“We conquered North Africa and the Middle East,” said the ram-horn, “all of which had been, at that time, bathed in the blood of the Slaughtered Lamb. We owned Spain, much of Austria. We even made it as far north as Tours in France.
“The lamb. How soft!” The pig-nose giggled, a high, unpleasant sound. “How curly!”
“How weak,” the ram-horn sneered in scorn. “How unable to protect his followers.”
“How bloody your ancestors were,” jeered the pig-nose.
“And yet, now,” he continued, bragging, “we have convinced you modern sons of mares to blame the Crusaders for slaughtering the innocent Muslims.” He laughed long and hard, a harsh, grating sound.
“Ooo,” the pig-face joined in gleefully, adding, “and the names of men like Charles Martel have been forgotten.”
“Who?” asked Shazia.
“See!” The whole gang of djinn chortled and guffawed.
“What a time that was!” the ram-horn grinned, showing ragged uneven teeth. “Back then, where the followers of the Lamb went, they stopped slavery, stopped the killing of women and children, and introduced liberties for the commoners, those gets of bulls. While your people—everywhere they conquered, they put men, women, and children to the sword. When they were generous, anyone who would not convert was demoted to second class dhimmi. When they were not generous, the conquered were instructed to convert or die. Or, even better for us, they just slaughtered them all. Like Boka Haram in Africa.”
“That is the true face of your ‘Religion of Peace.’” Chortled the pig-face.
“Why?” Shazia turned toward the angel. “Why did this all happen?”
The pig-nose snickered. “Your precious Mohammad did not pass the Test of the Prophet.”
“He did not fail entirely,” said the Angel Gabriel. “In the beginning, he heard me.”
“Wha… What is the Test of the Prophet?” asked Shazia.
The stench of the marid was beginning to make her feel light-headed. She feared she might faint. She felt it necessary to remind herself in the sternest of terms: Marines never fainted.
The angel spoke, “All who hear the good news that I, or one of my brethren, bring must undergo a test. A test of their worthiness for the task before them. If they pass, then they are true prophets of God. If they fail, they cease to hear us properly and become, instead, false prophets.”
“How do they pass or fail?” Shazia asked. “What are the criteria?”
“Faith and humility,” replied the Angel Gabriel. “They must both have faith, that Our Divine Father has picked the right ones for the task, and humility, to understand that they are one servant among many.”
“What happens when they fail?” she asked.
“Some judge themselves unworthy,” leered the pig-face, “even though the Unaccursed has told them otherwise. They bow to fear and kiss its dung-coated behind.”
“We whisper to the sons of vixen,” said the ram-horn, “feeding their fears, convincing them to refuse to speak the message given to them. Or, even better, to invent a lie, to shift some of the burden—such as to say that the words came from an old man met on a mountain road or were found on some, now lost, ancient manuscript.”
“And this is bad?”
“They think ‘a noble lie’ will harm no one,” said Gabriel solemnly, “but lies are the children of the Enemy. When mortals worship a religion founded on lies, they open themselves to—in addition to their personal sins—the mechanizations of Sut, Son of Iblis.”
Shazia knew from her great-grandmother’s stories that Iblis, the Lord of all Evil Djinn, had five sons: Tir, Al-A’war, Sut, Dasimn, and Zalambur. Each had an unholy duty it performed. Sut’s task was to suggest lies.
“Others,” cackled the pig-nose, “fail to recognize their own filth. They judge themselves grander than other men. They start believing that they shit rubies and piss sweet wine. They congratulate themselves and listen to our whispers. Their preaching becomes all about themselves, and they preach to the satisfaction of their lusts—violence, sex, drink, whatever offal they desire.”
“Look at your son of a dog prophet,” chuckled the ram-horn. “He preached more than one wife. Even though it is written: A man who marries two wives is a thief, for he steals the love intended for his first wife and gives it to another.”
“Ah! But it is not written!” snorted the pig-face, waving his hoofed hand back and forth, as if admonishing. “We arranged for that to be left out.”
The djinn all laughed heartily together, a terrible and maddening sound.
“At first he listened to me,” the Angel Gabriel said gravely. “In the early books of the Quran, he listened to me and called upon his people to show kindness to the followers of Isa Iln Maryam and the People of the Book. But he soon became much more concerned with naming himself the final prophet and calling for vengeance against those who did not agree. He stopped listing to me.
“As to the Test of the Prophet,” continued the angel, “when the time comes for a prophet to come into his own, the rules are told to him. Then he is tempted. For it is my eldest brother’s prerogative to have a chance to lead mankind astray. The potential prophet is told that it is allowed to do something that is not allowed. If he knows better, he is a true prophet. If he does not, he retroactively becomes a false one.”
“You mean… like Eve being told not to eat the apple, and then the serpent told her she could?” asked Shazia.
“Exactly.” The angel nodded. “Or Paris, who turned down a kingdom and earthly wisdom but fell prey to the promises of beauty and thus destroyed his civilization. Or Isa Iln Maryam, who turned down a kingdom and refused to use his heavenly powers for his own aggrandizement when the devil came to tempt him.”
“Wait! You mean… Paris Alexander? The Prince of Troy?” Shazia blinked. “I had not realized that he was a prophet.”
“Nor was he. But he could have been, had he not yielded to temptation.”
“Weird,” Shazia muttered. For a moment, her whole current experience took on a surreal quality. “I have heard of false prophets, but I have never thought before about people who were supposed to be prophets and failed.”
“There have been thousands. Tens of thousands,” said the angel.
“Oh.”
“Most disqualified themselves immediately by doubting the message,” said the angel. “The rest failed the Test of the Prophet.”
“And the Prophet failed?” Shazia’s voice quailed.
She thought of her devout parents and all the other good Muslims she knew, and how their faith had sustained them through times of trial. Surely, it had not all been lies. There was truth what they believed!
She knew it in her heart.
“As I said, at first, he wrote truly what I had spoken,” said Gabriel. “He wrote of peace and of the virtue of God. He wrote many wise and true things that uplift his followers, even today. But his temptation came in the form of the same temptation Isa and Paris rejected—the promise of an earthly kingdom. My eldest brother whispered to him, enflaming his pride. When he came to Medina, he presented himself as a Jewish prophet to the Jews living there. They asked for evidence of his claim, and when he was not able to give any, they doubted him. Instead of praying humbly for a sign, he grew angry and belligerent and attacked them. Instead of using his greatness to bring peace and healing, he chose war. This choice colored his judgment. After a time, he stopped being able to hear me. He did not realize that my eldest brother, the King of the Djinn, had taken my place.”
“You mean… Iblis Al-Shaitan?”
“I do.”
“So the Quran?”
The pig-faced chortled. “One of our greatest works! We convinced the manure-eating early Imams to scramble the books of the Quran. To put them longest to shortest, instead of eldest to newest. So no one could tell which came first. Or which came after.”
“Had this not happened,” Gabriel lowered his head in sorrow, “the imams who followed would ha
ve figured out that the idea of jihad was a distortion of my message. There would have been a general movement away from the later books, and Islam might have become, truly, the Religion of Peace.”
Shazia thought of the violence that currently rocked the Muslim world. She thought of her great-grandfather and how he had boasted of the great Muslim warriors of the past and of the carnage they committed upon the infidel. She thought of Raif Badawi, such a promising young man with three sweet little children, who had been sent to jail for ten years and flogged with a horse whip for the crime of blogging: “Muslims, Christians, Jews, and atheists are all equal.”
Her heart cried out for her people and for their terrible wounds.
“How did this come to be?” Shazia moaned. She hugged her shoulders and rocked back and forth.
Gabriel replied solemnly, “When I came to speak to Mohammad he could have received my word in humility. Instead he chose to ‘put himself above his peers in glory.’”
Shazia leaned against the cement wall. She felt a terrible pain in her stomach, as if everything firm and certain had been cut away.
“So… all Islam? We are all the servants of the dark ones?” she cried.
“Only those who lean toward the dark teachings,” replied Gabriel.
“Don’t feel so bad,” mocked the ram-horn. “You sons of pigs are not the only ones who bend and lick the feet of the children of Iblis. Tir, who brings about calamities, rules Islam, true. But to the West is the domain of Al-A’war who spreads debauchery. The East is rulled by Sut, Lord of Lies, who rules the Communists, those filth-eating fools gobble up whatever nonsense their masters feed them.”
“I do not care if the infidels are corrupt,” cried Shazia, “I care about the Prophet!”
“Do not judge him too harshly,” the angel said gently, “it is a very difficult task. Few succeed.”
“But if the Prophet could not do it, has anyone succeeded?”
“Certainly.” Gabriel smiled. “All that is needed is faith and humility. Do you not remember what Maryam said, when I brought her the Good News?”
Maryam, mother of Isa?” asked Shazia, startled. “The Quran does not say.”
Of course! This was the angel who had brought the word of virgin birth to the mother of the prophet Isa Iln Maryam.
The angel’s eyebrow actually twitched. “I told him to put that in.”
The marid and their cohorts chortled mightily.
“What did she say?” Shazia ignored the taunts of the raucous crows of djinn.
The Angel Gabriel replied, “She said: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.’”
The marid shrieked and yowled, the noise of it hurt Shazia’s head.
“Can you not rid me of these?” Shazia cried, her hands over her ears. “You said you could protect those who ask!”
Gabriel smiled, as if he had been waiting for this. “It would be my pleasure!”
The angel’s brilliant white coat billowed. Only Shazia saw now that it was not a coat but wings with pure white feathers. A circle of gold appeared above his head. The halo shed hope the way a lamp shed light. In its illumination, the giant marid seemed puny, weak, mewling things. Crying in dismay, they scuttled backwards to hide behind the frozen young men.
Beneath the halo of the Angel Gabriel, Shazia did not feel as cold. Such buoyancy lifted her spirits that even seeing her beloved cousin in such a terrible circumstance ceased to crush her spirits.
Only once before had she ever felt such a thing. When she was six, Great-Grandmother Anahika fell ill. For days, she had lain and moaned in bed. The doctor had come and left again, shaking his head. Family had gathered from distant villages, anticipating her death. A great aunt Shazia had not previously met was an artist. She had set up her easel to draw one last picture of Anahika, though mainly she had reminisced with the other women about the old days of their youth. Most of the children were unaffected by this commotion. Adults might be downcast, but the children’s lives went on.
Shazia and Kabir, however, were full of trepidation and sadness, for they loved Great-Grandma most of all.
Shazia had gone to her mother and asked to be taught a Du’a from the Quran for the healing of the sick. Her mother gave her: Truly distress has seized me, but You are Most Merciful of those that are merciful. Shazia had murmured it under her breath wherever she went.
But healing did not come, and Great-Grandmother would soon be taken from them. It was agreed by all.
Then, one day, the door had opened and her father had stood there. Shazia could still remember how he looked, the light framing his tall form.
“Shazia!” he had cried, scooping her up, “The doctor! He has found a new medicine! He says Anahika will get well!”
And so it had come to pass. Great-Grandmother had not died. The relatives from distant villages had to go home without a funeral. All had continued as it should.
But what Shazia remembered best was the hope that had come to her at that moment, when all was lost, and then there was Papa, surrounded by light. Hope had flooded through her, lifting everything inside of her. In later years, when times were grim, she had remember that moment, and she had told herself that if hope had come even then, when death was certain, fixed, it might come again.
How beautiful great-grandmother had looked when she was well and could again sit with the children at her feet to tell her stories. At the end of that next story session, Great-Grandmother Anihika had taken Kabir’s hand in one of hers and Shazia’s in the other, and she had held their two hands together, saying, “Thank you, my dear ones, for your dear love of me, and I charge you to always be true to each other. No matter what happens, put each other first and never let anything come between you.”
“Stop!” cried the marid, cowering behind the young men. “We will not pester the daughter of a whore. Stop!”
Gabriel folded his wings. The halo vanished, leaving a cold, gloomy, gray day filled with motionless raindrops. Shazia tried to hold onto the flame of hope that had kindled inside her, but it was nothing but a memory. The feeling it had kindled slipped from her grasp, leaving her feeling empty and cold.
The angel turned to Shazia. His eyes were a deep, bottomless blue. “The real question, Lance Corporal Shazia Hayak is not: Did Mohammad pass the Test of the Prophet. The real question is: Will you?”
“Wait, what? Me?” she squawked.
“You are talking to me.” The angel waved a hand at his shining self. “If there is another qualification for becoming a prophet, I know it not.”
“But that’s… just because I can see ghosts.”
“And why do you think you were granted such a gift?”
“But… ”
The angel took a step forward. “Did you not swear a solemn vow to make the world a better place? Can you think of anything it needs more?”
Shazia wanted to object, but she could not.
“Why me?” She sputtered, “T-they will not listen to me! They will discount what I say.”
“Is that so?” A flicker of amusement passed through Gabriel’s eyes. “Are you also slow of tongue?”
“Pardon me?”
The angel shrugged, his eyes twinkling. “Moses joke there.”
Shazia gaped at him. Angels could make jokes?
“Is not laughter the weapon of the angels?” asked Gabriel, smiling.
“Sorry, Old Gabe,” called one of the marid from where they cowered, “Under our influence, the sons of monkeys removed that line, too.”
“But,” Shazia sputtered, still appalled by the angel’s suggestion that she could be a prophet, “according to the Quran, a woman cannot become a Muslim preacher—women are only allowed to preach to other women.”
“True,” replied the angel, smiling, “but then a woman cannot be a Marine either. In Pakistan, they cannot even drive a taxi.”
Shazia blinked. “Um… but to change the Quran, the Law, would require a prophet. And the Quran says the Prophet—M
-mohammad, I mean—was the last prophet. There are to be no more. To change this would require a whole new religion! A woman cannot just start a religion!”
“Mary Baker Eddy did.”
“Who?”
“And there have been many female prophets. What of St. Teresa, St. Juliana of Norwich, or the ancient Jewish prophetess, Judith?”
Unsure of who these people were, Shazia merely nodded.
“Mohammed wrote down what I said. That is what made him a prophet. Now I have come to you,” intoned the angel. “Will you tell others what I tell you? Or shall you, too, fail the Test of the Prophet?”
“You want me to... ”
“Write down my words on those occasions in the future when I will come to speak with you. Tell the world, the Muslim world in particular, the truth. Be the light that leads mankind to the real Religion of Peace.”
Shazia remembered the words Maryam had spoken when Gabriel gave her the news that she was to bear the prophet Isa. Could she say such a thing? Merely accept such a dread fate without complaint? New admiration for Maryam filled her.
But was not this what she had wanted?
Had not she trained her whole life to change the world, to make it a better place? Did not she have a better chance of doing that with an angel on her side than without?
And yet, the idea sounded crazy!
“Me? Change the world?” she cried, her heart beating rapidly. “All by myself?”
“You were meant to have a helper.” The angel regarded the frozen young men.
“Kabir?” Hope flooded into her heart.
The angel’s eyes filled with kindness and sorrow. “Together, the two of you were meant to be called to end the doctrine of jihad.”
“Is that our task?” Shazia gasped with joy, looking from the angel to Kabir. “To end jihad?”
The angel nodded. “Was that not what he prayed for, the day he wished to stop the fighting of both men and roosters?”
She pressed her hands against her mouth and then brought them together, pleading. “O, Great One, can my cousin be saved?”
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