Shaikh Rashid greets him in the language of the Qur'an: "fa-inna ma a 'l-'usri yusrd." Ahmad, his classical Arabic rusty after three months of skipping his lessons at the mosque, deciphers the quote in the head and ponders it for hidden meanings. Every hardship is followed by ease. He recognizes it as from "Comfort," one of the early Meccan suras placed late in the Book because of their shorter length but dear to his master because of their compressed, enigmatic nature. Sometimes called "The Opening," it addresses, in God's voice, the Prophet himself: Have We not lifted up your heart and relieved you of the burden which weighed down your back?
His encounter with Joryleen had been arranged for the
Friday before Labor Day, so it was not until the next Tuesday that Charlie Chehab asked him at work, "How'd it go?"
"Fine" was Ahmad's queasy reply. "It turns out I knew her, slightly, at Central High. She has been led sorely astray since."
"She do the job?"
"Oh, yes. The job is done."
"Good. Her thug promised she could do it nicely. What a relief. To me, I mean. It didn't feel natural, you still having your cherry. Don't know why I took it so personally, but I did. Feel like a new man?"
"Oh, yes. I see life through a new veil. A new lens, I should say."
"Great. Great. Until your first piece of ass, you really haven't lived. I got mine when I was sixteen. Two, actually- a pro with a Trojan, and a girl from the neighborhood bareback. But that was when things were wilder, before AIDS. Your generation is smart to be cautious."
"We were cautious." Ahmad blushed at the secret he was hiding from Charlie, that he was still pure. But he had no wish to disappoint his mentor by sharing this truth. There had perhaps been too much sharing between them, in the closeness of the cab as Excellency processed New Jersey beneath its whirring wheels. Joryleen's advice to get away from that truck rankles.
An air of apprehension, of nervous multi-tasking, clung to Charlie this morning. The quick creasing of his face, the flitting expressions of his mobile mouth, seemed excessive in his office behind the showroom, where morning coffee was consumed and the day's plan was sketched. Unwashed olive coveralls waited here, and yellow slickers for days of delivering in the rain; they hung on their hooks like flayed skins.
Charlie announced, "I ran into Shaikh Rashid over the long weekend."
"Oh, yes?" Of course, Ahmad reflected, the Chehabs were significant members of the mosque; there was nothing strange in an encounter.
"He'd like to see you over at the Islamic Center."
"To chastise me, I fear. Now that I work, I neglect the Qur'an, and my Friday attendance has fallen off, though I never fail, as you have noticed, to fulfill salat, wherever I can spend five minutes in an unpolluted place."
Charlie frowned. "You can't do just you and God, Madman. He sent His Prophet, and the Prophet created a community. Witbout the ummah, the knowledge and practice of belonging to a righteous group, faith is a seed that bears no fruit."
"Is that what Shaikh Rashid told you to say to me?" It sounded more like Shaikh Rashid than Charlie.
The man grinned-that sudden, engaging exposure of his teeth, like a child caught out in a trick. "Shaikh Rashid can speak for himself. But he isn't calling you to him to rebuke you-quite the contrary. He wants to offer you an opportunity. Shut my big mouth, I'm speaking out of turn. Let him tell you himself. We'll end deliveries early today, and I'll drop you at the mosque."
Thus he has been delivered to his master, the imam from Yemen. The nail salon below the mosque, though well equipped with chairs, holds one bored Vietnamese manicurist reading a magazine, and the Checks Cashed window, through its long Venetian blinds, affords a narrow glimpse of a high counter, protected by a grille, behind which a heavyset white man yawns. Ahmad opens the door between these places of business, the scabby green door numbered 2781V2, and climbs the narrow stairs to the foyer where once the customers of the departed dance studio would wait for their lessons. The bulletin board outside the imam's office still holds the same computer-printed notices for classes in Arabic, for counseling in holy, proper, and seemly marriage in the modern age, and for lectures in Middle Eastern history by this or that visiting mullah. Shaikh Rashid, in his caftan embroidered with silver thread, comes forward and clasps his pupil's hand with an unusual fervor and ceremoniousness; he seems unchanged by the summer past, though in his beard perhaps a few more gray hairs have appeared, to match his dove-gray eyes.
To his initial greeting, while Ahmad is still puzzling over its meaning, Shaikh Rashid adds, "wa la 'l-dkhiratu khayrun laka mina l-uld. wa la-sawfa yu'tika rabbuka fa-tardd." Ahmad dimly recognizes this as from one of the short Mec-can suras of which his master was so fond, perhaps that one called "The Brightness," to the effect that the future, the life to come, holds a richer prize for you than the past. You shall be gratified with what your Lord will give you. In English Shaikh Rashid says, "Dear boy, I have missed our hours studying Scripture together, and talking of great matters. I, too, learned. The simplicity and strength of your faith instructed and fortified my own. There are too few like you."
He leads the young man into his office, and settles himself in the tall wing chair from which he does his teaching. "Well, now," he addresses Ahmad, when both are seated in their accustomed positions around the desk, upon whose surface nothing rests but a well-worn, green-bound copy of the Qur'an. "You have travelled in the wider, infidel world- what our friends the Black Muslims call 'the dead world.' Has it modified your beliefs?"
"Sir, I am not aware that it has. I still feel God beside me, as close as the vein in my neck, cherishing me as only He can."
"Did you not witness, in the cities you visited, poverty and misery that led you to question His mercy, and inequalities of wealth and power that cast doubt on His justice? Did you not discover that the world, in its American portion, emits a stench of waste and greed, of sensuality and futility, of the despair and lassitude that come with ignorance of the inspired wisdom of the Prophet?"
The dry flourishes of this imam's rhetoric, delivered by a two-edged voice that seems to withdraw even as it proffers, afflict Ahmad with a familiar discomfort. He tries to answer honestly, somewhat in Charlie's voice: "This isn't the fanciest part of the planet, I guess, and it has its share of losers, but I enjoyed being out in it, really. People are pretty nice, mostly. Of course, we were usually delivering something they wanted, and they thought would make their lives better. Charlie was good fun to be with. He knows a lot about state history."
Shaikh Rashid leans forward, resting his shoes on the floor, and presses the fingertips of his fine small hands together, perhaps to suppress their tremor. Ahmad wonders why his teacher should be nervous. Perhaps he is jealous of another man's influence upon his student. "Yes," he says. "Charlie is 'fun,' but is possessed of serious purpose as well. He informs me that you have expressed a willingness to die for jihad."
"I did?"
"In an interview in Liberty State Park, in view of lower Manhattan, where the twin towers of capitalist oppression were triumphantly brought down."
"That was an interview?" How strange, Ahmad thinks, that the conversation, in the open air, has been reported here, in the closed space of this inner-city mosque, whose windows have a view of only brick walls and dark clouds. The sky today is close and gray in wispy layers that may produce rain. At that earlier interview, the day had been harshly bright, the cries of children in holiday packs ricocheting between the glitter of the Upper Bay and the glaring white dome of the Science Center. Balloons, gulls, sun. "I will die," he confirms, after silence, "if it is the will of God."