Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

"These two so-beautiful jewels in the crown of the English language," Rashid called them. "Not one of us here can think a thought or form a phrase or have an impression of each other or ourselves without their having been shaped in some way by the concepts, by the vision, and by the language of these magnificent works of art."

The guy was riveting, I have to say. Incredibly eloquent, incredibly learned. There seemed to be no facet of the subject he hadn't mastered. Without notes, seemingly without even a plan, he took us on a leisurely, discursive survey of the world that had created Shakespeare and the King James, facts and ideas leaping each to each with a speed and natural ease that was captivating. I can't reconstruct it all. I wouldn't think to try. His thoughts were much too brilliant, too complex and erudite for me. I just want to try to tell enough of what I remember to describe the strange thing that happened to me.

He began with England's break from the Catholic Church and the sometimes-violent suppression of English Catholicism, including, perhaps, the Catholicism of Shakespeare's own family. Then he talked about Luther's declaration that all religious authority came from the Bible rather than the Church.

"Thus, translating the biblical text into English became an act of enormous political significance," he said. "Whoever controlled the language controlled the ruling religion itself. An observer as keen as Shakespeare had to ask himself: If power corrupts, can translations made under such conditions be trusted? It's no wonder that when Hamlet looked into books, he saw nothing more than 'words, words, words' devoid of any inherent truth value."

Now up to this point, I remember, I was enjoying myself. I was always a lover of both Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and Rashid made it very clear he loved them, too. It was exciting just to watch him think about the subject. I was swept up in it, as if I could see the lines of inspiration connecting thought to thought like lines on a planetarium ceiling linking seemingly random stars into a constellation.

"Perhaps Shakespeare, forced to abandon the Catholicism of his father, felt some strange mixture of identification with and repulsion from the native peoples now being estranged from their own traditions by European imperialism and the 'words, words, words' of its religious missionaries. The moor Othello, for instance, lives as a Christian and only identifies with his Muslim origins when he kills himself. Perhaps this is a reflection of Shakespeare's own-and thus England's own-religious displacement and internal division."

As he went on like this, my reaction began to change. My eyes wandered away from him. His genteel figure continued pacing and turning and gesturing onstage, but I looked instead at the students. I panned my gaze over their upturned faces and the faces pressed down into notebooks. They were young people, I saw, of many colors, white and yellow and brown, girls and boys from all over the country, I would've guessed, and from other countries, too. I found myself wondering: How many of them had actually read Shakespeare, or the King James Bible, for that matter? Myself, as I say, I had always loved them both. I could remember suffering over Othello's mistake, wanting to reach out and stop Desdemona's murder with my own hand. I could remember suddenly seeing the Bible as a single chain of thought, a single idea developed in the collective mind of a people over centuries, from their earliest understanding of creation to the discovery of Christ's empty tomb. I suspected many of these students would never experience any of that, would never know more about Shakespeare or the Bible than they learned at this lecture today.

"When Othello says he 'threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe,' by murdering his white Christian wife Desdemona," Rashid was saying now, "how can we not think of Jesus' admonition to not 'cast your pearls before swine'-that is, don't bother sharing Jewish truth with the piglike gentiles? Christianity has been wasted on Othello, you see. In the end, he has resorted to the kind of vicious, murderous behavior the worst enemies of Islam would have predicted of him. Savages may be brought to Christ by English missionaries, but they can't be trusted. They will return to their savage nature, in the end."

This is when it began. It was subtle at first. My heart fluttered, making me breathless. A cold clammy feeling ran down the back of my neck. I felt light-headed. I thought: Maybe I'm coming down with something.

"This English terror of the stranger, the other, exemplified by Shakespeare and arising from a fear of their own suppressed Catholicism, can't help but find its way into the King James translation," Rashid went on. "Thus these masterpieces of European literature, these cornerstones of our attitudes and our feelings and our thoughts, are also the vehicles for a fearful, urgent, kill-or-be-killed approach to different cultures. They carry within them the seed and the rationalization for colonization, conversion, and imperialism."

Then it came over me-this bizarre moment I'm talking about. Suddenly, violently, it was there: a red upsurge of revulsion, a strangling sense of horror as if something gory and terrible were happening right in front of my face. Sitting there, in that civilized hall, that Roman temple beneath the plane trees and maples, I felt the helpless, wild, careening panic of a witness to disaster. My mouth opened and closed. My hand clutched at my chest. All around me, the students continued taking notes, the professor continued ambling and chatting easily. Nothing was going on but a morning class at an excellent urban university-and yet I had the almost-overwhelming urge to cry out, to cover my eyes, to run to someone's aid amidst the smoke and rubble and blood-smoke and rubble and blood that simply weren't there, weren't there at all. How can I describe this? What can I compare it to? It wasn't a hallucination or a delusion or a fantasy, or anything like that. It was just an emotional response completely at odds with the facts of the experience. I was attending a lecture, and yet my feelings were those of a man watching the slaughtering clash of armies, a field of smoking corpses amidst smoldering ruins. It was as if one thing transformed itself into another inside me, as if I saw one thing and my heart translated it into something else.

And then-as I sat there breathless and sweaty-then the thought came to me-as clear as if it were spoken aloud-spoken with absolute certainty, absolute conviction:

Of course he's a terrorist. Of course he is.

That suddenly, that completely, I was convinced-utterly convinced-that Casey Diggs was right: Arthur Rashid was engineering a murderous attack on the city of New York.

The very next moment, the irrational wave of feeling began to ebb. The terror subsided and with it, the clarity and the certainty faded away as well. I dropped back in my chair, trying to catch my breath. I was nauseous. A clammy line of sweat was running down the back of my neck. Blinking hard, I thought, My God, my God- this is what must've happened to my mother. This is exactly what must've happened in the mind of my mother when she went insane.

My gaze was shooting around in an abrupt, disjointed way now, from the professor to the walls of the room and back over the faces of the students in their seats. And as I began to recover from that bizarre moment of panic and conviction, my attention lit on one girl sitting five or six rows in front of me. She was off to my left, in the last seat on the left near the wall. She was writing intently in her notebook, her head down, her lush black hair spilling forward. But just as my eyes fell on her, she looked up. She brushed her hair off her face with a graceful sweeping gesture of one hand. She turned to look at the professor and so presented her profile to me.