The Submission - Amy Waldman [58]
Until he failed to express gratitude toward her, she hadn’t realized she was expecting it. He must have seen the Post column, must have some inkling of the courage it took to stand up for him. So why not acknowledge it? She looked at the photograph again. A piece of history, but its meaning as yet unassigned. Before it hardened and came to seem as if it had never been otherwise, history was liquid, unfixed.
Claire reached for the Times Arts section, wondering if anyone had weighed in on the design itself. With so much else to report after Khan’s press conference, the papers had made only generic references to his garden. But today she saw, stripped across the top of the Arts section, “A Lovely Garden—and an Islamic One?” A cavity opened within her. According to the paper’s architecture critic, the elements of Khan’s garden she loved—the geometry, the walls, the four quadrants, the water, even the pavilion—paralleled gardens that had been built across the Islamic world, from Spain to Iran to India to Afghanistan, over a dozen or more centuries. There were pictures of the Alhambra in Spain, Humayun’s tomb in India, and a diagram of the typical chahar bagh, or foursquare garden, next to the diagram of Khan’s design from the press packet. They were remarkably similar. The critic called the gardens one of many rich art forms produced by the Islamic world. He wrote: “One does not know, of course, if these parallels are exact, or even intentional—only Mr. Khan can answer that, and perhaps even he was unaware of the influences that acted upon him. But the possible allusions may be controversial. Some might say the designer is mocking us, or playing with his religious heritage. Yet could he be trying to say something larger about the relationship between Islam and the West? Would these questions, this possible influence, even be raised if he were not a Muslim?”
None of the jurors—not the artists, not the experts—had thought to raise it when Khan’s identity was unknown, Claire thought, and his elegant, anodyne submission essay had given no hint.
He deserved the benefit of the doubt, she quickly decided. The benefit of a lack of doubt. The similarities could be coincidental. Or perhaps he had taken inspiration from these beautiful forms. He had every right to. Fearing a garden with Islamic elements—and she had to admit her first reaction had been, if not fear, anxiety—was no different from opposing a Muslim designer. She steeled herself to read on.
The gardens, the article said, had likely taken their characteristics from agricultural, not theological, imperatives, especially the need to water large tracts of land. In the first centuries of Islam, the gardens provided sensual pleasures—the scent of orange blossoms; the water burbling and cooling the baking air; shade—to rulers. Once the gardens became resting places for some of those rulers, their tombs began to transform the verdant settings into earthly representations of the paradise of the Quran—its “gardens beneath which rivers flow.”
Claire turned on the television, wanting to know what the shouting classes would make of this. “In a potentially explosive development, the memorial design may actually be a martyrs’ paradise,” a Fox News anchor reported soberly, before turning to a panel of experts on radical Islam. One intoned: “As we all know by now, the terrorists who carried this out believed their act would get them to paradise, with the silks and wine, the pretty young boys and the dark-eyed virgins, and now it seems it has.”
A second affirmed: “Their remains are in that ground, too. He’s made a tomb, a graveyard, for them, not the victims. He would know that the Arabic word for tomb and garden are the same.”
“He’s trying to encourage new martyrs—see, here’s a taste of where you’ll get if