The Butterfly Mosque Read Free Page A

slight compared to so many people; how appropriate that all I got for it was an Almond Joy.
    I had just read a verse of the Quran about
rizq,
which translates as “sustenance,” but has threads of destiny and fortune running through it. “Oh you who believe, partake of the good things We have provided for you as sustenance,and give thanks to God, if it is truly Him that you worship.” With an infinitesimal shift in probability, an invisible wink, a little
rizq
had been redistributed. The world seemed without contradiction. It was called into being,
kun,
with pain and synchronicity and malfunctioning vending machines already written on it. I was abandoning my ability to distinguish between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic.
    At home in Colorado that summer, I got a new tattoo. An artist named Fish inked
Al Haq
across my lower back in Arabic calligraphy, talking to me as he worked to keep my mind off the pain. I had signed up to take Arabic in the fall; in the interim I taught myself part of the alphabet out of an old textbook, to make sure I knew what I was putting on my body.
Al Haq
joined another tattoo designed by a kabbalist from Rhode Island, who gave me my first ink at seventeen after I showed him a fake ID. He had told me that nobody gets two tattoos—they either get one or they get lots. I would get two more before I quit, making the first in a series of difficult negotiations between art and religious law. As it is in Judaism, tattooing is frowned upon in mainstream Islam. The body is God’s creation, and therefore perfect; any medically unnecessary alteration is seen as an affront. I’m glad I didn’t know that when I decided to get this tattoo, because I’m not sure it would have stopped me.
    Al Haq
was a note to myself that I could not erase. As I got healthier, it would be easy to forget this part of my life, to go back to thinking the world contained only me and whatever I wanted at any given moment. Now I had a permanentphysical reminder. One day I would work up the courage to convert. I wasn’t ready yet—I still had chemical and social crutches, and it would take time to learn to live without them. When they were gone, though, I knew what I had to be.

The White Horse
    Zuljanah walked forward a few steps and stopped. Husayn stroked the horse’s white neck and said, “My faithful horse, I know you are thirsty and tired. You have been carrying me since morning. My faithful horse, for the last time, take me to the battlefield.”
    â€”Islamic folktale
    B ACK AT BU THREE WEEKS LATER , I WOKE UP TO A STRANGE piece of news on the BBC World Service: Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghani resistance leader who kept the Taliban at bay in the north for almost two decades, had been shot by men posing as journalists. I had been following his life for a class, and knew how important he was in the Afghan struggle against the Taliban and its allies. I was surprised that more attention was not paid to the cleverly staged attack that brought about his death. In all probability, it had been carried out by his fundamentalist enemies. The fact that they could come up with a plan so canny and sophisticated was a little scary.
    If working adults were graded on their knowledge of current events the way college juniors are, we would live in a very different world. I felt a kind of nausea that beginsbetween your eyes, like vertigo; the experience you have when you see a car skid across the center line and can picture the crash that is about to take place. Massoud’s death was not the endgame; it couldn’t be. He had been eliminated in preparation for something else.
    It was September 11, 2001, at about eight thirty in the morning.
    Boston is rarely part of the conversation about the attacks, but guilt was palpable in the streets afterward. The terrorists who hit the South Tower flew out of Logan Airport, the terrorists had been in Boston not two hours earlier, the