The Beauty of Your Face Read online

  THE BEAUTY OF YOUR FACE

  A Novel

  Sahar Mustafah

  For those struck down by hate,

  your stories still keep you among us.

  She’s so young. Would you not let her blossom a bit more?

  —friend of Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha

  Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

  —Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati

  THE BEAUTY OF YOUR FACE

  Nurrideen School for Girls

  ANOTHER ANGRY phone call, and it was only Tuesday.

  “It’s very haram, Ms. Rahman! All that drinking and debauchery!”

  Afaf Rahman inhaled deeply. She had cultivated a reputation for patience as principal of the Nurrideen School for Girls. This wasn’t the first complaint lodged against a book. “The Great Gatsby is a state-approved text, Mrs. Ibrahim,” she calmly explained to the parent on the other end.

  “The state of Illinois is not raising my daughter to be a proper muslimah, Ms. Rahman.” A swift retort. She could hear sneering through the line.

  The fathers rarely called Afaf—a professional woman with two master’s degrees—didn’t bother speaking with a marra. The men coached their wives on what to say when they called her. She could tell by the weak persistence in their voices that some of the wives had not taken their husbands’ positions against the liberal education of their daughters.

  This mother, however, was raring to go.

  Afaf’s assistant Sabah appeared in the doorway of her office, holding a folder. Afaf waved her in. “Um Ibrahim, raising your daughter to be a proper muslimah is your job at home, and my job at this school.” She rolled her eyes at Sabah. “I’m also responsible for providing each young woman enrolled at this school with a competitive education. I’m confident that no book could ever steer her—or any of my students—off the path of righteousness, Um Ibrahim.”

  My students—four hundred young, bright, and determined girls whom Afaf claimed as her own daughters. Her love and devotion to them were fierce.

  Sabah pointed at a signature line on a document and handed her a pen. Her assistant wore a thickly knitted infinity scarf around her neck and a long sweater over her abaya. In the middle of February in Illinois, you could bet on a wind chill of ten degrees one day and wake up the next morning to a thirty-degree hike above normal.

  “Have you read The Great Gatsby, Um Ibrahim?” Afaf asked the parent on the phone, quickly signing the form.

  Sabah smiled, knowingly shaking her head, and replaced the document in a folder. She retreated to her desk outside Afaf’s door.

  “Well, no. Abu Ibrahim and I watched it on Netflix. Leonardo DiCaprio’s in it.”

  Afaf massaged her left temple. “I see. Perhaps you and your husband should read it. I can arrange for copies to be sent home with your daughter Eman. Inshallah we can sit down once you’ve read it and discuss your concerns.” A few seconds of silence. She scratched the top of her hijab with the antennae of her two-way radio, waiting.

  In her ten years at Nurrideen School, Afaf wrestled with parents who never backed down—a few even withdrew their daughters’ enrollment. The majority eventually relented and trusted her. Still, she chose her battles: contraception could be explored in health class, without encouraging premarital sex. And absolutely no discussion of abortion.

  “No. That won’t be necessary, Ms. Afaf. May Allah give you the strength and wisdom to guide our daughters in this frightening world.”

  The parent hung up and Afaf left her office, clutching her radio. She gave Sabah a thumbs-up.

  Her assistant laughed. “By the way, the interfaith summit meeting is rescheduled to next week. They’re sending us a revised agenda by the end of the day.”

  “Good. Who are the student ambassadors?”

  Sabah scanned her desk. “Majeeda Abu Lateef, Jenin Muhsin, and Renah Abdel Bakir. Two seniors, one junior.”

  Afaf nodded. Jenin was her daughter Azmia’s best friend and the two of them had started the first student chapter of Amnesty International at Nurrideen School. Azmia had been only a freshman that year, already championing human rights. Like so many of her peers, she’d paid close attention to the case of Malala Yousafzai, a fifteen-year-old student like her, shot in the head for wanting an education. Azmia had been rattled for days.

  How can they do that? Aren’t they Muslim, too? her daughter had wanted to know. Afaf had no good answer except, They’re not true muslimeen, habibti.

  Then Sandy Hook happened and Azmia helped mobilize a student rally that traveled all the way to Springfield, joining other groups demanding that Illinois legislators hold Congress responsible for the lives of those twenty young souls.

  Azmia was a senior now, her eyes set on international law. Her friend Jenin had chosen premed with plans to volunteer with Doctors Without Borders. Sometimes Afaf stood outside a classroom, listening at the door as the teacher lectured, followed by an intermittent chorus of loud and unflappable responses. She was overcome by her students’ sense of pride and purpose. There was an infinite number of choices for these young women.

  At home, Afaf watched Azmia at the kitchen table, her head buried in a textbook, hair pulled into a bun, marveling at this magnificent creature who was nothing like Afaf had been at her age, wrecked and lost. Azmia was an extraordinary surprise at the saddest part of her life, growing up bold and assertive, her brothers fretting over her, though she constantly pushed them away, making room to spread her wings, to chart her own course.

  When she was nine years old, the girls in her Brownies troop told Azmia she was lucky she didn’t look Muslim. She’d come home fighting tears and begging Afaf’s permission to begin wearing hijab.

  Afaf had gathered her in her arms. Why, my love? You’re still so young.

  Azmia’s eyebrows furrowed like two wings intersecting as they always did when she was about to cry—a rare occasion, as tough as she was.

  I don’t want anyone to make a mistake about who I am.

  Hadn’t every muslimah asserted this collective identity to the world? There could be no mistake about who they are, what they believe. Her daughter’s brazenness still amazed Afaf; Azmia was so unlike how she herself had been at her age, a mousy girl with no sense of self, an invisible child. It’s what your children did: erased your flaws, your tragedies.

  Outside her office, Lou, the school security guard, sat at a small wooden table, spectacles propped on the bridge of his freckled nose, reading a newspaper. He didn’t look up, the bill of his White Sox cap shadowing his eyes. He raised his two-way radio in greeting.

  Afaf remembered his skeptical look when she hired Lou last year.

  “I’ve been retired from the force for five years. I’d never worked with a Muslim population.” He pronounced it Moo-slim and looked like he wouldn’t have been disappointed if he didn’t get the job.

  And yet Afaf had wanted him. He had that self-assured way that white people oozed because they believed you counted on them to improve matters. After a series of bomb threats, a jittery school board swiftly approved the full-time hiring of Lou, an ex–Chicago cop.

  She turned down the corridor past the cafeteria, where laughter and chatter rose and fell. Young girls—twelve through eighteen—ate turkey sandwiches and sipped from water bottles, their heads swaddled in the compulsory white hijab, their bodies hidden under shapeless forest-green uniforms.

  The head of the cafeteria staff waved at Afaf with her metal tongs. Um Khaddar was a widow, ancient and ageless all at once, with nine grown children. She’d pleaded with Afaf for a job in the kitchen to fill her empty days. The students adored Um Khaddar; she was like a mother hen, plump and fretting over wasted food.

  “Mas
hallah, ya sayidah Rahman!” Um Khaddar would proclaim. “These girls have every liberty nowadays. How I envy them!”

  Afaf would nod and smile, hoping progress would continue and every one of her students would reach her full potential. They were no longer swayed by fancy marriage proposals and dowries of gold. Careers in law, medicine, and political activism glittered on the horizon of their young lives more brilliantly than diamond rings. Her own teenage years were a blur of indifferent white boys, a deep loneliness engulfing her.

  Afaf waved back at Um Khaddar with her two-way radio, moving past the glass-plated window of the Student Services Office, past posters on good citizenship and high expectations. A framed photograph of President Obama smiled down on her. She would miss the noon prayers if she didn’t hurry.

  “Ms. Rahman! Ms. Rahman!”

  Afaf halted, sighed, and spun around. A short and stocky girl with a round face beamed up at her. Najwa Othman, a senior. She was neck-and-neck with another student for valedictorian. Her mother and Afaf had been in elementary school together. She was shocked to see how well Afaf had turned out in the end.

  “Salaam alaykum, Ms. Rahman! Have you had a chance to look over my proposal for the blood drive?” Najwa didn’t draw breath, batting her thick black eyelashes in expectation.

  “Not yet, Najwa. I will—”

  She cut Afaf off. “The deadline is in three weeks, Ms. Rahman.” Najwa bounced on the balls of her feet as she spoke, her excitement contagious, or annoying, depending on your mood.

  “Three weeks is still plenty of time to—”

  Najwa threw her hands up. “Inshallah I’d like to begin promoting as soon as possible, Ms. Rahman. I need your approval.”

  Despite herself, Afaf smiled. “Inshallah,” she said. Exchanging a complete sentence with Najwa was as futile as predicting the weather.

  Afaf hurried past the science lab. Last fall, Mrs. Sultany, the forensics teacher, won a state grant for an infrared spectrometer—Nurrideen School was the first in the area to acquire such a sophisticated instrument for chemical analysis and environmental testing. Her class had been featured in a community spotlight article while partnering with the Tempest Police Department on a case of a home burglary.

  She turned east down another corridor, toward the farthest end from her office on the first floor. Snow-crusted windowpanes cast a blinding glare, and tiny dust particles circulated like small galaxies above her head. She stopped in front of a wood-paneled door with a lattice.

  Afaf glanced behind her. No one was around. Dribbling balls and whistles echoed from the gymnasium on the other side of the building.

  She slipped inside and pulled a light bulb chain, illuminating a space no larger than a janitor’s closet. A worn cushioned chair was propped up against one wall, a small Quran on a lamp table beside it. This had once been a confessional, Afaf had learned on a tour of the building when she was first hired to teach ten years ago. Nurrideen School in Tempest, Illinois, had long ago been Our Lady of Peace, a two-story convent housing thirty Benedictine nuns.

  It was built in 1929, facing east toward Lake Michigan, though they could not see its gray-blue waters. Behind the convent was a modest field—two acres, the size of a strip mall parking lot. The sisters of Our Lady of Peace did not squander an inch of it, planting potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, and cabbages.

  During the Great Depression, it served as a way station for poor white families traveling north to Chicago from the central and southern regions of Illinois—some came as far as Joplin, Missouri. Escaping the threat of lynching, black men broke their journey at the convent, a few staying to help the sisters harvest the fields for a few cents a day. For white farmers ruined by the Dust Bowl, Chicago gleamed against their dull, economically stunted lives, traces of the eroded soil that had failed them still clinging to their clothes when they arrived. Travelers stopped at Our Lady of Peace, ate a meager meal of hard-boiled eggs and baked apples, and put up their horses until daybreak.

  Young children were sometimes abandoned in the middle of the night. Afaf imagined the sisters tending to them, killing their head lice with apple cider vinegar and hookworms with warm milk and castor oil. Soon it became regular practice—white widows and unwed mothers depositing babies and toddlers for whom they could not afford to care—and the convent transformed into a place for orphans, the sisters of Our Lady of Peace plunging the fear of God into their young, displaced bodies like a vaccine.

  Afaf loved the confessional. It was a place of escape, for solitary prayer and a break from the daily school operations. Before she removed her shoes to pray on a green velvet rug, Afaf sat on the chair and breathed deeply. She propped her radio next to the Quran and gazed at the door. A mural had been painted over it depicting the annunciation of Holy Mary. Afaf studied Mary’s solemn face, upturned as she receives the angel Gabriel’s message. The brown of her pupils had dulled and flaked over many decades, and the angel’s pearly white wings had turned dingy. The image was the only Catholic relic—that and the confessional itself—left in the Islamic school.

  The convent was closed down in the late 1940s when tuberculosis swept through, killing most of the nuns and whatever remaining children the welfare agencies could not reach in time. Over the decades, the state made it a halfway house for war-broken veterans. In the eighties, when President Reagan cut funding, the state turned it over to the village of Tempest.

  It remained vacant until Ali Abu Nimir stood up at a board meeting one frigid evening in February 1995—two years after the Tempest Prayer Center first opened its doors only a few blocks away—and proposed a private Islamic school for children. He was a wealthy businessman—an immigrant from Palestine—who’d washed and waxed used cars before owning his first lot on the South Side of Chicago. After fulfilling hajj with his wife, he returned to Tempest with pockets tipped toward good deeds, ensuring his place in Paradise. Among them, donating to the Center and opening a school for the next generation of muslimeen who were more likely to recite the latest pop song than a verse from the Holy Quran.

  Meanwhile, the white taxpayers of Tempest had been witnessing with trepidation a growing Muslim population. They’d nearly stonewalled the building of the Center in 1993; they weren’t keen on the expansion of “un-Christian spaces,” as one circulating pamphlet had charged. Ali Abu Nimir’s proposal for a school was rejected—and rejected six more times after that. It appeared the small town of Tempest was more likely to bulldoze the old convent before “letting it go to Muz-lumz.”

  In the winter of 1998, its construction was finally approved with the help of a Pakistani American civil rights lawyer, and the following year Nurrideen School opened its doors, first to boys, then exclusively to young girls after a brother school opened in a neighboring township. Among the dignitaries cutting the ribbon was Ali Abu Nimir, who later resigned from the school board and returned to his Palestinian homeland, leaving behind his legacy—an engraved brick on the exterior walkway.

  Afaf removed her shoes and stood up, planting her feet on the edge of the prayer rug. In two shifts, students and teachers filed into the gymnasium for scheduled communal prayer, temporarily halting games of volleyball and basketball. Most days, she preferred worshipping alone, avoiding the barrage of faculty requests and inquiries heaped on her as soon as she raised herself from the floor.

  The confessional was peaceful, though not quiet. A piano tune floated from a vent in the ceiling, then a chorus of altos. Miss Camellia’s show choir was preparing for the spring concert at Navy Pier. A faint rendition of Adele’s “Skyfall” echoed above Afaf’s head. During her brief escapes from her office, she’d sit on the cushioned chair, eyes closed, listening to the melodious voices flowing from the vent. But today she only had time for prayer. Aside from parent phone calls that morning, she’d been mulling over a new budget proposal and investigating an incident of plagiarism on a term paper.

  Hands folded over her stomach, Afaf whispered: “Bismallah al rahman al raheem.”

&
nbsp; By her final prostration, Afaf heard a sound like a firecracker. She quickly finished and reached for her two-way radio.

  Lou must have heard it, too.

  She turned up the volume and adjusted the control. “Lou. Can you check that noise? Troublemakers again. Over.”

  People around the neighborhood tossed M-80s over the school fence on a regular basis. It was a message booming loud and clear: You don’t belong here.

  The vandalism had gotten worse, too. Last week they’d spray-painted a pig’s head on the field house, and two days ago a beer bottle shattered the window of Mrs. Nawal Qadir’s art classroom.

  My husband’s been at me to quit, the young pregnant teacher had informed Afaf yesterday, her hijab-trimmed face tight with apprehension. She rubbed her growing belly, waiting for Afaf’s reassuring words.

  We’ve taken every precaution, Nawal. And beyond that, it’s in Allah’s hands, she’d told the art teacher, sounding more exasperated than hopeful. It was a script she’d automatically recite. And when a local news van pulled up to report on the latest incident of vandalism, she’d recite another one:

  We are a religion of peace, not terror. We are Americans, too.

  Defying the board’s recommendation, she refused to display more flags, particularly one outside the school’s entrance for public view. One, to which an assembly of students and parents pledged allegiance during programs and graduation, was already prominently stationed in the small auditorium. Is a flag the only proof of patriotism? she’d argued to the board.

  The radio crackled and Afaf set it back on the lamp table. She remained there on the floor, legs tucked under her, and closed her eyes.

  Allah gift me with patience, she thought.

  Eyes still closed, she gave du’aa for Azmia so she would do well on her AP psychology test this afternoon. They’d spent last night going over a dozen of Azmia’s handwritten note cards on categories of abnormal behavior.