There’s No Beer in Saudi Arabia

The situation is really pissing me off. I’d like to be an Arab college graduate who works as a garbage collector so I can badmouth the State. But I never did make it through college, and the truth is that my job isn’t that bad. I’m not really suffering at work. I’d like to be a dishwasher at some restaurant, to pray in a mosque, to be poor. I’d like the sewage to overflow from the toilet into the kitchen, and I’d like for a donkey to be tied to the fig tree, and for little barefoot kids to be shouting all the time, and for my wife to wear a veil.

Everyone has been turning to religion except my father. Every Ramadan, my grandmother launches a rebellion against the infidels. She tries to force my father to fast, and each time he swears he will, but he doesn’t. When we were little, Grandma would count the cigarettes in Father’s pack, to see if he’d smoked during the fast. When he didn’t fast, she staged a hunger strike in protest, refusing to eat the last meal. Every Ramadan, she tries again, but father refuses to behave himself. She says that when he was little he did wash and pray and go to the mosque every Friday. It’s all on account of my mother. Men always follows their wives’ example. My mother wants to be pretty; she’s afraid if she wears a head scarf she’ll look old. She doesn’t understand that faith in God makes your face beautiful and smooth.

I think about God a lot lately. It’s easy, not like with the Jews. All you need to do to be religious is to wash and pray. You can go on living in the same house, and you don’t have to separate from your family. In Moslem families, an Imam and a prostitute can live together in the same house.

I don’t remember how to pray anymore. I used to go to the mosque, but that was a long time ago. Our religion teacher would give perfect grades to all students who went to the mosque. I went there to pray until I had my shoes stolen. I searched through the piles for hours, but they weren’t there. I started crying and waited for everyone to take their shoes. Finally the only thing left was an ugly pair of plastic thongs. I didn’t want to wear those, so I had to walk home barefoot.

Adel has returned to religion. The perestroika got to him. He stopped being a communist and slowly discovered religion. He stayed in Jerusalem when he finished studying. At first he had a Russian girlfriend, but when Gorbachev took over, he left her. He said a Jew remains a Jew. He thought about it and discovered that, if war broke out, he wouldn’t want to save his girlfriend. Eventually, he married a Christian girl, because it says that anyone who persuades a single person to join Islam has a sure place in heaven. Adel took on a particularly tough case, a Christian girl from Nazareth, who sported the biggest cross at the university. Her name is Susie, no less. Her parents refused to go along with the idea of her marrying some Moslem fellah, so Adel and Susie waited until her father died of a heart attack, and then they got married.

Adel is living a comfortable life. He’s a lawyer. He has a new car and three kids. My wife gets along with his wife, so we’ve become friends again. He doesn’t drink anymore and never skips his prayers. Whenever we meet, he tells me how wonderful Islam is. He explains that only prayer will help me cope with my problems, and he prays that God will help me to believe. Adel knows I drink, he knows I don’t fast, and yet he and his wife invite us for the last meal before the fast at least twice each Ramadan. Susie converted to Islam. She says she’s become convinced that Islam is the right religion and Mohammed is the true Prophet. She prays, she fasts on Ramadan, and the only holidays she celebrates are the Moslem ones. She can’t believe she ever sang in a church choir.

Since Adel turned religious, he talks differently and dresses differently. He’s much calmer. He keeps saying el hamdulula. I envy him. He supports the Islamic movement and its motto, “Islam is the answer.” Adel believes that ultimately the Mahdi will come, just as Islam promises, and unite all Moslems. Then the Moslem empire will be the strongest in the world, just the way it was in the days of Omar ibn el-Hatab. Adel says that the more Palestinians Israel kills, the closer the arrival of the Mahdi. The worse the situation, the greater the chances of redemption.

Adel says the Jews and the Americans have advanced technology, but according to the Koran the decisive war will be waged with swords and bare hands. Their sheikh tells them in the mosque that God will inflict a terrible frost on the infidels that will freeze all their planes and weapons. That’s why Adel has bought his children plastic swords. He tells them they have to learn to use those swords now. He’s stopped taking his children to the doctor and giving them medications, because he says that pretty soon there won’t be any antibiotics and the children will have to learn how to overcome diseases without help.

When the war broke out, Adel’s Sufi sheikh told his congregation that he’d met the Mahdi at the El Aqsa Mosque. Adel was convinced it was the end. “The Mahdi must be in Mecca by now,” he said, “and very soon he will liberate Jerusalem and defeat the Jews and the Americans.” Adel said he was going to Mecca to wait for the Mahdi. He wanted to be one of the Mahdi’s soldiers and follow him from Mecca, just the way it says in the Koran, because whoever follows the Mahdi has a place in heaven. Adel announced that I was going with him. He had money, and he’d pay my fare. He didn’t want to go on his own. He preferred to share his room in Mecca with a friend, not with some stranger, a Moslem who might not know a word of Arabic because he’s probably from Afghanistan. Adel signed us both up for the hajj.

There’s no beer in Saudi Arabia, not even malt beer. The women are covered from head to toe in black clothes with netting over their eyes. Women are allowed to leave their faces and hands and feet exposed, but they believe that if they take extra precautions and cover everything, their punishment on Judgment Day will be reduced. Adel prays the whole time. Even after the twenty-four-hour ride on the crowded bus, he doesn’t pause to rest but hurries to visit the Prophet’s grave in Medina. He says that all we have is two weeks, so he has to pray as much as possible.

There’s one spot that can only be reached by inching your way forward for hours in a terribly dense crowd, but it’s worth it, because the reward for a single prayer there is equivalent to the reward for a million prayers. It’s the spot where the Prophet Mohammed used to sit and pray and read the Koran. And anyone who succeeds in reaching it says it feels like the most sublime place of all, the true heaven.

Heaven is divided into compartments, and even the lowest compartment is magnificent: a verdant heaven with rivers of honey and cascades of nectar. Every wish comes true in an instant. Think of a pear — and right away a pear tree will appear in front of you, and the branch will bend on its own and serve the fruit right to your mouth. People in heaven sit on the lawn all day long, like in a park. If you think about women, there they are. Or you can think of both food and women at the same time.

It’s hard to tell if the women you get are like the ones in Saudi Arabia. Probably not. The women in heaven are petite and young, and they dress in white. They don’t undress, because there’s nowhere to undress. Everyone sits on the lawn and watches. In heaven there are no houses, not even tents, because it spoils the environment. In heaven there are no industrial materials. You can think about a Walkman as much as you want, but you won’t get it. There are no cars and no planes.

Adel says this is my last chance to return to Islam. He takes me to the grave of the Prophet, and when I say there’s nothing inside and that all I saw was a green rug with verses from the Koran on it, he starts crying, and screams at me. For two days he cries, but in the end he decides to let me be. He starts praying on his own, and that’s that. In his opinion, I’m a lost cause, and I’m bound to burn in hell.