by Ayad Akhtar
By the time my martini was served—up, wet, dirty—I was unloading my skepticism about a Sufi order throwing a New York City gala to raise money, which, I joked, made only slightly more sense to me than a group of Carmelite nuns manning fairground booths at a carnival for the same purpose. “The gala was my idea,” he confessed with a chuckle. “The dergah needs renovations. I’ve known the sheikha for years from dhikr on Thursdays. I try not to miss it when I don’t have to.”
“Thursday dhikr at the Khalwati Order,” I offered wryly.
“You’ve been?”
“I have.”
“It took some work to overcome her resistance to the idea,” he said, noting my reserve. “They really do need the money. And this way, I figured it would be good for the foundation, too. Any chance to get a different image of Islam out there.”
“One that looks more like Lauren Hutton.”
“If it gets us onto the society pages? Absolutely.” It was my turn to chuckle. At least he was aware how shallow it seemed.
“A few years ago,” he went on with words—I thought—he’d used many times, his assertive baritone now sounding somehow labored, “we funded a study, focus groups, interviews with people around the country, all walks of life. ‘What do you think of Islam?’ Not just the obvious. We wanted to dig past the conscious stuff into the unconscious stuff, too. What we discovered? Top five words people associate on an unconscious level with Islam? Anger. Separate. Suicide. Bad. Death.”
“In that order?”
“Well, death was first, actually.”
“Pretty bleak.”
“Isn’t it? Because, see, usually when you dig down into the unconscious stuff, which is harder to get to—takes more time, costs more money—and I’ve done it before, with municipalities around debt initiatives. Even with the really scary stuff that people don’t get, like mortgage bonds after the crisis, deep down, even there you can usually find a silver lining, something they heard when they were kids, an association to some word or concept you can build on. Not here. Not with Islam. Group after group. The same story. Like cancer. Nothing positive.”
“Even Cat Stevens?” I joked. “‘Wild World’? ‘Peace Train’?”
“Believe it or not, that actually came up. They felt betrayed. Like Islam made him stop singing.”
“Right.”
“So like I was saying…the company that did the study, when they wrote about the findings, they put a quote at the beginning of the report, their way of summing up the problem as well as the challenge. I have it here.” He pulled out his phone and tapped at the screen, then handed it to me:
The established majority takes its we-image from a minority of its best, and shapes a they-image of the despised outsiders from the minority of their worst.
“Whose quote is it?”
“A sociologist named Norbert Elias. German Jew who left in thirty-three, when the Nazis took over. Saw what was coming before most did. Which isn’t a surprise, for someone who can have a thought like that.”
“Remarkable,” I said, handing the phone back to him.
“Isn’t it? I mean, when I first read this, I thought, ‘This is it. This is what we’re up against.’ In this country, the white majority is basically blind to the worst in themselves. They see themselves in the image of their best, and they see us in the image of our worst.”
“I get it—”
“—Muslims, blacks, whatever. To me, this wasn’t just an analysis of the problem, it pointed at a solution.”
“How so?”
“Do what they do. They push the minority of their best in our faces and then pretend that’s the whole picture. We need to do the same. Shove the best of our minority down their throats.”
“Seduction at the hands of Sheikha Maria…”
“Precisely.” He grinned, lifting his glass to finish his drink. “I mean, in a way, you’re doing your own version of the same thing, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“Laying claim? Owning what they think they see in us, then turning it right back at them. ‘You think this is us? It’s actually you.’”
It was an incisive articulation of my artistic procedure, but something about it felt askew. It took me a moment to find words to adjust the imbalance I thought I heard. “You could put it that way. Or you could say I’m just trying to show people as they are, no better, no worse. Which means I’m trying to show us as we are, no better, no worse.”
“And how are we?” The charming diffidence with which he posed the question only partly hid the dismissive sarcasm at its root. I sensed the temperature in me rise.
“Do we really want to get into this?”
“Why not? It’s just a conversation, right?” He looked over at the bartender, then back at me: “Another round?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“We’ll do this again,” he told the bartender, pointing to the drinks, then turned back to me with a shy, prepossessing smile. “C’mon. It really is just a conversation, right?”
“I mean…”
“So tell me: How are we?”
The thought of going into it pained me. I didn’t want the argument. I didn’t feel invested anymore in the ideas I had about our kind, however accurate I believed them to be. My critiques were taken for attacks—and I understood why. We, Muslims, were constantly besieged by a culture that didn’t understand us, that didn’t want us. It was why I only ever voiced my thoughts indirectly, through that particular prevarication called art. I didn’t see the point of harping on “our” issues in public when it was evident “their” mishaps and blind spots were so much more pressing. The existential threats to our species were not coming from us but from the proliferation of their “enlightened” way of life to every corner of the planet. Wasn’t that the necessary critique now?
And yet, as Riaz waited for me to respond, I could feel myself being drawn out. I could feel I wanted something from him, though I wasn’t sure what it was. I took a moment and another sip, and when I finally replied, it was with words I, too, had used before, but only with myself: “We are more obsessed with what they think of us than what we think of ourselves. We spend way too much time trying to correct the impression the West has of who we are. We’ve turned this defensiveness into a way of life. Edward Said writes a book about how wrong they’ve been about us, and it becomes our bible, a high road to self-knowledge. But that’s not what it is. Not remotely. Constantly defining yourself in opposition to what others say about you is not self-knowledge. It’s confusion. That much I’d figured out by the time I was in high school.” He was quiet. Whatever he’d expected me to say, this didn’t seem to be it. On some level, I must have known I was attacking what he saw as his purpose in the world.
“We’ve had good reason to be obsessed with how wrong they’ve been,” he finally said, visibly irritated. “I mean, even this conversation we’re having right now: You were born here. I was, too. But we’re referring to ourselves as coming from somewhere else. How did that happen?”
“I don’t know how it happened for you—but in my house, it didn’t happen because of them. They didn’t make us feel like outsiders. We were outsiders. At least my parents were, because you know what? They came from somewhere else. That’s what outsiders are. And it didn’t bother them. There was a culture here they had to learn—and they never really did. Not the way those who are born into it do. Don’t get me wrong. My father loves America. Loves it more than makes sense to me sometimes, frankly. He thinks he’s American, but what that really means is that he still wants to be American. He still doesn’t really feel like one. It’s been forty-five years, and he still doesn’t really understand what it means. Because being American is not about what they tell you—freedom and opportunity and all that horseshit. Not really. There is a culture here, for sure, and it has nothing to do with all the well-meaning nonsense. It’s about racism and money worship—and when you’re on the correct side of both those things? That’s when you reall
y belong. Because that’s when you start to represent the best of what they think they are, to come back to your quote.”
“Your point?” His tone was sharp.
“My point is just that we’re not really all that different. We do the same thing they do: we make ourselves out to be better than we are. And what really doesn’t help is how we end up using their contempt as an excuse to avoid our own failings.”
He was leaning at the bar, staring into his new drink. “So what are they?”
“What?”
“Our failings?”
“Riaz.”
“Just one. Humor me.” The crowd at the bar had been growing. And though we were not the only ones with raised voices, we were the ones being noticed—two brown men arguing was apparently a thing to make sure one kept an eye on. Riaz pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face. For a moment, he looked tired, as tired—I thought—as I felt.
“Fine,” I said. “Here’s one: When are we going to stop talking about the Golden Age? About how we kept Aristotle alive. How we invented algebra. How we laid the foundations for the scientific method. How we—”
He cut me off: “What should we do? Let them forget? Pretend it’s not true? How is that better?”
“Do it all you want, just don’t pretend it means anything. It doesn’t. The winners write history. I shouldn’t have to explain that to you. So they take credit they don’t deserve. So what? It’s never been any different. Back then, when we were winning, we did the same thing. Now they are. Writing history the way they see it. The real mistake is to expect that anybody would do otherwise.”
“What would you have us do?”
“For starters? Spend less time dreaming about the Golden Age and more trying to understand how we fell so far behind. Because that’s the problem. We’re caught in this awful cycle of belatedness and inferiority. It’s made us feel weak. For generation after generation. And being weak has made us angry—”
“And how is what you’re saying any different from Bernard Lewis?”
“Bringing up Bernard Lewis is not an argument.”
“He did a lot of damage to the world with that ‘clash of civilizations’ stuff.”
“He called us angry and made us look bad. So what? So now we’re supposed to say, ‘We’re not angry’? Even if we are? Are blacks supposed to go around pretending not to be enraged about the shit they go through in this country every day? Just because it makes them look bad to white people? They’re angry, and they’ve got damn good reasons to be. And maybe we do, too. So maybe if we spent a little more time trying to understand what we’re carrying—instead of complaining about Bernard Lewis—maybe if we did that, we wouldn’t be dealing with this death cult that calls itself a religion and that’s eating us alive.”
He stared at me now with the strangest look. It was a mute gaze, consumed and inhuman, the way a river boulder might have stared back at you if it had eyes. And then, all at once, the expression was gone, and in its place was a childlike smile. We’re back on the same side again, I thought, watching him take another sip, clearly pleased. In denouncing ISIS—I surmised—I’d pronounced a reassuring shibboleth. He could be sure now I was not the worst of what he feared: an intellectual apologist for Muslim violence. He signaled to the bartender that he wanted to settle up.
“I can tell you why we fell behind,” he said with an almost cheery tone. I wondered if he was starting to feel the liquor.
“What?”
“I said: I can tell you why we fell behind. I’ve actually thought a lot about this.”
“That wasn’t what I was getting at—”
“Didn’t you just say we should be spending more time trying to understand why it happened?”
“…I mean, sure.”
“That isn’t what you said?”
“No, it is.”
“And I’m saying: I can tell you why.”
Just then, the bartender dropped the check into an empty glass before us. I reached for my wallet. Riaz stopped me, placing his black Amex card on the bar. “Thank you,” I said, certain, now, there was no way to avoid the rest of this conversation: “So tell me. Why’d we fall behind?”
“The corporation. Plain and simple.”
“The corporation?”
“The Romans created the corporation. It enabled them to protect assets from being redistributed after an owner’s death. Which meant money could have the time to really grow, take on its own center of gravity. We had no way to do that. Muslim inheritance laws are very clear. After death, the estate has to be divided among the wives and heirs. Because there was no loophole to get around it, businesses didn’t outlive their founders. Everyone wrote short-term contracts with each other, because you were always afraid parties in a deal would die, and you’d have to go to the wives and kids to be made whole. One-off deals were the rule, as there was no good way to shelter long-term ventures. Which meant no path to long-term material investments.”
“We didn’t have any correlate for the corporation? I didn’t know that.”
He shook his head: “Complete liquidation of assets in every generation until the late eighteen hundreds. Do you have any idea what that meant for private enterprise? And it only changed once we finally took a page from the Europeans and built a corporate concept of our own. But at that point, their money’d been growing for six hundred years! That’s banks and industries with a half millennium of accrued capital. That’s why we’re behind. Because Muslim laws were trying to take care of wives and children! We’re behind because we cared more about what happened to people than money! What about getting that message out there!”
I laughed. “That’s a good one.”
“And the best part? It’s all true. Even though almost nobody knows it.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t already hired a writer to script the film.”
“Why do you think I’m paying for your drink?” he said, laughing, as he signed the check.
On our way to Gotham Hall, I noticed the tension between us had given way to something light and playful, our banter lubricated, no doubt, by the liquor and—at least in me—relief, a sense that the conversation I’d dreaded had been worth risking after all. Whether we’d agreed or not, the exchange felt enlivening. I felt myself hoping our time together wouldn’t—like one of those medieval Muslim business deals he mentioned—end up being a one-off encounter.
At the corner of 36th Street, I spied the sheikha emerging from around the corner. She was tough to miss. Poised on the sidewalk, regal in her marigold robe and a dark conical sikke, her chin nobly tilted to the towering facades around us, she looked every bit the European-gone-native in some unwritten Bellow novel of Eastern Anatolia. Then, all at once, like a rarely sighted bird easily spooked, she turned and hurried for the entrance. As she scurried away, I pointed her out and commented about the opulence of her robes. “I mean, it is hard to make a case for giving her money when we all know how much she’s already got.”
Riaz shot me a curious sidelong grin. “You don’t even know the half of it,” he said, stopping on the corner to tell me the story: It wasn’t until her father died, two years earlier, that she discovered he had written her out of his will. Her shock wasn’t just emotional. Her plans for the order—proliferating along both American coasts, each of its half dozen dergahs led by a female sheikha, the only Sufi organization whose every branch was run entirely by women anywhere in the world, as far as Riaz knew—depended on the money she’d expected to inherit. Yes, she was still wealthy enough to never have to worry about her personal expenses, yet now, worry was all she did. Signs of emotional chaos were growing, and Riaz was concerned that her mental state was jeopardizing the order. She showed up one day at his office with estimates in hand for work on the Duane Street building that couldn’t be put off any longer—the least of which totaled more than $400,000—and proceeded to have a panic attack on his couch. He told her he would help her raise the money, which was how the whole idea for the gala came
about.
All this Riaz shared with me matter-of-factly, without any of the hushed and huddled complicity of rumor, indeed, as if nothing untoward, or even that remarkable, was being divulged. But the evident breach of the sheikha’s confidence was not lost on me. As we made our way up the building steps, removed our wallets and phones, and marched through the metal detector flanked by the Gotham Hall security officers on high alert—no doubt alarmed by the preponderance of Muslims coming through the doors—I remember feeling flattered. I knew already how deeply Riaz had drawn me in. I was pleased to think that perhaps I, too, had done the same.
4.
I saw more of Riaz than I would have expected to in the coming months. As a regular invitee to his foundation’s events, I found myself in the presence of one remarkable American after another, each Muslim, each involved in some work that made my self-absorbed preoccupation with drama and contradiction start to seem not only trivial but also shameless. These people were changing the world—one grant, one prison inmate, one neighborhood block, one translation, one voting drive, and, yes, one PR campaign at a time. There was Sami Sleiman, the Syrian-born, Los Angeles–raised founder of Haqq, a community network that provided the safety net he believed local government should offer (but rarely did) to those in need—a food pantry, a walk-in clinic, a community arts center and café, a career-counseling service for former felons and at-risk youth; Hafsa Hossein, a Chicago-born, Harvard Law–educated attorney who—when she wasn’t filing briefs on behalf of accused Muslims deprived of their legal rights—ran a multilingual website committed to gender equity in Islam; George Iqbal Shawn, a white convert to the faith, a former journalist sickened by what he saw as a media industry fatally beholden to sowing anxiety and fear, who now spent most of his time in Turkey, toiling in refugee camps and extricating Western youths from the clutches of ISIS across the border; Janan Gul, a French-born cartoonist of Persian origin at work on a graphic retelling of Rumi’s relationship with his Sufi master, Shams, the first volume of which had already made the bestseller lists in a half dozen European countries; Kamal Morse, an all-star linebacker for the Oakland Raiders who left the NFL after a religious experience in Mecca that inspired him to start a mosque and, when he ran afoul of the local authorities, to run for city council in his native Kansas City. Riaz was particularly affected by Morse’s tale. He got choked up while introducing Morse at the event in his honor, outlining the moving saga of how the former football player had not only prevailed in bringing a house of Muslim worship to his community but also transformed his local government in the process.