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necessity of continuously applying independent reasoning to contemporary life while Sunni theologians are more comfortable relying on doctrines established centuries ago by religious scholars who established four different schools of Sunni thought.
    For me, going to Bibi’s house in Karbalā’ was an adventure into an exotic past, a premedieval city that was also a commercial center. The streets were narrow, some disappearing into walkways lined with small shops selling prayer beads and sizzling kababs and pickles and window after window of gleaming gold jewelry. Outside our car window, vying for space with cars in the congested streets, were bicyclists and donkeys carrying people and supplies. Women bustled purposefully through the streets in black abayas, and many men wore traditional long dishdashas. The whole city seemed to glow golden from the surrounding sand, the gold jewelry in the shop windows, and the sun glinting off the gold-leafed domes of the two mosques that dominated the city. When we stepped inside Bibi’s house, we were met with the rich, steamy air of roses distilling and stove pots bubbling with the tang of sour-sweet Iraqi stews. Bibi had set up her own rosewater still in her kitchen, and I remember armloads of roses lying out on the counter, waiting to be fed into this laboratory of plastic tubes and glass flasks that would magically turn them into rosewater for cooking and religious devotions.
    In Baghdad, my mother was a whirlwind of appointments and social obligations; we were always hurrying somewhere. But in Karbalā’ with Bibi, Mama calmed from the moment we walked in the door and Bibi greeted her a full embrace. The love between them was obvious, the differences in lifestyles and dress irrelevant. I couldn’t imagine living like Bibi any more than a city child could imagine making a living behind an ox and a plow, yet when she hugged me, I felt myself collapse into a rustle of unquestioning love. She was the symbol of premodern women my generation revered even if we didn’t choose to follow in their footsteps, the only human being in my life who never changed. Gentle, soft, and strong in the way people of unveering faith are strong, she seemed the same from the time I was born until she died.
    Oddly, the first time I heard about her childhood, I thought of Cinderella. Her parents and siblings had died, one at a time, when she was very little, until finally she was an orphan. An uncle was assigned to be her guardian and manage her inheritance for her until she grew up, but the guardian handled that responsibility badly and lost most of her fortune—a grave misdeed under Islamic law. So, when she was just thirteen, he arranged for her to be married to a wealthy businessman in Baghdad and reportedly emigrated to Iran. Bibi was not old enough for the marriage to be consummated, so she was commended into the care of her future mother-in-law, my mother’s paternal grandmother. That grandmother was a storied matriarch in our family, a woman who established her own sewing factory at the dawn of the twentieth century and died decades before I was born. For some reason, the one detail I remember hearing about her was that she ordered her own factory supplies from London, which was apparently remarkable at the time. This matriarch was determined never to lose control of her household, so she raised her young daughter-in-law to be subservient to her and her daughters, who in my mind played the role of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters. Bibi thus grew up passive and subservient, remaining at the beck and call of her mother-in-law, sisters-in-law, and husband, until she outlived them all. She sought her solace in religion and later her children. When her husband died a few years before I was born, she moved out of their sixteen-room mansion on the Tigris in Baghdad, where they had lived with a staff of Farsi-speaking servants, and into a small house in Karbalā’, where she found a spiritual adviser