Heir to the Crescent Moon by Sufiya Abdur-Rahman

Author:Sufiya Abdur-Rahman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

26

Her Own Way

AT BANU-HILAL HERBAL TEA ROOM, my mother could sit down after her classes at City College, where she was a freshman in 1972, drink a cup of tea, eat a piece of gingerbread, and feel as if transported to a Muslim land. Brothers with scraggly beards and thigh-skimming thawbs sat at the tables around her, sipping their own tea, reading Qur’an, and chewing on miswak sticks. The aroma of incense wafted through the air; jazz music played in the background; Arabic phrases sprung from conversation. She enjoyed almost everything about being there.

Her favorite, though, was lounging at a table with a cup of tea centered before her and a plate with pastry set off to her right. She’d breathe in the flowery fragrances rising from the glass as she sipped, then try to guess the ingredients of the slice of cake or bread she bit into, carefully savoring each morsel as she chewed. My mother had loved baking ever since she was a girl standing by her mother’s aproned side, watching her mix flour, sugar, butter, and waiting for a little batter to put in her own Easy-Bake Oven. The tearoom brought this to mind.

When she was there, she could also drift up to the storefront to admire handmade clothes adorning the glass display case. Her eyes examined the intricate patterns that multicolored yarns formed on kufis. Beside them, she studied men’s kameezes: long, sleek, and just as elegant. With a good look, my mother could tell if the stitchwork on each kufi would keep its form after wear and whether the cut of each kameez formed the proper symmetry. She’d been sewing for years; first, making clothes for her dolls on a toy machine with swatches her grandmother brought home from her job at a dressmaking factory; then, moving on to the old sewing machine her father bought and showed her how to thread and operate to make clothes for herself. Lately, she’d begun asking for more yards of fabric as the outfits she made had become longer and looser; inspecting the pieces at the tearoom made her ponder her Singer and what Muslim-inspired garb she might try to sew next.

Yes, she liked the tearoom. Except that when Salahuddin, her boyfriend since high school, asked her to accompany him there to listen to lectures about Islam, his new religion, she refused. Just because he went to the tearoom didn’t mean that she had to go with him, she said. It was the same thing she’d told him about becoming Muslim, which he’d done and told her she should too.

“I don’t need to take shahada ’cause you took shahada,” she countered. If she wanted to, she said, she’d become Muslim in her own way, in her own time.

* * *

My mother was born Joanna Frances Taylor in December 1954, the fourth and last child of her father, Wade Hampton Taylor Sr., an MTA subway conductor, and her mother, Vivian Wheeler Taylor, a New York City rent examiner. She was their only daughter.

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