Religion: source of terror and transformation; Reflections on seeing the face of God in my religious Other.

It was May at Chatham College in Pittsburgh, and the semester was almost over. I sat on the enclosed sun porch at Woodland Hall with a group of Muslim women and discreetly pocketed the nuts they offered me because I did not know how to the crack the shells open with my teeth. Aziza and Af-Shan talked excitedly with their mothers, who had arrived from Palestine and Pakistan (respectively) for the upcoming graduation. A cry of exclamation went up as Dr. Rachida El-Diwani, the Fulbright Scholar from Egypt, joined the gathering; my classmates and their mothers rose and kissed her on both cheeks, speaking in Arabic. When Rachida got to me, she spoke in English, smiling: "I will greet you the Mediterranean way," and she guided me through touching our cheeks together, first the left and then the right. The final meeting of the Muslim Student Association, to which I was an invited guest, had begun.

As Rachida began her farewell speech, I reflected on the memories I had of time spent with my Muslim friends: taping balloons to the tables for the Eid dinner; listening to Aziza encourage me to re-interpret my own scriptures so that I could feel better about difficult Bible verses related to women; warning Sukaina, who had not yet put on her scarf for the morning, that my father would be entering our residence hall; watching her fasten her scarf in front of the second floor mirror. I thought of the two courses on Islam that I had taken with Rachida and how she always handed back the papers I wrote with a smile, and I also remembered the voicemail message from her. She had urged me to submit a paper I had written for her class to the annual College Writing Awards sponsored by the English department. "I am sure you will win something," Rachida said excitedly. "You write so well--el-hamdoulilah!" I finished listening to the message and then pressed the button to hear it again, bursting into tears. No one--including me--had ever given spontaneous praise to God for my writing before. Then I recalled standing to be recognized in the awards assembly while Rachida sat beaming at me, because my paper had been chosen as one of the winners.

My attention came back to the Woodland sun porch and the meeting to which Rachida had invited me. The women listened as she encouraged them to wear colorful scarves so that people would not automatically associate all Islam with the black veils prescribed by the Ayatollah Khomeini. She exhorted them to speak the truth about Islam and to correct, to the best of their ability, the misconceptions that were put forth by the American media. "On that day," Rachida said with an intensity that could have rivaled any Christian preacher, "Allah will ask, 'What have you done with your knowledge?'" I sat very still--surprised--because I had not expected to be anything more than a supportive guest, a Muslim-friendly person. Rachida was encouraging the Muslim students, but I heard in her words a message for me. Jesus' parable of the talents suddenly made sense; knowledge and writing were both valuable things that God had given me, and they could lay unused in the ground if I were not careful. Rachida had named in me a gift for writing, and now she was challenging me to be faithful to it. This stranger from Alexandria, Egypt had shown up as God in the face of a Muslim woman.

Rachida, however, did not look like God to many of my classmates at Chatham College. A secular women's college in one of Pittsburgh's historic neighborhoods, Chatham attracts and nurtures independent thinkers and emerging leaders. The school has a Global Focus program, which highlights a different country or part of the world each year. In 2002-2003, the focus was on the Communities of Islam, and the College hosted a Fulbright scholar who lived in the Intercultural Residence Hall and participated in the academic life of the campus. When most people saw Rachida El-Diwani, they saw a woman who wore different colored headscarves but never exposed more than her face and hands to the public. She was a lively, engaging woman in her early fifties with a delightful sense of humor and a strong commitment to Middle Eastern hospitality. If Rachida had a plate of baklava in her office, she offered it to all who entered, without exception. Chatham professors saw a colleague in Rachida because she was a professor of French at Alexandria University; students saw a woman who could offer an insider's perspective on Islam after 9/11; Muslim students saw hope for better understanding of Islam on campus. Some students saw a woman who was not well acquainted with the American academic system and resented her for it. Everyone saw her as a human being, who talked and laughed and playfully scolded her husband, Refaat El-Attar, who accompanied her to public events and co-taught the Informal Arabic class.

Chatham College is not opposed to religion or religious people, but the College's secular, academic atmosphere can be very different for those who see faith as not merely a private matter. Some students may have found Rachida's habit of entering a classroom and wishing God's peace upon its occupants interesting and unusual, but everyone respected this as part of Rachida's individual religious practice, even if they themselves did not understand it. The same went for silent prayers I offered before meals in the cafeteria throughout my four years in college. My tablemates were never offended when I bowed my head to pray, although some were puzzled ("Are you making sure the food is edible?"), and others were curious ("Is that part of your religion?"). Except for friends who also called themselves Christians, no one ever joined me in table prayers (at least that I was aware of). Neither did anyone return Rachida's blessing for peace as she entered a classroom. As soon as I learned the Arabic words, however, I began reciting the proper return blessing and continued doing so for the rest of the year. Rachida would come in for class, saying, "Assalaamooaleykum," and I would answer, "W'aleykumassalaam." Returning Rachida's blessing was a way for me to practice her faith with her, to open myself in a greater way, and to promote peace and understanding on a spiritual, and not only academic, level.

Being hospitable in this way was a very freeing experience because it helped me to see common ground between Muslims and Christians. When Chatham held a World Religions panel during my first year, there was very little dialogue between the represented traditions, so my understanding of Islam remained intellectual and limited. The transition from knowledge to a more interpersonal and spiritual experience happened as a result of two things during my junior year. The first was when Rachida told our class, "Islam is a whole way of living, and I am sure you have trouble understanding this because religion is not like that for you here in the West." Initially, I was insulted. How can you say I don't understand what it means for religion to be a way of life? That's all I've been taught. I grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Amish buggies were part of my every day reality, especially if I had to drive around one on the road. The Mennonite schools I attended forbade jewelry and, up until my fifth grade year, slacks for women. My family spent a few years dressing plainly as part of a Conservative (1) Friends (Quaker) community, and we regularly hosted meetings and meals in our homes. Then I realized Rachida simply did not know about religion in the United States that was not mainstream. I began to look for opportunities to tell her about the plain people with whom I had lived.

The second thing happened when my family came to Pittsburgh for a weekend visit in late September. As we returned to Chatham from a Sunday morning service at Pittsburgh Mennonite Church, I saw Rachida walking near Mellon Hall and waved to her. She came over to the car, wearing a bright blue dress and matching hijab, and my parents got out to meet her: my father, bearded and wearing suspenders, and my mother, head covered with a gray scarf. Sometime later in the week, Rachida took me aside. "Eileen, your mother wears a head cover almost like mine. Does she wear it all the time?"

I hesitated, not sure of how to answer, but decided to go for the truth. "Well, she doesn't always wear it in the house," I answered, expecting disapproval.

Rachida smiled. "I don't wear mine in the house, either."

Through something as simple and as complex as my mother's head covering, Rachida and I began to understand each other as real people who practiced religious faith, and that intersection of our respective traditions opened the way for more conversations. Religion had become a source of transformation.

One day in Rachida's Islam and Contemporary Issues course, the class talked about the Qur'an and its view of women. During the course of the discussion, a student suggested that the Qur'an needed to be changed. Inwardly, I cringed at how poorly versed my classmates were in religious matters because this suggestion showed little understanding of what it means for scripture to be inspired from God, in addition to lack of understanding that human tampering with such scripture is forbidden. I did not know how Rachida might respond. To my relief, she tactfully pointed out that the Qur'an itself cannot be changed, but our interpretation of it can. In a world where Christian and Muslim extremists claim to know and follow the original meaning of their scriptures, Rachida's calm and thoughtful explanation reminded me that not all Muslims were like the angry ones I heard about in the news.

Her explanation also proved helpful one October evening as Rachida, Refaat, and I ate supper together in the cafeteria. They were troubled about the United States' slavery of African people and wanted to know how Americans had justified slavery and what my religious traditions had thought about it. "Well," I began, "I don't know too much about what the Mennonites were doing at that time, but I can tell you about the Quakers," and proceeded to describe Friends' involvement with the Underground Railroad in the nineteenth century. As I spoke, I could feel the power that comes when speaking from a place of deep truth. The Bible, I went on, had been used by American people to uphold slavery, but later they re-interpreted it to condemn slavery. The slaveholders and abolitionists read the same book, but they differed in what they were reading for. Across the table, I could see Rachida was nodding; she was hearing me.

"Slaves were forbidden to read and write because their masters were afraid of the power education could give them," I told my Egyptian friends, and noting the shocked looks on their faces (Mohammed had encouraged slaves to read and write), I explained more, leaning in closer to them. "There is a verse in the Bible that says, 'Slaves, obey your masters.' If slaves had been literate, they would have been able to read the verse after it, which says, 'Masters, be kind to your slaves because you also have master in heaven.'"

Rachida and Refaat's eyes were fixed on my face, eagerly following every word, enjoying watching me provide critical commentary on my national history and be proficient in my own scriptures. There was a pause, and then Refaat smiled deeply and shook his head in amazement. "Two months ago, I didn't know people like you lived in America." Once again, religious practice had been a source of common ground for us. By talking about (re-)interpretation of holy texts, a subject that Rachida, Refaat, and I were all familiar with in our respective traditions, we had a moment of understanding--and I might even call it communion--that brought us closer together, to be able to hear the truth that united us in our global and theological differences.

"Unity in diversity" was a phrase I did not hear at all during college. Chatham supported diversity in nationality, sexual orientation, race, and religion, but the school spent so much time celebrating difference that it was hard to see what I had in common with others. I had come to Chatham to hear and strengthen my own voice above the din of my religious communities, but when my secular, "liberated" first-year roommate suggested that I stop going to church, cease praying, and practice swearing in the shower so that I could figure out my identity, I was deeply annoyed. Her words gave me the impetus to continue praying and attending church, partly out of spite; her diagnosis of religion as a problem to be gotten rid of was galling--my roommate was not practicing a faith, and it shocked me that she saw in herself the authority to speak to my condition. It did not take me long to realize that being religious in a particularly Christian, Mennonite-Quaker way was a part of who I was; I just needed to reclaim this for myself. The difficulty at Chatham College, though, was that there were few people with whom I had enough common ground who could really affirm and accompany me in my quest to be true this part of myself. One of those people happened to be a Muslim named Rachida.

As we neared the end of finals week in December 2002, the Chatham College community learned that a first-year had committed suicide in her parents' home in Pittsburgh. I knew the young woman from Rachida's Islam and Contemporary Issues class. The announcement, which included an open invitation to a grief-processing meeting led by campus ministry and residence life staff, came via e-mail from the College president. Knowing that checking e-mail was a laborious task for Rachida, I decided to call her apartment, which was located on the first floor of my residence hall. Refaat answered, and I asked for Rachida without identifying myself. "One minute," he said. "Let me check."

I waited, and soon I heard Rachida's voice through the receiver. "Hello?"

"Rachida, did you know"--I began, but she interrupted me right away.

"Yes, yes, I just came from the meeting." She spoke in her accented English quickly, decisively. "Where are you? Are you here, in Laughlin?"

"Yes."

Before I could say anything else, such as my name, Rachida said in a tone that left no room for further questions, "I am coming to you right now," and hung up.

I opened door to my room, half-expecting to hear Rachida charging up two flights of stairs. One time I had been sick and missed an Arabic class, and she threatened to come and visit me while I was in my bed, or so she said. After a few minutes, I did not see or hear her, so I went down to the first floor, where she was walking around, looking for me. Then we sat together on the loveseat in the dark living room, a hijab-wearing Sunni Muslim from Alexandria, Egypt and a blue-jeaned Mennonite-Quaker from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, talking about our experiences and memories of Shelley, the young woman who had ended her life. "I don't understand," Rachida said. "You girls are so lucky in this country. Why would you want to kill yourselves?"

I sat helplessly in the dark. How could I explain white, middle-class, American female adolescence to an Egyptian? "In this culture, sometimes girls are very unhappy inside of themselves." I did not know what else to say. Rachida changed the subject.

"Shelley was concerned about religion," she said. "Allah will give her a fair judgment."

What Rachida said was true, and I knew I could not have articulated it any better even if I had tried. "Yes," I agreed. "God will give her a fair judgment."

"You know, when the Qur'an was written," Rachida went on, as if she were letting me in on a secret, "a well-watered place with lots of food would have been Paradise, because that is how people best envisioned it--they lived in the desert, you know. Today they might understand Paradise in a different way, but it is still that which we most long for. It is the fulfillment of our deepest desires."

Surely Rachida and I will be in Paradise together, I thought in a moment of wonder and fright. It was Shelley's death that had sparked this conversation. When Rachida and I sat down in the living room, we were united in having known Shelley, but when we got up from the sofa, we were united in our longing for heaven. How had it happened that in my search for the Truth, a Muslim woman affirmed and accompanied me in a way that no one else could? We came from different countries, cultures, and belief systems, but we had found a common truth, each walking in our own traditions. The Truth remained true and our particularities particular, but we had found unity. I was in awe of what had just happened, and I was also afraid. The unity we had experienced was small, a meeting of two hearts and minds in a residence hall living room. What if religious unity were to happen in a bigger way--were human beings even strong enough to live into the deeper transformations of which religion is capable? Religion brings us to that liminal space where we are open to the inbreaking of the sacred, (2) and acts of terror result from that when we become afraid of the transformation that could actually take place.

At Chatham College, most professors and students point to education as a source of transformation, and they are correct. Yet education can only take us--or perhaps just me--so far. It was not enough to sit in English literature courses and use words and phrases such as the Other, women's agency, race, class, and gender, and sign, signifier, signified in discussions and written papers. Until I stared into the face of the Other, and she stared back at me, I did not have a full understanding of what this Othering business was all about. From my Mennonite-Quaker perspective, I saw the Egyptian, Muslim Rachida as different, but then I looked long enough to recognize that other Face, the face of God, the Stranger and the Friend. The face of the Other is like a mirror that reflects back to us what we cannot see with our own eyes, which is the entire surface of ourselves in relation to our surroundings (religious, geographical, cultural, etc). (3) As God in Rachida offered me baklava, sat with me after a classmate's suicide, and rejoiced in my writing ability, I began to see that I was loved, and what was more, I started to love myself in a greater way.

Meeting the Divine and Muslim Others helped me to come to better terms with my Mennonite-Quaker upbringing. For many years, my mother's head covering had been difficult for me to accept. She began wearing a gray scarf during our time with the plain-dressed Friends community and had not felt released from wearing it, even after she began worshiping with a Charismatic congregation. Sometimes Mom would take off her scarf in the house, especially if the weather was warm, but if we left to go somewhere, she would put the scarf back on. I usually stood by, muttering, "Well, I guess we can leave, now that you've put on your symbol of oppression." Often Mom would tell me that she understood how I felt, but she was still wearing a covering as a witness to her religious commitment. Other times my mother agreed that it was a symbol of oppression and even used this term to refer to her scarf, and yet on other days, Mom rolled her eyes and ignored me. As Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art at Lebanon Valley College, her head covering had been the catalyst for conversations about religion with other colleagues and students. Mom did not want to shut down that avenue for religious talk by taking off her scarf.

Rachida provided me with a perspective on religious dress that was familiar to and yet emotionally distant enough from my own tradition. This was a woman who could laugh heartily about the audacity of her pre-Islamic dress days, describing how she once performed the ritual prayers in her bikini while she was at a beach. She even talked about wearing mini-skirts and decollete tops. Now Rachida wore long dresses and a hijab, but I did not see her as an oppressed woman, because she had freely chosen to wear them. (4) During Rachida's stay at Chatham, I began to have greater respect for my mother's decision to continue wearing her scarf. Another Muslim friend at Chatham had once said that she considered her hijab a veil of pride because it gave her identity and protection. She did not wear it because men told her to; she wore it as an act of submission or obedience to God. This was what I saw my mother doing. Throughout the year, Rachida spoke often of submission, and gradually that word ceased to send me into fits of anger about patriarchy and the male God. As I began to see God differently through Rachida, I discovered that yieldedness--or Gelassenheit, as others might say--to a loving, mothering God who wanted me into grow my full potential was helpful and healing.

A few days after the Muslim Student Association meeting on the Woodland sun porch in May 2003, Rachida and Refaat packed their bags to go back to Eygpt. Rachida invited everyone to come to Alexandria and told me multiple times that if I were to visit, I would need to pay for nothing except my plane ticket. A steady stream of well-wishers poured through their apartment with hugs and goodbyes. I tried to drag the heavy suitcases to the waiting taxi, but each attempt earned me a sound of disapproval from Rachida. She also made a fluttering gesture with both hands, which meant, "Let the men do the heavy lifting. That's what they're good for, you know." She rushed around, handing me pens and paper that had not been packed as way of supporting my writing. When the apartment was empty, and we stood outside, Refaat said, "Eileen, we will miss you," and shook my hand. Rachida hugged me tight and murmured, "I thank your parents for having you." My friends got into the taxi, and I watched them leave the parking lot. Refaat waved, but Rachida was looking away. Deep down, I knew why: she was crying.

Aching, I went back to my room. The Year of the Communities of Islam had taught me many things. In Rachida's classes, we read Edward Said and John Esposito, both noted scholars in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, and we talked about Islam, economics, foreign policy, terrorism, and suicide bombing. I wrote papers on the history of Turkey, feminist interpretations of the Qur'an, and Islamic banking. But all of that paled in comparison to mealtime conversations about religion and seeing the face of God in Rachida. I learned through my religious Other that God was a not patriarchal monster, and it seems right (although ironic) that I discovered this at a secular (5) women's college. Rachida left Chatham with, among other things, a better picture of religious life in the United States. (6) "Religion in America is not like religion in Europe," she once remarked. "I now know that religion is very important to Americans."

Three years later (and two of them spent at seminary), I look back on my year with Rachida El-Diwani, and I can say the greatest lesson I learned from her was the importance and necessity of bearing witness to the Truth. She praised God for my writing ability and considered it valuable and worth nurturing. In the spirit of bearing witness, then, I will say this: I have seen religion as oppression in Pittsburgh, Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Richmond, Indiana. I am also a witness to religion as transformation in Pittsburgh, Lancaster, and Richmond, and I am convinced that transformation is the harder and deeper task. Muslims and Christians have much to learn from each other, and being open to mutual enrichment is half the struggle. To be open, we need better images in our minds and newspapers, because we already have more than enough pictures of burning buildings, derailed trains, and blown-apart human bodies. Here is a picture I would like to see: women wearing colorful scarves and some wearing white bonnets, saying, Tell me about your head cover. What does it mean? Here is another picture: several families sitting around a table--or even sitting on the floor--passing shoofly pie and baklava. And my personal favorite: children playing in a grassy yard or a desert tent, speaking Pennsylvania German and Arabic, understanding each other perfectly.

Rachida and I are still in touch with each other. It is an infrequent e-mail correspondence, but she is with me in spirit constantly. "I am glad that you will go to the seminary to write and fulfill yourself," she wrote when I informed her of my post-undergraduate plans. During my first semester at the School of Religion, she sent this message: "Perhaps your gift of writing will help form bridges between your people and my people. You are open to the light that is to come. Please come to Egypt." I wrote back: "God-willing." EnshAllah.

Notes

1. By the term "Conservative," I do not mean evangelical. I am referring to a group of Friends who often affiliate themselves with Ohio Yearly Meeting in Barnesville, Ohio. Some people associated with OYM are plain-dressed and sometimes plain-speaking (thee, thou). They are very interested in preserving what they see to be the original message of Friends, i.e., Christ-centered, unprogrammed, and plain--or modestly dressed. "Old Order" might be a good way of describing these Friends. Wilmer Cooper, the founding dean of the Earlham School of Religion, grew up in this tradition.

2. From Lonnie Valentine's class handout summarizing John Fenton, "What is Religion?" in Niels Nielsen, Religions of the World, 1st ed. (New York: St. Martins' Press, 1983).

3. Julia Kasdorf draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to make this point in The Body and the Book (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 83.

4. I am well aware that not all women are in the position of being able to choose to wear religious dress, but it would be incorrect to assume that all women in such dress feel or even consider themselves to be oppressed. It happens to be my personal belief that it should be up to the individual woman to wear or not to wear religious markers, such as head coverings.

5. In this essay, I have expressed frustration with Chatham College's secular atmosphere. I do not want to imply, however, that I did not have a good experience at Chatham, because I most certainly did. Besides growing as a writer, a thinker, and a person, I discovered that my refusal to jettison religious talk and practice allowed me to have conversations with Muslims, Jews, Wiccans, agnostics, and other Christians with differing theologies and politics.

6. I would like to acknowledge that this statement--and the entire essay--is my experience of Rachida. I am sure that she would have different things to say if she were writing about her experience at Chatham. Furthermore, she might not agree with everything I have written.