The Submission - Amy Waldman [86]
15
The self-defense squads began to appear sometime after the third or fourth headscarf pulling. Across the country, young Muslim men roamed the streets of their neighborhoods, baseball bats in hand, to menace and sometimes beat outsiders who came too near hijab-wearing women. Even the Orthodox Jews living adjacent to Kensington began detouring around it, although with their own women bewigged and well smocked, they were unlikely denuders.
One night Asma and the Mahmouds watched a special news report called “The Headscarf Crisis.” Mr. Mahmoud, as always, translated for both women. Someone named Debbie from Save America from Islam (“I am starting to think it is we who need saving from America,” Mr. Mahmoud said, with uncharacteristic wit) was criticizing the self-defense squads. “It’s dhimmitude: non-Muslims aren’t allowed in Muslim neighborhoods anymore. Whose country is this?” The headscarf pulling itself she defended: “In Iran, Saudi Arabia, they force women to wear headscarves, to submit. This is America. What these men pulling off the headscarves are doing—it’s an act of liberation.”
Mr. Mahmoud snorted at this. “Yes, our women feel so liberated they’ve stopped going outside.”
Asma lay awake that night, thinking about what Mr. Mahmoud had said. He was only slightly exaggerating: most of the women in Kensington who covered their heads had stopped leaving the neighborhood, if not their homes. The fear of exposure, of violence was too strong. They were all becoming as invisible as Hasina, her next-door neighbor, which had to please the Kabirs of the world.
The next morning Asma put on her parrot-green salwar kameez and wrapped, more tightly than usual, a matching chunni around her head. She asked Mrs. Mahmoud to watch Abdul. Mrs. Mahmoud’s mouth made a small involuntary smile as it always did when she saw news in the offing.
“I’m running to the pharmacy,” Asma said. In truth her plan was to walk beyond Kensington to see what would happen. Or maybe ride the subway all the way to Manhattan and test the air there. She descended the four flights and made her way confidently down the street.
A block later she sensed someone behind her, too close. Her body clenched in apprehension. Then, seeing that it was only some young men from the neighborhood, she exhaled in relief. She paused to let them cross her path, then realized they were walking with her. Shadowing her.
“Asalamu alaikum,” she said.
“Alaikum asalam,” they all murmured politely.
They said nothing more to her, she nothing to them. They walked on together; together they traced a jagged shape around the neighborhood. The boys—there were six or seven—were trailing a foot behind her. She glimpsed them reflected in shop windows: their green headbands, the sticks two of them swung. They were good boys, some of them even students at the city’s special schools, where you had to take a test to enter. Did their parents know they were absconding from school for this? She turned. They turned. Even if she walked all the way to Manhattan they would be glued to her. She no longer knew who was imprisoning her, only that the prison was well sealed. At last she circled back to her apartment building. The boys gathered behind her, waiting for her to let herself in.
“Thank you,” she whispered, without turning back to meet their eyes.
With an excessive flourish Issam Malik fanned mock-ups of the council’s new ad campaign across the conference table in MACC’s office suite. “Et voilà!” he said. “They’ve done a stellar job. We’re putting a buy in sixteen papers and six magazines—or was it seven? And we’re putting together a press release; possibly a press conference, too. They need to be news. If the ads get coverage, it’s like getting ten dollars of free advertising for every one you pay for. Buzz, buzz, buzz.”
“Can you get it in the Post?” asked Laila. “It’s hardly fair we have to pay to answer their vitriol, but we want to reach those readers, not just liberals.”
“No point in doing da’wah among the converted, you mean,” Malik chuckled.
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