American Taliban (14 page)

I’m glad to hear it, Barbara said, drily. I’m very pleased to hear that my son has a percentage of good sense, however slight it is.

John put his hand on her shoulder. Mom, it’s nice to see you, too.

She pulled up in front of TipTops. I’ll be a moment, she said.

John grabbed his board and got out. To grind again on Connecticut. He hadn’t done it since June, when he’d moved down to the Outer Banks, and now, newly back on wheels, he couldn’t get enough of it. Besides he knew every seam of this sidewalk, every lip and crack, every metal plate. He could skate Connecticut Avenue in the dark, in his sleep. His experience of being grounded for ten weeks, he could
now admit, had been terrible, and though he’d accomplished much, read and learned, he’d lived only half a life, the life of the mind, but disconnected from the body, which isn’t full life. It was doable, he’d done it, but life without the physical was life without joy. Physical play makes for intellectual play. Thus he feels deliriously alive, impatient to range wide, to explore new things, new places. Thus he can’t wait. Thus, before Barbara turns the ignition to restart the engine, he blurts it all out:

Mom, he said. I want to study abroad, starting this June. At Islamia College in Pakistan. Khaled’s going.

Pakistan? Barbara echoed. What about Brown?

I checked out Brown’s Middle Eastern studies concentration, which requires extensive language credits and a year abroad in the region, so I’m pretty sure my credits from Islamia will transfer. It’s Pakistan’s most prestigious college, known for the best classical Arabic teaching.

Sounds like an adventure, Barbara said, but is it safe?

It’s in the countryside, in the hills. They have a website you can check out.

But you’ll miss a summer of surfing and the girls.

True, John said. But there’s plenty of white concrete for grinding.

Let’s talk about this at dinner with Dad. We have a reservation at Dish. There’s lunch meat for a sandwich in the fridge. I have two more patients to see today. What will you do this afternoon?

I want to get out on the street, reengage.

She shook her head. Be careful. She pulled up at the house to let him off.

BILL DIDN’T THINK
Pakistan or Islamia such a brilliant idea. Especially after that recent attack on the USS
Cole
, he said.

But that was in Yemen, John said.

If you wanted to study abroad in England or Ireland, for example, or anywhere else, I’d have no objections, but that region is a violent place right now.

Unfortunately, Barbara said, Ireland doesn’t offer immersion in Arabic.

It’ll be hot in the summer, Bill warned, and I don’t think they’ll be offering air-conditioning.

I’ll get used to it, John said. The pics show a beautiful campus. The main building is supposed to be an important example of Moghul architecture.
But a simple life will be part of the experience. I’ll live in the dorms, and they’re probably not that different from college dorms in the U.S., minus cable and DSL.

True, Bill said, and John felt he’d been persuasive enough, at least for now. After which, they moved on to other things: John’s healing bones, his therapist, Noor, the Bint-Khans, the surprise of the polls, which showed W. running alongside Gore.

Muslim Americans, John said, are voting for Bush. According to Khaled. I guess they’re more comfortable with religious people.

Orthodox Jews, Barbara said, feel the same way. It’s a tragic mistake. But we’re doing what we can. I had your jacket dry-cleaned. You’ll find several pressed shirts in your closet. And please, for once, would you wear a tie?

JOHN ENJOYED THE BUSY WEEKEND
, his mother’s attention, his father’s objections, and then he was relieved to get on the Sunday evening train back to New York, to the quiet of his apartment in Brooklyn, where his daily schedule and activities were entirely determined by his own interests and needs. He would see them again on Thanksgiving.

On the train, he practiced the seven Qur’anic verses he was committing to memory. Then he reread the pamphlet on prayer. It wasn’t as if he’d never prayed before. He had, but informally, stepping onto a wave, or ollying up for a particular grind. Now he wanted to experience what the pamphlet called creative prayer, but did that mean he had to accept God as his God? Because that’s what the prayer declared: There is no God but God, and Muhammed is his prophet. But what did that mean exactly? Of course God is God. Who else would he be? He brooded and doodled. On the back cover of the pamphlet, he sketched the black Ka’ba at Mecca, a closed box, then erased a small opening at the top of the box for the column that jutted out, Ibn ’Arabi’s great secret, the symbol that directed him back to himself because it was the only entrance to the temple and to the black stone within it. The column, ’Arabi understood, represented the individual, the angel of the self. And the secret of divinity, the divine itself was within the self, his I. John noted that the column could be perceived as an I and drew it that way, and then understood this as his own revelation,
an original one. Which pleased him. No matter what Barbara said, John was convinced that the idea of private prayer as an opportunitty to achieve one’s highest potential was not a lot of talk about nothing. Still, he would find out for sure, he would learn it and try it and prove for himself whether it was a nothing or a something. He would revisit the masjid and ask the brother to teach him how to perform the salaat. He would know what there is to know. He would find out whether for him, personally, God amounted to an absence or a presence or a nothing. If only he could concentrate all the powers of his heart, as Corbin wrote. If only he could achieve the kind of prayer that serves as an act of creation. He prayed to achieve it.

THE LECTURE, TITLED ORTHODOXY:
An End to Prophecy, started with the claim that dogmatic religion brought prophetism to an end, meaning the end of individual excellence. Prophecy, the professor explained, is a personal, self-generated calling, independent of church, community, and group thinking. When the church placed the incarnation in a particular moment in historical time with no possibility of its recurring in the present or future, it rejected the second-century Montanist prophets and brought prophecy to an end. What is history but a fable agreed upon, he quoted Emerson quoting Napoleon; Emerson concluded that there is properly no history, only biography. In other words, the church availed itself of history in a play for power, and falseness and lies arrive as soon as the law of community is given precedence over the needs of the individual. In Islam, as in the Christian incarnation, the divine manifests itself in human form, but not on earth, and significantly not in a historic past, but recurrently, in the middle world, the world of the imagination also known as Hurqalya, and this is why, so long as there are humans with active imaginations capable of experiencing Hurqalya, the sophistry of the phrase God is dead doesn’t exist in Islam. You have not and will not hear anyone write or say that Allah is dead. But unfortunately Islam, which never should have a church or authoritative council, is also guilty of corruption, the scholar finished.

Mr. Bint-Khan introduced John as his daughter’s new, scholarly friend and asked whether he had any questions for the professor.

John thought a moment. Yes, he said. I would ask why Islam calls itself the seal of prophecy if recurrent incarnation is at its heart. Also, doesn’t the professor believe that we are turning back toward prophecy and individual excellence, especially here in America, where personal achievement is so highly valued? You might almost be able to argue that achievement is the American religion.

The professor demurred. Your good questions require another lecture.

NOOR HAD AN ESSAY
due the next morning, on the subject of genre, the memoir versus the autobiographical novel, or the personal essay versus the reported, fact-driven piece. She complained that there wasn’t that much to say on the subject, that it seemed to her that fabrication didn’t belong in journalism, case closed.

John disagreed. It’s basically on the question of fiction as truth, on whether the imagination can inform fact, and therefore might help journalism. For example the professor’s ideas on prophecy.

I don’t see how prophecy could inform the subject of genres in literature and journalism, Noor said.

John wondered how she couldn’t see it. Think of prophecy itself as a genre. The prophet believes in his vision the way any artist does, so he thinks he’s prophesying the truth. And it is true for him because it comes out of his own head, his Hurqalya—I love that word, hurqalya, because it makes everything possible. This is really cool stuff to write about.

I don’t know if I can figure it all out for this paper, but I’ll think about it.

When they said good night, Noor stood on her toes for the left-right-left kiss, though he was wearing his white tunic again, and he walked home wondering whether she no longer objected to his dressing as a Muslim. And was dressing as a Muslim the beginning of becoming one? He asked himself whether this was what he wanted, whether his interest in Arabic literature and Sufism required that he accept the face of Islam, whether immersion had to include, as it did for Richard Burton, submission. John asked himself whether he was prepared to bear witness. Faith, he understood by now, was not a simple act of belief; faith was active prayer, and prayer was creative, an invitation
to his divine self, to the fulfillment of his own highest capacity. With Brother Gabirol’s help, he’d learned and was practicing the salaat, with its recitals of the tasbeeh, the tamheed, and the tahleel, rehearsing the head turns, first right, then left, pronouncing the illaha il’allah. In solitude, in the privacy of his apartment, he was praying daily, but he worried that Noor would disapprove.

He also didn’t tell her that he’d committed to zakat. And now Ramadan was only three weeks away, and he hadn’t yet decided whether to fast. He would discuss it with Brother Gabirol, who would ask whether John was ready for the shahada, and John didn’t know. If he could commit only to prophecy, reject dogma, all repression and restriction and politics, then yes, he could declare himself ready to submit to Islam. That, it seemed to him, was the professor’s choice; and that was what he, too, would choose: prophecy, vision, divine potential without dogma, law, and the restrictions of orthodoxy.

The professor, Khaled assured him, is Muslim. Islam is the least dogmatic of the three religions, though there are people who’re trying to change that. In fact, it’s the only religion that’s interpreted legally, by lawyers. That’s why religious persecution like the heresy trials of the Spanish Inquisition could never happen in Islam, not legally anyway.

So, John kept asking himself, was he prepared to submit?

He said the word shahada, practicing the sound of the Arabic
h
, which was formed deeper in the throat than the English one. It had some gargle in it, a sound that didn’t exist in the English language. The professor articulated beautifully, with perfect stops between syllables, a space of sound represented on the page by the apostrophe. It was a beat, a hesitation, a stutter. At school, the students seemed to swallow that silent note, to hurry on to the next one or forget to leave the opening, but hearing it in the professor’s Arabic, John felt it was as necessary a beat as silent beats are in music because it made the Arabic musical, and correct. Mr. Bint-Khan also made time for this silence; Noor, John noticed, only did it when she was reciting or quoting. Attempting it, John found he waited too long, he fell behind, lost the rhythm of the phrase and sentence. The timing wasn’t all that easy. He would have to live the language along with the life in order to learn it. Done right, it sounded a bit like a click.

THEY FINALLY GOT AROUND
to visiting the red brick plaza bordered by Franklin Street to the south, Pearl Street to the east, Park Row to the west, and Police Plaza to the north, known to skateboarders everywhere as the Brooklyn Banks.

With Noor on foot and John on wheels, they crossed a municipal parking lot and a housing project and made their way to the sloping walls under the shadow of the bridge. The sound of so many wheels grinding on concrete made his heart pump.

This is weird, Noor said. I’ve lived here forever and I never heard of this place. But who’d think of a park under the bridge. And it doesn’t exactly look like a park anyway.

John filled her in on the Banks’ history. It’s legendary for skateboarding. The most awesome skaters have grinded here.

But it’s like a rundown dump, Noor said.

Skaters don’t mind rundown, John said. Watch what they do and you’ll understand why. Here, watch this guy.

They watched a kid ollie his skateboard onto a rail, slide down, land, and roll away. That was an ollie to a feeble to a backside grind, John explained. Watch again. He’s good. He lands buttery, pops out of his feeble, and continues grinding as if it’s all nothing.

Can you do that? Noor asked.

Yeah, but this guy is good.

He took Noor’s hand and led her to another spot, so she could see from a different angle.

This trick, he said, is known as the heelflip. It’s so fast, it’s hard to see what he’s doing. I’ll show it to you in slow motion, or I’ll explain it to you without actually doing it. I’m sworn off tricks for another month. But watch. He’s doing it again. His front foot’s in the middle, toes hanging off the side. His back foot’s on the tail, ball of the foot on the corner. He bends his knees, he’s balanced over his heels. He’s starting his jump. Now. His toe smacks down on the tail. Now he’s dragging his front foot up toward the nose, kicks off the corner of the nose. Flips the board. I can’t say it quickly enough to keep up. Watch again. He stops the board from overflipping. Now he’s landed, balanced himself, and he rolls away.