Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions Read online

  This is why I’ve come tonight: to get the gift of tongues. Hope says I’ll feel better if I have God’s special prayer language. Although I’m skeptical, I could really use a direct line to God because the way I’ve been praying in my own Baptist church isn’t changing anything. In fact, things are getting worse. Two weeks ago, my mom put me on restriction for raising my eyebrows when she accused me of being more interested in my Baptist friends than I was in our family. I only raised my eyebrows because it was such a ridiculous thing to say, but she sent me to my room and told me I was never to go back to that “cultish brood” again. They were making me “contemptuous and disrespectful.” She came up to my room later and saw me reading my Bible, which flew her off the handle for good. She nabbed it away, right out of my hands, and stalked out of my room, slamming the door behind her.

  I’m hoping that if I get God’s special prayer language, my mom will let me go back to church and that maybe she’ll even come with me and get saved herself. That’s why when, after the singing stops, and after Ted reads from the Bible about how “bad company corrupts good morals” and then tells us the story about how he actually stopped drinking when he turned twenty-one because God told him to, I start to get nervous. Hope told me it’s always after the “message” that God baptizes people in His Holy Spirit. That’s what you call it when you start to speak in tongues. It comes from the Bible story about how the flames of the Spirit came down from heaven on the heads of all the believers at Antioch and they all started talking in foreign tongues.

  I’m sitting next to albino Hedda when Ted finishes speaking and I’m looking around for flames, which I imagine look like holograms, like those cartoon images projected on the mist at the late show in Disneyland. But then Donny goes, “So, like always, we’re prepared to pray for anyone who would like to receive the Holy Spirit tonight.”

  And Hope pops up her hand and she’s like, “Oh, Cami wants it, I think. Right, Cami?”

  Donny looks at me, and I can hardly even stand how blue his eyes are. “Pull your chair into the center of the circle, Cami.” All twenty-nine pairs of eyes are looking at me and I’m completely mortified of course, because I know that half of them are looking at this gigantic pimple I have nestled beside my right nostril. But I also really want to get the baptism of the Holy Spirit because I need the direct line to God that everyone else in the group has, so I go ahead and pull my chair into the middle of the room.

  I don’t really know what to expect, but Hope is next to me saying, “Don’t worry about anything. This’ll be really great.” Once my chair is settled squarely in the center of the room, everyone stands and circles around like they’re all looking at a cute little puppy or something. It’s pretty weird to have so many people standing that close to me. I have trouble getting a breath. In my family we’re not very touchy-feely, and I’m not sure how it’s going to be to have my whole body covered with hands. But it’s not so bad. Some kids kneel around me and grab my ankles, my shins, my knees. Other kids stand behind me and put a palm up against my back or my shoulder. Pretty soon, most of me is covered. Hope puts her hand on my head and runs her fingers through my hair the way she sometimes does at school during play practice when we’re all sitting backstage giving each other back rubs before Mrs. Doling arrives to get things started.

  Once all the kids are in position, Ted starts to pray, really quietly at first. “Thank you, Father; we praise you, Father,” he’s saying. I’m always wondering about making God into a father. Ever since I memorized the Lord’s Prayer last year at my own church, which starts, “Our Father, which art in heaven,” I thought it was funny that the pastor was always talking about having a personal relationship with our “heavenly Father.” It’s not that I don’t know some dads, like in my neighborhood or from friends at school, who are pretty involved and spend a lot of time with their children. It’s just that most dads are sort of busy. And if you took my dad as an example, some don’t even live with their families, so the whole personal-relationship-with-a-father comparison eludes me. But since the Bible is the word of God, I’m not allowed to argue, so I just keep my mouth shut.

  Anyway, Ted is whispering this whole series of phrases and so is everyone else. Since I’ve only been born again for a short time and it happened in a Baptist church where no one prays out loud unless they have to, I’m not used to talking at the same time that someone else is praying, but here they all talk quietly simultaneous-like. I keep my head bowed.

  Next, Ted starts praying louder, “Dear Holy Spirit, we just invite you to totally overtake our sister, Cami, and completely overwhelm her with your presence and give her your gift of tongues and help her feel you in her life daily and make her become a blessing to everyone around her.”

  “Yes, Jesus,” someone says. And another person says, “Please, God.” And I open my eyes just a little and there’s Hedda with her brow crinkled up, praying so hard I almost worry she is going to get a headache.

  I don’t know what everyone is expecting will happen, but they keep up the quiet, short little aspirations of praise for a long time. Hope keeps running her fingers through my hair, and I start thinking about how she knows everything about me—well, almost everything. Hope knows that my parents don’t pay much attention to me. My mom most of all because she spends a lot of her time in her bedroom with her new husband while I take care of my younger brothers. Hope knows my dad lives in a little trailer outside my grandmother’s house and that he snorts cocaine sometimes; Hope even came with me to see my dad once, just to see if he was okay. Hope knows that tonight I had to tell my mom I was going to her house to study at her kitchen table and that at my house we don’t even have a kitchen table—only a coffee table in the living room where everyone eats, and it’s always cluttered with dirty dishes so you can’t really do your homework there. Hope agreed with me that it wasn’t lying for us to come here tonight because we did spend ten minutes at her house studying for our college-prep English test.

  But there are also things Hope doesn’t know—things I don’t tell her because I know everyone in my family would kill me if they found out I said something. And she likes this about me, that I can keep secrets. She always tells everyone, “If you have something that’s totally exploding inside you that you have to say out loud but you don’t want everyone to know, you can tell Cami because she can keep a secret like nobody’s business.” And it’s true. There are things about my family I’ll take to my grave.

  Anyway, we all pray for a really long time. And nothing is happening, so I start to feel guilty that everyone is spending so much time trying to convince God to let me talk in angel tongues. Plus, their hands are getting sweaty on my back and legs. But I want this direct line to God because after this meeting I have to go home, and when I get there my mom is going to be boiling mad at me since I accidently left a little Gideon’s New Testament on the bathroom counter. If she finds it, she’ll know I smuggled it into the house after she took the first one away. I remembered that I’d forgotten to put it back in my coat pocket only after I got to Donny and Ted’s and now I’m hoping my new prayer language will help me convince God to make sure my mom miraculously doesn’t see it.

  I open my eyes and turn my head to see if I can make Hope look at me. She’s already got her eyes open and she leans over and says, “It’s okay, sometimes it takes awhile, just start moving your mouth. God will take care of the rest.”

  I’m super glad she’s there. I bow my head and concentrate. In my heart, I pray, “Okay, God, help me out here.”

  Nothing happens for another long time. I start to feel really bad, like maybe God isn’t that interested in me, or maybe I’m not really born again. Maybe—even though I walked down to the front of the church and said the Sinner’s Prayer with my Baptist pastor—maybe I don’t believe in God quite right. And then I start to get kind of freaked out because if that’s true, then my name still isn’t written in the Book of Life, and also God won’t help me by fixing the troubles in my family.<
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  My chest gets really tight and I wonder what Donny is thinking because, even though there isn’t any chance for us since I’m fourteen and he’s twenty-two, I want him to like me and he probably won’t if I’m not really saved. With everyone pushed in around me praying (but probably secretly wishing God would get on with it), I hyperventilate a little. I can’t quite catch my breath. This happens to me a lot, but it’s never happened in front of people before.

  Hope sees what’s going on and she whispers in my ear, “Just take a breath, Cami. God loves you. You just have to start moving your mouth.”

  Ted raises his voice above the hushed praises to pray loudly now, “Father, it’s time. Give our sister your gift. Give it to her now.” I figure I should at least do my part, so I start to move my mouth—opening and closing it really fast and swishing my tongue around inside.

  Suddenly out comes this long, incredible string of syllables. And it keeps coming and coming. My heart starts thumping hard, but I’m shy about the sound of it so I’m doing it almost silently, but Hope is watching my mouth and she says, “Do it louder, Cami.” So I up the volume just a little bit. It’s for real; I’m totally speaking in tongues. And the sounds just keep flowing out like you can’t believe.

  Hedda hears this and says, “She’s got it.” Then everyone starts cheering. I stop speaking and then start up again to make sure it’s real. It is. One girl who has been sitting on her knees in front of me even starts to cry and to hug my calf. They all start applauding and hugging me and saying, “Thank you, Lord.”

  After several minutes everyone quiets down and goes back to their seats. I do the same, but I’m in a daze—like I’m high, even though I’ve never been high, so I’m only guessing. The rest of the meeting is hazy as I keep thinking that now God can answer my prayers because I can tell Him what I don’t even know I need. We sing a few more songs and then everybody eats the treats that Hedda’s mom brought when she dropped her off.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, HOPE’S dad, who is also excited that I got my prayer language, drops me off in front of my house. My mom and stepdad and brothers are all watching TV and they don’t notice when I come in. I say hi, but they’re fixated on their police show. It’s a rerun, and they love reruns in my house—I don’t love them so much, but it’s mostly what we watch. So I just step over the clutter on the living room floor and make my way to the bathroom to see if my New Testament is there or if I’ll be in royal trouble when my mom’s show is over. There it is, in exactly the same place I left it when I took it out of my pocket. Nobody has noticed it. My new prayer language must already be working! So I stick the Bible back in my pocket, tell God thank you, and go upstairs to my room to study for my English test.

  Beaten by Devotion

  Huda Al-Marashi

  When my mother was a young girl in Baghdad, her family made yearly pilgrimages to Karbala, the town where Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Husayn, was killed in the seventh century AD. On the anniversary of his death, a day known as Ashura, Mama wrapped herself in a long, flowing black abaya and made her way through Imam Husayn’s gilded shrine. There she sat on Persian rugs and listened to passionate retellings of his martyrdom that made her cry.

  When I was a young girl in Monterey, California, my extended family made yearly pilgrimages to a run-down 1960s church in South-Central Los Angeles that had been converted to a mosque. We told our teachers and bosses there was a death in the family, never mentioning the death occurred well over a thousand years ago. With our bags tied to the roof rack and eight of us squeezed into a car designed for seven, we crossed three hundred miles of interstate, listening to tape recordings of religious services that made my mother, uncle, and grandfather weep, their shoulders bobbing up and down with each sob.

  My siblings and I did not cry. Our Arabic vocabulary was limited to the domestic, and my family’s tapes were not only garbled from use but full of words to which we’d had no exposure. My father did not cry either. I’d seen him cry only once, when he found out one of his sisters had died, and that had been only a short, angry burst of tears. My stepgrandmother pulled her face behind her abaya because sometimes she cried, but sometimes she didn’t, and holding back tears at a time like this was not a sign of strength.

  Shia Muslims believe the tears we shed in the name of our ill-fated imams (those spiritual leaders we believe are the rightful successors of the Prophet Muhammad) are blessed and rewarded. They are not to be comforted or contained. These tears were, in fact, the motivation for our journey. We traveled to this mosque precisely because the speaker was a prominent religious scholar, a descendent from the Prophet’s family known by the title of Seyyid, and even better known for his ability to evoke the soul-cleansing cry my elders craved.

  But first we had to endure the hot car, cramped seating arrangement, and a series of stops for gas and stretching. Halfway there, we pulled up to a Carl’s Jr. on a desolate patch of desert highway littered with proverbial tumbleweed. My father ordered coffee, onion rings, and fried zucchini—this just to officially make us customers before my step-grandmother put out her spread: kabobs she fried that morning, pita bread, and a bowl that held iceberg lettuce, whole tomatoes, and a knife. I stared at the table too embarrassed to eat the sandwich my stepgrandmother offered me.

  Born and raised in America, I knew it was wrong to bring your own lunch to a fast-food establishment. I knew it was even worse to wash for your daily prayers in a public restroom. As we poured handfuls of water on our faces and arms and then wiped our wet hands along our heads and feet, I saw women trying not to stare, throwing us glances as they washed their hands, sneaking one extra look as they walked out the door. And I knew, when we stepped outside to pray in the parking lot, the locals of Lost Hills, California would think we were the crazy practitioners of a strange religion.

  In spite of this, when it was my turn to pray I put on the white cotton chador that covered me from head to toe. Dressed in what looked like a ghost costume, I bowed and prostrated on the state map Mama used to cover the gravelly asphalt. To object would have brought on a different kind of shame. Instead I prayed quickly, my chador billowing up in the hot wind, my uncle calling out, “Slow down.” I prayed that no one was watching.

  At the mosque, the church’s pews stood against the walls of what had once been the nave. An enormous chandelier, donated by the Iraqi owners of a crystal shop, hung in its center, and a curtain stretched across the area that had been the altar, dividing the men’s section and the women’s section into drastically disproportionate parts.

  At the door designated as the women’s entrance, I balked at the space. The elders sat shoulder to shoulder on the pews pushed against the wall, and the floor was covered with women and children, sitting cross-legged, knee to knee. I pointed out the obvious: There is no room for us. But Mama would not be swayed. We added our shoes to the growing mound by the door and waded through the sea of women and children, stopping to regain our footing in the spaces between their bodies.

  My stepgrandmother soon found room on a pew. Mama bent down to greet and kiss the people she recognized from our yearly visits. At home, Mama was a busy suburban mother juggling work and nursing school, but here she was someone else entirely, more Iraqi, more Shia. From under her scarf and abaya, she spoke to us in Arabic as if English had not conquered her tongue as well as ours. “Sallemi,” she prodded us along to greet her friends with the traditional “Assalmu Alaikum,” followed by a kiss on each cheek.

  Mama had relatives in the area that had arrived earlier. They now pulled their purses into their laps to make room for us. Then the Seyyid’s voice carried over the partition, at first didactic and then afflicted with the weight of the tale on his lips. Mama stopped her crying and urged me to pay attention. “If you listen,” she promised, “you’ll understand.”

  I hated being told this. We had been making this journey for years now, but the only things I knew about the story of Imam Husayn were the things Mama had told me in English. I knew
he and his family had been on their way to Kufa when the reigning caliph’s army had intercepted them. In one day, Yazid ibn Muawiyya’s men killed Imam Husayn’s valiant brother and handsome nephew, his thirsty six-month-old son, dozens of his followers—all this before beheading the imam himself and setting fire to the camp where the men’s sisters, wives, and daughters awaited their return.

  Knowing this outline was not enough to help me decipher the narrative within the mournful dirge the Seyyid recited, the poignant details that made the women around me sob and slap their thighs. The only thing I recognized were the names that floated out of the Seyyid’s sermon like clear little bubbles, but I longed to understand more. I wanted to know what could be so sad it made people cry every time they heard it year after year. When Mama told me parts of the story, I felt sad, but I never burst into tears. I didn’t know if it was something about how the story was told in Arabic or if it was something about the people listening to it. Did Iraqis cry easier? Was I too American to cry? Or maybe the tears were age related? Maybe only adults cried?

  I studied the faces around me, hoping to find all the young people in the crowd dry-eyed. I’d almost confirmed my assumption when I spied two sisters in tightly wrapped headscarves huddled at their mother’s feet. They had tissues in their hands with their heads bent down. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to appear as if they were crying or if they actually were. I strained to get a better look and discovered that one of them had tear-stained cheeks. I was crestfallen. How come she understood when I didn’t?