American Dervish

by Ayad Akhtar

  The Burak—with the Prophet on its back—​climbed its hundred rungs, ascending into Paradise.

  Through gates of emerald and pearl, the Prophet rode the Burak through heaven, beholding every splendor it had to offer, the palaces of gold set into the clouds, the fountains and rivers of milk and honey and wine that inspired without intoxicating, the hordes of virgins and praising angels and each and every one of the Almighty’s human prophets. Muhammad greeted them all, and they prayed together in a diamond mosque. Then he climbed again on the Burak and they flew farther and farther upward, through veils of light upon light, to the limit of creation itself. Finally, they came to the place where the Burak would go no farther.

  Here the Prophet looked up and saw a tree as large as the universe. This was Sidrat al-Muntaha, the farthest tree of the farthest boundary. Now the Burak left him. No one, not even Gabriel, had ever ventured so far. This was where Allah lived.

  Our Prophet stepped forward and entered the Lord’s presence.

  “Almighty God,” Muhammad said, “let me see You.”

  And all at once, he saw nothing but the Lord. He looked to the right and saw nothing but the Lord, and to the left and saw nothing but the Lord, and to the front, and the back, and above…and everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but the Lord. What the Lord looked like Muhammad would never say, other than that His beauty was so great he would have preferred to stand there gazing at Him forever. But the Lord told him: “You are a Messenger, and if you stay here, you will not communicate My Message. Go back to the world. But when you want to see Me as you see Me now, make your prayers, and I will appear before you.”

  “That’s why we pray, behta,” Mina explained. “To know Allah in the same way that Muhammad did when he took his night journey.”

  I asked her what Muhammad himself looked like.

  Mina took a long time to reply. “I never met him, behta. But I had a teacher in high school, a great man, Dr. Khan. He met the Prophet, peace be upon him, in a dream. He said he was a handsome man, with long eyelashes and thick black hair. He said he had a full beard and a beautiful smile that showed a gap between his two front teeth.”

  “But how do you know if that’s how he looked? It was just a dream…”

  “Dreams are very important, behta. In Islam, we believe they can show you things that are more real than what we see when we’re awake. And when the Prophet visits someone in a dream, it’s a very important sign.”

  “Of what, Auntie?”

  “Of great holiness. It means the Prophet is watching over you.”

  Story hour had not calmed me. I left Mina’s room still agitated, wondering why it was God lived so impossibly far from us all. Instead of heading for my bedroom, I went downstairs to the kitchen, where Mother was fiddling with the trash. She looked up and saw me. “Here,” she said blankly, handing me the bag. “Take it out for pickup.”

  I took it, lingering at the counter. She stood at the sink, washing her hands and humming to herself. I wanted her to look at me again. She finally did. “What is it, Hayat? I’m not in the mood for your humors this evening. Go, already!”

  Outside, it was a heavy, hot July night. The lawn was awash with insects. Flickering fireflies, roaring crickets. Something was hurting inside. Something raw. I trudged along the front lawn, headed for the garbage cans at the end of the driveway.

  What’s wrong with you? I wondered.

  As I got to the cans, I stopped. The pain inside was throbbing, insistent. It seemed there was something I had to do, but I didn’t know what.

  I remembered what Mina had taught me. I closed my eyes and breathed.

  In and out. In and out.

  Beneath the crickets, beneath the wind in the trees, despite the stench of trash.

  I listened for the silence. And then I heard something. It was a voice, firm, cold, convincing:

  You can’t even take out the garbage. You’re useless.

  I opened my eyes. At the end of the street, a pair of tiny lights was slowly growing. As a car’s black form began to show, the engine’s tinny wail deepened into a rough and noisy rumble. The car was moving with unusual speed, and as it approached, the sound it made was painful to hear. It was a sound to be heard and heeded.

  I stepped out into the road, staring into the headlights.

  The horn blasted. The trash fell from my grip. Behind the windshield, eyes flashed wide with alarm. The engine roared as the car careened, swerving away, missing me by barely a yard.

  All at once, blood was exploding through my veins.

  The car disappeared down the road, horn still blaring. My heart was pounding; my knees felt like they were going to fall out from under me. I picked up the trash and stumbled back to the cans. Opening a lid, I dumped the bag inside. Then I sat down on the pavement. I looked back at the house. The lights were on upstairs, behind Mina’s closed blinds.

  Above me, the white oaks swayed, their branches groaning beneath the chatter of windswept leaves. I thought of Sidrat al-Muntaha, the tree that marked the place where God lived.

  Why so far away? I wondered. Why?

  I stared up at the trees, their twisting branches silhouetted against a turbid night. Far above, behind the murky cover of thick, low-hanging clouds, there was a bright spot: the hidden moon lighting its patch of sky, its glow strong enough to limn the forms of racing, roiling clouds beneath it. Don’t waste your time, I thought. Go back and read your Quran. I pushed myself to my feet and started up the driveway. But the truth was: I didn’t want to go back. Not to read Quran or for any other reason.

  I didn’t want to go home.

  Book Three

  Portrait of an Anti-­Semite as a Boy

  10

  The Mosque on Molaskey Hill

  How vivid was my melancholy as the summer progressed! Nothing gave me solace. Not spending time with Mina. Not reading the Quran. Gone were the days when I was moved to awe at the sight of the sky. God’s glory was nothing to me, and in its place was a new and growing torment: my recollection of Mina’s naked body. The image I thought I’d taught myself to forget would return, unbidden—her breasts; the thick, dark triangle at the top of her legs—and hours of confusion and unrest would ensue. I made fresh attempts to suppress the mental picture. To no avail. The more I resisted, the more persistent it proved. And now this image of Mina was making my short, soft penis grow long and hard. I had no idea what was going on. And I didn’t know who to talk to.

  One afternoon early that August, I took that photograph of Mina down from the refrigerator. I don’t know why I had the thought I did, but it occurred to me that if, each time I found myself thinking of Mina’s naked body, I had the picture to look at instead, it would distract me. For a few days, it worked. But then something curious started to happen. When I looked at the photograph, I would feel the stir and tumult that my recollection of her nakedness brought about.

  More than once, I had the urge to touch myself as I held and looked at that picture of her. I would lay my hands between my legs through my shorts or jeans, or through my pajamas. I never touched myself directly. But even so, the pleasure was intense. And it would fill me with a blazing fullness.

  One night I lost myself. Mina’s picture before me, my hands between my legs, I disappeared into pleasure. Before I knew it, my loins shuddered and convulsed, releasing something thick and wet inside my underwear. Horrified, I unbuttoned and saw myself hard and straight, covered with gobs of milky substance. It had a strong, acrid smell, like bleach.

  You knew it was something wrong, a voice inside me spoke.

  My sudden shame was sharp, overwhelming. I’ll never do it again, I thought.

  The second week of August, Nathan took a trip home alone to discuss his conversion with his parents. His father had lost much of his family in the Holocaust and, though an atheist, still deeply identified with his Jewish culture. Nathan expected his father might be shocked, perhaps even violently so. Which is why he thought it best to head home and to tell
his parents on his own, and to wait to introduce them to Mina on a separate visit.

  He left midweek and was back on the weekend. Mina spent most of those few days on the phone with him. She was worried, though she would have little reason to be. Things with his parents would turn out just fine. Nathan’s father had no objection to his son’s plans, but he did have a warning:

  No one will ever see you as anything other than a Jew, he told his son.

  “He’s wrong about that,” Mother said to me one morning, cheerfully in the thick of parsing all the details. “It’s what’s different about us—once you’re a Muslim, that’s who you are. And it doesn’t matter what you were or where you come from—it’s a true democracy. Where everyone gets to vote.”

  “He’s not voting, Mom. There’s no election. He’s just becoming a Muslim.”

  Mother’s expression flattened. “Don’t be a smart aleck, Hayat. You know what I mean.”

  She was right. I did. I just wasn’t sure she really knew what she meant. For, if politics was—as in our yearly classroom election—about getting people to like you, then Nathan’s interest in Islam really was more like politics than religion after all. More than either Mina or Mother realized.

  Mina doted on Imran even more than usual while Nathan was away. Her agenda was clear: She was trying to get her son to soften to the thought of Nathan as his father. Mother called the whole situation with Imran an “absurdity.” As she saw it, all Mina had to do was marry the man and force Imran to get used to it. “‘He doesn’t want a white father…,’ Mother mocked. “Who in God’s name cares what he wants? ‘Why can’t I have a father like Naveed-Uncle?’ The boy looks at your father and thinks that’s what a father should look like. What he doesn’t see… it’s not the color outside that matters, but inside…And we all know your father is black on the inside! Black as pitch!” Mother paused, gathering herself. The halcyon days occasioned by her meal of Lahori-style kidneys had apparently not lasted very long. “I keep telling her… he’s a child. Ignore him. But she doesn’t. And then she starts to think: If that’s what he’s saying, what will her family say…Who cares?! What did they ever give up to make her happy? Nothing! Beating her for reading books, for God’s sake. That’s what they did! For someone so advanced, so intelligent, your auntie worries too much about what others think…” Mother sighed, considering. A subtle smile crept across her face. “Kurban, if I get this to work out, I’m the one who should be given that Nobel, not Sadat…”

  By Sunday, Nathan was back. It was the day Father had agreed to accompany him to the South Side Islamic Center so that Nathan could introduce himself to the imam. Father asked me if I wanted to come along. I was ecstatic. Father almost never took me to the mosque. Of course I wanted to go, I told him.

  Nathan showed up at the house late that morning wearing the same skullcap he’d worn the day he’d told his tale of Ibrahim. Father had never seen him in a topi skullcap before, and made no attempt to hide his surprise as we all stood in the vestibule before heading out.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Nate? Why are you wearing that thing on your head?”

  “We’re going to the mosque, Naveed.”

  “So?”

  “I want to be respectful.”

  “I think he looks handsome,” Mina said, proudly. “Don’t you think, bhaj?”

  “I love the topi,” Mother said. She was holding Imran. “And the beard, too. It makes him look dignified.”

  Father rolled his eyes. “He already knows what I think of that growth on his face. But it’s even worse with the topi. The man looks like a damn imam. You’re a doctor, Nate. Not a maulvi.”

  “Not yet,” Mina replied with a smile.

  “God forbid,” Father moaned.

  Nathan pointed at me. “He’s wearing one,” he said.

  Father shook his head. “He’s a child, Nate. He doesn’t know any better…”

  Nathan looked at me, holding my gaze with a smile.

  I looked away.

  “Let’s get going,” Father said, pulling his keys from his pocket. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this. I really can’t believe it.”

  “It’s ’cause you love me, Naveed,” Nathan said, playfully.

  “It’s true,” Father said, suddenly serious. “I do.”

  For years, local Muslims had made do on religious holidays with impromptu prayer rooms hastily prepared in the banquet wings of area hotels. Adnan Souhef—a portly chemist from Jordan with enough religious education to pass for an imam—serviced the community’s need to congregate by renting the rooms out and getting them ready for worship the night before either of the biannual Eid festivals: covering coffee-stained carpets with white sheets—​bleached and ironed—on which worshippers could pray; erecting a mihrab (prayer niche) to indicate the direction of Mecca; raising a curtain to separate the sexes; and finally, installing the PA system that allowed the women on the other side of that curtain to hear the khutbah (sermon) that Souhef would deliver before the prayer. For ten years, this was the routine; ten years, for that’s how long it took Souhef to raise enough money not to have to make do any longer.

  By 1980, Souhef and his consortium of local Muslim-​American professionals had enough saved to fund the purchase of a permanent home. And so it was that, for the price of a quarter of a million dollars, the Molaskey Schoolhouse—an abandoned glory in the middle of a Polish neighborhood on the South Side—would become our first Islamic Center.

  Named for the hill on which it was perched, the Molaskey Schoolhouse stood four stories tall, a solid stone-and-brick block of a building complete with rounded towers and conical roofs. It looked more like a fort than a mosque. Overlooking the southbound highway, its Romanesque Revival façade (complete with Gothic gables) was dark with years of exhaust from passing cars. Empty of the children who’d once passed along its hallways and played on its lots—and whose presence would have softened the austere, forbidding impression—the Islamic Center gave off a sinister, even haunted air.

  “There it is,” Father said as he turned off the highway and merged onto the steeply canted Molaskey Street.

  “How funny,” Nathan said. “I’ve seen it from the highway a thousand times. I always thought it was abandoned.”

  “Would be better for us all if it was,” Father said. We climbed another twenty yards, then turned into a parking lot filled with cars. “There he is,” Father said in a joking tone.

  “Who?” Nathan asked.

  Father pointed over at the front steps as he pulled into an empty spot. “The king clown himself…or king crook, I should say.” He was pointing at Imam Souhef, who was standing on the stairs and smoking a cigarette.

  “Who is that?”

  “Imaaam Souhaaaif.” Father drew out the syllables for mocking effect, throwing the car into park.

  “Why are you calling him a crook?”

  “Did you ever meet a man of God who loved God half as much as he loved money?”

  Nathan was peering out the window, intrigued.

  “You hear me, Nate?”

  “I heard you…To be honest—yes, Naveed. I have met men of God who love God more than money.”

  “In books,” Father snickered.

  “No. When I was a kid. My dad had a close friend who was a rabbi. He was a good man. Genuinely. A really good man. People in his synagogue adored him.”

  “Well, go back there, Nate! Go back!” Father said, pushing at Nathan playfully. “I don’t know what you’re doing here…”

  Nathan shook his head as he popped open the passenger-side door. He paused before getting out. “Naveed, I need to make a good impression on these people. I’m probably gonna need this guy in some way…”

  Father waved Nathan off. “Don’t worry. I’ll be on my best behavior…”

  “Thanks.”

  “Just don’t come complaining when he bleeds you dry for consulting services and fees.”

  “Fees? For what?”

  “Y
our conversion. Your this. Your that. And God only knows what else.”

  From the front steps, Souhef watched us as we made our way toward him. He was a sight to behold: his girth filling out the shimmering, silk-woven robe that flowed and billowed about his imposing frame; his unusually long, gray-black beard, its tapered tip swaying in the blistering August breeze; and on his head, the white skullcap that gleamed, like a solar panel, flat and bright in the midday sun. Father had known Souhef a long time—the two of them had been among the first of our kind to move into the area—and I’d heard more than an earful about the man over the years. For her part, Mother never took anything Father said about Souhef seriously. She couldn’t understand why Father even bothered to offer an opinion about an imam. After all, a man who drank and cheated on his wife couldn’t claim to have any credibility, she liked to say. As for my own feelings about Souhef, on the rare occasions that I ever saw him, I was drawn to the man. He had a commanding presence, and though his sermons could be terrifying—filled with Islamic fire and brimstone, and delivered with decisive and pitiless passion—I always recalled his very palpable warmth. To many of the Muslims in our community, Souhef was a guardian angel. He presided over births and marriages and deaths, made midnight house calls in cases of spiritual crisis and domestic conflict, and even interceded with local authorities in matters as unremarkable as a Muslim boy who’d been barred from gym class for refusing to shower publicly in the locker room.

  But despite Souhef’s very obvious devotion to our community, Father didn’t like him. He conceded the man was committed, but to his pocketbook, Father liked to say. As proof, he told the story of Souhef’s first approaching him ten years earlier, when the Islamic Center was nothing more than a proposal scratched out in Souhef’s hand on a piece of paper. Souhef asked Father for a donation. Father declined. A few months later, Souhef came back to ask for money again, but now saying it was on behalf of a Palestinian immigrant in dire straits. Souhef told Father a tale about a man who’d escaped torture at the hands of Israelis and was fighting to stay in this country. Father was moved and pulled out his checkbook.