The Islam Quintet

by Tariq Ali

  The intense affection that Jindié felt for him could only have heightened the pain she felt when it became obvious he did not know her. What did he know? Did he remember his Maoist days? Was the past a total nonstarter? It couldn’t be if speaking in Punjabi had reminded him of Respected. Perhaps it was all inside him waiting for an opportunity to return to the surface. Zahid was confident that some of it would be recovered, though the shock or accident that had caused the loss of memory in the first place must have been a very long time ago. And that would be a problem.

  I returned to the Rue de Bièvre exhausted. Zaynab was out and I switched on the computer to read about memory loss. Nothing definitive. Too many variables. One interesting statistic, however, revealed that in sixty percent of the cases studied in California, memory had largely or completely returned.

  I had seriously considered going to Kunming and Dali with Jindié and Zahid, meeting young Suleiman and discovering what was left of the monuments from the time of the rebellion. How much of the Dali Forbidden City still existed? Had the Manchu, like the Red Guards a century later, wreaked their revenge on the architecture as well? It would all have to wait now. Confucius had become the centre of her world.

  The next day was the first real spring day of the year. Paris was caressed by deliciously warm breezes; Zaynab and I walked virtually the whole day. She had heard about Jindié and me, Zahid and his life from Plato, and clearly in some detail. Now she turned towards me, looking slightly worried.

  ‘I think Jindié still loves you.’

  ‘Aflatuni ishq. Platonic love.’

  ‘Our Plato didn’t think so. Did he ever tell you that when he was being discovered thanks to your help, she would contact him to ask about you and your life?’

  ‘He never told me. It was obviously too trivial to be repeated. In any case it means nothing. I am fond of her. I like her. Nothing more. She and Zahid are quite close in some ways and their life has developed a rhythm that suits both of them. It happens to couples who’ve been together a long time. You look vexed.’

  She did not reply, and I wondered whether this had anything to do with us. I asked her.

  ‘I suppose it does, in a way. When we first became intimate I had no idea what I really felt about you, but now I’ve got used to you. I miss you when you’re not here, and that is not good. What do you think?’

  ‘I think we need to find you a boy toy. A vigorous young stallion who can escort you all over the world. A jockey capable of riding any mare. A Plato-style chauffeur, but young and virile.’

  ‘Be serious, Dara. I’m not joking.’

  I could see numerous obstacles to any permanent arrangement, but I could also see the attractive side of what she proposed. I had got so used to being on my own and enjoying what I did that a complete break in my old routine was unappealing. Perhaps we could be together for long weekends, and more if we wanted, but I could also see that, after a lengthy interval, fate was offering a new possibility on a platter and that, too, was pleasing.

  ‘Let’s talk about this later and see how we should proceed. As you know, I’ve become attached to you.’

  ‘Not so attached that I am invited to stay in your London flat.’

  ‘Let’s go tomorrow. Come and see it for yourself.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  I was, and then I also remembered that neither of us had informed Alice Stepford of Plato’s death. That evening I rang her in New York. She demanded to know why we hadn’t told her. I though it best to be truthful.

  ‘We forgot.’

  She became vituperative, but then calmed down and wept sensibly.

  ‘Has there been an obituary?’

  ‘Two, in Art Monthly. Both good.’

  ‘I meant the New York Times.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m going to write one. And I assume that Zaynab is the executor and all the paintings now belong to her.’

  ‘This is true, Ally.’

  ‘Alice. Good. He did a nude of me once. Usual stuff. Huge balloon-shaped breasts with all the other accompaniments. Could you tell Zaynab that if it hasn’t been sold I’d like to buy it off her? Don’t like the thought of it hanging anywhere. I might e-mail you for some details of his youth, but otherwise I’ll write mainly about his work.’

  Which she did, introducing Plato to an art public that he had neither known nor coveted. He was the only one of my friends who, in all the time I knew him, showed no interest—negative or positive—in the affairs of the United States, or any desire to visit it. This lack of curiosity annoyed me, and when I reprimanded him he would contemptuously shrug his shoulders, but never offered an explanation.

  We may return later to the impact of Ally’s obituary, but in the meantime Zaynab is waiting for me in the restaurant to hear my views on our future. I thought of all the things I liked about her, some of which have already been listed. Another quality that I appreciated was her incapacity to make small talk and to give her undivided attention to people she did not like or value. Better not to speak than maintain a pretence. And though she was in her early fifties now, she had retained a girlish quality, largely with the help of her mischief-filled eyes, and this belied her age. All these traits could not have been the result of her unique upbringing, or other unfortunates in a similar position might have benefited equally. Nor was there a trace of bitterness in her. She did not suspect people she liked of base motives or jump to embittered conclusions regarding their actions. I’m sure that is what Plato saw in her, too, and why he adored her in the way he did.

  My hesitation was purely selfish. I wanted no further disruptions in my life and I was fearful that this might happen, which was why I had devised a compromise formula that might suit us both: weekends and holidays together and every third week a change of city. As I entered the restaurant the first thing I noticed was that the portrait of Balzac had disappeared from the wall. Zaynab sat at her table near the window, smiling. As I joined her she pointed at the menu to indicate that the Balzac quote had disappeared as well. What had happened? That catamite Henri de Montmorency had happened. He had returned one lunchtime and informed the: Spanish proprietor that the place postdated Balzac’s death and this was not a street much visited by the novelist in any case. I should have alerted Henri to the joke, but he had written a highly regarded history of Paris and probably would have become cross with me. History was sacred and woe betide those who took liberties with it. We tried not to laugh. Zaynab whispered that she had told them it was an honest mistake on my part.

  We talked and she appeared perfectly happy with my solution, as long as she could stay with me in London. Why should that have been a problem? She gestured as if to imply that I knew. I was genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Don’t you keep London pure for Jindié?’

  It was jealousy. I burst out laughing, repeated what I had said before, and explained why I hadn’t stayed in the guest room in Richmond and the excuse I had offered Jindié. For a minute I was the subject of a fixed and profound gaze, and then she burst out laughing.

  ‘I know how fussy you are about your cursed coffee. That may well have been the real reason as well. So there were two reasons for not staying. Now I’m convinced.’

  She had more wine than usual that night and at one point was overcome with a giggling fit, to which she was sometimes prone. This time there was no apparent reason. Finally she spoke.

  ‘I have been sworn to total secrecy and if this appears anywhere I’ll lose a very good friend in New York. She’ll never forgive me. It’s about a professor from our parts.’

  ‘Which parts did you have in mind?’

  ‘Geographical. In this case, South Asia.’

  The story concerned egos in academia. A leading professor in the literature department of a university in the Midwest had been invited to Harvard some weeks ago, where she was due to receive an honorary degree, followed by a banquet at which there would be speeches. Her best work was behind her, but it had once helped her acquire an
enormous reputation and a cult following for reasons that even at the time—it was the height of the postmodernist wave in the late Eighties—could be only partially justified. Subsequently she had languished, producing books that her students were compelled to read but that were not part of course lists on other campuses. The New York universities, in particular, had ignored her recent work and had stopped inviting her to lecture. For that reason, the honorary degree at Harvard and the fanfare surrounding it had come at a good time for her.

  During the dinner, at which Zaynab’s friend had been present, the guest of honour was ignored by most of the old men at the table. This lack of attention upset her greatly, and she burst into silent tears, which went unnoticed, and then began to weep loudly. Everyone present fell silent; now she was the centre of their undivided attention. A kindly retired professor in his eighties put his arm around her to ask why she was so upset.

  ‘Well, it’s like this,’ said the visitor. ‘After lying fallow for a long time I acquired a young Egyptian lover last month. All went well till yesterday, when he refused cunnilingus point-blank because of his religion. I just thought about it and that made me cry.’

  There was pin-drop silence. She looked appealingly at the gathering and pleaded for some expert advice. ‘Do any of you know why the Coptic Church forbids cunnilingus?’

  I laughed as Zaynab finished. It was the one of the more original and comprehensible utterances that I’d heard reported of this particular professor in twenty years. And just before leaving the restaurant, I think I managed to convince its hirsute proprietor that whether or not Balzac had literally eaten at this location was irrelevant. His spirit now hovered over this entire area, if not the country as a whole, and he should reinstate the portrait and the quotation. The Spaniard promised to give the matter serious consideration.

  Later that night we agreed that as Plato’s friend and possible biographer, I would accompany Zaynab to her family estates and study his unfinished masterpiece.

  ‘I’ve told you I hate it, D. If your opinion is the same and the work is without any intrinsic value, let it stay at home. Why inflict it on the world? Plato would have respected the decision.’

  Sleep did not come easily that night. Every so often Zaynab would sit up, turn on the lamp and question me. ‘D, what was that stupid Punjabi song that Plato used to sing or hum and which had quite a funny first line but was otherwise conventional?’

  I remembered. ‘The first line was Plato’s contribution, and the rest of the song was early Bollywood, vintage 1958, I think.’

  ‘“The sight of your breasts sends me to sleep.” Stupid Plato.’

  Half an hour later: ‘Are stupid people generally more happy than more intelligent ones?’

  ‘Zaynab, it’s nearly two in the morning.’

  ‘So what? Why, can’t you sleep? But first please answer my question.’

  ‘How the hell should I know? Make a list of your family members and answer your own question.’

  ‘I know some really stupid ones, but that’s not my point. What I mean is whether or not they even understand the concept of happiness.’

  I turned off the light and took her in my arms.

  FIFTEEN

  SIX MONTHS LATER, WHEN I returned to Paris, it was difficult to ignore the fact that Naughty Lateef had taken the city by storm.

  Her book was out. It had been sold to every large publishing corporation in the world. The advances had been modest, since the industry—was in severe crisis, but for this book subventions had been promised by various foundations and cultural organizations to cover the losses. Posters with Naughty’s image were everywhere. She had changed her name to something that was both user-friendly and exotic. She was now Yasmine Auratpasand. The market would respond well to that, with a tiny bit of encouragement from the publishers’ marketing directors. Their shrewdness and cynicism would both ensure good sales and, much more importantly, project the author straight into the world of celebrity. Unlike her male equivalents, she did not need any medical help in the way of a hair transplant or what is unappetizingly referred to as a nose job. Naughty was a healthy Punjabi girl with rustic good looks. All she required was some work on her English diction, but not too much, and on her overeager smile, which she was asked to make a touch more refined, a bit more modest, just enough so that she did not seem to be enjoying her new status quite as much as she actually did. The mediacrats were instructed to go easy on her, at the same time making sure that she became an overnight celebrity. That was important, since she needed to be used to justify, in the sweetest and mildest manner possible, every Western atrocity in Muslim lands requiring justification and simultaneously help to prepare public opinion to accept future crimes. What must be avoided was too early a comparison of her writing with Voltaire’s. That claim had seriously discredited a previous operation of this sort, and Washington had been forced to step in and transport the heroine in question to the safety of a right-wing think-tank. Perhaps in six months’ time the phrase ‘there is a touch of Diderot in her work’ could be suggested to Jean-Pierre Bertrand, the host of Orinico.com, the travelling book show aired on France 2, which was filmed on a cargo plane and sponsored by the eponymous company.

  The interview with Naughty in Le Monde had been conducted or, if readers will pardon a homely truth, written, by one of Zaynab’s dinnerparty guests, who, like most senior journalists in the Western world, wrote copy as imaginative as any of those gallant captains who enlivened the sixteenth century with tales of adventures in unknown worlds where they killed countless brigands and a vast number of heathens. (Those stories in their day had inspired or provoked hundreds of satirical and, sometimes, extremely vulgar sonnets, which were secretly admired by many.)

  In our twenty-first century, a Muslim woman’s real virtues cannot be appreciated on their own, but like the adventurous captains’ have to be spiced up with stories, imagined or real, of courage in the face of overwhelming odds—in her case, of Islamist tyranny. And since the struggle against this tyranny is led by humanitarian politicians and generals with high collateral from the Western world, they and their global network of media acolytes become the final arbiters of what these women’s books are worth. Zaynab, an unsung Muslim heroine of valour, had followed Naughty’s antics with a sense of horror, but also with growing admiration.

  Now she looked at the clock and rushed to switch on her television to Arte. ‘It’s the only thing left worth watching ... sometimes. There were more serious debates on Fatherland TV networks during the military period. Not now.’

  ‘What are we watching?’

  ‘Shhh.’

  Arte had decided to broadcast a live double interview with Naughty and a critic of hers, a hijab-clad Maghrebian Frenchwoman. Their two points of view were to be offered to the viewers as an either-or choice. Zaynab would not let me switch it off, nor would she allow me to leave the room. The show was live, she said, and anything could happen, which I strongly doubted. Very rarely are these things left to chance, and unforeseen spontaneity is muzzled the moment it rears its unwelcome head.

  The silk-shirted interviewer sharing a bit of his hairy chest—it was the ubiquitous Bertrand—introduced the two women in a husky French voice. I preferred reading the German sub-titles.

  ‘Yasmine Auratpasand, of course, is familiar to you. Her struggle for enlightenment in a dark world has inspired us greatly. In the right corner is Yusufa al-Hadid, a young schoolteacher who has published a slightly undiplomatic criticism of Madame Auratpasand’s work in Le Monde Diplomatique, where else?’

  He attempted to amuse us with his boxing-match terms, also meant to assure us that he was only the referee. His task was to separate the combatants if the fight became too rough, to prevent any fouls, and to pose a new question whenever he deemed a round completed. To set the tone for this new objectivity, he showed the audience a ten-minute film on Naughty’s world and the society that produced her. Beards, bombs, horrific footage of Taliban touts flogging a woma
n, statistics of honour killings, ‘balanced’ by interviews with a few good people in Fatherland, mainly women, who pointed out that most women who were put to death were killed in the family and not by fundamentalists. Then interviews with many bad people who wanted more wars, supported the drones, and accepted with sad faces that the collateral damage was a price that had to be paid for freedom. I wondered whether they would be saying that if their families had been wiped out. Intercut with all this were images of Naughty in peaceful Paris, reflecting on the difference between the two worlds. Wonderful stuff. Just like a boxing match whose outcome has been decided in advance—as long as the fall guy sticks to the bargain. I assumed that in Yusufa al-Hadid they had found a particularly obtuse young Islamist who would knock herself out, since Naughty had to stick to her script and was incapable of a killer blow. I was wrong.

  The young woman with the covered head began to speak. In a deceptively gentle voice, she congratulated the director for giving us a film from which all unpleasant images of Parisian cops harassing black people had been eliminated. This could not have an easy accomplishment in ‘our Paris’. Why had they filmed Madame Auratpasand exclusively in the arcades? Bertrand concealed his irritation with a patronizing smile. She was, of course, entitled to her opinions, because France was a free country. This remark, of course, implied that al-Hadid was not French, but some other, unspecified, nationality. Then he began posing his intelligent-sounding but banal questions.

  Naughty had been effectively tutored and carefully rehearsed. Her French was improving daily. At one point she said, with a sigh, ‘What a joy it is to read Diderot.’

  Bertrand gushed, ‘I must confess that after reading your own work I said to Justine, my wife—a famous opera singer, by the way, and a great fan of your work—that I think we have a new talent amongst us. A woman from a war zone with a touch of Diderot.’

  The camera lingered, first on his chest and then on hers. Before he could resume, Yusufa interrupted in a calm and reasonable voice: