Zeitoun (8 page)

That’s when her mother jumped to the rescue—in her way.

“She can wear it!” her mother yelled. “She can if she wants to!”

Now it was a scene. Everyone in the DMV was watching. Kathy tried to diffuse the situation. “Mama, it’s okay,” she said. “Really, it’s okay. Mama, do you have a brush?”

Her mother barely registered Kathy’s question. She was focused on the woman behind the camera. “You can’t make her take it off! It’s her constitutional right!”

Finally the DMV woman disappeared into the back of the office. She returned with permission from a superior to take the photo with Kathy wearing her scarf. As the flash went off, Kathy tried to smile.

Growing up in Baton Rouge, it was a crowded house, full of clamor
and extremes. Nine kids shared a one-story, 1,400-square-foot home, sleeping three to a room and squabbling over one bathroom. They were content, though, or as content as could be expected, and the neighborhood was tidy, working-class, full of families. Kathy’s house backed up against Sherwood Middle School, a big multiethnic campus where Kathy felt overwhelmed. She was one of a handful of white students, and she was picked on, pushed around, gawked at. She grew to be quick to fight, quick to argue.

She must have run away from home a dozen times, maybe more. And almost every time she did, from age six or so on, she ran to her friend Yuko’s house. It was just a few blocks away, on the other side of the high school, and given that she and Yuko were among the few non–African American kids in the neighborhood, they had bonded as outsiders. Yuko and her mother Kameko were alone in their house; Kameko’s husband had been killed by a drunk driver when Yuko was small. Even though Yuko was three years older, she and Kathy grew inseparable, and Kameko was so welcoming and dedicated to Kathy’s well-being that Kathy came to call her Mom.

Kathy was never sure why Kameko took her in, but she was careful not to question it. Yuko joked that her mom just wanted to get close enough to Kathy to bathe her. As a kid Kathy didn’t like baths much, and they weren’t a great priority in her house, so every time she was at Yuko’s, Kameko filled the tub. “She looks greasy,” Kameko would joke to Yuko, but she loved to make Kathy clean, and Kathy looked forward to it—Kameko’s hands washing her hair, her long fingernails tickling her neck, the warmth of a fresh, heavy towel around her shoulders.

After high school Kathy and Yuko grew closer. Kathy moved into an apartment off Airline Highway in Baton Rouge, and they began
working together at Dunkin’ Donuts. The independence meant everything to Kathy. Even in her small apartment off a six-lane interstate, there was a sense of order and quiet to her life that she had never known.

A pair of Malaysian sisters used to come into the shop, and Yuko began talking to them, questioning them. “What does that scarf mean?” “What do you see in Islam?” “Are you allowed to drive?” The sisters were open, low-key, never proselytizing. Kathy had no real inkling that they had made a great impression on Yuko, but Yuko was captivated. She began reading about Islam, investigating the Qur’an. Soon the Malaysian sisters brought Yuko pamphlets and books, and Yuko delved deeper.

When she caught on to how serious Yuko was about it, it drove Kathy to distraction. They’d both been brought up Christian, had gone to a rigorous Christian elementary school. It was baffling to see her friend dabbling in this exotic faith. Yuko had been as devout a Christian as walked the Earth—and Kameko was even more so.

“What would your mom think?” she asked.

“Just keep an open mind,” Yuko said. “Please.”

A few years passed, and Kathy, through a series of missteps and heartbreaks, was divorced and living alone with Zachary, who was less than a year old. She was renting the same apartment off Airline Highway and working two jobs. In the mornings she was a checkout clerk at K&B, a chain drugstore on the highway. One day the manager of Webster Clothes, a menswear store across the road, had come into the drugstore and, admiring Kathy’s ebullient personality, asked her if she’d be willing to quit K&B or, if not, take a second job at Webster. Kathy needed the money, so she said yes to the second job. After finishing in the early afternoon at K&B, she would walk across the highway to Webster and
work there until closing. Soon she was working fifty hours a week and making enough to cover health insurance for herself and Zachary.

But her life was a struggle, and she was looking for some order and answers. Yuko, by contrast, seemed peaceful and confident; she’d always been centered, so much so that Kathy had been envious, but now Yuko really seemed to have things figured out.

Kathy began borrowing books about Islam. She was just curious, having no particular intention to leave the Christian faith. At first she was simply intrigued by the basic things she didn’t know, and the many things she’d wrongly presumed. She had no idea, for instance, that the Qur’an was filled with the same people as the Bible—Moses, Mary, Abraham, Pharaoh, even Jesus. She hadn’t known that Muslims consider the Qur’an the fourth book of God to His messengers, after the Old Testament (referred to as the
Tawrat
, or the Law), the Psalms (the
Zabur)
, and the New Testament
(Injeil)
. The fact that Islam acknowledged these books was revelatory for her. The fact that the Qur’an repeatedly reaches out to the other, related faiths, knocked her flat:

She was frustrated that she hadn’t known any of this, that she’d been blind to the faith of a billion or so people. How could she not know these things?

And Muhammad. She’d been so misinformed about Him. She’d thought He was the actual god of Islam, the one whom Muslims worshiped. But he was simply the messenger who related the word of God. An illiterate man, Muhammad was visited by the angel Gabriel
(Jibril
in Arabic), who related to him the words of God. Muhammad became the conduit for these messages, and The Qur’an, then, was simply the word of God in written form.
Qur’an
meant “Recitation.”

There were so many basic things that defied her presumptions. She’d assumed that Muslims were a monolithic group, and that all Muslims were made of the same devout and unbending stock. But she learned that there were Shiite and Sunni interpretations of the Qur’an, and within any mosque there were the same variations in faith and commitment as there were in any church. There were Muslims who treated their faith lightly, and those who knew every word of the Qur’an and its companion guide to behavior, the Hadith. There were Muslims who knew almost nothing about their religion, who worshiped a few times a year, and those who obeyed the strictest interpretation of their faith. There were Muslim women who wore T-shirts and jeans and Muslim women who covered themselves head to toe. There were Muslim men who modeled their lives on the life of the Prophet, and those who strayed and fell short. There were passive Muslims, uncertain Muslims, borderline agnostic Muslims, devout Muslims, and Muslims who twisted the words of the Qur’an to suit their temporary desires and agendas. It was all very familiar, intrinsic to any faith.

At the time, Kathy was attending a large evangelical church not far
from her jobs. Though not always full, it could seat about a thousand parishioners. She felt a need to connect with her faith; she needed all the strength she could find.

But there were things about this church that bothered her. She was accustomed to the kind of fiery preaching that the church offered, the extremes of showmanship and drama, but one day, she thought, they crossed a line. They had just passed the collection plates, and after they had gathered and counted the funds donated, the preacher—a short man with a rosy face and a mustache—seemed disappointed. His expression was pained. He couldn’t hold it in. He chastised the congregation calmly at first, and then with increasing annoyance. Did they not love this church? Did they not appreciate the connection this church created with their lord Jesus Christ? He went on and on, shaming the congregants for their miserly ways. The lecture lasted twenty minutes.

Kathy was aghast. She’d never seen the collection counted during a Sunday service. And to ask for more! The congregants were not wealthy people, she knew. This was a working-class church, a middle-class church. They gave what they could.

She left that day shaken and confused by what she’d seen. At home, after putting Zachary to bed, she turned again to the materials Yuko had given her. She flipped through the Qur’an. Kathy wasn’t sure that Islam was the way, but she knew that Yuko had never misled her before, that Yuko was the most grounded and sensible person she knew, and if Islam was working for her, why wouldn’t it work for Kathy? Yuko was her sister, her mentor.

Kathy struggled with the question of faith all week. She lived with the questions in the morning, at night, all day through work. She had just started her shift at Webster one day when a familiar man walked in.
Kathy recognized him immediately as one of the preachers at the church. She came over to help him with a new sport coat.

“You know,” he said, “you should come to our church! It’s not far from here.”

She laughed. “I know your church! I’m there all the time. Every Sunday.”

The man was surprised. He hadn’t seen her before.

“Oh, I sit in the back,” she said.

He smiled and told her that next time he’d look for her. He made it his business to make sure everyone felt welcome.

“You know,” Kathy said to him, “this must be a sign from God, seeing you here.”

“How so?” he asked.

She told him about her crisis, how she had been disappointed with aspects of the Christianity she knew, in some of the things she’d seen, in fact, at his own church. She told him that she had actually been considering converting to Islam.

He was listening closely, but he didn’t seem worried about losing a member of the congregation.

“Oh, that’s just the devil toying with you,” he said. “He’ll do that, try to tempt you away from Christ. But this’ll only make your faith stronger. You’ll see come Sunday.”

When he left, Kathy already felt more certain about her faith. How could his visit not be a sign from God? Just at the moment she was having doubts about her church, a messenger from Jesus walked straight into her life.

She went to church that Sunday with a renewed sense of purpose. Yuko may have found comfort and direction in Islam, but Kathy was
sure that she herself had been personally called by Christ. She walked in and sat near the front, determined that her new friend should see her and know that he had made a difference.

It didn’t take long. When he looked down at the congregation and upon her, his eyes opened wide. He gave her an expression that made clear that she was the one he’d been looking for all day. She’d seen the same expression on kids spotting a birthday cake with their name on it.

And then suddenly, in the middle of the service, her name was being called. The preacher, in front of a full room of almost a thousand people, was saying her name, Kathy Delphine.

“Come up here, Kathy,” the preacher commanded.

She rose from her seat and stepped toward the blinding lights of the pulpit. Onstage, she didn’t know where to look, how to avoid the glare. She shielded her eyes. She squinted and looked down—at her shoes, at the people in the front row. She had never stood in front of so many people. The closest thing had been her wedding, and that had been only fifty or so friends and family. What was this? Why had she been called forth?

“Kathy,” the preacher said, “tell them what you told me. Tell us all.”

Kathy froze. She didn’t know if she could do this. She was a talkative person, rarely nervous, but to recount something she’d said privately to the reverend in front of a thousand strangers—it didn’t seem right.

Still, Kathy had faith that he knew what he was doing. She believed she’d been chosen to remain in this church. And she wanted to serve. To help. Perhaps, like Reverend Timothy entering the store that day, this was another event that was meant to be, meant to bring her closer to Christ.

She was given a microphone and she spoke into it, telling the congregation what she’d told the reverend, that she had been investigating Islam, and that—

The preacher cut her off. “She was looking to Islam!” he said with a sneer. “She was considering”—and here he paused—“the worship of Allah!” And with that, he made a snorting, derisive sound, the sort of sound an eight-year-old boy would make on a playground. This preacher, this leader of this church and congregation, was using this tone to refer to Allah. Did he not know that his God and Islam’s were one and the same? That was one of the first and simplest things she’d learned from the pamphlets Yuko had given her: Allah is just the Arabic word for God. Even Christians speaking Arabic refer to God as Allah.

He went on to praise Kathy and Jesus and reaffirm the primacy of his and their faith, but by then she was hardly listening. Something had ruptured within her. When he was done, she sat down in a daze, bewildered but becoming sure about something right there and then. She smiled politely through the rest of the service, already knowing she would never come back.

She thought about the episode while driving home, and that night, and all the next day. She talked to Yuko about it and they realized that this man, preaching to a thousand impressionable and trusting parishioners, didn’t know, or didn’t care, that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity were not-so-distantly related branches of the same monotheistic, Abrahamic faith. And to dismiss all of Islam with a playground sound? Kathy could not be part of what that man was preaching.

So by fits and starts, she followed Yuko into Islam. She read the Qur’an and was struck by its power and lyricism. The Christian preachers she’d heard had spent a good amount of time talking about who would and wouldn’t go to hell, how hot it burned and for how long, but the imams she began to meet made no such pronouncements. Will I go to heaven? she asked. “Only God knows this,” the imam would tell her. The various doubts of the imams were comforting, and drew her closer.
She would ask them a question, just as she had asked questions of her pastors, and the imams would try to answer, but often they wouldn’t know. “Let’s look at the Qur’an,” they would say. She liked Islam’s sense of personal responsibility, its bent toward social justice. Most of all, though, she liked the sense of dignity and purity embodied by the Muslim women she knew. To Kathy they seemed so wholesome, so honorable. They were chaste, they were disciplined. She wanted that sense of control. She wanted the peace that came with that sense of control.