The Call
by Esther J. Brown
1.
They began to call to me in 2009. I remember the day, a late September afternoon in Jerusalem, while I climbed around some limestone tombs south of the Old City walls. I sat on a stone to listen, looking east at the Palestinian village of Silwan, toward Mecca. First one, then two, three, four minarets crackled to life: the one on the gray-domed Al-Aqsa Mosque, the one at the bottom of the valley, and those scattered throughout the village.
The muezzins cried out in Arabic, reminding the faithful (and everyone, for that matter) that God is great. Their voices ricocheted off the valley walls, wailing, chanting the same words with different speeds, pitches, and intonations.
I was hypnotized. The sounds reverberated in my ears, engulfing me. I looked at Silwan, clinging to the steep, rocky slope: stone houses with piles of trash below their windows, laundry flapping on a rooftop clothesline, here and there an ancient tomb. A car drove down a narrow street, and a little boy ran where rocks have been thrown and men have shot other men.
2.
Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar.
Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar.
Ash-hadu anna la ilaha ill-Allah.
Ash-hadu anna la ilaha ill-Allah.
Ash-hadu anna Muhammad-ar-rasool Allah.
Ash-hadu anna Muhammad-ar-rasool Allah.
Hayya ‘ala as-salah.
Hayya ‘ala as-salah.
Hayya ‘ala al-falah.
Hayya ‘ala al-falah.
Allahu akbar.
Allahu akbar.
La ilaha illa Allah.
Allah is most great…
I bear witness that there is none worthy of being worshipped except Allah…
I bear witness that Muhammad is the apostle of Allah…
Come to prayer…
Come to success…
Allah is most great…
There is none worthy of being worshipped except Allah.
3.
Several months later my husband, Joe, and I vacationed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. In a touristy town called Dahab, we ate kushari — macaroni and rice piled with brown lentils, spicy tomato sauce, and crispy, caramelized onions — with the Red Sea lapping beside us. That night we lay in a rattan-sided hotel room with a straw roof and tried to sleep.
At 4:17 a.m., the speakers strapped to a pole near our hut began to blare. “Allahu akbar!”
While driving into Dahab on Friday, we’d passed a mosque at noontime. The streets were crowded with men going to prayer. The mosque was under construction, so we could see inside the main hall where hundreds of men stood shoulder-to-shoulder, their hands clasped in front of them. Clean, bareheaded, in button-down shirts and slacks or traditional jalabiya, they stood on a diagonal in the square room to face the Kaaba in Mecca — a solid mass of bodies.
I thought of those men as the call to prayer roused me from sleep. I thought of Muslims on this north-south stripe of earth — in western Russia, eastern Europe, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan — tens of thousands crawling out of bed with sleep in their eyes, washing their hands and feet and heads, placing their prayer rugs on the floor in the darkness, bowing, standing, and bowing together.
Yes, God, you are great, I prayed from my bed. But my heart ached, knowing that I was one in a million — that of everyone praying, I was not addressing Allah.
4.
For our two years in the Middle East, Joe and I lived in a tiny Jewish village west of Jerusalem. Some days, in the early morning I’d ride the bus from our home to the city, passing through Abu Gosh, an Arab-Israeli town that attracted me with strange magnetism.
Many of the people who boarded the bus here were men on their way to work — lean young men with gelled black hair, designer jeans and t-shirts, old men wearing knit hats and sweaters, men who stamped out their cigarettes on the sidewalk and allowed the women to board first. Many of the women wore heavy makeup and hijabs, precisely wrapped and fastened with glittering pins. They greeted one another with sabah el-khair — good morning — as they searched for seats. A palpable sense of community filled the bus as those deep gutturals and breathy, aspirated letters moved about me.
Sometimes I wanted to pull my scarf over my head and look like the women. I even practiced at home. But while I tried to blend in — not making eye contact with the men, whispering sabah el-khair to the woman who sat beside me — I also knew that I was different and wanted to be that way.
At the bottom of the hill, the bus passed the home of my only real Arab friends — three elementary-age girls who visited me every week to practice their English. They lived in an apartment above their wealthy uncle’s restaurant, with their father, a chef, and their mother, who had married at age fourteen.
Sometimes we did homework when they came. Once we decorated a gingerbread house, a mad mess of frosting and candies. They loved playing on “the games,” as they called the playground in our village, and making chocolate chip cookies (non-existent in Arab households). In exchange for my time, they brought me salty pickles and hummus from the restaurant and taught me to write my name in Arabic with sidewalk chalk.
In an attempt to understand them and their people, I borrowed a translation of the Quran from the library and started to read it. One day the oldest girl spotted it — a fat book with an embossed cover. “That looks like a Quran,” she said. “It is,” I replied. I asked if they’d ever read the Bible, and the middle girl looked at me like I was crazy.
My little friends fought a lot. Before Valentine’s Day, while making frosted sugar cookies, they fought over cookie cutters and accused each other of stealing ideas. At least one of them shouted “I hate you” to another. Although their words were not directed at me, they made me angry. I hated their petty arguments and noise.
As I scraped cookies from the pan, I did not want to treat them kindly. This was not the first time I’d felt this way. There had been the night they slept over and didn’t fall asleep until one a.m., though I told them to be quiet multiple times. There was the afternoon they brought their cousin with them, a boy who caused more strife than they did — when he got home, he told his mother I’d hit him, which pitched me into a tailspin of phone calls to his father and his uncle, explaining that I would never do such a thing. The time would come when the oldest girl would paint Joe’s name in big letters on the side of a storage container owned by our village, then lie and tell me the youngest had done it.
There were more peaceful days too, days I loved them easily, days we talked about kindness and doing right. I remember one summer afternoon, walking past the dusty sabra paddles crowned with prickly red fruits, talking to the middle girl. “Do you know what forgiveness means?” I asked.
But today, I could see, was not a day for questions or explanations, but a day for doing, for living. So with a prayer, I turned and continued to help them with their cookies.
“I love you, Esther,” the littlest one said, perhaps noticing my reddened eyes.
“I love you, too,” I replied, giving love that was not mine — love that came to me, undeserved, from heaven.
I wanted the girls to know that love, this whole village of Abu Gosh to know it. I prayed for that revelation as the bus continued to the bottom of the hill. Through the lights draped across the road for Ramadan, I could see rebar sticking up from unfinished buildings and the old Crusader church-turned-mosque. The sun rose, exposing all the finger and forehead prints on the bus windows.
5.
Chris, a fifty-five-year-old British bachelor, was our host in Amman, Jordan. He was slight and sloppy, spoke English with a stutter and Arabic without flaw. He lived, as he put it, in an “abysmal” apartment. It had a missing front door handle, a curtainless shower, a toilet that flushed with a hand-pull system, and a refrigerator door that was prone to falling off.
In a front room with twelve-foot ceilings, we ate stew and broccoli for supper and orange date syrup cake for dessert (his recipe, dry and dense to go with milky black tea), while he told us about his twenty-five years in the Middle East. He said that if we plan to return here — to this place, to these people — we must go for broke.
But before we could imagine doing that, we would have to conquer the task of escorting our traveling companion to her room across the street: feel our way down the pitch-dark stairwell, fit the skeleton key in the outer door lock, overcome our intimidation when kids approached us in the street. When we returned, Joe and I sat on mattresses on the floor of Chris’s spare room, its walls empty save an Arabic inscription or two, and prayed quietly.
Minarets surrounded Chris’s flat. At five in the morning, they crackled into a cacophony of voices — from down the street, from up the hill. For the first time, their call frustrated me. They assumed we all wanted to wake up and pray.
But I did pray there in the dark, face on my pillow. It had become habit. Outside, the lime-colored lights ringing the top of each tower glowed while the muezzins chanted. Their call to prayer had become mine.
6.
When I was a girl, my mother taught me to pray:
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. Amen.
And somewhere in the Middle East, a mother taught her daughter to pray, even as the minarets sang:
Abana ’alladhi fi as-samawati,
liyataqaddasi asmuka.
Liya’ti malakutuka.
Litakun mashi atuka
kama fi as-sama’i kadhalika‘ala al’ardi.
Khubzana kafafana ’a‘tina al-yawma!
Waaghfir lana dhunubana,
Kama naghfiru nahnu aidhan lilmudhnibina ’ilayna!
Wala tudkhilna fi tajrubatin,
Lakin najjina mina ash-shirriri. Amin.
7.
Today, in suburban Illinois, they call to me again. It’s late afternoon, and I’m reading on our bed. On the windowsills, seven speckled green tomatoes and three nectarines are sunning in the light. A fly crawls on the window screen, trying to escape. Kids ride bikes in the parking lot, and a breeze tousles the still unripe leaves on the trees.
I should be used to it by now, with the Muslims living downstairs, almost directly beneath us. The call to prayer, coming from their computer speakers, drifts up discreetly, starting me from my book. The words transfix and transport me, as always. They seem to plead with me in a million voices, begging me, imploring me: Come. Come to us.
Header image by rbarenblat.
