DECEMBER 2024

Strands of black whip with the wind as I approach a gallery. “The Gagosian,” the sign should read, but my glasses are blurry with the breath of frost and I read, “The Asian.” My plan is to linger in the threshold, to relish more in the space’s warmth than its content. The unknown invites me further inside; I accept. Flashes of color and form flit by me as I nibble different artworks, never committing to the consumption of a whole. Until I am stopped by the lack of face. A collage of photographs, all overlapping one another. Washed in black, it is devoid of warmth. From right to left, I scan, absorbing the plethora of burqas, the black masks, the absence of face. But the eyes call out, dark brown eyes like mine, like the fathers and mothers who came before me. There are tanks and graffiti and strangest of all, trees. Trees that line the pathways of the tanks, trees growing out the top of the tanks and rising high into the sky. But the trees’ limbs carry black twigs, and from the black twigs fall the red leaves of autumn. Squinting closer, the trees turn to men whose arms breathe fire. As I tilt my face upwards, my eyes swim into a sea of women all clad in black hijabs and burqas that wipe away any distinguishable features they bear. All I can see are the headscarves. A thousand black headscarves, glistening in the desert sun as they converge to form the cropped hair of one teenage girl. 

جهاد

Jihad: holy war. The eternal battle of the men in black who carry guns and drop bombs. The supposed cause of  the congregated, covered women. The sixth pillar of Islam, the faith to which my father subscribed; how is it possible he supported such religion? I came to be in the age of terrorist attacks, ISIS beheadings, and consecutive hostage crises; all Islam means to me is violence. Even the Arabic script resembles a sword making a stomach its sheath. My eighth grade iteration punily spurned my inherited faith in my refusal to eat meat, or goshto, by telling myself it was a challenge to overcome, or koshto. Goshto and koshto: two-near homonyms in my mother tongue, respectively meaning “meat” and “challenge.” One ebbs as the other flows forth. The small figure of my father in my mind fights to hold open the door to my native faith. He gets more and more compressed as I get older, but I cannot bring myself to close the door on him. Holy war cannot be all of Islam. Perhaps it has come time to redefine jihad. Let us reconcile. 

     جهاد

Jihad: to strive for better, derived from the Arabic word for effort. Jihad is the experience of both the immigrant and the child of the immigrant. It is a man bringing one land to another and a woman rising to wake her daughter each morning. Soiled suits worn again and again, essays written again and again, the warmth gained from a hug and a cup of cocoa. A tree shoots upwards even with no room to stretch its limbs. To strive and to struggle are one and the same.