Laughing All the Way to the Mosque

173 Pages·2015·0.9 MB·English

by  Nawaz

Laughing All the
Way to the Mosque

Zarqa Nawaz
Dedication

To my husband, Samiul Haque, who always consoles me with the words
“Sometimes grit is more important than talent.”

And to my parents, Parveen and Ali Nawaz, who instilled that grit at a very early
age and made me believe it was talent.
Contents

Dedication
Introduction
Recess
Hairy Legs
Hijab
Muslim Summer Camp
Medical School Reject
Meeting Sami
How to Name a Muslim Baby
Hajj
BBQ Muslims
Coming Full Circle on Circumcision
Water Jug Blues
The Packing Crate
Behind the Shower Curtain
Little Mosque in the City
Jinn—A Muslim Thing
Eid Dinner
Dying, Muslim-Style
Photos with White Men
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Zarqa’s Recipe for Halawa
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction

When I was seven, I went up to a little boy in the schoolyard. He was sitting
alone on the swings, sucking on a jawbreaker. He had black wavy hair and was a
little on the chubby side.
“Davy, do you believe in God?”
He shrugged.
“Because it’s really, really important to believe in God.”
Davy just wanted to be left in peace, but he could see the proselytizing fire in
my eyes. As far as he was concerned, I was certifiable. He did what any kid
faced with a raging, fundamentalist Muslim child would do. He made a Faustian
bargain.
“I’ll believe in God if you push me on the swings for as long as I want,” he
said.
I agreed. My arms ached and recess was torture, but that was the price of
saving Davy’s soul. A little while later, Davy’s mother invited me to his birthday
party. I was thrilled. As I sat at their table munching on some snacks, she
watched me with worry. I was afraid that he had told her about me—the little
Muslim kid who was trying to keep him from burning in hell. You’d think that
she’d be grateful. Instead, she walked up to me, her hands on her hips.
“Don’t eat that,” she said.
“But it’s yummy.” I stuffed more food into my face.
“That’s ham, and I’m pretty sure pork is forbidden in your religion,” she said,
frowning. “Aren’t you Muslim?”
I stopped mid-bite. I couldn’t believe my taste buds. The meat was so good, it
felt like eating a piece of heaven. I stuffed the last pieces into my mouth as fast
as my guilty conscience would allow. I looked sadly at the tray of cold cuts that
she quickly removed from my hypnotized gaze.
Davy’s mother apologized to my mother when she came to pick me up later.
“I just thought she would know what pork was,” she said.
My mother looked at her greedy Muslim child and sighed.
“We send her to the mosque,” she said. “But her attention span is limited.”
I was a little insulted. At least I had gotten the God part right. Who knew that
the pictures of cute pigs with a giant X through them would translate to tasty
morsels on a platter?
Davy looked at me.
“Are you going to hell now?”
“Of course not,” said his mother, appalled. “She made a mistake, and like we
learned in church, Davy, God forgives.”
“Davy goes to church?” I asked, disbelieving.
“Of course. We’re Roman Catholic. Davy’s a choirboy.”
“Will you still push me on the swings?” he asked.
After that day, I still pushed Davy on the swings because it was the right thing
to do, even if I had started for the wrong reasons. But I decided to pay more
attention to my lessons at the mosque. Religion was a tricky business. God was
probably teaching me a lesson: Worry about your own soul, which always
seemed in constant peril. And if I was really, really good, I’d get to eat pork in
heaven.
Dear reader, I’ve written this memoir so that one day, should you find yourself
facing a pint-sized, self-righteous Muslim trying to save your soul, you will be
armed with understanding of the other side. You will have all sorts of interesting
ammunition to catch them off guard with, like “Isn’t there a prayer that you’re
late for?” or “As soon as you figure out the moon issue, I’ll listen to you” and
the perennial “Exactly how clean are your genitals?” But please be kind to the
crazy-eyed Muslim. Remember, each of us has to face our own demons, even if
they are in the form of a piece of fried bacon.
Dear Muslim reader, don’t think I’ve forgotten you. First, stop sulking. This
book could have had confessions about drug problems, strange sexual fetishes
and criminal activity—basically the stuff of white-people memoirs. Although I
enjoy reading them, I know you don’t. There are no confessions of having sex
while swinging from a chandelier. My husband says he’d be very annoyed if his
colleagues were laughing at him behind his back. So you don’t have to be scared
of this book. But I did include some of my misadventures in the Muslim
community. Don’t get me wrong, I love my people. But we have a bit of a
contentious relationship. And I am tolerated because it’s not nice to throw
someone out of a mosque. Although they did try once (see the “Little Mosque in
the City” chapter).
When you grow up in the West, sometimes things get lost in translation. Plus,
it doesn’t help that I’m a bit of a kook. This story will show you what I mean:
The other month I was responsible for organizing the mosque community
potluck. My friend Faeeza and I watched guests arrive with dessert after dessert,
and no main courses in sight. She eventually turned to me.
“How did you arrange the potluck?” she asked.
I had decided not to leave the food up to chance, and sent out an
announcement dividing the food based on last name, just to make it easy.
“I asked the first half of the alphabet to bring dessert and the second half to
bring a main dish,” I replied.
“You realize that the majority of Muslim last names fall into the first half of
the alphabet, right? Ahmed, Abdullah, Ali …”
No, that had not occurred to me.
As the dessert table overflowed with trays of baklava and boxes of doughnuts,
we were forced to pile the sweets under the tables and in various corners of the
room. Discontent was brewing, though, as people started to get hungry. I could
hear grumbling stomachs. I looked at the two chicken dishes on the table.
“Order pizza,” said Faeeza.
A few tardy Yusufs and Zakariahs brought a few more chicken dishes while
we waited for the pizza. The potluck was officially two hours late, and even
though we fast every year during Ramadan, our group of hungry Muslims
couldn’t wait any longer. The crowd devoured what protein they could scrounge
and topped it off with ample dessert and tea. By the time the twenty pizzas
arrived, everyone was in the throes of a carb-induced stupor and had no interest
in the bright orange boxes.
“What are we going to do with all this pizza?” I asked Faeeza.
“Sell it?” she suggested.
I took to the microphone and made an announcement. “We are raising money
for a new mosque. Everyone who buys a pizza will be contributing to the fund.
They’re ten dollars each.”
“How much were the pizzas?” I asked Faeeza after I came back from the
podium.
“Twelve dollars. We’ll take it out of the new mosque fund, which never seems
to grow.”
No one was volunteering to buy the pizzas, so I went over to where the men
were sitting. I figured they’d still be hungry.
“Ask my wife,” said Wael. “She makes all the decisions in the family.”
You would have thought I was asking him to refinance his house. But it was
no use. Faheem, Abdul-Rahman and Gamal said the same thing. I eventually
gave up on the men and negotiated with the women. The women, of course,
could smell our desperation. They took pity on us and bought the pizzas. I felt as
victorious as if I had found families for homeless puppies.
A week later, my husband, Sami, let me know that a complaint had been
emailed to the board of the Islamic Association.
“Oh no,” I said, worried. “Someone’s upset that there wasn’t enough food?”
“No,” said Sami. “One of the men felt that there was a woman who was
fraternizing with the men too much. He wrote that ‘the standard of the mosque
potluck has fallen with all the lascivious gazing going on between the genders.
How we can continue to call these events Islamic is beyond the pale.’”
On the bright side, he hadn’t complained about being hungry or going into a
sugar coma from the desserts. My potluck would go down in history as a sex
scandal, rather than a culinary travesty.
And that, dear Muslim reader, is why so many of my interactions in our
community end up going sideways. I know, I know, I should never have been in
charge. But the mosque is short on volunteers and I need brownie points to get to
heaven. And I don’t think all those brownies at the potluck count. So basically
I’m writing about how I have an incredible talent for bungling everything I do
and how I occasionally take my family and my community down with me. It’s
the price everyone pays to be close to me. Just ask my husband, who pays the
greatest price of all. I know you would have preferred a look at our community
that wasn’t warts and all, but better to laugh with us than at us. And we’re kind
of warty.
So now, dear readers, you will get to experience my life in its full glory. I’ll
let you read it even if you don’t believe in God. And I promise to push you on
the swings for as long as it takes to finish the book.
Recess

“Could you make me a sandwich, like the other kids’?” I asked my mother as
she wrapped curry chicken drumsticks in aluminum foil for my lunch.
She raised an eyebrow at me. But my mother was the reason I was a social
pariah at school. Each day, I would watch the other girls eat their dripless
lunches while mine radiated smells like some sort of onion-infused nuclear
bomb. After lunch, all the kids at Fallingdale Elementary School went out for
recess. The girls skipped rope while I sulked by the brick wall. My oily chicken
legs were keeping me from assimilating. No one came near me because I was
probably contagious. They might catch whatever it was I had. I wanted to be like
Kathleen, with her long, shiny blond hair, light, airy summer dresses and lunches
that smelled like vanilla. Her hair, her clothes, her sandwich. I envied all three.
But I could only change one.
My poor mother silently listened to my request. She worked so hard to make
sure we were fed and dressed. And yet it was her curry drumsticks that stood
between me and Kathleen. I was a clumsy carnivore among graceful herbivores.
“People look at me strangely when I eat those things,” I said, pointing. “No
one wants to play with me because of my lunch.”
She looked at me with a level gaze. I’d expected a fight, but she surprised me
by agreeing to buy white bread, peanut butter and jelly.
The next day I walked to school armed with my sandwich, which smelled like
candy instead of cumin. It was the aroma of triumph, an answer to the question
of whether I could belong. I anxiously waited for lunchtime, and when it came I
looked over at Kathleen, sinking her teeth into a chocolate doughnut. This was it.
It was about to happen. I would open my brown paper bag, pull out my waxed-
paper-wrapped sandwich, and suddenly my world would change. I’d be at
Kathleen’s house, and she’d let me comb her long blond hair while we talked
about planning her ninth birthday party. I, of course, would wisely suggest
getting a piñata for the festivities, at which point she’d say, “I’m so glad I met
you.”
“What made you notice me?” I’d ask.
“The sandwich,” she’d say.
As I opened the aluminum foil package—could my mother never be trained?
—Kathleen turned and looked directly at my sandwich. The sandwich was
working! I almost brought up the piñata before I realized that directly behind my
sandwich in her line of vision was the cutest boy in our class. Kathleen gave a
little wave—not to my sandwich—before turning back to her shiny-haired
friends. The sandwich had failed me. There wasn’t enough white bread in the
world to make me instantly fit in with white kids.
As I sat dejected and hungry (because, in a cruel twist of fate, it turns out that
curry drumsticks are much more filling than peanut butter) on the carpeted floor
with my grade three classmates, I contemplated my options. I thought back to
Kathleen’s trifecta of perfection: hair, clothes, sandwich. The hair was out of the
question, but maybe, just maybe, I could change my clothes too. I looked
different from the other girls. It wasn’t just because I was brown and had long
braids. It was the way my mother dressed me. My clothes were odd. I looked
over at Kathleen. She was wearing a miniskirt with a halter top. I was wearing
brown cords with a matching corduroy shirt. She was the fairy princess and I
was the ugly stepsister. But even ugly stepsisters could go shopping. If I could
convince my mother to make me a sandwich, how hard could it be to convince
her to let me wear a dress? I dragged my beleaguered mother to Kmart and
found a white peasant minidress that fell to my knees. It was perfect.
The next morning, I ditched the corduroy, put on my beautiful white dress and
looked at myself in the mirror. My legs were a little cold, never having been
exposed to that much air before, but I looked like a brown princess. My mother
had become my fairy godmother, and as I grabbed my sandwich on my way out
the door, my metamorphosis was complete.
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked my mother.
“To school,” I replied. I knew I was sunk.
My mother dressed only in traditional Pakistani clothes, which consisted of
the shalwar kameez, a long tunic with baggy pants. To her, wearing a dress
without pants underneath meant you were halfnaked, like forgetting to put on
your shirt in the morning and going to school topless.
“You’re not going out dressed like that,” she said, staring at my bare legs.
I dutifully returned upstairs and put on my cords under my dress. I looked in
the mirror again. My fairy godmother was actually a fairy godmonster and had
reversed the spell. Now I was uglier than ever.
My assimilation stopped at peanut butter and jam.
To explain, it was only my third year in Canada. We had moved from
Liverpool, England, to Brampton, Ontario, when I was five. I had been hanging
on to the ears of my giant red rubber ball, happily bouncing it down the street,
when my father called me over. We were moving to Canada, he said. I never saw
my ball again.