Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [54]
“What should I do?” she asked Ammi. “I don’t want to fall for a pious man and be tempted when I’m still married. That would be zina.”
Zina was a multipurpose Arabic term from the Quran that had no equivalent in English. It was a powerful word. Within it the sinful act and the associated punishment were conjoined. Depending on the situation it could refer to two separate things: premarital fornication punished by flogging, and extramarital adultery punished by stoning.
Ammi told the troubled wife that it would be all right for her to go to court and initiate a divorce. Janice, however, was wary of switching her understanding of Islam “just because it is now convenient.”
“Maybe the strength of your faith is a sign by Allah that you should remain in the marriage and work on your husband’s faith,” Ammi suggested one day.
“Yes,” Janice said. “Maybe I’ll be able to bring him back toward the righteous path.”
Still undecided, Janice came to see Ammi every few days, hoping to find a viable Islamic reason to get a divorce, and each time she left thinking that she should stay in the marriage. It went on like this for weeks and ultimately Janice stayed married.
I followed the Janice matter closely until something far more interesting presented itself. Her name was Amina Alam. She was a demure Pakistani immigrant from one of the nearby communities. In her late thirties, she was married and had two children who had been sent off to college. She wore long flowing abayas in dark colors and mismatching hijabs. Amina Alam was an adulteress—or so she thought.
“As you know, sister,” she said, sitting on the floor and rocking back and forth in front of Ammi. “It is a sin punishable by stoning for a married woman to sleep with a man who is not her husband.”
“I know,” Ammi said. “Zina.”
“I believe that I’ve been committing adultery for the last sixteen years. What’s going to happen to me?”
“You should seek forgiveness,” Ammi said. “You should go to your husband and confess, and ask for his forgiveness too.”
“That’s the problem!” Amina said in frustration. “My husband is the one I’ve been adulterous with.”
“This is confusing,” Ammi said. “Are you playing a joke on me? One shouldn’t joke about such things.”
“No, I swear,” she said. “You see, I’ve been married for twenty years. Four years into my marriage my husband and I had a fight. Many fights, actually. In each fight he grabbed me by the arm and said to me, ‘I divorce you!’ He said those very words—‘I divorce you!’—three times. When I was growing up I learned that in Islam a man has only to say, ‘I divorce you!’ three times, and in the eyes of Allah the woman is divorced. This means I was divorced sixteen years ago.”
“You’re just remembering all this now?” Ammi asked.
“Yes,” Amina said, hanging her head. “Sixteen years I’ve been married to a man who is not my husband. What should I do?”
“Just remarry him,” Ammi suggested.
“That won’t solve it,” Amina said. “He’s still the man with whom I committed zina. I can’t face him. I shouldn’t even be in that house with him. Islam says that we shouldn’t be alone in the same space as men we’re not married to. What am I doing? If we lived in an Islamic state, I would have been stoned by now.”
That thought stopped the discussion for several minutes. Finally, Amina said, “Do you think I should move to an Islamic state so that I can be stoned as I deserve to be?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Ammi rebuked. “You’re an American now. There’s no stoning here. Here we believe in stoning only in theory. I think we need to ask one of the local scholars,” she concluded.
“No!” Amina replied decisively. “I can’t face their judgment. Besides, I don’t want word to get out.”
Ammi sighed. Then she got up and rummaged in her files. “Listen to me very carefully,” she said. “I have a solution. My children use this new Internet, and I’m learning all about it. On it there are scholars you can ask questions of by way of a letter.