The Submission - Amy Waldman [62]
His opponents claim, absurdly, that Muslims can’t be trusted because they have religious sanction to lie. This is a bald misrepresentation of the concept of Taqiya, by which Shiites who live under Sunni rule are allowed to disguise their beliefs to protect themselves. But doesn’t Mohammad Khan see that by refusing to discuss the possible meanings of his memorial, he fuels those stereotypes?
Mo set down the magazine and flipped through his stack of unread New Yorkers. To be written about this way in its pages was like being called shifty by a roomful of people he had thought were his friends. The rhetorical switchbacks couldn’t camouflage the demand that he address the suspicions he provoked. It barely consoled Mo when some of the editor’s liberal peers denounced the piece’s equivocation in their own publications, or when Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins wore green ribbons—garden green, Islamic green—to a movie premiere to show solidarity with him. The Comment had made ambivalence respectable, and it began to pour forth.
Manhattanites who had always prided themselves on their liberalism confessed that they were talking to their therapists about their discomfort with Mohammad Khan as the memorial’s designer. “It’s awful,” a thirty-two-year-old music executive who declined to give her name told The New York Observer, which accompanied the article with a color drawing showing an ominous-looking Mo looming over a shrunken Manhattan. “There’s this primal feeling in my gut saying ‘No’ to it, even though my brain is saying ‘Yes’—sort of like when you think you want to have sex with someone and your body won’t cooperate; or you think you don’t and your body cooperates too much—and I don’t get where it’s coming from. It’s like I’ve been invaded. But what can I say? I don’t have good reasons. It just makes me uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable makes me even more uncomfortable.”
Mo began to put psychological distance between himself and the Mohammad Khan who was written and talked about, as if that were another man altogether. It often was. Facts were not found but made, and once made, alive, defying anyone to tell them from truth. Strangers analyzed, judged, and invented him. Mo read that he was Pakistani, Saudi, and Qatari; that he was not an American citizen; that he had donated to organizations backing terrorism; that he had dated half the female architects in New York; that as a Muslim he didn’t date at all; that his father ran a shady Islamic charity; that his brother—how badly Mo, as an only child, had wanted a brother!—had started a radical Muslim students’ association at his university. He was called, besides decadent, abstinent, deviant, violent, insolent, abhorrent, aberrant, and typical. Neutering his unhappiness allowed him to read, with the floaty interest he would feel toward a dental drill penetrating a numbed molar, that green ribbons were sprouting like seedlings from the lapels of those who supported his right to design the memorial, that in response a member of Save America from Islam had created an anti-Garden sticker—a green foursquare gouged by a red slash, which began appearing on car bumpers and hard hats and T-shirts; that both sides had begun wearing American flag pins to prove their patriotism, and that arguments were breaking out on subways and in the streets between the beribboned and the stickered, with at least one clash turning violent, leaving a stickered man with a bruised shin, although it turned out that a dispute over a parking space had also factored in. By training his face not to show feeling, he could receive the attention of the strangers who stopped him on the street to tell him to withdraw from the competition, or not to withdraw, or, most often, only that they recognized him, as if he were some