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I spent hours traversing its vast spaces. The aim was to find all the millions of pieces of news relating to Islam—coming from newspapers and blogs and governments—and then rearrange them in such a way that Islamic reform seemed to be the dominant force in the faith. When there was a terrorist attack, it was an opportunity not just to condemn the extremists (for their violence) and the orthotoxics (for their apathy) and the Wahhabis (for their political use of Islam), but also to popularize the names of key figures in the reformist movement, to plug their books, to market their pamphlets. All of this had to occur in the blink of an eye.

I called it “psy-ops for the future of Islam.”

Ziad called it “psycho jihad.”

6

By the end of the first week we’d fallen into a pattern: while Ziad was at work each day, I did the above-mentioned Internet surfing, wrote e-mails, put out calls to my contacts, and devoured newspapers. When he got home, we generally went out into the city.

We visited the major outdoor souk and haggled with aged sellers, went into the interiors of the large mosques, drove near the royal palaces, and ate Lebanese and Indian cuisine at fancy restaurants.

We marveled at the new building projects and counted the number of Porsches in any given parking lot.

As we drove up and down the streets, we saw migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia wearing thick overalls in various colors. They’d run out of the shade every few minutes with brooms in their hands, sweeping the sand from the asphalt under the sizzling sun. Ziad and I made a game out of trying to identify which country particular laborers were from.

“One hint I can give you to make your guessing easier,” said Ziad, “is to not guess Muslim countries. They don’t like having laborers from Muslim countries here.”

“Why not?”

“They start agitating for rights.”

As we were wandering through a mall one day, I saw some shelves of books in a corner shop that sold mostly cigarettes and candy. I went to take a closer look. Of the three rows of books, the topmost were mostly books of Islamic creeds, discussing such things as tawhid and the virtues of fasting. The second row was predominantly Arabic translations of Danielle Steel novels. The third row seemed to be devoted to alarmist books. The one on the end of that row had a picture of Dajjal, the Islamic Antichrist, on the cover, and the pages were full of end-of-the-world prophecies and predictions.

Moving on, we passed by a clothing store, where we saw two bearded men in robes taking a young man’s cell phone from him. The boy seemed to be complaining, but the men didn’t listen to him; they just yelled at him to scurry off.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“Long story.”

“I want to know.”

“That boy just got caught out by the vice police.”

“I don’t see any police,” I said, looking around for uniforms.

“They’re undercover. Those guys with the walkie-talkies that took the phone. They’re just mall security taking their jobs too seriously.”

“Jesus. Is he in trouble?”

“No. I think he just lost his phone.”

“But why would they take his phone?” I asked.

“I guess the police have become technologically savvy.”

“Meaning…?”

“You know that you aren’t allowed to talk to a girl in public, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Sure.”

“One way kids get around the ban is with technology,” Ziad explained. “Boys and girls go to malls and hang out in their segregated corners, cell phones in hand. Then they all turn on the Bluetooth network and are able to identify one another using the screen names that show up. Basically, when you turn on Bluetooth it creates a map, and you can essentially see who’s who just by moving your phone around. It’s like finding treasure in a video game.”

“That’s amazing,” I said, marveling at how fast technology evolved. “But what about the fact that the women are covered?”

“Easy,” said Ziad. “Once you’ve identified a girl and she acknowledges you with her eyes or with a