My Other Name Is Hagar
by Heather M. Surls
Hala named me during our first session as teacher and student. We’d previously interacted at the Arabic center in Amman; she was effervescent, spontaneous, and hilarious, qualities that led me to request her as my instructor. But like many Arabs, she could not pronounce my first name easily—the vowel and consonant blends were like gravel in her mouth. In a tiny glass box of a classroom, we sat across from each other at a plastic table.
“Hmm, what can we name you?” she thought out loud, tapping her pen on a notepad. Her nails were painted, lips plumped with lipstick, headscarf wrapped tight. She’d already opted out of calling me Hadeel, her sister’s name, a name to which a couple of people had compared mine during my two years in Jordan. “Hajar. How about Hajar?”
“Hajar,” I repeated, leaning forward, watching her mouth shape the letters. A light h sound, an elongated a, a rolled r. “What does it mean?”
“It’s an old name,” she said glibly. “It’s in an old song.” With that, she wrote my new name at the top of her paper and our lesson began.
***
During our first two years in Jordan’s capital city, my husband and I studied Arabic intensively to prepare for his long-term position as a professor at a local seminary. Most Arab friends and neighbors grew accustomed to my clumsy English name, and I knew how to respond if new acquaintances inquired about its meaning. “Heather is a small, purple flower in Scotland,” I’d explain.
Soon after I started introducing myself as Hajar, I realized it was the Arabic form of Hagar, a name which frankly sounds ugly in English. Perhaps the American comic strip “Hagar the Horrible” influenced me, Hagar being the name of a bungling, red-headed Viking. More likely, my negative connotations about Hagar sprang from my religious tradition. Hagar was the servant of Sarah, Abraham’s wife, the Egyptian woman who conceived and bore Ishmael, who was not the true son of promise. My associations with Hagar had been further shaped by the Pauline passage that casts her as a woman bound by the law, a supreme anti-model for Christian believers.
I quickly discovered that Jordanian Christian women shared these perceptions. I met a couple of them one day outside of my apartment building. They had dyed hair, wore slacks and short-sleeved polyester blouses, and carried handbags on their shoulders.
“My name is Heather,” I told them, “or Hajar in Arabic.”
One woman crinkled her nose, a look of disgust crossing her face. “You don’t want to be called that.”
***
Through volunteer work in refugee communities, I met dozens of Muslim women, whose reactions to my name couldn’t have been more different. The name endeared me to them, eliciting smiles and exclamations. “Hajar was the wife of our lord Abraham,” they told me, using the title given to all honored prophets. “She had a son, Ismail, and when she was stranded in the desert, Allah rescued her.”
To these [Muslim] women, my name carried weight, significance, import. I got the impression it was a name to be lived into.
As I listened to their commentary, I recognized their reverence for Hagar, which echoed Catholic respect for the Virgin Mary. To these women, my name carried weight, significance, import. I got the impression it was a name to be lived into. I felt a weight of responsibility: who was this woman, and who should I be because I bore her name?
A Syrian friend and I sat cross-legged in her living room one day, drinking coffee and eating small, tart apples. Our kids had abandoned us for better entertainment. From the open window where her planter boxes sat empty, soft blocks of sunlight entered, warming the short-pile carpet where we sat. The scent of incense lingered around us; she’d been starting her mornings with incense and a chanted chapter of the Qur’an.
I leaned forward, eager for more details about my namesake. “Tell me Hajar’s story.”
***
The Qur’an does not mention Hagar by name, though hadiths of the prophet Mohammad fill out her story. These records say that Allah told Ibrahim to take Hajar and Ismail to the area of Makkah and leave them there. Ibrahim obeyed God’s instructions, leaving the nursing baby and his mother in the desert with a bag of dates and a skin of water. When Hajar saw that Ibrahim was abandoning them, she called after him, asking why. When he told her this was God’s command, she submitted. “Allah will not neglect us,” she said.
Soon the water Ibrahim left them ran out, and Hajar’s milk supply dried. Under the beating sun, Ismail baked, first thrashing and wailing, then becoming listless from dehydration. Hajar could not bear to watch his agony, so she ran up a nearby mountain. On the top of As-Safa, she shaded her eyes, searching for Allah’s deliverance. Then she tucked her robe into her belt and ran to Al-Marwa, still looking, prayers on her parched lips.
[Muslims] remember the Qur’an’s words that Ibrahim left Hajar and Ismail in the desert to “establish prayer.” In these ways, Hajar’s exile and expectant acts of trust are memorialized by millions year after year.
She repeated this desperate, hopeful run seven times, and then she heard a voice. She looked to the place where she’d left Ismail and saw the angel Jibril digging in the sand. She ran down to join him. With her hands, she formed a basin to catch the water burbling from the ground. She satiated her thirst, then cradled her son to her breast and nursed him.
Today, the water that sprang up for Hajar is called Zamzam. When Muslims make their religious pilgrimage to Mecca, they don’t just circumambulate the Kaaba, the black-shrouded shrine built by Ibrahim and Ismail, the place toward which Muslims worldwide turn when they pray. Pilgrims also drink the Zamzam water and walk between As-Safa and Al-Marwa in an air-conditioned gallery. They remember the Qur’an’s words that Ibrahim left Hajar and Ismail in the desert to “establish prayer.” In these ways, Hajar’s exile and expectant acts of trust are memorialized by millions year after year.
***
In spite of the respect with which Muslims view Hagar, I didn’t meet an Arab with my name until I’d lived in Jordan more than six years. We had moved to a new area of Amman to be closer to my husband Austin’s workplace and to our older son David’s international school. Adam, my endlessly energetic toddler, and I took frequent, figure-eight walks around the streets. He stumped along in his moccasins, and I followed, breathing fresh autumn air tinged with sun-ripened olives.
A couple of older apartment buildings sat behind ours. One had a grape arbor over the car park, creating a dappled rectangle of shade in which a few women often sat in the late mornings or early evenings. One day, as I passed with Adam, one of them hurried out to meet me. She had a thin face, sun-spotted, with dark crescents under her eyes, and a cold sore in the corner of her mouth. Her black and white head covering was stretched out, exposing a few centimeters of gray-laced hair. I asked her name.
“Hajar,” she said.
My right hand slapped my chest, involuntarily. “That’s my name too!”
She smiled at me. “We are destined for each other.”
***
Jewish people also have better preconceptions about Hagar than Christians. My Israeli-American friend described her fascination with Hagar, how she sometimes wondered if the secret to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was hidden in her story. She told me that a Jewish tradition identifies Hagar as an Egyptian princess. Indeed, according to Rashi’s commentary on Genesis 16, Pharoah said, “better for my daughter to be a maid in [Abraham’s] home than a ruler in another.”
Other midrashim—Jewish explanations of biblical texts—say that because Hagar was raised in Abraham and Sarah’s tents, she was accustomed to seeing angels. An article on the Jewish Women’s Archive expands on this idea. “The rabbis also emphasize her ability to perceive and interact with divine messengers,” writes Tamar Kadari, “demonstrating her spirituality and ability to connect with God.” Some traditions even equate Hagar with Keturah, the wife Abraham took after Sarah’s death. According to this interpretation, Hagar endured years in the wilderness with “knotted garment,” refusing the touch of other men and eventually returning to Abraham pure.
***
A surprising amount of medieval and renaissance artwork focuses on the moment Abraham sent Hagar and Ishmael out of his home. Some paintings show Hagar in red velvet, a siren who tempted Abraham into an ultimate act of unbelief. Many scenes include Sarah peering over Abraham’s shoulder, vindictive and smugly pleased. Depictions of Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness feature massively winged angels, lots of trees, and usually some kind of water jar.
Looking at [19th-century artist Edmonia] Lewis’s sculpture of Hagar, I see wonder on her face—wonder that the angel of the LORD calls her by name… wonder at the invigorating, sustaining promise of a free and mighty son.
A marble sculpture of Hagar by 19th-century artist Edmonia Lewis stands as a crisp, believable contrast to these paintings. At a time when Egyptians were considered “black,” it’s curious that Lewis—herself of African and indigenous American descent—portrayed Hagar as European, with a small mouth and nose and wavy hair flowing back over her shoulders. But the other details Lewis carved present a convincing portrait of Sarah’s slave. Hagar stands with face uplifted, hands loosely clasped in front of her. Her body appears to be in motion, or about to move—one foot lifted off the ground in readiness, her tunic flowing backward. She shows signs of hurried flight, with the shoulder of her dress ripped and one side of her skirt hitched up in her waistband. An overturned flask sits at her feet.
Although art critics note the absence of Ishmael in Lewis’s scene, to me this clearly indicates that Lewis intended to depict Hagar’s first meeting with God in the wilderness, as recorded in Genesis 16. In his book Arabs in the Shadow of Israel, Lebanese theologian Tony Malouf spends considerable space exploring this story, debunking common Christian misconceptions about Hagar and Ishmael.
In an ancient Near-Eastern context, Malouf points out, Hagar’s pregnancy conferred upon her great honor. Though she was a slave, she had become a mother, something her elderly mistress had never experienced. Malouf helps modern, Western readers imagine the characters’ evolving attitudes toward one another: Hagar, beginning to feel the privilege of her position, withholds some of her service to Sarah, throws condescending barbs when Abraham isn’t present. Abraham, pleased and proud that he will finally have a child, starts to treat Hagar preferentially. Sarah, naturally, gets mad. Exasperated, Abraham tells Sarah she can do with Hagar as she wants, leading to Hagar’s abuse and subsequent flight.
Malouf says Hagar probably fled about sixty miles south of Hebron to a region called Kadesh, solidly in the modern Israeli Negev. She headed south, toward Egypt. Did she think she would return to her home country? I wonder. How many months pregnant was she at this point? Did she flee Abraham’s camp in the night? Did she pack any provisions for her journey?
When she stopped at a spring near a place called Shur, Hagar was met by the angel of the LORD, who told her to return to Sarah and submit to her. But he didn’t leave her without comfort, Malouf notes. Rather, the angel delivered bolstering promises about the embryo in her womb, the developing seed wrecking her hormones. Though she was a slave, God would multiply her descendants. Her son would be “a wild donkey of a man.” According to Shimon Bar-Efrat, this metaphor implies that “the son would be a free man, independent like the nomadic tribes of the desert, not a slave like his mother.” Malouf adds that the angel’s promises sketch a man “who will be free and strong, able to fight against all who desire to subdue him and to preserve his freedom as a nomad.”
She became the first person in the biblical record to name God—she, a woman and a slave.
Looking at Lewis’s sculpture of Hagar, I see wonder on her face—wonder that the angel of the LORD calls her by name (which, notably, Sarah and Abraham never do in the Genesis account), wonder at the invigorating, sustaining promise of a free and mighty son. She is solemn-faced, her brow slightly furrowed with trepidation and incomplete understanding, but she is erect, focused, listening. The lifter of her head has spoken. I must do this hard thing, but there is future hope, she thinks. I will obey because God sees me and my affliction, and because he has promised me good.
In this annunciation-like moment, Hagar responded to the angel of the LORD, saying, “You are the God who sees me.” She became the first person in the biblical record to name God—she, a woman and a slave. I wonder, how did Hagar look as she returned from this encounter? I create my own painting in my imagination, sculpt her from my mind’s clay. Wrapped in a flapping cloak with embroidered edges, she crests the hill to Hebron. Abraham and Sarah spot her from afar. She returns their shocked gazes solidly, determinedly. Returning to hardship, she stands tall and dignified, transformed by her encounter with a God who knows her intimately.
***
A painting by French artist Jean-Charles Cazin realistically depicts the second half of Hagar’s story, recorded in Genesis 21. Wearing a neutral-colored linen headscarf, Hagar stands front and center with her face in her hands, trying to hide her distress from Ishmael. He leans against her with his hands reaching up, lost in her scarf. He appears to be nine or ten years old, like my boy David, and he stares up at his mother, attuned to her emotions, looking to her for guidance. I recognize that Hagar is trying to be brave and hold it together, but deep shudders well up in her as the full weight of realization strikes her. We have been rejected, stripped of our home and our security. We are lost.
Cazin’s landscape gives the sense that the pair have just reached the desert—the rise behind them shows the transition from forested hill to sand. White cubic shapes on a distant slope suggest a settlement or a grouping of goat-hair tents. And yet, though the narrative mirrors that of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, Cazin paints a hopeful paradox: Abraham and Sarah’s distant home is shrouded in dim light under a clotted, stormy sky, but light shines brightly on the sand around Hagar and Ishmael. Here, in a place of exile, rejection, and desolation, yellow flowers grow, hardy glimpses of mercy. If Hagar can lift her eyes, she’ll notice that a trickle of water has passed through here, raising tender herbs in its path. If she can wipe her tears, if she can find the courage to seek them, signs of God’s love are waiting.
In this way, Hagar’s story bursts with application for me, for I live in a dry land not far from where she wandered. I’m a mother like her who’s stood in the kitchen and cried, my boys peeking around the corner with concern. I’ve felt lonely, suffocated by the mind-numbing monotony and self-cancellation we call motherhood. I’ve wondered how I will care for my sons so far from family and my own language and culture. Sure, I have chosen to live here—I wasn’t rejected by my family—but can we acknowledge the myriad forms a wilderness can take?
I know women who have experienced rejection—a friend whose husband left her for another woman, a refugee whose spouse bailed out to another country. I know women facing unjust treatment and inequal opportunity or ostracization from their communities. Women skirting the deserts of hunger, who knock on doors because they can’t put food on the table; women in valleys of grief as dark as a desert night without a moon; women carrying the desert in their wombs.
I know so many Hagars. Aren’t we all her, in a way, voices howling into wastelands of depression, anxiety, abuse, loss, joblessness, illness, old age? Women calling out, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget us forever?”
***
On a sweltering morning, I walk two blocks to meet a Jordanian artist who’s creating images to accompany one of my freelance articles. After I find her in the meager shade of a tree, wearing white cotton gloves that match her sweater and headscarf, she drills me with questions as we return to my apartment. I’m used to endless variations on this conversation, but her phrasing, her insistence needles me.
“But why do you live here?” she asks. “How?” A few minutes later, sitting on my couch, she confides that her first wish as a girl was to leave Jordan. Then, after a glass of cold water and a few minutes in front of the fan, she pours a deluge of Arabic on me, talking about the shame of mental health challenges here, the corruption, the bad economy, how suicide is on the rise, the culture of lying. She says she hates her people. She’s blunter, more forthright than any Arab I’ve ever met.
But at the edges of myself, I’m pressed into God like a purifying mold. In dry places, he makes me a well-watered garden.
“How in this wide world can an American end up here?” they want to know. “Isn’t America more beautiful? Aren’t the salaries better there?” Friends and strangers alike ask rapid-fire questions, envying the healthy economy and upward mobility my origins represent. It feels like they’re pressing me to share a secret, or hoping they’ll find a catch, like they’re trying to reveal an aspect of their culture that will destroy my positivity.
The problem is, there aren’t any catches. Though we have a car and a good salary and a nice apartment with air conditioning—privileges I acknowledge—I have gone through the pain of learning Arabic and I associate with friends in the poorest of neighborhoods. I have an Arabic name, I gave birth to Adam here, I read their books, and I’m studying their traditional cross-stitch and weaving. And still I’m here.
Some taxi drivers and corner-shop owners leave this conversation puzzled, chuckling at those half-witted foreigners who somehow like Jordan while they all want to do is emigrate. A few display confusion, anxiety even, as my answers to their interrogations fall short of their expectations. And the longer I stay here, the more I sense people’s discontent with generalized exclamations about Wadi Rum and Petra’s unique beauty, or compliments about Jordanians’ legendary hospitality. Locals won’t have any of this nonsense about how lovely their people are. They know things like that don’t sustain a foreigner here for years. They leave our chats dissatisfied.
***
Pakistani-American scholar Riffat Hassan describes Hagar as a woman marked by fortitude and resilience. She also notes that her name is loosely associated with the Arabic word for and concept of hijrah, which she defines as “going into exile for the sake of God.”
“When one is in the wilderness,” Hassan writes, “without the protection of any familiar framework or faces, one’s faith in God and one self [sic] is put to the real test. Those who are willing to confront the challenge of hijrah, to leave their place of origin or sojourn in order to live in accordance with the will and pleasure of God, gain merit in the sight of God.”
When I read this passage, I hear a tinkling bell of recognition. Isn’t this what I’ve experienced while following God like a nomad, rootless in this world? Yes, the wilderness depletes me, pushes me to the edges of myself. But at the edges of myself, I’m pressed into God like a purifying mold. In dry places, he makes me a well-watered garden. Perhaps I’m like the Beguines, medieval European mystics who emphasized the centrality of suffering in knowing God and the desert as a place to encounter him.
Whoever I’m like—a Beguine or Hagar—if I’m going to survive here, I must doggedly pursue God. This is essential. I must run back and forth between desert mountains, seeking the One who sees me.
***
Christian theology calls the appearance of the angel of the LORD a theophany. The angel of the LORD is not just any angel; he is, in fact, the preincarnate Christ. So on a hot day, in the shade of his tent, Abraham served bread and meat, curds and milk to three men, one of whom was Christ. Jacob wrestled with, had his hip dislocated by, and was renamed and blessed by Christ. Moses heard from the burning bush the voice of Christ. And in the wilderness, Hagar was met by Christ.
The wilderness is full of this Christ. Jordan is full of him because he limns the low places with his presence, leaving traces of his glory everywhere.
The God who sees me, Hagar called this angel. The one who saw her affliction and abuse was the One who would be afflicted—head circled with thorns, hands and feet pierced with nails—the One who will bear these signs of abuse for eternity. The one who offered her comforting promises is the One in whom all the promises of God become “yes.”
This realization illuminates me for days. I have found a spring of living water that never dries, never stops flowing, more constant and eternal than Zamzam. Just as Christ met Hagar in the desert, so Christ meets me here.
The wilderness is full of this Christ. Jordan is full of him because he limns the low places with his presence, leaving traces of his glory everywhere. Finding him is a skill, yes, a discipline. But this pursuit results in intimate fellowship I can experience anywhere. I make a cup of tea at dawn and keep tryst with him while the doves on the power lines laugh at their inside jokes. I walk all the streets and talk to him while dodging cars and crossing impossible traffic. When I drive, he’s in the car with me. He carries with me the burden of the stories I hear. Before I visit my friend in prison, I beg him to keep his promise—and then, on the other side of the glass, I see him dressed in a blue smock.
When I make dastardly mistakes in Arabic, he finds me in the pit of embarrassment. I know humiliation, he reminds me with a grin. When I sit on the fringes of fast conversations, feeling alien, he sits with me, that Word made flesh. And when I pick up toy cars and trains at the end of the day, or slather together hummus sandwiches—again—I see him in the smiles of my sons, curled up in the armchair together. I feel him in Austin’s steady arms. No matter the challenges, I can wipe my tears and open my eyes to see hardy flowers rising in the sand.
And as he gave Hagar buoying promises, so Christ promises me that exile is not the end of my story. I’m a sojourner on this arid earth, seeking a better country than Jordan or the US. By faith, I seek an unshakable kingdom, an everlasting one. I follow Christ’s voice from the far side of a mirage—the quicksand of my own rebellion and the blinding injustices of the world.
Hajar, he calls me.
My spirit lifts. I am revived by his presence, crowned with the honor of being seen, known, and named. I am carried by the anticipation of glory.
Heather M. Surls is an American writer and journalist who has lived in the Middle East for more than a decade. Her reporting has appeared in outlets like the Jordan News, Christianity Today, Hidden Compass, EthnoTraveler, and Anthrow Circus, while her creative nonfiction has been published in journals like River Teeth, Catamaran, Brevity, Nowhere, Ekstasis, Ruminate, and The Other Journal. She lives in Amman, Jordan, where she recently completed her first book, a memoir-in-essays about Jordan and Israel-Palestine.
