Even if my assumptions had been wrong, I loved him when I made this baby. He had abandoned me, but that was not because of my failure. It was because of his fears.

Verve presents an extract from author, Asra Nomani’s critically acclaimed novel, where she writes that the deepest boundaries we have, are within ourselves.

Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam is published by HarperCollins.

The next day, January 23, 2002, Danny left for an interview he thought he was going to have with a spiritual leader named Sheikh Gilani. He was investigating reports that Sheikh Gilani had ties to Richard Reid, “the shoe bomber” who had tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Paris to Miami by lighting a fuse connected to explosives hidden in his sneakers. Unbeknownst to Danny, a Muslim militant by the name of Omar Sheikh had hatched a plot to kidnap him. In the early evening, Danny stopped answering his cell phone. Worried, Mariane and I began a mission that night, searching for Danny. The next morning, after we alerted the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. government, and Pakistani police, my house became a command centre for the investigation. My boyfriend had been with us the first night, but when he came over the second night after Danny’s disappearance he told me that Pakistani Intelligence officials had visited him to find out what he knew about Danny and me. The visit frightened him as well as his parents and friends. He wouldn’t come around anymore. I wept that night, privately, in a walk-in closet where I knew nobody would find me. And then I wiped away my tears and focused on only one goal: finding my friend. With Mariane, I crossed physical boundaries rarely breached in that culture. We lived alone in that space that women rarely claimed without a chaperone – their homes – and we worked alongside FBI agents and Pakistani anti-terrorism specialists trying to piece together the clues left by Danny’s kidnappers.

As the first week of our search ended, I wrote to my father to assure my family that I was safe, with armed police escorting us everywhere.

“We will find Danny,” I wrote. “Every day we are one step closer.”

As Mariane and I entered the third week of our desperate search for Danny, I realised something shocking: I might be pregnant. A pregnancy test confirmed my suspicion. I was shocked. I had never gotten pregnant before. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t wear a wedding ring, but I didn’t feel as if I had done something wrong. I had loved my boyfriend deeply and surrendered myself to him. Even if my assumptions had been wrong, I loved him when I made this baby. He had abandoned me, but that was not because of my failure. It was because of his fears. I called my boyfriend and asked him to visit me. He arrived that night, and I took him to my bedroom. “I am carrying your baby,” I told him, sitting on the edge of my bed.

He looked at me stunned. In a pause that I filled with so many dreams, he sucked his breath in hard and said, “I have to go.”

The truth revealed itself. He didn’t want me to keep the baby and all of his fanciful talk about marrying me disappeared. Despite my intellectual confidence in myself, I felt completely illegitimate. Within me was an American woman who believed in free will and thus knew that I had the right to keep my baby and raise him with my head held high. But the voices of my religion’s traditions also spoke strongly inside of me. I was consumed by the shame of ignoring the rulings of sharia, the “divine Islamic law.” For reporting I had done on the subculture of sex, drugs, and nightclubs in Pakistan, a leader of Jamaat-i-Islami, one of Pakistan’s religious parties, told me that the laws policed even sexual intimacy between consenting adults. In 1979, he told me, Pakistan passed laws based on hudud, or “boundaries” for moral conduct.

I knew these rules were used to control us, but now I learned that violating them could have more serious consequences. My situation could land me in prison.

To me, these laws emblemised a deeper crisis of self-determination for women in Islam. Women in Islam are so very much defined by hudud. These hudud are used to control everything about our lives, from our sexuality to where we can pray in the mosques that are our places of worship. By other names, these types of boundaries have also defined women throughout time in other cultures and religions, including Judaism and Christianity. So often religion is used to impose boundaries that ultimately deny women rights that have now been articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the right to self-determination, the right over our bodies, the right to travel freely. These religiously imposed boundaries directly affect a woman’s economic life, identity, sexuality, and political power. But when I discovered I was pregnant, I realised that the deepest boundaries we have are within ourselves. We are often most constrained by the fears that keep us from crossing the boundaries.

Tragically, in the fifth week of our search, we found out that Danny’s captors had slaughtered him. They had taken a knife to his throat and decapitated him. They titled a videotape of his murder, The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl. It lasted three minutes and thirty-six seconds. I was in disbelief.

The next day the phone in my house rang. It was Mohammedmian Soomro, the governor of Sindh, the province in which Karachi lies, and his wife, Khadijah Soomro, expressing condolences. They were on the hajj that I had been trying to join. Mariane and I had met them in our effort to lobby for political muscle behind the search for Danny. They had been kind and generous and Khadijah Soomro had given us shawls. In Mecca they were celebrating a holiday called Eid ul Adha, which marks a pivotal moment in the life of Abraham. Like Jewish and Christian children, I was taught that God told Abraham to slaughter his son as a sign of his devotion to God. Modern-day Muslims slaughter goats, sheep, and even camels as a symbolic gesture of their willingness to sacrifice in devotion to God. Outside my house in Karachi, goats had been bleating for days, tied up for the sacrifice. In the hours since we received the news of Danny’s murder, their noises had grown increasingly dimmer.