The Caul of Inshallah

My baby was born on the brink of death, with multisystem failures. One day in the eighth month, I felt him slip up in the womb, not reporting for his usual afternoon acrobatics. I reported this diminished activity, and we ended the day with an emergency C-section. Doctors were stymied by his condition—one in a million, they said, cause unknown—and nothing to do but monitor him in his little ICU crib, with all manner of wires attached, and hope his body kicked in.

Prayers poured in for him. He was prayed for by Sunni, Shia, Ahmediya, Sufi, Islamist, Salafi, Nation of Islam, and secular Muslims; by Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist, and secular Jews; by Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, an entire congregation of Universalist-Unitarians whose minister visited me in the hospital, Mormons, Baptists, Methodists, Hindus, Buddhists, and Wiccans. Agnostic and ardently atheist friends offered good thoughts in lieu of prayers. A dark-haired, olive-skinned friend came in one morning and stood in a sort of asana and intoned over his crib. “Family only,” the nurses cautioned, but let her stay when they took her for clergy (and she really was ordained—by Internet). They probably thought she was doing some sort of Islamic thing, with her arms upraised like that, but she was actually an Italian American from Long Island who believed in yoga and intoning, in conjunction with her very Christian belief in Jesus.

“God doesn’t need their prayers,” one of my orthodox Muslim visitors sniffed, dismissing the non-Muslims and heretics among them. But I and my family were not in the mood for turning away prayers—from anyone. We had broken through to a place where all prayer came to One.

The neonatal doctor told me, in the early days when there was nothing really to be done about the baby’s condition but stand bedside and make such conversation, that he’d read medical journal statistics saying that patients who were prayed over tended to fare better than those who didn’t. Survive the baby did, thank God, rallying after seven weeks, in an unexpected recovery his doctors called “miraculous.” This is not one of those “proof of the power of prayer” spiels, though. It’s bad taste to talk about the ineffable so glibly. And for anyone who has prayed for the healing of a loved one who then dies, it is difficult not to hear, in those well-meant “power of prayer” talks, undertones of “You must not’ve prayed hard enough” or, worse, “You must not be among the deserving,” as if God metes out survival from cancer or a hurricane as some sort of reward.

Yet I am going to talk about the Ineffable, breaking my own rule. When my daughter, then nine, asked me in those first uncertain days what was going to happen to her baby brother, I tented her under the sheet of my hospital bed and whispered, “He’s going to be okay.”

“Either he will get better and come home, or he will leave us. And both those things,” I said, although here I had to take a moment, “both are good places for him. Both are sweetness and mercy for him. I mean”—I struggled to find a better way to say it for her—“Angels will hug him. Here or there. So no matter what happens, he will be okay. See?”

My daughter, wise child that she is, saw. Jacob, son of Isaac, also got it. When Jacob’s older sons bring him news that his younger son, Joseph, has been killed by a wolf, the Quran says that he knows they are lying about what really happened—still, he knows his little Joseph is out there in some sort of terrible trouble. And there is nothing the father can do about it. “Beautiful is patience,” Jacob says. He says it twice over the course of the story, that Yodalike, grammatically inverted phrase: “Beautiful is patience.” It isn’t that he’s a cold one; he weeps until, the Quran says, his eyes are blinded, from grieving the missing Joseph. Still his...