Dr. Zaleekhah Clarke does not wish to live. She wants to excuse herself from a world where she often feels like an outsider, a confused and clumsy latecomer, an accidental guest who walked in through the wrong door at the wrong time. Unlike her namesake, the Qur’anic Zuleikha, she is not, and has never been, assertive. She is not a fighter. She does not even like to argue—not with her husband, not with herself, not with colleagues or friends or strangers, and certainly not with a God that as a child she has been repeatedly instructed both to fear and to love, even though He never cared to
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