can answer my prayers because I can tell Him what I don’t even know I need. We sing a few more songs and then everybody eats the treats that Hedda’s mom brought when she dropped her off.
L ATER THAT NIGHT , H OPE’S dad, who is also excited that I got my prayer language, drops me off in front of my house. My mom and stepdad and brothers are all watching TV and they don’t notice when I come in. I say hi, but they’re fixated on their police show. It’s a rerun, and they love reruns in my house—I don’t love them so much, but it’s mostly what we watch. So I just step over the clutter on the living room floor and make my way to the bathroom to see if my New Testament is there or if I’ll be in royal trouble when my mom’s show is over. There it is, in exactly the same place I left it when I took it out of my pocket. Nobody has noticed it. My new prayer language must already be working! So I stick the Bible back in my pocket, tell God thank you, and go upstairs to my room to study for my English test.
Beaten by Devotion
Huda Al-Marashi
W hen my mother was a young girl in Baghdad, her family made yearly pilgrimages to Karbala, the town where Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Husayn, was killed in the seventh century AD . On the anniversary of his death, a day known as Ashura, Mama wrapped herself in a long, flowing black abaya and made her way through Imam Husayn’s gilded shrine. There she sat on Persian rugs and listened to passionate retellings of his martyrdom that made her cry.
When I was a young girl in Monterey, California, my extended family made yearly pilgrimages to a run-down 1960s church in South-Central Los Angeles that had been converted to a mosque. We told our teachers and bosses there was a death in the family, never mentioning the death occurred well over a thousand years ago. With our bags tied to the roof rack and eight of us squeezed intoa car designed for seven, we crossed three hundred miles of interstate, listening to tape recordings of religious services that made my mother, uncle, and grandfather weep, their shoulders bobbing up and down with each sob.
My siblings and I did not cry. Our Arabic vocabulary was limited to the domestic, and my family’s tapes were not only garbled from use but full of words to which we’d had no exposure. My father did not cry either. I’d seen him cry only once, when he found out one of his sisters had died, and that had been only a short, angry burst of tears. My stepgrandmother pulled her face behind her abaya because sometimes she cried, but sometimes she didn’t, and holding back tears at a time like this was not a sign of strength.
Shia Muslims believe the tears we shed in the name of our ill-fated imams (those spiritual leaders we believe are the rightful successors of the Prophet Muhammad) are blessed and rewarded. They are not to be comforted or contained. These tears were, in fact, the motivation for our journey. We traveled to this mosque precisely because the speaker was a prominent religious scholar, a descendent from the Prophet’s family known by the title of Seyyid, and even better known for his ability to evoke the soul-cleansing cry my elders craved.
But first we had to endure the hot car, cramped seating arrangement, and a series of stops for gas and stretching. Halfway there, we pulled up to a Carl’s Jr. on a desolate patch of desert highway littered with proverbial tumbleweed. My father ordered coffee, onion rings, and fried zucchini—this just to officially make us customers before my step-grandmother put out her spread: kabobs she fried that morning, pita bread, and a bowl that held iceberg lettuce, whole tomatoes, and a knife. I stared at the table too embarrassed to eat the sandwich my stepgrandmother offered me.
Born and raised in America, I knew it was wrong to bring your own lunch to a fast-food establishment. I knew it was even worse to wash for your daily prayers in a public restroom. As we poured handfuls of
L ATER THAT NIGHT , H OPE’S dad, who is also excited that I got my prayer language, drops me off in front of my house. My mom and stepdad and brothers are all watching TV and they don’t notice when I come in. I say hi, but they’re fixated on their police show. It’s a rerun, and they love reruns in my house—I don’t love them so much, but it’s mostly what we watch. So I just step over the clutter on the living room floor and make my way to the bathroom to see if my New Testament is there or if I’ll be in royal trouble when my mom’s show is over. There it is, in exactly the same place I left it when I took it out of my pocket. Nobody has noticed it. My new prayer language must already be working! So I stick the Bible back in my pocket, tell God thank you, and go upstairs to my room to study for my English test.
Beaten by Devotion
Huda Al-Marashi
W hen my mother was a young girl in Baghdad, her family made yearly pilgrimages to Karbala, the town where Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Husayn, was killed in the seventh century AD . On the anniversary of his death, a day known as Ashura, Mama wrapped herself in a long, flowing black abaya and made her way through Imam Husayn’s gilded shrine. There she sat on Persian rugs and listened to passionate retellings of his martyrdom that made her cry.
When I was a young girl in Monterey, California, my extended family made yearly pilgrimages to a run-down 1960s church in South-Central Los Angeles that had been converted to a mosque. We told our teachers and bosses there was a death in the family, never mentioning the death occurred well over a thousand years ago. With our bags tied to the roof rack and eight of us squeezed intoa car designed for seven, we crossed three hundred miles of interstate, listening to tape recordings of religious services that made my mother, uncle, and grandfather weep, their shoulders bobbing up and down with each sob.
My siblings and I did not cry. Our Arabic vocabulary was limited to the domestic, and my family’s tapes were not only garbled from use but full of words to which we’d had no exposure. My father did not cry either. I’d seen him cry only once, when he found out one of his sisters had died, and that had been only a short, angry burst of tears. My stepgrandmother pulled her face behind her abaya because sometimes she cried, but sometimes she didn’t, and holding back tears at a time like this was not a sign of strength.
Shia Muslims believe the tears we shed in the name of our ill-fated imams (those spiritual leaders we believe are the rightful successors of the Prophet Muhammad) are blessed and rewarded. They are not to be comforted or contained. These tears were, in fact, the motivation for our journey. We traveled to this mosque precisely because the speaker was a prominent religious scholar, a descendent from the Prophet’s family known by the title of Seyyid, and even better known for his ability to evoke the soul-cleansing cry my elders craved.
But first we had to endure the hot car, cramped seating arrangement, and a series of stops for gas and stretching. Halfway there, we pulled up to a Carl’s Jr. on a desolate patch of desert highway littered with proverbial tumbleweed. My father ordered coffee, onion rings, and fried zucchini—this just to officially make us customers before my step-grandmother put out her spread: kabobs she fried that morning, pita bread, and a bowl that held iceberg lettuce, whole tomatoes, and a knife. I stared at the table too embarrassed to eat the sandwich my stepgrandmother offered me.
Born and raised in America, I knew it was wrong to bring your own lunch to a fast-food establishment. I knew it was even worse to wash for your daily prayers in a public restroom. As we poured handfuls of
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