American Dervish: A Novel (21 page)

“To what should we attribute this honor?” Chatha asked. There was something mocking about his tone.

“To my friend,” Father replied, turning to Nathan.

“I’m Nathan. Nathan Wolfsohn. Colleague and friend of Naveed’s.”

“Ghaleb Chatha, nice to meet you.” Chatha greeted Nathan as he had the others, with a hand to his heart and a gentle pressing shut of his eyelids.

“Brother Chatha,” Souhef began, “Nathan is here with us today because he is thinking of coming to the faith.”

Chatha’s blank stare brightened with surprise. He turned to Father. “Good work, Naveed,” he said, impressed.

“Nothing to do with me, Ghaleb. If I had my way…”

Nathan threw Father a sharp look. Father took notice, and paused.

“I’m listening,” Chatha said. “If you had your way…?”

“Well…we would be out on the water fishing right now…”

Chatha’s surprise had already passed, giving way again to that blank, almost lifeless gaze. “Then it was Allah’s will that you didn’t have your way today. And so you have your friend here to thank for that…” Chatha looked at Nathan and smiled. “Welcome,” he said.

Nathan brought his right hand to his heart and—like Chatha—pressed his eyelids shut.

Chatha looked down at me, noticing I was watching him. He smiled, his lips parting to reveal small teeth. “Pleased to see the boy here,” he said to Father.

This time, Father didn’t reply.

“Whatever your beliefs may be,” Chatha continued, “it’s so important to be teaching the boy about our way of life.”

Again Father said nothing. Another group of men, about half a dozen of them, approached the steps. They muttered
salaam
s to us all as they climbed to the entrance, gazing back at Nathan, intrigued.

“If you’ll excuse me, brothers,” Souhef said, “I have to see about getting the sound system ready for the
khutbah.
”

Nathan responded with a short, self-conscious bow.

“I’ll join you, Imam,” Chatha added. “I still have to perform my
wudu.
”

The two men went up the steps—Souhef gliding with a grace that belied his heft—and at the top, Chatha opened the door for him. Souhef disappeared inside. Chatha followed. Once they were gone, Nathan turned to Father with a startled smile.

“I don’t know what you’re so happy about,” Father grunted.

“That imam. He is so self-possessed. And kind. Not like the other guy.”

“They’re two peas from the same pod,” Father said. “And as for Souhef being kind…”

“He was kind to me…”

“Let’s just say that he’s smart. You’ve no idea what they’ll be saying about him if he can get you to convert. That Chatha will pour the money down his throat like champagne on New Year’s Day.”

Nathan wiped his sweat-covered forehead. “You’re such a cynic, Naveed. You really have to work on that.”

“Don’t worry about me. You get yourself ready. We’re heading into the Middle Ages.” Father nodded, indicating the group of women in head scarves gathered at the door to an entrance at the other end of the schoolhouse marked
WOMEN.
Through the waves of rising heat, their sheeted forms hovered, like specters in a mirage. There were about a half dozen of them, all looking at us.

“What are they looking at?” Nathan asked.

“What do you think, Nate?” Father answered.

“Me?”

Father nodded.

Nathan smiled and waved. Spooked, the women turned away, floating to the doorway and disappearing inside.

Father clapped Nathan on the back. “Like I said, Nate. The Middle Ages.”

Downstairs, the chanting was under way:

Allah hu akbar, Allah hu akbar, Allah hu akbar…

la illah ilallah…

We were in the shoe closet—an alcove outside the prayer room whose walls were covered with shelves of shoes—and the rumble of men’s chanting voices came through the prayer room’s double doors:

Allah hu akbar, Allah hu akbar, Allah hu akbar…

la illah ilallah
…

Nathan stared at the closed doors, listening as he removed his docksiders. Behind us, a pair of young men hurried down the staircase and quickly slipped off their shoes. They pushed open the double doors, and the droning chant sharpened, its song clearer, more forceful:

Allah hu akbar, Allah hu akbar, Allah hu akbar…

la illah ilallah…

Nathan turned to Father, wonder in his voice. “What are they doing?”

“
Dhikr.
They do it before the prayer.”

“It’s beautiful,” Nathan said.

Father nodded, peering into the room, a hint of moisture collecting at the corners of his eyes. “Yes, it is,” he said.

The
dhikr—
or “remembrance”—was what I recalled most vividly from the few times I’d been to a mosque. Before the services, congregants assembled in the prayer room, and by the time there were six of them gathered, the chanting would begin, a simple hypnotic tune that cycled between two deep notes…

Allah hu akbar, Allah hu akbar, Allah hu akbar…

… until the final syllables trilled along an arpeggio of higher pitches…

…la illah ilallah…

…only to end with a return to the chant’s first note, completing the circle, and beginning it anew.

The chant would gain breadth and volume as worshippers arrived and joined the choir. And as the numbers grew—from a handful to dozens, or even hundreds on a religious holiday—an ample sound would take shape, hovering over us—ringed and round, magical—like the angels the Quran claimed watched over all our human actions. There was something vast and ineffable about this bellowing in praise of the greatness of the one and only God, a vivid, sensate beauty—I felt it against my ears, along my back, inside my ribs—capable of bringing tears even to the eyes of a person as hardened toward his faith as Father.

The prayer room was filled with a hundred men, their seated bodies swaying in unison as they sang. The room itself—dark and capacious, cavelike, a sometime basement cafeteria transformed now into a Muslim prayer room—seemed to bulge and tremble with the holy song. Nathan looked over at me, shaking his head lightly in disbelief. “It’s so beautiful,” he muttered again. I nodded. Seeing Nathan so moved by the
dhikr,
I felt something in me soften.

I smiled. He smiled back, friendship in his eyes.

Father took a deep breath, murmuring to himself as he led Nathan to a place at the back of the room. I went over to the shelf where copies of the Quran were kept. There was only one left. I took it, then made my way to an empty spot near the center of the room. Holding the Quran to my chest, I joined in:

Allah hu akbar, Allah hu akbar, Allah hu akbar…

la illah ilallah…

Eager, I swayed as I chanted. But there wasn’t much
dhikr
left that afternoon. By the time Father had taken his place beside me, Imam Souhef was already settling in by the
mihrab.
Father laid his hand on my knee. When he did, I realized: Mine was the only voice still singing.

Souhef hoisted himself onto the raised platform from which he delivered his sermons. Sitting cross-legged, he untied the bandage wrapped around his right hand, then fiddled with the microphone on the stand before him.

“Testing, testing. Can you hear me?” his voice blared, rough and tinny over the loudspeakers mounted on stands. Grunts and murmurs of assent rippled through the room. Someone coughed. Souhef adjusted the mike again, releasing a painful flare of feedback. “Excuse me, brothers,” he said, playing with the cord, and adding with a chuckle, “And sisters, too.” (The women two flights up, crowded into a considerably smaller prayer room—listening to his voice over loudspeakers—had, no doubt, heard the feedback as well.)

His palms open and raised before him, Souhef offered the brief invocation. Finished, he looked into the Quran open in his lap and began to speak:

“Brothers and sisters, please, if you have a copy of our holy Quran, open it to
Surah Al-Baqara,
‘The Cow.’ Verses forty and forty-one.”

The rustling of paper erupted in the room as those with books searched for the pages. Souhef waited, his eyes trained on a distant horizon, or perhaps—I thought—on the newcomer, Nathan, who was sitting quietly against the back wall. Finally, there was silence again. Souhef looked down at the page, his eyes narrowed and gleaming, like polished blades. He began reading, his voice loud and lofty: 

O Bani Israel!  

Remember how I favored you.

Fulfill your promise to Me. I will fulfill my promise to you.

Of Me alone stand in awe!

Believe in what I have given. Confirm the truth you know. Be not the first to deny.

Do not give away My revelations for a trifling sum.

Of Me alone be aware!

An uneasy swell rose from the crowd. “Bani Israel” was the Quran’s way of referring to Jews. Father looked at me, a crease appearing on his forehead. He looked back at Nathan. I tried to do the same, but my view of the back wall was obscured by Ghaleb Chatha, who I was surprised to find sitting directly behind me.

Souhef continued, casually now, as if pleased that his declamatory reading had gotten our attention:

“Yesterday, my fellow Muslims, I hurt myself. While fixing my sink in the kitchen, I was using a wrench to open the pipe. The wrench slipped in my hand. My wrist slammed on the corner of the cabinet. There was blood. It was very painful…” Souhef held up the back of his right hand, which showed a long, ugly gash dark with dried blood. “The first thought I had when I felt my pain yesterday was about my son. He was singing in the next room, making noise on a cushion with a toy. The first thought I had when I hurt myself was that it was
his fault.
That his singing made me lose my concentration or something like that…And this was why I was now in pain…So I shouted at him. I told him to shut up!”

Souhef was pointing at us, but he turned his finger and pointed it back at himself.

“Of course, I was wrong. My injury had nothing to do with my son. He was just playing, singing a song, being happy. If the wrench slipped, if I hit myself, how could it be his fault? It was not. But I
felt
it was. And I have no doubt everyone here has experienced a moment like this sometime in their life…”

Nods, grunts of fulsome recognition followed.

“I thought about that moment for the rest of the day. About my feeling of pain. About the moment of injustice with my son. And I want to share some of the things I realized.” Souhef paused again, now shifting in place. “Let me describe what happened again, what happened in me in that moment, so we understand it better: Brothers and sisters, the pain I felt in that moment when the wrench slipped, this pain felt unjust to me. In that moment, I felt I was a victim. A victim of something I didn’t deserve. And in that moment, my feeling of injustice made me look for someone to blame. But the only thing I could find was my son…because he was the only one around. He had been singing, playing drums on his cushion. I heard this noise in the moment of my pain. And I thought that my pain was the fault of the noise he was making. I blamed him. I shouted at him. I told him to shut up.”

Souhef gazed down at his son—who was sitting in the front row—and smiled warmly. “You must be asking yourselves: Why is our imam so obsessed with this event? So he made the mistake of yelling at his son? We all make these mistakes. It was wrong. We know it is wrong. We don’t need our imam to tell us…

“But brothers and sisters, please be patient as we investigate this moment, as we look more deeply into it.

“When I hurt myself with the wrench, I felt there was injustice in that pain. I wanted to know who was the cause of this injustice. But that is a false question. The real question is different: Why did I feel that this pain was unjust? After all, the wrench just slipped! It was an accident! There is no question of justice here!

“The soul has its own logic, brothers and sisters. And we must listen very deeply to this logic if we are to understand anything about what Allah wills for us.

“Because that moment was painful to me, I felt it was unjust. And it is a simple fact of my nature—of human nature—that I do not want to feel pain. Any pain. And it doesn’t stop there: Not only do I not want to feel pain…I feel I
deserve
not to feel pain. I feel I deserve better than pain, nice things like kindness, happiness, peace, pleasure…but not pain…

“Here is the real question, brothers and sisters: Why do I feel this? Why do I feel I do not deserve pain? Isn’t
this
the question? Isn’t
this
why I asked myself who was to blame? Because I felt I was too good for pain? No? Maybe? Or maybe there is another reason?”

His voice grew louder with each question. This, and the insistent, percussive stress of certain words, announced a transformation those of us who had heard his
khutbah
s before knew to expect.

“Wasn’t it my
love
that caused me to ask this?!” he hollered now, the tinny boom of his amplified voice echoing around us, demanding our reply.

“Wasn’t it?!”

I felt something in my stomach, a gnawing and irritation, like fear.

“Isn’t it LOVE?! Love for ourselves…love of myself…love of yourself…isn’t
this
what makes us all think we don’t deserve pain? Isn’t it this self-love that makes us think we deserve better?!”

Again he paused. I stole a sidelong look along the row of men to my right. One was fighting not to fall asleep. Another was playing with a frayed thread on the carpet. I looked to my left, at Father. The worry on his face when Souhef had mentioned Bani Israel was gone. He yawned, bored.