CHAPTER 4 #3
Safiya responded to pressure the way she always had: by becoming useful.
She made lists.
She researched.
She volunteered.
She stopped sleeping enough.
And because she was newly serious about her deen, she added another category to the list: become better Muslimah.
One evening she sat with The Ideal Muslimah open beside her laptop, a lecture playing on her phone and three work emails unanswered. Solomon walked in, looked at the setup and said, "What are you doing?"
"Studying."
"Which thing?"
"All of it."
He closed the laptop.
Safiya stared at him. "Excuse you?"
"Pray Maghrib. Eat. Then pick one thing."
"I can multitask."
"You can panic in multiple tabs. That's not the same thing."
She wanted to argue.
Instead she laughed.
"I hate when you're right."
"You get a lot of practice."
She stood. "Now I hate you again."
"Mhm. Go make wudu."
? ? ?
Safiya's first masjid class without Solomon felt like the first day at a new school.
She sat in the parking lot for eleven minutes.
The building itself was not intimidating. The people walking inside were not intimidating. Nobody had stationed a committee at the door to test new Muslims.
Her nervous system did not care.
She adjusted her scarf in the mirror.
Too loose.
She fixed it.
Too tight.
She fixed it again.
Her phone buzzed.
Solomon: You go in?
Safiya stared.
Safiya: How do you know I'm here?
Solomon: Because you said class starts at 7 and it's 7:08.
Safiya: Maybe I'm inside.
Solomon: Then why you texting me back in 0.4 seconds?
Safiya rolled her eyes.
Safiya: I hate you.
Solomon: Go inside.
Safiya: What if I sit somewhere wrong?
Solomon: Then somebody will tell you.
Safiya: That's exactly what I don't want.
Solomon: You survived worse than a Muslim auntie moving you over.
She laughed despite herself.
Solomon: Go learn. Call me after.
Safiya locked the phone.
"Okay, Allah."
She went inside.
A woman near the entrance smiled at her.
"Assalamu alaikum."
Safiya answered too quietly, then worried her pronunciation had been wrong.
The woman did not flinch.
She simply showed Safiya where to place her shoes.
Inside, Safiya chose a spot near the back.
Another woman sat beside her.
"First time?"
Was it that obvious?
Safiya smiled. "Is my fear showing?"
"A little."
They both laughed.
The woman's name was Maryam.
She had been Muslim since childhood and still admitted she sometimes walked into a class and realized she had misunderstood something for years.
That confession relaxed Safiya more than any reassurance could have.
The class was about salah.
Not the choreography Safiya had obsessed over.
Presence.
Khushu.
What it meant to stand before Allah while the mind tried to run in seventeen directions.
Safiya wrote furiously.
Maryam leaned over.
"You don't have to write every sentence."
Safiya whispered, "Yes I do."
Maryam looked at the page.
Safiya had underlined three things and drawn arrows between two others.
"You research for fun, don't you?"
Safiya smiled.
"Unfortunately."
After class, Maryam invited her to sit with several women.
Safiya almost said no.
She had work in the morning.
She wanted to call Solomon.
She had laundry that was actually real this time.
Instead she sat.
The conversation moved from prayer to children to grocery prices to a woman asking whether anybody knew a good place to get alterations.
Safiya loved that.
Muslim women were not sitting around discussing religion every second.
They were living.
Faith moved through the living.
On the drive home, she called Solomon.
"Well?" he answered.
"I went."
"I know."
"How?"
"Because you didn't call me from the parking lot having a crisis."
"Maybe I had a private crisis."
"How was it?"
Safiya talked for twenty minutes.
She told him about khushu.
About Maryam.
About realizing that she had been so focused on saying everything correctly that she sometimes forgot who she was speaking to.
Solomon listened.
Then Safiya said, "Maryam said something I liked."
"What's that?"
"She said being new doesn't mean I have to be ashamed of being new."
Solomon was quiet.
Safiya knew that quiet.
"What?"
"I been telling you that."
"Not like that."
"Oh, so Maryam say it and now it's revelation?"
Safiya laughed.
"Don't be jealous of my new friend."
"I ain't jealous."
"You sound jealous."
"I sound hungry."
"That is not related."
"Everything related when you hungry."
Safiya smiled all the way home.
That night she opened The Ideal Muslimah.
She had been reading it differently lately.
At first every chapter had felt like a mirror she held up while asking, Would Solomon want this woman?
Would Solomon be proud of this?
Would this make me wife material?
The question embarrassed her now.
Not because wanting to be a good wife was wrong.
Because she had quietly turned spiritual growth into an audition.
She wrote in the margin of her notebook:
If Solomon never saw any of this, would I still want it?
She stared at the question.
The honest answer was yes.
Then another honest answer followed.
But I still want him to see.
Safiya smiled.
Maybe both things could be true while she learned which one belonged first.