12
Azia and John were the first Christians I’d ever spoken to, but they were not the first I’d seen. One afternoon before my father had fallen in with the radicals, back when he wore tight Western pants and bright shirts, he received a visitor. My mother was out of the house, and my father told my older sisters to prepare some tea and snacks and to knock on the door when they were ready.
I watched from the window, my face pressed against the glass alongside my sisters, as he greeted a stranger in the courtyard. He was dressed just like my father, but when he came into the house, the difference between them became apparent. The stranger was wearing the most exotic cologne I had ever smelled, and it seemed to me that the air was filled with mystery.
I was too young to know what business this man had with my father, and I didn’t think to ask my sisters. I just followed them down to the kitchen and let my nose pick out the strange, sweet scents he introduced.
Soon after my sisters had performed their duties, my mother returned to the house.
“Who’s here?” she asked.
All of us girls shrugged and told her that we didn’t know who the visitor was. She left us in the kitchen, but from there we could hear her open the door to the drawing room. We heard raised voices, and shortly after, the front door opened and then quickly shut again.
“Why did you do that?” my father asked my mother.
“Because I know who that man is.”
“He’s a business contact. Whenever he’s in town, I always meet up with him.”
“Yes,” my mother said, “and he’s a Christian, isn’t he?”
My father said nothing.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” he said quietly.
My sisters and I crept toward the doorway of the drawing room just in time to see my mother walk over to the tray that held the drinks and snacks my father had asked for. She picked up the cups and saucers—the best ones that we brought out only for honored guests—and turned to face my father. Then she hurled them to the floor, where they shattered into hundreds of pieces.
“Why?” My father stared at the floor.
“Because a Christian touched them. They were unclean.”
†
“Why?”
Whenever my mother looked at me intently like this, it made me nervous. I had rehearsed my answer a dozen times, but still the words were slow to come.
“Why?” she asked again, a little more gently this time. Was she trying to keep her emotions in check?
“I just want to spend more time with Allah,” I said. “I need to pray more.”
She looked at me carefully and then smiled. “Okay, I will call them.”
I waited on the stairs and listened to her half of the conversation.
“No, there’s no problem. She just says she needs more time. . . . Yes, she’s praying even more than usual, offering eight prayers a day. . . . She reads her Qur’an too. . . . No, she’s not scared. And she hasn’t changed her mind. She just needs time to be ready. . . . Yes, I will. As soon as she’s ready.”
My mother ended the call and walked over to join me on the stairs. She winced with pain as she bent down, but even though I protested and tried to stand up, she was determined to sit beside me.
“They say they’re confident you’ll be ready soon,” she said when she was finally seated. I could feel the silk of her dress on my arm. “I think it’s natural to want to wait awhile to make sure you’re ready. I’m so happy you’re spending time with Allah. You know, people are noticing how dedicated you are, and they’re impressed. I tell them that you and Allah are so close.”
I had nothing to say in return. Part of me felt relieved that I’d bought myself some time, but part of me was still deeply troubled. Everything felt fragile, as if a mighty storm were coming and I had suddenly discovered that the house was held up by thin sticks. It would only be a matter of time before everything fell down.
†
I set a task for myself: I would approach the Qur’an with the eyes of a scientist. In fact, I wouldn’t limit myself to the Qur’an; I’d study the hadith as well, weighing the historical accounts of Muhammad’s life and asking questions the way John had suggested.
Like any good scientist, I was testing my hypothesis—that the Qur’an was true and trustworthy, and that the verse John had shown me had somehow been twisted and used incorrectly. I still believed in Muhammad and I still believed in Allah, and once I found the evidence to back up my position, I could go back to John and expose his devious Christian lies.
I was in trouble almost from the very start.
I turned to a story in the Qur’an about a man named Dhul-Qarnayn.[1] He was traveling one day and reached a place where the sun was setting in a muddy spring. The text didn’t say that it was setting behind a muddy spring, nor did it say it appeared to be setting in a muddy spring. According to the hadith, the sun itself had reduced to a minute fraction of its actual size and heat, entered the earth’s atmosphere, and landed in a puddle. This struck me as ridiculous. How could the book of Allah have something so scientifically wrong in it?
I continued my search in the Qur’an, hoping to remind myself what it taught about the history of Allah’s people. Like most Muslims, I had been encouraged to read a few verses here and there, jumping from place to place without ever starting from the beginning and reading all the way through. We relied on the mullah to explain the words for us, and we were not encouraged to read more than a few verses for ourselves.
I decided to see what the Qur’an had to say about Abraham and Joseph, two men whose stories I had loved hearing about from the mullahs when I was growing up. I discovered that Abraham’s story was only partially told, the verses scattered like petals in a hurricane. There was no logic to it, no coherent structure for me to follow.
At least Joseph’s story was all in one place. The problem was that there was so little to it. The Qur’an starts by explaining that Joseph was so beautiful that when he walked by some women peeling potatoes, they stared at him and accidentally cut their hands. Then I read that Potiphar’s wife wanted to marry Joseph, but he refused because he was Allah’s faithful servant. I was curious to find out what happened to him next, but the story ends abruptly there.[2]
Jonah’s story is scattered like Abraham’s. The Qur’an says he was a messenger and talks about the whale and Jonah’s message to the people of Nineveh. But in various places, Jonah is described as being in the belly of the whale for one, three, seven, or forty days.
I started to wonder who wrote the Qur’an. I knew it wasn’t Hazrat Muhammad, because he was illiterate. From what I could tell, after Muhammad’s death, as his successors battled for control, people were invited to submit any stories they remembered about the Prophet. Some wrote on goatskins; some wrote on stones. In all, seven copies of the Qur’an were created. Then at some point, six of the copies were burned, leaving just one behind.
I wondered why.
†
Testing the trustworthiness of the Qur’an was a slow process. It is not an easy book to read, even in translation, and for weeks I tried to decode the pages, following the narrative as it jumped from place to place. Gradually the text came into sharper focus, and as it did, I found myself looking at Muhammad in a new light.
I had never questioned him before. I’d never doubted him. I’d never had any cause to think of him as anything other than the last and greatest Prophet. Never in my life had I uttered his name without adding the words “peace be upon him.”
But now I started to wonder about Muhammad himself. Stories that had delighted me as a child suddenly left an unpleasant aftertaste. So when I read about him fighting and taking prisoners, I no longer rejoiced in his power; I recoiled at his cruelty. I felt even worse when I read how one of those prisoners was a beautiful girl. She was taken to Muhammad, who said that if she married him, he would set her free. “It’s good for me to die in prison rather than be your wife,” she said. She was sent back to jail, where she died.
There’s also a story about an old widow who approached Muhammad and asked if Muhammad would marry her. Writing in the hadith, the narrator describes the way Muhammad looked at her from head to toe, saw she was old and not beautiful, and said to his followers, “Whoever will marry this person will go to heaven.” One man agreed but explained that he had no money to give her for a dowry. “Do you have a shawl?” Muhammad asked. “Give that to her.” The man did, and the two were married.
It struck me as wrong that the Prophet would be so influenced by physical beauty. Surely for a prophet of Allah, it should not matter one bit whether someone is old or young, beautiful or ugly. Shouldn’t Allah’s messengers dispense his mercy freely?
I could not deny everything about Muhammad. I still appreciated some of the stories, like the one where a non-Muslim woman dumped her trash on him every day. One day she became sick and couldn’t leave the house, so Muhammad visited her. Instead of seeking revenge, he gave her water and medicine. She became a Muslim soon after.
This was the Muhammad I had been brought up to follow.
How could I feel the same loyalty when I read about the time when he saw a blind man and turned his face away from him?[3] Why would he withhold mercy from someone whose affliction wasn’t his own fault?
The struggle within me grew fiercer. At times I felt as though I were going mad. Nothing made sense like it used to.
To my parents, I appeared to be diligent and devoted, the perfect daughter who was preparing to make the perfect sacrifice. When I wasn’t at college, I spent nearly all my time in the prayer room or on the roof, with the Qur’an open on my lap.
But appearances can be deceptive. Inside, I was starting to fear that my previously strong faith in Islam might not last much longer. To the outside world, I was pouring the words of the Qur’an into my soul. Internally, I was beginning to question whether any of the words I read could be trusted.
Every week I called the hospital. I figured that if anyone found out, they would assume I was checking on my mother’s treatment. In truth, I was speaking to John.
Every time we spoke, he’d ask me what I had been reading. “What do you think? Is it true? Are you finding the answers to your questions yet?”
“No,” I said more than once. “Just more questions.”
†
My mother had taught me well. From my earliest days, long before I attended the madrassa, I’d been able to recite my five daily prayers. I’d also known all the key scriptures that helped to outline exactly what it meant to be a Muslim:
O you who have believed, believe in Allah and His Messenger and the Book that He sent down upon His Messenger and the Scripture which He sent down before. And whoever disbelieves in Allah, His angels, His books, His messengers, and the Last Day has certainly gone far astray.[4]
I knew the hadith as well:
One day while Allah’s Apostle was sitting with the people, a man came to him walking and said, “O Allah’s Apostle. What is Belief?” The Prophet said, “Belief is to believe in Allah, His Angels, His Books, His Apostles, and the meeting with Him, and to believe in the Resurrection.”[5]
The same message is found in another hadith:
Abu Huraira reported: One day the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) appeared before the public that a man came to him and said: Prophet of Allah, (tell me) what is Iman. Upon this he (the Holy Prophet) replied: That you affirm your faith in Allah, His angels, His Books, His meeting, His Messengers and that you affirm your faith in the Resurrection hereafter.”[6]
Every one of those passages mentions “books.” None of them refer to a singular book, as if only the Qur’an is to be followed. Books doesn’t point to just the hadith, either. This term refers to four different books: the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, as revealed to Moses), the Zabur (or the Psalms, as revealed to David), the Injil (or the Gospel, as revealed to Jesus), and the Qur’an (as revealed to Muhammad). In other words, to be a good Muslim, you have to believe in the Bible.
Having struggled to find the truth in the Qur’an, it was only a matter of time before I told my mother I was feeling ill and needed to make an appointment to visit the hospital and have some blood tests conducted myself.
The next day I was standing in front of John’s desk. “Please,” I begged, “give me your Holy Bible. I know it contains three of the books all Muslims should read.”
“I’m so sorry, but I can’t give it to you. Do you know what happens to Christians around here if they get caught handing out Bibles to Muslims?”
I told him I didn’t, and he recounted stories about churches being burned to the ground, Christians being charged with blasphemy and sentenced to death, and clerics offering vast rewards to people who hunted down Christians accused of handing out Bibles. “If I gave you a Bible, they would use it as an excuse to persecute even more Christians in this city.”
I listened in silence, struggling to take it all in. I wanted to doubt every word he said, to discount it as lies and propaganda, but I knew I could not. Based on my field trips with the madrassa and the way my mother reacted when my father did business with a Christian, I knew he was telling the truth. Pakistan was a dangerous place for Christians.
All at once I was struck by the risk John was taking just by talking to me. He’d lose more than his job if he was caught. He would more than likely pay with his life. And if he had a family, they would be lucky to escape unscathed. At best, they would be thrown out of their home and forced to leave the city. At worst, their deaths would become part of somebody’s jihad.
What would he say if he knew about my plans for jihad? How would he treat me if he realized I was one of those Muslims for whom killing Christians like him is an act of duty? I couldn’t imagine that he would be willing to be in the same room as me, let alone treat me with such warmth and kindness.
A silence settled between us. Normally I would have taken it as my sign that the conversation was over and that I was being dismissed. I would lower my eyes and leave. But John was not like any other man I had met. Though we barely knew each other, in his eyes I saw nothing but trust and acceptance.
“Whenever you want to read the Holy Bible,” he said gently, “you can come here and read it. It’s always quiet in the afternoon, and I’d be happy to let you read it.”
I wanted so much to tell him the truth about me. And I wanted so much to hide my past.
When I spoke next, my voice was quiet.
“Aren’t you scared I’ll tell people about you?”
He looked straight at me. Such trust. Such acceptance. “No.” There was no hesitation in his voice, no doubt in his eyes. He held my stare for a moment, then broke it when someone appeared at the door and asked him a question about some results they were waiting for.
I stepped back and waited for the door to close.
When we were alone again, I told him I needed to get home and would return in a few days. I turned to leave, but something held me back. I looked at him and spoke the words I had been fearing for months: “I don’t think I’m a Muslim anymore.”
“Wow,” he said, wearing the widest smile I had ever seen. “That’s really good.”
“Is it?” I said. I wasn’t so sure. But I hoped he was right.