The Highest Score

By Um Aya

It happened almost two decades ago when I was ten. We lived in a small industrial town in the Soviet Russia, and our parents were working; we, the kids, were going to school. The routine of life was running smoothly and quietly, and it seemed that nothing could break this calm.

One day my literature teacher gave us an assignment to prepare oral reports on what we have read during vacation. The best report was going to be rewarded.

I wasn’t really thrilled with this idea. Not that I had nothing to talk about, on the contrary, I read all the books we had, and we had plenty of them, but I knew I wasn’t much of a public speaker. And this made my chances for the highest score look really tiny.

At home I asked my mother what I should do. I wanted to keep it short but good enough to earn the best grade there was. She gave me a magazine--one to which my parents subscribed but never actually read and kept bunches of them somewhere in the dusty attic. My mother seemed to know what she was saying when she so confidently declared that it would beat the top. Little did I know that day when I first read it that this short story from some dull magazine would alter my life forever.

It was a documentary written by a Soviet reporter following his heartbreaking experience in Afghanistan. The country was at war and Russia didn’t miss the opportunity to intervene, creating generations of ruined lives, bringing devastation into millions of homes, leaving incurable scar in its history.

As a child, I couldn’t estimate the scale of this atrocity. All I saw were sealed coffins, suddenly aging young women, who buried their unuttered grief in the deep sadness that death brings along. I remember picking up wild flowers in the yard behind our house and giving them to an elderly lady in a black veil. She was silently sitting near the zinc sarcophagus of her son, probably never opened since it arrived from the Afghan boarder. Subtle, governed by poisonous fear, sorrow, never pronounced even behind closed doors, was surrounding the place.

I made the presentation. My teacher shed a tear, and the whole class was stunned. My words clinked in silence as I went on telling about the cruelty and horror of this war, the bloodshed and useless losses. Trying to deliver the message of peace, I, a ten-year-old school girl, for the first time in my entire life, having absolutely no idea of its meaning, used the word "mujahidin" referring to the Afghan fighters for freedom and independence. For the first time ever I described Islam as the source of inspiration that kept one party going and left the other one in eternal nightmare. In spite of the abrupt hatred that the article was overwhelmed with, my imagination caught the sparkling glimpse of a fascinating world that I never knew before.

Almost two decades ago I had absolutely no way of knowing that from that moment on I was sent off on a journey that only now begins to make sense to me. Years of searching to find out why there’s so much resonance over Islam made my restless mind agonize over people’s pain every time a new clash or armed conflict was reported. Years of wandering around, till one day I had enough of being an outsider and took my first step towards this breathtaking experience of a lifetime.

I simply said that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger. And I definitely got the highest score.