Although it really wasn’t a big deal; after all, I always managed to make it in—it was a process that always drew an audience, increasing my frustration—and my accent. And because I was always shy about my grasp of formal Arabic (the language of the Quran and somewhat akin to Shakespearean English), these quizzes were so embarrassing that I resolved to learn to fit in at the site enough to be ignored, a valuable skill I hoped to pass on to my kids.
It wasn’t only the Arabic performances that made me want to blend in at the Mount, though. That award had to go to a little run-in I’d had with an angry mob over my use of Chapstick, about five years earlier when I went along on an outing with my mother and sister-in-laws to the old city for Friday prayers and a little shopping. It was also the day I had my first fight with Asya.
At the time, I thought that I was doing pretty well as I sat on the cool stones in the shade of the “Dome of the Chain,” the mini open-air copy of the Dome of the Rock, where legend said King Solomon hung a chain that connected heaven and earth, and had the miraculous ability to “judge” between disagreeing parties. Although there is no evidence of the chain in modern times, I definitely could have used a little divine intervention that day.
It was the middle of Friday Prayers, the single most crowded, and possibly volatile, day of the week in the Old City—not the best time to call attention to yourself as an “American with attitude.”
I wasn’t praying that week (Muslim women are not expected to pray during that time of the month), so instead of going inside the hot, crowded Dome of the Rock, I decided to sit in the shade on the edge of the overflow crowd praying outside. My youngest sister-in-law, Sa’eda, had her three-month-old baby with her, and I volunteered to hold the baby while she prayed inside with the others.
Although I had found a spot in the shade, I realized I still had to hunch my back over the baby in order to shield him further from the intense midday sun. Unfortunately, in the act of doing so, the tip of my ponytail apparently peeked out from the back of my “hijab,” because an older woman rushed over to tell me. Properly chastised, I quickly tucked in the offending strands.
It was hot, and as the prayer began I started to worry about the intensifying glare bouncing off the white paving stones that lined the surface of the Mount. Although I was mostly shaded, the sun was shifting and I needed to move. However, by then the crowd had grown large enough to make changing my location impossible, particularly because moving would have meant walking in front of the worshippers—an action that is absolutely forbidden. Thankfully, I could still shade the baby reasonably well with the edge of my scarf as I cradled him cross-legged on the ground. Unfortunately, I had another problem: the month before I’d begun treatment with the powerful (now, banned) drug, Accutane in order to get a stubborn case of acne under control.
As anyone who has tried it knows, Accutane is an amazingly effective but potentially deadly drug that, among other side effects, can make one extremely prone to sunburn and dry skin, to the tune of molting snake. As such, Accutane patients must wear protective clothing, sunscreen, and Chapstick anytime they are out in the sun or wind. I was wearing sunscreen, but as we had eaten lunch en route to the Mount, my lips were Chapstick free.
I had a trusty SPF 25 Chapstick in my purse—it’s not as if I wasn’t prepared for summer in the Middle East. The only problem was, in most Islamic societies it is considered extremely bad form to apply makeup of any kind in public. This is particularly true in conservative Palestine, and even more so during Friday prayers. Magnify that by sitting in the middle of the third holiest site in Islam, and you get the picture.
However, my horrific canker-sore episode was still fresh in my mind, my face was already peeling and I could literally feel the sun burning my lips. So I decided to take action, assuming that surely nobody would notice. Everyone was praying, for goodness sake! That meant they weren’t looking at me, so I figured I’d stealthily pull out my Chapstick, hunch over, give my lips a quick swipe behind my hand, and nobody would be the wiser.
And that’s where it all went wrong.
After a few minutes, the prayer ended and the crowd began to move off in several directions while I carried my nephew to one of the mosque entrances to await the others. As I walked toward the entrance of the building, an older woman touched my shoulder and quietly said, “Daughter, you know it is haraam (forbidden) to put on makeup.”
Amazed that she had caught my stealthy lip-balming (wasn’t she praying?), I smiled and nodded. I even thanked her. After all, I was still feeling pretty good about the day, and the woman was at that threshold age where she could pretty much tell me anything and I would treat her with respect. However, once I made it under the vaulted entrance to the Dome I joined a crowd of about fifty women sitting in the shade, obviously waiting to meet up with their groups, too. I stood there, shifting impatiently. The (breastfed) baby had started fussing, and the heat was getting to me. Where were my relatives?
As I stood there waiting, a woman in her early forties perched at the base of a stone pillar looked up at me and said, “I saw you putting on lipstick. You know, there are men that walk right though here, and it isn’t good for you to do that.”
Here we go, I thought wearily. Looking around, I noticed that most of the women milling around in the entrance had heard what she said and were looking right at me.
I smiled. After all, it was a silly misunderstanding, and responded, “Yes, I know…but it wasn’t makeup…it’s not lipstick…it’s (Lord, how do you say “Chapstick” in Arabic?) medicine for lips. I even showed them the Chapstick (which was unfortunately the tinted kind). Yes, that’s it, special medicine because…”
“No!” the first woman answered angrily (probably buoyed by my obvious foreignness once I opened my big, Arabic-challenged mouth). “I saw you! You put on lipstick right there in front of everyone!”
I sighed, my smile growing forced, and started to explain again. “No, I…”
“Yes, yes!” About five others also joined in, interrupting me and adding, “We saw you!”
Oh, my God! These crazy, sanctimonious, holier-than-thou…
It was then that Asya finally emerged from the mosque and into the excited crowd around me. As she made her way closer, I hurried to tell her what was going on. But the first woman, too impatient for me to finish my story, interrupted with her version of the scandal. When she finished, I repeated my story, stood back and relaxed, waiting for Asya to explain the situation to the women and get them off my back.
Instead, my loyal sister-in-law looked at them, smiled and announced, “But she is an American!”
Not good.
Open-mouthed, I turned to Asya, just in time to catch the hint of a smile on her treacherous face as the crowd erupted in exclamations of, “Tell her this isn’t America!” and “You can’t act like that here!”
Anger welled up in me, dissolving what logic and common sense I still possessed. There was something I sensed behind their words—a hate-tinged arrogance and willingness to attack me en masse, that ticked me off—that and the fact that there were plenty of other Arab women around us wearing heavy makeup, jeans, and other quasi-religious no-noes. Yet, they’d seized on me like a whore on the prowl in Vatican City.
But the final straw was when one young woman, twentyish and wearing the type of plain, chest-covering hijabs that identified her as an uber-religious local, joined the fray, piping up to add the final, shiny nugget, “We’re just trying to teach her how to behave!”
As furious as I was with Asya for the way she let me twist in the wind, and devastated by what I felt was an attack on my “otherness,” I shouted at them, “Why were you looking at me anyway, when you were supposed to be praying?”
Now I was drawing even more attention because of my accent. “It’s because I’m an American, that’s why—but you Arab women…all you do is yap yap yap…” I sniped, stabbing my hand out at them like a quacking duck for emphasis. “And you…” I continued, pointing at M
iss Teach-Her-How-to-Behave, “You just shut your mouth and mind your own business!”
Suddenly, I realized that I could be teetering on the precipice of a serious beating—at the very least, with the “You Arab women” comment.
But it was just then, thankfully, that my mother-in-law emerged from the mosque and like a little, old, glorious deux ex machina, she took one look at the crowd, assessed the situation, and immediately went into righteous “Shame on you!” mode, chastising the crowd into silence and dragging me (by then wild-eyed and crying) and my sisters-in-law away, shouting behind her in awesome Arabic, “She’s better than a hundred of you! May God curse your forefathers! Look at her, she wears the veil and she is Muslim, even though she is from America! Have you no shame?”
Yes! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!
Finally, we shuffled off toward one of the Mount’s exits—me, a mess of blubbering, tear-wiping, self-pitying, Arab-hating “I wanna go home” thoughts, and my mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law in wide-eyed shock. Asya, too, was blubbering after I tongue-lashed her for her “She’s an American!” comment and her snide smile.
If my “Mount Chapstick” experience taught me the importance of blending in, I also learned that there was a whole other set of criteria that applied to me because I was an outsider. (And yes, I also realized it is better to control one’s temper when surrounded by a crowd). It was important to fit in if only to avoid problems and misunderstandings—plus, it just plain hurt to be singled out. I swore that next time, I’d blend.
I consciously changed my personal style in the years following the incident, slowly morphing from typical American-Muslim look (long skirts, long sleeve shirts, and a long, oblong wrapped scarf), to West Bank style, mimicking the Islamic clothing trends that came hot off the Muslim catwalks (yes, they existed) and though I certainly knew that clothing alone didn’t “make the woman,” I wasn’t above using it as a cloak of armor.
My new modus operandi was to dress the part. Now, I wore traditional or contemporary Arabic styles of Islamic dress, specifically, the long trench-coat like garments known as jilbabs, or the much more comfy black, voluminous abaya—all the rage that season in shiny satin, with oversized Moroccan hoods, trimmed with tassels. I even used them as a kind of camouflage that I wore into the mosques back in America, once I realized it could shield me from the “let’s humiliate the convert” game—a popular sport at the Northwest mosques I attended.
Indeed, it seemed that many of the expatriate Muslims in our area had skills of Olympic quality, for they could make the occasional new, hopeful interloper run from the congregation faster than a hare from a pack of hyenas. After all, how would you feel if someone went out of her way to point out that your prayers wouldn’t be accepted by the Almighty because you had fingernail polish on, or watched you while you prayed just in case you needed some direction on the proper way to do it. Apparently, converts like me could only be counted on to find the faith, stand up to their non-Muslim families (who are usually unhappy with the transformation, sincere or no), and learn a totally new way of worship.
But getting respect was a whole other matter, and it was even harder in Palestine. Palestinian society was still relatively homogenous, especially in the smaller West Bank villages. People like me, Muslim or no, were still ajaneb (foreigners) perched on a branch of the family tree so weak it threatened to snap with the slightest move. If I always felt my position in the community and the family was precarious, that was one thing. I chose this life. But I desperately wanted to save Ibrahim, Amani, and Karim from a similar fate. I wanted my kids to belong to their community, and their family.
One of the first things that surprises visitors to the Temple Mount is the way it opens from the narrow, crowded, and dark alleyways and passages crisscrossing the Old City into a bright, wide vista of green pine, cedar, olive trees and flowering rhododendron, crowned at its center by the bright gold Dome of the Rock.
It’s a sight meant to impress, and one so beautiful it rivals the Western Wall as the image most associated with the Jewish state. It is either protected until Judgment Day (as many Muslims believed) or will someday be destroyed, to be replaced by a new temple (as some Christians and most religious Jews hoped), but for now locals and tourists admire the view, history, and sanctity of the place, regardless of religious affiliation. After all, according to Jewish tradition, it was here that the divine presence of God rested, an idea that the beauty of the place made it all the easier to believe.
If dressing the part was vital to being able to experience the Temple Mount as I wanted, acting the part had its place as well (and you sure as hell wouldn’t catch me whipping out anything resembling makeup there again). Now, on this visit to the Holy Land, I finally felt I was catching on enough to be as invisible as the locals. This was no small accomplishment for an Oregon mom with three high-spirited kids in tow.
Ninety percent of the difficulty of getting into the Mount with the kids hinged on avoiding the Israeli police outside the gates, the odds of which improved significantly once I lectured the kids against speaking at all within earshot of the officers. If we could avoid that hurdle, I found we were usually able to circumvent the interrogation reserved for foreigners completely, leaving us free to roam the site uninterrupted.
It might have seemed strange that the kids would have loved the Mount. After all, the place is so touchy that the only behavior I’d seen from the non-Muslim visitors from the four corners of the world was hushed, fearful reserve. It was the nature of the place because of the so-called “status quo” agreement made after the Israeli conquest of the city in 1967. Afterwards, then Prime Minister Levi Eshkol vowed that “no harm whatsoever shall come to the places sacred to all religions.”
Therefore, the inside of the Mount generally remained under the control of the Islamic authorities, while access to the Mount itself was up to the Israeli police outside. And that meant no young Palestinian men were allowed (unless they were locals with Jerusalem IDs), foreigners were restricted to one designated entrance and subject to limited visiting hours, and religious Jews or Christians were prohibited from praying, bringing in religious texts (including Bibles), or even singing. All of the complexity and gravity of the place meant that most visitors walked in somber, tight little groups, speaking in hushed tones to avoid any rebuke. The one exception to this general rule of decorum, however, was generally granted to children—and for my kids, that was a powerful draw.
Although I had a limited church background growing up, I didn’t recall being allowed to make a ruckus. Yet the Temple Mount—the most jealously guarded religious site in the world—was one place where at least the kids could cut loose. They were allowed the run of the entire compound, from the site of Fort Antonia on the northern end, to the far walls abutting the black-domed Al Aqsa mosque. In particular, they loved the “cool places,” their favorite spots that they demanded we visit every time. This began in the cave under the Dome of the Rock, where they pressed their ears to the floor above the “Well of Souls” and tried to hear the spooky whispers rumored to waft up from the covered opening. It is a place Mark Twain (in his day, lucky enough to get in) described in his work, Innocents Abroad, a characteristically humorous account of his 1867 pilgrimage to the Holy Land:
The great feature of the Mosque of Omar is the prodigious rock in the center of its rotunda. It was upon this rock that Abraham came so near offering up his son Isaac—this, at least, is authentic—it is very much more to be relied on than most of the traditions, at any rate. On this rock, also, the angel stood and threatened Jerusalem, and David persuaded him to spare the city. Mahomet was well acquainted with this stone. From it he ascended to heaven. The stone tried to follow him, and if the angel Gabriel had not happened by the merest good luck to be there to seize it, it would have done it. Very few people have a grip like Gabriel—the prints of his monstrous fingers, two inches deep, are to be seen in that rock to-day.
This rock, large as it is, is suspende
d in the air. It does not touch anything at all. The guide said so. This is very wonderful. In the place on it where Mahomet stood, he left his foot-prints in the solid stone. I should judge that he wore about eighteens. But what I was going to say, when I spoke of the rock being suspended, was, that in the floor of the cavern under it they showed us a slab which they said covered a hole which was a thing of extraordinary interest to all Mohammedans, because that hole leads down to perdition, and every soul that is transferred from thence to Heaven must pass up through this orifice…
Next, the kids and I would almost always walk down the wide stairs from the upper platform down to the black-domed Al Aqsa building, open, bright, and somehow friendlier than the gloomy Dome of the Rock, where Karim loved to chase the fat doves waddling along the carpets up to the rafters. Amani and Ibrahim, too, particularly loved this place because of its perfectly kid-sized cubbyhole windows, where they would cozy up to watch groups of Christian and Jewish faithful singing far below the ancient grilles.
But hands down, the kids loved their usual last stop best - a cavernous, second century Roman water reservoir-turned-mosque then Crusader stable, and then mosque again - mostly because there they could join the local, Old City kids in what seemed to be a perpetual game of tag. It was called Solomon’s Stables, or the Marwani Mosque.
The kids loved the place for all the light-hearted fun they had there, but the fact still remained that it was one of the most jealously contested places in the world. The center of Jewish faith and history, the third holiest site in Islam, and perhaps most important, the site where Jews, Christians and Muslims believe the Messiah will one day appear, it was thirty-five acres of “it’s mine,” from before Roman times. And although it was beautiful, peaceful, and welcoming, you were always aware of the gravity of the place. The Mount demanded respect.
All Roads Lead to Jerusalem Page 12
