a complete sentence with Najwa was as futile as predicting the weather.
Afaf hurried past the science lab. Last fall, Mrs. Sultany, the forensics teacher, won a state grant for an infrared spectrometer—Nurrideen School was the first in the area to acquire such a sophisticated instrument for chemical analysis and environmental testing. Her class had been featured in a community spotlight article while partnering with the Tempest Police Department on a case of a home burglary.
She turned east down another corridor, toward the farthest end from her office on the first floor. Snow-crusted windowpanes cast a blinding glare, and tiny dust particles circulated like small galaxies above her head. She stopped in front of a wood-paneled door with a lattice.
Afaf glanced behind her. No one was around. Dribbling balls and whistles echoed from the gymnasium on the other side of the building.
She slipped inside and pulled a light bulb chain, illuminating a space no larger than a janitor’s closet. A worn cushioned chair was propped up against one wall, a small Quran on a lamp table beside it. This had once been a confessional, Afaf had learned on a tour of the building when she was first hired to teach ten years ago. Nurrideen School in Tempest, Illinois, had long ago been Our Lady of Peace, a two-story convent housing thirty Benedictine nuns.
It was built in 1929, facing east toward Lake Michigan, though they could not see its gray-blue waters. Behind the convent was a modest field—two acres, the size of a strip mall parking lot. The sisters of Our Lady of Peace did not squander an inch of it, planting potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, and cabbages.
During the Great Depression, it served as a way station for poor white families traveling north to Chicago from the central and southern regions of Illinois—some came as far as Joplin, Missouri. Escaping the threat of lynching, black men broke their journey at the convent, a few staying to help the sisters harvest the fields for a few cents a day. For white farmers ruined by the Dust Bowl, Chicago gleamed against their dull, economically stunted lives, traces of the eroded soil that had failed them still clinging to their clothes when they arrived. Travelers stopped at Our Lady of Peace, ate a meager meal of hard-boiled eggs and baked apples, and put up their horses until daybreak.
Young children were sometimes abandoned in the middle of the night. Afaf imagined the sisters tending to them, killing their head lice with apple cider vinegar and hookworms with warm milk and castor oil. Soon it became regular practice—white widows and unwed mothers depositing babies and toddlers for whom they could not afford to care—and the convent transformed into a place for orphans, the sisters of Our Lady of Peace plunging the fear of God into their young, displaced bodies like a vaccine.
Afaf loved the confessional. It was a place of escape, for solitary prayer and a break from the daily school operations. Before she removed her shoes to pray on a green velvet rug, Afaf sat on the chair and breathed deeply. She propped her radio next to the Quran and gazed at the door. A mural had been painted over it depicting the annunciation of Holy Mary. Afaf studied Mary’s solemn face, upturned as she receives the angel Gabriel’s message. The brown of her pupils had dulled and flaked over many decades, and the angel’s pearly white wings had turned dingy. The image was the only Catholic relic—that and the confessional itself—left in the Islamic school.
The convent was closed down in the late 1940s when tuberculosis swept through, killing most of the nuns and whatever remaining children the welfare agencies could not reach in time. Over the decades, the state made it a halfway house for war-broken veterans. In the eighties, when President Reagan cut funding, the state turned it over to the village of Tempest.
It remained vacant until Ali Abu Nimir stood up at a board meeting one frigid evening in February 1995—two years after the Tempest Prayer Center first opened its doors only a few blocks away—and proposed a private Islamic school for children. He was a wealthy businessman—an immigrant from Palestine—who’d washed and waxed used cars before owning his first lot on the South Side of Chicago. After fulfilling hajj with his wife, he returned to Tempest with pockets tipped toward good deeds, ensuring his place in Paradise. Among them, donating to the Center and opening a school for the next generation of muslimeen