Children of Dust (23 page)

W
hen I looked around to see what was popular among my mostly twenty-year-old peers, the big winner was sex. Consider:

My roommate Jon, an atheist who believed the future of the world would involve androids, set up a multi-screen porn cineplex in our dorm and played gangbangs 24/7.

My other roommate, Aton, an agnostic white guy with a fetish for Asian girls, chased multiple women at once and kept notes on their performance.

I regularly watched a couple having sex on the balcony across from mine. They waved at me from time to time.

One of the Baptist friends I made had long discussions with me about her preference for anal over vaginal sex: “It allows me to remain a virgin till I’m married.”

I soon became envious of all this sexual license, and since I was new at school I took advantage of my anonymity and started going to clubs in the Buckhead district. I was underage and didn’t have a fake ID, so I pretended to be an Indian foreign exchange student—“Eyum enjeenyuring pee ech dee”—to get past the bouncers.

My accomplice was an anime-obsessed Japanese girl named Princess whom I’d met in one of my classes. For my first outing she took me to
the Havana Club, where—as soon as I was squeezed into a throng of well-lotioned legs, in the dark, with no witnesses—she became the representation of all the girls I’d ever desired. She was the girl in the dorm across from mine who liked exhibitionist sex; she was Nadia Sumienyova from the erotica I wrote as an adolescent; she was the girl in the porn that Moosa Farid and I had reluctantly turned off during our abortive DVD-burning career.

Reaching around her little waist, I pulled her tight for a moment. Then, as she leaned back against my forearm, my other hand explored in her hair, lightly tugging, then pulling her head back to expose her lovely neck. Our hips settled against one another. Her legs spread for a second and then pressed themselves on either side of my thigh. I put my hand on her lower back and ground against her. She hiked her skimpy dress up a little higher and rubbed herself on my rough denim. I put my mouth on her neck and licked her tentatively. She was salty but vulnerable. Opening my mouth a bit, I put my teeth into her. She relaxed against me and let me feed.

Suddenly the barriers of shame and modesty collapsed. I was Yajuj-Majuj bursting upon the world seeking apocalypse—although ejaculation would suffice.

M
uslim girls were my immediate “target,” because there were certain in-built advantages I could exploit. First, my aura as a “pious brother” was still intact. That reputation allowed me to go to Islamic conferences and conventions and initiate conversations with girls without having them think that I was hitting on them. “I’m starting an Islamic newsletter and we should keep in touch” was all I usually had to say to get a number.

The second advantage was my looks. I was tall and thin and innocent-looking, lacking in any strikingly masculine physical features. This made me seem less aggressive and perhaps less carnal than other guys my age. When it came to committing sinful fornication, the sisters who wanted to believe they were good girls preferred weak-looking men, because they assumed that aggressive-looking men might demand
intercourse, whereas guys like me would take whatever we could get. Since it was very important for sinning sisters not to end up losing their virginity in the dating game—that was a gift they wanted to reserve for their righteous and pious future husbands—my slightly effeminate appearance reassured them.

I began my exploration with a girl named Jullanar, who came from a very conservative family: curfew at sundown and no privacy at home and no cell phone and ceaseless attempts by her parents to marry her off to cousins in countries ending with “stan.” Given that her body really belonged to her father, and he didn’t want any part of him to create erections among other men—since that would mean that he was indirectly a homosexual—she had to buy jeans from the boys’ department at Sears in order to hide her curves. One time her father forbade her to leave the house because she was wearing her purse diagonally, rather like a sling, accentuating her breasts as the strap passed between them. Another time she got a long lecture from her father because she wore a black choker necklace. He literally ripped it off her because—he said—it made her look like a slut. All that repression had turned Jullanar into a closet exhibitionist. She craved attention no matter where it came from.

“There’s this boy, he’s a
desi
,” she said to me about an Indian guy at her college. “He stalks me. He follows me from morning when I get to school till night when I get home.”

“What a freak.”

“I know, right! It’s so hot!” she said.

“Wait. You like that?” I asked.

“God, yes. I love knowing I’m turning guys on. It makes me feel like a casual slut!”

I spent days turning my tongue in Jullanar—or dreaming of it—and spent nights scouting women online just in case someone more interesting turned up:

I maintained contact with a girl in Tehran who was looking to find a Westerner to marry.

I corresponded with a woman in Saudi Arabia who was already married but was trying to escape her husband and was looking for a good brother overseas.

There was a white convert from a troubled family who couldn’t reconcile her Islam with her increasing levels of bisexuality. From time to time she called me to complain about the single-sex dance parties that the sisters in her community threw, where beautiful married and unmarried girls took off their
hijab
s. “They get into the little black dresses they have under their
abaya
s and then dance on each other!” she said in a fit of frustration.

I chatted on the phone with a sister who liked to call me after she’d finished the early-morning
fajr
prayer and before she went to work. An only child, she had me pull sex stories from the Internet featuring brother-sister action and read them to her on the phone. “I can’t get to them myself because I share a computer with my family,” she explained sheepishly. She tended to hang up as soon as she climaxed, leaving me feeling used.

Then there was Anis. She was a pretty little
hijabi
I first got to know online. Although she had just entered college in a distant state when I first “met” her, she was on the cusp of getting married to a guy from New York. Our e-mail exchanges were mostly about how little she knew about sex and sexuality. I was, of course, more than eager to relieve her of her timidity.

“You don’t have to be shy about being explicit with me,” I wrote. “Muslims enjoy discussing sex.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Didn’t you know that Imam Ghazali, one of Islam’s foremost scholars, wrote a work called
The Etiquette of Consummation
? It contains instructions about what a man should do to and for a woman. Did you know that it’s your right as a Muslima to demand sex from your husband—and he can’t say no?”

“I had no idea the scholars said such things,” she wrote.

“Surely you’ve heard of Ibn Hazm, the great Spanish jurist.”

“Of course,” she replied.

“He also wrote a lot about sex,” I informed her, my fingers flying across the keyboard. “His most famous book is called
The Ring of the Dove.
It’s a tome about courtly love, but the metaphor in the title actu
ally refers to the head of a penis. So you see: the West learned its sexual explicitness from Islam!”

“I didn’t know that,” she wrote. “Well, if it’s the Islamic thing to do, I think I’m ready to talk about sex. You can ask me stuff and I’ll answer. Ask me anything.”

I went straight to the head of the matter. “Have you gone down on your fiancé?”

“No,” she replied. “He went down on me, but I told him I wasn’t ready to do it to him.”

“When do you think you will be ready?” I typed.

“I told him that next time we see each other I want to do it. Thing is, to be quite honest I don’t know how it works. As in technically.”

That was my in. “I could give you instructions,” I offered. “Especially since I want to ensure that your courtship is successful and you end up in a proper Islamic marriage.”

“That would be great!”

“There’s just one condition,” I stipulated.

“Anything.”

“When you go down on him, you have to imagine that you’re doing it to me.”

“I was already planning on it,” she wrote, adding the wink emoticon.

“Excellent!”

“Now
I
have a condition,” she countered.

“Anything,” I replied, taken aback by how unrestrained this
hijabi
was.

“When I imagine you, can I imagine that you’re going to marry me? See, I have this issue: I can sin only with a guy that I can imagine I’ll marry one day. So if I’m imagining sinning with you, I have to be able to imagine being married to you as well.”

“That’s fine with me.”

Anis and I communicated regularly from that day forward. To my surprise, within a couple of weeks she told me that she and the guy she’d been going to marry had called things off, and now she wanted to give
me
the honor of being the first guy she went down on. That was
an offer I couldn’t refuse. In fact, I got in my trusty Ford Ranger—my parents had kept the truck for me while I was in New York—and drove overnight to go see her.

“I couldn’t get us a hotel room,” she said, getting into the car as if we’d already been introduced. “They wouldn’t take cash!”

“We’ll find a quiet parking lot,” I replied, turning onto the main street of the rural town.

I stole glances at her while I drove. She was more beautiful than her online picture suggested. She was dainty and light-skinned, and her eyes were immensely sad. She wore Dior heels, a maroon
hijab
, a long black skirt, and a tight white blouse through which I could see the contours of her lacy black bra. I liked the way she wore her
hijab
; she wrapped it in whirls rather than safety-pinning the flaps the ugly way the Syrians and Malaysians did. At a traffic light I reached out and touched the texture of the scarf.

“Do you like it?” she asked. “I got it when I went to Mecca.”

“Very nice.”

“I’d like to give you a gift.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a little cloth bag.

“What is it?”

She unfurled the cloth and I saw that it concealed a miniature Quran.

“I want you to have it. Look, it’s even embroidered in gold and has silver calligraphy.”

I didn’t want to take it. It just didn’t seem right that she should give me something so special when we’d just met. But I suspected that giving me the Quran cast a veil of sacredness over the obscenity we were about to engage in. Perhaps it made her feel better about her impending sin.

I smiled. “I like it,” I said. “Put it in the glove compartment and I’ll take a closer look later.”

We drove around until we got to a park with a lake. Leaving the car, we took a walk around the water, stopping now and then to touch each other, and sitting on a bench to kiss. When we returned to our places in the car, I tilted her body back and reached over to unbutton her blouse.
She undid her
hijab
, letting a splash of auburn hair fall across my face. I squeezed her tresses between my fingers, wrapped the strands around my palms, and inhaled her Vidal Sassoon.

The rest of the day we made prostrations upon each other’s skin. In case someone was passing by, I drew the
hijab
over our bodies.

“A man and a woman are like a covering for one another,” she said, repeating a verse from the Quran.

P
ersuading girls to abandon the strictures of Islam, while it brought a wry smile to the corner of my mouth in the middle of a boring class, was not ultimately satisfying. I couldn’t boast or gloat about it to anyone. I couldn’t celebrate my success. The secrecy ruined it. What was the point of having power over another human being if it couldn’t be publicized?

So I decided to break it off with Anis. We’d met only once more since our first delicious encounter and sometimes talked on the phone. Looking for an easy way out, I told her that I was going to leave school and run away with Yemenese Sufis in order to work on the state of my
nafs
, or carnal self. She thought I was just making excuses, but I insisted, saying, “I really need to work on my Islam, maybe do some spiritual
tazkiyah
, or purification; maybe evaluate my
aqida
s, my creeds.” Those were Arabic terms, and I pronounced them like the pious did. Anis became quiet. She and I both knew it: she had been defeated by guttural inflection. She cried on the phone, declared her hope that I would never find love, and then hung up on me, leaving me to sort out how to redirect my energy.

The answer, as always, came in the form of Islam.

A leadership crisis had formed within the MSA. Apparently the few people being groomed as potential presidents were dithering and
doubting their qualifications. Part of their reluctance was proper Islamic etiquette—following the example of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, a Muslim being offered a leadership position was supposed to turn it down a few times—but part of it seemed serious. The possible lack of a president seemed to have shaken the community, and the organization’s elders were worried.

The whole situation reminded me of the upheaval in sixth-century Arabia. After the death of a man named Abdul Muttalib in the final quarter of the century, there was a leadership vacuum in the tribe of Quraysh—the primary guardians of the Holy Ka’ba. As lesser men haphazardly competed with one another, a figure by the name of Muhammad pushed himself forward as a leader. It occurred to me that perhaps Muhammad had been a postmodern before his time. He recognized the weakness of others and, like any strong poet, saw an opportunity to assert his authority.

I told myself that I had to be Muhammad to the MSA. In the spring of my junior year, I nominated myself for president and began campaigning.

My platform, which I prepared with no sense of irony, was one of social conservatism and restoring the moral center of the organization. The campaign speech was a skit featuring a sinful drunk brother who, by participating in one of my MSA meetings, reformed his ways and became a pious believer. The elections followed shortly, and I became the first-ever unanimously elected president.

I now had power over an entire flock of Muslims. What’s more, I was the representative, the immediate authority, for one of the three Abrahamic faiths—the fastest-growing one. Though our campus organization numbered less than a hundred, I could speak on behalf of a billion people. When a former U.S. president or the Dalai Lama or Archbishop Desmond Tutu came by, I was sent a special invitation to do a meet-and-greet. I went to large Christian churches around Atlanta, where I gave talks and held Q&As about Islamic history.

I also became responsible for giving the Friday sermon, which made me the spiritual head of our little community. After Friday prayer I held court in the hallway as, one by one, supplicants and spiritual mendicants, brothers and sisters, came to me, shook my hand, bowed to me,
and spoke their secrets in my ear: the brother asking how he should make his non-Muslim girlfriend turn toward Islam (with patience); the sister asking whether she should put on the
hijab
(yes); the brother who didn’t know what to do about his parents’ divorce (admonish them); the sister undergoing a nervous disorder (pray for a cure).

I was, finally, the
imam
my father had once wanted me to be. Islam had given me prestige. I placed great emphasis upon the fact that my full name was Amir ul Islam—Prince of Islam. It didn’t matter that it was all a charade.