Boy vs. Girl Read Free Page B

yourself, as a person, as a Muslim.”
    â€œTrying to live up to your ideals…”
    Auntie Najma smiled at them both. “Now that’s what
I’m
talking about! We have to remember how fortunate we are to see another Ramadan. It’s like we’ve been given another chance to repent, to better ourselves, to get some serious blessings from Allah. We’ve got a chance to make this month really special… I can’t wait!” She fished around in her bag. “Look, here’s a book I’ve been reading, just to remind myself, y’know?”
    She showed them the book:
Ramadan in the Qur’an and Sunnah
.
    Farhana’s eyes lit up, as they always did when she saw a book she hadn’t read.
    â€œD’you think I could borrow that, Auntie?”
    â€œOf course – but only if you let Faraz have a read too…”
    â€œYou’d better let me have it first, Auntie, or I’ll never get a look-in once it disappears into Farhana’s room!”
    They all laughed and Auntie Najma handed him the book. Then the milkshakes came and there was no time for talk. None of them remembered that they hadn’t even eaten lunch!
    * * *
    Faraz looked down again at the line in the book that lay open on his lap:
    â€˜Fasting has been prescribed for you so that you may attain righteousness…’
    Could he possibly attain that? Reach that point of awareness? Stay out of the madness? He wanted to try, wanted to so badly. He would make a go of it this year, he really would.
    But a little voice in the back of his mind whispered treacherous thoughts:
What about Skrooz? And the lads? What will they think?
    He pushed that thought aside. In this place, at this moment, there was nothing he wanted more than to attain righteousness, to feel at peace with himself.
    He took a deep breath.
    He would do it,
insha Allah
, he would. He just had to stay focused.
    * * *
    That night, Farhana stayed up after everyone else had gone to bed. She sat up in bed, her duvet pulled up over her knees, an open book on her lap, writing by lamplight. She was making a list.
    All evening, she had been thinking about what her aunt had said and, all evening, she had asked herself questions:
what do you want? Where are you going? How can you improve?
    Now she had written the answers on a page in the open book. As she wrote them, they became real somehow, concrete, as if they took life from the page they now covered.
    Pray on time
    Read more Qur’an
    Stop gossiping
    Give away some stuff
    Help the needy
    Study hard
    Get coursework done ahead of schedule
    Pray the night prayer
    Her eyes flickered upwards to the white
hijab
once again. Her hand hesitated as she formulated the sentence in her head:
    Start wearing hijab
.
    Could she really do it?
    She knew one thing for sure: if she put it on, she wanted to do it properly, for good, not takingit off again after a few weeks, or after Eid. She didn’t want to be a hypocrite. But was she ready to be a ‘
hijabi
’? In the fullest sense of the word? After all,
hijab
wasn’t just about covering your hair. It was about a state of mind: modesty, awareness of God, awareness of your actions, being accountable, being a walking symbol of Islam.
    After many discussions with Auntie Najma, and debates with her mum and her mate Shazia, who wore the
hijab
, albeit reluctantly, she now believed that the
hijab
was a religious obligation, an act of worship that would be rewarded.
    That wasn’t the issue.
    The issue was whether or not she could live up to its expectations – and whether she could deal with the negative reactions she was sure to encounter at school.
    â€˜And I did not create mankind or the jinn except to worship Me.’
    If that was her reason for living, what was stopping her from taking this step?
    Why should I care what the girls at school think?
she thought.
Or my teachers? After school, they go back to their lives, to their kids.