Homeland Elegies(18)

I loved him. All the kids did. He was like one of us, willing to lose himself in our games, our worlds. I’d met him first in Pakistan, in my father’s village. He’d just been married, and he and his new wife, Safiya, had come to pay their respects to my father’s parents. I remember him showing me how to use a laundry basket to catch birds. We practiced on the chickens in the compound, then took it out to the village square to try it on the parrots. Magically, we entrapped a kingfisher. Muzzammil took hold of the bird from under the basket and handed it to me, its electric blue and blazing orange a wonder in my palms. Later, we saw much of Muzzammil in Wisconsin, as his work in pharmaceuticals brought him to Chicago for business. One year, he visited us around Halloween. Some of the neighborhood kids were over, and Muzzammil snuck into the fort of sheets we’d built in the basement, where he regaled us with a tale about a half lionfish, half child his biochem lab concocted for the military, which creature, he claimed, escaped from its tank and was now wreaking havoc on the local mouse population in La Jolla. I’m not sure we were particularly terrified by any of this, but he did a convincing impersonation of the creature eating a mouse that would remain a mocking motif—always reenacted with some attempt at his strange accent—among the crew of neighborhood kids for the months that followed.

Muzzammil’s name came from the Quran’s seventy-third surah (or chapter), entitled Al-Muzzammil, or, literally, the Enfolded One. The chapter is short and at the outset paints a picture of our Prophet enfolded in his bedsheets, exhorted by God’s voice to resist sleep and rise to spend part of the night studying the Quran:

O thou enfolded one!

Rise. Stand in prayer the night, at least a little,

Half—less or more; and recite the Revelation with care.

We will send you the Word.

For rising is hard and good, and night a time for study,

The day consumed by your duties.

Remember the Name of your Lord. To Him, devote yourself complete.

To the Lord of the East and West; there is no Lord but He…2



Though he was named for the Prophet, Muzzammil was in no way religious. As a chemist, he thought when you got down to the basics—to the molecules and their constituent atoms, that is—there really was no need for a God, Muslim or otherwise. Safiya, his wife, wasn’t so sure. I remember her making a case for faith at Thanksgiving dinner one year, an argument I would later discover was the same wager Pascal suggested one might want to make sure one got right. Safiya’s name, too, was drawn from the Prophet’s life. Her namesake was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a Jewish tribal leader in Medina whom the Prophet—after killing her husband in battle—would take as his eleventh spouse. The Prophet’s Safiya was supposedly a very beautiful woman, which is not exactly what I would have said of the Safiya I knew, at least not before saying other things about her: she was short; she was plump and calm; she brimmed with what seemed to me to be well-being. In opposition to the underlying, fractious despair of my parents’ hurly-burly, Safiya and Muzzammil seemed blessedly stable. I heard no sharp retorts, felt no wounded silences, saw two people who genuinely seemed to feel that life was better with the other in it. The looks of love between them would surprise me, discreet (or not-so-discreet) glances and half smiles exchanged over nothing, as he mixed sugar into his tea, say, or as she brushed flour from her cheeks while mixing and making chappatis, or as they held hands and shuffled along in their sandals on our summer walks through the neighborhood. He picked roses for her in the evenings from my mother’s bushes when they were in bloom. She would clip a blossom from the stem and wear it in her hair at dinner. On our living-room couch, they nestled much closer than I ever saw my parents do, their own alleged love marriage notwithstanding. Indeed, I saw enough of whatever was working between Safiya and Muzzammil to recognize, as I got older, all the unknowing American ado about the unconscionable injustice of arranged marriage as exactly that, a lot of ignorant fuss. Their marriage had been arranged. The first time they saw each other was the afternoon before they were engaged, when Safiya was marched into a living room to clear the tea setting so that she and her prospective groom could each catch a glimpse of the other. There was no reason for it to work, except that it did—though Safiya did seem to believe their union was emblematic of some more enduring truth about love. It was from her that I first heard the analogy comparing love and arranged marriages to kettles of water pitched at different temperatures: the former already boiling, with no chance to get any hotter; the latter cold at the outset, requiring steady application to be sure but with ample room to heat up over the years.

They had one child, whom they would name Mustafa, a beloved patronymic on Safiya’s side of the family meaning “chosen one” and another of the Prophet’s many epithets. I have two cousins and an uncle named Mustafa. Indeed, of my twenty-two first cousins, fifteen have names taken from the Prophet or his circle; among my eight immediate aunts and uncles, the number is five. My mother’s name, Fatima, owes its stupendous popularity in the Muslim world to being the given name of the Prophet’s only daughter with his first wife, Khadijah—which is also the name of one of my mother’s sisters.

I have two cousins named Ayesha. The first, Ayesha G, is a consultant for McKinsey who lives in Connecticut. She has three daughters with her husband, who is ten years older than she is and on his second marriage. He’s white and works in finance but converted to Islam for her sake, and so, instead of getting disowned by her parents for marrying outside the faith, Ayesha G is that rare conquering hero who’s succeeded in bringing one of their kind over to our side for a change. The other, Ayesha M, is a stay-at-home mom of five who splits her time between Islamabad and Atlanta, miserably married to her childhood sweetheart. Ayesha was the name of the Prophet’s favorite of his many wives, a woman—as we are taught in our tradition—of great heart and intellect. She was the daughter of the Prophet’s right-hand man, that pillar of staid, unquestioning support, Abu Bakr, the first outside of the Prophet’s family to convert to Islam in its earliest days and the first to lead the community after the Prophet’s death. The Prophet’s Ayesha is the subject of much love and lore, called the Mother of the Believers, and of course her betrothal to the Prophet at the tender age of six—the consummation of their marriage delayed until the onset of her puberty, at age nine (when the Prophet would have been fifty-three)—has been a subject of debate and derision for centuries. This story caused no undue compunction in my community until after 9/11, when we all started to realize how backward it made us look, idealizing what people here could only conceive of as child rape; we weren’t just risking derision but also bodily harm. Only then did the arguments about the reliability of the early sources go mainstream enough to become a subject of dinner conversation in my extended family. Which sounds about right. You don’t go looking to change a story that’s been working for you for a thousand years until you have a damn good reason to change it.