My Accidental Jihad

by Krista Bremer

  But in her fourth-grade class, girls were already drawing a connection between clothing and popularity. A few weeks ago, she’d told me angrily about a classmate who had ranked all the girls in class according to how stylish they were. That’s when I realized that while physical exposure had liberated me in some ways, Aliya might discover an entirely different type of freedom by choosing to cover herself.

  One morning when I dropped her off at school, instead of driving away from the curb in a rush as I usually did, I watched her walk into a crowd of kids, bent forward under the weight of her backpack as if she were bracing against a storm. She moved purposefully, in such a solitary way—so different from the way I was at her age, and I realized once again how mysterious she was to me. It wasn’t just her head covering. It was her lack of concern for what others thought about her. It was finding her stash of Halloween candy untouched in her drawer in the middle of spring, whereas I’d been a child obsessed with sweets. It was the fact that she would rather dive into a book than into the ocean, that she could be so consumed with her reading that she wouldn’t hear me calling her from the next room.

  I watched her kneel at the entryway to her school and pull a neatly folded cloth from the front of her pack. Then she slipped it over her head, and her shoulders disappeared beneath it like the cape her younger brother wore when he pretended to be a superhero.

  As I pulled away from the curb, I imagined that head scarf having magical powers to protect her boundless imagination, her keen perception, and her unself-conscious goodness. I imagined it shielding her on her journey through adolescence, that house of mirrors where so many young women get trapped. I imagined the scarf buffering her from the restlessness and insecurity that clings to us in spite of the growing number of choices at our fingertips; I imagined it providing safe cover as she took flight into a future I could only imagine.

  THE SUMMER I turned thirteen, when my parents thought I was playing kick the can in the street as dusk hovered over the New Mexico mountains, I was actually in the dark corner of my neighbor’s garage, watching nervously as he reached behind his father’s heavy metal toolbox and pulled out a Hustler magazine. We sat cross-legged on the concrete floor, he spread the centerfold across his lap, and together we studied the strangest woman I had ever seen. Her mysterious expression was at once startled and inviting: arched eyebrows, wide hungry eyes, the slight upward curl of a lip. To me the most disconcerting aspect of her was that she seemed comfortable—even playful—in the most minimal and embarrassing of clothing and the most shameless of poses.

  My neighbor sighed, squinting and shoving his glasses up his nose with one thumb to get a better look; he was hypnotized. But this image had the opposite effect on me: I squirmed with a keen and painful awareness of my awkward body on the cold concrete. Most evenings that summer we’d met on the corner to play touch football in the street or explore the canyons behind our houses. We had similar tastes in sports, fantasy novels, even clothing: faded cutoffs with ragged edges, loose cotton T-shirts, and tennis shoes. Now, crouched beside him studying this picture, I suddenly noticed my chubby thighs, the downy hair on my shins, the high collar of my boxy T-shirt. I drew my knees to my chest, as mortified as if the nakedness on the page were my own. What men wanted, I realized in an instant, was the opposite of me: women who were arched and silken as cats, splayed out and submissive.

  Sexuality, it seemed to me then and for many years afterward, was for women a form of theater—a rigorous, carefully choreographed performance for an audience of one. Though she always played the starring role, the woman never chose her own lines or costume. My biggest obstacle to a successful performance was a stubborn, deep-seated streak of modesty—a paralyzing reluctance to put myself on display. To be as limp and flawless as a porcelain doll, as malleable as a marionette, went against every instinct I had. More than one teenage boy, in a moment of groping exasperation, implored me to stop being so “uptight.” I couldn’t help it.

  My freshman year in college, I moved into a Southern California dormitory perched on the cliffs over what I had no idea was a nude beach. The first time I jogged down the steep trail to the shoreline, I was shocked to discover so many naked men strolling across the sand or sitting spread-eagled staring out at the horizon, their dangling pink parts cooking like sausages in the sun. I learned to lock my eyes on the packed sand at the edge of the surf as I ran, to absorb myself in the bubbling sea foam, and to never stop to catch my breath—because the moment I did, one of the naked men would approach me without fail to ask me the time of day. Around this time I joined a nature club for students like me who loved outdoor adventures. The club was full of robust, androgynous undergrads: men with glossy blond ponytails and flannel shirts tied like skirts around narrow waists; women with muscled arms and furry legs. One hot afternoon we hiked in the desert, and as the sun bore down on us, my companions began to peel off their shirts one by one—first the men and then, wordlessly, the women, too. In the end I was the only one left wearing a cotton T-shirt soaked through with nervous perspiration.

  Discovering feminist literature my first year in college only added to my confusion. Authors I admired gave me powerful messages that I was free to express myself sexually; failing to do so, in fact, would be unhealthy and wrong, a sign of patriarchal oppression. But here on the Southern California coast, the western capital of physical perfection, there was a catch. My so-called sexual freedom must meet certain unspoken criteria: high swollen breasts and a flat, tanned belly, silky lingerie and hairless thighs skinny enough to always allow a sliver of light to pass between them. Sex itself could look like hundreds of different positions, as long as I remained in character: innocent yet brazen, devoted yet undemanding, petulant yet submissive. Layered and contradictory, it was nearly an impossible role to play. I sweated like a Shakespearean actor weighed down by a heavy costume and cumbersome couplets, too anxious for applause to ever really enjoy myself.

  In truth, my desires were nothing like images I saw on the screen or in magazines. There was nothing theatrical about my preferences: loving touches beneath a veil of darkness, warm skin and soft cotton sheets. I never liked lingerie. I had no fantasies about whips or leather, no made-up stories to act out in costume. I never imagined skin pounding and colliding. Instead my erotic mind was a mosaic of image and sensation: a blooming night flower with a moist, delicate center. A spoonful of honey fed into a hungry mouth. A garden washed by the merciful rain, dew on a petal like sweat pearling on flesh. Tell me your fantasy, my boyfriend whispered to me in the dark. Propped up on one arm, he studied my face, eagerly waiting for me to turn him on. The silence stretched out; I had nothing to say. My deepest longing had no characters, setting, or narrative arc. My most erotic fantasy was simply that I was enough: plain, holy, beautiful.

  THE FIRST TIME my skin touched Ismail’s, we were standing in his kitchen, two glasses of cold water on the counter between us. We had just finished a run; we were flushed and smiling. He placed his hand gently over mine, and the unexpected heat from his palm sent a jolt of electricity up my arm. I nearly jumped, hypervigilant about what his next move might be. It was a familiar and nerve-racking feeling, this heightened alertness in response to a man’s unexpected pass. I had known men who scrambled toward sex like racing toward a finish line. But Ismail did nothing else but hold my gaze and smile while his hand rested over mine. I couldn’t help but smile, too, and silence stretched out as I investigated the sensation of his skin. Not since I was fourteen, and the boy seated beside me at church reached for my hand and held it through the sermon, could I recall ever having been given so much time to investigate such a small pleasure.

  I soon discovered that Ismail relished small intimacies: holding my gaze, sweeping a strand of hair from my face, prolonging a doorway embrace when we said good-bye. Dropping me off at my house at the end of an evening, he reminded me of a teenage boy: awkwardly extending the conversation in the dark, reaching over the center console to find my hand, leaning ac
ross the emergency brake for a hesitant kiss. He moved at an entirely different pace from other men I had known—as if sex were not the grand prize, as if each connection were a revelation. I figured this must have come from spending his teens and twenties in a Muslim country where sex was strictly prohibited, where fleeting stolen intimacies were all a young man could hope for.

  A MODERN, LIBERATED American woman is only supposed to practice submission when toys, costumes, or accessories are involved. In the theater of sexuality we are given a pass, allowed to leave our political correctness at the door. In any other aspect of our lives, submission is seen as weakness. When I moved to North Carolina to attend graduate school, southern summers taught me my first lesson in surrender. On a sweltering July day, I moved into a tiny green house on the edge of a meadow whose overgrown grass stood utterly still in the hot clotted air. The unwieldy air-conditioning unit propped in my bedroom window groaned day and night, delivering a weak stream of relief that evaporated like steam from a kettle. Never one to nap in California, I fell asleep in the middle of the day on my living room futon, awaking to discover my body seeping a shadowy imprint onto its cotton cover. I had to escape the dark oven of this house; I was melting into the furniture. I swung open the door and collided with a wall of hot, thick air.

  That first month I stumbled around town muttering like a madwoman, dripping sweat and fuming with resentment for the infernal humidity. I once heard a southerner describe summer days like these as close: The weather was close. It was true: the wet heat wrapped me in its moist, fleshy arms, smothered me against its sticky bosom, and refused to let go. Southern summer afternoons climbed onto my lap like a big, hairy dog, its hot breath in my face. I took its assault personally: for three months I was offended on a daily basis by its impositions, outraged by its relentless assault. But over time I learned to submit to the season. I discovered the wisdom of rocking chairs on screened porches, tall glasses of sweet tea, early morning runs in the woods and lazy afternoons at the pool. I rediscovered the pleasure of finishing thick novels. I learned to yield to the season, to find what was good and be grateful for it.

  Marriage taught me my second lesson in surrender: I learned to submit to my beloved like a mother submits to an infant’s hunger, offering an aching swollen breast and feeling the sweet relief of doing exactly what she was meant to do. On a good night, when there was peace between us and neither one fell into bed exhausted, Ismail reached for me with gentle, insistent hands. I practiced molding my form to his: my body poised and quivering, tuned by his undivided attention, ready to be played like an instrument. His touch softened my flesh like butter. My body rose to meet his; my skin yielded gratefully to his pressure. Under love’s blanket, there was nothing theatrical or passive about my surrender. It was assertive, ecstatic, playful. He was trained on my pleasure, which then became his own. Giving and receiving became one, as indivisible as a body and a soul.

  “How would you rate your love life?” he whispered into my left ear. I was curled on my side, staring out the window at the bright, unblinking moon. His arms around me were soft as worn cotton.

  How could I possibly place this love on a scale? If ten was the ecstatic fusion of divine love, the white-hot annihilation of the small separate self, and one was the loneliness and despair of the wrong marriage, then all the years of our married life I had played this scale like a piano, my fingers dancing over all the keys, using each note to make haunting, beautiful music.

  “I would not rate it,” I murmured and then, nudging him with my heel in a reprimand, added, “That would not be a very Muslim thing to do, would it?”

  He pulled me closer, tucked his chin into the small depression of my clavicle, his face so close that I could hear the nearly inaudible pop of his parting lips: the sound of him smiling in the dark.

  “Alhamdu lillah is my answer to your question,” I whispered. “Alhamdu lillah.”

  All praise is due to God.

  Quiet for a moment, he contemplated my response. And then, propping himself up on one elbow so he could see me: “How exactly would you say it?”

  He wanted to study my face as I spoke the word, to discover if I said it with a teasing smile and laughter in my eyes. Did I say it earnestly, with humble gratitude for a gift so precious it warranted no other word? Or did I say the word with a distant look in my eye and a long, forbearing sigh, as one enduring a difficult trial?

  These were important distinctions. The straightforward translation for Alhamdu lillah is “all praise belongs to God,” but the way it is expressed creates nuanced differences in meaning. It is a heavy, solid container of a phrase—deep enough to hold self-pity, complacency, gratitude or awe. Sometimes when I ask a Muslim friend how she is doing, she replies with a long sigh, and her Alhamdu lillah tells me she is struggling to be patient and find blessing in difficulty. Spoken with a certain grim determination, it can mean “if God’s plan is for me to endure this tribulation, then I accept it.” At other times the word is awash with humility, each syllable pouring forth gratitude like water over river stones. No matter how it is spoken, the word washes away our small self-referential stories about the vast mystery of our lives. Trying to find its secular English equivalent, Ismail sometimes responds to the question “How are you?” by saying “I can’t complain.” But this phrase is a poor substitute, the domineering I pushing God out altogether and colonizing meaning, forcing each word that follows to march in single file behind the self. Alhamdu lillah wipes away the self altogether, like the swipe of an eraser against a chalkboard on which our most cherished stories are written. I murmured the word again, smiling in the dark.

  20 Prayer

  The last time he went to Libya, Ismail purchased six prayer rugs in Tripoli’s Old City. The night he arrived home, he hauled his suitcase into our living room, unzipped the bag, and spread the rugs across the floor: six different border designs, six different shades of minarets and tassels. The rugs smelled faintly of incense and dust and the rusty roll-down doors that shopkeepers bring clattering to the ground at the end of a market day.

  I was grateful to finally have my own set; prayer rugs were as essential to a Muslim gathering as a nice set of wineglasses were to a cocktail party. In the past I had felt sheepish when a Muslim guest peered out the window at the fading light, checked her watch, and asked if she could borrow a prayer rug to pray. Offering her a towel or a folded blanket was as wrong as serving good wine in a paper cup. Now I imagined passing out my six prayer rugs one by one, to three couples—or maybe two couples and two single people who might enjoy meeting one another. Watching my guests line them up side by side on the carpet, I’d feel the holy satisfaction of anticipating a guest’s every need.

  The next time we invited Muslim friends for a gathering, thirty people came. When it was time to pray, we moved aside furniture in our living room to make space for two rows of prayer rugs. Some guests had brought their own; others used ours. Lined up side by side, the rugs made a colorful mosaic of minarets on which our guests rose and fell in unison, Allahu Akhbar pulsing through the room like a single heartbeat. Afterward the rugs were refolded and stacked by the door for our friends to reclaim on their way out. At the end of the evening I walked each guest to the threshold, gave away neatly packaged leftovers, thanked them for coming, and said “Peace be with you” as they put on their shoes. I kissed the women on each cheek, touched the faces of the children, and put my hand over my heart as I said good-bye to the men, holding their gaze just long enough for them to see the love and gratitude in my eyes. After closing the door behind the last guest, I went to put away my prayer rugs.

  There were only five. One was missing.

  “One of our prayer rugs is missing,” I announced, standing in the doorway to the kitchen and addressing Ismail’s back. He was at the sink, rinsing water glasses and loading them into the dishwasher.

  “I’m sure it will turn up,” he murmured, without turning to look at me. I went back through my stack, then swept th
rough the living room. Nothing.

  “It’s definitely not here.” I reclaimed my place in the doorway and crossed my arms over my chest. Ismail shrugged, a noncommittal gesture that said, No big deal or It’s not my fault. Either way, I found it annoying.

  I could not stop thinking about my missing prayer rug. I imagined it folded at a friend’s house, someone else snapping it open and lying it across the floor for her guest. I mentioned it to a friend who said she might have ended up with an extra one. I breathed a sigh of relief—but then she asked me to please describe my missing rug so she could verify I was the rightful owner. This test I did not expect. I could not recall its color or pattern. I knew it only as rug number six. I smiled politely and changed the subject, but my stomach clenched with anger. She had my rug. I knew it.

  Later, when I asked Ismail to describe the missing rug to me, he told me he would recognize it if he saw it. As far as I could see, there was only one way to solve this mystery: Ismail and I would drop in to visit friends during prayer times. Each day Muslims were required to pray five times, and each of the five prayers had its own name: Fajr, Zuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and Isha. The first and the last prayer of the day fell outside of acceptable visiting hours—I could think of no good excuse to show up at someone’s house just as the first sliver of light appeared in the dawn sky or right before they went to bed—and another prayer fell in the middle of the workday. That left us with two options: the late-afternoon prayer, Asr, and the early-evening prayer, Maghrib. I figured we could kill two birds with one stone by dropping in on friends who lived farther away during Asr. We might show up just as they were unloading groceries or chopping up vegetables for dinner. We would chat for a while, and then Ismail would look down at his watch. “Shall we pray?” he would ask—a question that left room for only one answer. He would discreetly inspect the rugs as they were laid out. If he did not see ours, we would still have time to graciously excuse ourselves and hit another friend’s house by Maghrib.