The children of secular, liberal people tend to grow up assuming that everyone is as secular and liberal as their parents. That was the case with me. I had some exposure to religion at home, of course. Baba Nasser and Maman Farah were believers, and every day I would catch them immersed in prayer in a corner of their bedroom that faced Mecca. I liked to sneak behind them and imitate their movements, now kneeling, now prostrating myself, now swiveling my head to the right and to the left. But this was childish play. I didn’t know the Arabic words to the prayers. My elders didn’t think it necessary to teach them to me.
For my grandparents, Islam was a private matter. Maman Farah would don the hijab only at prayer time. She saw the compulsory public veiling introduced by the new regime as an irritating imposition. Her brand of Islam was at peace with the occasional glass of wine. Baba Nasser may have been slightly more orthodox. But he had a passive constitution, and my parents’ decidedly un-Islamic lives probably dampened any enthusiasm he might have had for transmitting his faith to his grandson.
It wasn’t until I started my formal education that I realized how Islam—Shiite Islam, to be precise—permeates Iranian life. Here was an immense spiritual, legal, and normative dominion that counted me as a subject, irrespective of my personal feelings about the matter. In school, I also discovered the Shiite faith’s jagged beauty and deep pathos. Most important, I learned about Hussein ibn Ali, the third Shiite imam and the greatest martyr in a faith of martyrs. To this day, I hear in Hussein’s story an echo of Christ’s teaching that “greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13).
* * * * *
The historian Edward Gibbon wrote: “In a distant age and climate, the tragic scene of [Hussein’s] death will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.” In spirit and climate, the Iran of my childhood was probably closer to Hussein’s late-seventh-century Arabia than Gibbon’s Georgian England was. You can imagine, then, how much more intense was my sympathy for Hussein once it was awakened. The agent of that awakening was my elementary school Qur’an teacher.
At an Iranian school, a Qur’an teacher wears many hats. He trains pupils to read, memorize, and recite the Muslim holy book. He also acts as a sort of resident ideologue, forming young minds to detest America and Western “cultural imperialism”, to defend the nation, to obey the supreme leader without question. It helps, too, to be a good actor and storyteller, because the Shiite rituals he is called to perform are nothing if not dramatic.
My Qur’an teacher at Shahid Sadoughi Elementary was particularly adept at this last function. Mr. Sadeghi was tall and swarthy, with a thick, perennially unkempt beard and a bearing that resembled an angry gorilla’s. He wore sweat-stained, ill-fitting shirts, untucked and buttoned to the collar (but sans tie). It was the uniform of the hezbollahi, a “partisan of God” and a true believer in the revolution. Among students he was notorious for his sadistic streak in matters disciplinary. Those who crossed him found themselves holding stress positions—lifting one leg and the next at a ninety-degree angle, among others—for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. A slap from him sent most kids reeling. Mr. Sadeghi was a bruiser.
Toward the end of the fifth grade, when we were on the cusp of graduating to middle school, he required my class to memorize several long chapters of the Qur’an, amounting to about 5 percent of the whole text, over two months. It was a final project seemingly designed to aggravate students from secular backgrounds. Children from religious families would memorize large chunks, or even the entirety, of the Qur’an at home under parental pressure or of their own volition; it came naturally to them.
I struggled badly. Watching my agony over this assignment proved too much for my mother. She organized a small group of like-minded parents, and they took their complaints to the headmaster. The parents couldn’t object to the principle that young Muslims should commit Qur’anic verses to memory. But they argued that being compelled to memorize so much in such a short time would sour the boys on scripture. Incredibly, teacher and headmaster relented. In the end, we had to memorize only two or three short chapters. Thenceforth Mr. Sadeghi became much more circumspect in dealing with me.
It was a bittersweet triumph. I loathed this man. He was the very type of the uncouth provincial who, thanks to the revolution, had suddenly come to wield great authority in a big-city school. Yet I also associated him with the most pious feelings that I had as a boy in Iran. These feelings invariably centered on the passion and martyrdom of Imam Hussein.
Every year, during the Shiite mourning month of Mu-harram, the headmaster would summon the teachers and the student body from their classrooms to the schoolyard. All were required to show up, even the Armenian Christians. We arranged ourselves in neat rows, the youngest at the front and the oldest to the back. When a black-clad Mr. Sadeghi ascended the elevated platform at the front, we knew the show was about to begin.
His heavy breathing blared on the speakers for a few minutes while he waited for the boys to settle down. Then, once he had our attention, Mr. Sadeghi teleported our minds and souls to Arabia in the year 680. The House of Islam was divided. Having united under the banner of Muhammad, who claimed to have brought God’s final and fullest revelation to mankind, the Arabs were divided once more, over who should succeed the late prophet as caliph and commander of the faithful.
“It wasn’t supposed be like this,” Mr. Sadeghi said. “The prophet, peace be upon him, hadn’t been dead for fifty years. His testament was etched in living memory.” He lowered his voice almost to a whisper and repeated the last few words: “. . . in living memory.”
At this, he began rhythmically beating his chest with the open palm of his right hand. The other teachers and we students followed suit. The sound of some four hundred men and boys beating their chests filled the schoolyard.
Slap! Slap! Slap!
We now stood at the origin of the Sunni-Shiite schism that has racked the Muslim world for nearly fourteen hundred years. Sunnis accept the legitimacy of a succession of caliphs chosen by Muslim leaders after the prophet’s death. But Shiites believe that the right of succession belonged to the Ahl al-Bayt, the members of Muhammad’s household who descended from his cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib.
“This was a time of injustice and unbelief,” our teacher went on, his voice rising again. “Decadent men arose, who would usurp the heritage of the prophet himself. . . the heritage of the prophet, peace be upon him.”
Slap! Slap! Slap!
Mr. Sadeghi was referring to the Sunni caliph Yazid. Having inherited the throne from his father—a dynastic passage that Shiites saw as a breach of an earlier accord between the two sects—Yazid set out to consolidate his power. From his base in Damascus, he demanded bay’ah (allegiance) from every Arab chieftain and Muslim figure of consequence. Ali and his elder son, Hassan, had been assassinated in the course of earlier strife. It fell to Ali’s second son, Hussein, to uphold the honor of the prophet’s household.
Hussein, whose lips Muhammad had kissed, wouldn’t bow to a corrupt, worldly potentate. He withheld his bay’ah from Yazid and soon was threatened at his home in Medina. He took refuge briefly in Mecca before decamping for Kufa, in Iraq. Word had come to Hussein that some 140,000 Muslims in Kufa were prepared to back him against Yazidian despotism. Hussein agreed to take command of the insurgency, though his divine foreknowledge told him that the cause was doomed.
Mr. Sadeghi, his voice now breaking with sobs, recalled Hussein’s words: “These people will search me out and put me to death in Mecca and Medina, and I do not wish the sanctity of Mecca and Medina to be violated by the shedding of my blood.” Our teacher added: “Oh Hussein, would that we could be with you now, following your blessed footsteps on that desert road. Oh, that we could shield your precious body and blood from the swords and arrows of the enemy!”
Slap! Slap! Slap!
No welcome party from Kufa greeted Hussein when he crossed the Arabian Peninsula into Iraq. Unbeknownst to Hussein, the city’s governor had already crushed the uprising in Kufa, killing some of the rebels and buying off others. Hussein’s “army” consisted of seventy-two loyal companions, plus an entourage of thirsty and famished women and children.
The sun blazed mercilessly in the sky above Mesopotamia as Hussein’s scouts scanned the horizon. What at first appeared to Hussein’s party like palm trees gleaming in the distance turned out to be a force of more than thirty thousand troops, including five thousand on horseback. Yazid’s army had cut off Hussein from the waters of the Euphrates and blocked the way to Kufa. The trap was set. Hussein and his companions pitched camp at a place called Karbala, on the banks of the river.
“Karbala”, according to the Shiites, means “the land of sorrows and afflictions”.
“On the night before Ashura, that is, the tenth day of Muharram,” said Mr. Sadeghi, his voice descending to a whisper once more, “Hussein gathered his companions and told them, ‘I have released your bay’ah. Anyone who wishes to take leave unharmed, let him use the cover of darkness to flee. You would not dishonor yourself if you choose to abandon me.’ ”
Not one of the seventy-two took him up on the face-saving offer. “When we are right,” said one, “what fear do we have of death, which would bring us to the prophet?” Come morning, Hussein and his friends and family members would enter the house of death—and then paradise.
Slap! Slap! Slap!
* * * * *
Beginning in elementary school, I was made to understand that Hussein’s sacrifice at Karbala was about more than a right of succession. Karbala was ultimately about resisting the triumph of the lie. Yazid, the enemy, ruled a nascent Muslim empire, yet he lived a debauched life. Claiming the title of commander of the faithful, he laid siege against the grandson of the prophet. His troops starved children and rained arrows on holy men and women. Yazid was the perpetual hypocrite, and in every age right down to our own, upright people had to face him in the perpetual Karbala. As I grew older, it dawned on me that I lived in a Yazidian world, though it claimed the banner of Hussein and Karbala.
* * * * *
In 1991, when I was six, my parents filed for divorce. It was a mutual decision, and the process itself was relatively painless. There was only one wrinkle: me.
Parviz and Niloofar wanted to insulate me from the reality that ours was a broken family. Instead of telling me the truth about their divorce, they played what amounted to a very elaborate, adult version of the children’s game house—for seven years. Other players included my grandparents, my parents’ friends, and many of our relatives. They all knew about the legal state of the marriage, but for my sake they helped maintain the charade. For seven years, I assumed that my parents were in a normal, if at times rocky, marriage.
I should have been suspicious. Shortly after the divorce, my uncle in Utah filed papers to bring my mother and me to America under the family-preference visa program. This I was informed about. It might take years, I gathered, but a document called a green kart would eventually open the gates to my promised land.
Yet there was no talk of my father joining us in America. I knew that he couldn’t travel abroad for reasons of his own making. From time to time, he would tell me of the marvels and wonders I would see in America. Parviz didn’t include himself in these American reveries. He never said “we” would do this or that in the United States, only “you”. I think he was readying me for the day we would say good-bye and never see each other again. I made peace with the prospect and lived those seven years ever aware that a permanent separation from my father was coming. And that was fine with me. America was home, Iran a transitory vale.
Meanwhile, there were more immediate signs that all was not well in the Ahmari household. My father spent only three or four nights a week at home, sometimes fewer. When he was with us, my parents generally kept apart. My mother would sleep in the master bedroom, while my father crashed on a couch in one of the spare rooms, with the television flickering silently through the night. Sometimes, he would spend the entire night in front of our Amiga 600 computer, playing a rudimentary three-dimensional game similar to Tetris. He claimed that these smoky, sleepless nights helped him refresh his architect’s mind.
There were moments of real tenderness between my parents and furious shouting matches in these years of playing house. One minute, the three of us would huddle and exchange kisses, and the next minute the active volcano of marital hostility would erupt and bury all that sweetness under lava and hot ashes. After these eruptions ceased, each of them would seek me out separately to offer competing accounts of the dispute. Each tried to keep me onside, as if I were a judge or marriage counselor.
In the end, my mother won this war for my heart and mind. She wasn’t necessarily the more persuasive of the two, but I could see plainly that Parviz Ahmari was a thoroughly irresponsible “husband” and father.
Take the matter of finances. In theory, my father was a successful architect with a comfortable income. He and his closest university friend had opened a practice together amid the building boom that followed the Iran-Iraq War. They made a good pair. His partner, Hadi, was eminently practical, and he kept my father from floating too high on the clouds of avant-garde architecture theory. The two had a natural division of labor, with my father doing more of the design and creative work and Hadi handling the business side.
My father’s draft avoidance barred him from formally joining the firm as a partner. He and Hadi maintained a years-long business relationship based on trust alone. My mother was in the dark regarding these arrangements. From time to time, my father would hand her a folder stuffed with wads of cash. But there was no regularity to these payments, which I suppose amounted to a form of alimony and child support. Sometimes he would go months without paying, and when the bills piled up, he would avoid the house and render himself completely inaccessible. Baba Nasser made up the difference; my mother endured.
What was Parviz doing with his earnings? Rumors of mistresses, gambling, and opium addiction swirled around him, but I was too young to grasp such talk fully and dared not contemplate the possibility. As with the state of the marriage, I was all too willing to cooperate in my own bamboozlement.
Some things were impossible to ignore. Dining out with Hadi, his wife, and a few other close friends was a regular feature of my parents’ social life; I would often tag along. When the meal was over, and it was time to pay the bill, my father would wince and make a vague hand gesture to Hadi, as if to say: Please pay this and subtract it from my account. Here was a grown man, a master architect, begging for his allowance. Hadi’s nouveau riche wife would register her social triumph over my mother with a knowing smirk and raised eyebrow. My mother would blush, and I would blush for her.
But my father was never less than absolutely certain that he was faultless in all things. His critics were boobs and imbeciles, trapped by backward mentalities that he, Parviz, had long ago transcended.
One night, when I was ten or eleven years old, I pressed him about these things. There was a party at Hadi’s swanky, modernist apartment, and as usual, Parviz was burning the candle at both ends. He stood in the middle of a circle of men, chaffing the others and bellowing dirty jokes over the din of electronic music. In a feat of Olympic-class carousing, he chain-smoked, took ‘araq (moonshine vodka), and chased the shots with beer and spoonfuls of shallot-infused yogurt in the traditional Iranian style—all in one seamless action. His voice had gone hoarse; his face flushed crimson.
After a couple of hours, he stepped away momentarily to check on me. I must have been watching one of those Ronald Reagan-era action cartoons—Rambo or G.I. Joe or some such—on Hadi’s VCR. My mood was sour. Earlier that night, I had overheard some of the women gossiping about my parents. Their tone hadn’t been so much condemnatory as haughtily amused. As was often the case in these situations, I mostly felt bad for my mother. I sensed her humiliation among the wives, even if I couldn’t quite articulate what it involved.
“Why do you smoke so much, Parviz?” I asked my father.
I don’t know why I picked on his smoking. It was one of his many habits that attracted social derision. All of the adults in that group smoked, but none of them smoked the way my father did, burning through pack after pack, lighting his next cigarette with the last. The disapprobation that his excesses aroused, I thought, rubbed off on my mother and me.
“I know you don’t like it,” he replied. “I’m quit. Well, I’m quitting. Later, later.”
“I think these people were talking about you and Niloofar.”
“And?”
“Not in a good way.”
“Let me tell you something: Ignore it. You know what they tell me? They say, ‘Parviz, you’re honor-less.’ Fine. I don’t believe this hogwash about ‘honor’, OK? Let them say Parviz Ahmari is honor-less.”
Bighayrat, Persian for “without honor”, is one of the worst things one can say about an Iranian man. It describes the kind of fellow who, in the face of an insult to his mother or sister, would slink away rather than avenge himself in a transport of rage (as Iranian society would expect him to do). My father applied the term to himself in front of me, his son.
What was I to make of this? I can’t say that I was shocked, for I knew that my father wasn’t like other fathers. I admired him, in the natural way that sons admire their fathers. Cracks had appeared in my picture of him, to be sure, and these were growing wider by the day. Still, this latest admission didn’t obviously count against him. I had to admit: His complete disregard for the opinions of others was captivating.
In his own crapulous way, my father planted in my mind the seeds of a dangerous idea—namely, that I could, and maybe should, question the things held sacred or untouchable by others. Even honor was fair game.
* * * * *
There were hypocrisies bigger and more pernicious than my parents’ sham marriage. When I was a child, the Old Colonel’s way—professing one set of values in public while living another behind closed doors—merely struck me as odd. But once I entered middle school and felt the first stirrings of puberty, I found it intolerable. How so many people maintained this duality, this studied separation of the realms, was a mystery. Worse, I had to play along. How was I to reconcile my parents’ constant exhortation to “be yourself” with Iranian reality?
The contrast between the realms appeared starker with each passing year.
In an effort to keep the embers of their own youth aflame, Parviz and Niloofar befriended a younger cohort of intellectuals toward the end of the playing-house period. Among these was a twenty-something poet named Golnar, who became something of a fixture in our house. She was the latest in a long line of female friends whom my mother would adopt almost as sisters. For her part, Golnar, who hailed from a traditional Kurdish family, found among my parents’ milieu a degree of personal freedom that was unthinkable under her father’s roof.
In our house, she could peruse towering shelves stacked with Persian and Western novels as well as fine, uncensored art books. We had ‘araq. We had a reliable “movie guy”, an Armenian, who, at great personal risk and meager profits, circulated VHS copies of the latest Hollywood and European art-house productions among families like ours. And we had a satellite dish beaming the latest MTV music videos and episodes of Baywatch and The Simpsons into our living room.
Golnar, our new part-time houseguest, produced strange and unexpected effects in me. She had a slim, shapely figure, and though her sad, Sylvia Plath airs blunted it somewhat, her intense femininity radiated powerfully all the same. Once, I caught glimpse of her in the early morning hours as she tiptoed to the bathroom wearing nothing but panties and a thin white T-shirt. Thenceforth, “Golnar”—which is to say, my fervid mental images of her—became the primary muse to my nascent sexuality. This I reciprocated by treating the real Golnar shabbily, mocking her poetry and various art projects.
In this department, as in others, my parents took a hands-off approach. Rather than give me some version of “the talk”, my father bought me an educational CD-ROM called Understanding the Body. It could have been worse, I suppose. My main takeaway from the CD was that any sexual activity could result in my immediately dying of full-blown AIDS. Meanwhile, a classmate—by then I was attending middle school—passed me a diskette filled with pixelated, barely legible 1980s soft-core pornography. I met no parental resistance when I selected one of the images as our computer-desktop background.
“He’s just experimenting, like we used to experiment” was a common refrain in our home.
This period of erotic bloom coincided with my first real experience of guilt. This was no longer childish guilt, which usually is little more than fear of punishment for bad acts, but a worrying apprehension that I had disturbed the proper order of things. There were no immediate, tangible consequences when I engaged in self-abuse, whether with Golnar on my mind or pixelated soft-core porn on my monitor; like most boys, I learned how to evade detection. Yet I felt bad afterward, and invariably vowed to myself never to do it again.
A cycle of sorts was thus set in motion within me. It began with a transgression and the guilt that it produced. Then came those solemn resolutions to do better, which I upheld—just until the next transgression renewed the cycle.
The nature of my bad acts also shifted around this time. Hitherto, they had mostly aimed at ends that in themselves weren’t bad: Having lost an expensive pen that my mother had purchased for me, for example, I might have stolen money from her to replace the gift. But now the idea of transgression, of being bad, became the main attraction.
* * * * *
One episode, which disquiets my conscience all these years later, took place toward the beginning of sixth grade (that is, the first year of middle school).
Each of the three grade levels at Hessam Middle School was divided into three cohorts (thus, 6-A, 6-B, 6-C, 7-A, and so on). Every few weeks, a big fight would break out between these various cohorts. One boy would shove a classmate in line for snacks. The aggrieved boy called for backup from his own cohort, and the offender did the same. Punches and kicks were exchanged, and the whole yard descended into generalized mayhem.
It was almost always the same dozen or so boys who initiated the battles, who landed the memorable punches, and who took the bulk of the punishment after the adults restored peace. They were the stars, so to speak, while the rest of us were supporting actors and extras. I would have gladly accepted the punishment—a beating from one of the assistant principals—if only I could take a star turn for once. Alas, for all my imagined bravado, I had a reputation as one of the nerdier students, and the real toughs didn’t consider it worthwhile to mix it up with me.
So it was that, on this particular day, I once more found myself on the sidelines of a major melee, determined to get in on the action. I scanned the yard and spotted a pile-up in one corner. It was difficult to tell how many boys were caught in that tangle of limbs in angry motion. The target that suggested itself to me was a boy from my own cohort, who was struggling to get up from the ground as two or three others wrestled atop him. The boy’s conically shaped head stuck out from under the pile.
Here was my chance to do something. But what? I hesitated for a second before kicking that funny-looking head of his with every ounce of strength that I could muster. The boy cried out in pain. The rest was an adrenaline-tinged blur. I was pulled into the tangle. I was punched and kicked, and I reciprocated in kind. It was invigorating. But it didn’t last long. A principal’s whistle rang out, and we stopped going at it. The adults rounded up the usual suspects—I wasn’t one of them—and marched the rest of us to the next class, calligraphy for me.
Reason returned to me once I settled in at my desk. What had I done? Scuffling at school was bad enough. But kicking a defenseless combatant while he was down multiplied the severity of the offense. Worse, the boy belonged to my own group, and he was sitting right there, across the room. He was the kind of quiet, friendless boy whom other students barely noticed. Now an instant’s folly had tied his fate to mine: Was he going to be all right? Did he know that it was I who had kicked him? Did anyone else see me throw the kick?
He seemed to be doing OK. There he was, sheepishly copying the lines on the blackboard into his notebook like everyone else. “You’re overthinking things,” I reassured myself. “He’s fine.” Then, halfway through class, the boy with the conical head raised his hand and asked to see the school nurse. He was bleeding from the nose.
“Oh God,” I said to myself. “His brains are melting right out! His mind is going to stop working any minute now. He’ll collapse and die. You’ll be tried. Convicted. Executed in public. You’ll be made an example for other cowardly boys across the land.” My heart raced, and I could feel it pounding in the back of my throat.
Ten minutes later, the boy came back, a bloody napkin stuffed into his nose, and resumed his work. He really was going to be fine. Maybe his nosebleed wasn’t even related to my kick. Still, I had to be sure. Before the final bell sounded, I sidled up to him more than once, offering oily words of concern. His cogent answers demonstrated that his brain was working, and the fact that he didn’t immediately jump me further confirmed that he didn’t suspect me. I really had gotten away with it.
Yet I couldn’t let the incident go. I lost my appetite in the days that followed. I could barely sleep, and when I did, I had nightmares. My usual comic books and cartoons held no interest for me. My mind, it seemed, was punishing me for an act that the real world of consequences had, for all intents and purposes, forgiven.
Finally, I fessed up to my mother about what had happened. For once, she lost her temper. Her first step was to confiscate all of my contraband VHS copies of G.I. Joe, Transformers, WrestleMania, and the like. Anxiety about the psychological effects of violent media on children had spread to Iran by then, and my mother was convinced that I had acted out under the influence of these tapes; she would return them to me a week or so later. Next, she resolved that we would march to the other boy’s house, where I was to apologize to him and his parents.
My victim’s home was only a few blocks from our house, yet a cultural and material chasm separated our two families. Hitherto, I had visited the homes of boyhood friends only from my own social milieu. Here, then, was my first real encounter with poverty in Iran and the mystery of human fortune.
The woman who greeted us at the entrance, the boy’s mother, was dressed in a full veil that covered all but her eyes and nose. My mother briefly explained the purpose of our visit. The other invited us in. She was gracious. We followed her up a darkened stairwell to reach an apartment on the third floor. Standing inside the door was my classmate, and peeking out from behind him was a younger boy, presumably his little brother. There was no sign of a father. Was he imprisoned or martyred in the war? I never found out. The mother ushered us in.
Their apartment was tiny—only slightly larger than the room that I had to myself—and utterly barren. The family had no books or records. There were no paintings or sculptures or other art objects, save for a framed piece of calligraphy that was hanging in one corner, above an old television with a wooden box. A garlicky smell wafted in from the kitchen, mixing with the rosewater scent of the living area to create an evil, eye-watering effect.
Our hostess removed her veil but not the floral headscarf she wore underneath. “Please, have a seat,” she said, before scurrying to the kitchen to brew tea.
There were no seats. The pillows and blankets that were rolled up next to the walls served as bedding at night and apparently doubled as furniture during the day. “Please, I know our house isn’t worthy of you,” the woman added.
In one swift motion my mother plopped herself cross-legged and pulled me down next to her. The two boys wouldn’t sit until their mother emerged from the kitchen to serve hot tea from a plastic tray. With the requirements of traditional hospitality out of the way, she sat down across from my mother; only then did her children join her on the floor, one flanking her on each side.
“So,” she said, “how may we be of service to you?”
My mother jabbed me with an elbow, as if to say: Spill it out! An excruciating interval passed, but I couldn’t find the words. My mother took it upon herself to detail what had happened, only leaving a blank spot for me to fill in at the end: “. . . and Sohrab wishes to express his. . .”
“I’m so, so sorry!” I blurted, and fell silent once more.
Our hostess considered what had been said for a minute. Then she replied: “You needn’t have come here. Boys get into brawls all the time. My boy was fighting, too. Anyway, he always tells me how much he admires your Mr. Sohrab. You folks needn’t apologize to us.”
I wished I could have melted into the floor, for shame. I couldn’t bear to look at my classmate and his mother. My eyes darted around the room, seeking something else to see. They came to rest on the calligraphy hanging on the wall. There, inscribed for praise and protection, was the name of God: allah. Instantly, I recalled Hussein and Karbala. My old Qur’an teacher’s voice resounded in my mind:
Oh Hussein, would that we could be with you now, on that desert road to Kufa. Oh Hussein, your children rubbed empty waterskins on their little bellies, but it offered them no relief from the thirst and the heat. You rode gallantly to the enemy line and held up your famished infant, hoping that the hypocrites might be moved to mercy. But, oh Hussein, they shot an arrow through the babe’s throat. Hussein, your enemies, who didn’t dare face you from the front, ambushed you from the rear.
I pictured Hussein bent over atop his steed and clinging tight to the lifeless infant in his arms. The horse, Zuljanah, reared by the prophet himself, must have sensed that its master was breathing his last. A hundred arrows that had made their mark protruded from the imam’s torso and limbs. The blood drained from his body and painted Zuljanah’s shimmering white coat crimson. Hussein’s serene visage, bathed in divine light (as the popular portraits had it), was a judgment against me. What a hypocrite I had been, what a sniveling little Yazid. I was overcome with pity for my classmate and his family and their wretched hovel, for that warrior-imam of seventh-century Arabia and his sacrifice.
But did I believe in Hussein’s God? Yes, but I wouldn’t for much longer.