A God Who Hates (11 page)

He treated my husband and me as if we were his children, trusting and confiding in us. He told us more than once of his experiences as a policeman and how he would accept bribes and beat people up in the interrogation rooms. Later he changed jobs and became a truck driver, and he told us how he would steal some of the goods he was transporting. Later still he became a doorkeeper at a brothel, before eventually returning to his native village after his wife and children had disowned him. He repented, asked God for forgiveness, and became the village sheikh. His fondness for joking was not in any way frivolous; rather, it reflected the psychological struggle he was engaged in, which I had observed ever since we had first met him.

Our friendship with him increased our doubts regarding the sincerity of the clergy, and in our conversations with him we often strayed into forbidden territory on the pretext of just joking around. He was by no means an ignorant man and was a fine practitioner of the art of conversation. He may have sensed from the outset that we wanted to use the appearance of joking to arrive at a number of truths. He himself had never doubted the truth of Islamic teachings for a minute. Nonetheless, he would usually evade answering direct questions by saying that only God knew, leaving us with the impression that he himself was not fully convinced of what he believed. In this he was very different from other sheikhs, who insisted that they had a monopoly of absolute truth.

When we left the village after three years of living next door to him, we had hundreds of unanswered questions. Our friendship with him had intensified both our doubts and our desire to search for the truth. However, I still insisted on retaining my links with Islam, fragile as they were.

Sheikh Muhammad was not our only local source of doubts regarding the teachings of Islam. During my time in the village I faced challenges of another kind. Its primitive rural society did not acknowledge that a woman was capable of being a doctor. In our first year there, I managed, through patience and persistence, to win the trust of the villagers, and of the women in particular. At night our house turned into an emergency room. I would be awakened in the middle of the night by knocking at the door and the sound of a voice calling out, “Please, Dr. Mo-rad, open the door, we need Wafa.” My husband is not a doctor but the villagers called him “doctor” nonetheless, while addressing me by my first name.

Because they trusted me, I penetrated further into their homes than even the rays of the sun did, and experienced firsthand all the secrets that lay behind their locked doors. What I found there appalled me and made me want to protest; but my voice was stifled by my fear for our own lives, which prevented me from speaking out against the injustices I witnessed.

The month of Ramadan, during which Muslims neither eat nor drink from sunrise to sunset, was one of the hardest months of the year for me. Many more patients flocked for treatment at the medical center where I worked than the number we usually saw. The number who collapsed from exhaustion and dehydration soared startlingly during the day, as did the number of those who suffered from indigestion and vomiting at night, as they stuffed themselves with food in an attempt to compensate for their daytime fast. Both men and women worked in the fields from early morning, performing arduous and exhausting agricultural labor, which, especially when the weather was hot, necessitated large quantities of water that the fast did not allow them to drink. Spurred on by my feelings of pity for them, I tried to persuade them—the women, especially—not to fast, then withdrew my suggestion when it was met with disdainful glances.

It goes without saying that the men treated their women inhumanely and, in this rural society, they were even more pitifully exploited. Many of them gave birth in the open fields, and I would sometimes be called out to help a woman whose labor pains had come upon her as she tilled the ground. My anger rose as I stood helpless, not knowing what to do in the face of such injustice. Sometimes I would exert my authority as a doctor and scream at the men, “Don’t you feel guilty at all?,” but they would usually just laugh and refuse to take my question seriously.

The exploitation of women as a workforce was not, however, my main concern. I was much more worried by the sexual abuse they suffered. Because I was a woman, I got to know about a great many cases that a male doctor would never have learned of. Although sexual assault was widespread in the area, it was well protected from the view of others. By showing my sympathy for the women I was able to win their confidence, and they told me secrets of a kind they usually took to the grave. Many had been raped and most of these rape victims had fallen prey to male members of their own family, usually their own fathers. Unmarried women who became pregnant as a result of these rapes were murdered as soon as their condition was discovered to wash away the disgrace and keep the scandal hidden. In some cases the murderer was the rapist himself. Some victims were deliberately poisoned with the pesticides that were used to spray the apple trees in that region famous for its apple production. The death certificate would read: “Death from natural causes.” No doctor was required to obtain a death certificate for these women. Witnesses were sufficient.

By the time I had completed my period of service in the village my heart had bled and I was seething with fury. I returned to Lattakia three years later a more experienced woman, well schooled in the human rights abuses that took place in the society in which I lived.

AT THE END
of the 1980s the world accused Syria of supporting world terrorism; its name was added to the international terrorism list and rigorous economic sanctions were imposed on it. I believe it was at about this time that a young Palestinian who held a Syrian passport placed a bomb in his girlfriend’s suitcase before she boarded a plane at a London airport. After his action was discovered the culprit took refuge in the Syrian Embassy in London, and British police had to storm the building before they could arrest him. After this incident Syria broke off diplomatic ties with Britain, and its relations with the international community reached a crisis point.

The economic sanctions began to affect Syria, and life there in the last four years of the 1980s became an unbearable hell. The ideological oppression rife in Syrian Muslim society on the one hand and its dictatorial regime on the other made young Syrians want to look for somewhere else in the world to live. Then the deteriorating economic situation poured oil on the flames and made them feel even more unjustly treated, further increasing their desire to emigrate.

My husband spent many nights waiting outside every single foreign embassy in Damascus, and we suffered repeated disappointments each time another embassy turned down our application. He spent most of our income on fares for his journeys back and forth to Damascus, where all the foreign embassies were, and on the hotels where he stayed while he waited to submit his papers to yet another consulate. I became impatient with his constant traveling and his unceasing search for somewhere else to live, as they were eating up most of our income. But whenever I brought the issue up he would tell me hopefully, “I’m utterly convinced I don’t belong in this country and that there is somewhere else in the world that deserves me more.”

In May 1988 the miracle came to pass and confirmed that my husband had been right in thinking that there was another country waiting for him that deserved him more than the land of his birth did. He received his visa for the United States, and left Syria eight months before I did. During the period we were separated he wrote to me at least twice a week. In his letters he described to me at length and in detail his impressions of American society. I still have those letters. In one of them he wrote, “Today I saw an American woman climbing an electricity pole to carry out some repairs—can you believe it?” In another letter he told me, “I saw on TV today how American emergency services tried to rescue a little cat that had fallen into a pit. Their attempts continued for about two hours, and everyone clapped when the cat was brought out alive.”

When I read his letters to my colleagues at the hospital where I worked I was accused of being dazzled by American society and ignoring its moral decadence. Privately I some-times wondered what our conception of morality was, and why we should not consider an action like the American emergency services’ rescue of a kitten to be a moral act. I wondered, why are people in our homeland less well treated than a cat in America? I couldn’t understand why my colleagues considered the United States to be a morally decadent society when they had no firsthand knowledge about it. If the United States is morally decadent, I wondered, then why are so many of my fellow Syrians standing in line at the door to its embassy? I knew that the only way I could answer all these questions was to join my husband and write about it firsthand.

My husband knew that I had a gift for writing and an unusually fine command of literary Arabic, and insisted in his letters to me that life in the United States would give me a unique opportunity to attain prominence as a writer in the Arab world. The dream of leaving grew day by day, and the way the people around me gossiped about my husband’s absence made me cling to it all the more and increased my longing to escape from a society in which I could not reconcile my religious convictions with the reality I observed around me.

On December 15, 1988 I got a heaven-sent gift: I received my American visa, after spending three days and nights outside the U.S. consulate in Damascus. Waiting before me in line was a Muslim woman, veiled from head to toe, who constantly repeated verses from the Koran and implored God to help her get her visa. She turned to me and said, “Daughter, repeat this prayer and I’m sure your wish will be granted: Say ‘God is one, Oh Lord, blind their hearts and their sight.’ “ I looked at her in surprise and asked, “Why do you want God to blind their hearts and their sight?” She replied, “Because if they knew the truth they’d never give me a visa. My husband’s in America already and we’re planning to stay there.”

I lifted my face to the heavens and pleaded, “Oh Lord, set me on the path to freedom and I promise You that I will fight for the freedom of others.”

On the twenty-fifth of that same month, on Christmas night, the plane set me down in Los Angeles, where my husband was waiting to greet me. He was living in a small apartment, and his next-door neighbor was an American lady. When she heard that he was going to the airport to meet me she hoisted an American flag at the door of her apartment and told him: “Tell your wife that America welcomes her.”

I was overwhelmed with happiness when I saw the flag and realized why my husband’s American neighbor, Diane, was flying it. She was unable to pronounce my Arabic name and so decided to give me an American one: She began to call me “Pam.” I did not like the name very much for the simple reason that in Arabic we do not have the sound
p,
and so, when we try to say it, we pronounce it like a
b.
It made Diane laugh to hear me introduce myself to others as
Bam.
Bam was the first word I looked up in the English dictionary, and when I learned it is used to indicate a sudden impact, I ran over to Diane’s to suggest changing the name. I told her, “Diane, I’d rather be called Lina than Bam.” She laughed, and today she still calls me Lina. When I recall this episode now, I wonder if it was mere chance that. I had accidentally referred to myself as Bam—or was it my fate?

That same week I registered at California State University’s, Long Beach, language institute. There were about fifteen students in the class—myself, a woman from El Salvador, a man from Yemen—and the rest were all Japanese. I was like a child entranced by a new toy. I had never met anyone from El Salvador or Japan before, or even anyone from Yemen, an Arab country only two hours away from Syria by plane, and I was glad to make the acquaintance of all of them. In my limited broken English I was able to learn from them within a short time things I had never learned in my own country.

My English was confined mainly to the medical terms I had learned while studying to become a doctor, but nonetheless, from the very start, I felt a great desire to acquire the language. I recall that on one occasion the teacher asked each of us to read a page in the
Los Angeles Times
and talk about it. I spent a long time leafing through the paper looking for an article that would be easy to read and prepare. My search led me to the Calendar section where I found what I was looking for: the “Dear Abby” column. The first time I read it, I became an addict. Getting to know “Abby” through her column proved to be another important turning point in my life. “Abby” receives letters from readers with problems, to which she proposes a solution. People may laugh when I say this, but you can learn a lot about America by reading “Dear Abby.” Through the people who wrote to her with their myriad of problems, I began to learn about the greater social issues in the United States, both the good and the bad. In turn, reading these letters, even filled with problems as they were, revealed to me the advantages of life in America and, very slowly, made me fall in love with it.

I believe that the quickest way to learn about a society’s advantages is to learn first of all about its problems and how it deals with them. Every time I read about a reader’s problem and the solution she proposed I would imagine the type of solution Islam might suggest and be frustrated at the difference between the two. I would wonder how many Dear Abbys our Muslim world would need in order to solve our problems in more scientific and humane ways. Thoughts of “Abby” and her readers took up residence in my mind and, with time, I turned into a sort of Dear Abby myself, with one difference: I write in Arabic for Arab readers.

After I had been in California for two months our financial situation deteriorated and I found myself in the position of having to accept any job my limited English would allow in order to bring in a bit of money. With the help of a young Syrian I found work at a gas station. Once I had helped blood pump through the human heart; now I found myself pumping gas! Some may think I was embarrassed by my new job. On the contrary, I regarded it as a golden opportunity to acquire firsthand experience of all classes of American society instead of just reading about them in the “Dear Abby” column. I observed the actions and behavior of the gas station’s clients, and listened to what they had to say. Some of them would start talking to me, and sometimes the conversation would branch out into personal matters.