Sayed Kashua - Dancing Arabs

Since Adel turned religious, he talks differently and dresses differently. He’s much calmer. He keeps saying el hamdulula. I envy him. He supports the Islamic movement and its motto, “Islam is the answer.” Adel believes that ultimately the Mahdi will come, just as Islam promises, and unite all Moslems. Then the Moslem empire will be the strongest in the world, just the way it was in the days of Omar ibn el-Hatab. Adel says that the more Palestinians Israel kills, the closer the arrival of the Mahdi. The worse the situation, the greater the chances of redemption.

Adel says the Jews and the Americans have advanced technology, but according to the Koran the decisive war will be waged with swords and bare hands. Their sheikh tells them in the mosque that God will inflict a terrible frost on the infidels that will freeze all their planes and weapons. That’s why Adel has bought his children plastic swords. He tells them they have to learn to use those swords now. He’s stopped taking his children to the doctor and giving them medications, because he says that pretty soon there won’t be any antibiotics and the children will have to learn how to overcome diseases without help.

When the war broke out, Adel’s Sufi sheikh told his congregation that he’d met the Mahdi at the El Aqsa Mosque. Adel was convinced it was the end. “The Mahdi must be in Mecca by now,” he said, “and very soon he will liberate Jerusalem and defeat the Jews and the Americans.” Adel said he was going to Mecca to wait for the Mahdi. He wanted to be one of the Mahdi’s soldiers and follow him from Mecca, just the way it says in the Koran, because whoever follows the Mahdi has a place in heaven. Adel announced that I was going with him. He had money, and he’d pay my fare. He didn’t want to go on his own. He preferred to share his room in Mecca with a friend, not with some stranger, a Moslem who might not know a word of Arabic because he’s probably from Afghanistan. Adel signed us both up for the hajj.

There’s no beer in Saudi Arabia, not even malt beer. The women are covered from head to toe in black clothes with netting over their eyes. Women are allowed to leave their faces and hands and feet exposed, but they believe that if they take extra precautions and cover everything, their punishment on Judgment Day will be reduced. Adel prays the whole time. Even after the twenty-four-hour ride on the crowded bus, he doesn’t pause to rest but hurries to visit the Prophet’s grave in Medina. He says that all we have is two weeks, so he has to pray as much as possible.

There’s one spot that can only be reached by inching your way forward for hours in a terribly dense crowd, but it’s worth it, because the reward for a single prayer there is equivalent to the reward for a million prayers. It’s the spot where the Prophet Mohammed used to sit and pray and read the Koran. And anyone who succeeds in reaching it says it feels like the most sublime place of all, the true heaven.

Heaven is divided into compartments, and even the lowest compartment is magnificent: a verdant heaven with rivers of honey and cascades of nectar. Every wish comes true in an instant. Think of a pear — and right away a pear tree will appear in front of you, and the branch will bend on its own and serve the fruit right to your mouth. People in heaven sit on the lawn all day long, like in a park. If you think about women, there they are. Or you can think of both food and women at the same time.

It’s hard to tell if the women you get are like the ones in Saudi Arabia. Probably not. The women in heaven are petite and young, and they dress in white. They don’t undress, because there’s nowhere to undress. Everyone sits on the lawn and watches. In heaven there are no houses, not even tents, because it spoils the environment. In heaven there are no industrial materials. You can think about a Walkman as much as you want, but you won’t get it. There are no cars and no planes.

Adel says this is my last chance to return to Islam. He takes me to the grave of the Prophet, and when I say there’s nothing inside and that all I saw was a green rug with verses from the Koran on it, he starts crying, and screams at me. For two days he cries, but in the end he decides to let me be. He starts praying on his own, and that’s that. In his opinion, I’m a lost cause, and I’m bound to burn in hell.

Hell is divided into compartments too, but even the highest compartment there offers nothing good. You die, and get resurrected a million times a day, and to make sure you suffer, they burn you in fire so intense you can’t even imagine it. I’ll burn, I’ll melt, and then I’ll be resurrected and I’ll burn again and melt again. There are these gigantic people there who never ever smile. They just stand over you and burn your skin off with a branding iron, the way they do with animals. Anyone who goes to hell hasn’t a chance of getting out.

On Judgment Day the entire planet will explode, and a thick cloud will destroy all living things. Then we’ll all move somewhere else. Everyone there will stand in line on a thread that’s thinner than a single hair. People from every period in history, anyone who ever lived on earth. There will be prehistoric hunters alongside doctors from Hadassah hospital. The deeds of every one of them will be weighed, and any deed can wind up deciding your fate for better or for eternal fire. On Judgment Day, nobody recognizes anybody, not even parents or friends. Everyone’s caught up in his own reckoning. Your father will come along and say, “Please, I’ve been good to you. All I need is one more good deed to get into heaven.” And you’ll refuse, because who knows? Maybe that’ll be the one deed you need to save yourself. Everything you’ve ever done appears before you, from the day you were born till the day you died. The angel on your right shoulder will report all the bad deeds, and the one on your left shoulder will report the good ones. Or vice versa.

I tried to believe in God, to become part of the big circle of people in white constantly circling the black stone. I tried to become part of the ocean of humanity moving toward the mosques. I recalled how I’d prayed as a little boy. I tried to reconstruct everything they taught us at elementary school. There were moments when I was afraid of being alone in the room, and I started to cry. Adel hardly came back from the mosque at all, and I couldn’t stop thinking about my wife and baby. At night, when the streets became a little less crowded, I’d put on the white hat and set out to buy some gifts for the family. The sidewalks were filled with women and small children. Without removing their shoes or clothes, they lay there on pieces of cardboard. Adel put us up at one of the fanciest hotels in Mecca, very close to the Kaba, and from the window of our air-conditioned room, I could see the black stone and the people shoving and crowding to get up close and kiss it. Adel made it. He’s large. He dislocated his shoulder but he managed to kiss the stone. “The fragrance of perfume from heaven,” he said, before he fell asleep.

Our two weeks there were over. The bus ride back was unbearable. Everyone buys enormous woolen blankets in Saudi Arabia, because they’re good and they’re inexpensive. The Jordanian guide who held on to all the Israeli passports and counted us each evening told us not to buy more than two blankets each, but some of the women bought as many as ten. Adel and I were the youngest on the bus, and we wound up having to stand the whole way home. We hardly said a word to each other the entire trip. There was a point when Adel wanted to get out right in the middle of the desert, to get away from the Jordanian guide and return to Mecca. He was sure the Mahdi had arrived and was afraid of missing him. “Maybe he’s in Jerusalem already,” he said when we reached Jordan, but the Israeli soldiers at the border and the clerks who addressed us with overdone politeness assured Adel that the Mahdi hadn’t come yet.