9

My father was delighted that his daughter would be engaging in jihad—so delighted that the subject of my marriage was dropped. Not that he ever said this to my face. He and I were hardly ever in the same room, let alone in a position to have a real conversation about marriage, jihad, or anything else. But I knew he was happy—my mother told me so.

If my mother felt differently, she hid it well. Right from the moment I volunteered for jihad, a close bond had formed between us, even closer than usual. She’d laid her hand on my back as soon as I volunteered, and in many ways, it felt as though she had never removed it.

She and I had always spent a lot of time together, whether it was in the workshop or cooking together in the kitchen. My mother did not play favorites, but there was no denying she had a closer relationship with me than she did with my other siblings. My two elder sisters had both married and left home by this time. My younger brother was seventeen and had always been the apple of my father’s eye. My younger sister was close to everyone in our house—to both of our parents as well as to my brother, me, and the two women who came every day to clean the house. For reasons I was never able to understand, she was free in ways I could only dream of being.

“I don’t want you to worry,” my mother said one morning not long after the daras. “You remember what I always tell you, don’t you?”

“Everyone has to die sometime?”

“Yes. Maybe tomorrow I will die too. What would happen to me then? I would face judgment. Would my good deeds outweigh my bad? Or what if I died while I was unclean? Nothing could save me then. Isn’t it better for you to die this way, with no husband and no children, knowing you are doing Allah’s work and you will be swept straight into paradise? We are all born in Islam; we have to die in Islam. When you give this life for Allah, it is no loss—only a benefit.”

I heard nothing from the militants in the weeks following the daras. As time passed, I almost forgot what I’d agreed to. I concentrated on my studies, started a new sewing project, and struggled to help some of the orphans understand calculus. I felt good—almost at peace.

There was no hatred in me. I did not sign up for jihad because I despised America or because I wanted to kill Christians and Jews. As far as I knew, I had never met a Christian or a Jew. I even admired them a little—or at least I admired the tools and machines and medicines they’d given the world.

Of course, I had not forgotten the lessons from the madrassa about how Christians and Jews persecuted Muslims and how they’d killed my people so brutally in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Palestine. But even so, I didn’t raise my hand out of hatred. I chose jihad because of Allah. I chose it because of love. I chose it because I was desperate for my father’s approval.

†

My mother was standing in the courtyard when I returned home from school one afternoon. Two months had passed, and even before she spoke, I knew what she was going to say.

“They called. They will come to collect you next week.”

For the briefest moment, I felt relieved. It felt like the instant a match flares and catches flame—a burst of emotion, a flood of good feeling. At last, the waiting was over. The end was about to begin.

But when I woke early the next morning and walked through the house to begin my first prayers of the day, whatever peace I’d experienced the day before faded. My limbs felt heavy; my stomach twisted as if it were gripped by an invisible vice.

The feelings of dread grew stronger throughout the day.

Somehow, during the two months of waiting, I had forgotten that when I left for jihad training, I would never again return home. Every time I looked at the things around me, from the guava trees in the courtyard to the rickshaws that filled the city streets, I wondered how many more times I’d see them before I died.

I tried to tell myself not to think this way. After all, dwelling on such things would only make me weak. So all through the day, I dug my fingernails into my palms, forcing myself to picture the next life and how beautiful it would be. It almost worked, but as soon as I came back home and saw my trophies on my shelf or the family photos on the wall, the questions came back louder than ever.

Will they remember me? Will they miss me? Will it be as if I never existed?

The only thing I could do was pray.

For well over two years, I’d been offering prayers eight times a day. There were no new prayers to be said, no extra rituals to observe. So I made the prayers last longer. What usually took me ten minutes I’d spin out for an hour. I took extra care as I washed and prepared myself and then repeated every prayer until my mouth felt too dry to speak. I clung to my prayer mat as if it were a life raft and I were alone in the middle of the ocean.

My relationship with my mother was changing too. Her health was deteriorating, resulting in periods of fatigue and breathlessness, but there was more to it than that. Her attitude toward me shifted. She held my hand more often than usual and offered to take me anywhere I wanted to go. She even said she’d cook me anything I requested to eat. I knew that I was going to die. Would she be far behind?

“I don’t need anything,” I said every time she offered me food, keeping hold of her hand. “I just want to stay here with you.”

I thought a lot about Auntie Selma during that week. Had she felt as apprehensive as I did? I couldn’t imagine that she did. She seemed so brave and strong, so happy to be giving her life in jihad. So I did what I thought she would have done and prayed some more. Better to spend time with Allah than to waste my last few days at home eating or walking around the city.

Yet I still felt no peace. Despite the mullah’s promises, I felt sure Allah would cast me away. Even if I somehow took the lives of one hundred infidels, I could not imagine him granting me the kind of riches the mullah said would be mine.

As I prayed, I tried to picture myself kneeling before him, just as I had done before Anwar. Only Allah would be on the throne, and instead of begging for the chance to go to school, I’d be begging for the chance to remain in heaven. I would beg him to show me mercy, to allow me to remain with him. I did not need a mansion with soft, white pillows or a garden with high walls. If Allah would only let me stay with him, I wouldn’t care how humble a corner of heaven I was given. That would be enough.

†

I woke to the sound of the azan, the call for the world to pray. I knew that nobody else in the house would answer it. My mother was too weak, my siblings were too comfortable in their beds, and my father . . . well, I could not remember ever seeing him up to pray at 3:30 a.m. I was glad of it too. I could not imagine sharing the prayer room with only him.

I had been getting up with the cockerels for so long that I was barely conscious as I moved. I slipped out of my room, past my sleeping little sister, and along the corridor to the bathroom. How many more times would I get up for morning prayers before I was gone? And where would I be taken? Would it be far from the city? Would it look like a military camp or a school yard?

I told myself that I wasn’t scared or troubled. I told myself that I was ready. I could die in an accident tomorrow, I thought. I could get knocked down in the street, and what good would that do me? Better to die and receive Allah’s rewards than to die and face his judgment.

In the bathroom, however, I saw something that drained my confidence. Blood. Starting my menstrual cycle meant that I was unclean. Unclean Muslims could not touch the Qur’an, pray, or even touch their prayer mat. I also assumed that unclean Muslims could not go to heaven, and they certainly couldn’t start jihad training.

I was troubled—too troubled to go back to bed—so I continued on to the prayer room. Sitting on the floor, with my mat rolled up beside me, I felt a deep sorrow growing within me. I slouched onto the floor, too sad to do anything else for a while.

I wondered whether, since my tongue was still clean, Allah might listen if I prayed to him in my own language, Urdu, rather than Arabic. “O my Creator, in a few days I will be going for jihad training. I am giving my life to you because you have created me. Please, I’m begging you, don’t send me to the fires of hell on judgment day.”

The words were like dirt in my mouth. How could I talk to Allah as if he were just another person in the room with me? How could I hope to barter with him like this?

As I was praying, my mind began to drift. I wondered about heaven and hell, and whether Allah would be merciful if I, an unclean woman, were to die at that very moment. Where would Allah send me? Had I done enough?

Soon I was dreaming. In my dream, I was in a graveyard. I knew that I had died and my death had not been a glorious act of jihad. Terror coursed through me—I was afraid I would step on the graves and hurt the people still trapped in them. Everything around me was soaked in darkness—I could practically taste it. I was desperate to leave and searched in vain for a way out.

“Allah!” I called out in Urdu. “Please be merciful!”

I kept searching for an exit but stopped when I saw a single light appear in front of me, a little ways off. The closer the light came, the more clearly I could see. It shone brighter than anything I had ever seen. It was like the sun in full blaze, yet somehow I could look at it. As the light came closer, I saw that it had a face, hands, and feet. It was not just a light; it was a person. A man. And he was speaking to me.

“Come and follow me.”

“No!” I replied.

“Esther, come and follow me.”

The name this man used confused me. “I’m sorry,” I told the man made of light, “but I’m not Esther. I am Zakhira Ahmad, and I don’t want to follow you.”

The voice was softer when it spoke for a third time. The warmth and love that flowed with the words spread deep into my skin. “My daughter, come and follow me.”

I couldn’t say no a third time. I didn’t want to say no. I wanted to live in that voice, to inhale those words and float on them forever. As I breathed, it dawned on me that perhaps this person in my dream might actually be able to help get me out of the graveyard. Why was he calling me his daughter? I had no idea, but I decided to do as he said.

As soon as I made that decision, the light started moving through the graveyard. I stood, transfixed, and watched his feet as he went. Every bush and stone on the path in front of him was swept away by invisible hands as soon as he approached. Wherever he stepped, the darkness faded away. And he left behind a trail of light—and not just light, but life.

Oh! I said to myself. This light really is showing me the way out. I started to chase after him, running along the path, which was now flooded with light. When he stopped in front of a grave, I stood at his side.

“Come out,” he said, looking into the grave. I watched, amazed, as a dead man immediately rose out of the earth. Under other circumstances, I would not have been able to take my eyes off the resurrected body, but in the dream, all I cared about was the man made of light.

“Who are you to be giving life to dead people?” I asked.

He turned to me. I could feel the light deep in my lungs. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he said.

“Please, help me.” My voice sounded small. “I want to get out of this graveyard.”

He put his hand around mine. The moment he touched me, the graveyard fell away. In its place was a sight of beauty the likes of which I had never seen before. In front of us lay an ocean of brilliant light—but solid, as if it were made of crystal. Beside us and behind us was a building whose walls were made of gold. But this was not the sort of gold I had seen in even the finest jewelry. That kind of gold was lifeless and frail, while these walls were full of life and power and light.

When I was younger, I would sometimes turn on the tap in the bathroom and listen, enchanted, to the sound the water made as it filled up the sink. In my dream, I heard that same sound nearby, only this time it felt as though I could hear it with every cell in my body.

The light was equally all-encompassing. Everything around me wasn’t just bathed in light; it was light. The crystal ocean, the golden walls, even the waterfall that was hidden from my view—they all seemed to pulse with light. It was as if my eyes were seeing for the very first time.

The view before me was beyond anything I had ever seen, beyond anything I could imagine. I needed all my senses to take it in. I tried desperately to hold it in my mind, to go deeper into it, to understand what this place was.

Then I woke up.

The prayer room was silent. The air was still. I looked around me, reminding myself of my surroundings by looking at the familiar objects: the pile of rolled-up prayer mats, the cupboard filled with copies of the Qur’an, the window that looked out onto the courtyard. I was at home. Where I belonged.

And yet I suddenly felt like this was not home—that there was somewhere else I longed for at the core of my being. I had received a taste of something I’d been craving for years but had never found.

For the first time in my life, I felt peace.