When Amin became a pastor, his mother’s eyes were filled with tears, but his father, on the other hand, who’d been dressed up with a tie and all and was told to remove his fez in the church, was totally lost. Amin became a pastor and got married the same day. Um Amin gave her blessing.
“She’s a nice girl. I wish you the best, my son. But tell her to speak to us in Arabic.”
Eugenie, the Reverend Nabil Khoury’s daughter, refused to visit the family in Ashrafiyyeh.
“Your mother talks too much,” she said to him once.
Um Amin was the one who told Eugenie about his grandmother Um Tanios.
“Why did you tell her, Mom?”
“I wanted to entertain her, and she should know something about us,” she said.
“She knows, but it was really unnecessary.”
Um Amin told Eugenie the story of Um Tanios and how she became a Muslim saint.
She told her how Abu Amin tried to shut his mother up. Abu Hasan al-Hawwari came and kneeled at her feet and began kissing her. The delegations never stopped coming, and the cobbler didn’t know what to do. When the woman died, al-Hawwari insisted on burying her in a Muslim cemetery. After long discussions and a lot of shouting, the two men came to an agreement. They performed the cleansing and shrouding for burial and then she was taken to Beirut, where she was buried in the family cemetery at Saint Mitr Church.
Um Tanios was eighty years old, living with her son and his family in their new house in Sidon. It was a one-story house with four rooms and a courtyard. The old woman lived in a room overlooking the courtyard. She was completely independent; she ate nothing but bread and water and never slept. She’d go often to the bathroom located on the edge of the courtyard. Night was a rhythm of footsteps pitter-pattering on the tiles of the courtyard. It was as if she never slept a wink.
Um Tanios didn’t like Sidon and wanted to go back to Beirut, She’d laugh at her son when he told his small children to shut their eyes and pray before eating their meals. She’d sit all alone in front of the door to her room, even in the dead of winter, moving her lower jaw incessantly. After the First World War, she fell and broke her leg. After that she was unable to get out of bed, and she started forgetting things.
“It’s senility,” the doctor told her son.
“Impossible,” Abu Amin said. “There is no history of senility in our family.”
“She’s got hardening of the arteries. There’s nothing we can do.”
She stayed in her bed for years. Um Amin took care of her while the old woman swore and moaned and went in and out of consciousness.
Then that strange thing happened.
It was about ten o’clock in the morning when this semiparalyzed woman began to shout in a loud voice, “O Muhammad, my Beloved.”
Um Amin ran to her and found her sitting up in bed talking.
“A tall, dark young man, O Muhammad, my Beloved, let go of me, I want to get up. A young man, his mustache twirled upward, carrying a staff in his hand, stood beside me and poked me. He said to me, Um Tanios, stand up and walk. The end to your sorrow has come, my dear, you will get up. He poked me on the forehead with his staff, then on my stomach. He put the staff down and told me to get up. A young man, dark, tall, O Muhammad, my Beloved, let go of me, I want to get up, let go of me. Why have you tied me to the bed, he said to me, O my Beloved.”
Um Amin screamed at her to shut up. But she went on, and her voice began to fade. She was covered with her own excrement as she tried to get up. She calmed her down, wiped her face with a wet cloth, and began washing her. The old woman wouldn’t settle down. She’d push and shout, “My Beloved, dark and tall, you will get up, let go of me, I want to get up, O my Beloved, O Muhammad.”
Um Amin heard footsteps out in the courtyard. She left the room and locked the door behind her only to find Abu Hasan al-Hawwari with a group of men standing in the middle of the courtyard.
“What’s going on, neighbor?” al-Hawwari asked.
“Nothing. The woman is senile and she’s screaming,” said Um Amin.
“Have shame, woman of God. Cover your head and let us go see Mother.”
“Who is Mother?” she asked.
“Um Tanios, Um Tanios saw the Prophet, peace be upon him, and we heard everything.”
“Please, neighbor, leave me to my worries.”
“Either you open the door or we’ll break it down.”
Um Amin went into the room. She left al-Hawwari and the men outside and went in. She locked the door behind her and pleaded with the old woman to quiet down, but the shouting was getting worse. Um Amin finished cleaning her and dressed her in her nightgown. She opened the door and went out.
When the old woman saw them she started screaming at the top of her lungs.
“My Beloved, O Muhammad, dark, tall, his mustache twirled upward, he had a staff with him, he poked me and said, You will get up.” And she tried to get up. Al-Hawwari and Abu Lutfi took hold of her and stood her up, and she tried to walk.
Al-Hawwari told her son she walked. “I saw her. She stood up, I let go of her, and she walked. It’s a miracle, dear Muhammad, Allahu Akbar.”
The room turned into a shrine. The old woman’s health was deteriorating and she had entered into a state of semiconsciousness, The visitors never stopped coming to see her. Women, children, men. And Um Amin never stopped making coffee.
“She has become a saint. She is indeed one of God’s true saints,” Sheikh Aiouti said after he left her room and kissed her hand. “Your house is blessed,” he said to Abu Amin. “My son, this is the light of Islam, the light of dear Muhammad.”
Abu Amin would nod his head, not knowing how to get out of this mess his mother had gotten him into. The problem wasn’t solved until after the woman’s death. She died suddenly. They got up in the morning and found her stone cold, she had been dead for hours. After a long discussion Sheikh Aiouti settled the matter. “We’ll wash her; you bury her.” And that’s what they did. They washed her and shrouded her amidst hymns and recitation of “La ilaha illa llah,” and Abu Amin carried her to Beirut and buried her there. And with her he buried the story that, when Eugenie heard it from the Reverend Amin’s mother, made her feel disgusted. She didn’t like that kind of life.
She told her husband she felt he was different from the rest of his family.
She told her husband she felt that way, but he agreed with her. He agreed and lived with her all those years, always on her terms. She was everything; he was the wandering pastor, the nobody. When he’d get rid of the people around him he’d forget how to speak, and she’d have the final word. His only pleasure was the whiskey he drank the few nights he was home. The rest of his life was full of dust and traveling between Marjayoun and Sidon and Tyre and everyplace else. He’d return to that house in Beirut he inherited from his father-in-law, only to discover he was the head of a family he knew nothing about. His children spoke in English, and his wife cooked nothing but food you could hardly swallow. He made no objections. When he missed eating real food he’d flee to his mother’s house, where he’d eat what he wanted and sleep till noon in his old bed.
The Reverend Amin was shocked by the obedience his wife displayed in front of his friends, especially the professors from the American University with whom he shared a special relationship. In front of them she was like a lamb. Mr. Davis envied him for this obedience in his wife and he’d say the magic of the East is its women. Perhaps it was because of this magic that Mr. Davis asked his friend the Reverend Amin to preach at the American University Church every Wednesday morning, which helped him a little financially.