The Butterfly Mosque Read Free

reject primitive little
-g
gods; anthropomorphized, local entities subject to the laws of time and space—it had taught me, in other words, to reject Zeus and the Keebler elves. And the God to whom I had prayed so desperately was not Zeus.
    When I prayed, maybe I was trying to justify a belief I already held. Being ill had shaken something loose in my head. Sitting up at night under dark windows, my perceptions had altered. My body was no longer an infinite resource but a union of thousands of fragile things, chemicals and precursors and proteins, all in a balance that could easily be upset. That so many people were well—that I had been well for so long—seemed miraculous.
    Illnesses usually bring people to religion through the front door; mine brought me through the back. I did not need to know if I was being punished or tested. Neither my health nor my illness was about me. The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force thathelped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me.
    That unified force was a God too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion. It was unclear to me whether there was a philosophy big enough for monotheism so adamant. It had to be a faith that didn’t need to struggle to explain why bad things happen to good people, a faith in which it was understood that destruction is implicit in creation. I had a faint attraction to Buddhism, but Buddhism was not theist enough; the role of God was obscure or absent. I would have liked to be a Christian. My life would have been much easier if I could stomach the Trinity and inherited sin, or the idea that God had a son. Judaism was a near perfect fit, but it was created for a single tribe of people. Most practicing Jews I knew took a dim view of conversion. To them, membership in the historical community of Jews was as important as belief.
    In Islam, which encouraged conversion, there were words for what I believed.
Tawhid,
the absolute unity of God.
Al Haq,
the truth so true it had no corresponding opposite, truth that encompassed both good and evil. There were no intermediary steps in the act of creation, God simply said,
Kun, fa yakun.
“Be, so it is.” I began to have a feelingof déjà vu. It was as if my promise to become a Muslim was not a coincidence but a kind of inversion; a future self speaking through a former self.
    It was a feeling that intensified as I stood in front of a vending machine in my Warren Towers dorm in the spring of my illness, on the verge of an epiphany. Another girl in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms stood in front of me with a deflated expression.
    â€œScrew this,” she said, punching the glass that divided her from the Almond Joy stuck inside, dangling by its wrapper. She sighed and turned away, muttering “Good luck,” as she passed. Her T-shirt read, “Why does it always rain on
me?
” Apparently she had dressed for this moment of synchronicity.
    I punched in the code for a Snickers. As it fell, it hit the trapped Almond Joy. When I pushed in the flap at the bottom of the machine I saw two candy bars, side by side. I looked around for the other girl, but she was gone.
    â€œ
Kun
,” I said to no one, and laughed. “
Kun fa yakun.
”
    At that moment, the girl with the synchronous T-shirt was more upset about losing her candy bar than I was about having
osteopenia,
low bone mineral density. The moral microcosm of Warren Towers seemed profoundly balanced. What I had suffered was so