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>> 253 6 Transmitting Tradition The Constraints of Crisis The Rope and the Anchor The familiar flat is noisier and more crowded than usual because today is a party, celebrating Fawzia’s successful recitation exam and her receipt of an ijaza. A large sheet cake congratulates her in pink icing on the dining-room table. Cold drinks are passed from hand to hand, and the young children, usually restricted to a bedroom and a babysitter, are running around in their socks between the small circles of students. The ansa’s own son, a long-legged boy with freckles and messy red hair, is wearing a Spiderman costume two sizes too big, hanging from the stair railing, showing off his superpowers to his mother’s students. The ansas have brought a folk singer, an old woman with a soaring voice. She sings songs in praise of the Prophet, accompanied by a drum and the faint and uncertain voices of American girls unfamiliar with the Arabic lyrics. Fawzia showed me the ijaza that morning in her apartment, in between impromptu dance lessons from her Arab American roommates in preparation for the party. The document lists the names that link Fawzia to an isnad, like an invisible thread of names interlocking, braiding, and knotted at each generation, linked and double looped all the way back to the Prophet in a smooth, unbroken line. Now Fawzia’s name is a knot, and now this thread will travel back to California. Fawzia makes a grand entrance, adorned with a silver, plastic tiara pinned over her white scarf and a white, sequined apron dress with princess sleeves slipped over her clothes and tied in the back. We circle around her, cheering and clapping and dancing, as she moves her hips and arms to the rhythm of the drum. “Is that the bride?” the young daughter of one of the Syrian tajwid teachers asks. 254 > 255 is broken. But others, you see someone after years, and she’s still connected . It’s like you never left; we’ll just pick up where we left off. You girls can send your shaykha an email. For me, when I was in the US, I could not communicate with my teacher or see her for years, but I held tight to my Islam, my Quran. There won’t be that distance unless you choose it.” Ansa Tamara pauses and smiles at the silent students before her, a few faces wet with tears. She raises her hands in a simple prayer. “Allah choose for us to be able to choose you. Ya Allah, let us be from those ones. Put Islam in front of us in a beautiful way.” Strangers Traveling Does Islam have a home, a land, a place with borders? If, as the American student-travelers I encountered in the Middle East believe, Islam is a universal tradition and not an “Eastern religion,” why did they call their journeys to the Middle East a “return”? A “return” to what, exactly? A “return” to where, exactly? After all, most of them are “returning” to cities in the Middle East they have never been to before. When I would bring up the contradiction between the idea of an Islamic homeland, their language of “return,” and the universality of Islam, they would often answer me with a Prophetic hadith: “Be in this world as though you were a stranger traveling a path.” Life in this world, they would remind me, is a transitory and fleeting journey. Home for the believer is in the next life. While American student-travelers do, of course, believe that this world is temporary and that the afterlife is eternal and, therefore , their real home, this answer elides the fact that the overwhelming majority of the American student-travelers come to the Middle East with the intention to return to the US. Their commitments of enormous amounts of time, resources, energy, and effort in working toward a future for their tradition in the here and now belies their desire for a home for Islam in the US. As archives of tradition, the intellectual centers of the Middle East are imagined as a temporary stop for American student-travelers, who believe their journeys must eventually lead them back to their US mosque communities. They are explicit that their travels are a means and not an end; they are in the Middle East to retrieve tools to ensure the future of 256 > 257 of uninterrupted continuity to the Prophet’s practice...

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