A Good Country

by Laleh Khadivi

  The imam was young, in a navy suit and green tie, and he spoke like Omid did, as if maybe once all his friends were from Compton. Rez tuned in and out of the lecture about the nature of love and the story of Abraham and where the allegiances of the heart lie when you pledge your life and soul to Allah and thought of Fatima in the room next door, watching the same lecture on the large screen, surrounded by women she liked and maybe even loved.

  He found her afterward looking for her shoes. He tapped her shoulder and she beamed at him, clean and energized as if she had just come out of the shower.

  So good, right?

  Yeah. It was cool.

  Something had happened to her during the prayer. The nerves and suspicions were shaken off and now she looked up at him with a ready face and he wanted to hold her cheeks in his hands, bring her fresh lips to his, and take her and take her and take her until the beams shone through him as well. He stepped away from her.

  Lunch?

  Let’s do it.

  They ate at a deli next to the mosque. Tables were set up off to one side, girls at some, boys at others. Men and women shopped and ordered kebabs and tabbouleh and drinks and watched Al Jazeera. Fatima and Rez took their food to a table of guys their age and Fatima introduced Rez as her cousin just visiting and they made space for him and said What’s up? and kept on with their conversations about the Lakers or the new Fast & Furious movie. The person next to Rez, a little older, with a nice watch and a clean beard, turned to him.

  Where are you coming from?

  The Bay, Rez lied.

  Nice. Mom’s side or Dad?

  Dad.

  Cool. Fatima’s awesome. So glad she joined this mosque. Not a lot of new young women come on their own. Good to see a fresh face. And fresh other things, if you … you know …

  The guy looked up from his food as he spoke and Rez followed his stare to the table of women where Fatima sat and laughed and covered her mouth as she practiced some Arabic phrases. Rez looked back at the guy, who turned to him and winked.

  She’s so lovely. Such a lovely presence.

  Rez spoke quickly, I am not sure she wants to stay at this mosque forever. Just trying it out, you know, like me.

  That’s interesting. See that girl she’s talking to? That’s my sister. Fatima told her she really likes it here. Wants to settle down in this community. I am hoping my sister will invite her over sometime, meet the rest of the family.

  He turned to Rez and smiled, part shyness, part something else. Rez stood up and left his tray of food on the table.

  Nice to meet you. I just remembered … a phone call …

  You don’t like the food?

  No. I just remembered my mom is expecting me to call.

  Ok. Well, um, have a good visit.

  Yeah. Thanks.

  Rez walked to Fatima’s table and leaned down toward the place her ear would be inside her headscarf.

  I want to talk to the imam.

  Why?

  I have some questions.

  Now?

  Yes. I mean, if it’s ok?

  I am still eating.

  I can wait outside.

  The women at the table grew quiet and Fatima nodded at him. Ok, just a minute.

  Outside she was fast with her words. Dude. What’s your problem? Are you fucking with me, with this, for some reason? How I appear matters. You can’t just show up because you are curious about my religion …

  It might be my religion too.

  She stopped midword and dropped her head and took a few breaths.

  Fine. Let’s go.

  The imam sat in a small room just off the main prayer room. Up close he looked older than on the podium, and when he took Rez’s hand, the grip was stronger than he expected. He was very clean, his skin, his teeth, his hair and clothes. To calm himself Rez imagined him as just another of the guys from lunch and thought about him on the basketball court, throwing bricks at the net. Fatima left them and Rez wiped his wet palms over his slacks and waited for the questions.

  Welcome.

  Thank you.

  The imam smiled and let the room, its single potted palm and dusty burgundy rug and leather-bound books, sit in stillness and silence. Unnerved, Rez waited and the imam waited.

  I am interested in Islam. I think I am. I mean, I might want to start practicing.

  Yes.

  So … I thought, what I wanted to know …

  Your parents? Are they devout?

  No. I don’t think so. My mom a little, maybe.

  A little?

  The room got still again and Rez waited.

  The imam righted himself and Rez saw that the back of the chair rose high above the height of the imam’s head. He reached for a few pamphlets and pushed them across the table.

  You must begin at the beginning. Talk to your parents. Read these and then, when you are ready, go be by yourself, turn off your phone, and think about your need for faith. Think with your heart and with your head. The strictures, the lifestyle, the bond with Allah. It’s a long road from curiosity to belief.

  The kindness never left the imam’s face or his voice and yet Rez hated him. As he spoke, all Rez heard was You’re not serious, you are young and foolish and in search of something else.

  The imam stood and offered his hand. Rez stood and shook it. Fuck this guy, he thought. He tried to pull his hand out but the imam held on to it.

  If you don’t mind me asking, what got you thinking? About Islam, about our masjid?

  Rez stared at him directly.

  Love.

  The imam’s face did not change but his grip tightened.

  That is a good start. The love of Allah is like no other.

  33

  He typed in the same search, How to be a Muslim, and went to the same sites as before and watched all the testimonials he could find. An Australian doctor, the child of Chechen refugees, told of his sense of obligation to join the New Country when it most needed his skill, when the future of the khalifa depended on it. To be Muslim in Australia is to be a second- or third-class citizen. Why should I settle for that? To be a lesser man among men?

  Rez watched two English girls, young from the sound of their voices, who spoke off camera while a still image of a dove showed on-screen. We were lucky to get out when we did. So many of our girlfriends at school were giving us a hard time for covering, for going to mosque, for not listening to music anymore, and we had to explain: our beliefs are what make us feel respected and useful in the world. We don’t have to worry what our bodies look like, our hair, our makeup. A woman is more than her skin here. Here we are the pillars of our households. Our husbands work every day to build the khalifa and we work every day to make our homes beautiful, raise our children, make Raqqah a city for the new times.

  A teenager from Germany spoke only in German but his words were translated into English and French subtitles. This is my apartment, three bedrooms, though I only have two wives. Well, right now I only have two. Let’s see what happens in the future. God willing. Here is my kitchen, very modern, my cooler full of food. Here is the room where I keep my guns, a rifle and a pistol, ready when the call comes. Raqqah is a beautiful city and it is the work of every man to defend it. Rez looked into the teenager’s face for some madness, some hint of a craziness for violence, but saw only a young man proud and not at all interested in his own past.

  Rez watched and listened and watched and waited for the dialogue box to pop up. Finally it did. The same message and the same name flashed on the screen.

  Hello brother. Hello sister. Are you interested in joining the Caliphate? My name is Daoud and I am here to answer your questions and provide you with any guidance you might need.

  Rez laid his fingers on the letters.

  Hi.

  Salaam alaikum.

  Salaam.

  Who is here?

  Reza.

  Nice to *meet* you Reza. Where are you?

  California.

  Great! Northern or
Southern?

  Southern.

  Sweet. I visited L.A. once. Wanted to learn to surf.

  Yeah. I surf.

  ☺

  Rez punched in the hang-loose emoticon.

  Are you interested in Islam? In our work in Syria?

  My parents are Muslim but don’t practice, and I’ve got a Muslim friend, Fatima, and she’s very devout now and I wanted to …

  The box interrupted with a line.

  Just a friend? ☺ ♥

  Rez left it and waited to see what would come next.

  Listen, my brother, I don’t know everything but I’ll answer as much as I can. Let me just say, first off, your curiosity is a sign that Allah is present within you and that you are trying to return to your original perfect state of being. Step toward your belief and you will step toward perfection, and probably toward Fatima too. ♥

  Rez stared at the screen.

  34

  All of it the same, yet nothing the same. In the days since the assholes at the beach, since the video of Khalil, his chats with Daoud, the nature of time had changed. Rez felt as if he were astride some great wild wave of time that heaved and swelled fast into a tube and then slow until he saw everything in raw epic detail. Whole mornings passed in quick minutes while dinnertimes at the awkward family table stretched out so long he saw neither beginning nor end of them. At night he could only lay his body down for four or five hours before waking up so fueled he had to do fifty push-ups and a hundred sit-ups just to shower without agitation.

  He spent the new time differently. He no longer stayed at home in the mornings, watching TV and floating in the pool. Now he ate breakfast with his parents and caught a ride with his father to the main library in Huntington to get back in the swing of things, you know, get used to staring at books again. He waved his dad off and then walked around the cool, silent building with his backpack and plugged himself into the most private computer in the public computer lab and did all the things he wanted and needed to do. By the time he let himself be distracted by a piss or a snack, the clock said two thirty or three. His work was never done, but every day he made inroads, read more history, found new sites, connected to better contacts, came up with quicker, cheaper logistics and paved the path out a little farther from where he stood.

  He began each day where Daoud told him to, with the Koran. Rez fell into the calm cadence of its calls for generosity, humility, the quiet decorum required to properly follow Allah. He recognized stories from the Old Testament, and new stories for how to be a man, how to be a woman, how to have a family, livestock, money, and honor. Some sites helped him to think about his conversion, step by step, from the shahada to the hadiths, from the best ways to offer prayers to the correct attitudes toward women, food, clothing. Sometimes he read out the phonetic words of the shahada in practice for the day there would be a witness and these words would seal his commitment. He always did so in a whisper, Daoud having reminded him that simply speaking Arabic in public had got people pulled off planes, taken to detention centers.

  Then he read history, tried to understand why things were the way they were, why a new country was necessary, vital. He went as far back as the early 1900s, when there were no countries, only dry lands covered in tribes with some loose association to kings and empires, all in service to the one God. What a time that must have been. He remembered the photographs in the garage, his grandfather as a young man among the men of his area, men in turbans with scythes in their loosely bound robes, lives lived on the thick skin of the desert beneath the thin enormous sky.

  Then what happened?

  He read on. Into the history, the hunger for oil, Europe’s keen eyes on the region and the carving that followed, random and haphazard, of tribes into nations, nations into influenced states. He looked at maps that showed random shapes and sizes with their own names and presidents and prime ministers and read of mandatory reeducation programs, tribal language eradication, a tilt toward European customs, the chair, the fork, the necktie.

  But then what happened?

  The great corruptions, the great rapes of gold and oil and gas and minerals and whatever could be mined or drilled and taken away. Some tried to resist—Mossadegh, Sadat—and came to a quick end. He read on: American support of Israel, American support of the Saudi royal family, and the slow noose of greed threading the neck of the region. And now the modern punishments, just as the imam on YouTube laid them out in Arash’s living room: Bosnia, Palestine, Kosovo, places where to be Muslim meant to be a target, to believe in Allah meant a separation, then a discrimination, then a mass slaughter. Rez came to resent his teachers, his life, for not telling him these truths and he read on, hurt head, hurt heart, to find the center chord of information, a truth he could find and pluck and so feel it resonate in the bones of his new self.

  In the encrypted chat rooms Daoud told him what to read, what sites to check out, and who to talk to and Rez would enter and start up conversations with men he’d never meet, kind men with useful information who said the faith had ways for him to turn the anger into action, and explained how they themselves had done it just six months, ten months, one year ago.

  And then it was too much. His head was full, he knew what he needed to know, about right and wrong, good and bad, like he knew calculus equations and chemical formulas. His heart, not empty, was not as full as his head and he cast about trying to find passions to lead him. Finally, when he could think of nothing else, when the same idea came to him again and again, he e-mailed Arash.

  It took two days but then the name popped up in his in-box next to hello brother! In the e-mail there was a quick what’s up and instructions on how to get into a video chat room on a site Rez had never heard of, a date and a time. See you soon! A.

  Rez did as he was told and the next morning, he waited for the library to open and was first inside, first in the computer lab. He logged on with his new fake names and sneaky passwords and soon sat in front of a black screen with a tiny black and white flag waving in the center of it. In his headphones a phone rang and rang and rang. When four or five minutes passed Rez looked around the room and saw the same senior citizens he saw every day and thought about hanging up, then the ringing stopped and Arash popped up. His head was closer to the camera this time and Rez saw his face was thinner, the beard more full. There was a greenish bruise just under his eye and his lips spread beneath it in a large smile.

  Rez, dude. Salaam! I was so glad to see your name in my in-box. Thanks be to God. I had a feeling you were going to get in touch.

  He sounded different. Rushed. Arash never said things like I had a feeling. He didn’t say much, usually his manner was so chill it did all the talking for him.

  I’m good. Glad you called back. I thought maybe you, well … hey. How’s it going?

  I am not on Mars, dude. Of course I’d get back to you. Was thinking of dropping you a line soon.

  Arash didn’t move far from the camera and Rez couldn’t see what was behind him, what world he was in.

  Where you at, dude?

  Arash shook his head.

  In the good place, the great place, doing the good work. Setting up.

  What happened to your face?

  A soccer ball. Right to the eye. You know my defense was always crap.

  Rez wanted to say what defense? Arash didn’t really play soccer. Whenever he went out with Omid or Yuri for a pickup game, Arash sat on the sidelines and read the news on his phone.

  Soccer huh? What else are you up to over there? You staying with friends? Family? Beard looks good.

  Thanks. I’ve been combing it.

  Arash stroked the hairs under his chin and the grin got even more lopsided.

  Yeah. Friends, good friend, I’m staying with some brothers, it’s pretty dope. A compound with a pool and gardens and the whole thing.

  Yeah?

  Yeah. You should come.

  And do what?

  Build the new country. It’s better than I can even des
cribe. Real people. Real respect. Skip college, give yourself an education in truth. Bring Fatima with you.

  You sound like an infomercial.

  Listen, Rez. It’s for real, this place. If you are calling me to check ’cause you are kinda interested that means you are already halfway here. Better than life in the OC by a million. Come, bro, come.

  How can I find you?

  Get to Raqqah and then just ask around. I am not sure where I will be by then, in terms of digs, but everyone knows everyone here. Come. I am not going anywhere.

  Rez could not imagine it. This place. It sounded like camp. His friend’s face seemed so present. So ready, skinnier and a little pale, but full of joy, almost too full. Rez leaned forward to speak directly to the speaker in the computer, hoping no one else would hear.

  Yeah. I was think …

  A sharp noise filled the headphones and scratched through Rez’s ears. The screen went sideways, cut Arash into a thousand shards, and then went black.

  Hello? Arash? Hello?

  Nothing. Rez took off his headphones and put them in his backpack and logged out of the computer. It wasn’t everything he needed, but it was enough.

  By the time he got outside it was early afternoon and Rez went to wait at the bus stop with the Latina maids and nannies and the leather-skinned white guys who made homes out of the caves and park benches up and down the coast, regardless of the season. Rez stood among them and thought about what he had read and seen and about Arash and wondered how different his life would be if he had been born into the skin of a woman in servitude or a man without a way.

  35

  She let him sit close again. Close enough they touched at the thigh and hip and shoulder, and if Rez wanted to reach for her hand, she let it be held. He wanted to make a joke about how this was the first time they’d held hands but decided against it, so they just sat, side by side, in the gazebo above Laguna Beach and watched the waves and kids and dogs dash in and out of the water’s reach.

  The new learning rang in his head like loud bells and he wanted to tell her about all he knew, about Islam and the New Country and Arash, but Rez stopped himself, he’d already said so much to her today, now it was better to sit and squeeze her hand.