‘What about our legal wives?’
His lifelong friend pondered over the matter for a long moment before he said, ‘Our legal wives will never go to Paradise.’
‘But what if one of them happens to slip in somehow,’ asked the Imam insistently, ‘then what?’
‘God will replace her with a young maiden,’ affirmed the Great Writer. ‘In Paradise there is no place for legal wives. For if it were not so, what difference would there be between our life on earth and life in Paradise?’
When I learnt that my sister had died in the war I recalled that I had not seen my mother’s face since the night I was born. In the orphanage we had an old grandmother whom we called Siti al-Haja. We gathered around her in the evenings and listened to her tales about djinns and about sirens who had the bodies of women and the tails of fish and swam along the shores of the sea at night. When a siren set her hands on a man she used sorcery to change him into another creature, into a catfish or a young calf or a sheep or any other animal of a lower order. If he had been changed into a sheep he would go round bleating in a low voice, looking for another woman against whose leg he would rub himself. This woman had to possess the secrets of sorcery, so that she could unravel the incantations of the woman at whose hands he had been changed into a sheep. Thus she could return him to his original state as a man. But once he had become a man again he would strut over the land full of his manliness, forgetting the woman who had created him, driven by his conceit to seek another woman who in her turn would reduce him from the state of a human being to that of a monkey or a cat with no tail.
He would begin to go round again seeking after a woman sorceress, rubbing himself up against her legs, and so round and round and on and on and night after night would go the tales told by our grandmother to the children gathered around her in the dormitory. Like in
The Thousand and One Nights,
the beginning of each new tale merged with the end of the one which had preceded it, like the night merges with the day. Her voice never ceased to echo in our ears, her story never ended before it had begun to merge into a new one. Like Shahrazad she seemed to fear even a moment’s silence, lest when she paused at some point in her tale her heart would stop beating, for Shahrazad knew her life would end the moment she ceased speaking. ‘Who was Shahrazad, Siti al-Haja?’ we asked, and immediately she picked up her story again. The husband left his wife to go to another woman, and when he returned at the end of the day he found her in the arms of his black slave. He killed his wife and swore an oath that from then on, in order to avenge himself for her treachery, every night he would kill a virgin in his bed. The husband was a white-skinned man of noble descent and he had occupied the throne of the earth since an early age. Every night he buckled his sword around his waist and implored God in heaven to have mercy on him, for how could a woman prefer a black slave to King Shahrayar himself? He could hear a voice speaking as though it arose from deep down inside him, a voice which resembled that of his father and which said: Because women are born treacherous, like their mother Eve.
At this point I interrupted her as she went on telling her tale and said, ‘But the King was betraying his wife with a black woman slave.’
She looked at me askance and said, ‘What matter, girl; the treachery of men is allowable by divine law, as God Himself has said. But the treachery of women is inspired by Satan.’
When I was a child I wondered why it was that the skin of kings was always white, whereas that of slaves was always black. I myself had dark skin, and I wondered whether I was descended from a breed of slaves. When I asked Siti al-Haja she spat into the neck of her black robe to chase away the Devil and said, ‘O God, verily I seek protection in Thee from Satan the accursed enemy. May evil always be far away from us and let no doubts assail us. You, my child, are descended from the breed of masters, not of slaves.’
Ever since I first opened my eyes on life in the orphanage they have called me Bint Allah. And after Siti al-Haja died I never stopped staring at my dark skin in the mirror and wondering about it. In my dreams my father always appeared to me with a skin as white as that of King Shahrayar. From where then did I get this dark skin? Did my mother betray my father with a black slave? Or am I the daughter of Satan and not the daughter of God, as my name says?
I can see myself trying to escape in the night, running as fast as I can with my dog Marzouk close behind me. Men wearing military caps are close on my heels, and bringing up the rear is a pack of dogs, their panting breath rising like a mist. I quickly climb up the hill between the river and the sea. I had almost given them the slip, was almost out of their reach, when I halted for a moment, seized by a yearning to fill my lungs with the air of open spaces. Since I was a child this yearning for the pure air of this place had never left me. In it was the warm odour of my mother’s flesh before she died. Here was the footprint left by my father on the earth before he fled, leaving her behind. Yes, I could have escaped from those who were hunting me down had I not remembered all these things as I trod over the ground. And just at the moment when I halted to inhale the odours of my life, the bullet struck me in the back. They always hit me in the back, never stand up to face me from the front. But before the letters of the alphabet had faded from my mind, before my memory had gone completely dead, I had the time to hear them say, ‘All this is the fruit of sin. He who kills her will be rewarded handsomely, both in this world and later on in Paradise.’
My head was high up in the sky. I was wearing the face of the Imam. Over my chest hung a row of medals, and through my fingers moved the sacred rosary of prayer beads which had been sent to me directly from the Kaaba. The lights of the first and second worlds flashed like rounded mirrors, surrounding me from all directions. And the acclamations of the people in the third and fourth worlds echoed in my ears with a roaring sound. ‘Long live the Imam, Defender of the Shari’a.’ My face was multiplied in the mirrors around me into a hundred faces less one, into ninety-nine faces, like the ninety-nine sacred names of God. Every time I moved my head to one side or the other I could see my face become many faces all at once. There I was, high up under the lights, seated on the throne in the midst of my supporters in Hizb Allah and in the official opposition Hizb al-Shaitan, and around us were the representatives of the Greater and Lesser Powers and the flying banners of liberty and democracy fluttering in the wind. My voice rolled out on a thousand microphones as I delivered my speech celebrating our great victory, while in the air burst the coloured rockets of the Big Feast. I was drunk with exhilaration, not with wine, swaying from side to side so that at a certain moment my face suddenly slipped off and dropped to the ground between my feet, almost rolling under my throne, and just as suddenly legs began to run hither and thither and feet stepped on my foot, and suddenly my seat lay on the ground with its four legs pointing to the sky, and I peered to one side, then the other, wondering what had happened so suddenly.
The Leader of the Official Opposition was standing close to the Imam, separated from him only by the Chief of Security, when suddenly he heard a voice asking whether the Day of Judgement had just come. He realized that it was the voice of the Imam, and that the Imam was now lying under the seat of his throne a short distance from where he stood. The Leader of the Official Opposition suddenly started to exhibit more intelligence than he usually did, and made the correlation between the available seats on Noah’s Ark, the discovery of nuclear energy, and the Day of Judgement. The Great Writer suddenly put his head between his feet and closed his eyes in eternal rest, but awakening for a moment he peered cautiously between his lids and said that to think about the Day of Judgement with a worldly mind was not permissible according to the Shari’a, that it was not possible to reach any conclusions about it except through the word of God as written in the Qur’an. He added that he who reads the Qur’an carefully will discover that the Day of Judgement is an event which does not only concern the terrestrial globe and the people living on it but the whole universe, for God Almighty hath said: ‘And His trumpets will be blown unto the wall, and all who are in the heavens and on the earth shall be struck down with lightning, verily, except those He wishes to save.’ These are the words of God and they brook neither opposition nor even discussion, be it from the Official Opposition or from the Illegal Opposition and clandestine movements. For the Day of Judgement will encompass the whole universe including the heavens and the earth, and by the will of God the only exception shall be His heir and representative on earth, the one and only Imam. This in so far as our worldly life is concerned. The words of Allah, however, also show that the inhabitants of the planets and stars, of the sun and the moon and of other heavenly bodies, will share the same fate as the dwellers on earth, since they shall all face a sudden death. The words of God make it clear that the Day of Judgement will descend upon all of us suddenly, for God Almighty Himself has said: ‘And did they believe that Allah will send them a cloud to blind them and make it such that they shall taste suffering at His hands, and that the Day of Judgement shall descend upon them suddenly?’ God has no need of things like nuclear radiation to bring the Hour of Judgement when the time has come, nor does He lack the wherewithal to destroy the whole universe suddenly.
The eyes of the Imam shone with admiration for the eloquence exhibited by his Great Writer, the extraordinary scope of his religious culture, and his extensive knowledge of Shari’a. The eyes of the Leader of the Official Opposition were quick to reflect the same admiration, but it was soon replaced by a dark look of jealousy almost akin to hatred. He launched himself into a long speech, longer than the speech which had been made by the Great Writer, in an attempt to prove that the relationship between the Day of Judgement and nuclear radiation was not excluded even if this was not mentioned anywhere in the text of the Qur’an.
The Chief of Security picked himself up from the ground and started to brush off the particles of dust from his coat. They floated off into the air, shining brightly as though charged with some kind of radiation. At this sight he suddenly started to run as fast as he could, leaving the leaders of Hizb Allah and Hizb al-Shaitan lying on the ground. They lay there inert, without movement, as though abandoning their fate to the will of God. Meanwhile, the Great Writer was following what the Leader of the Opposition was saying, his mouth open with admiration at the courage of this man who had dared to speak of the existence of a possible relationship between nuclear radiation and the advent of the Day of Judgement without there being any mention of it in the Qur’an.
A moment later the Great Writer and the Leader of the Official Opposition could be seen as they exchanged a smile extending from ear to ear on their faces lying between their feet on the ground. The Imam, however, continued to be silent, not uttering even a single word. Noticing his silence, they closed their mouths tightly and refrained from saying anything further, for the word of the Imam was always final and brooked no doubt or opposition of any kind. Seeing that the Imam continued to say nothing as though he had decided to maintain eternal silence, the Leader of the Opposition was encouraged to pose a question. Almost to his own surprise he heard himself ask whether the Imam existed or not. For a moment it crossed his mind that such a question could be considered a heresy and was akin to asking whether God existed or not. But he quickly realized that there was absolutely no heresy in what he had said, for on the contrary it was a proof of his deep-rooted devotion and endless loyalty to the Imam, since he was only trying to buttress the faith which comes from the heart with the reason of the mind. In fact, the day came when his question was cited as an historic event, despite the fact that it is something which every child in the world has asked at one time or another without being made to appear as one of the heroes in the movements of popular opposition. Nevertheless, the Great Writer sent him an envious look from where his face lay on the ground under his seat, and then took himself off to his fourth wife smiling from ear to ear.
That night, comfortably in bed, he swore a triple oath of divorce if it was proved that anyone else but he had dared to peer through his lids in order to witness with his own eyes the happenings of that historic moment. For indeed not a single member of Hizb Allah or Hizb al-Shaitan had had the courage to do what he did. All of them had remained with their eyelids tightly closed, as though they had died suddenly, all of them except the Chief of Security, who had disappeared suddenly, leaving no trace behind him.
I lost my sister Nemat Allah while still in the nursing school. She sacrificed her life for love. My brother Fadl Allah went to war and lost his life in defence of his country. I did not want to be a victim, nor did I want to go through life blindfolded. I woke up in the middle of the night and learned what I had to learn by heart so that I could repeat it the next day in the examination. Graduation day came, and with it the distribution of Certificates of Obedience and Service. Those that did well in the examination were awarded the title of the Perfect Servant. They were dressed up in special white uniforms and a bandage was tied round their hair. They walked behind one another in a line, and when they came near the platform they bowed respectfully.
Seated on the platform were the important women of state, the wife of the Imam seated on a high-backed chair in their midst. On her right was the president of all charitable societies, wearing her rubber face, and on her left side was the Head Nurse wearing the Medal of Duty and Charity pinned on her breast. Behind came rows of other lesser women, the widows of martyrs, ideal mothers, volunteer charity workers. They all looked the same, and it was impossible to distinguish between them. They sat without movement, their faces serious, unsmiling, their hands clasped together over their bosoms as though hiding something. If the wife of the Imam stood up they immediately rose to their feet in a single movement, their hands still held over their bosoms. I approached the platform with a slow funereal step. The new wife of the Imam looked shorter to me when she was standing up than when she was sitting down. Her head, wrapped in an imported silk veil, barely appeared above the rostrum. Attached round her veil was a diamond tiara which glittered in the light. When my eyes moved downwards from her head I could see a necklace and, further down, a brooch pinned over her left breast. On her arms were rows of bracelets, and on her fingers she wore many rings, so that every time she moved the universe seemed to tremble with the light of a thousand flashing stars.