Sweetness in the Belly (15 page)

We sat in a small courtyard behind the hospital where several other men and women in white and green were seated together. The laws of separation did not appear to apply here. Aziz bought two tin cups of tea from the hospital canteen, set them down and pulled a bag of white powder out of his pocket.

“Powdered milk,” he explained, offering me some. “I don’t drink any other kind. Is Bortucan learning anything in your class?”

“A little.”

“Zemzem’s father seems to be very impressed with his daughter.”

“She’s exceptional. By far the brightest. Trouble is, there’s only so much I can do with one Qur’an. I can’t exactly tear out the pages so they can each study the part they need to work on.”

“I know everything about having only limited resources to do your work. I wish there was something I could do to help.”

“Do you have a Qur’an we could use?”

“I do,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “And I’ll ask Munir.”

The next day Zemzem brought a piece of injera to class for me. Folded into it was a note from Aziz: “I have a solution for your problem. If you can meet me half an hour earlier at my uncle’s house on Saturday, I can show you.” This time it was signed not “Your friend” but “Your servant.”

I met him in his uncle’s courtyard just after noon that Saturday and followed him into the main room. His uncle opened a wooden chest in a corner, revealing dozens of thin leather-bound booklets. Each one contained a juz, the text of a thirtieth of the Qur’an. These were used on only one occasion, during the month of Safar, the dangerous month when people must not marry or travel, one juz for each day of the month. Aziz’s uncle was a member of a council of elders who met each night of Safar to read through one booklet and keep the danger at bay.

“For the children,” said his uncle.

I looked at Aziz. What a gift.

“He just needs them back for Safar. For the rest of the year they’re yours.”

We kneeled together and counted out two full dusty sets, which we wrapped in an old leather satchel used for carrying qat. I was speechless throughout, aware only of the soft worn leather passing through my hands and the desire to touch Aziz’s skin.

“From Hussein,” I lied to Nouria, stacking the booklets in the corner of our room.

the book of lies

S
everal different chapters being recited simultaneously produced a blissful blur of holy words that echoed throughout the city: my students reciting while Sufis sat in shrines and recited the ninety-nine names of God, and holy men like Sheikh Jami recounted Hadiths and imams sat in mosques and spoke to God and qadis filled their courtrooms with words of holy law and muezzins flooded the sky with their invitations.

With the aid of the booklets, my older students could address their own weaknesses, working on the chapters they knew least well. I tapped a stick against the wall, encouraging them to keep a measured and consistent pace. At the madrasas the teachers used a whip, which they lashed against the floor and, not infrequently, across the palms and backs of their students.

When the older children had managed to repeat an entire chapter as a group, without interruption, without falter or hesitation, I’d tap them into the next. With the younger students, more guidance was required. They would listen and repeat each line of a verse. I would correct their pronunciation, offer a line to jog their memories when they began to falter, encourage them to sway from side to side and find the rhythm of each verse in their bodies. She hadn’t gone beyond the first chapter, but Bortucan served as a metronome for the others.

Once the eldest six could recite the entire first third of the Qur’an together, we deemed it time for a celebration. Nouria and I invited the students’ parents over one Friday morning. Gishta made a huge tray of sweets and provided milk and sugar for tea. All the children were instructed to wear their very best clothes, even though for some of them this simply meant a laundered version of the clothes they wore every day.

The six children stood in a row facing east, Fathi and Anwar among them. I wore the traditional dress Gishta had had made for me and stood before them and recited the first line of a randomly selected chapter from the first third of the book. They repeated that line and then carried on through the rest of the chapter without me. I then turned the pages of the book and read out the first line of another chapter.

The parents stood stone still, mesmerized.

“Do they know which chapters you are going to select?” asked one father just as I was poised to choose a third.

“No. Here.” I held out the book to him. “You choose.”

He approached hesitantly and looked at the book over my shoulder. I turned the pages for him and invited him to tell me where to stop.

“Yes, there, there is good,” he said.

“Please, go ahead,” I encouraged him, nodding at the expectant children.

He cleared his throat and sang the first line of the third chapter. He had a beautiful voice, but the page before us showed the beginning of chapter five.

As the children finished the chapter, he burst into applause. More than one mother cried, and Nouria’s expression was one of rapture, as if she had never before been this close to God.

“They are as good as the rich children at the madrasas!” declared Zemzem’s father.

There were murmurs of agreement all around.

“We shall bring them to Uncle Jami,” said Gishta.

I glared at her.
What was she thinking?
The parents, too, murmured with uncertainty. Sheikh Jami was an imposing figure.

“All the Harari children do this,” Gishta said with a wave of her arm.

“True, true,” the parents agreed. The madrasas brought their students to the shrine once a year so that they could demonstrate their learning and receive the saint’s blessing for continued success.

“But those children are wealthy and well dressed,” one mother said.

“Shame on you,” Gishta chastised. “We are all equal in the eyes of God.”

I
warmed to the idea that Gishta seemed to have adopted as something of a mission. My students deserved the sheikh’s recognition as much as any other students and he could not, at least, fault me as a teacher.

“He
hates
farenjis!” Gishta delighted in telling me. “The tourists are one thing, but the worst ones are those who come here and say they are on a spiritual mission. Ooh, this makes him so mad!”

“But does that really happen?”

“Oh, maybe once every five or so years. They say they are Sufis. One came from England, another from a place called Florida. I like this word,
Florida;
it sounds like a girl’s name. One from Pakistan. And one from California, another girl’s name. Why do farenjis call their cities after girls?”

“My father was from a place called Basingstoke,” I offered.

“
That,
” she said, “is a ridiculous name.”

The sheikh apparently treated the arrival of any foreigner claiming to be on a spiritual journey with a suspicion bordering on contempt.
You want to learn the Sufi way?
he would demand of them.
Then you must live as an ascetic, renounce all worldliness, all mortal concerns, walk barefoot in the hot sand, live off scraps, refuse, have one thought and one thought only—that of eliminating the self, erasing the ego through devotion, seeking grace, seeking unity with the divine.

And they begged,
Oh yes, yes, please, my master, that is exactly what I want,
and threw themselves at his feet, saying they would do anything, anything at all.

It wasn’t his job to test the limits of their devotion; the test was of their own making. But the conviction of the foreigner inevitably proved as thin as his reedy voice. Gishta’s husband did not believe a foreigner was capable of giving up mortal pleasures, no matter how much of a Sufi he claimed to be. Each and every one of them eventually proved himself a hypocrite. There was the one who came with chocolate that he hid under a blanket. There was the one who took farenji medicine that made him have violent dreams while awake. There was a particularly terrible one who’d kept a change of clothes in a post office box just in case he ever felt the need for a break—a binge where he could dress in a suit and stay at the Ras Hotel in Dire Dawa, drink beer and pay a sharmuta for company.

But this would be different, Gishta insisted. Because I was a farenji doing good by teaching the poor children of Harar.

W
e were a shining bunch with nervous smiles. Nouria had had new shirts made for her boys out of one of her long-ago deceased husband’s shirts, which appeared magically, as if it had been lying in wait for just such an occasion. The mothers of three of the four female students had hennaed their daughters’ hands and given them new white veils like the children of the formal madrasas wear; the boys wore white knit skullcaps. I had dressed Zemzem myself.

Gishta met us in the lane, pulling strands of silver beads from her pocket and looping them around the astonished girls’ necks. She showered all the children with perfume before leading us through the green archway.

Her co-wives, Fatima and Zehtahoun, had left for the fields that morning without her—though not before Fatima had cursed her with the ultimate Harari insult, calling her a lazy wife. A servant girl stopped sweeping, surprised by the sight of us, and Sheikh Jami’s voice floated through the door of the shrine. He and Hussein were reading together as they did every morning—esoteric texts with accounts of miraculous events, and some of the more obscure Hadiths, records of the actions and sayings of the Prophet made by his companions and descendants.

We hovered at the entrance to the shrine, the children fidgeting. Most of them had been here in the compound among the hundreds one Thursday night or another, but never had they entered the shrine and stood before the sheikh and asked for his attention. Anwar’s grin wavered. He started when I put my hand on his shoulder.

Gishta held me by the arm. “It would be best if you stayed back,” she whispered. She nudged the children through the door, and they filed inside.

“Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim,” the eldest boy began singing after a moment, leading the group into their recitation of a section of the Qur’an particularly favored in Harar because it refers to seeking refuge in sympathetic lands.

I stood holding my breath, one hand on the wall of the shrine, one hand on my heart. I had Aziz to thank for this moment.

“Very good,” I heard the sheikh say, though not congratulating them with any particular vigor. “But I don’t understand. Which madrasa are you from?”

“Bint Abdal’s,” said the oldest boy.

“Bint Abdal,” the sheikh grumbled. “Who is this Bint Abdal?”

“Our teacher,” answered the boy.

“Yes, yes, but who is she?”

Gishta nudged me forward. I ducked through the entrance and stood beside my students.

The sheikh stared, utterly silent, Hussein kneeling beside him. “Masha’Allah,” the sheikh eventually muttered, shaking his massive head. Hussein opened his mouth as if he were about to speak. Anwar, still wearing that petrified grin, reached for my hand.

“Ya’Allah,” the sheikh said dramatically, clasping his meaty hands together in front of his face. He inhaled deeply, eyes closed.

One of the girls stepped backward, and the rest of the children followed her lead.

Suddenly the sheikh looked up, his eyes brimming yellow. He threw his arms wide and bellowed: “Farenji!” He roared something that roughly translated meant bastard child of a charlatan. Then he named Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud. The booming bass notes coming from his mouth would have shaken the foundations had there been any, but instead they fell dead against the soft clay walls, the ratty rugs and dirt floor.

One of the children began to blub, and Gishta’s hands suddenly appeared through the doorway, tugging at the children’s clothes, pulling them out into the light.

“Gishta!” the sheikh shouted. “What is this?”

She spoke timidly through the door. “The students have come for blessing,” she said.

“But with a farenji? We do not learn our Islam from farenjis! These people are useless! Liars! Thieves!” he shouted.

“How dare you judge me?” I said, staring into the oily puddles in his eyes.

He was fuming, about to erupt.

“Only God can judge what is in another person’s heart,” I said into the dim. “Peace be upon you.” I ducked out through the door to join my students.

D
o you remember this man Muhammed Bruce?” I asked Gishta once we’d made our humbled way back to Nouria’s compound. She nodded vigorously. Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud, she told me, was legendary as one of the most dangerous pilgrims who had ever set foot on Harari soil. He, who had claimed to be an albino Pakistani raised in poverty in Lahore, had been taken in by the sheikh, but made the rather great mistake of hiding his secrets inside the hollow of one of the trees in the compound.

Shortly after Muhammed Bruce’s arrival, Sheikh Jami had thrown some burning coals inside that very hollow followed by a few lumps of incense, as he did once a month in honor of Bilal al Habash’s mother. That month he was met not by a sweet spiral of smoke billowing forth from the tree but rather by a smell decidedly more toxic. He was forced to throw a can of water into the hollow, dousing the smoldering fire.

Bewildered, he reached inside the tree and pulled out a soaked and partially burned satchel. Inside, he found a roll of banknotes, a passport of the man who called himself Muhammed identifying him as Bruce Mac-something of the United Kingdom, a flask of alcohol, a book about Harar and a set of playing cards depicting naked boys.

Sheikh Jami had sent Bruce and his burned satchel full of poison packing. “A less peaceful man would have killed you,” the sheikh had said. “But
that,
I’ll leave up to God.”

The one thing the sheikh had kept was the book because books were revered, words were power. “A farenji book of lies about Harar,” Gishta told me with a shudder. “You will see! You will see!” she exclaimed. “I will bring it and you will see.”

The next afternoon she dropped a battered volume onto the ground at my feet. It was
First Footsteps in East Africa: A Journey to Harar,
by Sir Richard Burton, the famous explorer Muhammed Bruce had boasted was his great-great-uncle.

The sheikh could not read the book, but one of his scholarly friends had underlined certain passages and written Arabic translations in the margins.

Gishta looked over my shoulder as I read the underlined passages. Burton called the place “a paradise inhabited by asses.” He denounced the people as “religious fanatics,” “bigoted,” “barbarous,” “coarse and debauched,” “disfigured by disease,” with ugly voices: “the men’s loud and rude,” “the women’s harsh and screaming.”

He boasted of being the one to break the guardian spell said to protect the city and its people. He had sought to tear away the shroud of Islam and render the Harari people naked, vulnerable, beholden. To subjugate through contamination.

“But he didn’t break the guardian spell,” I said, turning to look at Gishta. Burton or no Burton, Islam was within and all around us. And Sheikh Jami, as a descendant of the greatest of all the saints of Harar, was the fulcrum of this world; he was its heartbeat.

“But after this man, the farenjis started coming,” said Gishta.

“Even if they’d come and destroyed all the mosques and all the shrines, Islam would not have been broken,” I said.

“Maybe one day you will write another farenji book and tell the truth,” Nouria said.

“Insha’Allah,” I replied.

“My husband is a blind man if he cannot see what is in your heart,” said Gishta.