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So where did that body fly to? Perhaps it was snatched up by God and taken
straight to Heaven. Ahmad’s teacher, Shaikh Rashid, the imam at the mosque
upstairs at 27811?2 West Main Street, tells him that according to the sacred
tradition of the Hadith such things happen:
the Messenger, riding the winged white horse Buraq, was guided through the seven
heavens by the angel Gabriel to a certain place, where he prayed with Jesus,
Moses, and Abraham before returning to Earth, to become the last of the
prophets, the ultimate one. His adventures that day are proved by the hoofprint,
sharp and clear, that Buraq left on the Rock beneath the sacred Dome in the
center of Al-Quds, called Jerusalem by the infidels and Zionists, whose torments
in the furnaces of Jahannan are well described in the seventh and eleventh and
fiftieth of the suras of the Book of Books.
Shaikh Rashid recites with great beauty of pronunciation the one hundred fourth
sura, concerning Hutama, the Crushing Fire:
And who shall teach thee what the Crushing Fire is?
It is God’s kindled fire,
Which shall mount above the hearts of the damned;
It shall verily rise over them like a vault,
On outstretched columns.
When Ahmad seeks to extract from the images in the Qur’an’s Arabic—the
outstretched columns, fi 'amadin mumaddada, and the vault high above the
hearts of those huddled in terror and straining to see into the towering mist of
white heat, naru l-lahi l-muqada—some hint of the Merciful’s relenting at
some point in time, and calling a halt to Hutama, the imam casts down his eyes,
which are an unexpectedly pale gray, as milky and elusive as a kafir woman’s,
and says that these visionary descriptions by the Prophet are figurative. They
are truly about the burning misery of separation from God and the scorching of
our remorse for our sins against His commands. But Ahmad does not like Shaikh
Rashid’s voice when he says this. It reminds him of the unconvincing voices of
his teachers at Central High. He hears Satan’s undertone in it, a denying voice
within an affirming voice. The Prophet meant physical fire when he preached
unforgiving fire; Mohammed could not proclaim the fact of eternal fire too
often.
Shaikh Rashid is not much older than Ahmad—perhaps ten years, perhaps twenty. He
has few wrinkles in the white skin of his face. He is diffident though precise
in his movements. In the years by which he is older, the world has weakened him.
When the murmuring of the devils gnawing within him tinges the imam’s voice,
Ahmad feels in his own self a desire to rise up and crush him, as God roasted
that poor worm at the center of the spiral. The student’s faith exceeds the
master’s; it frightens Shaikh Rashid to be riding the winged white steed of
Islam, its irresistible onrushing. He seeks to soften the Prophet’s words, to
make them blend with human reason, but they were not meant to blend: they invade
our human softness like a sword. Allah is sublime beyond all particulars. There
is no God but He, the Living, the Self-Subsistent; He is the light by which the
sun looks black. He does not blend with our reason but makes our reason bow low,
its forehead scraping the dust and bearing like Cain the mark of that dust.
Mohammed was a mortal man but visited Paradise and consorted with the realities
there. Our deeds and thoughts were written in the Prophet’s consciousness in
letters of gold, like the burning words of electrons that a computer creates of
pixels as we tap the keyboard.
The halls of the high school smell of perfume and bodily exhalations, of chewing
gum and impure cafeteria food, and of cloth–cotton and wool and the synthetic
materials of running shoes, warmed by young flesh. Between classes there is a
thunder of movement; the noise is stretched thin over a violence beneath, barely
restrained. Sometimes in the lull at the end of the school day, when the
triumphant, jeering racket of departure has subsided and only the students doing
extracurricular activities remain in the great building, Joryleen Grant comes up
to Ahmad at his locker. He does track in the spring; she sings in the girls’
glee club. As students go at Central High, they are “good.” His religion keeps
him from drugs and vice, though it also holds him rather aloof from his
classmates and the studies on the curriculum. She is short and round and talks
well in class, pleasing the teacher. There is an endearing self-confidence in
how compactly her cocoa-brown roundnesses fill her clothes, which today are
patched and sequinned jeans, worn pale where she sits, and a ribbed magenta
shorty top both lower and higher than it should be. Blue plastic barrettes pull
her glistening hair back as straight as it will go; the plump edge of her right
ear holds along its crimp a row of little silver rings. She sings in assembly
programs, songs of Jesus or sexual longing, both topics abhorrent to Ahmad. Yet
he is pleased that she notices him, coming up to him now and then like a tongue
testing a sensitive tooth.
Excerpted from Terrorist by John Updike Copyright © 2006 by John Updike. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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