Children of Dust (15 page)

A
mir had a multi-year plan for independence. He was going to apply for college far away from home. He was going to become a player. By the age of twenty-seven he would move to Amsterdam, work for equality at the Human Rights court, and keep a harem.

I applied to schools in New York, Chicago, and California. I used the Internet to befriend girls in those regions, hoping one day to meet them in person. At the same time, I distanced myself from all the backward people in Alabama—all the people I’d been calling my friends.

Then one day I met Una—blue-eyed, blond-haired Una. When she entered my life, I felt as if my plan was finally going someplace.

I met her at an academic achievement banquet held out of town. Her eyes were lively, and there was something of the Wild West in her presence that suggested a rowdy spirit. Her pale face had small freckles equidistant from one another except on one side of her forehead, where they congregated like a constellation. She did all the things I associated with all-American girls: she rode horses, played the piano, was on the school’s swim team (which meant she wore bikinis), and liked to read infamous freethinkers such as Marqui de Sade and Voltaire. We kissed the first night we met.

After the banquet, we kept in touch via phone and e-mail. I started opening up to her and explained my family’s fundamentalism. I expected her to back away, both hands up, but she seemed to become even more interested in me. Knowing that she liked me made me want to tell her that I’d be willing to challenge my family’s religious dictates for her.

That was when Una sent me sonnets.

The poems, set in medieval times, dripped with the encounter of East and West. They were about ramparts and towers. Minarets and domes. She was Vienna and I was Ottoman. She was Andalucia and I was Almoravid. She was Desdemona and I was the Moor. She was a blond princess batting her eyelashes into the sun and I was a dark rider eclipsing the moon.

At first the poems seemed to suggest that even if I was willing to shun Islam, others wouldn’t see me as anything but a Muslim. I took the poems as a sign that I couldn’t escape my servitude.

But then I realized that the poems were special. They were liberating. In them Islam was understood not as a series of rules and regulations, but as geography, as aesthetics, as decoration. The poems allowed me to identify myself as a Muslim without having to take on the baggage that my parents and Saleem and the QSC added to it. Una offered an understanding of Islam—Islam as imagery, symbolism, exoticism—that seemed perfectly in sync with being an American. The old Islam was for Abir and the new Islam was for Amir—and he wanted Una to be his girlfriend.

I told Una that we should coordinate our college applications so that we could end up near one another. We kept our acquaintance secret for many months, hoping that no one would suspect anything between us. Slowly our applications were sorted out: Una would go to Cornell in central New York state and I would attend a private university in Manhattan. I would spend weekdays doing city things like reading Henry James and visiting museums, and during the weekends I would hang out with my all-American goddess.

Amir was very much ready for the next stage of his life. His American life.

U
na didn’t go to Cornell in the end. She left me for Stanford—all the way on the other side of the country—and I arrived in New York all alone.

The city immediately crushed me. When it rained, no one stopped to appraise the weather—taxis just flipped on their lights and people magically sprouted hoods. When it became sunny and I went to the park, a homeless man turned down the fish filet I offered him. The only flowers were red ones spray I saw painted on the side of a train. Even the English was different: the letters H-o-u-s-t-o-n, for example, were pronounced “Howston” and not “Hewsten.”

I walked around the city endlessly during my first days there because I wanted to find a way to embrace it. I stood before the skyscrapers, trying to analogize them to something familiar, but I had never encountered things so massive. No other place compared to Manhattan, so I retreated into my imagination. I invoked a faraway place out of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. A glittering Elven city, maybe. An eternal metropolis ruled by Aragon, perhaps. The towers of those imaginary kingdoms competed with the skyscrapers in Manhattan; the arabesques of that illusory sultanate challenged the beauty of the friezes at the library on Forty-second Street; the busy canals of that metaphysical capital teemed
with boats as Broadway did with buses. Unfortunately, comprehending Manhattan as if it were nothing more than the beguiling doppelgänger of a city from my fantasies simply made me feel more estranged. I could say that I was in Manhattan’s bloodstream, but not that I was in any way essential to the city. The recognition of this partition—between subject and city—was both instantaneous and painful. It forced me to seek out anything that was familiar.

I went to the university’s residential services office because I heard of a dorm where you could ask for the specific kind of roommate you wanted—and I requested a Muslim.

My new roommate, Moosa Farid, had been looking for a Muslim to live with because the person he was initially assigned to turned out to be a “Luti.”

“Man, I walked in on that white boy sodomizing another one,” he said. “The room smelled like wet towels. Gross stuff. It was like I was back in the Prophet Lut’s time. We know how God punished
them
.”

In just a few days in the city, small-town Moosa Farid had become an expert in homosexuality. He hadn’t wanted for it to happen, of course. It had happened, he concluded, because the gays were after him. How else to explain the fact that when he was looking for a place to eat he got stuck with a bunch of queers in a gay pride parade in West Village? What else explained the fact that during class orientation, of all the tour guides possible, he had gotten the flaming gay one? Why else would he go into a cafe and see his ex-roommate sitting with his legs crossed, being all faggoty with his faggot-fuck buddy? All these homosexuals were surely sent as a sign to remind Moosa Farid how much of a Muslim he was; how unlike Manhattan he was. And the more Moosa talked about homosexuals, the more Muslim I felt too.

As soon as we settled into our room, he started grilling me about Islam. “Do you eat
halal
?” he asked, “or are you wack?”

“I eat
halal
.”

“Real
halal
? As in slaughtered in the Islamic way? Or just so-called
halal
, when you say
bismillah
over the meat like wack Muslims?”

“Real
halal
,” I said, suddenly wary of this “wack” category that inspired so much animus in my roommate.

“Are you a player?” he asked. “Are you going to have girls here?”

“No girls. That would be wack,” I said, testing to see if I had picked up the lingo correctly.

“Good.” He nodded approvingly. “Tell me: are you going to join the Muslim Students Association?”

“Of course I am. Are you? Or are
you
wack?”

He laughed at the competitiveness filling the air. “I already know where the next MSA meeting is. Do you?”

“No,” I conceded, realizing that he had won.

“How often do you pray?” he asked.

“I pray all five times,” I said aggressively, though it was completely untrue.

“Me too,” he said, nodding. “Let me ask you: do you shake hands with women?”

At first I thought it was a trick question. Didn’t all human beings shake hands with each other? Certainly I’d shaken hands with people all my life. Then I realized that Moosa wouldn’t have posed the question unless the answer was no.

“Come on!” I said, taking on an incredulous expression. “I’m not wack!”

“Me neither,” Moosa said. “Touching women you aren’t married to is
haram
.”

“I agree.”

“Do you lower your gaze?” he asked, continuing the inquisition.

I had no idea what he meant. Was this a code phrase that good Muslims used to identify the wack ones?

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t know?”

I shook my head.

“The Quran says that you shouldn’t look at women you’re not married to. If you happen to glance at one, it should be only one look. So when you catch yourself looking at an attractive woman more than once…”

“…you lower your gaze,” I concluded, putting it together. “I get it now.”

“Right. If you don’t lower your gaze, you’ll go to hell. I’m surprised that you didn’t know that. Haven’t you ever seen that T-shirt that some
of the sisters wear? On the front of the shirt it says, ‘I know I’m hot,’ and on the back it says, ‘So lower your gaze because hell is hotter.’”

I shook my head. “Never seen those. But that’s creative.”

“Yeah. I saw one last year. I was looking at a pair of breasts in a mosque, and the shirt really put everything in perspective. Like, what is looking at a hot girl with mangolike D-cups when the punishment for looking at them is an eternity in hellfire?
Fi nari jahannum
.”

“I’ll keep my gaze to the ground.”

“I’m just looking out for your afterlife, brother!”

Once we’d established that we disliked homosexuals, weren’t wack, and indeed executed Islam perfectly, we struck out to try to socialize with people. I suggested that we meet up with a Pakistani girl named Kyla I’d been chatting with on AOL; she was also on campus as a freshman. I figured this would be safe since she was Pakistani, and all the Pakistanis I knew were good Muslims—in other words, not wack. We made an appointment to meet Kyla at the student center near the security guards.

As we got approached we could see her waiting.

“That a pretty short skirt she’s got on,” Moosa said, turning to me. “That’s pretty immodest!”

I immediately regretted setting up the meeting. “Let’s go back,” I said in a concerned voice.

“Can’t. I think she’s seen us.”

Sure enough, Kyla waved and came toward us. She was the height of wackness. Low-cut blouse. Lots of cleavage. She kissed cheeks when she greeted. She took my wrist and pulled me close for a hug that I couldn’t prevent.

Moosa was more adept: he avoided her sin-trap by backing away and saluting from a distance. He never did come any closer.

Kyla said she was delighted to meet other Pakistanis. When I’d made the appointment with her I had been too, but now my enthusiasm was dead. I was worried that Moosa would impute her wackness onto me. She kept trying to talk to me, but I gave her monosyllabic answers. Anxiety about what Moosa thought about me skittered around in my head until Kyla got irritated from my terse responses and stomped off.

When Moosa and I were alone, I wanted to say something to let him know that I didn’t approve of her lifestyle and wouldn’t try to hang out with her again. However, to say that I would ignore her
because
she was immodest wouldn’t quite work, because that would suggest that I’d noticed her (lack of) clothing, which would mean that I paid attention to immodest women—and only wack Muslims did things like that.

“She’s ugly,” I declared. It was just as effective.

I soon got an opportunity to redeem myself in Moosa’s eyes. A Jamaican guy we knew came over to the dorm when he heard that Moosa had a DVD burner. He brought a bag full of discs with him.

“I’ll make you a business deal,” he offered, scattering his stuff on my bed. “I’ll give you a dollar for each one you burn, and if you want to burn an extra copy for yourself, that’s fine too. I have two hundred blanks on me.”

“You just want me to burn them?” asked Moosa.

“Yup.”

“What do you do with all these movies anyway?” I asked.

“I’m a distributor,” he said. “I sell them.”

The deal was struck immediately and the guy left.

“That’s a sweet deal,” I noted as Moosa popped the first DVD in and the computer started whirring. “I wonder if he has a copy of
The Rock
with Sean Connery.”

“Let’s see if he has
Executive Decision
,” Moosa suggested. “It has a Muslim in the story line, although like always they make us look evil.”

Suddenly the film came onscreen and Moosa let out a massive yelp. “Shit! It’s porn!” he exclaimed, clinging to the wall as if he’d been shot.

“Are you serious?”

I leaned over the monitor: sure enough, there was a gorgeous black-haired girl giving a blow job. Up and down, up and down. Her hair was so black it was purple. Up and down. The actress was stunning. Part of me thought that if Moosa was so scandalized, he should leave the room so that I could enjoy the goods. Rather than expressing what I really thought, I pulled back from the screen and took on a serious air, twisting my face into a disgusted sneer.

“That’s wack!” I said, reaching forward to flick off the screen.

“What are we going to do now?” Moosa asked.

This was my opportunity to demonstrate what a good Muslim I was.

“Give back the DVDs, dude.”

Moosa was reluctant. “Maybe I could just burn this set and not do anymore. I could keep the screen off as they copy.”

“Yes,” I said in a moralistic tone. “But it’s porn, and that’s
haram
. It’s like distributing alcohol.”

“I know,” Moosa replied. “But it’s not gay porn at least.”

“Good idea running loopholes with God.”

“I was just kidding,” Moosa said, cowed by my hard line. “I’ll give these back.”

We were now even, the two of us, after what had happened with Kyla.

M
oosa Farid and I found a crew of brothers from the MSA to hang out with. We all took turns talking about how we’d never been religious before but were trying to become religious, now that we were “in the real world,” and we urged one another to confess salacious stories from our past.

Moosa went first and talked about how he regretted hooking up with some girl when he was a sophomore in high school. I went next and talked about how I had kissed Una, and how I regretted feeling tempted to go to the prom with a beautiful cheerleader, and how sometimes in class I used to touch the girls’ bare skin at the place where shirt and skirt separated. Our honesty spurred the others.

“I became wack in high school,” a tall brother named Aslam admitted. “I sinned. I sinned a lot.
Bad
sin, too. Ate pork. Got a blow job. Fingered a girl. Dated a blond. She was hot too. We don’t even need to talk about her, but I’ve got her picture if you don’t believe me. Looking back, I can’t believe that I was seventeen and sinful. Man, when Muhammad bin Qasim, the great general of Islam, was seventeen, he was conquering India. I need a headcheck, you know? Something is definitely wrong with me!”

When any of the brothers rattled off their list of sins, the rest of us shook our heads judgmentally. Each swivel of the neck condemned the brother who had just finished speaking. Each turn of the neck pulsed disapproval. Our sardonic smiles sizzled with chastisement. “Damn, you were wack,” we said. “You’d lost your sense of righteousness,” we stressed. “You’d left the
sirat ul mustaqim
.” We were like children learning a new language, one organized around accusation and excoriation.

We behaved like this because we all knew the prophetic
hadith
about the adulterer:

Once an adulterer went to the Prophet and confessed his sin before him and the glorious Companions. Then he pleaded to be stoned to death. The Prophet heard him out and then turned away, saying, “Don’t tell me any more.” The man ran around and faced the Prophet and again confessed his adultery. Yet again the Prophet turned away from him and said, “Don’t tell me.” The man moved to face the Prophet yet again and confessed for a third time. The Prophet then told the adulterer to go home and repent to Allah and never commit adultery again.

The actual moral of the
hadith
was that if a sinful Muslim sincerely repented, then the earthly punishment for his sin—even if it was something as grievous as adultery, which was theoretically deserving of stoning—could be waived by the authority responsible for carrying out the law.

However, the lesson that
we
drew was that in order to really repent for our sins, we had to prosecute and convict ourselves in front of others, as the adulterer had in front of the Prophet and the Companions.

Besides, since we were all brothers in Islam, we had an obligation to assist one another in our psychological flagellation. That would help keep us from repeating our sins in the future.

In short: it was out of concern for our friends that we had to berate them publicly.

Briefer: humiliation was kindness.

W
e didn’t go to bars; we didn’t date; we didn’t hit strip clubs; we didn’t do weed; we didn’t go to parties. We all upheld the Islamic rules that our parents had had such a difficult time enforcing against us when we were younger.

What we did do was watch movies.

Every Friday and Saturday night—and sometimes even Friday afternoons—we rushed to the one of the city’s many movie theaters and watched whatever was showing. Since films were the only form of entertainment we had, we had reached an unstated agreement that we wouldn’t make reference to the ratings. After all, if we couldn’t watch R-rated films, there really wouldn’t be much to do. We normally took turns paying for one another, but when we watched an R-rated film we bought our tickets individually, to compensate for knowingly sinning. This was based on the Quranic verse that says, “None shall bear the burden of another.”