Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

There was a smaller TV in the corner of the deli, dusty and unused. I went and sat before it. I looked around for the young attendant who used to work here. Chris had been his name. Not seeing him, I gestured for the old man to come over.

“You a spy?” He wiped his hands on his smock.

“Excuse me?”

“I never see you before,” he said, loud enough for some of the younger men to glance over.

I felt a pulse of panic go up my thighs. I thought of Leila sneaking that manual out of the trash in Madrid. I thought of all the time I’d spent around people close to the State Department. Was there some unstated war between the moderate Muslims and whatever strain this old man was affiliated with?

“I think you misunderstand me,” I offered.

“No,” he wagged his rag, “I know exactly who you are. Only two falafel places in city. Me and Hisham in West Philly. He send you here to watch me, yes? You are caught, no need to lie.”

I assured him that I was not committing culinary espionage and wasn’t even aware of Hisham’s existence. This made the old man quite happy. “And even if I knew him,” I added, “I’d be on your team because you are from my neighborhood.”

“Good,” he said. “This is why I like Philadelphia. So very neighborly. What you will order?”

I ordered a burger and watched Al Jazeera. I wanted to add bacon but knew better than to ask. A bit of instrumental music, interspersed with the pleasing sound of an announcer, came on the set. Globes and parabolic maps and gold-flecked leaves flew around on the screen and revealed a young female anchor with a Turkish name sitting confidently in her chair. She sprayed out a sentence in near-perfect Victorian English.

The old man saw my interest and got out of the way.

The anchor was interviewing a Malaysian geographer. He wanted to take the opportunity of the unveiling of the newly erected clock tower in Mecca — which he called “the Big Bin”—to make the world drop Greenwich standard time and replace it with Mecca standard time. His first argument vis-à-vis the Big Ben in England was simply, “Our clock is bigger.”

The anchor didn’t seem to find this convincing. “The other clock is older. ”

“Fine, fine,” the man said, stroking his goatee. “But Greenwich time is a colonial relic. We could accept their time before but we won’t accept their time now. We are almost first world ourselves.”

“But aren’t there pragmatic reasons to stick with Greenwich?”

“Like what?”

“Well, the international date line,” said the anchor, “as it currently stands, is exactly 180 degrees to Greenwich, which makes the line fall somewhere in the middle of a giant ocean — and that is convenient because it prevents conflict and confusion. If you were to make Mecca the meridian, the date line would end up running right through the West Coast of North America, so even though it would be Wednesday in New York, it would already be Thursday in San Francisco.”

The geographer chortled and got excited. “So what? You make it seem as if it’s important for New York and San Francisco to have a consistent clock. Maybe when America was powerful such things were true. But now? Bankrupt countries don’t have a right to a schedule that makes sense.”

“Maybe,” the anchor replied. “But you haven’t really given any clear reason why Mecca should be the meridian.”

“It is very simple,” the geographer said with narrowed eyes. “If you were to move far away from the earth, and look down at it with a telescope, you will see that Mecca falls at the exact center of the earth, and in the exact center of Mecca you will find the holiest place of Islam—”

“I’m going to stop you right there,” shrieked the anchor, adjusting her hijab. “Your comment would only make sense if the world was flat. But if the world, as has been known for some time, is round, then its exact center can’t be on the surface. It must be deep in the middle of it. At least that is what my physics teacher taught me. I think we’re going to end our—”

“No, wait, wait,” pleaded the geographer. “Fine, so you do not accept religious argument, I understand. But what about history? Long ago, long before Islam even, Arabs used to worship time. They used to call it dahr . They even had a goddess in its honor.”

“You are on stronger footing with that,” the anchor commented. “Except this was two thousand years ago.”

“Yes,” said the geographer, now visibly irritated. “But if after thousands of years the Jews can claim Israel, then after many more thousands of years the Arab can claim time, no?”

The anchor rolled her eyes and continued arguing. I zoned out and turned my gaze outside. A couple of youths passed by, flipping a football to each other.

* * *

Ali Ansari arrived during a commercial break. He carried a pair of heavy bags with him, one of which obviously contained camera equipment. He rummaged through his pockets, but was short on change. In his hurry he dropped a ring on the ground. I picked it up and handed it back to him. Then I ordered a second burger for me and one for him.

“Been awhile, buddy,” he said, tucking the ring back in his pocket.

“I know,” I said, regarding his scruffy face. “I’ve been out of the country. For work.”

“I didn’t know you got a job. Here I thought you were an autonomous dude.”

“I’m a freelancer,” I said.

“Do you get paid?”

“I do.”

“Then you are a hireling.”

“Aren’t we all?” I pointed at the heavy bags next to him. “Are the cameras for your cash cow?”

He shook his head and slit both his throat and groin. He had dismantled the pornographic enterprise. Gone so far as to formally dissolve Talibang Productions, so that it no longer existed even on paper. It seemed sudden to me; but for him it had been a long time coming. It boiled down to no longer wanting to turn the Muslim into a performer for the Western gaze. Using the example of black men in porn had been a bad one. They weren’t to be emulated. They were workers who were exploited: exploited for their bodies; exploited for the color of their skin; exploited for the poverty that made them take injections and consent to surgery and performing in a risky and perverse environment for next to nothing for their labor. There had to be another way to become known.

Besides, Ali Ansari had other, more pressing projects. He had finished his wrestler documentary, the one about Martin Mirandella, and it had turned out better than expected. Last week he had found out that his documentary about the blacklisted wrestler had won the Haddon Prize, worth fifty thousand dollars, and would be screening at Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival. The award committee was impressed by the manner in which he had teased out a tension in contemporary America, where even non-Muslims could be affected by the prejudice that Muslims faced.

I asked him what he was going to do with the money.

He smiled and said that he had already reinvested it, this time in underwriting a guerrilla concert and documentary about the Gay Commie Muzzies. “That’s why I’ve been in New York so often.”

“What does guerrilla concert actually mean?” I asked, removing a pickle from the burger.

Ali Ansari smiled. He said it meant sneaking into the building site at the Freedom Tower in New York and holding an hour-long show, as well as a reading of the Koran, all of which would be broadcast on the Internet using miniature cameras. They were doing it because they wanted to flip off all those people who’d said that building a mosque so close to Ground Zero should be prohibited.

It struck me as the kind of thing Candace might have come up with. Then again, she and Ali Ansari had similar ways of looking at the world.