by Nick Louth
Mother Umniya said that this was all she knew, except that she and her husband had always loved him, and always would. She looked up from the cutlery she was cleaning and kissed Rifat gently on the forehead.
‘Inshallah, Rifi, you will find peace with this. We all walk in the sight of God, and are judged by our actions in life, not on our birth. Remember that.’
But there was no peace. In subsequent days the dreams, unbidden, came again. Shame and rage convulsed him.
* * *
Rifat already knew from searches online that the byline Taseena al Khalifa was found across a dozen or more banking and finance magazines in recent years, but he found nothing that went further back than 1995. It was clear that very little was electronically archived before that, and the Internet had barely got going, something he found hard to believe. One article, a guest column in an English language news magazine, had a brief biography in which she was described as having been based “…over the last twenty years in London, Beirut, Istanbul, Paris and Athens, and has travelled extensively across Asia, the Gulf and North America”. Rifat sighed. He could have been conceived anywhere on earth, in any hotel with a random businessman, traveller or acquaintance, which would truly make him a global bastard. The simplest way for Rifat to find his birth father was to talk to her again, if he could bring himself to do it. He spent a few days making notes about what he wanted to know, and decided that the easiest strategy was to feign interest in her career. Perhaps she would be flattered. He smiled to himself. She could think that if she wanted.
Within a week he was ready. He rang her without prior arrangement to try to catch her off guard. By good fortune, she picked up the phone and hearing his name, gave a little gasp. Rifat apologised, again, for his behaviour in Athens, and said that we would like to be more respectful to her in future. She sounded grateful for the approach, and told him how terribly hurt she had been. Rifat waited out a long and emotional outpouring, about how he had been such an affectionate little boy, and how she just wanted to gather him up in her arms and take him back, but circumstances made it impossible. All this did nothing but deaden his heart. He kept having to remind himself that if he wanted to find out what he wanted to, he must not be cruel, even though that was just what he wanted to be. Remembering what Mother Umniya had said about the circumstances of his birth, he asked Taseena to tell him.
‘Oh Rifat, this is very hard for me. I was very confused, very emotional and upset. You were born in a nice hospital in Lebanon, and the nurses were very kind.’
‘Did you want to have me?’
There was a brief but significant pause before she answered. ‘Yes. I did want you, once I knew I was pregnant.’
‘But I wasn’t convenient, was I?’
‘Rifat, please, it wasn’t a matter of convenience…’
‘You had your career, and you weren’t married to anyone, were you?’
‘No I wasn’t married, but I was, or had been, in a relationship with someone very special.’
‘And this person is my father?’
‘Yes, he is. Let me tell you, Rifat. This wasn’t some casual relationship. You were the product of love. I loved this man and in some ways I still do. You are the product of a love between two people. Who they are matters less than the fact of their love for each other.’
‘But how could this be,’ Rifat exclaimed. ‘He was already married, wasn’t he? Mother Umniya told me. She said that he wanted you to have an abortion because he already had children of his own. With his wife.’
‘Oh yes, Mother Umniya. How very kind she is to spill such details.’
‘These are not details. These are the circumstances of my life!’
‘Rifat you are so young, and so angry. One day…’
‘One day I will be a man, and I will be just as angry.’
‘Please, Rifat.’
‘I want to know who he is.’
‘I cannot tell you. I’m sorry. You have to believe me when I tell you.’
‘But the man who fathered me wanted me dead?’
‘I cannot answer all your questions, Rifat. I’m sorry.’
‘I just want to know one thing,’ Rifat said. ‘I have been brought up in the light of the Prophet, peace be upon him, and you are my mother. So, mother, will you please tell me whether my father was a Christian?’ Rifat calculatedly played on motherhood to weaken her resolve.
There was a long sigh. ‘He wasn’t a Muslim, as I said. I don’t think he had any religion, though you would call him a Christian. But he was a good man, despite everything…’
‘So I suppose you met him in a bar or nightclub?’
‘Rifat, don’t say such things. What do you think of me? We worked together for a while, that’s all. And I was very young, you must understand.’
Oh, I understand alright, Rifat thought. I’m young, but I would never do such things.
‘I’m sorry Rifat, this call has made me upset and I have to go now. I’m sorry I cannot tell you who your father is, really I am. Now goodbye, my son.’ She put the phone down.
She cannot tell me? She virtually has, Rifat mused. Just a little bit more work, and I’ll know who it was. Then I’ll get to work.
* * *
Rifat’s heart hardened over the next year as he checked up everything he could find about his aunt’s career. It was already clear that she had worked in Beirut at the time of his birth and for several years before. But who her colleagues were at that time was harder to establish, because she worked on a number of magazines as a freelancer. The easiest checks he could make were ones close to home, particularly with his father, who was still clearly proud of his little sister, and did not have the guile of either Mother Badriyeh or Mother Umniya. His father had been surprised when Rifat said that Amma Tazi had refused to say exactly who his father was.
‘So can you tell me?’ Rifat asked.
‘No. I cannot. It is your mother’s responsibility to decide how much you should know. I feel for both of you in this difficult question, but it is not my role to break my pledge to her.’
‘So you do know?’
‘Yes, I know.’
Rifat was boiling inside, but he knew that he could not press his father any further.
‘It will be good enough for me,’ Rifat said, ‘To know that I have been brought up in love and care, by you, my real abi and by Mother Umniya.’
His father looked at him in wonderment. ‘Then you have indeed become a man in my sight.’ He ruffled Rifat’s hair, something that he could not recall in many years.
Rifat bided his time for many months. He searched the flat and his father’s study, looking for letters, or even copies of old articles that his aunt had written. The study was almost a sacred room to which he had always been forbidden entry, though he had seen Mother Badriyeh searching it herself in the past. He knew there were several locked drawers in his father’s desk but he had no idea where the keys were kept. He had never seen them hanging up, and presumed that his father might keep them in a briefcase. Perhaps there were letters from Amma Tazi there, or a diary. An opportunity presented itself on the festival day of Eid al Adha, when the whole family would take dawn prayers together, and participate in a feast. After prayers, Rifat feigned stomach cramps and locked himself in the bathroom, making vomiting noises. He retired to his bed, hoping to be left behind. At first, his father wanted to call a doctor, but he settled for nominating Mother Badriyeh to remain behind to look after him. This was an irritant, because Rifat wanted the house to himself, and had seen where his father’s briefcase was. After the rest of the family had driven off to the hotel where the feast was laid on, Rifat managed to persuade Mother Badriyeh to go to the pharmacy for him. She grumbled, because she would have to walk for ten minutes in the heat, there being no male member of the house present to drive her, but she agreed.
Rifat knew he had less than half an hour. Two minutes after she had departed, Rifat emerged from his bed wearing a nightshirt, and raced down to his father
’s briefcase. He was relieved to find it unlocked. Inside was a key ring with several small keys. As he had hoped, they opened the desk drawers. The first two held nothing of interest, but the deeper bottom drawer held bundles of papers, and at the bottom a stack of two dozen magazines, Gulf Banking and Insurance from the 1990s. Rifat flicked through, and saw the Taseena al Khalifa byline on the masthead of each. The articles were mostly datelined Beirut, and looked boring. There were also a few letters, which he decided would be worth looking at. However, right at the bottom of the stack, heavy in a thick manila envelope, was something else. To his shock and amazement, it was a pornographic magazine. Playboy, from April 1990. He was shocked that his father bought such things, which were forbidden in Saudi Arabia and sinful in Islam. Perhaps he had bought it in Bahrain, or had risked bringing it in from Europe on one of his frequent trips. Of course, the diplomatic bag gave him immunity. Unable to resist, Rifat flicked through the pages, soaking up the photographs of naked women, from France, Germany and Denmark. This was something he had never seen before. He was transfixed by the shocking visions before him. Waves of some power he had never experienced swept over him, and his breathing quickened. Underneath his nightshirt, he had a hard erection. Putting the banking magazines back, he raced upstairs with the magazine to his bedroom. Flicking through the pages, he moistened his hand with saliva and stroked his penis. Right at the back of the magazine was an introductory photograph of a particularly beautiful dark-eyed girl, Mariam, nude but for a sequinned scarf she was holding across her face. This left only her bewitching eyes, her beautiful breasts and pubic hair open to the view of all the world. Rifat, his hand now moving fast, turned the page, and saw a double-page picture of the woman with her legs wide apart on a chair. Her bodily lips, parts of a woman he had never even seen, were fully open to view. Something like a hot lava was welling up deep within his entrails, something too strong for him to resist, that would brook no question or argument. He was possessed, gripped, by something of immense power demanding the seed of him, something that made his mind a slave in his own body, his arm a devilish piston. In the last second, he lifted his sight from the woman’s vulva to her face and was horrified. Surely it couldn’t be, but it was. She was unmistakeable. A young Amma Tazi, his very own mother. As his semen flew up into the air, he cried in passion and anguish, a puppet in Satan’s hands. The thick white liquid spattered across the page, smearing the text which so falsely described this ‘beauty from Beirut who dreams of world peace.’
The weight of horror that descended on Rifat was multiplied when he heard the front door slam. Mother Badriyeh was coming back into the apartment. He stuffed the magazine under his bed, knowing that now, stained with his seed, it could never be returned to his father’s desk. Guilt, and a deep sense of shock at his own weakness lay heavily on him. So this was what the imam meant by the lure of falling angels, the calling of sweet voices by the brides of Lucifer. He had felt their power, their undeniable magnetism in those few moments, forcing him to the most vile and base deed, something he had never done before. And it was his own mother, that sharmuta who had brought him into Satan’s fold. He roared his hatred of her, so loudly that Mother Badriyeh came up to ask him if he was alright.
He made no reply, and composed himself before her arrival, wiping his soiled hand under the pillow, and getting back into bed.
‘I’m getting better,’ he said, accepting the herbal drink she had prepared him.
Never again would he let his mind be taken by base thoughts. Only purity of purpose, the highest calling, the life of obedience, of prayer and of denial would he accept. Western corruption, evil to its core, had first seduced and despoiled his mother who whored herself to the entire world in those pages. And now she had dragged him down. Her blood was his blood, mixed with that of some opportunistic crusader. In his veins ran the thick DNA of sin. But what could he, not yet a man, do about it?
* * *
Rifat found it impossible to share his guilt and loneliness. Mother Umniya, though sympathetic, had cast him away, her covering of her hair in front of him a symbol of that rejection. His brother and sisters, cousins in reality, were younger and had not been told. They rejoiced in the embrace of a real family that was now denied him. His school friends, who always enjoyed teasing him for his geeky interests, would seize upon the merest hint of his tainted birth. If that happened he would die of shame.
One day in the bathroom, he opened the cabinet and looked through the vast array of tablets and pills that Umniya and Badriyeh were always popping. The thought occurred to him that there would be enough there to end his misery.He took one tablet and popped it on his tongue. Looking in the mirror, he absorbed the image of a man poised on the precipice of death. Perhaps he would look up what these tablets would do.
The next time he was at the mosque, his father asked Rifat to wait behind at the end. ‘Your mothers tell me you are unhappy, and I do see it in your face. I have made an appointment for you to see a mudarris, a man whom I trust. This teacher whose name is Tawab may help guide your spirit.’
Rifat was asked to sit in a waiting room, bare but for two old desks and a sumptuous Koran. He was reading it when a man came in. ‘Mudarris Tawab is not available today. I am Imam Hosseini. I will guide you.’
Hosseini was known as a hardliner and critic of all things western. A few minutes later, Rifat was sitting cross-legged on a floor cushion in the imam’s chamber and describing how he felt besmirched by the actions of a relative, who had slept with a Western man, and given birth to a child out of wedlock. Rifat’s tale, poured out in an emotional welter seemed to at first confuse the imam, an elderly man with a well-kept white beard and steel grey eyes. Rifat made no mention of the magazine, nor of his own sins. The imam waited patiently until Rifat had finished and had wiped the tears of anger from his own eyes.
‘The child born out of wedlock, I take it, is you,’ he said.
Rifat, shocked at the perceptiveness of the imam, nodded.
‘And this woman, your mother, lives abroad? The accusation you make is a very serious one. What you describe is addressed by the Prophet in Sura 24.2-3. It is zinah, sexual intercourse outside of marriage. The sura says: “The woman and the man guilty of zinah, flog each of them with a hundred stripes; let not compassion move you in a matter proscribed by Allah.” The punishment is to be witnessed by a party of believers,’ the Imam said, a slight smile spreading across his face. ‘This case would greatly interest the religious police.’ He harrumphed and shrugged. ‘They of course can do little against such whoredom, unless she returns.’
‘I don’t think she will ever come back to our land,’ Rifat said. ‘She meets father only abroad.’
The imam smiled knowingly. ‘No doubt she fears the white light of the holy places. Now Rifat, you have been brought up in an important and devout family, which I have known for many years. I am surprised that the head of your family should indulge such a woman, and not cast her out. No doubt he has his own reasons. However, it is you and your welfare that concern me. You are like a ship shorn of its anchors in a storm. So let me ask: how do you feel about the man who fathered you?’
‘I feel anger. I want to ask this man why he felt he could abandon a child he created. Surely this is a sin, even in the Christian church?’
The imam laughed gently, and shook his head. ‘The Christian church is as soft as a ripe melon. The commandments are clear enough, but the populace and much of the clergy lives undisturbed in idleness, idolatry and sodomy. If you expect justice there, you will be disappointed.’
‘What should I do?’
‘You must take justice to him. In this respect the child is father of the man. Take the sword of righteousness in your right hand, and show no mercy.’
‘Alright.’ Rifat was shocked at what he seemed to be required to do, but was too frightened to seek confirmation.
‘It is natural that you remain confused, Rifat. Don’t worry. The right course of action will come to you.’ For m
ore than an hour and a half, Imam Hosseini continued to question Rifat: his religious adherence and honouring of the five imperatives of Islam, his work ambitions, and interest in electronics, his school work, particularly his knowledge of English and other languages and his assessment of his own strengths and weaknesses. During the interview, several visitors to the imam’s office were briskly turned away, then mint tea was delivered on a tray in tiny silver edged glasses, with a full sugar bowl.
‘My mouth is dry, Rifat. Let us drink tea.’ The imam added a spoon heaped with sugar to his own glass. ‘So, young man. You were just eleven years old when the response from Islam to the empire of crusaders really made itself known. Can I ask what your feelings were when you saw the pictures of those two New York skyscrapers aflame?’
‘I was young,’ Rifat said, ‘But it was the day before my birthday! I was just shocked, and even more so when it emerged that the attack was made by my fellow countryman.’
‘And how do you feel now?’
‘Well, I see more clearly now that America has provoked the world. They kill people in every country, they attack Islam, and then lecture the world about how good the United States is. So, now, I think they got what they deserved, and I am proud that it was my country which provided the martyrs.’
‘Would you be a martyr for such a cause?’ The imam’s eyes bored deeply into Rifat’s own. He had to fight not to avert his face. He gulped, and his throat was dry, realising that he could be called to God so soon.
‘If that was the will of Allah, so be it.’
The imam smiled kindly and reached out his arm to grasp Rifat’s wrist. ‘Do not worry, this was only a test of faith. However.’ He turned stern again. ‘Knowing that you are thirsty for justice, and ripe for for jihad, I can recommend help. There is a brother who is pursuing the world-wide caliphate under blessed Sharia law. He has answers to your questions, guidance for your heart, and quests awaiting your bravery. This brother is someone whose name I will not give you now, but you can find him at this address after Friday prayers in two weeks’ time. Be there at three precisely.’ The imam wrote down the date, an address and some directions. ‘He will be expecting you, just give your name at the door. Do not mention this to any member of your family, not to friends, do not write the address on a computer, or input it into one of those mobile phones that you seem inseparable from. The Base has very clear requirements for faith, but also for discretion.’
