Children of Dust

by Ali Eteraz

  I began my exploration with a girl named Jullanar, who came from a very conservative family: curfew at sundown and no privacy at home and no cell phone and ceaseless attempts by her parents to marry her off to cousins in countries ending with “stan.” Given that her body really belonged to her father, and he didn’t want any part of him to create erections among other men—since that would mean that he was indirectly a homosexual—she had to buy jeans from the boys’ department at Sears in order to hide her curves. One time her father forbade her to leave the house because she was wearing her purse diagonally, rather like a sling, accentuating her breasts as the strap passed between them. Another time she got a long lecture from her father because she wore a black choker necklace. He literally ripped it off her because—he said—it made her look like a slut. All that repression had turned Jullanar into a closet exhibitionist. She craved attention no matter where it came from.

  “There’s this boy, he’s a desi,” she said to me about an Indian guy at her college. “He stalks me. He follows me from morning when I get to school till night when I get home.”

  “What a freak.”

  “I know, right! It’s so hot!” she said.

  “Wait. You like that?” I asked.

  “God, yes. I love knowing I’m turning guys on. It makes me feel like a casual slut!”

  I spent days turning my tongue in Jullanar—or dreaming of it—and spent nights scouting women online just in case someone more interesting turned up:

  I maintained contact with a girl in Tehran who was looking to find a Westerner to marry.

  I corresponded with a woman in Saudi Arabia who was already married but was trying to escape her husband and was looking for a good brother overseas.

  There was a white convert from a troubled family who couldn’t reconcile her Islam with her increasing levels of bisexuality. From time to time she called me to complain about the single-sex dance parties that the sisters in her community threw, where beautiful married and unmarried girls took off their hijabs. “They get into the little black dresses they have under their abayas and then dance on each other!” she said in a fit of frustration.

  I chatted on the phone with a sister who liked to call me after she’d finished the early-morning fajr prayer and before she went to work. An only child, she had me pull sex stories from the Internet featuring brother-sister action and read them to her on the phone. “I can’t get to them myself because I share a computer with my family,” she explained sheepishly. She tended to hang up as soon as she climaxed, leaving me feeling used.

  Then there was Anis. She was a pretty little hijabi I first got to know online. Although she had just entered college in a distant state when I first “met” her, she was on the cusp of getting married to a guy from New York. Our e-mail exchanges were mostly about how little she knew about sex and sexuality. I was, of course, more than eager to relieve her of her timidity.

  “You don’t have to be shy about being explicit with me,” I wrote. “Muslims enjoy discussing sex.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Didn’t you know that Imam Ghazali, one of Islam’s foremost scholars, wrote a work called The Etiquette of Consummation? It contains instructions about what a man should do to and for a woman. Did you know that it’s your right as a Muslima to demand sex from your husband—and he can’t say no?”

  “I had no idea the scholars said such things,” she wrote.

  “Surely you’ve heard of Ibn Hazm, the great Spanish jurist.”

  “Of course,” she replied.

  “He also wrote a lot about sex,” I informed her, my fingers flying across the keyboard. “His most famous book is called The Ring of the Dove. It’s a tome about courtly love, but the metaphor in the title actually refers to the head of a penis. So you see: the West learned its sexual explicitness from Islam!”

  “I didn’t know that,” she wrote. “Well, if it’s the Islamic thing to do, I think I’m ready to talk about sex. You can ask me stuff and I’ll answer. Ask me anything.”

  I went straight to the head of the matter. “Have you gone down on your fiancé?”

  “No,” she replied. “He went down on me, but I told him I wasn’t ready to do it to him.”

  “When do you think you will be ready?” I typed.

  “I told him that next time we see each other I want to do it. Thing is, to be quite honest I don’t know how it works. As in technically.”

  That was my in. “I could give you instructions,” I offered. “Especially since I want to ensure that your courtship is successful and you end up in a proper Islamic marriage.”

  “That would be great!”

  “There’s just one condition,” I stipulated.

  “Anything.”

  “When you go down on him, you have to imagine that you’re doing it to me.”

  “I was already planning on it,” she wrote, adding the wink emoticon.

  “Excellent!”

  “Now I have a condition,” she countered.

  “Anything,” I replied, taken aback by how unrestrained this hijabi was.

  “When I imagine you, can I imagine that you’re going to marry me? See, I have this issue: I can sin only with a guy that I can imagine I’ll marry one day. So if I’m imagining sinning with you, I have to be able to imagine being married to you as well.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  Anis and I communicated regularly from that day forward. To my surprise, within a couple of weeks she told me that she and the guy she’d been going to marry had called things off, and now she wanted to give me the honor of being the first guy she went down on. That was an offer I couldn’t refuse. In fact, I got in my trusty Ford Ranger—my parents had kept the truck for me while I was in New York—and drove overnight to go see her.

  “I couldn’t get us a hotel room,” she said, getting into the car as if we’d already been introduced. “They wouldn’t take cash!”

  “We’ll find a quiet parking lot,” I replied, turning onto the main street of the rural town.

  I stole glances at her while I drove. She was more beautiful than her online picture suggested. She was dainty and light-skinned, and her eyes were immensely sad. She wore Dior heels, a maroon hijab, a long black skirt, and a tight white blouse through which I could see the contours of her lacy black bra. I liked the way she wore her hijab; she wrapped it in whirls rather than safety-pinning the flaps the ugly way the Syrians and Malaysians did. At a traffic light I reached out and touched the texture of the scarf.

  “Do you like it?” she asked. “I got it when I went to Mecca.”

  “Very nice.”

  “I’d like to give you a gift.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a little cloth bag.

  “What is it?”

  She unfurled the cloth and I saw that it concealed a miniature Quran.

  “I want you to have it. Look, it’s even embroidered in gold and has silver calligraphy.”

  I didn’t want to take it. It just didn’t seem right that she should give me something so special when we’d just met. But I suspected that giving me the Quran cast a veil of sacredness over the obscenity we were about to engage in. Perhaps it made her feel better about her impending sin.

  I smiled. “I like it,” I said. “Put it in the glove compartment and I’ll take a closer look later.”

  We drove around until we got to a park with a lake. Leaving the car, we took a walk around the water, stopping now and then to touch each other, and sitting on a bench to kiss. When we returned to our places in the car, I tilted her body back and reached over to unbutton her blouse. She undid her hijab, letting a splash of auburn hair fall across my face. I squeezed her tresses between my fingers, wrapped the strands around my palms, and inhaled her Vidal Sassoon.

  The rest of the day we made prostrations upon each other’s skin. In case someone was passing by, I drew the hijab over our bodies.

  “A man and a woman are like a covering for one another,” she said, repeating a vers
e from the Quran.

  3

  Persuading girls to abandon the strictures of Islam, while it brought a wry smile to the corner of my mouth in the middle of a boring class, was not ultimately satisfying. I couldn’t boast or gloat about it to anyone. I couldn’t celebrate my success. The secrecy ruined it. What was the point of having power over another human being if it couldn’t be publicized?

  So I decided to break it off with Anis. We’d met only once more since our first delicious encounter and sometimes talked on the phone. Looking for an easy way out, I told her that I was going to leave school and run away with Yemenese Sufis in order to work on the state of my nafs, or carnal self. She thought I was just making excuses, but I insisted, saying, “I really need to work on my Islam, maybe do some spiritual tazkiyah, or purification; maybe evaluate my aqidas, my creeds.” Those were Arabic terms, and I pronounced them like the pious did. Anis became quiet. She and I both knew it: she had been defeated by guttural inflection. She cried on the phone, declared her hope that I would never find love, and then hung up on me, leaving me to sort out how to redirect my energy.

  The answer, as always, came in the form of Islam.

  A leadership crisis had formed within the MSA. Apparently the few people being groomed as potential presidents were dithering and doubting their qualifications. Part of their reluctance was proper Islamic etiquette—following the example of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, a Muslim being offered a leadership position was supposed to turn it down a few times—but part of it seemed serious. The possible lack of a president seemed to have shaken the community, and the organization’s elders were worried.

  The whole situation reminded me of the upheaval in sixth-century Arabia. After the death of a man named Abdul Muttalib in the final quarter of the century, there was a leadership vacuum in the tribe of Quraysh—the primary guardians of the Holy Ka’ba. As lesser men haphazardly competed with one another, a figure by the name of Muhammad pushed himself forward as a leader. It occurred to me that perhaps Muhammad had been a postmodern before his time. He recognized the weakness of others and, like any strong poet, saw an opportunity to assert his authority.

  I told myself that I had to be Muhammad to the MSA. In the spring of my junior year, I nominated myself for president and began campaigning.

  My platform, which I prepared with no sense of irony, was one of social conservatism and restoring the moral center of the organization. The campaign speech was a skit featuring a sinful drunk brother who, by participating in one of my MSA meetings, reformed his ways and became a pious believer. The elections followed shortly, and I became the first-ever unanimously elected president.

  I now had power over an entire flock of Muslims. What’s more, I was the representative, the immediate authority, for one of the three Abrahamic faiths—the fastest-growing one. Though our campus organization numbered less than a hundred, I could speak on behalf of a billion people. When a former U.S. president or the Dalai Lama or Archbishop Desmond Tutu came by, I was sent a special invitation to do a meet-and-greet. I went to large Christian churches around Atlanta, where I gave talks and held Q&As about Islamic history.

  I also became responsible for giving the Friday sermon, which made me the spiritual head of our little community. After Friday prayer I held court in the hallway as, one by one, supplicants and spiritual mendicants, brothers and sisters, came to me, shook my hand, bowed to me, and spoke their secrets in my ear: the brother asking how he should make his non-Muslim girlfriend turn toward Islam (with patience); the sister asking whether she should put on the hijab (yes); the brother who didn’t know what to do about his parents’ divorce (admonish them); the sister undergoing a nervous disorder (pray for a cure).

  I was, finally, the imam my father had once wanted me to be. Islam had given me prestige. I placed great emphasis upon the fact that my full name was Amir ul Islam—Prince of Islam. It didn’t matter that it was all a charade.

  4

  The responsibilities of leadership in the MSA were anything but princely.

  Balancing budgets, begging the student government for money, vacuuming the prayer center, organizing dinners, setting up cheesy social events, attending interfaith meetings in the early morning, meeting with the heads of other MSAs in the area and pretending to care about their thoughts and concerns, and meeting with Rabbi Aaron, the Jewish campus chaplain, to try to establish a joint halal-kosher deli—these things, inglorious and tedious, occupied most of my time as president. The rest of my time was spent supporting my staffers, whether by making late-night runs to Kinko’s to make colored copies or driving around the university and plastering up posters advertising MSA events.

  I also learned that leadership came with a whole host of new restrictions. Consider:

  Some congregants thought that my favorite shirt, which featured a man in a fedora and had the letters NPA—National Pimp Association—written underneath him, was now inappropriate.

  When I commented that I would consider getting a small tattoo on my arm, some of the members told me that it would be in bad taste for the president to get inked, since some scholars considered the practice un-Islamic.

  When I made plans to attend a birthday party at a club, I was given naseeha, or confidential religious counsel, by a brother who felt that this would reflect badly upon my office; and when I objected that I wasn’t planning on drinking or dancing, and that in fact many of the MSA members themselves were going, I was told that most people would think I was there solely to monitor their morality and would therefore likely be viewed as the religious police.

  In short, there was a downside to being “Muhammad to the MSA”: I now bore the expectation of infallibility and heightened purity. A Muslim leader couldn’t be just an average guy undergoing the same tribulations, committing the same mistakes, and liking the same things as everyone else. On the contrary, a Muslim leader had to be an ideal that other, less religious people looked toward as a way to motivate themselves to be more pious. A Muslim leader, rather than being himself, had to be what others thought a perfect Muslim should be. The trouble, of course, was that I was far removed from piety—postmodernism and my own nature had assured that—and therefore the only solutions were to genuinely achieve perfect piety or to fake it.

  As a true postmodernist I opted for the latter and called it art. It was as Nietzsche had said: “giving style to one’s character.” I styled myself a slave of Islam.

  My plan to depict myself as Islamically submissive had three elements: wardrobe, conventions, and public rituals.

  First the wardrobe. Adopting the Islamic “look” was easy. It required mixing and matching the following clothes and accessories:

  Chinstrap beard

  Palestinian-style checkered kafiyas (2)

  Multicolored West African kufi, a rounded, brimless cap (1)

  Elegant white, crocheted kufi (1)

  Green cargo pants and green dress shirts (2)—green being the color of Islam

  Official MSA T-shirts (2) with Quranic verses from beloved chapters—Surah Baqarah and Surah Nur—imprinted on the back (maroon and blue respectively)

  Long-sleeved pride shirt in white with “Muslim” written in gold lettering across the front

  Pakistani shalwar kameezes (2), to be seen in, particularly in the student center

  Gray Iraqi robe-style thowb (1), to be worn during Friday sermon Tasbih beads (2 strings)—one string hanging teasingly out of a bag, the other hanging in the car

  Islam ring for ring finger to symbolize “marriage” to the faith (sterling silver with star and crescent) (1)

  Crescent necklace (sterling silver) (1)

  Sterling silver wristband with Quranic verse etched inside (1)

  The second component of my plan involved showing off my new wardrobe at the Islamic conventions that were a big part of my job as president. The best place to show off the fashions of the faith was the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA.

  Every Labor D
ay the ISNA held a convention in Chicago. It was the biggest gathering of Muslims in the Western hemisphere. Believers came from everywhere, filling Chicago’s hotels. College MSAs used funds they’d collected over the year to subsidize the trip for at least some of their members. People went to listen to lectures by superstar evangelists like Hamza Yusuf and Siraj Wahaj and to go to the massive bazar, where everything from Medinan miswaks—teeth-cleaning sticks—to Indonesian devotional music was available. There were workshops and seminars and networking events for young professionals, where they discussed such things as how to tap the market of rich Muslim doctors. For the bachelors and bachelorettes in their mid-twenties—clearly past marital age—there were expensive matchmaking banquets at which prospective spouses wore color-coded name tags corresponding with their age. (Some of the parents, many of whom accompanied even their middle-aged children, complained that the colors ought to correspond to degrees or income, since those were the most important barometers of marital eligibility.) Often, prominent religious figures from abroad were invited to ISNA conventions. One time Shaykh Sudais, the lachrymose imam of the Holy Mosque in Mecca, flew in secretly during the middle of the night to lead the morning prayer. When he didn’t cry during his recitation, everyone was disappointed and some brothers rioted.

  The youth loved the annual ISNA event. We attended primarily to socialize with other Muslims of similar age and interests. Much of the hobnobbing took place late at night, in the various hotel lobbies. The best lobby was at the Hyatt. The youth ironically called it Club Hayat, which—translated loosely—means Club Modesty.