Children of Dust Read online

  I didn’t want to make a scene in the classroom so I dashed out of the mosque to take a walk around the neighborhood and blow off my anger.

  Crossing a few streets, I entered an adjoining neighborhood. It was one of those surreal places forgotten since the Civil War, where bleak houses rested ponderously on crumbling stilts, where aged men with shiny eyes and grizzled faces leaned against handrails, where spilled sewage and trash were ubiquitous—a place acknowledged by the government only when a highway bridge needed to be noosed around it. Walking around on that hot afternoon, I imagined the place a hundred years earlier. What would have been different then? Nighttime light would have come from cracked stars instead of fizzled-out halogen bulbs. That was about all. The rest was the same: dogs voiding bladders, men who were lonely, and the glare of a despotic sheriff.

  The scene made me wonder if some people were simply destined to be servile. I asked myself if I was one of them.

  4

  Ammi cultivated a small following of troubled women for whom she served as therapist. When Pops was at work, the ladies came to our house for long conversations over chai and cookies.

  One of the women who came was a middle-aged hijabi named Janice. She had an unusual problem.

  A long time ago she had entered into a financial arrangement with an Egyptian man: he agreed to pay her a monthly sum, and she agreed to be his wife on paper so that he could get a coveted green card. Along the way she ended up converting to Islam, and they took their marriage seriously. Three children later, their marriage ran into trouble when husband and wife went in different theological directions—Janice became a fundamentalist and her husband stopped practicing. Now she wanted a divorce so that she could marry someone who wouldn’t reduce her chances to get to Paradise. However, the way her husband had been raised in an Egyptian village, women didn’t give divorces, men did—and no matter how much she agitated for divorce, he wasn’t going to give it to her. His refusal wouldn’t have been an issue if she could have gone to family court and filed a paper at her own initiative. Problem was, according to the scholars she followed in all other areas of life, a Muslim woman couldn’t initiate a divorce, only a man could. Since her husband was unwilling, she was out of options.

  “What should I do?” she asked Ammi. “I don’t want to fall for a pious man and be tempted when I’m still married. That would be zina.”

  Zina was a multipurpose Arabic term from the Quran that had no equivalent in English. It was a powerful word. Within it the sinful act and the associated punishment were conjoined. Depending on the situation it could refer to two separate things: premarital fornication punished by flogging, and extramarital adultery punished by stoning.

  Ammi told the troubled wife that it would be all right for her to go to court and initiate a divorce. Janice, however, was wary of switching her understanding of Islam “just because it is now convenient.”

  “Maybe the strength of your faith is a sign by Allah that you should remain in the marriage and work on your husband’s faith,” Ammi suggested one day.

  “Yes,” Janice said. “Maybe I’ll be able to bring him back toward the righteous path.”

  Still undecided, Janice came to see Ammi every few days, hoping to find a viable Islamic reason to get a divorce, and each time she left thinking that she should stay in the marriage. It went on like this for weeks and ultimately Janice stayed married.

  I followed the Janice matter closely until something far more interesting presented itself. Her name was Amina Alam. She was a demure Pakistani immigrant from one of the nearby communities. In her late thirties, she was married and had two children who had been sent off to college. She wore long flowing abayas in dark colors and mismatching hijabs. Amina Alam was an adulteress—or so she thought.

  “As you know, sister,” she said, sitting on the floor and rocking back and forth in front of Ammi. “It is a sin punishable by stoning for a married woman to sleep with a man who is not her husband.”

  “I know,” Ammi said. “Zina.”

  “I believe that I’ve been committing adultery for the last sixteen years. What’s going to happen to me?”

  “You should seek forgiveness,” Ammi said. “You should go to your husband and confess, and ask for his forgiveness too.”

  “That’s the problem!” Amina said in frustration. “My husband is the one I’ve been adulterous with.”

  “This is confusing,” Ammi said. “Are you playing a joke on me? One shouldn’t joke about such things.”

  “No, I swear,” she said. “You see, I’ve been married for twenty years. Four years into my marriage my husband and I had a fight. Many fights, actually. In each fight he grabbed me by the arm and said to me, ‘I divorce you!’ He said those very words—‘I divorce you!’—three times. When I was growing up I learned that in Islam a man has only to say, ‘I divorce you!’ three times, and in the eyes of Allah the woman is divorced. This means I was divorced sixteen years ago.”

  “You’re just remembering all this now?” Ammi asked.

  “Yes,” Amina said, hanging her head. “Sixteen years I’ve been married to a man who is not my husband. What should I do?”

  “Just remarry him,” Ammi suggested.

  “That won’t solve it,” Amina said. “He’s still the man with whom I committed zina. I can’t face him. I shouldn’t even be in that house with him. Islam says that we shouldn’t be alone in the same space as men we’re not married to. What am I doing? If we lived in an Islamic state, I would have been stoned by now.”

  That thought stopped the discussion for several minutes. Finally, Amina said, “Do you think I should move to an Islamic state so that I can be stoned as I deserve to be?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Ammi rebuked. “You’re an American now. There’s no stoning here. Here we believe in stoning only in theory. I think we need to ask one of the local scholars,” she concluded.

  “No!” Amina replied decisively. “I can’t face their judgment. Besides, I don’t want word to get out.”

  Ammi sighed. Then she got up and rummaged in her files. “Listen to me very carefully,” she said. “I have a solution. My children use this new Internet, and I’m learning all about it. On it there are scholars you can ask questions of by way of a letter. We can ask them without using your name. They’re far, far away—in South Africa or India; I can’t remember. They’ll tell us what to do.”

  Amina, who was now crying, pulled herself together and agreed. I was summoned and instructed to find an online fatwa service from which we could solicit an Islamic opinion. We then composed an e-mail to a group of scholars in South Africa.

  It took the online scholars only three days to reply. Their verdict: Amina had been divorced sixteen years ago, and if she didn’t want to continue living like an adulteress, she needed to leave her husband immediately. They also implied that she was hell-bound, but there was a chance that with just enough penance Allah might show mercy. They didn’t say anything about stoning.

  Amina wasn’t with us when I read the verdict to Ammi.

  “That Amina isn’t as stupid as she pretends,” Ammi said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think that for twenty years she wanted to get out of the marriage but didn’t have the courage to leave. Now, with this story about getting divorced sixteen years ago, she’s got influential Islamic scholars telling her that she needs to leave; otherwise, she’s an adulteress. Now no one can stop her.”

  Ammi was right. When Amina found out about the fatwa, she was visibly elated. She left her husband within a week and moved to another state, where she got a job in human resources.

  Of all the people I came across in adolescence, I identified with Amina Alam the most. She just wanted to be free.

  5

  I was prohibited everything related to the opposite sex.

  Ammi had a pair of mantras that impressed on me the immorality of interacting with females. The first was based on a hadith. “When a woman and a man a
re alone,” she said often, “the devil is the third.” It meant that every single moment spent in the company of a girl was tantamount to Satanism.

  Her other refrain, “A man is like butter and a woman is like a hot stove, and fire always melts the butter,” had uncertain origins and equally uncertain meaning. However, it evoked in my head images of the various tortures in hell—which had been clearly described by the imam at the mosque and involved getting broiled in a cauldron full of pus—and was therefore effective despite its apparent absurdity.

  Every time I felt an iota of arousal I was struck by fear. Then, trying to preempt the punishment that Allah and the angels were undoubtedly preparing for me in the afterlife, I tried to figure out a way to make myself suffer in this life. My behavior made Islamic sense: an imam back in Pakistan had once said that the reason Islamic authorities punished so harshly in this life was so that we wouldn’t have to be punished for the same sin in the afterlife. I figured that since I lived in America now, and there were no Islamic authorities to give me penance through flogging, I might as well do their work for them.

  Thus, when I went to a sleepover and ended up getting turned on while watching a soft-porn film called Threesome, I went back home and prayed for Allah to give me AIDS, the disease by which I believed Allah killed all orgiastic people. (Later, however, I prayed to Allah to veto my earlier request of death-by-AIDS, because I was concerned that if people learned I had the virus they would think I was gay, which all Muslims considered reprehensible.)

  My general reaction to developing feelings toward girls at school was denial and avoidance. When a pretty, usually shy girl named Becky wrote me a love letter during film-hour in science class—it was stamped with a big, glossy kiss that smelled of bubble gum—I told myself that she was only joking; then, making certain that she could see what I was doing, I threw it in the trash can. Another time, when I developed a proper crush on a girl named Rachelle—a crush that I couldn’t shake no matter how hard I tried—I convinced a friend of mine to ask her out and made a long list of all the other guys that I could potentially set her up with. It was easier to run away from girls I liked if they happened to be attractive: I simply told myself that I was too ugly for them. I used non-religious justifications for avoiding girls when I had to explain myself, because I was too embarrassed to admit to non-Muslims that it was Islam—archaic, anachronistic, exotic Islam—that controlled me. Admitting that would lead me to be viewed as an outsider—and I wanted nothing more than to be American.

  There was one place where I pushed back against the restrictions: TV and film. I wanted to see every attractive onscreen girl I could. I wanted to see every instance of lascivious behavior. I wanted to see every inch of naked flesh. My reasoning was simple: since I’d consented to abiding by the rules imposed on my body, I should at least be able to see the things I was missing.

  Unfortunately, Ammi and Pops had imposed a strict regime of media censorship almost as soon as we moved to America, which, like all such regulations, was only applied selectively, leading to resentment on my part. Two weeks after we landed at JFK, Pops had introduced all of us to the New York Public Library system, and we went regularly to the Park Slope branch as a family. It was there I discovered that you could get a copy of any film you wanted. On an early visit I picked out a film called My Beautiful Laundrette, based on a screenplay by British-Pakistani author Hanif Kureishi. It was about Omar, an idealistic young man of Pakistani origin, who was trying to get ahead in life by taking ownership of a laundrette in a working-class neighborhood in South London. As Ammi and I watched, there came a scene involving Tania, played by the vivacious Rita Wolf, in which she lifted up her sweater and flashed Omar and his uncles in the company of her oblivious father.

  “What a wahiyat film!” Ammi said, condemning the nudity as she shut it off. “This isn’t us!”

  As the screen went dark, I didn’t move. Tania’s dark areolas were burned in my head. To see a Muslim girl—like that!—set every fiber of my burgeoning youth on fire. I wanted Tania. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Day after day I passed by the film sitting on the VCR and wished I could just pop it in and look at those tits. But the strength of Ammi’s reaction had evoked enough deference that I abstained. The night before the film was to be returned, however, the desire to see Tania was too strong: while everyone else was sleeping I turned on the TV, muted it, and popped in the video. I expected the film to resume at the part with the breasts; I told myself that I’d watch just those few seconds and then go back to my room. But when the screen came in focus, the final credits were rolling. At first I thought that perhaps the tape had malfunctioned, but then I realized that Ammi must have watched the film when Flim and I were at school.

  Her hypocrisy angered me. If the film was wahiyat, she shouldn’t have watched it either. Now I resolved to watch too, not just the part with Tania’s breasts, but every other scene involving intimacy. In fact, when I got to the part with Tania’s breasts, I rewound the scene many times over.

  Over the years numerous TV shows were banned at home—somehow each containing an actress that I liked. The reason given was always Islamic: “Watching kissing on TV creates a desire to kiss in real life, which creates a desire to date, which leads to fornication, which is zina, which the Prophet would have punished by flogging or stoning and which is going to lead you to hell.”

  It was a stifling syllogism and my imagination became my escape.

  I had always been a writer, weaving stories about heroic ants and edible jinns. By the time I was in high school I set my craft in the service of sex and began writing erotica.

  One of my recurring characters was Nadia Sumienyova, a gymnast, astronaut, and nymphomaniac. Her entire existence was sensual. One time she found herself on a mystical spaceship populated by a race of men who had one collective phallus—it was six feet tall and looked like the primordial me—that she promised to lick one hour per day in exchange for gaining the power of immortality.

  One day I let myself engage in a bit of auto-writing. When I went back to read what I’d written, I saw that I’d retold (and revised) the story of Yajuj and Majuj—the tribes that the Quran said were trapped behind King Zulqurnain’s wall and spent an eternity trying to lick their way out, and whose emergence would signal the arrival of the Islamic apocalypse. In my story, however, I had reimagined Yajuj and Majuj as a tribe of beautiful, naked women. The wall, hardened steel, was a huge penis: my penis, of course. It was licked by the women until ejaculation and then fell away flaccid. Then Yajuj and Majuj, so aroused by licking my wondrous penis, sprang out upon the world in search of sex. They jumped on the men of the world and killed them all through incredible blow jobs. Then they made out with all the remaining women until the Day of Judgment.

  This sexual apocalypse ameliorated my desire to talk about sex, but only briefly.

  Thankfully, I found an ally in an unusual place: Saleem.

  Saleem and I talked about girls in all sorts of raunchy ways. We usually had these talks at a basketball court near his house, away from anyone’s earshot. The only problem with him was that he tended to Islamize every discussion, which meant that the focus was on getting married first and then having sex. Still, we did get to sex eventually, and that was good enough for me.

  “I can’t wait anymore,” he said dribbling the ball. “I’m sixteen and a virgin! How is this possible? I hit puberty at eight. I need to fuck.”

  “Me too,” I agreed, both disturbed and excited by his word choice.

  “There’s this kid in Birmingham. I met him at the Muslim Sports Day. He got married as soon as he got out of high school.”

  “Is his wife hot?” I asked, hoping he would describe her.

  “Dude. He’s getting it on three times a day!” he said, ignoring my request for a description.

  “Lucky bastard.”

  “So who do you want to marry?” he asked. We were both aware that asking who you wanted to marry was code for asking who you wanted to
bend over and nail.

  “How about that Egyptian chick, Amal?” I said, remembering a young hijabi that Saleem had pointed out to me at a Starbucks once.

  “Yum,” Saleem said approvingly. “She’s got thick thighs. The thickest thighs in the Islamic ummah. But you need to tap that fast.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s Egyptian, man. Egyptian girls get fat quick. You need to ask for her hand in marriage soon. I bet you her parents would hand her over to you.”

  “I can wait a little,” I said, not entirely sold on the idea of getting married during high school.

  “Yeah, I guess you can wait. After all, all our women get fat,” Saleem concluded with all the authority of a sixteen-year-old virgin. “That’s why we’re allowed to get another couple of wives when we’re older.”

  I looked at him and smiled. Talking about polygamy was code for discussing threesomes.

  “I’m going to get a Brazilian and an Indian in addition to my Egyptian,” I said greedily. “Cover three continents that way.”

  “I’m going to get a Bosnian and a Colombian,” he replied.

  I imagined the scene and smiled again.

  “Do you know why it’s really important to reestablish the Islamic caliphate?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “So I can be appointed governor of South America. Then I can have my pick of Latinas for wives.”

  “I guess I’ll take Los Angeles,” I said. “Good diversity there.”

  “What would be your title? The Sultan of California?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’d be too busy getting ass,” I replied, trying out the new vernacular.

  As Saleem went on speculating about how my caliphate in California—or khalifornia, as guys he read about on the Internet called it—could be actualized, I imagined my ideal woman: a virgin, stripper, actress, homemaker with a PhD.

  “Where can I find such a girl?” I inquired.