Searching for Faith

Hasbun Allahi wa nimal wakeel. These words had become my mantra. “God alone is sufficient for us, and He alone can rectify our affairs.” These were the words that I would recite thousands of times a day that winter. I would repeat this phrase in the early morning hours when I couldn’t sleep. As I heard myself murmur the words, my own voice seemed to lull me into a trance-like state, as if I floated out of my body.

It was the beginning of January 2015. During those chilly nights, I began to feel her stir. Her subtle movements manifested deep in the pit of my abdomen. I knew she would be a girl. It was too early to confirm this fact, but I knew. Throughout the day, as I kept busy mothering, she would be rocked to sleep and quieted, just as my thoughts were silenced. But in the stillness of the night, she would awaken, and with her delicate stretches and kicks, my thoughts would be prodded and roused as well.

Habitually, late in the night that cold January, her slight movements and my racing thoughts would wake me. And, as much as I tried, I couldn’t sleep. Eventually, I would give up trying and lay out my prayer mat. The green of the prayer rug was almost the same shade of emerald as the scarf that I wrapped around me, covering my hair and chest. The scented smoke from the incense I would sometimes light, floated in the air, making swirled patterns of vapor. It might have been a beautiful scene, if it weren’t for the empty bed behind me and the broken picture frame on the nightstand, all reminders of the truth I wasn’t ready to face.

Besides the glow of my phone, whose face informed me that it was somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m., the only other light came from the moon and stars outside my window. In that eerie semi-darkness, I would attempt to focus on my prayers. I would whisper my prayers quietly, so as not to awaken Zakiyyah and Taj, the two children outside of my womb. They slept soundly, just down the hall in their bunk beds. I took a little comfort in the fact that as much as they were going through, they were still sleeping well.

My prayers started off calmly enough, but as much as I try to push down my sadness, my tears would eventually bubble up like a spring. Exhausted with trying to hold them in, I would give in and cease resisting the sadness that washed over me like waves, threatening to engulf me. I sat on my rug, my feet tucked under my bottom, for hours; I sat there and allowed the tears to fall. Yet soon enough, I could see the morning light begin to peek through the shades of my bedroom window. I had to get up, get them dressed, get something for them to eat. As much as I yearned for an end to the sadness, or at very least, the sweetness of nonexistence, the work of motherhood couldn’t be put on pause. I had to wash my face and pretend that everything was alright. I had to get it together, whatever it was.

A week previously, an Imam had written the words hasbun Allahi wa nimal wakeel down on a piece of paper like a prescription. He urged me to recite this four hundred and fifty times after every prayer. His directive felt akin to instructions to take two of these and call me in the morning. I had been reciting it thousands of times a day. So much so that I don't know if they were saving me or driving me further away from sanity. I said these words until the words lost all meaning. I said them until I broke not one, not two, but three strands of the prayer beads which I used to keep count.

“God alone is sufficient for us, and He alone can rectify our affairs.” The words were meant to remind me of my complete dependence on God. They were meant to instill in me a sense of faith and trust in God’s plan, a salve to ease hurt inflicted by the fallibility of people. Yet, as much as I tried to focus on those words, I often felt my faith in them falter. At times they had the power to calm me at night, but they did nothing to abate the feelings of hopelessness that crept in during the daytime.

During the day, I tried to keep my mind focused on the task at hand, whether that was lecturing in my evening classes, or teaching Taj to read, or making dinner, my mind would begin to retrace all the events that had brought my marriage to this point. I wanted to find the day, the exact moment the pain began, then maybe I could fix things.

I had found the letter the previous month, in the beginning of December. It was an email my husband had tried to hide in an innocuous looking folder in his email account, obviously meant to evade suspicion. The letter was dated November seventh.

That letter. In it, she described the life they could lead together, the love she had for him, her sexual desires. “I will always love you,” she wrote, “every inch of you inward and outward…My every being wants to spend the rest of eternity with you.” Each word made me dizzy. Yet, I read on, “I would give nothing more than to be the woman you wake up to, the one who you fall asleep with, the only one who you make love to and who makes love to you, the companion who holds your hand while walking, who rests her head on you while sitting, who holds you close in the night.”

Reading the words, from a woman I had once called my sister in faith, made my whole body feel hot, and then, oddly, a sensation of coldness took over. My heart raced. I was three months pregnant at that point, already in a constant state of nausea and exhaustion. The words pushed me over the edge and made me physically sick. I ran to the bathroom and threw up. I had nothing in my stomach, yet green, vile tasting stomach acid burned my throat and made me gag.

For months before that, I had a nagging feeling. Our emails and phones had never been concealed from each other. It was an unspoken rule that our lock codes on our phone were each other’s birthdays. Yet, one day, I tried to open his phone to check something only to realize his code had been changed. I knew something was wrong.

It wasn’t only that. He was spending less time at home. One night, he didn’t come home at all and said he was working in the office all night. I remember tossing and turning all night, uncomfortable in the space left by his absence. When he finally came home, he made me feel ungrateful for the sacrifices he was making to provide for us. I began to feel disoriented by it all.

Yet, each time I broached the subject with him, he denied that there was a problem. He repeatedly rejected my concerns. One day I asked him, “If nothing has changed, why do I feel this way?”

His reply was, “You’ll have to ask yourself that question.” These words did nothing to erase the feelings of unease within me. I felt crazy. Why couldn’t I put my suspicions aside? He worked, paid the bills. Why wasn’t that enough? Why didn’t I feel loved?

The day I found the letter, I realized that my intuition had been right. He had come home from work with a stomach bug. I was still early in my first trimester and often felt nauseous myself. I remember saying to him, “Now you know what I feel like every day,” thinking he was overreacting. Yet his face wore a greenish tinge. He went to bed, and as I tried to put his laptop bag in the closet, his unlocked tablet fell out. Hoping to quiet my suspicions, I began searching through his texts and emails. Nothing was amiss, but something made me check that innocent looking folder in his email. There the email was, along with others from her.

I had trusted this woman. We had prayed together in my home, shoulder-to-shoulder, just a few Ramadans ago. She was a married Muslim woman, the mother of four children. She wore hijab, supposedly a sign of modesty and commitment to God’s commands. The words she wrote in that letter, “I long to be wrapped up in your arms with your body making love to mine…” were at odds with any definition of modesty. Thinking of it made my whole body tense up, the nausea washing over me in waves.

I thought I could trust my husband. I had trusted him before I found the letter. I never wanted to become the kind of wife who checked phones and emails. The kind who was insecure and suspicious. My husband and that woman (should I know refer to her as his mistress?) both worked for the same IT company. Her husband had called mine the previous summer, asking if there were any opportunities at the company for his wife. That’s when this all began. Who knows what went on or how long it went on before I found that letter.

I thought I could trust my own mind, but evidently, I couldn’t. Because even after confronting him with the letter, he denied any relationship with her. They both denied any physical relationship. Yet something had gone on between them, the letters made that obvious.

She wrote me a long apology email. “I need to ask your forgiveness for hurting you in the beginning, middle, and end and taking so long to do what is right,” she wrote. “I cannot bear to hurt you and cause a believing woman, possibly even [a] friend of Allah pain or oppression.” They both promised to stop communicating and I was meant to forgive, because how can we ask for God’s forgiveness, if we can’t forgive others?

So, we decided to go to marriage counseling. In our sessions, he said he wanted to work on our marriage and focus on our expanding family. I agreed to work on forgiveness, and I tried to push the double betrayal out of my mind. Yet, just a few weeks later, that nagging feeling came back. I discovered text messages from her. In order to rebuild trust, he agreed in counseling to leave his phone unlocked. One day, my intuition urged me to check it, and there the message waited for me, almost as if he wanted me to discover them.

That December afternoon, I had fallen asleep on the couch after coming home from work. During the day, I home-schooled our children. In the evening, I taught a literature course at a community college. The so-called morning sickness lasted all day for me, and I had been out of the home since 7:30 a.m. that morning. I discovered the text messages on his phone, a string of complaints about me: she’s sleep on the couch/can’t even talk to her. She comforted him, you can always talk to me. He later wrote, I can’t wait to marry you. He ended that message with a wedding ring emoji and hearts.

I was carrying his child, taking care of two more, home-schooling, and working. Of course, I was tired. I was embroiled with hot anger.

He was working on his computer when I confronted him about the messages. He jumped as his phone was in my hand. I don’t remember what either of us said, but I remember my yelling, my tears. I remember pushing him away from me, forcefully. I remember his empty excuses and how sickened I felt at seeing a bit of quinoa stuck in his front tooth from the food I had cooked the night before.

The next several days are a blur. Somehow our arguments shifted. Instead of apologies, he began to blame me for everything. He had a list of grievances. I didn’t wear makeup. I didn’t respect him enough. I returned a ring he had given me years prior. This was all my fault. The place we were in was my doing.

“If you weren’t too busy to talk to me, or you were interested in the things I am, I would never have looked her way.” He retold events in a way that always painted him as the victim.

Hasbun Allahi wa nimal wakeel. I repeated the words as advised to me by the Imam. I knew in my heart that God was sufficient, yet I still wanted my family to stay together. Even as my love for my husband splintered, I clung to a marriage I no longer believed in. If I let go of the pieces, where would that leave me? A pregnant woman alone with two children. That couldn’t be what God wanted for me. Could it?

“How long have you been having suicidal thoughts?” the Imam had asked me a week later. This was a different one, and I had requested this meeting, hoping he could do something. What, I wasn’t sure exactly, but surely the right Imam would be able to do something, maybe talk some sense into him, something. I sat in his office, surrounded by Arabic calligraphy and photos of the Kabah. It was just after Friday prayers, and I could hear the buzz of the congregation milling about just outside his office door. The Imam wore a high kufi, a thobe. He wasn’t an Imam whom I was familiar with, but I wasn’t getting anywhere with the others. One Imam had agreed to call a meeting that never came to fruition, and the rest kept putting me off. I hoped that this Imam would be different, but his question made me unsure.

“I'm not suicidal.” I was shocked by his words. I didn't want to end my life. I just wanted to put it on hold until the pain would go away. Before this time, I didn’t know that mental anguish was capable of causing such physical pain. Everything felt magnified, and it was unbearable. The pain burned through me like hot lead and everything from the inside out felt raw, open, tender, and exposed. Part of it was fear. I had left my parents’ home and gone directly to my married home. I had never lived alone, let alone with two and a half kids. There had to be something he could do.

I patiently explained to him the situation again. “I’m pregnant. I have two young children, and their father is gone,” I paused to collect myself. I refused to cry. “He hasn’t been supporting us since he left.” I looked up to see him looking at me calmly. Why wasn’t he outraged?

“Didn’t you say that you changed the locks?” Why was he focusing on that? What about what he did and was doing? I tried to control me frustration.

Yes, I had changed the locks, after it became clear that things were getting worse, not better. That was after the last argument, after I threw our wedding photo on the floor, breaking the frame. A few days after I changed the locks, a friend saw his car parked at her home.

The Imam’s response was to say a prayer over me and offer me a form to fill out, should I wish to receive charity from the mosque. It was in that moment I realized that, in this situation, I was alone. Hasbun Allahi wa nimal wakeel. “God alone is sufficient for us, and He alone can rectify our affairs.”

The knowledge that the leaders in the community, at least the ones I had been meeting with, didn't seem interested in helping as much as they wanted to get rid of me, made me feel like a blight. Everything I was going through was proof that beneath the surface, things could be very different than they seemed.

After leaving the Imam’s office that night, I returned to my empty home. The children were having a sleepover with their cousins, and I was thankful for the space their temporary absence provided. That night, in my dimly lit bedroom, I prayed salatul istakhara with hopes that the prayer for guidance would instill in me a feeling of resolve. I prayed salatul haja, the prayer of need. As much as I didn’t want to face it, the answer was clear. I knew in the pit of my stomach, the same place where my baby girl resided, that I had to move on.

I prayed for strength, I prayed for courage, and I prayed for resilience. On January fifth, a few days after changing the locks, I filed for divorce.

I let go of the fear of being alone. I let go of the fear of potential judgements from my community. I let go of the fear of being a single mother. I held onto faith in God’s plan instead.

-Amani-Nzinga Jabbar

Amani-Nzinga Jabbar is an award winning author, speaker, and college instructor. Her writing is heavily influenced by her background, as a Black Muslim woman raised in the Southern United States. Representing the intersection of these seemingly diverging identities, she feels it is imperative to elevate voices such as hers. She holds an MA in English Language Literature and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. She resides in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and children.