by Nura Maznavi
Who had time for men when there were flyers to hang and phone banks to organize? Well, I guess I did, but only if it was the right kind of man. I was getting tired of dating, falling in love, and having my heart broken, but was still in a falling-for-charismatic-jerks phase. I had a weak spot for the kind of guy who sweeps you off your feet and then, after he’s convinced you that he’s the one for you, takes out the dustpan and, well, let’s just say you wake up with eyes swollen from crying and wonder how long it will take this time for the sharp pain in your gut to dull.
I thanked Ahmed for his kind words and walked away. On our way back to our Venice Beach apartment, Leila said, “He was totally into you. Couldn’t you tell?”
I couldn’t. Besides he wasn’t my type. “Not interested,” I said.
“Because he’s a nice guy,” she said.
“Exactly,” I said.
She huffed and then said, “Nice could actually be good for you.”
Maybe she was right. Why not?
Then she told me that the guy who had spoken to me was Ahmed Nassef, the head of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) on campus. That was why not. At that time in my life, the word “Muslim” meant religious and possibly fanatic, and I had spent too many years distancing myself from my wacky Catholic upbringing to even consider dating a religious guy.
Of course, when I was in the West Bank and Gaza, many of my host families were Muslim, and I remembered how in awe I had been the first morning when the call to prayer had woken me up. I had watched through a crack in my bedroom door as the mother and daughter who were hosting me prayed, and I had felt calm, something I had never felt before in relation to prayer. When I was growing up, prayer meant obligation, confession, and begging for forgiveness—in other words, it was, for me, an anxiety-ridden experience.
Still, in my mind, watching this mother and daughter share what looked to me like a true spiritual experience had nothing to do with Islam, or my idea of it then. Besides, what people did in the privacy of their homes was one thing, but God had no business getting involved with politics.
Leila tried to explain to me that the MSA at UCLA was one of the most progressive groups on campus, and that Ahmed was totally cool.
“Haven’t you ever read his column in the Bruin?” she asked.
I had thought he looked familiar. I, too, was writing a column for the university paper, and we were both considered to be on the left. I think the paper even ran our columns on the left side of the page. And when I read Ahmed’s commentaries, I always thought they were smart, cool, and very progressive, but the Muslim thing threw me for a loop. There were no Muslims when I was growing up in the Bronx—just FUCK IRAN T-shirts during the Iran hostage crisis.
I didn’t give Ahmed another thought until the next time we met, eight months later. It was the day of the 1988 Dukakis vs. Bush debate, which UCLA hosted. I was in a room with my supposed comrades, who were all shouting at me because I refused to support either Dukakis or Bush. “Dukakis is the lesser of two evils! We must support him!” my good friends yelled in my face.
“No. We don’t!” I heard a voice shout from behind me. It was the president of the Muslim Student Association, coming to my defense. “We need to support who we believe in.”
That marked the beginning of a great friendship.
And we stayed friends for years. Ahmed wanted more, he asked for more, but I wasn’t into him in “that way.” I wanted to feel “that way” about him, though—he was smart and sweet, and for every joke I made, he had an even funnier response. I’d be upset after a call from my mother during which she’d spent an hour telling me all the ways I needed to change my life—the same call I got every Sunday at three—and Ahmed would just spring into Steve Martin’s “cruel shoes routine.” No guy ever made me laugh or think as much as he did.
So of course I loved him. But I was not in love. Being in love meant feeling sick to your stomach most the time. So we stayed good friends and then, after one of those guys who did make me sick to my stomach broke my heart, my friend Leila said, “Hey, maybe it’s time to give the nice guy a chance.” And I did. And after a year of giving “the nice guy” and “love” a chance, we decided to get married. But it wasn’t until we’d been married almost four years that Ahmed and I would share an experience that would finally get me to shout, “I am in love with this man!”
It started on the morning of Ahmed’s thirty-third birthday. He wanted only one thing. It was the same thing he wanted every weekend, but—between family obligations, work, and a wife who treated lounging during daylight hours like it was a sin—something he rarely got: a Sunday morning in bed reading the newspaper from front to back, drinking a triple-espresso nonfat latte, and snacking on a French baguette and cheese.
Grateful I didn’t have to make a trip to the mall to buy him a present, I woke up early, and before Ahmed opened his eyes, he had the Times, coffee, bread, cheese, and a bouquet of his favorite purple and yellow tulips at his bedside. “Happy birthday,” I said, kissing his dry morning lips.
“Thanks,” he smiled.
I did good, I thought, and was turning to leave him to his fantasy Sunday, when he said, “Don’t go. Stay with me.”
I thought, I should have just gotten him a CD player instead.
I was one of those women who are up and on the move as soon as they awaken. There was always something to do, and in my mind, it was always dire. This was one of the fundamental differences between Ahmed and me: He loved to nap, and I could barely sleep.
But it was his birthday.
I took off my shoes but left my street clothing on, and got back into bed.
He put his arm around me, which felt nice. Maybe this would be fine, I thought. Then he lifted the front section of the paper to his face and handed me the book review section, one of those “should-reads” for writers that had never become a “want-to-read” for me. I flipped the pages, until all the reviews of books that weren’t mine started to make me feel that I had to get out of bed. I had just started my MFA in fiction; I needed to be writing. But Ahmed’s hold around my shoulders was tight.
I looked at the Paulo Coelho novel on my nightstand and wished I hadn’t finished it the night before. I had to do something, because I was close to sighing mode. When I sighed, Ahmed always stopped what he was doing and said, “Okay, let’s do something you want to do.” But it was his birthday, and I knew that even if I said that I didn’t want to do anything but lie there with him, that sigh would make it impossible for him to relax. And just look at him, I thought, smiling as he read and chewed and sipped. There was something else on the nightstand. I reached over to get it.
“Where are you going?” He sounded sad.
“Nowhere. I’m just reaching for this,” I said, pointing to the blue-and-white booklet on the nightstand.
“This is nice. Thank you.” He kissed me on the top of my head and went back to his paper.
The blue-and-white booklet was the coverage information for our new health plan. For most people, reading this sort of material was as stimulating as drinking half a bottle of NyQuil. But I wasn’t most people. I was a need-to-know-it-all personality who liked reading about medical procedures and was always up for any test a doctor wanted to prescribe. I was actually disappointed when a doctor told me there was no need for me to have a colonoscopy.
So this was a good way to pass the time. This plan covered a whole slew of procedures and treatments that our old plan hadn’t, like acupuncture, which I knew could be costly. I had tried it before, but it was hard to tell whether it was working or not, because I wasn’t treating any particular symptoms. I just thought it would be interesting to try.
Then I got to the section on infertility testing. We were covered. For everything.
“Ahmed,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he answered, with his eyes on his paper.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that we have been together for years—barely using protection—and I’ve never gotte
n pregnant?”
“No.”
Come to think of it, I had made a few stupid choices before Ahmed and had never gotten pregnant then, either.
“What if I can’t?”
Ahmed put his paper and his plate with the last bite of cheese and bread on his nightstand, and released my shoulders.
“Sit up a second.”
I sat up and looked at him.
“Are you telling me you want to have a baby now?”
I didn’t hesitate. “No.”
I wasn’t ready to have children. Until Ahmed, I hadn’t even wanted them at all. But I knew the first time we took a twelve-hour flight to Cairo together that I wanted to have a child with him. Every kid on the plane was drawn to him. Toddlers took turns sitting on his lap, and none of the mothers flinched. They trusted this stranger. He was too good with children not to be a father, and I figured he probably had enough maternal instincts for the both of us.
“Okay, so, what are you saying?”
“I just want to know I can have one. And since we’ve got this great coverage right now . . . ”
“Pat,” he said, in a tone that told me I had broken his mood, “the reason we have never gotten pregnant is because it’s just not been the right time . . . When we are ready to try, we will just have to have a lot more sex, and Allah will take care of the rest, inshAllah.”
Even after having been Muslim for almost seven years, I still got thrown when Ahmed played the inshAllah card. “God willing” was the translation, and sometimes it was comforting to know that God was going to take care of it all. But sometimes, especially recently, it said to me, How dare you question God’s intention?
When it came to our faith, this was the major difference between us. Ahmed had been born into his faith, so there was a lot he could take for granted. As a convert, I had to work for everything I believed. I had to think about the whys of my choices, which, in the early days, meant looking a lot to Ahmed, not necessarily to God, for answers.
This wasn’t to say that Ahmed didn’t study and question what it meant to be a Muslim. He did. All the time. He might have left his Islamic studies graduate program with everything but his dissertation done, but there was never a time when he wasn’t reading or writing about Islam. For this reason, I turned to him with almost all of my questions. They started with the rudimentary ones—“If you swallow accidentally while you brush your teeth, does that mean your fast doesn’t count?”—and eventually, after more studying and searching on my part, became more sophisticated: “Can a woman really divorce her husband if he doesn’t please her sexually?”
Though Ahmed encouraged me to lead the prayer when we prayed together, I refused, even when he insisted. He was the authority. Besides, he sounded so beautiful when he recited the Qur’an in Arabic. I sounded completely ordinary when I recited the translated version. In those early years, I was translating constantly, and not just language, but also rituals and belief systems. I was still very much a Catholic who believed that an individual could not have a one-on-one relationship with God. You needed an intermediary, some authority, someone more worthy to intervene on your behalf. I realize now that for a while I didn’t just make Ahmed my teacher; I made him my priest. When it came to matters of faith, I wanted him to call the shots.
But on Ahmed’s birthday, as we discussed the possibility of having a baby, I didn’t repeat inshAllah and let the matter go, as I usually did. This time I repeated it . . . and kept talking. “I think Allah has given us these tools, and I want to use them. Besides, who knows how long we will have this kind of coverage?”
“It’s your choice,” Ahmed said as he got out of bed, bringing the conversation and his dream Sunday to an end.
Life continued on fast-forward, and while balancing graduate school, writing (or agonizing about how I wasn’t writing), my family, Ahmed’s family, and all of my other obligations, I took tests. All sorts of tests.
In the beginning, I felt like a fraud when I went to my fertility-clinic appointments. I knew the women waiting with me in the reception area weren’t there because they just happened to be curious about their fertility and had good health insurance. These women were like the ones I had watched so often in movies—women who wanted to have children. At first they left it to fate and spontaneous, passionate lovemaking. When that didn’t work, they took the more calculated, scientific route—temperatures taken every morning, ovulation pinpointed to the day, bedrooms turned into laboratories. It wasn’t until they felt like failed science experiments that they came to the clinic. These women were now desperate for children, which made every test either the possible answer to their prayers or the proof positive that their worst fears were true: They couldn’t conceive, and no amount of medical intervention could change that.
After two years of blood, urine, and cervical-fluid tests, ultrasound scans, an endometrial biopsy, and a hysterosalpingogram (which inspired “The Blue Dye Up My Uterus Blues,” my first and only blues poem), my own fertility started to matter.
The hardest thing about the medical field is that—as many answers as it has—it doesn’t have them all. In my case, it didn’t have any. The tests all came back negative. Everything looked okay. Ahmed’s sperm tested well, too—plenty of good swimmers, the doctor said. So why, after five years of unprotected sex, were we not pregnant? The fertility specialist hadn’t a clue. And neither did I.
After almost another year of now trying to get pregnant and failing, Ahmed and I flew to Northern California to attend a Sufi retreat led by Kabir and Camille Helminski, of the Threshold Society. We met many lovely people that weekend, and Leila, one of our closest friends who lived in the area at the time, was there with us. It gave Ahmed and me something we both desperately needed: calm time together, without having to answer phones or emails. I especially needed a break from the fertility question.
I took away a lot of ideas from that weekend about faith and my relationship with God. What grabbed my heart, as opposed to my head, and hasn’t let go of it since, is the idea that spirituality is not something found only in the monasteries of Tibet or the retreat centers in the mountains of Santa Cruz. True spirituality can also be found while working at an office, shopping at a supermarket, riding a subway, or looking for one’s fertility.
I can’t say for sure if it was the experience of that weekend or just the timing in our lives, but it was soon after that retreat that I knew I was ready to have a child. I also knew that the answer to my fertility, or infertility, was not going to be found in a medical laboratory. That’s when I went back to saying inshAllah. The idea of God’s will didn’t shut me up as it once had. Instead, I accepted who was in control.
Six months after I stopped testing, Ahmed and I were driving home after an early movie.
“Where do you want to go for dinner?” he asked, checking his side mirror.
“I’m tired,” I said.
He pulled the car over. I understood his reaction. I was never too tired to eat.
“You’ve been tired a lot lately,” he said, turning his head to me.
“I think I’m just coming down with something,” I said. “No big deal.”
“Let’s get a pregnancy test,” he said.
“It’s just a cold,” I said.
“Let’s get one anyway,” he said, and this time he reached over and covered my hand with his. He knew I couldn’t go through another disappointment, another failed test.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said.
“Whatever happens?” I asked.
“Whatever happens.”
I didn’t know then that when we got home that night, I would pass the test. We were going to have a baby. But as we drove to the nearest pharmacy, Ahmed steering with one hand, never once letting go of me, I knew, without a doubt, that I was in love with this man. The man who told me it’s going to be okay, and believed it enough for the both of us.
Wild Wind
Nijla Baseema Mu’min
I met him while int
erning at a film festival in San Francisco. His eyes surveyed the crowd as if he was searching for something. His long, fuzzy locks hung past his shoulders. I liked the sharp angle of his cheekbones. I thought to myself, He’s cute, then continued to work, greeting guests and making sure the screenings started on time.
As festival patrons gathered in clusters, sipping red wine and eating hors d’oeuvres, he and I engaged in a visual game of tug-of-war. The look on his face carried some sort of longing. And it was this look that led him over to me. He pushed past overdressed attendees as the next screening was announced. He revealed his name. Theo. We chatted a bit. I told him about my upcoming trip to South Africa and discovered he had traveled the world through a Semester at Sea voyage the year before. Cute and well traveled. We exchanged phone numbers. Our eyes met many more times throughout the evening.
A week later, I went to South Africa to help film a documentary—an independent project a colleague of mine had developed—about community development and self-sufficiency in a township called Mamelodi. I served as the director of photography and still photographer, capturing the everyday nuances of the Mamelodi society on video and film. I was gone for a month and a half, and immediately upon my return, Theo’s number appeared on my cell phone. I didn’t recognize the number, but I recognized his soft, lazy voice.
“So, how was Mamelodi?” he asked. “Anything like Cape Town?”
His South African awareness was an instant turn-on. I was surprised to find out that he’d remembered our conversation at the film festival and waited exactly six weeks to call me, knowing I had no cell phone reception in Mamelodi. By the end of the conversation, we had set up a date.
Dating was always an interesting but difficult concept for me to understand. All my life, I have possessed a dual, conflicted religious existence that has complicated socially accepted practices, like dating, courtship, and boyfriends. My mother and father divorced before I could say my first words, and with their divorce came a variance in the way I saw the world. My mother believed in Allah and regarded Islam highly, but she didn’t pray five times a day, drank Corona beers, and eventually married a non-Muslim man. My father was a disciplined Muslim who converted to Islam and changed his name after moving to Oakland in the late 1960s from a small Christian town in Louisiana.
