Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

“Helpers of.?”

“You know. ”

“Hamburger?”

He grew perplexed. “The Helpers, you know, of the Prophet? The Ansar ?” He glanced down at the card and read out my name again, making sure it belonged to me. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I thought you were someone else.”

The class cleared out. Left alone in the amber hallway, Ali Ansari and I stared at one another. He took a step back and folded his hands at navel level and passed my card through his fingers.

“I got into Emory,” he said. “But I didn’t go.”

“Why not?”

“Because someone who goes to Emory is called an Emroid. I couldn’t carry that crucifix.”

“But Emory is among the top five most beautiful campuses, according to another ranking.”

“Is that a reference to the architecture or the girls?”

“Well, the former,” I said. “But I met my—”

Ali Ansari suddenly put his finger to his mouth. With his pinky he pointed to two people who had appeared from a side entrance. One was a bearded fellow, in jeans folded high above his ankles, wearing thong sandals. The other was a short, doe-eyed girl in a white hijab and cargo skirt with military boots. They headed to a plastic table at the entrance of the hallway and spread a tablecloth with a giant green crescent over it. They placed mugs on one corner that read, Terrorism Has No Religion, and, Forgive Those Who Insult Islam. The girl placed a giant pig teddy in front of the table. It wore a shirt that said, Pig Protection Program.

“I don’t get the pig thing.” I turned back to Ali.

“You got to go all the way back to the Roman Empire and the Jews for that. Pig was the favorite meat of the Romans. They sacrificed it as an offering to the god of war. It was also the symbol of Roman domination. When the Romans killed the Jews in Alexandria, the surviving women were forced to eat pig’s flesh. And when a Roman emperor captured Jerusalem, the head of a pig was catapulted onto the temple to signal final victory. Muslims abstain from pig to follow the footsteps of the Jews. Hating pig is how the first Muslims showed they hated the Romans.”

“I didn’t mean the history,” I said. “I don’t understand what the shirt says.”

“It just means that Muslims don’t kill pigs. You really don’t get it? Our propaganda needs work.”

The pair spotted Ali Ansari and came over with a sign that went around his neck. It read, Hug a Muslim.

Ali made introductions. Hatim was the president of the Muslim Students Association, and Saba the secretary. Ali was an advisor to the organization and had encouraged them to reach out to marketing professionals for some work they needed.

“What kind of work?”

Sister Saba cleared her throat. “A campaign to put slogans on city buses. I’m sure you’ve seen how the neocons and the right-wing noise machine are coming after us. Passing these anti-sharia bills as if it’s wrong for us to have religious weddings and funerals; asking our politicians to make loyalty oaths before they can get a job; holding congressional meetings to decide who is moderate and who is extreme; and preventing Muslims around the country from building mosques wherever we like. We want to do something about it. To make people aware that Islam is about piety and safety and caution and patience and peace.”

“And modesty,” Hatim chimed. “Most of Islam is actually about modesty. And marriage too. In fact, the Prophet Muhammad, may peace and blessings be upon him, said that marriage is half of the faith. So, if 50 percent is about modesty and the other 50 percent is about marriage, then the whole thing is actually about modesty.”

Ali played with his bun and joined the pitch. “Twenty years ago, if you said you were a Muslim, people thought that was some kind of Latino. They used to see us as lovable street urchins hanging with fat blue genies. But now they see us as sons of a serpentine vizier attempting to poison the jasmines. Trying to hide who we are doesn’t work, because nowadays everything is about identity, and we have been identified. The only thing we can do today is to clarify misconceptions. What better than way than advertising?”

I had little interest in subjecting myself to more believers. “The last time I ended up with this kind of work I was chewed out and not even given dick to suck.”

“So you’ve done work with Muslims before?” Saba clapped. “That’s great. We haven’t found anyone with that kind of experience. No one wants to help us. Now Allah azzawajal has put you in our path. I only see a slight problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you just said a bad word, and that’s going to make you impure, so I think you should please go do the ablution before we continue. The bathrooms are that way. But be warned, they don’t have a footbath. The university doesn’t think it makes sense to install footbaths to accommodate us. Do you see the kind of oppression we’re facing?”

The two students couldn’t read my panic, but Ali Ansari picked up on it. Without breaking a wing, he took off his sign and pulled me up and away. “That’s right. I will take him to do the ablution. But I just remembered, we have a lecture about Plotinus to attend. I totally forgot about that.”

Hatim tried to join us. He was a philosophy major and his thesis sought to reconcile Western reason with Islamic revelation. “Did you know Plato was one of the prophets of Islam?”

“Plotnius, not Plato,” Ali clarified. “This one the Christians already got.”

Leaving Hatim behind, Ali and I rushed out and walked along Broad Street, past the frat houses, toward the movie theater on Cecil B. Moore. There was a pair of skateboarders avoiding the police cruisers whose job it was to keep them off the rails and the steps. A small group of black guys dressed in the finest new athletic gear came our way and headed into the movie theater.

Ali Ansari, it turned out, wasn’t a Temple student. He was actually close to thirty and had graduated a few years earlier. Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to find any serious sort of employment, he also never got around to graduate school. Now he worked in the stacks at the libraries and as a security guard at one of the boutique museums on campus, while making films on the side. He lived in a small place on Diamond Street.

“A delinquent putting his salvation in film,” I said. “But at least you chose a cheaper part of town to live in.”

“It’s not as cheap as it used to be.” He waved his hand toward the intersection.

We purchased rotisserie chickens at the market and sat on a bench across from Assalamalaikum Barbershop, next to the abandoned Kabobeesh. Ali Ansari went up to one of the barbers standing outside and exchanged pleasantries, before coming back to report that Talib was off probation. A pair of black guys came out of a nearby house, in skullcaps, with checkered scarves around their necks, knee-length white shirts over khakis, both with chinstrap Sunni beards. “Cops stopped me the other night,” one of them said. “No probable cause. Punched me in the face.”

I turned my eyes toward the Hillel House. It emanated a soft blue light that seeped into the grass around it. I saw the Star of David and thought of Richard Konigsberg. He and I used to share moments like this.

“Sorry about before,” Ali said after finishing up with his acquaintances. “I should have figured you out earlier.”

I considered this man who hung out at a university; was familiar with the distinction between Plotinus and Plato; and could make jokes about gentrification. He had a name that was similar to mine, and he looked similar to me. This created kinship between us. I got the sense that if I were to tell him about being declared a residual supremacist he would understand me in a way that Marie-Anne and Richard weren’t able to. To them, my being understood as a Muslim was a problem that could be made to go away, either by adapting to it through business, or by going to the courts. But to someone like Ali Ansari, being a Muslim in America was a persistent pain in the heart. The pain of being too visible. The pain of being perceived contrary to how you conceived of yourself in your thoughts.