American Dervish: A Novel

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For My Mother & Marc H. Glick

And Allah said: I am with the ones
whose hearts are torn.

Hadith Qudsi

Prologue: 1990

I
remember it all with a vividness that marks the moment as the watershed it would be:

The court was glowing, its wooden surface honey-brown beneath the overhead lights. Along the edges, players huddled with their coaches, and beyond, we were gathered, the clamoring rows upon rows of us, eager for the timeout to end.

Below, I spied the vendor approaching: a burly man, thick around the waist, with a crimson-brown ponytail dropping from beneath the back of his black-and-orange cap, our school colors. “Brats and wieners!” he cried. “Brats and wieners!”

I nodded, raising my hand. He nodded back, stopping three rows down to serve another customer first. I turned to my friends and asked them if they wanted anything.

Beer and bratwurst, each of them said.

“I don’t think he’s got beer, guys,” I replied.

Out on the court, the players were returning to their positions for the last minute of the half. The crowd was getting to its feet.

Below, the vendor made change, then lifted the metal box to his waist and mounted the steps to settle at the edge of our row.

“You have beer?” one of my friends asked.

“Just brats and wieners.”

“So two bratwurst and a beef dog,” I said.

With a clipped nod, he tossed open the cover of his box and reached inside. I waved away my friends’ bills, pulling out my wallet. The vendor handed me three shiny packets, soft and warm to the touch.

“Beef wiener’s on top. That’s nine altogether.”

I handed off the brats, and paid.

Cheers erupted as our side raced down the court, driving to the basket. I unwrapped my packet only to find I wasn’t holding a beef frank, but a marbled, brown-and-white pork bratwurst.

“Guys? Anyone have the beef dog?” I shouted over the crowd’s noise at my friends.

Both shook their heads. They were holding bratwurst as well.

I turned back to the aisle to call out to the vendor when I stopped. What reason did I have anymore not to eat it?

None at all,
I thought.

We drove to the basket again, where we were fouled. When the whistle shrieked, the roar was deafening.

I lifted the sausage to my mouth, closed my eyes, and took a bite. My heart raced as I chewed, my mouth filling with a sweet and smoky, lightly pungent taste that seemed utterly remarkable—perhaps all the more so for having been so long forbidden. I felt at once brave and ridiculous. And as I swallowed, an eerie stillness came over me.

I looked up at the ceiling.

It was still there. Not an inch closer to falling in.

After the game, I walked along the campus quad alone, the walkway’s lamps glowing in the mist, white blossoms on a balmy November night. The wet air swirled and blew. I felt alive as I moved. Free along my limbs. Even giddy.

Back at the dorm, I stood before the bathroom mirror. My shoulders looked different. Not huddled, but open. Unburdened. My eyes drew my gaze, and there I saw what I was feeling: something quiet, strong, still.

I felt like I was complete.

I slept soundly that night, held in restful sleep like a baby in a mother’s loving arms. When I finally heard my alarm, it was a quarter of nine. The room was awash in sunlight. It was Thursday, which meant I had Professor Edelstein’s Survey of Islamic History in fifteen minutes. As I slipped into my jeans, I was startled by the bright prickle of new denim against my skin. The previous night’s wonders were apparently still unfolding.

Outside, it was another unseasonably warm and windy day. After hurrying over to the Student Union for a cup of tea, I rushed to Schirmer Hall, Quran tucked under my arm, spilling hot water as I ran. I didn’t like being late for Edelstein’s class. I needed to be certain I would find a place near the back—close to the window he kept cracked open—where I would have the space quietly to reel and contemplate as the diminutive, magnetic Edelstein continued to take his weekly sledgehammer to what still remained of my childhood faith. And there was something else that kept me in the back of the room:

It was where Rachel sat.

Professor Edelstein looked fresh and formal in a variation on his usual pastel medley: an impeccably pressed mauve oxford, topped and tightened at the neck by a rose-pink bow tie, and suspenders matching the auburn shade of newly polished penny loafers.

He greeted me with a warm smile as I entered. “Hey, Hayat.”

“Hi, Professor.”

I wove my way through the desks to the corner where I usually sat, and where lovely Rachel was munching on a cookie.

“Hey.”

“Hey there.”

“How was the game?”

“Good.”

She nodded, the corners of her lips curling coyly upward as she held my gaze. It was looks like this—her bright blue eyes sparkling—that had made me hazard the invitation to the game the night prior. I’d been wanting to ask her out on a date all semester. But when I’d finally gotten up the courage, she’d told me she had to study.

“You want some?” she asked. “It’s oatmeal raisin.”

“Sure.”

She broke off a piece and handed it to me. “You do the reading for today?” she asked.

“Didn’t need to.”

“Why not?”

“I already know the chapters he wanted us to read…by heart.”

“You do?” Rachel’s eyes widened with surprise.

“I grew up memorizing that stuff,” I explained. “It’s a whole production some Muslim kids go through. You memorize the Quran…They call it being a
hafiz.
”

“Really?” She was impressed.

I shrugged. “Not that I remember much of it anymore. But I happen to remember the chapters he assigned for today…”

At the front of the class, Edelstein started to speak. “I trust you’ve all done your reading,” he began. “It’s not ground we’re going to cover today, but it’s obviously important material. I’d like you guys to keep moving. The Quran can be slow going, and the more of it we get through this semester, the better.” He paused and arranged the papers gathered before him. Rachel offered me the rest of her oatmeal cookie with a whisper: “Wanna finish?”

“Absolutely,” I said, taking it.

“Today, I’d like to share some of the recent work a couple of my colleagues in Germany are doing. I wasn’t able to offer you any readings on their work, because it’s very much happening right now. It’s at the very forefront of Islamic scholarship…” Edelstein paused again, now making eye contact with the Muslim-born students in the class—there were three of us—and added cautiously, “And what I have to share may come as a shock to some of you.”

So began his lecture on the Sanaa manuscripts.

In 1972, while restoring an ancient mosque in Sanaa, Yemen, a group of workers busy overhauling the original roof found a stash of parchments and damaged books buried in the rafters. It was a grave of sorts, the kind that Muslims—forbidden from burning the Quran—use to respectfully discard damaged or worn-out copies of the holy book. The workers packed the manuscripts into potato sacks, and they were locked away until one of Edelstein’s close friends—a colleague—was approached some seven years later to take a look at the documents. What he discovered was unprecedented: The parchment pages dated back to Islam’s first two centuries, fragments of the oldest Qurans in existence. What was shocking, Edelstein told us, was that there were aberrations and deviations from the standard Quran that Muslims had been using for more than a thousand years. In short, Edelstein claimed, his German colleague was about to show the world that the bedrock Muslim belief in the Quran as the direct, unchanged, eternal word of God was a fiction. Muslims weren’t going to be spared the fate of Christians and Jews over the past three centuries of scholarship: the Quran, like the Bible, would prove to be the historical document common sense dictated it had to be.

Up in the front row, one of the students—Ahmad, a Muslim—interrupted Edelstein’s lecture, raising his hand angrily.

Edelstein paused. “Yes, Ahmad?”

“Why has your friend not published his findings yet?” Ahmad barked.

Edelstein held Ahmad’s gaze for a moment before replying. And when he did, his tone was conciliatory. “My colleague is concerned about continued access to the texts if they were to make these findings known to the Yemeni authorities. They’re preparing a series of articles, but are ensuring that they’ve had enough time to go through all fourteen thousand pages carefully, just in case they never get to see the documents again.”

Now Ahmad’s voice bellowed, red and bitter: “And why exactly would they be barred from seeing them again?”

There was silence. The classroom was thick with tension.

“There’s no need to get upset, Ahmad. We can talk about this like scholars…”

“Scholars! What scholars make claims without documented findings? Huh?!”

“I understand this is some controversial stuff…but there’s no need—”

Ahmad cut him off. “It’s not controversial, Pro-
fess
-or,” he said, spitting the middle syllable back at Edelstein with disgust. “It’s
incendiary.
” Ahmad bolted up from his desk, books in hand. “In-
sult
-ing and in-
cen
-diary!” he shouted. After a look at Sahar—the usually reticent Malaysian girl sitting to his left, her head lowered as she scratched nervously on her pad—and then another look, back at me, Ahmad stormed out of the room.

“Anyone else want to leave?” Edelstein asked, clearly affected. After a short pause, Sahar quietly gathered her things, got up, and walked out.

“That leaves you, Hayat.”

“Nothing to worry about, Professor. I’m a true and tried Mutazalite.”

Edelstein’s face brightened with a smile. “Bless your heart.”

After class, I stood and stretched, surprised again at how nimble and awake I felt.

“Where you headed?” Rachel asked.

“To the Union.”

“Wanna walk? I’m going to the library.”

“Sure,” I said.

Outside, as we strolled beneath the shedding ash trees that lined the path to the library, Rachel remarked how surprised she was at Ahmad and Sahar walking out.

“Don’t be,” I said. “Saying less than that could get you killed in some circles.” She looked skeptical. “Look at Rushdie,” I said. The fatwa was only a year old, an event still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Rachel shook her head. “I don’t understand these things…So what did you mean by what you said to Edelstein?”

“About being a Mutazalite?”

“Yeah.”

“A school of Muslims that don’t believe in the Quran as the eternal word of God. But I was joking. I’m not a Mutazalite. They died off a thousand years ago.”

She nodded. We walked a few paces. “How did you feel about the lecture?” she asked.