Part 1: The Mosque

I stood in front of the mirror and carefully tucked stray hairs into my hijab with bobby pins until only my round face showed. I slipped on the abaya, the long black robe women wear over their clothes; this one had a burgundy trim around the sleeves and down the front, and only my fingers and the tops of my shoes were visible: face, fingers, and feet. I stared at myself in disbelief. Why did I look so old? I felt a new respect for my clothes, which had apparently kept me young all these years. I turned to check my profile—the power of a good hair day suddenly occurred to me.

I was fixated on how I looked, but really, I was just uncomfortable. Easier to worry about my profile than to sit with what it meant to cover myself, even temporarily.

This was the final teacher orientation session before school started: a cultural tour of the Al Fatah Mosque. I was nervous, so I waited in the lobby and watched as my colleagues and fellow Westerners awkwardly stepped out of the elevator, trying not to trip on their abayas or run into each other. A head covering destroys any hope of peripheral vision.

Shawna was the first to spot me; she tugged at the front of her abaya like a straitjacket. "This thing is a furnace," she whispered, fanning herself dramatically.

Cheryl smirked. "You're lucky. At least you don't have to wear it all day."

Tim adjusted his sleeves and glanced around the room. "It's not about function. It's about compliance."

I caught his eye. "You think?"

He nodded. "Get people to accept small rules first. Then bigger ones. That's how it works."

"Thanks for the commentary, George Orwell," I muttered. Tim saw compliance everywhere except in our own choices. We'd all signed contracts to teach in a country with restrictive laws and wore these abayas because our employer required it. It's almost amusing to see now how blind I was to the fact that we were complying with our own system, one that exported Western teachers to shape Bahraini minds in English-language schools. But that kind of conformity was invisible to me because I had chosen it.

We arrived at the Al Fatah Mosque by mid-morning, and the sun poured through the windows, creating bright squares of light on the floor, in doorways, and over a massive chandelier dangling from the ceiling. Light radiated from every direction, but the room remained cool; the ornate, gold-geometric design seemed to glow in the soft light, with parallel lines marking the thick carpet where worshippers would unroll their prayer mats and perform the five Salah movements in perfectly straight rows.

Our guide, a mullah, seemed to glide towards us, as if he had materialized from the thick silence of the mosque. He was tall, wearing a long thobe. "Welcome to this sacred place, a house of prayer and community."

I don't remember his name, though I can still hear his voice, calm and authoritative with a slight accent.

Maybe he'd seen us looking around, or his next line was just part of the scripted tour. "In Islam, no images of Allah or the prophets," he continued. "Geometry, calligraphy—reflections of the infinite is the only decor."

Our necks craned to trace the intricate patterns on the ceiling, and we slowly followed our guide to the back of the empty mosque, which seemed even larger with the almost complete absence of furniture. The mullah glided beside us, or maybe that's just how I remember him now, hovering rather than walking. He gestured toward the floor, said something about the mosque's design facilitating equality, and worshippers standing shoulder to shoulder.

I knew this in theory, but I was pretty sure that women weren't included in these shoulder-to-shoulder prayers. Were women even allowed to pray here? I wondered, since I had only ever seen men going to the mosque for worship. I raised my hand and asked where the women prayed.

He smiled, as if he'd been waiting for this question. "Women do pray in the mosque. Their space is separate." He gestured toward a staircase leading to a balcony enclosed by wooden lattice.

Our collective heads turned upward.

"Prayer is intimate," he continued. "The separation prevents distraction, allows focus."

It was the kind of answer that sounded rehearsed but not insincere.

A guy in our group, Tim, spoke up. "But couldn't they just be on opposite sides of the same room?"

Our heads swiveled back to the mullah, then to Tim.

The mullah's smile didn't waver. "Our prayers involve prostration. Full bowing. Physical separation maintains modesty."

Tim persisted, trying to sound casual. "So men could use the balcony instead? And women could be down here?"

The mullah shifted slightly.

"In theory, yes." He paused. "The Qur'an doesn't specify. But centuries of tradition..."

He let the sentence hang there. The conversation unfolded, not verbatim as I'm writing it now, but close enough. The questions were real, even if the exact phrasing has smoothed out in memory.

I wondered how women felt about this arrangement. Was there some underground swell of women fighting to pray alongside men? My westernized brain could easily concoct this image, but how much truth was there in it? In Saudi Arabia, just over the causeway, the law prohibited women from driving, and that was based on tradition, and I knew women were fighting for that right. I've since learned that Muslim women had far more agency than I'd imagined, that debates within Islam were far more nuanced than my 'freedom vs. oppression' binary. Even so, it would take another 15 years before Saudi women won the right to drive.

The tour continued, and I zoned in and out of the mullah's commentary, but his words and the vibe ‌triggered memories of my many experiences in churches. As a Catholic, I spent my early years kneeling in pews, watching the adults take communion, hands clasped and mouths open like baby birds in a nest. My Catholic childhood comes back sharper than the mullah's words: the rituals and traditions both fascinated and bored me, but it is the religious iconography that I remember most. The stained glass windows depicted the Virgin Mary, a haloed baby Jesus, and, finally, an adult Jesus wearing a crown of thorns and with blood dripping down his face. It was confusing and scary‌. I remember wondering if I was going to have to die for my sins someday.

This mosque, with its hazy squares of light, geometric designs that blended into each other, and arched ceiling, felt more like a library than a place of problematic dogma. The comparison was easier to make when their stained glass didn't include bleeding saviors.

We congregated at the front of the mosque, right by an enormous grandfather clock-like structure constructed of rich cherry-colored wood, which stood as the focal point; it was the equivalent of a pulpit, and the mullah called it the minbar, which he also noted faced toward Mecca. I always thought of Mecca as a theoretical place, but there is an actual Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and this is the direction all prayers flow; of course, they also flow to the theoretical Mecca.

I zoned back in about the middle of his speech, something about the minbar being a platform to convey teachings rather than assert authority. I wondered if that was part of his usual speech or if he had added it for our benefit.

Cheryl blurted out a nervous laugh, as if she'd been waiting for any pause to jump in. "So, about that woman we saw in the souq—the one in a burqa, walking behind her husband. Does Islam actually require that?"

Awkward silence. I cringed inwardly, not because the question wasn't valid, but because of how bluntly she'd asked it.

All eyes shifted from Cheryl to the guide, eager to hear the response of our unflappable mullah, but his expression didn't change. "The burqa is tradition, not a mandate. Different sects, different families all interpret modesty differently." He paused. "A woman walking behind her husband? That's not in the Qur'an. Islam emphasizes partnership in marriage."

His answer came smoothly, like he'd given it many times before.

"It's important," he added, "to separate cultural practices from religious obligations."

He was being diplomatic. In Bahrain, where a Sunni minority ruled over a Shia majority population, 'culture' and 'religion' were never as cleanly separated as he suggested.

But we didn't know that then, and we had only heard all about Sharia law at our orientation; I knew the basic tenets of Islam, the five pillars, but the Mullah launched into a monologue, which, of course, elicited a fresh round of questions from our Western hive-mind. Shawna asked about prayer, why men basically got prayer breaks at mosques while women had to balance everything at home, including kids, prayer, household chores, and all.

This is when we learned that women weren't actually required to pray during their menstrual cycles, and could combine prayers missed because of familial obligations. The Mullah was proud of this answer, and I braced for a swift retort, but she just nodded and repositioned her hijab. By that time, she had probably stopped processing the barrage of new information. I know I had. The details kept slipping away, like trying to hold onto those squares of light moving across the floor.

But I asked one final question. When would I ever have this opportunity again? I remember asking something about struggle and what it costs to be faithful. What happens when someone can't meet all the obligations? When does the daily discipline become too much? I don't remember my exact words, and I was asking for myself as much as about Islam.

His answer comes back softer than the rest, gentler. Something about Islam being a path, not perfection. That faith is personal. That sincerity matters most.

I held onto the idea that faith could be about effort rather than achievement; it felt fair, the way I sometimes graded on effort, and it was closer to what I thought religion should be, across any denomination.

He clasped his hands together, a gesture that felt like closure.

We walked out, and I fumbled for my sunglasses. The sharp sunlight stabbed at my eyes after the dim calm of the prayer hall. I thought about all the questions I'd asked—about women's agency, about control, about what it costs to be faithful.

The question should have unsettled me more than it did. I was about to teach classes full of Bahraini students, and I knew so little about them. And yet, as quickly as I stripped off my hijab, I released that doubt and all the lessons I had just learned. I could uncover myself the moment it became inconvenient. Put it on for the tour, take it off at the exit.

Within a week, those questions about agency and control would stop being theoretical.