by Ayad Akhtar
Ayesha M is six years younger than I am, the second daughter of my father’s youngest sister. I remember a waif of a girl, gangly and game—at least when her domineering older sister, Huma, wasn’t around to step on her impulses—who grew up into a lithe, lovely woman with more than just a recognizable portion of the offbeat gamine that she was the summer I was thirteen and back in Pakistan with my folks, visiting their various siblings and their families. One afternoon, when we were over at Ayesha and Huma’s house for tea, the girls persuaded me to play Ken to their respective Barbies in the living room. Huma was ten. Ayesha was seven. The play veered, perhaps inevitably, into the question of marriage. Would my Ken marry Huma’s Barbie or Ayesha’s? (Only their outfits distinguished the two blond dolls, this being well before the era of anything like Brown Barbie—let alone Hijarbie.) The question led to an argument between the sisters about which one of them would marry their father. The claim went back and forth, Huma increasingly irritated at Ayesha’s insistent desperation to be included in the quartet of their father’s possible wives, until the older sister announced to the younger with finality that it would be their mother and her, and no one else. By this point, Ayesha was ready to cry, but before she did, she blurted out a surprising rejoinder:
“I don’t care, because, anyway, I’m going to marry Rasool-e-Pak.”3
Huma snickered. “I already told you. You can’t. He’s dead.”
“I don’t care. Mom said Rasool-e-Pak married Ayesha when she was nine, and she became his favorite wife.”
“I said he’s dead, dumbhead.”
“I don’t care. I’m going to do the same.”
“You’re so stupid.”
“You’re so stupid.”
“No, you are.”
“You are.”
And on and on, until Huma finally snatched her sister’s Barbie and smacked it against the fireplace tile, putting a crack in its face. That’s when Ayesha broke into tears and stormed out.
Everyone in Ayesha and Huma’s family had green cards, but it wasn’t until two years later that their parents would decide to sell their Islamabad home and relocate to Atlanta, where their father, after working for Coca-Cola in Pakistan since the late 1970s, had been offered a job at the US headquarters. They bought a house in Decatur, east of downtown, where they were delighted to find a vibrant (though small) Muslim community. That first year, Ayesha met Farooq, a ten-year-old whose Pakistani family had emigrated from Kenya. I didn’t hear about Farooq until they were in their midteens, and I wouldn’t meet him until he and Ayesha were in their midtwenties and getting married, at which point I found him slick and insincere and mostly neglectful of his fiancée in ways that would have shocked me even if I wasn’t seeing them on the eve of their “special day.” When I later heard from my mother that Ayesha was unhappy back in Islamabad—where they moved after the wedding, Farooq thinking his American MBA would get him further there, faster—I assumed the problem was not Pakistan but Farooq. I hope I won’t be taken for trying to prove my deductive capacities by sharing what the family would all find out in due course: Farooq was abusive, sometimes physically, and Ayesha had taken (and been hiding) it for years. For all his forward American thinking, my father would address his niece’s predicament in true Punjabi style: he called a cousin in the village, the sort of fellow who could round up a crew and pay someone a visit that wouldn’t easily be forgotten. Last I heard, Ayesha had decided to stay in Atlanta with the children year-round; Farooq was spending most of his time in Islamabad.
But well before any of this would happen:
During the rehearsal dinner the day before their wedding, Ayesha gave a speech in which she told a story. (Celebratory rehearsal dinners replete with roasts and speeches and, usually, with the bride and groom in Western garb are a new and still uncommon custom in Pakistani American weddings; the time for public palaver of this sort is at the end of the sequence of wedding events, during the walima, when the bride and groom host their guests as a newly married couple.) Ayesha was wearing a stunning emerald-green column gown, her thin-as-stick forearms each covered with rows of golden bangles that murmured as she moved. Her hennaed hands unfolded the paper on which she’d made notes as she lifted her lightly trembling lips to the microphone to speak. In a quavering voice, she told us that since she was a very little girl, she’d always had the feeling she was going to meet her husband when she was nine. She didn’t know why she thought that, but she did. What happened when she was nine? That was how old she was when her family found its way to Decatur. “Goooo, Bulldogs,” she added with a fist pump for the sizable contingent of fellow Decatur High grads in the audience. And nine was how old she was when her family ended up sitting next to another local Pakistani family at a Fuddruckers one Friday night during their first few months in Georgia. That night, she shared pickles with the boy who would end up as her husband, Farooq. Looking back now, she said, her voice breaking as she teared up, she knew that meeting him then was kismet. Meant to be.
Of course, it’s impossible to know for certain if her mother’s telling her that the Prophet had married his favorite wife at nine was the decisive early prompt that led to Farooq. What is certain, though, is that the story Ayesha told us during her rehearsal dinner was one she’d told herself countless times, and that this story was if not inspired, then certainly legitimized by that oft-told tale of the Prophet and his child bride, and that all this made it somehow easier for her to stay in a relationship—and, later, a marriage—that might not have been the best thing for her. The Prophet’s relationships with women, however progressive and egalitarian some of them might have been for those medieval times, can hardly be taken as exemplary today. This might seem obvious—it certainly is to me—but so many I love very dearly don’t see it that way at all.
2.
The Prophet’s beloved Ayesha had two half sisters, Umm Kulthum—a name some will recognize as belonging to the most famous Egyptian singer of her era—and another named Asma. I had an aunt Asma—a great-aunt on my mother’s side. Asma taught literature and critical theory at UConn until her untimely death from a stroke in the early aughts and was the first person to tell my parents, after hearing that I wanted to be a writer (and after she read a story I sent her when she wrote to ask me if what she was hearing from my parents was true), that writing was not quite so far-fetched a career as they might think.
That, anyway, is what she told my parents; what she said to me was different.
We met in Providence in the spring of ’94, a few months after our exchange of letters and weeks before I was to graduate from Brown. She took the train up from New Haven, where she lived, and we met for dinner at a swanky seafood restaurant not far from the station. I found her in a booth overlooking the river in a dark brown kameez with a cream-colored dupatta slung across her shoulders. She was reading, her head tilted down, the angled edges of her gray bob falling forward and anchoring her thinking face to the page. Her large brown eyes looked even larger and browner through the lenses of her thick black-framed reading glasses, which she pulled off as she rose up and enfolded me in her arms. I was surprised by the welcome. Though we’d met many times—she and my mother had grown close when we lived in New York City during the 1970s—I’d never been treated to anything like this display of either affection or familiarity.
We sat, and she asked what I wanted to drink: “Because if you want wine, I’m happy to get a bottle and we can drink it together. Do you like red or white?” Her accent was strong and sonorous, the rounded vowels and pointed consonants shaped with ease and sophistication, an aural marker not only of her education—Kinnaird College, in Lahore, and Cambridge after that—but also of her lingering pride in the glories of the Raj, under which her family had produced a slew of journalists and university professors. I noticed the not entirely empty martini glass at the edge of her setting.
“I don’t drink,” I lied.
She smiled wryly. “I won’t tell your ammi. What do you like, red or
white?”
I shrugged. “Whatever you want, Auntie.”
“Red it is, then. And I know the one,” she said, slipping her glasses back on to peruse the wine list. “This Saint Emilion from Tertre Roteboeuf is brilliant. Rich and racy.” She waved over a waiter and indicated her selection. He nodded, eyeing me briefly, then cleared my salad plate and left the wineglass. “Always better just to point it out,” she said once he was gone. “Half the time they don’t have the first clue what they have on the list. If you had any idea how many times they’ve brought out the wrong bottle!” She reached for a bag on the seat beside her and pulled out a stack of books tied together with twine. “These are for you. This is where you need to begin if you’re going to be a writer.”
“That’s so nice of you, Auntie. Thank you.”
“It’s a hard life. It’s thankless. If you can do anything else with yourself, anything more certain, you owe it to yourself and to everyone you love to do that. But if you can’t, if you need to be writing, well, then, one of the joys of the lonely journey ahead, beta, is the comfort of reading. A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.”
I thanked her again as I picked up the stack and read the bindings:
Orientalism.
Pride and Prejudice.
The Muqaddimah.
Death Comes for the Archbishop.
The Wretched of the Earth.
“It’s a hodgepodge, I know. And I’m sure somebody has made you read the Jane Austen already. But I do think it the most wonderful novel ever written. I don’t think you can read it enough times. And not just for the pure, unending delight. Her analysis of the world is not to be underestimated. You’ll find more wisdom about the way the world really works in those pages than in a million more pretending to tell you. Money, money, money. That’s all it ever comes down to.” She looked up with a smile at the waiter who’d returned and stood now, pulling the cork, a napkin draped over his forearm. He poured briefly for her to taste. She swirled and smelled, then brought the glass to her lips. “Hmm, it’s good. But it needs to breathe. Pour us both half glasses, and we’ll wait. Thank you.” Once he was gone, she resumed: “Of course, before you read or write another word, you must read Edward Said. What a brilliant man. And gorgeous. He moved like a leopard. I met him at a conference ten years ago. If I hadn’t been married, beta, what I would have done to get into that bedroom! Anything. Anything! Don’t tell your ammi I said that. You don’t tell her about me and Edward, I won’t tell her about you and this Saint Emilion.” She sipped from the glass again. “Better, but it needs time. Edward’s book is indispensable, Ayad. There are very few books you can say that about. But Orientalism is one. You won’t know who you are until you’ve read it. Whatever you think you are now, when you finish that book, you will be something different. What are you reading currently?” she asked as she bit on a piece of bread and started to chew.
“Rushdie.”
“Midnight’s Children? Brilliant book. Just brilliant.”
“No. The Satanic Verses.”
She coughed. She reached for her water and sipped to clear her throat, staring at me, the taut lines on her forehead now crossed and furrowed. “Why are you reading that?”
The Rushdie was the final reading assignment in my ongoing independent study with Mary Moroni, the professor I mentioned earlier (and of whom there will be more said in the pages ahead). “I’ve made you read too many white people,” she’d said to me as we sipped tea in her office one afternoon earlier that spring. I laughed, but it was clear she wasn’t joking. I’d been curious about Rushdie’s book since its publication five years prior. My mother bought a copy during the commotion, tried reading it, and soon gave up. She couldn’t make heads or tails of it was what she said. For more than a year, the book had lain on the side table in our living room, where she’d set it down never again to pick it up, dog-eared some thirty pages in. That copy I’d brought to school, hoping I would get to it at some point.
Mary hadn’t read it, either, and was curious to do so as well.
It took me three days to read Rushdie’s book, three days that remain singular in my reading life. I’d never before encountered so much of myself on the page—my questions, my preoccupations, the smells and sounds and tastes and names of my family—a potent form of self-recognition that bred a new certainty: I existed. There was also the dizzying thrill of formal discovery: I hadn’t read Gárcia Márquez yet or the postmodernists—so The Satanic Verses was my first experience of both magical realism and metafiction. Most thrilling was the book’s unapologetic parody of the Muslim mythology I’d grown up with as a child. To write a book filled with so many unthinkable thoughts, and to do so with such joyous abandon. I didn’t know anyone could do such a thing.
As I sat across from Asma that evening in downtown Providence, I wouldn’t have time to find the words to explain how significant an event Rushdie’s book was in my life. She interrupted my hesitating silence and began her attack: “I never thought I would be saying this about him, after that brilliant first novel, I mean, brilliant—look, I knew he never came up with anything on his own, borrowing everything, and, of course, what crime is there in that? Everyone knows there’s not a new idea to be found anywhere under the sun. Shakespeare stole from everyone. So what’s the issue with Salman doing the same thing? The problem, beta, is that you have to do it well. You have to do it better than the ones you’re stealing from. He’s not. Not anymore. It’s used now. Tired. And worst of all—and this is what really bothers me—it’s the malice.”
“Malice?”
“The sickening, ad hominem attacks on the Prophet, peace be upon him. Picking through that disgusting orientalist history, disgusting tales the Christians told to make the Prophet out as some sex-crazed cult leader, God forbid. I mean, this is what we have to expect? From Salman? From one of us?”
“He says he’s not a Muslim, Auntie.”
She snorted. “Please. I read that idiotic essay. Even more pathetic than how derivative he’s become is his cowardice. He knew what he was doing when he was writing that book. I know for a fact. We have friends in common. He was going around talking about sending the mullahs a message they won’t forget. Well, message received. But guess what? He didn’t like how they received it. So now? It’s not about Islam, he says. I’m not Muslim. How can it be blasphemy if I don’t believe in it? He’s a coward. He’s a coward and a hypocrite.”
To tell her I didn’t agree would have implied that I understood what she was getting at. I didn’t really. I, too, had felt shocked reading the famous dream sections of the book set in the fictional Jahilia, depicting the Prophet as a mostly unremarkable man, maneuvering and money-minded, confused about his calling; I’d experienced shock, but not that of blasphemy. Instead, I’d wondered why it had never occurred to me that the Prophet might just be as mythic a construction as I considered Jesus and Moses to be. I didn’t see anything malicious about Rushdie’s portrayal of the Prophet. I found it brilliant. Terrifyingly so. In fact, the book worried me in a way far more as one who wished to write than as a Muslim: I worried I would never write anything remotely as powerful.
“Does he think any of this is new?” my aunt went on. “Calling him Mahound? Really? That’s been around since the Middle Ages, Salman. We all know what it means.” She stopped, with a sudden thought. “I hope you’re doing your homework, beta. I hope you know what he’s saying when he uses that name. He’s calling the Prophet an impostor at best, a daemon at worst.”
“I know, Auntie. But it’s a dream sequence. And there’s the writer, Salman, in the book, writing it, who—”
“Dream sequence? More creative cowardice if you ask me. Hiding behind dreams. It’s clear as day what he’s doing. He’s trying on his own Nero complex to see how well it fits.” She drank again, this time pleased. “It’s good we waited. Try it now.”
I drank. It tasted bitter to me.
“Wonderful, isn’t it?
Such a rich body.”
“What’s a Nero complex, Auntie?” I asked.
“Right. That’s something Albert Memmi talks about in his book The Colonizer and the Colonized. I’ll send it to you. He says that when you come to power through having usurped it, you’re never free of the worry that your claim to power is not legitimate. And this fear of illegitimacy, this sense of being haunted, it causes you to make those from whom you stole power suffer. Fits Richard the Third and Rushdie both to a tee. He thinks he’s one of them now. He’s usurped the place he wanted, and now he’s terrified he doesn’t fit the part. So he puts his own people down just to prove himself. What other reason does he have to bring all this medieval nonsense back? To rub our noses in this filth about the Prophet being a fake and his wives no better than prostitutes? And then you want to pretend it’s not about the Prophet, it’s not about Islam—because it’s some dream sequence? And you go around saying it can’t be blasphemy because you don’t fast and you don’t pray? What is this garbage? He’s the prostitute. He’s the impostor. Not the Prophet. Frankly, it’s surprising a man like that had a book like Midnight’s Children in him. But it goes to show you. Every era has its Boswell.”
Most literary Muslims I would meet in the years ahead seemed to share the broad outlines of my aunt’s feelings about Rushdie and The Satanic Verses. Some of it was driven by envy, no doubt. Rushdie’s travails made him the most famous author alive. But there were those with no real basis for envy who still objected to the work. Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate—himself no stranger to fundamentalist attacks—told the Paris Review in 1992 that he found Rushdie’s novel insulting:
