Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

We continued the tour. There was a religious high school in the mosque, catering to the children of Muslim diplomats. Girls, all with their heads covered in white hijabs, sat on one side, and the boys were on the other. Leila and I sat in between them, along with our liaison, and the students heard us talk about life as Muslims in America. Leila’s delivery was polished. She talked about Afghan food marts and Afghan weddings and how she had come to hear about the tragedy of the fallen towers and the fear and anxiety she felt “until I heard the President of the United States tell everyone that Islam was a religion of peace.”

My own delivery lacked much in the way of substance. It meandered through my childhood growing up in the South and my eventual life with Marie-Anne. I absolved my life of its warts and villainy. I didn’t mention the story about residual supremacism. I made no mention of the panic Brother Hatim felt regarding his fundamentalism. I said nothing about people like Ali Ansari. I hadn’t been brought here to give a bad impression.

One afternoon Leila and I wandered to the Prado. Guards, sentries, guides, clad in their dead-blue blazers and knee-length skirts, stalked the halls like silent wraiths. The majority of them were aged, infirm, with bloated ankles, using the numerous rocking chairs provided to them out of the kindness of the administration. I found myself transfixed in front of a painting called The Bearded Woman, by Ribera. It was a bearded man in a red robe, breast out, feeding a baby, with another man in black standing behind. But the man with the breast was not a man. The painting was of a woman called Magdalena Ventura, who had decided to grow a beard at the age of thirty-three. I noted that in a few days I would be turning the same age.

We came out into the afternoon. It was a surprisingly intense sun, with hammers for rays; but they fell upon me soft, like the keys of a piano in a light jazz piece. The drone of the people in the squares was like the hum of another instrument. Leila’s clicking heels provided the percussion. We headed toward the Atocha memorial, erected on the site of a train bombing.

We entered the monument from the bottom — from underground, through a subway door — and then passed the names of all the victims of the attacks. Then the subway door sealed shut and we entered a dark and empty chamber with a huge hole in the ceiling. There was a hollow tower extending up into the place where the explosives had shot out into the street above. Inscribed inside the tower were messages of condolence.

This was where Leila’s transformative moment had occurred.

“It was a couple of years ago,” she said. “I was here during a college trip. One day I came here. Walking distance from the Goya in the Prado and Picasso in the Reina Sofía. I just thought to myself, those artists depicted all that violence and yet there is still more violence in the world.” Her face took on a pained expression. “It was so crazy to sit there, you know? I realized it had been Muslims not much younger than me, acting in the name of my faith, who had carried out the attacks. All I could think about was how Muslims once brought Alhambra to Spain and now gave this.” She had become a reformist as a response. She needed to believe that there were Muslim peacemakers, because to not be a reformist would mean that she would have to be terrified of being a Muslim.

I envied Leila in that moment. She had, from the very start of her adult life, known that she was nothing but a Muslim and found a space to live in, thrive in. I, on the other hand, had grown up under the misapprehension that I wasn’t similarly circumscribed. I had lived under a lie. Why had I not seen my chains earlier? I might have worn them like bangles like she did.

The whole thing reminded me of a novel I had read once, written by a Russian émigré. At the start of it a man called Cincinattus C. is arrested for an inchoate crime and taken to prison. Except for being accused of “gnostical turpitude” the man is never given a reason for his arrest. The reader is left to ponder what kind of crime gnostical turpitude really was. Cincinattus stays in the farcical prison, under the aegis of a cruel warden, for a very long time, until the moment of his execution is imminent. Suddenly the entire edifice of the prison withers and fades from his view. Cincinattus had willed it away.

Residual supremacism was nearly as obtuse. What George Gabriel had been hinting at was the notion that underneath the cultured exterior, underneath the man who knew Chagall and spoke highly of Nietzsche and Goethe, there was a latent man, a zealot, one who drew direction from the supremacist message of the Koran, aspiring to ultimately overturn the existing bookshelf and seek out domination in the name of Allah. I had been identified as an agent of Islamic expansion, the fear of which was woven into every Westerner, who had known a thousand years of Islamic assault, from Spain to Russia, from late Rome to early America. This fear transformed and cohered into a different form after the shadows struck New York. No longer was it a fear of an empire of faith lorded over by a sultan, armed to the hilt, strapped with swords, but robotic sleeper cells waiting to be activated by some dark man in a dark cave. But either way the fear was the same as it had always been: Islam sought ascendance and Muslims made that ascendance happen.

The trouble with this narrative was that it didn’t apply to me. There had been a misunderstanding. I harbored nothing toward Islam, or toward any other idea in the world that might assert itself as a competitor to America. I didn’t recite la ilaha illallah , neither out loud nor in any recess in my heart. For me there was no deity but America, and this was all there was to it.

But that’s the thing about misunderstandings. Unless you have the power to take control of the one who has misunderstood, you have to participate in the misapprehension. You have to enter the prison that someone else has constructed for you, and you have to live there with all the patient forbearance of Cincinnatus C., without any guarantee that the prison might wither and break.

* * *

Later in the week Leila and I went to visit a far less stellar mosque, in inner-city Madrid. It was located on a block where the shops belonged to newly arrived immigrants from North Africa and where many of the signs were in Arabic. The imam here was a portly man named Qahtani, who seemed always to be surrounded by college-aged men and women. When Leila and I arrived outside the mosque, an old jobless laborer from Algeria began grilling me. He spoke Arabic and assumed I did too. I simply made a thumbs-up sign and said, “USA!” He made a thumbs-down and disappeared.

The mosque was three stories, with a large courtyard downstairs, a large prayer hall on the second level, and a third level where the administrative offices, conference rooms, and women’s section were located. The old building had the smell and disposition of a place held together through will and hard work. The shelves for the shoes were old and creaky. The bathrooms were tired, damp, with leaky faucets. The carpet in the prayer room had worn ages ago. There was no library so much as a series of shelves in various rooms.

The imam led us to a small room where Leila and I waited for the youth to arrive. The room was full of junk, old sofas, broken chairs. Once we were alone Leila started snooping around, digging into a box containing trashed books. She laid them out before me. Most of them were theological manuals about ablution, prayers for the bathroom, and the like.

“Goddamn!” she said, raising a small green book over her head.

“What?”

“Look at the name.”

It read, Jihad fi Sabilillah .