Standing Alone Read Free

in Arabic. The hajj is meant to be a time to absorb the central messages of Islam: that Islam means having a special relationship with God based on surrendering to divine will and praying to and revering God; that there is a kinship among people that expresses itself through sacrifice for the benefit of others; that life is about struggle—a battle to secure a livelihood and ensure that good triumphs over evil.
    For women, the hajj is given the value of struggle, or jihad. The concept is daunting. Jihad is normally associated with military combat, but its deeper meaning is a struggle within our souls to live by the highest spiritual principles we can embrace.
    It’s said that the prophet Muhammad’s wife Aisha asked him, “Do women have to make jihad?”
    The prophet replied, “Yes, the hajj and umrah. ” Umrah is an off-season pilgrimage that happens anytime other than the five designated days of hajj.
    I knew that this jihad beckoned me, and the idea of journey felt familiar to me. My family had been early pilgrims of another sort when my family migrated to America. In Arabic, migrants are called muhajir , a word that coincidentally sounds like hajj . From my earliest days, I had been a person on pilgrimage.

REFLECTIONS ON LIFE AS A DAUGHTER OF ISLAM
    The problems with the Christians start, said Father, as with women, when the hudud, or sacred frontier, is not respected. . . . To be a Muslim was to respect the hudud. And for a child, to respect the hudud was to obey.
    Fatima Mernissi (Moroccan scholar),
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1994)
    HYDERABAD , INDIA —I stared at the bare-chested laborer standing on the roof of my childhood home in India, hammering at its final remnants. It made me reflect on my roots and the imprint they left on my identity.
    When I left India at the age of four, my grandmother—whom I called Dadi, meaning “paternal grandmother” in my native language of Urdu—dressed my brother and me in matching outfits cut from the same striped cloth (in case we got separated and had to be matched), and she lined myeyes with black kohl, or eyeliner, to protect me from the evil eye. It served me well in a life that, much like most lives, has encountered tests. We lived first in Piscataway, New Jersey, where I spent my girlhood trying to find a place for myself as an immigrant child of America. Watching a children’s TV program called Romper Room , I waited for the hostess to call out my name when she greeted children in TV land called Mary, Sue, and John, but I never heard her say my name. At home I grew up following the script of a traditional Muslim girl. I stopped wearing dresses when I was nine years old because my father, with his traditional Muslim sensibilities, felt that it wasn’t proper for me to keep baring my legs.
    When I was ten, we moved to Morgantown, West Virginia, where my father got a job as an assistant professor of nutrition at the local university, West Virginia University. Morgantown is tucked into a north-central corner of the state about seventy-five miles south of Pittsburgh and two hundred miles west of Washington, D.C., along a river called the Monongahela. About 90 percent of the population is white. West Virginia University is known for its football team, the gold-and-blue Mountaineers, but it has also churned out a record number of Rhodes scholars to Oxford University. West Virginians have a fierce mountain tradition of independence that I seemed to absorb. I was always proud to be on my side of the boundary line between Virginia and West Virginia. When the war over slavery broke out, our territory had stood on the right side of the issue, breaking off from Virginia to create the free state of West Virginia. In Morgantown, we had a dynamic intellectual community. West Virginia University was the richest academic enclave in the state. Drawn by the university, immigrants from India were one of its largest