2

I was not the only one my mother sought to educate about the importance of being a good Muslim. She encouraged my siblings to pray and emphasized to all of us the realities of the judgment we would face after death. But while I was an attentive, thoughtful listener, the same could not be said for everyone in my family. Especially my father.

The first battle of their marriage was over his closet. My father favored Western dress, but to my mother, his polyester pants and skintight shirts were an outward sign of a lack of inward devotion to Allah. He was a weaker man then compared to his later years, and he gave in soon enough, accepting the plain, flowing shalwar kameez that his new bride suggested. It was a hollow victory, however, for in the years that followed, my father showed no sign of becoming a more devoted servant of Allah. He dressed the part, but his heart was not in it.

One night I woke to the sound of shouting outside. I joined my giggling sisters at the window and watched as my father, dressed in the tightest-fitting pants I had ever seen and a white shirt with a collar almost as wide as his shoulders, banged on the door.

“Let me in!” he shouted.

“No.” My mother’s voice drifted up from inside the house. “I don’t want you coming in here if you’re going to dress like that and go to the cinema.”

There was a pause. “Okay,” my father said, his voice calm and gentle. “I won’t go again. So let me in.”

“No!” my mother shouted, full of the confidence that came from knowing she was acting as a dutiful daughter of Allah. “Let everyone see you’ve been locked out.”

The battle was over, but the war raged on. Several months later, my father walked into the house carrying a brand-new television. We had never owned one before, and like all my siblings, I was thrilled. It was hard for my mother to get us out to school the next morning, and we all rushed home at the end of the day, excited to see what wonders were in store for us on the screen.

To our surprise, there was a gap where my father had placed the TV.

“I sold it,” my mother said as we stood there, openmouthed. “I don’t want a TV in my home. If it stayed, Allah’s blessed angel wouldn’t come to us.” I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t argue with her logic. My mother had told me so many times about the importance of not defiling ourselves. To serve Allah dutifully, we must follow all the steps laid out in the Qur’an—how to pray, how to eat, how to dress, and even how to greet each other. According to the hadith, angels do not enter a house where there are animate pictures, so why would a good Muslim family even contemplate bringing a TV into their home?

When my father came home and discovered what had happened, he did what he’d done all along in his marriage. He said nothing and walked out.

†

My mother set all the rules for the house. She made sure all her children prayed at home five times a day, and she saw to it that the Qur’an was always the highest book in the room and was never placed on the floor. In order to encourage the blessed angel to visit our home, she ensured that no unclean animal such as a dog ever came through the doors.

Our family wasn’t unusual in this regard. Our street was full of families just like ours, in which the mothers took care of their children and homes and the fathers devoted themselves to their businesses. However, even at a young age, I could tell there were times when people treated us differently. Whenever we went to the market to buy rice, lentils, or garlic, the vendors always paid my mother a little more attention than they paid to the other customers. And if my father sent any of us children to the butcher to collect some meat, we would be given the best cuts as well as a cold soda—something none of the other children in the shop received. Wealth brought with it many privileges.

The fact that people respected my father and held him in high esteem didn’t mean much to me. All that mattered from my perspective was that I was a disappointment to him. As hard as I worked in school, the moments when I made him proud were few and far between. The taunts from my sisters continued, as did the murmurs and sour faces from the women who gossiped about me whenever I was in their presence. I was still the child my father never wanted. I was still the girl he wished would have been born a boy.

†

Our whole world changed the day my father grew a beard. At least, that was how it seemed to me at the time.

I was ten years old, and Pakistan was changing. A small group of militant Islamic extremists started recruiting in our area. They wanted to wrest control of Pakistan away from the businessmen and secular leaders who held power. They believed that Pakistan should be ruled by sharia law, and they encouraged our community to reject all the trappings of Western life that so many in our country had embraced. They tried to close down the cinemas and starve the fashion shops of business. In retrospect, I see that they targeted my father specifically because he was wealthy. They had ambitious plans for the future, and one day they would need people to fund them.

I don’t know how, but they were able to succeed where my mother had failed. They managed to turn my father’s head away from the world of tight-fitting pants and Indian movies and convince him to take his faith seriously.

And so he grew his beard.

The more time he spent with the militants, the longer and fuller his beard became. At first it was patchy, but by the time it was long enough to cover his chin, he had started taking my brother to the mosque at the end of our street to pray five times a day.

By the time his beard was long enough for him to stroke, its strands curling around his fingers, he had announced that our entire family should declare our allegiance to the group.

When the beard was almost as full as the beards of the clerics he talked to on the street, my father remodeled the first floor of the house. He wanted to create a room big enough to invite one hundred people to come and listen to the clerics as they taught about what it means to be a true, devoted Muslim.

Within weeks, the building work was complete. One of the bedrooms was gone, and so was the best room in the house—the place where we had once received guests, seating them in leather armchairs that squatted like thrones along the wall. In their place was a room with wall-to-wall carpeting, a single chair at one end, and a curtain that could be drawn across one corner so that women could attend the meetings at the same time as the men without being seen.

Though this room contained no machines, little color, and nothing in the way of womanly chatter and laughter, I thought it was every bit as magical as my mother’s workshop. And after the first meeting I attended there, I was convinced it was a place where miracles could happen.

Once the builders and decorators left, I helped clean the room. My mother led the work, directing all of us children in our tasks and encouraging us with statements like this: “The harder you work, the happier Allah will be.”

By the time Friday afternoon came around, I could barely contain myself. I watched from upstairs as a crowd of men gathered outside our gates before being welcomed in by my father. I listened to the house fill with the sound of deep male voices and then quickly took my place alongside my sisters and mother, hidden from view by the curtain.

Since this was the first daras, or meeting, my father decided we should mark the occasion by asking Allah to bless the food my mother had prepared: white rice with almonds and cashews mixed in and milk poured over the top. My father’s job was to bring in the dish, cover it with a white cloth, and place it near the seat of the cleric, who was to give us instructions on how to pray.

We all closed our eyes, held our prayer beads, and repeated the same Arabic prayer twenty-one times—once for each of the beads. We turned our heads left and right as we prayed. Soon we fell into a rhythm, and the room hummed and stirred just like my mother’s workshop when all three sewing machines were running.

“Allahu Akbar!” The loud cry from the front of the room startled me at first. I looked up to see the cleric standing in front of the dish, the white cloth held high.

“The handprint!” another man said. “We have been blessed by the Prophet, peace be upon him.”

The room erupted with praise and excitement, and I pushed toward the front so I could see beyond the curtain and witness with my own eyes what everyone was looking at. In the middle of the rice was a clear handprint. It could only have been made by a man, and I saw no reason to doubt that Muhammad himself had made it.

“You see,” my mother said as I caught her eye, “the harder we work, the happier Allah will be.”

†

After that first daras, we held meetings at our home at least once a week. I never needed to be persuaded to attend. Even if I was the youngest female sitting behind the curtain, I would listen, enthralled, as the clerics taught from the Qur’an (the sacred text revealed to Muhammad by Allah) and the hadith (the additional writings that give further insight into the life and teachings of Muhammad). I learned to love both, to feast on the words as if they were bread.

In those days, I heard a lot about generosity and the importance of helping those in need. Though we were wealthy, I knew I only had to walk a couple of blocks to see poverty on the streets. The more I heard and the more I observed, the more I understood that Muslims are passionate, generous people. When they give, they do so joyfully and without reservation.

Perhaps the best example of such generosity came to me from an unlikely source: my father. I arrived home from school one day to see five sewing machines lined up in the hall and my mother staring at them, confused.

“What are these for?” my mother asked my father when he came home.

“I bought them for the widows,” he said.

“Why? You could just have given them the money instead, and they would be able to buy food and send their children to school.”

“Perhaps, but this way they will be able to earn money for themselves. And when they do, they, too, will be able to give just as we’re doing.”

Not long after the sewing machines had been given to their grateful new owners, we hosted a daras I’ll never forget. The room was even more crowded than usual, and instead of a single cleric up front, there were five. The men held themselves with a degree of authority and composure I’d never seen before. To my young eyes, these men with their flowing beards and scholarly airs looked like the wisest people I’d ever seen.

The oldest among them spoke for a while about the life of Muhammad and then indicated that the other clerics should each take hold of a corner of a large white sheet. They held up the sheet between them, and at once everyone got to their feet and pressed forward. Most people threw money onto the sheet, but one woman removed a gold bracelet and placed it among the coins and notes.

I ran out of the room and headed upstairs to my bedroom, retrieving the box at the bottom of my closet. In less than a minute, I was back at the daras, my hands letting go of the gold chains and earrings that I’d owned for as long as I could remember. They were the most precious possessions I had, and I wanted to give them to Allah.

Once the meeting was over, I sat quietly on the carpet while the guests drifted out. It felt good to be generous. I wanted to help the poor, but I also wanted Allah to smile on me. I wanted our family to be blessed, and I knew that my gold was a small price to pay for Allah’s favor.

A pair of shoeless feet stopped in front of me. I looked up to see my father staring down at me. I felt flustered, nervous to be so close to him.

“Stand up,” he said. “Follow me.”

When we got out to the front courtyard, my mother was talking to my sisters. My father had me stand beside him and addressed my mother, along with whoever else was within earshot.

“I am proud of this girl!” he said. “She gave the very best she had to give. She did it all for Allah’s cause.” I was so happy I thought I would burst. “I’m proud of you,” he said. “You never thought about yourself.”

He looked at my mother again. “Go and buy her some more jewelry. But this time buy bigger, thicker chains.”

My sisters looked at me in shock. I allowed myself the briefest of smiles, dropped my eyes to the ground, and gave silent praise to Allah. The thought of being given more valuable jewelry was wonderful, but even that excitement paled in comparison to the joy I felt after hearing my father speak about me like that in public. It was almost too much to take in.