My Accidental Jihad

by Krista Bremer

  One girlfriend had just completed a triathlon, another was starting her own company, and a third had just returned from a business trip to Europe. They were smart, funny, and adventurous, willing to explore any subject in conversation—except for God. Even my friend who took her twins to Sunday school studiously avoided the subject—as if she visited him only once a week in the sprawling church off the freeway where he lived, that impressive estate that floated in a sea of SUVs and minivans on Sunday mornings.

  When I told my girlfriends the Shaykh reminded me of a prophet, they flashed one another warning looks. They’d much rather talk about controversial subjects like polyamory or pot legalization than prophets.

  “Like Martin Luther King reminds me of a prophet,” I hastened to add, to show I was no zealot. Devout Muslims emulated their prophet in every respect, from his manners to dress to diet, so it was no accident that great teachers became more prophetic as they manifested more courage, compassion, and humility for the sake of civilization. I once saw a photo in the Guinness Book of World Records of a man hauling a steam engine with his teeth. Men like Martin Luther King and the Shaykh reminded me of that guy: they bore down on truth and refused to let go, leaned into it and gave everything they had to move this great sluggish engine of humanity forward just a few inches before they gave out.

  The first time I saw my husband put his forehead to the ground in prayer, through a crack in his bedroom door when he thought he was alone, I was as disturbed as if I’d caught him piercing a voodoo doll with a needle. What kind of God, I wondered, would want us in such a compromised position? But worship is Islam’s fundamental practice; Muslims cultivate a direct relationship with God through their five daily prayers. The more I listened to the Shaykh, the more I wondered about those prayers. Five times a day seemed excessive—unless I counted the number of times each day I lost focus, compulsively checked messages, got too distracted by busyness and daydreams to remember the single most important thing. Then it seemed infinitely small.

  I knew from my writing and running routines what rewards came over time from disciplined practice, so I decided to perform the Salat, or Muslim prayer, for one month—just to see what happened. I did not discuss my prayer experiment. Meditation was hip, but prayer put me in league with strutting televangelists, histrionic abortion-clinic protesters, homophobic politicians with lurid sexual secrets. And Muslim prayer was even worse.

  I HAD ALWAYS had a hard time taking instruction from my husband, but thanks to Google, I didn’t have to in this case. I found a website to guide me through the motions, with an audio file to teach me Arabic pronunciation. In my bedroom I moved awkwardly through the positions. With the help of a free download, I turned toward the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site, which Muslims everywhere face in prayer. I stood noble and tall, as God’s representative on earth, then bowed at the waist, then folded all the way down to the ground like the lowliest of servants. My body strained to embody nobility and servitude, strength and powerlessness. That repeated up-and-down movement dislodged something deep inside. The weight of my forehead against the ground broke apart what I’d spent a lifetime trying to protect: my fragile individualism and brittle self-determination. With my face to the ground, an oppressive weight rolled off my shoulders: the burdensome arrogance and guilt that came from believing I was master of my life, the sole source of its brokenness and beauty. I began to weep for all I did not understand and could not control.

  It was not easy to pray first thing in the morning, just before bed, and in stolen moments of privacy throughout the day. I only discussed my experience with one wise and luminous friend. Her serenity and strength did not come from taking yoga classes, listening to Eckhart Tolle CDs in her car, or attending Buddhist retreats in Big Sur. She paid dearly for her maturity a few years ago, when her husband was struck with leukemia and died a few months later, leaving her with a five-year-old son to raise.

  The morning after her husband died, we sat together at her kitchen table drafting his obituary. Not long after the funeral she attacked her front yard, hacking away at crab grass and slamming the shovel’s metal blade into hard North Carolina clay the color of rust. She built a garden, enclosed it in a high deer fence, planted vegetables and marigolds. When I visited her in summertime, she filled my cupped hands with brilliant yellow flowers whose petals appeared to have been dipped in blood.

  “A strange thing has happened,” I told her. “I’ve begun to pray—and it actually helps me.” After two weeks, the change was subtle but undeniable. I was more patient and grateful. Anxiety was loosening its grip. Meditation emptied my mind, but prayer filled my heart.

  My friend hugged me. “I’m so glad for you,” she said, and her happiness lit up the room like sunlight.

  “I just can’t understand why it works,” I went on. “Do I sound crazy? Is it a placebo effect? Am I deluding myself?”

  She put her hands over her ears, groaned, and rolled her eyes.

  “Please, stop! For God’s sake, if it’s working, don’t overanalyze it!”

  After I’d been listening to the Shaykh for over a year, I had the opportunity to attend one of his khutbas, or public sermons, while I was on a cross-country trip. A low-budget Internet video denigrating the prophet Muhammad had recently led to explosive protests in Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, four Americans, including the American ambassador to Libya, had been murdered during an attack on the American embassy in Benghazi. The Shaykh had been giving impassioned speeches against violence and fundamentalism. “I adopted this faith,” he said at a Friday sermon in Northern California, “and I am sick of defending ignorant, backward, reactionary fools.” At the same time, he challenged non-Muslim Americans to consider why this country refuses to tolerate the vilification of an ethnicity but allows the vilification of a faith. Did Americans realize that Jesus and the other prophets were as beloved to Muslims as was their prophet Muhammad? He had thrust himself into the middle of a volatile confrontation and was taking on both sides. He looked exhausted: smaller, more fragile in person.

  After his sermon was over, I approached him to ask if I could take a photo. He smiled a tired smile, put his palm out like a gussied-up Indian at a roadside tourist attraction, and made a cynical joke: Five dollars, he said. I wanted to tell him I was no tourist and he was no prop; I was looking for far more than a souvenir. But in a sense he was right: I wanted to capture his soul in a photo, to steal some of his spirit to take home with me.

  Beside my bed is a bookshelf that holds all the spiritual texts I’ve acquired over the years. Some nights, unable to sleep, I lie on my side and study the spines of those books: so many years of searching, so many different ways to describe the mystery at the heart of our lives. I propped the Shaykh’s photo on the bookshelf. Later, as I thumbed through my closet looking for the right outfit, I glanced up and saw his face, and was reminded that not just the dress but the body is a costume, that it will grow wrinkled and worn and finally be gone. I began to think about beautiful actions instead.

  21 Celebration

  I once had a boyfriend in California who inherited sky blue eyes from his father, along with a taste for pricey liquor and a penchant for designer brands. He picked me up for dates in a convertible that had been a graduation present: a car like a toy, candy-apple red with gleaming chrome. He taught me how to order sushi, mix a strong martini, throw a party that lasted until the early hours of the morning. The year I moved in with him, small square envelopes began to appear in the mailbox of the studio that we shared: invitations with our names written in flowery script and that, when opened, scattered matching sheets of paper across the floor. All at once and without warning, our friends were starting to get married. Like the first summer heat that makes sweat pearl on skin, these wedding invitations were a sign that a new season was upon us—but we didn’t realize that at the time. We saw these weddings as a chance to get dressed up, dance through the night, and enjoy free food and booze.

  To each wed
ding we attended that summer, I wore a velvet floor-length dress with a plunging neckline that hugged my body like a second skin. My boyfriend had selected it for me at a store where carpet muffled our feet and a saleswoman hovered around us in a cloud of flowery perfume. He wore a black suit whose jacket draped across his broad back and pants that brushed his polished shoes as if they were made for him. On summer afternoons, we drove to beachside wedding ceremonies with the top down on his car. The air was soft as melting butter; a warm wind whipped at our faces. We arrived late and found ourselves a seat in the back row, where his hand crept up my velvety thigh while the minister’s grave tones echoed off cavernous walls. The vows our friends repeated to one another sounded stiff and archaic. When I heard the words “For better or for worse,” I leaned in close to my boyfriend, rolled my eyes, and whispered “That’s the kicker,” and we snickered. We agreed that weddings were fantastic fun and thought maybe we’d even get married one day if only we could eliminate those last three words—or for worse—which seemed tagged on to the ceremony like the warnings on medication commercials: potential side effects rattled off as quickly as possible, right after a warm voice has lulled you into believing that a particular pill is the solution to your hair loss or weight gain, your dull sex life or creeping despair.

  AT ONE RECEPTION, the band played the first chords of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” just as the fiery sun melted into a sea of glass, bathing the parquet dance floor in a warm glow. My boyfriend grabbed my hand and pulled me from my seat. He could not resist an empty dance floor: all that room to perform, all those flushed and hungry faces watching. His hand warmed the naked skin of my lower back as he pressed my body hard against him, and we began to twirl. The floor spun beneath us.

  As we turned, I caught the eye of a white-haired man in polyester slacks, utterly still except for a thick, knobby finger circling the rim of his cocktail glass. He stared at us, transfixed, like we were an apparition: a ghost from his past or a storybook prince and princess come to life. The woman beside him watched us the same way, slack-jawed, her wrinkled face softening beneath thick layers of makeup. For the three minutes it took the band to play that song as the sun melted into the ocean, we were the focus of their naked longing and nostalgia; their admiring faces lit up the stage for our performance of love.

  We made a spectacle of ourselves on that dance floor: our supple, hungry bodies, our shimmering ignorance, our cliche theatrics of romance. It was a moment of pure illusion. That young man who guided me so expertly across the dance floor did not know how to listen to me, challenge me, or comfort me when I cried. And despite the fact that I yielded so gracefully on the dance floor, I did not know how to apologize, to show gratitude, to accept him for who he was. Later that same night, he stumbled drunk from my bed and peed in my closet, all over the polyester work clothes I had just purchased for my new job. Years later, through a common friend, I would discover that while I was in the restroom that evening he had slipped into his pocket the phone number of the voluptuous hairdresser at our table. Our short-lived affair was like a binge, an ill-fated night on the town: we spent ourselves extravagantly, hopping from pleasure to pleasure, chasing a fading high even as a creeping void nipped at our heels. Right from the beginning we hurtled toward the end of us, our downfall accelerated by bad choices and deferred responsibilities. Our breakup was a blur of mounting exhaustion, sloppy rage, and a disturbing sense of disorientation: how had I gotten here and how would I ever find my way back home?

  I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about real love back then—but after being with Ismail for eight years, after creating a home and delivering two children, and trying and failing over and over again to juggle parenting and work and partnership, I did now. Real love was sitting outside on the front porch in the dark with him on a weeknight, after dinner had been eaten, dishes cleaned, books read, children showered and put to bed—and then chased down and tucked in again after they had stealthily crept from their rooms. We were too tired to talk, too tired to touch, too tired to do anything but sit side by side staring into the darkened street, taking long swigs of silence as if it were a stiff drink.

  And then I tried to put into words what I couldn’t say to anyone else. I described the sadness that sometimes settled over me like a dense fog, obscuring the shape of my life. I told him there were days when I became utterly lost in our small house—when I wandered aimlessly from room to room, unable to find a path forward. For me, the most difficult part of parenting was not the sleepless nights, the financial responsibility, or even time’s relentless forward momentum, like a moving sidewalk always carrying my children farther away from me. The hardest part was to remember why we did all this work to preserve our home and family. I wanted to show my children what a meaningful life looked like, to teach them that existence was about more than standing in straight lines at school and raising their hands before they spoke, keeping a home tidy and stocked with groceries, saving for college or retirement. But I was so exhausted and overwhelmed that I had forgotten the answer to the most important question.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy,” I mumbled, staring straight ahead, not looking at Ismail, my eyes filling with tears.

  He did not respond. After a moment, I felt his hand settle over mine, the calloused pad of his thumb stroking my skin.

  “Then I will go crazy with you.”

  I glanced over at him, and when his eyes met mine, he shrugged. “Wherever you are, I want to be with you.”

  I sat there speechless, in my sweatpants and old tank top that sagged in the chest, looking out at the empty street. I did not lean in for a long kiss, or take him by the hand to lead him upstairs to our bedroom, or even tell him I loved him. He was wearing his flannel pajama pants with the red and pink polka dots—a gift from a previous Valentine’s Day that had never suited him but he wore anyway. His face looked drawn. There was nothing else I wished for, nothing more precious or enduring than his words, which were swallowed up by the hungry darkness as soon as they were spoken.

  IN OUR EARLY years as parents, after we had gone to the justice of the peace and recited the Fatiha before our Muslim friends, I had dismissed the idea of a wedding. But as the years passed, I began to feel it was important for family and friends to witness our vows—and after everything we had been through, I could think of no better reason for a party than to celebrate the endurance of our love and commitment. Eight years after we met, we finally had a wedding celebration at a farm in the North Carolina countryside, on a late-spring day when the heat was beginning to press in. Our children were three and eight years old. We hand-lettered invitations for our friends: Aliya Rose and Khalil Zade invite you to celebrate the marriage of their parents. We’d lived together so many years in this small town; I imagined friends’ eyes widening in surprise when they opened the mail. “Honey, you won’t believe whose wedding we were invited to today!” they might say over dinner that night. Was it too late for this? Would our friends think a celebration indulgent? Would they assume we hadn’t been married before? It didn’t matter. Something in me had shifted, and now the public ritual seemed important. We needed to stand before our community and affirm our commitment to each other and to this family.

  The day of our wedding, Ismail and I went on an early-morning run down the same trails we had explored when we first met. The air was thick and fragrant with rain. We noticed a box turtle in our path—then another, then another, stopped smack in the middle of narrow trail. We knelt to admire the mottled yellow and brown shells slick with moisture. Later, I took a drive out into the country and down a gravel road to a flower farm, where a woman with long gray braids and a girlish smile packed dewy, tangled wildflowers into plastic buckets. I loaded them into my hatchback and even balanced some on my lap, so that I peered through flowers as I drove. Petals pressed against each window.

  One of Ismail’s oldest friends was a reclusive piano repairman who drove his battered red truck all over the countryside
, tuning and fixing pianos in church basements and well-appointed living rooms. Over six feet tall with thick glasses, bushy eyebrows, and a long gray ponytail, Carlos spoke rarely and only in staccato bursts. When something struck him as funny, he snorted and blushed like a gangly adolescent. Only when he was seated at a piano, with his back to the world, did he seem completely at ease.

  For our wedding he insisted on hauling a grand piano on a flatbed trailer to the pine tree in the middle of the meadow where we planned to exchange our vows. “Seems like a heck of a lot of work for so little return,” said my neighbor skeptically, as he stood in the shade the day of our wedding, watching the eight-hundred-pound piano being hauled slowly over potholes and through tall grass. But Carlos could not be dissuaded. He was not one to stand in front of our guests to deliver a toast; nor would he offer us a prettily wrapped present. His incomparable gift was to lean over his piano as we made our way arm in arm across the meadow that afternoon. As we approached, he cocked his head and seemed to listen for a message in the whispering breeze. Then he began to play. His fingers fluttered like butterflies over the notes; his music swooped and rose like a springtime cardinal.

  It was a wanton, glorious act: a herculean effort for a fleeting moment of perfection. In the glow of a late-afternoon sun, Ismail and I walked hand in hand across that green meadow and into a pool of friends gathered in the shade of the pine tree. Their love washed over us like a gentle wave. We stood before a tree trunk my friend had garlanded with wildflowers. Our curly-haired son slept in my mother’s lap in the front row; our dark-haired, long-limbed daughter walked a few feet ahead of us scattering petals along the path. A Muslim friend waited beneath the tree to lead the ceremony, the wings of his white robe whipping in the breeze. An elderly neighbor who sold flowers at the farmers’ market and led the choir at the Baptist church sang us a gospel song a cappella. Our friend Jamal stood beneath the tree and recited a Rumi poem like a royal bard, turning his face toward the sun and sweeping his arms toward the sky: