Because I Said So (5 page)

That could very well have been true; her name was not among those of the thirty-five members who had signed the petition. But that left about one hundred members who hadn’t taken a stand.

They were just another part of the silent, moderate majority who allow extremists to define Islam in the world.

“. . . a father’s kindness towards the poor, deserted babe.”

“Mama! Dada! Mama! Dada!
Mama! Dada!” my young son cooed every night, lulling himself to sleep by singing my name and the Urdu name he called my father.

Literally,
dada
means “paternal grandfather,” and it was the word that Shibli had heard my brother’s children call my seventy-T h e S c a r l e t L e t t e r
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two-year-old father. This gentle man has taken to calling himself a

“soccer mom” in his retirement days, shuttling his grandchildren to the arts center and soccer field, changing diapers. Whenever I hear Shibli comfort himself with his names for my father and me, my heart swells.

For so many years I had held the forces of my culture’s paternalism against my father—my loving, accepting father. But as religiously orthodox as he might have seemed to my rebellious younger self, he always tried to be open-minded and compassionate. His rejection of the social stigma of Shibli’s conception had been a public manifestation of his unconditional love for me. And by showing me that unconditional love, he helped free me to be a mother who could show unconditional love to her son. Making peace with my father meant making peace with myself.

My son helped me realize that my father is an extraordinary man. He could have bowed to societal and extended family pressure to live a public lie about my child, but he urged me to be truthful. Through the circle of life, these two generations, boy and man, had encouraged me to be a strong, powerful woman.

In a gesture of our solidarity, before my trial my father and I had written an article on the battle at the mosque for the
Journal
of Islamic Law and Culture.
We had traveled so far together, as father and daughter, to transcend our traditional boundaries. It was not a victory just for Islam, I told him when the article was published, but for us.

As my trial wore on, I sat through a night in my father’s room at the hospital where Shibli had been born. Earlier that evening, my father had patiently hosted a visit from his busy, toddler grandson, who turned the sink faucet into a fountain, spraying the room. Now I watched my father sleep; the gentle sound of his breath filled the quiet room. The water dripped in the apparatus that sent him fresh oxygen. My father’s body was feeling the burden of challenging the dark forces in this world with the only weapon he had: love.

Here, where vulnerability pierced ego, I was able to see my father with clarity. Earlier, he had wept in the emergency room for the way puritans, with their divisive ideology, had overtaken our
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local Muslim community. “I love everybody,” he cried. When he awoke in the morning, it would be my turn to echo the words that had allowed me to rewrite Hester Prynne’s legacy in the twenty-first century. “I love you,” I would tell him.

There were two Latin words
that separated my fate from the destinies of women such as Hester Prynne:
pro bono.
I knew it was time to hire a lawyer. Amina Lawal did not have one when an all-male jury of Muslim men sentenced her to death; but for her appeal, she had Nigerian attorney and human rights activist Ayesha Imam. Imam helped Lawal win her freedom.

I had a powerful legal team headed by an American Jewish lawyer and an Egyptian American Muslim attorney. Attorney David Remes supported my case as he concurrently represented Muslim prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. He identified my defense immediately in the mosque constitution: “Each member shall exercise tolerance and respect the right of other members and their opinions.” Mr. Remes wanted to invoke Islamic justice, because he knew it should prevail when it came to truth-telling.

I was also blessed to have standing by me Khalid Abou El Fadl, one of the greatest scholars of Islamic law. Dr. Fadl said that Islamic jurisprudence did not allow political expediency to over-ride a morally compelled duty such as speaking the truth. “The Prophet says a person who conspires is a silent devil,” he told me.

“No one has a right to put you on trial. This is nothing less than an inquisition.”

As my trial continued,
I took to heart acts of faith in which my twenty-one-month-old son revealed to me the divine providence of following my instincts as his mother and as a truth-teller.

I knew that this effort to exile me, if successful, would be a de facto ban not only on my son but also on the future of truth-telling in the Muslim world. And I knew that truth and righteous-ness would prevail; my son told me so.

The Ziploc justice meeting broke up as the man who had
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declared that I was worthless recited the
azan,
or call to prayer, which starts, “Allahu Akbar.”

Listening to the call spill into the room, Shibli paused from his spinning around the room with his Foosball.

“Ababooboo,” he said through a grin, imitating the sound of the
azan.

As my mother and I gathered to leave, Shibli scampered upstairs into the main hall and stood in the sacred space where my mother and I had taken to sitting. He lay in full prostration in the darkness, just like a good Muslim man, then jumped up with a smile and caught my hand in his own.

“Hester,” said he, “hast thou found peace?”

In the end,
Hester Prynne becomes a heroine to her community and in American literature. She perseveres. Her daughter, Pearl, marries into a royal family and, though Hester leaves her cottage at the outskirts of the village for some years, she returns to give counsel to others who carry a psychic scarlet letter on their hearts.

As I write this, I remain under trial. Even if I am ultimately banished from my mosque, I consider the trial and the cultural examination it has opened a victory, for myself and for others. A gay man from the Arab world wrote to ask me how he could overcome the despair of being considered a criminal in his native land. A crowd of Muslims, young and old, male and female, mobbed me in support after I made a presentation at a large Islamic organization’s convention about women’s rights in Muslim communities. A young woman from Pakistan hugged me again and again in appreciation of my efforts to reclaim women’s rights in Islam. A young woman from Boston thanked me for my work and said, “Give a kiss to Shibli from me.”

I reject the letter
Z
that many in my community want to thrust upon me. The message I stand for, instead, is women’s rights and truth. One night, in downtown Morgantown, holding Shibli’s hand, I walked with a poster board I had created embla-18

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zoned with an “Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in Mosques.”

Standing in front of a notorious underage bar was one of my greatest detractors at the mosque, a Muslim man whose family operates the club; ironically, the bar is named Club Z.

Surrounded by co-eds in micro-miniskirts, he avoided my eye. I stood strong and proud, firmly holding my son’s hand and my poster. I knew the spirit of Hester Prynne walked with me.

Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty,
came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves, with her maiden hope, and a happiness
before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. . . . All
at once, as was with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the
sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, glad-dening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to
gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees.

Feeling triumphant about standing before my community, regardless of the final resolution of my trial, I took my mother and son to California for a few days’ respite. My father was recu-perating at home, trawling Internet message boards discussing my case. “Death to Asra,” said one that called for me to be stoned to death. On the other side of the country, I took Shibli to the shore of the Pacific Ocean. The wind snapped his face into wide grins, the sun glittered off his untamed curls. My mother quietly smiled.

I took to flight and flipped through the air in a cartwheel, free.

Two Heads Are

Better Than Three

M a r y R o a c h

In the early days
of transplant science, a horribly enthusiastic surgeon named Vladimir Demikhov grafted the head of a puppy onto the neck of a full-grown dog—a dog that already had a head, thank you very much. In the files for my last book, I have a photograph of the aftermath of this ill-advised undertaking. The severed head is sewn into the front of the neck of the intact dog, nose up, so that the two canines are face-to-face, constantly reminded of each other’s presence. You can almost see the Wellbutrin bottle in the background.

Bear with me, I’m working on a metaphor here.

Seven years ago, I met a man and fell in love. He had been married before and had two young daughters. Because I was in love, and because at that time his children lived with their mother in another state and our visits with them went well, I did not give the complexities of the situation all that much thought. I did not read even one of the dozen or so books out there about “blended families.” (I love the term “blended.” I love the ridiculous optimism of it. It suggests an outcome that is smooth and delightful and effortless to attain. “I’ll be the mango!”
“I’ll
be bananas!”

“Dad, you push FRAPPE!”)

After a couple years, the man’s family moved back to our city.

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Do you see what I wrote? “The man’s family.” They were his family, and I was his second wife. His parents are her kids’ grandparents, which gives his ex-wife a permanent slot there between the generations on the family tree. I don’t know if there’s even a protocol for adding second wives to family trees. I’m imagining a faint dotted line of the sort used by mapmakers to delineate unpaved roads or proposed subway extensions that have been in the works since the Eisenhower administration. There is an inal-terable solidity to the ties of matrilineage. These are people attached to one another by the uncorrodable bonds of blood and ancestry and family photo albums. A second wife is a flimsy, sewn-on thing.

This became clear to me shortly after their return. My husband’s ex-wife gave me a present and a card that said, “Welcome to the family.” This was an extraordinarily nice gesture, for she is an extraordinarily nice and generous person, but for some reason it did not sit right with me. When you first fall in love with someone, you have a sense of the two of you as a complete and perfect universe. Like any new couple, you want to feel like the core of a family unit. It was naïve and self-centered, but such is the nature of new love. Reading that card was my Demikhov moment. You are the stitched-on dog head, it might as well have said. No, I thought,
you
are. No, YOU are!

Then I forgot about it, because things were going well. My husband’s kids liked me, and when the four of us were together, I permitted myself to think of us as a family. The transplant, it seemed, had taken. Of course, this probably made my husband’s ex-wife—“my ex-wife,” as I sometimes slip up and call her—feel like the unwanted dog head. (With stepfamilies, it seems, someone always has to be holding the “big fat loser alone at recess”

card. I once saw a book entitled
How to Win as a Stepfamily
. I imagined opening it up and finding 213 blank pages with the last page saying, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha YOU CAN’T!!!!”) As it turned out, the ex-wife did not have to feel this way for long. Soon it was my turn. Like transplanted appendages, stepparents are allowed to thrive and feel good for a short while
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before the rejection stage begins. Family counselors call this the

“honeymoon period.” Inevitably and all too soon, the honeymoon ends. Someone starts to have issues.

Often this coincides with someone hitting puberty. Up until puberty, you can pretty much get a kid to go along with anything.

All kids have issues with a parent’s remarriage, but the issues remain more or less subcutaneous until adolescence. As long as the equilibrium holds, stepparents—provided they are not abusive, overbearing boors—are treated like any other adult in the child’s universe: one more person to play Chinese checkers or spring for lip gloss. Not the greatest thing in the world, but not the worst.

Then comes puberty. Now the issues demand to be heard.

They unionize. They organize demonstrations and carry signs.

This is a period when everything is annoying, and a stepmother, especially to a girl, can top the list. A stepmother is a random extraneous adult thrown into a girl’s life, day in and day out, taking up her dad’s time and attention, which she doesn’t want anyway these days but she’s going to resent its absence nonetheless.

The child who just last year was walking hand-in-hand with you to the corner store is now refusing to laugh at your jokes or look you in the eye.

I was no longer me; I had become the things I represented: someone standing in the way of Mom and Dad’s remarriage, someone who usurps dad’s love. When I look at the situation from a stepchild’s perspective, I can understand the resentment.

Of course they have issues. I would too. That doesn’t mean I enjoy it or handle it well. Issues breed issues. It is not easy to enjoy the company of someone who makes it clear, however subtly, that she wishes you’d go away. Not surprisingly, the odds are not in favor of the stepfamily living happily ever after. I read somewhere that 60 percent of marriages involving “blended” families end in divorce. Rocks in the Osterizer.