Love from a to Z

works to find loving homes for the dogs native to this area (salukis) that we
rescue from abuse and neglect.
Adam and Hanna had filled me in on the stories. Of dogs being
mistreated by different sorts of people—some locals, some Westerners,
expatriates working in the Arabian Gulf who took them in and then didn’t

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care for them as their canine type needed to be taken care of, some who
then even just released the dogs into the streets when they moved back
home.
And then there were the cultural taboos about dogs being bad.
That made me sad. But not sad enough to bravely go forth.
I called to mind the Islamic story that I’d been taught in Sunday school,
that Hanna had recounted to me as we waited for Adam to fill out papers at
the shelter reception desk, because her dad had just taught her the tale.
Prophet Muhammad once told his companions of someone who was
forgiven completely by God for every ill deed she’d ever done—because
she’d been thirsty and so had climbed down an abandoned well to drink
water, and, when she emerged from the depths of the well, she found a dog
at the surface, panting from the same thirst she’d felt. She climbed back
down and filled her shoe with water and brought it up for the thirsty dog,
and thus, for this act of kindness, she was utterly forgiven.
I told myself that the Saluki Mission Shelter was the woman in the well:
noble and selfless.
And that I should have a tiny iota of this compassion too. Enough to
proceed to see this sad, neglected dog.
Nothing. It did nothing to erase my fear.
I hung back.
Until I saw the change in Ariel. She was sitting down in front of the
barrier across from Hanna and Adam, who was also cross-legged. Whatever
they were saying to her was making her calm.
I inched forward slowly, stealthily.
Then Ariel whipped her head up, noticing me and, maybe, my intense
stare. She began yelping and running around in a frenzy again.
It took my all not to scream and run the other way.
I mouthed, I’ll wait out there, to Adam and walked quickly to the front
office area that we’d entered through.
• • •
Afterward, after I’d played twenty rounds of Angry Birds Rio on my phone
while I waited for their visit to end, Adam’s father picked us up.
Adam kept apologizing on our way back home for me “not being able to
enjoy the dogs.”

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“Totally okay,” I said, finally happy and at peace. I loved the feeling of
fearlessness again. “I can tell Ariel has had a difficult life.”
“She was tortured,” Hanna said. “They tied her.”
I swallowed.
“Some people think dogs are bad. Like they actually think they’re evil.
So they hurt them.” Hanna crossed her arms.
“Unfortunately, there are so many misconceptions about certain things in
Islam,” Adam’s dad said. “And too often it’s us Muslims who have them.
Like the thinking that dogs are unwanted. Yet in the Qur’an itself, the surah
of the cave describes how loyal that dog was to the young people it was
with. How important their dog was.”
I nodded and told myself, You hear that, Zayneb?
The image of Ariel kneeling calmly in front of Hanna and Adam came to
me. Maybe she’d been okay with them because she knew they cared about
her.
But when Ariel had seen me, she’d become agitated. Somebody had hurt
her, and it wasn’t me, but, still, she didn’t know what I was about. And I’d
become agitated when I saw her—even though she wasn’t the one who’d
hurt me so long ago.
I teared up. “Does the shelter take donations?”
Adam nodded. “You can do it online or at the shelter itself.”
“Okay.” I made a note to myself on my phone.
A picture showed up in my messages. It was an AirDrop from Hanna’s
iPad.
Ariel. Sitting on the floor of the shelter, head settled on her front paws,
mouth firmly closed, no teeth in sight.
I smiled at Hanna. She leaned over and whispered, “You’re scared, right?
Of dogs?”
“No, just when they get hyper,” I whispered back. “And do things like
biting people, you know?”
She nodded.
For the remainder of the ride I taught her how to play Angry Birds Rio on
my phone.
When I got out in front of Auntie Nandy’s building, Adam got out too.
He looked like he was going to say something, and I waited, spending a bit
of time opening my bag to get keys out, so that he could say what he
wanted to say.

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