Homeland Elegies(47)

Riaz shot me a curious sidelong grin. “You don’t even know the half of it,” he said, stopping on the corner to tell me the story: It wasn’t until her father died, two years earlier, that she discovered he had written her out of his will. Her shock wasn’t just emotional. Her plans for the order—proliferating along both American coasts, each of its half dozen dergahs led by a female sheikha, the only Sufi organization whose every branch was run entirely by women anywhere in the world, as far as Riaz knew—depended on the money she’d expected to inherit. Yes, she was still wealthy enough to never have to worry about her personal expenses, yet now, worry was all she did. Signs of emotional chaos were growing, and Riaz was concerned that her mental state was jeopardizing the order. She showed up one day at his office with estimates in hand for work on the Duane Street building that couldn’t be put off any longer—the least of which totaled more than $400,000—and proceeded to have a panic attack on his couch. He told her he would help her raise the money, which was how the whole idea for the gala came about.

All this Riaz shared with me matter-of-factly, without any of the hushed and huddled complicity of rumor, indeed, as if nothing untoward, or even that remarkable, was being divulged. But the evident breach of the sheikha’s confidence was not lost on me. As we made our way up the building steps, removed our wallets and phones, and marched through the metal detector flanked by the Gotham Hall security officers on high alert—no doubt alarmed by the preponderance of Muslims coming through the doors—I remember feeling flattered. I knew already how deeply Riaz had drawn me in. I was pleased to think that perhaps I, too, had done the same.





4.


I saw more of Riaz than I would have expected to in the coming months. As a regular invitee to his foundation’s events, I found myself in the presence of one remarkable American after another, each Muslim, each involved in some work that made my self-absorbed preoccupation with drama and contradiction start to seem not only trivial but also shameless. These people were changing the world—one grant, one prison inmate, one neighborhood block, one translation, one voting drive, and, yes, one PR campaign at a time. There was Sami Sleiman, the Syrian-born, Los Angeles–raised founder of Haqq, a community network that provided the safety net he believed local government should offer (but rarely did) to those in need—a food pantry, a walk-in clinic, a community arts center and café, a career-counseling service for former felons and at-risk youth; Hafsa Hossein, a Chicago-born, Harvard Law–educated attorney who—when she wasn’t filing briefs on behalf of accused Muslims deprived of their legal rights—ran a multilingual website committed to gender equity in Islam; George Iqbal Shawn, a white convert to the faith, a former journalist sickened by what he saw as a media industry fatally beholden to sowing anxiety and fear, who now spent most of his time in Turkey, toiling in refugee camps and extricating Western youths from the clutches of ISIS across the border; Janan Gul, a French-born cartoonist of Persian origin at work on a graphic retelling of Rumi’s relationship with his Sufi master, Shams, the first volume of which had already made the bestseller lists in a half dozen European countries; Kamal Morse, an all-star linebacker for the Oakland Raiders who left the NFL after a religious experience in Mecca that inspired him to start a mosque and, when he ran afoul of the local authorities, to run for city council in his native Kansas City. Riaz was particularly affected by Morse’s tale. He got choked up while introducing Morse at the event in his honor, outlining the moving saga of how the former football player had not only prevailed in bringing a house of Muslim worship to his community but also transformed his local government in the process.

The foundation raised money, generated press, and, maybe most important, provided an excuse to ask the wealthy and influential for help. If sufficiently moved, they might do more than just open up their pocketbooks. Organizations like these, I would learn, depended on relationships with those who had access to money and power, depended on populating their boards with people who not only understood the stated mission but also made it their own. I would learn all this when I joined Riaz’s board myself, an invitation extended to me despite the fact that I had access to neither power nor money. But I did have a Pulitzer, Riaz joked, and more important, he felt my “somewhat contrarian” views would help keep the foundation on its toes. Most of the board agreed; I was elected with only one dissenting vote. That vote came from an avuncular sometime professor of Islamic studies, now a college dean, who’d tried to teach my works only to discover—filled as they were with extremists of various sorts; teeming with buried, toxic postcolonial resentments; compromised by concessions to dominant narrative structures—that his students could make no productive sense of them. To assign my writings—he’d contended at the vote and would later explain to me during a coffee break at my first board meeting, his genteel, Cambridge-inflected reserve tested by the fierce emotion he felt about the matter—was to discover how effective they were in galvanizing every negative impression of Islam one could imagine. I was not writing literature, in his view, but rather emotionally charged rhetorical delivery devices passing for art; it was anti-Muslim muckraking, offering deceptively compelling illusions of reasoned argument in service of the destructive tropes Riaz’s foundation was working hard to undo in the first place. Admitting me to this board was, in a word, a disgrace—though apparently not disgraceful enough to merit his leaving it. I took his animadversions in stride. What else was there to do but thank him for his thoughts and pretend I didn’t care?