My (earnest, irate) thoughts

I have begun to pray the obligatory prayers again. Yusuf, probably thinking it would inspire us, set up the ezan machine, a plastic mosque that sings a recorded Arabic call to prayer at the appointed times. The times are slightly off, because our city is not major enough to have its own setting: you have to be a New York or a L.A. to warrant that. When it yelled Allahu ekber Allahu ekber this morning, I jumped out of my skin.

I am used to being wrathful at the beep-beep-BEEP-BEEP of my ’70s-era alarm, and then, as I remember why I am waking up in the dark, I push my ‘just five more minutes’ nefis aside to head for the bathroom. Then, as it dawned that I was furious with what should be a lovely, if mechanical, call to prayer filled me with enormous guilt. ‘Why did you set that?’ I demanded, irate that guilt was my first emotion of the day. My husband looked taken aback. Then I noticed he was wearing the knit prayer hat I hadn’t seen in months. ‘Are you praying?’ I asked. Probably sarcastically, because it had been me going it alone these last few weeks. ‘Last night I did,’ he said softly, still looking shocked. I got up and washed and prayed, an extra two rakats — perhaps I was seeking absolution. Then I fell back asleep sort of fitfully, without explaining my behavior. I was blushing in the dark, unable to understand why my heart was beating so fast. Then I remembered why, one morning months ago, I had taken the batteries out of the ezan machine. We weren’t praying then, and the noisy five-times-daily reminder of the obligation I was shirking sent my guilt into overdrive. It was better, I had thought, to wake up to the alarm, feel a prick of guilt for not having set it early enough, and then go on with my day. But I couldn’t understand why its unexpected sound still evoked the same flood of guilt, since I was getting up to pray.

Honestly, and I swear there’s no judgment here, but I don’t know how folks who don’t pray live in Muslim countries, where the call to prayer rings out every single day whether you want the reminder or not. The guilt would kill me, I think. I’d have to start praying, or run away to a non-Muslim-majority country, where the faithful go to noiseless churches once a week, where the dead go silently to nondescript funeral parlors, eerie places with flowers and low lights and grave men in gray suits. The noises of Turkey — the ezan, and the funeral prayer ringing out for the recently deceased, washed and wrapped in white cloth and prayed over before going directly into the earth — must be an uplifting blessing for the faithful, and a crushing burden for the faithless.

When my husband said, ‘I don’t understand you’ I thought, ‘I don’t understand me, either.’

Like in Istanbul, when my non-Muslim stepfather greeted us at breakfast at our tiny hotel near the Blue Mosque, and as we gorged on fresh bread with cherry jelly, honey and white cheese and cup after cup of hot çay, he said, with a look of surprised happiness on his face, ‘I heard the ezan this morning through the window.’ And I would smile and say, ‘Me too’ but I would blush furiously, because the sound had woken me from sleep and briefly, but pointedly, made me mad. I envied his ease, how the sound was novel for him, the way wearing a headscarf at my nikah had been, a foray into something foreign, not a lifestyle to be lived.

It’s like this weekend. I went to visit my grandmother on Saturday, bringing her lentil soup and a chopped salad with my experimental attempt at vinaigrette. We made conversation, and of course it devolved into listening to my grandmother pass on hearsay and judgment about people I do and don’t know. She’s a devout Christian, but born and raised in Georgia, and for a great many Southerners, gossiping comes as natural as breathing. Afterward, I was wrecked. I felt exhausted from playing the ‘dutiful granddaughter, who behaves so selflessly now that she’s Muslim’. And ashamed that my good deed came didn’t seem to come from my heart, that I had to push myself to do it, push myself to get through it, and then try not to complain about it incessantly afterward (I failed at the last one). On Sunday, I visited my deceased grandmother’s best friend, bringing her a lobster sandwich from her favorite restaurant. And, though I thought I had absolutely no expectations from our time together, afterward I felt exhausted, again. Maybe from playing the ‘personification of perfect, contented Islam’ role, which — yes I know — is absurd. Maybe because I wish good deeds gave me that thrill of a job well done, like they seem to for my mom, whose nur shines on her face after she plants flowers in my yard or helps Yusuf study for the GRE.

My brain knows Allah loves me, and that religion is forgiveness, not guilt; Muhammad is a prophet of comfort, not gloom. Why doesn’t my heart know this?

I vaguely remember Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, saying in one of his writings that sometimes with delicate, sensitive people, Satan whispers to them that their ‘bad’ thoughts are proof that they are not really Muslim, because if they were ‘really’ Muslim, their thoughts would be pure. Is that what this is? Is this just Satan being a bastard, or is this ugliness the real me? … Another question: Must right thought precede right action, or does right thought stem from right action?