Knife, page 14
If you believed in Heaven you would understand.
Tell me.
You would understand that this life, here in this world, is unimportant. It is only a waiting room in which the best we can do is to follow God, and then after this life we will have the life eternal. So what does it matter where I spend these years? When you are burning in hellfire I will be in the perfumed garden. I will have my attendant spirits, my beautiful houris, untouched by man or djinn. It is written: “Which of the Lord’s blessings would you deny?”
Written where?
In the Book.
I’d like to talk about books.
There’s only one book worth talking about.
Let me tell you about a book about a book. It’s written by the Turkish author Pamuk, and called The New Life. In this book there’s a book that has no name, and we do not know anything about what’s written on its pages. But everyone who opens this book has their whole life changed. After they read the book they are not the same as they were before. Do you know a book like that?
Of course. It is the book containing the Word of God, as given by the Archangel to the Prophet.
Did the Prophet write it down immediately?
He came down from the mountain and recited, and whoever was nearby wrote it down on whatever came to hand.
And he recited with complete accuracy. What the Archangel said: word for word. And then they wrote it down with complete accuracy also. Word for word.
That is obvious.
And what happened to these pages?
After the Prophet’s life ended, his Companions put them in order, and that is the Book.
And they put them in order with complete accuracy.
Every true believer knows this. Only the godless would question this, and they don’t matter.
Can I ask you a question about the nature of God?
He is all-encompassing. All-knowing. He is All.
It is in your tradition, is it not, that there is a difference between your God and the God of the other People of the Book, the Jews and the Christians. They believe, as it says in their books, that God created Man in His own image.
They are wrong.
Because, if they were right, then God might have some resemblance to men? He might look like a man? He might have a mouth, and a voice, and be able to use it to speak to us?
But this is not correct.
Because, in your tradition, the idea of God is that He is so far superior to Man, so much more exalted, that He shares no human qualities.
Exactly. For once you are not talking garbage.
What would you say were human qualities?
Our bodies. How we look and how we are.
Is love a human quality? Is the desire for justice? Is mercy? Does God have those?
I am not a scholar. Imam Yutubi is a scholar. He is many-headed and many-voiced. I follow him. I have learned everything from him.
I don’t mean to ask you for scholarship. You agree that your God has no human qualities, according to your own tradition. Let me just ask this. Isn’t language a human quality? To have a language, God would have to have a mouth, a tongue, vocal cords, a voice. He would have to look like a man. In His own image. But you agree that God is not like that.
So what?
So if God is above language—so far above it as He is so far above all that is merely human—then how did the words of your Book come into being?
The Angel understood God and brought the Message in a way that the Messenger could understand, and the Messenger received it.
Was the Message in Arabic?
That’s how the Messenger received it and how his Companions wrote it down.
Can I ask you something about translation?
You do this too much. We are going in one direction and then you swerve across the road and start driving the other way. Not only a butterfly but a bad driver.
I only want to suggest that when the Archangel understood the Word of God and brought it to the Messenger in a way that the Messenger could understand, he was translating it. God communicated in the way that God communicates, which is so far above human understanding that we cannot even begin to comprehend it, and the Angel made it comprehensible to the Messenger, by delivering it in human speech, which is not the speech of God.
The Book is the uncreated Word of God.
But we agreed that God has no words. In which case, what we read is an interpretation of God. And so maybe there could be other interpretations? Maybe your way, your Yutubi’s way, is not the only way? Maybe there is no one correct way?
You are a snake.
Can I ask in what language you read the Book? In the first language or another?
I read it in this inferior tongue in which we are speaking now.
Another translation.
I understood it through the many hours of instruction I received from Imam Yutubi.
In your nocturnal life, locked in your basement, looking at your laptop. In between playing video games and watching Netflix.
Of course.
And what you received from your many-headed imam were further interpretations. More acts, we might say, of translation.
What you are saying makes no sense. It is irrelevant to anything that matters.
I’m trying to suggest to you that, even according to your own tradition, there is uncertainty. Some of your own early philosophers have suggested this. Your Yutubis from the centuries before YouTube. They say everything can be interpreted, even the Book. It can be interpreted according to the times in which the interpreter lives. Literalism is a mistake.
That is not so. The Word is the Word. To question that is to question the meaning of life. Of the stability of the universe.
Let me ask one last question, and then we can rest until tomorrow. Have you ever been to Jerusalem?
No.
Because in Jerusalem, as you know, there stands the Dome of the Rock.
The Haram al-Sharif. Al-Aqsa.
You know, I haven’t been to Jerusalem either. But I have been told that on the walls of that mosque are certain inscriptions of verses taken from your Book.
Yes, naturally.
And I have been told that, curiously, some of these verses are a little different from those in the Book you now have.
That is impossible.
It’s impossible, right? Because the mosque is very old. So what would that mean? If those old words on the walls are not exactly the words you have in your pages?
It means you’re not telling the truth. You’re lying. As usual.
I won’t argue. I haven’t seen this for myself.
You say what you write are “fictions.” Which is another word for “lies.”
Like “secular.”
Exactly. You make your living as a liar.
Let’s stop there. Maybe we’ll get on better tomorrow.
* * *
Second session.
Can we talk this morning about foreign travel? Do you like to travel abroad? Do you believe that travel broadens the mind?
More stupid questions. I have no interest in tourism. The world is the same everywhere. The question is, can one see it as it is. Not many people can do that.
But in 2018 you did leave America. You went to Lebanon.
I went to visit my father. That is the opposite of tourism.
They say Beirut was very beautiful then, before the explosion of 2020. You are lucky to have seen it. A city of great culture, great civilization, a liberal, open city, known as the Paris of the East.
I didn’t spend time in Beirut. And you are romanticizing. Maybe you are ignorant of the conflicts in that part of the world, the civil war, the wars involving Syria and Israel. My father does not live in Beirut. He lives in a village near the border.
Your mother says that at first you didn’t like it there and wanted to come back right away. But you stayed a month and came back changed. So it seems travel did affect your mind.
My mother can say whatever she wants.
Your former stepfather was very surprised by what you had done. He wept, and said you were smart and had a very good heart and wouldn’t touch anybody. So it seems you did change. Something happened to you there that altered your whole personality.
Silence.
Your neighbors in Fairview, New Jersey, describe you as a loner who didn’t socialize much. But in Lebanon, I’m guessing, you did socialize. I’m guessing you met people.
Yes, of course.
What can you say about the people you met?
They were strong. Powerful. They understood the world. They saw it as it is.
They were religious? More religious than your mother and sisters?
They were men. They had real men’s understanding of the faith. They took no shit from anybody. They served God and fought for Him.
They opened your eyes.
They opened my heart.
Then you came home and moved into your mother’s basement and stopped talking to her and your sisters. What did you do down there?
Like you said. I played video games and watched Netflix. And listened to Imam Yutubi.
And this is how you lived for four years.
I was thinking.
About what?
About how many enemies we have. It is as you yourself said. One-quarter of the human race—two billion people—is us, the other three-quarters is not us, and there is hatred for us. You see it everywhere in America. I saw it in Lebanon also. The enemy is all around, and we must learn to fight. Two billion against six billion. We must learn to overcome such odds.
I want to explore this, the idea of the enemy.
Of course. Because it is you.
And the idea of the enemy justifies violence against such persons.
The enemy is violence in human form. Violence walking and talking and acting. In a certain way, the enemy is not human. It is a devil. How should one proceed against such entities? You know the answer. Because the entity is you.
You believe I am violence in human form. You spent four years learning this.
You are unimportant. I learned many things. Finally, I asked myself, what was I personally prepared to do against the enemy? Only then did I begin to think about people like you.
What are people like me like?
You are hated by two billion people. That is all that it is necessary to know. How must that feel, to be so hated? You must feel like a worm. Beneath all your smart talk, you know you are less than a worm. To be crushed beneath our heel. You talk about travel to other countries, but you can’t set foot in half the countries of the world because there is so much hatred for you there. Say something about that, why don’t you.
I have learned a lot about demonization, that’s true. I know that it is possible to construct an image of a man, a second self, that bears very little resemblance to the first self, but this second self gains credibility because it is repeated over and over again, until it begins to feel real, more real than the first self. I believe it’s this second self that you have gotten to know, against whom your sense of an enemy is aimed. To answer your question, I know I am not that second self. I am myself, and I turn away from hatred, and toward love.
No, that is fakery. What I know of you is real. Everybody knows that.
There’s a story by Hans Christian Andersen about a shadow that separates itself from a man and becomes more real than the man. In the end the shadow marries a princess and the real man is executed for being a fake.
I don’t care about stories, as I told you before.
What if I said to you, at the heart of the book I wrote, which you hate even though you only read two pages of it, is an East London Muslim family running a café-restaurant, portrayed with real love? What if I told you that before that I wrote a book in which I placed a sympathetically drawn Muslim family at the heart of the narrative of Indian and Pakistani independence? What if I said to you, when plans for a mosque near the 9/11 Ground Zero site were opposed by some New Yorkers, I defended the mosque’s right to be there? What if I said to you, I have consistently opposed the present Indian administration’s sectarian ideology, of which Muslims are the main victims? And what if I said to you, I once wrote a book in which the condition of Kashmiri Muslims, and of a young Kashmiri man who turns to jihad, was sympathetically portrayed? In a way, I wrote that book, Shalimar the Clown, about you before I knew you, and, writing it, I knew that character is destiny—so that, in your case, there’s something I’m trying to get at, something in you beneath all the Yutubi noise that made it possible for you to pick up the knife.
It doesn’t matter what you say to me. We know who you are. If you think you can win us over, then you are a fool.
Very well. In that case, that is the kind of fool I am.
Silence.
What if I said to you, the reason why I, and people like me, have always opposed the death penalty is that there are many wrongful convictions, and if the wrongfully convicted person is executed then the matter cannot be rectified?
Don’t lie. You oppose the death penalty because you have been rightfully convicted and you are afraid to die.
What if I said to you, there are Muslim writers who find my book, that book which you hate after reading two pages, to be beautiful and true? What if I said to you, they want to reclaim my book as a capacious work of art? Is there any possibility that you might consider the possibility that there are other ways of seeing what I do, what I have done? You wanted to be an executioner. What if later you read these writers and understand that you might have been wrong?
It isn’t important. I’m not really a reader. But I know what I know.
You’re going to have a lot of time to read. I don’t think you’ll have Netflix or video games where you’re going.
I don’t care.
Your favorite video game is Call of Duty, I imagine?
It’s your imagination.
What if I told you that my younger son—my son who is not even two years older than you—is an expert player of that game? Maybe you even played against each other somewhere out there in the gamer universe? How does that make you feel? That maybe, behind all the pseudonyms, you might have been friends? Friendly adversaries? Or even on the same team?
It makes me feel nothing.
The writer Jodi Picoult says this in her novel My Sister’s Keeper: “If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.” I find this helpful. I see you now at twenty-four, already disappointed by life, disappointed in your mother, your sisters, your fathers, your lack of boxing talent, your lack of any talent at all; disappointed in the bleak future you saw stretching ahead of you, for which you refused to blame yourself. But you needed to blame, you wanted very much to blame, and all that loose blame flooded through and around you, and then something, a tweet, a video, who knows, directed all that lifetime of blame in my direction, and it settled on my head, and you began to make your plan.
Silence.
I’m just wondering. You lived a lot of your nighttime life in imaginary universes. In those universes, the universe of Call of Duty, death is everywhere, but it isn’t real. You kill many, many people, but you also kill nobody. You go: Run kill shelter. Run kill hide. When you went to Chautauqua, was that a move in the game? It would be a killing in which nobody died? Or maybe you didn’t even know you would do it, because you would have to cross the border between the gamer world and this one and maybe that was too much? You could bring the gamer knife, but in this world it would really cut and wound and really kill. I think you weren’t even sure you were really going to do it until I came out on stage and you got up out of your seat and started to run. And then your running feet took you across the point of no return and there was no way to stop. You were right in front of me and there I was: reality. Real honest-to-goodness reality standing on its own two feet, facing you, looking you in the eye. There was me and there were all your other realities too, your loneliness, your failures, your disappointments, your need to blame, your four years of indoctrination, your idea of the Enemy. I was all those things, and you started stabbing and you thought it was terrifying, it felt good to you but terrifying at the same time. I’m sure you were scared. You were scared to death. Because the one who had lived in fictions was you, and now you were facing the consequences of being led by your fictions into the real world, which is to say toward murder, and toward your own ruined life.
Silence.
* * *
Third session.
Allow me to ask: Do you have a girlfriend?
What kind of a question is that?
Ordinary question to ask an ordinary guy. Have you ever been in love?
I love God.
Yes, but human beings? I know you told me about your houris in Heaven. But Heaven is still some way away. No houris anytime soon. Anybody down here?
None of your business.
I’ll take that as a no. How about a boyfriend? I heard you talk about your admiration for the real men in Lebanon. How about real men in Jersey?
Don’t be disgusting.
So—another negative. Just to check: never? Nobody in your whole life? You’re arousing in me an unexpected emotion.
What emotion.
Pity.
You pity me? No, no. I pity you. Also, you are intrusive and rude.
I’ll tell you what’s intrusive and rude. A twenty-seven-second knife attack. That’s what. In my view it gives me some license to ask you personal questions. What’s the difference between a virgin and an incel?
