“How are you, Mohammed?”
“Thanks be to God, Stephanie,” he sighs. “Thanks be to God.”
He keeps staring up at his television showing thousands of Lebanese marching in the streets of downtown Beirut against Syria. The sight of Christians, Muslims, and Druze all marching together has been particularly surreal, and more than one person has mentioned to me sarcastically that after fifteen years of hating one another, the one thing that could finally unite the Lebanese is hating Syria.
“Mohammed?”
“Shoo?”
“Who do you think killed Rafik Hariri anyway?”
I prepare myself for the inevitable answer: the Americans, the Israelis, Al Qaeda, the Saudis, or even the rumor that Rafik Hariri staged his own death and is sunning on a beach in South America. Instead he examines the street beyond the window. I am not sure what he is looking for. Then, very slowly, it dawns on me that he is making sure that no street sweeper or window washer is casually walking by, listening.
Finally, he looks at me wearily. “I think that we did, Stephanie.”
“What?” I can’t believe what I am hearing.
He quietly nods his head. He looks heartbroken, like he has just caught his girl in bed with another man.
This is when I know the Syrians are waiting for the government to fall.
17.
I’VE PROMISED MYSELF that I won’t flee the country, in part because, if relations between America and Syria remain this icy, this might be my last chance ever to spend time here. So I escape into books, the world in which I have found solace throughout my entire life. I have a grant to study the Muslim Jesus, after all, and since my Arabic is improving it is high time that I get started on my research. Yes, books are the safest solution. They don’t listen to my phone calls or worry that I work for the CIA. If they become too scary, I can simply shut them and hide them under the bed.
Unfortunately, I have hit upon a bit of a snag in my plan, for the only book I truly want to read now requires a guide. After years of studying Islam in English, I feel ready to read the Quran in Arabic, but I know I can’t do it alone. The Quran in Arabic is an uncharted country and hardly a book one picks up and reads at random. It is a difficult journey, and you simply don’t start walking unless you have someone beside you to show you the way.
This is how I find myself halfway across the city this morning, sitting on a minibus crammed with very religious Muslims, the women covered except for their faces. A man rises and gives me the seat next to his wife, so that as a single woman I will run no risk of touching him. The Quran plays on a tape recorder. Outside the window, mosques seem to sprout out of almost every corner, along with bookstores selling prayer books and cookbooks based on the food of the prophet Mohammed, hair salons with black crepe covering the windows so that Muslim women can show their hair inside, Internet cafés with separate entrances for men and women. Damascus is really a series of very small cities folded together. I often forget that I live in only one of them—the Christian one, at that.
After a full half hour I arrive at the apartment of the female sheikh who has agreed to take me on as her student. The city descends beneath me from the window of the elevator as I rise to the fourth floor. Then I knock on a door until a shy young boy with his hair in a bowl cut opens it for me. He must be only five.
“I’m here to see your mom,” I tell him.
He nods and then turns and shouts at the top of his lungs, “Mom!” He giggles hysterically.
I slip off my shoes, as is the custom in an Islamic house, replacing them with the pink house shoes soled with loose wooden bottoms waiting at the door, so that now I clank gently against the ground when I walk. Then she is in front of me, kissing my cheeks.
“Ahlan wa sahlan,” she tells me, her voice light and warm.
“Thank you very much for having me,” I respond in very formal Arabic.
“Ma’shallah, you speak Arabic so well!” she responds, putting her hands to her cheeks.
And, instantly, I love her.
MY SHEIKHA DOESN’T LOOK anything like I imagined a female sheikh might look, not that I have much experience with sheikhs of any persuasion. I had secretly worried that she would be the image of the feared Catholic-school nun, wrinkled in her habit and brandishing a ruler in her hands. But this Sheikha’s loose brown curls drop to her shoulders, as she does not wear the headscarf in the privacy of her home and with another woman. Her big brown eyes light up each time she speaks. She is wearing a long, elegant gray robe with fur-lined sleeves and a collar (making her a rather chic Sheikha), and I can glimpse the edge of highlights in her hair, which for some reason I never even thought a Muslim leader could have. There is nothing severe about her. She rushes to the kitchen to prepare me tea, which she serves in thin, delicate teacups like those my grandmother used to serve me hot chocolate when I was a child.
“Can I help you?” I ask, feeling slightly ridiculous, sitting on her plush sofa like a queen while she is running back and forth to serve me.
“Shhh, you rest now,” she scolds. “Ahlan wa sahlan, How do you take your tea?”
It is all rather odd. I am drinking tea with a female sheikh, like Alice in Wonderland. Just when I think life can’t be more bizarre, God throws this in to surprise me.
I suppose that it might be unusual for a prominent Muslim leader to invite a young Christian woman into her home under any circumstances, but with the current political tensions it is particularly remarkable. I am, after all, tied to the enemy. In the last week, many of the Fulbright scholars have lost their local sponsors, as Syrians become increasingly afraid of being labeled as collaborators. Yet if the Sheikha has any reservations, she reveals nothing. She watches me finishing my tea, and then a few minutes later she leaves the room and returns, handing me a dark red leather-bound Quran, the chapters threaded with colored lettering through the Arabic words, written right to left. The pages resemble tiny tapestries.
“It’s yours,” she tells me. “It is my gift to you.” I have been a collector of books since childhood, and this is the most beautiful book I have ever owned in my life.
She opens her Quran to the first page, the Fatiha. “Let’s begin at the beginning.”
The opening of the Quran parts the air as one would hear the first, faint notes from a violin in a symphony. The lines she recites are breathy and effortless and altogether lovely. I have never heard words sound like that—the end of each line holding in space, filling the empty air around it, almost tangible. She memorized the verses so long ago that they escape from her mouth effortlessly. This is Arabic, I think to myself. This is the Arabic language as I dreamed it might sound, pushed to its limits, water filling a vase.
“Now you try,” she encourages me, and I nod. I struggle reading the Arabic, fumbling over the vowels, until we begin chanting, call-and-response, her voice calling and my voice reaching out after it, as my mother taught me to sing when I was a child:
Bismallah al-Rahman Al-Raheem…
In the name of God, the merciful and compassionate…
There are hundreds of female sheikhs in Syria, women who can teach other women in the mosque and who visit women in their homes to provide solace and advice in a society where a man, even a sheikh, should not be left alone with a woman. My Sheikha is somewhat famous, as far as female sheikhs are concerned. She descends from an extremely prominent family of religious scholars, so that she was raised learning the Quran and Islamic law from the time she was old enough to speak. She memorized the Quran in her teens, as well as thousands of sayings of the prophet Mohammed. She is an authority on Islamic law and founded one of the most prestigious women’s madrassas—religious schools—in Damascus more than twenty years ago. She is also the mother of three. Oh, and I forgot to mention: she believes that non-Muslims can achieve salvation. Which is also why I am sitting here without a headscarf, carrying all of my Catholic-school, rosary-reciting Christian past, and our two voices are calling out a common prayer, blen
ding together and floating through her living room.
In time, the reading becomes easier, and I find myself falling into a rhythm that feels like singing, though Muslims would be quick to call this tajwid—not song, but recitation. While it is my first time reciting the Quran, there is something familiar about this moment, this calling out in Arabic, this language rising in my chest, only I can’t pin down exactly what. Then, slowly, I understand. I understand when I keep saying his name, Allah, over and over, which in Arabic is simply the name of God, for both Muslims and Christians. Just as in the monastery I sang, Allahu nooree wu halasee. The Lord is my light and my salvation, so do not be afraid.
I am praying. It has been months now since I felt the simple rising in my heart, this direct communion with God, not since those winter days in the desert. But I am once again praying in Arabic, my monastic language, and even though I am struck by the oddity of being led in prayer by a female sheikh, I am relieved that my prayer life is not lost entirely.
After an hour, she guides my hand through the second chapter of the Quran and then leaves it to rest on a verse.
“This is one of the most beautiful stories in Islam,” she tells me. “It is the story of how God created Adam, peace be upon him, out of clay. I know that in Christianity you think of Adam as a sinner, but for us he is the first prophet, even if he sinned in front of God.”
“How can he be a prophet if he sinned?” I ask her.
“Prophets are human, Istifanee, and God is merciful and forgiving. If the prophets weren’t human, then we would never be able to follow them. We would think that what they do is impossible for the rest of us.”
I remember that Adam’s name in Hebrew means simply “earth,” “soil.” As if man was built from all of the heaviness of the ground, the hard reality of earth, making who we are and the road we must travel one and the same.
“After God created the world he gave Adam the names, allowing him to see the essence of the world and all that was contained inside of it,” she tells me. “He then asked the angels to bow down to him.”
I imagine this for a moment, the angels bowing down in front of man, their wings folding softly over their backs, their foreheads briefly touching the ground.
“All of the angels bowed down in front of Adam, except for the one named Iblis,” she says, closing her Quran and looking at me. “Iblis asked God, ‘Why should I bow down if I am made of fire and Adam is only made of clay?’”
I smile at the question, so human to my ears.
“Iblis could not understand why God would ask him to bow down to a human, when he had been made an angel.”
“Well, why would he?”
She meets my eyes, kindly. “He could not comprehend the miracle, that despite our weaknesses, God has made mankind higher than the angels.”
18.
IT DOES NOT TAKE ME long to fall in love with the Quran. I stop at the Islamic market on my way home from my first lesson and buy the entire Quran on tape, and I spend the afternoon listening and running my fingers over the lovely threaded lines of my new book, trying to whisper along. This is the first time I have ever read a religious text in its original language, and I am surprised by the difference it makes. Very often, even if I don’t understand the text, I can sense the meaning in the feeling of the words. It reminds me of studying a difficult piece of music. Like unchaining a sentence and letting it fly into the air. In Islam, the language of the Quran is considered to be a miracle. I have met men from Pakistan who memorized the entire Quran when they were boys without understanding a word of it, just so that they could possess that sound.
The truth is, since the Spiritual Exercises I’ve been afraid to go too deeply into the Bible, afraid that I might get thrown again over the edge of a psychological abyss. But I’m not afraid of the Quran. It is not a linear narrative but pieces of stories, woven together, sometimes nothing but music holding them in place. The same story appears over and over in different contexts, the meaning each time changing slightly, shifting, so that the entire book becomes a process of understanding and reunderstanding what happened in the past, and even what can happen in the future. Every time I think I have completed a story, it appears again, challenging the previous belief. Every time I understand what a word means, it repeats itself in a slightly different context. Reading the Quran is a lesson in personal humility. They say that no word ever means the same thing twice. So I can do nothing but finally let go, surrender to a story greater than my own understanding, letting it be.
Letting go. It feels like such a relief.
Somewhere, alone in my room, in this letting go, is where I feel a small bird stirring within my heart, a feeling I might reasonably call happiness. I have not earned it or discovered it. It has simply been given to me, without asking for anything in return.
“Hello, God,” I whisper, smiling to the empty space of my room. “It’s so nice to see you again.” I think that somewhere in the universe, God winks at me.
SOME MORNINGS, when I can’t bear the thought of studying alone in my room, I visit the women’s mosque across town where the Sheikha lectures on Islam. I sit in a room covered in carpets and crowded from wall to wall with women dressed in long coats that fall to their ankles, slowly passing prayer beads through their hands. It feels so refreshing to find myself in a room full of women. I’ve spent so much time with Ahmed and Mohammed and the Baron that I’ve often wondered where all of the women are in this country who aren’t nuns or potential nuns. I just haven’t known where to look for them.
The Sheikha looks slightly intimidating up there at the lectern, her hair covered in a navy scarf fastened firmly beneath her chin, her clothing hidden by a navy coat buttoned all the way down to the ground. But her voice is as light as ever, and she teaches us the stories of the Quran, about Noah floating away in his Arabic Ark, Joseph abandoned by his brothers at the bottom of the well, Abraham searching for God in the heavens. Hearing these tidbits feels like knowing a close girlfriend for twenty years and then suddenly learning something totally unexpected about her, like that she knows how to fly or is a Cordon Bleu chef. I have been acquainted with most of the characters in the Quran—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Mary, Jesus, John the Baptist, Moses—since I was a child listening to Bible stories. But I have always known them as holy people, members of some other species. The Quran makes them human.
My favorite parts of the Quran, though, are when, in the midst of all of this glorious language, a small and completely ordinary detail is slipped in. For example, I read that John the Baptist was kind to his parents. In the chapter called The Cave, which tells the story of a group of men who fell asleep in a cave and woke up hundreds of years later, the text mentions that a dog followed them on the way and fell asleep beside them. In the story of Moses, a mysterious guide named Khidr appears to teach him the mysteries of the universe. But he ends up telling Moses in very human frustration, You won’t have the patience to understand. It is nice to hear from a prophet the same kind of scolding my mother would give me when I asked her about grown-up conversations I’d overheard as a child.
I never call the Sheikha by her first name, which seems much too informal for someone who possesses so much knowledge. And she calls me Istifanee, which in Arabic means “he selected me.” She tells me that it is from the same verb that the angel Gabriel uses in the Quran to tell Mary what has happened to her. God has chosen you, chosen you from all of the women of the world.
So it is as Istifanee that I sit across from her during our lessons, trying to understand these new stories that have been placed in my life. Sometimes it only takes a single word to change the meaning entirely. Last week, for instance, I was reading the story of Adam and Eve expelled from paradise, and I noticed that before they left, “God turned to them.” I looked that up in my dictionary.
“God turned to them?” I asked the Sheikha later at our lesson. “You mean that he forgave them?”
She laughed. “That’s what it says.”
“So there is no original sin?”
“No, in Islam, everyone is born without sin.”
“You mean there is no curse?”
She eyed me with confusion. “How could someone be born with a curse? God is compassionate. We can only be responsible for our own choices.”
What a difference a word makes. God turns for a moment without us even seeing him, and the entire universe for generations becomes lighter in response.
19.
THE MOOD IN DAMASCUS continues to shift, and increasingly Syrians are defying the government, openly voicing their frustrations to anyone who will listen. In a country so dominated by the secret police, this carries the air of the impossible, like a mute man suddenly, out of nowhere, starting to speak. One is not supposed to be able to criticize the government without instantly disappearing in a puff of smoke. Yet now it is happening every day, and it is a bit unnerving. Shopkeepers complain that the president has not come out in public to defend them. Journalists line up to interview political dissidents on the record. I hear intellectuals in cafés advocating war and whispering of a coup. I had no idea how much people had been suppressing until now.
I try to keep to myself, and still every day I maintain my evening appointment with the Baron in front of his beat-up, rickety television. All of the programs have been canceled in Lebanon for forty days of official mourning, so that we are left to stare at montage after montage of the martyr Rafik Hariri beamed to us by satellite, interspersed with footage of tens of thousands of Lebanese citizens protesting against Syria and waving Lebanese flags.
“Hariri, Hariri, Hariri,” the Baron moans in agony. “No more soap operas. No more dancing. Just Hariri. My God, how long do we have to mourn him?”
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 23
