My Accidental Jihad

by Krista Bremer

  When I described my plan to my husband, he studied my face for a long moment. Then he shook his head slowly.

  “No way,” he said. “If something else were missing from our house, I’d help you track it down—but not a prayer rug. You’re just going to have to be at peace with the fact that someone is touching their forehead to it in prayer.”

  SPRING ARRIVED WITH an explosion of green. In our new house, it was my first season of tending plants whose names I was still learning: camellia, jasmine, forsythia. A gardener friend told me I needed to cut my butterfly bushes down to the ground. Only when the plant was relieved of the burden of last year’s fading leaves, she explained, would it explode with new growth. Same went for the rosebush. She was a master gardener, so I should have trusted her, but I was skeptical. I was attached to the tangled branches that lined my walkway to the back porch, concealing an electric box and plain siding behind purple flowers and green foliage. I didn’t like the idea of losing all that fullness; I worried about the empty space that would be exposed by such aggressive pruning. What if the plants never grew back as high and lush as they now were? To hack away so much of a living thing felt violent, so instead I trimmed hesitantly, taking too little to make a noticeable difference.

  But as I worked I couldn’t help but notice the brittleness of the branches, the dullness of once vibrant leaves, the desiccated brown remnants of purple blooms. Tiny green shoots near the ground, fresh and new, ignited my imagination, and I began to wonder what else might emerge from the dark soil if I cleared away the half-dead remnants of the past. So the following day, armed with my husband’s gloves and a pair of shears, I attacked the bush. I slashed at the undergrowth, forced my way through branches as thick as my thumb, brittle on the outside but still sinewy with life at the center. I cut and cleared, pulled at dead limbs, my elation growing along with the pile of branches beside me. Hacking away at the faded aftermath of a bygone season, I thought, This is my life, a tangle of half-dead relationships and routines, diminishing pleasures, faded habits, and brittle assumptions. I felt myself fading, felt the enervation of sustaining half-dead branches of myself. And yet I’d been afraid to cut it away, to confront the emptiness, afraid of what might grow from emptiness and whether it would be lush enough to satisfy me.

  SOMETHING INSIDE ME was withering. I was not addicted to alcohol or drugs. I never lost a job or destroyed a marriage or racked up a mountain of debt from gambling. I was going to work every day, stopping by the grocery store on the way home, keeping the house tidy and exercising regularly and helping my kids with their homework and returning emails and phone calls. I was bottoming out quietly in that stylish suburban middle-class American way: my life not shattered by a single explosive addiction but slowly strangled in the web of so many small ones. Like a grasshopper who has taken a leap into an invisible web—its trembling limbs announcing its arrival to the spider that skitters closer to weave a gossamer shroud. No longer the brilliant green leaping creature he once was, his once-strong legs now paralyzed, his big black eyes now hidden behind a film of gray.

  At night I slept restlessly, the chime of my husband’s iPhone announcing the arrival of emails at regular intervals throughout the night from China and India and Europe, inquiries flagged with a red exclamation mark from corporate clients whose gushing cash flow had briefly been obstructed by a glitch in the software. In restless dreams, money was my oxygen, fed into my old and withered nostrils at the end of my life. I woke early in the morning, rose like a zombie from bed, and stumbled downstairs, summoned by the call to prayer of two lords: caffeine and the Internet. I ground coffee, set the kettle to boil, and logged on to the computer. Now my face was lit up by the dim glow of email and Facebook. The blank slate of my rested mind quickly grew cluttered with pictures of my high school boyfriend’s Hawaiian vacation, stills from YouTube videos, close-up shots of the meals distant acquaintances had eaten the night before. One friend I had never met posted cholesterol levels from yesterday’s physical exam; another posted a picture of her toddler on the toilet. Now my fingers were tapping, my mind was racing, the kettle was shrieking, the holy silence was evaporating. Here was a video of a talking shell that kept a dust mite for a pet, here was another of a white-bearded Sufi in Pakistan, here was one more of a motivational speaker whose talk about overcoming anxiety had gotten seven hundred thousand hits. I was listening to Bob Dylan, to a stand-up comedy routine, to the silence of a giraffe giving birth, to the thud of her baby falling from her womb onto to the cold, hard ground. I was racing around the world, and I was nowhere.

  COME HERE, ISMAIL said. Sit down. He was in the living room. I was in the kitchen putting away the last of the dishes. Just a second. One more spoon to return to a drawer. One more quick wipe of the countertop. One more stack of papers to sort through and walk out to the recycling bin.

  Please, come.

  I sighed, put down what I was doing, and went and sat down across from him in the living room. The kids were in bed; the house rested under a blanket of silence. Ismail stared down at the Qur’an on his lap, took a deep breath, and began to recite. Bismillah ar rahman ir rahim—“in the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful.” His was the voice of a stranger, high and pleading. I closed my eyes and listened to the strange sound—not exactly singing or chanting but something else altogether.

  Over the years I had heard the Qur’an recited only a few times before, and each time it had gotten under my skin: the sound of a human voice saturated with longing, calling out to the unseen. The first time I heard it, I recoiled like I had accidentally stumbled upon someone naked; the sound was so vulnerable it made me want to turn and flee. But when I bore witness to that expression, it broke my calcified heart wide open, releasing the floodwater of compassion usually contained by the high dam of my ego.

  One night, at a Muslim banquet, I was seated in a hotel’s cavernous banquet room, at a table covered with platters of hummous and pita, halal chicken and tall glasses of iced tea. When I entered the banquet hall I had scanned that crowded room in search of a single person I might relate to, instantly discounting all those brightly covered feminine heads, women who looked to me like they belonged not just in a faraway country but in a distant century. I dismissed, too, all those dark-skinned Muslim men in their pressed slacks and buttoned-up shirts, their dark hair combed or concealed beneath skull caps, grown men who looked so neat and earnest it was as if their mothers had dressed them. I sighed. I had reluctantly agreed to come to this gathering with Ismail, expecting it would be exactly like this: no one for me to talk to, no one to giggle with me or pass the time. I smiled politely at the strangers seated around me at the banquet table, then stared down at the blank canvas of the tablecloth, rolling the ice from my water glass across my tongue and wishing it was wine. I looked surreptitiously at my watch, mentally calculating what time we’d be home and whether I would make it in time for my favorite television show.

  A man from the local mosque began the program by standing at the podium to welcome everyone. His short speech was peppered with references to God as if he were the honored guest this evening. Praise be to God for the crowd gathered here tonight, and God willing we would enjoy this fine program, and in the name of God let’s listen to a recitation from the Qur’an. He stepped aside and a skinny young man strode across the stage, nearly disappearing behind the podium. Silence fell as his lips moved in silent prayer, to the hum of air-conditioning and the clink of silverware against porcelain. Then he took a deep breath and began to recite, and it was as if an invisible hand turned down the volume of my internal chatter while turning up the volume on his plaintive, androgynous voice. Sharp as a surgeon’s knife, this sound pierced me to the quick before I realized what was happening. Tears streamed down my cheeks; the rhythm and rhyme of his words were a turning of the knife. I felt as if I had been wandering in a desert, and his voice was water. I was parched for this sound. I gulped it in—but drinking was not enough. I wanted to pour it over
my head, dive deep beneath its surface, try to touch the very bottom of this melody.

  As he held the last note of his recitation, his Adam’s apple bobbed on his skinny neck like it was trying to break free—and then it was over. The sound stopped abruptly, and I came up sputtering for air. The lanky, acne-faced man at the podium bore no resemblance to the vibration that had filled the room. Looking around me, I saw a few other shining faces that told me they, too, had been drinking in this music, that we had been swimming together in the same ocean. The moment passed. A silver-haired academic took his place behind the podium and began to speak about the immigrant Muslim experience, his catalog of facts and ironclad logic like so many links in a chain locking me back into my intellectual mind after my brief foray into my boundless heart. By the time his speech was over, the recitation was a half-remembered dream. I didn’t even speak to Ismail about it on the way home.

  I did not hear the Qur’an recited again until a couple of years later. One night Ismail told me about a famous reciter whose plaintive voice had been the background sound track of his youth. He found a video online and invited me to sit with him and listen. On the tiny screen, a bald old man with shining obsidian eyes began to make this noise from deep in his being—somewhere between a wail and a song, somewhere between a harmony and a howl. Tears streamed down his face as he sang, as if God were wringing him out like a washcloth. He wiped his wrinkled face in a steady motion as he continued to recite, his graceful fingers caressing his cheeks the entire time he was making this otherworldly sound, as if his hands were no longer his own, but the hands of Allah, laid upon him to grant the gift of this haunting music.

  Yet in all our years together, I had never heard Ismail recite. How strange it is, the way two people who have shared a bed for over a decade can stumble into awkward new intimacy, can discover secrets between them after so many years. He closed his eyes. The voice that filled the room came from a stranger. Not the man who grumbled about the headlines each morning. Not the man who ran for an hour, then sat on our back porch peeling off his sweat-soaked socks. Not the man whose iPhone buzzed at his hip like a living thing. Not the man who turned up the music and danced with his children on weekend nights. This pure, plaintive voice was the sound of a child in a Libyan madrassah: a lanky, earnest boy who stayed up late practicing his Qur’anic recitation by the dim light of a kerosene lamp, refusing to blow it out and rest until the words were perfect. The boy who shot out of the madrassah at the end of his school day and ran to the souk, where he knew his illiterate and volatile father waited impatiently for him to record the day’s transactions in the heavy, ink-smeared ledger. But in that moment in the madrassah, when he recited the Qur’an, he was able to briefly forget everything else but this. His eyelids fell like velvet curtains, and the words spilled from his lips as naturally as if they were his own—they became his own—filled with the longing of his own heart. My focus had been shattered into a million pieces, but like mercury to a magnet, his voice drew me in, gathered up my splintered spirit and made me whole again.

  OMAR STOOD ON my doorstep, smiling and peering at me through square, outdated glasses. He placed his hand over his heart in a traditional Muslim greeting and stepped inside. His disabled son shuffled in, too, with a mischievous smile, as if the joke were on us, dragging half his body behind him like heavy luggage. A friend of Ismail’s, Omar had lived all over the world but moved to our hometown to care for his elderly father, whom he visited each evening in a nursing home. That afternoon he sat cross-legged on our living room floor in pressed pants and a collared shirt, drinking tea and having a passionate conversation with my husband about politics, social justice, and Islam.

  The news headlines often link Islam and violence, but Omar was one of the most peaceful people I had ever met. I wanted to know what made him so humble and patient, what inspired him to care so deeply for the oppressed and take such good care of his family and, when I asked him how he was doing, to respond with a smiling “Alhamdu lillah”—as if every bit of it were a blessing.

  So when he sent me a one-line email—“For anyone on a spiritual path, this is a must-see”—I clicked the link. A grainy video transported me to a windowless room where dark-skinned men were crowded shoulder to shoulder in cheap plastic chairs. A bearded man stood before them: intense, near-black eyes, his head swaddled in a white turban. This was no prestigious university or Western conference center; this was the stuff of American nightmares: a poor, dark, faraway place where violent, irrational men plot our downfall. Why was Omar sending me this?

  If the major world religions were schoolchildren, Islam would be the outcast. Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity would roam the playground together, swinging from the monkey bars and making up games and resolving their own disputes. Hinduism would be more solitary—flamboyant and misunderstood. Islam would be the troubled one, mired in conflict, battling a reputation that preceded it.

  It’s surprising, since Islam is really so much like the other Abrahamic faiths: touched by sexism from the get-go, adapted to various cultures along the way, open to a range of interpretations, marred by violence and eternally in dispute. But the living heart of Islam is beautiful and pure.

  The Shaykh on the video began to speak. Was that a California accent? It was! I leaned in to listen and he reminded me that I would not find happiness in status or possessions, that I must take my fleeting life seriously. “Every breath takes you one breath closer to your final destination.” Like a splash of cold water to my face, his words startled me awake from vivid dreams of vanity and immortality. He taught that this body I cherished and adorned was a just a temporary home for my spirit, which would one day fly away like a bird released from its cage. Stripped to its essentials, his message sounded like the dharma teachings at the Buddhist temple where I sometimes went to meditate.

  I’D BEEN MARRIED to a Muslim for twelve years, but I’d never explored the faith—nor did Ismail pressure me to. According to Islam, he explained, every people have their own prophet; many paths lead to God. So he kept to his prayers, and I kept to my morning meditation. Each day during the month of Ramadan I prepared a plate of dates for him at dusk so he could break his fast, and each December he sorted through our photos to help me select one for the family Christmas card. But mostly we steered clear of one another’s baffling rituals.

  Buddhism had been part of my life since college, when I’d stumbled across Charlotte Joko Beck’s illuminating text Everyday Zen. But there were two words I tripped over, syllables like boulders blocking my path forward: nothingness and emptiness. No matter how many years I spent counting my breath or naming my thoughts, I could not bring myself closer to that abyss Buddhism said was the center of my life.

  Maybe that’s partly why I was drawn to this American Muslim teacher who taught that at the heart of our existence was infinite mercy and divine unity. “Meaning is everywhere,” he preached. “May God open our hearts to the meaning of our existence.” I was struck by the love I heard in his voice and by the way he wove God into every other sentence. In the nominally Christian household of my childhood, I’d been taught never to take God’s name in vain; Jesus Christ was an epithet reserved for moments of great exasperation. In Islam no circumstance was too trivial, intimate, or explosive to warrant invoking God’s name.

  Fervent spiritual seekers once made long, treacherous journeys to study with the great masters. Today even halfhearted seekers with ADD can find them: the best teachers of every tradition are just a mouse click away. I downloaded the Shaykh’s teachings, originally delivered to audiences in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. At dawn, as I jogged along a dirt trail beside the creek, he spoke of a merciful God. He explained that the Arabic word for mercy—rahma—came from the Arabic word for womb, and that women had a spiritual advantage over men. “Humanity’s best qualities are found naturally in women, but must be acquired by men,” he taught. He went on to say that, like Christians, Muslims honored Mary as the mother of Jesus but that
in Islam, Jesus was also honored because he was her son. Muslims revered her; many scholars believed she had the stature of a prophet, and she was referenced more often in the Qur’an than in the Bible. I did not expect a Muslim teacher to speak so reverently about women—or to refer so eloquently to great Western literature. He cited Shakespeare and Yeats alongside ancient Muslim teachers, and he spoke with insight about the human condition. “To validate our own pain, we deny the pain of others,” he said. “But only in acknowledging others’ pain can we achieve our full humanity.”

  He was an American convert, and his idealism and intensity reminded me of my college friend, a wild-eyed philosopher who burned with passion to know God, save the world, and do something extraordinary with his brief and precious life. But unlike my old friend, whose insights were dulled by alcohol or marijuana, the Shaykh’s intellect was razor sharp. His mind and heart were engaged at full throttle and in perfect balance, like the twin engines that lift a massive jet improbably toward the heavens.

  “What’s the name of that guy you’re into? Osama Sultana?” a friend asked, and the others giggled. We were seated around a fire pit in my backyard on a cool spring evening. I’d recently told her the name of the Muslim teacher whose lectures had moved me so deeply. The Arabic syllables had swirled in her imagination with billowing black smoke, Arabian Nights, tumbling towers, a fine-featured man with coffee-colored skin in a mountaintop cave. Osama Sultana.