The Submission (15 page)

“Honest, you mean? We need to be more crude, not less. What’s the point of a hearing if we can’t speak our minds?”

“You can speak, but in a civilized manner, a manner befitting the fact that Khan is as American as you are. He has rights, including the right not to be denigrated for his religion.”

“What about my rights? The families’ rights? The victims’ rights? Don’t they count for anything?” Sean raised his voice. Customers turned. Let there be witnesses. “My parents’ rights. Do you know what this is doing to them?”

“Emotions are not legal rights.”

“I tell you this is tearing up my parents and you lecture me about legal rights?” Sean exploded. In a code that could mean either “Call the cops” or “Check, please,” Paul raised a single finger to the man at the cash register.

“What about right and wrong?” Sean barely tempered his volume.
“Whatever happened to that? If you’re going to police what we say at that hearing, then we’ll find our own way to say what we want.”

“Be my guest,” Rubin said. His even tone made Sean’s yelling ridiculous. His look whittled Sean to boy-size. “Go lie down on the site if it will make you feel better. But the hearing will stay within appropriate bounds.”

Sean stood and tossed a twenty-dollar bill onto the table, and the small smile this triggered from Rubin, whose net worth exceeded Sean’s by a factor of roughly four hundred thousand, sent him stumbling in unseeing rage out of the restaurant and down Madison Avenue. He stopped only to scowl at his image in a shop window, to confirm that every unkempt aspect of him called out for disrespect. His hair, smacked into order before he left the house, was now a melee; Sean had his father’s habit of running his hands through it when stressed. If he tried to enter the shop, he suspected that the owlish, suited store clerk staring at him through the glass would refuse to buzz him in.

In the window, long white gloves were laid out like prone bodies, a display that brought to mind Rubin’s mockery—”Go lie down on the site if it will make you feel better”—then, unexpectedly, an idea. Sean mustered his most lunatic smile, pressed the buzzer until he saw panic on the smug owl’s face, and moved on.

The first joint meeting of Save America from Islam and the newly renamed Memorial Defense Committee came to order a few days later at a Brooklyn church borrowed for the occasion. The SAFIs, as they called themselves, like some lost Judaic tribe, were mostly from Staten Island, Queens, and Long Island, and they were mostly women. As far as Sean knew, most of them hadn’t lost anyone in the attack. Radical Islam was their freelance obsession. His mother’s rage, most of the time, was so quiet you could forget it was there. Not so with the SAFIs. They were the professional wrestlers of activists.

Their leader, Debbie Dawson, looked like a poorly weathered
Angelina Jolie. She had to be close to fifty, but her blog,
The American Way
, showed her in a see-through burka with only a bikini beneath. Today she was wearing a custom-stitched T-shirt that said “Infidel” and a rhinestone-encrusted
PEACE
around her neck.

It was Debbie who had called Sean to propose that their groups collaborate. “They’re trying to colonize this hallowed ground,” she said. “This is what they’ve done all over the world, all through history: they destroy something, then build an Islamic symbol of conquest in the same place. Babur tore down Ram’s temple in India and put up a mosque. The Ottomans conquered Constantinople and made the Hagia Sophia—what else?—a mosque. Here, one set of Muslims destroys the buildings and now another comes along to put a paradise there for his dead brothers. For all we know this was part of the plan all along.”

Sean didn’t get her and didn’t want her—he was having enough trouble managing his own crew. But her membership was growing, too—there were now five hundred SAFIs, if you counted the satellite chapters in thirteen states—and given Sean’s inspiration after his meeting with Paul, these numbers held new appeal. He agreed they should join forces.

Fifteen minutes into the meeting, though, he was deep in regret. He had imagined himself leading an even larger crusade against Khan’s memorial, but nothing about these women—Christians, Jews; housewives, retirees, real estate agents—suggested that they would be easily led. They would barely shut up for one another. Their knowledge of the Islamist threat far outclassed his. They told anyone who would listen about how Quranic chapters from Mohammad’s time in Mecca gave the illusion of tolerance by praising the “People of the Book,” while the chapters set in Medina showed Islam’s true, harsh nature: “Kill them wherever you find them.” Some of them toted copies of the book marked up with orange highlighter. The best of them had memorized the offending parts. They tossed around terms like “dhimmitude” as if they’d learned them on the high-school cheerleading
squad: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, dhimmitude has got to go!” three women were chanting in the pews.

When Sean asked what dhimmitude was, Debbie, dismayed, called out to a chanter: “Shirley, please educate Sean—all these boys—on dhimmitude.”

Shirley’s gray curls, glasses, and fuzzy cheeks invoked Sean’s elementary-school librarian; he wondered if she also smelled of menthol and stale books. “It’s the voluntary submission to being second-class citizens under Sharia law,” she called out. This didn’t exactly clear things up, but Sean kept quiet. “It’s being stupid,” she added. “Letting our own way of life be destroyed by liberal idiots as much as by Muslims.”

Debbie and Sean were standing in front of the altar. Their members, together, filled most of the pews. Debbie’s honk of a voice carried effortlessly down the nave. “What we have here, although it may not look that way, is a stroke of unimaginable luck,” she said. “Two years after the attack, Americans were getting complacent. This attempt to claim our most sacred space—it’s a wake-up call. This is what I’ve been trying to tell people: You think the violent Muslims are dangerous? Wait until you see what the nonviolent ones do! What’s next? The crescent over the Capitol? They’re trying to make this piece of land Dar al-Islam!”

“The House of Islam,” she said, with exasperation, at Sean’s blank look. “Make a cheat sheet, Sean. You can’t fight this threat if you’re not versed in the vocabulary.”

“Words aren’t the way to fight this,” he shot back, to applause from his members, who also seemed to have tired of Debbie’s schooling. “They want to police what we say about Khan at the public hearing. They call us un-American, then take away our free speech. So we’re going to take back the site, literally—we’ll lay our bodies down on it, and not leave until they agree to hold a new memorial competition. We’ll turn Martin Luther King’s techniques right back at them. Who’s up for getting arrested?”

Hands shot in the air like they were doing the wave. There were cheers and whoops and cries of “Take it back! Take it back!” Sean passed around a sign-up sheet for the protest and scheduled a practice session.

“Don’t forget to keep the pressure on Claire Burwell—she’s the most important backer Khan’s got,” Debbie said when the church had emptied. Her hands were on her slim hips; PEACE glittered from her neck. She eyed the Virgin Mary as if sizing up a potential recruit.

“Asma!” Mrs. Mahmoud called, clapping her hands. “Come out for tea. I’ve bought gulab jamun.”

Asma sat very still on her bed and wondered if she could get away with pretending she wasn’t home. Ever since her pregnancy, she had hated gulab jamun—sticky, sweet, sickening. All she wanted was to curl up with the latest newspapers and read while Abdul played quietly. She was in the middle of a column translated from the English papers: “Islam means submission—it makes slaves of its followers, and demands that people of other religions submit to it, too. Their goal is to impose Sharia, Islamic law, wherever they can, including the United States. They will tell you this isn’t true, but the problem is that Islam also sanctions lying—the Islamic term for this is taqiya—to help the faith spread or to wage jihad. The Muslim who entered this memorial competition practiced taqiya by concealing his identity …”

Asma paused to think about this. Because she didn’t read or speak Arabic, her knowledge of the Quran came in pieces, through memorized prayers, through the sermons at Friday prayers, through bits quoted and discussed by her grandfather, her father, the imams. None of those people had ever told her to wage war against non-Muslims or try to impose Sharia, although they probably wouldn’t rely on the women to do that. Certainly no one had told her to lie. This didn’t mean she never had. She lied to come to America, putting “honeymoon” as the purpose of her visit on the visa application, when she knew she was coming to America to live. But people from all over the
world, from every religion, told that lie. She lied when she told Inam that it didn’t hurt the first time they made love, but after that the pain had become pleasure, so deep she couldn’t find words, so it wasn’t a bad lie, and also she guessed that lie, too, wasn’t told only by Muslim women. She lied, was lying still, to the Mahmouds by not telling them about her money …

“Gulab jamun!” Abdul sang out. Now there was no pretending.

“We’ll be right out,” Asma called, heaving a sigh that she hoped released all of her resistance.

She opened the door from her room and saw Mrs. Mahmoud inching her buttocks into her sofa, as if anchoring herself for a long chat. Setting Abdul loose to roam, Asma took a seat next to her. Mrs. Mahmoud held out the plate of gulab jamun, and Asma managed a very small bite.

Tea with Mrs. Mahmoud was never just tea, rather it was a lubricant for the gossip that would be disseminated or collected, the measuring of everyone else’s situation and the landlady’s own.

“They say the rains in Sandwip are going to be terrible this year,” she began, with authority. “But my husband’s parents don’t have to worry: they have a new roof because of the money he sent. They say it is the best roof for kilometers around …”

Mrs. Mahmoud slurped her tea and belched politely. She had twenty years, forty pounds, and several hundred gray hairs on Asma. Her talk was a solid object that filled the room, confining Asma to a tiny space.

“Salima Ahmed thinks she is special these days because she has found a match for her son,” Mrs. Mahmoud said of her sworn enemy and sometime best friend. “She snuck into line in front of me at the butcher. She thought I didn’t see, but I did. She took the cut of goat I wanted, not so much as an apology, barely even a Salaam.”

Often these little dramas, revealing how Mrs. Mahmoud’s feelings, her pride, were so easily hurt, almost as a child’s might be, brought Asma’s affection for her to the surface. In her pushy way, Mrs. Mahmoud had been very kind to Asma, serving along with her
husband as surrogate parents. But today Asma wasn’t in the mood, and the boasting, the envy made her feel the prisoner of this petty woman who was as dishonest with herself as she so often was with others. Always at moments like this the little matter of the call-waiting returned to Asma, and the bitterness eddied inside her.

Sometime after Abdul’s birth—two weeks? a month?—Mrs. Mahmoud came to see Asma with a confession. She had told Asma that Inam had not called the morning of the attack. The truth was that she didn’t know. All that morning she had been on the phone, gossiping with her niece. Her call-waiting had clicked repeatedly but—now she looked down at her prematurely arthritic fingers—the truth was that for all her boasting about her call-waiting, she could never remember how to use it. It was entirely possible that it had been Nasruddin, calling to reach Asma. But it was also possible—this had troubled her ever since—that it was Inam. She hadn’t wanted to upset Asma before the baby came. Now she could no longer keep such a torment to herself.

To share a secret, Asma understood then, was to shift a burden. She wished that day, as she often would after, that Mrs. Mahmoud had never told her, so unbearable was the thought of Inam calling and calling but never connecting, perhaps the last sound he heard the ringing of an unanswered phone. For a long time afterward Asma couldn’t hear that sound herself without a sharp chill, as if she were watching his last moments through glass. Asma had pretended, that day, to forgive Mrs. Mahmoud. On days like today, she knew she never really had.

On the pretense of retrieving the remote control from Abdul, but really so she could breathe freer air, she went to him. In her own hands she took his, which were sticky with sugar syrup and softly scented with rose water. Looking into his wondering mischievous eyes, she tried to lose herself in the black dots of his pupils. He shrieked a laugh, threw his head back, nearly knocked her with his chin.

She tuned back in to Mrs. Mahmoud only when she heard Nasruddin’s
name. “And he promised to line up a job for my husband’s nephew and he hasn’t done a thing. I think he has forgotten about all the people who helped him become such a big shot”—this term in English—”in Brooklyn.”

“Helped him?” Asma snapped, incredulous, returning to the couch. “He is the one who has helped everyone else. He has no time for himself. You shouldn’t say such things.” Shut up, you fat water buffalo, rolling in the mud of other people’s lives, is what she wanted to say. But she bit her tongue and reminded herself of how Mrs. Mahmoud had held her hand through Abdul’s birth, which made her think that if she had found strength enough to push him out, she could hold her meanest comments in. At this moment it seemed harder.

Even restraining herself, she could tell her vehemence had surprised Mrs. Mahmoud. This, too, would probably get chewed and swallowed and regurgitated in other households. So be it. They sat unspeaking for a moment.

Then Mrs. Mahmoud said, “Well, none of us may be here to help anyone anyway.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Asma, still curt.

“Now they—the English newspapers, the radio—they’re saying Muslims don’t belong here!” Mrs. Mahmoud was back on form, rolling slightly, like she was on casters, as she did when she got excited. “And then who, might I ask, would fix their buildings and drive their taxis? And who would give them halal meat?”

“No one will need halal meat if there are no Muslims,” Asma said severely. Suddenly warm, she took off her cardigan sweater.