Children of Dust (28 page)

O
nce I was back at Ziad’s I felt good about the future.

Now while he was at work I started venturing out, often spending time at the malls. Eventually I got bored with that and headed farther afield, finding and delighting in hidden
souk
s. These were open-air markets, dusty and hot without air conditioners or fans, at which migrants from all around the world sold foods, wares, clothes, and used goods. Whereas the mostly Arab clientele in the malls wore
dishdasha
s and
abaya
s and
niqab
s, the market’s clientele wore mostly denim, topped by collared shirts and blouses. Many of the women didn’t cover, and there was no sign of any policing or monitoring. These
souk
s reminded me of the old Pakistani
bazar
s, seeming less formal and more jovial than any Kuwaiti mall I’d been in thus far.

The first day I discovered such a market, I walked around with a smile on my face. I sniffed cologne at one stall and then browsed through a magazine rack containing books from all over the world. I walked past a group of Filipinos, male and female, hanging about and carelessly chatting with one another. I heard clusters of Egyptians talking loudly with one another. A Lebanese man tried talking to me in English about how he was going to move to Canada. Toward the end of that day, as one of the Indian jewelers selling used watches closed
up shop, his tiny companion, a dark-skinned Sinhala girl, walked past close enough for her hair to brush against his arm, and when they walked away, he momentarily reached forward with his hand and touched her fingers. I tried to pull out my phone camera to capture this moment of fleeting intimacy, this act of natural liberty, but by the time I got the lens in focus, the couple had gone.

After I got back to the apartment, Ziad and I went to a small café for dinner and I told him about my day while we waited for our food to arrive.

“It was lively,” I reported. “It was loud. There was music playing. I didn’t expect to see such…” I began, struggling for a word.

“Such what?”

“I don’t know the word I’m looking for.”

“You mean freedom,” Ziad said, smiling. “You saw poor people in a Muslim country—”

“An
Arab
Muslim country,” I interjected.

“—and you figured they’d be hard-core theocrats or fundamentalists.”

I nodded. “Something like that.”

“Quite the opposite,” Ziad replied, nodding at the waiter as he brought our tea. “The people at the bottom of the rung—migrants and Bedouins—are pretty laid-back, both culturally and religiously. Same goes for the ultra-rich. It’s the middle class—the mall-going, bureaucratic, Camry-driving portion of the population—which is uptight and stuck-up.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said. “They do seem to be the most religious group. I’ve seen more women wearing the veil inside the malls than outside, for example.”

“Being uptight doesn’t only have to do with Islam, though,” Ziad replied. “Women wear the veil today for all sorts of reasons that have little to do with religion. For most of the middle-class women it’s so that no one confuses them for an immigrant.”

“So bigotry instead of Islam?” I said sarcastically.

“Or classism. Or maybe even just fashion. Look, we can never understand why individuals do the things they do.”

“Fashion? Come on!”

“Yes, fashion,” Ziad repeated, pointing to a pair of
niqab
-wearing women in a far corner of the café. “Look at those girls. They’re covered up, but they’re in this café which is mostly men. That already indicates that they aren’t constrained by Islam. If for some reason the café owner suddenly stopped permitting women inside, these girls would still find a way to be around guys.”

“How?”

“You’d be surprised. Maybe they’d drive really slowly down the road, and guys would pull up next to them so that they could exchange phone numbers through the window. We’ll drive up and down the main highway next Friday night. You’ll see the pick-up scene there.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Just look at the shoes they’re wearing,” he said.

“Heels,” I said, taking note. “Strappy ones. Nice sexy heels. So what?”

“I don’t know many brand names, but those are guaranteed to be Dior or Chanel or Jimmy Choo. And if you go to the mall you’ll find all these girls in the boutiques buying up a storm. Why would they buy stuff if there wasn’t anyone to appreciate them?”

I nodded.

“And look at how they’re watching the belly dancer on TV,” Ziad added. “Clearly they have no problem with sexuality.”

“But they cover their face,” I noted. “That’s repressive. We have to liberate women like them. Veiled women raise fundamentalists: the veil is the ‘gateway drug’ to extremism.”

Ziad laughed. He sipped his tea and thought for a moment before responding.

“A veil is not a bomb,” he said. “Besides, free them from what? The veil is a cultural symbol that has a long history. If you live in Kuwait for an extended period, you’re going to run into a sandstorm. The sand particles are tiny, and they get into your eyes and nose and throat and clog everything up. I bet you that when one comes, you’ll be covering your nose and mouth as well. That’s probably how the people of this part of the world started wearing veils thousands of years ago. At the
end of the day, though, if they want to wear the veil, that’s their choice. Why not put up your feet and just admire the diversity of the world? I like to think of the world as a science fiction film. There are a whole bunch of creatures that look messed up to one another, but even if we don’t like what someone looks like we should still talk to them.”

“But there are people in this world—Muslims—who want to impose the veil on
everyone
. Those are the people Islamic reform is trying to stop.”

“That’s not
Islamic
reform, though,” Ziad replied. “To ‘impose’ you gotta be in government. Any time a government imposes anything on you and you resist, that’s just standing up to a government. Why do you bring Islam into it?”

“Because
they
say it’s all about Islam.”

“Just because
they
say it doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s your job to see beyond that. Look, if the American government says that they need to incarcerate a segment of their population in the name of Pokémon, do you turn yourself into a Pokémon expert in order to try and prove that, no, Pokémon wouldn’t do such a thing?”

Our waiter chose that moment to bring our food—felicitous timing, because I didn’t have a response to Ziad’s question.

He persisted. “You have to ask yourself what you’re fighting for, Ali. Are you an enemy of Islamic fundamentalism simply because it pisses you off, or do you actually support liberty? If it’s the latter, why do you have to talk about Islam all day? If it’s the former, you have to ask yourself why you let your life be controlled by being pissed off. Or…never mind.”

“Or what?”

“Or maybe you’re just desperate to be relevant.”

A
fter my illuminating—but discouraging—talk with Ziad, I started working even harder on Islamic reform to compensate for the doubts I felt about its usefulness.

I started by setting up a legislation monitoring system for Muslim countries—a system that would track reformist laws in Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt to start with but would eventually expand to all fifty-five Muslim-majority countries in the world.

The initial focus of the project was to be in the area of criminal law. The goal would be to identify all the various activists who favored repealing the anachronistic Sharia—or Islamic law—punishments, such as stoning, amputation, and lashing. I would then put those activists in touch with reformist scholars of Islam, who would help provide them with a religious basis for changing the law. In other words, the system would facilitate an alliance of reformist theory and action.

I printed out hundreds of documents in various languages, paged through history books by the score, and began translating articles by lawmakers and political leaders who supported progressive initiatives. I read the platforms of large political parties, compiled the names of major liberal clerics in every country, and trolled the Internet for reports by international human rights agencies.

The model for this project was the collaborative activism that had led, a couple years earlier, to the Women’s Protection Bill in Pakistan. In 2006 a number of activists in Pakistan gained sufficient influence over legislators and leaders that they were able to get repealed certain Sharia-based punishments that had been imposed upon women by General Zia ul Haq decades earlier. The reform effort centered, particularly, around laws that imposed the punishment for adultery—stoning—upon a woman who was raped. The repeal effort had been nearly thirty years in the making but had stalled in the face of pressure from conservative clerics. Eventually, a number of reform-minded religious scholars allied themselves with the feminist cause, and that alliance gave the bill the new energy that got it passed.

My view was that since many of the reforms in the Muslim world—such as the Women’s Protection Bill—required changing laws that had originated in some inappropriate interpretation of Islam, the most helpful thing for social activists would be to have a place where they could connect with religious scholars who could provide a religious imprimatur for achieving progressive aims. In other words, I wanted to make sure that Muslims’ lives were improved, but I also wanted the credit for those improvements to go to Islam.

The project gave me a way to lose myself. I became consumed by press releases and news reports, by unjust laws and the search for religious justice. My agitation became a walking apparition that stalked the house.

Eventually my tension started to wear on Ziad. Whereas he had come home from work as early as possible when I first arrived, now he came home later and later. When we finally sat down to eat, he rarely talked, and if he did say something it was trivial. If I talked about my work, he seemed to bristle and become even more distant. We started cutting dinner short so that I could go off to my computer and he to the couch in front of TV, where night after night he fell asleep.

One night I decided to confront him. Perhaps the issue wasn’t my work but something else entirely.

“Knock knock,” I said, entering his bedroom.

Lying back with his head on the pillow, he wiggled his toes in acknowledgment. The curtains were pulled tight, and it was freezing in
the room, the air conditioner on high. A pale aromatic candle burning in the bathroom sent its ghostly smoke into the bedroom. There was a big tower of novels on the bedside table, but none was open. An iPod sat next to him; though he wasn’t wearing the headphones, I could hear faint music coming from the earpiece.

“This is your house,” I said awkwardly. “I feel like I’ve taken over.”

“You’re my guest,” he said. “It’s not a problem.”

“I can contribute more financially,” I offered. “You drive me around but I rarely pay for gas.”

“Our gas is subsidized,” he replied. “Gas is cheaper than air in this country. Besides, you’re the starving activist and I’m the established professional. There’s nothing for you to contribute.”

“This is weird,” I said. “But I guess I’ll just say it.”

“What?”

“I know I sound like a wife here, but I feel like there’s this distance between us.”

I expected Ziad to change the subject. Instead, he confronted the matter directly.

“Of course there’s a distance,” he said, sitting up. “You’re a reformist and I’m not. The things you’re seeking to accomplish are different from the things I know. That doesn’t mean I don’t value what you do. It just means there will always be space between us.”

“In other words, you’re not particularly interested in what I’m doing,” I said somberly.

“Right.”

The realization made me a little sad. Not because I wanted him to think Islamic reform was the greatest thing in the world, but because for all the loftiness I associated with my work, that work was keeping me distant from the only person in the world who was helping me.

Remembering that communication is a two-way street, I set about trying to get to know what Ziad found interesting, given that all I’d done thus far was use him as an encyclopedia and a companion.

“Tell me,” I said. “What’s your orientation?”

He looked at me askance. “I see that you’re still trying to get me executed.”

I laughed. “Not like that. I meant Islamically. You read my work and enjoyed it. You oppose the theocrats and terrorists. You don’t believe in requiring
hijab
s or beards. Yet you say you aren’t a reformist. I haven’t heard you say what you
are
, though: Shia or Ismaili or orthodox Sunni—whatever. It’s a big mystery to me—you know, your theological orientation, stuff like that.”

“It’s too simplistic to be worth getting into.”

“I’m interested,” I said, pulling up a chair.

Ziad shook his head. “Don’t worry about me. I keep rolling along. Why don’t you update me, though? What’s happening with the
shaykh
and the sculptor? And has Ali Ahab landed his rich Moby Dick?”

I waved my hand to dismiss his questions. I didn’t want to talk about myself any more than Ziad did.

We sat companionably in the dark and silent room. The only noise was the faint pulse of music coming out of the headphones.

“What are you listening to there?” I asked.

“Your people’s music.”

“Really? I don’t associate you with hip-hop.”

“Your
other
people,” Ziad said. “Punjabis.”

“Let me hear.”

Ziad handed me the iPod. “The Indian guy at the parking lot who washes my windshield told me about the CD that this song is from. Said his siblings loved the music and I reminded him of one of them. I don’t understand it, but it’s beautiful.”

I put in one earpiece and began listening. I immediately recognized the heavy female voice. It was Abida Parveen, Pakistan’s leading singer of folk and Sufi music. Most of her songs were from the tradition of Punjabi
kalam
poetry and mysticism that had been popular among Muslim saints, Hindu yogis, and Sikh gurus for hundreds of years, but was now ignored by most people, largely because ethnic literature no longer received patronage. The particular work that Abida Parveen was singing into my earpiece had been written by Baba Bulleh Shah, a famous Sufi saint born in Kasur, who had been the student of the spiritual master Shah Inayat. Bulleh Shah lived several hundred years ago in a period of great spiritual beauty in India. His life overlapped with that of the poet Waris Shah, who penned the greatest lyric poem in Punjabi, “Heer.”
The prominent Sindhi Sufi Sachal Sarmast was also a contemporary of Bulleh Shah.

I knew the history of Punjab’s mystics because I had long kept track of the work of these poets, using their lyrics to rebuke orthodox and extremist Muslims. It was something that was part of the “reformist arsenal” that we activists relied upon. The mystics’ abandon, and their denigration of orthodoxy, was especially useful when reformists were sick and tired of dealing with religious recalcitrance and wanted to blow the conversation up with mockery and jest.

“This is great stuff,” I said. “You don’t understand it?”

“Nope.”

“It’s called
Ek nuqte vich gul muqdi e
. ‘It is all in One contained.’” I plugged the iPod into Ziad’s laptop so that we could both hear and turned up the volume. “The lyrics are mocking the dogmatically religious,” I said, translating:

I continued translating through the thirteen-minute song.

As the song wound down, I muted the volume and unplugged the iPod. “I really like Bulleh Shah,” I said. “He was the most confrontational of the mystics. He had no time for the orthotoxics and the theocunts. If he were alive today, he’d definitely be a reformist.” I turned toward Ziad, expecting him to have gotten as much kick out of the lyrics as I did.

Instead, I saw that he had gotten out of bed and paced to the corner of the room, where he was running his fingers over his dresser. I
thought I heard him sighing; sure enough, when I caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror there were tears running down his cheeks. He turned to me, his eyelashes wet and his lips quivering. He snatched the iPod from my hand, took a deep breath as if preparing to dive, and said simply, “Shut up with your reformist nonsense.”

Feeling like I’d been slapped, I backed out of the shimmering blue room.