American Dervish: A Novel (6 page)

The tale of our Prophet’s childhood brought tears to her eyes no matter how many times she told it: a young Arab boy who’d lost everything a boy could lose, with a father already dead when he was brought into the world, and a mother who died when he was six. And yet, despite his misfortunes, young Muhammad was never sullen. Everywhere he went, people would remark on his good nature, his unusual poise and calm, and on the special light they saw shining in his eyes. This light, Mina said, had been put there by God shortly after young Muhammad’s mother’s death. One afternoon, as he was playing with a group of friends, three mysterious figures enshrouded in veils of light—they were angels—appeared and whisked him off to the top of a distant mountain. There, the first angel reached into Muhammad’s breast, and cut the boy open to the belly. Young Muhammad felt no pain as he watched the angel’s hand disappear inside his body and bring forth the goopy tangle of his intestines. The angel cleaned the organs with fresh snow from a magical green vase. Now the second angel approached and plunged his hand into the boy’s still-open chest. He took young Muhammad’s heart out and searched inside, removing a tiny black clot. This clot, Mina explained, was the seed of evil contained in all human hearts, but no longer in Muhammad’s. The third angel stepped forward to put the boy back together, restoring his organs and sealing up his chest. This angel declared that the mission was complete, and young Muhammad was now returned to his playmates, none of whom, oddly, had even noticed he was gone. The whole miracle had taken place in the time it took to blink an eye.

Two years later, when Muhammad was eight, the man he now called Father, his grandfather, also died. Mina was always saying that God loved Muhammad more than anyone else, but I didn’t understand how that could be the case: Why did Allah take everyone Muhammad loved away from him?

“To teach him to depend on Allah only,” Mina explained.

“But why?” I asked.

“Because it is the truth,
behta.
Not a truth most can handle, but truth all the same: God is the only One we can depend on, truly.”

And while I didn’t doubt she might have been right, I remember thinking I didn’t want to lose my parents—or Mina either—just to find out something that was true. No matter how true it was.

My favorite of Mina’s stories of Muhammad’s life took place in a cave. It was the tale of how he became the Prophet of Islam. Already forty, he was a married man. He was a merchant by trade, but Mina called him a
seeker of the truth
by nature. And during his travels along the trade route to Syria, Muhammad met Christian and Jewish holy men from whom he’d learned about Abraham and his teachings about the one and only true God. It was from these elder Christians and Jews, Mina claimed, that Muhammad learned to pray. And it was while praying quietly one night in a dark cave at Mount Hira, not far from his home, that Muhammad heard a voice.

“Recite,” it said.

Muhammad opened his eyes and found hovering before him a blinding light in the form of a man. It was Gabriel, God’s archangel. Muhammad opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“Recite!” the figure repeated, the command echoing ominously through the cave.

Muhammad tried, but still couldn’t speak.

Now Gabriel pressed in closer, the cloud of light growing brighter as he did, more unbearable. Muhammad felt as if his heart were going to explode.

“Recite!” Gabriel commanded again.

“I don’t know what to recite!” he finally cried out, trembling.

Gabriel now took the mortal into his arms of light. Just as Muhammad was about to faint with terror, it happened. Words blossomed on his tongue, words he didn’t know were inside him. And what he spoke that night, Mina said with pride, were the first words of our great Revelation.

The Quran.

It was late August, the evening of my eleventh birthday. Mina came to get me earlier than usual from the family room. “I have something for you,
behta,
” she said, eagerly. Once we were in her room, she shut the door, pulling up the shawl around her shoulders to cover her head. She stepped over to the bookcase and reached for the green book that sat by itself on the highest shelf. She brought it to her lips, kissing the cover, then turned to me. “It’s time you had a Quran of your own. But before I give it to you, I want you to go and wash your hands. Respect for our holy book begins with cleanliness.”

I went to the bathroom and scrubbed at my hands with soap and scalding water. When I returned to her room, my palms tingling, I found Mina standing behind a chair that faced the window, the direction in which she prayed five times a day. Mina had a long piece of white muslin in her hands.

“Sit,
behta,
” she said.

As I did, Mina started to wrap my head in the cloth. Her touch was warm. It sent a shudder through me. “We cover our heads in respect for the word of God.” Once she’d finished, she handed me the Quran.

“Kiss it,” she whispered.

I lifted the book to my face. Its soft, green leather-bound cover was cold to my lips.

“Open to the first
surah,
” she said.

“First what?”

“
Surah.
It’s what we call a chapter in the Quran. A
surah.
”

The book’s new binding cracked as I opened it. Inside, each page was like a work of art, covered on the left with a block of black Arabic text enclosed in a golden frame; on the right was the English translation. As I turned the thick pages—heavy like vellum—they released the crisp, pleasing odor of new paper.

I found the first
surah,
a half page of verse called “The Opening.”

“That’s it,” Mina said. “Read it to me.”

I cleared my voice and began to read:

In the name of God, the Benevolent, the Merciful.

Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds,

The Benevolent, the Merciful.

Master of the Day of Judgment,

You do we serve; You do we ask for help.

Guide us on the right path,

The path of those You favor;

Not those who earn Your wrath,

Nor those who go astray.

I stumbled through the text, tripping on the words “benevolent” and “merciful.” When I’d finally gotten through the text, I was surprised to find that Mina was smiling at me. “Remember when the angel Gabriel came to the cave and made the Prophet recite?”

I remembered.

“Well,
behta,
” she explained, touching the Quran, “that is how this whole book came into being through our Prophet…
peace be upon him.
”

I remembered a question I’d been meaning to ask her for some time. “Auntie, why do you always say
‘peace be upon him’?
”

“Out of respect, Hayat. The Prophet gave us all so much, so we try to give something back by always praying for the peace of His soul.”

“Do you have to say it every time?”

Mina laughed. “No,
behta.
With everything in life, Hayat, it’s the
intention
that matters. As long as you respect the Prophet’s memory, that’s the important thing.” Mina leaned in to turn the page. Her arm brushed against mine, her touch whispering along my skin and echoing up my arm to the back of my neck.

Mina turned the pages, explaining that there were 114
surah
s
,
each the result of a different encounter between Gabriel and Muhammad, sometimes in the cave at Hira, sometimes while Muhammad was at home with his wives, sometimes as he lay dreaming on the rock-hard cot that—Mina said—Muhammad slept on his whole life, even once he had become something like a king and could afford so much more.

Mina explained a way of dividing the Quran into thirty sections of equal length called
juz.
This was how the
hafiz
broke it up, the
hafiz,
or those who knew our holy book by heart. Mina said that becoming a
hafiz
was one of the greatest things a person could do in one’s life. It meant not only securing one’s own place in Janaat, but a place for one’s parents as well: Janaat, our word for “Paradise”: that garden in the sky that was the ultimate end of all our labors. And though I didn’t know much about our faith, I knew how important Paradise was. To us Muslims, life here on earth was of no value if it did not lead to that abode of endless peace and pleasure, where rivers of milk and honey flowed, and where the famous virgin hordes awaited our arrival.

I didn’t know what the word “virgin” meant, though I knew it had something to do with the uneasy fascination and shame that came over me when, say, Bo Derek floated across our TV screen jogging through a golden haze in ads for
10
; or while watching the endless parade of bikini-clad women in high heels stopping to pose for the camera on the beauty pageants that Mother—inexplicably, considering her seemingly ceaseless disdain for white women—watched religiously. I knew the word “virgin” had something to do with the lure of a woman’s unclothed body, still mysterious to me, as I knew nothing more about the facts of life than that it was the name of a television show about four girls at boarding school. And compounding my confusion was the apparent paradox: Why were these bodies so forbidden to us now if they were precisely what was promised to us later in Janaat?

“Are you a
hafiz,
Auntie?” I asked.

She laughed. “I’m too lazy for that,
behta.
Learning the Quran is hard work. It takes many years, and a very special person. A
hafiz
never gives up.”

Nothing seemed more remarkable to me at that moment than the mysterious
hafiz,
whoever they were.

Mina turned the pages back to the opening. “Let’s read it again,” she said.

“Together?”

“No,
behta.
You read it to me.”

I did. My voice rattled softly in my throat and chest as I read aloud. When Mina stopped me to ask if I understood what I was saying, I realized I’d been paying no attention to what I was reading, only to the pleasure of the sounds themselves.

So I read the verses to her again.

“I understand the words, Hayat,” she said, stopping me. “I want to know what they
mean.
”

I was looking at her lips as she spoke, their pink, plump, ridged surface moving with her words. The side of her face was bright, lit by her bedside lamp, and the other half receded gently into shadows. She was beautiful.

“Hayat? Hayat?”

“Yes, Auntie?”

“I want you to concentrate, okay?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Let’s take a look at these lines again. Three words are repeated more than one time …What are they?”

I looked down at the page. In the lamplight, the black letters pulsed against the yellow-white page; Mina’s fingers—tipped with red—moved along the lines. I tried to focus, looking for the repeated words.

In the name of God, the Benevolent, the Merciful.

Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds,

The Benevolent, the Merciful.

 “ ‘God,’ ‘benevolent,’ ‘merciful,’ ” I said.

“Good. Now, you already know what ‘God’ means. But how about these other words. Let’s start with ‘merciful.’ What does ‘merciful’ mean?”

“It means nice?”

“Not only. It means something more precise than that.”

I had a soft feeling about the word, something kind, something released or releasing. But I didn’t know how to explain it.

“I don’t know,” I replied, annoyed.

“Let me help you, Hayat…When someone hits you, what do you do about it?”

“Hit them back?”

“Or?”

I thought for a moment. “You tell someone?”

She smiled. “Or?”

I didn’t know.

“You can forgive them,” she said. “If you forgive them, you’re showing mercy.” I was surprised. There was a force in the clarity of her definition. It made her seem even more remarkable to me. “And ‘benevolent’?” she continued. “Do you know what that means?”

I shrugged. I didn’t.

“It means doing good,” she said, softly. “When you do something good, you are being benevolent.” She reached out and touched the side of my face. “So what is the beginning of our Quran saying?”

“That God forgives? And He does good?”

She smiled. “That’s exactly right, Hayat. And I want to tell you something else, something very special…” She leaned in, her voice lowered, her lightly British accent more pronounced than usual as she went on: “Something no one told me until I was older than you…and I don’t want you to forget it. Okay?”

I nodded.

“Allah will always forgive you, no matter what you do.
No matter what you do.
All you have to do is to
ask
to be forgiven. That’s what it means that He is
merciful.
And Allah is also
benevolent.
And that means He will make sure that whatever happens to you is always for the good.”

“You mean that even the bad things that happen to us are for the good, right?”

“Exactly, sweetie.” There was a fire in her eyes now. “This
surah
is telling us about Allah’s nature,
behta.
That it is His nature to forgive us. And it is His nature always to do what is
for the good. And what it means is very simple: You never have to worry. Never. You are safe. As safe as if Allah Himself were holding you in the palm of His hand.” She put out her palm, its narrow, waxen surface glowing above a network of crisscrossing lines. Like the page—and her fingers on it earlier—her hand struck me as startling, vivid, breathing with life. She kissed me on the forehead again. “Allah be with you,
behta.
”

That night my nerve ends teemed and pulsed. I still recall the vividness of my cotton pajamas against my arms and legs, the fabric pressing here and there, distinct points of contact alive with pleasure. And this was only the surface. Deep inside, things were stirring as well. Even my bones seemed to be breathing. My body felt whole, one, unified, filled with air, expanding with light.