The mosque, the humblest of the several in New Prospect, occupies the second floor above a nail salon and a check-cashing facility, in a row of small shops that includes a dusty-windowed pawn shop, a secondhand bookstore, a shoe-repair man and sandal-maker, a Chinese laundry down a little flight of steps, a pizza joint, and a grocery store specializing in Middle Eastern foods—dried lentils and fava beans, hummus and halvah, falafel and couscous and tabouli moldering in plain printed packages that look strange, in their lack of pictures and bold lettering, to Ahmad’s American eyes. For four or so blocks to the west, the so-called Arab section, begun with the Turks and Syrians who worked as tanners and dyers in the old mills, stretches along this part of Main Street, but Ahmad never ventures there; his exploration of his Islamic identity ends at the mosque. The mosque took him in as a child of eleven; it let him be born again.
He opens a flaking green door, number 2781½, between the nail salon and the establishment, its big window masked by long blond Venetian blinds, that advertises CHECKS CASHED: Minimal Fee. Narrow stairs lead upward to al-masjid al-jmi‘, the place of prostration. The green door and the windowless long flight of stairs frightened him the first times he came here, searching for something he had heard about in the chatter of his black classmates concerning their mosques, their preachers who “didn’t take none of the man’s shit.” Other boys his age became choir boys or joined the Cub Scouts. He thought he might find in this religion a trace of the handsome father who had receded at the moment his memories were beginning. His flighty mother, who never went to mass, and deplored the restraints of her own religion, humored him by driving him, those first times and afterwards, when her schedule permitted, until he was a teen-ager and relatively safe on the streets, to this mosque on the second floor. The large hall converted to worship was once a dance studio, and the imam’s office has replaced the foyer where pupils in tap and ballroom dancing, accompanied by parents if they were children, waited for their lessons. The lease and conversion of the space dated from the last decade of the last century, but the close air still bears, Ahmad imagines, echoes of a piano being thumped and a whiff of awkward, unholy effort. The worn, wavery boards where so many labored steps were rehearsed are covered by large Oriental rugs, rug upon rug, which in turn show some wear.
A caretaker, a shrivelled elderly Lebanese with a bent back and lame leg, vacuums the rugs and tidies the imam’s office and the children’s nursery created to satisfy Western babysitting habits, but the windows, high enough to discourage spying, whether upon dancers or worshippers, are beyond the crippled caretaker’s reach and semi-opaque with accumulated grime. Clouds are all that can be glimpsed through them, and these darkly. Even on Friday’s alt al-Jum‘a, when a sermon is preached from the minbar, the hall of prostration is underutilized, while the thriving modernistic mosques of Harlem and Jersey City fatten on fresh emigrants from Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The Black Muslims of New Prospect, and the apostate adherents of the Nation of Islam, keep to their own lofts and storefront sanctuaries. Shaikh Rashid’s hope of starting, in one of his third-floor spaces, a kuttab for teaching the Qur’an to flocks of elementary-school-age children, hangs short of fulfillment. Lessons that Ahmad seven years ago began in the company of eight or so others, in age from nine to thirteen, are now carried on by him as the only pupil. He is alone with the teacher, whose soft voice in any case carries best to a small audience. Ahmad is not utterly comfortable with his master, but, as the Qur’an and the Hadith enjoin, reveres him.
For seven years Ahmad has been coming twice a week, for an hour and a half, to learn the Qur’an, but he lacks opportunity in the rest of his time to use classical Arabic. The eloquent language, al-lugha al-fusb, still sits awkwardly in his mouth, with all its throat syllables and dotted emphatic consonants, and baffles his eyes: the cursive print, with its attendant spattering of diacritical marks, looks small to him, and to read it from right to left still entails a switch of gears in his head. As the lessons, having slowly marched through the holy text, undergo review, recapitulation, and refinement, Shaikh Rashid reveals his preference for the shorter, early Meccan suras, poetic and intense and cryptic compared with the prosy stretches in the book’s first half, wherein the Prophet set about governing Medina with particularizing laws and mundane advisements.
Today the teacher says, “Let us turn to ‘The Elephant.’ It is the one hundred and fifth sura.” Since Shaikh Rashid doesn’t wish to pollute his student’s carefully acquired classical Arabic with the sounds of a modern colloquial tongue, al-lugha al-‘mmiyya, in his rapid Yemeni dialect, he conducts the lessons in a fluent but rather formal English, speaking with some distaste, his violet lips, framed in his neat beard and mustache, pursed as if to maintain an ironical remove. “Read it to me,” he tells Ahmad, “with some rhythmic feeling, please.” He shuts his eyes the better to listen; his lowered lids show a few purple spider veins, vivid in the waxy-white face.
Ahmad recites the invocatory formula “bi-smi llhi r-ra-mni r-ram” and, tensely because of his master’s demand for a feeling rhythm, tackles aloud the long first line of the sura: “a-lam tara kayfa fa‘ala rabbuka bi-abi ‘l-fl.” His eyes still closed as he leans back against the cushions of the spacious silver-gray high-backed wing chair in which he sits at his desk and receives his student, who perches at the corner of his desk on a Spartan chair of molded plastic such as might be found in the luncheonette of a small-city airport, the shaikh admonishes, “, : two distinct sounds, not ‘sh.’ Pronounce them as in, oh, ‘asshole.’ Forgive me; that is the sole word in the devils’ language that comes to mind. On the glottal stop, don’t overdo it; classical Arabic is not some African click-language. Sweep the sound in gracefully, as though it’s second nature. Which it is, of course, for native speakers, and students sufficiently diligent. Maintain the rhythm, despite difficult sounds. Stress the last syllable, the rhyming syllable. Remember the rule? Stress falls on a long vowel between two consonants, or on a consonant followed by a short vowel followed by two consonants. Proceed, please, Ahmad.” Even the master’s pronunciation of “Ahmad” has the soft knife-edge, the soulful twist, of the pharyngeal fricative.
“—a-lam yaj‘al kaydahum f tall—”
“Strengthen that ‘ll,’” Shaikh Rashid says, his eyes still closed, trembling as if with a weight of jelly behind them. “You can hear it even in the Reverend Rodwell’s quaint nineteenth-century translation: ‘Did He not make their guile to go astray?’” His eyes half open as he explains, “The men or companions, that is, of the elephant. The sura supposedly refers to an actual event, an attack on Mecca by Abraha al-abash, the governor, as it happens, of Yemen, the lavender land of my warrior ancestors. Armies in those days, of course, had to have elephants; elephants were the Sherman M1 tanks, the armored Humvees, of the time; let’s hope they were equipped with thicker skins than the unfortunate Humvees supplied to Bush’s brave troops in Iraq. The historical event was supposed to have occurred at about the time the Prophet was born, in 570 of the Common Era. He would have heard his relatives—not his parents, since his father died before he was born and his mother when he was six, but perhaps his grandfather, ‘Abd al-Mualib, and his uncle, Ab lib—talking about this fabled battle, by the firelight of the Hashemite camps. For a time the infant was entrusted to a Bedouin nurse, and perhaps from her, it has been thought, he imbibed the heavenly purity of his Arabic.”
“Sir, you say ‘supposedly,’ yet the sura asks in the first verse, ‘Have you not seen?’—as if the Prophet and his audience have seen it.”
“In his mind’s eye,” the teacher sighs. “In his mind’s eye, the Prophet saw many things. As to whether the attack by Abraha was historical, scholars, equally devout and equally convinced that the Qur’an was of divine inspiration, differ. Read me the last three verses, which are especially profoundly inspired. Keep your breath flowing. Favor your nasal passages. Let me hear the desert wind.”
“wa arsala ‘alayhim ayran abbl,” Ahamad
intones, trying to drop his voice into a place of gravity and beauty deeper in his throat, so he feels the holy vibration in his sinuses. “tarmhim b-ijratin min sijjl,” he continues, gathering a walled-in resonance in at least his own ears, “fa-ja‘alahum ka-‘as. fin ma’kl.”
“Better,” Shaikh Rashid indolently concedes, waving in dismissal his soft white hand, whose fingers appear sinuously long, though his body as a whole, clothed in a delicately embroidered caftan, is slight and small. Beneath it he wears the white undertrousers called the sirwl, and, level on his tidy head, the white brimless lacy cap, the ‘amma, that identifies him as an imam. His black shoes, tiny and obdurate as a child’s, peep out of the caftan’s hem when he lifts them and rests them on the padded footstool in the same opulent fabric, containing the glints of a thousand silver threads, that covers the thronelike wing chair from which he delivers his teaching. “And what do these superb verses tell us?”
“They tell us,” Ahmad ventures, blushing with the shame of sullying the holy text with a clumsy paraphrase, which furthermore depends less on his sight-reading of the ancient Arabic than on a surreptitious study of English translations, “they tell us that God loosed flocks of birds, hurling them against stones of baked clay, and made the men of the elephant like blades of grass that have been eaten. Devoured.”
“Yes, more or less,” said Shaikh Rashid. “The ‘stones of baked clay,’ as you put it, presumably formed a wall which then came down, under the barrage of birds, which remains somewhat mysterious to us, though presumably as clear as crystal in the graven prototype of the Qur’an that exists in Paradise. Ah, Paradise; one can hardly wait.”
Ahmad’s blush slowly fades, leaving on his face a crust of unease. The shaikh has closed his eyes again in reverie. When the silence stretches painfully, Ahmad asks, “Sir, are you suggesting that the version available to us, fixed by the first caliphs within twenty years of the Prophet’s death, is somehow imperfect, compared with the version that is eternal?”
The teacher pronounces, “The imperfections must lie within ourselves—in our ignorance, and in the records that the first disciples and scribes made of the Prophet’s utterances. The very title of our sura, for example, may be a mis-transcription of Abraha’s royal monarch, Alfilas, which a dropped ending left as al-Fl—‘the elephant.’ One presumes that the flocks of birds are a metaphor for some sort of missiles hurled by catapult, or else we have the ungainly vision of winged creatures, less formidable than the Roc of The Thousand and One Nights but presumably more numerous, crunching their beaks upon the clay bricks, the bi-ijratin. Only in this verse, the fourth, you will notice, are there any long vowels that do not come at the end of a line. Though he spurned the title of poet, the Prophet, especially in these early Meccan verses, achieved intricate effects. But, yes, the version handed down to us, while it would be blasphemy to call it imperfect, is, because of our mortal ignorance, in sore need of interpretation, and interpretations, in the course of fourteen centuries, differ. The exact meaning of the word abbl, for example, remains after all this time conjectural, since it occurs nowhere else. There is a term in Greek, dear Ahmad, for such a unique and therefore undeterminable word: hapax legomenon. In the same sura, sijjl is another mystery-word, though it occurs three times in the Sacred Book. The Prophet himself foresaw difficulties, and in the seventh verse of the third sura, ‘The Imrans,’ admits that some expressions are clear—mukamt—but others are understood only by God. These unclear passages, the so-called mutashbiht, are sought out by the enemies of the true faith, those ‘with an evil inclination in their hearts,’ as the Prophet expressed it, whereas the wise and faithful say, ‘We believe in it; it is all from our Lord.’ Am I boring you, my pet?”
“Oh, no,” Ahmad answers, truly; for as his teacher murmurs casually on, the student feels an abyss is opening within him, a chasm of the problematical and inaccessibly ancient.
The shaikh, tilting forward in his great chair, is taking on a vehement energy of discourse, with indignant gestures of his long-fingered hands. “The atheist Western scholars in their blind wickedness allege the Sacred Book to be a shambles of fragments and forgeries slapped together in expedient haste and arranged in the most childish order possible, that of sheer bulk, the longest suras first. They claim to find endless obscurities and cruces. For example, there has been a recent, rather amusing controversy over the scholarly dicta of a German specialist in ancient Middle Eastern tongues, one Christoph Luxenberg, who maintains that many obscurities of the Qur’an disappear if the words are read not as Arabic but as Syriac homonyms. Most notoriously, he asserts that, in the magnificent suras ‘Smoke’ and ‘The Mountain,’ the words that have traditionally been read as ‘virgins with large dark eyes’ actually mean ‘white raisins’ of ‘crystal clarity.’ Similarly, the enchanting youths, likened to scattered pearls, cited in the sura called ‘Man’ should be rendered ‘chilled raisins’—referring to a cooling raisin drink served with elaborate courtesy in Paradise while the damned drink molten metal in Hell. I fear this particular revision would make Paradise significantly less attractive for many young men. What say you to that, as a comely young man?” With an animation almost humorous, the teacher accentuates his forward tilt, resting his feet on the floor so that his black shoes flick out of sight; his lips and eyelids open in expectation.
Startled, Ahmad says, “Oh, no. I thirst for Paradise,” though the abyss within him continues to widen.
“It is not merely attractive,” Shaikh Rashid pursues, “some distant place pleasant to visit, like Hawaii, but something we long for, long for ardently, is it not so?”
“Yes.”
“So that we are impatient with this world, so dim and dismal a shadow of the next?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“And even if the dark-eyed houris are merely white raisins, does that lessen your appetite for Paradise?”
“Oh, no, sir, it does not,” Ahmad answers, as these otherworldly images swirl in his head.
Where some might take these provocative moods of Shaikh Rashid to be satiric, and indeed a dangerous flirtation with Hellfire, Ahmad has always taken them to be maieutic, a teasing-forth, from his student, of necessary shadows and complications, thus enriching a shallow and starkly innocent faith. But today the rub of maieutic irony feels sharper, and the boy’s stomach chafes, and he wants the lesson to end.
“Good,” the teacher pronounces, his lips snapping shut in a tight bud of flesh. “My own sense of it has always been that the houris are metaphors for a bliss beyond imagining, a bliss chaste and unending, and not literal copulation with physical women—warm, rounded, slavish women. Surely copulation as commonly experienced is the very essence of earthly transience, of vain joy.”
“But…,” Ahmad blurts, blushing again.
“But—?”
“But Paradise must be real, a real place.”
“Of course, dear boy—what else? And yet, to continue briefly with this matter of textual perfection, even in the tamer declarations of the suras ascribed to the Prophet’s Medina governance, infidel scholars claim to discover awkwardness. Could you read for me—I know, the shadows are lengthening, the spring day outside our windows is pathetically dying—read for me, please, verse fourteen from the sixty-fourth sura, ‘Mutual Deceit.’”
Ahmad fumblingly finds the page in his dog-eared copy of the Qur’an, and makes his way aloud through “y ayyuh ‘lladhna man inna min azwjikum wa awldikum ‘aduwwan lakum fa ‘dharhum, wa in ta‘f wa tafa wa taghfir fa-inna ‘llha ghafrun ram.”
“Good. I mean, good enough. We must work harder, of course, on your accent. Can you tell me, Ahmad, quickly, what it means?”
“Uh, it says that in your wives and children you have an enemy. Beware of them. But if you, uh, forgive and pardon and are lenient, God is forgiving and merciful.”
“But your wives and children! What is ‘enemy’ about them? Why would they need forgiveness?”
“Well, maybe because they distract you from
jihd, from the struggle to become holy and closer to God.”
“Perfect! What a beautiful tutee you are, Ahmad! I could not have put it better myself. ‘t‘f wa tas. fa wa taghfir’—‘af and afaa, abstain and turn away! Do without these women of non-Heavenly flesh, this earthly baggage, these unclean hostages to fortune! Travel light, straight into Paradise! Tell me, dear Ahmad, are you afraid of entering into Paradise?”
“Oh, no, sir. Why would I be? I look forward to it, as do all good Muslims.”
“Yes. Of course they do. We do. You gladden my heart. For next session, kindly prepare ‘The Merciful’ and ‘The Event.’ In numerical terms, suras fifty-five and fifty-six—side by side, conveniently. Oh, and Ahmad—?”
“Yes?” The spring day has passed, beyond the upward-looking windows, into evening, an indigo sky too stained by the mercury-vapor lights of inner-city New Prospect to show more than a handful of stars. Ahmad tries to remember if his mother’s hours at the hospital will permit her to be home. Otherwise, perhaps there will be a cup of yogurt in the refrigerator, or he else must risk the doubtful cleanness of the Shop-a-Sec’s snack provisions.
“I trust you will not be returning to the kafir church in the center of town.” The shaikh hesitates, and then speaks as if quoting a sacred text: “The unclean can appear to shine, and devils do good imitations of angels. Keep to the Straight Path—ihdin ‘-ira ‘l-mustaqm. Beware of anyone, however pleasing, who distracts you from Allah’s pure being.”
“But the entire world,” Ahmad confesses, “is such a distraction.”
“It need not be. The Prophet himself was a worldly man: merchant, husband, father of daughters. Yet he became in his forties the vehicle God chose through which to deliver His final and culminating word.” The cell phone that lives deep in the shaikh’s overlapping garments suddenly sounds its trilling, semi-musical plea, and Ahmad seizes the moment to flee out into the evening, out into the world with its homeward rush of headlights and its sidewalk scents of frying food and of branches pale with blossoms and sticky catkins overhead.