The Butterfly Mosque (2 page)

“I guess the Almighty doesn't bargain,” I said one day to Elizabeth, who lived down the hall. We were on our way to Eli Wiesel's annual lecture on the Book of Job, about which we had to write a paper.

“Not with miserable sinners,” she said cheerfully. She was Episcopalian.

“There is such a thing as respect, you know.” Javad, whose steady supply of dining hall cookies and sympathy helped prompt my brush with Islam, appeared behind us
with some other students from our section. “Even if God is only a hypothetical to you.” He was a serious person, and smoked Djarum Blacks; he was not amused by my attitude toward the whole thing.

“I'm being respectful,” I said. “I was serious. Hypotheti-cally serious.”

“So you feel like hypothetical God abandoned you?” He raised one eyebrow.

“No, I don't. But I'm having trouble understanding why that is.”

“Of course you don't. You can't feel abandoned by a God you don't believe in,” Elizabeth pointed out. I shook my head.

“I'm not sure it's that simple.”

We found seats in the middle of the lecture hall just as Dr. Wiesel was being introduced. Since we were humanities students, the idea of listening to a lecture on Job was not all that terrifying. We had already faced Confucius, the Stoics, and the Bhagavad Gita and come through relatively unscathed. But as Dr. Wiesel talked about the role of suffering in God's covenant with the Jews, I began to feel uncomfortable.

“I don't think that's what it means,” I muttered.

“What?” Elizabeth frowned at me.

“Job. I don't think that's what it's about. I think it's about—”

Someone several rows back made a shushing noise.

“I think it's about monotheism,” I said, “the idea that faith in the God of mercy is also faith in the God of destruction. God causes Job's suffering, not the devil.”

The shushing became more insistent. I slumped in my seat, dissatisfied.

When I made my desperate offer to trade faith for health, I had not read a word of the Quran. My otherwise exhaustive liberal education skipped right over it. The professors I queried said teaching the Quran as a work of literature angered Muslim students and put everybody at risk. I was skeptical of this answer. When we studied the Bible, it was as a work of
holy
literature, and there was a level of respect and suspension of disbelief in our discussions. If the Quran was afforded the same treatment, I had trouble believing Muslim students would be so ominously displeased. The few that I knew—Javad and one or two others—seemed benign enough. Through them, I had picked up some stray facts: I knew there were two major sects of Islam, and I knew not all Muslims were Arabs. But I knew almost nothing about what they believed, and even with a $30,000-a-year education, I had no idea Islam was the world's second-largest religion.

I began to investigate Islam on my own, and tried to understand the relationship of the three Abrahamic traditions. The beliefs of my religious friends, once a source of silent pity, were now fascinating: I wanted to know about the Trinity and the Eucharist and the Jewish concept of the afterlife. I discovered opinions I did not know I held.

“If there is one omniscient omnipotent God, why send a holy spirit to impregnate Mary? Why the extra step? Couldn't He just cause her to become spontaneously pregnant? Isn't that what omnipotence is? Why do people always
point up when they talk about Heaven? If heaven is up there, where is it in China? Down? Where is it on the moon? How could there be such a thing as inherited sin? Isn't that a fundamentally unjust idea?” I was persistent, maybe even rude, and my questions were often met with ruffled silence. These are questions atheists often use to dismantle religion, but to me, they were urgent attempts to name what I was finding harder and harder to ignore.

I had been taught that it was weak minded to believe the world was created by an invisible man with superpowers. But what if God was not an invisible man with superpowers? Atheism had never taught me how to answer that question. It had only taught me to reject primitive little
-g
gods; anthropomorphized, local entities subject to the laws of time and space—it had taught me, in other words, to reject Zeus and the Keebler elves. And the God to whom I had prayed so desperately was not Zeus.

When I prayed, maybe I was trying to justify a belief I already held. Being ill had shaken something loose in my head. Sitting up at night under dark windows, my perceptions had altered. My body was no longer an infinite resource but a union of thousands of fragile things, chemicals and precursors and proteins, all in a balance that could easily be upset. That so many people were well—that I had been well for so long—seemed miraculous.

Illnesses usually bring people to religion through the front door; mine brought me through the back. I did not need to know if I was being punished or tested. Neither my health nor my illness was about me. The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that
helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me.

That unified force was a God too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion. It was unclear to me whether there was a philosophy big enough for monotheism so adamant. It had to be a faith that didn't need to struggle to explain why bad things happen to good people, a faith in which it was understood that destruction is implicit in creation. I had a faint attraction to Buddhism, but Buddhism was not theist enough; the role of God was obscure or absent. I would have liked to be a Christian. My life would have been much easier if I could stomach the Trinity and inherited sin, or the idea that God had a son. Judaism was a near perfect fit, but it was created for a single tribe of people. Most practicing Jews I knew took a dim view of conversion. To them, membership in the historical community of Jews was as important as belief.

In Islam, which encouraged conversion, there were words for what I believed.
Tawhid,
the absolute unity of God.
Al Haq,
the truth so true it had no corresponding opposite, truth that encompassed both good and evil. There were no intermediary steps in the act of creation, God simply said,
Kun, fa yakun.
“Be, so it is.” I began to have a feeling
of déjà vu. It was as if my promise to become a Muslim was not a coincidence but a kind of inversion; a future self speaking through a former self.

It was a feeling that intensified as I stood in front of a vending machine in my Warren Towers dorm in the spring of my illness, on the verge of an epiphany. Another girl in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms stood in front of me with a deflated expression.

“Screw this,” she said, punching the glass that divided her from the Almond Joy stuck inside, dangling by its wrapper. She sighed and turned away, muttering “Good luck,” as she passed. Her T-shirt read, “Why does it always rain on
me?
” Apparently she had dressed for this moment of synchronicity.

I punched in the code for a Snickers. As it fell, it hit the trapped Almond Joy. When I pushed in the flap at the bottom of the machine I saw two candy bars, side by side. I looked around for the other girl, but she was gone.

“
Kun
,” I said to no one, and laughed. “
Kun fa yakun.
”

At that moment, the girl with the synchronous T-shirt was more upset about losing her candy bar than I was about having
osteopenia,
low bone mineral density. The moral microcosm of Warren Towers seemed profoundly balanced. What I had suffered was so slight compared to so many people; how appropriate that all I got for it was an Almond Joy.

I had just read a verse of the Quran about
rizq,
which translates as “sustenance,” but has threads of destiny and fortune running through it. “Oh you who believe, partake of the good things We have provided for you as sustenance,
and give thanks to God, if it is truly Him that you worship.” With an infinitesimal shift in probability, an invisible wink, a little
rizq
had been redistributed. The world seemed without contradiction. It was called into being,
kun,
with pain and synchronicity and malfunctioning vending machines already written on it. I was abandoning my ability to distinguish between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic.

At home in Colorado that summer, I got a new tattoo. An artist named Fish inked
Al Haq
across my lower back in Arabic calligraphy, talking to me as he worked to keep my mind off the pain. I had signed up to take Arabic in the fall; in the interim I taught myself part of the alphabet out of an old textbook, to make sure I knew what I was putting on my body.
Al Haq
joined another tattoo designed by a kabbalist from Rhode Island, who gave me my first ink at seventeen after I showed him a fake ID. He had told me that nobody gets two tattoos—they either get one or they get lots. I would get two more before I quit, making the first in a series of difficult negotiations between art and religious law. As it is in Judaism, tattooing is frowned upon in mainstream Islam. The body is God's creation, and therefore perfect; any medically unnecessary alteration is seen as an affront. I'm glad I didn't know that when I decided to get this tattoo, because I'm not sure it would have stopped me.

Al Haq
was a note to myself that I could not erase. As I got healthier, it would be easy to forget this part of my life, to go back to thinking the world contained only me and whatever I wanted at any given moment. Now I had a permanent
physical reminder. One day I would work up the courage to convert. I wasn't ready yet—I still had chemical and social crutches, and it would take time to learn to live without them. When they were gone, though, I knew what I had to be.

Zuljanah walked forward a few steps and stopped. Husayn stroked the horse's white neck and said, “My faithful horse, I know you are thirsty and tired. You have been carrying me since morning. My faithful horse, for the last time, take me to the battlefield.”

—Islamic folktale

B
ACK AT
BU
THREE WEEKS LATER
, I
WOKE UP TO A STRANGE
piece of news on the BBC World Service: Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghani resistance leader who kept the Taliban at bay in the north for almost two decades, had been shot by men posing as journalists. I had been following his life for a class, and knew how important he was in the Afghan struggle against the Taliban and its allies. I was surprised that more attention was not paid to the cleverly staged attack that brought about his death. In all probability, it had been carried out by his fundamentalist enemies. The fact that they could come up with a plan so canny and sophisticated was a little scary.

If working adults were graded on their knowledge of current events the way college juniors are, we would live in a very different world. I felt a kind of nausea that begins
between your eyes, like vertigo; the experience you have when you see a car skid across the center line and can picture the crash that is about to take place. Massoud's death was not the endgame; it couldn't be. He had been eliminated in preparation for something else.

It was September 11, 2001, at about eight thirty in the morning.

Boston is rarely part of the conversation about the attacks, but guilt was palpable in the streets afterward. The terrorists who hit the South Tower flew out of Logan Airport, the terrorists had been in Boston not two hours earlier, the terrorists
could have been stopped here
—people spoke as though they had been personally negligent. Then there was the paranoia: it was rumored that another terrorist cell was still in the city. We were to be quarantined, cut off from bridges and rail routes until the cell could be found. A few hysterical BU students rushed to South Station to catch trains home “before they shut everything down.” There was no cell and no quarantine. But F-15s flew overhead, deafeningly low, and the sirens never stopped. My parents left a number of terrified messages on my phone, afraid I might have gone to New York to visit friends at NYU, as I sometimes did on weekends. I sent e-mails in return, begging them to obey the official request to stay off the phones.

With remarkable foresight, the chancellor of BU kept classes in session that day, becoming one of the first to argue that if we disrupted our way of life we would be helping the terrorists. And so, at three p.m., I went to the Arabic class I'd signed up for the previous spring, carrying a textbook whose title began with a big scarlet
A
.

The next evening I made dinner plans at the student union with Ben, another history major. I brought my Arabic homework, but lost interest as soon as I opened the book. I jumped when Ben tossed his bag on the chair opposite mine and sat down.

“I have a flask of gin in my coat,” he said. “I say we get hammered and go see
Zoolander.
Apparently the movie theaters are open. I can't handle this anymore.”

I sighed with relief. “Yes. Sure. That's the best idea I've heard all day.”

We ate in silence and left, walking down a balmy and subdued Commonwealth Avenue toward the Fenway.

“What do you think is going to happen?” Ben asked without preamble, passing me the gin. It was cool and piney, like pool water and Christmas trees.

“I'm glad it's not my job to know,” I said. I didn't want to think about it. My Arabic professor, a cheerful but permanently annoyed Egyptian man, had come to class looking exhausted. At that point, we assumed the retaliatory blow would fall on one of the countries whose citizens were responsible for the attacks.