My Fairy Tale

I always wanted to live a fairy tale,

To have my heart stolen by a charming prince,

Who defeats evil for my love.

Sitting in a cafe, holding my book,

My eyes wondered outside the window,

Watching people minding their business,

Suddenly he shows up, tall and handsome,

So charmingly European....

Enchanted by his voice,

Asking "is this seat taken?"

(No one can fill it better, I thought)

I smiled, feeling the heat in my face,

He sat before me: my story has just begun!

Our eyes would meet, blue meeting black,

We would be spell bound,

He would start a conversation, about the weather maybe,

In a minute we'd become "match made in heaven",

We would exchange numbers, and he would call me,

We would live the fairy tale…

But every tale has an evil witch,

To spell-bound the lovers,

Setting them apart far away from each other...

(I can see it in your eyes, your blue avoiding my black,

I can see where you are looking),

My scarf sends you away,

Further beyond the oceans between our countries,

I will always be foreign to you,)

I blinked, and there he was,

turning toward the equally blue eyes,

They both make a perfect couple!

My story ends as it began...

Just a fairy tale…

Dancing in the Rain

I always wanted to dance in the rain,

But in Iraq, it was rare, and definitely not mine

to enjoy or dance to its music.

In London, it is plenty,

For everyone to be drawn in its melody…

Today, I can dance in the rain.

I want to have my scarf soaked wet with falling drops

To embrace heaven's tears of joy!

I want to dance in the rain...

but my ankles are chained.

My mother gave me her golden anklets.

She had them from her mother who had them from hers.

It ran from one female to another.

They did not dance in the rain...

They didn't have their scarves soaked wet.

They didn't embrace heaven's joy!

I want to stretch my arms wide,

to embrace all the rain.

I want to feel the chill.

To have my body would shiver with every drop,

Passing through layers of fabric thick.

But they were too heavy.

They kept me too warm...

But there is my face!

Open to the sweet drool

Fully exposed!

Every drop kissed my revealed skin.

My eyes wide open to heaven and her tears;

No, these are not tears,

They are blessings of freedom,

My scarf has just embraced them all.

I am dancing in the rain…

Nadia F. Mohammed   

Homeless

I see them every day. They don't take much space,

A body folded small into a corner:

A bundle of faceless cloths, 

Hiding from London's cold,

Or the coldness of passers-by.

They beg with an old paper cup,

For some change to our humanity. 

(Sometimes, I just wish to sit next to them, 

Participate in the ritual of bundling myself. 

I may seem odd to them: no rugged cloths to dress, 

Not really jobless to beg for daily living, 

But still, I am as homeless as they can be!) 

Like the cold bundles on street corners, 

I came from far away, 

I left the home where I grew, 

I am as homeless as they can be.

Like them, I have no identity to show, 

My country today is nameless to me. 

Every day, I pass them by with envy, 

Wishing to crawl small, 

to hide in a corner, I call my own.  

My Scarf

They think they know me well to analyze or offer advice,

Maybe to improve what they see,

Maybe in anger against what I say,

Or they just want a better me.

I listen to them, politely smile back, and walk away,

But I keep wondering: what is there to change?

Are they annoyed by the way I dress?

                    Jeans and tops

Boots or trainers

And a head-scarf,

Not a stereotype.

(I think, maybe I need to smile less).

Day and night, I roam London streets,

I smile and smile back

when a head-scarfed woman comes ahead:

“Assalam alykum” is expected by both,

Coded greeting to know our own:

We are one community who believe in peace,

“assalam alykum” “wa alyakum alsalam”.

No shia or sunni needs to interfere.

It is a secret language,

Of stereotypes.

They ask me to remove the scarf:

                    Angry maybe

Or they say it with love.

I don’t give it religious sanctity,

But I don’t throw my hair in the wind

Nor let free a suppressed beauty.

They don’t understand what it means,

To throw colors on

Black hair:

Pink and blue,

Sometimes cream.

They don’t get how it makes me feel:

At home, while living nomad in a strange world

It is my mother’s Abaya and my sisters’ familiar eyes

It is the country I have left

                              Confused,

                              In fear.

N. F. Mohammed 

                

Between Here and There

"I don't want to go back,
I am staying here; this is my life goal now",
She said sipping her European coffee,
with eyes set on London's busiest street.

"If all of us abandoned our land,
and decided to enjoy the life we miss there,
then who would guide our people through,
who would lead them out toward the light?"
He wondered, enjoying hot coco.

She looked deep into his small eyes,
she was confused what to say:
he was enjoying the freedom of the foreign land,
but still his heart was left there,
in the country he abandoned.

(Was she a traitor to her people,
did she turned her back in their hardest time?
Do they really need her? Does she have to go back?)

"Then pack your bags and return,
to the land that needs you most.
Why you are still here, while they cry for you there?"

"ah, I can't go back, no one appreciates my talent there,
I can't go back, because I have a life here",

He looked at his watch, "Break is over,
"Time to get back to work",
She saw him hurrying out of the cafe,
Sinking in the crowds,

Her mind still wondering
between life here and there.


Nadia F. Mohammed 

Why I think that Islam Needs Reform

Like most of the Muslims today, I was born to follow this religion rather than it was a personal choice which I decided upon later in life. The earliest realization of this religious identity came in the first class of "Religion" in school when I was six years old. The teacher asked couple of my other kids to go to another class when it was the time to study religion. When I asked the kid next to me why those other kids had to leave, she said because they were Christians and they didn't have to sit in the Islamic religion class. I knew then of the difference between me and those other kids. My mother explained to me that we were Muslim, and Christians were different from us because they had another prophet other than Mohammed.

I grew up to be Muslim but I could not accept my religion blindly like many others and wished to learn more about it and the more I read, the more questions I had about why and how religious laws developed. These questions were intensified and became more urgent when Quranic verses started to be linguistically clearer as I have advanced in Arabic language study in high school. Language learning and exploring linguistic structures was something I was good at and loved. Thus, when I read Quran, I couldn't escape applying the linguistic rules I had learned of Arabic on the verses I was reading. More questions started to formulate and became more urgent when the linguistic structure refuted the Islamic laws imposed by Sharia.

I couldn't escape noticing that men's taken-for-granted guardianship over women, which is claimed to be stipulated by a Quranic text, was cleared condition in the only verse cited to support this guardianship. Quran says men are guardian of women because of the latter economic and physical dependence. So if these two conditions of dependence didn't exist, would women be free of this guardianship? I wondered. Unfortunately, no sharia book explained this guardianship as conditioned and actually made it part of Sharia followed for centuries that no one question any more.

I found the polygamy verse also conditioned linguistically and with further reading it was given in a specific historic situation, and yet polygamy in Islam is part of Sharia and Islamic culture! I found covering the head is not exactly mentioned in Quran and instead we have one verse that advises decency of clothes rather than strict dress code, but still the latter is inserted as part of our Islamic Sharia. Singing, art, literature, poetry, and many other things that Sharia would label as "haram", or against true religious devotion were not dismissed as such in Quran, yet Sharia would not even reconsider their Prohibition. In two verses, in different chapters, Allah talks to Mohammed telling him that he is given these stories to entertain him in hard times, and find solace in the similar path walked by previous prophets: entertainment and instruction. Yet, authors usually are frowned upon in Islam, unless of course they write about religion!  

When these ideas started to take strong hold of my brain, my alienation from the world increased, and thought there was no one who might walk the same road and became critical of Sharia, which I believe was the first reason why Islam is hated that much today. I saw this Sharia make us miserable and turn us into hated rigid human beings who thought they were the chosen ones (which is quite ironic considering that Muslims reject Jews claim of being the chosen ones as mere human vanity!)

For years I have been nourishing these ideas on my own, but I didn't dare to breathe them out because I knew that people don't separate our faith from Sharia, between Islamic set of believes and Islamic law (the religious institution). For me, Islam as I have learned from Quran is to believe in the maker of the universe (different cultures gave the Maker different names), to believe that through human history there were men who knew that maker, who managed to land on the truth which most of us search for today, there were men who were social reformers, and there were men who were political leaders, and all sought for better life. What people made of them later, that was not their fault. Quran argues that Jesus didn't claim divinity, and didn't ask his follower to worship him as God. It is not his fault that people now called him God, as it was not the fault of Mohammed that his followers believed that all should become Muslims even if it means using force!

I have learned that there were many things in Quran or Islamic history that were bound by the culture and history of Arabia almost 1400 years ago! To judge Mohammed for having many wives, is to judge the Romans or Greeks for having slaves! It is a cultural practice which was unquestionably normal then. However, it is not today's culture, nor it is acceptable with the increase of women's self-empowerment.

Our religion doesn't need reform, but our Sharia need it badly. It is simply ridiculous to regularize the life of 21st c. by laws based on a culture that doesn't exist any more. Today's world is regularized and organized by set of rules and laws that change with every historical and political crisis. With the world as a small village and open communication, a religion that keeps its people enclosed in a world of their own is destined to perish or his followers will do. In today's world, anyone cherish their own vision of life as the only one that is right is stupid vanity. Today, the universe is open and it showed us how small and insignificant we are against the vast existence of worlds that went for thousands of years beyond man's imagination.

Death is still the unconquered territory for man. We can travel into the vast space of the universe, but death will always brings us down and end our vanity. Because of that, throughout our history of existence we may have imagined or we may not a life after death. Can anyone assure its existence? did anyone we know who died and came back to tell us what would happen after that moment when the brain cease to work? Even in the times of complicated medical sets, we can trace when exactly the brain stops to work, but we can't tell how or what is happening inside that brain at that exact moment! Heaven and Hell have always found colorful description that abide by the culture of the time. For me, heaven of leisure life and variety of foods and drinks never interested me: I don't want a heaven that will reduce me into an animal for eternity. To feel the pain of hell need fleshly existence which goes in contradiction with the later eternal life! Heaven and Hell can be something else we need to re-imagine, or we just can't take this description literally.

But the belief in heaven and hell is not related to the essence of Mohammed's or any prophet's messages of social reform: all called for better life, social justice, and more humane conduct. All wanted their people to be kind to each other and don't persecute each other. Yet, their followers, in vanity of being the chosen ones, ruined the teachings of their masters and decided that God is helpless divine entity that needs their worldly help to have his word preside over earth!

Time to re-read our holy books, time to look up and down and place Sharia in its cultural and historical contexts. If someone says "reform your religion", ask them to elaborate and learn to listen to what they have to say. If they made a good point, maybe this would be for the best interest of our faith, if they missed it, explain to them why. Dismissing other's opinions is just vanity which will alienate us further from the world. In the so-called Islamic world people are not happy, not because some conspiracy theory made them so, but because they are now opened to a world that goes beyond them, a world of different cultures and beliefs with people variously happier than they are, the ones who believe they are the best nation. God's chosen ones!

N. F. M.      

Who I am

I was reading on Arab-American women writers as part of my research and for the first time I find a lot that defines me and speaks for my experience. For the first time I felt inspired, and found my true voice. I could find myself in the words of Lisa Suhair Majaj who yearns for a recognition of her identity, not as the stereotyped "harem" girl, nor as the "Americanized" female. But I know that I am not eligible to dream that dream, nor to aspire that one day to free myself from the burden of people's expectations of my identity. Like Majaj, and many other Arab -Americans I wish to "walk into the forest empty handed, /climb up a mountain and down again,/ carrying no more than what any human needs to live". Like them, I want "to stand alone in a high place,/send [my] voice echoing across wild rivers"

These writers always struggled to define an identity that is denied by both: the Americans who always considered them "foreign", and framed them in an orientalist stereotype of exotic harem, and the Arabs, the other half of what they are, who considered them "Americanized" or "westernized" women who rebelled against their cultural traditions.

For an Iraqi girl who spent the time passing from teenage to adulthood reading Jane Austen, Emile Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, who loved poetry because of Emile Dickinson, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove, and took "Still I Rise " as her motto in life, this girl was not less confused about who she is, and didn't struggle less with stereotyping and positioning as much as her favorite writers.

I lived most of my life in Iraq. My first travel happened late when I was already above thirty-five, but my mind traveled way before that, when I first read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and learned that in faraway land, miles and century and half away from Baghdad 1998, there was a girl names Elizabeth Bennett who refused to abide by the surrounding conviction of marriage, and sought someone who could win her mind and heart before winning her body. My mind took me to a room of my own, where an isolated 19th American girl, who might have lived unrecognized in her family's house, with suppressed screams for freedom and spiritual release, but loud enough to reach a girl of 22 in Baghdad. My traveling mind took me everywhere, to all the magical places my books offered, and brought me back to Baghdad, to my family house, different adult who can't live by the rules of her restricted culture.

By the time I finished my PhD, I could no longer identify myself with world around; it just seemed to me so small and so limited. I felt that I had the energy to reach to the stars, but my world was putting my down. At that time, I knew I don't belong to this world. I was so different from my sisters, for I never shared their interests, I was a disappointment to my mother, who suffered a lot with me for not being what she wanted me to be, and I know that I wanted more from my world that it could really offer. I developed a yearning to travel and live abroad, maybe in that world I have read so much about in literature, where I can be free, and only the sky can be my limits.

After years, the dream came true and now I am in London, where I can be whoever I want to be. However, only after settling in London. I realized the liminality of my position, that I have carried with me two cultures whose struggles against each other is still unresolved. In Baghdad, I failed to play the "good girl" part, and has been always my mother's worse headache, and my sisters' worry for not dreaming similar dreams. They all seemed to play in one team, playing one symphony, while I always felt like the black sheep, the one with uncanny voice.

The same sense of alienation seems to follow me in London, where I always wanted to be, because I wasn't as "westerner" as a European woman could be, nor I was the "wild" girl who can now set herself free after years of suppression. In London, I was "conservative" and "up-tight" girl who is "foreigner" to all other girls of her age! The same feeling of "I don't belong here" still overwhelms me, and I still couldn't find "my kind of people", till I started reading these Arab-American women writers. They speak to me, they know what I have been through, they were caught between two worlds neither seemed to be "home" enough for them.

Like them, I long for a status of being human, and nothing else need to follow in an identity card: I don't want to be defined as woman, as Muslim. or as Iraqi. I don't want people to build expectations, and characterize me once they see my head-scarf. I don't want an identity built on features I didn't choose for myself: for a biological reason I became a woman, and because my family was Muslim I was raised as one, and I didn't choose to be born in Iraq. But I choose to be everything else: I chose to be educated, to have a career, to sing a different song! I chose to survive and rise again from every fall I had to suffer in my adult years. I chose to be simply a human being.

N. F. Mohammed