the original Companions of the Prophet recast as sex-crazed purveyors of snuff films whom even Rushdie’s satirical genius could not have imagined.

What I heard as I listened with new ears was fear.

The world looked to us—and now I speak as an American—to uphold a holy image, or as holy as it gets in this age of enlightenment. We have been the earthly garden, the abundant idyll, the productive Arcadia of the world’s pastoral dream. Between our shores has gleamed a realm of refuge and renewal—in short, the only reliable escape from history itse

“What’s a Nero complex, Auntie?” I asked. “Right. That’s something Albert Memmi talks about in his book The Colonizer and the Colonized. I’ll send it to you. He says that when you come to power through having usurped it, you’re never free of the worry that your claim to power is not legitimate. And this fear of illegitimacy, this sense of being hau

Looking back at that trip, I see now the broad outlines of the same dilemmas that would lead America into the era of Trump: seething anger; open hostility to strangers and those with views opposing one’s own; a contempt for news delivered by allegedly reputable sources; an embrace of reactionary moral posturing; civic and governmental corruption th

and back in Pakistan with my folks, visiting their various siblings and their families. One afternoon, when we were over at Ayesha and Huma’s house for tea, the girls persuaded me to play Ken to their respective Barbies in the living room. Huma was ten. Ayesha was seven. The play veered, perhaps inevitably, into the question of marriage. Would my K

appurtenances

(For Muslims, to speak of Muhammad as the author of the Quran is a surpassing blasphemy; only God could have authored such a miracle, we are told; Muhammad was just a holy stenographer, if you will, taking divine dictation.)

“Bismillah al-rahman, al-rahim.”*