by Zoë Ferraris
“Oh.”
“You don’t believe me?” Ra’id was getting more tense by the second. “They were friends, nothing more.”
“It seems to me she knew this Eric guy pretty well. She went out with him quite a lot.”
“They hung out sometimes, that was it.”
“Is that what she told you?”
“It’s none of your business!” Ra’id shot out of his seat, surprising Osama.
“Mr. Nawar, sit down.”
Ra’id remained standing a few seconds longer, then reluctantly took a seat. The look on his face told Osama that he was done cooperating.
“Was she going to meet Eric that day?” Osama asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Did it upset you that she didn’t want you to come along?”
Ra’id jutted out his lower lip. Despite the proliferation of coarse black hairs it was a boy’s chin, and he seemed more juvenile every minute. “Like I said before: I don’t know where she went that morning.”
Nothing more was said for a cold few minutes. Osama thought of Nuha’s birth control pills lying shattered on the kitchen table and of the shameful feeling he’d had after smashing them, that he wasn’t able to control himself, that there was something very traditional inside him that couldn’t be so easily dismissed. Instead of thinking of it as a character flaw, however, he began to imagine that everybody had a secret trigger. Had Leila, like Nuha, done something in particular that had brought out her cousin’s surprising wrath?
Osama stood up. “Mr. Nawar,” he said, leaning over the table. “We’re going to find out what’s on these tapes, and we’re going to put all our information together, and I want you to know that there’s simply no chance at all that we’re going to let this killer get away. Is that clear?”
Ra’id didn’t reply, and Osama made as if to leave.
“Wait,” Ra’id said. “Are you going to let me go?”
“No,” Osama said.
“But why? I didn’t do anything!”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Nawar, you ran away once before, and I’m not convinced of your innocence.” Osama waited for more protest, but Ra’id didn’t speak, and Osama left him looking furious.
24
Before Dhuhr prayers on Sunday was the best time to catch Imam Hadi alone. It was supposed to be the hour when his older students practiced their recitations, but they always came after ‘Asr, leaving him a brief period to inhabit his office and enjoy a cup of tea with those congregants who knew him well enough to take advantage of this gap in his schedule. He was usually studying or writing, sitting behind the great oak desk, glasses perched on his nose, his shumagh draped on the chair behind him.
Nayir found him like this and felt guilty for intruding, but Imam Hadi welcomed him with typical bonhomie and begged him to take a seat while he went to fetch tea. Nayir found it comforting to note that nothing had changed since his last visit here two months before—not the parchment scriptures on the walls, nor the way the holy books were stacked on the shelf above their heads. Even the smell was the same, wood and leather and the cool plastery scent of stucco walls.
When the imam returned, he was carrying two cups of tea. Nayir liked that about him, that he wouldn’t use a servant, that he understood what genuine modesty was. Hadi set the cup before Nayir and took a seat at the desk.
“It’s been a while, Nayir,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of you. My wife and I went out to the desert last week to visit a friend of ours, an old Bedouin. I know I’ve told you about him. He reminds me so much of you, he might have been your father.”
“Which tribe is he from?”
“Al-Murrah.”
“Ah, I know some Murrah.”
The imam’s cell phone rang, and he switched it off. They sat in contented silence for a while, listening to the creaky metal fan in the corner spin back and forth.
“So tell me how you’ve been,” Imam Hadi said. There was no note of concern in his voice, none of Uncle Samir’s pitying looks. If he’d noticed that Nayir had lost weight, he had chosen not to mention it.
Nayir assured him all was well, then explained the reason for his visit. He gave the imam a brief explanation of the documents he’d analyzed at the lab and reported Majdi’s suggestion that they represented earlier, and somehow more authentic, versions of the Quran. Yet they had contained obvious mistakes.
“What sorts of mistakes?” Imam Hadi asked.
Nayir explained. Imam Hadi sat back in his chair and crossed his hands on his belly. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he said gently. “We know about the existence of minor differences in wording in the Quran throughout the ages. And there are a number of very simple reasons for it. When the words of Allah were first delivered to the Prophet, peace be upon him, they were transmitted orally. Of course the first Muslims wrote everything down, but those who learned the Quran in the beginning had to memorize it, and sometimes they wrote the Quran in their own way. The Prophet’s companions had their own versions for personal use. But because they had already memorized the Quran, they used the written documents as a memory aid, nothing more. There are books that go into great detail about all of these things.
“You see,” he went on, “in any human system like that, you will find imperfections. What is miraculous—what is evidence to me of the greatness of Allah—is that the true Quran has remained unchanged. And that centuries of Muslims have chosen not to alter a single diacritical mark in the holy book.”
“You’re right,” Nayir said. He knew about the various “personal” versions of the Quran, but he had assumed they had all been burned. It was hard to understand why he hadn’t explained this to Majdi, why he hadn’t been as calm about the whole matter as the imam was now.
“Islam has often been accused of inconsistency,” the imam said, “or of being a mere forgery of another religion, or of being some variation of the truth, and not the whole truth. But remember the words of Allah: When We substitute one revelation for another—and Allah knows best what He reveals in stages—they say: ‘Thou are but a forger!’: But most of them understand not. It means that Allah has given us guidance throughout the ages, in many forms, but the fundamental message doesn’t change. The truth is always the same.”
Nayir nodded. He felt a flood of relief and gratitude to the imam. Of course he had known all this before, but he needed the reassurance that Majdi had indeed been too quick to judge.
“We can talk about the history of the Quran,” the imam said, “but I would like to hear about you. Tell me what has been going on.”
Guiltily, Nayir remembered his other reason for coming. “The truth is”—he felt a flush of embarrassment for not having told the imam any of this before, but he pressed ahead—“I met a woman. A while ago, in fact.”
Hadi raised an eyebrow with a happy, expectant twitch. “Yes?”
Nayir began to explain. He had to start at the beginning, meeting Katya at the morgue when he was picking up Nouf’s body on behalf of her family. He had tried to tell the imam these things months ago, after he and Katya had stopped talking, but he hadn’t had the nerve. He hated to think how the unfolding story of his relationship with Katya would change the imam’s opinion of him, but worrying about that now was only stupid pride.
Hadi listened patiently, sipping his tea and nodding, occasionally letting his face reflect interest or chagrin. At the end, there was a thoughtful silence.
“Tell me,” the imam said, “why didn’t you speak to her for all those months?”
“We talked on the phone this one time,” Nayir explained again, running a hand down his neck, “when she told me about her new job. I asked if she would be working with strange men, and I think the question upset her. She’s not the sort of woman who expects that I should understand everything she does. She’s a good Muslim, and there’s a part of her that’s traditional, too —”
“That’s good.”
“Yes, but she said she worked at this job with men,” Nayir said. �
��It’s a new job.”
Hadi gave him a look that seemed to say Well, we’ll have to deal with that at some point. “So she stopped calling you because she was upset by your reaction?”
“I think so.”
“And you didn’t call her?”
“It wouldn’t have been proper.”
Nayir wanted to tell him that she still wore Othman’s engagement ring, that it stabbed him every time he saw it, and that he had no idea what it really meant—did she still have feelings for Othman? It would be a terrible admission, because at the very least it meant that her heart wasn’t invested in a relationship with Nayir, and that he was a fool for hoping.
The imam sat back in his chair and took a breath, raising his eyes to the ceiling in a thoughtful way. “And you believe that she’s a good Muslim woman.”
“Yes.”
“Despite the phone calls.”
“Yes.”
“And despite her insistence on seeing you alone.”
She always had a driver, Nayir wanted to say, but he thought quickly of the time she’d shown up at his boat without an escort, and the time they’d eaten lunch together alone, and he bit his tongue.
Hadi sat forward again and set down his cup. “It seems to me that you care about this woman.”
“Yes.”
“And has that always been the case?” he asked delicately.
Nayir cringed inside. Yes, he wanted to say. “I would have done the right thing and asked her to marry me, but she had just broken off an engagement with another man. I felt that she wasn’t ready, or maybe that she was rushing things. For herself.”
“And for you?”
Nayir shrugged nervously. He wanted to say how difficult it was to think of asking for Katya’s hand in marriage when he wasn’t even sure of such an action himself. He wanted to say how much he felt for her, how beautiful she seemed, how when he’d first met her she’d been very pretty, but now that he knew her better, there was a different kind of beauty about her, something both thrilling and familiar. Yet after waiting so long to marry, it would be stupid to leap into a bad decision. He wanted to be absolutely sure that it was right. He knew that the imam would tell him that he ought to have proposed to her months ago.
“Nayir,” Hadi said with a sudden rush of compassion, “you shouldn’t be afraid of rushing into a mistake. You of all people can be relied on to approach things with caution. Your mistake here will be not to act when you should.”
“You mean proposing marriage.”
“Yes,” Hadi said. “It’s what you should have done from the first. If this woman is important to you, then that is the only proper way. Not to let these months of silence go by.” He frowned at Nayir in a kind way. “I don’t think you want to spend your whole life alone.”
Nayir was surprised. He had felt certain that Hadi would tell him to be wary of a woman who worked among strange men, a woman who would be so forward with him.
“But she is not—” he began.
“No, she is not the Muslim you are,” Hadi interrupted, “but you believe that she is a good Muslim. And you said that her father is devout, so you know that she is from a good family. I trust your judgment of people. And if she is pious, then she will eventually understand the impropriety of interacting with strange men. You see, many women expose themselves to strange men because they are looking for a husband. And this woman, if she is a good Muslim as you say, then once she marries you, she won’t have that need anymore. She will have you. She will begin to have children, and she will want to stay home to raise them.” Imam Hadi spread his hands. “Everything will change once you do the right thing.”
Nayir blinked, fighting off an abrupt feeling of sadness. “And if it doesn’t?” he asked.
“Then she’s not right for you.”
That’s what I’m afraid of, he thought.
“Go and find out,” the imam said. “Go and make a mistake if that’s what you need to do. Because it is haraam for you to spend time with this woman, to yearn for her, to feel improperly toward her when she is na-mehram to you and you are not married.”
Nayir stayed and talked with the imam a while longer in a vain attempt, he realized, to improve his mood. But the sadness followed him back to the Rover, rooting around in his chest and swelling up now and then like the wild cry of some poor, lost animal. He couldn’t figure out where the feeling came from. Something about Katya, and the image of her having children. The thought had always made him feel hopeful, but the conversation had thrown a melancholy over it, and he felt, for a sad, lonely moment, that he would never be happy with her again.
25
With a treacherous sigh, Katya slid the next of Leila’s DVDs into the computer’s hard drive. She’d taken only a short break to help Majdi process evidence from Ra’id’s car. Now she was beginning to feel that she’d been trapped in her office too long, and that if she poked her head out the high window she would see cars flying through the air, people in space suits, evidence that decades had passed while she’d been absorbed in one woman’s obsession with prostitutes, drag queens, and publicly humiliating behaviors.
Not that all of it was boring. In fact, the interesting bits were becoming more frequent, and Katya could see how Leila had begun to develop her talents as an interviewer and camerawoman. In the last full interview Katya had watched, Leila had actually managed not to anger the subject, and the whole thing had ended on a note of personal triumph, with the prostitute declaring that she didn’t believe she would need Allah’s forgiveness because it was never a sin to make a lover smile. But the video footage had begun to give Katya the feeling that she was pursuing the wrong lead. Leila’s recent behavior had not been all that confrontational. It was looking less likely that she had provoked someone to kill her in a fit of passion. If anything, she had become more diplomatic.
But Katya kept watching the footage anyway, hoping for a find.
On the desk beside her sat the box of cassette tapes they’d found in Ra’id’s car. One of the lab techs downstairs had already digitized half of them and was right now burning them onto DVDs. Katya was supposed to do the other half, but she suspected that the originals were going to be the same as the ones she’d taken from Farooha, and she didn’t want to waste any more time. She was already struggling to get through the DVDs she had.
The next DVD surprised her. The screen came alive with images of Mecca and pilgrims circling the Kaaba. At first Katya thought that she’d stumbled on more B-roll, but a title appeared on the screen: Pilgrimage: One Man’s Quest to Find the Truth about the Quran.
Words scrolled across the screen: Many Muslims believe that the Quran is the pure and holy Word of Allah as transmitted directly to the Prophet Mohammed… A face appeared. Sheikh Al-Arifi, the caption said. His robe was so white and crisp that it looked as if a confectioner had frosted him, applying just the right swirls around the head and hands. His skin was agonizingly soft and clear (was he wearing makeup?) and his beard was neatly trimmed with an endearing unevenness at the bottom edge, a faux carelessness. He was handsome—too handsome. He belonged on a wedding cake. As he began speaking, a mellifluous, rolling Jeddawi accent draped him in an air of professionalism. This was not a ranting madman but a strong-minded, articulate scholar.
“The Quran is pure,” he was saying. “The book as it is printed today is the same text exactly that was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. The reason is that the Quran contains the true words of Allah, and they cannot be corrupted.” He spoke as if he were having dinner with his family and was explaining something obvious to his wife: “Yes, of course, once you turn the key, the engine starts. That’s how cars work, habibti.” Katya wanted to roll her eyes, but she was too full of contempt.
From the logo in the corner, she saw that Leila had stolen this segment from Memri TV. Of course. The station aired anything that made Islam look tawdry and ridiculous: extremists, rigidly conservative sheikhs. The last segment she’d seen on Memri had inv
olved an imam giving a lecture on how girls in Denmark were so perverted that they regularly had sex with donkeys.
Then the picture cut to a different sort of man. He was tall and blond and deeply browned by the sun. The tag on the screen identified him as Apollo Mabus, Quranic scholar. He wore a pair of khaki pants and a safari jacket with bulging pockets. He was standing in the desert as if he belonged there, dust caking his neck and face, big brown eyes squinting against the overbright sun. A strong wind kicked up clouds of sand, giving the scene a certain urgency.
Speaking less formal Arabic, and with no trace of an accent, he said, “Most modern scholars agree that the Quran is not pure. It’s not the perfect embodiment of the words of Allah, because I tell you”—here he chuckled —“if so, then Allah is a terrible writer. The truth is, the Quran contains factual errors, grammatical errors. Fully one-fourth of the book makes no sense at all. It has been rewritten and abrogated and abridged. It’s so full of contradictions and mistakes that it’s embarrassing to most intelligent Muslims.”
His voice contained that particular sense of pity that intellectuals often have for the irrational world around them. You poor things will never understand logic. It was the kind of all-knowing superiority that stemmed, perversely, from an ignorance of the power of tradition and faith. And it provoked an even greater contempt in her.
A recitation came over the computer speakers while images of Quranic documents filled the screen. Katya recognized them—they were similar to the ones Majdi had been looking at in the lab. They scrolled elegantly from right to left, while faded images of minarets and city skylines lit up the blank spaces.
A voice-over began. Katya recognized Leila speaking: Is the Quran pure? Or is it the result of editing and meddling? This question has plagued Muslim scholars for centuries, but today, the brave men and women who ask that question must fear for their lives. Even to suggest that the Quran is not pure can result in charges of apostasy, which carries a punishment of death.