by Ali Eteraz
“I’m neither player nor prayer. How about I just watch?”
“If praying here is bothering you, we can go to a mosque. Only the believers will be there. No one to watch us.”
Candace reached for my hand and bit the tip of my finger. The pressure from the teeth cut through the gelatinous force field I was ensconced in. Despite myself, I assented to her proposition, and without a pause we were taking long strides up to Cecil B. Moore, toward Sheikh Shakil’s mosque. Each step drained vitality from me and the usual reservoirs of replenishment receded in the face of the scorching fear that came with stepping into a mosque. It was one thing to have gone into the sanctuary of the Gay Commie Muzzies and seen Ali Ansari praying, by accident, in one corner of a house, while the rest of the group engaged in sexual foreplay. That seemed to me a safe way of experiencing Islam: one that didn’t arouse suspicion; one that wasn’t likely to be equated with something foreign, dangerous, different; one that didn’t lead to your name being written in the ledgers held by informers. It was quite another to be taken to the mosque of a former felon escorted by a convert who had gone so far as to excise music from her life and who was comfortable performing prayer in front of the rest of the world.
We stepped into the mosque and passed through a group of young black boys wearing white robes and white skullcaps, coming out from the basement where a madrassa was located. Candace knew most of the boys and asked them how their Koranic memorization was going. The interior of the mosque had a kind of damp sandalwood smell to it, mixed with sawdust and the sweat of men coming in from some outdoor work. Candace pointed me in the direction of the men’s entrance and then gestured with her head that she was going to the women’s side. I asked her if there was a middle place where we could sit together. She shook her head and whispered: “There’s only brothers and sisters, no middle place. Besides, only husband and wife can sit together; we are fornicators.” Reluctantly, I took my shoes off with everyone else, tucked them in a cubby, and then went to the bathroom to perform the ritual ablution. There was a row of dripping faucets against a wall and pair of older men with cracked feet were squatting on wooden boxes. I squatted down near them and from a corner of my eye watched them wash their hands, arms, heads, and feet. One of them caught me looking and smiled. “The grandson of the Prophet once repeated his wudu three times so a shy convert who was watching him could get it right.” I nodded at him with a smile of my own. The old man touched me on the back with his wet hand and left a cold imprint.
The prayer hall was split in two halves with the men on the left, the women on the right, a few yards between them. A simple chandelier hung down from the rafter and there were Arabic inscriptions and pictures of global mosques all around the room. I looked at the sisters’ side, hoping to spot Candace among them, but with big prayer shawls covering their bodies it was hard to tell the women apart. I scanned to the front and spotted Sheikh Shakil. He was an elegant and thin man, with a shapely mouth that was not overwhelmed by his fist-long beard. He wore a white robe and leather socks and carried a fat cane. He helped the men “align the ranks.”
Prayer was an exercise in silent emulation. I lined up with all the other men, folded my arms as they folded, and bowed and prostrated as they did. Unlike them I didn’t know what to recite or when to gesture with my fingers or when to turn my head. I had only seen my father pray once—at the funeral of a man we had known from a grocery store. I tried to pull that memory back to me, the body lying in front of the all-male congregation, the act of raising my hands to my ears and then down. Nothing more came to mind. I had been twelve then and found the entire pageant so farcical that I had never again let myself near a religious gathering.
Once prayer was finished, Sheikh Shakil stood up, tapped the microphone, and said that although it wasn’t Friday he had a simple message that he wanted to convey to the congregation. It had come to him the night before, during a conversation with a brother who had gone astray. The milling and whispering quickly died out and the crowd anticipated his talk.
“Religion,” he said, starting slowly, with a hoarse throat, “is a glue.” He looked around, sighed, and was content with the attention he commanded. Then he started over.
“Religion is a glue that God gave mankind so we could stick to each other. Without it we would be broken. Spread apart. Isolated. The religion don’t need us. We need it. We need it because we ain’t meant to be alone. We need it because we can’t be alone. Who alone got the power to withstand loneliness? Allah azzawajal. He took it upon Himself so that the rest of us wouldn’t have to. That is Allah’s sacrifice. The rest of us, man, all we can do is find ways to stick together. Now some of y’all might say, of all the religions out there, of all the glue y’all can sniff, why is it that this brother is trying to preach Islam? Why not Christianity? Rasta? The religions of our African ancestors? I tell you one simple reason why it is Islam: Not because it’s the truth. I know y’all better than to tell you the difference between truth and falsehood. Y’all wouldn’t be here if you didn’t already know it. All I’m here to do is tell y’all that in this age. Age of nudity. Age of incarceration. Age of war. Age of drugs. Age of booze. Age of world domination. There’s only one religion that is feared. One religion that all of the peddlers and all of the pornographers and all of the fat cats fear. They know, deep in their hearts, that if you gave us the opportunity we would bring justice and purity and cleanliness to this world. They see us, five times a day, washing our bodies, making ourselves pristine in order to stand before Allah, and they fear our prayer, and they fear our hygiene. They don’t fear nothing else. They don’t fear Osama. They don’t fear the Taliban. Hezbollah. Qaeda. None of them. They got no reason to fear them. They fear belief in something higher than them. Something other than them. Something that ain’t subject to their power. If y’all want to go join them. If y’all think you can rule the world through their devices, I ain’t gonna stop you. You go and do that there. But if you wanna be one of the people who stand on the Last Day, the Day of Judgment, Yawm al-Akhira, and tell Allah azzawajal that you took measure of your age and you put up your hand and you said, Stop in the name of the God! then you got to stick with Islam. It will give you the only pathway to bring change to this world. All the other religions gave in to corruption and wealth. They give in to vanity and hedonism. Islam will give you the brotherhood you need to stand up when you weak. It will give you the discipline you need to survive the prison that is this world. Most of all, it will give you the rope of God. If you got that, then alhamdulillah hi rabbil aalameen.” He snapped his fingers. “The prison walls disappear. Now y’all gotta remember that this system, this system of resistance, ain’t gonna cost you no money. But it’s gonna take all your labor. For it to become your biggest asset, you got to put all your self into it. You gotta sign all your belongings to it. Your spouse. Your children. Your soul. And the way you start that transfer is through the Witness of Faith. You say that statement, and right then—boom—the transfer starts. You start uploading yourself into Islam and it starts pumping its powers of resistance back into you. You stop wanting to get naked. You stop doing things that take you to jail. You stop going to war. You stop them drugs and booze and vice. Say that shahada then. Say it now, my brothers and sisters in Islam: Ashadu Allah ilaha illallah Muhammad rasool Allah.”
The entire crowd murmured the testification of faith, first in a quiet manner and then louder, until it became a collective chant that climaxed with Mu-ham-mad ra-sool Al-lah being sung between the male and female parts of the congregation. Muhammad was not a living person, but in that song he had more life than a thousand presidents. I thought of my father again. He had never taught me about Muhammad. He had never made me chant the shahada. How had my father resisted the inexorable power of this Muhammad who could otherwise move to music a group of citizens of an empire whose predecessor empire didn’t even exist during Muhammad’s time? Was there something in my father that was immune to the charisma of great men? Or was it s
imply that he had erased the love of Muhammad from his heart in order to carry out the lifelong project of settling in this country? Perhaps it something darker—perhaps my father had sought control over me so completely that he considered even Muhammad a competitor. I wished he was around. I needed an answer as to why I was unmoved by Muhammad.
Sheikh Shakil got off the podium and walked around the mosque, nodding and smiling at his people, mouthing the shahada with them, shaking hands, asking little questions about family. In his other hand he carried a straw skullcap that served as the collection tray. He sent it into the river of rows and it got passed around the mosque. He trailed after it slowly, greeting, laughing, and sometimes embracing. When the cap passed before me I put all my cash into it. Sheikh Shakil watched me from a distance, with a smile on his face, and then suddenly pointed at me. “You got to recite the shahada, brother.”
Air trapped in my chest and became a knot. My eyes hopped across the mosque. I experienced the gaze of the believers upon me. Could they tell I hadn’t recited the testification? What did they think of Sheikh Shakil outing me in front of them? Was he about to make an example of me? Or was shaming me sufficient? My temples started streaming sweat and my armpits filled with moisture. My face contorted into a strange and terrible smile and I made my lips move in the same bur-bur sound others were making, trying to give Sheikh Shakil the appearance of my witness. Every movement of my lips stung me as wrong. Not because I was cheating, but because I was afraid of getting caught. Was I making my lips pout too much? Did I need to make my tongue roll more? Did I need to rock like the others were rocking? Did I need to elongate the round sounds? Flex my neck more for the guttural ones? The panic was intense and nauseating. As soon as Sheikh Shakil turned to the sisters’ side of the mosque, I got up and went out into the street, forgetting even my shoes. In a dumpster across from the mosque I threw up the halal chicken from earlier.
It was a long and painful vomit. Sulfur cobras. Corpse fingers. Shit shavings. At any moment I expected Candace to show up and hold my hand; but she was either too occupied with the chant or had not seen me rush out. I was alone with my pain. In the middle of my heaving, when my eyes turned back, I saw Independence Hall pass before me. I saw Ken Lulu packing up his equipment, throwing a backpack over his shoulder, and exiting the scene. The light show that Candace had put on replayed like a strobe light. Accompanied by the tremendous symphony. This time it wasn’t exhilaration; it was a tremor of disgust that followed. Something recoiled and regurgitated along with me.
Could we just waltz over to the building where the Constitution had been written and spray it with words inspired by the Koran? The Constitution was supposed to be a blueprint for a new order that had sought to break away from the Old World, the one to which Islam and the Koran had belonged. How would the Muslims feel if one day we walked over to Mecca and took off its black shroud and replaced it with a cloth covering on which the Constitution was embossed? Wouldn’t they rightly think of it as an act, if not of war, then at least of insult? Didn’t we, not just as residents of America’s foundational city, but as guardians of the Constitution, owe the symbol entrusted to us some modicum of exclusivity—dare I say, supremacy? Or was the Constitution not sacrosanct? Was it just a document that could be played with? If that was the case then why even hold onto it? Why enshrine it? Why treat it as central to our identity and sovereignty? Tomorrow perhaps the Chinese could come and project images of Confucian wisdom on Independence Hall. The day after we could invite the Hindus and let them throw the Vedic swastikas all over it. Like that, little by little, the gift handed down by Franklin and Jefferson and Madison and all the others who had gathered in the hot summers two hundred years earlier would be slowly whittled down, watered down, perhaps even completely altered. It might be personally appealing to me to regard Independence Hall and see upon it images that would bring a smile to my mother’s lips, to my Candace’s lips, to the lips of my new friends; but the Constitution and the principles that it represented were supposed to be bigger than my personal satisfaction. They were supposed to be holy. I wasn’t certain I appreciated engaging in this blasphemy that Candace had wrought. She seemed less like the harbinger of newfangled freedoms and more a criminal dragging me into a secret lair. She wanted me to sever the rope that bound me to the dream in whose name my parents had sacrificed everything, even their past. Candace’s promise was that I would be more at home in a space that affirmed Islam. I did not believe her.
My shirt was as soiled as my mouth. I needed a change.
I did not wait for Candace to emerge from the mosque.
Chapter Seven
I came to the apartment and rushed to the shower. Marie-Anne was in the bedroom, sleeping with her phone on her chest, a plate with scraps of chicken tenders next to her. The phone had slipped between her large breasts, the light from the screen making her veins glow blue. When she snored, the phone rose up and hit one of her chins. I picked it up and stared at the screen, wondering if there were unsent messages to me. I found instead a series of e-mails from her boss.
I slept in the living room late into the afternoon, moored to the sofa. Marie-Anne woke up and brought a little storm around, stomping through the living room, trying to create awareness about herself without having to explicitly demand my attention. It didn’t work. I kept my face pressed in the cushions and waited for the waves to recede. They came in the form of the front door slamming.
As soon as Marie-Anne was gone I checked my phone. Candace had flooded me with messages, inquiring where I had gone, if I was all right, if I was mad at her.
It isn’t you.
Then what?
It’s the glue.
I don’t follow.
You follow too much. That is the problem.
I shut her out after that. She deserved my anger. She had betrayed me before even allowing me the chance to give her my trust. Her cosmopolitanism, her vulgarity, her social expertise, her sexual liberation had fooled me. Misled me. She wasn’t a libertine; she was only a sinner. I was not what she sought in the world; I was only the consequence of a temporary disorientation she suffered on a bizarre and surreal night. The moment that Candace authenticated herself she would look at me and see a mistake. Then she would either remove me from her presence, or worse, in an effort to make me conform to her chosen principles, force me to experience corrective judgment. She didn’t just have Sheikh Shakil to enforce her writ. She had entire congregations.
I got up and waddled around. It was raining outside. That mysterious Philadelphia rain where the drops were all interconnected so it seemed like a slab of mist had propped itself between earth and sky. Like a presence had descended.
I ended up in the study. My eyes fell upon the desk. There was a gift-wrapped box sitting on it. I looked around, reached for it, and checked the card. It was addressed to me. I undid the ribbon and tore open the purplish-pink paper. A bound book was inside, with a hefty black cloth cover. The title said Falsipedies and underneath it was my name. I opened it up and browsed. The book was a collection of 114 of my gym-motivational poems for Marie-Anne. They were laid out in reverse-chronological order. The later ones, belligerent, related to persistence in the face of pestilence; the earlier period, when I encouraged Marie-Anne to fight for the sake of our love; the first ones, where I addressed her illness obliquely, as if it wasn’t real. The inscription inside the front cover was written in Marie-Anne’s messy hand.
I can’t always tell you how I feel, but you have always been able to tell me how you feel, and that has made all the difference.
With love, your wife?
M-A
I texted Marie-Anne and asked her to meet me at the gazebo at Schuylkill River, the one overlooking Boathouse Row. There were still a few hours left in our anniversary weekend. She texted back a single four-letter word to dismantle my heart: Fine.
My eyes turned back to the desk. I skittered toward it, running my hands over this little investment, this little emblem of my
fidelity to America, pulled back the chair, and opened the drawer. Sitting underneath the pile of papers was the Koran inside the pouch my mother had sewn. It seemed so long ago when I had tucked it in here, out of sight. How circuitous the journey had been since then. How uncertain. I reached for the Koran and brought it close.
It was odd. Touching it now created no insurrectionary thrombosis in me, didn’t fill me with rage. Just a distant shame one feels when having hobnobbed with friends no longer worth one’s time. I picked up the Koran, with the pouch, and I tucked it into my pocket.
I also picked up the wooden book holder and opened it up into its X shape, running my fingers over the designs. I blew the residual dust off and brought it out into the living room and put it on top of the bookshelf. I had never noticed it before: the wood was the same color as the bookshelf. The book holder belonged here. It was what had sat on it that did not.
I texted Marie-Anne an update and ran out of the apartment, hustling through the dog park, past the flying-horse swings, down the slope that would bring me to Kelly Drive, where a man with a cauldron sat hidden behind some bushes, asking passersby for lighter fluid. I ran through the night traffic without so much as a glance for my safety. It was the abandon of childhood, when we used to play capture the flag in Mobile, sweating and out of control in the acrid air stunk up by the paper mills. Or later on, when we were older and raced our lowered pickup trucks on the flat highway outside of Citronelle, swerving into the shoulder, toward the oncoming trucks belonging to the rednecks who were looked down upon by rednecks. It was the confidence of youth, when you believed there was a sacred covenant with the earth that held you and the passion that compelled you—and neither would ever let you suffer harm. It was the trust one felt toward one’s birthplace.
The gazebo constituted itself before me. I picked up my pace and reached my destination, parting the little curtain of water that nature had drawn around the structure. I went into the dry area and called out Marie-Anne’s name. Once. Then twice. “Here I am,” she replied from over by the railing. I put my arm around her and my face in her neck and we were together there, staring at the river, the line of trees, the entirety of the north. There was a strange brightness in the water underneath us and it flowed fast, like the blood of a living creature—not quite an abyss, but evocative of its mystery.