Was my mother a saint?

Was my mother, who passed away a decade ago, a saint? This is, of course, a loaded and intriguing question inviting immediate skepticism. But, in retrospect, I have perfectly legitimate reasons to pose it.

Her name was Khadijeh, same as Prophet Mohammad's first wife, and she was a mother of ten -- seven boys and three girls -- married to a civil servant, my dad, who passed away many years ago due to a brain stroke in his mid-fifties. She was a school teacher and taught ethics to high school female students in Iran, But, more than that, she was very religious and prayed five times a day, reciting Quran from memory. Her religiousity was not, however, dogmatic, and she firmly believed in gender equality. A few years after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when she was already in retirement, she migrated to US, initially in Massachusetts and then in California, and that's where she assumed a new identity as a preacher, strictly for women, as well as a healer. I once saw a video tape of her event for a large group of mostly middle age Iranian ladies, who listened intently to her recitation of Quran and some of them went into a trance. My mother had a full voice and once went on a Persian radio to read a long poem I had written for her in Farsi, indeed one of my longest poems, which she was very proud of. During the last two decades of her life, she lived alone in an apartment complex and was always busy on the phone with so many people who sought her help for their various problems. She wrote special prayers for some of them and wrapped them in a small plastic-covered note that her followers carried in their purse or in the dashbords of their cars, seriously believing in the magical power of my mom's prayers.

But, I must confess I was not one of those and, being a secular Muslim all my adult life, attributed some of that to the Marxian-Freudian power of religious superstition as the opiate of masses. Then, one day I went to the city of Karaj near Tehran and stayed with one of my brothers who lived in a big building that used to be a girls' school built by my mom and dedicated to the town years ago, until it was returned to us for whatever reason. For many years, our family provided the text books and bi-annual clothing for all the students in that poor neighborhood. People did not forget my mother's kindness and small groups of veiled women used to knock on the door and ask my brother's permission to go and pray in the school yard. According to my brother, most of those women did not simply pray but came there also to make wishes since they were convinced that my mother was a saint and their wish would be granted. I decided to speak with a couple of those ladies and, sure enough, they were absolutely convinced about my mother's sainthood. And when I expressed my doubt about it, one of them terselysaid that she obviously knew my mother better than her kids!

Maybe she did, since for many years I lived in the East coast and she was on the West coast, hampering my ability to gain a deep knolwedge of her holy spirit. She often reminded me that of all her ten children, I was the only one who was born with a tissue of skin covering my face, which she insisted was the mark of divinely-touched characters, i.e., the chosen ones. She had dried that skin and filled it with Quranic verses and was anguished that someone had taken it from us. On the day of her funeral, I was approached by two Iranian ladies, mother and daughter, who had been her neighbor in that complex for a number of years and both believed as firmly as those veiled women in Karaj that my mom was a saint. The older lady pointed to her daughter, who was now a physician and worked at a nearby hospital, and said, "your mother saved my daughter. She is alive because of your mom." I asked how and they took turn to explain the following story: One day the daughter falls from the third floor window and remained unconscious on the ground. The mother rushes to my mother's first floor unit and asks her for help. My mothe calmly stands above the young girl lying unconscious and while praying keeps running her hands on her body, her face, neck, front, back, hands and legs. I vividly remember the mother's sincere facial expression when she relayed to me how "suddenly a miracle happened" and her daughter, whose name I do not know, opened her eye lids and then stood on her feet, without a trickle of broken bone in her entier body. The daughter was equally adamant about it and told me, "I know. I am a medical doctor, you don't fall from third floor without braking a bone. Your mother performed a miracle and brought me back from the dead, and I am forever grateful to her." They had tears in their eyes and we had just buried my mom. For a moment, I felt her presence, her motherly smile, her holy spirit, hoevering above my head.

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