An Arkansas Ramadan

Coming into the home of Wahida Zamani on any given afternoon visitors might hear the boisterous sounds of teenagers watching TV and breathe in the heady aroma of dinner being prepared as they take off their scuffed shoes and place them by the front door. But this night Wahida isn’t cooking for her husband and three children. She is preparing food for almost 130 Muslims and guests to break fast on the 22nd night of this year’s holy month of Ramadan.

Wahida is padding back and forth on her bare feet, dashing between pans to turn the sautéing chicken and add saffron to a huge pan of rice. When she is finished the food is going to the Islamic Center in Fayetteville for iftar, the evening meal when Muslims break their fast.

“Let me tell you, this is not kind of bragging,” she says as she shrugs a shoulder and smiles. “Iranian has the best cuisine.”

Wahida moved from Iran almost 19 years ago to be with her husband. When she first moved to Northwest Arkansas, there was no one to tell her things like the time of iftar; she had to look at the sky to guess. She had to work hard to keep the spirit of Ramadan alive. Now she uses a tape to announce iftar to her family to help remember traditional Ramadan in her home.

“When I was growing (Ramadan) kind of turned out to be a…symbol of growing, adulthood, maybe power, challenge,” she says. “Especially during that time of iftar, when people are sitting around the table, it was feeling that sense of victory, that ‘I made it!’ all the day.”

Wahida has defined her life in this country by combining the values of Iran and the U.S., she says. It gives her a unique structure and a unique way of life.

She has decorated her house so that the front is in a more traditional American style, but the back, including the kitchen and the family room, help her feel closer to home. A traditional tea maker from Iran holds a place of honor on the kitchen counter. Elaborate hand-woven carpets from Iran cover the hardwood floors in several of the rooms, but are most prominent in the family room where small carpets decorating the walls contain the names of Wahida’s two daughters, a passage from the Qur’an and a woven pictorial of a carpet maker and his son.

“It is very accepting here because everyone is immigrant here and it doesn’t have a color of its own,” she says. “I love that spirit of accepting.”

When Wahida arrived in the U.S. she had a degree in math and was accepted into the masters program for computer science, but three pregnancies in five years prevented her from finishing her degree. She says it was during this time of staying home with her children that she began to really know herself and grow spiritually. She experienced a need to embrace her faith and tried to influence her husband to begin praying and fasting during Ramadan, something he had not been doing before he married Wahida.

Wahida’s husband, Hossein Kouchehbagh, moved to the U.S. nearly 38 years ago, living in Fayetteville the last 35 or 36 years. Hossein had a good job in Iran, but he did not like the regime at that time, he says. After arriving in the U.S., Hossein received a degree in industrial engineering, and now owns a used car dealership.

After 16 years in the U.S., Hossein visited Iran to find a wife. He and Wahida were introduced by his sister and her neighbor, and were married three weeks later. After a honeymoon in China, Hossein returned to the U.S., but he and Wahida traveled together over the next two years while they waited for her visa.

Hossein did not practice Islam the first 16 years before he met Wahida, he says.

“I see some Muslim, they say something (but) they do something different. I was discouraged from it,” he says. In 1997 a friend of Hossein’s from the University Baptist Church, H.D. McCarty, invited Hossein to come talk to a man named Baker about Islam.

“After that I was in love with Islam again, and I started practicing in 1997,” Hossein says. His faith had been rekindled by Wahida and he had been fasting and praying some with her for five or six years before talking to Baker, but hearing from a Christian about Islam cemented his belief, he says. He began observing Ramadan every year after.

Ramadan is a total fast for a lunar month in which people abstain from eating, drinking, sexual relations and smoking from sunrise to sunset. It is the celebration of the month in which the first revelation of the Qur’an is believed to have been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.

When she first arrived, Wahida began collecting and learning recipes traditionally prepared in Iran for Ramadan such as the sweet called Zoolbia, but it was not easy to find things she needed for making traditional foods. Wahida once substituted corn starch when she could not find the wheat starch Zoolbia is normally made with, she says. Unfortunately, corn starch absorbs about 10 times as much water as wheat starch.

“My recipe got bigger and bigger, it was a disaster,” Wahida says, laughing. Now when she goes to Iran she brings ingredients she cannot find locally back with her.

Not all of the Muslims in the community practice Ramadan, and it was hard for her to understand at first because where she came from everyone practiced, she says.

“But here, people have choices, options…so it really, you know, raised my tolerance and acceptance,” Wahida says. That does not always go both ways.

Wahida doesn’t wear the traditional hijab, or headscarf, that many Muslim women wear, so she is not always recognized as being Muslim. She returned to school a few years ago to get a master’s in counselor education and recently began her internship. During orientation they were offered free lunch, and when Wahida didn’t take a lunch, everyone asked her why she wasn’t eating.

“I just wanted not to say, ‘Hey, I’m Muslim and I’m fasting,’ you know,” she says. She didn’t know how her new coworkers would accept her and she didn’t want to create a wall between them and her, she says. Instead, she told them she wasn’t hungry.

Wahida also has had to deal with occasional prejudice in Northwest Arkansas. Her son had a music teacher who sang songs about “swatting the Muslim fly” and correlated Muslims to being terrorists, she says. Wahida had to make a complaint to the principal of the school.

“Music is supposed to bring people together, not separate them,” she says.

Bringing people together is an ideal that Wahida believes in strongly and is something she thinks Ramadan helps to do. It brings together friends, people in the community, but most of all family, she says.

Ramadan “binds us together, that we are warriors of temptation,” she says.

“Wahida basically is our moral spirit in our house,” Hossein says. “About the religion, our relationship, about eating habits, drinking habits…she is our moral spirit because she really does more than a person, more than a wife, more than a mama. She is our friend.”

Sara, her 17-year-old daughter, says Wahida is the one who brings the family together during Ramadan. She wakes the family to eat sahur, the pre-dawn meal, and encourages the kids to keep the fast even when they don’t feel like it. But she never forces them, Sara says.

“I never push my children to do praying or fasting,” Wahida says. “I encourage them but not push them.” She never punishes them for breaking fast, she says.

During Ramadan the family often takes iftar in the Islamic Center. Taking iftar in the mosque is for social as well as religious reasons, Hossein says. He enjoys the discussion, and his children have a chance to make new friends.

Ramadan is special for people, for some it’s religious and for some cultural, says Joel Gordon, director of The King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas. It is a time of deprivation, but it can also be seen as festive, especially during the breaking of fast, Gordon says. People can break fast at home, but here going to the mosque becomes a community get-together, he says.

That evening at the mosque, the spread is an international potluck; savory dishes and desserts from Asian countries, including India, and several Middle Eastern countries clog the two buffet tables. During iftar, Wahida’s dish of chicken and rice is one of the first to disappear.

“People around the world….practice Islam within the context of their own culture,” Wahida says. “Culture influences our beliefs. Family culture, regional, continent, they all affect our beliefs.”