Homeland Elegies(44)

Riaz and I arranged to meet up before the gala for a drink. When I arrived, he was leaning against the thick zinc counter at the end of the bar, already halfway through a Manhattan and chewing on the Maraschino. Almost at once I found myself struck by the same thick charisma I’d discerned the first night we met. I’d remembered him as stout, but looking at him in his two-piece suit, I could tell he wasn’t. Not really. As we chatted, some part of me was only watching him, trying to make sense of—what was it, exactly? Charm? Confidence? Magnetism? There was not a whit of will or self-manipulation about it, but something muter and more elemental at work, like the balanced girth of a standing stone on Salisbury Plain. I observed him as we spoke, wondering: Is it the money?

By the time my martini was served—up, wet, dirty—I was unloading my skepticism about a Sufi order throwing a New York City gala to raise money, which, I joked, made only slightly more sense to me than a group of Carmelite nuns manning fairground booths at a carnival for the same purpose. “The gala was my idea,” he confessed with a chuckle. “The dergah needs renovations. I’ve known the sheikha for years from dhikr on Thursdays. I try not to miss it when I don’t have to.”

“Thursday dhikr at the Khalwati Order,” I offered wryly.

“You’ve been?”

“I have.”

“It took some work to overcome her resistance to the idea,” he said, noting my reserve. “They really do need the money. And this way, I figured it would be good for the foundation, too. Any chance to get a different image of Islam out there.”

“One that looks more like Lauren Hutton.”

“If it gets us onto the society pages? Absolutely.” It was my turn to chuckle. At least he was aware how shallow it seemed.

“A few years ago,” he went on with words—I thought—he’d used many times, his assertive baritone now sounding somehow labored, “we funded a study, focus groups, interviews with people around the country, all walks of life. ‘What do you think of Islam?’ Not just the obvious. We wanted to dig past the conscious stuff into the unconscious stuff, too. What we discovered? Top five words people associate on an unconscious level with Islam? Anger. Separate. Suicide. Bad. Death.”

“In that order?”

“Well, death was first, actually.”

“Pretty bleak.”

“Isn’t it? Because, see, usually when you dig down into the unconscious stuff, which is harder to get to—takes more time, costs more money—and I’ve done it before, with municipalities around debt initiatives. Even with the really scary stuff that people don’t get, like mortgage bonds after the crisis, deep down, even there you can usually find a silver lining, something they heard when they were kids, an association to some word or concept you can build on. Not here. Not with Islam. Group after group. The same story. Like cancer. Nothing positive.”

“Even Cat Stevens?” I joked. “‘Wild World’? ‘Peace Train’?”

“Believe it or not, that actually came up. They felt betrayed. Like Islam made him stop singing.”

“Right.”

“So like I was saying…the company that did the study, when they wrote about the findings, they put a quote at the beginning of the report, their way of summing up the problem as well as the challenge. I have it here.” He pulled out his phone and tapped at the screen, then handed it to me:

The established majority takes its we-image from a minority of its best, and shapes a they-image of the despised outsiders from the minority of their worst.



“Whose quote is it?”

“A sociologist named Norbert Elias. German Jew who left in thirty-three, when the Nazis took over. Saw what was coming before most did. Which isn’t a surprise, for someone who can have a thought like that.”

“Remarkable,” I said, handing the phone back to him.

“Isn’t it? I mean, when I first read this, I thought, ‘This is it. This is what we’re up against.’ In this country, the white majority is basically blind to the worst in themselves. They see themselves in the image of their best, and they see us in the image of our worst.”

“I get it—”

“—Muslims, blacks, whatever. To me, this wasn’t just an analysis of the problem, it pointed at a solution.”

“How so?”

“Do what they do. They push the minority of their best in our faces and then pretend that’s the whole picture. We need to do the same. Shove the best of our minority down their throats.”

“Seduction at the hands of Sheikha Maria…”

“Precisely.” He grinned, lifting his glass to finish his drink. “I mean, in a way, you’re doing your own version of the same thing, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

“Laying claim? Owning what they think they see in us, then turning it right back at them. ‘You think this is us? It’s actually you.’”

It was an incisive articulation of my artistic procedure, but something about it felt askew. It took me a moment to find words to adjust the imbalance I thought I heard. “You could put it that way. Or you could say I’m just trying to show people as they are, no better, no worse. Which means I’m trying to show us as we are, no better, no worse.”