The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (5 page)

"`Man' include women," Uncle Taher said. "It's just the way we talk."

"So men and women are equal too?" she said.

"God don't care whether you a man or woman, anymore than He look at black or white," Uncle Taher said. "The Quran says, `God don't suffer the reward of anyone's deeds to be lost, male or female.' None of that matters with God."

Tayiba slid back onto her bottom, satisfied.

"And who was the first Muslim?" Uncle Taher went on.

"Abu Bakr," Eyad said. He wore a blue woolen cap with a big yellow puffball.

"Nah," Uncle Taher said. "Not the first Muslim." Eyad was crestfallen. His puffball fell to one side.

"Ali," Danny Nabolsy said. His little brother Ramsey fidgeted beside him.

"No." Uncle Taher paused for effect. "Abu Bakr was the first man, "he said, and Eyad's cloud lifted a little-vindication. "And Ali was the first child. Ten years old-and doesn't that show a child can do something important?" he said, and they all sat up taller on their ankles. "But what I asked you was, who was the first person to become Muslim, the very first?"

"Oh-I know!" Hanifa raised her hand so high that she needed to hold it up with the other hand. Uncle Taher called on her. "Khadija!" she fairly sang.

"That's right!" Uncle Taher boomed, and she beamed with the glory of it. "The Prophet's wife, Lady Khadija. And who was number one in the deep after the Prophet's death, that everyone went to with their how-come questions?"

"Aisha!" Khadra said, with a triumphal glance at Hakim.

"That's right. And who was the person closest to the Prophet's heart?"

This time Hakim's hand went up first. "Fatima," he said, without so much as a sideways look at Khadra.

"Show me how you pray," Uncle Taher said, sitting cross-legged in the masallah with a brown leather kufi on his head. The kids lined up, girls on one side, boys on the other. Malik Jefferson started to raise his hands for the first "allahu."

"Hang on," Uncle Taher said. "It's not the hundred-yard dash. You want to focus. You want to hold on to your nia-your purpose and intent."

Khadra, Hanifa, and Tayiba gave Uncle Taher a workout with their questions. Are birthdays haram? Mama said birthday parties are vainglorious. What is vainglorious? How come the Islamic year is only 1398? How come Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women but Muslim women can't marry non-Muslim men? Will all non-Muslims go to hell? He called them the "How Come Girls."

"Do everything with nia," he admonished, as the children filed out.

As far as they could see, to the east and to the south and to the west, nothing was moving on all the vastness of the High Prairie. Only the green grass was rippling in the wind, and white clouds drifted in the high, clear sky.

"It's a great countrj Caroline, " Pa said. "But there will be will Indians and wolves here for many a long day. "

-Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lime House on the Prairie

Zuhura stood on the porch of the Dawah Center Home Office in a full skirt, one hand on her hip, the other shading her eyes from the sun as she looked out across the street at a red pick-up truck, around which a klatch of locals hostile to the Dawah was gathering. The Center was only a mile from the Fallen Timbers Townhouses at the edge of Indianapolis, but technically lay within the city limits of Simmonsville, a small, economically depressed town. Many of its residents were not so happy about the Muslims doing God's work there, and some of these were the men Zuhura was watching.

The Dawah Center was not a mosque like Salam, but a nonprofit outreach office, a dream begun by devout but impoverished Arab and Indo-Pakistani graduate students in the mid-1960s and run from filing cabinets in the home of one or the other of its board members. Until recently, that is. The Center only had a shoestring budget and was lucky to have found a Victorian fixer-upper on this quiet, old-fashioned street lined with maple, black walnut, and elm trees. It had a big backyard with three crabapple trees and one mulberry that the Dawah children picked bare in June. A large side yard spread with gravel served as the parking lot; a freestanding garage served as a garden shed. A flagstone path led to a charming outbuilding behind the house. This had been insulated and converted into small guest quarters. There was a root cellar, used mainly as a warehouse for Dawah literature.

Dutchman's breeches, Johnny-jump-ups, and wild violets crept here and there over the flagstones. A deep bank of tiger lilies camouflaged the chain-link fence on one side of the yard. Tall lilacs grew along the fence shared with the back neighbor, and a pussy willow bush filled one corner.

On the oaken front door was a small placard of Quranic calligraphy:

Let there arise from among you a band of people, inviting to all that is good, enjoining what is right, and forbidding what is wrong. They are the ones to attain felicity

Thumbtacked underneath it was a framed postcard picture of an oil lamp glowing in a niche. Rather than quaint old oil lamps, of course, fluorescent tubes were the actual source of light in the house-there was an energy crisis, after all.

The Dawah Center officers, including Khadra's father, worked long hours for low salaries. Denied themselves other careers where they could have made more money. Got home haircuts from their wives, lived simple and frugal lives. Yusuf Thoreau, the office accountant, was so scrupulous with Dawah money that if he accidentally took a pen home he charged himself for it. The Center wives took turns cleaning house, right down to the toilet bowls, to save on cleaning bills, and the Dawah men mowed the lawn and did the maintenance work themselves. Service for the sake of the On-High.

On the other side of the chainlink fence in the Center yard, an elderly white woman could often be found working in her vegetable garden. This morning, she marched with spry step to the Dawah Center door, ignoring the men around the red pick-up, and announced to Zuhura and to Kuldip Khan, who had joined her on the porch, "I am Mrs. Moore. I am a Friend. Here is some rhubarb." She presented long reddish stalks that mystified Kuldip, the onearmed Pakistani editor of the Dawah newsletter, The Islamic Forerunner. He'd lost his right arm in a printing-press accident in Rawalpindi and wore a prosthetic one, most days.

He thanked her profusely.

"Salam alaykom, "Mrs. Moore said.

"Wa alaikum assalam, wa rahmatulla!" Zuhura responded, beaming at her.

"You speak Arabic, then?" Kuldip said, surprised. He spoke Urdu but, of course, read Arabic.

"Bits and pieces," the woman said, her face half hidden under her voluminous straw hat. "Just enough to get around when I lived in Syria, you know."

"You've lived in the Middle East?"

"Although you could get around just as well with French in those days," Mrs. Moore went on. "But I prided myself on learning a bit of the language wherever I was. Unlike Agatha, who never bothered."

Kuldip, who had never been able to cure himself of being an Agatha Christie reader, despite discovering, in secondary school, that her writing reeked of Orientalism, was going to ask, his voice squeaking excitedly, "the Agatha?" but Mrs. Moore was already pottering down the sidewalk, getting baleful stares from the crowd at the pick-up.

"Where did this wonderful rhubarb come from?" Trish Nabolsy asked, coming out of the front door as Zuhura stepped in to put the stalks in the fridge. Kuldip explained the unexpected gift of the morning as Mrs. Moore waved good-bye.

"Well, praise be," Trish said. Like Kuldip, she'd come out to keep an eye on the worrisome situation across the street. Trish was an American convert with bright red hair, eyelashes so pale she seemed to have none, and freckles all over her face. Her husband, Omar, was the Dawah general director and looked like an Arab Marlboro Man, rugged and mustached. He and Trish and their four sons lived in a notoriously messy white clapboard house. Khadra and Eyad rode to many a Dawah youth camp in the Nabolsys' muddy Volkswagen. The Shamy kids loved going to Aunt Trish's: the Nabolsy house was messy, but you could do stuff there-finger paint and rock polish and wood burn, or feed Ramsey's iguana or the hamster that belonged to little Jalaludin (called JD). "As long as you don't feed the hamster to the iguana," Sammy, the oldest boy, joked. And Danny, the nicest brother, would push you on the tire swing that hung off a fat four-trunked cottonwood tree in the front yard. Or all the kids together could play air hockey or ping-pong in the basement, amid the beat-up armchairs and cobwebby signs that said "McGovern" and "My Mercy Prevaileth over My Wrath."

Trish didn't like it when people assumed she became a Muslim for her husband. "I was Muslim for years before I met Omar," she'd bristle. She'd been in the peace movement in the 1960s at a place called Haight-Asbury in San Francisco. She was unique in the Dawah Center community because she was the only woman who didn't cover her hair, except during prayers. It was the special project of Khadra's mother to persuade Trish to "perfect her Islam," as she put it, by covering that red hair with hijab.

The group across the street was the doing of a man named Orvil Hubbard. Hubbard was a tall, gaunt man with a crew cut and a limp, who liked to wear his old army uniform with the Congressional Medal of Honor pinned on whenever he protested against the Muslim presence. He'd announced at a city council meeting that, due to the incursions of "certain parties" on the character of their town, he and other private citizens were forming the American Protectors of the Environs of Simmonsville, and whoever wanted to join was welcome. "I'm not speaking from ignorance," he'd said quietly. "I've lived in their countries, and I know. They will destroy the character of our town."

The first act of the Protectors, as they came to be known, was to call Immigration and Naturalization authorities, charging that the Center harbored illegal immigrants. Hubbard had paced across the street, hoping to see someone hauled off and arrested. The INS raid yielded no illegals. But they did find Sammy Nabolsy's secret BB gun, which he'd hidden in the garden shed of the Dawah Center, and which got him in tons of trouble with his father.

Hubbard was disappointed, but not ready to give up. His next move was to invoke zoning ordinances. Today he was waiting across the street for the zoning inspector, who arrived shortly and began his tour of the Victorian house, with Wajdy Shamy at his side. Zuhura followed them. While the building inspector was measuring the shutters, she looked over his shoulder and said, "Did you know that zoning law has often been used as a tool to keep people of other races out?"

Jotting things on his clipboard, the white man nodded politely but paid no attention to her.

"I was going to say-I just wanted to know if you intend-" she pressed, dogging his steps, and he scowled slightly. Wajdy gently but firmly signaled for her to go back into the house.

Zuhura was not accustomed to being brushed aside. She did not have the habits and mein of most of the Indiana black women the building inspector would have come across in his life, or their understanding of the unspoken rules of "getting along" in this place where they lived. She was likely to accost and question you, man or woman, even if you had an air of authority, and she did so with an attitude that assumed her objections would be addressed. Fully. Her mother was the same.

These were good skills for a lawyer, as Zuhura hoped one day to be. Like the sharp rational faculties of Aisha, the early Muslim woman beloved of Sunnis, they were good skills for the propagation of Islam, and the Dawah culture encouraged them, in girls as well as in boys. They were not, however, the best skills for getting along as a foreign newcomer in Simmonsville, or as black woman in the social landscape of central Indiana. Zuhura didn't fit into this landscape. She didn't fit what the locals thought they knew about someone who looked like her as they saw her approaching. And so there was always a sense of something off-kilter, a bristle in the air that went around with her. It was as if her physical presence was a challenge to knowledge held dear, to some core that made them who they were, and so the hair on the back of their sun-reddened necks stood on end at the sight of her, without them even being aware of it, necessarily. At the sound of her voice, something went "click" and disconnected between them and her. Both sides might continue speaking, but the line between them was dead.

It wasn't just Zuhura. The Dawah people as a whole didn't know much about the character of their new environs. In grad school carrels, they'd put their heads together over a map and said, "There! That's the middle of the country, so Muslims in all parts of the land can find us." That Indianapolis, besides being centrally located, had an international airport, low crime rates, and affordable land, was enough, to their minds. None of them had ties to the people there, not even Trish-she was from California. Some, like Aunt Khadija, did come from the black Muslim population native to northern Indianapolis. About the lives of the small-town residents of Simmonsville and southern Indianapolis, however, the shopkeepers and schoolteachers, the beer-and-peanuts crowd and the country club set, much less the outlying landscape of central Indiana with its farmers in crisis, many facing foreclosure in the 1970s, the Dawah folk knew next to nothing, and didn't care to know. They bent their heads to their task.

Ayesha didn't know why, but there was something slightly familiar about the figure of Hubbard limping beside his truck, suspiciously watching the exchange between her inquisitive daughter and the building inspector. She couldn't put her finger on it. Her step crunched over the gravel as she went to her car in the driveway of the Victorian house. She knew one thing: she was already tired of Hubbard and his plots. They were draining precious energy, the Center's and hers.

"Klansmen without sheets," Ayesha sniffed to Kuldip, who had followed her out with a box of bulk mail, holding it rather awkwardly to his chest.

"He has a prosthetic leg from stepping on a mine in Korea," Mrs. Moore said quietly, over the chain-link fence. Ayesha jumped, not expecting anyone to have overheard her comment.

"Really?" Kuldip said. He found this interesting, as someone who wore a prosthetic limb himself. He did not ask how she knew. Americans knew things about each other. They learned them in places mysterious to Kuldip, such as golf courses and bars and, naturally, in their own homes, where he rarely had reason to go.