In the prevailing traditions of the local mosques, men gathered, but women prayed at home. This was what the hadiths were said to teach, and Abigail was fine with that. The peace and quiet in the apartment block where she was staying was calming and restorative.
She thought to herself "that's not what Muhammad actually says in the surahs of the Qur'an" but as with so many such thoughts, she kept it to herself. In early Islam, men and women mingled in prayer, but that, like so many things, changed quickly after the Prophet's death and the start of the Great Estrangement, or so she had heard called the second century after the Prophet's death.
In the Qur'an, Adam and Eve are created together out of one original soul, no ribs involved; in the Qur'an, Adam goes for the forbidden fruit first, not Eve; in the Qur'an, both men and women are called upon to be modest. It was cultural tradition and the scholarship of lands into which Islam spread that created the second-class status so many in the West think is the Islamic way of seeing women's place.
And within Islam, Abigail had found the emphasis on the oneness of God to be refreshing. Sufism and other forms of Islamic mysticism caught her imagination within, even as she had to focus on learning the external observances which were what kept her safe and allowed her entry into Pakistani households.
As for the anti-woman, more than mildly misogynistic aspects of Islam, she often found herself thinking about the glass houses, lived in, so to speak, by Mr. Peggotty in "David Copperfield" seeking Em'ly, or worse by Ethan Edwards as played by John Wayne in "The Searchers" pursuing Natalie Wood's Debbie . . . honor culture was not an exclusively Islamic issue. It wasn't that long ago, in historical terms, that the cultured West had many of the same anxieties driving their menfolk, even if under multiple layers of concealment.
Having said that, she was done. She was ready to go home, or at least somewhere more like home. The constant furtive pressures to be invisible, to vanish, to not be seen underneath the coverings or behind walls -- even some of the careful friendships she had made among women here were not enough to balance what was becoming a memory of openness and involvement in the world around her. She wanted to walk down a street, turn and enter a shop, and order some food from a clerk without regard to what she was wearing or what gender the counter worker was. Even if it was falafel. Maybe especially falafel.
But was she ready to go back to Ohio? To home? That might be too close a set of constraints in a different, but not dissimilar way. London, that was the ticket. She knew at least two networks would pay her to go there and be available to do stand-ups in front of a studio window for a few weeks, talking about the 'Stans, and women, and whatever was blowing up at the moment. She would go to London.
The moment she thought that, it took an effort of will not to reach up and pull off the burqa immediately. Not yet, not until the airport. But soon.
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