say about it: “The smell of the fasting person’s breath is sweeter to Allah than that of musk.” Allah may have delighted in this smell, but I didn’t. In bed at night I no longer rested my head on his chest. I began to avoid eye contact and increase the distance between us when we spoke. I no longer kissed him on impulse in the evening. I slept with my back to him, resentful of this odor, which hung like an invisible veil between us.
The purpose of fasting during Ramadan was not simply to suffer hunger, thirst, or desire but to bring oneself closer to taqwa: a state of sincerity, discipline, generosity, and surrender to Allah, the sum total of all Muslim teachings. When, in a moment of frustration, I grumbled to my husband about his bad breath, he responded in the spirit of taqwa. He listened sympathetically and then apologized and promised to keep his distance. He offered to sleep on the couch if that would make me more comfortable. He said he wished I had told him earlier so he could have spared me any discomfort. His humility caught me off guard and suddenly made my resentment absurd.
Ramadan revealed to me the limits of my compassion. I recalled a conversation I had with Ismail in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when the word jihad often appeared in news stories about Muslim extremists who were hell-bent on destroying the United States. According to Ismail, the prophet Muhammad taught that the greatest jihad, or struggle, of our lives is not the one that takes place on a battlefield but the one that takes place within our hearts—the struggle, as I understood it, to manifest humility, wisdom, and compassion. Ramadan threw me into my own accidental jihad, forcing me to wrestle with my intolerance and self-absorption. And I had been losing ground in this battle, forgetting my husband’s intentions and focusing instead on the petty ways I was inconvenienced by his practice.
I thought I understood the rules of Ramadan: the timetable on the refrigerator, the prohibitions, the prayers. But I didn’t understand that the real practice was responding to a toddler’s temper tantrum or a wife’s hostile silence when you hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in ten hours. I was like one of the children of Israel in the Bible who once complained that, despite their dutiful fasting, God still wasn’t answering their prayers. The children of Israel had it all wrong: God didn’t count calories. The fast itself only set the stage. God was interested in our behavior and intentions while we were hungry. Through his prophet Isaiah, God gave the children of Israel a piece of his mind: “Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure, and oppress all your workers. Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to hit with a wicked fist. Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high” (Isaiah 58:3 – 4).
Ramadan was meant to break our rigid habits of overindulgence, the ones that slipped into our lives as charming guests and then refused to leave, taking up more and more space and stealing our attention away from God. And it wasn’t just the big addictions that grabbed us by the throat—alcohol, coffee, cigarettes—but the little ones that took us gently by the hand and led us stealthily away from the truth. I began to notice my own compulsions, the small and socially acceptable ones that colonized my day: The way I depended on regular exercise to bolster my mood. The number of times I checked my email. The impulse to watch a movie with my husband after our children were in bed rather than let the silence envelop us. And the words: all the words in books, in magazines, on the computer; words to distract me from the mundane truth of the present. I began to notice how much of my thinking revolved around what I would consume next.
I was plump with my husband’s love, overfed by his kindness, yet I still treated our marriage like an all-you-can-eat buffet, returning to him over and over again to fill my plate, as if our vows guaranteed me unlimited nourishment. During Ramadan, when he turned inward and had less to offer me, I became indignant. I wanted to make a scene. I wanted to speak to whoever was in charge, to demand what I thought was promised me when I entered this marriage. But now I wondered: was love an endless feast, or was it what people managed to serve one another when their cupboards were bare?
In the evening, just before sundown, Ismail arranged three dates on a small plate and poured a tall glass of water, just as the prophet Muhammad and his companions did long ago. Then he sat down next to me at the kitchen counter while I thumbed through cookbooks, wondering what to make for dinner. He waited dutifully while the phone rang, while our daughter practiced scales on the piano or sent a box of LEGOS crashing onto our wood floor. At the moment the sun set, he lifted a date to his mouth and closed his eyes.
RAMADAN WAS THE time of year when Ismail slowed his relentless forward momentum. While fasting he no longer had the energy for strenuous workouts, impassioned political discussions, or ambitious weekend errands across town. His movements grew more deliberate and his daily rhythm more circular, aligned with the sun and the moon. He spent more time in silence, doling out words a few at a time like dates on a plate.
To his dismay, Christmas affected me in exactly the opposite way. As November days ticked past like seconds on a stopwatch, and December days began their freefall straight toward Christmas, I grew increasingly frantic. At night, after the kids were in bed, I sat at the kitchen counter puzzling over my gift list, racking my brain to try to remember whom I had forgotten, doing the complicated math of trying to ensure that my gifts were precisely equal. I sat up late clicking through our digital archives for a family photo suitable for a holiday card, rejecting one sweet captured memory after another because one or more of us did not look happy or young or fit or successful enough.
One night Ismail lay in bed, chin propped in his hands, watching me where I sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor, surrounded by shopping bags, wrapping paper, gift boxes, and ribbon. I was wrapping my rec
ent purchases in holiday gift paper: tiny ecstatic Santas soared through a glittering blue sky like planes over an airport during rush hour.
“What part of this holiday do you love the most?” he asked suddenly.
I glanced up at him, then let my gaze fall onto the scraps around me. I searched for a better answer than the word that leapt to my mind: presents. The unparalleled pleasure of holding a gift with my name on it, the shimmering dream that within bright paper and pretty bows I would find an offering big enough to fill the emptiness inside, that deep, deep hole of restlessness and want. For a brief moment with a gift in my hands, the ribbon still intact and the paper untorn, I forgot what inevitably followed: the relentless creeping desire for something shinier, bigger, newer; delight turning once again to dissatisfaction.
It wasn’t just receiving gifts that thrilled me; wrapped up in giving them was a different promise of salvation. Each time I shopped for a loved one I could almost taste that tantalizing possibility of finding just the right object to convey my feelings: to express what I had been too cowardly to say; to erase the memory of times when I had spoken too much or listened too little; to bridge emotional, geographic, or philosophical distance; to make our relationship brand new again.
After having witnessed Ismail’s holy month of discipline and deprivation, having seen the way a glass of tap water or a bite of one wrinkled date transported him to ecstasy at the end of a day of fasting, I was too embarrassed to tell him this. So instead I recited something about family and friends, gratitude and good food. I was as credible as the job applicant who brightly insists she is a team player.
The only time of year Ismail was accustomed to giving presents was Eid, the celebration at the end of Ramadan. People came together for feasts and presented gifts to children only—as if brightly wrapped surprises were a youthful indulgence, outgrown in maturity like make-believe games. It made me sad to imagine all the inner children trapped in the hearts of Muslim grown-ups—desperate for scraps of frivolity, longing for reprieve from all that earnest goodness. Christmas, I explained to Ismail, was a time to indulge my inner child: that exuberant, impulsive girl who refused to grow up, whose heart leapt at the sight of blinking holiday lights. She anxiously scanned the presents beneath the tree on Christmas morning, even as I appeared to sit disinterestedly on the couch with puffy eyes and morning frown lines, cradling my cup of coffee as if a caffeine fix were all I wanted from Santa Claus. I liked to imagine my inner child as playful and spontaneous, full of rosy-cheeked wonder at the world. I wished Ismail would be charmed by her, find her irresistible and delightful to please. But he found her demanding and self-centered, and during Christmastime, when she screamed mine and more, she made Ismail intensely uncomfortable.
My Accidental Jihad Page 7
