cheater, cheater, za’atar eater

When H, Z and I walked out of our Sharia class, we came across a niqabi whom they knew. (Niqabi is Muslim American slang for niqab-wearer, like hijabi is shorthand for hijab-wearer). H and Z didn’t introduce us so, as they enthusiastically discussed a recent exam, I studied the niqabi.

She wore a tightly fitting mauve jilbab with her black head- and face-cover — a combination I couldn’t help but consider a little contradictory, like coupling red lipstick with a no-nonsense hijab or a burqa and hot pink high heels.

By the end of my study, my mental notes were that she had tawny skin, was slender and double-jointed, and spoke with her hands.

After we walked away, Z teased H about helping the niqabi on the exam.

“You little cheater.” Z confirmed. They laughed. They mustn’t be serious.

“I’m not the cheater,” H retorted, “I helped her.”

A little car crash took place in my brain.

Did she just say that out loud? Rewind. Did this jilbab-clad young lady just casually tell me — a recent acquaintance — that she helped that niqab-wearing woman on the test? And they are Sharia majors? Could this situation be more ironic? Perhaps there’s been a fatwa? How could I have missed that memo?

In my head, the ambulance siren got louder and louder. An explanation would be here any moment. Yes, it’d repair this mess.

“She’s a first year,” H explained without the defensiveness of the guilty, “She’s older than us, and she’s redoing this year, because she failed last year. You know, if we don’t help her, she’ll never make it.”

Well, if there ever was a noble cheater, this could be she.

may i see your face?

When someone sees you without your hijab for the first time (presumably not because you lost it on a roller coaster or in a railway accident), you invariably get, “My God! Your hair is so [a pause] long / short / curly / straight / wavy!”

Therefore, you can imagine my surprise when one of my college friends remarked, upon seeing my hair, “I feel so privileged — I mean, to be able to see it. Fully fifty percent of the world’s population doesn’t get to do what I just did!” Um, if hijab is supposed to curb the ego, it didn’t work that time. My head got bigger after that comment, no matter how hard my hijab tried to physically constrain it.

For a change, today I was the one who felt privileged. On this delightfully windy Saturday morning, I was at UJ for class. (It was a mandatory catch-up class. The Middle East is strange, but not strange enough that Saturday morning classes are not strange. Eek. Too many iterations of ‘strange’ there.) Anyway, The professor is late or we’re early — who knows — so we girls are seated and the outnumbered boys have opted to wait outside until the single most popular girl in the class arrives (i.e. the instructor).

I seize the opportunity and ask my niqabi friend if I may see her face. I’ve been speaking to her lovely round eyes for two days and, much as I like analyzing them, I want context.

Before I reveal to you what wonders I saw there, behind that exotic, fluttering black niqab, perhaps I should tell you about this young lady’s personality. (By the way, the young lady in question is eight years older than me. “No, I don’t want to tell you my age. I can’t. You’ll be shocked.” She warned me in English. “You promise you won’t be shocked?” But it turns out it’s irrelevant whether I was shocked. Even her age is irrelevant, because she’s one of the most upbeat people I’ve seen yet. Sure, judging by her irresistible laugh and smiling eyes, I’d have guessed she was several years my junior. I mean, you’re supposed to become more jaded over time, but I think she missed that memo.)

So about her personality.

For starters, she shakes my hand with her black-gloved one as if we were chums, raised together since infancy, sisters who drank at the same breast and choked over the same piece of hard candy. She has a sort of swagger, confident but unproud. And as if those two things don’t make her endearing enough, when she comes to class, even though I can’t see her face, I can tell from her eyes that she’s smiling.

I learned from one of our pre-class conversations that she has relatives in the U.S. or Canada (or some other predominantly white-peopled region of the earth), and so she was absolutely enraptured by my American expressions.

“You’re married to a Bosnian? Dude, that’s pretty cool.” My l was hard, American.

“Dude! Dude!” She pointed as if she’d caught me red-handed. “And cool!” Her l was soft, like that of Arabic and Spanish.

“Totally!”

“That’s another one! Totally!” She imitated me, again using her soft l. We laughed. (Read that l in your mind as you wish.)

“Yeah, I guess we say those a lot. Hey, your English is pretty good. Have you been to the U.S.?”

“No. I spent time in the U.A.E. though.”

“Awesome.”

“Awesome!” She laughed. “That’s another one.”

She was on a roll. Every time I opened my mouth, a beach-goer word fell out. And every time she opened her mouth (which I naturally couldn’t see), she caught those words like a wave. By the end of our short pre-class conversation, she had caught all my beach-bum words. All she needed was a surfing board and maybe a burqini and she’d be California ready.

So this morning she greets me with that veiled (not vested) smile and that ecstatic handshake I’ve already come to expect. I see a guy or two drop their books on seats and leave the classroom, so I pop the question. (I know that’s usually said in reference to proposals, but this was a kind of proposal.)

“Do I get to see your face?”

She darted a mischievous glance to and fro. The coast was clear. Up went the niqab.

No, I’m not going to describe it to you, her face. That’d be cheating. Plus, removing the hijab (or niqab) selectively is one of the two perks of donning the veil. The other perk, of course, is donning it.

we few, we happy few

It’s not St. Crispin’s Day, I’m not at war, and (much as I wish I were) I’m not Shakespeare’s Henry V. Still, I cannot help but think: “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers (and sisters).”

During the Fulbright orientation in D.C., I met a hijabi Fulbrighter, A, among a myriad of other beyond-awesome people. As she and I and other newly met girlfriends strolled through our nation’s capital, we were accosted right and left — in the best possible way.

For example, the Muslim hotel concierge asked us about our countries of origin. On the street, a woman in hijab and salwar kameez requested directions. (We were just an ounce less clueless than she was.) Then, as we waited for the crosswalk, we witnessed a taxi driver make a perilous turn, with hands and face poking out of his window — all in order to tell us assalamu alaikum, peace be unto you.

One of our friends, K, regarded us quizzically after one of these perilous hi-and-runs. So we explained that salams were greetings of peace, an etiquette of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). “Do you… like that?” she asked hesitantly. I completely understood where she was coming from. It looked like were being tokenized, that random passersby were making assumptions about our religious affiliation simply based on our appearance. And yet A and I couldn’t repress our smiles. “Do we like it? We love it!”

Nothing kicks estrangement out the window like a stranger’s salam. It’s like a “welcome to my ‘hood” sign. It’s like an “if you need any help, I’m here” signal. (Salam with a smile is like an In-N-Out burger with onions. Yes, it’s that good.)

Unfortunately, I realized that I only experience the euphoric hallucinogenic effects of salams where Muslims are scarce. Why, you ask? Because, ironically, where Muslims are ubiquitous, salams are harder to come by.

Take, for example, Egypt.

Cairo alone has a 7 million+ Muslim-majority population (which, by the way, outnumbers the entire population of its Sahara-plagued neighbor, Libya.) If Muslim residents of Cairo were to say salam every time they came across a fellow Muslim — well, they’d do little else.

As a guest of Egypt last summer, however, I didn’t know that. It was my first trip to a Muslim-majority country — correction, to any country outside the U.S. As I ventured with Baba onto new territory, I told myself I was going to be educated, thoughtful, attentive. What I succeeded in being, however, was naive.

After committing several touristy foibles at the airport (like taking pictures of the “Enter [Egypt] in Peace” banner — an allusion to a verse in the Qur’an), I militantly guarded my suitcases as Baba tried to retrieve a lost bag. As hijabi janitors passed by in their Guantanamo-like orange jumpsuits, I said my salams. They looked at each other, amused, but humored me nonetheless. I quickly noticed that no one — I mean, no one was saying salam.

Oh, I thought to myself. This is what it must feel like to be in places like Dearborn, Michigan, where seeing Muslims is like breathing air — taken for granted. I’ve heard about places like that, where a Muslim will meet a Muslim and look upon her with an indifferent eye. (Who but me goes to Cairo to learn about Dearborn? That’s like going to the sea to study the little pool of rainwater in your backyard.)

That made me think — yes, as a hijabi, I do wear a costume that, on most days, wins me gawking looks at the local Albertsons or no word of acknowledgement from the librarian. And yet, a single comical salam out of a taxi cab window makes this sore thumb a little proud to stick out.

have a question? axe the idol

When a Muslim all-women party gets started, it’s impossible to tell which fair lady came in with a hijab, all allusions to illustrious majors and careers are jettisoned (until mothers expose them, of course), and conversations usually turn fluffy, especially among strangers.

Not this time.

At yesterday’s bridal shower, I met a couple of young ladies with whom I’d previously exchanged little more than the perfunctory salams and kisses. This time, sitting in a sprawling patio, we spoke about hijab. Or the lack thereof.

First, we joked about the times and places we were most tempted to send our hijabs fluttering to the floor and our hair fluttering in the wind.

M and H — both young professionals — agreed that the mall was the very place. I was thinking of something more cliche — namely, on horseback in a field as wide as the horizon, under a luxurious sun. But really, dream of taking off your hijab in whatever imaginary place you’d like, right?

Leaning back in her chair and touching her hair, M then remarked, half to herself, “But I’d never take off my hijab. No, I’d never take it off.” She spoke about her relatively recent decision to wear hijab. That it arose — not from a deep immersion in a hijabi community but in the books. She had felt an emptiness in her life and had developed a disgust for the lifestyle she had seen some lead. The more she read, she told us, the more she felt the need to cover her hair — an act of obedience to God. She felt it so keenly that she’d throw on a hood on her way to work. Then, one day she decided she’d take the big step — “put it on and never take it off.”  Two years ago, she made the promise to God to pray regularly and don the hijab, and she assured us that “I haven’t broken that promise since.”

H chimed in, “When you think about it, the reason for which most people would put on the hijab is good — for God. When you consider all the reasons why you’d take it off — they’re all social. To please people. And who are these people? You know, you think about it, and it’s like why should I change myself for them?”

No matter what philosophical questions brewed inside my head in college, I’ve never seriously considered taking it off. Because though most don’t know this, I’m stubborn, even bullheaded at the core. And even at the times when I’ve been most disenchanted with Muslims and the world, I’ve never felt inclined to satiate someone else’s visual hunger, or make someone else feel triumphant at the apparent dissolution of my own faith. There is nothing to celebrate in the shattering of ideals or in the collapse of hope — and for me, Islam provided (and continues to provide) exactly those two things: ideals to yearn after, and hope to turn life’s lemons into lemonade.

As my thoughts wandered, H made a remark that made me reflect. She said, “When we’re 14, 15 the difference between right and wrong seems clear enough. It’s when we’re in our 20′s — that’s when there are so many questions, and we’re not sure about anything anymore.”

Our college educations often question the very foundations of our beliefs, the authenticity of the very sources we’ve trusted all our lives. And that’s not all bad. It prepares us to make careful, deliberate choices, instead of simply inheriting our parents’ ideas like sheep.

Prophet Ibraheem (Abraham) has always been my Qur’anic guide on this. After all, isn’t he the one who, as a youth, complains of his confusion to the heavens? Isn’t he the one who contracts the sun and moon as his gods, then finds them inadequate? Ultimately, Prophet Ibraheem puts an axe to the very idols that his father built — and with those idols challenges a hegemonic system that worships the created instead of the Creator. Sound familiar?