Free Zeitoun by Dave Eggers Page B

strangers—it didn’t seem right.
    Still, Kathy had faith that he knew what he was doing. She believed she’d been chosen to remain in this church. And she wanted to serve. To help. Perhaps, like Reverend Timothy entering the store that day, this was another event that was meant to be, meant to bring her closer to Christ.
    She was given a microphone and she spoke into it, telling the congregation what she’d told the reverend, that she had been investigating Islam, and that—
    The preacher cut her off. “She was looking to Islam!” he said with a sneer. “She was considering”—and here he paused—“the worship of Allah!” And with that, he made a snorting, derisive sound, the sort of sound an eight-year-old boy would make on a playground. This preacher, this leader of this church and congregation, was using this tone to refer to Allah. Did he not know that his God and Islam’s were one and the same? That was one of the first and simplest things she’d learned from the pamphlets Yuko had given her: Allah is just the Arabic word for God. Even Christians speaking Arabic refer to God as Allah.
    He went on to praise Kathy and Jesus and reaffirm the primacy of his and their faith, but by then she was hardly listening. Something had ruptured within her. When he was done, she sat down in a daze, bewildered but becoming sure about something right there and then. She smiled politely through the rest of the service, already knowing she would never come back.
    She thought about the episode while driving home, and that night, and all the next day. She talked to Yuko about it and they realized that this man, preaching to a thousand impressionable and trusting parishioners, didn’t know, or didn’t care, that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity were not-so-distantly related branches of the same monotheistic, Abrahamic faith. And to dismiss all of Islam with a playground sound? Kathy could not be part of what that man was preaching.
    So by fits and starts, she followed Yuko into Islam. She read the Qur’an and was struck by its power and lyricism. The Christian preachers she’d heard had spent a good amount of time talking about who would and wouldn’t go to hell, how hot it burned and for how long, but the imams she began to meet made no such pronouncements. Will I go to heaven? she asked. “Only God knows this,” the imam would tell her. The various doubts of the imams were comforting, and drew her closer.She would ask them a question, just as she had asked questions of her pastors, and the imams would try to answer, but often they wouldn’t know. “Let’s look at the Qur’an,” they would say. She liked Islam’s sense of personal responsibility, its bent toward social justice. Most of all, though, she liked the sense of dignity and purity embodied by the Muslim women she knew. To Kathy they seemed so wholesome, so honorable. They were chaste, they were disciplined. She wanted that sense of control. She wanted the peace that came with that sense of control.
    The actual conversion was beautifully simple. With Yuko and a handful of other women from the mosque present, she pronounced the
shahadah
, the Islamic pledge of conviction of faith. “AshHadu An La Ilaha Il-lallah, Wa Ash Hadu Anna Muhammadar Rasul-allah.” That was all she needed to say.
I bear Witness that there is no deity but Allah and I bear witness that Muhammad is His Messenger
. With that, Kathy Delphine had become a Muslim.
    When she tried to explain it to friends and family, Kathy fumbled. But she knew that in Islam she had found calm. The doubt sewn into the faith gave her room to think, to question. The answers the Qur’an provided gave her a way forward. Even her view of her family softened through the lens of Islam. She was less aggressive. She had always fought with her mother, but Islam taught her that “heaven is at the feet of your mother,” and this reined her in. She stopped talking back and learned to be more patient and forgiving.
It