Doubt (Part I)

Huda’s alarm bell rang an hour before sunrise. It was winter in New York and today the Fajr athan was at 5:58am and she knew she had until 7:18am to complete the Fajr prayer. If she prayed later than that she would be praying it late and she didn’t want to be delayed. She felt a chill run down her spine and hugged the blanket a little tighter. The bed in the hotel room she was staying at was placed near the window so that guests can make the most of the scenic view. That consequently also meant that she was cold no matter how long she turned the heating on. And any bed felt a little colder without her husband in it. Despite the chill she had woken up with her pajamas sweaty again – a sign of stress, a doctor once told her.

Her alarm bell rang again.

Annoyed, Huda kicked her blanket off, and got up to go to the bathroom. Careful not to let her feet directly touch the marble floor, she put on her white cloth bathroom slippers.

A3ootho billa min il 5ubth wal 5abaa2ith. Huda stepped in with her left foot first.

She stared at the gold-framed mirror in front of the sink and noted the dark circles that were now framing her eyes. She had trouble falling asleep the night earlier because she was too anxious about her upcoming therapy session. What do you know? She thought. Therapy in and of itself causes anxiety. This is pathetically ironic. Or just pathetic.

Bismilla ilra7man il ra7eem, ya rab sa3idni, she muttered silently but resolvedly. Huda rolled up her sleeves to several inches above her elbows and rolled up the bottom of her pants all the way up to her knees. She found her headband and used it to hold the front part of her hair back and used a hairclip to tie back the rest of her rich auburn-dyed locks. She always tied her hair back before performing her ablution because she felt the hair that came towards her face would block the water from reaching her skin and her ablution would be incomplete.

With her hair completely pulled back the color of her complexion stood out, a pinkish bronze glow in the brightly lit bathroom. She had full cheeks which always made her look a little chubbier than she really was and narrow shoulders that contrasted with her wide hips – the feature she liked least in her body. That sentiment was probably a reaction to an event that happened when she was a teenager. In an effort to illustrate the use of creative descriptions an English teacher once described Huda as the ‘lovely’ student with the ‘child-bearing hips’. At the tender age of thirteen, Huda was all but mortified. As she grew older, however, she started to see that a curvaceous physique was voluptuous, and ‘voluptuous’ was a nice description, so nice that it almost negated the nasty taste left by her English teacher’s misguided illustration efforts. She was now looking at the mirror again to make sure no strands of hair fell on her face.

A3ootho billa min iblees.

She fiddled with the sink knob to find the right temperature and started washing her right hand and then her left. She gargled and washed her nose and then went on to wash the rest of her face. She washed different sections of her face separately because she worried that the water wouldn’t reach everything. She rubbed her eyes and her cheeks near her ears and even washed a little bit of the top of her hair because she worried that otherwise the water wouldn’t fully wet her forehead. She washed the sides of her face to below her chin towards her neck just to make sure she covered everything. When Huda started washing her right hand, which she was only supposed to do three times, she kept repeating her movements because she would doubt that she covered her hand in water completely. She would then forget that she washed a certain section of her hand and so she washed it again and again. She washed her forearm until past her elbow at least seven times. She did the same with her left side. When she was finally done with her arms she poured water on both her hands for a little while to make sure they were entirely wet. She then wiped her head. But she worried she did not wipe her head properly so she wet her hands again and wiped it again.

She stopped to look at the mirror for a second and thought that she looked like she had just come out of the shower. It had already been fifteen minutes since she started her ablution. This was the reason she needed an hour before sunrise to get her prayer done. She always worried her ablution would take so long that she would miss the prayer. Finally, she washed her feet, each at least twenty times over. She couldn’t quite see all sides of her feet as she washed and she kept doubting that she missed a spot.

She completed her ablution by seven o’clock with eighteen minutes to spare before sunrise. Hurriedly she rolled out her prayer mat and put on her thob. She tried to position the prayer mat so that it is the direction of the Ka’aba but the compass she used kept giving her different directions depending on where she put it on the floor. Frustrated and worried about being late, she opened the curtains and tried to see where the sun would rise from and guess where the real direction of the Ka’aba was. But she knew she didn’t know what she was doing so she relied on one of the directions her prayer compass gave her and hoped that she was praying in the right direction.

Bismillah ilra7man il ra7eem. Nawaitu an u9alli 9alat il Fajr.