The Pickup

Chapter 30

Canada had enough Arabs, Pakistanis and Indians — the kind other than the red ones who were the original Permanent Residents. Sweden, small country a generous refuge to the politically persecuted, was more cautious about those whose plea did not have the same kind of justification. He began to feel that his manhood was in question. She was his wife, after all, he had to satisfy her needs not only in bed. Green. He now was demanding a country for her as well as for himself. And he could not admit defeat by discussing this with her. When he was not in the clangour of whirring, grinding, and the stink of fuel helping out at the vehicle repair shop, he was about among a certain group of young men to whom he had gravitated once the ones-in-the-know, who assured that with palm-grease they could get you in wherever you wanted, proved to be living on hopes that couldn’t be realized — even for themselves! Else why would they still choose to be here, selling watermelons in the market, mending shoes, slaughtering sheep and making coffee, like two of his brothers.

These other young men have some education — like himself — one has a university degree but is a second-grade clerk in a local government office: he has tried to get out but as he has been refused a passport at this end of the process because there is a record of his having been a political troublemaker, as a student, dissident against the regime, he hasn’t the first requirement of the many for visa application. For reasons of the same record there’s no hope of him being promoted in the civil service; others in the group that drifts every night to the oil lamps of one of the bars disguised as coffee shops have similar histories. Three — like himself — have been declared illegal and deported, back to this place, from the countries they managed to enter and work at whatever they could turn a hand to. They talk until late in order not to go home to the family warrens they escaped once, and to which they have been returned like dead letters — illegals have no fixed address, no identity. They talk about what it is unwise to talk about, even in this poor hole where the Uncle and the husband of Maryam’s employer, neither the ruling party’s local mayor nor the Imam, would ever be around to overhear, although you could never be sure that a security policeman in plain-clothes galabiah might not be among the shadows. These young men want change, not the rewards of Heaven. Change in the forms it already had taken for others in the old century, change for what it was becoming in this new one. To catch up! With elections that are not rigged or declared void when the government’s opposition wins; hard bargains with the West made from a position of counter-power, not foot-kissing, arse-licking servitude (they bring the right vocabulary back with them from the West, whatever else they were denied); change with a voice over the Internet not from the minaret, a voice making demands to be heard by the financial gods of the world.

… bring the modern world to Islam but we’re not going to allow ourselves to be taken over by it, no, forced to—

… revolutionary but not like other revolutions, they must understand this is a moral religious revolution—

— but it can only be achieved by the seizure of state power, like any other revolution! What are you—

— Yes yes! No question! Don’t think there’s any other way to get rid of this government that grows fat on us and tells us this poverty is freedom, bismillah—

… we can’t go on accepting what our grandfathers do, what life is that, Ibrahim — the traditional interpreters of Islam … for them Islam hasn’t anything to do with the future, everything is complete, forever, you only have to …

… total Islamization — against world powers? — what a mad dream; no, no—

— we must cross-fertilize Islam with the world if the ideals of Islam are to survive, the old model doesn’t fit, any kind of isolation can’t stand a chance with what’s happening in the world, ask Ibrahim, technological revolution already here while we’re just talking, talking …!

And as young men do when they drink together they also spoke of women, but not in the way the men in the garage near the EL-AY Café did.

— Look, we don’t want to deny our past for the American sex we enjoy seeing on TV (there was a whistle and laughter) … but hijab, I mean you happen to make love with a married woman, she wants it, ay — and she must be stoned to death, who can accept that it’s the law, even if it isn’t carried out — who can accept that in this age!—

The university graduate emptied his glass and offered: — I just read it somewhere. ‘A Muslim doesn’t fall in love with a woman, but only with Allah.’— He kept a gloomy face, perhaps himself a lover in difficulties, while there was more laughter — the others evidently did not regard the cynicism as blasphemous.

— So what’s our life? With women? What? You tell me. What freedom do they have or we have with them?—

— But they’re the ones now with their own revolution—

— Oh it’s part of ours—

— But they want to decide for themselves. They don’t want anyone to tell them to wear the chador, all right, but if they do want to wear it, they won’t have some Westerner telling them to throw it away. They want to study or work anywhere they decide outside the kitchen, the modern world where men still think we’re the only ones to have a place.—

— We must get one of them to speak, you know, next time we have a meeting — never done that, we are true sons of our grandfathers—

— Will they dare to come—

— They’ll come. They’ll come. I know a few …

— Ah then you’ll really see how the government fathers get the police to go after us …

The graduate of the university where he himself gained the degree that had qualified him to be employed as, in another country, what her friends called a grease-monkey, turned to him where he was listening, silent.

— I’ll lend you a book. Ever heard of Shahrur Muhammad Shahrur? Written a book, al-Kitab wa-l-Qur’an: Qira’a mu’asira. He says people believed once that the sun revolved round the earth, but it was then discovered that the opposite was true, eh? Muslims still believe prejudices of religious authority that are the complete opposite of the correct perspective — conventional religious authority can’t exist with economic market forces today! But take care. Don’t leave the book lying around. You can’t find it, here, somebody sent it, and even then it had to be hidden in the cover of some other book, some nonsense. A package of anything printed that comes from overseas, it’s opened by the authorities, perhaps you’ve forgotten that, my brother.—

He was their brother in frustration. Sometimes he felt himself fired by them to act, join them to plot and agitate, risk, for change here — this desert. But within him something drew back appalled at the submission; the future of this place the world tried to confine him to was not his place in that world. Permanent residence; under no matter what government, religious law, secular law, what president in a keffiyeh or got up in military kit with braid and medals — that was not for him. The company of brothers in frustration salved his own, but this secret refusal, his refusal, roused in him strongly as any sexual desire.