The Scope of Permissibility, page 4
When she arrived at the station, Abida was already waiting.
‘Assalamu alaykum, my love,’ Sara said, opening the car door.
‘Wa alaykum salam. Are you ready for a jam-packed day of thumbtacking posters around campus and avoiding getting bottles thrown at us? I know I am,’ Abida said, flashing a stockinged calf from beneath the hem of her abaya as she settled into the passenger seat and closed the door behind her.
Sara laughed. Abida’s proclamations distracted her from the tight knot in her stomach. Abida would start on a rant now about Australia’s settler colonial history, its settler colonial present. She would pound her fist against the glove box without realising, apologise, then do it again. But instead Abida just laughed too, although hers was short and guttural.
‘Laugh all you want,’ she said to Sara, ‘but they might actually throw a bottle at you for a change, white girl. You’re looking particularly Muslim today.’
Sara ignored her, turning the key in the ignition and reversing out of the packed carpark. Abida would sometimes use what she knew of Sara to jab at her insecurities, the way Sara imagined siblings did. These jabs were administered as affectionate badinage, but the real sting was that most were true. Sara had in fact dressed with more care and conservatism than usual, donning a striped maxi dress she had purchased on sale and a proper wraparound hijab instead of one of her floppy, lopsided turbans. She wanted to appear as the other MSA girls did, to eliminate any doubts that Sara Andrews was truly one of them.
‘I am definitely looking forward to lunch,’ Abida said. ‘I asked Ahlam to get manoush from her uncle’s bakery and I told her to put aside two of the labneh and za’tar ones just for you, your favourite.’
‘You always know the way to my heart. I’m going to return the favour and pump some T Swizzle for you.’
This was where they understood each other best, in the bits of their lives which did not make sense to other people. Most of the core people in the MSA didn’t listen to music, or if they did, they wouldn’t admit to it. Abida didn’t listen to mainstream music either, but Sara knew that her one weakness was Taylor Swift.
‘“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, please. An oldie but definitely a goodie.’
‘This song always reminds me of our school disco –’
‘And Emma-Louise hooking up with Matt King in the bathroom and we all heard him moaning in the toilet and thought he was being attacked.’
‘Trust you to remember that. Such a gutter mind you have under that jumbo hijab.’ Sara grinned, turning up the volume as they hit a rare, unclogged section of Parramatta Road and moved closer towards the city. She thought of Naeem again, imagining him driving his car as she was, getting closer and closer to where they would be meeting.
‘So what do you think of me running for MSA President if Mustafa does quit? Do you think I could actually pull it off?’
Abida was in continual pursuit of a new scheme, some cause to petition or champion. Over the years Sara had handed out pamphlets, attended working groups and stayed up until the early hours listening to Abida rehearse pitches and poems. She consoled Abida through the fits of self-doubt as they inevitably emerged, knowing that underneath all the swagger, Abida was brittle. Sara thought of Abida’s preoccupied mother and the way she smelled of bleach and garam masala; three girls to the one bedroom, the way Abida’s father left the family for spells of several weeks while on Tablighi Jamaat proselytising missions to remote islands in the Pacific. She loved Abida for her evident strength, but she loved her even more for the vulnerabilities she knew it masked.
‘I told you, I think you could definitely give it a go and then see how things unfold.’ Sara had learned that the most judicious course of action was to neither encourage nor discourage Abida’s proposals. If they failed, Sara would be censured for her lack of foresight, and if they were successful, she would then be upbraided for not having displayed requisite faith in them from the outset.
‘I know, I know. It’s just hard to know whether it would be worth all the hassle. The MSA is such a sausage fest and most of the guys are complete freaks when it comes to speaking to girls, let alone taking orders from one,’ said Abida.
Sara nodded as they got out of the car. The group had arranged to meet in front of the musallah. On the way there, Abida was preoccupied on her phone, her fingers sliding across the screen as they walked. Sara was consumed in her own thoughts of Naeem. She was grateful now for the many years she had been friends with Abida, the space it allowed her to think and not have to explain herself. One of her least favourite parts of befriending new people was that it necessitated a show of unswerving interest, to be seen to participate and pose a stream of questions. The fact that she and Abida could so frequently sit or walk or drive together, both consumed in their own private contemplations, was one of the surest indicators that their friendship was sound.
‘Assalamu alaykum, sisters. Great to see you both.’ Mustafa walked ahead of them, bearing large canvas bags of materials.
As much as she tried, Sara could not feel comfortable referring to anyone as sister or brother; it seemed too cult-like and familiar. She did concede, however, that Mustafa managed to imbue the term with a level of respect and warmth she had not thought it could possess.
‘He always has such nice adab, mashaAllah,’ Abida whispered in her ear, nodding with approval at Mustafa’s manners. Adab was one of the many Islamic terms Sara understood in the context of someone else’s sentence without being able to explain or use it herself. It was easier to remain silent, let the others proclaim their knowledge of Him and His vocabulary.
Just ahead of them, several MSA members were already assembled. She looked for Naeem among their faces but he wasn’t there. To one side, Ahlam held a styrofoam coffee cup and conversed with a chirpy Malaysian international student named Fitri and either Mariam or Lina Kamaleddine. Sara could not always tell the twins apart. Both possessed the milky skin she associated with red hair, had their hair been at all visible beneath their stretchy khimars.
Now on the other side of the quadrangle, Mustafa stood with Ziad and the burly Afghan boy, Wahid. Together, they looked like an advertisement for one of the government graduate programs that Abida derided for their tokenism: Mustafa with his clear black skin, Ziad pale with burnt caramel hair, Wahid with his dark brown hair and dark brown skin.
‘Bismillah. Assalamu alaykum everyone. We’re just waiting for a couple more people and then we’ll get started with our chalking and posters. Islamic Awareness Week is still some time away but, as you know, we need to get in early and start getting everyone on campus talking. May Allah reward you all for giving up part of your weekend for this. Let’s start with Al Fatiha before we go ahead with the day’s proceedings,’ Mustafa said.
Sara bowed her head and cupped her hands, murmuring the familiar words. Al Fatiha, the opening. She recited it every day, every few hours. The words could be leaden and cumbersome in one prayer, smooth and rhythmic in the next, an ongoing wrestle of the tongue. Sara had taken great care to learn its meaning in English but still loved that millions of the faithful could speak it daily, reverentially, without ever comprehending its meaning.
When Sara glanced up from her palms, Naeem was standing on the fringe of the group. He had appeared so quietly that she did not think anyone else had noticed. His hands were clasped in front of him as he prayed. He was dressed in a striped black-and-grey jumper, his hair brushed back behind his ears, which protruded a little. If he was aware of her presence, he offered no indication of it, reaching for the posters Mustafa and Ziad had stacked on the floor.
‘All right, let’s get started,’ Mustafa said.
Abida reached over and grabbed a handful of posters. Sara assumed the two of them would pair off, but Ahlam tugged at Abida’s arm, leaving Sara to stand on the other side with Fitri and Lina/Mariam. It didn’t occur to her to protest. She did not want to obstruct the intimacies of others, guarding her own as fiercely as she did.
‘Let’s head towards Law Library first and then make our way in?’ Fitri’s manner was brisk. She wore bootleg jeans and a frilly pink top that did not quite cover her bottom. Sara tugged at her dress, checking it was fixed in place, that she had not exposed her ankles as she walked.
‘Sounds good, sis. Let’s head off before it gets too late,’ Mariam said.
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch your name, sister. What was it again?’
‘It’s Mariam. And you’re Fitri, right?’
Mariam began to walk beside Fitri, leaving Sara to follow along in their midst. In these environments, she often felt like an appendage to Abida and that when they were apart people did not have much to say to her. She knew that much of this was her own doing. She papered over her anxieties by making herself as small and noiseless as possible. Whenever people learned her name, they asked the same erroneous questions about when her parents had converted to Islam and where they had migrated to South Africa from. She did not know the right words to explain that a British forebear had taken what he wanted from his maidservants, that their descendants had retained their religion in secret but not their names or languages or even where they had come from. Her MSA friends were Bangladeshi, Lebanese, Turkish, Somali. Their identities seemed rounded and full with language and dress and dance, where hers had been hollowed out centuries before.
Fitri and Mariam were talking as they walked. The campus was emptier on weekends and the walkways seemed wider, cleaner. The walls were crammed with posters for pub crawls, quiz nights and Marxist reading circles. Mariam was talking softly as she pinned her poster, making the case for hand-slaughtering animals as Fitri protested that stunning was more practical and still halal, still permissible. Mariam was gentle, but implacable. Sara wondered where Naeem was now and who had thought it clever to include a ‘try-on-a-hijab’ event as one of the scheduled activities for Islamic Awareness Week. It appeared to her much like a game of pin the tail on the donkey.
Once all the posters were secured the girls walked back over to the lawn outside the musallah. The conversation had now shifted to Fitri’s irregular menstrual cycle and spotting, which rendered ascertaining the times at which she would be excused from the daily prayers and Ramadan fasts difficult. Finally, Sara had something to contribute as she had watched a lecture from a shaykh on this precise topic on YouTube, which she promised to send to the girls. She sat down, smoothed her dress. Through it she felt the pleasant tickle of the grass against her legs. The boys were walking back now.
Mustafa distributed the parcels of manoush. The oil from the za’tar soaked through the paper, coating her fingers. She bit into it, savouring the tang of the oregano as she looked around. The atmosphere was more relaxed than usual; people seemed too tired and hungry to bother much about the customary gender segregation. She watched Naeem, who sat cross-legged on the grass as Wahid delivered an impassioned monologue on some topic. Even as she watched Naeem, Sara could not say why she was doing so. He had not been kind to her, and she had more than adequate reason now to deem him rude and immature. She did not know why she had selected him and not Wahid, who was more handsome, or Mustafa, who was both witty and kind. There was no logic to it, and this unsettled her.
She was too old for a crush. She knew about kissing, she knew about sex. Some of this knowledge had been accrued by her own choosing, some through listening to her school and university friends talk about their sex lives and how much, or how little, they were getting. In sex education at school they had learned that the average Australian had sex by the age of seventeen, and here she was, two years into university, sneaking surreptitious glances at a boy with whom she had exchanged a few lines of conversation. But by the standards of many, Sara knew she was already doing too much. The first look is permissible, but the evil lies in the second. This she understood and accepted as correct, but she could not prevent herself from seizing this tiny consolation.
The girls were now discussing the schedule for Islamic Awareness Week and its headline events. Abida was talking to Mustafa, asking something about US airstrikes in Somalia. Abida could talk to the boys about anything, she was not craven like Sara.
Sara began to despair of having an opportunity to speak to Naeem. He had not once glanced in her direction or acknowledged her presence in any way. What was he thinking, if anything? He stood up now, dusted crumbs from his sweater and walked towards the bin on the other side of the lawn. Sara placed her hands on the ground, swung out her legs beneath her and followed him.
When Naeem saw her walking towards him, he angled towards the bin, seeming to inspect its contents before turning around and facing her. He looked the same as he always did. There was something irritating about how unflappable he appeared, and Sara longed to jab a hole through the façade. She thought again of how he had blocked her without warning. He was not as composed as he seemed; he could be frightened.
‘Hey, salam,’ she said.
‘Wa alaykum salam.’
There was a conspicuous pause, the cackle of Fitri’s laugh echoing across the lawn.
‘I’m sorry –’
‘There’s nothing to be sorry for. You don’t owe me anything. But if you didn’t want to talk to me, you could’ve just said so rather than blocking and deleting me without saying a word.’ Sara unclenched her fist. She had not been conscious of the motion until she had to undo it.
Naeem looked down at the grass. Then he raised his head and looked somewhere to the left of where she stood, towards where the group were sitting.
‘I’m sorry for blocking you. That was silly of me.’
‘Why did you do it then? Are you too religious to talk to girls?’
Naeem sighed. It was not a dramatic sigh, just an exhalation which lingered slightly, suggesting that he was not unaffected by the brusqueness of her speech. To Sara he seemed to be a person who valued structure, and she had to wonder at how he had allowed himself to become involved in such an untidy situation.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I’m not really sure why I did it, but it doesn’t matter anyway. There’s nothing to be gained from us talking. We’re not exactly going to be best friends, are we?’
‘I guess not.’ Sara nodded, unwilling to impart anything further than those three words.
She had to contain the hurt, direct it inwards. If she did not, she would cry in front of these people, and they would observe that the two of them were not engaging in the type of polite and incidental conversation that they should have been.
‘Okay. Take care then, Sara. Salam.’
Naeem walked away, and Sara stood next to the bin, wondering what she would say later to Abida, whose surprise at the sight of Sara conversing with one of the MSA boys was palpable.
5
Abida
‘We really need to ditch this try-on-a-hijab thing. Our hijabs are not some kind of spectacle or prop. To reduce hijab to a piece of cloth anyone can just plonk on their head is to completely devalue the spiritual dimension of why we do what we do, and the struggles we face each and every day as the visible targets of Islamophobia and racism. This is why I need you girls to make your voices heard and tell the MSA boys point blank that we are not going to run the session during Islamic Awareness Week.’
Abida paused and tucked her skirt beneath her ankles, noting that her sock had developed a hole where her left big toe was. This was irksome as she owned precisely four pairs of socks. Every piece of clothing she owned was important, every piece of it carefully rationed. She would have to pinch one of Hamina’s or Farah’s pairs from the next round of laundry Ammu did and stash them in the top drawer where they seldom thought to look.
‘I don’t see what the big deal is. In Malaysia my non-Muslim friends loved trying on my hijabs. Some of them watched hijab-styling videos with me on YouTube and one even ended up converting a few years later,’ Fitri said.
‘If people are going to convert because of a hijab-styling video then frankly I’d rather not have them convert at all,’ Abida said. ‘It’s all just commodification and rampant consumerism dressed up as modesty. Besides, we accept too many weirdos into the fold as it is.’
Ahlam giggled. She wore a green turtleneck jumper over fitted black jeans, black winged eyeliner etched on with kohl. From these accoutrements, Abida gleaned that Ziad was somewhere about on campus today. They were sitting around in the musallah as they often did in between lectures and tutorials. It was their home at university more so than any other place. The room divider between the boys’ side and their own, which had been temporarily pulled aside for the MSA meeting, was now erect and the room was crowded with girls praying in rows, and occupied with various activities. There were mismatched donated cushions strewn about the room and a girl with fluffy pink socks was dozing on one in the corner, while two Saudi Arabian international students pored over an open architecture textbook on the floor as they chatted in Arabic. Abida loved this space, loved that in here they were not marked by their difference but by their similarity.
