5

I had a clear reason for wanting to do well at school. More than gaining my father’s approval—which had become an increasingly remote possibility the more deeply involved he became with the militant group—I had a single, clear goal in mind. I wanted to be a doctor. Specifically, I wanted to be a cardiologist. I did not want to fix just any stranger’s heart; I wanted to help my mother. If I didn’t, I knew she would die.

My mother’s health had started to deteriorate when I was at the madrassa. Sometime after I changed schools, she had been diagnosed with a heart condition, and lately the pain had been increasing. The doctors knew exactly what was wrong and that she would continue to get worse. They even had a plan for surgery that would restore her to full health again. But there was one problem: the only surgeons capable of carrying out the operation in our local hospital were men. For both my mother and my father, this was a deal breaker.

No matter how much I begged her to change her mind and allow them to operate, she refused.

“If I die in surgery after a man has touched me, I will die unclean. I would rather live in pain and die a good Muslim than risk facing Allah like that and be sent to hell.”

It was a conversation we repeated often, and it always had the same ending. My mother would look at me and say, “Everyone has to die sometime.”

As her body weakened and her pain increased, my own frustrations mounted. I grew to understand my mother’s desire to avoid Allah’s judgment, and I even came to see her commitment with a degree of respect. What bothered me was that the older I got, the more unlikely it seemed that I would be able to help. Even with Anwar’s tutoring and an upturn in my grades, every hospital visit reminded me that there was little room for female doctors in my community. Now that I was sixteen, I could see that I was pushing an impossibly large boulder up a mountain. How could I ever hope to succeed?

At the same time that I began to doubt my own abilities, I started to ask questions of the world around me.

It happened at the hospital one morning. I was sitting next to my mother while she was having tests done. As she lay there wired to a couple of machines, I peeked around the back of one of them. It read, “Made in Germany.”

I checked the other machine. “Made in the UK.”

In the days that followed, I was on a mission to determine the source of all the medical equipment that was helping my mother. Sure enough, it all came from the West. That prompted me to wonder about other inventions, so I looked in reference books in the school library. I researched everything from the telephone, tape recorders, and monitoring machines to bullets, bombs, and cell phones. I could not find a single invention that came from a Muslim nation. And almost every inventor’s name was Christian or Jewish.

All along, the same question rang loud and clear in my head: Why?

Why would Allah give so much wisdom to the infidels instead of to us, his beloved and faithful followers?

And why, when I’d been told all my life that people in the West were not good, did they seem so happy all the time? Every advertisement and newspaper photograph I saw showed them smiling. Why, if they were living so badly and in need of being saved, did Allah not make them sad? It did not make sense.

And if Muslims really were the beloved of Allah, why would he allow our enemies to beat and burn and kill us? Why didn’t Allah send an angel to destroy them?

It was as if I’d picked a thread at the end of an old rug. The more closely I looked at things, the more everything seemed to unravel, and the more questions I had.

Inevitably, I did what my mother and Anwar had taught me and turned to the hadith. I remembered a famous story I had read about Muhammad’s followers who were hiding in a valley called She’eb Abi Talib. People were chasing them, and since they had no food, they had no choice but to eat the grass. Their suffering lasted for three years. When I compared this story to the account in the Qur’an about Moses hitting the rock and water gushing out or Allah providing the Jews with bread as they wandered in the wilderness, it made no sense. Why would Allah feed the infidels but let his own people starve?

These thoughts would force their way into my mind without warning, but it was when night had fallen and the house was still that I heard them the loudest. There in my room, where all was silent apart from the sound of my older sister’s deep breathing, I would feel the anger rise within me. I would rage against Allah, shouting silently at him for treating his people so poorly and for treating our enemies so well.

My fury never lasted more than a few seconds. Almost as soon as I released the anger, I felt the fear rise within me. My chest would pound, and my stomach would twist. Raging at Allah was not something a good Muslim was supposed to do. At times like those, I would climb out of bed, walk to the prayer room, and kneel on the floor, begging for Allah’s forgiveness, desperately hoping that he wouldn’t block his ears to my cries.

†

My rebellion, such as it was, was not confined to matters of theology and science. Like teenage girls on every continent, I entered a phase when I fought with my mother regularly about fashion. All those afternoons spent in her workshop had nurtured in me a deep love of dresses and style, and the older I got, the more opinionated I became about what I liked.

Of all my mother’s magazines at the workshop, my favorite was the one full of photos of rich people getting married. I spent hours staring at the women in their white dresses, tiaras sparkling on their heads. I even managed to smuggle a couple of issues of the magazine home, where I could continue my browsing uninterrupted.

“When I get married,” I announced to my mother one day after we had returned from the market, “I want to wear a white dress.”

She made a noise that was midway between a snort and a cough.

“What?” I said. “Why not?”

“Red is the best color to marry in. White is what you wear when you are mourning the loss of a husband.”

“But why should the color of a dress make any difference to anyone?”

“Zakhira, it just does. Everybody knows that to wear white when you aren’t mourning is to invite death. It’s the same with black. A woman wears black only when she wants to curse someone. If she wears it at any other time, her brother will die. Now stop this nonsense, and put the garlic away.”

I was halfway up the stairs when she finished talking. When I returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, she screamed.

“What are you doing, Zakhira?”

I stood in the doorway, smiling. I did not particularly like the heavy black dress I had changed into—the cut was all wrong, and it was a little too big on me. But this was not about fashion. This was about logic—and making a statement to my mother.

“I just want to see if my brother dies or not.”

“What?” she yelled. “You want to kill your brother?”

“No,” I said calmly. “I just want to see whether what you say is true or not.”

It took hours for my mother to calm down and agree that my brother was still alive and well. After several days of my arguments, she finally agreed to let me wear black again if I wanted to. Still, it wasn’t much of a victory for me. What I really wanted was to be able to wear white, like the brides in the magazines. And I longed to make sense of my religion, to know that it could withstand a little testing.

Shortly after this act of defiance, I made a dress for myself that was like the ones I admired in the bridal magazines. I found some white cotton in my mother’s workshop and spent weeks embroidering a delicate pattern by hand all around the neck. All the other women there admired it, and even my mother commended me on the quality of my work. But she still refused to let me wear it.

When a family wedding approached, I began lobbying harder than ever. For days on end, I tried to convince my mother to allow me to wear the dress. “Everyone says it’s beautiful,” I begged over and over. “Why won’t you let me wear it? What are you afraid of?”

It was no use. She would always dismiss me with a wave of her hand and a roll of her eyes. In response, I would turn and storm out of the room.

I’d return and try again after a few hours, but my mother was immovable.

And so on the day of the wedding, being every bit as stubborn as she was, I stayed home alone while everybody else in the family went.

Did I regret it? No. A part of me knew that it was foolish to fight over something as insignificant as a dress. Deep down, I knew that it was not about the dress itself. I had found a crack in my religion, a fault line that bothered me. If my own mother, who had taught me so well what it means to be a good Muslim, could be bound by such a foolish and illogical superstition, what else had she gotten wrong?

†

It was Anwar who helped me to see things more clearly and put a halt to my questioning.

“I have a question that has been troubling me,” I said one day when I was about to leave his house. “Why did Almighty Allah choose to feed Moses and the Jews but not Muhammad, peace be upon him, and his followers?”

“You shouldn’t think so deeply, Daughter,” he said with a smile. “Don’t think deeply about Allah, and don’t read deeply into the Qur’an. Don’t think about each and every word; otherwise you’ll go astray. You’ll end up questioning Allah himself.”

I could feel the blood rush into my head as he spoke. Did he know about my angry outbursts toward Allah?

“I’m sorry,” I said, regretting that I had asked the question. “I won’t think about these things anymore.”

I was desperate for the conversation to be over, but I could feel Anwar’s eyes on me. The silence weighed heavily, and I could feel my heart beat faster.

When he spoke again, his voice was quiet but firm, as if he were giving instructions to a child. “Do you know what happens when you die?”

I searched Anwar’s face, wondering what he was trying to tell me. I said that I knew a little—that my mother had explained to me about the angel on the left and the angel on the right and how all our good deeds will be weighed against the bad.

“That’s all true,” he said. “And how you live here on earth will determine how you are rewarded in heaven. For those who serve Allah the most, paradise will be the best. Women will sleep on beds as soft as roses, surrounded by pearl-white cushions. Each one will have a garden surrounded by a high wall that no man can peer over. Anything you want will be just a thought away. If you wish, you can even keep your earthly husband. And the men who are rewarded the most will each receive seventy-two virgins, whose very sweat will be fragrant like perfume.”

My mother had told me most of this already, but I still shifted awkwardly in my seat as he spoke.

“Those who never listened to Allah or who never accepted Muhammad, peace be upon him, as the last prophet will stay in hell forever. They will be thirsty because of the great heat, but the only drink available to them will be boiling water that burns all the way down or pus so vile it could make the strongest stomach sick.”

Anwar waited awhile, letting the image swirl in my mind. “That is the choice you face: spend your life as a dedicated follower of Allah and receive the rewards, or choose to turn from him and endure an eternity of punishment. Everyone has to die.”

†

My mother had her own plan to make sure I stayed true to following Allah. She told me that I needed to pray more.

“This life is temporary, Zakhira-jan,” she said, using an Urdu term of endearment. I stood beside her in the kitchen as we peeled the garlic and washed the lentils. “We need to prepare ourselves for the next life. When you die, the first question the angel will ask is—”

“Are you a Muslim?” I knew the script well enough already.

“That’s correct. And what will the angel ask next?”

“Did you offer your prayers?”

“Yes. And then you’ll have to recite them. Hell will last longer for those whose voices are mute, and heaven will come sooner for those who know all five of the daily prayers. If you don’t know them when you’re alive, how are you going to remember them when you’re dead?”

We repeated some version of this conversation every week, and eventually the message sank in. Between my mother’s counsel and Anwar’s advice, my questions faded and my anger was snuffed out. I put the white dress in the back of my closet and devoted myself to being a good Muslim.

I pursued my religious obligations with the same fervor I had used in my science classes. In addition to praying the usual five times a day, I decided to offer three more daily prayers. I started at 3:30 a.m., knowing that these early-morning prayers brought with them extra rewards.

When my mother’s health allowed, she joined me, but more often I was alone. I didn’t mind at all. It felt good to know that everybody else was sleeping while I was bowing to Allah in prayer, earning my eternal reward. When I was in school and the clock approached 10:00 a.m., I would excuse myself and walk alone to the prayer room. No one else was ever there. In a school of more than two thousand students, I was the only one who was this dedicated.

At home my father would often take my brother to the mosque to pray, leaving us females at home. I would stand in front of my sisters and lead the prayers. Nobody complained or questioned my right to do so. I wasn’t the oldest, but I was the most devoted of my siblings, and it seemed only right that I would lead.

Even though I had given up questioning Allah about things like science and the infidels, I still tried to view my religion from a logical perspective. One day I would have to face judgment for my life, and I figured that if five daily prayers were good, surely eight daily prayers were better. I convinced myself that all these extra prayers were a way of tipping the scales in my favor.

But there was one question that haunted me day and night: Were my prayers enough? As hard as I tried, I couldn’t be sure I could do enough to secure my place in heaven.

The question burrowed deep inside, echoing endlessly within my mind. This unease set me on edge, leaking into me like oil in a lake. I did my best to ignore it, trying to pray more diligently and recite the Qur’an more regularly.

Some days, though, this struggle to secure my own salvation seemed beyond me. And I didn’t know where to turn for help.