My Mother, The Muslim

Jan. 8 - The Taliban pushed themselves into my mother’s room through newspapers I read while waiting in the intensive care ward. I had a dream they entered the hospital in Beirut and I couldn’t chase them away from my mother’s bed. I was afraid that their long beards would touch her sheets, was afraid that their breaths would foul her air, that they would entwine and entangle her to protect her from male doctors because, you see, my mother was a Muslim.

MY BEAUTIFUL MOTHER, stretched on the bed that ascends and descends—if Sheherezade told one more tale for the “Thousand and One Nights” it could be “The Magic Bed”—covered in an electronic array that breathes life into her and feeds her nourishment through her nose and sedatives through her arm. My mother, the Muslim, whose unveiled opinions and unbridled voice believed that oppression was a sin and justice was righteousness. My mother who was fourteen years old when she married, and had been forbidden the right to read or write. She held this shame all her life like a tattoo on her soul.

“Knowledge is a light,” my father used to say. “One should seek it even as far away as China.” But the light was for his daughters, not his wife. She was from a generation of suffering, we were from a generation of hope. My father believed in Islam and in tradition, but he believed in the future of his children. Now, what faith in the future remains?

Everywhere I see the forbidden encroaching. In the hospital waiting room veiled women arrive in increasing numbers. An Arab women’s magazine asks me to change the color of a character’s dress from ‘wine’ to something else, because wine is forbidden. Television makes religious men into stars, while writers, novelists, journalists pay for their words in blood. Fanaticism like an X-ray penetrates the tiniest molecules of thought.

My mother, now visibly expiring, is trying desperately to tell us something through the tangle of breathing tubes that block her vocal chords and imprison her words. She points with her eyes, with her hands. How are we to decipher the code? Maybe she could draw a picture like the one she used in her address book, caricatures and symbols. A smiling moon-faced man who was a dead ringer for her electrician, or a pigeon, symbol of a daughter who fled from Lebanon to find another life.

On the seventh day after my mother died, we stood in a group around her grave, men and women mingling together. A peroxide blonde wore a short, black lace skirt, another used kohl and red lipstick. They were mixed with the veiled and those who put on the scarf only for the occasion. Noticing a man who eyed the blonde, I thought of an esoteric poem written by a Pashtun woman full of sighs of lust, love, pain and deprivation:

Tomorrow my hungry lovers

Will be satisfied

As they watch me

Crossing the village

Unveiled

With my hair left to the wind.

And I thought about why men fear women. A woman becomes like a thing kept in the refrigerator to be taken out when her husband craves something sweet. But even stored away, she makes him anxious. ‘What if my neighbor craves something sweet as well?’ Why, he wonders, is he the lord of all he surveys, yet weakened by this woman he needs only a few minutes a day? How he wishes she would disappear from the earth.

I think of those American women who would marry the likes of the Taliban, and defend them, and I wonder what personal problems they have. Do they want to change the world to change themselves? How disappointed they must be in their husbands, and their lives. And I think about the Arab women I have seen demonstrating in favor of Osama bin Laden and carrying his portrait. They might as well carry banners announcing their own funerals.

Hanan Al Shaykh’s most recent novel is “Only in London.”

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.