City of Veils (25 page)

And We shall marry them to a companion, with beautiful, big, and lustrous eyes.

The verse was a promise that the blessed would reach paradise and be rewarded by truth and beauty. The word
companion
was supposed to be
hur
, a plural form of
houri
, which meant grapes. It also meant young virgins. Of course, the choice of meaning was clear, because who married a grape with beautiful eyes? But instead of
hur
, the text showed the word
ahwar
. It meant a single male companion, which didn’t make sense.

And We shall marry them to a single male companion, with beautiful, big, and lustrous eyes

His head was swimming. He mistrusted his eyes. “Do you have a copy of the Quran?” he asked Majdi.

Majdi left the room and came back a few minutes later with a worn copy of the holy book. He passed it to Nayir.

Nayir opened the book to the appropriate sura, feeling ridiculous but determined to hold the real Quran side by side with the mistake. He set the book beside the paper, comparing the two with Holmesian thoroughness.

“There’s a mistake here,” he said. His voice came out pinched. Majdi came over and Nayir showed him the phrase.

Majdi looked unsurprised. “I thought so,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there had to be some reason Leila hid these under her dresser drawer.”

“Well, yes,” Nayir said. “But where did she get them? And why have they been altered?”

“They weren’t necessarily altered,” Majdi said. “It’s probably a bad copy. I mean, a thousand years ago they didn’t have white-out.”

“Then it should have been burned,” Nayir said.

“Burned?”

Nayir reminded himself that not everyone kept up to date on fatwas. Still, it seemed like something everyone should know. “The Hadith says that when ‘Uthmaan produced the first standard and complete version of the Quran, he burned all the excess, incomplete copies. It protected them from being stepped on or desecrated.”

Majdi looked unimpressed.

“He buried them, too,” Nayir went on. “But I think when a document contains a mistake like this—especially something that would lead to a misinterpretation—the general agreement among sheikhs is that it ought to be burned.”

Majdi was one of those people who thought with his whole body. His eyes were scrunched up, fingers drumming his chin.

Katya came in the door behind them. She looked slightly frazzled, probably from the meeting with her boss. Majdi greeted her and proceeded to explain the inconsistency in the text.

“So somebody made a mistake copying it,” Katya said. “What does that mean?”

“Well, Nayir and I were just discussing the fact that when mistakes are made in copying the Quran, the bad copies are usually burned.”

“Do you know how old these documents really are?” she asked.

“No, but I’ve got an archaeologist from the university coming in this afternoon. He should be able to help.”

“Okay, but we can assume they’re pretty old.”

“That’s what we’ve been assuming,” Majdi said.

“Let’s say that they are, and they didn’t get burned,” she said. “Someone overlooked them, or they were hidden somewhere.”

“Or…” Majdi sighed and glanced nervously at Nayir. “It might not be a mistake.”

“What do you mean?” Nayir said. An awful premonition was forming. “It would have to be a copy mistake.” He wanted to say more, but they already knew that the published Quran in front of them was
the
Quran.

Majdi plunged ahead: “Have you ever heard of the Yemen documents?” he asked.

They shook their heads.

“About thirty years ago, an archaeologist in Yemen came across a paper grave. It was a site where old copies of the Quran were stored; it was actually in the roof of the Great Mosque of Sana’a. The archaeologist, I can’t remember his name, realized that the documents were very old, and the antiquities people brought in some German scholars to work on the preservation. There were a lot of documents—thousands of pages’ worth—and it took them about twenty years to sort them all out and get everything cleaned and treated and assembled.

“Anyway, the German scholars have claimed that the documents are authentic early copies of the Quran. In fact, they’re the earliest copies ever found. Except that there are many minor differences between those old pages and the modern text today. In the old codex, the verses were out of order, and the text itself was different in places. Some of the documents were palimpsests; they showed obvious signs of having been edited.”

“Someone edited the Quran?” Katya asked, clearly surprised.

“Yeah, well, the scholars are fairly certain that because these documents were so old, they represented an earlier and more authentic version of the Quran than the one we currently have.”

Katya glanced at Nayir just as he said, “There are no ‘versions’ of the Quran.”

Majdi looked uncomfortably at Katya before going on: “Obviously, this idea didn’t go over too well. I don’t know what’s happening with their research now. I’m only telling you this because I think it’s possible that these are part of the cache that was found in Sana’a—or at least, they’re something very similar.”

Katya shook her head, looking slightly overwhelmed.

“And it’s obvious,” Majdi went on, “that Leila was hiding them. No matter where they came from, they wouldn’t be well received in this country if they contained mistakes—no matter what the reason for the mistakes was.”

This was met by a tense silence.

“Personally,” Majdi said, “I don’t think anyone should have a problem with it. There have obviously been variations of the holy book over the centuries, or ‘Uthmaan wouldn’t have had to burn anything in the first place. And if the Quran was written down in error, then it’s human error.”

“The Quran says Allah corrects His errors,” Nayir replied and quoted:
“And for whatever verse We abrogate and cast into oblivion, We bring a better or the like of it; knowest thou not that Allah is powerful over everything?”

“Right,” Majdi said. He looked as if he were making an effort not to roll his eyes. “But as a person who cares about the Quran, shouldn’t you be curious to know which version is correct? Wouldn’t you want to know better what Allah really said?”

“This is what Allah said,” Nayir replied, touching the printed Quran.

Katya was quick to intervene. “But Majdi, just because the document is old doesn’t mean it’s
not
full of errors. What you’re saying raises the possibility that the whole text is full of human error. But then how can you know which parts of it are authentic?”

“Exactly,” Majdi replied, “and don’t forget that the Quran was originally written in Aramaic, so it was
translated
on top of everything else.”

Katya bit her lip, looking worried.

“Actually, I don’t think this should matter so much,” Majdi went on, seemingly immune to the tension around him. “What’s really important about the Quran is already there, isn’t it? Love Allah, love your neighbor. And the idea that there’s only one way to read it reduces the whole book to something flat. It’s not dynamic anymore. It can’t keep up with the changes in humanity. It just becomes an ornament.”

Nayir stared uncomprehendingly at him. He almost couldn’t believe what the young man had said. Arguing that the Quran was some sort of human project was insulting enough, but going on to say that one of the Quran’s finest aspects—it being
mubeen,
its purity, the fact that it hadn’t been altered since its inception—was actually a detriment seemed over the top.

“It all comes down to this,” Katya intervened. “We don’t really know anything about these documents. They could have been falsified. Until we find out who their owner is, and what they were doing in Leila’s bedroom, we should avoid speculation.”

I
t was too early in the morning for a stern conversation. Osama tried not to squirm. Sitting across from Chief Inspector Hassan Riyadh was the career equivalent of being beaten by an
‘iqal;
it would leave marks, but it wouldn’t necessarily deform you. Riyadh was a master of courtroom silences that would alternate, awkwardly, with a false paternalism. He was a man with seven children and two wives but seemingly no comprehension of how to handle people. Osama had visited him at home during past Ramadans, and the man had been just as awkward in his own house. On a normal day, Osama could keep a cool façade in the face of whatever beating he was about to take, but today he felt weak.

He blamed this on the fact that he’d slept for only four hours on the unforgiving rug of his sitting room floor. When he’d arrived home last night, Nuha had met him at the door with a terrible expression of fear and apology on her face. Obviously she’d found her birth control pills lying scattered on the kitchen table. He could still see it now, still feel wounded by the tears welling in her eyes and the image of himself turning away. Seeing Abu-Haitham come in the door behind him, Nuha had fled to the women’s sitting room, which is just what Osama had intended by inviting the most devout man in the department over for dinner. It had ensured that Nuha would not have a chance to speak to her husband all night. Of course her mother had come in to bring dinner and to shoot him nasty looks, but otherwise he’d managed to avoid the whole family.

He and Abu-Haitham had stayed up until two in the morning making a futile and often confusing attempt to profile the Nawar killer. He had woken up this morning on the floor of the men’s sitting room. The call to prayer was ringing through the neighborhood’s loudspeakers. Abu-Haitham was asleep on the sofa above him.

Even though it was the weekend, Chief Riyadh had called him in anyway. Osama dreaded the meeting, but he dreaded staying at home even more. Across the desk, Chief Riyadh sucked on his lower lip and regarded Osama coolly. They’d been discussing the Nawar case, the chief demanding to know why they hadn’t found the victim’s cousin or ex-husband yet. Osama reassured him that it was still early in the investigation and that they were working on a number of promising leads, but that it was going to take some time. Now the chief was glowering at him.

“I’m cutting your support staff in half,” he said, forestalling Osama’s protest by soldiering on. “You don’t need this many men if you’ve only got these thin leads you’ve mentioned, so you’re going to have to make do.”

Osama heard in this a familiar criticism—that he had been foolish enough to trust his partner Rafiq, and that he might even have been in on all the dirty dealing himself. It galled him that Rafiq had been scapegoated when so many other officers were corrupt. It was doubly annoying that Riyadh was now using Osama’s former partnership with Rafiq to keep him under his thumb.

“All right,” he said. “Then I want to keep at least one woman.”

“You can have access to one, but I’m not handing any of them over permanently,” Riyadh said. “We’ve got precious few of them; they get prioritized, too. Who were you working with?”

“Faiza Shanbari,” he said.

“You can’t have her.”

“Why not?”

“She was let go this morning,” Riyadh said, emotionless. Osama managed not to give a visible reaction, but his mind was racing. Faiza had been fired? She couldn’t have done anything to merit that.

“Turns out she wasn’t really married,” the chief said. “One of the detectives in the department met a cousin of hers at a friend’s house, and he put the matter straight.”

Osama blinked, trying to believe it. “Her cousin?” he said. “What did Faiza say?”

“She admitted that she’d lied.”

Osama’s heart swooped. He finished the meeting as quickly as he could and left the chief’s office. The building was air-conditioned, and he was grateful for that, but his blood was still pumping as he made his way to the forensics lab. He wasn’t sure why he was going there, just that he needed to avoid his desk, the horrible emptiness of his office, as much as he needed to avoid the squad room with the crowding and loud laughter and telephones jangling. As he walked, he felt the flickers of grief give way to anger—at Riyadh for firing Faiza for such a small, stupid lie, at Faiza for being stupid and lying in the first place, and then for being stupid again and admitting the truth to Riyadh. And most of all anger at Nuha.

Majdi was in the lab with a woman. When she turned, he saw that it was one of their newer hires, Katya, who had come to his attention recently for discovering the Bluetooth in Leila Nawar’s burqa. He was impressed that she was working on a weekend. He stood outside the glass-walled office for a moment, not in the mood to face a stranger right now. But when she saw him she didn’t lower her burqa, and he figured it was foolish to keep standing there.

“Good morning,” Majdi said, getting up from his stool with a downcast expression that indicated he would have few new revelations to impart. Osama greeted them both.

“Glad you’re in today,” Osama said. He turned to Katya: “Congratulations on the Bluetooth discovery.”

“Thank you.” She looked pleased and a little surprised.

“I just wanted to check on things,” he said to Majdi, realizing from the looks on their faces that his tension was showing. “Any more news on the Nawar case?”