bath required of those who wash the dead. "
And what of the dead, where do they lie in a non-Muslim land? Next to kuffar graves whose graven images may deter visiting angels? And what do you do if a country's laws require burial in a box, when a Muslim should be buried with nothing but a seamless shroud between her and the receiving earth?
These were some of the questions of adjustment that the Dawah Center was created to address. In America, you could not be passive about enacting your faith; you had to "Do for Self." No one was there to do it for you, like in the Old Country. There were hardly any Muslim institutions yet in this wilderness. You had to study your faith, dig out the core principles from underneath all the customs that may have accrued around them in the old Muslim world, and find a way to act on those principles in the present conditions. The spring after Zuhuras funeral, the Dawah Center would print up a pamphlet giving all the answers in easy-to-follow directives based on sound shariah research. Wajdy Shamy was one of the authors. Untold numbers of the U.S. faithful appreciated How to Be Buried as a Muslim in America.
Maybe we don't belong here, Khadra thought, standing next to Hanifa in the crowd at Zuhura's graveside. Maybe she belonged in a place where she would not get shoved and called "raghead" every other day in the school hallway. Teachers, classmates-no one ever caught her assailants. They always melted into the crowd behind her.
The whole Indianapolis Muslim community came out for the funeral-they were all family-and a lot of students from Bloomington, even some non-Muslims. There was a Nigerian athlete, and another young black man who cried hard and left quickly, mystifying the Dawah folk. But he exchanged a few quiet words with Zuhura's mother, and she nodded, seeming satisfied.
Instead of looking for the killers, or rounding up any of the APES (American Protectors of the Environs of Simmonsville) for questioning, the police handcuffed Luqman and threw him in the back of a car. Where was he that night? they asked. Was Zuhura seeing someone on the side? they asked, maligning her morals with horrible questions. "No!" he shouted, "She was an honorable girl!" The Indianapolis Star reported on him being a suspect: Murder Possible Honor Killing-Middle Eastern Connection, they said, with a sidebar on "the oppression of women in Islam."
No charge of murder was brought against Luqman. He was deported anyway, on a technical visa violation.
Zuhura's murderer was never caught. The Dawah community labored on with its godly task, if a little heavier of heart. "Just like the early Muslims," Khadra's mother said. "When one fell, another one picked up the banner and struggled on."
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath it allwhat then would life be but despair?
-Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Khadra's father and the other Center workers took the Dawah on the road. They drove to chapters across the country, developing Islamic awareness. Ebtehaj was just as involved in organizing local Muslim women's groups, although she was not a salaried Center employee like Wajdy. So the whole family piled into the station wagon for these mission trips.
In this way, Khadra and Eyad got to see more of America than most of their American classmates. They made ablutions in the Great Salt Lake (it really was that salty!) and prayed duhr at Mount Rushmore with the giant faces of the presidents gazing down upon them ("Carved by a Klansman," Wajdy said). They uttered the journey blessing in unison as they went up the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and they pushed Jihad's stroller between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.
One of the road trips took the Shamys to the
And what of the dead, where do they lie in a non-Muslim land? Next to kuffar graves whose graven images may deter visiting angels? And what do you do if a country's laws require burial in a box, when a Muslim should be buried with nothing but a seamless shroud between her and the receiving earth?
These were some of the questions of adjustment that the Dawah Center was created to address. In America, you could not be passive about enacting your faith; you had to "Do for Self." No one was there to do it for you, like in the Old Country. There were hardly any Muslim institutions yet in this wilderness. You had to study your faith, dig out the core principles from underneath all the customs that may have accrued around them in the old Muslim world, and find a way to act on those principles in the present conditions. The spring after Zuhuras funeral, the Dawah Center would print up a pamphlet giving all the answers in easy-to-follow directives based on sound shariah research. Wajdy Shamy was one of the authors. Untold numbers of the U.S. faithful appreciated How to Be Buried as a Muslim in America.
Maybe we don't belong here, Khadra thought, standing next to Hanifa in the crowd at Zuhura's graveside. Maybe she belonged in a place where she would not get shoved and called "raghead" every other day in the school hallway. Teachers, classmates-no one ever caught her assailants. They always melted into the crowd behind her.
The whole Indianapolis Muslim community came out for the funeral-they were all family-and a lot of students from Bloomington, even some non-Muslims. There was a Nigerian athlete, and another young black man who cried hard and left quickly, mystifying the Dawah folk. But he exchanged a few quiet words with Zuhura's mother, and she nodded, seeming satisfied.
Instead of looking for the killers, or rounding up any of the APES (American Protectors of the Environs of Simmonsville) for questioning, the police handcuffed Luqman and threw him in the back of a car. Where was he that night? they asked. Was Zuhura seeing someone on the side? they asked, maligning her morals with horrible questions. "No!" he shouted, "She was an honorable girl!" The Indianapolis Star reported on him being a suspect: Murder Possible Honor Killing-Middle Eastern Connection, they said, with a sidebar on "the oppression of women in Islam."
No charge of murder was brought against Luqman. He was deported anyway, on a technical visa violation.
Zuhura's murderer was never caught. The Dawah community labored on with its godly task, if a little heavier of heart. "Just like the early Muslims," Khadra's mother said. "When one fell, another one picked up the banner and struggled on."
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath it allwhat then would life be but despair?
-Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Khadra's father and the other Center workers took the Dawah on the road. They drove to chapters across the country, developing Islamic awareness. Ebtehaj was just as involved in organizing local Muslim women's groups, although she was not a salaried Center employee like Wajdy. So the whole family piled into the station wagon for these mission trips.
In this way, Khadra and Eyad got to see more of America than most of their American classmates. They made ablutions in the Great Salt Lake (it really was that salty!) and prayed duhr at Mount Rushmore with the giant faces of the presidents gazing down upon them ("Carved by a Klansman," Wajdy said). They uttered the journey blessing in unison as they went up the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and they pushed Jihad's stroller between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.
One of the road trips took the Shamys to the
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