2 Calls to Prayer

My name is Mowafa Said Househ. This is not the whole truth. My name in Arabic is Mowafaq. In English it sounds like “Mowa-fuck.” I did not change my name legally, but in Grade 8, I dropped the last letter to stop the endless bullying, and no one asked. In the Levant dialect of Arabic, the dialect my mother speaks, the q is silent. To her I have always been Mowafa. And now I was that to the rest of the world, too. I am the first son and first child of Said Househ and Hanan Ghnaim, and I was named Said for my father. This is the custom in our culture: a father’s first name becomes the middle name of his children, be they sons or daughters. The practice serves to identify one’s paternal lineage, and it goes back to the earliest times, when Arabs were primarily nomads, at home in the desert. Following this tradition, I named my first son Said, after my father. I had wanted to name one of my daughters Hanan, after my mother, but she objected. She thinks that you only name your child after your parent or brother once they pass away (God forbid).

Like many Arab Muslims, my mother kept her own surname after her marriage. When she became pregnant, her sister-in-law—Khadija, who was married to my Uncle Faisal—made sure that she received the traditional pregnancy rituals: herbal tea, chicken soup, and warm molasses, all served by Aunt Khadija to celebrate the start of their new family in northern Alberta.

I was born on 7 December 1977, at Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital. It was the same day that Gordie Howe scored his one-thousandth goal, against the Birmingham Bulls. My father, then working as a travelling giftware salesman, was in High Level, about 750 kilometres north of Edmonton. He found out about my birth the following day. When he arrived back home, the first thing my father did was recite the athan in my ear: “There is no god but God, and Muḥammad is the messenger of God.”

This profession of faith holds a powerful sense of belonging—to God and to a community of close to two a billion people that transcends national and ethnic boundaries yet shares a spiritual sense of place. The shahada (“I bear witness that there is no deity [none truly to be worshipped] but, Allah, and I bear witness that Muḥammad is the messenger of Allah”) is the fundamental tenet of the Islamic faith. It forms part of the call to prayer, the adhan, which draws Muslims to a place of worship five times each day: fajr (dawn), dhuhr (midday), asr (late afternoon), maghrib (shortly after sunset), and isha (when total darkness falls). Broadcast from loudspeakers high atop mosques, these calls reach out to the community, bringing everyone together, all turning to face the Kaaba, the holiest of places in Islam that is located near the centre of the Masjid al-Haram, the Great Mosque in the Holy City of Mecca. In some places, like deserts or Prairies, the call to prayer can be heard from far, far away. It is a cinematic cliché—a minaret silhouetted against the early dawn sky, the lonely voice of the muezzin echoing across the soundtrack, an evocation of the exotic, the unknown. But, in the opening credits of my own life, my father spoke the shahada to me to wish peace upon my life, to honour my potential and our growth as a Muslim family—a Palestinian family—trying to stay warm in an Edmonton December.

When my father held me for the first time in Edmonton, I was an anonymous Palestinian Canadian baby waiting for the honour of being named. Like many fathers, he thought hard about naming me Muhammad. Instead, he chose Mowafaq, the name of my mother’s brother who had passed away a few months earlier. I’ve never learned the full story, but Uncle Mowafaq had been involved with a paramilitary group rumoured to be affiliated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, the dominant faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization and had ended up in exile in Sweden. Uncle Mowafaq died in nebulous circumstances in a car accident in Sweden. The official version of his death is that the brakes on his car accidentally failed, but my family remain convinced that Uncle Mowafaq was killed under mysterious circumstances. My grandmother always claimed his death was linked to Israeli intelligence services operations, but this has never been confirmed.

As individuals, Palestinians may be treated politely, but collectively we are regarded as terrorists, the “unwanted” or the “undesirables.” We belong to an invented race, a people defined not by bloodlines but by faith, our piety routinely mistaken for militancy. Rarely are we recognized as displaced persons, as uprooted families searching for an escape, people trying to cope with the pain of survival in an ongoing genocide. As Palestinians, we must defend our right to a future. We come from a nation now deemed to be imaginary, a nation blamed for its stubborn refusal to acquiesce in the face of its own destruction.

In 1993, when I went to apply for my birth certificate at an Alberta registry office in Edmonton, I was told that I could not list “Palestine” as my parents’ place of birth. This was not an option. So what was I was supposed to say—that my parents were born in Israel? That would not be true. I realized then that I was up against more than just the anti-Muslim racism of particular individuals. This was a legal form of persecution, with institutions conspiring to erase us from the map.

My name, Mowafa Said Househ, ties me to my family and to Palestine. That is something no one can take from me.

My father became a refugee before he could walk. It was sometime in the summer of 1948, but family memory is vague on the exact dates. Without radio, news came on the night wind of a brutal massacre in the village of Deir Yassin, on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Families attacked in their homes. Bodies everywhere, some mutilated. Women and children killed. In Lydda, where my family is from, people tried to calm each other. “Maybe the stories are wrong. Maybe it was just a few bad soldiers who did things they’re not supposed to do. Maybe it’s all been exaggerated.” But others were whispering, “No, it was a massacre. There is no hope. We could be next.”

Rumour was that the attack had been carried out by two Zionist paramilitary organizations, Irgun and Lehi. Not long afterward, fighting broke out in Jaffa, on the coast just south of Tel Aviv and barely twenty kilometres from Lydda. By mid-May, the city was under the control of Israeli forces, and some forty thousand Palestinians had fled, some by land and some by sea. Lydda and the neighbouring town of Ramle, both strategically important towns in the war, lay just off the main road connecting Tel Aviv and Jaffa to Jerusalem and were clearly in Israel’s sights.

Fearing another slaughter like the one in Deir Yassin, my grandparents gathered their nine children together and fled their home on foot. Along with many of their neighbours, they trudged east down the dusty road towards the front lines of Jordan’s Arab Legion. “It’s just for now, it’s just for now,” people told each other. “We will go back when it’s all been sorted out.” Yet, under the unforgiving sun, and in the occasional shade of an olive grove, they could feel the despair. Later, they learned that some Palestinians who had remained in Lydda, including my fourteen-year-old uncle, Darwish, had fought back. Darwish had survived, but other members of their family had died fighting occupation. My great-grandfather, Abdulrahman, had been killed while he was transporting weapons from Turkey to fight against the British. Someone from Lydda communicated his whereabouts to the British, and he was killed. My family’s blood has been spilled for Palestine from the earliest days of occupation.

The Israeli occupation of Lydda and Ramle was followed by expulsion orders that were signed on 12 July 1948 and given to the Israel Defense Forces by Lieutenant Colonel Yitzhak Rabin. The orders stated that the inhabitants had to be expelled immediately, no matter how old or young. In the end, perhaps as many as seventy thousand Palestinians were forced to leave the area, joining roughly three-quarters of a million other Palestinian refugees who had fled or been driven out of their towns during the war, and before. Some died from dehydration or from sheer exhaustion during the exodus. Others never even made it that far. They were shot point-blank by Israeli forces for refusing to hand over money and valuables. This massive displacement of Palestinians came to be known as Al-Nakba, the Catastrophe.

The Nakba is soaked into my father’s being. His first real home was a leaky tent in a refugee camp in Amman, which lay at the end of the road after the flight from Lydda. My grandfather’s brother, Uncle Issa, took refuge in the Gaza Strip, a decision he would come to regret as the violence there escalated. My grandfather and his family initially joined Uncle Issa in Gaza, but then my grandfather decided it would be safer to move to Jordan. My grandparents had heard that it was safe in Amman, and that Jordan was temporarily welcoming Palestinian refugees until the Arab forces liberated Palestine from Israeli hands—which, of course, never happened.

My grandfather’s name was Mahmoud. His name, Mahmoud, means “the praised one” or “worthy of reverence,” but everyone called him Tuma. Tuma had been a farmer in Lydda. He had also worked as a farmer and nighttime security guard during the British occupation of Palestine. He owned a home—his own land. When I close my eyes, I can imagine him, tall and proud, and hear his voice. He was in his early thirties in 1948 when he was forced to abandon his land, and his independence abruptly gave way to vulnerability.

As a refugee in Jordan, Tuma found work as a gardener, turning the earth with his hands to feed his family. Whenever he could, he shared generously with his neighbours, giving them the choice of the produce he was able to procure. A humble and pious man, my grandfather looked only to plant new roots in this foreign land and to raise his family with love and give them a secure future.

The call to prayer was deep within my grandfather. Every morning, he would pull himself away from the rest of the family and from the warmth of everyone cuddling together in the tent. At times, it was so cold outside that he had to break the surface ice on the water for wudu—ablutions before prayer. As the fajr prayer left his lips, his breath would float out on the winter dawn, rooting him in his faith amid loss and upheaval.

I recall my father telling me that story during our family reunion in Calgary in 2013. He agreed that evening before dinner to let me record some of his stories, so I can still hear his scratchy voice share the experiences of his parents, and how his voice aches when he relates the death of one of his brothers in 1960. When Uncle Faisal, who was working in Germany at the time, heard that Uncle Assad had been diagnosed with leukemia, he arranged for him to come to Germany and stay with him so that he could care for him and take care of any expenses. My dad remembered watching as Tuma hugged Assad and said, “Son, take care of yourself. I fear I will never see you again.” Assad died a few weeks later in a German hospital.

My grandparents wept together but accepted that Uncle Assad’s death was God’s will. They refused to bury their son in Germany. It had to be Palestine. If it couldn’t be Lydda, then at least it could be somewhere in the West Bank, an area then under Jordanian control. They chose Nabi Musa, in the desert wilderness south of Jericho—the site of the tomb of the prophet Moses. It was, they said, “a good place for Assad to rest.” Just seven years later, his grave would lie in Israeli-occupied territory.

After burying his son, Tuma returned to Jordan. He thought often of Palestine, the only real home he had known—the place where his father, Darwish, his grandfather, Abdulrahman, and his great-grandfather, Khalil, were born. The land of abundance had been ripped apart by the war, and Tuma dreamt how he and his neighbours lived once again like nomads, in tents. He hoped there would be better days ahead for families like theirs.