“Did you really want someone who looks as if he’s loafing around under the sun like a jobless person?” I retorted, even though I loved Ahmed’s dark skin and the way his eyes shone.
Then came the honeymoon phase. In Riyadh, girls courted one another the way we wished boys would court us. We gave one another heart-shaped necklaces that had our names engraved on them, necklaces that we hid under our hijab because they were forbidden at school. We dressed up and wore makeup and went to women-only restaurants in the mall. We complimented one another on our style. Aisha had always wanted to eat at Herfy, but her father, the doctor, strictly forbade it for health reasons, so one evening we went there as an excursion.
It turned out Aisha hated the food, but she laughed so hard it was worth it just for that. At the end, while I drank her milk shake because she couldn’t handle any more, she put in the final seal and said, “Leena, can I be serious with you? I need your help with something.”
“Anything,” I said, because that was the whole point of a secret society.
“I need you to help me with this debate. I know it’s asking a lot. I mean, this was always your dream, not mine. My dreams are of medicine, not law.”
“What changed?”
“I wanted to be a doctor. Especially a women’s doctor. My father’s one, you know. He always said it was a sign, and why Allah gave him three daughters.”
She didn’t say anything for a while, so I said awkwardly, “Becoming a doctor would be a great accomplishment.”
“Maybe,” she said, frowning as if she were trying to convince herself. “It’s not the same thing as power. My older brother was arrested recently. My mother said he’d been posting on a blog, but I don’t even know if that’s true. I think it was something worse, because we tried to pay the fine and they still wouldn’t let him go for five whole days. I heard my father yelling on the phone that money was no problem, but we had no wasta. He wants to leave the country, go to Dubai, Oman, somewhere that an education can matter more than birth. Anyway, it’s why I’ve been so mixed up recently. I want to be useful, but I don’t even know enough about the law to get through class, never mind to make a difference at the Majlis. Most days I’m so scared about the future I can’t even concentrate.”
I squeezed her hand.
“I know you probably wanted a friend who was more fun,” she said, squirming. “But I’m not like—”
“I hate malls,” I admitted, not letting her finish that sentence with a name I couldn’t bear to hear. “This isn’t my kind of fun.”
And just like that, we found out how we fit. Every evening, Aisha came over to my house just before the maghreb. We prayed, ate a snack, and studied until well after the isha prayer. Over dinner, which we cooked together, we discussed what we’d studied and tried to make sense of it.
I had lived through Batool the Fool for so long that I knew what not to do. I refused to be the kind of teacher I hated, forcing down hadiths into memory to be regurgitated on demand. I wanted to understand the prophet, to shake his hand as an equal, and to love the rebel in him, this lonely man who had shaped our whole world. So I shared the books with Aisha that my father had smuggled into the country from Lebanon and beyond, including the full works of Ibn Rushd, who explained how the law was derived, the sources and reasoning used in each case, all with the intention of helping jurors decide what the law should be. It was like a magic guide to our textbook, which only gave the answers—if X happens, do Y—without explaining the all-important why.
The other book we read, in turns or together, sitting in bed with our knees raised and the book between us, was Al-Ghazali’s Alchemy of Happiness, which was banned in Saudi Arabia because it had lately come back into fashion, selling more copies in Turkey than the Quran. Al-Ghazali had become paralyzed in the middle of his life. Unable to speak, doctors diagnosed him with a serious emotional disorder because he had lost his faith. He had left the Sunni family to join the Sufi mystics, walking away from the distractions of public life to work on self-discipline and surrender.
In the absence of the real boys we loved, we placed the images of these dead men. Aisha preferred Ibn Rushd, who was practical, almost mathematical in his attention to detail.
“He’s the kind of man I can trust. The kind of man I’d marry,” she said, as if he hadn’t been dead for centuries.
“I want the poet,” I said. “I want the one who surrenders to his emotions and lets them carry him away.”
I was happy with our little shillah of two, but Aisha was right to have expected others to join us. There was something magical about what we had, the spark of souls bonded in that perfect friendship that was at the heart of the idea of the ummah. The fanatics had stolen and desecrated that word, ummah, calling for an international kingdom of Muslims beyond national laws. But the real ummah was something I believed everyone of every faith yearned for, the sense that there was something beyond selfishness and petty tribal feuds. It was a connection of minds that Al-Ghazali had sought hundreds of years ago. And although he was dead, I felt his mind had reached mine.
In a month, we were having weekly halaqas as if we were in Qaraouine itself, a group of girls bonded partially by our desire for friendship and freedom and bonded more completely by our mutually assured destruction. Aisha and I still studied together on school days, but on the weekends, nearly a dozen girls met secretly, each telling her parents she was at another’s house.
We met at a different place every time, just in case there was a raid. We placed chairs and floor-level Arabian sofas by the walls in a large circle facing the center. Every time, the conversation proceeded like the courtship, beginning with the easy topics—food, fashion, and family—and ending with the serious ones. Books and boys.
“I don’t know if it’s wrong to be a writer,” Sofia said. “I’ve always wanted to be, but what do I even have to write about? Our lives are so dull. Nothing ever happens. I really want to be a journalist, but wouldn’t that be complaining about the will of God, airing everyone’s dirty laundry for foreigners to laugh at or pity?”
Sofia had recently extricated herself from Mishail’s set and joined us. I didn’t trust her at first, because I couldn’t understand why she would want to be with me and Aisha when she could be with the glamorous Daria and Mishail.
“Because sometimes I like to be the one telling the stories, not just listening to theirs,” she’d said with a smirk and offered up her evidence. She had written a love story in which our favorite superhero, the Egyptian Qahera, found a man who was worthy of her. The Qahera webcomics were forbidden to us, so writing a love story about the burqa-clad bat-woman was certainly illegal.
“Besides,” Sofia added, her smirk fading into grim determination, “my father was killed in the Spring. He was a journalist.”
“Is it haraam to write stories?” asked Rasha, a whip-smart girl from the junior class who had won a national Quran recitation competition and had found her way into our shillah by the ingeniousness of her crime. She had entered the competition purely for the prize money, which she used to buy prepaid phones that could not be traced by the Ministry of the Interior. She had given us these phones so we could contact one another safely.
“Why would you think that, sweetie?” I asked her.
“Because I don’t know if it counts as telling a lie. If it doesn’t, then maybe Sofia can write about things without giving away any real secrets.”
“It only counts as a lie if you pretend it isn’t just a story,” I said. “And that’s a great idea.”
Rasha glowed with pleasure. It struck me how easy it was to be generous with affection, and how the more I gave the more I received. We had each been in our corners, hoarding the tiny slice of love we still had, but together we had more than enough for everyone.
Another night we were at Sofia’s house, and we didn’t talk at all, just danced to celebrate the end of the preliminaries, which everyone knew were harder than the actual final exams. Even I joined in, safe in
the knowledge that we were all equally graceless, but we weren’t dancing to impress a guy or one another but purely out of our own joy.
“I feel bad for having fun,” Aisha confessed that night as her driver took us home. “The debate is coming up, and—”
“Oh, be quiet,” I said. “Fun is the point. Fun is what they keep forbidding. Laughter is all there is. It’s what keeps us going, it’s what we have left to live for, it’s why those girls came today. We might die tomorrow if that’s God’s will. What’s the point of anything we do?”
Aisha sniffed. I pulled her into a hug and kissed her until she laughed and pulled away.
Still, she had a point. The gnawing anxiety in my stomach told me that I didn’t have much time, either. Ahmed had said that the boys would soon put their plan into place. They were waiting for something, but I hadn’t been able to figure out what it was, or maybe they were just bragging idly and didn’t even have a plan. Meanwhile, my mother was working two or three events a day to make the amount required to pay back her mahr and initiate a divorce. In just months, I would write my final exams and graduate from high school.
Time was running out.
17
GARAWIYYA
The results of the preliminaries were posted in the main hallway. Aisha had beaten me to take first rank. I came in second, and Daria was third. Mishail was barely in the top ten. Even Bilquis had done better.
It was the first time anyone had ever done better than me at school. It stung, and for a moment I thought angrily that if I hadn’t helped Aisha, she’d never have won. The impure thought lasted only a moment. The next moment, something wonderful happened that made me realize I would never again care about coming first.
Aisha saw her name at the top of the list, stared in disbelief for nearly a minute while everyone whispered anxiously around us, and then she burst into loud tears and threw her arms around my neck.
It was the happiest moment of my entire school life.
The icing on the cake was Daria’s fury. I had never thought anyone could be so upset about losing anything. She called us cheats, lovers, teacher’s pets, and other more terrible things, then ran into the classroom and shoved the tables and chairs. She kicked the large metal teacher’s desk until it formed a dent the size of a football. And then she grabbed her books and ran out of the classroom.
“Where does she think she’s going?” Sofia asked. “First period begins in two minutes.”
I watched Aisha receive her congratulations without a trace of jealousy. Fifteen minutes later, we were in the middle of history class when the loudspeakers in our hallway requested that Aisha and I go to the headmistress’s office.
“What do you think this is about?” Aisha asked as we made our way there.
I shook my head. We knocked and entered the office that had become so familiar to me that I thought I might actually miss it when I graduated. Maryam Madam and Naseema Madam sat behind a desk covered in preliminary-examination papers and the official registration forms for our finals. Daria sat on the other side, her eyes red.
“Sit down, girls.”
Maryam Madam looked puzzled, as if she didn’t quite understand what the issue was yet. It was Naseema Madam who spoke.
“I hear that you and Aisha have been taking special lessons in history and law,” she said. “And you did not invite Daria.”
My eyebrows flew to the ceiling. Was Daria really playing the kicked kitten here after what she’d done to me and Mishail?
“I don’t understand, Naseema,” Maryam Madam said. “Many students take private lessons from tutors.”
“Not at Najd,” Naseema Madam said, sounding sulky. “We did not think it was fair for those who could afford it to have an advantage over those who couldn’t.”
“Oh,” Maryam Madam said. She had a strange look on her face, a kind of amazed fondness, as if a child had said something adorable.
I said, “But, ma’am, it’s Daria and Aisha who have been taking the special lessons in preparation for the debate. How is that fair?”
Aisha fussed with her hands nervously. I discreetly squeezed her finger to let her know I wasn’t actually upset with her. I kept my eyes on Maryam Madam, knowing that I’d be able to tell from her face when a storm was coming. She gave me an exasperated look, but she didn’t seem angry.
“When you have to speak in front of an audience, you’ll receive the same instruction,” Maryam Madam said, adding with a smile, “Not that you have any trouble finding words, right, Leena?”
“Tell her to say where they’re taking lessons!” Daria said in a voice that shook with sobs. “It’s not fair!”
“We haven’t been taking any lessons, you whiner!” I said. “It’s not our fault you’re so stupid.”
“Leena!” Maryam Madam said. I fell silent immediately, sorry for having lost my temper. But I hated Daria so much I was giddy with it.
“Liar,” Daria muttered.
“How dare you call me a liar after the things you’ve done!” I shouted, aware that I was probably making things worse for myself with the headmistresses, but how many times was I supposed to let Daria ruin my life and then insult me? “You call Naseema Madam a blind bat behind her back while you break every single rule in existence, but now you’re acting like you’re the victim?”
“Leena, khalaas!” Maryam Madam said. Now she was angry. I fell back in my chair, breathing heavily. Naseema Madam was paler than I’d ever seen her, as if she’d been slapped.
“How dare you speak that way in front of us?” Maryam Madam said. She was standing now, her fingers clenched around the edge of her desk.
“Daria would never say anything bad about other people,” Naseema Madam said in a low voice. I felt a pinch of hatred for her, too, for being so blind. “Don’t you know, at Najd, she was the favorite of every teacher and all the students.”
“No wonder,” I muttered under my breath. Daria heard me and flinched. I felt the urge to strike at her even harder until she learned not to stand in my way again.
“What’s that you said?” Maryam Madam said. “What’s wrong with you, Leena? You think I don’t see that something’s changed? You’re being stupid to the point of recklessness, and I don’t understand why now when you’re so close to graduation. Don’t you care about your future? About what happens to you? What would your father think?”
I knew this was just Maryam Madam entering Phase Two, but I didn’t have the patience to wait until she made it through all her questions and arrived at her total disappointment. Not this time.
“My future?” I said with a bitter laugh. “I don’t have a future, do I? You and Daria saw to that. I’m not allowed to be part of the debate because Majlis members might question the character of a girl whose father is in prison. But Daria? It doesn’t matter that she’s given her phone number to every guard outside this school, that she gave herself to all the male teachers of Najd National to keep her top grades, none of that matters a bit because … why? Are you both really as blind as she says you are? Or does she have some wasta that cleanses her of all her sins, in which case, how do I get some of that?”
The old, round clock above the headmistresses’ heads ticked loudly in the silence that followed. The second hand moved heavily upward past the large seven, slipping a millimeter downward with every upstroke, as if sagging against gravity.
Maryam Madam was no longer staring at me but through me.
Naseema Madam said, “Leena, do you have any evidence that proves what you just said?”
I looked at Aisha out of the corner of my eyes. She shook her head very slightly in warning, so I said nothing. I wasn’t going to get Zainab, Mishail, Munira, or any of the others to confess what they knew. It would be their word against mine and only make my position worse when they all stood together and later hated me for revealing them.
“Daria, go back to class,” Maryam Madam said. Her lips were white.
Daria hesitated. She said, “But the special lessons i
n…” and then saw enough in Maryam Madam’s face to run out of the room.
“Why did you do that?” Naseema Madam asked, but Maryam Madam didn’t answer. She went to the door and locked it, and then returned to her chair. She intertwined her fingers to rest her chin on them.
“Maryam?”
“You don’t always need evidence to know what’s true,” Maryam Madam said without looking up. “You just need to be willing to get your head out of the sand.”
“You’re saying you believe—”
“I’m saying we’d be stupid to think that our girls are as innocent as we’d like them to be,” Maryam Madam said, getting up and looking out her window. There wasn’t anything to see but the ten-foot brick wall that held us in. “You think I need video footage to know that Leena and Aisha have been up to something? It’s written all over their faces. And Mishail’s grades wouldn’t have dropped this much if she wasn’t somehow still involved with that boy. These girls think they’re so smart, but as you can see, they can’t even control their tempers to save their lives.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. I had never heard so much disappointment in Maryam Madam’s voice. I wondered if she knew how each thing she said stung me deeper than the last. She knew about our shillah, or at least knew enough to not bother knowing more. Could Mishail really still be involved with Ahmed? True, he and I had been spending fewer nights together, but he’d always given me a good reason. We’re making the really dangerous part of the plan, best you don’t know any more in case you’re questioned. I don’t know if I can stay away from temptation tonight, maybe it’s best we don’t see each other for a little while. I don’t want to get in the way of your studies for your preliminaries.
Suspicion clouded my thoughts until I could barely feel the rest of Maryam Madam’s disappointment in me for losing my temper. How would I find out if there was still something between Mishail and Ahmed? And how would I stand it if it was true? Already my bones were rattling with nearly unbearable grief.
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