Now, sitting in the hotel room, I knew I had introduced a deadly disease into an unsuspecting host. The human body does not know when a cancer is growing within. It hums happily along, seeming to function normally. Even when the immune system performs its routine protective scans, it does not recognize the cancer cell as a threat because the cell itself takes on the aspect of its neighbors, fooling the body for months and sometimes years. But over time, the cancer spreads and then becomes dominant, until finally it brings the host to the point of death.
So is radical Islam to America. Now I was speaking out against it. And apparently had become a target. Some might call it poetic: the cancer had circled back to one of its makers.
My mission could have ended today, I thought.
I thought about my wife, my children. What if they had been with me? What if there had been an attack? Should I stop? Should I stop telling America to wake up? To rise up and fight?
When I met my American wife, I was unprocessed, like the minerals in a rock. She saw something in me I did not know was there. Was it goodness? I did not think that was quite the right word. But she knew if she could chisel it out, if she could polish it, it might shine. I could not risk losing her. And yet she was the one who kept me going forward with my message.
“It’s the right thing to do, Kamal,” Victoria often said.
If she was not afraid, how could I be afraid? Yet I knew how deadly these people were. Their blood was darkness and they had no tears. They were not only willing to die, but hoping to die, to be ushered into the presence of Allah and the glorious rewards of al-shaheed, the martyrs.
On the clock beside the bed, red numbers flickered past. Throughout the long watch of the night, I stared at the door, certain that any moment the knob would silently turn.
Beirut, Lebanon
1963
1
It was at my mother’s kitchen table, surrounded by the smells of herbed olive oils and pomegranates, that I first learned of jihad. Every day, my brothers and I gathered around the low table for madrassa, our lessons in Islam. I always tried to sit facing east, toward the window above the long marble sink where a huge tree with sweet white berries brushed against the window panes. Made of a warm, reddish wood, our table sat in the middle of the kitchen and was surrounded by tesats, small rugs that kept us off the cool tile. Mother sat at the head of the table and read to us from the Koran and also from the hadith, which records the wisdom and instruction of Allah’s prophet, Muhammad.
Mother’s Koran had a hard black cover etched ornately in gold and scarlet. Her grandfather had given the Book to her father, who had given it her. Even as a small boy I knew my mother and father were devout Sunni Muslims. So devout, in fact, that other Sunnis held themselves a little straighter in our family’s presence. My mother never went out without her hijab, only her coffee-colored eyes peering above the cloth that shielded her face, which no man outside our family had ever seen. My father, respected in our mosque, earned an honest living as a blacksmith. He had learned the trade from my grandfather, a slim Turk who wore a red fez, walked with a limp, and cherished thick, cinnamon-laced coffee.
Each day at madrassa, Mother pulled her treasured Koran from a soft bag made of ivory cloth and when she opened it, the breath of its frail, aging pages floated down the table. Mother would read to us about the glory of Islam, about the good Muslims, and about what the Jews did to us. As a four-year-old boy, my favorite parts were the stories of war.
I vividly remember the day in madrassa when we heard the story of a merciless bandit who went about robbing caravans and killing innocent travelers. “This bandit was an evil, evil man,” Mother said, spinning the tale as she sketched pictures of swords for us to color.
An evil bandit? She had my attention.
“One day, there was a great battle between the Jews and the sons of Islam,” she went on. “The bandit decided to join the fight for the cause of Allah. He charged in on a great, black horse, sweeping his heavy sword left and right, cutting down the infidel warriors.”
My eyes grew wider. I held my breath so as not to miss a word.
“The bandit fought bravely for Allah, killing several of the enemy until the sword of an infidel pierced the bandit’s heart. He tumbled from his horse and died on the battlefield.”
Disappointment deflated my chest. What good is a story like that?
I could hear children outside, shouting and playing. A breeze from the Mediterranean shimmered in the berry tree. Mother’s yaknah simmered on the stove—green beans snapped fresh, cooked with olive oil, tomato, onion, and garlic. She would serve it cool that evening with pita bread, fresh mint, and cucumbers. My stomach rumbled.
“After the bandit died,” Mother was saying in her storytelling voice, “his mother had a dream. In this dream, she saw her son sitting on the shore of an endless crystal river, surrounded by a multitude of women who were feeding him and tending to him.”
I turned back toward Mother. Maybe this story was not so bad after all.
“The bandit’s mother was an observant woman, obedient to her husband and to Allah and Muhammad,” my mother said. “This woman knew her son was a robber and a murderer. ‘How dare you be sitting here in paradise?’ she scolded him. ‘You don’t belong here. You belong in hell!’ But her son answered, ‘I died for the glory of Allah and when I woke up, He welcomed me into jannah.’”
Paradise.
My mother swept her eyes around the kitchen table. “So you see, my sons, even the most sinful man is able to redeem himself with one drop of an infidel’s blood.”
2
Through one window of our flat in West Beirut, the blue Mediterranean smiled up at me, not more than two kilometers away. That was my dreaming window. From that cinderblock frame upon the world, I gazed across the rooftops where children played, old men smoked, and drying clothes flapped in the sunlight.
Even as a child, I knew the proud history of my country. My grandmother, Fatima, would tell me stories about the ancient coastal kingdoms and the peoples who used to line the shores of Lebanon, like the Phoenicians, the swarthy maritime traders in Tyre and Sidon. Although my country had been conquered many times, it was often under the siege of mighty warriors like Alexander the Great, a fact that always fired my boyhood imagination.
“Even the great King Nebuchadnezzar took thirteen years to conquer Lebanon,” my grandmother once told me. I later learned that Lebanon had been annexed to Rome and conquered by France, but she always fought bravely and when beaten rose again.
To the modern ear, Beirut means war and smoking ruins. But the Beirut of my childhood was a lush jewel encircled in a green mountain embrace. Century after century, the tread of foreign feet had turned it into a seaside feast of cultures and religions. The Jews, the Christians, the Sunni and Shia Muslims, and the Druze all worshipped freely, in separate neighborhoods that melted one into another. In my neighborhood alone, I could see the imprint of many nations. Cafes sold filet mignon bordelaise, a French dish; Greek baklava; shish tawook, Turkish chicken on a skewer; and from America, Wimpy Burgers.
From my dreaming window I could see the hills by the seashore where my family went each spring to picnic in the fields. Mama would take scissors with her for cutting wild herbs while my brothers and I ran across the meadows flying brightly colored kites. From my window, I could also see white sailing ships sliding into port. I imagined the wealthy passengers: cream-suited gentlemen smoking fine cigars and fair-skinned ladies who smelled brazenly of musk and roses and did not cover their heads. If I passed such a woman in the streets, my mother taught me, I was to avert my eyes and hold my breath so that her sinful odor didn’t spark sin of my own.
I thought about the tourists and the places they came from: Britain. Italy. Germany. France. When the cruise ships set sail again, their foghorns lowed, wooing me with an invitation. At night, as I lay awake with my brothers in our tiny living room, the salt breeze carried the sound in through my dreaming window. To me, it
was the voice of the sea, vast and colossal where the moon touched the water, promising a freedom bigger than our three-room flat.
When you are a very small child, you do not know you are poor. Early on, when I had only four, and not ten, brothers and sisters, we were clean and well-fed. I did not think it was remarkable that we had only one bedroom for a family of seven, that we pulled out mattresses in the living room each night, arranged them like puzzle pieces for sleeping, and stuffed them away in a metal cabinet each morning. I did not notice that our only light was a naked bulb dangling from a wire attached to our high Lebanese ceiling, or how infrequently we ate meat, or how carefully my mother pressed the olives, sure to squeeze out every drop of oil.
I did not get to go outside in the street to play very often because Mother looked down on the “street” people and thought them of a lower class. But I loved the street kids; and the rare times she let me go out, I had the time of my life. My friends—Hisham, Marie, and my best friend Eli—and I played “Cowboys and Indians” and “Germans and Americans.” The Germans and the Indians always won—our small revenge against the Americans, whom we had heard were generally a loud and dirty people.
My favorite game was “seven stones.” The children broke into teams and stacked seven square stones in a tower. Each team rolled tennis balls at the tower to try and knock it over, and the team that knocked it over had to rebuild it before getting pinged out with more tennis balls. I loved that game, and a couple of times I snuck out of the house to play it while Mother was taking a nap.
That ended when I got caught. Mother beat me with a stout, knobby switch from a pomegranate tree. She used to order a stack of these from my Uncle Mahmoud every year. She kept them on a high shelf in the entry way, where we could see them every time we entered the house. The day I snuck out to play seven stones, she gave me the worst kind of beating—smacking the bottoms of my feet, each blow causing fire to light up in my brain. But my mother was fair in her judgment: if she beat one of us, she beat everyone. Her reasoning was that if one of us was doing a crime, the rest of us were thinking about doing it.
Whenever I scraped together a few kroosh, I gave the money to my brother and asked him to buy me comic books. Batman and Superman took me outside of madrassa, giving me a different window on life. I carried my treasures to my hiding place, an attic storage area above the bathroom, and escaped from the world for awhile. I also remember a book I had from Egypt about child spies, kids who knew how to decode phone numbers and who rode fast, powerful motorcycles. They were devastatingly clever: if they wanted to know someone’s nationality, for example, they would watch to see which flag the person saluted.
I looked forward to the Muslim festivals, Adha and Ramadan. During Adha, people went on a pilgrimage to the mountains to make sacrifices for their sins. During Ramadan, we fasted for thirty days then celebrated like crazy for three. Before those celebrations, Mother baked all day long, kneading dough and mixing it in huge copper pots. All of us children helped, waking before sunrise to line up along the marble counter and around the low kitchen table.
“Kamal, crush these very finely,” Mother would say, dumping a kilo of pistachio meats on the table before me. I loved helping in this way, the scent of nuts and dough and pastry glazes wrapping around me like a comforting blanket. Amira, my oldest sister, chopping the spinach for fatire, small pies. My oldest brother, Fouad, browning meats for the sanbousick, meat pies. Ibrahim smashing dates for baklava—my mother would make six different kinds.
Laughter filled our tiny kitchen during these times, the pink sun warming us through the window as it rose.
3
When I was small, I was awakened most mornings by the smoky scents of brewing Turkish coffee and my father’s Italian cologne. He bought this elixir by the liter and slapped it on after showering in the chilly water that ran under Beirut from the springs of Jabal Sunnin. Each day, before the sun peeked over the mountains, Father left for his blacksmith shop, and all day long I looked forward to his homecoming. In the evenings, he would scoop me up in a hug, and I could smell the metal dust on his skin, the masculine scents of iron and fire.
I always loved climbing on my father’s back, holding onto his big thick neck. He had a French moustache, thin, not thick, sitting just on top of his lips.
I liked to run my finger over it. “Daddy, when I grow up will I have a moustache like you?” I would ask.
Fifty times I asked him that and yet each time, he would smile and say, “Yes, my son, you will have one just like mine one day.”
My father almost always arrived home after sunset, almost always carrying two leather sacks filled with fresh vegetables and grains from the market, or souk. One day over a family dinner in the kitchen, when I was about six years old, Father looked at me across the table where I sat between Fouad and Ibrahim.
“Kamal, would you like to go to work with me tomorrow?”
Joy surged through my heart and that night I could hardly sleep, my anticipation percolating in me as though I were going to a great feast. It was before sunrise when Mother rousted me from the couch in the living room. I could already smell the coffee and Father’s cologne, and I heard ice-laced rain pelting against the windows. Mother double-dressed me, pulling Ibrahim’s trousers and shirt over my pajamas. She had made for me a special hat of a shape she had seen in pictures from Tunisia. It was shaped like a ship, pointed in the front and back, wide around the middle, and trimmed in fake fur.
When I stepped outside with Father, an icy wind snapped at my ears. I could hear the ice pinging down on tin roofs. My father tried to cover us both with his good umbrella.
The blacksmith shop was in an area called Zaytoon, not far from the Mediterranean, set between an area called St. George Chalet and the Valley of the Jews. When we reached it, Father used a key to unhinge a great padlock, then rolled up the door, which rattled its way to the top.
I hurried inside out of the biting wind and into the dark place that smelled like my father. Quickly, he exchanged his street clothes for blue work pants and a khaki shirt. Right away he began building up a fire of rock coals, not wood, in two big barrels. In Father’s shop, everything was manual, nothing was electric. In the middle of the wall, high up, two huge barrels created pressure, and Father used the big chain dangling from the ceiling to pump heavy air into the ovens.
I stood watching him in awe as he strode back and forth across the floor, yanking tarps off the machinery and bringing the shop to fiery life.
Soon the coals glimmered in the furnaces, sending off an orange glow. The shop radiated with dry heat and Father took his shirt off. Suddenly, I saw him in a new light. Covered in a thin sheen of sweat, his skin reflected the fire’s copper glow. He was muscular, cut all over, his torso the shape of a sharp V, with wide shoulders narrowing to a trim waist and a hard belly that rippled in the shape of my mother’s washboard. His arms were thicker than all of me. The heat in the room ignited the smell of his cologne, and it mixed with that of the metal. Suddenly, I realized the strength of my father and pride swelled my heart.
At that moment, he flashed me a smile; and a great warmth, far beyond the heat of any furnace, flooded through me. To me, my father was everything a man is supposed to be.
4
My father did not teach madrassa often, but would sit in during especially important lessons. I remember the day we learned about the seventy-two virgins. My brothers—Fouad, Ibrahim, Omer—were there and also my mother’s brothers, Uncle Khalid and Uncle Shafiq. My mother sat quietly at the end of the table while Father told us a story from the hadith about a man who charged into a Jewish army all alone, sacrificing himself for Allah.
“The moment he died, he woke up instantly in jannah,” Father said. “Allah presented him with seventy-two virgins, women who had never before been touched by a man. And each virgin also had seventy-two virgins attending her, and all these women belonged to the man who died as al-shaheed, a martyr.”
Uncle Khalid winke
d at Fouad, who grinned widely. It seemed my oldest brother thought this was a fine arrangement. But I sat on my tesat and thought about it. Seventy-two times seventy-two? At six years old, I could not even count that high.
“Father,” I said, “You only have one woman in the house, and you fight all the time. How are you going to be able to manage so many women?”
My uncles burst out laughing, and Father smiled a little sheepishly. He thought it over for a moment, then said, “The grace of Allah is sufficient.”
He went on to explain that there would be no bickering or fighting in jannah. “These women will attend to all your desires and needs.”
“So they are servants?” I said.
“No, they are , virgin women. They will not be angels, but not human, either. They will be there to meet your heart’s desire.”
I knew what he meant. My friends had told me a million versions of how sex was done. Also, I had seen sheep and goats mating in the little barn behind our building.
But now I wondered: What about my mother?
I looked down the table and caught her eye. Then I turned to my father again. “You are married to my mother,” I said. “If you die as a martyr and you get this many virgins, how about if my mother died as a martyr? What does she get?”
My uncles and my brothers laughed, although a bit nervously this time. Father looked at Mother, who returned his glance, then looked down.
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