My Accidental Jihad (6 page)

E
arly one morning in September, when our house was pitch dark, Ismail sat upright at the first sound of his alarm, dressed quickly, and left our bedroom. After I made my way downstairs for a cup of coffee, I found him standing at the counter, stuffing the last of his breakfast into his mouth, his eye on the clock as if he were competing in a pie-eating contest at the fair. The minute hand clicked forward, and on cue, Ismail dropped the food he held.

For the next month, nothing would touch Ismail’s mouth between sunup and sundown. Not food. Not water. Not my lips. A chart posted on our refrigerator told him the precise minute when his fast had to begin and end each day.

Ramadan is the ninth month of the lunar calendar, the month during which the Qur’an was revealed to the prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. Each year, more than one billion Muslims observe Ramadan by fasting from dawn to dusk. In addition to avoiding food and drink during daylight hours, Muslims are expected to refrain from all other indulgences: sexual relations, gossip, evil thoughts—even looking at “corrupt” images on television, in magazines, or on the Internet. Ramadan is a month of purification, during which Muslims are called on to make peace with enemies, strengthen ties with family and friends, cleanse themselves of impurities, and refocus their lives on God. It’s like a monthlong spiritual tune-up.

Fasting was easier for Ismail when he lived in Libya, surrounded by fellow Muslims. Everyone’s life changed there during the fast: people worked less (at least those who worked outside the home), took long naps during the day, and feasted with family and friends late into the night. Now, with a corporate job and an American wife who worked full-time, he experienced Ramadan in a totally different way. He spent most of his waking hours at work, just as he did every other month of the year. He still picked up our daughter from day care and shared cooking and cleaning responsibilities at home. Having no Muslim friends in our southern college town, he broke his fast alone, standing at our kitchen counter. Here in the United States, Ramadan felt more like an extreme sport than a spiritual practice. Secretly I had come to think of it as “Ramathon.”

I tried to be supportive of Ismail’s fast, but it was hard. The rules seemed unnecessarily harsh to me, an American raised in the seventies by parents who challenged the status quo. The humility required to submit to such a grueling, seemingly illogical exercise was not in my blood. In my family, we don’t submit. We question the rules. We debate. And we do things our own way. I resented the fact that Ismail’s life was being micromanaged by the chart in the kitchen. Would Allah really hold it against him if he finished his last bite of toast, even if the clock said it was a minute past sunrise? The no-water rule seemed especially cruel to me, and I found the prohibition against kissing a little melodramatic. I was tempted to argue with Ismail that the rules were outdated, but he had a billion Muslims in his corner, whereas I had yet to find another disgruntled American wife who felt qualified to rewrite one of the five pillars of Islam.

When Ismail told me stories about his childhood, it was as if he were reading from an ancient, hardbound storybook about an exotic land where the wailing of women was as constant as the howling wind, where children died like stray kittens from diseases I had never heard of, where the thirsty sucked water through cheesecloth to avoid parasites that could colonize the human body and emerge later as worms as long and thick as a pencil. When they were struck with illness, families journeyed for days to Sufi shrines in the desert, where they pleaded with long-dead saints for a cure.

My childhood memories were equally strange and unsettling to him. Like this one: one evening when I was a child, a few days before Christmas, my family sat at the dinner table. I was five, my sister seven. Just as we were finishing our meal, the conversation turned to Santa Claus. What was he doing right now? my father wondered. Maybe putting in a late night at his workshop—and what time was it at the North Pole, anyway? He shook his arm; his watch slid down his wrist. As he was calculating the time difference between San Diego and the North Pole, a booming knock on our front door made us all jump. No one ever stopped by our house during dinnertime.

My dad’s eyes grew wide. “I wonder who
that
could be?” he asked, locking eyes with my mother. When he swung the door open, my sister and I gasped: there on our stoop, wiping his shiny black boots on our frayed welcome mat, stood Santa Claus himself, in a red suit so rumpled and worn it must have been around the world and back.

“Ho, ho, ho!” he bellowed, his voice ricocheting off our living room walls.

It was an awkward introduction, but my mother, who is a master at making other people comfortable, took it in stride. She smiled pleasantly as she stood up from the table. “Hello, Santa, would you like to come in?” As if Santa were our neighbor stopping by to borrow an onion instead of a global celebrity who held the desires of children everywhere in the chubby palm of his hand.

Santa waddled across the room and heaved himself into my dad’s favorite chair. Patting his thigh, he gestured for me and my sister to come to him. I looked down at the half-eaten meal on my plate and then back at him. Before he arrived I would have given anything for a one-on-one consultation, but now I wasn’t so sure. He had massive, candy-apple red felt arms, bloodshot eyes, and a wiry beard that was yellow at the edges and slid up and down his face when he spoke.

Hovering close together just beyond reach of his broad, hairy hands, my sister and I nervously recited the list of everything we wanted for Christmas. Then I turned to the window, scanning our front yard for that reindeer with the glow-in-the-dark nose and all the rest of them. All I saw were our own toys scattered across our overgrown front lawn. My neighbor’s car rolled slowly into his driveway, tires crunching over gravel, the engine shuddering and sighing to a halt in the garage. There was no sign of a sleigh anywhere. Santa explained that he’d left his reindeer at the gas station around the corner. “For a fill-up,” he added, with a chuckle and a wink. He
did
smell faintly of gasoline. He wagged his finger at us and told us to be good, and after my mother had taken a few pictures, he disappeared as abruptly as he had arrived.

After I told Ismail this story, he was disturbed and full of questions. Who
was
that man in your living room? What was it like to place your faith in an obese man in a furry red suit? The whole idea of Christmas as a day of reckoning for children, and salvation as a pile of presents beneath the tree, made him anxious. He knew Christmas was important to me, but he had no idea why. He could sense that the stakes between us grew high during the holiday season, so he decided to proceed very cautiously.

“I’m happy to celebrate Christmas with you—please just explain to me what it means to you and how to honor the occasion.”

He spoke reverently, as if Christmas were a sacred holiday—and it was, but not in the way he imagined. The high stakes of the season had nothing to do with the afterlife and everything to do with the real and immediate possibility of our home turning into a living hell if he failed to embody the so-called Christmas spirit. Everything depended on his ability to access that elusive state. So he tackled the problem like a scientist, believing that once he could identify its elements and composition, he could reproduce it at will. But the Christmas spirit could not be reduced to a laboratory experiment or a mathematical formula; nor did it lend itself easily to a clear definition.

It had to do with a cut tree in the center of our living room, its branches bent under the weight of ornaments and blinking lights, its trunk girdled with brightly wrapped presents; velvety, oversized socks hanging from the mantel and weighed down with chocolate or mints or bars of soap. It had to do with a particularly flattering family photo, signed and mailed to friends and family; a reindeer with an electrified red nose and a lawn covered in colorful lights. But these elements, however essential, were not enough to make the holiday successful. A twinkle in the eye, a generous impulse, a burst of good cheer were required. If it was difficult to remain in good spirits while fasting during Ramadan, it was exponentially more so to remain cheerful during the Christmas season, in the mad rush of shopping and wrapping and baking and decorating and recovering from a hangover and mailing and receiving and thanking and returning for store credit.

Having always been surrounded by people who celebrated them the same way I did, I had never thought too much about holidays. I had never imagined I would have to explain the significance of chocolate bunnies that laid caramel eggs in nests of shredded green plastic each Easter, or the blazing smile of the jack-o’-lantern on Halloween, or the tree that rained dry green needles onto the living room carpet each December. Each time he posed a question, I felt a sharp loneliness. Explaining these rituals was not easy—especially to such a serious student as Ismail, so eager for symbolism and meaning, so quick to assume that holidays had something important to do with God or history or nature. It was difficult for him to understand holidays untethered from meaning and drifting in an ocean of desire and delight.

I quickly discovered that nothing squashed the Christmas spirit more quickly than the question
why
. The
how
was so much easier to explain: how to strap a tree to our car with bungee cord and soak its trunk in ginger ale so it would stay fresh in our living room; how to pierce the fattest part of a piece of popcorn, thread it onto string, and drape it from needly branches; how to tuck the highest tip of the tree beneath the frilly skirt of a glowing angel. But
why
? Each time he asked this question, my mind was as blank as a desert. Searching that stark landscape for a grain of significance, I glimpsed for the first time an ominous cloud in the distance, the remote and unsettling possibility that my rituals had no meaning.

Like a closely choreographed dance, Ramadan was tethered so tightly to tradition that it allowed no room for creativity. My holidays, on the other hand, were amenable to improvisation. To raise the stakes of our annual Easter egg hunt, my father brought out a stopwatch and timed us like it was an Olympic sprint; Thanksgiving had become the day for our annual bean bag toss tournament. More recently, my family had constructed a new Christmas ritual: the annual gift drawing. A month before Christmas my parents drew names of each relative from a hat. Shortly thereafter we received an email (subject line: Ho Ho Ho) informing us of the person for whom we would play Santa that year.

To have one’s name in the hat was to be officially embraced as a member of the family. But failing to grasp the honor and symbolic weight of being included, Ismail only dreaded participating in such a baffling ritual. Each year I had to calm him down and outline the procedure for him all over again. Step one: call or email the person whose name he had selected—my acupuncturist aunt in Santa Barbara, my younger sister’s boyfriend with the tattoos and the penchant for pit bulls, my father who had returned or exchanged every gift he had received since 1980. The purpose of step one was to obtain as much information as possible about what this person wanted. Brand names, colors, and sizes were ideal. Just pretend you are Santa bouncing their inner child on your knee, I told him. This only made him more confused.

The level of detail gathered in step one made step two—the purchase—that much easier. A thorough interview could save additional trips to the mall or, if one was shopping online, shave down the process from five minutes to two and a half. Simply enter key words into Google, browse through options, and then click Pay Now (not forgetting to select the gift wrap and personalized card options). The most important part of all was to remain at all times, from start to finish, in the Christmas spirit.

The hardest part for Ismail was not giving a gift but receiving a call from his personal Santa Claus—who was not calling from the North Pole but from the college town where she was working two jobs in order to put herself through school or from the home she would soon lose to foreclosure. Well-meaning relatives called to ask what he longed for, and when he replied honestly that he didn’t want anything, they sent him a fleece jacket nearly identical to the one that hung in his closet or a sweater that hugged him a little too tightly around the middle.

“Can’t we all just go out and buy ourselves something each Christmas?” he asked me more than once—a question to which I didn’t even bother responding. Instead I just flashed him a withering look that said,
I don’t know where the hell you left your Christmas spirit, buddy, but you’d better find it fast.

I SHOULD HAVE
been more sympathetic, since I found it nearly impossible to capture the “Ramadan spirit” during Ismail’s monthlong fast. People said that for a relationship to work, a couple needed to have a shared passion. My husband and I did have one: food. Years ago, when we first met, we shared other passions, such as travel, long runs on wooded trails, live music. But now that we had a small child, those indulgences had fallen by the wayside. No matter how busy our lives became, however, we had to eat. On days when it seemed we had nothing in common, when I struggled to recall what brought us together in the first place, one good meal could remind me. Ismail was an amazing cook. I could still remember in great detail the meal he prepared for me the first night we spent together: the walnuts simmering slowly in the thick, sweet bloodred pomegranate sauce; the chicken that slipped delicately away from the bone, like silk falling from skin. The next morning the scent of coriander ground into strong coffee filled his small apartment as he served me olives and fresh bread for breakfast.

But during Ramadan, our relationship became a bland, lukewarm concoction that I found difficult to swallow. I was not proud of this fact. Despite the amorphous nature of my holiday celebrations, I did try to maintain a spiritual practice: I stumbled out of bed in the dark most mornings and meditated in the corner of our room with my back to him, trying to find that bottomless truth beyond words. Once in a great while, I dragged him to church on Sunday. Whenever I suggested we say grace at the table, he reached willingly for my hand, and words of gratitude flowed easily from his mouth. He never criticized my practices, even when they were wildly inconsistent or contradictory. But Ramadan was not ten minutes of meditation or an hour-long sermon; it was an entire month of deprivation. Ismail’s god was the old-fashioned kind, omnipresent and stern, uncompromising with his demands. During Ramadan this god expected him to pray on time, five times a day—and to squeeze in additional prayers of forgiveness as often as he could. My god would never be so demanding. My god was a flamboyant and fickle friend with a biting wit who liked a good party. My god was transgendered and tolerant to a fault; he/she showed up unexpectedly during peak moments, when life felt glorious and synchronous, then disappeared for long stretches of time.