Children of Dust Read Free Page A

Jalalud-din Khwarezmi, a prince of Persia, bereft of his kingdom when his father was killed by the Mongols. He waged a long-standing series of battles against Genghis, raising armies and chasing him from Armenia and Azerbaijan to India and back again. The serial was a tragic-romantic recounting of the major military and political events in Khwarezmi’s life, interwoven with the exploits of his allies.
    In the final episode, one of Khwarezmi’s cohorts gave a rousing speech to the leaders of Baghdad about making a call for jihad —which only the Caliph had the power to do—and sending troops to Khwarezmi’s assistance. He told them to believe in Khwarezmi because he was the only Central Asian leader who had defeated the Mongols in open battle. The speech caused the leaders to break out in spirited debate, because they didn’t want the Caliph to declare jihad . Meanwhile, the scene shifted to Khwarezmi, standing atop a cliff with his men near the front against the Mongols. At a distance he saw riders bearing Baghdad’s colors. The sight of the riders prompted him to break into a monologue in which he thanked the heavens for Baghdad’s support and lambasted the skeptics among his crew for doubting Baghdad’s mettle: “I told you that Allah would hear our prayers and they would come.”Once the riders came closer, however, Khwarezmi realized that they were simply messengers carrying a letter of decline from Baghdad. The Caliph had shown his cowardice.
    It was here that the tragic climax of the series occurred. Intermixed with scenes of dance, wine, and women—symbols of a Muslim warrior’s failure—Khwarezmi engaged in a sequence of monologues. He bemoaned his castles of sand, complained of the way the soldier’s blade melted before the enemy’s wealth, and wept that his voice didn’t reach the heavens. The series came to an end with tasbih beads falling ingloriously upon the ground as an anonymous old man cried, while Khwarezmi, no longer worthy of a horse, got atop an ass and rode off into the snow. The scene of his departure was followed by still paintings accompanied by melancholy music depicting Baghdad’s eventual fall to Hulagu Khan in 1258, a story of great tragedy and humiliation that all Muslims know well.
    The main character of the series turned out not to be Khwarezmi. It was Baghdad—its decadent elite, its political intrigue, its traitors, its emasculated Caliphs. It was the infiltration of pro-Mongol elements, and the monopoly of sniveling, pacifist, fatalist, out-of-touch clerics who simply wouldn’t allow the Caliph to make an open call for jihad and go to Khwarezmi’s assistance. To avoid being defeated as Baghdad was by the Mongols, Muslims had to be more like the Companions of the Prophet or the mujahideen of Afghanistan. They had to engage in jihad . That was the TV show’s simple lesson.
    I took a tennis racket, tied a rope around it, and slung it around my torso like a Kalashnikov. Then I went around declaring people Mongols and shooting them.

4
    I learned of sin from a girl named Sina.
    A few years older than my seven, she was a servant at Beyji’s house. She had dark brown skin and her musk was musty. She bore the irrepressible smell of a kitchen drain clogged with stale vegetables. She owned just one outfit, a light pink floral shalwar kameez . Due to age and infinite washing it had become nearly see-through, so that when she went into a squat and swept the veranda in long, controlled, side-to-side sweeps of the jharoo I could see her sinewy thighs—dark pythons wearing gauzy veils. When she picked up my plates I could see the small areolas on her chest. Day after day I watched her, wanting only that she raise her downcast eyes and look at me. Yet she remained expressionless. She performed her chores with such blind commitment, such indifferent exactitude, that there was never any reason for anyone to speak to her. If out of all the other servant girls she was arbitrarily selected